A noise demonstration that took place outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas one year ago has resulted in decades of prison time for the anti-ICE activists involved. Federal judges sentenced eight defendants, who the government cast as antifa operatives, to between 30 and 100 years in prison for terrorism-related charges last week; seven more people were sentenced this week.

“There’s a stunningly wide gap between what the Justice Department has put in its press releases and what top officials have said, versus the evidence that was actually presented at trial,” says Intercept reporter Matt Sledge, who has been covering the Prairieland case and was present at the sentencing. “It’s a real stretch to assert, as the government did, that this was all one coherent group.”

“There’s a concerted effort to characterize opposition to ICE or opposition to the Trump administration as some form of conspiracy, as an effort to provoke terrorism,” says Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” “There are a number of things that can be said about the various sentences, but perhaps the most obviously egregious is that handed out to Daniel Sanchez [Estrada]: 30 years for moving some zines, some literature, which is not illegal to possess.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Bray and Sledge about Prairieland as a test case in Trump’s war on dissent, and why the administration is determined to convince the public that antifa is a domestic terrorist organization.

“I don’t think Trump or his allies really care about antifa per se. It’s a useful umbrella term to craft into a boogeyman scare tactic. In a way that ‘Communist’ was used in past generations, antifa is used now,” says Bray. He and Sledge point out that in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Trump administration became much more aggressive in its targeting of the left and dissent in general.

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“You had these Prairieland defendants who had already been arrested and charged, and then the government really ups the ante against them by bringing material support for terrorism charges against them, which really contributes to these long sentences. And I think it’s a preview of what’s going to happen elsewhere,” says Sledge. “It shows that in this post-Kirk era, the government is going to use the most aggressive charges it can find against people it does not like.”

“What that calls upon is creating a different kind of antifascist movement, and to me perhaps the most inspiring kind of model or example is the anti-ICE movement, which does not under many circumstances call itself an antifascist movement,” says Bray. “I think that this moment is bringing out the best in a lot of people, whether or not they have activist experience or not, in organizing with their neighbors. The best moments of antifascism throughout history have been those moments where it ceases to be some sort of specialty politics, but becomes just a common-sense way of protecting our neighbors, those most vulnerable amongst us, and protecting our freedoms.”

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.

Matt Sledge: And I’m Matt Sledge, also a politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: Matt, it’s really great to have you back on the show. Today, we’re going to talk about some really important reporting you’ve been doing on the Prairieland case.

Last week, judges sentenced eight protesters to between 30 and 100 years in prison on terrorism-related charges for their participation in a July 4 protest last year outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas. 

Matt, as you wrote in your piece, Judge O’Connor handed down a 30-year sentence to a man, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not present at the protest and whose only alleged crime was moving a box of anarchist zines for his wife.

His wife, Maricela Rueda, who was present at the anti-ICE protest but left early, received one of the harshest sentences — 70 years — because she asked her husband to move her zines. 

You were at the sentencing. What was the room like when people heard that they would be spending, for some of them, the rest of their lives behind bars for attending a protest?

MS: I would say it was very somber, but also strangely reserved. I think many of the defendants and their supporters went into the courtroom expecting very long sentences. At the same time, some of them held out a sliver of hope that the judges who were sentencing people in two courtrooms at the same time might listen to their pleas for downward variations from the sentencing guidelines, might do something to attempt to distinguish between the different roles of the people who were at the protest and the one person who wasn’t there, Daniel Sanchez Estrada. And that essentially didn’t happen.

They all got really harsh sentences, and the judges made it clear that they were trying to send a message.

JW: Matt, we talked about this a little bit offline before the podcast, but it’s hard to imagine that the jurors who handed down these convictions could have imagined that they would be sending people to prison for these enormously long sentences, could have imagined that someone would spend 70 years in prison for a nonviolent act. What do you think is going through these jurors’ heads now?

MS: It’s hard to put yourself in someone else’s heads, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re surprised. Because even though some of these charges had various serious-sounding names like “riot” and “material support of terrorism,” jurors almost never know the sentencing ranges that come with charges.

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And in this case, probably did not know or expect that federal prosecutors would seek — and the judges would apply — these very harsh terrorism sentencing enhancements that really raised the sentences for all the defendants.

JW: Can you tell us what happened outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility and how this case came to be in the first place?

MS: There were a group of people, generally from the kind of lefty scene in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, that wanted to stage what they termed a “noise demonstration” protest outside this ICE facility, a show of solidarity, they later said, with the people detained inside the facility. This is one of these facilities that saw a huge increase in the number of people detained under Trump. 

There had been a daytime protest outside this facility earlier on the day on July 4, 2025. This group of people, around a dozen people, went that night, much later around 10:30, wearing all black, carrying fireworks, and in some instances carrying guns — which is legal to do in Texas.

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They set off some fireworks. One of the people who was there described it as actually a kind of festive environment. Then the police were called, as you might expect, and some of the demonstrators there were already gone by the time the gunfire erupted. A responding local police officer was left with a gunshot wound to his neck. And then the person later convicted of shooting the gun that left the police officer injured, Benjamin Song, escaped that night and was on the run for several days, hiding out in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

So there was a large police manhunt. This was a big story in the Dallas–Fort Worth area for days.

JW: Obviously, federal prosecutors have a different spin on who these protesters were and what their connection to each other was. Federal prosecutors have labeled this group of protesters as a “North Texas Antifa” terrorist cell.

What are prosecutors trying to do here by labeling protesters as members of antifa, and what evidence did they actually have to make a case that these individuals were “antifa operatives”?

MS: There’s a stunningly wide gap between what the Justice Department has put in its press releases and what top officials have said, versus the evidence that was actually presented at trial.

I’m not aware of anybody associated with this group ever claiming that there was such a thing as the “North Texas Antifa Cell,” which is what the government has branded this as. Several of the cooperating defendants, the people who helped the government out in its prosecution, said they did not think of themselves as antifa.

I think it’s safe to say that everybody involved in this protest was politically on the left, outraged over the Trump administration’s immigration policies and other things. Some of these people may have thought of themselves as anarchists or consumed antifascist zines, but it’s a real stretch to assert, as the government did, that this was all one coherent group.

In fact, at trial, the government story was a little more nuanced than what it put in its press releases and referred to a smaller planning group and then a larger group of people who had essentially just showed up to this demonstration. But there were two really different spins from the protesters and their attorneys and the government as to the intentions going into this night.

The people on trial said basically to a person that they did not go there intending to hurt anybody, they were just trying to show solidarity. Then the government pointed to things like wearing all-black clothing and bringing guns and ballistic vests as evidence that they were essentially going there looking to attack.

JW: Could you just explain to our listeners why it’s a bit of a misnomer to call antifa a group, or particularly in the way that the government is describing here?

MS: The whole idea behind the ideology or movement, whatever you want to call it, is that it’s very decentralized and is all about individuals or small groups taking direct action against people they view as fascists.

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This idea that there might be a whole movement of people committed to antifascism is a little too complicated for antifa’s critics to grasp. [Laughs] They insist that there is this, like, global network.

There are certainly small groups and larger groups of people who identify as antifascists. They certainly talk to each other. But again, this idea that there was something called a “North Texas Antifa Cell” just doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts.

JW: So Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines, as we’ve already discussed. Elizabeth Soto and her husband, Ines Soto, were sentenced to 50 years for their part in the protest. But part of the evidence used against the Sotos was that they owned a printing press to print zines. Matt, what kind of zines are we talking about here?

MS: Yeah, a lot of the zines and kind of social media feed evidence that the government presented at trial were your standard, off-the-rack anarchist, antifascist zines you might find at any anarchist bookstore or book fair, something like that. Something that would not be surprising at all to someone who has spent time in those spaces.

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There’s nothing that came close to being directly relevant to plotting either a protest or an attack outside the Prairieland Detention Center. The government stretched and pointed to zines that were from years before and discussed very general tactics.

So it’s stuff that you may have seen before. It’s not some super secret stuff. It’s very typical anarchist, anti-government zines.

JW: So anything I could probably find in a bookstore in Bushwick, is what you’re telling me.

MS: Exactly.

JW: Speaking of, one of the frequent takeaways I’ve heard from this case is that it proves Signal is not as secure as you think.

You’ve extensively covered the trial. What did you learn about digital privacy in 2026 and how people can continue to resist in an era where our digital communications simply aren’t safe?

Matt Sledge: Yeah, there was something interesting that came out at trial, essentially like a glitch in the way Signal worked and the way it interfaced with iPhones. I’m probably oversimplifying or butchering this, but basically our phones store what pops up in the little notification center when our phones are locked. The feds were able to use that to glean some of these communications. 

But you also have to remember they had several cooperating defendants. There were several Signal group chats going on at the same time. So even if Signal is perfectly buttoned down and the government hasn’t found some new hack or glitch to do — your messages with your fellow organizers, or anybody else you want to communicate with in an encrypted fashion, are only as good as the weakest link in the group.

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If someone decides they’re going to be willing to cooperate with the government and they’re in your Signal chat, the government’s probably going to be able to get access to it, which is why security researchers say it’s really important to have disappearing messages on and keep groups as small as you need them to be, and so on, common-sense approaches.

But I also just think that Signal is not like some silver bullet for privacy protection; it’s a way of reducing risk. People should think about it that way. 

It was also really interesting at trial, and we’ve seen this in a few of these cases, the way the government treats the use of Signal itself as something suspicious.

I’ve seen this also in government bulletins to local police that using Signal or another encrypted messaging app is a threat indicator — when people who use Signal, including Pete Hegseth, would say it’s just a way of keeping their messages private. But Hegseth is a good reminder that you have to look at who you’re including in your Signal group.

JW: I do appreciate a little Hegseth diss as a part of the Signal explanation, as that was, I would say, one of the more high-profile — “leaks” is really not even correct to describe what happened there. 

MS: Yeah, it’s not a leak when you just send a journalist out of the blue your war plans. [Laughs]

JW: Yeah, really can’t call it that. But I did want to talk more broadly about not just the legacy of this case, but what the administration is trying to do more broadly. The Prairieland protest case came on the heels of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which the Trump administration almost immediately used to justify cracking down on the broader left.

Matt, can you talk about how the administration is trying to silence critics more broadly by labeling all dissent and protests as acts of terrorism, and can you talk about the other active cases the government has against activists?

MS: Yeah, I think it’s important to remember the timeline. The Prairieland demonstration happened in July of 2025, and then Charlie Kirk was killed in September 2025.

Very soon after that, President Trump issued this executive order purporting to designate “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization — not something he can actually do, but so it goes.

Then he issues NSPM-7, this presidential memorandum instructing the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies to really crack down on the president’s enemies on the left.

So you had these Prairieland defendants who had already been arrested and charged. And then the government really ups the ante by bringing material support for terrorism charges against them, which really contributes to these long sentences.

I think it’s a preview of what’s going to happen elsewhere. It shows that in this post-Kirk era, the government is going to use the most aggressive charges it can find against people it does not like.

In terms of other cases, you can look to Illinois, where the protesters outside the Broadview facility there, the government attempted to charge them. The grand jury initially rejected it and the government was able to secure charges, and then the case fell apart under government scrutiny.

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More recently, we’ve had [new] charges against some Stop Cop City organizers in Georgia, and charges against protesters in Minneapolis with this aggressive theory about a conspiracy against federal officers, and these folks’ defenders say they were essentially just cop watchers keeping an eye on the federal invasion in Minneapolis.

So the charges may differ from case to case. The exact logic of how these cases work may differ, but the overarching strategy of using the most aggressive charges you can find and painting this all as a big conspiracy is going to continue.

JW: The cases that you just brought up had given some people hope that while the government may be trying to target protesters and dissenters, they didn’t have the power to jail them to the extent that they obviously wanted to and were intending to.

The Prairieland case and these sentences is a really scary wake-up call that the government is incredibly powerful and that these are not just words or prosecutions. This is an intent to really jail Trump’s dissenters and to jail any kind of opposition to this regime and that they have the power to do that in some of these cases.

We’re going to leave it there. Matt, I just really want to thank you for this update and your reporting. To continue following Matt’s work, sign up for The Intercept’s newsletter at theintercept.com.

MS: Goodbye, Jessie. Thanks for having me.

JW: Next, we zoom out with Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”

Bray is a history professor at Rutgers University and a frequent target of the right. He also consulted as an expert witness with one of the Prairieland defendants but did not testify. With Bray, we’ll take stock of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on dissent and talk to him about his own experiences being targeted by the right.

[Break]

JW: Mark, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Mark Bray: Thank you for having me.

JW: Mark, we just spoke to my colleague, Matt Sledge, about the details surrounding the Prairieland case. But to start, can you just give us your reaction to the charges and to the sentencing?

MB: Certainly when we look at the Prairieland case and some other somewhat similar cases during this second Trump administration, we can see that there’s a concerted effort to characterize opposition to ICE or opposition to the Trump administration as some form of conspiracy, as an effort to provoke terrorism. I see it in that context. 

There are a number of things that can be said about the various sentences, but perhaps the most obviously egregious is that handed out to Des — to Daniel Sanchez — 30 years for moving some zines, some literature, which is not illegal to possess.

It’s part of this broader effort to characterize opposition as terrorism conspiracy that we’ve seen in various manifestations. It seems like a particularly egregious version of that, when, to my knowledge, many of the people who were at this protest in Prairieland aren’t even accused of firing the weapon that was supposedly fired.

JW: Yeah, you’re right. The fact that Benjamin Song is the only person who actually fired a weapon and that everyone else participated in what appears to be nonviolent protesting — the charges that were handed out are really hard to even contemplate.

I want to get a little bit more personal as well. So The Guardian reported that you acted as a consultant for one of the defendants but didn’t testify. I know your name also came up multiple times during the trial. Can you talk about that, and what that was like for you?

MB: I was in Spain at the time. I had left the U.S. in response to death threats from the far right and my concerns about the political situation in the U.S. So I was unable, unfortunately, to testify in person. I was consulted by the attorneys for Daniel Sanchez, for Des. I think they asked whether I could testify remotely, and I imagine they were turned down because they didn’t follow up on that.

But part of what I did was, they sent me a Dropbox link or some such equivalent to read all of the radical literature that he transported, all of the scanned zines.

I read through a bunch of them; a few of them I was familiar with already. And a few things stood out. As I said, number one, it’s not illegal to own these things. Just because you own a book or a piece of writing doesn’t mean you necessarily agree with everything in it or anything in it. I own a copy of “Mein Kampf” — that doesn’t make me a Nazi. 

Although these folks were accused of being part of some sort of supposed antifa cell, very few of the zines that he transported had anything to do with antifa politics, and one of them was actually a critique of it.

So it just goes to show you that the political claims are intentionally superficial, vague, and minimalist in order to be able to package as much stuff they don’t like under the same kind of terrorist umbrella as possible.

JW: I want to get into why you had to flee a little bit more deeply. But before that, we spoke to Matt Sledge about this, but I wanted to get your take as well. Why is the administration determined to convince the public that antifa, a decentralized antifascist movement, is a domestic terrorist organization? What are the motivations here, and what does it mean if they can successfully convince us that these are terrorists?

MB: I guess the starting point is to recognize that I don’t think Trump or his allies really care about antifa per se. It’s a useful umbrella term to craft into a boogeyman scare tactic. In a way that “Communist” was used in past generations, antifa is used now.

Certainly, the FBI have been monitoring antifa groups for years now, and I’m sure they have a reasonably accurate sense of what it is. There’s a number of different groups in different cities that organize against the far right in a variety of ways. None of them are particularly large. There aren’t that many of them in the U.S., relatively speaking.

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But by arguing that antifa is — as a number of far-right provocateurs over the years have argued — like the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party, that phrasing shows us how they’re trying to make the case that whatever kind of far-left radical figure is actually just a version of the center-left, and that everyone who is not with us is against us.

That, I think, is reflected in the term “antifa-aligned,” which the Department of Homeland Security promoted as a framework for thinking about this. That, OK, there are antifa groups, there’s antifa-aligned. It’s like different layers to the onion to be peeled back. 

For me, it’s a useful term because it’s poorly understood. It’s associated in the popular imagination with people who cover their faces, who engage in acts of violence. And in that way, it’s a useful linchpin for framing a conspiracy.

Beyond that, we haven’t actually seen self-described antifa groups in the streets opposing the far right in the U.S. since last decade. It’s not particularly germane to what’s going on in U.S. politics, but of course, the reality of it is not particularly important to Trump and his allies.

JW: That’s really interesting. This isn’t just an attack on the left, and I think people on the left can often see it as, “OK, this is an attack on the left.” This is an attack on any kind of resistance, any kind of dissent, any kind of opposition to Trump. And have we seen this in history? You alluded to attacks on communists, but can you talk a little bit about the history of targeting the left and the broader ripple effects?

MB: There are so many cases. One that comes to mind is something I wrote a book about. I wrote this book called “The Anarchist Inquisition” about Spain and France at the turn of the 20th century. In short, there were anarchist bombings and assassinations — actual anarchists who said, “Yes, I’m an anarchist,” who tried and sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed to kill the king of Spain or to kill the president of France.

They didn’t have a ton of allies, and even in the anarchist movement, most disagreed with that strategy. But the Spanish government, and to a lesser extent the French government, used that as an excuse to arrest all sorts of trade unionists and Freemasons and anti-clerical figures and socialists in this big scandal in the 1890s, El proceso de Montjuïc, where these people were put in a dungeon. And it was this effort to create this conspiracy among the left that all these different people were somehow in cahoots to try and overthrow the monarchy.

So there are many cases throughout history around this. You can go forward into the movements of the ’60s. It’s useful for the right to portray all of the left as being the same. Which is actually a useful way I think those of us on the left should remind ourselves — that while there are comparisons between different kinds of right-wing forces, it’s also a mistake to say that all different kinds of fascists and far-right formations are all the same. Because there are differences there too, and understanding them makes sense. Flattening the dynamic can be useful rhetorically on both sides, but it’s usually not accurate.

JW: One thing I have just been thinking about is we’ve seen so many attempted prosecutions of protesters under the Trump administration, and this is their first real victory against, they’re calling it their first real victory against antifa.

Obviously, as we’ve discussed, it’s much more complicated than that. But we’ve seen the administration attempt to prosecute the Broadview Six, who were arrested for protesting outside of an ICE facility in Chicago. Obviously there are sillier instances where federal prosecutors tried to go after someone for throwing a Subway sandwich.

But now that they have their boogeyman scenario for the left, they have sentenced people to prison for the rest of their lives for protesting against injustices perpetrated by their government — does this embolden the administration? Do they learn that they can successfully prosecute people for opposing them?

MB: It certainly emboldens the administration to get this verdict and to get these sentences. Looking back to the fall of last year, when I received threats for my alleged involvement in antifa groups — which is not true, I haven’t participated in any of those groups — the specter of a kind of antifascist Red Scare was looming large.

I think that to a reasonable extent, it kind of faded a bit as the administration focused on a lot of other problems and issues, or created them. It’s come back a bit recently with the Prairieland case, the Prairieland verdicts, also the anti-ICE activists arrested in Minneapolis. There seems to be a bit of a return toward trying to stitch together this alleged antifascist conspiracy.

It’s so Orwellian to think that the antifascists are the bad guys in the midst of an increasingly authoritarian regime, which many scholars of fascism call, to one extent or another, if not fascist, trying to create something akin to fascism. So I do think it emboldens them. I do think it establishes a precedent.

We know that the legal system is all based on different kinds of precedents. And when the administration tried to make the case for antifascism as terrorism back in the fall, they cited a number of different cases which really had nothing to do with it. But what that shows us is that they’re trying to establish a track record, establish the reality of this enemy, this internal enemy they’re trying to combat. This helps them do it because there’s something they can point to. Of course it’s a dishonest intellectual, if you even want to call it intellectual project, to fake evidence and then refer to it as evidence of the thing you’re trying to use as evidence for the evidence. But we know how this administration functions, and it’s not surprising.

JW: As someone who has had to deal with the comms side of the White House, I will say it is not very surprising at all. 

You touched on this already a little bit, but because you’re widely viewed as an antifascist expert and you wrote the 2017 book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” you’ve long been a target of the right, so much so that you and your family had to leave the country.

Can you talk about that experience and how the threats you were receiving escalated over time to the point that you had to make that decision?

MB: When my book was published in 2017, it was rushed to publication and came out days after Charlottesville. It became a bestseller and was really the book of record for talking about what it was that antifa groups did and what they thought and why.

In that context, I received quite a few death threats. I was visited by the FBI. There was a bomb scare at my work. I was denounced by my employer, the president of Dartmouth College, but not fired because I received support from fellow faculty. But over the coming years, that kind of diminished. Antifa was not particularly pertinent to the news, with maybe the exception of a week in 2020 when Trump tried to blame the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd on antifa. It pretty much disappeared. 

Then all of a sudden, with Charlie Kirk’s killing, antifa was back on the radar. It was declared a supposed terrorist organization, although it’s neither terrorist nor an organization.

At first, frankly, I didn’t think much of it because I had received threats in the past. Even when Turning Point USA — the local group on my campus, although they were really fed the initiative by the national organization — crafted a petition to have me fired for writing my book, I kind of shrugged. It changed when some of the threats included my home address, and then my home address was published online on X, along with information about my family.

In a country that’s awash in guns, I was very concerned about something like something that happened to Charlie Kirk happening to me, and I was also very alarmed about the political direction of the country. So my goal was not actually to publicize that I was leaving the country, that leaked, but I was planning on leaving. Spain’s sort of my second home, I’ve done research there over the years. 

Now, going back to your earlier point though, the degree of the kind of onslaught of the Red Scare that I was fearful of did not fully materialize over the coming months. It didn’t — I don’t regret going — but it didn’t fully materialize.

I was concerned about all sorts of progressive activists being rounded up, and fortunately that hasn’t happened. It doesn’t mean that we need to stop our vigilance. That’s why we’re talking about issues like this. But it didn’t fully materialize. I do think it’s picking up again a little bit now, so I don’t think we’re out of the woods, so to speak.

But that was my experience, and I returned to the U.S. last week. I’m going to take all sorts of precautions to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again and to do what I can to keep speaking about these issues.

JW: Why do you think that the energy, the kind of Red Scare energy we had seen pick back up, why do you think it died down, and what do you think brought it back? Do you attribute that to Charlie Kirk’s death specifically? I think a lot of people think that the right used that as an excuse. I’m curious why you think it went up and down in that way.

