David Suarez, a city commissioner for Miami Beach, is accused of hiring the trucks to drive past a Jewish Voice for Peace demonstration outside the Art Basel festival in Miami Beach in December. The trucks accused JVP of being an “extremist group” and singled out members Alan Levine and his wife, Donna Nevel, with the label “Jew Hater,” according to court documents that Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida filed on Wednesday.

The trucks arrived while JVP and other Palestine solidarity organizations were protesting Art Basel in what has become an annual tradition since 2023. Activists have picketed each year outside the annual art fair, calling for a boycott over financial ties between Art Basel sponsor UBS and Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Nevel, a native of Miami Beach who described her early education in Jewish ethics as a driving force behind her activism, accused Suarez of targeting her and her husband over their clashing views of Judaism and Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“The Commissioner has targeted me and called me a Jew hater because I differ with his views on Israel,” Nevel said. “When we saw the billboards, we didn’t know Commissioner Suarez was the one who created and paid for them, but having watched his destructive, taunting behavior in City Commission meetings over and over again, I can’t say I was shocked to learn it was him — though, even for him, it was extreme.”

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Supporting exhibits filed alongside the motion include an invoice from Mobile Billboards of Miami dated December 6, 2025, charging Suarez $4,000 for the rental of three trucks, and an email from the company to a Gmail account that JVP claims is the commissioner’s personal email address.

Suarez and his attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The motion, filed in the Southern District of Florida on Wednesday, requests that the court compel Suarez, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, and others to produce documents related to a larger court case brought by JVP over a city ordinance that the group claims was passed to stifle its protests against the genocide in Gaza.

“In the months since October 2023, the Mayor and the Miami Beach City Commission have become active supporters of Israel’s campaign of relentless destruction in Gaza,” the group wrote in its broader complaint filed in September of last year. “At the same time, the Defendants have aggressively sought to silence critics of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, first by adopting a resolution that prohibited the City from hiring contractors who refused to do business with Israel, then by publicly castigating Israel’s critics for their views, and finally by passing an unconstitutional anti-protest Ordinance explicitly designed to silence criticism of Israel.”

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The city government of Miami Beach has come under fire recently for allegations that it targeted pro-Palestine residents, including Raquel Pacheco, a local artist who in January received a visit to her home by police after writing a Facebook post criticizing Meiner for his pro-Israel views. In March, Pacheco sued the city, Meiner, and police chief Wayne Jones in federal court alleging that the visit to her home violated her First Amendment rights.

A spokesperson for Meiner told The Intercept that the police visit was motivated by legitimate security concerns and denied that it took place due to disagreement with Pacheco’s political speech.

Similar stunts to the Miami Beach billboard trucks have become a hallmark of pro-Israel groups seeking to discredit and attack pro-Palestine activists. Accuracy in Media, a pro-Israel pressure group focusing on allegations of antisemitic media bias, has hired so-called “doxxing trucks” on multiple occasions to personally call out members of the pro-Palestine movement at Columbia University and other college campuses. In January, a state court in New York ruled that a defamation lawsuit over the tactic could proceed.

Update: May 13, 2026, 6:11 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from the Miami Beach mayor’s office.

The post Miami Beach Official Hired Billboard Truck to Call Pro-Palestine Activists “Jew Hater,” Lawsuit Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.

On March 6 of last year, two days before unidentified officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement abducted and arrested Khalil at his home, the FBI received an anonymous tip claiming that Khalil, listed incorrectly as a 22-year-old, had called for “violence on behalf of Hamas.” 

According to the heavily redacted documents, as of March 19, 2025, the FBI had closed an investigation into the tip and determined that Khalil “does not warrant further FBI investigation.” But by then, ICE had already secretly taken Khalil, now 31, thousands of miles away to a detention center in Louisiana. Despite the FBI’s decision to close the tip, the Trump administration continued to paint Khalil as a “Hamas supporter” and a threat to national security. 

It’s unclear if the FBI tip was directly related to Khalil’s ICE arrest, and the FBI did not respond to The Intercept’s question about whether the tip was shared with ICE. But Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which has worked with Khalil since his arrest, said the timing reflects “a threat to us all.”

Though the FBI document says Khalil did not warrant further investigation, “that didn’t stop ICE from holding him in a detention center and separating him from his wife and newborn son for months,” Bendaas said. 

The document comes to light as the Trump administration has fast-tracked Khalil’s deportation case, which Khalil’s legal team argues is a form of retaliation against his protected political speech in support of Palestine. Khalil’s team received the FBI document, which has not been previously reported, via a lawsuit over a public records request and shared it exclusively with The Intercept.

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Khalil was the first of thousands of students the Trump administration targeted for deportation over First Amendment-protected speech in support of Palestine or criticizing Israel. The Trump administration exploited an obscure provision in immigration law to claim that Khalil and other students, including Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, presented a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ordered Khalil to be deported, has repeatedly claimed that he sympathized with terrorists, echoing claims from far-right doxing groups that had targeted Khalil in the months leading up to his arrest. Trump’s unprecedented crackdown came after years of similar attacks on pro-Palestine students that gained speed under former President Joe Biden. 

“Under Trump’s rogue presidency being led by extremists and conspiracy theorists,” Bendaas said, “any of us can be kidnapped by federal agents in the middle of the night simply for speaking against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide, no matter what the facts or Constitution says.” 

The Center for Constitutional Rights, part of Khalil’s legal team, submitted a request for public documents related to his arrest nearly a year ago, on May 29, 2025. After denials and delays, CCR filed a lawsuit on November 20 claiming that federal agencies, including the FBI, had improperly withheld the records. CCR said it has since received other documents from the Department of Justice and is expecting more from other agencies in the coming months.

“Despite the FBI closing its investigation with no findings to support the accusation, the Trump administration continued to label Mr. Khalil a supporter of Hamas in public comments,” said CCR staff attorney Samah Sisay. “This document further supports our argument that the Trump administration had no legitimate reason to target Mr. Khalil besides his free speech in support of Palestine.”

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In a statement to The Intercept, an FBI spokesperson said, “We let documents obtained through the FOIA process speak for themselves and decline to comment further.”

Reacting to the FBI file, an attorney at Palestine Legal condemned the Trump administration’s approach but called it “representative of the tactics used more broadly against Palestine activists.”

“Revelations that false reports were made against Mahmoud prior to his government sanctioned kidnapping, and that the administration continued to make false claims that Mahmoud posed a danger, even though the FBI found these claims to be unsubstantiated, are highly representative of this administration’s broader approach of acting first and making up justifications later, with no regard for truth or the findings of the administration’s own experts,” said Zoha Khalili, a senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal. “Around the world, people who demand freedom, equality, liberation, and the basic necessities of life for Palestinians have been smeared, silenced, investigated, and even imprisoned for their advocacy.”

Khalil’s team also plans to appeal the Board of Immigration Appeals order rejecting Khalil’s appeal to terminate his deportation proceedings. He is still fighting a separate federal habeas corpus case and cannot be deported while the case proceeds.

Update: May 12, 2026, 4:06 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from an attorney at Palestine Legal sent after publication.

The post FBI Quietly Closed a Probe Into Mahmoud Khalil While He Was in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon claimed the war had cost $25 billion, a figure that analysts said was likely a gross undercount. In testimony before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, the Department of War’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, said the cost of the war has risen “closer” to $29 billion because of the “repair and replacement of equipment” and “general operational costs” of keeping troops in the Middle East.

Experts also expressed skepticism at this revised count.

“The costs of this war are still growing, and the Pentagon is still not being straight with taxpayers or lawmakers about the numbers. If the numbers being thrown around in committee hearings were complete, why would the Pentagon continue withholding a comprehensive, itemized cost assessment from Congress?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “Taxpayers deserve answers, and lawmakers need them in order to craft a responsible budget.”

Hurst, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are on Capitol Hill to discuss the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027 before House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on Tuesday. Hegseth said the massive sum — the largest request in history — “reflects the urgency of the moment” and would address both the “deferment of long-standing problems as well as position our forces for the current and future fight.”

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Murphy called the dramatic 45 percent increase a negotiating tactic. “They’re seeking $350 billion through reconciliation and $1.15 trillion in the base budget, but they know reconciliation is a long shot. It’s all about trying to make a $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget seem reasonable in comparison,” said Murphy. “But there’s nothing reasonable about it. It’s a roughly $150 billion increase over last year.”

Americans, Murphy said, deserve an explanation for the runaway military budget. “If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”

President Donald Trump said Monday that the ceasefire with Iran — which went into effect on April 8 — is “on life support” after Iran’s response to the latest U.S. peace proposal. Reuters, citing Iranian state media, reported that Iran’s proposal included war reparations from the United States, lifting sanctions on Tehran, and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump rejected Iran’s reply as “totally unacceptable” and called it a “piece of garbage.”

Hegseth said the Pentagon was prepared to reignite hostilities with Iran. “We have a plan to escalate, if necessary; we have a plan to retrograde if necessary. We have a plan to shift assets,” the secretary testified, declining to say more in the public hearing.

An analysis by The Intercept found that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. The expenses of this wide-ranging war on the world are rising across the globe.

The Intercept was, for example, the first outlet to reveal that the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion, according to an exceptionally cautious estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

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The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs, according to the report. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

Recently, Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.

The post Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s easy to say but harder to prove. Doing empirical analysis that shows these biases is time-consuming and complex, full of pitfalls and nuances that can muddy the picture. Yet the double standards are everywhere — and there are ways to do sober, qualitative work that elucidates not only the differences in how Israeli and Palestinian life are covered, but also also in how other recent conflicts are covered.

For my new book “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza,” I attempt to demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that U.S. media coverage of the war on Gaza was one-sided, racist, dehumanizing, and often veered into outright incitement.

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I examined over 12,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press, along with 5,000 TV segments that aired on CNN and MSNBC. The focus is on center-left media outlets influential with the Biden administration during the first year of the conflict — with an emphasis on the first few months, when Israel firmly established its narrative justifying the genocide, rendering mass death inevitable.

Here are seven statistical findings that prove the U.S. media’s bias against Palestinians.

Israel’s “Right to Defend Itself”

The media’s penchant for invoking a nation’s “right to defend itself,” typically followed by the rationalization of mass civilian killing, was reserved almost exclusively for Israel. On CNN and MSNBC, guests, anchors, and reporters mentioned the right to self-defense for Israel 94 times more than they did for Palestinians. In print media, Israel was afforded this right over 100 times more frequently than Palestinians in Gaza.

Watch a supercut below of the phrase being repeated on TV news.

“Human Shields” to Justify Killing Palestinians

News outlets frequently apply the term “human shields” to any instance where a guerrilla force operates near civilian infrastructure — a definition rejected by human rights groups, but used by partisans to explain away civilian deaths. That didn’t stop media outlets from invoking the term hundreds of times about civilians near Palestinian fighters, implicitly justifying their deaths in Israeli attacks. On the other hand, my analysis of TV news showed no mention at all of the Israeli military’s use of “human shields” — despite documented cases where Israel’s tactics meet the legal definition.

Emotive Words About Killing Civilians

Cable networks and print media outlets consistently applied a double standard in favor of Israel when using the terms “massacre,” “barbaric,” “savage,” and “slaughter” to describe the killing of civilians. Over a 100-day period that saw roughly 24,000 Palestinians killed, the use of these emotive words in the print media I surveyed was entirely in favor of Israel. (I only included instances when the words appeared in outlets’ own editorial voices, not when they quoted commentators or officials.)

Watch supercuts below of U.S. news personalities using the phrase “savage.”

Using “Hamas-Run” to Downplay Palestinian Deaths

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After the October 17 bombing of Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab hospital by Israel, media outlets almost uniformly adopted pro-Israel pressure groups’ pejorative qualifiers “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” to describe Palestinian death counts, thereby discrediting them. Neither CNN nor MSNBC used the term between October 7 and October 17, 2023, but it quickly skyrocketed in usage as the body count in Gaza grew — with the use of a related phrase becoming an official policy at CNN. This, despite the U.S. State Department, World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, and others’ long use of Gaza Health Ministry figures.

Sympathetic Victims: Gaza vs. Ukraine

Victims of Israel’s attack on Gaza who could be expected to elicit sympathy from audiences — like journalists and children — received little coverage during the first 100 days of Israel’s assault, compared to their counterparts in Ukraine.

Antisemitism vs. Islamophobia

While incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia were on the rise in the months after October 7, coverage focused almost entirely on antisemitism with little or no regard for anti-Muslim bigotry or how the mass killing in Gaza impacted Palestinians stateside. This was especially true on college campuses, where students protesting Israel’s war were tarred as antisemites in the mainstream press, while Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students who faced discrimination barely received any attention.

Campus Antisemitism vs. Killing Children in Gaza

For a poignant example of how Palestinians are dehumanized, consider the media’s treatment of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay in comparison to their coverage, or lack thereof, of the killing of Hind Rajab. Not long after Gay resigned under pressure from Congress amid a monthslong fixation on allegations of antisemitism on college campuses and allegations of plagiarism by Gay over 20 years prior, the Israeli military opened fire on a car carrying Rajab and her family and left the 5-year-old Palestinian girl to die. On the New York Times homepage, stories about Gay appeared in 15 of the 31-day period covering the height of the scandal, whereas Rajab didn’t appear once in the month that followed her death.

The post We Analyzed Thousands of News Articles: Here’s the Proof of Pro-Israel Bias in Mainstream Media appeared first on The Intercept.

One of New York state’s grievance committees, disciplinary panels that determines penalties for violations of legal ethics, notified nonprofit groups last week of its finding against Sarcone, Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again U.S. attorney in Albany.

The committee is keeping mum on the exact nature of its findings, and in a letter to a press freedom group last week, it even tried to claim that the foundation could not disclose the very fact that it found “there was sufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct.”

The letter from the Attorney Grievance Committee for the Appellate Division, Third Department, was dated April 1 and sent via email on May 8. The committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on when the finding was reached.

The committee’s actions fit in a larger pattern of New York shrouding prosecutorial misconduct investigations in secret. One of the groups that filed a complaint, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said it was time for the state’s legal ethics cops to stop insisting on silence.

“Sarcone is a high-ranking prosecutor who is at the center of national news as we speak and who the New York Grievance Committee found had engaged in professional misconduct after he retaliated against a news outlet,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the foundation. “No complainant, but especially a press freedom organization, should be told to keep quiet about something so plainly newsworthy and important to New Yorkers and Americans.”

Sarcone and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In an emailed statement, the grievance committee said it was following state laws. Under that law, chief committee attorney Monica Duffy said, “until such time as charges of professional misconduct are sustained against an attorney in a public order of the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, all papers, documents and records concerning this Committee’s investigation and disposition of any grievance complaint concerning the conduct of that attorney are sealed and deemed private and confidential.”

Sarcone had no prosecutorial experience when the Trump administration tapped him to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York last year. Since then, he has been involved in a long-running saga over whether he can even run the office.

Sarcone has never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. After his temporary appointment to the post expired, judges appointed a veteran prosecutor to fill the post. That replacement was fired within hours. Sarcone has continued to oversee the office as state Attorney General Letitia James and Justice Department lawyers argue in court over whether he lawfully holds the office.

The administration has a major incentive to keep the Trump loyalist in charge: The Albany prosecutor’s office has jurisdiction over New York state politicians who have drawn the president’s ire, including James.

In addition to the question of whether he can hold the office, Sarcone has faced criticism for booting the Albany newspaper off his office’s press list after it reported that he had attempted to claim a boarded-up apartment building in the district as his home to satisfy residency requirements.

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That action was a violation of the First Amendment, the Freedom of the Press Foundation argued in the August 11 complaint it filed with the grievance committee, along with Reinvent Albany and the Demand Progress Education Fund. The complaint alleged that Sarcone may have violated at least four of the state’s rules of professional conduct.

