The race in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District was one of several contests on Tuesday pitting the left and democratic socialists against establishment Democrats in a midterm cycle defined by competing visions for the future of the party. Just over an hour after polls closed, The Associated Press called in Bell’s favor.

Before polls closed on Tuesday evening, Bell brushed off Bush’s criticism of his support from the pro-Israel lobby.

“What we’ve seen over and over is talking about an issue that is not impacting folks right here in St. Louis, and while we take those issues seriously, you know, the M in Missouri doesn’t stand for Middle East. It stands for Missouri,” Bell said.

The question going into Tuesday’s primaries, including the widely watched Michigan Democratic Senate race, was whether progressives could win in the Midwest. Despite a decent track record in the region, it was unclear if the energy that boosted progressives in other primaries from New York to Colorado would be enough to help Bush, a former member of Congress and another democratic socialist, come back from a bruising loss two years ago.

Outside groups opposing Bush poured money into the rematch, spending $4.6 million against her or backing Bell. In comparison, Bush drew just $200,000 in outside spending in her favor. Most of that money came from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel group that took credit for ousting Bush last cycle. The group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent $3 million against Bush this year, far less than the $8 million it poured out against her in 2024 as part of a historic investment targeting elected lawmakers critical of Israel. 

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In response to that kind of spending, progressive groups put much more money into this year’s primaries, though they were still heavily outspent. But while groups like Justice Democrats and American Priorities, the new pro-Palestine super PAC, pumped record-setting sums in races in Michigan, Colorado, and New York, they did not spend in Bush’s race. Justice Democrats, which backed Bush in her 2020 election, gave Bush its endorsement this cycle but instead concentrated its resources on Tuesday in Michigan in support of state Rep. Donavan McKinney, another democratic socialist, in his bid against Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich. Another new pro-Palestine PAC, the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, spent $20,000 in support of Bush.

With its funding, United Democracy Project recycled attacks that had helped topple Bush in 2024, hitting her for voting against former President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill and claiming she had been an ineffective member of Congress. In line with that attack, a spokesperson for United Democracy Project, which ran the ads, recently described Bush as “a terrible member of Congress who didn’t do her job and didn’t deliver for St. Louis.” 

Bush’s critics, including AIPAC and Bell, painted her as failed experiment by the left, pointing to past positions on defunding police and criticism of Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Bush went on to endorse Harris, and many Democrats have come to share her views on Israel. But her opponents cast her as an “extreme” in the party’s left flank who was out of step with voters. 

Even some of Bush’s backers worried that the damage done last cycle would be enough to tank her attempt at a comeback. 

Although Bush won reelection by a wide margin in 2022, the pro-Israel lobby started laying the groundwork to oust her shortly after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. Bush, a vocal critic of Israel, drew ire from AIPAC and other pro-Israel actors after she introduced a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza less than 10 days later, alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. AIPAC’s super PAC and other groups spent close to $20 million to oust her that cycle, hitting her for her vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill. Bush said she took that vote, along with five other leading progressive Democrats, because the measure did not do enough to expand funding for social services.

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One Bush supporter said they heard frequently from St. Louis residents about the vote — despite the fact that she easily won reelection shortly after taking it. They suggested that voters only started caring about the vote after AIPAC told them to.

Bush said voters were frustrated by attacks from AIPAC after having been saturated by similar ads in 2024.

“People have been coming up to me apologizing,” Bush told The Intercept in an interview ahead of the primary. “Saying, ‘Cori, I just didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the ads. I didn’t understand what was being said about you. I didn’t know who AIPAC was.’”

The post Wesley Bell Again Defeats Cori Bush — With Plenty of Help From AIPAC appeared first on The Intercept.

Bari Weiss’s latest hire for “60 Minutes,” whose major journalistic output includes smearing genocide victims and putting a target on the backs of reporters in Gaza, shows that the full-blown right-wing tabloidification of the television news program is charging ahead. 

If one held out hope that U.S. media would seek to reverse course after its support for genocide in Gaza over the past 34 months, those hopes were severely misplaced. The mainstream media’s lockstep support for genocide, which I document in my recent book on the subject, has not abated, and in key ways it’s only ramped up, become more explicit, and removed any remaining pretense of editorial independence.

The most obvious example of this is the Ellison family’s $8 billion purchase of Paramount and overtly right-wing revamp of CBS News, which kicked off in earnest last year. A former gold standard of centrist journalism, Weiss’s takeover of CBS News has seen numerous high-profile firings, scandals, and credible allegations of undermining journalistic independence, allegations of Trump toadyism, and a broader editorial push to the right.

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This campaign has been, in large part, aimed at sucking up to Trump to push through the much bigger prize of a $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. But there’s another element at play: The Ellison family’s documented support for Israel and its broader ideological aims. As I noted last December, Weiss was put in place by David Ellison precisely because of her years of strident, pro-Israel coverage and willingness to push the boundaries of racism and cynicism to pursue this cause. So far, Weiss’s attempt to turn the prestigious “60 Minutes” brand into another New York Post has been met with major internal resistance from high-profile reporters, producers, and news management. 

And despite Ellison’s buzzy op-ed for The New York Times today, where he pushes back on “speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions” and pledges “independence” for the newsroom, Weiss’s latest hire makes clear that her ideological coup of the once-vaulted “60 Minutes” brand is right on schedule. 

The hiring of Tanya Lukyanova, a video journalist for The Free Press, as an associate producer for “60 Minutes,” was announced Friday. Lukyanova has previously done video and research work for the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and Semafor. She rose the ranks of journalism doing critical — if boilerplate — reporting on Russia, but over the past year, under Weiss’s direction, she has veered into outright right-wing tabloidism. This climaxed with her contribution to two of the most shameful supposedly journalistic contributions since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began in late 2023: an article she produced herself in September 2025 helping justifying Israel’s unprecedented attacks on journalists in Gaza, and an article she co-bylined in August 2025 downplaying mass starvation in Gaza.  

The September 2025 article, “Gazan Journalists Say Al Jazeera Works Hand in Glove with Hamas,” relies almost entirely on alleged Gazan sources procured by the Center for Peace Communications. This is a pro-Israel front group that poses as a “peace organization” and has peddled similar dubious narratives elsewhere, almost aways designed to create the narrative that Gaza is little more than 2 million Palestinians being held captive by Hamas, who desperately want Israel to bomb their way to liberation. The group’s board of directors includes major pro-Israel funders, as well as Dennis Ross, a long-time pro-Israel pundit and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, itself a spin-off from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The CPC is run by Joseph Braude, who in 2004 pleaded guilty in federal court for illegally smuggling artifacts out of Iraq, namely 4,000-year-old marble and alabaster stone seals he knew to be stolen. 

At no point in the story was the shady past of the “Center for Peace Communications,” or its overt Zionist advocacy and funding, mentioned by Lukyanova, who presents them merely as a good-faith humanitarian organization. The shameful guilt-by-vague-association piece proceeds to imply, over and over again, that any connection to Hamas, no matter how remote, makes journalists a fair target for Israeli killing — without once reckoning with the numerous active and former members of the Israeli military who make up the ranks of Israeli and U.S. media.

It relies heavily on New York Post reporting because the New York Post is exactly what Weiss wants CBS News to look like in the near future: lurid incitement mixed with shoddy sourcing and anti-Palestinian racism. Lukyanova dutifully lends this shoddy racist incitement the veneer of respectability. 

Israel has killed more than 240 media workers in Gaza since October 2023, including several prominent Al Jazeera journalists such as Mohammed Samir Wishah, Hossam Shabat, Mahmoud Wadi, and Anas al-Sharif. In airstrikes in late 2023 and early 2024, Israel killed the wife, 7-year-old daughter, 15- and 27-year-old sons, and two nephews of longtime Al Jazeera reporter and Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, effectively wiping out his whole family while failing to kill al-Dahdouh himself after he was injured in a separate attack.

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The Costs of War project at Brown University deemed Israel’s war on Gaza the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded. Lukyanova’s anonymously sourced “exposé” accusing Al Jazeera reporters of being “affiliated with Hamas” came just two weeks after +972 Magazine revealed a secret Israeli military propaganda campaign to tie critical reporters to the designated “terrorist organization,” using what it calls a “Legitimization Cell.”

Lukyanova’s other major contribution, published along with Olivia Reingold, was “They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems.” The article led to widespread backlash and criticism for its callousness, bizarre logical leaps, and the implication that starving children was No Big Deal if those being killed by Israel’s deliberate campaign of hunger as a weapon of collective punishment happen to have preexisting conditions.

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As Natasha Lennard noted for The Intercept at the time, Anne Frank wasn’t directly killed by the Nazis but died of typhus as a result of the Nazis creating the condition for such a disease to spread in their concentration camps to claim its intended victims. Drop Site News followed up on the 12 “Gazans” whose brutal suffering Reingold and Lukyanova decided to well, actually and found “their underlying health conditions did not drive the deterioration of their health. Instead, it was the lack of access to food and medicine that drove their acute medical crises. Such is the hallmark of a famine. The first to fall victim are generally those who had underlying conditions to begin with.” 

This is consistent with much of Lukyanova’s non-Gaza output. While ​​plenty of her journalistic output is conventional in nature, she has published several articles promoting schlocky regime-change narratives aimed at various U.S. enemies, namely Iran and Venezuela. Lukyanova has shown a willingness — and apparent eagerness — to use her influential platform to promote war, starvation as a weapon of war, attacks on reporters, and related ideological orthodoxies of U.S. and Israel aggression.

And this shameless propagandist, who has repeatedly shown a willingness to be callous in the face of widespread famine and launder pro-Israel talking points about Israel-critical reporters being secret terrorists, will now be an associate producer at the most respected news program in all of the American media.

“60 Minutes” has always been a flawed institution, but hiring people willing to wade into the lowest gutter of incitement reporting — putting targets on the backs of disabled, starving kids and journalists documenting a genocide — is a major escalation in Weiss’s battle to turn “60 Minutes” into a billionaires’ ideological plaything. 

This is who gets ahead in U.S.-based journalism: not who is most humane, or accurate, or fair, or speaks truth to power, but those who serve the needs of power — whether it be the U.S. and Israeli governments or billionaire media owners.

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Just as The Atlantic’s now-editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was rewarded for his lies attempting to tie Saddam Hussien to 9/11 in the run-up to the Iraq War with becoming the head of the most influential liberal magazine in the country; just as Joe Scarborough was rewarded for cheering on the Iraq War with a three-hour morning block on the most influential liberal cable news show; just as Iraq War cheerleaders from Ezra Klein to Anne Applebaum to Bret Stephens to David Remnick have all enjoyed prestigious positions in today’s elite liberal media — those who lied about, covered up, or otherwise downplayed the genocide in Gaza will continue to rise to the top. This dynamic is only becoming more shameless and acute now that pro-Israel multibillionaires are buying up old legacy media and turning them into their personal tabloid outlets.  