MB: The killing of Charlie Kirk was obviously an excuse. Even before we knew who had done it Trump was blaming the left.

The effort to frame Tyler Robinson as a leftist is ridiculous if you actually look at all the kinds of convoluted things he believed. Then there was this effort for a few weeks to craft the antifa terrorist threat. Now, why it stopped, I’m not entirely sure. I do think that we live in this social media era where you can make something a big deal very quickly, but just as quickly people move on to the next thing.

I wonder if there was an element of that, particularly in the context where the administration was trying to pursue a number of different objectives at once. I felt, I don’t know what your opinion was, but towards the end of 2025, the kind of authoritarian momentum of the regime started to wane a little. And then all of a sudden January hit, Maduro gets kidnapped from Venezuela, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis grows even more intense. It seemed like particularly with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, that there was an effort to get the momentum back going again. In that context, the antifa terrorist threat was almost completely abandoned because Pretti and Good were simply called terrorists. 

So the middleman term between leftist and terrorist was antifa. They took out the middleman term: Leftists are terrorists. They’re coming back to it now. I’m not entirely sure how far they’ll get with it. One of the questions you always have with the growth of authoritarianism or fascism or whatever you want to call it in democratic states is, to what extent can the institutions that are designed to thwart those advances hold up?

I think overall it’s been a mixed bag in the U.S., but certainly you’d have to think that Trump and his allies do not believe that they can simply arrest just anyone and claim they’re part of a terrorist conspiracy at this point or they would have done it. A lot of the arrests that ICE made have not held up, and so I guess they don’t feel fully emboldened.

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But as you suggested earlier, every step they take, every supposed precedent they establish could make them feel more emboldened to take steps moving into the future. The one last thing I’ll say, though, is that I think the real linchpin for these efforts is something more approximating a genuine crisis or emergency, where they can more believably say, “If we don’t deal with these terrorists, our efforts to save the country will be for naught.”

Right now I don’t think that most Americans believe that there is this internal terrorist conspiracy, that’s something they have to be concerned about, especially when the price of groceries is going through the roof, or of gas. But if they get some situation where that’s more plausible, then I’d be more scared.

JW: As you noted, you wrote your handbook just at the start of Trump’s first term. The forward is written by the late Joshua Clover, who recounts pivotal moments in those years in which antifascists were pushing back against the rise of white nationalism. Nearly a decade later, how do you think about this moment that we’re in, and how we’ve gone from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a group of neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” holding tiki torches, to all of the in between and where we are now?

MB: When I published “Antifa” in 2017, I described the situation we were in as a moment of preventative antifascism that was akin to one extent or another to the post-war European context of trying to organize such that Nazis or fascists couldn’t bring back another horrific regime. We’re not in that situation anymore in the U.S., and I think to some extent we’re in a bit of an unprecedented situation, which I know that’s a term that’s thrown around a lot, but I mean it when I say it.

Whereas you look at the growth of Hitler’s regime in Germany or Mussolini’s in Italy, from the point at which they had the opportunity to take authoritarian power to the kind of consolidation of the regime, there was a much quicker, more straightforward ascension. Hitler outlawed various different political parties and threw their leaders in jail pretty quickly over the months after the Reichstag fire, which provided the context for the Enabling Act [of 1933], which allowed him to centralize his power.

In the U.S., we are not in the status quo, but we’ve not yet fully reached a kind of fascist or authoritarian regime, that we do still have other political parties. You can at least, under most circumstances, protest. So thinking about that in between I think is very interesting, particularly since the kinds of antifascist politics that I wrote about in the book were designed by different kinds of leftists after World War II to stop small and medium-sized fascist groups before they reached the halls of power.

But now, figures like Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth and so forth they have their hands on the wheel. So what that calls upon is creating a different kind of antifascist movement, and to me perhaps the most inspiring kind of model or example is the anti-ICE movement, which does not under many circumstances call itself an antifascist movement.

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I would call it an antifascist movement, which ironically is exactly what Trump is trying to get us to call it from a different angle. I think there’s a kind of contestation over language, contestation over images of suffering. I found it shocking when they published the alternate video of the killing of Renee Good in order to essentially — I and many others interpreted it — for us to think that she deserved it because of the context of her partner shouting at the ICE agent.

So contestations over images of violence over words, and I think that this moment is bringing out the best in a lot of people, whether or not they have activist experience or not, in organizing with their neighbors. The best moments of antifascism throughout history have been those moments where it ceases to be some sort of specialty politics, but becomes just a common-sense way of protecting our neighbors, those most vulnerable amongst us, and protecting our freedoms.

That’s what I think is happening now, and that’s what I hope we’ll continue to see, and that could produce really inspiring social movements over the years to come.

JW: To your point, what we’ve been witnessing with these anti-ICE protests is not just organized groups in Signal chats working together, although that is obviously happening as well. We’re seeing everyday people watch their neighbors get dragged out of their homes and standing up and saying, “I won’t stand for this.”

You have to think that the movement of antifascism — separate from how, the Trump administration is trying to describe antifa — but this larger movement of antifascism does have legs if people are willing to stand up for each other, to see their neighbors as members of their family, as members of their community.

We’re going to have to leave it there, but Mark, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

MB: Thank you so much.

JW: We want to know what issues you are following, send us an email at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. 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 doesn’t 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 to find us.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Trump’s Communist Boogeyman Playbook: Charging Protesters as Terrorists appeared first on The Intercept.

The Other Lobby

Regime change in Venezuela; a punishing siege of Cuba; election meddling in Honduras, Argentina, and Colombia; economic sabotage and terrorist designations in Brazil; boots-on-the-ground militarism, knife-to-the-throat death squads, and torture in Ecuador; lawfare, psy-ops, and CIA kill teams in Mexico; mass deportations and support for a gulag state in El Salvador; a deadly crackdown on protesters in Bolivia; and outright murder in the Caribbean and Pacific — a year and a half into his second term, President Donald Trump has deployed, with significant success, the full range of U.S. hard power on Latin America.

Even as the White House has proved reckless and self-defeating in Iran, it has maintained a menacing, disciplined focus on Latin America. The siege of Cuba and informal annexation of Venezuela are the centerpieces of this program, but there’s not one country, except perhaps Uruguay, where Washington isn’t in deep. The State Department was even micromanaging the recent Colombian elections, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally approving the deportation of Beto Coral, a Colombian national who lives in Texas, because he has been critical of Trump’s preferred candidate.

The extent of this power projection is impressive, even if the power asymmetries make operations in Latin America easy compared to the Middle East. You can pressure Ecuador with a gang designation and $20 million in security aid and get results. You can’t do that with Iran.

But asymmetry alone doesn’t explain the Trump administration’s overwhelming focus on Latin America. Florida, to a large degree, does. A narrow, wealthy Latin American diaspora geographically concentrated in the greater Miami area has captured U.S. hemispheric policy — not through persuasion or broad public support, but through the state’s electoral math and alliance with the Republican Party. This informal lobby represents a Latin American propertied class who fancy themselves dispossessed, who imagine their interests threatened by the mildest of democratic reforms. The members of this class see Trump and Rubio as their personal repo men. 

The Cause

Florida’s outsized role in U.S. politics begins with the backlash to Cuba’s 1959 revolution. Those who fled Fidel Castro’s socialist government in its early days overwhelmingly came from the middle and upper classes. They turned the peninsula into a sanctuary state. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion — the CIA’s 1961 bid to use exiles as an expeditionary force to invade Cuba and dislodge Castro — the more ideological of these agency-trained exiles continued to populate the counterinsurgent gothic. These Cuban emigres allied with rogue elements in the CIA and FBI, Colombian drug traffickers, and mafiosi to advance “The Cause,” as the novelist James Ellroy calls efforts to liberate Cuba through the violent overthrow of Castro’s government.

Cuban exiles, drawn into covert operations and the ranks of the then-fringe U.S. New Right, would go on to participate in many of the storied black-bag operations that defined the middle to late Cold War: the conspiracies surrounding JFK’s assassination (as the House Select Committee on Assassinations put it in 1979: “anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination, but the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved in the assassination) and the execution of revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia, led by Bay of Pigs veteran and CIA operative Félix Rodríguez, who then went to Vietnam to train the death squads of the Phoenix Program. Other Bay of Pigs alumni flew CIA combat missions over the Congo strafing Simba rebels and carried out the Nixon White House’s Watergate break-in and the Iran–Contra affair, in which Reagan administration officials secretly sold weapons to embargoed Iran and diverted the illegal profits to right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua, directly violating a congressional ban.

The Cold War ended but the Cause continued. In 2000, the notorious Republican operative Roger Stone recruited Cuban American protesters for the infamous Brooks Brothers riot — the mob action that shut down the Miami-Dade recount of presidential ballots and handed George W. Bush the White House — by instrumentalizing exile grievance through Cuban radio broadcasts. “The idea we were putting out there,” Stone later said, “was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba.”

Drug profits financed many of these operations. “Every major area of operation in which the CIA has worked has left behind a major functioning drug cartel,” as CIA operative-turned-whistleblower John Stockwell put it. So too the Western Hemisphere with the Cubans. The beginning of the modern cocaine trade “had developed largely under the control of exile Cuban criminal organizations based in Miami,” Bruce Bagley, an expert on Latin American drug trafficking, observed in Foreign Affairs.

By the late 1970s, Miami prospered, even as the rest of the country was suffering from a prolonged economic downturn, high unemployment, and urban decay. Laundered cocaine money in effect provided Miami a covert Keynesian stimulus, a massive injection of cash into construction, retail, banking, and services at the exact moment the U.S. government was abandoning such policies as inflationary. While nearly every other Federal Reserve district was running a deficit, the vault of Miami’s Fed was stuffed with a $5 billion surplus made up of manicured bundles of $50 and $100 bills, evidence of large cash transactions conducted outside normal financial channels. Real estate boomed. Employment boomed. Car dealerships, paid in cash, boomed. Buildings went up, the city’s traditional pastel stucco and red tiles giving way to glass, glitz, and gleam.

Cuban Americans came to dominate Miami’s independent banking sector. Continental National Bank, the first Cuban American-owned bank in the United States, was founded in 1974 by exile Carlos Dascal in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. Typical of the small Latin American-owned banks that proliferated in this period, Continental went from $12 million in annual deposits in the mid-1970s to over $600 million by 1980 — a dramatic illustration of the narco-dollars flooding Miami’s banking system.

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It was a wild time in Miami’s exile community. Cocaine and covert ops were a dangerous mix. No two figures better embodied the era than Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch — both CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veterans, both connected to the New Orleans mob and the drug trade. Together, they founded the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, or CORU, which the FBI described as “an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization” that served as a subcontractor for Operation Condor, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet’s hemisphere-wide assassination program. In 1976, Cuban CORU operatives planted the car bomb that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his U.S. colleague Ronni Moffitt in Sheridan Circle in Washington — the first case of state-sponsored international terrorism in the nation’s capital. Posada and Bosch also carried out the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 off the coast of Barbados, killing all 73 people aboard, including the Cuban national fencing team, soon after.

Democracy Promotion in Hialeah

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential election victory changed the calculus. His advisors were hard-line: the New Right had moved from the fringe to the halls of power. Cocaine continued to finance Miami, but the off-the-books exiles had become a liability. The historian Alan McPherson writes that by the mid-1970s, Cuban exile militants had carried out, in addition to the attacks described above, more than 100 bombings on U.S. soil and in 1974 accounted for 45 percent of all terrorist bombings in the world. The Reagan White House didn’t want to dim exile passion, but it also didn’t want planes being shot down over the Caribbean and bombs exploding in Sheridan Circle. And so mercenaries were out, and lobbyists were in.

Reagan’s national security adviser Richard Allen worked with Jorge Mas Canosa, who had left Cuba in 1960, to create the Cuban American National Foundation, or CANF. Allen explicitly modeled CANF on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC — telling fellow Cubans to study the Israeli lobby and replicate its methods, as documented by political scientists Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush. The goal was not just to sideline terrorists like Posada and Bosch but to marginalize more moderate perspectives within the Cuban American community who wanted some accommodation with the Cuban government. Reagan needed a respectable political vehicle for hard-line Cuba policy that could operate in the open. That was CANF.

Note the self-reinforcing loop: The Reagan White House organized the creation of a lobbying group to lobby itself for policies it already wanted to pursue, generating the appearance of popular democratic pressure for what was in fact long-standing government hostility toward the Cuban Revolution.

Mas Canosa put his own personalistic imprint on the AIPAC model. He combined, as Saul Landau put it, the style of an “old-style political ward boss” — getting himself and his allies appointed to local utility, road, and electoral commissions; awarding contracts; doing incoming immigrants favors; finding them jobs and housing — “with the pragmatic lobbying techniques” of AIPAC, cultivating congressional allies to enforce and strengthen the Cuba sanctions. His anti-Castro ideology was both genuine and lucrative: a Cuba opened to U.S. capital would be an enormous prize, and he and his inner circle would be best positioned to seize it.

In 1989, CANF won its first congressional seat, when Cuban-born Ileana Ros-Lehtinen defeated her Democratic opponent to succeed Claude Pepper, the New Deal lion who had championed labor, Medicare, and Social Security from the same Miami district for more than two decades. The symbolism was stark: “Red” Pepper’s left-liberal tradition eclipsed by Cuban exile politics.

Ros-Lehtinen would serve for 30 years, becoming the powerful chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and what the South Florida journalist Juan David Rojas called a founding figure of the “Miami neocons.” She was simultaneously the exile community’s most aggressive Cuba hard-liner, a champion of Israel in its Lebanon and Gaza wars, the author of Iran sanctions legislation, and a vocal defender of the accused Flight 455 bomber Orlando Bosch. Her former intern was Marco Rubio, now Trump’s national security adviser and secretary of state.

Over in Broward County, Florida’s 25th Congressional District, with its large Jewish, Colombian, and Venezuelan population, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is another Miami neocon, a Democratic one, advocating for hard-line policies in both Israel and Latin America. An AIPAC favorite, Wasserman Schultz shortly after first being elected in 2004 worked closely with Trump’s current Venezuela viceroy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, to squash five initiatives that would have diluted Cuba sanctions. 

At the time, Claver-Carone, born in Miami, was running both the U.S.–Cuba Democracy PAC and the Cuba Democracy Advocates. Since 1996, the National Endowment for Democracy, a nongovernmental organization, and the U.S government have channeled more than $100 million into similar “democracy” programs, many of them headquartered in Hialeah and Coral Gables. Democratization in Cuba was the stated objective, but the work of the NGOs and their subcontractors are often protected from disclosure as “trade secrets” under FOIA exemptions.

Mas Canosa died in 1997, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that the Cuban American lobby had peaked. The old guard was dying off, and poll after poll showed that younger Cuban Americans — U.S.-born, English-dominant, less connected to the island — were open to normalization and an end to the embargo. President Barack Obama’s surprise announcement in December 2014 that the United States and Cuba would restore diplomatic relations — the most significant shift in Cuba policy in more than half a century, negotiated secretly with the help of Pope Francis — seemed to confirm the lobby’s decline.

And yet the U.S. government, in the last two years of Obama’s presidency, continued to flood Miami with “democracy promotion” grants, a direct federal stimulus to activists who would become some of Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters. With Trump’s election, what looked like the lobby’s last gasp turned out to be its renaissance.

Trump ended the normalization of relations with Havana and, listening to Florida’s then-Sen. Marco Rubio, imposed harsh sanctions on the island. After Ron DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial victory turned the state hard right, Florida (home to a good number of the nation’s billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Google co-founder Larry Page) became the command center of MAGA power.

A Febrile Complex

Beyond Trump, something was transforming Miami that would change the lobby’s nature entirely. Through the 2000s and into the 2020s, the city was absorbing a new wave of Latin American capital flight on a scale that dwarfed anything produced by the original Cuban exodus.

Across Latin America, economic liberalization, a policy pushed by Washington since the 1980s, failed to generate prosperity and stability, leading many nations to elect left-leaning governments. Venezuelans had been arriving in Florida since Hugo Chávez’s first election in 1998. Now they were joined by wealthy Brazilians, Bolivians, Argentines, Nicaraguans, and Mexicans. Colombians had been coming for decades, fleeing the violence of their country’s civil war.

Even the mildest of leftists could spark a flight of capital northward. When it looked like Gabriel Boric would win Chile’s 2021 presidential election, two Chilean law firms opened offices in Miami to help wealthy Chileans move their assets to South Florida. Boric did win, and investors pulled money out of Chile at a record pace, leaving behind what Bloomberg estimated as a $50 billion hole. Chileans ranked eighth among foreign buyers of real estate in South Florida in 2021.

“When governments in Latin America go left,” as one prominent Miami realtor put it, “buyers go north.” Latin Americans bought nearly half of all new luxury units in South Florida through mid-2025, most of them in cash.

The city of Doral, just west of Miami, became so heavily Venezuelan it is informally known as Doralzuela. Miami’s Brickell neighborhood is filled with Colombian and Brazilian private banking offices. The Biscayne corridor attracted Mexican, Argentine, and Peruvian capital. These were not the huddled poor who arrived in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, an exodus of Cubans, or the desperate Haitians who came after the 1991 coup. These were the propertied business classes — and they were looking for ideological allies in Washington to beat back the social democrats at home.

The Cuban exile network absorbed and nurtured the grievances of these new arrivals. Following the 2009 military coup in Honduras — which ousted the elected center-left president Manuel Zelaya and replaced him with a right-wing government — a delegation of Miami Cubans, working with Sen. John McCain, the Republican Party’s most prominent neoconservative, served as a bridge between AIPAC and the greater Latin American lobby and hosted Honduras’s coup leaders in Washington to validate their takeover. For a brief moment, President Obama opposed the coup government, but when Cuban Americans and other conservatives began associating him with Castro and Chávez, he backed down and recognized the regime as legitimate.

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The new Latin American arrivals found a common language in a single word: “castro-chavismo.” The term had been popularized in Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s former president and leader of its far right. Uribe himself imported the term into the U.S. as part of a campaign to derail the Colombian government’s Cuban-brokered peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas. Flanked by then-Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, Uribe gave a rallying speech at a Doral restaurant, Mondongo’s, in October 2016. He warned the crowd of Colombian and Venezuelan expats that castrochavismo would come to Colombia if the peace deal were ratified. Uribe used this trip to deepen his ties with Trump’s people: Policy analyst Adam Isacson and historian Christy Thornton, separately, note Uribe’s influence on Trump’s first reelection campaign, when he ran ads in Florida linking President Joe Biden to the Latin American left. “Joe Biden is a PUPPET of CASTRO-CHAVISTAS,” he tweeted in 2020.

The Cuban lobby had long been motivated by the specific wounds of the Castro revolution: the confiscations, the executions, the broken families, what Joan Didion called in her 1987 book “Miami” the “febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos” that united the exiles. The newcomers from across Latin America were equally febrile, but their cause was not just a free Cuba — it was a continent liberated from the likes of left-leaning presidents like Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro.

Unlike the Cuban lobby, which had operated under the tight discipline of Mas Canosa and CANF, the newer Latin American exile community had no single institutional home. The Trump transition team after the 2024 election moved quickly to capture these new constituencies, reaching out to figures like Félix Maradiaga, a Miami-based Nicaraguan opposition leader whom former guerrilla fighter and strongman president Daniel Ortega had stripped of his citizenship. Maradiaga says that Trump’s envoys were urging the opponents of Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela to “unite our points of view so that the actions that come from the United States have a joint impact in the quest for democracy.”

Mar-a-Lago became the diaspora’s clubhouse, a palace-in-exile for Latin America’s displaced elites — where Brazil’s Bolsonaro family bends Trump’s ear, Venezuelan opposition figures convene with White House officials, and Colombian magnates attend fundraisers alongside Cuban American politicians and businessmen to discuss business opportunities and coordinate the hemisphere’s restoration.

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The scale of what was being plotted there has been partially revealed: a cache of forensically authenticated voice notes leaked from former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. Convicted of drug trafficking, Hernández had been serving a 45-year sentence in a West Virginia federal penitentiary until Trump pardoned him in December 2025. The leaked memos reveal that Hernández was being financed by both Israel and Argentina (he spent his first night of freedom in the five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel) and that his political proxy, current Honduran President Nasry Asfura, was meeting with investors at Mar-a-Lago to discuss sketchy deals with U.S. officials and to plan a broader destabilization program targeting Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.

Miami Rules

The new, greater Latin American lobby operates differently from the old CANF model, trading a single-issue ethnic lobby focused on one country for a class-based hemispheric operation united by a common enemy: reformism of even the blandest sort. CANF itself continues to exist but has fallen into irrelevance. Its PAC went dormant and its lobbying function was absorbed into a broader, more decentralized Latin America lobby. Florida’s Republican Party has largely absorbed CANF’s electoral machinery.

Class divisions had long existed in the Cuban diaspora, especially after the Mariel boatlift. But a singular focus on liberating Cuba had muted the cleavages. Now, though, as the diaspora became hemispheric in scope, the gap between the haves and have-nots has become more visible. Doral’s gated communities sport lovely names — Doral Isles Riviera, Doral Isles Venetia — and wealthy Venezuelans play golf at Trump National. Tens of thousands of poorer Venezuelans — many of whom risked their lives trekking the Darién Gap to get to the U.S., many of whom work at that same golf resort — live in constant fear: Trump has revoked their Temporary Protected Status, leading to more than 15,000 deportations. Some have been sent back to Venezuela, others to El Salvador’s infamous maximum-security CECOT prison.

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The cruelty is not limited to Venezuelans. The Trump administration has targeted other poor immigrants, including Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians. Even poor Cubans — who in the past could expect automatic residency — are now being shipped to Mexico, where many, elderly and sick, find themselves sleeping on the streets of random cities, such as Villahermosa, the humid capital of Mexico’s southern state of Tabasco. “They’re casting us aside to die,” said Harold A, a 58-year-old Cuban national who was deported to Mexico earlier this year. “They don’t give us anything, nothing. … How are we supposed to eat?”

The wealthy members of the diaspora tend to see these deportations as harsh but necessary to protect their reputation as “exceptional migrants.” Poor Venezuelans are referred to by some of their better-off compatriots as orcos — orcs, subhumans — a class contempt that Oxford scholar Erick Moreno Superlano has documented in detail. The lobby that presents itself as the agent of Latin American freedom is, in fact, a staunch defender of the hemisphere’s status and class hierarchy.