In the response to the complaint sent last week, the committee said that “after deliberation, the Committee determined there was a sufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct and took appropriate action.”

The case was now closed, the committee said. In the letter dated April 1, the committee said that it had reached its conclusion at a “recent” meeting.

What “appropriate action” the committee took is unclear. There are no records of public discipline in Sarcone’s entry on the state attorney directory. The committee has a range of actions it can take short of public discipline, including private letters of reprimand.

Another group that filed a similar complaint against Sarcone, Campaign for Accountability, received a near-identical letter from the grievance committee. In a statement, that group noted that Sarcone remains in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office with a title of first assistant.

“While we’re pleased the New York Attorney Grievance Committee recognized that Mr. Sarcone, who remains First Assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, engaged in professional misconduct, a secret slap on the wrist is insufficient. Mr. Sarcone’s pattern of conduct reflects on his credibility as an officer of the court, so any court in which he appears — along with the public — deserves to know what he was sanctioned for and why,” said Campaign for Accountability’s executive director, Michelle Kuppersmith.

The letters to both complainants including a heading indicating that they were “confidential.” Stern said that attempting to force people who filed complaints to remain silent about the letters they receive in response would be unconstitutional.

One state grievance committee previously tried to clamp down on law professors who shared details about the complaints they had filed against local prosecutors accused of failing to turn over exculpatory evidence or lying in court. The professors sued and won a federal district court ruling in their favor.

The post A Trump U.S. Attorney’s Professional Misconduct Must Be Kept “Private and Confidential” appeared first on The Intercept.

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” took place Monday evening at Young Israel of Midwood, an Orthodox synagogue in southern Brooklyn. Event organizers confirmed the location in an automated response to The Intercept’s request for comment, but they did not comment on the event itself.

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The roving expo is co-sponsored by several real estate companies with ties to Israel, and it is typically held at synagogues and other centers of Jewish life. At the event held last week at Park East Synagogue, The Intercept saw at least one table advertising land sales in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other Israeli settlements in the occupied territories — sales considered illegal under international law.

The event presented a test for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has caught flak from the pro-Israel side for condemning the illegal land sales, and from pro-Palestine groups and free speech advocates for allowing the NYPD to maintain “buffer zones” that keep protesters away from houses of worship.

Compounding the mayor’s entanglement is the fact that Young Israel of Midwood, the synagogue where Monday’s event took place, is home to a city-funded senior center called Young Israel Senior Services. The senior center received more than $800,000 from the Department for the Aging in 2024, according to a city budget document.

A spokesperson for Mamdani, who campaigned on his pro-Palestine bona fides, declined to comment on the latest real estate event, pointing instead to comments about last week’s expo.

“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” spokesperson Sam Raskin told The Intercept last week.

The mayor has also affirmed attendees’ rights to go to and from synagogues without interference, in line with a controversial “buffer zone” bill the New York City Council passed last month. The new law, sponsored by the council’s moderate speaker, requires the New York Police Department to address physical obstructions and interference at houses of worship — which opponents see as a means to crack down on protests.

By late afternoon on Monday, the NYPD had blocked off the street for a block in each direction from the synagogue, but allowed protesters to congregate within sight of the building.

Groups of pro-Palestine demonstrators marched through the neighborhood on side streets, followed by a swarm of pro-Israel counter-protesters. Among the pro-Israel demonstrators, a large number of young men on scooters hurled slurs at the pro-Palestine protesters and at times almost came to blows as police struggled to keep them apart. Members of the pro-Israel crowd threw eggs, and one protester told The Intercept a pro-Israel counter-protester had pepper-sprayed him.

Police appeared to make at least one arrest. A spokesperson for the NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Last week’s event, held Tuesday at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side, prompted heated protests from Pal-Awda and other pro-Palestine activists, which in turn drew a counter-protest from pro-Israel groups including members of the extremist group Betar U.S. The NYPD kept the groups separate and kept protesters, members of the media, and members of the public alike away from the synagogue with a tight cordon of security barriers that impeded movement along numerous city blocks in the vicinity of the synagogue.

After last week’s event, Mamdani praised the NYPD’s handling of the crowd at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday.

“We in this city believe in the sacrosanct nature of the right to protest and also are committed to ensuring that any New Yorker can safely enter or exit from a house of worship and that access never be in question while we also protect the First Amendment, and I do believe that the police ensured that yesterday,” he said. “I think that critique of the policies of a government is very much separate from bigotry toward the people of a specific religious faith. And there is no tolerance for antisemitism.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union, by contrast, offered a rebuke for the police force, calling the NYPD’s barricaded area a “no-speech zone.”

“When politicians use Freedom of Religion as a pretext to impose severe restrictions on speech, they undermine all New Yorkers’ rights,” said Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU’s executive director, in a statement released Wednesday. “The subject of last [week’s] protests was not a religious service but a private, politically-charged real estate event held at a synagogue.”

Correction: May 11, 2026, 4:59 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story previously stated that Mamdani signed the City Council’s new “buffer zone” law. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority, and Mamdani allowed it to become law without his signature.

Update: May 11, 9:31 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with details about the protest outside Monday’s event.

The post Israeli Real Estate Expo Advertising West Bank Settlements Returns to NYC appeared first on The Intercept.

Armed federal agents recently arrested Dr. David Morens, a 78-year-old retired government scientist, strip-searched him, and charged him with crimes that could carry decades in prison — all for allegedly using his personal email to try and evade Freedom of Information Act requests.

According to prosecutors, Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, used personal email accounts to dodge FOIA, deleted records, and sought to circumvent federal records requirements. In one message about communications about Covid research, he allegedly wrote: “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I’m FOIA’d but before the search starts. … Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to my Gmail.”

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If true, his actions were egregious and wrong, and accountability should be both proportional and consistent with previous cases of records destruction and FOIA evasion. 

But the Justice Department has, for decades, largely taken a hands-off approach to enforcing FOIA. When it has enforced the law, it’s usually landed in civil rather than criminal court. The DOJ has almost never treated FOIA evasion behavior as a crime — at least until now.

Even in high-profile cases involving far more sensitive material, such as Hillary Clinton’s infamous use of a private email server or Bill Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger’s repeated removal of classified documents from the National Archives, penalties were limited. Berger, for example, received probation, a fine, and community service, and Hillary Clinton wasn’t charged.

Morens, by contrast, faces real prison time if convicted: up to five years for conspiracy, up to 20 years per count for destruction of records, and additional penalties for concealment.

It should be irrelevant that Morens allegedly tried to evade FOIAs from a mix of organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and U.S. Right to Know. But it raises a question the Justice Department has not answered: Would similar charges be brought if the requesters were environmental groups, press freedom organizations, or others less politically aligned with the current administration?

The answer is likely no, and that’s the real danger: making it so FOIA evasion is only a crime if the administration has a score to settle.

This prosecution also comes at a moment when the federal government’s commitment to FOIA has never been lower. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hollowed out most of his department’s FOIA offices, and the FOIA office for the bureau where Morens used to work is drowning, with over 1,100 backlogged requests right now as a result. The agency is also more than two months late posting its annual FOIA report, which would give us a better idea of how well (or not) it is responding to public records requests for the first year of this Trump administration.

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At the same time, public health, environmental, and scientific information has been removed from federal websites at an unprecedented pace, FOIA officials are being fired for lawfully releasing information that the administration doesn’t like, and the Justice Department is actively helping the White House evade record-keeping laws.

Against that backdrop, targeting a single retired official while systemic transparency failures go largely unaddressed is absurd.

There are legitimate arguments for stronger consequences when officials deliberately evade transparency laws. But selective criminal enforcement carries its own risks. It invites politicized prosecutions and risks reshaping FOIA itself into a system where compliance is influenced, consciously or not, by who is making the request. That would undermine the core purpose of FOIA: equal access to government records.

If the goal is better compliance, structural incentives may matter more than individual prosecutions. Agencies routinely under-invest in their FOIA operations, leaving small offices to manage massive backlogs with limited resources and political support. One way to change that would be to tie agency leadership’s discretionary budgets to FOIA performance, thus rewarding timely, lawful disclosure and penalizing chronic failure.

That approach would address not just willful evasion but also the broader system that allows noncompliance to persist.

Morens’s alleged actions warrant scrutiny and accountability. But this case is about more than one official. It is about whether the government is establishing a new standard for enforcing transparency, and whether that standard will be applied fairly.

If evading FOIA is now a crime, it must be enforced evenly. Otherwise, the transparency law risks becoming what it was meant to prevent: a tool that, when applied selectively, only serves the powerful.

The post Dodging FOIA Could Now Mean Arrest and Strip Search, Depending on Who’s Asking appeared first on The Intercept.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is preparing for the legal fight of its life with the U.S. government — but its most immediate threat is coming from the financial system, rather than the courts.

Fidelity Charitable, Charles Schwab affiliate DAFgiving360, and Vanguard Charitable have begun blocking donor-advised fund, or DAF, donations to the SPLC — effectively cutting off one of the organization’s most important funding pipelines at a critical moment. The decision arrives alongside a politicized and bogus indictment announced late last month by the Trump Department of Justice, which is attempting to paint one of the country’s most prominent watchdogs against hate and racial violence as a promoter of it.

A letter from Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon notes the House Judiciary Committee has received whistleblower reports that the DOJ “ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama to rush through the indictment of the SPLC despite serious concerns about the strength of the case.” As Alabama Reflector editor Brian Lyman wrote, “DOJ has no evidence of SPLC committing a crime. The organization’s real offense, in the eyes of Trump’s toadies, is its lack of obedience.”

But before any courts can assess the merits of the case, the SPLC is already suffering severe financial consequences.

Donor-advised funds have become a key part of American philanthropy. Managed by firms like Fidelity and Vanguard, DAFs allow donors to receive immediate tax benefits while recommending grants to IRS-recognized nonprofits over time. They are one of the primary channels many nonprofits use to connect with donors.

What’s happening to the SPLC fits a broader pattern of using financial exclusion to punish speakers who challenge those in power. In 2010, after WikiLeaks published State Department cables that embarrassed the U.S. government, major financial institutions — including Visa, Mastercard, and Bank of America — cut off its ability to receive online donations. The punishment happened without WikiLeaks ever having a chance to defend itself in a court of law. The consequences were devastating for the organization, which lost more than 95 percent of its revenue the following year.

That episode is often treated as a one-off, but my research has shown that’s far from the case. I’ve spoken to dozens of law-abiding U.S. citizens who’ve lost financial services due to speech or political viewpoints — groups like VoteAmerica, which had a bank account closed by Chase Bank and was denied an account by First Republic Bank, and the National Committee for Religious Freedom, which also had its bank account shuttered by Chase. I detail these and many other cases in my newly published book, “Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech.” 

As with the SPLC, financial censorship sometimes happens to those who have been merely accused of a crime. I’m reminded of the case of a Stop Cop City activist who faced charges for participating in an anti-police protest in Atlanta. The Daily Mail wrote a disparaging news article about her, calling her “an Antifa terrorist who is part of the Atlanta cell.” Shortly after that article was published, Chase closed the bank account she’d held for years, citing “negative media.” 

The implications of this type of censorship go beyond the individual accounts impacted; it has a chilling effect on anyone who wants to attend protests or engage in advocacy. Like WikiLeaks before and the SPLC today, organizations and individuals who challenge the status quo must fear drawing the ire of the corporations that wield immense power over our financial lives.

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We’ve also seen financial corporations try to police the news, as with a 2022 policy rolled out by PayPal that promised a $2,500 fine to any accounts spreading “misinformation” — a term left conspicuously undefined. PayPal was widely criticized and swiftly retracted the policy. Given the Trump administration’s open hostility to journalism and its novel legal tactics to attack the press, it’s entirely possible that the next target of financial censorship could be a news outlet after the WikiLeaks blockade set the precedent.

Courts have recognized the danger when the government plays a direct role in shuttering financial accounts. In Backpage.com v. Dart, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals compared a government official pressuring credit card companies to end services to a website as similar to suffocation, saying it was like “killing a person by cutting off his oxygen supply rather than by shooting him.” The Supreme Court has also seen the dangers of financial companies policing speakers at the behest of the government, noting in National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo that intermediaries like financial companies won’t stand up for free expression because they “will often be less invested in the speaker’s message and thus less likely to risk the regulator’s ire.” But in both of these cases, the government pressure was overt and coercive, triggering the First Amendment protections for the speakers involved.

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The case of SPLC is more ambiguous but no less troubling. As of now, there is no public evidence that the government contacted Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity directly. Instead, these financial giants are justifying their decisions by pointing to their own terms of service, which they can write and amend as they see fit and which don’t trigger the same First Amendment concerns.

But the ethical and societal concerns are just as important. Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity are punishing a lawful nonprofit organization that hasn’t been convicted of any wrongdoing. These companies are under no obligation to shut off SPLC donations at this time. The San Francisco Foundation, which also oversees donor-advised funds, has promised to continue sending DAFs to SPLC, noting, “we are guided by our values and by our donors, not shifting political winds.” 

The result of Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity’s decisions could be devastating for the SPLC, which will have fewer resources available to fight this politicized prosecution. Regardless of how one feels about the SPLC, we should all object to weaponizing the financial system this way.

This is a problem across the ideological spectrum. The SPLC has itself championed the idea that DAFs should stop the flow of donations to conservative nonprofit organizations it alleges promote hate and racial violence. Pressuring financial intermediaries to advance a political agenda when no court has weighed the merits of a case is no more appropriate in those cases than it is in this one.

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What is particularly ironic about this moment is that President Donald Trump himself has spoken out against financial exclusion used as a political weapon, going so far as to sign an executive order against debanking last year that attempted to stop “politicized or unlawful debanking.” But under his administration, one of the country’s most prominent civil rights organizations now faces a sudden constriction of its funding channels. 

A financial system that shutters or blocks the accounts of advocacy organizations that have not been convicted of any wrongdoing is not neutral. It is a system that can be used to sideline communities and activists — without ever stepping into a courtroom.

The post Big Finance Might Be Dooming the SPLC — Even Before Its Day in Court appeared first on The Intercept.

The ink had barely dried on the Supreme Court’s ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act when Republican lawmakers raced to deliver on the barely veiled promises of the court’s decision: the decimation of Black political power and a revival of Jim Crow-era racist voter suppression.

In Tennessee on Thursday, Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a half-century-old law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and then the overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed new redistricting maps that eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district. The 9th Congressional District, also Tennessee’s only reliable Democratic seat, will be carved into three — purposefully redrawn for each piece to have a white-majority and Republican-leaning electorate. The votes of Memphis’s 63 percent Black population will be diluted to near irrelevance; the entire state will be handed to Republicans.

No one can act surprised. This was the predicted outcome of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which decimated Section 2 of the embattled Voting Rights Act, a provision that had protected minority voters from redistricting. With the right-wing justices’ blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering and reestablish the pre-civil-rights-era status quo ante.

It stands to reason that Republicans are not representing the interests of Black Tennesseans, some 17 percent of the population, overwhelmingly Democrats. These residents only have one representative in Washington, Rep. Steve Cohen — the lone Democrat among the state’s nine congressional seats. That is the seat being eliminated by the new maps passed by Tennessee’s largely white legislature.

The situation is already one in which Black working-class interests are hardly represented — and nor would greater Black representation in the state necessarily ensure the delivery of racial justice and the economic justice it requires.

The point is that Black disenfranchisement both reflects and produces conditions of white supremacist rule, wherein greater anti-Black oppression is assured.