The post Bari Weiss’s “60 Minutes” Hires Producer Who Downplayed Gaza Starvation, Justified Killing Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

Malik Muhammad’s transfer from the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections came almost immediately on the heels of a misconduct report about organizing protest activity about their conditions from prison.

The report — which was obtained by The Intercept and flags conversations that are critical of Israel, the U.S., and the Oregon prison system — and subsequent transfer raise serious concerns about the state of censorship and free speech within the state’s carceral system. 

In March, Muhammad vanished from every inmate tracking system without a trace, after missing a scheduled call with their lawyer. Days went by with no word. Inquiries from their attorney were met with vague runarounds from officials.

Muhammad, a veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, spent much of their time in Oregon in and out of solitary confinement. As a result, trouble communicating with Muhammad was not altogether unusual. As the days of silence became weeks, however, fear set in among Muhammad’s loved ones. 

In April, Muhammad’s partner received a letter saying that Muhammad was alive — but thousands of miles away at Kirkland Correctional Institution in South Carolina.

The Oregon Department of Corrections, in response to questions from The Intercept in May, denied that Muhammad, an avowed anarchist and father of one, had been transferred as retaliation for their activism inside the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. Prison system officials said instead that there were “extensive background reasons” for Muhammad’s transfer.

A misconduct report issued in March suggests that Muhammad’s public-facing and internal activism — particularly on their blog, “Malik Speaks!” — was a major thorn in the side of the Oregon prison system. Other prison write-ups of Muhammad’s activities behind bars described to The Intercept by their attorney took a similar line, focusing on Muhammad’s organizing on their blog and communications with other incarcerated people.

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The misconduct report from March details posts from Muhammad’s blog urging their supporters to undertake a coordinated phone and messaging campaign; Muhammad wanted them to write to the prison and to public officials to call for better conditions inside and an end to Muhammad’s solitary confinement.

Oregon corrections officials are “punishing Malik for their political beliefs, for things that would normally be First Amendment protected and not within the normal scope of exceptions,” said Lauren Regan, director of litigation and advocacy at the Civil Liberties Defense Center and Muhammad’s attorney. Prison systems, she said, “hate anarchism and anti-fascism.”

The March misconduct report, which accuses Muhammad of “formulating an impact on the safety and security while promotion of security threat activity,” came only six days before the transfer to South Carolina. (The Oregon Department of Corrections declined to comment on “disciplinary matters,” citing department policy.)

To Christopher Kuttruff, a friend of Muhammad’s, it all seems like Oregon’s transfer was a ploy to make the publicity around Muhammad’s case into someone else’s issue.

“They want it to be another state’s problem,” Kuttruff said, “so they don’t face the same scrutiny.”

In the Hole

As they clutched the wrinkled pages of the misconduct report, Muhammad knew something big was about to happen.

In early March, officials flagged messages where the activist said they “have always been anti-Israel my whole life.” In another message, Muhammad says, “I’m begging for them to do it” — allegedly in reference to someone bombing the U.S. The messages prompted a further review, according to the misconduct report obtained by The Intercept.

The review turned up a message in which Muhammad called a guard a pig and said they wanted to “breakkk” their face. Muhammad maintains that the messages were spliced out of context and that the face comment was not a threat, but an insult tossed out in frustration.

Muhammad was thrown back into a disciplinary housing unit.

Weeks after their time in the “hole,” Muhammad received another misconduct report. This one, however, felt different.

“I knew that was what they were constructing to get me sent out,” they said. “I sent like a hundred letters as soon as I got the DR” — referring to the disciplinary report.

The three-page report accused Muhammad of engaging in “racketeering,” “unauthorized transfer” of digital currency, “unauthorized organization,” and “unauthorized use of info systems.” All the allegations were related to Muhammad’s blog, which they maintain with the help of their supporters and use to organize advocacy around their case and raise funds for their commissary account.

“Evidence supports that AIC Muhammad utilizes his visitor [redacted] to actively maintain a blog on his behalf while he is incarcerated,” a prison official wrote, referring to Muhammad, who uses they/them pronouns, as an “Adult in Custody.”

“His blog website,” the misconduct report says, “focuses on an organized grouping of individuals that support AIC Muhammad in his beliefs, using visual, written, and recorded readings from AIC Muhammad. These items contain his propaganda messages and are dispersed in a social seeding manner through his visitor(s) through his blog.”

The report says Muhammad had broken Oregon administrative rules on “unauthorized use of info systems” by allowing a recording from a prison call system to be transcribed and uploaded to their blog.

Another conclusion was more consequential: Citing writings on Muhammad’s blog, officials claimed that the protest organizing and political activity was having “an impact on the safety and security” of the facility. The report cited Muhammad’s encouragement of the phone campaigns and other activities related to the blog, such as purchasing left-leaning reading materials for other incarcerated people.

Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney who has litigated prison free-speech cases and is today with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that speaking out on conditions inside of prison is generally First Amendment-protected speech. Officials can’t curtail speech to the outside by exempting complaints from inside about prisoners’ incarceration.

“If an inmate,” said Fitzpatrick, “is sending a letter or posting online peacefully making their views known about, ‘Hey, here’s what’s going on inside the facility. If you think this is wrong, I suggest writing your congressman or writing the facility, and asking that something be done to fix this’ — to me, that strikes me as something that ought to be protected by the First Amendment.” 

Behind bars, though, it’s not always that simple. A chasm lies between what should fall under First Amendment protections in prison and what does in practice.

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The Supreme Court has ruled that constitutional rights apply in prison, but courts have upheld all types of restrictions on free speech, from bans on fantasy games like “Dungeons & Dragons” to medical texts like the “Physicians’ Desk Reference.” The barriers to even getting before a court to vindicate your rights are steep. 

“The on-the-ground regime of what censorship looks like [inside prisons] is pretty ridiculous, and basically stands the First Amendment on its head,” said David Shapiro, the executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit focused on the criminal legal system. “It is close to an anything goes censorship regime.”

Muhammad’s Blog

Few people understand this better than Muhammad, who in March was racing against the clock to get help before officials could act. After receiving the report, they began furiously sending letters.

Days after receiving the misconduct report, guards ferried Muhammad, chains hanging around their belly under their jacket, onto a plane. It wasn’t until they landed in Utah that someone bothered to tell them they were headed to South Carolina, where guards at Kirkland Correctional Institution forcibly restrained Muhammad and shaved their head.

(“It is our policy to cut inmates’ hair upon arrival,” said Chrysti Shain, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Corrections, though she said she couldn’t speak directly to Muhammad’s case.)

Only one of the dozens of letters they’d sent made it through, they said, and it only arrived at its recipient after they had already been transferred.

It would be days before Muhammad was able to get a letter out to their partner, alerting their loved ones that they were, in fact, alive — just 3,000 miles away. 

Muhammad is widely liked, with a wit and intellect that obscures their relative youth, a trait that has been rewarded in prison with more than a few bumps and bruises from guards or angry fellow incarcerated people. 

At 25, Muhammad was sentenced to 10 years in prison for throwing Molotov cocktails at protests in September and October 2020. As with many of the later prosecutions in the aftermath of the George Floyd uprisings, federal prosecutors initially left the case to state prosecutors before eventually charging Muhammad federally.

Muhammad wrote on their blog that they first got involved in activism as a high schooler, after the killing of Trayvon Martin. The calling would eventually lead Muhammad to travel the country and participate in the George Floyd protests against police violence and impunity.

The blog touches on a range of topics from their life story to their treatment in prison to poems about resistance. An allegedly unauthorized audio recording cited in the misconduct report is a poem about how oppressed people are robbed of their humanity. 

“Under oppressive conditions, love is resistance as joyousness is not permitted. Like Palestinian hostages being released, but their families told not to celebrate or be joyful; like blacks showing unity, working out in solidarity, or sharing things in prison – food, or hygiene, or shoes,” said Muhammad. “Even emphasized in the visiting room, as one of my partners came to see me, their grin bright and gleamy.”

Where Muhammad sees an outlet, however, Oregon sees a threat — “an impact on the safety and security.” The actual activities at hand seem much more innocuous.

“Watching Malik’s Back”

The report accuses Muhammad of engendering a so-called “zap” phone campaign. In zap campaigns, a common protest tactic to bring public pressure to bear, organizers encourage large numbers of supporters to call or write en masse.

In this case, the declared recipients would be the detention facilities or Oregon Department of Corrections officials. The idea with the campaigns is to demonstrate wide support for a cause by overwhelming the targeted people or institutions with communications.

Oregon officials said the calls and other activities on the blog constituted the security threat.

In one post referenced by the misconduct report, the blog encourages supporters to contact the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution to get Muhammad released from solitary confinement. In 2024, according to previous reporting from The Intercept, Muhammad had effectively been held in solitary confinement for over 250 days. Oregon is supposed to limit time in so-called special housing to 90 days. 

The report does not elaborate on how receiving calls about solitary confinement placed anyone in jeopardy.

“Outsiders watching Malik’s back,” said Regan, their lawyer, “knowing what’s going on, calling the warden and saying, ‘Hey, I know that you’ve put Malik in the hole for 300 days and that Malik is on a hunger strike. What are you going to do about it?’ Those are all what little mechanisms Malik has to ensure their survival while in prison.”

Muhammad said there is nothing “untoward or illegal” about people calling to advocate on their behalf.

“A lot of the times, it’s the only way to get any traction or get anything done because they try to isolate people,” they said. “If people don’t have any knowledge of stuff that’s going on, then these people who run this as their little fiefdom, they’re able to do what they want.” 

Having a loyal community online has landed them in hot water. Officials argue that Muhammad used the recordings, as well as solicitations for donations, to “support and promote an organization,” in violation of their rules on “unauthorized organization,” “racketeering,” and “unauthorized transfer” of digital currency — a charge related to the donation solicitations.

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The report accuses Muhammad of fraud for soliciting donations under a hyperlink titled “Free Malik Now!!” It implies the money is going toward an appeal, the report says — despite also acknowledging the website explains that the funds go toward their commissary account and legal needs, as well as toward supplying books and reading materials to other incarcerated people.

The report also casts the online group of supporters that manage and visit Muhammad’s blog as “an organized grouping of individuals that support AIC Muhammad in his beliefs.”

The language about an organized group is consistent with other disciplinary matters, including transfers, behind bars. Prisons sometimes justify prison transfers by saying they are severing contact between gang members, in theory to reduce violence. Calling readers of a blog who occasionally make phone calls and donate to Muhammad’s commissary account an “organization” is a novel interpretation. 

Muhammad wants the censorship they faced to serve as a lesson.

“In this country, free speech has never been allotted to anyone, and certainly not in prison, and certainly not in this climate,” Muhammad said, “not in this steady march to fascism that we’re on.”

The post BLM Protester Transferred Thousands of Miles Away After They Organized Against Their Solitary Confinement appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the start of the conflict, the Department of War has posted the official count of casualties on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president. This official total of dead and wounded personnel, as documented over months of reporting by The Intercept, has been a gross undercount, stemming from what that same official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

But after a series of Iranian strikes on U.S. facilities in the Middle East in July, the Pentagon last week rolled out a new approach. Casualties since July 7 are now counted separately on a new webpage with a generic designation: “Overseas Operations.”

