In September 2025, Hinson — who is battling Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek in a tight race that could decide control of the Senate — tapped Abe Adams to lead her campaign’s digital efforts. 

Adams is a co-founder and managing partner of Targeted Victory, a digital consulting firm that has been used by high-profile Republican candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Targeted Victory shares an address and much of its staff with Targeted Communications Global — a related company with no discernible online presence. Both are subsidiaries of marketing company Stagwell Global.

Israel awarded Targeted Communications a $9.9 million contract in March 2025 focused on social media and paid advertising, documents show. By October 2025, the firm was at work pitching news content and guests on Fox News and CNN, and creating YouTube ads suggesting young Iranians have been educated to believe the “most sacred thing they do is stab a Christian in the heart.”

Hinson is endorsed by both President Donald Trump and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and has been supportive of Trump’s war in Iran. 

A June 2026 Department of Justice FARA filing from Targeted Communications details much of the firm’s work for Israel. The document lists 10 registered foreign agents working on the Targeted Communications contract for Israel. Six of them are identified as Targeted Victory employees on the company’s website or their LinkedIn accounts. Adams is not named in the filing.

Hinson, Adams, and Targeted Victory did not immediately respond to  requests for comment.

Adams is not the only Hinson campaign adviser with ties to Targeted Victory and the Israel lobby. Hinson’s current deputy campaign manager, Addison Lavis, worked at Targeted Victory before serving as Hinson’s campaign manager in her 2023 congressional run. Lavis was previously an intern at AIPAC. Lavis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Hinson has received more than $100,000 from AIPAC and related pro-Israel PACs in 2026, and as an Iowa state representative supported legislation that prohibited the state from working with any companies that boycott Israel. 

Hinson’s political action committee has paid Targeted Victory more than $1.6 million this election cycle for digital consulting and ads — 27 percent of its total expenditures, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Israel’s deal with Targeted Communications is part of a major public relations push that has pumped more than $100 million into swaying public opinion, particularly among young conservatives, back toward Israel.

The post Ashley Hinson’s Digital Chief Oversees Firm Paid Millions to Push Israeli Propaganda appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump has spent the erratic waning years of his presidency leading his party into a political wilderness by waging a deeply unpopular war on Iran and driving the cost of living ever higher. Republicans who enjoy a governing trifecta have tried to distance themselves from the party’s decision-making and its leader, a once-animating force who has turned himself into a liability. Poll after poll says the same: Democrats are poised to take control of one or both houses of Congress — and spend the next two years thwarting Trump’s agenda.

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But after a primary season dominated by an ascendant left wing and a broader rejection of centrist politics, the question isn’t just whether Democrats win on Tuesday. It’s what kind of Democratic Party emerges on Wednesday morning. 

“I really like the socialism aspects,” said Gibrel Said, a supporter of Abdul El-Sayed at his closing rally in Detroit Monday night. In the marquee contest serving as a referendum on the Democratic Party’s future, the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee espouses progressive politics and has often been associated with the the left’s agenda-setting socialists, though he doesn’t identify as one. His race has been rocked by the kind of left-versus-right identity crisis that presents a perennial challenge for Democrats. 

“One, Medicare for All; two, how do we fund things that help us as constituents,” Said told The Intercept, ticking off things he appreciates about the candidate. Said, who lives in the Arab enclave of Dearborn, Michigan, especially praised El-Sayed’s willingness to buck party leadership and speak out on U.S.–Israel policy. “Instead of tiptoeing around the subject, he very adamantly says, hey there’s a genocide happening here, we shouldn’t send our money.”

Cycle after cycle, in state after state, an insurgent band of Democrats critical of the political establishment’s ties to corporate interests and its unflinching commitment to Israel has had to overcome the barriers erected by its own party’s centrist leadership. Both sides present themselves as the true representatives of working people: the centrists by arguing that more transformative ideas will scare off lower-information voters, the left by saying they represent the masses.

How much of this trickles down to actual voters? On Monday, The Intercept followed canvassers and spoke to voters in Michigan, Maine, and Texas, asking about which issues had permeated and taking the temperature of voter enthusiasm. Some rolled their eyes at the spats that have dominated the headlines, dismissing the idea that eleventh-hour backstabbing would make a difference. Others regurgitated right-wing misinformation. Many complained of too many campaign mailers.

“They’re wicked mean,” said Sharon McDonnell, a supporter of Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine. Speaking to The Intercept in the town of Yarmouth, she described one mailer that included a photo of Jackson chomping a cigar and describing him as “evil.” “It’s just nasty.”

In Maine, the party’s left flank seized power in the nominating process for the Democratic Senate candidate — then fought to hang onto it after onetime rising star Graham Platner flamed out after a sexual assault allegation (which he denies). With Jackson, a former state Senate leader, Maine now offers progressives one of two opportunities to test their message at the Senate level, where a candidate has to secure appeal statewide, not just in deep-blue House districts.

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The other is Michigan, where the intraparty battle is still raging. Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., demolished her past attempts at fence-mending when she endorsed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers on Sunday and abandoned El-Sayed, who beat Stevens in a Michigan primary that saw $30 million in outside spending from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

The dustup has had Democrats biting their nails and moderate party leaders making the cable news circuit to demand party discipline — this time, to scold a centrist. The party leads in the polls for 218 of the 435 seats up for grabs in the House of Representatives, but they need to perform well in seven key states — Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, in addition to Maine and Michigan — if they want to win the Senate. 

“I think she’s counterintuitively, perhaps, given people a reason to rally some more,” said Kathleen Britton, an El-Sayed supporter at the Detroit rally on Monday, of Stevens. “I really don’t think it’s gonna help Mike Rogers.”

Earlier that day, in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Detroit, a prominent Black supporter of El-Sayed preparing to knock on voters’ doors described Stevens’s endorsement as an “ego-driven statement.”

Mike Bland, the executive director of the Black Men Vote PAC, highlighted that Stevens made her public endorsement of Rogers in a Black church in Detroit. He doubted that Stevens, whose criticism of El-Sayed centers primarily on his skepticism of the U.S. relationship with the state of Israel, would be able to pull Black voters to Rogers, a conservative former House representative whose campaign has repeatedly peddled anti-Muslim tropes against El-Sayed.

“How can I say this without cursing? She used a Black church as a prop, and we have seen that time and time again,” Bland said. “Black folks aren’t stupid.”

Over the past month, El-Sayed has rallied with Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, the two most prominent Black politicians in America — and hardly radicals estranged from the establishment power center. At the same time that Stevens was making her endorsement of Rogers public, El-Sayed was attending a get-out-the-vote event at another church in Detroit. The two primary foes were supposed to appear together that day with Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C.

One of the Democrats’ most coveted Senate pickups didn’t present much of an opportunity for the left in the primary, but it has still been characterized by intraparty animosity.

In Texas, where both Democratic Senate primary contenders espoused relatively moderate politics, outgoing Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, has declined to campaign with state Rep. James Talarico, though she endorsed him after he beat her in the state’s March Democratic primary.

Talarico has been performing well with Latino voters, a massive voting bloc that helped fuel his primary victory. But Crockett — who, unlike Stevens, is Black — has suggested that Talarico has not done enough to excite Black voters, a demographic she carried in the primary. On a canvassing operation targeting Black voters in the Dallas–Fort Worth area on Monday, few Black Texans who spoke to The Intercept expressed excitement for Talarico. But most had already voted for him, saying they were motivated to do their civic duty. 

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Black voters frequently discussed concerns over affordability, gas prices, and homelessness. Canvassers told The Intercept they had heard some of those voters express concerns over their perception of Talarico’s policies toward transgender children, at times espousing blatant misinformation, such as the idea that Talarico supported arresting parents who refused to give their children gender-affirming surgeries. 

“ I don’t stand for that,” said voter Jermiah Robinson, referring to her belief that Talarico pushed “sex-change” surgery for minors. Like many voters, she cited the cost of living as her most pressing issue. Robinson said she would “want to vote for him if he stands by his words, and he’s actually like ‘Yeah, I’ll help out as far as prices and everything.’” 

Talarico appears to have improved his margins with Black voters in the final stretch. According to the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, Talarico is leading with 79 percent of the Black vote, signaling a significant increase in support from Black voters from just last month. The conventional wisdom suggests that he could barely ask for a better opponent than the scandal-plagued Republican candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. 

In 2015, Paxton was indicted on felony securities fraud charges in Texas, in a case that dragged on for roughly nine years, and ended with Paxton being required to do community service and pay restitution. And in 2023, the Texas House of Representatives voted across party lines to impeach him as attorney general for alleged corruption and retaliation against whistleblowers.

Scandal kept rocking the race for Senate in Maine, where longtime Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins faces her toughest reelection challenge yet from Jackson. Before Jackson, who lost a race this cycle for the state’s Democratic nomination for governor, there was Platner, hailed early as a working-class champion who faced a series of personal scandals in his successful primary campaign. There was the revelation of a Nazi tattoo that he claimed not to understand until last October. There were crudely worded Reddit posts and stories of cruelty from women he’d dated. One former girlfriend’s allegations of sexual assault ultimately ended his campaign — and set off a scramble to find a replacement that progressives ultimately won by elevating Jackson. 

By Monday, Mainers who spoke to The Intercept appeared exhausted by the lengthy, contentious, and expensive Senate race that has dominated the state.

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“There’s a lot of fatigue. People are tired of it,“ said Charlie Dingman, who chairs the state Democratic Party. “I have had some conversations at doors with people that have led me to think that the extremely negative and extremely untruthful ads may be backfiring.”

Tyler Echard, in Norway, said he’d already cast an absentee ballot for Democrats down the ticket. He was disgusted with a deluge of political mailers and eager to stop seeing them pile up on his doorstep.

“The amount of mailers we get — just mailers, not just handed at the door but in the mail — especially from the Republican side, the amount of money is probably more than I will make in my lifetime, spent in this election,” Echard said. “At some point, we gotta get legislation because money’s just gonna run everything into the ground. I ain’t got it, so I can’t influence it.”

Frustration with the status quo in Congress could spell the end for Collins’s 30-year career in the Senate. On Monday, a University of New Hampshire poll found Jackson leading Collins by 4 percentage points. And in September, Collins found herself thrust into a scandal of her own, when ProPublica revealed that the FBI anti-corruption squad was investigating an alleged pay-to-play scheme between Collins and a donor eager to secure government contracts.

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The Intercept later exposed that, alongside a series of campaign donations, defense contractors cozy with Collins had received lucrative carveouts in defense spending. (Collins has denied wrongdoing in all cases.)

But the incumbent senator has faced controversy and come out victorious before. And some Mainers doubt they’ll see change either way.

“I can’t vote for either side,” said a man, who declined to share his name with The Intercept, walking down a rural road in Norway with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. “You can’t trust neither of them.”

Noah Hurowitz reported from Yarmouth and Norway, Maine; Akela Lacy reported from Fort Worth, Texas; Matt Sledge reported from Detroit, Michigan.

The post If Democrats Win, Thank the Left appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump called him a “jihadist.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on a racist rant against Arabs. According to Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a mailer went out showing El-Sayed’s face next to the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.

“They are running the most bigoted, hateful, Islamophobic campaign I’ve ever seen,” McMorrow told a local TV outlet. McMorrow, who ran for the Democratic Senate nomination but dropped out before the August primary, is taking a far different tack than Rep. Haley Stevens, the Democratic primary runner-up who has spent the race’s final days painting El-Sayed as an angry antisemite and crossed party lines Sunday to endorse Republican contender Mike Rogers.

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Rogers has sought to portray El-Sayed as anti-American and repeatedly tried to tie his opponent to the Muslim Brotherhood. He insists the attacks have nothing to do with faith. But that is exactly how many observers see them, including Muslim Republicans who have been disgusted by the rhetoric.

As the election draws to a close, the Islamophobic attacks have taken a backseat to Stevens’s claims of antisemitism — most prominently concerning a PAC ad that connected high grocery prices to U.S. spending on Israeli military aid — and a personal feud between the former primary opponents. And some of El-Sayed’s allies worry that the Muslim and Arab-baiting attacks will work. One recent poll found that 38 percent of Michigan voters said they would be less likely to vote for a Muslim candidate.

Michigan’s Muslim and Arab organizers have not been taking the attacks lying down, however. In interviews last month, two prominent leaders in Dearborn’s Arab American community described widespread excitement over the opportunity to vote for the man who would be the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate.

“It very much feels like when President Obama was running and his whole campaign was around like hope. That’s what it feels like,” Layla Elabed, the organizing director at Arab Americans for Progress, told the Intercept on October 8.

Elabed, the sister of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., was one of the key movers in the Uncommitted movement, which urged Michigan voters to withhold their votes from Joe Biden during the 2024 primary in protest of his support for Israel’s war on Gaza. The movement succeeded in making a statement, but also drew criticism from centrist Democrats for allegedly fracturing party unity.

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Elabed’s current group is an evolution of the Uncommitted movement. Its canvassers have been knocking on doors to turn out support for El-Sayed and other candidates.

“I don’t think many people in Dearborn are surprised by Haley Stevens,” Elabed told The Intercept on Monday. “Arab American Democrats in Michigan have been sounding the alarm about her for years, warning our fellow Democrats about a pattern of putting political interests ahead of the people she was elected to represent.”

She believes the same coalition that came together for Uncommitted could help push El-Sayed over the top this election.

“Abdul has been able to really take a stand on all the issues that were really important to anti-war voters and anti-genocide voters,” she said. “It’s not a coincidence that that same coalition, that same base of Democratic voters are now all coming out to support us.”

Hers is not the only group seeking to mobilize Muslim and Arab voters, who make up a sizable slice of the Michigan electorate. The Arab American Political Action Committee has also endorsed El-Sayed. Its president, Osama Siblani, said there is widespread enthusiasm for El-Sayed in areas with dense Arab populations such as Dearborn.

Siblani compared El-Sayed’s potential victory to John F. Kennedy’s pathbreaking election as the first Catholic president.

“First of all, he’s qualified. Second of all, he’s saying the right things, he has a good agenda,” Siblani. “His opponent is an asshole. In addition to all of this, he is breaking the ceiling for our community and for other communities. That is a plus.”

The goal of the Arab and Muslim-baiting attacks from El-Sayed’s enemies is clear, according to Nazita Lajevardi, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

“Islamophobia is a tried and true strategy for garnering a candidate support and swaying the vote,” she said.

Yet it is also possible that the attacks on El-Sayed’s identity will lead to greater turnout in places like Dearborn, she said.

“I think scholarship would tell us that when political elites discriminate, that it does mobilize people into action. Past scholarship would say yes, it would, but it’s an open question,” she said.

Elabed agreed that the attacks are nothing new. “We’ve watched it play out time and time again,” she told The Intercept. Stevens’s about-face isn’t a major development, she said, “It’s that the rest of the Democratic Party is finally seeing what our communities have been saying all along. We weren’t wrong. We just weren’t being listened to.”

Siblani expressed a similar sentiment on Monday. “I’m not surprised, I’m disgusted,” he wrote of Stevens in a text message, attaching an emoji of a person vomiting.

Stevens’s choice to jump ship for the Rogers campaign appears to have galvanized El-Sayed’s base. His campaign announced a one-day fundraising record after his fellow Democrat pulled her endorsement on Sunday.

The post Abdul El-Sayed’s Race Has Been Defined by Islamophobia. Will It Be Determined by It? appeared first on The Intercept.

When a grand jury in Harris County, Texas, charged the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer behind the wheel last week, the indictment pointed to a broader pattern in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants and activists. The charge was assault with a deadly weapon; the weapon was the vehicle.

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, claimed Parra Hernandez ran in front of the government vehicle; surveillance footage of the incident shows him running away from the car moments before he is hit. (An attorney for the ICE officer accused of assault against Parra Hernandez told The Associated Press his client had not committed any crime.)

In the same month, an unmarked ICE vehicle speeding the wrong way down a one-way street in Long Beach, California, struck a bicycle ridden by Ricardo Gonzalez, whose daughter later said he was a U.S. citizen. An agent immediately drew their gun on Gonzalez, who was later hospitalized for his injuries. The government said the man was not struck, but video released by the New York Times showed the ICE vehicle swerving into the bicycle.

Three days later after the collision in Long Beach, Antonio Moreida stood in the street in Woodland, California, outside Sacramento, documenting an unmarked ICE vehicle when the black Chevy Tahoe accelerated toward him. When the SUV hit him, Moreida told a meeting at Woodland City Hall last week, he was knocked to the ground — and the driver of the Tahoe did not stop to check on him.

The Department of Homeland Security said Moreida jumped onto the hood of the unmarked car, but when video of the incident showed him standing in place, local police and the mayor publicly disputed ICE’s account.

Weaponized Vehicles

In the national conversation about ICE’s heavy-handed crackdown on immigrants across the country, much has been made of the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that immigrants and activists “weaponized” their vehicles against federal agents. After immigration officers shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was targeted by ICE, and community defender Renée Good in separate incidents, the government said the civilians had used their cars to attack agents — allegations that have not been borne out in criminal charges, or were called into question by witness accounts and video analysis.

What happened to Parra Hernandez, Gonzalez, and Moreida, however, was the opposite of what the government said about Good and Salgado Araujo: It was ICE agents who weaponized their vehicles against civilians.

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As the Trump administration ramped up deportations over the last year, federal agents have effectively turned their cars into massive, deadly blunt objects. Common tactics, known collectively as “offensive driving techniques,” include ramming the cars of immigrant targets and activists; “brake-checking” volunteers trying to observe ICE activity; and, in some cases, outright driving into civilians. The Intercept reviewed two dozen cases of ICE using vehicles against civilians in these ways, including multiple incidents where victims were hospitalized or even died from their injuries.

“Vehicles are another tool ICE agents are using with unchecked force, just like their guns, Tasers, and pepper spray,” said Hannah Stauss, co-director of Hands Off NYC, a group that opposes ICE’s presence in New York City. “ICE’s deranged use of vehicles effectively weaponizes them against our immigrant neighbors and rapid responders, and will continue to kill people. We are witnessing in real time the results of a federal agency being allowed to operate with impunity, in secrecy, and with unfettered violence.”

In a statement to The Intercept that compiled past responses to the incidents in this article, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, “ICE is instituting additional training including, crowd control measures, additional training for high-risk vehicle stops, a live-fire cover course for officer safety, and medical training.”

The spokesperson did not respond specifically to allegations about the incident involved Parra Hernandez; said Gonzalez was not struck by an ICE car; and blamed Moreida for the accident because he was in the roadway.

“Offensive Driving Techniques”

In federal policies and memos, the maneuvers used in the incidents reviewed by The Intercept, along with testimony from rapid responders, are referred to by federal agents as “offensive driving techniques.” They are part of a wider patten of aggressive driving by law enforcement officers across the country, but especially by federal agents with little accountability and nearly blanket backing from the Trump administration.

Last October, Leo Martinez was monitoring immigrations agents’ activity as a volunteer with VC Defensa, a community defense group in Ventura County, California, when an unmarked ICE car rammed his pickup truck. ICE agents arrested Martinez and later released him without charge.

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In March, they did it again: Three unmarked government vehicles rammed Martinez’s car as he sought to reverse away from them. The federal agents broke his window and dragged him out. Martinez, who was hospitalized from his injuries, was again released without charge. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond specifically to questions about the incidents involving Martinez.)