These new well-to-do exile groups vote in their national elections as a bloc, and often decisively so for their country’s most Trump-like candidate. Last month in Peru, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori — who spent 16 years in prison for human rights violations committed during his presidency, including death squad killings — would have lost the presidential election if only votes cast in Peru were counted, but ultimately beat her center-left opponent thanks to the votes of the Peruvian diaspora. The roughly 9,000 Miami-Dade votes helped her win by less than 1 percent.

More recently, Colombians living in Miami turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote for the hard-right Trump mimic Abelardo De la Espriella, helping him win a presidential election that was as close as Peru’s. De la Espriella is a U.S. citizen and was a long-time resident of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Miami, where he worked as a defense lawyer for Colombian clients, among them paramilitaries, right-wing politicians, and money launderers.

Be it by the bullet or the ballot, Miami rules.

The Dogs That Caught the Car

Both AIPAC and the greater Latin American lobby had, in the second Trump term, achieved close to their maximal ambitions simultaneously: a war on Iran and a full-court press on Latin American leftists of all stripes, with the deployment of U.S. Special Operations forces, CIA assassination teams, naval blockades, and sanctions. War powers resolutions to stop Trump’s actions — in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela — are routinely blocked by a Republican caucus dependent on AIPAC money and Florida’s electoral votes, often with an assist from a handful of AIPAC Democrats.

Yet both lobbies now find themselves something like the dog that caught the car, and then was run over.

Trump’s war in Iran was a tactical and strategic disaster, leading the White House to lash out at Israel in ways that, just a month ago, would have been unimaginable. Vice President JD Vance just lectured Israel that it “can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem.” And Trump warned Benjamin Netanyahu “you will be on your own very soon.” AIPAC’s maximalist project — permanent war, permanent leverage, permanent intertwining with U.S. power — is in tatters.

Whether the same reversal comes for the Latin American lobby remains to be seen. Trump is still pressing Cuba hard, demanding a “deal.” But the deal Trump is pushing looks less like regime change than an investment prospectus. It’s less the Monroe than the Capone Doctrine: Sanctions destroy foreign competitors, Helms–Burton lawsuits punish anyone who stays, and Trump-connected U.S. investors move in to pick up assets at distressed prices. Recently, a business connected to a former Trump official Ray Washburne muscled out a Canadian mining and cobalt corporation.

Trump’s sanctions worked too well. They broke Cuba’s economy so completely that Havana was forced, recently, to enact sweeping economic liberalization — reforms that serve investors, not exiles.

In Florida, Cuban Americans who have never set foot in Cuba, like Nicolás J. Gutiérrez — a Miami-born lawyer whose “young millionaire” father lost his sugar fields to Castro — founded organizations such as the “National Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba,” hoping that Trump would make a country they have never seen theirs again. 

For many, that hope is dissipating quickly as they face their nightmare scenario: a repeat of what happened recently in Venezuela, where Trump entered into a partnership with the existing government, letting demands for root-and-branch regime change take a back seat to oil industry dealmaking. ExxonMobil, which has a large role in setting Trump’s Venezuela policy, just won a Supreme Court Case that allows it to sue Cuban state-owned companies in U.S. federal courts to win compensation for property confiscated more than 65 years ago. This ruling will give the company enormous leverage in what comes next for Cuba. At the same time, Trump, in his second term, has deported nearly 8,000 Cuban nationals, many of the low-income asylum-seekers but also a considerable number of middle-class business and property owners.

The sugar fields, it seems, will not be returned to the children of their former owners any time soon, though they might be put out to bid. But those hoping for restoration will always have Mar-a-Lago.

The post How Florida’s Cuban Diaspora and the Israeli Lobby Came Together — and Are Coming Apart appeared first on The Intercept.

The MAHA enthusiast announced last month that HHS was demanding federal action on allegations that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also known as CAIR, and its California and Washington affiliates had misused federal grant funds. “If there is evidence of fraud, abuse, or ties to designated terrorist organizations, we will act,” he wrote on X. 

The post came as a shock at CAIR’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., because the organization had never received nor solicited federal funding from Health and Human Services.

“Not even a penny,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of CAIR. “[Kennedy] would know that if he had spent any amount of time doing research before he decided to publicly attack us in this way.”

Kennedy’s mystifying crusade appears to be an attempt to satisfy the demands of a group of Republican members of Congress led by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, as an emboldened right wing chomping at the bit to target Muslim Americans dictates the decisions of the executive branch. After Roy and his colleagues argued without evidence that CAIR and its affiliates were connected to international terrorist organizations and had misused federal funds intended to help settle Afghan refugees, Kennedy’s fumbling attempt to address their concerns set off a bizarre chapter in the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent that left the intended targets wondering whether they were under a real investigation or had become pawns in a challenging midterm cycle.

“During election cycles we see the ramping-up of this type of anti-Muslim rhetoric,” said Saher Selod, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. “Saying we need to investigate CAIR national is following a playbook of trying to motivate a base to come out and vote, and Muslims have become the bait in this moment.”

CAIR, which advocates for the civil rights of Muslims in the United States, has been a thorn in President Donald Trump’s side since his first administration, when the group sued to block his infamous “Muslim ban.” In Trump’s second term, CAIR national and its local chapters have continued to push back against the administration’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agenda through the courts and in public statements.

While CAIR national has never received HHS funding, CAIR California and CAIR Washington, which operate separately from the national branch and are overseen by their own boards of directors, have received federal health dollars to provide legal services to Afghan refugees fleeing after the Taliban took power in 2021.

Both chapters vehemently denied any wrongdoing and emphasized the extensive vetting process required by both their respective states and the federal government to use the funds under contention. 

“They won’t get anything out” of an investigation, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR California. “It is merely an attempt to create smear and destruction, to silence … the most important American Muslim voices in the country when it comes to issues dealing with Israeli abuses and the U.S. funding of those abuses.”

The allegations levied against CAIR and its local affiliates come amid a larger wave of anti-Muslim attacks as Republicans fight to hold onto power in a midterm cycle where they’re likely to lose seats. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in December in designating CAIR as a “foreign terrorist organization.” In Tennessee, Republican Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”

Democrats have hardly been immune from spreading Islamophobic rhetoric. During last year’s New York City mayoral election, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand had to apologize for comments characterizing now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, as supportive of a “global jihad.” Before winning New Jersey’s June primary, Dr. Adam Hamawy faced attacks from some of his Democratic opponents over a brief 1995 trial testimony he gave for a religious leader convicted of plotting terror attacks, in what Hamawy’s campaign described as well-worn Islamophobic tropes.

Roy, who has been leading the charge against CAIR in Congress, was running his own campaign for Texas attorney general when he sent a letter to Kennedy urging HHS to investigate and suspend CAIR and CAIR California, accusing the organization of having long-standing ties to Hamas and documented “misuse of federal grant funds.” 

In response, CAIR California sent a letter to Kennedy refuting Roy’s claims as “lies, smears and defamatory statements.” The group noted that it was selected and vetted by the state of California to provide these services, and argued that its “use of public funds are fully accounted for, transparent and compliant with its legal obligations.” 

Over a month later, CAIR California received what Ayloush, its executive director, described as an “amicable” and “reassuring” response from HHS. In the letter, obtained by The Intercept, the director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, Paula M. Stannard, said she was directed by Kennedy to respond to CAIR California on his behalf.

“OCR plays a critical part in the effort to ensure that people are able to lead healthy lives free of discriminatory barriers,” Stannard wrote. “OCR’s policy and enforcement efforts continue to protect all Americans from unlawful discrimination; ensure equal access to health and human services and respect the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” 

The letter did not commit to anything, but Ayloush said that he did not get the sense that the secretary would be joining in on what he described as the “bashing of Muslim organizations.” 

So it came as a surprise when only a few days later, the secretary posted about an investigation not only into CAIR California, but also CAIR national and CAIR Washington. 

“There’s an interesting divergence between what he said privately to CAIR California in writing, and then what he said on social media,” Mitchell, the national deputy director, said. 

So far, all three organizations told The Intercept that they have not received any correspondence from HHS. “To this point, we have not received any communication from him indicating that he’s looking into anything,” said Mitchell. “No subpoenas, no nothing at all, just this shot across the bow in the court of public opinion.” 

Roy, who founded the Islamophobic “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” thanked Kennedy in June for “investigating CAIR’s alleged ties to the groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.” 

Imraan Siddiqi, executive director of CAIR Washington, said that accusing Muslim Americans of fraud had become a convenient line of attack politically. He pointed to attacks in Washington state on predominantly Somali Muslim childcare workers after conspiracy theories that Somalis were committing child care grant fraud spread in Minnesota.

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“They’ve found a line of attack that some people are responding to or resonates with them,” he said, particularly in an era where social media can easily amplify misinformation for an audience eager to confirm their own biases. 

Hatem Baizan, an Ethnic Studies lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, said the administration does not need to prove these claims to smear CAIR and its affiliates.

“Facts are immaterial for this current administration,” he said. “The aim is to throw as much dirt as possible, use as many investigative tools as possible with the hope that you have enough delegitimization, enough doubt, to actually get people to distance themselves from CAIR.” 

The post RFK Jr. Claims He’s Investigating Terrorism Now, Too appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested an Ecuadorian man at a court at 26 Federal Plaza and a man from the Dominican Republic at another court at 290 Broadway, both in Lower Manhattan. The arrests continued on Monday, when ICE agents detained a third man, originally from Guatemala, at 290 Broadway.

In legal filings challenging the detentions of the men taken Thursday, advocates with the nonprofit Make the Road New York accused ICE of not only violating their clients’ right to due process, but also of brazenly flouting a federal court order.

The judge’s order barred ICE from making arrests at Manhattan immigration courts in all but a narrow handful of exceptions, while a similar ruling issued on June 23 from a federal court in California applies nationwide.

By detaining the men at court on Thursday, ICE appears to be directly contravening the New York order without yet providing a justification, according to Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y.

“ICE continues to flagrantly violate the law by arresting immigrants who are attending their mandatory court hearings, despite a court order mandating an end to courthouse arrests,” Goldman said in a statement to The Intercept, adding that his office was working to get the men released.

ICE appears to be acting outside the law, according to Murad Awawdeh, the head of the advocacy group New York Immigration Coalition.

“We’re witnessing ICE, yet again, operate in a lawless and rogue fashion and not following court orders,” Awawdeh said. “We’re supposedly a nation under the rule of law, and our judicial branch has said that this agency must stop engaging in this lawless behavior, and they continue to do so.”

In its habeas corpus filings, lawyers from Make the Road demanded that the two men arrested Thursday be released and allowed to continue navigating the immigration process.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for ICE denied that the agency had violated any court order. The spokesperson did not explain how the arrests fit into the exceptions to the ban on courthouse arrests put in place by the federal judge.

No Exceptions

From May 18 until last week, just two arrests had taken place at Manhattan immigration courts; in both cases, the detainees were swiftly released after lawyers and immigrant rights groups mobilized to invoke the federal judge’s order.

That has not been the case for the men arrested on Thursday and Monday. All three men have since been transferred to detention centers, according to ICE records.

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The Dominican man arrested Thursday is currently being held at ICE’s Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, while the Ecuadorian man arrested the same day is being held at the D. Ray James ICE Processing Center in Folkston, Georgia. The Guatemalan man arrested on Monday is being held at the Orange County Detention Facility in upstate New York. (The Intercept is withholding the detained men’s names because of the sensitive nature of their cases.)

The arrests appeared to end a brief period of calm at Manhattan immigration courts in the wake of the May 18 ruling by Judge Kevin Castel requiring ICE to revert to a policy put in place in 2021. The Biden-era policy allowed for courthouse arrests with prior authorization in only a handful of instances, including when a person might pose a threat to national security or to public safety — narrowly defined as cases in which agents are in direct pursuit of a subject or if it would not be possible to make the arrest in another location.

In their statement, the ICE spokesperson pointed to a conviction for trespassing on the part of the Dominican man and a 2025 conviction for disorderly conduct on the part of the Ecuadorian man.

One immigration lawyer said the courthouse arrests were part of a growing pattern of increased ICE detentions.

“For whatever reason, that order is essentially being disregarded, and we’ve seen a pretty significant uptick in detentions,” said Benjamin Remy, senior coordinating attorney at the immigration protection unit of the New York Legal Assistance Group.

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In the year and a half since President Trump returned to office and unleashed the agency as part of his mass deportation agenda, ICE has repeatedly been found in violation of orders around the detention of immigrants. The alleged violations have been ramping up in recent months, according to advocates and court records.

“We’ve seen ICE have a fairly flexible and adaptive relationship when it comes to the truth and the facts,” Remy said, “and to complying with court orders and frankly to rule of law as a fundamental concept.”

An Impossible Bind

Beginning in May 2025 and continuing for almost exactly a year, ICE arrests at 26 Federal Plaza, 290 Broadway, and another immigration court at 201 Varick Street were commonplace, with hundreds of people swept up by masked ICE agents when they showed up for scheduled hearings. According to an analysis published last August by The City Reporter, a local news site, more than half of courthouse arrests nationwide were taking place in New York.

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Like the overwhelming majority of people arrested in immigration courts over the past year, the men arrested over the past week were following demands made of them by the immigration system.

Both men arrested last week had fled home due to persecution, entered the U.S., and been detained before obtaining release as their cases proceeded, according to petitions filed on their behalf by Make the Road New York. When summoned to court, both showed up as instructed.

ICE has repeatedly defended the arrests as legitimate. Immigration advocates, however, have warned that it puts immigrants in an impossible bind, forcing them to decide between risking arrest by following the law and showing up to court, or losing any chance of lawfully remaining in the country by skipping a hearing.

“It is not uncommon for me to encounter folks walking into court in the morning already just sobbing,” Remy told The Intercept. “These arrests are discouraging the legal process. It’s discouraging people’s fundamental constitutional right to due process and to be able to have their day in court.”

The post ICE Flouting Federal Judge’s Order to Stop Arresting Immigrants at New York Courts appeared first on The Intercept.

Since Trump returned to the White House, DOJ prosecutors have moved to seek the death penalty against at least 42 defendants in 34 cases, according to figures compiled by The Intercept, based on legal records and data from the Justice Department and Federal Capital Trial Project. In at least two additional cases, federal prosecutors have conveyed their plans to seek death but have not yet submitted a notice of intent — the formal legal filing telling the defense and presiding judge that the DOJ seeks to execute a defendant. By comparison, the DOJ authorized some 38 capital defendants total over the course of Trump’s first term.

Many of the new cases have originated in places where the death penalty has been abolished — states like New Mexico, Colorado, and Maryland — as well as jurisdictions where there is no history of capital punishment, like the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than 70 percent of the defendants are people of color, most of them Black.

The spike in new death penalty cases is a striking illustration of Trump’s longtime enthusiasm for capital punishment, which led him to carry out an unprecedented execution spree in the months before he left office in 2021. It’s also in stark contrast to the Justice Department under President Joe Biden, who put capital prosecutions almost entirely on hold — and whose attorney general, Merrick Garland, deauthorized dozens of pending death penalty cases upon taking office.

Trump’s ramped up authorizations won’t necessarily bring a wave of new death sentences. Only a relative handful of federal capital authorizations end up going to trial — and fewer still result in a death sentence. Although executions have been on the rise across the United States since Trump retook office, new death sentences have been on a consistent decline for decades. Prosecutors have become more reluctant to seek death sentences, and jurors have also been less and less willing to send defendants to death row.

“The American public has made a very, very decisive turn away from the death penalty during the last 20 years,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “Twenty years ago, we had five times the number of new death sentences than we had last year.” Although Trump’s DOJ “purports to be acting consistent with the will of the American people,” she said, “those are American juries that are making different decisions now.”

The Trump administration’s death penalty plans have already come apart in many cases. Since then-Attorney General Pam Bondi first started filing notices of intent last year, roughly a third of the defendants have seen the death penalty taken off the table. In numerous cases, the presiding judge has struck down the government’s authorizations. In one case involving two co-defendants, the DOJ has withdrawn its prior authorization. And two cases have been resolved with guilty pleas.

This still leaves at least 27 defendants currently facing capital trials. With Blanche, who was previously Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, vying to become attorney general, there is no reason to expect the push to send people to death row to slow down anytime soon.

The defendants facing the death penalty under Trump have been accused of grisly crimes, from mass shootings to gang murders. But if there’s one thing driving Trump’s escalating pursuit of new death sentences above all else, it is his sustained rage at Biden, who took the historic step of commuting 37 death sentences before leaving office, leaving three people on federal death row. Trump railed against the commutations in a Truth Social post on Christmas Day, wrongly referring to them as pardons and telling the commuted prisoners themselves to “GO TO HELL!”

Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump immediately signaled his intent to repopulate federal death row, proclaiming in an executive order that his administration would “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” Framed as a rebuke to Biden’s act of clemency, which he derided as a “mockery of justice,” it also called on states to step up their own efforts to execute people — and to try to seek new death sentences at the state level against the 37 men whose federal sentences were commuted.

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A month later, in February 2025, newly installed Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo to DOJ prosecutors directing them to seek death wherever possible. “Absent significant mitigating circumstances, federal prosecutors are expected to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murder of a law-enforcement officer and capital crimes committed by aliens who are illegally present in the United States,” Bondi wrote. She ordered prosecutors to prioritize capital cases involving gang members and people accused of international drug crimes. And in an unprecedented move, Bondi announced that the DOJ would review every decision in which the Biden administration declined to seek a death sentence to determine whether prosecutors should pursue the death penalty after all.

The attempt to turn Biden’s “no-seeks” into capital prosecutions has proven mostly unsuccessful. Of hundreds of cases reviewed by the DOJ, prosecutors ended up filing a notice of intent against 15 defendants who had previously been told they would not face the death penalty. One by one, the new capital authorizations were smacked down by presiding judges, several of whom scolded Trump’s prosecutors for their ham-fisted efforts to win death sentences in cases that, in many instances, were already set for trial. Currently three cases remain in which prosecutors are still seeking to move forward with a capital trial despite the Biden DOJ’s previous decision not to seek death.

It did not take long after Bondi was fired for her replacement, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, to make clear he intended to continue Trump’s death penalty push. In late April, he released a 48-page report by the Office of Legal Policy, which outlined in detail Trump’s plans to ramp up new death sentences and speed up executions. Titled “Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty,” the document again framed Trump’s commitment to capital punishment as a response to Biden’s dereliction of duty — and in particular to his betrayal of victims’ families.

The report included a chart showing Biden’s DOJ’s rejection of capital cases, casting Garland as an outlier among other attorneys general. By contrast, the report devoted little space to Trump’s new authorizations, avoiding entirely its mostly failed attempts to reverse Biden’s “no-seeks.” Nor did it hint at the fact that Blanche, like previous attorneys general, would himself issue a flurry of no-seeks in death-eligible cases upon taking over — something that is standard practice at the DOJ. Death penalty cases are, after all, at least in theory, reserved for only the most serious crimes. “To pursue use of the death penalty in the manner that is set forth in Trump executive order would require an almost singular focus on seeking death sentences to the exclusion of so many other priorities,” Maher said.

While the Blanche report is certainly cause for concern, Maher said a lot of it read as a wishlist more than an achievable blueprint. “The majority of that report, I thought, reflected the Trump administration’s grievances about lawful decisions made by the previous administration,” she said. “To me it was more like a campaign website instead of a measured legal document by a government agency.”

“These executive orders, these memoranda — everything is changing by the day,” she said. “We just don’t know how this is all going to play out.”

What might be most sobering about Trump-era capital punishment is not the way it differs from past presidents but how it remains consistent. In the hands of an administration overtly committed to white supremacy, the defendants chosen by Trump’s DOJ for capital trials look a lot like the defendants who have always faced the federal death penalty.

More than 70 percent of Trump’s authorizations have been against people of color, most of them Black. This is strikingly consistent with the federal death penalty’s overall track record; according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 73 percent of capital defendants authorized for death penalty pros­e­cu­tions from 1989 to June 2024 were people of color.

The racial disparities in the federal system have been well-documented for decades. Yet, apart from the most high-profile cases, Americans are generally unaware of capital prosecutions brought at the federal level since most authorizations never lead to a death penalty trial — let alone a death sentence. This leaves the most dramatic racial disparities hidden from view. Data from the Federal Capital Trial Project shows that, in the state of Maryland, for example, which has sent only one person to federal death row since the late 1980s, DOJ prosecutors have authorized death penalty prosecutions against more than 30 people, the majority of whom were Black. The rest were Latino.

Trump’s recent authorizations replicate this trend, with DOJ prosecutors in Maryland filing notices of intent against four defendants, three of them Latino and one of them Black. (The former three, alleged MS-13 gang members from Baltimore, have since seen their authorizations thrown out by a judge.)

Since last year, Trump’s DOJ has also authorized death penalty prosecutions of four people in the Eastern District of Missouri, which is home to St. Louis. As with every other federal authorization from the same jurisdiction to date, all of them are Black. (Two of these defendants have since seen their authorizations withdrawn by the DOJ.)

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Trump’s execution spree six years ago briefly put the racism of the federal death penalty on display. The eighth man put to death, Orlando Hall, had been sentenced to die by an all-white jury in Texas, where, according to his lawyer’s last legal filings, federal prosecutors were “nearly six times more likely to request authorization to seek the death penalty against a Black defendant than a non-Black defendant.” Co-defendants Christopher Vialva and Brandon Bernard, who were executed less than three months apart, were sent to death row by a federal prosecutor who openly told me that people considered him “crazy” for allowing a single Black man to serve on their jury.

At that time, the U.S. was experiencing a supposed reckoning over race, which made such cases all the more disturbing to those paying attention. Yet the executions had been made possible by a Democratic party that paved the way for Trump’s killing spree by expanding the death penalty in a way that was racially skewed from the start. That Trump’s aggressive death penalty push is no more racist than what came before speaks volumes about what capital punishment has always been.

The post Trump Has Already Launched More Death Penalty Prosecutions Than in His Entire First Term appeared first on The Intercept.

Voters chose democratic socialist Melat Kiros, an attorney who lost her job for condemning her industry’s silence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ahead of longtime Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat representing Denver who touted progressive positions on domestic issues but drew criticism that she had grown complacent over three decades in Congress and generally followed the party line on support for Israel.

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DeGette’s defeat in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District brought more bad news for Democratic incumbents reeling after losses in New York last week. Party leaders are facing a surge in public frustration with their brand and a cascade of voters who say they don’t wield power effectively. Though some Democratic leaders have discounted those races and claimed that the ascendant candidates’ vision is out of step with the party’s base, leftists and progressives are continuing to notch wins under their noses as they take the battle over the future of the Democratic Party to the polls.