“These maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump,” said Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson at the Tennessee statehouse on Thursday. Pearson, a progressive activist and one of the state’s few Black representatives, is running for a seat in Congress and was neck and neck in polling for his August primary against Cohen, the 76-year-old incumbent. The redrawn maps would likely foreclose his chance to represent South Memphis in Washington.

Pearson called the gerrymandered maps a “political lynching” that “set our state back over 150 years.”

Trump’s Larger Project

Trump, who is historically unpopular, has every reason to push his GOP to use newly unconstrained gerrymandering capacities in advance of the midterms. Right-wing redistricting efforts go beyond a scramble for November, though, and sit within a larger project of white supremacist backlash.

Like in Tennessee, Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina all called special legislative sessions — as explicitly ordered by Trump — to push new redistricting maps that will decimate majority-Black districts and deliver congressional seats to Republicans.

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According to the cynical rationale of the Supreme Court conservatives, such maps would not violate what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, because the GOP is not openly describing their gerrymander as targeting Black voters.

“The more racist you are as a party, the more insulated you are from Voting Rights Act liability under this decision,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told Bolts Magazine about the Callais ruling. “If there were a party called the Klan party, right now, it would trigger an awful lot of nonwhite opposition based on the party’s platform. But this opinion says, you have to set the party’s platform entirely aside to figure out if there’s been any damage based on race. So the more you can tie the two together, the more insulated you are.”

In short, as Levitt put it, “the most racist partisan gerrymandering is going to be the most immune from a VRA challenge.”

Tennessee Republicans proved precisely this point on Thursday. Striding into the statehouse to disenfranchise Black voters, Republican state Rep. Todd Warner wore a giant Trump 2024 flag as a cape.

As other states follow Tennessee’s example, the consequences of Callais could see the largest-ever drop in the number of Black lawmakers in Congress. The previous record was set, NPR reported, in the post-Reconstruction backlash, by the Congress that began in 1877 with four fewer House districts represented by Black lawmakers than the previous session.

In response to racist Republican gerrymandering, Democrats can play their own game of redistricting — but there’s a reason the Callais decision is understood as a gift to Republicans.

“The states controlled by Republicans where there are majority-minority districts have no internal constraint on how much they can screw over Black voters, because Black voters are not voting for that party,” Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, told Slate.

Democrats could expand a small number of safe seats in New York and California, for example, by eliminating minority voter districts. As Karlan noted, however, this would be politically unpalatable because “the politics of the state are not going to look favorably on that, and the Democrats in those states depend on Black and Latino voters in statewide races.”

According to Karlan, in this race to the bottom, Republican-led election fixing will not be addressed without a different Congress, a different president, and a powerful political movement to hold politicians accountable.

“Voters have to first build a political movement around this that makes elected officials afraid to do this,” she said.

Meanwhile, Democratic redistricting efforts in Virginia were dealt a blow on Friday, when they were struck down by the state’s Supreme Court. Voters had approved in a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional map, but the court’s ruling hands Republicans a fierce electoral advantage.

After Thursday’s vote, Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Justin Jones burned a paper Confederate flag in the statehouse rotunda, surrounded by protesters who had gathered to decry the racist gerrymandering.

“We saw a time like this, in this building before,” Jones told his fellow lawmakers earlier this week during the unprecedented redistricting special session. “If you study Reconstruction. We had Black lawmakers after the Civil War, then from the end of the 1800s to the 1960s, we had no Black folks here” — meaning the statehouse.

On Thursday afternoon, the NAACP’s Tennessee chapter filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the new congressional map, which is likely to be the first of several legal efforts against the rushed, conniving, and unrepentantly racist gerrymander.

The post Tennessee GOP Moves to Decimate Black Voting Power After Supreme Court’s Blessing of Jim Crow appeared first on The Intercept.

Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X on Wednesday suggesting vitamin D, zinc, and ivermectin could prevent the rodent-borne disease. Ivermectin, an antiparasitic medication, surged in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic as vaccine skepticism rose. In another post, Greene shared a 2024 article about mRNA hantavirus vaccine research while claiming pharmaceutical companies “manipulate the virus (bioweapon)” and “make the vaccine (poison).”

Other high-profile ivermectin advocates also circulated claims online, including physician and activist Mary Talley Bowden, whose post about ivermectin and hantavirus was viewed millions of times on X, and commentator Josh Walkos, known online as “Champagne Joshi,” who shared posts questioning hantavirus vaccine development.

Primarily found in South America, the Andes hantavirus can cause severe respiratory illness and, unlike most hantaviruses, has demonstrated limited ability for person-to-person transmission in previous outbreaks. Health authorities are now investigating a recent cluster linked to international travelers aboard an expedition cruise ship traveling between Argentina, Antarctica, and South Africa, with several cases identified beyond the vessel.

The strain can be deadly, with mortality rates in some outbreaks estimated at as high as 50 percent. But experts say it typically requires close contact to spread, making it significantly less transmissible than Covid-19.

The resurgence of ivermectin claims comes as some Republican-led states continue efforts to expand access to the drug years after it became a flashpoint during the Covid-19 pandemic. On Wednesday, the South Carolina House passed legislation that would allow ivermectin to be sold without a prescription.

“There is no meaningful clinical evidence for ivermectin against hantavirus, full stop,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security whose work focuses on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity.

Adalja said the only antiviral formally evaluated in clinical trials for hantavirus is ribavirin, and even those results showed limited benefit.

Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, said the Andes virus remains the only hantavirus known to spread person to person.

“There is zero evidence indicating that ivermectin would be a treatment for any hantavirus,” Racaniello said.

While ivermectin is approved to treat certain parasitic infections in humans, including river blindness and intestinal strongyloidiasis, the FDA warns that improper use or high doses can cause serious side effects, including seizures and neurological complications.

Racaniello warned that unsupported medical claims circulating on social media can create public confusion during disease outbreaks.

Health communication experts say distrust that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic continues to shape how some Americans respond to new disease outbreaks. Evolving public health recommendations during the pandemic, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci’s acknowledgment that the widely used 6-foot social distancing rule was not firmly grounded in data, contributed to enduring skepticism toward public health institutions.

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Even as his administration rushed vaccine development, President Donald Trump publicly promoted unproven Covid-19 treatments including hydroxychloroquine, further politicizing debates around experimental therapies and public health guidance.

The president has so far offered scant remarks on the outbreak. Asked about the virus on Thursday, he told reporters “it should be fine.”

“People’s experience with Covid-19 permanently changed how many view public health guidance,” said Rebecca Fish, a health communications professor at the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media who previously worked in senior health policy and pharmaceutical industry roles. “There is now a much higher level of skepticism toward institutions like the CDC and official public health messaging.”

The Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not respond to questions from The Intercept about whether federal health agencies have evaluated ivermectin for Andes hantavirus or plan to address unsupported treatment claims circulating online.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has publicly defended the off-label use of ivermectin and criticized clinically informed public health policies for Covid-19, now oversees HHS and the CDC. Last year, CBS News reported that layoffs tied to Kennedy’s restructuring of federal health agencies eliminated all full-time employees in the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, which investigates outbreaks aboard cruise ships. Amid the news of the hantavirus outbreak, the administration confirmed to STAT that the cuts had been reversed. The chief of the Vessel Sanitation Program, however, announced his retirement on Wednesday.

People in a health crisis often look for reassurance and a sense of control, not just facts, Fish said, adding that unsupported treatment claims can spread quickly online when distrust in institutions is already high.

“When someone feels ridiculed for asking a reasonable question, they don’t defer to authority, they route around it,” she said. “The question is not whether that vacuum will be filled, but by whom and with what.”

Fish said public health officials and journalists should distinguish carefully between what is false, what remains unproven, and what is still unknown as evidence develops.

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But experts said distrust in public institutions does not eliminate the need for clinical evidence when evaluating medical treatments.

“Clinical claims require real evidence that goes beyond anecdotal evidence,” Adalja, the Johns Hopkins scholar, said.

Racaniello, the microbiologist, warned that unsupported medical claims circulating on social media can still carry real public health risks.

“The problem arises when people inject their opinions on social media when they have no expertise in the matter,” Racaniello said. “Ivermectin at high doses can be damaging, so encouraging its use in this outbreak is irresponsible.”

The post Amid Hantavirus Panic, the Ivermectin Super Fans Are Back appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, triggering a new wave of redistricting fights in the midst of midterm primary elections. Last week, the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The decision requires there to be evidence of intentional racism to prove that a map is discriminatory, making it nearly impossible to successfully challenge racial gerrymandering. 

Following the 6-3 decision along partisan lines, Louisiana suspended its already active congressional primary, throwing out cast ballots. Alabama’s Republican governor took steps to gerrymander her state’s maps ahead of November elections. Tennessee GOP leaders also convened a special session to eliminate the last remaining Democratic stronghold in the state, home to Memphis, a majority-Black city and district; the new map would split Memphis into three districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a state law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and the new map was passed by Tennessee Republicans.

The primary goal state Rep. Justin J. Pearson tells The Intercept Briefing “is to dilute Black political voting power and representation, and it’s starting at the U.S. congressional level.” The Democratic Tennessee state representative for Memphis is running for U.S. Congress in the district at the heart of the state’s re-districting fight. “When you look across the South, the truth is about at least a dozen seats are likely to be taken in this very racist redistricting era that we are in, but it won’t stop there,” Pearson says. “We have over 200 legislative seats in the House and the Senate that are also likely to be eliminated through racist redistricting that is happening.” 

Voting rights journalist and author Ari Berman says SCOTUS’s latest blow to voters’ rights is a “power grab.”

This week on the podcast, Berman and Pearson speak to host Jessica Washington about how the latest Supreme Court decision bolsters President Donald Trump and Republicans’ aims to take control of voting in the country.

“This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act,” says Berman. “You can’t understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. … This is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

Berman says that this ruling could bring us back to the “dark days” before the Voting Rights Act made the United States a “multiracial democracy.” Now you look at what’s going to happen in these places, in places like Tennessee, in places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. If they eliminate all of their Black members of Congress, that’s going to make politics a white-only game. If politics is a white-only game, that’s going to mean that white supremacy in some form or another is going to be the dominant politics in those states. It’s already the dominant politics in lots of these states, but it’s going to become much more explicit in terms of how it’s expressed.”

Pearson says that the Supreme Court’s assertion that these protections are no longer necessary is a lie. “The hatred that hung us on lynching trees did not disappear. It dissipated into institutions of power, into state houses, into governor’s mansions, into the U.S. Senate, into the U.S. House, into the presidency of the United States,” says Pearson. “Everybody has to do more than they are currently doing in this moment in time in order for us to preserve this modicum of a democratic constitutional republic. … Because what is likely to happen is the most significant purging of Black political power and elected Black leaders since the end of Reconstruction.”

“The litmus test for America’s progress is not Massachusetts, New York, and California,” says Pearson. “The litmus test for America’s progress is what happens in the South, where 50 percent of Black African American descendants of enslaved people live.”

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.

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

JW: Midterms are heating up this week, and Maia, on top of being my editor, you also manage our election coverage. So what’s sticking out with you this week?

MH: This was a really weird week because we’re coming off some primaries where the most-watched races in the country were actually a set of state Senate races in Indiana. And that’s weird because most people don’t even know who their state senator is. It’s very rare to be focused on state legislative elections as the top race.

But this one was seen as a huge test for Trump because essentially he was on this revenge path where a handful of Indiana state senators, Republicans, part of his party, had defied the president when he wanted them to redistrict the state. So he said, I’m gonna primary you, and I’m gonna kick you out of office for not doing what I wanted.

In all but one or maybe two of those cases, the people that Trump backed — so the challengers taking out the incumbents — won. So it looks like, if that was a test of Trump’s power in his base, at least in Indiana, at least there, it looks pretty good for him on that front.

JW: Trump has really set off this redistricting war that’s happening across the country. There was this idea that Donald Trump was going to be weakened by the war in Iran, by the economy. The fact that we’re also seeing redistricting, which generally makes people really angry, also doesn’t seem to be weakening Trump, that sets the stage for something really interesting in the midterms.

MH: It’s a really interesting question because I think it gets at the constant tension in politics between the politician’s identity and the issues.

So on the issues, the conventional wisdom right now is that Trump and the Republicans look really weak going into the midterms, right? People don’t love it when you’re running on lowering the cost of living and not starting new wars — and then you start a new war and spike the cost of living.

But it is still, in my view, a cult of personality around Trump in the Republican Party, and it seems like he still holds a ton of sway over what the Republican base thinks. That’s really interesting if we think ahead, not just to the midterms, but to 2028, which unfortunately we’re already thinking about because even if Democrats have a stronger footing perhaps on a lot of these popular issues right now, they don’t have that figurehead.

JW: Republicans have been unleashed by the Supreme Court ruling striking down Louisiana’s congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The ruling also required there to be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to prove that a congressional map is discriminatory.

Obviously, we know that there’s going to be many new redistricting efforts as a result of this ruling, and we’re going to get into the ruling itself a little later in the episode. But Maia, where are we seeing pushes from Republicans to reshape the map?

MH: Right now, this is according to The AP, as of Thursday, there are four states that are still in flux. Louisiana, as you mentioned; there’s also Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee. 

This is such an interesting issue because gerrymandering to help your party get seats or keep seats is frankly anti-democratic in the simplest, most literal possible sense of the word. You’re taking some of the power of choice away from the people. But it also puts politicians in a really weird bind because if one party’s doing it, how is the other party supposed to not?

JW: Yeah, as you point out, there’s been a lot of news on that front. On Wednesday, Republicans in Tennessee unveiled a new congressional map that would split Memphis into three distinct districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. The new Memphis district would span nearly 300 miles. On Thursday, the Tennessee House passed this new map.

Then there’s Virginia. The FBI raided the office of Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas on Wednesday. She’s one of the leaders in the Democratic-led redistricting fight there, and she’s been a real target of Trump and Republicans’ ire.

On the podcast today, we break down the latest Supreme Court decision with voting rights journalist Ari Berman and Justin J. Pearson. He’s a Democratic Tennessee state representative for District 86 in Memphis. He is also running for Congress in the district at the heart of these redistricting fights. Pearson lays out Republican strategy to eliminate the last remaining Democratic district and gut Black voting power in the South.

But first, we’re going to start with Ari. He’s going to give us more of a bird’s-eye view of what this decision actually means for voters and democracy as we head into an election.

MH: Cool. I’m excited to hear that conversation.

JW: Ari, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Ari Berman: Hey, Jessica. Great to see you. Thank you.

JW: Glad to have you on. I want to get into the news of last week. As you’re well aware of, last week, the Supreme Court dealt another blow to the Voting Rights Act, striking down Louisiana’s congressional map with a second majority-Black district, and requiring there to be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to prove that a map is discriminatory.

Ari, you wrote that the Louisiana v. Callais decision “narrows Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.”

What did you mean by that, and what does this decision mean for voters?

AB: What I meant by that is that the last remaining weapon of the Voting Rights Act is essentially gone. The Supreme Court has already narrowed other parts of the Voting Rights Act, or struck them down altogether, so that the law has lost almost all of its teeth. And now they took away the last part of it, which was the protections against racial gerrymandering — the ability of voters of color to elect candidates of choice.

Basically what they said is, those districts in which voters of color can elect their preferred candidates are unconstitutional. At least, that’s what they ruled in Louisiana. The expectation is that’s what they’ll rule in other places as well. 

My big fear with this ruling is that it’s going to lead to a major rollback in representation for candidates of color. It could lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. You could have a situation throughout the South — where the largest percentage of Black Americans live — there could ultimately be no Black representatives. That would take us back to the Jim Crow era, in terms of how representation looks in America.

JW: You’re laying out a really scary scenario where we no longer have any of the protections that the Voting Rights Act — that was obviously so hard-won and fought for — those protections are now mostly gone. I guess my question is, for voters as they’re thinking about primaries, November, what does that mean for them?