“They run stop signs, red lights, they’ll cut off complete intersections, and they rarely turn on their lights,” Martinez told The Intercept. “They’ll slam on their brakes in the middle of the freeway, in the middle of the street. Sometimes they’ll do sudden U-turns in the middle of nowhere and cut off traffic in both directions.”

When activists are monitoring federal agents, one of the most common ways for ICE to leverage their vehicles as physical threats is the “brake check,” a move where a car suddenly breaks to cause the car behind it to slow down — or slam into its rear bumper.

“Brake-checking” doesn’t appear in official guidelines as an “offensive driving technique” with good reason: It is considered to be illegal in all 50 states, covered by various statutes like reckless driving or other anti-road-rage laws. Yet VC Defensa volunteers, who like Martinez monitor ICE activity, said that when they follow ICE vehicles to alert the community with horn-honking, they keep a distance of two to three car lengths because federal agents so frequently brake-check volunteers.

Federal agents use “offensive driving techniques” so often in Ventura County that VC Defensa volunteers sometimes identify the unmarked cars by the body damage that characterizes them.

Customs and Border Protection, another agency that, like ICE, is under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, expanded its agents’ discretion and ability to use these techniques during abduction operations after President Donald Trump took office for a second term.

A previous 2023 Customs and Border Protection pursuit policy largely prohibited officers from boxing in vehicles or making vehicle contact with another vehicle in motion. A partially redacted 2025 CBP directive gives officers broader discretion to use offensive driving techniques and ignore traffic laws.

“Most federal agencies are not well trained in police-citizen interactions, traffic stops, and pursuits,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology and criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina who helped Customs and Border Protection rewrite their car-chase policy under the Biden and Obama administrations.

In December, ICE agents in Elgin, Illinois, chased a Venezuelan man until his car and the ICE vehicles crashed. State investigators found the ICE agents likely conducted an “unskilled precious immobilization technique (‘PIT maneuver’) and lost control of the vehicle.” (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the target of the raid rammed an ICE vehicle into a tree.)

In January, Christian Molina, a U.S. citizen, was preparing to pull over for an ICE traffic stop in Minneapolis when the agents rammed the back of his car, injuring his back. The agents said they would pay for the damage, but left without providing contact information. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond specifically to questions about the incident involving Molina.)

In June, agents conducted a high-speed chase through a residential neighborhood of Chicago, blowing through intersections until finally ramming their target’s car. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed the target of the immigration enforcement action for the accident because he fled from ICE.)

“It’s disheartening to see some sort of federal agents or law enforcement driving so aggressively in a residential area,” one neighbor told Block Club Chicago. “I have a kid who’s two and we go out for walks all the time. We could have been crossing the street when they came through the intersection.”

High-Speed Chases

Following the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in July, the Department of Homeland Security ordered a temporary halt to traffic stops.

The day the directive was issued, ICE chased a group of roofers in Texas, blowing through a stop sign and over a speed bump without sirens. A mother driving her son to the theater was forced to swerve into a ditch to avoid a collision.

“They speeded right next to me,” the mother told the Texas Observer. “They hit the speed bump so bad that, when they got in front of me at high speed, I had to go to the right.”

If she had not swerved, she said, “they would have hit me.”

Some of these car chases have turned deadly in the very places where local police are restricted from chasing suspects because of the attendant dangers.

In February, agents undertook a high-speed chase in pursuit of Oscar Vasquez Lopez outside of Savannah, Georgia. Vasquez Lopez’s car struck a teacher, killing her.

The Savannah Police Department only allows pursuits when the suspect has committed or is attempting to commit a forcible felony, and the risk of not capturing someone outweighs the risk of the chase. Vasquez Lopez had no criminal record, only a civil deportation order from 2024.

Two immigration car chases in New Jersey, where police face similar restrictions at the statewide level, resulted in hospitalizations. (In the Texas case, the Georgia case, and the New Jersey case, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed the target of the immigration actions for causing unsafe conditions by fleeing.)

“They are not required to follow local agency policies (the same as other agencies), but they must be held responsible for their actions under state and federal law,” Alpert, the criminology professor, said. “The failure to evaluate these behaviors in a full, complete and transparent manner leaves us all in the dark.”

Earlier this month, the AP reported on an internal memo to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division that banned agents from conducting high-speed car chases. The directive still allows trained agents to make traffic stops and undertake offensive driving maneuvers.

Ramming Pedestrians

ICE agents’ vehicles are not just recklessly pursuing and ramming vehicles driven by who they thought were targets for immigration enforcement. In multiple filmed interactions, agents have driven into pedestrian rapid responders and protesters.

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In Woodland, California, ICE agents crashed into Moreida as he sought to collect their license plate information. After a major workplace raid in Los Angeles in June 2025, a news helicopter filmed the moment a protester walked in front of several ICE vehicles. One slowly sped up until it knocked him to the ground.

“It’s a disproportionate use of force. An individual is not going to win a fight with a vehicle,” Alpert, the criminology professor, said. “I’ve never seen any state or local law enforcement ever use a vehicle properly to hit or to run into a civilian.”

In other incidents, federal agents have weaponized their vehicles against crowds of activists. (Asked about the protests incidents mentioned in this article, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed “anti-ICE agitators.”)

In the aftermath of an ICE shooting this month in the New York City neighborhood of Marble Hill, immigration agents were seeking to move a man with a gunshot wound — whose car, with his 5-year-old son in the back, smashed into a concrete barrier during the incident — from a hospital to a detention facility. As government vehicles left the hospital in a speeding caravan, a bicycle was nearly hit by an federal agent in a black vehicle, which honked its horn, according to video of the incident. In another social media post, an ICE agent in an unmarked vehicle continued driving even with six protesters walking in front of it.

In July 2025, in San Francisco, after ICE clashed with protesters while moving detainees from the immigration courthouse to unmarked vehicles, several protesters clung to the hood of the car until they were physically thrown off when the vehicle sharply accelerated.

“I absolutely worry about ICE agents hurting people or killing people with these aggressive driving maneuvers,” said a New York rapid responder. “In order to avoid having their movements in vehicles documented, ICE agents will dramatically accelerate far beyond safe speeds for a dense urban environment like New York City.”

The organizer, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from the government, reported that agents drive at high speeds into oncoming traffic, run red lights, and abruptly turn without signaling. They rarely use emergency lights or sirens. These tactics align with the pattern of behavior described by Martinez in California — but in a city where rapid responders and neighbors are more often on foot or riding bicycles, not in their own vehicles.

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When ICE agents brought a detainee to a Brooklyn hospital after a violent arrest in May, hundreds protested outside the hospital. One TikTok video from the night captured the moment an unmarked ICE vehicle drove into several gathered people, accelerating sharply until they leapt out of the way.

“Given the frequency with which these agents are engaging in aggressive maneuvers to try and lose rapid responders or prevent documentation of their movements,” the organizer said, “it is honestly only a matter of time until an ICE agent seriously injuries or kills a cyclist or pedestrian in New York City.”

The post “Offensive Driving”: ICE’s Deadly Weaponization of Vehicles Against Civilians appeared first on The Intercept.

Several observers familiar with the case said the grand jury is likely related to the extradition effort.

The refusal of the grand jury witnesses to testify takes on added importance because the U.S. is pursuing Chambers’s extradition based on a criminal complaint, not an indictment, according to his Spanish lawyers. The criminal affidavit, signed by a single FBI agent, includes three charges related to his support for pro-Palestine causes.

The distinction, critics of the extradition case say, highlights how the case is hung on one agent’s complaint, which remains under seal, rather than a grand jury investigation to determine if the state had sufficient evidence to indict Chambers.

“The complaint is not only vague and weak, it’s not normal,” said Aitor Martínez, one of Chambers’s Spain-based lawyers. “In 20 years of practice, I’ve never seen a U.S. extradition request based on a criminal complaint.”

Martínez pointed to a statement from a summary of the complaint contained in an international arrest order reviewed by The Intercept and directed at Spanish authorities that says, “If Chambers’ extradition to the US is granted, another charging document called an indictment will be sought from a federal grand jury.”

Xavier de Janon, the executive director of the U.S.-based National Lawyers Guild and who is not working directly on the Chambers case, said, “Seeking an extradition without there being an indictment puts the cart before the horse.”

“If he is extradited under a criminal complaint,” said de Janon, “he can’t even fully challenge the charges, because he hasn’t been indicted.”

The State Department referred questions to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment.

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Two of the three charges underpinning the extradition request against Chambers — riot and incitement to riot — are related to allegations that he helped fund a late-2023 protest in Merrimack, New Hampshire, against an Israeli weapons manufacturer, according to the summary of the complaint contained in the arrest order. The summary says Chambers provided funds for demonstrators used to purchase materials such as smoke bombs and to help cover protesters’ legal fees.

The third charge is international money laundering related to more than $7 million he transferred to bank accounts in Tunisia, where he was living in 2024. The Trump administration, according to the international arrest order, says the money was used to fund Hamas, which is a proscribed terror group in the U.S. The order does not say he is charged with material support for terrorism.

Chambers’s family and supporters and multiple representatives of Club Africain, a Tunisian soccer club, have said the money was used to pay the club’s debts and related expenditures such as training grounds. The club’s fan base has long supported Palestinians.

Grand Jury Refusal

Two women who participated in the 2023 protest against a factory operated by the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems recently announced their intentions not to cooperate with a November 4 grand jury hearing where they have been summoned as witnesses.

“If they are being summoned now, this suggests that the grand jury seems to be linked to Chambers’s case,” said Martínez, his lawyer. “It seems like a fishing expedition against him.”

Kira Kelley, an attorney for the two women, said, “Context clues suggest this is about Fergie.”

If the pair don’t answer questions from a federal prosector before the New Hampshire federal grand jury, they could risk a possible jail sentence for contempt.

Nonetheless, the two women — Bridget Shergalis and Sophie Ross — shared a statement with The Grayzone Thursday announcing their intention to refuse to testify. In an interview on the same day with The Intercept, the women recounted being under investigation for a year over the protest and being threatened with felony charges that carried potential sentences of decades in prison.

Shergalis and Ross said they turned down several deals for their cooperation. By the end of the ordeal, they were found guilty of misdemeanor offenses and received 60-day jail sentences.

Following that experience, said Ross, the pair decided to reject the subpoena to testify before a grand jury.

“It was an easy decision for both of us,” Ross said.

Shergalis and Ross are slated to testify on Wednesday, at which time they plan to assert their Fifth Amendment rights and decline to answer any questions from the federal prosecutor.

At that point, a hearing before a judge may be scheduled, to determine whether to hold Shergalis and Ross in civil contempt, which could result in up to 18 months of prison, according to Kelley.

Martínez, who also worked on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s defense team, said the decision by Shergalis and Ross recalled that of Chelsea Manning, who twice refused to testify against Assange before a grand jury, serving time in prison in both instances. 

“It’s like Chelsea Manning, years later,” he said.

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Shergalis and Ross decided to go public with their plans after speaking with organizers behind the recently-launched NSPM-7 Defendants Union, a nationwide project for protesters targeted by the Trump administration’s efforts to criminalize dissent as laid out in last year’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7. The document, part of a broader effort to paint left-wing activism as terrorism, directs the FBI to go after “violent and terroristic activities” associated with “anti-fascism.”

The NSPM-7 Defendants Union is centered around signing a pledge to follow practices such as not cooperating with law enforcement, adopting collective legal strategy when possible, and publicly announcing those strategies — a goal that runs against the secrecy surrounding federal indictments.

While secrecy benefits prosecutors before a grand jury, said Shergalis, “It’s good for all of us to be as transparent as possible.”

Shergalis, Ross, and Chambers have each signed the pledge, and the grand jury decision appears to be the first public test case of the union’s ideas.

“We should celebrate people across the country deciding to assert their legal rights boldly against the federal government and its NSPM-7 policy,” said de Janon, of the National Lawyers Guild. “We’re seeing NSPM-7 result in unprecedented levels of prosecution against protesters.”

“This Is Bad Faith”

Meanwhile, Chambers remains imprisoned in Madrid, as the Spanish courts decide whether to grant the U.S. extradition request or not.

Chambers has applied for asylum in Spain and, if his application is granted, he would be released and the U.S. extradition request would be denied. He cannot be extradited until the asylum case runs its course.

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A self-described communist and anti-imperialist, Chambers is heir of the Cox family, owners of Atlanta-based telecom giant Cox Enterprises. As part of a settlement in which his family severed ties with him at the time, he sold stock back to them in mid-2023 worth about $250 million.

Since then, he has been funding an estimated 100 humanitarian and left-wing projects in 20 countries, according to his partner, actress and activist Stella Schnabel, including aid projects in the Occupied Gaza Strip.

As for the Trump administration’s case, Martínez, the Spanish attorney, underscored how the criminal complaint against Chambers raises charges related to the protest against the New Hampshire factory for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, but leaves out how federal prosecution efforts ended up with minor convictions for Shergalis, Ross, and other activists.

“The people who carried out the acts received a minor sentence,” he said. “They leave this out. This is bad faith.”

“Why don’t they tell this to Spain?” he said. “It’s likely that Spain won’t turn someone over based on actions that got 60-day sentences.”

Martínez said Chambers’s opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza is the real reason behind the case. “I believe this is part of the persecution against pro-Palestine protest. The U.S. has even sanctioned the International Criminal Court because of this.”

Of Chambers’s case, Martínez said, “This is one more attack.”

The post Fergie Chambers Faces Extradition to U.S. Despite Never Being Indicted, Says Lawyer appeared first on The Intercept.

Michigan Democratic Senate primary loser Rep. Haley Stevens on Sunday released a video that will place her in an ignominious legacy of establishment Democrats who act against the collective good.

And, like others on the list, she did it for the sake of one thing only: Israel.

In the video — filmed on her phone, in her car, and at an awkward angle — Stevens announced her endorsement of Republican candidate Mike Rogers against the Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Stevens had previously called Rogers a “rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda.”

“I don’t belong in Abdul’s campaign,” said Stevens about El-Sayed, the candidate who currently enjoys 95 percent of Democratic voters’ support in Michigan, according to polls.

Stevens’s defection follows a pathetic, Islamophobic, and chaotic effort over the last weeks to suggest that El-Sayed must make greater overtures to Israel supporters.

Stevens now follows in the footsteps of other conservative Democrats who have shown an extreme disregard for the welfare of people in this country and beyond.

We might recall former Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona, who left the Democratic Party while still in office and notoriously delivered a dramatic thumbs down and curtsy when voting against a raised minimum-wage provision during the height of the Covid pandemic. Sinema and fellow then-Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia also joined with Republicans to effectively tank major voting rights legislation in 2022.

And, of course, there is the entire Senate career of conservative pro-Israel fanatic, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who still remains a nominal Democrat. Fetterman offers a consistent master class in dangerous extremism and should be seen as a profound political liability by his own party.

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It is, after all, so-called moderates like Stevens who are the radicals. As writer Eoin Higgins noted, an array of Democrats have revealed themselves more willing to see Republicans win than allow the party’s left-wing flank — or, more to the point, criticism of Israel’s genocide — to gain further ground.

And while there is little political agreement between the right and left wings of the Democratic Party on a whole array of issues, defeating Republicans, particularly Donald Trump’s Republican Party, was at least the stated goal of even the most conservative of Democrats.

To so openly fail on even those basic electoral terms should be the very definition of a political liability for a party.

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Meanwhile, left-wing candidates running on popular policies with support networks built from the ground up have again and again been treated as the primary internal enemy by the party establishment.

Shifting Winds

Stevens had perhaps thought she could rely on this pattern. Numerous powerful Democrats and Israel apologists like Reps. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., were slow to get behind El-Sayed and have continued to pick fights over his policies on Israel.

Stevens’s Rogers endorsement was not, however, met with the tolerance that Democratic rightward lurches have typically enjoyed. In a bellwether moment, another strong supporter of Israel, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called her endorsement of the Republican candidate “a despicable betrayal.”

The condemnation is the correct response of a party leader to a member taking active steps to thwart a crucial Senate race. It may not mark a shift for Schumer away from his own reliable conservatism and support for Israel’s genocide, but it nonetheless reflects a shifting political landscape when a figure like Schumer sees greater political expediency in standing with a progressive, Israel-critical, Muslim candidate, than with the radical centrist wrecker with whom Schumer is more ideologically aligned.

Stevens’s theatrics are unlikely to make a significant difference to Tuesday’s election results. Voters who elevate support for the Israeli state over human lives in Palestine and in the U.S. were already not going to vote for El-Sayed.

It’s unclear, then, who would be swayed by Stevens’s erratic actions two days before the election. In a close race like this, however, pulling any support away from the Democratic candidate reveals the extremism of the purported center.

We can welcome what looks to be a long overdue shift in political common sense and hope that positions like Stevens’s are seen as a liability before they reach their most extreme iterations.

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Yet it shouldn’t take so-called centrists quite literally choosing Trumpian Republicans over progressive and left-wing Democrats to make clear who the real threat to the Democratic Party is — if winning elections and delivering policies to improve the lives of constituents is, in fact, their goal.

It certainly is for El-Sayed. He has dismissed Stevens’s performance as a distraction.

“None of this matters,” he told reporters on Sunday, and insisted instead on speaking about the state of schools, healthcare, and the cost of food for Michigan residents.

The post Radical Centrists Like Haley Stevens Are the Real Extremists in the Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.

“Even just rumors of [ICE at the polls] are going to spread fear. That’s not what we want,” said Daniela Padilla, deputy director at Texas for All, a statewide coalition of organizations working on democracy and justice issues. “Even your reporting around, ‘We’re watching for ICE at the polls’ — it could scare voters.” 

In Texas, a 40 percent Latino state where a longtime Republican grip on power now finds itself in question, there are real concerns that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents could pop up in targeted communities to make people afraid to go out and vote on Tuesday. But while the possibility of election interference has been discussed as one of several “big ticket items” of this year’s midterms, Padilla said, “the biggest threat that we face in Texas this year is voter suppression.”

That suppression can take many forms. In Tarrant County, for example, where local officials closed 92 polling locations, reports from early voting indicated some election officials wrongly turned away eligible voters. More than fearing ICE would actually approach the polls, Padilla and several organizers working on election integrity and voting rights in Texas told The Intercept they were worried that journalists amplifying the Trump administration’s stated plans to “surround the polls” with ICE and federal agents could function as an inadvertent form of voter suppression.

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Federal and state law prohibits federal immigration agents from being inside polling sites and bar any form of voter intimidation. Those laws haven’t stopped the Trump administration and its allies from threatening to deploy ICE and military personnel around the country during elections. In August, the Department of Justice announced that it planned to send at least 1,000 federal monitors to oversee midterm voting, prompting multiple states to assert they would not let them  inside polling locations. As states like Maine prepared to respond to the federal presence at the polls, the DOJ claimed to Newsweek it “never said” it would send federal law enforcement to the polls.

“The Trump administration has been spreading fear for months, refusing to say that they will not send ICE to the polls,” said Emily French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “I think that the main function of this discussion around ICE at the polls from the Trump administration is scaring people into staying home on Election Day.”

According to Brianna Brown, executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, disinformation efforts are a common voter-suppression tactic in Texas. “So we’re trying to reassure people it’s safe to vote,” she said.