“In the last week, we have taken out 40 years of incumbency,” said Usamah Andrabi, spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which backed Kiros and two of the candidates who won in New York. 

Members of the Democratic establishment “hate that they can no longer simply spend unlimited sums of money to buy a seat in Congress, and we are truly proving that organized people power and mass movements can beat the money,” he said. “We’re just having an amazing fucking cycle.”

Kiros, who will face Republican Christy Peterson in November, is heavily favored to win in the solid Democratic district.

Anti-incumbent sentiment also came through in the tight Democratic race for governor, where the state attorney general framed himself as the choice against the establishment despite holding statewide office. Two-term Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser defeated sitting Sen. Michael Bennet after casting himself as outsider who went after President Donald Trump in court dozens of times and won — a fairly standard tactic for Democratic state attorneys general.

That’s not to say every race in Colorado was a warning sign for the establishment. In the statewide race for Senate, the incumbent safely kept his seat as progressive challenger Julie Gonzales fell short of ousting centrist Sen. John Hickenlooper. (Hickenlooper had refused to debate Gonzales and tried to thwart her run early in the race.)

Mixed Results in Key Districts

In the district encompassing Colorado Springs, Jessica Killin, an Army veteran and previous chief of staff to former second husband Doug Emhoff, easily beat Joe Reagan, a populist second-time candidate and fellow veteran. Killin had far outraised him with the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

Days before the 5th Congressional District primary, Killin pledged to sign onto a new pact from conservative House Democrats to promote capitalism, equating socialism with the right-wing MAGA movement and promising to fight both. Killin will face first-term incumbent GOP Rep. Jeff Crank, whose district the Cook Political Report changed from “solid” to “likely” Republican.

State Rep. Manny Rutinel, who has been described as a progressive but recently reneged on some of his policy pledges, meanwhile, beat a former state lawmaker backed by conservative Democrats’ Blue Dog PAC in the 8th District, rated a “toss up” and one of the DCCC’s “races in play” that could help determine control of the House. He’ll face freshman GOP Rep. Gabe Evans, who was ranked last summer as the most vulnerable incumbent in the country.

Rutinel campaigned in the heavily Latino district on fighting the “cruelty” of Trump’s immigration policy and attacked the record of his opponent, Shannon Bird, on the issue. He positioned himself as the candidate who would do more to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Backed by the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rutinel backed off of some of his more left-leaning stances during his campaign, such as Medicare for All and opposing fracking. While he had reportedly been privately critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he said he wouldn’t “boil it down to one word descriptors” and would support military aid to Israel. He ran without the support of the Working Families Party, which had previously endorsed him.

While Blue Dog-backed Bird had the institutional support of the centrist and party-aligned New Democrat Coalition Action Fund and EMILY’s List as well as the pro-Israel Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, Rutinel had the advantage in fundraising and dominated ad space. House Majority PAC — which is aligned with House Democratic leadership — has already reserved $6.1 million in ad reservations for the general election.

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“Voters can see through the hollow words and platitudes of the corporate-backed candidates who have tried to hijack our working families-centered messaging during this campaign,” said Carlos Valverde, Southwest regional director for the Working Families Party. “People are tired of status-quo, do-nothing politics that protect the comfortable while working families struggle with housing, healthcare, wages, and basic dignity.”

In Denver, according to Andrabi, on-the-ground energy from the campaign’s supporters made the crucial difference. While DeGette received a last-minute infusion of super PAC money, the Kiros campaign “knocked 115,000 doors in this race, which is just insane.”

The post Socialist Momentum Grows as Melat Kiros Wins in Denver appeared first on The Intercept.

Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

The months after the October 7, 2023, attacks saw a wave of questionable mainstream news stories about alleged sexual assault in Hamas’s attacks that day on Israel.

It would be years before the American press began to deal with sex crimes against Palestinians imprisoned by Israel as part of its brutal occupation.

It’s a reckoning that is long overdue.

Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both a systematic and a decades-old practice — a well understood dynamic that is being put in the spotlight this week in a new report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers.

The extensive 188-page report, parts of which were shared with The Intercept in advance of publication, situates recent, high-profile news stories detailing the rape and sexual assault of Palestinians in Israeli detention as part of “a wider system of sexualized and gendered violence spanning detention, warfare, surveillance, reproductive destruction, family separation, domicide, and the desecration of Palestinian bodies” over decades.

The report, “A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians,” brings together witness and survivor testimonies; news coverage; academic research; United Nations reports; and findings from human rights groups, like the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and Israel-based B’Tselem; along with declassified Israeli archival material.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces denied allegations of mistreatment of Palestinians in detention and said the military could not comment on specific cases without more information about the detainees.

“The IDF rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees, including allegations of stripping detainees of their clothes and sexually assaulting detainees during interrogations in detention facilities under its responsibility,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “Allegations of misconduct by IDF soldiers are examined and handled accordingly. In appropriate cases, criminal investigations are opened by the Military Police.”

The United Nations added Israel in May to a blacklist of countries found to be committing sexual violence in war zones, citing 31 cases of sexual violence perpetrated in the last two years by Israeli forces against Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The new Palestinian Feminist Collective report underlines that the U.N.’s findings are merely the tip of the iceberg.

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The compilation of harrowing details from a multiplicity of sources offers a chilling rebuke to those who have sought to discredit Palestinian victims’ claims or dismiss cases of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by Israeli forces as rare aberrations.

Crushed testicles, genital beatings, rapes of detainees including children and the elderly — the report, like a number of the previous human rights reports it draws from, shows that such abuse is, according to the authors, “institutional practice rather than individual misconduct.”

Rape by Trained Dogs

A section of the report shared with The Intercept includes the detailed testimonies of multiple released Palestinian prisoners. A 42-year-old woman arrested in Gaza while going through an Israeli military checkpoint in November 2024, for example, described being stripped, blindfolded, and handcuffed to a metal table and raped vaginally and anally by Israeli soldiers.

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“I felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me,” the woman said, in testimony originally collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “I started screaming, and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded. I felt the man who was raping me ejaculate inside my anus.”

She then recounted subsequent vaginal rapes.

A 41-year-old Palestinian father arrested at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023 and held for 22 months in Israeli prison reported, “One of the soldiers raped me by violently inserting a wooden stick into my anus. After about a minute he removed it and then inserted it again more forcefully.”

Other accounts from boys and men detail anal rape by soldiers and prison guards using carrots, bottles, batons, and other sharp objects.

The report also includes multiple accounts claiming the use of trained dogs as sexual threats and tools of direct sexual violence.

When the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof last month reported on widespread and extreme sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention, including the use of trained dogs to rape detainees, the backlash from Israeli authorities and pro-Israel mouthpieces was as swift as it was predictable.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed the article as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” — a typical retort that deems any criticism of Israeli brutality to be antisemitic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sue the Times for defamation. No such lawsuit has materialized, bound as it would be to fail and risk a court process revealing further horrors perpetrated by Israeli forces.

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Meanwhile, for Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian liberation, Kristof’s report was perhaps only surprising for its presence in the New York Times. Reports of rape, sexual violence, and sexual humiliation in Israeli custody have been widespread well established for years.

Pro-Israel media outlets like Bari Weiss’s The Free Press attempted to discredit and debunk the testimonies in Kristof’s article, particularly those from formerly detained Palestinians who alleged that trained dogs were used to rape prisoners. Such abuse was impossible, the critics claimed — despite the fact that, according to survivors, Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, as well as Nazi prison commander Klaus Barbie, reportedly used dogs to rape and sexually torture prisoners.

The “Predatory State” report lists 10 specific incidents of rape or severe sexual assault involving trained dogs, as reported to human rights groups by victims themselves or firsthand witnesses.

“The shock came when they forced me to lie down, and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me,” one detainee testified, in a report first compiled by Euro-Med and cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. “At first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.”

“They unleashed police dogs on us again, allowing them to tear into our flesh,” a 48-year-old man arrested at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in further testimony cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. He reported that one dog attacked a fellow detainee and “started mauling his genitals (penis). He bled to death in my arms.”

“Violence Across Decades”

The report authors note that “sexual torture has often preceded the deaths of detainees and prisoners and therefore must be considered part and parcel of the crime of genocide waged against the Palestinian people.”

This statement covers more than just Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: The Palestinian Feminist Collective report is explicit in including accounts of sexual violence reportedly carried out by soldiers as well as settlers in the West Bank.

“They zip-tied my penis, tightened it and then dragged me all around the village,” a Palestinian man, Qusai Abu-al Kebash, told B’Tselem of a reported assault at the hands of settlers in his West Bank village earlier this year.

In response to credible claims of sexual assault, particularly in Israel’s Sde Teiman military prison, Israel’s defenders have attempted to downplay incidents as aberrations or outliers in the fog of war.

“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesperson, now fellow at the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told The Free Press.

He was responding to an incident caught on video of Israeli soldiers appearing to beat and brutally sodomize a Palestinian prisoner with a knife. Conricus blamed “reservists without the right training” who “were called up to be prison guards” — but rejected any claims of systematic abuse.

All charges were dropped against the soldiers accused of sexually assaulting the detainee. Numerous Israeli lawmakers, including far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, condemned the military for even attempting to charge the soldiers.

Reports like the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s further give the lie to excuses like Conricus’s.

“The Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven until Israeli perpetrators record themselves,” legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat told The Intercept. “Still the debate focuses on whether individual soldiers received direct orders, rather than how a state has sanctioned, protected, and repeated this violence across decades.”

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In a statement shared with The Intercept, Loubna Qutami, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, said, “This report names what Palestinians have long known and what the world has too often refused to hear: Israel’s sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians is systemic, historical, and constitutive of Israeli colonial rule.”

According to Igal Dotan, an Israeli attorney cited in the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report, “The situation before the war was very bad, but it is not comparable to what happened in Israeli prisons after October 7.”

Dotan’s clients include a “severely disabled” 14-year-old Palestinian boy, diagnosed with autism, who was, the report notes, “reportedly sexually, physically, and psychologically assaulted while in detention.”

Before October 7

The Palestinian Feminist Collective refuses to begin its history of sexual and gendered violence on October 7. The report includes testimonies of sexualized violence gathered from oral histories, declassified archives and historical documents, dating back to the Nakba in 1948, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what are today’s Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

The long history of systematic displacement and dehumanization of Palestinians is run through with sexualized violence — as is common in situations of oppressive, militarized violence and population control.

“‘A Predatory State’ documents how sexual torture is a technology of Israeli rule: a means of terrorizing Palestinians and advancing a project of destruction,” Erakat told The Intercept. “Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.”

With the genocide in Gaza ongoing and Israeli expansionist violence continuing in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, such accountability seems beyond our current horizons of expectation.

More evidence of the sort compiled by the Palestinian Feminist Collective is unlikely to change that; it is not for lack of evidence that Israeli forces continue to carry out war crimes with impunity.

The urgency is to act on the ample evidence we have.

“The report is a call upon all responsible citizens to stay united,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, in a statement on the Palestinian Feminist Collective report, “not just to end genocide, but to fight once and for all this testosteronic model of power that roots and grows through subjugation and repression.”

Update: July 2, 2026
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Israeli military received after publication.

The post How to Show That Israel’s Sexual Violence Against Palestinians Is Systemic — and Has Gone on for Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

The resolution sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., failed 235–189, with near-universal opposition from Republicans.

Still, the vote was another sign of changing attitudes among Democrats about Israel: 187 Democrats voted in favor of it, and only 22 voted against.

Tlaib’s resolution marked the second time she has forced the House to go on the record about the war on Lebanon, which Israel says is aimed at Hezbollah but has left a fifth of the country displaced and thousands dead.

Under the 1973 War Powers Act, any member of Congress can force a vote on U.S. involvement in hostilities. Critics of Israel suspect the U.S. military has supported Israel’s attacks on Lebanon through help with developing target lists or refueling military aircraft. (U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the region, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

On June 4, Tlaib’s first attempt to pass a war powers resolution about Lebanon failed on a 324–92 vote.

House Democratic leaders opposed that earlier resolution because of what they said were drafting errors that might have inadvertently forced the U.S. to stop protecting its embassy in Beirut or providing aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces, the regular military of the Lebanese government.

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The more recent version of the legislation gained the support of Democratic leaders by including explicit carveouts for those activities. While leadership did not officially whip the vote, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., who is close to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., spoke in support of the measure on Monday.

Speeches from Meeks and Tlaib, however, revealed a divide in what Democrats thought the measure might accomplish.

Meeks criticized the conduct of Hezbollah and Israel alike, adding that, to his knowledge, no U.S. forces were directly involved in combat in Lebanon. The resolution would prevent the Trump administration from joining in the war, he said.

Tlaib, meanwhile, cast the resolution as a way to cut off U.S. support for Israeli forces. She pointed to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s call “to burn all of Lebanon” as proof of the Israeli government’s intent there.

“I want to make this very, very clear: The United States is not a bystander to these war crimes,” Tlaib said. “It is an active participant. The United States is currently engaged in illegal and unauthorized hostilities supporting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in violation of the War Powers Act.

“Without that support,” she added, “those jets cannot drop bombs to kill Lebanese children. Congress must reassert its constitutional authority and immediately vote to end all unauthorized U.S. participation in the destruction of Lebanon.”

Only two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, voted in favor of the resolution. The Republican caucus was officially represented during the Monday floor debate by Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“This resolution only seeks to embolden Hezbollah. That is the only thing that it does,” Mast said. “There are no U.S. forces engaged in hostilities. Do we train Lebanese Armed Forces? Yes, we do. Do we provide intelligence? Yes, we do. But we don’t have forces engaged there.”

Ahead of the vote, Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, a group that is sharply critical of Israel, said he was pleased to see more Democrats backing Tlaib’s resolution.

“Democrats have been pretty unified about speaking out against the killing of innocents and all of the harm by the Iran war, but there has been less vocal outrage about the mass killing and occupation in Lebanon,” Sperling said. “This is just an important signal that Democrats are aware of the way the Lebanon war is a humanitarian crisis and is the key roadblock to ending this war and delivering the peace that Americans are demanding.”

The post Congressional Dems Shift to Overwhelmingly Oppose Involvement in Israel’s War on Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

The far-right Supreme Court majority marked the final day of Pride month with an anti-trans decision upholding state bans on trans girls from playing girls’ sports. That the ruling from the right-wing court had been long expected made it no less horrendous.

With a 6–3 judgment applying to two cases, one from Idaho and one from West Virginia, the court gave states nationwide carte blanche to discriminate against trans girls who want to play on teams consistent with their gender. The ruling does not constitute a nationwide ban on trans athletes, and trans girls can continue to compete in states without bans. Twenty-seven states currently have bans on the books against trans girl athletes. All those bans — and whatever new ones come into place — can stay in place.

One of the cases was just about a single girl seeking to participate in her school sports.

Pointing to the absurdity, the legal scholar and trans rights advocate Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky, “Just absolutely insane to me how many millions were spent and the massive political and legal effort exhausted just so a state can ban a single trans girl from playing sports with her friends in school.”

This was always the plan for the anti-trans zealots who saw girls’ sports as an easy entry point from which to decimate trans people’s civil rights protections. It’s no surprise then that the consequences of the rulings threaten to go far beyond school and college athletics.

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As multiple critics of anti-trans sports bans stress, efforts to exclude trans athletes also open the door to the abuse and harassment of any girls alleged to appear insufficiently feminine. Genital inspection and genetic testing requirements are the next logical steps — steps that have already been proposed by Republicans in several states.

The Supreme Court majority argued that the anti-trans bans do not violate either Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that proscribes sex-based discrimination, or constitutional guarantees of equal protection.

Even the dissenting liberal justices ceded vital ground in the moral struggle for trans rights. Though they sided with the trans students’ claims under the equal protection clause, they agreed with the conservatives that trans-exclusionary, sex-segregated school sports bans did not violate Title IX’s prohibitions in schools.

The liberal stance paints a telling picture of the decimated state of trans rights. The far right has been able to pursue its trans-eliminationist agenda to an extraordinary degree in part because liberals and even some leftists have been willing to throw trans people under the bus, if not fully align with fascistic anti-trans fearmongering.

The idea that trans girls pose a threat or danger to cisgender girls playing sports remains a myth without any evidence or grounding, conjured from whole cloth by anti-trans ideologues looking for a wedge issue to pass overreaching anti-trans laws.

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Today, the strategies dreamt up by well-funded think tanks and advocacy groups like the rabidly anti-trans Alliance Defending Freedom have again paid off: According to the highest court in the land, trans exclusion in sex-segregated sports does not violate civil rights.

Even more anti-trans bathroom bans and other policies of exclusion from public life will no doubt follow.

Anti-Trans Eliminationism

The West Virginia case was brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school student who has identified as a girl since she was 8 years old, takes puberty blockers, has a birth certificate recognizing her as female, and just wanted to compete on the athletics team with other girls.

Writing the majority opinion upholding the ban against her participation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh described trans girls and women and “biological males.”

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Earlier this week, anticipating the court’s ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chase Strangio wrote, “I hope that everyone who, like me, loves sports will pause to think about what it means to exile a group of young people from the social, cultural, and emotional experience of being part of a team.”

The legal arguments for permitting anti-trans discrimination are by now familiar: The bans are not discriminatory, anti-trans bigots say, because they apply equally to those they deem biologically male and those they deem biologically female.

The fact that anti-trans discrimination is unavoidably a matter of sex-based discrimination is neatly avoided in a way that erases the sex-based reality of trans people from existence. Little matter that no current state laws are on the books relating to boys’ sports.

It evidently matters even less to the Supreme Court justices that sex and gender do not exist in the sharp binary that sports bans and other anti-trans policies demand.

In an unnecessary and cruel concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas went out of his way to note, “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe they are.”

This tells us all we need to know about the right’s designs on trans existence, reflecting an anti-trans eliminationist ideology that flies in the face of medical consensus and empirical evidence.

[newsetter][/newsletter]

As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive 2016 feature on the practice of so-called “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such tests purports to achieve.

“Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw,” Padawer wrote.

Not that this has mattered to the sports regulators and gender-conformity zealots, committed as they are to the brutal racist legacy of gender policing, and desperately pushing to exclude trans people from public life.

“No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” Kavanaugh had the audacity to say at the end of his opinion, upholding laws designed precisely to ostracize and vilify trans children.

The post Even the Liberal Supreme Court Justices Ceded Ground in the Fight for Trans Existence appeared first on The Intercept.

Roque wasn’t in a war zone, and the killer wasn’t an enemy combatant. It was Wooster Rancy, a fellow soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who had gone to Walmart for trash bags on the last day Roque was seen alive in October 2024. The Army found her body in a dumpster behind the barracks.

“Even now, I still can’t believe it,” her mother, Ana Roque, told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.”

A first-of-its-kind analysis by The Intercept found that in the Army, women are more likely to be killed by their fellow service members than by enemy combatants, in a reversal of the threat soldiers are trained to face. Between 2011 and August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army — more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans. Using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per capita death rates, The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers, the opposite of national and global trends.

In many cases, women in the Army are killed by current or former romantic partners. Over 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point, and the rate of homicides among women soldiers from intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average. In others, like Roque’s case, it’s unclear how male soldiers chose their victims.

“There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” said Ana Roque. Given that Rancy was convicted of murder in February, Roque added, “I can’t complain about the prosecutors, they did their job. But my grievance is that they didn’t push to uncover the truth behind why he did it.’”

Research points to the military’s hypermasculine culture, which historically devalues women, as a contributing factor to high rates of violence against them. But the existing scholarship is insufficient, said Erin Siegal McIntyre, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has spent years digging into the hidden structures of militarized institutions.

“There’s no way to know how bad the problem really is,” Siegal McIntyre said. “There is an abysmal amount of data collected on domestic violence perpetrated by law enforcement officers, for example, many of whom are former military.”

Analyzing over 14 years of Defense Department death data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept’s investigation is the first to compare rates of violence against women in the Army to factors like duty location, jobs, and relationships with perpetrators. The FOIA data also reveals deaths not previously announced by the Army and the Department of Defense.

Violence against women in the military also appears to take a mental toll. In addition to the 41 women who died by homicide, another 128 died by suicide, the majority of them lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. From 2011 to 2024, the last complete year of data, homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide.

The Army doesn’t make any of this public, and the Intercept’s investigation has found flaws in what data collection currently occurs: Homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita, preventing deeper analysis and comparison.

There’s also nothing publicly accessible on how many homicides are committed by service members, who their victims are, or where homicides occurred. The Defense Department’s annual suicide report doesn’t note how many of the deceased had experiences with sexual assault or harassment.

Meanwhile, systems meant to protect women are being rolled back and dismantled.

In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. It had existed for nearly 75 years, focusing on issues including sexual harassment and assault. In January, he ordered a six-month review of women in combat roles. In April, a woman who had been a whistleblower on sexual harassment within the Army Special Operations community was accused of sharing classified information and arrested by the FBI. Hegseth has also intervened to block the promotions of women officers.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Army denied that its protections were insufficient.

“The Army has several programs and policies to protect service members who experience sexual assault or domestic violence,” said Army spokesperson Heather Hagan.

A Pattern of Abuse

When Spc. Mayra Diaz was assaulted on the Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, she was lucky to survive.

Diaz was blindfolded, with her hands bound over her head, having water poured on her face — “waterboarding me and causing me to choke,” Diaz later wrote. Her attacker “then wrapped a cord around my neck in an attempt to kill me.”

The assailant was a superior, Sgt. Greville Clarke, who knocked on her door at the barracks before threatening her with a pistol and raping her during the attack. The Army knew two other women had been assaulted at the barracks in similar attacks; officials chose not to issue a public warning, citing concerns about compromising the investigation and causing potential panic.

The problems of homicide and suicide among women in the Army are inextricable from the prevalence of sexual assault. In some cases, like Diaz’s, a sexual attack involves an attempt on a woman’s life. Rape and sexual abuse are known to be detrimental to mental health, increasing the risk of suicide or self harm.

“There’s a huge correlation between sexual assault and suicide rates,” said Josh Connolly, senior vice president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for victims of military sexual trauma. “It’s unambiguous — sexual assault rates are higher than in the civilian world.”

Male soldiers faced a smaller increase in suicide rates compared to civilian men than Army women did compared to civilian women, and men in the Army have a lower risk of dying by homicide than their non-military counterparts.

In fact, The Intercept’s investigation found, suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women.