Two hundred and seventy-three U.S. troops were killed or wounded since July 7, according to the Monday total on the new Overseas Operations page.

When combined with the existing DCAS page for the Iran war, the official count stands at 704, an 83 percent increase in casualties since April 8, the day the first ceasefire deal was struck between the Trump administration and Iran. When counting known casualties overlooked by the DCAS page, the total exceeds 900 personnel.

For months, the Pentagon has failed to comment on DCAS anomalies reported by The Intercept nor the reason for the change in the way it now counts casualties, which was first reported by the New York Times. Last week, the Pentagon told the newspaper that “since Operation Epic Fury has concluded, the department classifies casualties as overseas operations in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.” Central Command oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

“This is certainly designed to conceal the count of the wounded,” the official said, while noting that “incompetence” has also caused confusion in the casualty count.

The change comes after a July 20 rant by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell who claimed reports of a Pentagon effort to withhold news of dozens of U.S. casualties were “baseless and malicious” and a U.S. official’s disclosure to The Intercept that same day that recent attacks on U.S. bases by Iran had wounded “far more” personnel than the Pentagon had acknowledged.

The casualty spike resulted from Iranian attacks on at least nine U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a second U.S. official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press.

Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated.

Last month, the tally of wounded personnel fluctuated by the day in the wake of increased Iranian attacks. On July 21, the casualty count on DCAS for Operation Epic Fury, the military’s official designation for the Iran war, stood at 500. Now, it has shrunk to 431.

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For months, The Intercept found anomalies with the counts offered on the DCAS website. On April 21, for example, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparities in its casualty count.

Prior reporting by The Intercept also found DCAS is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel from Epic Fury. The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures for Epic Fury show that 65 Navy personnel were wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East.

Recent reporting by the War Horse, using Pentagon records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, found more than 400 casualties were recorded between February 28 and April 8. Seventy occurred on March 18 alone, but this huge single-day toll was never reported by the Pentagon.

The records provide more granular detail than DCAS, revealing that at least 17 troops sustained life-threatening injuries. They show that U.S. troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and other injuries. The most common injury recorded, however, was head trauma — which affected at least 170 troops, according to the data.

President Donald Trump has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” 

The post The Pentagon Found a New Way to Undercount U.S. Casualties in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Over 50,000 people last week risked their lives to cross the border between Morocco and Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa, in the hope of making it to mainland Europe.

The vast majority have already been returned to Morocco; fewer than 2,000 refugees remain on Ceuta and are, according to on-the-ground reports, in urgent need of food and shelter. Over 80 people reportedly died during the crossings, most from drowning.

The crisis for those seeking to enter Europe through Ceuta last week, including those who have been sent back, has already been framed according to a putrid, far-right political fulcrum. As a wide array of responses to the situation on Ceuta make clear, a commitment to harsh border regimes is not the sole preserve of the far right.

Once again, liberals and centrists who claim to decry the right’s anti-immigrant stances are themselves treating immigrants as a threat to be secured against.

For the international far right, images of thousands of desperate young African men entering European Union territory — little matter that Ceuta is, in fact, not on mainland Europe — has been fodder for predictable racist fearmongering and calls for extremist border rule. Far-right leaders blamed the crossings of the left-wing Spanish government’s extremely reasonable plans to regularize over 1 million undocumented immigrants who have already been living and working in Spain for at least five months.

“It’s terrible. Remember that picture. That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” President Donald Trump told Fox News, in a groundless attempt to use the suffering on Ceuta to his advantage. A spokesperson for the White House decried Spain’s new immigration regularization proposal as “far-left, globalist policies.”

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Meanwhile, conservative and right-wing leaders across Europe and the U.K. echoed similar sentiments, conjuring the old lie of an “invasion” confronting the West. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proposed Spain be suspended from the Schengen Area. A total of 22 EU leaders, including Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, wrote a joint letter to the European Commission expressing “serious concerns” about how Spain’s decision to grant legal status to immigrants served as a “pull factor.”

In response to these attacks and criticisms, several liberal and centrist politicians, institutions, and media organs have pushed back. Analyses in the New York Times and The Atlantic have stressed, for example, that not one of the people who crossed into Ceuta managed to make it to mainland Europe. These responses are framed as a counterpoint to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s right-wing critics.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also defended Sánchez against right-wing attacks, by praising the Spanish authorities’ “swift handling” in “successfully preventing illegal movement onwards to mainland Spain and Europe.”

Sanchez himself took a similar line.

“In less than 48 hours, my government has succeeded in fully restoring control over the border,” he wrote on Saturday in a response to criticism from other European leaders.

The mainstream defense against far-right fearmongering, then, was merely a regurgitation of the right’s anti-immigrant premise. Stopping immigrants who have been forced to take irregular routes, according to this logic, is a good thing. What the far right got wrong, by the lights of these centrists and liberals, was not their virulent racism, but rather that the claims of an “invasion” of Europe are not factually accurate.

“Spain and Germany’s centrist responses have been to ‘assure’ the E.U. that borders are fortified,” wrote migrant justice organizer and scholar Harsha Walia on Instagram. “This rebuttal simply buttresses the premise of border securitization.”

The reasons for the surge in crossings are not yet fully known; speculation abounds about the role of Moroccan and other state forces. A few things are, however, clear: Misinformation had spread in the preceding days on social media suggesting, falsely, that a recent Supreme Court ruling in Spain would prevent the Spanish authorities returning immigrants.

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In a world of increasing and inevitable mass migration, it is a moral failure to treat the swift removal of immigrants as a victory. Such a framing is also a gift to the far right, who will continue to benefit within a political consensus that treats immigration as a bad thing.

Only a few voices on the European left have placed focus where it belongs: with supporting immigrants who remain on Ceuta.

“What is happening in Ceuta is not a natural disaster, but the result of political decisions,” said Clara Bünger, a member of Germany’s The Left Party. “Germany and the EU have a duty to help with providing for refugees and to take in those seeking protection.”

“People are fleeing war, poverty, and the climate crisis,” she noted. “Higher walls won’t stop them; they will only make the escape more deadly. The most important thing now is that no one else dies.”

The post Liberals Are Ceding Ground to the Far Right on Ceuta Border Crossings appeared first on The Intercept.

Seeking to highlight ties between Columbia University and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the campus protest movement had culminated in a building occupation that ended with dozens of arrests, sparking activism on campuses across the country. At Columbia, classes went virtual or used a hybrid model.

On the day classes resumed their regular scheduling in September, one protester splattered the university’s famous Alma Mater statue in red paint.

Following the incident, New York Police Department investigators deployed an extensive array of high-tech surveillance and investigative tools to identify the alleged vandal, according to documents from the court case provided exclusively to The Intercept. Police leveraged networks of surveillance cameras and facial recognition software to pinpoint a suspect.

In July 2025, Jakhi Isaiah, a New Jersey-based activist whose legal last name is McCray, was charged for the incident.

As the nationwide protest movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza became a national lightening rod and the Trump administration began to throw its weight against activists, authorities at all levels began to expend tremendous resources against pro-Palestine demonstrators. Using intensive surveillance tools in response to relatively minor crimes became typical in cases against pro-Palestine protesters.

“I think it deliberately sends a very chilling message that you better not dissent,” said Bina Ahmad, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney has represented pro-Palestine protesters but is not working on Isaiah’s case. “How many [resources] they used for such a small charge kind of says they will go to any length to grab who they want to grab and charge what they want to charge.”

The documents obtained by The Intercept also detail how NYPD investigators appeared to have abandoned the case, before being spurred to reopen it by federal officials. Both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service, according to the documents, were participating in a separate federal investigation into Isaiah.

Facial Recognition

Columbia claimed that the paint protest had caused thousands of dollars in damage to the statue, but maintenance crews were able to clean it up almost immediately. Photographs taken by students show that, by the end of the day, all the paint had had been removed.

The hunt for the alleged vandal soon got underway.

In the days following the incident, NYPD detectives used 21 different camera angles and tracked the person that they allege is Isaiah as he moved both inside and out of Columbia’s campus.

“If you go around New York, there’s fucking cameras literally everywhere,” Isaiah told The Intercept. “That’s freaky as hell.”

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Investigators claim to have followed Isaiah’s movements using surveillance footage for more than two continuous hours surrounding the incident, tracking him even after he entered a university building and changed clothing. The person on video footage during the vandalism was masked and wore a hat. (Neither the NYPD nor Columbia responded to requests for comment.)

A camera eventually captured someone dressed in similar clothing with their mask removed while running down a nearby city street, according to the discovery documents. NYPD detectives then took the maskless image and used facial recognition tools to generate a hit on Isaiah.

Following the facial recognition ID, a probable cause to arrest notice was issued, meaning that officers Isaiah encountered would have discretion on whether or not to bring him into custody and charge him with the vandalism offenses.

Months later, Isaiah was arrested at an unrelated anti-ICE protest. Despite being in custody, he was not charged or arraigned on any offenses relating to the Columbia University incident, suggesting that the NYPD investigation against him had stalled.

Later, internal communications obtained by The Intercept revealed that while Columbia’s public safety department eventually asked the NYPD to terminate the investigation, they reversed course less than a day later, citing a “miscommunication” between university officials and the NYPD.

Newfound Attention

In June 2025, some 10 months after the paint incident, Isaiah received newfound attention from law enforcement. He was accused of being the perpetrator behind a multi-car arson carried out against NYPD vehicles at a Brooklyn precinct.

The NYPD investigation seemed to have languished, Isaiah said. Despite the police’s probable cause to arrest notice tied to his identity, Isiah said he had several run-ins with NYPD, including the ICE protest arrest, where officers stopped Isaiah, but opted not to charge him with any offenses related to the Columbia investigation.

After the federal investigation into Isaiah for arson, however, the NYPD detectives seemed to revive the case against him related to the Columbia vandalism.

Internal communications obtained by The Intercept from one week after the arson investigation began show NYPD detectives saying that “due to recent incident that occurred in the confines of the 83 Precinct involving wanted perpetrator, case has become federal and the federal authorities will continue to follow up.” Two wanted posters — one for the arson, and one for the vandalism — were attached to the email.

Following a weekslong manhunt by federal law enforcement related to the fires, Isaiah surrendered to police. (He has since pleaded guilty to one count of arson in federal court.) Following his detention by federal authorities, prosecutors in New York charged him in the Columbia paint incident.

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Federal cooperation with local law enforcement agencies has ramped up in the wake of the national protest movement against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spurred in part by initiatives like Donald Trump’s National Security Memorandum-7 and his executive order that designated “antifa” as a domestic terror group. Highly politicized federal agencies are now more regularly working hand in glove with local police departments, who now have a mandate to pursue politicized cases, said Brendan McQuade, a criminologist at the University of Southern Maine.

“This is collaboration institutionalized,” said McQuade.