Texas is home to one of the most dramatic potential Senate upsets in the country, with Democratic state Rep. James Talarico leading in the polls over the state’s scandal-plagued Republican attorney general Ken Paxton in a race that could see Texas end up with a Democratic senator for the first time since the ’90s. And the 32 million-person state has enough voter suppression strategies even without ICE in the picture, Brown said, pointing to a 2021 bill that banned drive-through voting, weakened protections for disabled voters, and gave more power to poll watchers appointed on behalf of a candidate or political party. 

“Texas is just like a perfect storm,” Brown said. 

When ICE showed up at a polling site in San Antonio in May — marking the first known case of ICE at the polls in the country during this year’s primaries — the county sheriff kicked the agents out. Even then, it did not appear that the federal agents were targeting someone in the process of voting; they had arrived at the scene shortly after state police, with whom they work closely, pulled someone over in the polling site’s parking lot.

That day, staff at the Texas Organizing Project and a group of civil and voting rights organizations working as part of the Texas Election Protection coalition helped coordinate outreach to the local sheriff to get ICE removed from the site.

The state coalition is part of a nationwide effort to protect this year’s elections from interference — federal or otherwise. In Texas, the Lawyers’ Committee and several other groups including the Barbara Jordan Leadership Institute, Common Cause Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project have been training people to help make sure voters know their rights on Election Day and that they report any instances of voter intimidation — whether an eligible voter is wrongly turned away or someone spots ICE — to a national hotline.

“We want to inform people, but we don’t want to scare them from coming to the polls,” said Khanay Turner-Osborne, executive director of the Barber Jordan Leadership Institute. She said she hasn’t heard much concern about ICE showing up around polling sites in Tarrant County, where she’s based and where people can vote at any polling site in the county. But still, for voters in hotspots of ICE activity and other forms of voter suppression, the group has told them to consider voting at a different eligible site, she said. 

The group wants to help people prepare, Turner-Osborne said. “But I don’t want it to be in a way that deters people from voting.” 

The post Warnings About ICE at the Polls Risk Their Own Kind of Voter Suppression appeared first on The Intercept.

Imperial ambitions are ever-shifting under President Donald Trump. Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba are oftentimes spoken about as one continuous train of complete victories and soon-to-be-complete-victories. With the midterms fast approaching, and the date for an apparent telegraphed return to the Iran war on its heels, talk of easily overthrowing regimes has returned, if it ever truly left.

At a rally in Florida last Friday, Trump laid out his grand vision, which he promised would come to pass once the Islamic Republic is neutralized as a threat to the world: “We’re going to come back from Iran. Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They’ll raise up their hands, and then we’re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal.”

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the descendant of Cuban immigrants who left under President Fulgencio Batista (though Rubio later tried to claim his parents fled Castro, who came to power three years later), has long put overthrowing the Communist government in Havana at the top of his agenda, with the hope of replicating the relative ease of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Rubio turned some heads last Friday when he publicly posted on X that those seeking “to create positive change in Cuba” could “seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”

The post was widely met with bewilderment (Bloomberg’s White House correspondent wrote: “Checked like four times that this was real”), but U.S. officials and members of Congress also shared the post, elevating the public call for collaboration. Recruiting in public might come across as strange and out of character to a public that imagines the CIA recruiting secret agents and informants through clandestine channels or hidden websites, as the agency had done to try and recruit agents inside Iran under Bush and Obama.

But public appeals of this kind are not wholly new. Under the Biden administration, the CIA recruited collaborators inside Russia via a public Telegram channel, as well as publishing videos on social media hoping to recruit Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean assets.

This kind of overt recruitment stems from the difficulties Western intelligence agencies face against adversaries who have built sophisticated surveillance networks of their own. A CIA official told ABC News in May 2025, “in today’s world of [universal technical surveillance], we can’t recruit sources the same way that we did 20 years ago, probably the same way you did 10 years ago.” This has not only affected intelligence operations targeting Beijing, but also Tehran and Havana, where both the U.S. and Israel’s lack of on-the-ground connections and limited official presence has led the CIA and the Mossad to try to recruit willing informants online.

While these limitations may govern the particulars of this strategy, those in power in their respective countries may not see it as evidence of constraints, but instead as evidence of the power of their new strategy: boasting about their national power, rather than keeping it behind closed doors where it supposedly remains useless. After all, what is the use of a deterrent if nobody knows it was you?

The scale of these public appeals, despite having started under Biden, has exploded under the second Trump term, but these moves were arguably preceded by Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to bring the Mossad’s operations much more into the public sphere. The Israeli prime minister’s bragging about numerous cyberattacks targeting Iran’s nuclear program in the late 2010s began to precipitate a shift in public discussion of the Mossad’s work, with many Netanyahu allies, like then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, praising the fact that Iran could now “know it is exposed and that Israel can reach anywhere in the Islamic Republic.” A former deputy director of the Mossad said after the unveiling of Iran’s stolen nuclear archive that Netanyahu’s move “goes against our nature,” and that “the prime minister insisted on publicizing this.”

Netanyahu’s pick in 2021 for the director of the Mossad, David Barnea, has been credited with institutionalizing that change, shifting the secretive intelligence agency’s operations toward appealing to larger masses, and reportedly concerning Mossad veterans who were shocked by the publicizing of agents inside Iran. Casting Israel as a superpower capable of exerting its power anywhere has become a popular refrain under Netanyahu. In an interview with “60 Minutes,” one Mossad officer said of the 2024 pager attacks in Lebanon, which injured more than 2,000 people, that “they are walking proof of our superiority all around the Middle East,” with another officer saying the operation’s complexity and success demonstrated “the world is our stage.”

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The U.S. has also gotten in the habit of flexing its superpower status under Trump, declaring the nation’s intent to conquer places like Greenland and Canada, to steal the natural resources of Venezuela and Iran to fill American coffers, and to openly and unabashedly place the Western Hemisphere under a Washingtonian protectorate known as the “Donroe Doctrine.” Rubio declared in Greece in early October, speaking in terms of civilizational battle against the backdrop of the Acropolis, that “we choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.”

Openly siccing the CIA on foreign adversaries and ICE on domestic ones has been part of that strategy of embracing imperial fervor at home and abroad. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and a private security contractor who remains influential in Trump world, said he was “jealous” of the pager attacks and publicly urged the CIA to take a lesson from the Mossad, saying “we should be getting those kinds of results.”

While both countries have openly sought deep intelligence penetration in adversarial nations, there are limitations to the power of clandestine and overt operations, even by superpowers and wannabes. While the CIA asserted its power in May by openly having its director meet with Cuban officials in Havana to demand “fundamental changes” in return for relief from economic strangulation, the agency’s history of attempts to overthrow the Communist Cuban government are as storied as they are unsuccessful. Earlier hopes for Iran to be as quick and as clean as taking control of Venezuela’s government were dashed early on in the conflict, with the war that was supposed to only take a few weeks now all but certain to extend past the midterm elections for another devastating round.

Even if the war with Iran ends so easily that American ships are able to go through Cuba on the way back ready for more, both outside analysts and even internal U.S. intelligence assessments do not see as easy a way to overthrow the Communist state. The New York Times reported in August that American intelligence sources indicate it could be a situation closer to Iran, where even if Raúl Castro (who has held no official position in the country since 2021) were captured, “few pragmatic officials” are likely to take power in his stead.

While Cuba’s military lacks the kind of advanced equipment Iran has, and shows of readiness (like with Venezuela) are no indication of a country’s actual willingness to fight a protracted campaign, Cuba’s military structure is similar to Iran’s in that it is based on decentralization and redundancies in leadership. In addition, Cuba has a political power structure that, also similar to Iran, is not actually based around a single individual, despite popular claims to the contrary.

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Despite Trump’s constant bluster about the miracle of being able to take out Maduro without a single American death, the brazenness of that operation, and the openness with which the negotiations with Iran have been deceptive, appear to have had lessons for the Cuban leadership. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in June: “All these elements create a lot of distrust in the Cuban people when it comes to conducting any type of negotiation. We continue to express our willingness for dialogue, but it has to be a dialogue between equals, without pressure and with respect for our sovereignty.” American officials have yet to internalize that sentiment. Discussing Cuba in March, Trump joyfully mused: “Whether I free it, take it, I think, I could do anything I want with it.” At the time, he was saying similar things about Iran.

The post The CIA Is Resorting to an Open Casting Call for Would-Be Cuban Assets appeared first on The Intercept.

Halloween weekend is the last chance for centrist Democrats to stop the nightmare they fear most: Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, who could be the first Muslim in the Senate. 

The Michigan Democrat’s campaign came under pressure from party moderates days out from the general election to denounce an ad produced by The Young Turks presenter Cenk Uygur and his Rebellion PAC. El-Sayed and his campaign were not involved in the production or distribution of the ad, which tied rising domestic prices to U.S. financial backing of the Israel military. But on Thursday, the campaign made the conciliatory gesture of distancing itself.

For centrists, it still wasn’t enough.

Rather than take the win, Haley Stevens, the House member who lost to El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate in August, used that condemnation on Friday as a springboard for a scathing denouncement of her former opponent, framed as a “celebration” of her magnanimous decision to campaign for El-Sayed this weekend alongside Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C. — and laying out conditions for her support with just a few days to go. 

In the statement, in which Stevens assigned herself the role as spokeswoman for Michigan’s Black and Jewish communities — Stevens herself is a white Protestant — she all but called El-Sayed an antisemite and a bigot attempting to cozy up to the worst of the far right. 

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“I have learned from Democratic Party leaders and emissaries, as reported in the news media, that Dr. El-Sayed has heard the deep concerns of the Jewish community and is now, for the first time in this campaign, formally condemning that ad for what it is,” Stevens wrote. “That is why I accepted Congressman Clyburn’s invitation to appear with Abdul on Sunday.”

Stevens’s eleventh-hour ratfuck came after her fiancé Jason Turkish, a political donor who supported incumbent Maine Republican Susan Collins this cycle, as well as other politicians of both parties, announced he’d vote for the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, on Tuesday. On Friday night, Turkish told TMZ that his fiancee might join him if El-Sayed didn’t accede to her list of demands.

Establishment Democrats see El-Sayed, and the politics he represents, as an existential threat. It’s not his rather anodyne liberalism in domestic policy — his policy portfolio isn’t far from that of party stalwart Elizabeth Warren — but El-Sayed’s opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians that’s the issue. It’s a major problem for the entrenched, centrist Democrats who have controlled the party for decades and have tamped down any dissent on this issue. 

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Recent polling is likely motivating efforts to ding the El-Sayed campaign. Senate polling from The New York Times/Siena University this week showed South Carolina in a dead heat — an absolute shocker — with Minnesota comfortably in the Democratic corner. CNN polling published on Thursday gave Democrats leads in Texas and Michigan and toss-ups in Maine and Kansas. 

With a Senate majority on the horizon, centrists need to enforce discipline and regain control. AIPAC is down, but not out; the lobbying group still has a hold on the party, even as voters are moving away from pro-genocide policies. 

Taking El-Sayed down would be a show of force to keep donors and the party’s right wing happy. If Democrats can win the Senate without him, it would be all the better.

But the effort may be backfiring as a faction of party elites, led by popular former President Barack Obama, are putting their muscle behind the El-Sayed campaign. Obama has been a steady presence in Michigan, and Clyburn will rally for the candidate on Sunday at the aforementioned event that Stevens was set to attend. 

Anger is also spreading among party members in the state.

“I have no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing,” Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan state senator who placed third in the August primary, told CNN Friday night. “This is a moment where we have to recognize the stakes.”

Stevens — who also demanded El-Sayed pull an ad showing far-right broadcaster Tucker Carlson saying he would “never” support the Republican in the race, Rogers — seems undeterred. 

Given an inch by the campaign’s willingness to publicly mend fences, Stevens took it several miles, using that ad as a way of implying that El-Sayed was, at best, disinterested in the concerns of Black Michiganders.

This last-minute blitz comes after months of attacks on El-Sayed by centrist Democrats, both before and after his primary win. The smears have been normalized and facilitated by a number of Democrats eager to stay on good terms with the party’s powerful but increasingly marginalized pro-Israel wing. El-Sayed’s connection to the streamer Hasan Piker, who helped get out the vote in the primary, has been a direct and implied slam on the campaign for over half a year from other members of the party. 

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Thursday called opposition to Israel’s existence as an apartheid ethnostate “more than concerning, it’s wrong,” on Donny Deutsch’s podcast, adding, “This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress.” On CNN Wednesday, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — a consistent pro-Israel voice — declined to directly endorse El-Sayed by name. 

Right-wing Democrats aren’t stupid. They know their influence over the party is at a historic low. The genocide in Gaza has pushed the base away from supporting Israel, perhaps permanently. Supermajorities of Democrats oppose the occupation and sympathize with Palestinians. 

But the party’s donor class still backs Israel to the hilt and is fomenting a war-on-terror-style Islamophobic bigotry toward Muslims. As Perry Bacon noted on Thursday in The New Republic, party elites attacked then-candidate for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani throughout 2025, then picked up where they left off with El-Sayed, the next prominent Muslim Democrat running for office, in 2026. 

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The same Democrats who indulge in the attacks on El-Sayed are making hay out of rejecting more openly bigoted attacks from the likes of President Donald Trump and Rogers. Rep. Dan Goldman — an outgoing pro-Israel Democrat who jumped on the Condemn El-Sayed bandwagon earlier this week — called Republican attacks on El-Sayed “Islamaphobia” [sic] on Thursday; Booker did the same. And Pelosi, just days after her comments on Deutsch’s show, urged Democrats to vote for El-Sayed.

Voters don’t seem very interested in the back and forth. In a Marist poll of Michiganders released October 21, 95 percent of the state’s Democrats said they support El-Sayed. There’s no split in the party at the state level with respect to the nominee; the fight is at a higher, ideological level with a national stage. 

As for El-Sayed, he seems done with Stevens and focused on the election. That rally on Sunday? Stevens isn’t wanted there, Politico reported, as the El-Sayed campaign is making clear it would be a distraction. In a statement released Friday evening, the candidate said he is intent on fighting for affordability, defeating the GOP, and making sure the Senate seat stays blue. 

“That should be the priority for all of us right now,” El-Sayed wrote. “So while Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago, let’s all focus on the task at hand: that’s beating Mike Rogers, holding Trump accountable, and getting money out of politics, putting money in pockets, and passing Medicare for All.”

Washing his hands of the wrecker behavior Stevens is engaging in at the final stretch of the campaign is a smart move for El-Sayed. After Tuesday, the Democratic Party should do the same for anyone who indulged in and encouraged it and present a united front against Trump. There’s no room for anyone more interested in keeping their increasingly untenable right-wing ideology beyond voters’ reproach — even if that means losing.

The post Centrist Democrats Would Rather Lose the Senate Than Win With El-Sayed appeared first on The Intercept.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — When it opened in early 2024, Engage Men’s Health Clinic served as a free, one-stop shop for sexual health, gender-affirming medical care, and HIV prevention, testing, and treatment. Located within a short distance of seven universities, it was a place where many college students came before “they’d even had sex for the first time,” a former worker told The Intercept. This made Engage a “high-impact” clinic for distribution of the HIV prevention drug PrEP. 

The building, on a tree-lined stretch of Reserve Street in Johannesburg, was adorned with the logo for the President’s Plan For AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR; a rainbow-colored mural of Simon Tseko Nkoli, the gay anti-apartheid activist who helped start one of Africa’s first Pride celebrations and who died of AIDS in 1998; and a sign for USAID saying the site was a gift “from the American people.”

Today, it would be very hard to get help here, despite the welcoming-but-outdated signage. The clinic, once staffed full-time by professionals, closed abruptly during the first hours of the second Trump administration. Its replacement, an unrelated volunteer clinic called USpace, is open a mere four hours a week. They can do HIV tests here. But they have no HIV treatment, HIV prevention, or gender-affirming medication to distribute. 

South Africans account for about a fifth of the 41 million people living with HIV around the world. Out of a population of nearly 64 million, some 8 million people in South Africa are living with HIV, which is roughly 1 in 8. Managing their healthcare is a matter of international concern and requires global coordination and an immense local network. In a nation with such high rates of HIV, public health workers can’t just wait for people to walk into clinics; they must proactively go to them. 

Yet over the last year and a half, this crucial work has been stymied. By Jacqueline Pienaar’s count, HIV prevention groups have lost track of approximately 20,000 people with HIV in the Johannesburg and Pretoria region alone since U.S. President Donald Trump came back to the White House. “It used to be if someone didn’t show up to get their medication, you’d go to them,” said Pienaar, a principal investigator and global health specialist at the Aurum Institute, an NGO that offers medical care and contact tracing for the region’s massive HIV-positive population. 

For years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded her work. Many of her patients were homeless, unemployed, and extremely poor. If they are unaccounted for and unmedicated, their viral loads will spike, all but assuring large transmission increases in a country that is already home to 20 percent of the world’s HIV-positive population.

With U.S. funding vanished, South Africa now finds itself at risk of unmitigated HIV spread. 

Now, at organizations like the Aurum Institute, interviews with Pienaar and other workers reveal how funding cuts have devastated the care apparatus. Employment in HIV care and prevention has become precarious, and resources to slow HIV transmission are increasingly scarce. As elsewhere in the world, this is creating a crisis of unemployment for Black LGBTQ+ workers, which itself creates higher risk for HIV. Gender-affirming care, which is a crucial tool for preventing HIV, has disappeared almost entirely. 

Until the second Trump administration, the United States government sent a bit more than half a billion dollars a year to the Republic of South Africa. Of the $580 million the U.S. sent in 2024, 78 percent ($455 million) went towards HIV/AIDS.

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But this money from America was hardly charity or lacking in self-interest. Because viruses know no borders, what happens with AIDS in the country with the most infections affects everyone on Earth. Controlling HIV in South Africa makes the entire world safer by preventing the emergence of dangerous viral mutations, reducing the global burden of infectious diseases, and strengthening health systems that detect future pandemics. Because viruses mutate rapidly when allowed to replicate unchecked, poorly controlled epidemics anywhere pose a direct threat to global health security.

South Africa also leads the world on another important front: medical research to address HIV. The republic is home to more clinical trials than any other country for seeing how medications of all kinds (including Covid vaccines) impact those with HIV. The profits of American drug companies depend on South Africans undergoing research trials. 

And after a year-and-a-half of dialing down HIV funding and only allowing it with many caveats which have caused major harm, the United States announced in June — during America’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month — that it will end all HIV funding in South Africa. 

The ramifications of this will be felt globally for years to come.

They are already being felt by the millions of South Africans for whom HIV care has become harder and harder to find. And the effects are most severe for those already on the margins of South African society: those already living with HIV/AIDS, immigrants, trans women, and the poor, including thousands of newly unemployed HIV prevention workers.

On January 20, 2025, Trump signed two executive orders: 14169, “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” and 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Within hours of Trump taking the oath of office, the vast majority of workers for OUT LGBT Well-Being, which ran the Engage clinic, were told not to come in to work the next day nor to even open their work laptops again. According to one, 82 of 86 workers were let go. They would become part of the one-third of South Africans who are already unemployed.

Trump executive order 14155 formally pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in January 2026. Trump’s cuts came after the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden reportedly failed to pay some $130 million in 2024 WHO dues, leaving the organization with a $1.9 billion gap. As a consequence, WHO implemented a 30 percent reduction in its workforce.