AB: Voters are going to have less choices. It’s going to mean that red states, in the South in particular, are going to maximize Republican representation. The way they’re going to do that is by eliminating Black representation, because in the South, voting is very racially polarized. By and large, white people vote for Republicans, and Black people vote for Democrats. That was one of the really insidious things that the Supreme Court said in their opinion in Callais was basically that, if Black people support Democrats and Republicans are just targeting Democrats, then it doesn’t matter that Black voters are disenfranchised.

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But the fact is that even if race and party are intertwined, this is ultimately about race. This is ultimately about white legislators in all of these states — because all of these Southern states have white-majority legislatures and governors — eliminating Black districts. That means that in a place like Mississippi, for example, that’s 40 percent Black, you could have no Black representatives. In states like Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, states with large Black populations, there could be no Black representatives, and that means those communities are going to be underrepresented.

A lot of these communities are already underrepresented in Congress, and a lot of these communities are already among the poorest, most impoverished areas with the greatest need for representation, and now they’re going to have the least amount of representation. It’s really going to skew representation all across America.

JW: You just brought up Louisiana. And in this episode, we also are going to speak to Justin J. Pearson, a Democratic Tennessee state representative for District 86 in Memphis, about how after the Supreme Court ruling last week, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat, which is home to Memphis, a majority-Black city.

What’s your reaction to that redistricting effort?

AB: It just reminds me of what happened when Reconstruction ended in the South. That you had a situation where there were Black members of Congress from the South elected during Reconstruction after the passage of the 15th Amendment. And then you had violence, you had fraud, and then you had, ultimately, changing of the laws: things like literacy tests and poll taxes and gerrymandered districts and all-white primaries.

Suddenly, there were no more Black representatives, and that situation lasted for nearly 100 years in the South. When I see states rushing to immediately get rid of majority-minority districts, immediately get rid of districts in which there are Black majorities after this ruling, I think of what happened at the end of Reconstruction.

So it’s a very dark chapter in our history. It’s one that we would like to think we’ve moved past. In his opinion in Callais, Justice [Samuel] Alito talked about all the progress that America has made on race, but he completely ignored the dark parts of American history that could return when laws like the Voting Rights Act no longer exist or are functionally irrelevant.

JW: Do you take the court at face value when they argue that racism, racial gerrymandering, these are issues of our past? Should this be understood as more of a conservative power grab, or are these genuinely held opinions that the court is expressing?

AB: It’s impossible for me to get inside Alito’s head and know that, but I think it’s a power grab, ultimately.

The fact that they not only dismantled the Voting Rights Act but did so leaving Southern states time to actually redistrict for 2026 makes me believe that this is ultimately about a power grab. Because at the very least, they could have waited until June when it was too late for most of these Southern states to be able to redistrict.

Instead, they did it with just enough time for Southern states to redraw their maps. The Supreme Court has said over and over, you shouldn’t change voting laws too close to an election. And now they’ve basically allowed all of these Southern states to change their voting laws in the middle of an election — in some cases, canceling elections to put in place new maps.

This is extremely political to me. It’s extremely partisan. This decision just underscores how partisan, how political, how authoritarian the Roberts court has become.

JW: In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan touches on just how big of a decision this actually is, and how the court is trying to hide the extent to which this is going to change what voting looks like in this country.

So I’m going to just read a small piece of her dissent: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”

What do you make of what Kagan wrote there? Is this a fair reading of the decision?

AB: Yes, because Alito basically made it sound like he was just updating the VRA, it was just these technical changes, and what Kagan said was, this was a demolition of the law. And it wasn’t the first demolition of the law; it was part of a pattern. This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, they ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer need to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That was the first blow against the Voting Rights Act.

In 2021, they ruled that it was going to be much harder for voters of color to challenge discriminatory voting laws. That was a second major blow against the Voting Rights Act.

Now they have essentially overturned majority-minority districts, which is a third major blow of the Voting Rights Act.

You can’t understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. A pattern that the Court wants to dismiss, but a pattern that is now impossible to ignore.

JW: To your point, the echoes of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision are clearly felt throughout both the dissent and the opinion. For those who don’t know, the Shelby County v. Holder decision effectively struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required certain states and localities to seek preclearance before changing their voting laws. Can you set the stage a little bit more for us about what happened in Shelby County v. Holder, and how we’re still feeling that to this day?

AB: Shelby County v. Holder eliminated the most important part of the Voting Rights Act, because the requirement that states with a history of discrimination, largely but not exclusively in the South, had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That stopped attacks on voting before they even occurred.

It was like stopping a crime before it had been committed. It was such a powerful tool the federal government had to block voting discrimination. It meant that when all of these Southern states had to do new redistricting plans, they had to be approved with the federal government. Now they no longer have to be approved with the federal government, but they can openly discriminate in terms of these maps.

What was clear at the time was that the Shelby County decision was going to open the door to new attacks on the Voting Rights Act, and the court denied this at the time. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in that case, said this attack on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will not affect Section 2, the other part of the Voting Rights Act.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened in 2021, and again in 2026. They attacked the other remaining part of the Voting Rights Act, which makes me believe that they’re not out to get one part of the Voting Rights Act or another part of the Voting Rights Act. They’re out to get the Voting Rights Act altogether, and this is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The Voting Rights Act is the most important law of the civil rights movement, of the civil rights era, and that’s why this has been the top target of the right for so many years.

JW: As you point out, it’s been a while since this decision. We’ve had over a decade in between. Do we have any sense that the Supreme Court has been looking at the track record of what happened, the aftermath of them undermining Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act?

Do we have any sense in any of their opinions or writings that they’ve noticed what’s happened, the kind of carnage that they’ve unleashed on the country in this decade-plus since?

AB: No, the Supreme Court completely got all the facts about the aftermath of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act wrong.

Justice Alito said the Black and white turnout gap is narrowing. Well, the elections that it narrowed were 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama was on the ballot. If you look at what happened after that, in the wake of Shelby County, the Black and white turnout gap has widened. So Justice Alito was just completely wrong in terms of the statistics that he talked about in terms of Black/white turnout, in terms of racial polarization in voting.

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The only time that the court has reversed itself was two years ago in Alabama, when they upheld a second majority-Black district in Alabama. That makes the Louisiana ruling even more confounding because the Louisiana case followed from the Alabama case in 2023. It was only because of the Alabama decision, which was authored by John Roberts and joined by Justice Kavanaugh, that Louisiana created a second majority-Black district.

So some of the justices clearly had buyer’s remorse from that decision. Basically, what happened was Alito’s dissent in the Alabama case in 2023 became the majority opinion in the Louisiana case in 2026. 

At some point, someone’s going to write a backstory of how that occurred, but it’s clear that the small victories from voting rights that emanated from the Roberts court have been the exception, rather than the rule. And the rule more often than not has been a steady stream of weakening things like the Voting Rights Act, and more broadly attacking voting rights.

JW: I would definitely read a book on that backstory. I want to ask a little bit more about the history of the Voting Rights Act, because I think to understand what’s happened in the decade-plus since Shelby and what’s likely to happen now, we have to understand how we even got the Voting Rights Act in the first place.

Can you tell us a little bit of that history and how the Voting Rights Act came to be?

AB: The Voting Rights Act was meant to rectify the widespread disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the South who couldn’t vote because of things like poll taxes and literacy tests and grandfather clauses and all-white primaries.

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There was a situation where in states like Mississippi, for example, only 6 percent of African Americans were registered to vote. That was a situation that existed for many years in the South. It only changed when there were huge protests of the civil rights movement that people are very familiar with. For example, the march, in Selma, Alabama, on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, when John Lewis and civil rights marchers were brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers. The footage from Selma, Alabama really transformed the nation and led to LBJ introducing the Voting Rights Act and Congress passing it overwhelmingly.

It really was a transformative law because of what it did. It got rid of, overnight, those literacy tests and those poll taxes and those things that had disenfranchised Black voters for so many years. It led to a huge registration of previously disenfranchised Americans. Then over a longer period of time, the law was broadened so that it didn’t just help Black Americans, but it helped Americans of color throughout the country, whether it was Latinos or Asian Americans or other language minority groups.

It really made America a multiracial democracy for the first time. It was the first time that you had a situation in which people of color could vote broadly throughout the country, candidates of color could win office, and you had multiracial coalitions being built in America. So it really profoundly shaped American society and American democracy. And I’m very concerned that without that, we’re going to go back to the dark days of racially polarized voting, of Black voters and Black candidates being disenfranchised, of one-party rule and white supremacy being enshrined, particularly throughout the South.

So I think it’s a misnomer to look at the Voting Rights Act in terms of just Black and white. That’s why I always talk about the fact that it made multiracial democracy possible. Because it had a big impact on white voters as well and on white politicians as well, that you didn’t just have to pander to race, and you didn’t just have to appeal to white supremacy to get elected anymore.

Now you look at what’s going to happen in these places, in places like Tennessee, in places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. If they eliminate all of their Black members of Congress, that’s going to make politics a white-only game. If politics is a white-only game, that’s going to mean that white supremacy in some form or another is going to be the dominant politics in those states. It’s already the dominant politics in lots of these states, but it’s going to become much more explicit in terms of how it’s expressed.

JW: The nightmare scenarios that you’re describing are happening against the backdrop of what the Supreme Court did, but also what the Trump administration is trying to do and Republicans are actively trying to do.

Wired recently ran a story about how the Department of Justice under Trump has essentially dismantled its voting rights [division], going from 30 attorneys to two since he started a second term. What are the implications of this broader attack, both from Republicans and the Trump administration, and now the court as well?

AB: That’s right. You can’t divorce the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act from the larger context of the attacks on voting rights we’re seeing from the Trump administration. There’s already a mid-decade redistricting war going on that’s trying to eliminate representation for Democrats, and particularly targeting communities of color.

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There’s already a huge rollback in civil rights enforcement. The Department of Justice basically doesn’t enforce civil rights laws in America anymore. They’ve weaponized those laws, in fact, to defend white people at the expense of communities of color that these civil rights laws were meant to protect.

You already have the Trump administration, for example, going after elections in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing ballots, demanding names of election workers in the largest county in Georgia, home to Atlanta, which has a huge Black population. So it’s very clear that over and over, the Trump administration has tried to target certain communities.

They’ve tried to target communities that ally with Democrats, and so often those are Black, Latino, other minority communities. That’s why this attack on the Voting Rights Act is part of this larger effort to, in Trump’s words, “take over” the voting system. Some of it succeeded, some of it hasn’t succeeded, but the fact that all of these things happened at the same time is very alarming.

JW: Do voters have any recourse to defend themselves against what appears to be a blatant power grab?

AB: I think, more broadly, there needs to be a lot more investment in the South. A lot of these places, these “red states,” places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, they’ve been ignored by the national Democratic Party, and I don’t think that can happen anymore.

There has to be investment in these places because if these districts no longer exist, then there’s going to have to be efforts to win in new places and build new coalitions that haven’t existed before. That’s going to take new leaders. It’s going to take new investment. That’s something that needs to be created. That’s one part of it. 

I also think that some of the bigger issues that come out of this decision, for example, the need to reform the Supreme Court, the need to actually do something at a national level about the problem of gerrymandering — those are things that voters can demand from their politicians.

What are you going to do about a completely unaccountable and lawless Supreme Court? What are you going to do about the problem of gerrymandering so that states just don’t redraw their maps every year or two when they feel like it because of the political circumstance? 

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Then I think in terms of what voters can do to protect the election system, voters can become poll workers. Voters can become election monitors. Voters can decide to volunteer for civil rights organizations, things like that. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for democracy, and people are going to have to get involved in whatever way they think can make the most difference.

JW: Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

AB: Thank you so much for having me, Jessica.

[Break]

JW: After the most recent Supreme Court ruling further gutting the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn immediately called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat in the state. 

Justin J. Pearson is a Democratic state representative in Memphis running for Congress for the district at the heart of Tennessee’s gerrymandering fight. We spoke with Pearson on Tuesday evening as that fight began. 

On Thursday afternoon, the state legislature concluded the special session, eliminating the only remaining Democratic-held House District. We speak to Rep. Pearson about the impact this will have on his district and Black voters statewide. 

Rep. Justin J. Pearson, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Justin J. Pearson: Thank you so much for having me.

JW: After the Supreme Court’s ruling last week invalidating a Louisiana map that — in line with the Voting Rights Act — created two majority-Black districts, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat in your state, which happens, of course, to be the seat you’re running for and part of your district. What impact is that going to have on your state? 

JP: The removal of the only Black-majority district in the state of Tennessee will have detrimental ramifications for our representation and our right to be able to select elected officials of our choosing.

The fact is, this is a racist redistricting and gerrymandering attempt. It is a coup. It is the stealing of a congressional seat on behalf of the president of the United States, the governor, and white supremacist leaders in the state House and state Senate. And I’m using that language very particularly. 

This is an election cycle. This is a moment where white supremacy is governing. It’s not what’s best for our citizens. It’s not what’s best for our constituents. But it is a weaponization and a mobilization of power. And stealing it is what this president has asked for the state government of Tennessee to do on his behalf, and it is what they are doing and have done right now in the state.

JW: We’re speaking Tuesday evening after that first redistricting special session that you were part of. What can you tell us about how the first of these sessions taking place this week went down?

JP: Today, committees were assigned, and each of those committees, the biggest ones in the House, was the Congressional Redistricting Committee, there’s a resolutions committee, and a couple of other ones.

But my big concern is these committees are set to operate at the speed of lightning to make a decision that actually undos current statute, which says that there can be no redistricting between apportionments of districts between the census. Now we’re going to undo that law in an attempt to now take a congressional district that would otherwise be directly in contradiction.

There’s an expectation that we’re going to hold those committees, and that those committees are going to be presented with new gerrymandered maps that break up the only Black-majority district. And the only reason that this is happening at this point in time is because Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, and the ability of Black folks to seek remedies in the judicial system no longer exists in the way that they had before.

They still do exist, but the fact of racial animus and the racial intention has been severely weakened — which is why this case is so devastating. Because our ability to go to the courts and seek remedies from those decisions is really something that has been able to keep the Voting Rights Act in effect. It’s been able to keep Black representation as a possibility in our democracy. 

It’s really important to realize we aren’t at this point in our nation’s history of needing a Voting Rights Act because people were just bad, right? It was because of centuries of systematic oppression.

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It was violence, lynching, the murdering of people whose bodies were found in the Mississippi River and other small towns all across the South in particular, just for registering to vote or trying to vote. We have to realize the ramifications of what has happened in the state of Tennessee and what is likely to happen in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and across the South — the Confederacy states — are going to have far-reaching implications for us in this generation and generations to come

JW: People bled out for this. They fought for this. These are rights that are hard-won. In your district, what are you hearing from people in Memphis about, particularly Black people, about how this is going to impact them and the kind of rights that they’re, I’m sure, terrified of losing right now?

JP: I think the first feeling for a lot of people is fear. Fear that they’ll never ever again have the opportunity to send a Black person to the U.S. Congress, that they’ll never — and we’ve been on the campaign trail since October 8 — but that they’ll never really be able to have a voice in the national government is deeply concerning to them as Black people and also for folks who are Democrats. They’re deeply concerned that this won’t happen again because of, again, mid-decade racist redistricting that is happening. 

There is some organizing and some energy that has mobilized people into action. We’ve had two busloads of people come up to Nashville every single day — it’d be on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday — who are speaking up and speaking out and saying, “No, this is unfair. This is unjust. This is wrong.” They’re not just coming from Memphis and Shelby County, which I have the privilege of representing in the [Tennessee] House of Representatives for District 86, but these folks are coming from all across the state in small rural counties and other places who fear that their representation will no longer be proximate to them because districts are being created that in some cases stretch 200 miles, just to break up the compactness of our district, just to break up our ability to have Black political power. 