When Isaiah was finally arraigned for the Columbia paint charges, an NYPD report featured a list of 41 different “associates” — people police suspected to be contacts or who he’d been arrested alongside at protests. Isaiah believes the list is part of a wider pattern of repression and investigation of pro-Palestine protesters. He wonders whether if he had not turned himself in, the list may have been used against people in his community.

“It’s just very obvious network mapping,” he said. “If they hadn’t found me, they probably would have kept going through that list.”

Isaiah is expected to stand trial for three vandalism and graffiti-related charges in August but says that he sees his case as emblematic of larger trends in American society.

“The repression on the movement, the surveillance on the movement is often just a microcosm of the larger repression of communities as a whole,” he said.

He nonetheless remains hopeful: “Communities are still finding a way to prosper and live their lives, despite this intense level of omnipresence.”

The post NYPD Used High-Tech Surveillance to Find Gaza Paint Splatter Protester, Docs Show appeared first on The Intercept.

Dem Frontmann der britischen Punk-Rap-Band Bob Vylan wurde aufgrund seiner pro-palästinensischen Aussagen unlängst die Einreise nach Deutschland verweigert. Er wurde am Berliner Flughafen festgehalten und schließlich zurück nach England abgeschoben.

Die Bundespolizei begründete die Einreiseverweigerung des Sängers am 15. Juni mit seinem Auftritt beim Glastonbury Festival im vergangenen Jahr, wo er den Sprechchor „Death, death to the IDF“ („Tod, Tod der IDF“ – der israelischen Armee) angestimmt hatte.

Ende Juli hoben die Behörden das Einreiseverbot gegen den Sänger, der mit bürgerlichem Namen Pascal Robinson-Foster heißt, in einem entsprechenden Schreiben wieder auf, verweigerten jedoch jede Auskunft darüber, warum die Maßnahme aufgehoben wurde; oder wie die Entscheidung über das Einreiseverbot zustande gekommen war.

Die polizeiliche Akte zu Robinson-Foster, die The Intercept vorliegt, wirft ihm vor, antisemitische Narrative und Hamas-Propaganda zu verbreiten, die zur „Radikalisierung einzelner Bevölkerungsgruppen“ beitragen und terroristischen Gruppen oder Einzelpersonen als „ideologische Begründung“ dienen könne.

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Zudem heißt es, Robinson-Foster stelle „eine Gefahr für die öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung“ in Deutschland dar. Seine Einreise würde dem internationalen Ansehen sowie der Glaubwürdigkeit der Bundesrepublik „erheblichen Schaden“ zufügen; dadurch entstünde der Eindruck, Deutschland unternehme keine Anstrengungen, „den propagierten Antisemitismus und dazugehörige Aufrufe zur Gewalt, insbesondere grenzüberschreitend, zu unterbinden“.

Detaillierte Fragen zu dem inzwischen aufgehobenen Einreiseverbot beantwortete die Bundespolizei nicht. Sie berief sich dabei auf Belange der öffentlichen Sicherheit und Datenschutz. Auf einen Fragenkatalog zum Entscheidungsprozess hinter der Einreiseverweigerung, ihrer Rechtsgrundlage, zu beteiligten Behörden sowie zu den Gründen der Aufhebung der Einreiseverweigerung erklärte Bundespolizei-Sprecher Nikolai Jaletzke gegenüber The Intercept, man äußere sich nicht zu Gefährdungsbewertungen, operativen Maßnahmen oder Abstimmungsprozessen zwischen Behörden.

„Zu behaupten, ich würde eine Gefahr für die nationale Sicherheit Deutschlands darstellen, ist schlicht absurd“, sagte Robinson-Foster The Intercept. „Genauso absurd ist die Behauptung, wir würden Propaganda im Namen irgendeiner verbotenen Organisation verbreiten.“

Bob Vylans Auftritt beim Glastonbury Festival sorgte weltweit für Aufmerksamkeit. Er kam zu einem Zeitpunkt, als immer mehr Kulturschaffende begannen, sich öffentlich gegen die Zerstörung Gazas durch Israel auszusprechen. Der Auftritt – insbesondere der Sprechchor „Death, death to the IDF“ – wurde von Politiker, darunter dem damaligen britischen Premierminister Keir Starmer, sowie von mehreren pro-israelischen jüdischen Organisationen scharf verurteilt. Der Antisemitismusbeauftragte der Bundesregierung Felix Klein bezeichnete den Auftritt als „Hass und Hetze“ und rief Konzert- und Festival-Veranstalter in Deutschland dazu auf, Bob Vylans Konzerte abzusagen.

Kurz nach dem Glastonbury-Auftritt waren Robinson-Foster und seinem Bandkollegen Wade Laurence George Visa für ihre Einreise in die USA entzogen worden. Deutschland ist jedoch das erste Land, das einem Mitglied der Band die Einreise verweigert und ihn abgeschoben hat.

Die The Intercept vorliegenden Dokumente betreffen ausschließlich die Umsetzung des Einreiseverbots – nicht den dahinter liegenden Entscheidungsprozess. „Unsere Position ist simpel“, sagte Alexander Gorski – der deutsche Anwalt, der Robinson-Foster vertritt. „Es gibt ein verfassungsmäßiges Recht darauf, die Akte zu kennen, auf deren Grundlage eine solche Entscheidung getroffen wird.“

Nach Robinson-Fosters Abschiebung stellte Gorski beim Bundespolizeipräsidium Potsdam einen Antrag auf Löschung der Einreisesperre aus dem Nationalregister sowie auf Einsicht in die zugrundeliegenden Akten. Kurze Zeit später hob die Bundespolizei das Einreiseverbot wieder auf – ohne jedoch zu erklären, warum. In dem zweiseitigen Schreiben, das The Intercept ebenfalls vorliegt, heißt es lediglich, dass dem Antrag stattgegeben wird und keine weitergehenden Informationen erteilt werden könnten.

„Natürlich ist es gut, dass das Einreiseverbot aufgehoben wurde“, sagte Gorski The Intercept. „Aus rechtsstaatlicher Sicht ist es jedoch hochproblematisch, wenn jemand wegen einer politischen Äußerung, die keinen Straftatbestand erfüllt, an der Einreise gehindert wird – und ihm anschließend noch der Zugang zu den zugrunde liegenden Akten verweigert wird.“

Gorski legte daraufhin formell Widerspruch ein, um Einsicht in interne Akten zu erhalten, die zur Verhängung des Einreiseverbots führten. Robinson-Foster habe ein Recht darauf zu erfahren, auf welcher rechtlichen Grundlage ihm die Einreise nach Deutschland verweigert wurde. Nicht nur, um die Rechtmäßigkeit des Vorgangs überprüfen zu können – sondern auch, um zu verstehen, welches Verhalten die deutschen Behörden zukünftig als Grundlage für eine Einreiseverweigerung ansehen.

„Wenn ein Künstler sich an das Gesetz halten will, muss er wissen, was die Regeln sind“, so Gorski.

Bislang ist unklar, wie es dazu kam, dass ein britischer Musiker, dem weder in England noch in Deutschland eine Straftat zur Last gelegt wird, von deutschen Behörden als Gefahr für die öffentliche Sicherheit eingestuft wurde. Die britische Polizei hatte entsprechende Ermittlungen zu Bob Vylans Glastonbury-Auftritt Ende letzten Jahres eingestellt und erklärt, es gebe „keine ausreichenden Beweise für eine realistische Aussicht auf eine Verurteilung“.

„Es fehlt nicht an Beweisen, es fehlt an einer Straftat“, sagte Robinson-Foster gegenüber The Intercept. „Die BBC hat den Auftritt übertragen. Man kann ihn sich einfach ansehen.“

Für Gorski steht der Fall paradigmatisch für einen grundlegenden Wandel im Umgang mit deutschem Migrationsrecht gegenüber pro-palästinensischen Stimmen. Letztes Jahr hatte das Land Berlin Abschiebeverfahren gegen vier ausländische Staatsangehörige eingeleitet, die sich an Protesten gegen Israels genozidalen Krieg in Gaza beteiligt hatten.

Gorski argumentiert, die deutschen Behörden würden das Migrationsrecht verstärkt dazu nutzen, um „unerwünschte Stimmen zum Schweigen zu bringen“, indem etwa Kritiker Israels die Einreise verweigern wird – oder indem sie des Landes verweisen werden. Ähnliche Bedenken äußerte zuletzt auch Thomas Oberhäuser, Vorsitzender im Geschäftsführenden Ausschuss der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Migrationsrecht im Deutschen Anwaltverein. Auch Oberhäuser sieht Anzeichen dafür, dass das Migrationsrecht in Deutschland zunehmend für politische Zwecke eingesetzt wird.

Gorski verwies im Gespräch auf frühere Fälle, etwa den Fall des britisch-palästinensischen Chirurgen Ghassan Abu Sitta sowie den Fall des ehemaligen griechischen Finanzministers Yanis Varoufakis. Gorski hat beide in vergleichbaren Verfahren vertreten. In beiden Fällen hatten deutsche Behörden versucht, ihre Einreise zu verhindern, um ihre Teilnahme an pro-palästinensischen Veranstaltungen zu unterbinden.

Robinson-Foster sagte gegenüber The Intercept, er sei im Juni privat nach Deutschland gereist. Er habe vor der Veröffentlichung des neuen Albums der Band Freunde und Musikerkollegen besuchen wollen. Bob Vylan tourte in den letzten Jahren mehrfach auch in Deutschland. Obwohl die deutschen Behörden das Einreiseverbot jetzt aufgehoben haben, habe der Vorfall „eine Büchse der Pandora geöffnet“.

„Es scheint, als hätte die Einreiseverweigerung in Deutschland dazu geführt, dass wir bei der Einreise in andere Länder nun immer wieder Probleme bekommen“, berichtete Robinson-Foster. Seit seiner Abschiebung seien sowohl er als auch sein Bandkollege bei Einreisen in andere EU-Länder mehrfach intensiv befragt worden. In einem Fall hätten belgische Grenzbeamte den Schlagzeuger der Band zu dem Vorfall in Deutschland befragt – obwohl dieser selbst nicht nach Deutschland eingereist sei.

„Wir möchten weiterhin Konzerte in Deutschland spielen“, sagte Robinson-Foster. „Wir sind in den letzten fünf Jahren regelmäßig auf Tour dort gewesen. Es wäre wirklich bitter, wenn wir den Kontakt zu den Menschen verlieren, die uns dort unterstützen.“

The post Nach Abschiebung wegen Anti-Israel-Parole: Bob-Vylan-Frontmann wehrt sich erfolgreich gegen Einreiseverbot appeared first on The Intercept.

Hawley was at an event in St. Louis, Missouri, celebrating the inclusion of expanded funds for victims of nuclear radiation in President Donald Trump’s signature economic bill. In the photo, the far-right Republican smiled down on former Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who had worked with him on the measure, as he embraced her.

Bush was no longer in Congress at the time. She was ousted from her St. Louis seat in a Democratic primary the summer before, after facing more than $18 million in spending from outside groups, including the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Bush’s AIPAC-backed replacement, Rep. Wesley Bell, stood in the background of the photo, off to the side.