Some cases have made national headlines, such as the March 2023 death of Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz at Fort Hood, who took her own life at 20 years old after reporting sexual harassment.

For Ruiz’s family, the timing of her death raised troubling questions, echoing fellow Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillén’s infamous 2020 murder by an Army specialist. A subsequent Army inquiry into Ruiz’s case, reported by Telemundo, pointed to a “persistently toxic culture permissive of harassment.”

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Years earlier, in the wake of Guillén’s death, an independent review revealed “a total disregard and disrespect for female soldiers.” Investigators issued 70 recommendations, including a sweeping overhaul of the military’s sexual harassment and assault prevention programs.

But the violence didn’t stop. Women at Fort Hood continued to experience a grim roll call of harm: Homicide. Sexual assault. Suicides.

Three deaths at Fort Hood were never reported publicly by the Army but appeared in the data obtained by The Intercept.

Counting Guillén and Ruiz, there were nine fatalities from homicide or suicide among women stationed at the base in five years. The Defense Department’s most recent suicide report does not provide data on how many suicide decedents experienced sexual trauma, although the Pentagon has provided this data in previous years.

From 2001 to 2023, nearly 1 in 4 women service members experienced sexual assault, according to the Brown University’s Costs of War project, much higher than the numbers annually reported by the Pentagon. Research identifies those experiences as a key driver of suicide risk. Over the past two decades, suicide rates among women veterans have risen faster than among men.

In Diaz’s view, institutional failures were a key factor in her assault.

“Because the Army took no action to address the string of female soldiers attacked in their barracks,” Diaz wrote in a federal tort claim, “Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”

Clarke assaulted five women before he was apprehended October 2022 and convicted in 2025 of charges including attempted premeditated murder. He died by suicide in custody.

Diaz was “in a U.S. Army base in a locked barracks, opening the door to someone in uniform. It was very reasonable for her to think that that was a safe thing to do,” Christine Dunn, an attorney representing Diaz, told The Intercept. “You don’t expect someone who’s in a uniform to be a serial predator.”

Diaz wrote that leadership denied repeated requests to move her into family housing off-post, and only after she and her sexual assault representative made clear that remaining in the barracks was “an untenable environment” was she finally allowed to leave.

“I suffered from extreme paranoia, exacerbated by my attacker remaining at large,” Diaz wrote. “I abused alcohol in an attempt to forget what happened to me. … I began going to weekly therapy but have stopped going because I still find the attack very traumatizing to talk about.”

The Army did not provide comment on Diaz’s case or reports of Clarke’s predation specifically.

The anxiety, Diaz wrote, has never fully gone away.

“What happened to me was a result of the United States Department of the Army’s and the Department of Defense’s negligence,” her complaint stated. “It was entirely preventable.”

False and Frivolous

Last year, Pete Hegseth directed the Army to change its 15-6 regulation, which governs the process for investigating military-related misconduct like sexual harassment. Now the first step is verifying the “credibility of accusers with new disciplinary measures for soldiers who submit knowingly false or frivolous complaints.

Some fear the rule may discourage those experiencing sexual harassment from reporting incidents, perpetuating a “culture of victim blaming,” according to Protect Our Defenders’ Connolly.

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While Hegseth rolls back protections, the issue of violence against women in the military appears to be getting worse. The Intercept’s analysis shows that from 2011 to 2020, the per capita rate of women dying by suicide or homicide in the Army was 15 per 100,000. From 2021 to 2024, following the Army’s attempted reforms in the wake of Vanessa Guillén’s killing, the rate increased over 35 percent, to 21 per 100,000.

And deaths continued their pace in 2025.

Siegal McIntyre, the UNC professor studying domestic abuse, pointed to cases like that of Sgt. Francine Martinez, who was just weeks away from her 25th birthday on a night out at Fort Hood in September 2021, when she ran into the father of her child. He was a fellow soldier with whom she had recently separated, and Martinez had filed for child support weeks earlier.

An argument broke out, and when Martinez got into a car to leave, he followed, and eventually shot her in the head. She was hospitalized for two weeks before dying from her injuries, leaving behind her 1-year-old.

Research and Pentagon data indicate that rates of domestic and intimate partner violence in the military, particularly in the Army, are higher than the civilian population. Most victims are women, who also make up most of the homicide cases tied to that violence.

Martinez’s death was one of three cases the Defense Department reported in 2021 in which service members killed someone in a domestic or interpersonal dispute.

But data compiled by The Intercept identified at least seven cases that year in which service members were suspected of killing a spouse or partner in acts of domestic or intimate partner violence — more than double the official count.

“When the situation involves a marriage or partnership between agents and service members, it only complicates reporting,” said Siegal McIntyre.

A Naval Criminal Investigative Service report from 2021 suggests the number could be higher still, identifying several additional domestic violence-related homicides. The Intercept’s investigation also found other years’ congressionally mandated reports also have data tracking problems.

A Project on Government Oversight investigation revealed thousands of abuse cases involving Army personnel were mishandled, many never entered into tracking systems. Investigators could only look at 10 out of more than 60 Army installations. A Government Accountability Office report found the Pentagon doesn’t reliably screen for sexual assault when service members seek care or leave service and lacks systems to prioritize treatment or ensure confidential, long-term support.

“I don’t think there’s a mechanism within the Army for holding itself accountable,” said Dunn, who is also representing some of the 80 victims suing Army gynecologist Maj. Blaine McGraw, who was assigned to Fort Hood in 2023; he has since been accused of recording and making harmful physical contact with women during gynecological exams. (The Army did not comment on McGraw’s case, which remains ongoing.)

Some women who came forward had gone to McGraw seeking rape kits for sexual assault and say his actions further traumatized and distressed them.

“When the institution is facilitating the assaults and allowing them to happen, the institution needs to be held accountable,” Dunn said. “Almost every client who comes to me wants to come forward so that this wouldn’t happen to other women.”

A Failing System

In response to questions from The Intercept, the Army acknowledged having recorded more homicides than were noted in the dataset provided based on The Intercept’s FOIA request.

Between 2021 and 2023, the Army recorded a total of 16 homicides among active-duty women, Hagan told The Intercept. The data provided to The Intercept for its FOIA request counts only nine.

Hagan did not respond to follow-up questions on the discrepancy, and the Army did not provide data outside the years 2021 to 2023.

But the additional homicides would make the disparities found by The Intercept’s investigation even wider. If the same pattern of undercounting extends across the full 14-year span of our data, the true toll could be substantially higher.

After the independent review of Fort Hood following Guillén’s killing, Hagan said, the Army “implemented a series of major reforms to strengthen prevention, reporting, and accountability for sexual harassment and assault.” It shifted its criminal investigations division to civilian leadership, requiring more independent investigations, establishing stricter missing-soldier response protocols, and expanding data-driven oversight of cases.

But the deaths have continued, including another homicide at Hood last year. To advocates, there are other solutions to address these failures.

“You have to call DoD into Congress and demand answers on why progress hasn’t been made,” said Connolly. “Congress could scrutinize the data on domestic violence and other issues. They can appropriate more resources to DV investigations and hold hearings.”

“The potential solution lies with how funding is or isn’t tied to oversight,” Siegal McIntyre said. “Without Congress doing its job, nothing can change.”

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., a House Armed Services Committee member and Air Force veteran, said The Intercept’s findings reflect a broader failure of leadership and oversight.

“This report is staggering, and unfortunately, unsurprising,” she said. “Servicewomen consistently bear the brunt of harassment, assault, retaliation, and systemic failures within the ranks, and it is costing them their careers, their safety, and in far too many cases, their lives.”

In a 1995 Defense Department study on homicide victims by gender, female service members across active-duty branches were killed at higher rates than both their male counterparts and women nationally. A Marine Corps and Navy-specific study covering 1995 to 1999 found similarly elevated risks.

The Pentagon never did further analysis. Ana Roque believes that change would fundamentally start with how the military builds itself to protect women like her daughter.

“I understand that the country needs soldiers, but recruiters need to be more careful regarding where these individuals come from,” Roque said. She called for more police and camera surveillance on bases, arguing that if it had been present, “they could have seen him moving my daughter’s body in broad daylight.”

She wishes she could have her daughter back.

“She always had a smile, no matter how difficult her day was,” Roque said. “She made time to help colleagues with various issues and never said no. I have many stories written in my notebook from soldiers and civilians who knew her and told me, ‘She saved me,’ simply by taking a minute to listen to them. She loved her family; we would talk three times a day: at 7 a.m., during my lunch break, and at night, when she would always say ‘Good night, Mommy.’”

How we analyzed the data

Reporters working for The Intercept submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the Pentagon seeking data on all U.S. Army active-duty noncombat deaths from 2011 through August 2025. In response, the Department of Defense provided a spreadsheet detailing 5,285 U.S. Army deaths over the 14-year period categorized by rank, gender, military occupation, and cause of death. The latter was classified as either illness, self-inflicted, accident, pending, or undetermined.

To calculate the per capita suicide and death rates for women in the U.S. Army in this time period, The Intercept pulled manpower data from the Defense Department for each year in our analysis to provide the total number of women in the Army. National and international data on homicide and suicide was pulled from the FBI Crime Data Report, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to compare suicide and homicide rates.

There is no publicly available equivalent data for Army veterans, nor has such an analysis been done for the Navy, Air Force, or Marines.

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.

The post Women in the Army Are More Likely to Be Killed by Fellow Soldiers Than Enemy Combatants appeared first on The Intercept.

The Colorado Democrat is facing her first competitive primary in her 30-year House career on Tuesday. After a series of confrontations with voters — including a public meltdown in a coffee shop — an unfavorable poll kept out of public view, and speculation that she called on powerful allies to pressure venues to cancel planned participation in a rally for her opponent, a slew of new super PACs swooped in to keep DeGette’s campaign afloat in the final weeks of the race — including one funded by the pro-Israel lobby. 

While DeGette has spent the campaign’s home stretch defending her record as a progressive, her leading opponent, democratic socialist Melat Kiros, has never been more optimistic. 

After leftist candidates rode to victory in New York last week on a growing wave of anti-incumbent sentiment, Kiros said her campaign saw a major uptick in donors and volunteers. A coalition of leftist organizations backing her has run an aggressive field campaign and say they’ve out-organized DeGette, who didn’t take the challenge seriously at first and was almost kicked off the ballot in March. In a district full of the kinds of young voters who helped socialists win last week in New York, Kiros’s backers say a similar coalition could power another socialist challenger to topple the Colorado incumbent on Tuesday.

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“While the Democratic establishment reveals its contempt for its own voters by lashing out against the candidates their base elected, our candidates keep winning by taking on the corporate interests raising our prices to deliver a positive vision to make life more affordable for working class voters — from Medicare for All to ending taxpayer-funded genocide,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Kiros.

DeGette’s challenge is emblematic of a wake-up call for many Democratic incumbents this midterms cycle, Andrabi said: Even being relatively “progressive” is no longer enough to fend off a challenger from the left, let alone to keep your seat. 

“Voters are done watching Democrats take corporate PAC money and then wonder why nobody trusts them to fight,” Kiros said in a statement to The Intercept. “They are done with representatives who show up six weeks before a primary because a challenger finally scared them into it. The energy that showed up in New York is the same energy that’s showing up in Denver and we are ready for Tuesday night.”

Another progressive strategist who works with congressmembers and candidates and requested anonymity in order to speak freely said DeGette’s backers were worried. “Across multiple districts we’re seeing Dem primary voters unwilling to accept the usual platitudes from incumbents about their work ‘standing up to Trump’ as sufficient to earn their support,” they said.

“Voters across the spectrum are deeply frustrated with the Democratic Party’s ineffectiveness, and feel like many of these incumbents have been all talk and no action in this term,” they said. “There is broad anti-establishment sentiment that creates real opportunity for a next-generation challenger like in CO-01.”

The influx of super PAC spending for DeGette in the final days of the race came even as she had painted herself as further to the left. The incumbent has name-dropped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., for example, in campaign ads, a candidate forum, and an interview.

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And while DeGette has said repeatedly she isn’t backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, pro-DeGette super PAC money came from one of several groups used this cycle by United Democracy Project, the super PAC for AIPAC, to back its preferred candidates without publicly getting involved in races. United Democracy Project provided more than a third of the money raised this year by the group behind the ads.

“AIPAC’s desperation to stop the pro-Palestinian movement’s momentum and our candidates bringing this fight forward proves just how much they are losing the Democratic Party,” Andrabi said. 

DeGette has banked her reelection on reminding voters that she’s a progressive. Pointing to her three decades in Congress and a late endorsement from her Congressional Progressive Caucus colleague, former chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., DeGette has warned that electing Kiros — who was born the year after DeGette was first elected and who the incumbent says has no political experience or capital — comes with risks. 

Kiros’s backers are using DeGette’s long record against her. They argue she has little to show for her 15 terms in Congress and say the wave of young voters turning out to oust incumbents and back leftist candidates across the country will work against her.

Throughout her time in Congress, DeGette has expressed her support for all the right marquee progressive priorities. She’s reminded voters that she helped write the Medicare for All bill and is the top Democrat on the committee that could make it a reality, and led fights to protect healthcare, the right to abortion, and the environment. 

But her critics, including Kiros, say she’s rested on those laurels and done little to leverage her seniority in the Democratic caucus to pass meaningful legislation on those issues — and that part of her inaction is tied to her donors. 

“The DeGette team clearly was not in the community talking to voters, because that is the only way they could have missed the energy behind our campaign and the hunger for leadership that is unbought and unafraid,” Kiros said. 

Kiros and others have pointed to DeGette’s longtime support from the pharmaceutical industry, one of Medicare for All’s greatest foes, as a major reason she’s allowed the legislation to languish. DeGette has promised voters that if they reelect her and Democrats win the House this year, she’ll finally take over the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, where she has served as ranking member since January 2025 and been a member since 2017, and bring the bill up for a vote. 

There’s also the issue of Israel and Palestine. Despite naming her progressive bonafides, DeGette has described herself as pro-Israel and has a mixed record on related legislation. She’s not endorsed by AIPAC, but its super PAC is funding one of the groups spending against Kiros, an outspoken critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza who was fired for writing a post criticizing big law firms, including her employer, for blacklisting pro-Palestine protesters.

The group running the ads, Pro-Choice Majority Action, formed in May as an affiliate of EDW Action, which received $1 million from United Democracy Project between April and May. That’s about a third of the $2.7 million EDW Action reported since January. Another pro-Israel group, DMFI PAC, gave EDW Action $37,750 in April.

“Our endorsements are based on a candidate’s record of fighting for women and families, not on foreign policy,” a spokesperson for Pro-Choice Majority Action told The Intercept. “In fact, our endorsed candidates have held a wide range of views on Israel and the broader foreign policy debate within the Democratic Party. When other organizations support one of our candidates, we sometimes work together to amplify our message about that candidate’s record of fighting for women.”

United Democracy Project and DMFI PAC did not respond to requests for comment.

“Their support for a 30-year congresswoman who they don’t even publicly endorse is far less about Diana DeGette and far more about the extremes they have to go to blunt the momentum of first-time candidates like Melat who represent the will of the Democratic majority,” Andrabi said. 

“We are seeing a new generation of leaders elected by a new generation of young people who are approaching politics with moral clarity,” said Denae Ávila-Dickson, a spokesperson for the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which is backing Kiros. “These elections make one thing clear: Candidates who are unapologetic about opposing the genocide in Gaza, willing to take on billionaires and corporate power, and committed to fighting for working people are the ones inspiring young voters.”

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The winner of the Democratic primary in heavily blue Denver is almost certain to be elected in November. And if Democrats win the House — the party in power tends to lose midterm seats, but Republicans are pushing forward aggressive plans to gerrymander and pass new voting restrictions — DeGette says Democrats will finally have the leverage they need to really stand up to President Donald Trump.

The DeGette campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

DeGette’s detractors say a lack of urgency beyond just Medicare for All characterizes her record — and that she’s only been beating the M4A drum because she’s facing a credible challenger. Only seven bills she’s sponsored over her 29 years in Congress have become law or been enacted through other bigger bills, according to GovTrack. Most representatives pass zero or one bill each term, and Congress is in an era where historic levels of partisan gridlock mean it’s passing fewer bills than it ever has.

While legislation passed is only one of several measures of a member’s activity in Congress, DeGette’s Colorado colleague, Rep. Joe Neguse, a member of House Democratic leadership first elected in 2018, had 22 bills enacted in his first two terms — the most of any member last session. In 2024, the four Republican representatives with more than 10 years in office who had the most legislation enacted into law passed six bills each.

“No seat is safe when an establishment Democrat is taking millions from corporate PACs and calling it representation,” Kiros said. “The voters are ahead of the party establishment, and they have been for a while. The question is whether the party is finally ready to listen or whether they’re going to keep learning this lesson the hard way.”

Update: July 1, 2026
This story has been updated with a comment from Pro-Choice Majority Action.

The post Socialists Are Surging. In Colorado, a 29-Year Incumbent Is Sweating. appeared first on The Intercept.

Turning Murder Into Content

Half a decade later and I still remember his voice. A young man lies on the ground, begging, pleading, screaming as another man, swinging a machete, forces him to place his right arm on a small wooden bench. The attacker wants to make things easier on himself.

But it was never going to be easy.

The assailant begins hacking away. Swinging the panga again and again and again, taunting his victim as he delivers the blows. It unfolds slowly. You learn that even for a strong man with a large, sharp blade, it’s difficult to amputate an arm. Excruciatingly difficult.

It’s got to be the longest 1 minute and 18 seconds ever. After the final swing, you see the victim kicking his legs back and forth — in a way I’ve never seen another human move — writhing in agony on the ground.

For a while, my sources in conflict zones, and others who knew I investigated atrocities, would regularly send me such gruesome videos. There was the man lying in a street in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an assailant with a machete attempts to cut off his leg below the knee; I can still remember the exact sound of his cries. There’s the video of the captured Kurdish fighters. I recall how the second woman to be killed — just before she’s shot, point blank, in the head — watches the execution of her comrade. She doesn’t plead or cry or even flinch.

I would dutifully watch the videos, analyze them, and then pitch an article if I could make something of the footage. “You are going to die,” said a Cameroonian soldier, speaking to a group of women he referred to as “BH” — shorthand for the terrorist group, Boko Haram. In that video, which I reported on for The Intercept back in 2018, soldiers force their victims to kneel, including a woman with a toddler strapped to her back. One of those men directs the tiny girl to stand next to her mother. He then pulls the little girl’s shirt over her head, blindfolding her. You can guess what follows.

Videos of war zone violence, from Myanmar to Ukraine to the Middle East, have proliferated even more in the years since. Drones chasing panicked soldiers, or even toying with their quarry, before killing them, have grown into a popular modern motif. And graphic video of ambushes, executions, and traditional trophy “photos” are a commonplace. This type of footage, which used to lurk at LiveLeak and deeper recesses of the internet, is now more ubiquitous, circulating in more accessible online locales like Reddit.

Watching footage of such slaughter comes with a price. In 2015, Eyewitness Media Hub conducted a survey of people who often work with graphic “user-generated content.” Even back then, more than half of the 209 respondents reported that they viewed distressing media several times weekly. Twelve percent of the responding journalists and almost a quarter of the human rights and humanitarian workers said they viewed such traumatic content daily. Forty percent of respondents said that viewing such distressing images and video had a negative impact on their personal lives, leaving them with feelings of isolation, flashbacks, nightmares, and other stress-related symptoms. One quarter reported high or even very high “professional adverse effects.” More recently, a 2023 study of 300 Pakistani journalists found more than 66 percent reported experiencing indirect trauma.

“Intrusive recollections — re-seeing traumatic images one has been working with — are not unusual,” wrote Gavin Rees at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, where I was once a fellow. “Our brains are designed to form vivid pictures of disturbing things, so you may experience images popping back into consciousness at unexpected moments.”

I’ve certainly found this to be true. As a conflict and crisis reporter, I saw some disturbing things in the field which lodged in my brain. But strange as it may sound, some gruesome videos have had more staying power than horrors I saw in person. It’s a phenomenon that I’ve also encountered among other journalists, soldiers, veterans, and witnesses of war violence. I once knew a man who saw something incredibly traumatic — an almost unthinkable atrocity — which his mind blocked out almost entirely. He watched a movie where nearly the same type of murder-spectacle played out and was horrified. He told me that after watching the film, he couldn’t believe someone would do such a thing — and yet, he had seen exactly that same horror show.

In recent months, my laptop has been filling up with a different type of snuff film. The footage is very similar to those Cameroonian clips: defenseless people being slaughtered as the murderers film. In these cases, however, the videos are shared not by some low-ranking murderer or accomplice-in-arms. The first of them was posted on social media by the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, President Donald Trump. Several later videos were posted online by self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The most recent clips have been shared by a military command headed by a four-star Marine Corps general, Southern Command chief Gen. Francis L. Donovan.

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Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 200 civilians, since September 2025.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings. These summary executions are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial. After each of these double or triple or mass murders, Trump, Hegseth, or SOUTHCOM have posted a video of those civilians being executed from above.

Snuff films have become a signature of the second Trump administration. Just eight days after Trump took office for a second time, Sebastian Gorka, the senior counterterrorism director on the National Security Council, said he presented Trump with a target in Somalia. “Kill him!’” Trump replied, and the man was slain in an airstrike. “He declassified the video because the president wanted to post it. So he posts the video of the hammers of hell being dropped on this ISIS leader,” Gorka recalled with a laugh. “President puts it on Truth Social. … He got 120 million likes in like 18 hours. And at the bottom of that post, he wrote, ‘We will find you and we will kill you.’ Which we have made into the motto of our directorate.”

This cavalier attitude toward turning murder into online content stands in stark contrast to past U.S. military responses to videos of killings released by foes. Twenty years ago, U.S. military officials condemned terrorist “snuff films” — snipers filming their kills — in Iraq. And when it came to a video of two dead American troops shared online, the U.S.-led Multinational Division Baghdad “condemn[ed] the release of the video in the strongest of terms.” The command added: “It demonstrates the barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life.”

A decade later, as the Islamic State group released shocking execution videos, one of Hegseth’s predecessors — Chuck Hagel — expressed revulsion at the group’s spectacle of slaughter. “I think regardless of your background, your experience, just as a human being with having some sense of decency and respect for human life and other people, it makes you sick to your stomach,” he said of the group’s videos of the killing of defenseless civilians. “But it again reminds of the kind of brutality and the barbarism that is afoot in some of these areas of the world.”