That is what is the primary goal of what they’re doing. It is to dilute Black political voting power and representation, and it’s starting at the U.S. congressional level. When you look across the South, the truth is, about at least a dozen seats are likely to be taken in this very racist redistricting era that we are in, but it won’t stop there. We have over 200 legislative seats in the House and the Senate that are also likely to be eliminated through racist redistricting that is happening. 

We just have to have people’s eyes wide open to what is going on and to the far-reaching implications this is going to have when you no longer have advocates and people who speak to the concerns, the issues, the culture, the identity of our community.

JW: There’s precedent for what you’re talking about here, for that kind of impact. Back in 2022, Republicans redistricted Nashville in a way that diluted Democratic voters’ influence, making the district lean more toward the GOP. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened then, and what that could mean for the district you represent?

JP: Absolutely. So we did see this in Nashville when the maps were redrawn in 2022. They were forced to have three different congresspeople all representing the city of Nashville. The intention there was to dilute Nashville’s political power, putting them inside of districts where the majority of people probably live very differently, much more rural, vote much more conservatively, and have much less diversity than the city of Nashville does.

Since then, people who live here don’t have representation in the U.S. Congress. The congresspeople don’t have any offices near or around Nashville, and even elected officials that I’ve met who represent Nashville have a hard time accessing any of the people who supposedly are representing them on the federal level.

So the voices in this community have, in effect, been silenced when it comes to the federal government and national government issues, and that has really been detrimental to this community, and many people here will tell you that.

I am deeply concerned that that is the exact same thing that’s going to happen in Memphis. We won’t have a voice in Washington, D.C. We won’t have someone advocating about the issues from the socioeconomic perspective, from public health perspective, from an educational perspective, that can elevate the problems that we know acutely exist in our city. 

My city’s the most beautiful place in the world, but we have problems.

A fourth of our adults are living in poverty. We got poor kids because we got poor parents. We haven’t increased the minimum wage to $25 an hour. We need access to universal healthcare in a state that has refused to expand Medicaid. We need housing, 55,000 units of housing for people who make $17,000 a year.

When you understand that history, that tradition, those statistics, not just as numbers on a page, but as something that you feel an accountability to do something about because it’s the community where you live. It’s the community where I’ve grown up. It’s the place that has made me into who I am. That is very different than being connected or thrown into a district that is majority-white in an attempt to silence our voices.

JW: The conservatives on the Supreme Court obviously hold a very different opinion of this issue from you. In this case, and obviously in the Shelby County decision as well, they argue that these protections are no longer necessary because the South has made great strides on racism. As a Black representative who represents a majority-Black district in the South, what do you make of the notion that racial gerrymandering and voter suppression are issues of the past?

JP: Anyone who says that racial gerrymandering and voter suppression and racism no longer exist are lying. The fact that they are saying that shows the depth of racism and the institutionalization of white supremacy in our country, that some people are so enamored with whiteness being right that they don’t see the disparities that are vast and right in front of them.

Black people are still being deprived of educational opportunities. As it relates to housing, Black folks are still living in some of the most segregated neighborhoods in the United States of America. The wealth gap remains about 10 to 1. At every level, Black folks and African American folks are being deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In fact, there’s even a case right now of a man named Tony Carruthers who is on death row to be killed on May 21 in the state of Tennessee. Because we know the people who are on death row disproportionately are Black African American people, and even though 10 percent of them could be exonerated, states are using death by lethal injection, or now the federal government wants to do firing squads as a new form of lynching.

Twenty-one percent of Black people can’t vote in the state of Tennessee. Already, 1 out of 5 Black people cannot vote in the state of Tennessee due to felon disenfranchisement. And so for people who are trying to articulate some false narrative and argument that racism is no longer a problem, you are lying.

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You are lying to yourselves, and you are lying to communities that are feeling the impacts of racism every single day. Those vestiges are very real, and the hatred that hung us on lynching trees did not disappear. It dissipated into institutions of power, into statehouses, into governor’s mansions, into the U.S. Senate, into the U.S. House, into the presidency of the United States, and that is what we are dealing with right now.

So the Supreme Court has it wrong, but John Roberts has been going after the Voting Rights Act, I think, for [more than 40] years he’s been trying to gut it, since he was a staffer in the White House. So the fact they passed Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted Section 5, and now they passed anti-affirmative action. They wrote an opinion against affirmative action, which again targeted race consciousness, and now gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is all in sequence of their goal to try and make us somehow believe we live in a colorblind society that just so happens to leave Black African American people at the bottom every single time. 

JW: The forces that you’re talking about here of white supremacy are just incredibly strong. We can talk about racial gerrymandering, all of the other issues with racism that we’re dealing with in this country that you just mentioned.

How do we do anything about that? What does resistance look like in this moment? Obviously, in 2023, you were famously expelled from the state legislature for protesting for stronger gun control laws in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville. That expulsion disenfranchised the voters in your majority Black district.

But instead of accepting an early retirement, you went on to win your district in the next election and continue to fight Republicans in the legislature. Do you think your story has any lessons for how people fight back against this behemoth of white supremacy and this energy of racial disenfranchisement?

JP: It’s multifaceted, the fight back. Here we are three years later from April 6, 2023, and Republicans are at it again disenfranchising our community and seeking to disenfranchise 750,000 people, both white and Black, but majority-Black district here in District 9. The fact of the matter is this: We did not quit then, we must not quit now.

As horrible as this decision is by the U.S. Supreme Court, what we also need to internalize is we need to organize for the next 50 years. Because I do not believe that when I die, this is the type of America that we’re going to live in. But that isn’t going to happen if we throw our hands up, if we quit, if we say, “Oh, there’s nothing we can do.”

Certainly, you can go quit and go get a job in corporate America, make six figures doing all those other things. But the reality is, if you are living in a society that structurally is designing itself to make you less than, structurally designing itself to tell my wife she is less than, my nephew’s sons, that they are less than American citizens, they’re less than human beings — if you sit on the sidelines at such a time in a critical and crucial moment as this, you are a part of the problem.

I understand some folks are working 80 hours a week just to make it. I get that. But there are some people who are retired, and they’re sitting on the couch, and they won’t pick up the phone to call their state House member, their state senator, and their governor. There are some people who are just hoping and praying in pews, but they’re not willing to show up and help people get to the polls.

That is what we have to quit on. Everybody has to do more than they are currently doing in this moment in time in order for us to preserve this modicum of a democratic constitutional republic that very quickly is being disrupted and destroyed at every single turn. Because what is likely to happen is the most significant purging of Black political power and elected Black leaders since the end of Reconstruction.

That’s what we’re looking at here. This is not a joke. This is not a game. And to anyone who says I would have been there with Dr. King, I would have been marching in the 1960s and 1950s. As one pastor said to me, “Whatever you are doing now is what you would have done then.” And people need to realize they have a responsibility now to do more.

JW: Do you feel as if your Democratic colleagues, both in the state legislature and nationally in Congress, do they have your back on this? Are they allies in this? Do you feel like they have that fight in them that you’ve mentioned?

JP: I am seeing more fight right here in the statehouse than I’ve seen in the last three years. People realize that the racism, the bigotry, the white supremacy that for too often has been cloaked in decency and niceness was all a façade.

We get caught up being told you have to learn to work across the aisle. I have done it. I passed resolutions with Republican co-sponsorship, signed on to some Republican bills, but we cannot forget that the roots of the institution are rotten.

They are designed to defeat our ability to resist, to speak up, to stand up against what’s happening.

In this moment in time, what I will say is, we need more support. We need more support. We need in every state, in every city that this is happening, we need a cadre of Congressional Black Caucus members coming to speak and to testify. We need dozens of nonprofit organizations, like we have right here in Tennessee, coming together to fight back and to resist and to speak up and to shout and to sing and to testify and to speak and to organize power at the ballot box. Not just registering people to vote, but making sure people actually get to the polls.

The South is where the litmus test for America’s future is, and I’ve said this for years. The litmus test for America’s progress is not Massachusetts, New York, and California. The litmus test for America’s progress is what happens in the South, where 50 percent of Black African American descendants of enslaved people live.

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If we continue to be neglected, millions of us, tens of millions of us, are going to continue to live under authoritarian, anti-democratic, mobcratic rule, and that is wrong. That should rouse this nation into action. It should force people who might not otherwise show up to show up and to speak up and to do more because their voices are the voices that we’re going to lean on and rely on to help change the status quo that is deeply impacting our states.

JW: Thank you, Rep. Pearson. Those were all of my questions, but do you have any final thoughts to share with our audience?

JP: I think what’s really important here for Black America is to realize this: We did not just come this far to get this far, and our ancestors who marched, who protested, who bled, who died, who were assassinated, who were taken from their families much too soon and too young, like 39-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., like Medgar Evers, who was quite young and in his 30s, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten by police officers and other folk. We didn’t come this far easily. This is a difficult road that we trod, as our Black National Anthem says, but we were built for this moment in time.

As a spiritual person who practices Christianity, I have to tell you this: I think we have been sent for such a time as this. And everybody who is alive right now has a responsibility in this moment to do something. So if that is march, do that. If that’s protest, do that. If that’s run for office, do that. If that’s sign a petition, do that. 

But you’ve got to do something because the moment is coming where somebody’s going to look you in the eyes, somebody who is not born yet, and they will say, “What did you do in the year 2026, in our 250 year of this country, when democracy was crumbling?” And you need to have a response.

JW: Thank you, Rep. Pearson. We really appreciate you coming on The Intercept Briefing.

JP: I appreciate you, too, and thanks so much for having me.

JW: And 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. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Claire Mullen 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. Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It  appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter to Twitch and Amazon, New York Democratic Rep. Richie Torres once slammed Hasan Piker, the popular political streamer, for his “depravity” and called him “the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism.” While mainstream Democrats and their allies have for months weighed the “problem” of Piker for the party, his star has only continued to rise. Insurgent candidates on the left are now making him their go-to surrogate, with Piker as a new kind of kingmaker, one they hope can shepherd his mass of online supporters behind them.

Piker recently touched down in Missouri to lend his star power to Cori Bush, who is looking to reclaim her position in the House after serving as the first Black woman to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District from 2021 to 2025. During her first term in office, Bush authored a bill calling for an “immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” In what was widely read as retribution, Bush was primaried by a Democratic opponent, Wesley Bell, who ended his own Senate campaign against Republican Josh Hawley for the run; Bell defeated Bush with the help of an unprecedented nearly $9 million in spending from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Now Bush is back, and like Piker, is unbowed: During the rally, she wore a T-shirt with her campaign slogan “FIGHT BACK” in big, bold letters. 

“I love seeing you all,” Bush told the May Day crowd. “I just don’t love why I keep seeing you all.”

Bush, who rose to prominence as an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, quickly gained a reputation in office for bucking establishment Democrats — even outpacing other members of “the Squad” — and being outspoken in her criticism of party leadership.

On his wildly popular Twitch stream, Piker has argued that “80 percent of the Democratic Party now agrees with the principles that Cori Bush was defending at a time when it was inopportune for her to do so.” Piker’s visit to St. Louis coincided with weeks of national media scrutiny condemning the popular streamer’s views as antisemitic, culminating in Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., pushing a bipartisan bill to explicitly denounce Piker.

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But for the left, the criticism rings more like an endorsement, and Piker has hit the campaign trail for a number of progressive Democrats including Abdul El-Sayed, who’s running for the Senate in Michigan; Dr. Adam Hamawy, who’s running for a New Jersey House seat; and Rep. Ilhan Omar, who’s up for reelection in Minnesota. 

On stage with Bush, Piker described Bell as an “AIPAC stooge,” and urged St. Louisans to rally around the Bush campaign. “Republicans are monsters who traffic in hatred,” said Piker. “But we’re no longer going to vote for do-nothing Democrats, either.” He told the crowd about a St. Louis woman at the airport who was shocked to see him, visiting the city. “There’s this attitude in places like Missouri where city slickers like myself, the bicoastal elite, don’t come to places like St. Louis. Like, she genuinely was shocked,” Piker said on a stream re-cap.

At the rally, Piker described St. Louis as part of a growing coalition of the discontented. “I’ve seen a lot of places like St. Louis. Places that have been left behind by wealthy corporations that pollute your waters and steal your productive output … but today we say, ‘No more!’”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Bell pointed to common criticisms from mainstream figures over Piker’s past online comments. “If Cori Bush spent as much time meeting with her constituents as she does associating with people who condone sexual assault and blame America for September 11th, she may have fared better in her last election,” said Bell campaign spokesperson Jordan Blase.

Before Piker and Bush, historian Ángel Flores Fontánez took the stage as an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, anchoring the day in proud St. Louis labor history. One of the first American general strikes took place in the city in July 1877, when railroad workers across the United States objected to immiseration imposed by Gilded Age robber barons.

In 1877, railroad workers across the United States shut down rail line capital from New York to Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania to Ohio, all the way out west to Missouri. In St. Louis, the strike escalated, evolving into a general action which drew river levee roustabouts, coopers, newsboys, foundry workers, and refinery laborers into a weeklong action. 

The strike was a multiracial coalition, and the strike’s executive committee briefly ran St. Louis as one of the first commune governments before it was violently suppressed.

Fontánez recalled the city’s legacy of socialists, which dates back to the abolitionist German ’48ers, and the Funsten Nut Strike of May 1933. As University of Missouri history professor Keona Ervin notes in “Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis,” the Funsten strike was one of the first successful strike actions of the era, with the Communist Party USA using the strike as a moment to “mark the urban Midwest as a new hotbed for radical labor politics spearheaded by black working women.”

In the aftermath of the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement, which began in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, many hoped to see St. Louis once again become a beacon of progressivism. But Missouri poses a cadre of challenges: The 1st District is a gerrymandered product of a red state that used to be purple. Missouri was a bellwether for a century, but as polarization intensified in the early 2000s, Missouri Republicans successfully drew maps that neutralized the state’s urban progressive centers.

Most Missourians live in the blue islands of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield, which also make up 80 percent of the state’s annual GDP. Previously, the state elected Democratic governors, senators, and controlled a handful of congressional seats. But now the 1st District is one of the few remaining positions not controlled by Republicans.

Decades of state and federal Republican rule have been disastrous for the Greater St. Louis area, plunging the city into a pattern of capital flight and population loss. The city is still reeling from the May 2025 tornado which ripped through the city and hit historically Black neighborhoods in North St. Louis the hardest.

From the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the St. Louis mayor’s office, many residents feel the recovery has been botched and worry that the North Side will not be rebuilt. Last month, protesters confronted Mayor Cara Spencer over the sluggish cleanup effort, where houses have been left half-destroyed and their residents sleeping in tents. 

“When we’re going to our electeds, we’re saying fully fund the North Side,” Bush told the crowd. “If you can’t stand up to Donald Trump and his administration — at the city level, the state level, or the federal level — then you’re no representative for us. If you can’t stand up to Donald Trump and his allies, then how are you supposed to stand up for us?”

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St. Louisans are calling on their elected officials to fight for more disaster relief, and also against attacks by the state legislature. At the direct request of President Donald Trump, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe, a former car dealership owner turned Republican politician, is attempting to further gerrymander the voting map for Kansas City. 

Kehoe also wants to abolish Missouri’s income tax, which critics say will send the state into a budget tailspin not unlike Sam Brownback’s failed tax-cutting policy, the “Kansas Experiment.”