“Cori, thank you,” Hawley said. “We would not be here without you and your work.”

It was a rare show of camaraderie between two officials who rarely saw eye to eye. Bush previously called for Hawley’s removal from office in 2021 and said he had blood on his hands after making a show of solidarity with rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6.

“One thing that we both respect is fight,” Bush told The Intercept.

Though they might disagree on a swathe of other issues, they worked together to deliver the package because it was something they both believed in. Bush said the acknowledgment from Hawley was an honor, particularly because she was no longer in Congress when the bill was finalized. Zero Democrats in the House voted for the bill, though Bell said he supported the provision.

“He decided that he wouldn’t forget about me,” Bush said. “And he said that with the current congressman standing behind him. He didn’t acknowledge him.”

Asked recently about the event, Bell said: “I never take it offensively when Josh Hawley does not give me credit.” (Bell’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Beyond sparking internet memes speculating that there had been a romantic bent to their embrace, the event and the subsequent photo distilled the heart of Bush’s argument in her campaign to win back her seat on Tuesday in a rematch against Bell.

Bush told The Intercept this cycle is completely different from her last race.

“This cycle, the momentum met me,” she said. “The community asked me to run. The community came to me and said, ‘Cori, where is our fighter?’”

Two Paths From Ferguson

In many ways, the protracted fight between Bell and Bush started long before either of them ran for Congress.

It was the summer of 2014. Bush was working as a nurse and a pastor. Bell had just lost his first campaign for a seat on the St. Louis County Council.

Four days after Bell lost the race, a Ferguson police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. Protests erupted that would rock the city and launch a nationwide movement against police brutality and overpolicing in Black communities.

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Bush drove to Ferguson on the second night of demonstrations. She provided mental health support to people in the community. Her work in Ferguson and her ascendance in the Black Lives Matter movement would eventually lead her to run for federal office.

At the time, Bell was an assistant professor of criminal justice at St. Louis Community College, in addition to gigs as a municipal judge and a prosecutor. After he lost his 2014 race in St. Louis, Bell soon set to work on his next campaign for another council seat. This time, though, Bell ran in Ferguson in the city’s first election since Brown’s killing.

Ferguson was a majority-Black city with a largely white government, and Bell, the son of a police officer, was at the time one of four Black candidates running to reshape the city council. One supporter compared him to former President Barack Obama and speculated that he might eventually make it to Congress.

Bell would eventually do just that, though perhaps not in the way some of his supporters envisioned it. Bell moved from the Ferguson City Council to the office of the top prosecutor in St. Louis County, campaigning as a reformer and toppling the three-decade incumbent who’d failed to indict Brown’s killer. He transformed the prosecutor’s office, ending cash bail for misdemeanors and launching a unit dedicated to reviewing wrongful convictions and addressing police abuse.

Four years later, Bell launched a primary to unseat Bush. He initially ran for Senate in Missouri, but saw an opening to take on the incumbent after she introduced a resolution for a ceasefire in Israel’s assault on Gaza shortly after the October 7 attacks. Two weeks after the legislation was introduced, Bell dropped his Senate bid and announced his campaign against Bush.

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It soon looked like Bell had made a sound political judgment. The pro-Israel lobby made Bush one of their top targets, with AIPAC pouring more than $8 million into the race, and Bell vanquished her in the primary.

Before resigning from office to enter Congress in 2025, one of his last acts as a prosecutor was slapping Ferguson protesters with felony charges.

Grassroots Energy

In a Democratic primary cycle that’s been largely defined by frustration with incumbents, Bell is aligned with two political forces that the party’s base increasingly views as enemies. He’s an incumbent with AIPAC on his side — though the group has invested just a fraction of its 2024 spending, with its super PAC United Democracy Project putting more than $3 million into the race this July.

One thing Bell does not have is Bush’s grassroots army. Though he’s far outraised Bush and has outside spending in his corner, Bush is buoyed by organizers with the St. Louis chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. The group, of which Bush is a member, has helped power insurgent candidates and topple incumbents from New York to Colorado this cycle. She also has endorsements from the progressive group Justice Democrats, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. (Bush told The Intercept she has not spoken to her former Squad colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.)

Facing that insurgency from below, Bell, who previously challenged Bush to televised debates, has not shown up to a series of candidate forums, frustrating Democratic organizers who say they rearranged schedules to accommodate him. One of the only polls in the race, released this spring, showed Bell just 4 percentage points ahead of Bush, with 17 percent undecided.

After being saturated with negative ads and mail from AIPAC and other groups that spent on the 2024 primary, St. Louis residents are slightly more prepared this time around, said organizers backing Bush’s campaign, including Jessica Montgomery, co-chair of the St. Louis DSA chapter. Montgomery said she joined DSA in 2021 because of her experience volunteering on Bush’s 2020 campaign, when she toppled a half-century political dynasty on her second attempt at the seat.

“A lot of people have buyer’s remorse,” Montgomery said. “Wesley Bell was selling himself to be a certain way, and now that he’s been in office, I don’t think he’s lived up to what he was selling people.”

Even with those factors on her side, Bush is still facing headwinds.

There’s the obvious problem: She lost her last primary.

She’s also facing a recently launched investigation by the Missouri attorney general, an unelected Republican official, over allegations that funds she raised for tornado relief were moved to a political committee. There’s been reporting on her using PACs not connected to her campaign to legally pay salaries to herself and her husband totaling $25,500. Her husband was the target of charges for pandemic loan fraud in a case that was dismissed earlier this year.

And she was the subject of an investigation launched by the Department of Justice in 2024 into using campaign funds to pay her now-husband for campaign security services, an issue the Office of Congressional Ethics had previously investigated and dismissed. (A conservative group had originally filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission about the spending in 2023, claiming that Bush had used campaign funds for personal use.)

Bush has said all those claims, including her husband’s pandemic loan probe that started under former President Joe Biden, were politically motivated attempts to discredit her. The person who eventually signed her husband’s indictment was the former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, who at the time led the federal prosecutor’s office that brought the charge.

“What they’re talking about is less than what someone would be paid for a part-time job,” Bush said of the salaries she and her husband drew from PAC money. She added that the investigations into her husband were part of a broader effort to tear her down. (There has been no public update investigation by the Department of Justice investigation, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“The DOJ investigation against me did not go anywhere,” Bush told The Intercept. “There was someone that is no longer with the DOJ who we were told said, ‘Well, we just have to keep looking. Let’s look into her husband now,’ because the target was me.”

A Perfect Foil

In many ways, Bell is Bush’s perfect foil.

Asked if she looks back on her time in office and wishes she’d done anything different, Bush said, if anything, she would have done more.

“Before I felt like I was there flipping tables, sometimes. I was flipping them one by one,” she said. “This time, I’ll have to do two at a time.”

In contrast, Bell has largely kept his head down in Congress. He’s sponsored around 30 bills, including just one that passed the House in March that allowed the National Park Service to host private events at a national landmark in St. Louis.

At times, Bell has seemed to side with party centrists or, worse, Republicans. In June 2025, Bell voted with 74 other Democrats for a measure to express “gratitude” to ICE, explaining after Bush criticized him that the resolution included a condemnation of a thwarted terrorist attack in Colorado.

Montgomery, the St. Louis DSA co-chair, also pointed to a measure in Congress to back-burner an effort to impeach President Donald Trump; the majority of Democrats opposed the resolution, but Bell was one of 47 Democrats who voted present.

“There’s a lot of very progressive voters in St. Louis who don’t like the fact that he voted to thank ICE,” said Montgomery. “I think they want someone who will be more adversarial and will fight back against the Trump administration.”

Bree Bowen, president of the 6th Ward Democrats in St. Louis, helped to organize a recent forum where Bell canceled a planned appearance at the last minute that had more than 100 people in attendance, many who had come to see Bell speak. Bowen started working on Bush’s campaign shortly afterward.

After the group changed the date of the forum to accommodate Bell’s schedule, he canceled and sent a surrogate instead, Bowen said.

“The wards that were there have the highest turnout in the whole city,” Bowen said. “A lot of people that were there I think were very disappointed — not shocked, but disappointed that he wasn’t there because they came to see him.”

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Today, there’s a higher level of literacy around the source of many of the most salient criticisms of Bush. She took heat for being one of six Democrats to vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill in 2021 over concerns that it didn’t include more spending for social services. And critics said Bush didn’t show up for work at a time when she said she had Covid.

Those attacks nevertheless stuck with many voters, said Keith Rose, another St. Louis DSA member who also helped on the 6th Ward candidate forum Bell skipped.

“Whenever you say ‘Cori Bush’ to so many of our voters, those are the first things that come to their mind,” said Rose, whose role as the Missouri organizer for Our Revolution, launched by supporters of Bernie Sanders after his 2016 presidential primary, is dedicated to supporting Bush’s campaign.

Still, Rose pointed out that Bush won reelection the next year by more than 40 percentage points the year after the Biden infrastructure bill vote. The difference two years later? Rose said it was AIPAC’s prodigious spending.

“These exact same humans” — those critical of Bush — “voted for her afterward because they hadn’t been told yet by AIPAC to care about that other vote,” Rose said. “They’ve really just defined the terms of the fight so effectively just through repetition and spending.”

Bush said she wouldn’t change the infrastructure vote, where she sided with the heads of Missouri unions in the effort to secure social welfare provisions along with the physical infrastructure funding.

“I put myself on the line with that,” she said. “But history recorded that, and now we can look back and say, maybe if we had those things right now, we wouldn’t be looking at a president who some people voted for because of the price of eggs.”

The post Cori Bush Has No Regrets appeared first on The Intercept.

For the low, low price of $100,000 a month, the ever-oxymoronic Truth Social is now selling direct access to its most important posts — or, in the firm’s preferred parlance, “truths” — to Wall Street. That’s an expedited lane to access statements and data from the president of the United States and other government officials, which have significant potential to move financial markets, ahead of us suckers in the general public. 

This sort of product, called an Application Processing Interface, or API, is not a particularly unusual offering for a social media company in the abstract. But Truth API, which launched today, is uniquely positioned to fuel blatant presidential graft. 

The move has been rightly called “brazen corruption,” “the president’s most desperate grift yet,” and a “clear and unacceptable pathway for corruption.” In a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sens. Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren called the offering “an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders.” All of that is true, but Truth API doesn’t stop at creating a new pathway to funnel de facto bribes to Trump; it also seeks to functionally merge the provision of a public good with a for-profit company. 

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DOJ Wants to Scrap Watergate-Era Rule That Makes Presidential Records Public

It has become de facto administration policy for high-ranking government officials to make official announcements on Truth Social without going through traditional press offices. Trump has also set a new standard for blurring the lines between his communications as a public official and a private citizen.

For nearly half a century, communications from the president have been recognized as the property of the United States, not the president himself. Under the Presidential Records Act, any documents (with some carve-outs for national security and personal records like journals and diaries) that are “created or received by the President … in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President” are subject to the United States’ “complete ownership, possession, and control.”