But Gorka — back then the national security editor of Breitbart News — had a different takeaway. He also mentioned ISIS’s brutality but seemingly with more than a hint of admiration. “Every American, everybody who stands for the values of this republic needs to watch these videos because then you understand the nature of the threat of the brutality of the people we’re facing,” he said of ISIS’s snuff films in 2014. “It’s very, very slick. Think about one thing — just two weeks ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda, issued a 55-minute lecture in Arabic. … That’s not going to bring you recruits. That’s not going to further your cause as a jihadist. These people do instant little messages. They do these short videos. They have a very, very professional audio/visual social media crew.”

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Whether or not Gorka has been the driving force behind the snuff film fixation, the Trump administration seems to be larded up with MAGA minions channeling their inner ISIS. When the Iran war began, military officials began spoon-feeding Trump so-called highlight reels of strikes on targets, according to reporting by NBC: “The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of ‘stuff blowing up.’”

The White House has then taken such footage and spliced in clips from action films, TV shows, and video games to create online content. In one, the White House combined clips from Nintendo’s Wii Sports with videos of attacks on Iran. Another — captioned “STRIKE” — featured a former professional bowler, anthropomorphic AI bowling pins labeled “Iranian regime officials,” a fake fighter jet, and real airstrike footage. Videos of airstrikes were also combined with short clips — “Gladiator,” “Braveheart,” “John Wick,” “Superman,” “Better Call Saul,” “Dragon Ball Z” — to create “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” a video posted by the White House and eagerly shared online by top administration officials. It ends with a voiceover saying “flawless victory” — an audio clip from the video game “Mortal Kombat.”

“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie,” Ben Stiller, who directed and starred in the movie “Tropic Thunder,” featured in the aforementioned Justice video, wrote on social media. Three months later, the White House’s murderous mash-up remains on X.

The White House employs a media strategy that melds influence operations with influencer culture, muddying the news cycle, laundering lies, and countering critical coverage by flooding the zone with shoddy propaganda, TikTok-style memes, rancid AI slop, and music videos. “We’re here. We’re in your face. It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic,” Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital media team, told the Washington Post last year, after countering criticism of its brutal anti-immigrant policies with social media that turned federal viciousness into a joke. The Trump administration’s viral war porn provides another layer of calloused cruelty obscuring the human costs of America’s global killing spree.

In a 2002 New Yorker essay on images of the suffering wrought by war or torture, Susan Sontag reflected on photographs of Black victims of lynchings from the 1890s to the 1930s. “The lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness. About inhumanity. They force us to think about the extent of the evil unleashed specifically by racism. Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it,” she wrote. “The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens, as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree.”

The Trump administration’s snuff films are no less dehumanizing or shameless — even if the victims are censored in the footage — and the cheering replies on social media celebrating the boat strikes and murder memes are the modern-day equivalent of those churchgoers’ grins. But unlike the singular images of horrific violence meted out on black victims across the U.S., we are — 100 years later — drowning in endless videos of boat strikes and drone attacks and impacting missiles and bombs dropped on apartment buildings. The voyeuristic nature of the content dehumanizes the victims and debases us all.

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Trump, Hegseth, Gorka, and Donovan might be immune to any shame, regret, or guilt. Serial killers — people who murder a series of victims over a period of time — often lack empathy or remorse. But the entire kill chain involved in strikes and the propaganda apparatus that transforms footage of murders into social media content is filled with thousands of people — military personnel, members of the intelligence community, White House workers, and others — for whom these videos might not be so easy to dismiss and forget.

Most of the Trump administration’s boat strike footage plays like the movies of his childhood, flickering black-and-white footage, and the movies of his parents’ youth, silent films. You don’t hear the explosion of a missile’s impact or the cries of the wounded and dying. In that respect, it’s different than a homemade video of a young man having his arm hacked off with a machete. Those sounds, those cries got stuck in my head — more so than even the visual horror. The Americans who make the snuff films possible might be spared this. But in the end, that might actually be worse.

A veteran once told me of a murder he replayed again and again in his head for the rest of his life. Like the boat strike footage, he said there was no sound. That’s what he said was so terrifying. This veteran always saw the victim, mouth agape, screaming in agony. But he could never conjure a soundtrack. It was awful. Unnerving. Maddening. Agonizing. It caused his head to ache, his chest to tighten, and his guts to twist into knots. This horrific hush was deafening. He told me that, decades and decades later, it was — above all — this “silent scream” that tortured him.

The post The Trump Administration’s Shameless Snuff-Film Fixation appeared first on The Intercept.

Jewish Voice for Peace Action is building off of the momentum from a string of victories for the insurgent left in Democratic primaries, where voters have repeatedly chosen outspoken pro-Palestine candidates to represent their party in the November midterms. The nominations signal a sea change in the Democratic Party and its electorate — adding a new class of members to Congress willing to question the United States’ unconditional support for Israel and putting heat on an entrenched political establishment.

“Abdul has been a stalwart and unapologetic defender of Palestinian rights and freedom, and his campaign has demonstrated a moral consistency that centers justice and equality for all people,” said Beth Miller, JVP Action’s political director. “This campaign is a historic opportunity to bring a leader into office who will fight for our communities here at home, and to reimagine a US foreign policy that supports freedom and justice, not genocide and apartheid.” 

Ahead of the August 4 primary, El-Sayed is locked in a contentious three-way race with Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., a centrist lawmaker with the backing of the Democratic establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, including its flagship warhawk lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a self-styled progressive who has drawn endorsements from figures like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and the liberal pro-Israel group J Street.

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El-Sayed, who has the endorsements of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., as well as progressive Squad members in Congress like Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, has positioned himself to the left of both his opponents and has been a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since long before he launched his campaign. While many voters cite affordability and economic pressure as their top electoral concerns — especially amid rising prices spurred by the U.S. and Israel’s unpopular war on Iran — Israel’s genocide and apartheid conditions for Palestinian people have continued to animate political organizing across several congressional races this cycle. 

That’s at least in part thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been instrumental in drawing public attention to the genocide in Gaza by organizing a wave of anti-genocide demonstrations across the U.S. – from college campuses to Wall Street and the Capitol. Its political advocacy and lobbying arm is a main backer of the Block the Bombs bill in the House, which has become a litmus test for progressive candidates in congressional races. 

“There is a marked shift in the way that movements, organizations and voters are showing up to send a very clear message: that Palestine cannot be removed from a broader progressive agenda,” Miller said.

It’s considered harder to elevate a more radical candidate to the Senate, where a politician has to win statewide election, than it might be in a deep-blue congressional district with a progressive electorate. But Miller said El-Sayed was a standout — in the seven years since its 2019 establishment, Jewish Voice for Peace Action had never seen a Senate candidate that seemed worth its endorsement. JVP Action also backed candidates in the recent House races where the left won in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, though its preferred candidate lost in San Francisco. In Colorado’s primary election on Tuesday, JVP Action is also supporting Melat Kiros, an anti-war House candidate who was fired from her job as an attorney for refusing to take down her post on the genocide in Palestine.

The bulk of El-Sayed’s platform focuses on affordability, championing Medicare for All, a tax on billionaires, and labor protections against the AI industry replacing jobs. Yet his position on Israel has drawn perhaps the most scrutiny from his opponents. 

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Moderate Democrats condemned El-Sayed’s decision to invite influential streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker to a pair of campaign rallies at Michigan universities in the spring, claiming that appearing with the vocal anti-Zionist streamer was insensitive to the Jewish community in the wake of a horrific March shooting at a Michigan synagogue. McMorrow, whose husband and daughter are Jewish, compared Piker to the far-right, neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes in an interview with Jewish Insider, and she repeated that it was insensitive for El-Sayed to stump with Piker after the synagogue attack on CNN last week. 

“I believe in freedom of speech,” she told CNN, “but we have a very diverse population here in Michigan — we have the largest Arab American population in the country, alongside a very significant Jewish population. We need to keep everyone together, not just to win, but to govern and represent this state appropriately.”

El-Sayed has repeatedly condemned the synagogue attack and decried the use of actual antisemitic violence as a cudgel to deflect criticism of Israel’s violence against Palestinians. “He knows our community intimately and cares for it,” said Miller of JVP Action, pointing out that El-Sayed grew up in close proximity to the Jewish community in Michigan, attending bar and bat mitzvahs and Seders and spending time at shul.

“Many candidates, many in the establishment of both parties, treat Palestinian safety, treat Jewish safety like political footballs that they can use to divide our communities in order to score political points,” Miller said. “What I have seen from Dr. El-Sayed, he is not going to play into bad faith smears and attacks.”

El-Sayed had not only weathered the political storm but may have benefited from the added attention. In polls over the past several months, he has consistently led Stevens and McMorrow, though margins remain slim in the tight three-way race. One recent poll by Zenith Research showed El-Sayed outperforming his Democratic opponents in a November general against the likely Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, largely due to El-Sayed’s popularity among progressive and younger voters.

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The June poll also found that a plurality of Michigan voters — 46 percent — showed support for ending all U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, in accordance with El-Sayed’s campaign position. McMorrow says she supports blocking offensive weapons shipments, leaving room for so-called “defensive” systems like the Iron Dome, and Stevens supports continuing the unconditional flow of arms to Israel.

“At a time when too many have tried to pit communities against one another,” El-Sayed said in a statement, “JVP Action has shown that standing against antisemitism and standing up for the lives and dignity of Palestinians are rooted in the same commitment to our shared humanity. I’m deeply humbled and energized by their support and the movement they’ve built.”

The post Abdul El-Sayed Becomes First Senate Candidate Backed by Pro-Palestine Jewish Group appeared first on The Intercept.

Aron D’Souza, the brainchild behind the lawsuit to kill Gawker Media, says he wants to fix journalism. To that end, in the spring he launched a platform that he described as a “private AI tribunal” to adjudicate the veracity of media claims.

“Today, anyone can publish allegations. Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media,” the platform’s homepage read until late May. Then, the site was unceremoniously taken down, not long after The Intercept’s interview with D’Souza. 

“Due to feedback we’re rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future,” Objection’s site, which features an uncanny AI-animated image of a painterly woman’s shifting eyes, now reads. “Stay tuned for updates.”

The platform itself was something of a mishmash between Snopes.com for right-wing culture war issues and a private defamation arbitration service marketed to the everyman. Among the claims it was adjudicating was whether Joe Rogan promoted the use of “horse dewormer” ivermectin as a Covid-19 cure and claims by Sen. Bernie Sanders that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

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It’s deeply unclear how many everyday people need easy access to defamation remedies; the lawsuit that eventually killed Gawker was brought on behalf of the professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is also one of the backers of Objection. But when I caught up with D’Souza, an Oxford-educated lawyer, to discuss the project which has been criticized for its possible impacts on press freedom, he was awash in populist rhetoric. 

“I don’t think anyone is actually happy with the state of journalism,” he told me. “My view is that someone needs to structurally fix journalism.”

When I asked why he shuttered the site, D’Souza pointed to sky-high demand.

“After launch, we received many customer requests for more complex investigations (with much higher willingness to pay),” he said. “As such, we decided to focus the team on retooling the website.”

When I first spoke with D’Souza shortly after launch, he was fresh off ringing the opening bell for the IPO of his other venture, which includes the Enhanced Games, a kind of Olympics where all manner of performance-enhancing drugs were allowed. We spoke about his views on the press and how he hopes his controversial Objection AI platform will reform the media.

There isn’t much that D’Souza points out that isn’t already obvious to most casual observers of the state of news media. Journalists are underpaid. “It’s kind of unimaginable why you would go to Columbia Journalism School and get half a million dollars in debt and then get paid $50,000 to write at The Huffington Post,” he said. The business model for most publishers “has completely fallen apart.” And “the people who are being written about,” he said, “aren’t very happy because they feel like they’re being represented incorrectly.”

On top of all of that, the editorial boards of the largest mainstream media outlets, owned by a handful of elite families, reflect their own biases — whether it’s the Sulzberger family, who owns the New York Times, or the Murdochs, the News Corp scions who own Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

“You walk into that building on 6th Avenue in New York and you feel the presence of Rupert Murdoch, as you’re aware. You walk into the Daily Mail building on Kensington High Street in London, you feel the presence of the Rothermere family. In a more subtle way, you walk into the New York Times building, and you feel the presence of the Sulzbergers,” D’Souza said.

According to him, that concentrated, elite media ownership class has contributed to a compounding, historic crisis that threatens the credibility of journalism as a whole. Just 28 percent of Americans trust the media, according to a 2025 Gallup survey, the lowest it’s ever been. Republicans, who are traditionally the partisan group with the lowest trust in media, have remained that way (6–17 percent) but curiously, now only a slim majority of Democrats — 51 percent — say they trust traditional media. For all intents and purposes, D’Souza’s got much of the diagnosis right. It’s his solution that’s the problem. 

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The centerpiece of Objection is what the company calls its “Honor Index,” a rating system that purports to tell how credible a journalist is. Here’s how it works: For a fee of $2,500 to $5,000 (depending where on the website you looked), anyone can file an Objection. After that, your case is investigated by what the platform describes as “the most qualified researchers,” which it says include award-winning investigative journalists, former CIA and FBI agents, and military intelligence officers.

The resulting investigation purportedly identifies the factual claims that require investigating, and adjudicates evidence by its “proximity to the underlying event.” Primary sources, documents, court filings, emails, and transaction records are valued at the highest premium. Anonymous sources “lacking a traceable origin” rank lowest. Once the investigators have gathered their “evidence” and offered the journalist in question an opportunity to reply, a proprietary AI system makes a judgment on the quality of the claim. The goal, ostensibly, is greater transparency into the business of newsgathering.  

“The actual article you publish,” he told me, referring to this Intercept story, “will only include a very small percentage of the actual data that has been transmitted to you. We live in this world of infinite cloud storage, infinite AI comprehension capability. So why isn’t that underlying data available?”

On first blush, D’Souza’s critiques mostly track, but for the fact that much of what he is asking for is already standard practice in many newsrooms. Pick through the archives of the once formidable, now-defunct BuzzFeed News data investigations team and you’ll find the underlying code for the publication’s award-winning investigation into surveillance aircrafts used by the military and law enforcement agencies, among other stories. Most newsrooms that practice data journalism host GitHub pages where people can audit their code and datasets.

Anonymous sources, however, are D’Souza’s biggest gripe. They are, he said, “One of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.” By his reasoning, science doesn’t use anonymous sources and is subject to peer review, so why isn’t journalism held to the same standard of external oversight?

It doesn’t take much to realize that the power differential exists in much the opposite direction. Who’s more of a threat: a whistleblower speaking out about the dangers of some of the biggest companies in the world, or the powerful company with the $300 billion market cap sitting on some of the most sophisticated surveillance architecture in the world?

When Objection launched in April, and up until after our conversation, D’Souza said the company had seeded a list of active cases it was working on adjudicating. One case under active “investigation” before the site went dark was “The Public v. Hannah Broughton,” over the statement made in the U.K.-based outlet The Mirror that “Amazon workers were forced to work around a dead colleague and told ‘don’t look.’” However, Broughton wasn’t the originator of that claim; it was originally made by the investigative journalism outlet The Western Edge. The Mirror had merely aggregated the publication’s reporting and sourced it to the original reporter.

When I asked D’Souza about the claim and why, while it was under investigation, the company decided to reach out to the aggregator, he responded, “Repetition is not a defense to defamation in law.” Publications are generally liable for republishing defamatory content. But scrutinize that investigation further, and among the evidence listed is other stories, including by People magazine, that also aggregated The Western Edge — but not the actual Western Edge story.

But the real irony is that the person investigating that claim for Objection is listed as an “anonymous investigator.” When asked about fighting anonymity with more anonymity, D’Souza again gestured to the “power imbalance to be reckoned with.” While the case is being investigated, he said, Objection doesn’t want to “disclose the name of the investigator because a rich and powerful individual might say, oh, ‘I’m going to go bribe that investigator.’” The investigator’s name, he said, would be published when the investigation concludes. 

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It would take an awfully credulous person to believe that the businessman behind the shuttering of Gawker has an authentic stake in “fixing” journalism — especially considering that D’Souza described in an editor’s letter once live on the site that he views Objection as a “natural extension” of his and Thiel’s invasion of privacy lawsuit. Even so, one might wonder how the infamous sex tape story that was Gawker’s undoing would fare through Objection’s proprietary AI adjudication process. After all, Hulk Hogan did have sex with Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife, and Gawker did have the receipts, namely the video, to prove it.

Objection’s AI arbitration system, in which both the aggrieved figure and the journalist would need to agree to, also seems to have a fatal flaw. In promoting the use of AI judges, D’Souza cites a paper by two University of Chicago legal scholars that suggests AI adjudicators apply the law more consistently than human judges. In one test case, AI cited judicial precedent 99 percent of the time in its decision-making versus 61 percent for human judges. But that paper also critiques that level of accuracy. The paper’s authors write, “Another possibility is that GPT is actually a better judge than humans are. While many readers have argued that this is the proper reading of our results, we believe that this theory is decisively contradicted by the fact that GPT made decisions like law students.”

Real judges, the authors say, don’t make decisions in a legal vacuum but also through the broader human context of their decisions. Asked about that conclusion, D’Souza questioned whether “the goals of the law” should be more “interpretive” or more by “the letter of the law.”

“If you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man,” he said. “I firmly believe that we should be reducing human bias.”

But that area of human judgment is also arguably how the legal profession moves the law forward and how unjust laws are overturned. The seeds of this country’s freedom of the press law were laid when a jury defied the British crown’s judges and refused to convict the publisher of a small New York printing press of libel for publishing material that offended the then-governor of the state. Jurors would nullify the convictions of those who helped fugitive slaves flee violating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the 1970s, when the Camden 28 were tried for breaking into their local draft board offices and destroying their draft cards, the jury again acquitted the group based on their moral conviction. It’s hard to imagine that AI, trained on the letter of the law as it’s written, could easily navigate the murky moral waters that those laws may produce.

“Human judges are able to depart from rules when following them would produce bad outcomes from a moral, social, or policy standpoint,” the paper’s authors write. 

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A more basic mark against the AI arbiter the paper’s authors point out is fundamental to how these systems work — or don’t: “No one understands how they make decisions, and some people speculate that their decisions are literally unintelligible for humans.”

D’Souza is asking a question as old as the oldest democracy: Who watches the watchmen? 

One doesn’t have to look farther than the appalling double standard the mainstream press has applied to its coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to see the relevance of that question. But in a world where American press freedom is already backsliding in favor of the wealthiest, it’s hard to see how a black-box AI “fact-checker” backed by the billionaire owner of one of the world’s biggest military tech company is a better solution than a well-funded public media ecosystem buttressed by press freedom laws that are designed to hold the most powerful among us accountable.

The post The Peter Thiel Ally Who Helped Kill Gawker Wanted to Save Journalism. Then His Site Went Dark. appeared first on The Intercept.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.

At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity. 

That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly. 

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That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.” 

Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources.  

Trump’s administration has made no secret of the fact that it wants to destroy journalism that holds it to account, including by unmasking sources and punishing them. This week, for instance, news broke that the Department of Justice had unsuccessfully subpoenaed reporters from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, likely as part of a leak investigation.

But what if it could skip the journalists and simply demand that tech companies identify sources who may have spoken to reporters using their platforms?

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The risk isn’t hypothetical. The first Trump administration abused its authority to spy on journalists to figure out who they’re talking to, including online. The second Trump administration has already repeatedly attempted to unmask its critics online and raided a journalist’s home and seized the devices she used to communicate with her sources. 

In the face of these risks, using secure communication methods, like Signal or SecureDrop, can help. But some sources may still reach out to reporters through social media. As a result, age verification laws will create a new pool of data that the government can demand when it’s hunting for information about the people who may have spoken to the press.

The most common methods of age verification rely on the collection of government IDs to verify a user’s date of birth with certainty. The KIDS Act says it won’t require platforms to collect government IDs, but at least some platforms will likely choose this route to comply with the law or offer it as a fallback approach when other methods inevitably fail. 

But online anonymity isn’t assured even if platforms use other ways to verify users’ ages. Even so-called “privacy-preserving” approaches risk exposing users’ identities and undermine anonymity. All of the methods ultimately require platforms to collect, process, and retain more data on all users, raising the risks for anonymous sources who use online platforms to contact reporters.

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Age verification laws will also make it difficult or impossible for journalists to use anonymous social media accounts to gather information, like sock puppet accounts used to infiltrate and report on online extremist groups, or to avoid surveillance by the very Big Tech companies they’re reporting on. Reporters outside the U.S. who publish anonymously on platforms like X or Facebook to avoid the wrath of autocratic regimes will also find those entry points vanish.

Pools of incredibly sensitive identity data also creates an enticing “honey pot” of information that malicious actors could use to target, intimidate, and chill journalists from pursuing certain stories or sources from speaking to them. Already, many age verification providers have been breached, leaking users’ sensitive data and allowing others to link online activity to users’ offline identity. Age verification companies may also grant access or sell the data they collect to others, like payment processors, creating another avenue for data breaches.

Many Democratic lawmakers recognize that journalism is under threat from the Trump administration. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., the ranking member of the House committee that reached the deal on the KIDS Act, has rightfully blasted the Federal Communications Commission for abusing its power to destroy press freedom and free speech, for instance. So why would he and other Democrats now support legislation that serves the same anti-press agenda? 

Proponents of the KIDS ACT, and similar bills in the Senate, say these laws are necessary to protect children. But the truth is that age verification requirements are bad for everyone, including children. Why should we trust platforms with even more personal information, including from kids, when so many companies already use that data to target ads or share materials with law enforcement agencies that users believed was private?

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That’s not to say that platforms shouldn’t be required to do more to actually protect children online — they should. But comprehensive privacy legislation that protects everyone and requires platforms to collect less data, not more, is a better approach.

Mandating age verification, in contrast, effectively hands Big Tech and the government a skeleton key to the identities of every whistleblower, dissident, and investigative reporter who uses online platforms, not to mention everyone else, including children. This kind of surveillance on steroids that surrenders our right to speak, report, and read the news anonymously won’t make anyone safer.  

The post Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing appeared first on The Intercept.

Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s sixth prime minister in a decade, has resigned. Even allowing for the weariness of repetition, this should theoretically be a big deal.

Within that benighted kingdom, it will be for some — the John Fetterman-esque cartoon Andy Burnham, now widely considered Starmer’s all-but-inevitable successor, looks set to grip the poisoned chalice that is leadership of the British Labour Party, for all the good it will do him. The ascendant far-right outfit Reform U.K. will likely regard Starmer’s downfall as another stepping stone to turning Oswald Mosley’s deferred dreams of Anglified fascism into reality.