South Africa’s response to HIV has been shaped by its two most famous citizens: Nelson Mandela and Elon Musk. 

Mandela, the first president of the republic, played a large role making sure combating AIDS was part of national policy, even guiding the writing of gay, lesbian, bisexual and even trans rights into the constitution (the first constitution in the world to do so). Musk, for his part, can take credit for exacerbating the plague. 

During Trump’s first term, with Musk merely cheering from the sidelines, U.S. funding for LGBTQ+ health and HIV did not decrease significantly, at home or abroad. But ahead of Trump’s second term, it was Musk who first recommended a U.S. “government efficiency commission” to Trump in 2024, planting the seeds for what was to come.

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HIV funding nationally and globally have plummeted in Trump’s second term through cuts largely enacted at the behest of Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency. (These have been paired with an immigration policy so racist, over the last six months, literally the only refugees to enter the U.S. have been white South Africans.) 

Musk quit just a few months into his tenure in 2025, before DOGE shut down entirely. He reportedly took a swath of DOGE data with him, saw his wealth skyrocket, and became the world’s first trillionaire. Reporting on mathematical projections about how many people have been or will be killed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, cuts he pushed have ranged from hundreds of thousands to about 10 million to even tens of millions. (When Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., accused Musk of executing “a death sentence for an estimated 4.5 million children around the world,” Musk threatened to sue him.) 

But not all harm results in immediate, quantifiable fatalities. HIV-related deaths usually take many years to occur, and South Africans who die of HIV, or due to an increasingly transphobic healthcare system, are unlikely to be mourned in any numerically comprehensive database.

In South Africa, being trans is not a crime — it’s legally protected thanks to its 1996 constitution shaped by Mandela. And yet, as one trans HIV-prevention worker put it, “we have rights for trans women only on paper.” Because trans care was largely being financed largely by USAID, PEPFAR, and CDC research, when U.S.-money disappeared, trans care went away — along with a lot of the much-needed HIV prevention for everyone.

In South Africa, LGBT Pride celebrations happen in the fall to connect gay history to the September 24 Heritage Day national holiday. 

At last year’s Soweto Pride in the all-Black township where Winnie Mandela once lived, there were no corporate sponsors and zero presence from the U.S. Embassy or any U.S.-based NGOs. 

It was here The Intercept first met Sibonelo Ncanana Trower, the worker at OUT LGBT Well-Being which had run the now-shuttered Engage clinic. He and his partner were wearing matching rainbow sweaters. Nearly nine months after being laid off, he was still looking for work — and it was one of his first times going to a gay event.

Though he was no longer getting paid, Sibonelo still was doing a lot of public health work for free, out of a sense of communal responsibility.

“If you go on Grindr — and I don’t suggest that you do, it’s too dangerous,” Sibonelo said, “you will see many of my former colleagues offering services.” People who had been trained as social workers and peer educators to provide care to sex workers were now working as sex workers. In an email to The Intercept, Sibonelo said he is back to working at OUT as of early June.

As the festivities continued, the almost entirely Black crowd danced to a mix of hip hop, rap, and dance hall on a grass field, bordered on one side by tents. Under the banner “The Queer Nation Has No Borders,” a group of volunteers and workers at the SafePlace International tent welcomed LGBTQ+ migrants and refugees and offered help for finding housing and work.

While Europeans are routinely worried about African refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to Greece or Italy, SafePlace explained that most migrants in Africa are not trying to leave the continent at all — and most queer and African migrants fleeing legal persecution head down to South Africa. They try to go south because they’ve correctly heard that South Africa is legally good for queer Africans and that they can claim asylum. But they also come because they’ve heard — rather incorrectly — that South Africans welcome migrants. (In recent decades, migrants have faced great hostility in South Africa, especially in the lead-up to 2025’s G20 summit in Johannesburg, which Trump boycotted, and in increasingly bold xenophobic protests in 2026.)

Mpho is a lesbian from rural South Africa, and she spoke about a kind of refugee status few Westerners consider. Mpho explained that people who come from within South Africa to Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria or Johannesburg are often called immigrants, for their distinct cultures, languages (South Africa officially has 12 languages), and understandings of sexuality, gender, and being intersex. She herself knew she was different; but in her township, where there is not constant connectivity with mass media, she didn’t know anyone like her until she came to a big city. 

Masi has had an even more challenging route. He is a trans man born in Zambia who made his way to South Africa, after surviving an arranged marriage and a community shunning.

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Mpho and Masi have both known trans people who have experienced extreme body dysmorphia, including trans men who have started to have periods again once they lost access to hormone replacement therapy due to the Trump–Musk cuts. They know someone who has gone into the public health system, had their doctor leave the room in the middle of a genital exam — and then return with a group of colleagues to laugh at their body.

This has led to a wave of depression and suicides among their friends. Masi has made the difficult decision to only “socially transition.” He has chosen to dress and live as a man without hormonal or surgical intervention, because he does not want to begin any process that he can’t finish, or which could be taken away from him for any time.

A few days later, Masi and Mpho drove into Johannesburg in a car early on a Saturday morning, decked out in “the queer nation has no borders” swag. With them was Mandi, a trans woman from Uganda. While Mandi waits for surgeries she plans to have, she has found a way to get estrogen — and stay on it — despite “the cuts.”

The three friends were on their way to perform an “Act of Kindness,” a part of SafePlace’s program where queer and trans people perform service projects which confer dignity upon each other. (SafePlace is privately funded, and like other privately funded NGOs, its work and workers are stressed in trying to meet the profound additional need in the wake of U.S. and WHO cuts.) Masi, Mpho, and Mandi would be serving lunch at a shelter for displaced queer women in the Vaal area, south of Johannesburg.

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Mandi grew up assigned as a boy but knew she liked other boys. Uganda only made being gay a capital offense in the last couple of years, but it has been illegal in various forms since at least 2014. As in many places, Mandi’s legal problems did not come from random government surveillance; rather, she kissed a friend, whose parents found out, who told their school, who told the authorities, who arrested them both. This, in turn, outed Mandi to her family, who threw her out on the street. (She has never seen them again.)

Eventually, she made her way 5,000 kilometers by land to South Africa. 

Mandi had an idea that South Africa “accepted people like me,” and while living on the streets of Cape Town (and then in the back of a restaurant where she did unpaid labor), someone pointed her to SafePlace. They found her a home, helped her get healthcare, and supported her in starting to live as a woman.

After crossing the Mandela Bridge, the roads shifted from highway to unpaved, red-clay-earth roads. They arrived in the Vaal and approached Orange Farm, an area well known to AIDS researchers for its high prevalence of HIV and for hosting many research studies, including the world’s first trial to see how circumcision could affect rates of HIV transmission.

Mpho, Masi, and Mandi pulled up to a nice home, double wide in size, which had a rainbow flag on its fence. This was the shelter where they’d be serving lunch.

The group set up a precarious gas stove in the garage and began cooking massive amounts of chicken, vegetables, and pap, the South African grain dish that is akin to Cream of Wheat in America or polenta in Italy. 

Before the meal, Mandi got up in front of important community elders from the neighborhood and told her story. She implored them that the most important thing about having an LGBTQ+ child is to not kick them out and to stay connected. As a cautionary tale, she warned them that her elders now wanted her to return to Uganda to take care of them in old age — even after they’d abandoned her. 

Gwendolyn Dube lives in the Orange Farm section of the Vaal, in a tin-roofed shack with no running water or electricity, not far from the Steve Biko Elementary School. 

At 35, she has lived with HIV for more than 20 years; she was infected when she was raped as a child. She was among the first cohort of South African children to receive antiretroviral medication, or ARVs, in the early 2000s. 

For many years, she received free medical care and ARVs at a clinic across the street from Eyethu Orange Farm Mall. It encompasses many buildings across a large campus, and its rooms are simple and very crowded. A small pride flag hangs on a poll beside the South African flag — both are at half mast, for no discernible reason.

While this is not officially an HIV clinic, Orange Farm has one of the highest rates of HIV anywhere in the world, and HIV is part of most medical care here. In a room with racked, connected plastic chairs like a bus terminal, signs read: “Are you or your child on ARVs? Do you know your VIRAL LOAD?”

Moving through the hall full of hundreds of mothers with children carried on backs in baby wraps, Gwendolyn recalled how difficult it’s become to get medicine. She used to get three months of treatment at a time, then two, then one. Then she was told there was no file for her. 

“I think they say that when they’re overworked,” she said. 

One of the workers behind the check-in desk told The Intercept that things have gotten much harder since the cuts: “We don’t turn people away. But we don’t have enough staff. People will come here and wait for 8, 10, even 12 hours — and sometimes they don’t even get to see someone about what they need.” (For people living in abject poverty, the loss of a day’s earnings can be devastating — especially if they have HIV and have to face this risk regularly.) 

Another clinic worker shared that since the cuts, many visiting healthcare workers on U.S.-funded grants not only left, but also took their equipment with them.

The nurses of the clinic move with a military precision, even wearing military rank epaulets on their shoulders. The head of them is the “matron,” who, when asked by The Intercept, denied that they’ve run out of any medication, or that they turn people away (a claim Gwendolyn and others disputed). The matron conceded that sometimes people have to wait so long “they will leave” — and maybe don’t come back. She acknowledged that the clinic doesn’t always have the specific medication people need when they need it. She also bemoaned that it’s hard to keep staff, burnout and turnover are high, and that her mobile teams, which would go out into the townships, are severely limited. 

“I used to send teams out every day,” she said. “Now, it’s maybe once a week.” 

Shon, a Black trans woman living with HIV, is still working at the Aurum Institute — at least for now. Unlike at the shuttered Engage clinic in Johannesburg, some staff remain in Aurum’s Pretoria office, but they decreased in number. As a result, Aurum is offering fewer services and steering patients to the public health system, where trans people receive little necessary care.

Aurum used to be a “one-stop shop” for trans women, Shon said. But now, after the cuts, doctors visits are no longer free and hormone drugs aren’t available at Aurum’s popular Pop Inn clinics. “The ladies do come to get [HIV medication], others come to get PrEP, but they cannot get hormones,” Shon said. “They’re told to go to a public clinic,” but “they don’t know anything about trans women!” Shon added that patients will be addressed with derogatory and incorrect terminology at such locations. 

The stigma is too high to go to a public clinic, so Shon goes to a private doctor herself, when she can afford it. But getting hormones is now tough. While patients aren’t being blackmailed as they are in Uganda, “a pharmacist might say, ‘What do you need this for? No, I’m not giving it to you for that. I have other patients who really need it,’” Shon said.

Trans women are struggling, Shon said, recalling how she knew two “who were suffering from depression. One couldn’t take hormones, became really religious,” stopped hormones, and became suicidal. Another was suffering from liver problems after buying hormones on the contraband market, without the supervision of doctors.

Whenever transgender patients are taking contraband hormones via syringes which might not be sterile, they are being exposed to increased risks of contracting HIV and hepatitis — all because DOGE cuts took sterile medical care away from them.

Amid the devastating cuts to global HIV care, a potential breakthrough treatment is just beginning to reach patients. Lenacapavir, a new medication, promises to prevent HIV for six months with just one injection. But it comes with a prohibitively expensive $28,000-a-year price tag, making it out of reach for those who need it most.

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Recently, the Global Fund for HIV, Tuberculosis, and Malaria struck a deal with pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences to produce the shot for $40 in limited quantities. Small amounts are headed to South Africa.

At an outdoor cafe under a massive tree in the picturesque city of Cape Town, Fatima Hassan, a legal and HIV scholar, blasted the pilot study coming to the republic.

The government’s approach was “making the same mistake” of excluding those who were most affected: sex workers and men who have sex with other men.

The plan is to bring a one-time shipment of 40,000 doses — a woefully inadequate number for a country of more than 60 million people where about 1 in 5 adults is living with the virus is living with the virus. 

Worse, only a tiny fraction — 5 percent, or 2,000 doses — is to be set aside for testing on men who have sex with men.

None are going to be set aside for sex workers. 

And another problem: So many of the people who would be needed to distribute lenacapavir to the people who need it most — to the gay college students who used the shuttered Engage clinic on Joburg’s Reserve Street, to the trans women who went to the Pretoria Pop Inn clinic — have been fired. Without those workers, can South Africa even distribute the medication?

Steps from the cafe, within sight of well-appointed apartments topped with electrified razor wire and the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, there is a shantytown of cardboard-and-wood dwellings, home to some 100 Black adults without anywhere else to live. 

A conservative estimate means that probably at least 20 of them were living with HIV, if not more. 

And because of Trump and Musk, the people who used to find them and treat them have been fired — and are at higher risk of HIV themselves.

The post How Trump Destroyed South Africa’s Effort to Slow HIV Transmission appeared first on The Intercept.

“Why do you wanna have a pep rally when people are hurting?”

That was the question Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III posed at a September food drive in South Dallas, where volunteers were collecting groceries for struggling families. Across town, Republicans were holding a midterm convention. Haynes, a longtime Baptist pastor and Democratic congressional nominee, was introducing James Talarico, the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas.

A month later, speaking at a Dallas megachurch, Talarico offered his own interpretation of Christian duty.

“I try to love my neighbor through public policy,” the Presbyterian seminarian told the congregation. “I’m trying to make my neighbor’s life easier, better, less stressful.”

Both men are making a deceptively simple argument in some of the staunchly staunch red-as-hell, Republican territory in America, one that might transcend the conventional wisdom about national campaigns and the millions poured into competing campaign war chests: When far-right policy translates into actual pain, at what point does intervening become a spiritual obligation?

Amid the big-ticket ad buys, fundraising appeals, and armies of political consultants, Talarico and Haynes are tapping into a political tradition that has long sustained communities across the South: showing up.

At Haynes’s Friendship-West Baptist Church, the ministry extends to legal services, immigration advocacy, counseling, economic justice, and food policy. It is an example of how churches often form the connective tissue of communities suffering under economic and political strain.

That strain is measurable. Texas is home to four of the nation’s 10 most financially distressed major cities, including Houston, which ranks second nationwide, according to a 2026 analysis. Feeding America estimates that nearly 1 in 5 Texans experienced food insecurity in 2024. Meanwhile, federal analysts project that changes to Medicaid eligibility enacted last year will increase the number of uninsured Americans by 7.5 million by 2034. 

While Democratic Party leaders publicly debate how to punish Donald Trump politically, allege corruption, or navigate the ideological divide between moderates and democratic socialists, a different argument is emerging from Southern pulpits.

The Underground Church

From Quaker abolitionists to the Social Gospel’s challenge to industrial exploitation, progressive religious institutions have helped drive some of America’s most consequential political transformations. Christian farmworker ministries supported migrant laborers before joining the United Farm Workers’ California grape boycotts in the 1960s. And while Black churches overwhelmingly led, sustained, and suffered the brunt of violence in the fight for equal civil rights in this country, a handful of white denominations joined them. 

Of course, churches also defended slavery, segregation, and exploitation. The blunt reality is that throughout American history, Christianity has always been political and has been used to justify a wide variety of competing political ends.

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But Republicans have deftly exploited the perception that they alone speak for American Christians. The Trump administration has readily embraced religious iconography, from evangelical leaders praying over the president in the Oval Office to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s frequent invocations of the medieval Crusades.

There is no way around the fact that Republicans have built a formidable religious coalition, particularly among white evangelicals. Last year, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, found a majority of Republicans qualified as either Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers in 2025, compared with 17 percent of Democrats.

But Republicans don’t have a monopoly on Christian voters. Pew Research Center polling this month found 73 percent of white evangelical Protestant registered voters preferred Republican House candidates, while 74 percent of Black Protestants and 59 percent of Hispanic Catholics preferred Democrats. None of that is particularly surprising on the surface.

Nor is this some newly discovered religious awakening. According to PRRI’s Census of American Religion, which was published in April, 57 percent of Democrats identified as Christian in 2025, a significant drop from 70 percent in 2013. The white Christian left isn’t necessarily growing, but it’s far from insignificant. Much of it has simply been politically overlooked.

It’s a perception the GOP has routinely capitalized on, often spending a great deal of their election campaigns attacking opponents on religious ground. 

On Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cravenly tarred his Democratic gubernatorial challenger, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, as supporting “Sharia law,” citing an endorsement from a Muslim advocacy group’s political affiliate.

Perhaps ironically, Hinojosa is, and has been on the record, a Catholic — same as Abbott.

“My faith is my moral compass,” Hinojosa told the National Catholic Register in September. “It grounds me in purpose and gives me the courage to do what is right regardless of obstacles or consequences.”

Faith Without Works Is a Dead End

For those who have spent years watching their faith become synonymous with a politics they don’t recognize, frustration may finally be giving way to something else: a determination to be heard.

There are signs that this long-overlooked religious tradition is finding a more public voice. An August study by PRRI documented progressive Christians organizing against Christian nationalism in eight states, including Texas and Louisiana, channeling local meetings, religious discussions, and community networks into political action. Elsewhere, hundreds of members of the clergy have joined protests against immigration enforcement, and some have been trained in direct action and civil resistance. While the movement may not be growing in numbers, its willingness to challenge political power is increasingly visible.

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As retired Texas Rev. Kathleene Card, who has thrown her support behind Talarico, told the Houston Chronicle, “faith should influence how people respond to poverty, human rights, the environment, and the well-being of their community.”

Whether any of this will translate into winning on Tuesday is still an open question. An October Fox News poll put Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton at 49 percent apiece among likely voters, but newer polls show Talarico with a small lead. Abbott led Hinojosa by 5 percentage points in that Fox poll, and most polls in the race show the governor with a slim lead. 

No matter the result, the Texas campaigns offer a different, more nuanced way of understanding political persuasion. They also challenge a long-standing assumption among national Democrats: that their voters are a monolith, moved by the same issues, values, and appeals. 

Across rural America and the South, voters may be growing weary of manufactured arguments and hypothetical doomsday prophecies, with research showing that political advertising, as it stands, has little effect on changing minds at all.

There is something to be said for people willing to put boots on the ground, to do the work instead of endlessly debating how to begin and whether it matters, in the name of service. 

It’s a moral code not too dissimilar to a Western: When confronted with injustice, you stand for what’s right, even if you stand alone and are ridiculed for what you believe. It’s a mode of Christianity that harkens back to Abraham Lincoln (and maybe even John Brown.)

That might be a more enduring political proposition than many Democrats’ feigned, helpless aggrievance to the latest Republican spectacle. Campaigns come and go; so do their promises, if they existed in the first place. But the obligation to one’s neighbors remains.

The post The Rise of the Christian Left in Texas appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s a superlative achieved again and again: The current election cycle is the most expensive on record, according to AdImpact, likely to be surpassed only by the next one. North of $16 billion have been raised ahead of Tuesday’s looming elections, with ad spending in House and Senate races topping $4 billion. Mega-donors this election season have overwhelmingly backed Republicans with contributions largely flowing from AI, crypto, and online gambling interests.

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The Intercept tracked how super PAC spending is flowing into the midterms and how growing public skepticism of special-interest money in politics is affecting campaign strategies. Hundreds of candidates are still taking donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, despite public sentiment turning against the pro-Israel lobby. 

“The data overall reveals that [AIPAC is] still spending a ton of money on a lot of races, and more often than not, their candidates are still winning,” Intercept managing editor Maia Hibbett told The Intercept Briefing. “It is still quite meaningful money.”