In other words, selling expedited access to such statements is effectively privatizing a public asset. That might be part of the reason why, this spring, Trump’s Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that argues the heretofore uncontroversial Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional.

Trump owns a 41 percent stake in Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. In December 2024, all of his shares were transferred into Trump’s revocable trust, which is overseen by Donald Trump Jr. At the time, it was a 52 percent stake, worth about $4 billion against the company’s total valuation of $7.5 billion. Those TMTG shares (which are of course traded under the narcissistic ticker DJT) represent a major part of the president’s total wealth. While his stake in the company is now valued at (only!) $1.2 billion, it still represents 18 percent of Trump’s overall wealth, which Forbes estimated to be $6.5 billion.

And while Truth Social has become a pillar of the Trump business empire, it is also a pillar of sand. Truth Social hemorrhages money: In 2024, it only brought in $3.6 million and had a net loss of more than $400 million. Last year was even worse: Revenue ticked up slightly to $3.68 million, but its net loss soared to more than $700 million. The company’s value is now less than one-fourth of what it was in its spring 2024 heyday. That’s a lot of money on board a sinking ship.

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TMTG tried to find income streams from branching out into prediction markets, cryptocurrency issuing, bitcoin investment, and nuclear energy production (perhaps a nod to Trump’s physicist Uncle John). But none of these maneuvers have stopped the bleeding.

This latest plan to sell the API might finally be the path to profitability that TMTG so desperately needs. At its core, what an API does is provide a data feed directly into a particular software program, in this case financial trading terminals. So even though the company insisted to the Wall Street Journal that “Truth API is designed to deliver posts the instant they are made public to everyone, not before,” it still represents priority access to government officials’ statements because anyone not paying for the service will be unable to process the information at the same pace as subscribers, letting professional traders and hedge funds outpace the market and reap the benefits.

In modern financial markets, an advantage of even fractions of a second can be decisive — and can provide the opportunity to reap huge profits. This is the sitting president directly selling financial powerhouses a significant edge from the very heart of the federal government for a cool $100,000 a month (or a paltry $60,000 if you opt for a multi-year subscription!).

This entire sordid arrangement already reeks of corruption, but the stench grows stronger when juxtaposed with this administration’s propensity to mistakenly, illegally, and/or prematurely release information when they aren’t supposed to, and not infrequently on Truth Social. Trump’s presidency has always been defined by the degradation of our sense of shared reality and by rampant corruption. There’s no better metaphor than sticking a price tag on the “truths” coming out of the administration.

The post Trump’s Truth Social API Is a Blatantly Corrupt Favor to Wall Street appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday, Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., will face off in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The race is the next biggest test of whether progressives can win statewide, particularly in purple territory.

The Michigan race is one of the most expensive primaries of the cycle. Outside groups have spent upward of $50 million in support of Stevens or against El-Sayed. Most of that money is coming from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated groups — close to $30 million, which their largest investment ever in a single race, according to The AP.

“It’s just anti-democratic on its own terms,” El-Sayed, the former public health official, tells The Intercept Briefing. “I always ask people, “OK, you’re covering this as a very close race, but would it be close if they didn’t have $60 million to spend? Would it even be a close race at all?’”

This week on The Intercept Briefing podcast, host Akela Lacy asks, can progressives win outside of blue cities? El-Sayed argues, if you focus on the issues people care about and act on them, you can: “Look, you have an option that’s not bought off by all the same corporations. And that option is desperately clear about wanting you to have healthcare, and also wanting your kid to have a good school, and also making sure that there’s not a data center that gets planted in your backyard to automate your job away.”

Lacy explores that question further with Ryan Clancy, a Wisconsin state representative and founding member of the state legislature’s current Socialist Caucus, and Thom Hartmann, a progressive political commentator. 

Clancy says voters he speaks to in Milwaukee “want a fighter. People want people in office who are going to fight for the middle class, fight for actual transformative change.” He adds, “The idea that in order to win in a purple district that is roughly split between Democrats and Republicans, that you need when you’re a Democrat, to look as much like a Republican as possible is just not helpful.” 

Polling suggests that El-Sayed has a commanding lead over Stevens in the Democratic primary. But polls for the November general election narrow sharply when El-Sayed is up against Trump-backed Republican candidate Mike Rogers; one shows Rogers beating him by 10 percentage points, which the Stevens’s campaign has leaned into.

“We’ve been in this change moment. We’re sick and tired of neoliberalism. We’re sick and tired of Reaganism. We’re sick and tired of the status quo. We’re sick and tired of a dying middle class. We have been living in this moment, in my opinion, since 2000, and I think in a big way since 2008. Obama promised hope and change, and really just brought us a bunch of health insurance companies,” says Hartmann. “I’m not sure if we’re there yet to the point where a good message like El-Sayed’s message can overcome millions of dollars from Israel and from big corporations. That’s going to be the big challenge.”

The Intercept invited Stevens on the program for an interview but as of publishing have not heard back yet.

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

Transcript

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

What do Democratic voters really want? It’s the question that’s animated primaries so far this cycle in the ongoing battle over the future of the Democratic Party. 

Progressives and democratic socialists say their recent wins from New York to Maine to Colorado, including a slew of races where insurgent candidates beat incumbents or others backed by the Democratic Party, have pushed their skeptics to move the goalposts. 

The main criticism facing the left is no longer that its candidates can’t win — it’s that they can’t win in “normal” places outside of city enclaves full of young, educated, left-leaning voters. 

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.:  In those swing states, it’s the moderate candidate that is more successful statewide.

AL: That argument has reared its head again ahead of key primaries in the Midwest set to test the power of progressives to win in statewide races pitting them against the Democratic establishment in states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, we’re talking about the question we just can’t seem to get away from: Can the left win in the Midwest?

We put that question to one of the candidates at the center of that debate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday. We also asked his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, to discuss the issues, but she has not gotten back to us.

But first, I’m joined by Ryan Clancy, a Wisconsin state Rep. and founding member of the state legislature’s current Socialist Caucus and the first democratic socialist lawmaker elected in Milwaukee in more than half a century. 

Ryan Clancy, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Ryan Clancy: Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to this. 

AL: We’re also joined by Thom Hartmann of the “Thom Hartmann Program” on radio stations across the country, and the author of “Who Killed the American Dream?”, about an 1886 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations constitutional rights. Thom, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Thom Hartmann: Thanks, Akela. 

AL: So we’re talking about the question of whether the left can win in the Midwest, but I want to start with the premise of that question. Why is there this idea that the left can’t win in the Midwest? Where does that come from? Ryan, let’s start with you, and then Thom. 

RC: I think it’s coming from two different places. One is just fear. In Wisconsin here, we’ve lived now for 16 years under Republican control. We haven’t had the abilities to even get bills hearings, much less pass things into law and do what Wisconsin needs us to. So I think there is some valid concern that people just don’t want another Republican.

But there really is no basis for not wanting somebody from the left unless you’re a Democrat who’s just a conservative or moderate and one of the folks who is, I think, on the way out both in Wisconsin and across the country. 

AL: Thom, what’s your take? 

TH: I think it’s astonishing that we’re calling this “the left.” I’m assuming that Ryan is not calling for all of the big companies in America to be owned by the government. 

RC: Not until next week. [Laughter]

TH: Exactly. Right now where progressive Democrats are at is where Dwight Eisenhower was at. He ran for reelection in 1956 on the fact that he had almost doubled the number of people on Social Security. He’d expanded the benefits. He’d almost tripled the number of people eligible for union jobs and increased union membership by almost 100 percent. 

My mom, in the 1950s, went to college, and she paid her way through Michigan State University and graduated — with a summer job as a lifeguard in Charlevoix, Michigan. That was the world. 

Today, if anybody proposed that you should be able to go to college and work a part-time job for three months to pay for an entire year of a major Big Ten school!

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Healthcare was inexpensive in Michigan where I grew up. Blue Cross Blue Shield was required by law to be a nonprofit. In fact, all of the insurance here, all of the hospitals in the state were required by law to be nonprofits. If anybody were to propose this stuff now, they’d be screaming “communism!” This is just common sense. 

To the extent that America has been radicalized, I would say it’s the radical middle, not the left. The real left largely doesn’t exist in America. 

RC: Yeah, you’re totally right. I think the reason for the resurgence of the left, really, is the economic conditions. It’s people having really been let down by capitalism, by so many years of moderate and Republican control.

We’ve seen the average age for somebody buying their first home go from the 20s years ago: It’s 41 now. The idea of the American Dream really is out of grasp for many people, even people who are working really hard to get there.

TH: Again, in the 1950s, my dad bought the house that I grew up in 1957. He was able to do that because he finally got a union job at a tool and die shop. With that one union paycheck, he was able to buy a house. He bought a new car every three years. He took a vacation every year. He retired and traveled the world. He put four boys through college — on a single paycheck!

If you use that as the definition of the middle class, 65 percent of Americans were there because a third of us had union jobs when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981. Today, it’s 41 percent of us who can make that claim, who can satisfy all those tick marks for the middle class — and it requires two paychecks to do that.

This is 45 years of Reaganomics that’s just essentially ripped America apart, torn apart the middle class. So you’ve got people reacting and saying, no, we want to either go back or go forward — however you want to define it or frame it — to a world where work is honored, regardless of educational attainment. If somebody works a 40-hour week, they should be able to have housing and transportation and food and a decent life.

The reactionaries, the Reaganites, the crazies on the right start screaming “leftism” and “communism.” I’ll call myself the left, but the Overton window has just been — it hasn’t moved, it’s been blown off the side of the map.

RC: Absolutely.

AL: We were talking about this today in a meeting with some of my colleagues about criticism when reporters use the word “centrist Democrat” or “moderate Democrat.”

I think that’s the perfect counterpoint to the point that you both are making, which is that not only have policies that were considered common sense or mainstream half a century ago [are now] portrayed more and more as radical. But policies that are overtly conservative among the Democratic Party are portrayed as the common sense or the centrist position, when in reality, they are increasingly reflective of a right wing — a strong right wing — within the Democratic Party. How has that happened? 

That subtext feels like it’s missing from all of the conversations that we’re having around this midterm cycle. Part of this is the messaging battle, right? That Republicans are very good at fearmongering — and Democrats are good at fearmongering around the left. But what has made that shift possible and that sort of flipping of these definitions? 

RC: I think it’s a lack of political bravery. In Wisconsin 16 years ago, we had a trifecta, and Democrats totally missed the moment. We didn’t codify abortion rights. We didn’t raise the minimum wage from $7.25, where it has languished for many years now. The sub-minimum wage in Wisconsin is $2.33 for service industry workers that are customarily tipped. 

When Democrats have the ability to make real substantial change, and they don’t, we’re in trouble. I think we see that window moving, slipping slowly to the right and have for the last 15 years.

TH: I think it’s important to put this in a historical context. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in ’33, only about 20 percent of America was in the middle class. He set out to create, and succeeded in creating, the world’s first middle class that was more than half of the nation’s population. And the principal thing that drove that was unionization.