The Greens, who have enjoyed some recent success with their novel proposal that left-wing people might actually want a left-wing party to vote for, may see this as further proof of the once-verboten idea that — whisper it — maybe the Labour Party doesn’t need to exist. And those constituent nations of the U.K. which are not England but are nevertheless forced to abide by its whims will be reminded that the British state they are bound to has not enjoyed stable government for quite a while.

The question of whether the wider world should take heed of the U.K. and its travails remains open, and for good reason. The centuries long legacy of Britain’s various eccentric neuroses being imposed outside of its island isolation is horrifically grim, and I would not blame anyone for wishing to see it quarantined like patient zero in a zombie outbreak. Yet there are lessons to be learned from Starmer’s short, sad tenure, especially as the international left will continue to face manifestations of the worldview he represented — not least the U.S. Democratic establishment, as New York primary voters will need no reminding this week, who seem stubbornly resistant to learning them.

It shouldn’t be controversial to say that Starmer’s rise was not achieved on his own merits. As Labour leader, Starmer’s role was essentially pest control: He was installed as head of a party that has historically, if intermittently, pretended to belong to a species of socialism, and was tasked with disinfecting Labour of any threat it might genuinely embody that ideology. In this mission, he was nominally successful, purging the party of anything associated with his leftist predecessor Jeremy Corbyn (whose specter continues to haunt Britain’s commentariat, despite achieving precisely zilch). Starmer, the best that central casting could produce, was then delivered to Downing Street with a ridiculous majority by an electorate exhausted by more than a decade of Conservative government.

In power, the Tories had alternated between brutality and incompetence, and Starmer did not buck that trend, reaffirming Gore Vidal’s contention that trying to find much difference between Labour and the Tories was like bringing “a measuring rod to Lilliput.” At every turn, Starmer pursued the credo of centrism by meeting his government’s increasingly psychotic right flank where they were, and was somehow shocked and dismayed to find this only made him more despised, while also emboldening and empowering reactionary forces.

Under Starmer’s health secretary and supposed human being Wes Streeting, trans youth in the U.K. were stripped of gender-affirming healthcare, and Britain’s frothingly transphobic “gender-critical” lobby — from which their equally exterminationist American sympathizers have taken much inspiration — fumed that young trans people still existed.

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Starmer’s government saw Palestine solidarity activists criminalized under a dubious interpretation of anti-terrorism law, yet British right-wing media continued to grumble that pro-Palestinian protests were still possible at all. Within a year of Starmer vowing his government would curb legal immigration and “take back control” of the U.K.’s borders, immigrants in Britain were subjected to pogroms and firebombing.

It should not need to be spelled out, but Starmer and his backers have shown time and again that it still does — if the mythic Overton window shifts to the right, and you obligingly follow suit, it will simply move further toward that extreme, and reward only the tip of the spear. Those in the U.S. who saw Kamala Harris struck mute on trans rights and blind in the face of genocide in Gaza know too well the stakes of “moderating” to the right in the interest of “consensus.”

Since his resignation, a small and desperate coterie of British pundits have urged their dwindling readership to focus on the positives of Starmer’s reign by emphasizing those instances in which he stood firm on the rock of not-quite-fascism, particularly in foreign affairs. After all, they point out, he recognized a Palestinian state (while simultaneously offering precious little resistance to killing the people who would otherwise live there). But whether in the United States’ kidding-but-not-really bid to colonize Greenland, its pursuit of regime change in Venezuela via the enactment of a lousy ’80s action movie, or a war with Iran — the sheer sloppy-drunk incompetence of which stunned even its most vociferous critics — the Starmer administration never achieved any greater fortitude than weakly suggesting, “I say, steady on …”

There was never any realistic hope that this erstwhile human rights lawyer was going to seriously confront a sclerotic superpower ruled by a meat-headed fascism which treats human rights as a laughable suggestion. It is appropriate that in his resignation speech, Starmer expressed pride in supposedly protecting Britain’s youth from social media; this feat of Herculean self-aggrandizement was, in its own way, telling of Starmer’s entire premiership. Given the choice between taking on the entrenched power of social media platforms (to which the U.K.’s political class remains unashamedly addicted) or restricting the liberties of a constituency not particularly useful to him, Starmer inevitably chose the latter.

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Less than a decade ago, the idea that the American progressive left might be in a healthier state than its British equivalent would have drawn hoots of derision from those smugly confident in Corbyn’s brief ascendance. Yet the left in the United States — from the days of Occupy Wall Street through Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, and on-the-ground anti-ICE resistance — has wised up to the idea that it must move in an independent and extra-parliamentary manner. They may take heart in developments such as the rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani, but they seem to understand that real political change requires mass organizing beyond party structures and a willingness to break with the accepted norms and niceties of the political process.

This understanding passed entirely by all those on the British left who invested in Labour, along with those centrists and liberals who warned against the insidious influence of identity politics and “culture wars” that would require giving a shit about the rights, liberation, and lives of embattled and persecuted minorities. Starmer’s premiership, and its ignominious end, are the consequence.

The lesson of Keir Starmer’s undistinguished spell as prime minister is that — in the U.K. or anywhere else — if you throw red meat to a bloodthirsty right, it is only a matter of time before they are devouring your own flesh. You will not defeat fascism, or even delay it — you will simply make sure that when it arrives, much of its work has already been done.

The post Keir Starmer’s Downfall Is the Only Reward for Simpering Centrism appeared first on The Intercept.

The Trump administration attacking the right to publish or report information is a given at this point. The president has threatened journalists for everything from questioning the wisdom of his failed war with Iran to touching the peeled lining of his renovated reflecting pool. 

Tantrums like those may now feel routine, but this week marked a new front in Trump’s war on information: Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write. He’s one of eight defendants sentenced on Tuesday to a combined 450 years — the first prison sentences against so-called “antifa” handed down under the framework of NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s sweeping “counterterrorism” memorandum to clamp down on dissent from the left.

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The prosecution’s theory was that Sanchez moved the zines, which discussed anarchism and other anti-government ideas, to conceal evidence in the case against his wife, Maricela Rueda. Rueda attended a July 4, 2025, protest at the Prairieland immigration jail in Texas where a police officer was shot. (She was not accused of shooting him or having anything to do with the shooting but was herself sentenced to 70 years.)

But that nuance is cold comfort: It assumes that simply possessing years-old political pamphlets that said nothing about the protest or shooting could somehow constitute evidence of a crime. Sharing the political ideology of the shooter, the government contended, meant Rueda and her co-defendants were culpable for the shooter’s actions — and by allegedly attempting to prevent officers from finding out about Rueda’s ideology, Sanchez shared in the blame as well.

We’ve reached the point in the erosion of the First Amendment where the government considers possession of anarchist zines and membership in a terrorist cell to be more or less the same thing. Once the box of zines was discovered, there was no need to prove Rueda planned or had any idea that anyone would be shot at the protest. 

What’s worse is that this will likely only ramp up the administration’s efforts to criminalize being in possession of information. Whatever you may think of former CNN host Don Lemon, he’s no anarchist or extremist, and the content of his broadcasts bears little resemblance to the zines Sanchez was convicted of transporting. And yet, after indicting him and independent journalist Georgia Fort on frivolous charges relating to their livestreaming of a protest at a Minnesota church, the government sought a warrant to obtain the identities of subscribers to their YouTube channels.

Fortunately, a judge rejected that warrant. But it’s a chilling revelation of the administration’s modus operandi. Lemon and Fort’s YouTube subscribers would, of course, have no knowledge of what happened at the church protest beyond what was publicly broadcast. Their identities are as irrelevant to whether Lemon and Fort committed a crime as the box of zines was to Rueda’s case. The only conceivable reason the government might want a list of YouTube subscribers is to keep an eye on people who watch disfavored shows. 

And let’s say someone who’d watched Lemon and Fort’s livestreams and then heard about their arrests had cleared their browser history because they (rightly) feared the administration might target them. Could they then be prosecuted for concealing evidence under the same logic applied to Sanchez? If they’d downloaded the video, could they be accused of possessing contraband? Would forwarding a link equate to trafficking? 

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It all sounds preposterous, but virtually nothing is too absurd for this Department of Justice. In fact, it’s already argued that documents investigative reporters receive from whistleblower sources can constitute contraband. (It’s worth pointing out that Joe Biden’s DOJ used this same logic when it pursued its own ridiculous “transporting” of information case against Project Veritas for moving Ashley Biden’s diary across state lines). 

These frivolous actions create a catch-22 for all Americans. The more people are investigated for engaging with ideas the administration deems dangerously anti-government, the more likely others are to conceal evidence of their own controversial beliefs — not because they are evidence of any real crime but because prosecutors are out of control. But if they do so, they risk incriminating themselves. 

NSPM-7, which was issued last September, tasks federal agencies with dismantling networks of “anti-fascist” actors, a purposely overly broad term since expanded to include those with “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” 

Given that antifa, as a singular, cohesive organization, is a figment of the right’s imagination, agents cannot accomplish that task by uncovering a membership registry. They can only do so by identifying people with viewpoints they consider “extreme,” like anti-ICE protesters officers have told they’re being added to watchlists, or pro-Palestine opinion writers they’ve sought to deport. 

In Chicago and other cities ICE invaded, activists and organizers packaged whistles and zines to distribute to residents. Under the logic of NSPM-7 and Sanchez Estrada’s conviction, that is a network of actors engaged in organized political violence. If you read one of their zines, you could be deemed a member of an illicit enterprise, and if you hide one, you’re covering for criminals.

The government argued that the Prairieland defendants are different. One prosecutor said: “People with that kind of extremist beliefs need extra time in prison. They believe violence is justified.” U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, in handing down the sentences, reportedly said he wanted to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.” But lots of people believe political violence is sometimes justified. If someone who believes punching Nazis is justified attends an anti-Nazi protest where someone else punches a Nazi, are they at risk of being convicted of assault alongside the actual assailant, particularly if they have some anti-Nazi literature on their bookshelf? The answer is far less obvious than it used to be.

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The administration has vowed the Prairieland case “will not be the last” of its kind. We must take it at its word. The next one might also involve protesters from the political fringes rather than ordinary Americans reading, say, The Intercept, or watching Don Lemon on YouTube. But what about the one after that? We’re not as far away as you might think. Stephen Miller has called the whole Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” — clearly invoking the language of NSPM-7. Trump has labeled his political opponents “the enemy within” and the press “the enemy of the people.” 

Whoever said slippery slopes are a fallacy never met Donald Trump. If Sanchez Estrada indeed moved the zines because he foresaw their being used to tie his wife to a nonexistent terrorist network and a shooting, he should be commended for his prescience. Maybe more of us should think like Sanchez Estrada.

Or would that be a crime?

The post 30-Year Sentence for Transporting Zines Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Free Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

Yet after back-to-back earthquakes rocked multiple Venezuelan cities on Wednesday, toppling scores of buildings and killing at least 188 people and injuring at least 1,520, Trump merely offered assistance.

“The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help! I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly,” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “We will be there for our new and great friends.”

One U.S. government official told The Intercept that Trump’s offer doesn’t go far enough since Venezuela is now a U.S. “vassal state.” “Don’t we run that country?” the official asked, speaking on background and referencing Trump’s comments. “That’s an obligation that exceeds friendship.”

At the same time, Venezuelan American organizations and progressive foreign policy groups are about to circulate a letter calling on the Trump administration to provide massive, unconditional humanitarian aid to Venezuela in the wake of the 7.2 foreshock and 7.5-magnitude quake, as well as long-term economic damage from U.S. sanctions, according to details of the letter shared exclusively with The Intercept by Just Foreign Policy, one of the groups that drafted the letter. The organizations argue that the United States bears a unique obligation to Venezuela and that U.S. aid “must match the scale of the harm the United States has played a role in creating.”

This all comes after Trump seemed to suggest earlier this week that the U.S. has reaped billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil wealth in the last six months.

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After ousting Maduro, Trump’s installed a puppet government run by former Maduro ally Delcy Rodriguez. She has carried out day-to-day governance under the threat of a looming U.S. criminal indictment alleging corruption and money laundering charges. Trump also warned that the U.S. might attack again if Rodriguez did not comply with his demands.

The costs of Absolute Resolve — the military operation and abduction of Maduro — topped $206 million, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Since then, the Trump administration has seized control of Venezuela’s oil industry and claims to be exploiting it for massive returns. This week, Trump said that the U.S. has recovered its war costs 28 times over through oil extraction; this equates to roughly $5.7 billion.

“The people are happy in the country. They have smiles,” Trump said of Venezuelans on Tuesday, prior to the earthquakes. He claimed Venezuela has shared in the economic rewards.

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But the letter being drafted by the Venezuelan American and progressive groups cites a recent economic analysis by Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez showing that U.S. policy has failed to produce the economic recovery Trump has claimed. The letter notes that sanctions have left Venezuela operating at a “diminished capacity,” that “the buildings that collapsed were not maintained,” and “the hospitals that must now treat nearly a thousand injured were not adequately supplied” as a direct result.

In the port city of La Guaira, for example, more than 100 buildings were destroyed in the twin earthquakes. “Should the U.S. be responsible for rebuilding?” the U.S. government official mused. “Any word from Trump on that?”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the U.S. would ease sanctions or help to rebuild Venezuela.

U.S. Southern Command, which spearheaded the war on Venezuela earlier this year said on Thursday that it was “working with the Department of State to support U.S. government relief operations in Venezuela.” The command added that it “has established an operational planning team that includes experienced subject matter experts from the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, who are advising staff and leadership responsible for disaster relief planning and mission-related decisions.”

But disaster aid is inadequate, according to Just Foreign Policy and the other groups. “Emergency relief alone will not be enough. Venezuela’s recovery will require access to its own financial resources and the ability to import the equipment, construction materials, medicine, fuel, spare parts and other goods needed to rebuild homes, hospitals, schools, roads, ports and critical infrastructure,” they wrote.

Even before the earthquakes, almost 8 million people in Venezuela were in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations. The letter from Just Foreign Policy and others calls on the Trump administration to “provide immediate, massive humanitarian assistance with no political conditions attached,” to release Venezuelan oil revenues currently held in U.S.-controlled accounts, and to suspend remaining sanctions impeding disaster response and reconstruction.

The post Trump Claimed to Run Venezuela. After Earthquakes, He’s Walking That Back. appeared first on The Intercept.

All three congressional candidates that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamadani endorsed won their primaries on Tuesday. The races were widely viewed as a test of just how much influence the left would have in charting the next chapter for the Democratic Party — and a referendum on Mamdani’s power.

“Mamdani is the one variable that truly matters,” Michael Lange, political writer and elections analyst of The Narrative Wars Substack, tells The Intercept Briefing as he breaks down the wins of Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier by district. “You pair that type of broad cultural political figure with the block-by-block organizing of New York City DSA — it’s a very powerful thing.” 

“You had a candidate who said ‘Fuck Kamala Harris’ win the historic capital of Black America,” says Lange, of Avila Chevalier’s win over five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. “If that is not a distillation of the ‘Democratic tea party,’ I don’t quite know what is.”

This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lange and Intercept managing editor Maia Hibbett about the strategic mistakes of the traditionally progressive Working Families Party, the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party, and how the DSA is upending electoral politics from the left.

“Here in New York, a lot of the momentum is being driven by the DSA, of course, but there are these progressive and insurgent candidates across the country who are trying to change the course of the Democratic Party,” says Hibbett, “and excite voters who might not have been into the Democratic establishment in past cycles.”

Lange notes how demographic changes and pressures on the Democratic Party base are impacting voters’ priorities. “The party’s becoming younger, more educated, and increasingly squeezed financially,” says Lange. “There’s just this broad alienation of people who have not really been able to get ahead, not for their own fault, and I think it’s like downstream of our economy, and that’s why the affordability zeitgeist is so potent.” He adds, “You spin the wheels up in two years, what could this look like in a Democratic presidential primary?”

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

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor of The Intercept.

AL: Maia, did you see what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had delivered to his House office on Wednesday morning?

MH: Yes, they were beautiful.

AL: The Republicans’ House campaign arm delivered flowers and a card offering their condolences to Jeffries after candidates that he endorsed lost to socialists on Tuesday night in primaries in New York.

This is what the card said. “Three losses in one night is tough. We wanted so-called ‘Leader,’” — in quotes — “Jeffries to know our thoughts are with him, his candidates, and whatever remains of his influence in the Democratic Party.” Maia, let’s get your thoughts on this.

MH: On one hand, Jeffries probably felt a little bit of relief that no one did end up challenging him, so he wasn’t one of the people facing that challenge. But it was a really bad night for establishment Democrats. Ally of Jeffries and lots of other Democratic old guard, Rep. Greg Meeks in Queens, was also mad, and he was giving comments on Wednesday morning implying that New York City was going to suffer, it wasn’t going to get as much resources from the federal government because it was losing one of its really powerful incumbents.

You’ve covered the race that toppled Espaillat pretty closely. It represents a different kind of power coming into play in New York and in Democratic politics.

AL: One of the candidates most considered a long shot prior to Tuesday is Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ousted the powerful chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Avila Chevalier was notably an organizer of the Columbia pro-Palestine protest alongside Mahmoud Khalil. She cited Espaillat’s refusal to help Khalil in the aftermath of his arrest as one of the main reasons that she even decided to challenge him in the first place. And she came on the national stage after writing an op-ed in support of [Khalil] and being recruited by Justice Democrats.

MH: That result was really striking, especially because if you think back to a little over a year ago, before Zohran Mamdani won the primary for New York City mayor, you were covering the arrests of these student protesters in solidarity with Palestine, and that storyline has changed so dramatically.

It seemed at the time like their power was going to fade, or that these protests were getting crushed — and now one of them is going to become a member of Congress.

AL: This was definitely not on Democrats’ bingo card, particularly Espaillat, who was a large recipient of money from the pro-Israel lobby and faced a lot of criticism for how little he did to support those students at the time.

While Avila Chevalier’s win on Tuesday was one of the biggest surprises, both liberal and conservative critics of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which she is a member, framed her success as part of this narrative that we’re seeing come out from some reactions — that Ivy League transplants are taking over the Democratic Party and don’t actually reflect the working-class interests they’re claiming to represent.

MH: That was a huge criticism in another race on Tuesday night in New York, which was the competition between Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso for Nydia Velázquez’s seat. Velázquez was retiring, and she had chosen Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as her successor. Velázquez was considered a progressive.

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She was early to support Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. And in some ways, the DSA’s choice to run someone against her chosen successor was being presented as this betrayal and this attempt to usurp the progressive power base that had begun to grow in New York City.

AL: And then, of course, in the middle of all this, there’s Brad Lander, who many of our listeners may recall ran against Mamdani for mayor and then formed a coalition with him.

He ousted incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn less than 10 minutes after the polls closed. That was less of a shock, as Goldman had lagged behind in the polls for some months, but I think with the quickness that they called the results was another twist of the knife for Democrats in the establishment who had stood by Goldman.

MH: Yeah, and it’s funny because not that long ago, I think Goldman was considered a pretty powerful and a pretty popular politician. People talked before the 2025 mayoral race about the possibility that he could run for mayor of New York City. Maybe now he will because he’s free to do stuff. 

Here in New York, a lot of the momentum is being driven by the DSA, of course, but there are these progressive and insurgent candidates across the country who are trying to change the course of the Democratic Party and excite voters who might not have been into the Democratic establishment in past cycles.

Next week in Colorado, there’s a race that you’ve been covering really since it started, which is an insurgent candidate named Melat Kiros, who is endorsed by Justice Democrats and is also a DSA member backed by the national DSA. She’s running to take out longtime incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver.

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There’s also Graham Platner in Maine. There’s Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, both candidates we’ve covered a lot, running for Senate. Another DSA candidate is Francesca Hong, who’s running for governor of Wisconsin. In some of these races, the DSA is a huge driving force behind these insurgent candidates, and in other cases, they’re not actually DSA candidates, but they’re adopting this similar populist working-class-focused politics that has been elevating politicians in these races across the country.

It does seem like the story of the Trump era is that people want change. There’s the pearl-clutching version of this that’s, “Oh, God, there’s populism. There will be a Trump of the left.” But perhaps there needs to be, and populism is just governance by the people.

AL: Next, we’re going to go deeper on all of this and more with political writer and analyst Michael Lange. He writes about politics in New York City on his Substack “The Narrative Wars” and is the author of a recent piece called “The (Not So) Civil War for the Commie Corridor.” We’ll discuss the growing influence of DSA and how the group is upending electoral politics from the left. 

Michael, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Michael Lange: Oh, it’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

AL: Michael, we are speaking on Wednesday afternoon. I know you’ve had a busy day talking about the results from Tuesday night’s primaries in New York. Leftists are ecstatic right now. The primaries on Tuesday night were widely viewed as a test of just how much influence the left would have on charting the next chapter of the Democratic Party and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s abilities as kingmaker.

I want to go through some of these results with you, some of which were absolutely stunning. We have former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who beat Rep. Dan Goldman, which was somewhat expected. But two socialists came out on top in congressional races that were far less predictable.

You called, ahead of Tuesday, a closer race for Claire Valdez. Were you surprised by the results?

ML: Certainly the scale of it, yes. There was always a world in which — let’s start with New York 7 — where Antonio Reynoso, the candidate that Claire Valdez was facing, he’s more of an institutional progressive supported by the Working Families Party, Brooklyn borough president, was in the City Council.

There was a scenario in which his support fell off to a certain degree with younger voters, and younger voters, Claire Valdez-friendly, came to the polls en masse and broke the outcome for that way. But I was still surprised because there is a part of this district, in addition to a lot of the institutional and labor support that someone like Antonio Reynoso has, and he does also have a genuinely progressive record, and he was running on a very left-wing policy plank. 

AL: Virtually indistinguishable from Valdez’s.

ML: 100 percent right. The contrast between the candidates was very coalitional and institutional and also cultural, to a certain degree. So he kinda had these bona fides, and I thought that in some places, he can at least dent her margins.

And then the big kind of wild card is that this district is also home to a very large Orthodox Jewish community, the Satmar of South Williamsburg. Interestingly, even though they’re Orthodox Jews, they’re religious anti-Zionists. But they’ve known Reynoso for a very long time, and those folks were turning out in quite large numbers. They block vote in accordance with the whims of the rabbinical leaders there. 