The governor also caused an uproar by legally invading St. Louis in 2025, taking over state control of the city’s police department. In doing so, Kehoe defied a 2012 statewide vote which granted local control of the police to the St. Louis mayor. Missouri is the only state in the U.S. where the governor controls the police of the major cities, including the police budget.

Many St. Louisans are vehemently opposed to the police takeover and disgruntled with the status quo, but Missouri’s 1st District includes several neighborhoods in St. Louis County that went heavily for Bell in 2024. G Gamache, a union organizer with Starbucks Workers United who attended May Day rally, told The Intercept that Bush is still the fighter St. Louis needs.

“When you see her in person, you see how much she hasn’t changed who she is. … She’s still 10 toes down on things like Medicare for All, affordable housing, and ending the genocide of Palestinians by Israel. A wide majority of Democratic voters, and even many Republican voters, even in Missouri, support all these things,” he said.

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Back in August 2025, Bush’s opponent, Wesley Bell, held his first and only in-person town hall, which was disrupted by protesters. Local activists challenged the congressman on his support of Israel, his refusal to call Gaza a genocide, and his trip to Tel Aviv, which was sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation.

During the town hall, a man providing security for Bell was caught on video attempting to forcefully physically remove the protesters. 

Between Missouri Republicans and Bell, the 2.8 million St. Louisans living in the greater metropolitan area are generally represented by pro-Israel politicians. According to the Pew Research Center, most U.S. voters have soured on Israel, which is now engaged in an invasion of Lebanon, continued violence in the West Bank, the further annihilation of Gaza, and now an ongoing conflict with Iran, which has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane. As of April 2026, 60 percent of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year, and the trend seems to be accelerating.

Bell has tried to square this circle by recognizing the Armenian genocide, voting against Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and denouncing Kehoe’s attempts to redraw Missouri’s congressional maps. Since the initial almost $9 million, AIPAC has continued supporting Bell, directing donors through its PAC’s portal to fund his campaign.

Blase, the Bell spokesperson, told The Intercept that “Congressman Bell remains focused on standing up to Trump and fighting for the people of Missouri’s first Congressional District.”

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While Bush called for a ceasefire early on, her criticisms of Israel don’t quite explain why AIPAC would spend so much on a Missouri congressional campaign.

A more complete answer may lie in Missouri as a node in the country’s military–industrial complex. St. Louis is home to several Boeing facilities, with the Seattle-headquartered aerospace company selling a range of weapons to the Israeli military, including F-35 and F-15IA fighter jets, missiles, and smart bombs.

In 2020, pro-Palestine student groups in St. Louis protested the St. Charles Boeing facility over a $2.2 billion contract to manufacture small-diameter bombs sold to foreign nations, including Israel, and in 2024, the Washington University Student Union Senate passed a resolution to divest from Boeing.

In one of its corporate PR products, a 2025 Boeing video highlighted St. Louis as “Fighterland U.S.A.,” nicknamed for its importance in military jet manufacturing across the Lambert International Airport and Scott Air Force Base complexes. In February 2026, the company announced the return of its Defense, Space & Security headquarters to St. Louis. Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, near Kansas City, made headlines in June 2025 as playing a key role in launching strikes against Iran.

St. Louis is also home to a number of companies on pro-Palestine boycott lists. The North American headquarters of Israeli Chemical Limited Group — which manufactures fertilizers, metals, and chemical products including white phosphorus — is in Creve Coeur, Missouri. As Human Rights Watch reported, Israel used white phosphorus in populated areas of Gaza and Lebanon in October and November 2023.

Bush told The Intercept that Missouri voters are agitated enough to show up and oust Bell, pointing to polling that shows the race to be neck and neck. But Bush is positioning herself as a fighter for people who have long felt left behind by the Democratic Party.

“If you hurt my people, I can’t sit back and do nothing. … If we wait on the feckless people in some of these seats to do it, it’ll never happen,” she promised.

The post Hasan Piker Is the Democrats’ New Man on the Trail, Whether They Like It or Not appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a coveted endorsement of state Sen. Joe Baldacci in the primary race, prompting angry protests from the three other candidates in the race to replace outgoing Democratic Rep. Jared Golden.

In response to the endorsement, the Penobscot County Democratic Committee — in Baldacci’s home county, which includes the city of Bangor — will vote Saturday on a measure to condemn the endorsement. The language of the proposal, which was put forward by former Maine state Senate President Charles Pray, denounces the endorsement as being in “total disregard and willfully ignoring” local party rules that bar the Democratic state and county chapters from backing a candidate in a primary.

“With the DCCC deciding to throw itself into the mix here, truthfully that just kind of aggravated me,” Pray told The Intercept. “I’m going to support whoever wins the Democratic nomination, but I just think it was an unfair position on their part of trying to dictate or trying to boost up a candidate. Point is, let the people decide. Let the voters in the primary make that determination.”

Pray, who previously worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations and described himself as “a progressive moderate with liberal tendencies but conservative perspectives,” has personally backed State Auditor Matt Dunlap in the race, but said his pique at the DCCC’s endorsement isn’t about any one candidate.

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“This has nothing to do with Joe — I think all four of them have an equal chance,” Pray said. “It’s a primary, and, by the way, our state party rules and our county rules are that the party organization cannot endorse or support a candidate.”

A spokesperson for the DCCC said the group was focused on winning in the general elections and beating back President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“It’s imperative that Democrats must take back the House to hold Trump accountable and deliver on what truly matters to voters,” said the spokesperson, Viet Shelton. “That’s why we are proud to announce our latest round of Red to Blue candidates who span the ideological spectrum, are authentic voices in their districts, and are best positioned to win in November.”

Four-Way Race

The race to replace Golden — who announced in November that he would not seek reelection — is being closely watched nationwide ahead of the midterm elections. Whoever takes the Democratic primary will square off against Paul LePage, a brash, plainspoken businessman and Republican former governor whose time running Maine was marked by proto-MAGA far-right populism.

Baldacci is facing off against Dunlap, who is also a former Maine secretary of state; Jordan Wood, a longtime Democratic fundraiser and political operative; and Paige Loud, a social worker and first-time candidate. In the wake of the DCCC endorsement of Baldacci, the other candidates in the race took aim at D.C. Democrats for picking a side.

“It’s undemocratic for national establishment Democrats to put their thumb on the scale in any primary,” Dunlap said. “Just like in certain other races across Maine this year, they won’t decide this one — the people of Maine will.”

With Dunlap picking up endorsements from Our Revolution, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and other progressives, Baldacci — who enjoys name recognition as the brother of former Gov. John Baldacci — is widely seen as the establishment candidate in the race. Reached by phone Thursday, Baldacci declined to comment on the Penobscot County party proposal condemning the endorsement, but said he was glad to have the backing of Democrats in Washington.

“I’m pleased that they did it,” Baldacci said, referring to the endorsement. “My understanding is they based it on polling to determine who is the best candidate to run against LePage.”

Wood said the DCCC move demonstrated the problems with Washington party politics.

“The fact that the national Democratic Party would come in and try to decide this primary literally weeks before we vote is just another example of how broken our Democratic leadership is,” he said.

A Pan Atlantic Omnibus poll in March put Baldacci well ahead of his opponents, but there is little in the way of recent polling to indicate a current popular favorite in the race. Following the stunning collapse of Gov. Janet Mills’s bid for the U.S. Senate — despite the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — against populist insurgent Graham Platner, not everyone in Maine sees the DCCC as the best political oracle to follow.

“It’s annoying that the DCCC thinks they know better than Mainers,” said Loud, the left-leaning social worker. “We just saw the DSCC’s endorsement of Janet Mills, and we all saw how that turned out. I don’t think they have the finger on the pulse.”

Update: May 7, 2026, 5:12 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include Jordan Wood’s experience as a political operative.

The post Maine Dems to Vote on Condemning DCCC Interference in House Primary appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit is signed not just by the agency’s acting general counsel and deputy general counsel, but also Benjamin North, who The Intercept reported was hired earlier this year as assistant general counsel.

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EEOC Quietly Hired Lawyer Who Crusaded for Cases of Discrimination Against Men — Including His Own

North was suspended as a college student over a rape allegation in a case that he claimed violated his civil rights; he has consistently denied the charges. North went on to do work arguing that Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination at federally funded institutions, has been used to discriminate against the rights of men.

North’s signature on the new lawsuit against the New York Times could mean he wrote it, said Chai Feldblum, a former EEOC commissioner.

Asked about North’s role, EEOC spokesperson Victor Chen referred The Intercept to the complaint.

The suit comes as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies across the country, including his administration’s efforts to use the EEOC to these ends.

The new EEOC suit, filed Tuesday on behalf of an unnamed man whose identity New York Magazine speculated about, alleges that the employee was passed over for a position because he is a white man.

The claimant applied for a job as a deputy real estate editor in January 2025 but, the lawsuit claims, despite meeting all the requirements for the position, he didn’t get it because he “did not match the race and/or sex characteristics NYT sought to increase in its leadership.” Instead, the job went to a multiracial female candidate who the lawsuit alleges was not qualified.

Feldblum, the former EEOC commissioner, was skeptical of the agency’s legal argument.

“There is no actual evidence that he was more qualified than her,” Feldblum said. Of the EEOC, she said, “They’re putting out their best facts in this complaint, and the facts are pathetic.”

Particularly for leadership positions, she pointed out, there are many aspects that go into deciding who is the most qualified candidate.

“Their assertion that she was less qualified than him is based on their view of the facts,” she said. “We’ll see what the facts actually say.”

In a statement, the New York Times said it has merit-based employment practices.

“The New York Times categorically rejects the politically motivated allegations brought by the Trump administration’s EEOC,” said Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha. “Throughout this process, the EEOC deviated from standard practices in highly unusual ways. The allegation centers on a single personnel decision for one of over 100 deputy positions across the newsroom, yet the EEOC’s filing makes sweeping claims that ignore the facts to fit a predetermined narrative.”

Diversity Without Discrimination

The EEOC’s lawsuit claims that the company has “engaged in unlawful employment practices” since at least October 2024 through its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. It cites the company’s self-published diversity goals, including a 2021 document setting a goal for increasing Black and Latino leadership by 50 percent within four years.

The Times was making “employment decisions on the basis of race and sex to achieve its desired demographic goals,” the lawsuit alleges. “A necessary consequence of NYT’s intent to increase the percentage of non-White leaders would be a decrease in the percentage of White leaders.”

The assertion that the company has engaged in illegal racial and sex discrimination and is making employment decisions solely on those bases “is simply not borne out by the evidence,” Feldblum argued. The EEOC would instead have to have found evidence that hiring decisions were made expressly and intentionally based on such characteristics.

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Instead, the actions the New York Times took are “the most basic, acceptable, legal ways to try to increase diversity in a workplace,” Feldblum said. “There is literally nothing illegal in anything that the EEOC has detailed.”

The only place where the Times could have potentially run into legal trouble, she said, was when it was requiring diverse candidate pools for jobs. But if done carefully, she said, that can follow the law as well — for example, by expanding a pool of candidates without removing any qualified white or male ones.

“One can include diversity as an employer without discriminating against white people,” Feldblum said. 

Kalpana Kotagal, the sole Democratic commissioner on the EEOC after Trump fired the others contra statute, said she voted against authorizing the lawsuit against the New York Times “because I disagree with the substance of the case and don’t believe it’s a good use of scarce agency resources.”

She added that “a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), without more, is not evidence of discrimination.”

As a reporter at the Times told New York Magazine, “I’m sorry, there are plenty of white guys at the top of the New York Times. Not really something that’s holding you back.”

The complaint comes after EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas directly solicited complaints from white men alleging that they were discriminated against based on their race and/or sex. She has also instructed agency officials to focus on cases that are in line with her personal priorities, which include “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” and cases claiming reverse racism have been “accelerated through the process,” the New York Times recently reported, even though staff are struggling to find complaints with merit.

Feldblum argued that the lawsuit is “quite an inappropriate use of EEOC resources.” The agency’s staffing is currently at its lowest level in decades, so any focus on a particular issue comes at the expense of others.

She said, “It is truly a sad day for anyone who cares about civil rights to see what the EEOC is spending its resources on today.”

Correction: May 6, 2026, 9:24 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct a reference to Chai Feldblum’s past position at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She is a former commissioner. An errant reference to the law that established the EEOC has also been corrected; it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The post Lawyer on EEOC’s New York Times Lawsuit Has History Battling Discrimination Against Men appeared first on The Intercept.

The battle playing out in the state attorney general’s race is one example of many of the crypto sector trying to elect industry-friendly officials. In Nevada, it’s also a story of an eccentric multimillionaire whose money threatens the political ascent of a woman who helped deny his dream.

The spending by crypto entrepreneur Jeffrey Berns is “meaningful money, especially at this early stage in the primary,” said Kenneth Miller, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “And we don’t know if this only represents an initial investment and will be followed up by more.”

Spending Big

Berns has donated at least $2.5 million since 2023 to a political action committee controlled by Nevada State Treasurer Zach Conine, who is running for attorney general against state Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro.

That is more than twice the $1.2 million that Conine received from individual donors to his personal campaign account over the same period.

After receiving money from Berns, Conine’s PAC in turn donated more than $1.8 million to a newly created campaign outfit called Safe and Strong Nevada PAC, which rolled out a website and video advertisement attacking Cannizzaro.

Both Cannizzaro and Conine are Democrats on the June 9 primary ballot. They have settled on similar campaign themes as fighters who will take on President Donald Trump — a reliable message in an election year with an energized Democratic base.

Neither candidate has made cryptocurrencies a focus of their campaigns. Yet Berns’s donations make him by far the largest donor to Conine’s campaign organizations. Miller, the political science professor, said the scale of Berns’s donations reflected a larger trend.

“All semblance of constraints on political donations have eroded away in the past couple decades, and the amount of money it takes to be impactful in a Nevada primary election is well within reach for a lot of wealthy individuals,” he said. “Campaigns around the country often have one or two super PACs involved that are funded by one or just a handful of people. It is not typical for a campaign to be almost entirely propped up by one wealthy megadonor, but it does happen sometimes.”

A Dream Denied

While Berns did not respond to a request for comment on why he is intervening in the race, he has a tangled history with Cannizzaro. Five years ago, she helped kill his vision of building what his company called a “smart city” near Reno.

Berns was formerly a California plaintiff’s lawyer who won huge settlements taking on the banking industry. He was also an early investor in the Ether token, a leading competitor to bitcoin.

His multiplying fortune allowed him buy waterfront properties in ritzy destinations including Lake Tahoe, where he bought and sold a $47.5 million mansion, and Turks and Caicos, where he recently listed for sale at $35 million a beachfront property that was once featured on the Netflix reality dating show “Too Hot to Handle.”

He also founded a company called Blockchains, which in 2018 purchased 67,000 acres of land in Storey County in northern Nevada near the Tesla “Gigafactory” for the sum of $170 million.

Storey County has flexible development rules, but not flexible enough for Berns. Instead, he and his company wanted to build an entire city running on blockchain that operated independently from the county.

“I want to create a place where we can rethink things. Where we can democratize democracy,” Berns told the BBC.

Berns won the support of a critical backer: then-Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat who endorsed the idea in his 2021 State of the State address.

Opponents noted that Berns had donated tens of thousands of dollars to Sisolak and smelled an end-run around regular democratic governance. They also raised concerns about more mundane issues such as lost tax revenue and water rights.

The idea would have needed approval from the Nevada Legislature. Berns’s push for legislative approval was damaged by the revelation that he was being sued by his children’s nanny for allegedly trying to force her into a sexual tryst with him and his wife. Berns said the plaintiff was a disgruntled former employee, and he settled the case the next year without admitting wrongdoing, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Despite Sisolak’s support, the smart city idea was ultimately doomed to die the bureaucratic death of a study committee. One of the key players who helped kill the proposal was Cannizzaro, the state’s first female Senate majority leader.