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He legalized unions in 1935 with the Wagner Act. So from the mid-’30s all the way up until really 1992, what you saw was that the Democratic Party was largely funded by unions, and the Republican Party was largely funded by corporations and fat cats. But in 1981, Reagan went after the unions. A third of us were in unions at that time when he was elected, and he starts with PATCO [the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization], and he just deconstructed the unions.

He puts an anti-union lawyer in charge of the Labor Department, et cetera. So by ’92, right when Clinton wants to run for president, the unions are down to like 10 percent of the American workforce, maybe 9 percent of the American workforce. They got no money. 

So Clinton’s looking around going, “I can’t get enough money to run for president. What do I do?” And the solution that these guys came up with — and it was a reasonable one at the time in 1992 — was to say, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to take corporate money, but let’s take it from the good corporations. Let’s take it from health insurance companies and banks and pharmaceutical companies, not those awful oil companies or the chemical companies or the mining operations.”

So we got all this speechification from Clinton about the new jobs and everything else. But the bottom line was that was the point at which the Democratic Party essentially sold out to neoliberalism and this “moderate position.” In fact, Clinton called it the Third Way, The Third Way Democrats, and the new Democrats. The same thing was going on in the U.K. It wasn’t really until the Obama campaign in 2008 that we discovered that the internet was capable of raising money for a presidential campaign, enough to get somebody into the White House. But the Democrats had not, or at least about half of the Democrats right now, have still not sworn off that money that Clinton lurched at.

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So you’ve got about half the Democratic Party that is beholden to their donors. That’s why you’re not seeing them take advantage of these opportunities like Ryan was talking about. Then you got another half of the Democratic Party, the Progressive Caucus in the House, about 100 members, who are not taking corporate money and are explicitly saying, “No, let’s work toward what people want.”

That schism — that split — in the Democratic Party, it’s way behind the American people. The Democratic base is 80, 90 percent with the progressives. The American public is 60, 70 percent with the progressives. But the institutional Democratic Party and the old line, or these on-the-take Democrats, I call them the Jared Goldens and Josh Gottheimers of the world — they’re going to fight like hell to hang on to that money and all those perks that go with it. That’s the real tragedy of this moment because it just cripples our ability to challenge the genuine fascists who are running our government right now and trying to take our country apart.

AL: Ryan, we’re two weeks out from a very big primary in Wisconsin. What are you hearing from your constituents on the issues that resonate with them from a democratic socialist perspective? Do voters in Midwestern states actually prefer more conservative Democrats? 

RC: They absolutely do not want conservative Democrats. The playbook that I think a lot of Democrats are working from is old. I don’t think that it was really the case even 10 or 20 years ago. But the idea that in order to win in a purple district that is roughly split between Democrats and Republicans, that you need, when you’re a Democrat, to look as much like a Republican as possible is just not helpful.

It’s not what people want on the doors. People want a fighter. People want people in office who are going to fight for the middle class, fight for actual, transformative change. That’s the reason that we saw some voters move from a Bernie Sanders to a Donald Trump. It wasn’t necessarily the specific policies; it was the idea that they wanted somebody who would mess with the system.

I knock on Republican and Independent and socialist, libertarian doors all over the place. And there’s a critical mass of folks right now who still want that change, but they realize that it’s not going to come. The sort of change they want is not going to come in the form of a Donald Trump or in a Tom Tiffany, who is the likely Republican nominee for governor.

But they do want Democrats who are going to fight for them in ways that we’ve really missed the moment on in over the last decade and a half. 

AL: The next biggest test on these questions, particularly whether progressive wins that we saw earlier this cycle will carry over into statewide races, is the upcoming Michigan Democratic Senate primary.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens are facing off on Tuesday. El-Sayed, a former public health official, has the backing of some of the most well-known progressives in Congress, from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Stevens, on the other hand, is backed by members of the Democratic establishment, like Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Sen. Chuck Schumer said she had the best shot of winning, though he didn’t officially endorse her.

This is one of the most expensive primaries of the cycle. Outside groups have spent upwards of $50 million in support of Stevens or against El-Sayed — most of that money coming from one single group, the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent a record amount, more than $25 million, on the race.

Stevens and El-Sayed debated on Monday. Let’s hear from both their opening statements. 

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: My friend is going to frame this race about me and her. It’s not about that. It’s about you. It’s about what you deserve. It’s about you deserving a politics that’s not bought off by the same corporations picking your pocket at every single turn.

I’m looking forward to the conversation about how we get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, and pass Medicare for All. 

Rep. Haley Stevens: Look, Michigan deserves a senator who can win and who can deliver. I’m the only one on this stage who has flipped a Republican seat, and I was named Michigan’s most effective Democratic lawmaker in Congress because my only focus is you. Abdul is running for celebrity. Republicans are propping up his campaign. 

RC: You could not have candidates that are more starkly contrasted with each other.

You have somebody who’s backed by AIPAC. In that same interview, actually, she was asked point-blank if she took money from their power company [two major Michigan utility companies]. And she said no, that she had not, and absolutely did. 

AL: She was asked about saying no, and then she said that she thought they were talking about this cycle and not previous cycles. And she admitted that she had taken it in previous cycles.

RC: She is backed by all of the institutions that average people across that state, and across the U.S., absolutely revile. AIPAC is wildly unpopular now — so are power companies, for that matter.

You have a candidate who is very clearly beholden to his community, somebody who came up as a doctor in public health; and then you have somebody who claims to be successful. Her version of success is collaborating with Republicans to pass bad policy. That is not the definition of “effective” that most voters in the United States right now want. They want people who will be fighting for something better, not rolling over and collaborating with the people that have made it worse.

AL: Thom, what are the biggest takeaways from this race so far, and who do you think is going to win? 

TH: It’s a classic example of the kind of Hillary–Bernie divide brought into this era. In that 2016 election, I was living on a boat in Washington, D.C., in the marina there. We were doing our show from D.C.

Maybe a third of the people who lived in that marina were either active-duty or retired Coast Guard or Navy, living in boats. Men mostly, and almost all every single one of them that I can recall called himself Republican. During that primary, most of them were actually planning on voting for Bernie, these Republicans, because they thought that he was going to bring genuine change.

But when the day finally came, and afterwards, I talked to many of them, a lot of them ended up voting for Trump because they thought that he would actually bring change.

We’ve been in this change moment. We’re sick and tired of neoliberalism. We’re sick and tired of Reaganism. We’re sick and tired of the status quo. We’re sick and tired of a dying middle class. We have been living in this moment, in my opinion, since 2000, and I think in a big way since 2008. Obama promised hope and change, and really just brought us a bunch of health insurance companies.

I’m not sure if we’re there yet to the point where a good message like El-Sayed’s message can overcome millions of dollars from Israel and from big corporations. That’s going to be the big challenge. We’re seeing this now. In the 2024 election, 20 percent of all the spending in that election came from a handful of billionaire families, all for Republicans.

So it’s going to be really interesting, and it’s going to be really instructive, I think, next Tuesday to see how this shakes out. But it’s really a challenge of big money.

AL: The irony being that Haley Stevens, in the last couple of debates in the final weeks of the race, has tried to make that argument against Abdul El-Sayed, saying he’s got all this personal wealth: “I’m the only non-millionaire in this race.” Meanwhile, she has the vast majority of outside spending on her side; it’s not even a comparison. 

El-Sayed has been leading Stevens in primary polls, but her campaign has been touting other polling that shows her leading Republican Trump-backed candidate Mike Rogers in November, and El-Sayed losing to him.

This is another classic case of voters potentially having a different preference for the direction of the Democratic Party and the party pushing back against that with the electability argument. But if the less popular Democrat actually wins — either in the primary or in the general — where does that leave the party in the long term? Does that not aggravate voter frustration even more and set up a situation where the GOP gets the upper hand anyway? 

TH: It does, and it always does. I would argue that when you look at these match-ups, with the general population voting and El-Sayed starts dropping — what you’re seeing there is racism and anti-Muslim bigotry probably more than anything else. And apparently it’s a bigger force, at least in this election, than misogyny. In addition to all the money that’s been spent.

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AL: I will say my colleague Jonah Valdez did a great piece on Islamophobia in this race that I encourage all of you to read at The Intercept. This is for our listeners.

Ryan, did you want to add anything on that? 

RC: I do think that the polls, both in Michigan and in here and other places, they are not measuring the enthusiasm gap as they should. I think they are underrepresenting these dynamic leftist candidates. Because when somebody is asked, they can only say yes so forcefully, right? A yes is a yes. But voters and people who are really engaged with these campaigns, when you knock on their doorstep and you ask them about somebody and they light up — these are the folks who are going to drag their friends to the polls, both for primaries and again in November, in a way that somebody grudgingly backing a centrist candidate just isn’t.

So I think he’s going to do fine. 

AL: The counterpoint to the argument that progressives or a leftist archetype doesn’t work outside of blue cities is that there is an archetype that works. And it’s dictated largely by the Democratic Party and its campaign committees. But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other groups aligned with the conservative wing of the Democratic Party have had a very rough cycle.

They’ve lost races in Arizona, California, and Colorado, while other incumbents lost in New York and Texas. The DCCC recently added a candidate that they endorsed against in Arizona to their coveted Red to Blue list, which typically helps boost candidates with fundraising. That addition to the list comes along with another candidate, Sam Forstag, who’s running for a competitive congressional seat in Montana against Republican Aaron Flint.

Forstag is a firefighter and a union organizer who won the endorsement of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last month, and she spoke at a rally for him in Montana in May. This is a rare case of overlap between the DSA and the establishment wing. Is that surprising to you? Is this a model that we could potentially see in other races?

RC: It has to be, otherwise it is the death of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party as a brand is not polling well at all. If I was the Democratic machine, if my goal was to make sure that the Democratic Party was strong and vibrant and thriving, I would be encouraging these awesome candidates on the left into my party.

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But increasingly we are hearing Democrats talk about a big tent, but they only mean big to the right. For some reason, the tent flap is just not big enough to cover those on the left in a lot of cases. But ultimately that unity and saying, “Oh, the candidates on the left within our own party are not a threat to us, they are the future, they are how we get through this,” really is inevitable. And they have to do this or fall out of power even more than they have.

TH: Yeah, they’re 20 years behind the electorate right now. 

AL: I want to turn now to the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary on August 11. Francesca Hong, democratic socialist candidate, has been leading in recent polling, while other Democratic candidates in the race like Mandela Barnes and David Crowley, who dropped out of the race and quickly reentered after the establishment pick Sara Rodriguez dropped out over a campaign finance scandal, have been polling below Hong.

What do you think it would take for a more progressive candidate to win in Wisconsin or throughout the Midwest? We’ll start with Ryan, and then I’ll come to you, Thom. 

RC: Folks on doors are really concerned about everyday things. They’re concerned about affordability. They’re concerned that they cannot afford healthcare. They’re concerned that they can’t afford rent and that they’ll never be able to afford a home because everything’s getting more expensive.