Artificial intelligence super PACs have also poured tens of millions of dollars into this election cycle, most of it on just a few races in the primaries. The two leading AI super PAC networks, affiliated with OpenAI or Anthropic, dropped a whopping $50.7 million on the primaries, but are noticeably spending much less in the lead-up to the general election, $8.5 million — likely responding to public backlash in the same way that AIPAC has.

“The polls are just so startling on the public’s transformation on AI and data centers over the last year. … The entire life cycle of these AI super PACs, which started about a year ago, has followed that evolution of the public’s opinion,” said Intercept politics reporter Matt Sledge. “One of the things that’s been really interesting in the general election races is … candidates [trying] to paint themselves as the more pro-AI safety, pro-AI regulation candidate.”

This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Hibbett and Sledge about the spending trends in the most expensive election cycle to date and unpack the intended impact.

“No matter which party gets control of either or both houses of Congress, there will be a lot of people elected next week who got there on the backs of Big Tech and special interests,” said Hibbett.

“They’re backing a lot of people in safe seats who don’t really have a tight election,” Sledge added. “The goal may just be to buy themselves a few friends in Congress, because sometimes in Congress, it’s just as good to have a few people who can stop regulation as it is to have people who can shape and actually pass laws.”

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

Transcript

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

On Tuesday, voters will head to the polls to cast their ballots in the most expensive election cycle ever in terms of campaign ad spending, even outpacing past presidential elections. That’s according to AdImpact. 

North of $16 billion has been raised this cycle, with ad spending in House and Senate races topping $4 billion. Billionaire Elon Musk has dumped hundreds of millions into races across the country, using his enormous personal wealth to sway the election in favor of Republicans. Musk, who has a home and multiple businesses in Texas, has taken a particular interest in the state’s Senate race between Republican candidate Ken Paxton and Democratic candidate James Talarico.

Most of the money from Musk and other donors has flowed not to candidates, but to powerful super PACs representing a variety of different special interests.  

That super PAC spending is the subject of my colleagues, Intercept politics reporter Matt Sledge and senior politics reporter Akela Lacy’s new project, tracking how money is flowing into the midterms. 

Maia Hibbett, managing editor for The Intercept, and Matt Sledge join me now to talk about the project and how big money is shaping the midterms. 

Matt, Maia, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing 

Maia Hibbett: Thanks for having us. 

Matt Sledge: Thank you for having us, Jessie. 

JW: Maia, I want to start with you. As a part of the super PAC project, The Intercept tracked how millions of dollars flow through the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

What did the reporting reveal about how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and affiliated groups like the United Democracy Project mask their influence in U.S. elections in a political landscape where AIPAC’s contributions and endorsements have become largely politically toxic? 

MH: The reporting showed that AIPAC and its affiliated super PAC UDP are a little bit weakened, but they’re still pretty dominant.

The narrative out of this midterm cycle, especially during the primaries, was largely focused on a few high-profile races that an AIPAC-backed candidate lost — and that was a huge shock. These big upsets were AIPAC or UDP or a related group that, we can talk about a little bit later, had poured money into, and then the candidate didn’t succeed.

But if you look at it in the aggregate, what the data overall reveals is that they’re still spending a ton of money on a lot of races, and more often than not, their candidates are still winning. It is still quite meaningful money. And even though AIPAC has been discussed as going underground, they are still directly invested in a lot of races.

JW: I want to get into AIPAC’s shifting strategy and their latest announcement on that. But first, Matt, I wanted to talk about your reporting. AI super PACs have poured tens of millions of dollars into this election cycle.

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What do we know about the people and companies behind these super PACs? This may seem obvious, but what are they hoping to gain with this level of spending? Are there specific examples of friendly legislation these varied interest groups are hoping their candidates will see through if they win?

MS: To answer your second question, I think it’s really more about setting the tone for future regulation at the federal level. You have two big super PAC networks. One is affiliated with OpenAI, and they broadly favor a laxer regulatory scheme for AI. Then there’s another network that’s affiliated with Anthropic that paints itself as supporting a stricter regulatory scheme.

Skeptics will point out that these networks are both backed by big AI companies. So at the end of the day, they’re probably going to favor regulation that is favorable to the AI companies. I get into this a little bit in my story, but, just in the last few months, there’s also been this constellation of other smaller groups that are sometimes backed by individual employees at these firms or just by people concerned about AI that are pushing for stricter regulatory regimes and aren’t as directly connected to one of the big companies.

JW: Matt, I’m curious about the impact on voters here. CNBC analysis from early October found that mega-donors this election season were overwhelmingly backing Republicans with contributions largely flowing from AI, crypto, and online gambling interests: “Fourteen of the 20 largest donors and donor groups this election cycle have exclusively or nearly exclusively backed GOP candidates or aligned groups.”

Matt, are we seeing voters become more receptive to Republicans as a result of all this ad spending? Is it working on the voter base? 

MS: It’s always hard to tease out the impact of an individual super PAC or industry, because you have to keep in mind that a lot of the time, if you’re a crypto super PAC, or an AI super PAC — or more recently, a prediction market super PAC — they are not running pro-crypto or pro-AI ads.

They are running ads that look very similar to everybody else’s. Often, they’re doing negative campaigning that campaigns don’t want to do themselves, and they have such vague names that they’re not associated with crypto or AI. So I do think ads have an impact on the races, but overall what we’re seeing in polls is that it’s not a great environment for Republicans.

So it may have served, just writ large, to potentially soften the blow to Republicans this time around. It does help them to have this many corporate allies, but it may still be overwhelmed by a blue tide. 

JW: That makes a lot of sense in terms of just, this is a bad environment for Republicans. They have a president who is unpopular. We have an economy that is not amazing right now. It makes a lot of sense that despite all this ad spending, the baseline of the election is not in favor of Republicans. 

Maia, I wanted to get back to something that you had said a little bit earlier about AIPAC and their shifting strategy. AIPAC recently announced that they would no longer officially endorse candidates or give money directly to campaigns.

Were we seeing an early signal of shifting strategies from AIPAC during the 2026 midterm elections? And what does this change actually mean for AIPAC’s influence on our elections?

MH: I’m so glad you asked, because we actually noted early in the 2026 cycle that AIPAC was starting to retreat and change its strategy. Our colleague Akela Lacy wrote a story in December 2025, and the headline was, “AIPAC is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.” I encourage anyone to go back and read that story because it was really prescient about what we would see in the cycle to come, which is that AIPAC used to do all of its spending behind closed doors.

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In 2022, it made a big splash when it started doing direct spending in that year’s midterms. The group had helped fund some anti-Bernie Sanders ads during the 2020 presidential campaign, but it was 2022 when it went all in, rather than routing its donations through other groups or through dark-money pathways, it just started giving contributions to candidates. 

After it spent so much money in that midterm cycle and in last cycle‘s 2024 races, and as public sentiment started to turn against the pro-Israel lobby’s interests and people became very critical of the U.S. support for genocide in Gaza, AIPAC started to essentially return to its roots.

I think this is really interesting because in the press it has been talked about as a very new strategy. But really, it’s more that AIPAC is returning to the way it used to do business. 

JW: Is that as effective as a strategy — the old model that they had? Should we expect that it’ll have just as much influence on elections as they did previously?

MH: It’s a good question. I don’t know how effective it will be as a strategy. There’s a lot more scrutiny on AIPAC now than there was a few years ago, and so it’s much more difficult for them to hide what they’re doing because there are journalists like us who are going to try to follow the money and say, maybe you gave to something that’s called Elect Chicago Women, but it’s actually from UDP, which is the super PAC for AIPAC.

I think in some cases, they can’t get away from the public perception that now exists. But on the other hand, there are many voters who might not really pay attention to the name of the PAC that sponsored the ad that they saw, and then go look it up and see where the money came from. So it remains to be seen how effective it will be.

JW: Not everyone is reading The Intercept before voting, as they should, but it’s fine.

Matt, I wanted to get back to you because there’s a lot happening with these big AI super PACs. You noticed in your reporting that, after spending a lot in the primaries in New York in particular, but in other places as well, the big AI super PACs have gone pretty much quiet in the general election.

Are AI super PACs responding to public backlash in the same way that AIPAC is? What have you observed in terms of why they’ve gone a little bit quieter? 

MS: In response to your question about backlash, I think the answer is yes.

They’re on this kind of accelerated timeline going through what AIPAC went through over the course of five years but essentially in five or six months. The polls are just so startling on the public’s transformation on AI and data centers over the last year. It’s just such a rapid change in public opinion, and the entire life cycle of these AI super PACs, which started about a year ago, has followed that evolution of the public’s opinion.

It’s just a dramatic decline in spending from the primaries to the generals — even though they still have money they can tap. Leading the Future, which is the OpenAI-aligned network, they started first, and then the Anthropic-aligned network, Public First, they started a few months later as a response to the Leading the Future network.

So it seems like, from what we’ve been able to tell, Leading the Future scaled back on spending as the general election came about, and Public First responded in turn and also scaled back its operations. That doesn’t mean they’re not spending anything, and we have seen a slight uptick in the final few days of this election when ads are probably just less effective than they would have been a couple weeks ago.

One really notable race is now South Carolina, where Leading the Future is helping prop up Sen. Darline Graham, who hasn’t been a great fundraiser on her own. So there’s actually still a world where AI plays a decisive role in this election in terms of control of the Senate.

If Darline Graham narrowly gets away with winning her race in South Carolina of all places, and that narrowly hands control of the Senate back to the Republicans, then you can still say that Leading the Future and the AI industry played a pretty important role in the general race.

JW: Just to be clear, you’re referring to Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, correct? 

MS: That’s correct. 

JW: Maia, speaking of Big Tech, you also edited a story from Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez looking at how tech leaders, including John Hering, are dumping millions into the LA city attorney race to block Marissa Roy, a DSA-backed candidate, from winning. What is going on here — why such an interest in a race most people are likely not paying any attention to?

MH: City attorneys are one of those jobs that, as you said, a lot of voters don’t pay attention to them. I think a lot of people in cities all over the country maybe couldn’t tell you who the top lawyer of whatever city they live in even is. But this is a job that is largely tasked with enforcing regulations and laws and making companies that might be based in that city or might operate in that city comply with them.

Marissa Roy, this DSA-backed candidate, is currently a deputy attorney general for the state of California, and she’s one of the people who helped the state prosecute this historic Meta settlement where Meta ended up having to pay $17 billion for harms to children using its technology.

We don’t know exactly why John Hering and other tech leaders, like the founders of Ring and Tinder and investors in Anthropic and SpaceX, are spending so heavily in this race, but you might be able to conclude that they’re interested in preventing a person who just helped carry out this huge settlement against Meta from becoming the city attorney of LA.

Some of them are funding a group that’s called Neighbors for John McKinney, which is backing the opponent in the race. John McKinney is the other candidate, and he is much less likely to win, but is propped up now by a lot of spending. They frame him as a tough-on-crime candidate; they say he’s going to restore order to LA, help clean it up is the idea.

Like Matt was saying, often these tech investments in races don’t actually foreground the interests of Big Tech, and they don’t say explicitly, “We want to stop this person from coming into office because we’re worried they’re going to regulate our industry.” Instead, they find a different issue and spend money on that.

It’s also worth noting that John Hering, his group, frames John McKinney as a lifelong Democrat and very anti-MAGA, is the language they use. But John Hering himself is a big ally of Elon Musk. He has been an eager investor in his companies. He said Musk was an “American hero” this year, and he has spent pretty heavily also to support Musk’s America PAC and the Trump campaign after previously spending on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Like many Silicon Valley types, he’s had an evolution. And although he lives in San Francisco, he also spent in favor of Spencer Pratt for LA mayor.

JW: Wow. Yeah, Big Tech has really come a long way from the ’08 years in terms of their relationship with Democrats and Republicans, and propping up Spencer Pratt.

Matt, I want to bring you in and get your perspective and kind of big picture. What has made this election cycle so popular for Big Tech? 

MS: When it comes to AI and crypto and the prediction markets, it’s knowing that the next few years are really going to be critical for them in terms of regulation. These are all fairly young industries, and the rules haven’t been set yet. The Trump administration is doing its best to set them, but Congress has not had a final word on any of those industries.

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They see a chance to shape the rules in a way that favors them, and they’re just using the old Washington playbook of spending a bunch of money on campaigns and a bunch of money on lobbyists to try to shape the rules in their favor.

JW: Is this just also a matter of them having more money to play with than they’ve had before? Is this something tech probably would have done years ago if they’d had this access to capital? Or is this really, like you said, just they’re aware that there is existential risks to their industry if they don’t?

MS: Tech for the last few decades has had a lot of money. It’s just been a huge part of the U.S. economy. But I think this move into more regulated spaces is maybe what’s newer.

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When Microsoft is creating an internet browser or a word processor, that creates potential antitrust issues, and they have to spend political money in that sense. But they’re not playing in the same kind of highly regulated financial spaces, and nobody ever thought that Clippy posed an existential risk to humanity. So we are moving into new territory when it comes to techs. 

JW: I miss Clippy. That is my one comment on that. 

I want to get both of you back in here. We’ve been talking about some of the biggest donors in American politics today, and a few special interest groups in particular who’ve obviously been experiencing public backlash — AIPAC, AI, and data centers.

What do you make of this new record-level spending in a midterm election in particular? We’ll obviously have more answers on this next week, but from what you’ve observed so far, is it having the intended impact on voters? Maia, let’s start with you. 

MH: I think to use the cop-out that we keep coming back to, we won’t really know if it worked with voters until after the results next week. But it’s clear in this midterm cycle and maybe this is a reminder of kind of a perpetual truth in, when it comes to money in politics, that these big spenders are always going to fund candidates on both sides of the aisle. Often election narratives and questions about special interests will really look to one party or the other and try to map this kind of spending onto partisan issues.

While some of that certainly happens, I think no matter which party gets control of either or both houses of Congress, there will be a lot of people elected next week who got there on the backs of Big Tech and special interests.

That is something that voters are more and more aware of and more and more frustrated by, and we did see a lot of rejection of that kind of big-money spending in the primaries. But ultimately, I don’t know how much that narrative has changed. 

JW: Matt, I know you’ve seen some specific examples of this impacting elections. Can you talk about that a little bit? 

MS: One of the things that’s been really interesting in the general election races is this race from candidates to paint themselves as the more pro-AI safety, pro-AI regulation candidate.

I’ve done some reporting in Michigan’s 7th [Congressional] District, where a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement is trying to unseat an incumbent Republican, and he has from the start really run on being an anti-data center candidate, campaigning with local activists in small towns of a few thousand people.

His Republican opponent is now also trying to paint himself as a data center skeptic — using different language, more language about local control than about big, bad companies. 

But there’s been such a backlash that we’ve seen some changing tactics from the big AI super PACs in the runoff. One has donated money to a nonprofit that’s more focused on building support for data centers. Good luck with that, I guess.

And then another, the Anthropic-aligned network, has essentially handed off money to a pro-Scott Wiener super PAC in California that already existed and already has funding from other tech leaders in the San Francisco area. But that donation has generated this whole fight between Scott Wiener and his opponent, Connie Chan, over who is the more pro-AI regulation candidate now. So it’s a lot of candidates fighting to be the more pro-regulation candidate.

Just thinking back to your question about the effect on voters, I think for the super PACs and for their funders, the impact on candidates may ultimately be more important, on elected officials. They’re backing a lot of people in safe seats who don’t really have a tight election. The goal may just be to buy themselves a few friends in Congress, because sometimes in Congress, it’s just as good to have a few people who can stop regulation as it is to have people who can shape and actually pass laws.

JW: That’s a good point. Speaking of the election, which we know is just days away, what are you two going to be following closely next week? Maia, I want to start with you.

MH: There’s obviously a lot to follow next week, and more races than we can keep track of. One I think that will be very interesting that I was thinking about in terms of AIPAC spending — when Matt just mentioned this thing about AI groups backing candidates who are not in close races — is, of course, the Senate race in Maine.

One of the interesting takeaways we found in this AIPAC project is that in the primaries when AIPAC was spending, as it does in, in various races, one of the top recipients of its money was Susan Collins — who at the time did not have a primary challenger, but it spent heavily to support her primary campaign.

So we’ll obviously watch the Collins–Jackson race in Maine. We have a reporter going there. Matt’s going to go to Michigan. We also have a reporter going to Texas to track some of the big Senate races. Depending on how the results look, I think we’ll pretty quickly be pivoting to accountability for, coverage for the people who are elected, who, maybe entered office vowing not to take corporate PAC money or not to take special-interest money, and to keep an eye on those now Congress members and see if they vote like it or if they continue to have that policy once they’ve been elected.

JW: And Matt, what are you following? 

MS: As Maia mentioned, I will be in Michigan. Super interested in that 7th District race that I mentioned between Will Lawrence and Tom Barrett. But then the race everybody’s going to be spinning and talking about for weeks probably: the Mike Rogers/Abdul El-Sayed race. It just is going to carry so much narrative heft going forward about what the voters were trying to say. 

Where are you going to be, Jessie? What are you going to be up to? 

JW: I will be in D.C., and I’ll be looking at what it means to have yet another election with the National Guard in town and essentially in an occupied city.

I’ll also be looking into what it would mean for the district to have a socialist mayor, Janeese Lewis George, who is almost certain to win on Tuesday, particularly when it comes to ICE and the Metropolitan Police Department’s collaboration with ICE. That’s going to be something I’m really keeping an eye on, not just on Election Day, but going forward to see if she can implement some of these really bold ideas that she’s proposing in a city that’s very constricted in what it can actually do because of federal law.

But that’s enough previewing from me. We’re going to leave it there. Maia, Matt, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. 

MH: Thanks again. 

MS: Thanks for having us. 

JW: And thank you for listening. Next week we’ll be back in your feed early with a special midterm election episode, so stay tuned.

That does it for this episode. We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

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

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

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

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post How AIPAC and AI Spent Their Money This Midterm Election appeared first on The Intercept.

This midterms cycle, however, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s strategy seems to suggest the opposite. Contrary to its signature slogan, AIPAC’s name has become anathema to voters across the political spectrum repulsed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and frustrated by Washington’s outpouring of military aid for a foreign government while domestic costs soar.

So it’s going underground. As The Intercept reported in December, AIPAC entered the 2026 midterms by returning to its strategic roots — funding other groups and uniting donors, rather than focusing on direct-to-candidate spending. Now, AIPAC has announced that it will no longer officially endorse or contribute directly to candidates. 

Though progressives welcomed the announcement as evidence of AIPAC’s retreat, it’s far from a sign that AIPAC is backing down. The group is expected to continue spending heavily on elections through its super PAC, which took advantage of campaign finance loopholes to conceal its involvement in several races this cycle until after elections had already passed. To Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, AIPAC’s opting for obscurity shows that “its brand has become politically radioactive.”

But how much has really changed? As AIPAC shifts strategy, a new project by The Intercept reveals the hundreds of candidates still taking its cash, plus how the money paid off for them. The data suggests that though the pro-Israel lobbying giant may be weakened, it’s still dominant.

The Intercept tracked how much the group and its super PAC spent on elections to put pro-Israel candidates on the ballot in this year’s midterms — including the money it tried to keep out of the public eye. While AIPAC makes use of a series of new pop-ups and pass-throughs, it still poured millions directly into 2026 midterm races. Its candidates usually still win.