A lobbyist involved in the discussions confirmed that Cannizzaro was instrumental in shelving the idea. In a statement, her campaign also said that she opposed the idea.

“Like nearly all of her legislative colleagues in both parties, Majority Leader Cannizzaro was extremely skeptical of the idea of letting private corporations run their own governments and siphon off millions of taxpayers’ dollars,” said Peter Koltak, a campaign spokesperson. “Ultimately, she informed the Governor’s staff and the bill’s supporters that there wouldn’t be legislative support for the concept.”

Berns was so disappointed by the process that his company pulled out of the study process, prompting its staff to declare that there was no point in exploring the idea further.

Berns Shifts Gears

While Berns vastly expanded his wealth by investing in cryptocurrency, he is not a household name in the industry. Many of the wealthiest crypto companies and venture capital firms have backed a national super PAC called Fairshake that has hundreds of millions to spend on federal elections. Berns has not donated to that effort, federal campaign finance records show.

Instead, he has focused his giving on Nevada, supporting politicians on both sides of the aisle. Berns gave $5,000 to Republican Gov. Joseph Lombardo in 2024 and $250,000 to the Democratic Party of Washoe County in 2022, campaign finance records show. He also gave $5,000 to Cannizzaro in 2020 before the smart city proposal died in the legislature.

Despite the pushback the smart city proposal drew, it has not made him a particularly controversial donor.

“In Las Vegas, not a month goes by without an artist’s rendering of a proposed resort, arena, or other project popping up,” said Miller. “Some of them happen, and many of them don’t. I don’t expect that the smart city proposal left much of an impression on many Nevada voters.”

While neither Conine nor Berns responded to questions about the latter’s donations, Conine has signaled that he is friendly to crypto.

During the smart city debate, Conine promoted the idea of allowing government entities to accept payments in stablecoin. In 2024, he attended an event sponsored by a crypto industry trade group.

Cannizzaro, for her part, does not appear to have staked out any major public positions on the crypto industry. Since the start of 2024, she has raised $2.2 million between her personal campaign account and a PAC she controls. Her campaign said she will not be deterred by Berns’s spending.

“Leader Cannizzaro has always defended Nevada from big corporations and wealthy special interests, and an unaccountable tech billionaire dumping his millions into this race is certainly not going to stop her,” said Koltak, the spokesperson.

The post She Opposed His Plan for a Blockchain City. Now He’s Bankrolling Her Primary Opponent. appeared first on The Intercept.

The Great Israeli Real Estate Event — a showcase that advertises its services in helping people in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. purchase land in Israel and the West Bank — hosted the event at Park East Synagogue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Tuesday. The expo helps potential buyers navigate taxes, education concerns, and other issues that arise during relocation to Israel.

Ahead of the event, Mamdani spoke out against the possibility of potentially illegal land sales being facilitated within the city.

“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” said Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for Mamdani, in a statement to The Intercept. “These settlements are illegal under international law and deeply tied to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.”

The website for the expo includes a reference to Gush Etzion, a cluster of some 20 settlements in the West Bank, southeast of Jerusalem, that are considered illegal under international law. Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said the inclusion of Gush Etzion was a telling reminder of the claim made on all of the Occupied Territories by the pro-settlement movement.

“Gush Etzion is the Israeli term for an area of the West Bank located south of Jerusalem on which, under international law, all Israeli construction, all Israeli communities are considered illegal under international law,” Friedman said. “The pro-settlement movement around the world, and most Israelis, do not make any distinction between Israel and the West Bank. The idea is that all of this is Eretz Yisrael” — Hebrew for “the land of Israel” — “and it belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them.”

The Intercept attended the event Tuesday. Just inside the synagogue, a large welcome sign specified that the event was for “information purposes only.” More than a dozen tables advertised the services of real estate companies, most of which promoted glitzy luxury buildings in Tel Aviv, Netanya, and other cities inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

At least one company, Harey Zahav, displayed a map of properties in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Brochures at the Harey Zahav table offered detailed looks at properties in these settlements.

Past Discrimination Allegations

The expo is being sponsored by a group called Home in Israel, but it isn’t the only organization putting on events of this sort. In recent years, real estate fairs put on by similar groups have popped up in New York and other North American cities, including Baltimore, Montreal, and others, including at synagogues.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are widely considered to be open only to Jewish residents. At one real estate event in suburban New Jersey in 2024, protesters said they were explicitly asked about their religious affiliations when they tried to register for the fair, potentially implicating anti-discrimination laws. The New Jersey Civil Rights Division reportedly questioned realtors about their practices. (The New Jersey Civil Rights Division not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Pal-Awda, a pro-Palestine group, announced plans on social media for a protest on Tuesday outside the Park East Synagogue.

“We will not be silent as ethnic cleansing is being actively promoted in our neighborhoods,” the group wrote.

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Self-proclaimed supporters of the synagogue have circulated a flyer on social media announcing a counter-protest. “All members of the Jewish community need to come out and protect the synagogue,” says the flyer. Though it includes the social media handles of the synagogue, the call for a counter-protest did not appear to come from Park East Synagogue itself. (A spokesperson for the synagogue declined to comment.)

Past events have led to sometimes violent confrontations between protesters and counter-demonstrators.

In light of the dueling protests planned outside Park East Synagogue, Raskin, the mayoral spokesperson, called for both the safety of eventgoers and respect for the free-speech rights of the protesters.

“Our administration has also been clear that we are committed to ensuring safe entry and exit from any house of worship,” he said, “and that such access never be in question while all protesters are able to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

Protests at Park East

Park East Synagogue has already been the site of one anti-Zionist protest that raised hackles in New York.

In November, Pal-Awda organized a demonstration against an event hosted by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group that facilitates migration to Israel, sparking howls of protest from then-Mayor Eric Adams and other political leaders in the city.

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That protest, along with others across New York City, were part of the impetus behind a bill introduced this year in the City Council aimed at creating a so-called buffer zone to keep demonstrators at a distance from any house of worship.

Despite the opposition of free-speech advocates, a version of that bill — requiring the New York Police Department to provide a plan for protecting houses of worship but without the buffer zone provision — passed in March and became law on April 25 after Mamdani declined to sign or veto it. The bill gave the New York Police Department 45 days to provide a proposed plan of action and 90 days to give a final plan, meaning it is not yet in full effect.

A related bill proposing buffer zones for universities and other educational institutions passed the City Council but was vetoed by Mamdani, who criticized the bill as overbroad and a threat to free speech.

Update: May 5, 2026, 6:45 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include reporting from inside the Great Israeli Real Estate Event on the promotion of property for sale in Israeli settlements that are considered illegal under international law.

The post Mamdani Condemns NYC Expo Promoting Property Sales in Israeli West Bank Settlements appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, President Donald Trump said Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacked U.S. ships guiding vessels through the Strait of Hormuz as part of Trump’s ill-defined “Project Freedom.”

The following day, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said Iran had launched numerous attacks. “Since the ceasefire was announced, Iran has fired at commercial vessels nine times and seized two container ships. They’ve attacked U.S. forces more than 10 times,” he told reporters on Tuesday. He explained that despite attacking U.S. troops, the strikes were “below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point.”

Trump suggested to reporters on Tuesday that Iran knew what actions constituted red lines that would violate the ceasefire, but refused to go on record on what they were. “Well, you’ll find out, because I’ll let you know,” he said, without letting anyone know.

“One of Trump’s standard plays with respect to Iran is resorting to belligerent threats of potentially illegal violence in the hopes of coercing Tehran,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. “Notwithstanding Trump’s threat, attacks on U.S. ships are a real possibility and a potential vector for the breakdown of the ceasefire.”

At the press conference alongside Caine, War Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked if the truce ended, since the U.S. and Iran had fired at each other in the last 24 hours. “No, the ceasefire is not over,” he replied. “Ultimately, this is a separate and distinct project.” Both he and Trump have also repeatedly claimed victory in the war, that they simultaneously claim is paused.

Hegseth suggested last week in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the ceasefire undercut a 60-day legal deadline mandated by the 1973 War Powers Resolution for the U.S. to exit the war. (The deadline expired on Friday, though the White House can also extend the timeline for another 30 days to assist with the withdrawal of forces.)

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses or stops in a ceasefire,” said Hegseth. He reiterated this erroneous contention on Tuesday.

“I do not believe the statute would support that,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., replied, adding that he has “serious constitutional concerns and we don’t want to layer those with additional statutory concerns.”

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Only two ships were known to have passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, and none did so on Tuesday. “As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait,” said Hegseth on Tuesday. Iran’s state broadcaster dismissed Project Freedom as a failure and said Iranian control over the waterway had tightened.

“There’s this ongoing denial of reality by the administration about the global and domestic consequences of this conflict,” said Finucane. “This war is very unpopular. The president’s own popularity has fallen, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better as the economic consequences worsen. The current status quo is untenable, but it’s unclear how the president is going to find his way out of this mess of his own making.”

The post Hegseth Clings to Phony Ceasefire to Help Trump Evade War Powers Pressure appeared first on The Intercept.

Braden Peters, better known online as Clavicular, did not become famous by offering young men discipline in any ordinary sense. He became famous by selling them “ascension”: the promise that a better face, leaner body, harsher jaw, and ruthless optimization could buy them power in a world they believe has already priced them out. In April, that sermon hit a grisly wall (or, more accurately, a floor) when Peters was hospitalized after a suspected overdose during a livestream in Miami. Bloody and bruised, he later described the hospitalization as “brutal.” 

In the aftermath, Clavicular’s online presence has unraveled. YouTube recently removed his channels for repeated policy violations, including linking to prohibited sites and attempting to evade a previous ban. Despite being pushed off major platforms, he doubled down, staging a stunt trip late last month with a group of young women to Little Saint James, the private island once owned by Jeffrey Epstein. 

Now, that same pattern of boundary-pushing has bled into the courts: Clavicular is facing a civil lawsuit in Florida from Aleksandra Mendoza, who alleges battery, fraud, and emotional distress, including claims that he injected her with a non-FDA-approved substance during a livestream and engaged in nonconsensual sex. Still, the streamer seems to make news almost daily, most recently for reportedly entering into a club venture in Miami with a man with ties to the Israeli mob.

None of this ongoing ordeal is some tragic footnote to the Clavicular brand. It has been him reaching his final form, stripped of filters: a young man preaching mastery through chemical self-invention, then collapsing live on camera, only to be slapped with subpoenas.

The New Prophet of Male Despair

Clavicular’s movement lives in the vocabulary of “looksmaxxing,” “hardmaxxing,” and “ascending,” a lexicon born in incel-adjacent internet forums and now being pushed into the mainstream by TikTok, Kick, and algorithmic outrage. Looksmaxxing culture didn’t emerge from nowhere; it grew out of the fringe online forums where users reduce attraction to “power, status, and looks,” obsessively rate faces, and turn self-improvement into an unyielding, almost clinical hierarchy of attractiveness.

His popularity stems from selling what he claims is the answer to a worldview born from the insular hodgepodge of pickup artists, anti-women forums, and involuntary celibacy groups — and he’s dragged it into the spotlight.

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He has promoted steroid use, “bone smashing,” injecting peptides, and even using methamphetamine as part of a savage self-improvement regimen aimed mostly at young men. He has also drifted openly around Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and the broader online right while insisting politics are for “jesters” (an insult in the looksmaxxing community). That juke is its own tell, because when a teenager builds an audience on hierarchy, humiliation, sexual scarcity, and racialized beauty standards, he is doing politics whether he says so or not.

It’s not unheard of for a young man to throw himself into the gym, practice self-discipline, embark on a rigid diet, and curate a public-facing persona. I’ve imbibed on bodybuilding culture in my own life. But Clavicular’s worldview is fueled by more than simple vanity. It is blackpill nihilism in gym clothes. The “blackpill” tells young men that the social order is fixed, intimacy is a commodified market, and the only thing left is to become more physically dominant than the next guy or accept your permanent irrelevance. In that mental framework, body maintenance becomes class warfare of the face. It is triage in a mating economy. Clavicular did not invent male despair, but he has certainly monetized it to his own great success.

Blackpilled

There is a reason this message is resonating. Clavicular’s runway to launch is an America where young men are more atomized and are worse off than their forefathers. Young American men are lonely, socially frayed, and increasingly detached from the kinds of institutions that once gave people identity outside romance and work. Gallup found that 25 percent of U.S. men ages 15 to 34 said they felt lonely “a lot” of the previous day, a higher number than young women and second in the world among our peer countries. The 2023 surgeon general’s advisory on social connection warned the country’s broader epidemic of isolation is not merely personal but structural.

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Gone too is the era where men could feel like they were contributing to the community and world around them. A farmer could see his food nourishing his neighbors, a cobbler’s work lived on the feet of his peers, and a doctor literally saved the lives of his local village. These are now nothing more than oral legends passed down from baby-boomer and Gen X parents of the way it used to be. 

But it is also revisionist history. This is the part too many elders refuse to admit: A lot of men were raised to expect an unearned inheritance. It was an entitlement gained at the exclusion of everyone else. They were assured that stable work, baseline social respect, and starting a family would follow if they merely stayed on the tracks as a heterosexual, yet basic, white man. But the tracks have buckled. Economist Raj Chetty’s work on mobility found that 90 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents; for children born in the 1980s, that figure had fallen to around half. Meanwhile, wage growth for the top has badly outpaced the bottom 90 percent over the long arc of modern American inequality. That does not excuse reactionary politics, but it does explain why so many young men feel they were promised adulthood and handed precarity.

The modern far right, which has stepped in to fill the space the erosion of our institutions and social fabric have left behind, understands something even modern liberals tend to flatten: Misogyny is not a secondary issue. It is foundational to the entire right-wing project. Researchers have described misogyny as a gateway into far-right radicalization, and scholars who research white nationalism have shown how “Great Replacement” ideology is soaked in reproductive anxiety — the fantasy that white decline is caused not just by immigration but by women refusing their assigned breeding role. In these circles, women are not citizens. They are demographic assets and currency.

But as civil rights, reproductive rights, and immigration have expanded opportunities, life isn’t so easy for the static white-bread young men of America. They now have to bring more to the table.

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It is why in Clavicular’s talk of “ascension” doesn’t just coincide with a rise in personal male beauty, but in parallel with right-wing mansophere attacks on what has been the perceived robbery of white male entitlements. It’s no shock that much of Clavicular’s vocabulary aims to diminish women, whom he publicly humiliates on his stream and reduces into self-serving chasers of status, making claims of centuries-old patriarchal domination as a societal good.

It’s an ethos that punches back at the external reality of his impressionable fanbase. 

That is why Clavicular matters beyond his own cartoonish excess. He is not just some young misanthrope with a camera and a syringe. He is a clean vessel for a much older grievance: that sweeping social change has stripped certain men, especially but not exclusively cis white men, of an unearned ease their fathers and grandfathers treated as normal.

The Disappearing Man

The real theft here is spiritual. In a quixotic quest for authenticity, young men are instead being sold a playbook that they must collapse themselves into tiny, fixed archetypes: warrior, king, alpha, mogger, Chad.

In Clavicular’s lane, and under the auspices of social media attention, the commandment is simpler still: become beautiful or become nothing. Conspicuously absent from that script are virtues like wisdom, tenderness, stewardship, restraint, humor, and even morality. 

Missing, too, is heroism — not performative strength, but the harder labor of standing against cruelty, telling the truth under pressure, protecting the vulnerable, and trying to tilt the world a few degrees toward justice.

That is why the blackpill philosophy, and broader manosphere, is antithetical to perhaps the most important tenet of true growth: courage. 