So Reynoso had 10 percent of the electorate that was basically giving him close to 100 percent of the vote. So he started off with 10, and she started off with zero. And I was like, well, to claw back from that, it won’t be entirely easy. And there were public and private polls that showed this race within 2 or 3 points. So maybe I paid a little bit too much attention to that.

But Claire Valdez had a very strong close and was able to engineer a lot of young voter turnout, especially proportionally to the amount of people turning out in this lower turnout congressional primary.

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And she really ran away with it. Voters under 50 of all races, I think, supported her pretty substantially. There were some neighborhoods in this district where she was getting the same margins that Zohran Mamdani was getting versus Andrew Cuomo. Although instead of Cuomo being this fossil of the Democratic establishment, she was getting them against someone who’s lived his entire life in the district and does have other progressive and institutional validators.

I’m a little less surprised, actually, by Darializa’s win because I’ve been covering that race pretty closely and I had talked at length about how this was a prime opportunity district. Adriano Espaillat was, to some degree, in my estimation, a paper tiger and also that he was someone who was operating with a pretty hard ceiling. However they seemed to — and by they, I mean the political establishment, Hakeem Jeffries, a lot of labor unions, a lot of outside spending — seemed to really realize that there was quite a lot of vulnerability to him with one month left. Then of course, Mayor Mamdani endorsed Darializa, and that really raised the salience of the race, and then all of a sudden she’s getting attacked a lot.

There was a deleted Twitter account where they found her tweets. She said a bunch of different things, ranging from like, F Kamala Harris, to she attended an October 8 rally in New York. I thought to a certain extent that might hurt her with older voters who, again, white and Black who may not have much love for Adriano Espaillat, but I thought when you project that amount of money and negative spending onto a relatively unknown candidate, it can, in certain instances, have very drastic implications.

But she was able to really weather that, and also he was someone who had spent much of his career appealing to building Dominican American political power in Upper Manhattan. That was a stronger strategy 10 years ago when the Dominican electorate was half or even a little more than half of what this district is.

But it has been redrawn. It has experienced demographic change to a certain extent, and now it’s basically one-third Hispanic, one-third white, one-third Black. And so he was very focused on a third of the electorate, and it left him very, very vulnerable. Darializa was able to — again, for someone who had not held office before — against a 10-year Democratic incumbent, she did quite well with Black voters, and she did very well with white voters as well, of all ages and also religions.

This district has a lot of, I would say, progressive, older Jewish voters. A lot of this spending was geared at getting them to flip toward Adriano Espaillat or at least sit the race out. But they didn’t, and they backed her by considerable margins, and she paired that with real inroads with the white, Black, and Hispanic renter class, and that was enough for her to win by 3 points.

So it’s an incredible accomplishment.

AL: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up the money piece because this was one of the most expensive congressional cycles in the history of New York, with more than $50 million spent. And obviously, not every seat, every congressional seat in New York was up for election. We’re talking about the handful that were up. 

Also down the ballot, super PACs spent almost five times what they spent on state legislative races in 2024, according to a report on Wednesday from New York Focus. A total of $9.6 million — including more than $2.5 million spent against DSA candidates alone, almost every single one of whom won their races.

What is the upshot here? We also saw some of the biggest national investments ever from pro-Palestine groups spending to support progressives in these races. How has all of that money changed how elections work in New York, both for the establishment and for this insurgent class?

ML: The value that this spending has is clearly diminishing. But I also think it’s worth highlighting American Priorities and Justice Democrats and some of the money that they used to support Darializa. Darializa was spent, I think, 3 or 4 to 1. Which is not great, but it’s not a margin that I guess can truly make or break a campaign.

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She was not getting out-spent 10 to 1, 20 to 1, things like that. So I think, again, stabilized some of the potential bleeding that could have come with a really hefty independent expenditure advantage one way or the other. There was, as you mentioned, tremendous super PAC spending in these downballot races. But those largely flopped. 

One of the things that New York City DSA and also Mayor Mamdani did quite well this cycle is there was a lot of emphasis — and, some of this was happenstance in the way that incumbents retired and things like that, and what came available. But for Claire Valdez running in the 7th Congressional District, there was one DSA-endorsed state Senate candidate farther down the ballot, and then there were, I believe, three competitive or open incumbent challenges, Assembly races that overlapped with the 7th District.

Basically, Claire’s race really helped raise spend, engagement, turnout in a lot of these crucial districts down the ballot. And then Claire, of course, blows it out of the water. I don’t want to say that she carried all these other folks to victory, but the dynamics of her race, campaign, and blowout certainly helped folks at the bottom of the ballot get turnout.

AL: I find it interesting that the national discourse around getting out of money in politics, which is still very strong and a big part of these candidates’ campaigns, but they’re also recognizing and being very candid about the fact that they do need money to combat some of the spending.

And obviously it’s not going to be equivalent, but you had Valdez and Reynoso trading barbs about dark money or super PAC money in the race. And she said something to the effect of, and you hear this argument all the time, “We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back.” I think that’s an interesting tension that’s come out in the aftermath of this. 

[Break]

AL: Another big discourse talking point, if you will, is about whether this marks the end of the relevance of traditional progressives, many of whom voters see as beholden to the Democratic establishment.

We see this nationally with the declining relevance of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, despite the election of more and more progressives to Congress. Most people might think of the left flank of the national Democratic Party as strictly progressive. Think Kamala Harris versus Bernie Sanders. But it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, especially in New York.

You wrote recently, “It is The Socialists vs. The Progressives: NYC-DSA, the volunteer army that went from study hall to City Hall in a decade; versus the Working Families Party [WFP], the progressive third party that dominated the anti-establishment lane of New York politics for twenty years before the socialists arrived on the scene.”

For our listeners who might not be as familiar with the nuances of how this works in New York, can you break down those lanes on the left? Who is in each camp, where do they diverge, and how are they pushing Democrats to the left?

ML: I think some of the biggest differences between DSA and WFP is ideological. It is an outgrowth of that Sanders versus Warren 2020 presidential primary, but I think it’s also in structure of the organization.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that DSA is just a more democratic, member-driven organization. The way the Working Families Party does their endorsements and things like that, it is a little more top-down. As a rank-and-file member of DSA, you have a lot more input on the direction of the organization. Some of that manifests in terms of the number of people who actively participate, the number of people who are dues-paying members, who volunteer, things like that.

DSA — they push a very class-focused politics. Not that the Working Families Party does not. Also DSA’s led quite significantly on Palestine and those issues, especially after October 7.

Not to say that the Working Families Party doesn’t talk about class. I mean, it’s literally in their name, but there is a bit more of an identitarian bent to that. Even today, the leader of the Working Families Party, Jasmine Gripper, was talking about, well, Antonio built a multiracial coalition. She was saying things like that — whereas if DSA just lost a race of that magnitude, they wouldn’t say, well, we built a multiracial coalition. That type of thing. Never mind that Claire Valdez won Hispanic voters by a very large amount.

Anyhoo, I do think that it was a very difficult evening for the more traditional progressive wing of the party. And again, we saw this in the mayoral race last year with the rise of Zohran Mamdani and the stagnation of Brad Lander — who, of course, was just elected to Congress. And then especially in this Trump 2.0 world, people are hungry for a different type of politics. I foregrounded this race, the 7th District, as a battle to see who leads to left in New York. It’s very clear that after last night, DSA is the one leading the left. And I think that will have wider repercussions as well.

AL: This is a great segue because I do want to ask you about this piece that you wrote on the 7th District, where I am a resident.

ML: Oh, there you go.

AL: And in talking about that, talk a little bit about how progressives whose candidates lost last night are reacting to the results. You already mentioned Jasmine Gripper, state director for the New York Working Families Party. But you dubbed this race a “civil war in the commie corridor.”

The “commie corridor” branding has really taken off in the past couple of months. I just wanted to tip my hat to you. 

ML: It has, for sure. Thank you. 

AL: But what’s going on here, and how did this race in particular become such a referendum on Mamdani’s power?

ML: Very early on, Mamdani and a lot of New York City DSA leadership and rank and file wanted to support Claire Valdez. 

I’m a DSA member. I’ve known Claire Valdez for years before anyone cared that I said the “commie corridor” or I wrote books or anything like that. She has a lot of goodwill in the organization with just normal members. She’s a union organizer. People really just like her.

So when Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez — who, I should also say I used to work for her when I first graduated college — when she retired, there were a lot of people who went to Claire, a reluctant candidate, and said, “Oh, I think you would be really great.” And clearly the mayor shared that sentiment. A lot of people close to the mayor did as well. 

But of course, Congresswoman Velázquez, I think there was some appetite on her part to support another DSA candidate, one that she was more familiar with. But then she did not want to support Claire, so then she really went all-in on Antonio Reynoso. Those two are very close. Antonio was born and raised in the South Side of Williamsburg, which is a historically Puerto Rican area. And credit to Nydia and Antonio: They were waging fights against the machines of old in that part of town prior to 2016, prior to 2018, before DSA really asserted themselves politically.

But then, I think, she was upset that the mayor wanted to go a different route than her. She made some comments to The New York Times. It got bitter. It felt like both sides were waging a lot of capital on this outcome. There was a lot of media sparring and things like that. Obviously with hindsight, potentially the Working Families Party and the Reynoso camp, they might have raised the stakes of this race too much. Now, they probably didn’t know what was going to happen but I think probably they’re sitting here on Wednesday regretting it.

But I think that the most important thing is that Mamdani is the one variable that truly matters. And New York City DSA, for all of the local nonprofits and relationships that Antonio Reynoso had, New York City DSA out organized them.

They knocked over 300,000 doors. They knocked the entire district, and you really felt those results on Tuesday night. To pick that district to have a very high-stakes proxy war was a strategic mistake on the part of the Reynoso–Working Families Party world, because this was not like a fight in Park Slope or Carroll Gardens.

Not that it would’ve gone differently, but those are a little more progressive, granola, Brad Lander-coded areas. They were really having this fight on some of these blocks where 93 percent of voters are under the age of 50, and where Mamdani is not just a political giant, but a cultural figure.

You walk around Greenpoint or Bushwick with him, and there are women just tumbling over themselves, running out of the bar to get a picture with him. He did a selfie line at McCarren Park. And ironically, someone I went to college with who also reports on this stuff, he was saying that everyone he spoke to who said they were voting for Clara Valdez was like, “I’m doing it because of Mamdani.”

And you pair that type of broad cultural political figure with the block-by-block organizing of New York City DSA — it’s a very powerful thing. It’s how they were able to basically create a very favorable electorate even without the big highly salient mayoral race, the wall-to-wall media coverage, things like that.

I won’t get the voting data for probably a couple days or a week or so, but I have a hunch that the voting base this year in the 7th District was even younger than it was last year. Were the same amount of young voters, like raw, going to turn out? Not necessarily, but proportion-wise, it was pretty robust and it really cascaded on election day.

AL: You mentioned DSA sort of outorganizing the Working Families. I also want to mention that New York DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo told Hasan Piker at a watch party last night that his phone bank for Darializa Avila Chevalier could have identified 2,000 voters, which was the margin by which she won. A pretty spectacular effect. 

ML: Yeah, it’s funny, I thought they were going to make fun of me because I was like, “Oh, I think Adriano might eke it out.” But they were like, “Actually, we saw that you said that and we were like, all right, we gotta go into overdrive.”

AL: There you go, data-driven. 

ML: I obviously wanted Darializa to win. I quite literally voted for her. I owe it to the people who read and trust what I say to share that. 

And I do think that there was a broad sentiment, like, “Oh, she’s probably like pretty close, but will she get across the finish line?” That type of push that they were able to engineer, it’s just no other mass-member organization that I can really think of could do that. They called through every Democrat who had voted in Upper Manhattan in the last six years. I think the first list they did, they burned through it in 12 minutes. Really remarkable organizing that is exactly the type of thing that decides a race at the margins like this.

AL: The other big question coming out of last night is and really, this is in response to the way that both Democratic Party leaders and Republicans are spinning this, which is that Hakeem Jeffries has lost control of the party and that there’s a communist takeover of the Democratic Party that is out of step with the vast majority of voters outside of the coasts.

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But is this something that can work outside of New York City? There are several races with progressives and socialists on the ballot coming up. Midterms are not over, I’m sorry to our listeners. Next week in Denver, Melat Kiros is challenging Rep. Diana DeGette. Kiros is a DSA member endorsed by the Denver DSA chapter and the national DSA.

Later this summer, Assembly Member Francesca Hong is running for Wisconsin governor. She’s a member of the Assembly Socialist Caucus and a DSA member. On the nonsocialist but progressive populist side, there’s also Graham Platner’s Senate race against Republican Susan Collins in Maine.

Is this a coastal formula? Why or why not?

ML: It’s funny. This is the question that’s at the heart of my forthcoming Mamdani book.

AL: Oh, wonderful. 

ML: But it won’t be out for a bit because we’re living through his effect on the Democratic Party. I do think the party’s becoming younger, more educated, and increasingly squeezed financially. 

There’s this growing precarious middle class that’s really not getting ahead, really disillusioned with — it’s funny talking about this, it’s like I sound like Morris Katz because he says similar stuff.

AL: Morris Katz is a Mamdani adviser who’s also working with other progressive candidates, including Graham Platner. But Michael, continue.

ML: But yeah, you have this youngerish, but also middle-aged, we’ve even seen races where progressives and leftists have won Gen X suburbanites because even these mortgaged homeowners are really feeling squeezed by affordability. But it’s also a broader cultural alienation. It’s downstream from the loss of community, the rise of oligarchy. I think technology as well, like the tech oligarchs, it’s all intertwined. Two years from now, artificial intelligence and that type of stuff could be the number one, the number two, or the number three issue.

But I think there’s just this broad alienation of people who have not really been able to get ahead, not for their own fault, and I think it’s like downstream of our economy, and that’s why the affordability zeitgeist is so potent. And so yes, does the “commie corridor” like literally travel to Michigan? Not exactly. But also the Democratic Party is pretty urbanized. It’s getting even more urbanized, especially in a primary setting.

What you’re asking is what a lot of us are asking right now? Is like, OK, you spin the wheels up in two years, what could this look like in a Democratic presidential primary?

What was very interesting about New York 7 and New York 13 is that ironically, the rest of the Democratic Party is copying Mamdani’s message with respect to affordability, almost verbatim. But in 7 and 13, Claire Valdez and Darializa, and I was thinking like, oh, if maybe they underperform or maybe one of them doesn’t win, this is a tweak to make in the future cycles. They weren’t going super hard on affordability. There was a lot of talk about Palestine and AIPAC, things of that sort. Darializa also leaned into Adriano’s voting for omnibus bills that increase ICE funding, things like that. 

So my thesis was like undoubtedly those were motivating issues to Mamdani doing so well in those areas, but particularly in Upper Manhattan, that’s the heart of the multiracial working class. And I was like, a huge part of it was affordability. But what was really fascinating is that, it’s one thing to win in Ridgewood with that, but in Upper Manhattan — more tenants than any other district in the country. And Darializa won by talking a lot about Palestine and a lot about ICE. If she didn’t win, it would’ve been maybe we should’ve talked more about affordability. But she did win — in spite of all the spending. That’s like quite a, I don’t want to say a narrative buster, but it’s a very interesting, data point.

AL: It flies in the face of the claims by centrist strategists that those things are not popular with the base that they need, particularly that working-class base where they’re saying that those issues are not the bread-and-butter issues that working people come home and think about at night.

But I do think you’re touching on a key point here, which is that those issues tie into the broader frustration with not even just the positions that they’re taking, but the shutting down of discourse or the lack of teeth, particularly on the ICE thing, the lack of a response to really differentiate themselves from Republicans in the longer term.

You did mention a socialist presidential candidate. 

ML: Oh, boy. 

AL: That is the perfect segue to my final question for you which is, again, echoing a big question that came out of last night, which was where was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

ML: To her credit, she did support four state—

AL: Assembly members, yes.

ML: Who were all challenging incumbents, and they all did win.

AL: Yes. And so this is the strategy. So the criticism here, for our listeners, was that Mamdani did the work in the congressional races, and AOC did the work in the state legislature races. Both of them supported all DSA candidates in the respective races that they did endorse in.

But many people were taking shots at AOC saying that she should regret that she didn’t endorse Valdez or Avila Chevalier.

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I find the argument that they were splitting their clout in a race where the left had limited resources to be a compelling one. I also find the argument that AOC is looking at building bridges with the people who will help her potentially run either for the Senate or for the presidency one day, and that it wasn’t worth her while to step into these races where Mamdani was already clearly carrying a lot of the weight.

What did you make of that strategy?

ML: Yeah. I think it’s just downstream of the nature of the relationships and the institutions that both of them have. Mayor Mamdani not endorsing any insurgent challengers in the state legislature in an effort to, not piss off, for lack of a better word, Carl Heastie, who’s the Assembly speaker.

The inverse, though, pushing a lot of chips in with respect to Congress. I mean, Claire — it’s an open seat. Everyone needs to be adults about it. But the Darializa’s thing — that was big to take on the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

With the congresswoman, it’s probably just the inverse of that. There’s also a special Nydia Velázquez connection there. 

But plenty of people running had either the mayor or they had AOC. And then I think a lot of them also had Bernie Sanders as well, and New York City DSA. So it was like, you had almost everybody with one or two or three really famous folks on their lit, and the institutional heft.

Regrettably, Conrad Blackburn was running for an Assembly seat in Harlem. He was the only candidate to lose last night.

AL: The only DSA candidate to lose.

ML: It was partially because he was the only one who did not have a Mamdani or an AOC endorsement.

It was a tricky race. I think just to zoom in and out, there was a lot of money spent against him at the beginning. When he was in Florida and a law student, he had that two-month internship in the Florida attorney general’s office, but the Florida attorney general was Pam Bondi. That, I think, hurt him considerably. But after months, I think he was able to claw back. 

I think also Darializa being on the top of the ballot was able to help him. But the Darializa versus Conrad thing is a very interesting dynamic in how their spending was treated. Whereas with Darializa, they opened the floodgates late with all these attacks, and with Conrad, they started earlier. I’m sure if they could do it over again with Darializa, they would’ve taken her much more seriously, because now, of course, Adriano Espaillat, someone who is, I don’t want to contribute to a myth here, but he is someone who built a Dominican political machine, while I don’t really agree with the politics of it, over the course of 30 years. It was a 30-year-old machine being defeated by a 32-year-old Columbia graduate student who had never run for office before. 

AL: Who said, “Fuck Kamala Harris.” 

ML: Well, yeah, if I can curse. You had a candidate who said “Fuck Kamala Harris” win the historic capital of Black America. If that is not a distillation of the “Democratic tea party,” I don’t quite know what is. For as much anti-incumbent sentiment as there just is broadly now, there has been that with Adriano Espaillat, particularly in the southern parts of his district for a while, which was another reason that he was vulnerable and he played it poorly, and I think she ran a gutsy race.

AL: Michael, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for helping us make sense of the wild ride that was Tuesday night. I look forward to reading your book when it comes out and looking forward to more of your — I don’t know if you’ll beat “commie corridor,” but we’re excited for whatever comes next.

ML: I appreciate that a lot. It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.

AL: We want to know what issues you are following in this exciting midterm cycle, send us an email at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover appeared first on The Intercept.

Ocasio-Cortez is backing Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson in the 9th Congressional District, which will be a tough win for Democrats after Republicans scrambled to gerrymander it earlier this year thanks to the Supreme Court’s gutting of a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The district covering parts of Memphis and its suburbs is one of more than a dozen that Republicans have redrawn at President Donald Trump’s demand to ward off what many in the GOP see as the increasingly likely prospect that they lose both congressional chambers to Democrats in November. 

An endorsement from democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez is a coveted stamp of approval for progressive insurgents looking to challenge incumbents or capture open congressional seats. She has endorsed several Democratic primary candidates running for open seats in other states this cycle including Chris Rabb, who won his primary in Pennsylvania; Analilia Mejia, who won in New Jersey; and Junaid Ahmed, who lost his primary in Illinois. But critics raised eyebrows at her decision to stay out of key congressional primaries in New York; she opted instead to endorse a slate of democratic socialist candidates in the state Assembly.

The endorsement is a major boost to Pearson, who is also backed by Justice Democrats, the progressive group that first backed Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 against longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Pearson originally launched his campaign with the intention of ousting two-decade incumbent Rep. Steve Cohen, the last remaining Democrat in Tennessee’s congressional delegation. Cohen dropped out of the race in May after state lawmakers split up his district into three neighboring districts, saying it was “drawn to beat” him. 

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Observers theorized that Ocasio-Cortez’s absence from New York’s congressional primaries reflected a desire not to butt heads with Democratic Party leaders who endorsed against leftist challengers, potentially signaling her plans to run for higher office in a future cycle. Others argued that she stayed out to split her efforts with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to maximize the left’s political currency in a cycle with historic outside spending against their candidates. Mamdani emerged as a kingmaker in Tuesday’s elections, backing three congressional candidates who won their primaries on Tuesday: socialists Clare Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and progressive Brad Lander, and several — but not all — of the New York City DSA’s endorsed candidates.

On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said the left’s wins in New York’s House primaries were part of both “a moment” and “a movement” of voters demanding more from the Democratic Party after major losses in 2024. 

Endorsing in the races would have pitted Ocasio-Cortez against her congressional colleagues whose support she might need in a run for higher office, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become House speaker if the Democrats retake the chamber in November. She’s made most of her other endorsements this cycle in open seats with no incumbent, including Rabb, Mejia, Ahmed, Adelita Grijalva in Arizona, Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, and Sam Forstag in Montana. She endorsed Democratic candidate Randy Villegas against the incumbent Republican, Rep. David Valadao, in California. Her former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, said her decision not to endorse him likely contributed to his loss in an open California primary to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., by fueling attacks from his opponents.  

In New York City, Avila Chevalier and Lander ousted incumbents backed by Jeffries and Democratic leaders: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat and Rep. Dan Goldman. Valdez won her primary in an open seat where retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez had endorsed her preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Velázquez bemoaned Mamdani’s endorsement of Valdez against her pick in the months leading up to the race. And even after their candidates lost on Tuesday, Jeffries and other party leaders aired their disappointment in Mamdani’s decision to go against them. 

But in Tennessee, Pearson emerged as the frontrunner when the incumbent dropped out. He’s hoping to tap into voters’ frustrations with both parties by campaigning on economic change for the working class — a message that boosted both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. 

The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wades Into Tennessee Primary, Endorsing Justin J. Pearson appeared first on The Intercept.