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The new data builds on a 2024 project in which The Intercept documented just how AIPAC shaped the last congressional class. At the time, Donald Trump was preparing for his return to the presidency as Kamala Harris ran a campaign hamstrung by public disillusionment over the Biden administration’s unflinching support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To critics of Israel desperate to stop the violence, the two parties looked equally bleak, and the pro-Israel lobby’s grip on Congress appeared unshakeable. 

It’s been different this cycle. Primaries across the country saw candidates win after vowing to cut off or restrict military aid to Israel, and incumbents signed on to legislation blocking weapons transfers in an attempt to keep their seats. But the shift should not be overstated: AIPAC still waded into nearly three-quarters of races, and its candidates still won far more often than they lost.

In total, AIPAC or its super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent on 333 of the 473 seats up for election this year.

These are the dollars AIPAC and UDP spent directly in races. The former makes contributions to candidates, while the latter, as AIPAC’s leading super PAC, makes independent expenditures, like buying ads. They made up the bulk of the pro-Israel lobby’s known elections spending — $53.3 million from AIPAC and $66.7 million from UDP, compared to $53.7 million and $41.4 million last cycle. Simultaneously, the groups took up another tack: making it harder to tell which races they were actually involved in. The group’s donors poured money into races where AIPAC didn’t officially endorse a candidate. AIPAC’s board president hosted a fundraiser for a candidate who swore the group wasn’t backing her. And in a series of races, no one knew for certain that AIPAC had spent on the election until after it was over.

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The group tested different strategies in different states, spending directly in the Michigan Senate race, for example, while concealing its spending in several other primaries. In those races, UDP gave money to other committees, including a series of “pop-up PACs,” groups that registered just before primaries, allowing them to delay disclosing their donors until after the election passed. Several of those groups took money from AIPAC’s super PAC, spent on ads against candidates critical of Israel, and then disappeared. 

The pop-ups and pass-throughs represent AIPAC’s most talked-about new tactic, but the lobbying group and its flagship super PAC still sunk the bulk of their spending into key races and high-priority states. The Intercept analyzed where AIPAC employed which strategy, how UDP dollars flowed through pop-up PACs, and which candidates received the most AIPAC and UDP cash in their primaries. 

The Direct Spending

The pro-Israel lobby’s biggest investment in the primaries turned out to be a disappointment. UDP spent more than $30 million on ads attacking Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race or backing his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. Now that El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee, UDP is also battling El-Sayed in his general election contest with Republican Mike Rogers, spending just over $500,000 so far. 

Thanks in part to the deluge of spending, the El-Sayed–Stevens contest was one of the marquee primaries of 2026, pitting a vocal critic of the pro-Israel lobby who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator against an enthusiastic AIPAC cash recipient who famously said: “Israel comes to me in my dreams.” It’s one of the key races where we’re breaking down the money AIPAC and UDP spent in favor of one candidate and against a clear opponent. We’re skipping Democratic House candidate Adrian Boafo, who benefited from $5.7 million in UDP spending, because his Maryland primary included 23 other candidates.

After Stevens and Boafo, the top AIPAC and UDP recipient from this year’s primaries was Rep. Wesley Bell, a moderate Democrat from Missouri who fended off a challenge from former Rep. Cori Bush to return to the House (AIPAC spent millions to oust her last cycle). When UDP spending is excluded, Bell received more AIPAC funding in the primaries than any other Democrat.

On the Republican side, the top beneficiary was Ed Gallrein, the Trump-backed challenger who unseated Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky. Massie, a libertarian critic of all foreign aid — including to Israel — was the relatively rare Republican incumbent AIPAC and UDP opposed.

Often, the pro-Israel groups backed Republican incumbents. Two more top recipients were Sen. Tom Cotton, who easily won his primary in Arkansas, and John Cornyn, who lost to state attorney general Ken Paxton in Texas.

But the greatest Republican recipient of AIPAC largesse — ahead of Gallrein, when UDP is excluded — did not face a primary opponent.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, now facing a tight general election contest against Democratic candidate Troy Jackson, has been a longtime beneficiary of campaign cash aligned with the pro-Israel lobby. Asked by Zeteo last year for her comment on Americans killed by the Israeli military, Collins shook her head and said only: “I am pro-Israel.” 

The Pop-Ups

On top of the $53.6 million it spent directly on races this cycle, United Democracy Project poured another $13.1 million into Democratic primaries by giving money to other committees whose names or stated agendas indicated no connection to Israel policy. That $13.1 million, more than triple the $3.5 million United Democracy gave through other groups last cycle, helped fund at least three pop-up PACs that formed this year. 

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The groups’ names offered little insight into their political agendas, as The Lever recently highlighted. UDP spent the most on popup PACs in a series of Democratic primaries around Chicago, where groups with names like Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership, and Affordable Chicago Now! used their funds to attack candidates running on rejecting AIPAC money or ending U.S. military support for Israel. Several of the groups also received funding from major United Democracy Project donors, and three of them shut down after the primaries and gave their money back to United Democracy Project. 

In other cases, United Democracy Project funded long-established political action committees with ties to current or former House Democratic leaders, like Bold America, which was formed by former members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. That group got almost a quarter of the $12.2 million it reported raising this year from UDP. The UDP share, $2.8 million, was nearly equivalent to the $2.9 million Bold America spent against Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist and pro-Palestine activist who defeated incumbent and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York.

The super PAC EDW Action Fund was similar. Former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Cheri Bustos and former Rep. Annie Kuster formed that group in late 2023 as an offshoot of the political action committee Elect Democratic Women. Like Bold America, EDW Action got about a quarter of its funding from UDP. It also provided more than 80 percent of the funding for Pro-Choice Majority Action, a new PAC that formed in May and spent in 12 primaries. The group presents itself as supporting Democratic women, but Pro-Choice Majority Action notably spent against pro-Palestine candidates like Melat Kiros, who ran a primary challenge against Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and won. 

In a statement to The Intercept, Pro-Choice Majority Action spokesperson Lenny Young dismissed reporting characterizing the group as a pop-up PAC and said it had backed 23 candidates with a range of views on Israel across the primaries and general election.

“To suggest that we would deny a Democratic woman from being elected to Congress because of her position on Israel, on either side, misses the whole point,” Young said. “We want more Democratic women in Congress because we believe it would improve the lives of women and families. Period.”

Bold America did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Emails to Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership, and Affordable Chicago Now! bounced back because the groups have shut down.

UDP gave another $2.65 million to groups that did not spend directly on ads in Democratic primaries this cycle. 

In August, United Democracy Project gave $1.65 million to a group called SD PAC, also known as Save Democracy PAC, which registered in 2020 and has supported Democratic candidates in past general elections. The group did not directly conduct any outside spending in Democratic primaries this year, but it funneled money to affiliate groups that did — some of which funded attacks against progressives.

The other recipient of money from UDP, Palmetto Action, formed in May and only spent in South Carolina’s Republican Senate primary. The group backed Sen. Lindsey Graham before his death in July, then received a cash infusion from UDP and started supporting Graham’s sister, Darline, ahead of a special Senate primary. The group did not report any additional spending in its last filing due before the general election.

Palmetto Action, Save Democracy PAC, and EDW Action Fund did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

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If last cycle AIPAC proved that it could leverage its financial advantage to target critics of Israel, its performance this cycle suggests that its money has become a faltering superpower. 

New pro-Palestine groups have sprung up to spend against AIPAC — though their pockets aren’t nearly as deep. When candidates went head-to-head this cycle in primaries defined by U.S. military support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, pro-Palestine candidates often came out on top. 

For decades before it started spending directly on elections, “AIPAC operated in the shadows,” Friedman, of Foundation for Middle East Peace, said. Its endorsements were once “clear but unofficial,” she added, and its funding operated through “informal understandings with big donors and allied but ostensibly independent PACs.” 

Today, “AIPAC is trying out a sort of middle road,” Friedman said. “It will return in part to the shadows — no direct endorsements, no direct donations — but it will also continue to flex its power directly in elections, via tactics it has been testing and honing these past four years.”

If anything, next cycle could see an expansion of the recent pop-up PAC strategy, making it harder to tell when AIPAC is involved — until it’s too late. 

The post AIPAC Isn’t Retreating. Here’s How It’s Already Shaping the Next Congress. appeared first on The Intercept.

Super PAC networks bankrolled with millions of dollars from Anthropic and OpenAI executives spent heavily in competitive primaries earlier this year, including a high-profile race in New York City. They were touted as the looming successor to another single-issue group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as AIPAC moved its spending underground.

Yet as public outrage over data centers and AI’s threat to jobs soared, artificial intelligence super PACs dramatically throttled back spending on congressional races compared to the primaries. The biggest AI super PAC network has spent only modestly ahead of next week’s general election — and mostly in safe seats.

An Intercept analysis of AI spending in the 2026 midterms, based on Federal Election Commission records and independent race ratings, shows that only 5 percent of their direct expenditures have gone to contested general election races. The industry’s avoidance of the contested races that could determine control of the next Congress suggest that the PACs have realized how the public has soured on the tech, campaign finance and industry observers told The Intercept.

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“Essentially these companies underestimated how much the public despises the data center buildout, and the inescapability of AI systems that no one asked for that say they will automate jobs and maybe kill us all,” said Rick Claypool, a research director for the president’s office at Public Citizen, a nonprofit campaign finance watchdog.

Although there is still time for a last-minute flurry of spending, the story of AI’s role in the 2026 midterm elections may turn out to be the story of a single race — a primary in New York — that forced the industry to step away from the limelight.

Claypool’s group released an analysis earlier this year of “corporate supremacist” super PACs, a new breed of campaign committees modeled on a crypto super PAC called Fairshake that spent tens of millions on the 2024 elections.

The model was to amass a massive war chest and use it to punish candidates who opposed the company’s preferred government regulations, while throwing cash at allies or potential allies from both parties.

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The first big AI super PAC to launch in August 2025 was Leading the Future, which was bankrolled by the president of OpenAI and its investors. A rival super PAC network, Public First, launched months later with the goal of countering Leading the Future’s influence. Its donors include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who gave $1 million. Anthropic has also given a nonprofit associated with Public First millions of dollars, while stipulating that the money cannot be used on elections. Public First says that it supports tighter regulations than its rival.

The two networks plowed $50.7 million into the primaries, campaign finance records show. Most of that money was spent on primary races where the outcome was in doubt, driven by an eye-popping $21.3 million the networks spent on supporting or opposing a single congressional candidate, Alex Bores, in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District.

Bores, a New York State Assembly member, attracted the ire of those in the industry who favor a laissez-faire approach by authoring an AI regulation bill in the state legislature.

Leading the Future succeeded in defeating Bores, who lost to his State Assembly colleague Micah Lasher in June. But the group drew intense blowback in the process. Many observers suggested Leading the Future’s spending had boosted Bores rather than hurt him, because it gave him a chance to position himself as a foe of the AI industry — while also benefiting from a PAC aligned with the Public First network.

“Down to the wire, they were sweating,” Bores told The Intercept, referring to Leading the Future. “I think people who have been in politics for a while will realize that their spending really served to elevate the issue of AI.”

Leading the Future did not respond to a request for comment.

After wading into contested primary elections, the two leading AI super PAC networks have held back from spending on competitive general elections — even though they have plenty of money in the bank.

Until a few days ago, Public First had spent nothing on general election races. Leading the Future has spent only $7.4 million on general election races as of October 26, according to the FEC data, despite having $34 million in cash on hand across its network as of its most recent report.

Only 31 percent of that total has gone toward competitive races, as measured by the independent analytics website FiftyPlusOne. The only reason Leading the Future has spent money on competitive general election races at all is because it’s backing U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., who filled the seat of her late brother Lindsey Graham and is now facing an unexpectedly fierce challenge from a Democrat to win a full term in ruby-red South Carolina.

“They are not going to have an impact on the balance of power in Congress,” said Shaunna Thomas, one of the founders of Guardrails Alliance, another new super PAC set up to counter Leading the Future’s influence. “They are spending money on candidates who they think will protect their ability to control if and how they are regulated.”

Public First has only recently started spending a relatively small sum on a handful of general election races. The spending had amounted to $1.1 million as of the morning of October 26, according to processed FEC data.

Asked for comment on how its strategy has changed since the primaries, a Public First spokesperson said that it was still trying to support “strong advocates for AI regulation.”

“Public First was founded as a counterweight to Leading the Future, and that fight looks very different today. Leading the Future is going dark. Its biggest backers are walking away,” said Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, the spokesperson.

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Into that gap have stepped new groups pushing for tougher AI regulation such as the Guardrails Alliance, which bills itself as a grassroots alternative to corporate-backed super PACs. It is funded in large part by Silicon Valley tech workers but has taken a more aggressive stance against “tech oligarchs.” Guardrails has spent about $2 million thus far and reported having $1.2 million on hand as of October 14.

About three-quarters of voters are less likely to support a candidate they know has received support from an AI super PAC, according to a Data for Progress poll of more than 3,000 likely voters in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio commissioned by Guardrails. Voters were more concerned about spending from AI companies than from crypto companies or AIPAC.

The dislike for data centers and AI cuts across party lines. In Michigan’s purple 7th Congressional District, Democratic candidate Will Lawrence has seized on data centers as one of his leading issues.

“The politics of this are terrible. Eighty percent of everybody is against it, whether you’re a Democrat, independent, or Republican,” he told supporters at a recent town hall.

Notably, neither of the super PAC networks has intervened in Lawrence’s race, despite it being one of the closest in the nation. (Lawrence’s campaign has pointed out that Elon Musk, who leads AI company xAI, has spent against Lawrence via his America PAC.)

There are emerging signs that the big AI super PAC networks are changing tactics in response to that public distaste. Public First’s dark-money affiliate donated $3 million since August to a preexisting super PAC supporting California state Sen. Scott Wiener, one of two Democrats vying to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi in California.

Leading the Future, meanwhile, gave a $500,000 donation on October 9 to a pro-data center nonprofit called Build American AI.

AI super PAC critics are also watching to see what Leading the Future will do, given its large war chest.

“I think they are going to continue to spend. I think they are going to try to do more and more spending that isn’t as easily tracked, because they are such political dead weight,” said Bores.

Delaware Corporations

When single-issue super PACs know their issue is unpopular, they use vague names, “pop-up” affiliates, and other dubious tactics to hide their activities from voters.

Add another one to the list: Leading the Future has routed more than $30 million of spending through newly minted Delaware corporations, blocking transparency during an election that has been defined by voter backlash against the industry.

Those apparent shell corporations have accounted for the lion’s share of the largest artificial intelligence super PAC network’s expenses during this year’s election.

The practice is a flagrant violation of Federal Election Commission guidelines that require campaign organizations to disclose which consultants, pollsters, and advertisers they are paying, a campaign watchdog alleged in a complaint filed in May.

There may be little recourse for observers worried about the lack of transparency for now, however. The FEC is short of the quorum that would allow it to take action on complaints such as the one filed by the Campaign Legal Center. (Leading the Future, which did not respond to a request for comment, has previously defended its tactics as legal in a statement to Wired.)

The Leading the Future network was funded in large part by an executive at or investors in OpenAI, one of the world’s largest AI companies. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Company president Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna Brockman, donated $25 million to the network last year. When it came time to spend that money, the Leading the Future network leaned on two affiliate super PACs, one for Democratic candidates called Think Big and the other for Republican candidates called American Mission.

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That is a typical tactic of the new breed of single-issue super PACs popularized by the crypto industry. Campaign finance reform advocates say it may help obscure the origin of campaign ads from voters but does not run afoul of any laws itself.

What those super PACs did next raised red flags for watchdogs, however. Since December, American Mission has reported spending $17.4 million through a Delaware-incorporated limited liability corporation called Summit Ridge Media Group, on services ranging from media placement to ad production to consulting.

Think Big has spent $21.3 million through a different Delaware corporation, Lantern Production Consultants, on a similarly wide range of expenses.

The grab bag of expenses is a giveaway that the super PACs are likely using the newly created corporations to hide their true vendors, according to Shanna Ports, a senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

“There’s no way of knowing what is motivating this arrangement — but I know there is backlash to AI. It is possible that the vendors who are working with American Mission and Think Big don’t want to be identified in FEC reports,” Ports said.

Thomas, of the rival super PAC Guardrails Alliance, told The Intercept she thinks the network is obscuring its spending because a lax regulatory approach has become “politically toxic.”

“Their donors don’t want to be associated, their candidates don’t want their support, and their vendors don’t want to be associated,” Thomas said. “If you were public, you are running away. If you are not, you are interested in not being exposed.”

This story was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

The post AI Tried to Buy the Midterms — Then the Lobby Learned Everyone Hates AI appeared first on The Intercept.

Officials in the state have prepared for months against the possibility of election interference from federal officials, and the state remains on high alert in the run-up to the general election on November 3.

Training materials for law enforcement officials in the state, obtained by The Intercept through a public records request, were updated this year for the elections to include explicit references to federal statutes barring armed federal agents from polling sites. 

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said the inclusion of such references was a direct defense in response to the fearmongering around election integrity from President Donald Trump and his administration.

“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” Bellows said. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”

Bellows’s office offered up the training slideshow, which cites a U.S. law that bars armed civil or military officers from posting at voting sites, to law enforcement personnel in the run-up to Maine’s primary election in June and again in the lead-up to the general election on November 5.

Nationwide, Democratic officials have expressed fears that the Trump Administration might weaponize U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies to undermine the rights of voters. In New York, state Attorney General Letitia James issued a reminder to voters that federal officials may not “police the polls,” and the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP called out the assignment of federal election monitors to two counties in the state as potential intimidation.

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The Trump administration, meanwhile, has sounded the alarm about the alleged scourge of non-citizens on the voter rolls, sending agents from the FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division to probe alleged fraud. A handful of people in California, New York, and North Carolina have been indicted for allegedly voting as non-citizens, but a review of similar cases by the Washington Post found that such cases were often the result of honest mistakes.

In Maine, worries about federal interventions at polling places flared when — following a slew of social media videos from Trump allies suggesting that fraud is already taking place among the state’s Somali American community — a local outlet reported that the Department of Justice would be sending election monitors to the state.

Jon Fetherston, a journalist with the far-right Maine Wire, which is funded by conservative megadonor Leonard Leo, was seen following people in and around an early voting site at Lewiston City Hall and aggressively questioning them. (The Maine Wire did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Critics said the moves were tantamount to voter harassment, but Maine Wire editor-in-chief Steve Robinson later defended them as an act of election transparency. Robinson, who has led a crusade against what he alleges to be a network of fraud in the state’s Somali American community, questioned the role of interpreters tasked with helping “jobless Somali bums” cast their ballots.

In the wake of the Maine Wire controversy in Lewiston, Bellows confirmed to the Maine Morning Star that a wave of federal election monitors would be headed to polling sites in Lewiston and Portland.

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The Department of Justice on Tuesday confirmed to The Intercept that it intends to send election monitors to Maine for Election Day, but did not elaborate or respond to specific questions about where the monitors were to be sent. 

“We will have around 1,000 monitors in counties throughout the United States, but we will not share the full list until Election Day,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Intercept in an email Tuesday. “All monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, including that they not interfere with the voting process. Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate.”

Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Collins Takes Right-Wing Bait

With Maine a key battleground state for control of Congress — Democratic challenger Troy Jackson is seeking to topple long-serving GOP Sen. Susan Collins, and the Democratic House candidate Matt Dunlap is seeking to best former Gov. Paul LePage in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District — temperatures are running high in the state.

Progressives in Maine worry that even without a robust federal presence at voting places — whether monitors are armed or not — activist campaigns like the one undertaken by the Maine Wire journalists could pose a potential threat to voters’ rights.

“Basically, if you were walking into City Hall and you were Black, you could expect to have this guy come up to you with his phone and ask you all sorts of rude and obviously racist questions,” said Ben Chin, co-director of the progressive Maine People’s Alliance. “We’re trying to encourage everyone to come out to vote, but it makes sense why that might give people pause. You hear a guy like that is outside a polling location, it’s reasonable to wonder, ‘Should I go down there right now?’”

In a statement to The Intercept, Bellows said the state and the city of Lewiston were taking steps to ensure that voters could cast a ballot free of harassment.

“We have received complaints about the intrusive filming, photography, and harassment of voters in the City of Lewiston by political operatives,” Bellows told The Intercept in a statement. “All voters should be able to exercise their right to vote without feeling watched, questioned, or harassed, and we take these allegations seriously, particularly when it appears that voters were targeted for no other reason than their race or ethnicity. We understand the City of Lewiston has taken steps to address the problem, and we will continue to monitor the situation.”

Collins, meanwhile, took the Maine Wire’s reporting seriously after Fetherston asked the senator at a campaign event about the role of interpreters, which he and the Maine Wire cast as “electioneering.”

“I’m unaware of those allegations, but certainly only Americans should be voting in American elections,” Collins said. “And it is troubling to me if people are being accompanied into voting booths and handling ballots in a way that is not sanctioned by law.”

The post Trump Vows to Send Election “Monitors” to Maine After Far-Right Conspiracies Spread appeared first on The Intercept.

The Limits of American Might

The failure of Tel Aviv and Washington to achieve their war aims in Iran has resulted in the most dramatic American retreat from a region since the U.S. flight from Vietnam in 1975. This startling American defeat — after a generation of forever war failures and stalemates — has been thrown into broad relief by the resumption of another regional conflict that has received far less attention than the Trump administration’s sputtering war with Tehran. This fall, the forces that most Americans know as “the Houthis” have conducted a blitzkrieg in their native Yemen and have been pummeling Saudi Arabia’s aviation and energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. In doing so, they have put a spotlight on the limits of American power, and the shrinking U.S. military footprint, in the Middle East. 

The long-standing conflict between Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen’s Ansarullah, or “Helpers of God,” led by the Houthi clan, heated up again in July 2026, when Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa International Airport to prevent a Houthi delegation from landing on its return from the funeral in Iran for slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Ansarullah government launched its own attacks and, in October, managed briefly to close Saudi Arabia’s own airport. The renewed war has now expanded into a regional conflict, with Pakistan, Türkiye, and, recently, Egypt pledging to defend the kingdom from attack, though none of these regional powers appear eager to conduct operations in Yemen itself. Notably absent from the current conflict is Saudi Arabia’s most powerful ally, the United States, since President Donald Trump has repeatedly declined to intervene on behalf of his Saudi allies.

The typical U.S. press framing of Ansarullah as an “Iran-backed militia” is inaccurate, since the movement has local, Arab nationalist reasons for its actions and is a full-scale government that rules some 80 percent of Yemen’s population. Still, it does receive surreptitious technical and military support from Iran, though nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech armaments — from kits turning 2,000-pound “dumb” bombs into precision munitions to advanced air-to-air missiles — that the U.S. provides the Saudis. Ironically, Trump’s war on Iran, fought in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, weakened the Saudis and exposed their vulnerabilities to military attack by Iranian drones and missiles, impelling them to seek a symbolic win over a less formidable enemy in neighboring Yemen. But the weaknesses exposed by Iran’s drones helped encourage a vigorous Ansarullah rejoinder.

The Incredible Shrinking Superpower

The American refusal to join Saudi Arabia’s war signals a profound degradation in U.S. capabilities and standing in the Middle East. The U.S. military had, for decades, dominated the region from a network of about 20 major bases. The U.S. Navy operated out of the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain. The U.S. Air Force flew missions from the massive al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which housed 10,000 U.S. personnel. Thousands of ground troops were barracked in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. The Pentagon admitted that “Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF.”

The naval base at Manama, one of America’s most important naval facilities and headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, was destroyed by Iranian strikes. (Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted last month that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”) The loss of Manama led to supply shortages and poor morale aboard the USS Lincoln and other ships patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, bedeviling Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

The CIA offices at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh were annihilated. Iran struck al-Udeid’s evacuated Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, from which the Pentagon had directed its strikes on enemies as diverse as the Taliban and ISIL over recent decades, and rendered this facility inoperable. All U.S. troops were also withdrawn from Iraq, a process accelerated by the inability of U.S. missile interceptors to protect them from attacks by Iran and allied Shiite militias there.

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Iran’s deployment of swarms of Shahed drones caused the United States and Israel to use up much of their stock of interceptors, which are time-consuming and expensive to replace. A basic Shahed costs as little as $20,000, though new hardened versions are more expensive — whereas a Patriot interceptor costs $4 million. One reason the Trump administration may be reluctant to intervene in Yemen is that if the U.S. cannot fly missions from al-Udeid, and cannot be sure any new fighter-jet fleets stationed in the region will be safe from Iran, given the paucity of interceptors, the Pentagon will have a limited ability to rescue any U.S. pilots shot down over Yemen.

America’s Profound Weakness in the Middle East 

Saudi Arabia launched a war against the ascendant Ansarullah in 2015 when the latter staged a coup in the capital of Sanaa. The Ansarullah movement is rooted in Yemen’s Zaidi Shiism, though it is more radical than traditional Zaidism. (Zaidi Shiism differs substantially from Iranian Shiism, having no ayatollahs and having relatively good relations with Sunnis.)

About a third of Yemenis are Zaidis, who predominate in the north of the country, and many have long resented the dominance of their politics and culture by neighboring, oil-rich, Sunni Saudi Arabia, whose official ideology is hard-line Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Quran. Wahhabi proselytizing among the Shia enraged the Houthi clan and their followers began rebelling against the government of military dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2004. But when he was deposed by popular demonstrations during the Arab Spring in 2012, Saleh gradually allied with the Houthis, and by 2015 about half the Yemeni military rallied to their side, along with some major Sunni tribes.

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In response to the Houthis’ rise, a Saudi-led coalition that included the United Arab Emirates began bombing Yemen in 2015. Until 2022, the U.S, then militarily dominant in the region, provided the Saudis with strategic advice, weaponry, and in-air refueling for their fighter jets in the Yemen war, though Riyadh’s tendency to bomb civilian infrastructure rather than confining themselves to military targets caused tension between the two allies. While the Saudis and their coalition pushed the Houthis out of much of the south of the country, including Aden, they were unable to dislodge them from the north. The Saudis implicitly acknowledged their failure with a United Nations-brokered truce in April 2022, which largely held until this past summer.

The Forever Wars Effect

America’s forever wars against Middle Eastern countries that decline to accept the Israel project or American corporate neocolonialism helped reignite the Saudi–Yemeni conflict. Iran is the last major state in the region that rejects Israel and is off-limits to U.S. corporate investment, a stance that inspires much of Washington’s animus. Netanyahu was therefore easily able to persuade Trump, as a privileged visitor to the White House Situation Room, to attack Iran in February.

The glib expectation of Netanyahu and of his Mossad chief at that time, David Barnea, that the Islamic Republic would crumble if Israel murdered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and around 50 other high-ranking regime figures proved wishful thinking. The notion that Iran was vulnerable to a tightened petroleum blockade was turned on its head by the hard-liners who ascended to power after Khamenei’s death. Largely veterans of the grueling eight-year Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, the country’s new leaders pursued a policy of “de-basing” toward the United States, taking out its main regional military facilities.

In addition, Iran launched precision strikes at the energy facilities of their Arab Gulf neighbors who had hosted those American bases. They struck Kuwait’s national petroleum company and its fields and refineries. They took out 17 percent of the production of Qatar’s Ras Laffan natural gas facility, even though Doha had good relations with Tehran and had mediated for Iran. Tehran also struck ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, using missiles and drones, scaring the major shipping insurers into withdrawing their contracts. Few shipping magnates would risk cargoes worth billions of dollars without insurance.

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Iran threw the world into an energy crisis reminiscent of the 1970s, which would have been even more devastating had China not released oil from its vast private and public petroleum reserves and cut its oil imports from 11.5 million barrels a day to under 9 million barrels a day, a move partially enabled by its turn to electric vehicles, which saved it 1.5 million barrels a day. High gasoline and diesel prices hurt Asia more than the United States, but prices rose globally. A third of the world’s helium, essential for cooling computer chips in the production process, comes from the Gulf, and that supply was also interrupted, increasing the price of electronics.

By successfully striking Saudi Arabia, Iran demonstrated that the kingdom’s ability to protect itself is imperfect and its infrastructure is vulnerable. By blockading the Strait of Hormuz in a way that the United States had difficulty undoing, Iran demonstrated the vulnerability of key world maritime arteries, something Ansarullah had already highlighted by striking at shipping in the Red Sea to protest the Gaza genocide. 

Blockade for Blockade

When the Saudis bombed Sanaa’s airport in July 2026, Ansarullah’s leadership appears to have decided that Riyadh posed an ongoing existential danger to their state and sought to strangle the Yemeni economy, just as Israel had done to Gaza. Moreover, they sensed that the kingdom could be rolled back in the wake of the failure of the Israeli–U.S. war on Iran. Just as Iran had weakened the Gulf Arab states with its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis believed they could seriously degrade the Saudi economy by blocking Riyadh’s shipping through the Bab al-Mandab, “the Strait of Tears,” between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Saudi exports through the Strait of Hormuz had fallen substantially. The kingdom did, however, have an escape valve: its East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Ships loading at Yanbu then headed for Saudi Arabia’s major Asian markets through the Bab al-Mandab. If Ansarullah could make the tanker captains fearful of this transit, they could reduce Saudi Arabia’s income even further. The Houthi spokesperson, Muhammad Abd al-Salam, warned that the prohibition of Saudi shipping was only the first step in a tit-for-tat strategy of “blockade for blockade.” The idea wasn’t original. The Saudis and the U.S. had often attempted to blockade petroleum imports to northern Yemen during the seven-year Saudi–Yemeni War.

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In the subsequent three months, Ansarullah deployed missiles and drones constructed from Iranian models by military engineers trained by the old nationalist government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, many of whom had joined the Ansarullah military, in what has been called a Yemeni “military industrial complex.”

Just as the kingdom’s interceptors had proven unable to prevent Iranian strikes on targets such as the CIA section of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, they sometimes failed to halt the barrage of Yemeni missiles and drones. Refineries and oil installations, even the headquarters of the state oil giant, Saudi Aramco, in Dhahran, were hit. In October, Ansarullah closed Riyadh’s International Airport, just as the Saudis had attempted to close that of Sanaa in July. Ansarullah also surged out of their mountain strongholds and made a major push to Yemen’s southwest coast, taking the strategic port of Mocha overlooking the Bab al-Mandab. They also moved on Taiz, an inland industrial city of nearly 1 million inhabitants, one of the last major population centers not already under their control, in a campaign that tested the ability of the small Saudi-backed government of Rashad al-Alimi in Aden to resist it.

Highlanders and Oil Sheikhs

Just as the Vietnam War was one conflict among many fought in the Third World during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so the Saudi–Yemeni War of 2026 is part of the larger struggle between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. Still, just as Vietnam was more about Vietnamese anticolonialism, nationalism, and sovereignty than about Communism and the ownership of the means of production, so the Saudi–Yemeni War is about Yemeni autonomy more than it is about the loose Houthi alliance with Iran. The conflict is not primarily between Zaidism and Wahhabism, though religious tensions are part of the story, but is far more rooted in a struggle between desperately poor Yemeni highlanders and fabulously wealthy Saudi sheikhs.

The plutocratic Saudi ruling elite is closely tied to Washington and has secret dealings with the Israelis, with whom it shares a distrust of the poverty-stricken Palestinian resistance, and views Ansarullah as cat’s paws of Iran in the Arabian Peninsula and as radical republicans trying to overthrow the region’s oil monarchies in favor of populism. For its part, Ansarullah are Arab nationalists, anti-American, and seek to use oil resources for populist purposes. And they have been willing to attack Israel to defend the Palestinians of Gaza from genocide.

Last week, Ansarullah battered targets across Saudi Arabia, prompting a further pullback from the region by Washington. The Yemeni forces attacked King Fahd International Airport in Dammam. An Ansarullah spokesperson said the group also targeted the Saudi defense ministry in the capital, Riyadh, along with an Aramco site in Yanbu, and an airport in the southern city of Abha. Reports also emerged of an attack on another Aramco oil field.

“Houthis have increasingly engaged in hostilities against Saudi Arabia, including attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure,” wrote State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott in an October 21 post on X, after the wave of attacks, ordering “non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members” out of Saudi Arabia.

It’s just the latest evidence of the most significant regional retreat by the U.S. in half a century and evidence of profound American military decline. The outcome of their war with the Saudis will not determine the issue of the U.S.–Israeli contest with Iran, but the very ability of Ansarullah to prosecute it points to the profound weakening of the American posture in the Middle East.

The post The Incredible Shrinking Superpower appeared first on The Intercept.

Grissett was stunned. He later summed up his reaction: “Vindication.”

McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent — and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth.

Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory’s 1985 trial, he said, Grissett’s own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. “He says, ‘There’s no way that guy can say that,’ Grissett recalled. “I mean, anybody with common sense would know that.”

In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as “thin,” Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself “is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.”

Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison.

The ruling was not only momentous for McCrory, who has insisted on his innocence for more than four decades, but it also marked a new victory in the long legal battle against junk forensics — and the discredited discipline of bite-mark analysis specifically.

Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out. Although his lawyers asked the court to free him on bond pending the state’s decision to release or retry him, the Alabama attorney general’s office filed a motion last week asking Huffaker to reconsider his order overturning the conviction. The state’s appeals will likely drag out McCrory’s ordeal through the holidays and into next year.

In a statement, McCrory’s current legal team praised Huffaker’s “explicit acknowledgment that criminal convictions based on discredited bitemark evidence cannot stand.” Mark Loudon-Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, said they are “grateful for the decision and look forward to continuing our fight to bring Mr. McCrory home.”

In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state’s parole board denied McCrory release.

Julie Bond McCrory’s body was found inside her home in Andalusia on May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple’s son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his bed. Police quickly pointed to McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

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The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives found no physical evidence to connect McCrory to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two windows in Julie’s bedroom that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime. 

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory’s teeth.

To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn’t definitively link the two marks on Julie’s arm to McCrory’s teeth, at trial he was unequivocal that they matched.

Bite-mark analysis is based on a two-pronged foundation. First, that the shape and arrangement of our teeth are unique, like DNA, and second, that skin is a suitable substrate for recording this uniqueness. As it turns out, there’s no science backing either assertion. In fact, research into the discipline has routinely found the opposite — that human dentition is not unique and that skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury. This makes bite-mark analysis a random and entirely speculative practice.

Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and ’90s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters.

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In the years that followed, however, bite-mark analysis was increasingly called into question and ultimately exposed as junk science, a subjective pattern-matching practice that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions. At least four of those, including McCrory’s, are cases in which Souviron served as the prosecution’s expert.

In 2019, Souviron recanted his testimony in McCrory’s case, providing an affidavit to Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.”

Despite the fact that their key witness had disavowed the evidence they used to send McCrory to prison for life, prosecutors fought to preserve their conviction. At the 2021 hearing, they insisted that McCrory was guilty, based on the same evidence they presented at trial. They recast the supposed bite mark as “teeth marks,” implying that, while bite-mark analysis may be discredited, the study of “teeth marks” is a separate and valid discipline. Even if Souviron had not testified for the state, they argued, jurors could have looked at photos of the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that McCrory inflicted the wounds.

Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecutor. So did the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his ruling in favor of the state. But Huffaker did not.

Huffaker took exception to the notion that analyzing “teeth marks” is somehow separate from bite-mark analysis. It is clear, he wrote, “that bitemark identification is based on analysis of individual teeth markings.”

But “most importantly, the state court unreasonably determined that, even without Dr. Souviron’s expert testimony, a reasonable jury could compare the bitemark evidence with McCrory’s dentition themselves and find that it belonged to McCrory,” Huffaker wrote. “This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence presented by McCrory at the postconviction evidentiary hearing.” In a footnote, he added that “if an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either.”

McCrory is not the only person who is still fighting for his freedom decades after being convicted based on discredited junk science. Last year, Chris Duncan was declared innocent nearly 30 years after being sent to Louisiana’s death row based on bogus bite-mark evidence. He was released one day before Thanksgiving. In his case, a video showed the state’s supposed bite-mark expert manufacturing the evidence that was used to convict Duncan.

As in McCrory’s case, Louisiana prosecutors have nevertheless continued to insist their case against Duncan is solid. And as in McCrory’s case, this has not gone over well with some judges. Earlier this year, Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Judge John Weimer wrote that bite-mark evidence “should be discarded and no longer have a place in the realm of forensic science.”

“Long ago, some who were thought to have the best and brightest minds of that time endorsed ‘trial by water’ as a means of determining a person’s guilt or innocence. We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “Thankfully, as scientific knowledge evolved, there was a realization that these practices had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, or the search for truth, and the practices were discarded.”

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As the holidays approach, McCrory’s family remains hopeful that he will soon walk out of prison. His son Chad, who is now in his 40s, has attended a dozen parole hearings with the hope of one day seeing his father released.

Grissett, McCrory’s former lawyer, reached out to Chad to share his hope that McCrory will finally come home. While memories have faded in the tight-knit community of Andalusia, many people remember McCrory’s case, he said.

“Everybody sees this was junk science,” Grissett said. “You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.”

It’s “sad that it’s taken this long,” Grissett said. It haunts him that “somebody’s still out there who murdered this lady. And I’m afraid that they’re not gonna look into that.”

The post Prosecutors Want to Keep a Man in Prison for His Wife’s Murder — Despite Judge Saying Their Evidence is Junk appeared first on The Intercept.

“I never thought about leaving the country,” Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian senator and son of the deposed, disgraced leader, told his 16 million Instagram followers on Monday. It was the day after he lost the presidential election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a margin of more than 4 million votes. 

Flávio promised to stay in Brazil to “organize the opposition” during Lula’s next term. 

“I’m the last obstacle to the Workers’ Party’s plan to destroy the country,” Flávio warned, referring to the party of Lula, who defeated his father four years earlier.

A few hours later, he left his mansion in Brasilia and sought asylum in the U.S. The Trump State Department told The Associated Press that it will grant him and his family visas.

“I didn’t take ​sides, but it looked like another rigged election,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday, echoing Flávio’s election night talking points without providing any credible evidence that casts doubt on Lula’s come-from-behind victory — even as Flávio’s own party put out a statement acknowledging the results later that day.

It is no coincidence that the Trumps and the Bolsonaros are so fond of each other. Their modus operandi is nearly identical. 

Both wrap themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism and moral righteousness, while treating their political offices as personal get-rich-quick schemes. And, when their lies finally catch up with them, you can be sure that they will jump ship to save themselves first and abandon their followers.