It is surrender disguised as realism. It tells men to stop imagining themselves as builders of community tasked with fighting unjust systems, and instead obsess over their social ranking. It is a feudal vision of manhood with the body as castle, the whole world as an ever-present threat, and other men as rivals. 

That is the real cowardice of imagination at the center of Clavicular’s rise. Not that he tells young men to exercise, clean up, or care how they present themselves. Fine. Groom yourself. Build your body. Take some responsibility. But do not confuse optimization with grit. And do not mistake a man begging his followers to buy into his despair for a leader of men.

The post Clavicular and the Right-Wing Project to Radicalize Young Men appeared first on The Intercept.

Sightline Intelligence, a firm focused on AI video processing, has made at least 10 shipments of hardware to the Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems since 2024, according to investigators with the Movement Research Unit, the group that originally obtained the documents.

The revelation that a local company has been doing business with Israel has led to protests by activists in Portland.

“We really want our city councilors to help us follow up and look into what Sightline is doing,” said Olivia Katbi, a member of Portland Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. “Are they producing these items here in our city? What is their relationship with Elbit Systems in Israel?”

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Drones have become a crucial part of Israel’s military strategy, allowing it to mount deadly attacks without endangering its own troops, said Movement Research Unit’s Abdullah F., who asked to omit his last name due to the sensitivity of his work.

“They’ve been connected to the death of many civilians,” he said, “and they’re a critical part also of the surveillance architecture.”

10 Shipments

Researchers with the Movement Research Unit, which gathers information for left-wing organizations and causes, said they pinpointed 10 shipments from Sightline to Elbit Systems in Israel. Four of the shipments went to an Elbit facility in the city of Karmiel, Israel; four to Rehovot; one to Holon; and one to Haifa.

The Intercept was able to independently verify the dates and corresponding cargo weights of those shipments from Portland to Israel.

Six of the shipments passed through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and four went through Newark International Airport in New Jersey. (Sightline, its parent company Acron Technologies, and Elbit Systems did not respond to requests for comment.)

Using commercial data drawn from cargo manifests, the researchers found that the shipments included SLA-3000-OEM embedded video processing boards and associated components that are part of a surveillance system that can be used for target recognition.

In marketing materials, the company says the tech can quickly identify people and vehicles on the ground and classify them as civilians, military targets, armed targets, or people willing or unwilling to surrender. It assigns a percentage to the confidence of these classifications.

“Sightline provides an application that allows unmanned vehicles to autonomously classify targets, and these video processing boards are a crucial part of that,” Abdullah said. “They enable low-latency — AKA very fast — video processing so that a drone operator can, in real time, see like, ‘This person is 94 percent unarmed’ or ‘75 percent military.’ And so we can all imagine how decisions might be made based on that algorithm.”

Abdullah declined to detail research techniques for fear that companies could take steps to evade identification of future shipments. Research using these techniques has, however, been borne out in the past. Shipments identified by the group’s methods were confirmed through parliamentary questioning in the United Kingdom and are, in part, the basis for an ongoing court case in Belgium against FedEx for the undeclared transport of weapons components, in both cases with regards to the shipment to Israel of parts for F-35 fighter planes.

Similar methods were also used to expose a shipment of nitrocellulose — an explosive component used in ammunition — from JFK Airport to Israel in May 2025, as first reported by The Intercept and the Irish investigative website The Ditch.

Israeli Targeting

Originally founded in 2007 as Sightline Applications, Sightline Intelligence is based in Portland, with offices in Hood River, Oregon, and Brisbane, Australia. Until Friday, the company was owned by Artemis, a Boston-based private equity firm that announced last week it had sold the company for an undisclosed sum to Acron Technologies.

Sightline specializes in target recognition and touts its low-latency video processing as an essential tool in the modern military arsenal. The firm has not publicized business dealings with Elbit Systems, a prominent target of the global BDS movement. On its website, however, Sightline lists FMS Aerospace — a company that works with weapons contractors in the country — as an “international partner.” FMS Aerospace, in turn, lists Israel’s air force as a partner, along with Elbit Systems and other companies in the Israeli military–industrial complex.

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Israel’s use of military drones and commercial quadcopter drones has been documented extensively by journalists and human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. There is no publicly available information as to whether the hardware or software developed by Sightline Intelligence has seen use in the field by Israeli forces, but a recent photo included in a dossier of information hacked from the phone of a high-ranking general appears to indicate that, at the very least, Israel has tested the technology, Abdullah said.

The photo, published online by the Handala hacking team, an outfit believed to be operating out of Iran, shows Israeli Gen. Herzi Halevi with half a dozen other men in military garb and a laptop screen in view that appears to shows a software user interface that places a map with markings on the left of the screen and informational and toggle displays in a column on the right side. (Abdullah, who pointed The Intercept to the image, cautioned that he could not independently verify it.) The display is similar to the user interface for Sightline targeting program that the company posted online.

“On the laptop you can see what looks very, very similar to Sightline’s geospatial intelligence planning tool,” Abdullah said. “You can see the long blue lines that are on the front of the screen, which appear to match up with the planning tool. You can also see a couple of blue toggles on the side that also seem to match up, and then a goal distance bar in the bottom right of the screen that appears very similar.”

“While we cannot say conclusively that this is the same platform,” he added, “this is highly suggestive of this software being deployed or trialed in an Israeli military environment.”

Portland Protests

In Portland, protesters organizing against Sightline’s business relationship with Israel spoke last week at a City Council meeting and later gathered several dozen people to rally outside the company’s headquarters. (A spokesperson for Portland Mayor Keith Wilson declined to comment.)

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One item in particular from Sightline’s promotional materials caught the eye of local activists. The company’s website shows what appears to be a surveillance image taken from above the aerial tram stop at Oregon Health & Science University, a public research university in the city.

The image appeared in a video originally posted online by the company last June. The video, however, has since been updated with several seconds cut to exclude the images of the tram stop.

Katbi, the BDS organizer, said, “I think people will be mad if they find out that this company is potentially training this technology to identify us as civilians here in Portland, without our consent, and then using that technology to kill people in Gaza.”

Correction: May 5, 2026, 9:39 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct the destination cities in Israel where Elbit Systems received shipments from Sightline Intelligence, according to shipping data. They are Karmiel, Rehovot, Holon, and Haifa.

The post Portland AI Company Ships Targeting Tech to Israeli Drone Maker appeared first on The Intercept.

“The administration has failed to explain the long-term objectives of this mission or provide any evidence of reduced drug flows into the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said about the campaign on Thursday. “I would ask for a credible answer to this most fundamental question: What is the operation actually meant to accomplish?”

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted attacks on 54 so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 185 civilians, since September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. These summary killings 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 on criminal charges.

“These are extrajudicial executions, or even just murders — something similar to a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back when there is no self-defense justification,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. He called the growing death toll “a gross human rights violation.”

While Trump consistently lies about various aspects of the boat strikes, including the illicit narcotics allegedly on the boats and the number of lives supposedly saved by the attacks, the Pentagon has followed suit, using rhetorical sleight of hand and seemingly disingenuous statistics to bolster the claims of their commander-in-chief.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” said retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin.

The Pentagon and White House for months failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept on the boat strike campaign.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels attacked by the U.S. are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. “The boats get hit and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean, it’s like floating in bags, it’s all over the place,” he said in October of boats leaving from Venezuela.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and five other government officials briefed on boat strikes told The Intercept that top officials admitted in close-door briefings that the vessels are not transporting fentanyl. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” said Jacobs, who serves the San Diego area. “Representing a border community, I know that 99 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes through legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.”

Fentanyl is generally produced in the United States or Mexico, Baumgartner said. “I have not seen any evidence that fentanyl has ever been smuggled from South America to the United States,” he told The Intercept. “Cartels would not smuggle fentanyl down to South America just to smuggle it back by boat.”

While bales of cocaine float in water, Baumgartner said, fentanyl is shipped in dramatically smaller quantities and would not be seen floating in the aftermath of an airstrike.

Fentanyl or not, Trump has also touted astounding decreases in drug smuggling due to the boat strikes. “Drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent,” Trump said at a January 29 White House briefing. Experts said that Trump’s claim is ridiculous, invented, or involves disingenuous numbers meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Baumgartner noted that even the Pentagon figures put the lie to Trump’s claim. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” he said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

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The word “deterrence” has become a popular Pentagon euphemism for the use of lethal strikes, in contrast to previous U.S. government efforts to marshal economic, diplomatic, and military means to convince adversaries to change their ways. “Deterrence has a signaling effect on narco-terrorists, and raises the risks with their movements,” Humire claimed. But last month, for example, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, including five in five days. “That shows that traffickers, even along that high seas route, are not being deterred,” said Isacson.

The amount of cocaine seized by U.S. authorities suggests the strikes have had little impact on the trade. “Really absurdly, there’s been no impact on flows of drugs toward the United States,” said Isacson. While data is limited, figures from Customs and Border Protection show that seizures at U.S. borders and along coasts have increased amid the Trump administration’s airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. “CBP’s cocaine seizures have actually gone slightly up since the boat strikes began. Cocaine seized at all U.S. borders in the seven months before the strikes began was 38,000 pounds. In the seven months since, it’s 44,000 pounds — 6,000 pounds more,” Isacson explained.

The Coast Guard recently announced “record-setting interdictions” of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific under Operation Pacific Viper, indicating that large quantities of the narcotic are still transiting through that maritime corridor. Since last August, that service has seized more than 215,000 pounds of cocaine as part of this operation, Coast Guard spokesperson Brandon Hillard told The Intercept. “Narco-terrorists continue to go to great lengths to traffic illicit narcotics within and out of the Western hemisphere,” he said, highlighting “the seizure of hundreds of tons of cocaine.”

The general stability of the drug’s wholesale price also suggests it remains widely available. “The Coast Guard recently seized 1.2 tons of cocaine and reported a wholesale value of $19.3 million. This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner explained of a seizure announced this month. “This report may be using old pricing information, but I would expect a significant spike in prices with even a 20 percent reduction in the cocaine flow.” 

According to the drug-testing company Millennium Health, use of stimulants, including cocaine, is climbing sharply and was detected in urine samples at nearly twice the rate of fentanyl in 2025.

“A 97 percent reduction in cocaine flow would mean that cocaine was now extraordinarily rare in the United States,” said Baumgartner. “The price of cocaine would have skyrocketed. Addicts would be fighting each other over what little cocaine or crack they could find.”

Trump has also advanced absurd statistics about lives saved by attacks on boats. “When you see the boats being hit, those boats kill on average 25,000 people a boat,” Trump claimed. This echoed his previous assertion that “every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.” Experts say that there is no way of knowing how many lives are saved due to drug interception efforts, but that Trump’s claims are nonetheless untethered from reality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 70,000 drug overdose deaths for the 12-month period ending in November 2025. By Trump’s math, the drugs on the 54 boats would have been responsible for 1,400,000 deaths — 20 times the number of overdose deaths in one year. “The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

While not as egregious as Trump’s claims, Humire also offered up overdose numbers that appeared calculated to deceive. “As early as September 2025, the Administration had also achieved a nearly 20% drop in deadly drug overdoses in the United States compared to the previous year,” said Humire, crediting Operation Southern Spear with a share of the success. Left unsaid is that the first boat strike occurred that September, meaning the strikes would have had little or no impact on the numbers. The Pentagon did not provide any details on the source of Humire’s figures.

Experts say Humire’s statistics appear to be rhetorical sleight of hand, since Operation Southern Spear is not actually preventing the flow of fentanyl — the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. Baumgartner called it “misleading” to link Operation Southern Spear to decreases in overall drug overdoses and drug flow because it “only impacts cocaine smuggling, not fentanyl or other drugs.”

Humire claimed Southern Spear and National Defense Areas on the U.S. Southern border “diminished the flow of fentanyl,” telling Congress it is “down 56% since the same period last year.” In actuality, CBP’s seizures of fentanyl at the U.S.–Mexico border have been declining since 2023. Halfway into fiscal year 2026, fentanyl seizures are almost exactly half of the total for 2025.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth also claims that the boat strikes have significantly impacted the drug trade. “Some top cartel drug-traffickers in the @SOUTHCOM AOR have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean,” he wrote in a February post on X. The Pentagon won’t name these “top” traffickers, failing to respond to repeated requests for information from The Intercept.

Lawmakers and other experts say that the Trump administration completely misconstrues the nature of the drug trade. “They have a fundamental misunderstanding that drug trafficking is a business. And that means there is no military solution,” Jacobs told The Intercept.

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Tree, of the Institute for Policy Studies, echoed this. “They’ve applied a war paradigm to an economic problem, as if there is a command structure of the global drug economy where the person at the top finally says, ‘We’ve had enough. Everyone, stop what you’re doing now. We surrender’ — as if a cartel boss could command users, growers, smugglers, money launderers, and dealers, to all give up. It doesn’t work that way,” he explained. “Even if you did find a case or two of someone deciding to get out of the business, there are an infinite number of replacements willing to step up because that’s where the money is. Smuggling is the business. There’s always going to be a Han Solo.”

The Trump administration’s killing of civilians on alleged drug boats contrasts with the administration’s ongoing embrace of drug traffickers, drug dealers, and certain cartels, as well as its cuts to drug enforcement efforts. Justice Department records show, for example, that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has dropped by about 6 percent since 2024. And more than 5,000 FBI and DEA agents have been reassigned from combating drug cartels to immigration enforcement, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. Trump’s then-Attorney General Pam Bondi also scuttled the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces which allowed the department to coordinate investigations of cartels and transnational criminal networks. And last year, federal prosecutions for drug trafficking dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades.

To justify January’s U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump administration prosecutors charged him with numerous crimes, including “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy” and “Cocaine Importation Conspiracy.” The Trump administration is now running the country via a puppet regime that includes Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who was indicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking, having “partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world, and relied on corrupt officials throughout the region, to distribute tons of cocaine to the United States,” according to the Justice Department. 

Trump has also granted clemency to around 100 people accused of drug-related crimes, including kingpins. He gave, for example, a “full and unconditional” pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison after being convicted in 2024 for using his office to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana asked: “Why would we pardon this guy then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States?”

On Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., questioned Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the boat attacks. “What legal justification could there possibly be that would allow the U.S. military to strike boats in international waters and kill the occupants of those boats without a showing of evidence that there’s narcotics on those boats?” he asked, before being met by a stream of doubletalk about the legality of the attacks. Unable to elicit a straight answer, Kaine responded: “I think there’s a profound mismatch between what is occurring and the underlying assumptions in the legal opinion.”

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Military briefers have admitted to members of Congress that they cannot satisfy the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or prosecute survivors of the boat strikes, leading the U.S. to repatriate, hand off, or leave injured victims to drown. Similarly, those killed — if they are involved in the drug trade — are hardly drug kingpins. An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those killed in U.S. strikes found that while they had been smuggling drugs, they were not “narco-terrorists” or gang leaders but laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, two were low-level criminals, and one was a local crime boss. All were from a desperately poor area, and most were crewing such boats for the first or second time. “These individuals don’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” said one government official of those killed.

Asked about the disconnect between the Trump administration pardoning drug kingpins and killing low-level persons who may be associated with the trade, Tree said it was par for the course. “The punitive aspect of the drug war has never been about logical consistency,” he said, noting that tobacco will kill close to 500,000 Americans this year, six times the number of overdoses. “Does that mean Trump is going to drone strike the homes of tobacco executives in the U.S.? Can other countries target them since Trump lacks the political will? That would be absurd because we don’t use missiles to address a public health problem.”

“These are visceral knee-jerk responses designed to make politicians appear tough,” Tree said, “but being tough is not the same as being effective.”

The post Trump’s Killing Spree Isn’t Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.