The affinities become obvious when you watch Bolsonaro, his failsons, and co-conspirators all end up in Trump’s America, where Flávio is about to join his brother, and in the denialism and violence that follow their failures.

Coups and Flight Risks

Flávio Bolsonaro’s election denial and hasty escape are his version of Trump’s infamous January 6 speech: Rile up the troops to do your dirty work and get the hell out of the way.

It’s not the first time a Bolsonaro ran this playbook. After Jair Bolsonaro became the first modern Brazilian president to lose a reelection bid, he refused to attend the January 2023 inauguration ceremony. Instead, he also fled to the U.S., staying in a Minions-themed children’s bedroom in the Orlando, Florida, home of retired UFC fighter José Aldo.

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A week later, on January 8, the ex-president’s allies laid siege to the capital, Brasília, vandalizing Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court, as foot soldiers in a larger coup plotted to overthrow the Lula government. Nearly four decades of Brazilian democracy was only spared when key military leaders blinked before they could finish the job.

Jair Bolsonaro eventually returned to Brazil and was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading the plot, which included a plan to assassinate Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Allies, including top military brass, were also convicted. Jair remains under house arrest — widely thought to be pinning his hopes for freedom on a Flávio presidency that wasn’t to be.

Flávio, however, will not be lonely in the States. His brother, former Brazilian Congress member Eduardo Bolsonaro, just received green cards for his family and is living in a $1.2 million McMansion in Southlake, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as we revealed in The Intercept Brasil earlier this year. Eduardo, who is a regular on the Trumpworld circuit, was sentenced in absentia to four years and two months in prison for lobbying the U.S. government to interfere in his father’s trial. 

Flávio, too, seems poised to receive news of his own prison sentence while sitting on a couch in a Texas suburb. In May, our reporting at The Intercept Brasil put the first nail in the coffin of his presidential campaign when we published chat logs and audio recordings of the senator negotiating $24 million — and being wired $10 million — from disgraced billionaire banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is a sort of Brazilian cross between Charles Ponzi and Jeffrey Epstein. 

The payments, wired to a U.S. account, were supposedly meant to finance “Dark Horse,” a biopic about Jair Bolsonaro starring Jim Caviezel. Brazilian Federal Police, though, have already poked holes in Flávio’s story as they investigate whether the money was actually used to bankroll Eduardo’s treasonous lobbying of the Trump administration to sanction Brazil and help his brother’s electoral chances. 

Flávio is also being investigated for his alleged ties to a billion-dollar money-laundering scheme through an online betting company run by Willer Tomaz. The two are not only close friends but also business partners. Flávio even had unfettered access to one of Tomaz’s offshore bank accounts. You will not be surprised to learn that Tomaz left Brazil in August and is now living in Miami.

Police argued that, after losing the election, Flávio would pose a flight risk, especially in light of his closest associates’ recent actions. They asked the Brazilian Supreme Court to order Flávio to turn over his passport, which is permitted under Brazilian law. A top justice granted the request and, when the deadline passed, canceled the senator’s travel documents. 

By then, Flávio was already on his way to the U.S.

The post The Bolsonaro Family Playbook: Lose, Cry Fraud, and Run to Trump’s America appeared first on The Intercept.

San Francisco resident John Hering has sunk more than $1.25 million into an effort to defeat Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general at the California Department of Justice endorsed by the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and to support John McKinney, a county prosecutor running an uphill general election campaign. It’s a heavy injection of cash from a single individual in a local race for a little-known office, but it pales in comparison to Hering’s private-sector spending: In 2022, his investment firm Vy Capital pumped $700 million into Musk’s takeover of the company then known as Twitter and $300 million into his tunnel-construction Boring Company.

A co-founder of the cybersecurity company Lookout, Hering is spending in line with the tech industry in which he’s long been invested. While the city attorney’s office is commonly used as the city’s defense against litigious residents, the office also carries the power to mold legislation, enforce state law, such as labor protections, and take on corporations and the federal government in court. Roy has vowed to wield the office’s regulatory muscle against corporations — including Big Tech.

“Monopolies and Big Tech are things that [Roy] sees as an opportunity to wage battle against,” said former LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who has not endorsed either candidate. “If I were Big Tech, I would certainly think, ‘OK, well, this is someone who is a potential threat.’”

Hering, who did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, is part of a group of tech titans backing McKinney. Others include the founders of Ring, Tinder, and Boingo, and investors in Anthropic, Anduril, and SpaceX, who have collectively put more than $1.9 million into pro-McKinney committees. A group called “Committee to Expand the Middle Class Candidate” — backed by the property rental tech giant Airbnb — donated an additional $4.2 million to a committee supporting McKinney.

To help get McKinney through the June primary election, Hering and fellow tech investor Diego Berdakin poured more than $1 million into another committee. Over the past month, Hering’s general-election spending group, Neighbors for John McKinney, has been paying for TV and online ads and mailers that play up McKinney as “a lifelong Democrat” and “100% anti-MAGA.” 

The same can hardly be said for the group’s top funder.

After giving to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid and Democratic candidates like Beto O’Rourke, Hering donated $41,300 to the Republican National Committee and $500,000 to Musk’s America PAC in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s run for president. He has publicly praised Musk’s chaotic purge of the federal government through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency program and called the world’s richest man an “American hero” for offering to pay TSA salaries during the spring government shutdown. In 2025, Hering and Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who has also donated to Neighbors for John McKinney, attended a White House dinner where Trump hosted dozens of high-profile Silicon Valley figures. The pro-McKinney group is also funded by billionaires Rick Caruso, a failed LA mayoral candidate, and Ron Burkle, a Democratic megadonor.

Earlier this cycle, Hering, who listed San Francisco as his residence in campaign finance documents, also waded into the LA mayoral election — boosting right-wing reality star Spencer Pratt.

Tech industry spending in LA’s elections arrives amid a midterm cycle where Big Tech and artificial intelligence have doled out millions of dollars to exert influence in congressional and state races across the U.S. as lawmakers grapple with how to regulate the industries. Musk, for example, has dropped more than $442 million into the midterms, including more than $70 million in his political action committee, America PAC, in October alone. And in state Assembly and Senate races across California, tech and AI executives have spent more than $29 million, according to Tech Equity Action, a political nonprofit that lobbies to craft tech-related legislation while advocating for workers’ rights.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom gave big AI companies a scare last month, when he signed a slate of bills protecting workers from AI overreach, like limiting its use to terminate or discipline workers, banning employers from using AI to surveil employees in bathrooms, and assuring that human healthcare workers will have the final say on patient care decisions. 

The tech industry had fought hard to kill the bills, and while Newsom did offer the industry some concessions, labor organizers say the new laws offer them an opportunity to expand local worker protections, too. 

In LA, Roy has said she would use the city attorney’s office to fight for workers against losses in potential wages, promising that she would go after “large corporations and big tech companies” that “misclassify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying them minimum wage and providing benefits,” according to her campaign website. She also spoke against companies who are increasingly using automation “to evade regulations and eliminate jobs.”

Tech leaders may view a city attorney with an appetite for regulation as “existential to their business model,” said Brian Justie, a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center who was part of the coalition that pushed for the bills. 

“What happens in California sets a precedent and serves as a blueprint for the rest of the country,” Justie said. “And so if you’re a Big Tech, you really need to have a certain outcome come to pass here to avoid ripple effects elsewhere.” 

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For his part, McKinney has blasted Roy for her desire to “turn the city attorney’s office into the country’s largest public interest law firm” as out of touch with what LA voters want. However, voters across the U.S. have increasingly expressed opposition to the expansion of artificial intelligence and the construction of data centers. Roy’s campaign has shown a willingness to lend an ear to growing AI anxieties.

“Billionaires don’t want to answer to the working people, consumers, and communities they exploit,” Roy said in a statement to The Intercept. “But as Los Angeles’ City Attorney, I intend to hold them, their corporations, and the MAGA Republicans that permit their behavior accountable — that’s why they’re spending on someone who won’t.”

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

Ads put out by Neighbors for John McKinney assert that McKinney would “take on crooked landlords.” The committee’s website said he would fight for tenant’s “legal protections” against things like “illegal eviction.” But among the committee’s biggest funders is the Santa Monica-based real estate firm, Douglas Emmett Properties, which attempted to carry out one of the largest mass evictions in LA history until it was overruled by a judge. Douglas Emmett donated $250,000 to Neighbors for John McKinney in late September.

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Neighbors for John McKinney has also funded attack ads against Roy that paint her as an inexperienced attorney who is weak on crime and has “extreme DSA” positions. The ads cite an article by the conservative California Post, a West Coast spinoff of the New York tabloid, that claimed she had supported a freeze on prosecuting misdemeanors, which she denies.

McKinney campaigns in the mold of law-and-order candidates, pledging to address homelessness and public safety by prosecuting misdemeanors, touting closer relationships with police, and promising to revive a neighborhood prosecutor program. Other California tech-supported efforts have echoed the same — like when tech leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area fueled a successful effort to oust progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin. 

But the LA city attorney’s office holds limited criminal enforcement power, Bonin pointed out. He suspects the tech investment in the LA race is more concerned with potential civil litigation, and he thinks that if voters make that connection, it could spell an issue for the campaign.

“Voters are concerned about Big Tech, they’re certainly concerned about AI, they’re concerned about the influence of — I don’t think you can describe it any other way — 21st-century robber barons,” said Bonin, who now runs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “Income inequality is a big issue in Los Angeles, so if they make the connection that this funding is symbolic of the agenda that McKinney will pursue … then it becomes more of an issue.” 

Roxana Tynan, senior advisor of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, called the amount of Big Tech money being spent in the race “outrageous.” As she and other labor rights groups gear up for a fight for more worker AI protections in LA — like expanding safeguards to include temporary and gig workers, and banning employers from using AI software to collect sensitive worker information — she said she hoped people would follow the money being poured into the race and the influence that a few figures look to exert on the city.

“These are people who really believe that not only can they buy elections,” Tynan said, “but that they deserve to buy elections.”

Correction: October 29, 2026
This story has been updated to correct Roxana Tynan’s title.

The post The Elon Musk Funder Trying to Sway the Race for LA’s Top Lawyer appeared first on The Intercept.

The fear is mounting after a series recent attacks and threats against ground targets, including the destruction of key bases in the Middle East by Iran, plots against mega-bases in Europe, including to U.S. bombers at a British air base, and a Russian campaign that damaged European military facilities, according to two government officials.

While the Pentagon is notorious for inflating threats to press for additional funding, the officials stressed that the anxiety is real, not invented. Despite the U.S. military’s enormous budget, they say, the United States now finds itself scrambling strengthen its fortifications, protect its costly equipment, and recall personnel from some locations.

“Now all the world knows what the SecDef should have,” said one of the officials.

Foreign adversaries have taken notice of Iran’s ability to defeat U.S. air defenses using missiles and drones, they said. The officials drew specific attention to Tehran’s ability to damage or destroy bases that have been the key to U.S. power-projection and war-making for decades in the Middle East.

An Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical logistics hub. The Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, was severely damaged by Iranian missiles early in the war, rendering it inoperable. Both were recently attacked again, raising questions about whether either will ever be rebuilt. The destruction of these bases has fundamentally altered America’s future force posture in the region, according to the officials. One of them called it a “seismic shift.”

On Friday, the Trump administration leaked highly classified intelligence to Fox News and Axios suggesting Iran has “substantially increased” efforts to target U.S. diplomats and other officials in the Middle East and beyond. The October 23 memo claimed that “the lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages.” A U.S. official confirmed the accuracy of the intelligence but questioned the motives of the “official leak,” suggesting it’s part of a case being built to justify renewing the failed war.

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The leak came as the State Department ordered a further reduction in staff at multiple diplomatic posts across the Middle East, including in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. One of the officials said the move “definitely” spoke to America’s inability to defend its assets overseas. Those fears now extend to the United States, according to the officials.

Last month, buried in an unhinged address to troops in which he attacked the press and those within the military he calls beardos, weirdos, and wimps, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth tacitly acknowledged the vulnerability of U.S. domestic bases, noting that the Pentagon was now “hardening every installation on American soil” against “sabotage and drones.” And last week, the Pentagon quietly began seeking advice on new ways to protect bases by using innovative advanced materials, camouflaging facilities, obscuring their thermal and electromagnetic signatures, hiding them underground, and making them more resilient in the face of successful attack by adversaries, according to a special notice issued by a top Pentagon official.

As the Pentagon refines this “base of the future” concept, Iran is teasing a “war of the future” effort that builds on its successes in throttling the Strait of Hormuz, regionalizing the war, and battering U.S. bases, according to Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the lead negotiator and speaker of Parliament. “The second generation of surprises will be on their way; at the time and place of our choosing, in the manner we have devised, and with the creativity that only our unparalleled fighters can muster,” he wrote on X, teasing how Iran would respond if America ramps up the war.

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Iran’s successful attacks on U.S. bases have added to the growing realization that foreign adversaries, proxies, terror groups, and lone wolf actors can use low-cost, easily obtained drones to attack the military bases, aircraft, and military personnel of the U.S. and its allies.

While Iran dominated the headlines for months, officials became increasingly worried about danger from Russian attacks. “When do we stop calling it gray zone?” asked a third official briefed on the intelligence, referring to a Russian drone attack on a massive air freighter, used to carry military assistance to Ukraine, at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany in August. One drone hit the cargo plane but failed to explode, another struck a different aircraft, and a third was found near the airport. “That’s what Putin always does. He keeps testing us, pushing us, to see how far he can go,” said the official. That official and another said that the intelligence proved there was “no question” that Russia was behind the operations. Russia has denied responsibility.

The August drone attack was part of a monthslong campaign of nonstop sabotage, cyberattacks, and psychological operations against NATO nations. “These were happening in sequence from earlier in the year, through August, through September and they didn’t show any signs of stopping,” said the third official. But the attacks slowed or stopped after President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that the United States would buy Russian diesel in an effort to bring down fuel prices before the midterm elections and called on Ukraine to stop striking oil Russian refineries.

The officials noted that Pentagon leadership has been slow to respond to the changing nature of warfare, specifically drawing attention to tactics honed by Ukraine in its war with Russia. Earlier this month, for example, intelligence suggested that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was planning a complex drone attack on U.S. B-1 bombers used to attack Iran, and U.S. personnel at Royal Air Force Fairford air base. The plot, they said, was to launch small drones from just beyond the bases’ fenceline, attacking the supersonic bombers, which were not in hardened shelters but in the open on the tarmac. They noted that the plot appeared to be patterned on a Ukrainian attack, dubbed Operation Spider’s Web, against Russia last year. The plot so unnerved top military officials that the bombers were flown out while some aerial refueling aircraft were still being deployed to support their panicked flights back to the U.S. In addition to RAF Fairford, U.S. officials referenced additional threats against other bases in Europe, including Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

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Last August, Hegseth established Joint Interagency Task Force 401 to deliver “C-sUAS” or counter-small unmanned aircraft system “capabilities to America’s warfighters, [to] defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.” But an inspector general report from January said “immediate attention” was required to protect the most critical bases in the U.S. against drones and noted that Pentagon “documents contradict one another and do not speak to certain aspects of C-UAS authorities and capabilities.” The IG found also that key “military installations, government-owned, contractor-operated facilities, and contractor-owned, contractor-operated facilities conducting critical missions” were not even designated for protection.

In March, small drones flew over Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base, the home of Global Strike Command which oversees America’s bomber fleet and its intercontinental-ballistic missiles. And the IG report mentions “10 DoD installations and activities where Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) incursions have occurred.”

Late last month, the Air Force awarded a contract for counter-drone systems for Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. The military has also been looking into drone-killing technologies to defend Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, Japan; Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota; Battle Creek Air National Guard Base in Michigan; and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, among other facilities.

Two of the officials suggested that new Pentagon plans for military base modernization are rooted in an uneasy acknowledgment that U.S. outposts around the world — including within the continental United States — are increasingly vulnerable to complex and asymmetric attacks. A recent Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.” 

Hegseth’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Intercept.

One U.S. official told The Intercept that the cost of repairing and rebuilding these Middle East outposts could be “upwards of $50 million,” but said the “real cost” might be “far higher.” The Pentagon, however, refuses to disclose the price tag of the damage, which has only been shared in a classified briefing.

“The American people deserve to know the full cost of the Trump administration’s unauthorized war against Iran. Even if DoD has not yet determined which facilities it is planning to rebuild, disclosing these costs represents the bare minimum transparency DoD owes the public,” wrote Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumentha, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Duckworth, and Gary Peters in a recent letter to Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of Central Command. CENTCOM did not reply to a request from The Intercept for the total cost.

Last week, the Pentagon quietly began seeking information for “near-term” procurement and long-term modernization strategies to “move past traditional ‘pour-concrete-and-hope’ hardening” of its facilities and increase the “survivability of these installations under kinetic and multi-domain threats,” according to a special notice from the office of Dale R. Marks, the assistant secretary of war for energy, installations, and environment.

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Following the destruction of NSA Manama and Al Udeid Air Base, the Pentagon is seeking ways to promote “operational capability and survivability under kinetic impact,” by employing decentralized energy grids, “autonomous backup utility systems,” innovative base layouts, and modular structures. Recognizing the need to “protect assets and personnel from kinetic impacts, thermal effects, and blast overpressures,” the military is looking at ways to harden facilities. This means employing advanced construction methods involving metamaterials designed for surviving air attack, energy-dissipating composites, self-healing materials, and “novel concrete formulations.” 

The U.S. is also seeking ways to lower the profile or conceal the location of its bases through technological means. This includes camouflaging facilities and integrating them into the natural environment to make them more difficult to spot, masking their thermal and electromagnetic signatures, and creating decoy structures to draw fire. 

Beyond the use of “terrain-integrated facility design,” the U.S. is also seeking to take its most sensitive facilities deep below ground. Increased vulnerabilities to aerial attack have led to a reemergence and increased reliance on subterranean warfare in the Russia–Ukraine war, harkening back to World War I trench warfare and the use of massive underground tunnel networks and bases by Vietnamese forces in the American war.

Iran, for its part, uses underground facilities to shield its missile and nuclear programs. The Pentagon, according to the documents, is interested in new methods of “high-speed tunneling,” the rapid creation of protected caverns, and “shock-isolated underground structural design[s].”

Last week’s quiet plea from the Pentagon follows an announcement by Hegseth of a FORTRESS America initiative that he calls a “national insurance policy for the American homeland.” One former Pentagon analyst, however, said it sounded more like “cutting America and Americans loose” in the event of a major conflagration, tying it to Hegseth’s belief that the military is a warrior elite superior to civilians.

“Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power. Independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid by cyberattack, by sabotage, by any means, our bases stay lit. Our aircraft keep flying. Our command centers never go dark,” said Hegseth, explaining the FORTRESS concept. “We are building long overdue strategic reserves deep enough to fight through disruption. Think munitions. Fuel. Medicine. Blood. Deep enough that if the world’s supply lines break, and in a real war, they are going to break — America keeps fighting anyway.”

The former advisor said that Hegseth’s plan appeared to send a message to 99 percent of the American public: “It sounds as if he is saying to people ‘fuck off and you’re on your own.’”

The post Pentagon Fears Drone Attacks on U.S. and Foreign Bases appeared first on The Intercept.