But they also have these existential concerns. I’ve never seen people more concerned for themselves and their families. I talked to a woman on doors a couple weeks ago who broke down crying at the door because rather than me showing up and saying, “Here’s who I am and, will you vote for me?” My question was, “How are you? What are you concerned about?” And she started crying and talked about how she was concerned about a family member being abducted by ICE and the ever-present threat of that. So we need people who are going to meet the moment, who are going to address those very real concerns from affordability to concern for community in a way that we haven’t yet but that we need to.

TH: I think that it’s really important that people who are concerned about this political future and where things are going and whatnot get inside the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, it’s a billion-dollar corporation. It’s just sitting there, saying, anybody can come in and volunteer and participate. 

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I’ve had a bunch of people call into my program over the years since I’ve been ranting about this for a decade, who have gotten inside their local Democratic parties. And once you become a precinct committee person, you’re the person or the people who write the platform for the party. You’re the ones who determine who the primary candidates are going to be. You’re the first ones that when your congressperson or your senator comes into your state to talk to the people, you’re the first one they talk to. You have incredible power and influence. A lot of people are just sitting around complaining rather than doing something like this.

Progressives, social democrats, right across the board, I think that we need to be taking over the Democratic Party. We need to learn from the way that the GOP got flipped by the right a decade and a half ago. 

AL: Ryan and Thom, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

I will just mention for our listeners: Thom’s new book gets at one of the root causes of many of the issues that we’re talking about, giving corporations the same rights as people. Thank you both again for the time. This was a great conversation. 

TH: Thank you. 

RC: Thank you so much for having us.

[Break]

AL: The race on everyone’s minds is happening on Tuesday in Michigan, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is running against Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. 

El-Sayed joins me now. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.  

Abdul El-Sayed: Akela, it’s a privilege to be with you. You gotta call me Abdul.

AL: I will. Thank you. We also reached out to Stevens’s campaign to join us on the podcast and did not hear back. 

Abdul, let’s just jump in. I’ve been listening to a lot of your interviews, and one thing that has stood out to me is that you’re walking this delicate line between providing what you say is an alternative for voters who’ve been disenchanted with both parties, while also trying to demonstrate your capacity to beat a Republican in November.

How do you square those two objectives between attracting support in a state that Trump won — including potentially from people who might have supported him — and also making this case that you can and will beat Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate Trump endorsed in the race and was campaigning with earlier this week.

AES: I don’t think about it as much as walking a line as I do about building something that is magnetic for everyone. I think walking a line implies a frame of this, like, left–right divide. “You don’t want to go too far left, otherwise you might lose the people who are on your right!” And I just don’t think that’s the reality for most people.

Most people don’t walk around asking, “Where do I sit on the left–right spectrum?” Most people are walking around asking, “What the hell’s going to happen if I get sick? What’s going to happen if I lose my home or I lose my job? Or AI, literally, they automate out the possibility of my being able to earn the money I need to provide for my family? Also, why does my kids’ school look like it did 50 years ago?”

I think those are the things that unite most Michiganders. You can go anywhere in the state, and you hear the same concerns. I’m looking to build a movement that pushes back on the bipartisan consensus that we ought to build a politics that is paid for by corporations, Big Tech, Big Pharma, DTE [Energy], Blue Cross — and that gives you milquetoast answers to most problems.

I’m looking to build a politics that takes the questions that we’re asking head on and answer them by telling folks that we really can get past the corporate-bought version of politics that’s too often forced into our eyeballs in tens of millions of dollars of spending on ads, and to a question of, let’s solve these things because we’re not bought off by the people who caused the problem in the first place.

AL: Touching on, this flipping the left–right divide framing on its head: Have you spoken with voters who’ve supported Trump? Are you courting those voters?

AES: They come to my events. That’s the thing is, that people think you gotta kinda go to different places to court different voters.

The nature of this world — you and I are talking by virtue of a set of microphones and cameras. This is going to go out into the ether, and it’s probably going to be clipped, and then people are going to hear these clips. What that means is that it’s a lot easier for folks to hear something, and then if that sounds kinda right, they’ll come and find you. And then they’ll come to your events.

I can’t tell you how many people have come to events of mine saying, “I voted for Donald Trump three times, and I’m voting for you.” I give them a kinda quizzical look. I’m like, “Me? Me?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” I ask why, and it’s because, “Hey, I really think you want me to have healthcare.” I’m like, “I really want you to have healthcare.” They’re like “I think you really are America first, like you want to keep my tax dollars here.” I was like, “I really want to keep your tax dollars here.” And they’ll say, “Look, I voted for Donald Trump not because I agree with him on everything, but he didn’t look like politics as usual.” And they’re right. He didn’t look like politics as usual. He was like the most heinous version of the worst things about politics as usual.

I’m out here trying to say, “Look, you have an option that’s not bought off by all the same corporations. And that option is desperately clear about wanting you to have healthcare, and also wanting your kid to have a good school, and also making sure that there’s not a data center that gets planted in your backyard to automate your job away.”

Imagine what that could look like. So what happens if, instead of Donald Trump, the person pushing back on politics as usual on both sides of the aisle is a doctor who rebuilt health departments to eliminate medical debt, provide Narcan, and put glasses on kids?

AL: You’ve said Trump is a symptom of the bigger problems in our political system, not the problem itself. A core part of your campaign is highlighting what you’ve described as the corruption of politics on both sides of the aisle by corporate and special interest money, as you’ve mentioned already, as we’re talking. Democrats just launched a new campaign hitting Trump’s corruption ahead of November, tying it to rising costs for Americans. And they’re preparing to make this the centerpiece of their agenda should they take control in Congress after the midterms.

Is that an effective strategy? What do you make of that effort? Is that an approach you share, or would you do anything differently?

AES: Yeah, I think we should take on his corruption. His corruption’s insane. It’s like he’s made $2 billion off of the White House. He just took out the East Wing because he wanted to, and is now fixated on drapes despite the fact that he took us into a war he doesn’t seem to know how to take us out of.

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I think the issue here is corruption, but I also think that in order to talk about corruption, it really helps to be somebody who’s not played that game at all and will never play that game. We need more Democrats who make sure that we are not playing on that side so that the contrast is clear.

Look, I don’t do this because I care about the future of the Democratic Party. I care about the future of Michiganders. But if an election is an exercise in contrasts, and your argument is that they’re corrupt, it helps to make sure that you have not taken a dime of that corruption money.

AL: Democrats can’t make that argument in your race, right? One of the most expensive primaries in this cycle due almost wholly to the spending of one super PAC, United Democracy Project, AIPAC super PAC. But why does —

AES: Akela, if I can push back on that. Actually, UDP has only spent half the amount of money: $61 million, they’ve spent $31 million of it. So the other money is, it’s buried in these shell 501(c)(4)s.

Part of it is probably DMFI money, part of it’s also probably other AIPAC money, but a lot of it is also just your usual standard issue, Big Pharma, Big Tech, big everyone else. DTE, our local utility who’s one of the worst corporate actors in Michigan. So it’s all bundled in one and the same. Obviously, UDP is just insane amounts of money. They set a record against me in terms of the amount of money that they’ve spent.

But it is everyone, and part of it is also the point that it’s just anti-democratic on its own terms. I always ask people, “OK, you’re covering this as a very close race, but would it be close if they didn’t have $60 million to spend? Would it even be a close race at all?” 

Then if it’s their corruption money against a campaign of grassroots organizers knocking nearly 10,000 doors a day, what kind of politics do we actually want? One where corporations and people who want to send your money abroad get to dump $60 million into a race? Or one where young organizers are coming together to build a movement, to knock doors, to have conversations about who we are and who we want to be?

It’s anti-democratic on its own terms. And Democrats, they’re all so worried about what this all means. I’m like, “It means that we still have an opportunity to inspire people, y’all. That’s what it means, and we can win if we do it.”

AL: One of the questions that we’ve been talking about a lot on this podcast is, why are Democrats so afraid of the message that you’re sending in terms of getting big money out of politics? Could the Democratic Party exist in its current form if they didn’t rely on these kinds of outside groups spending to prop up their preferred candidates, particularly in primaries?

AES: Look, if you’re somebody like Chuck Schumer and your experience of politics is to be able to dictate where a whole bunch of money from big corporations and their lobbyists goes, so that you can handpick your senatorial colleagues who will do exactly what you want them to do, and then you get invited to their fancy cocktail parties and have a nice life — if that’s your vision of politics, then, yeah, you’re probably scared of somebody like me. Because, A, I’m not coming to your cocktail party. B, I’m not somebody who’s going to do what you tell me. And C, I don’t need you or your money. So I think that’s why they’re all so afraid. Now, of course, they hide behind the idea of, “Well, can somebody with his politics win in Michigan?”

If you were out there solving actual problems for people — if groceries weren’t inflating like a balloon, if people could afford their gas because you actually were an opposition party that could stand up to this absurd war, if people had healthcare and didn’t have to worry about it because you weren’t so bought off by Big Pharma and health insurance corporations, I think we would have so much better an opportunity to both win races and actually govern.

The problem, though, is that there’s a cynicism to this kind of politics. You retain a certain level of power, but the other side of it is you can’t actually solve the problems because, of course, that means opposing the very corporations who create the problems in the first place.

AL: Digging a little bit more into specific policy issues. You’ve said AI has taken over climate change as the biggest risk, though the two are inextricable. How has AI and the issue of data centers come up in your conversations with voters?

AES: Yeah, I don’t want to say biggest risk, just most urgent — because it’s imminent, right? And climate change feels imminent now that we’re all worried about trying to dodge air coming from wildfires in Canada. It looks like Europe is burning. So yes, I don’t want to undercut —

AL: They’re linked. They’re two sides of the same issue.

AES: They’re linked. It’s just this one is exceedingly urgent. I want all of us to step back and just remember that moment where ChatGPT came out. It was the end of 2022. It is now the middle of 2026, and I want you to think about just how much money is being flowed into the economy to enable research that’s foundationally unregulated, that could cause danger in so many different ways.

The first is, it can disrupt the social contract as we know it to the ability to sell your human capital on a market for money, when intelligence is now automated — that part.

Then there’s the existential, actual risk. Just last week you had an OpenAI model that jumped its “sandbox” to go commit a cyberattack on a website.

Then there’s the question of data centers. This comes up all the time, and it comes up usually from communities where data centers are trying to be placed. Or it comes up from young people who are actually the most avid users of AI and also have this pit in their stomach about the existential risk of not having a job in the future.

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I gotta be honest with you, the worry that I have is that you’ve got probably three nine-figure super PACs that are out there in the world right now. Two of them are AI PACs; the third one is AIPAC. They are trying to throw their body weight around in a way that could render AI ungovernable.

The reason I say this, and I started with this question of do you remember where you were, less than four years ago, is that it’s only been three and a half years. So what happens in the next three and a half? If our Congress is not capable of setting the regulatory framework now, we might reach escape velocity. I don’t love that future when a few billionaires get to decide what happens with the most powerful technology that’s ever existed.

AL: Abdul, you’ve criticized what you say has been a conversation about climate change that’s been held in esoteric terms. This is a criticism that Democrats have faced on other issues beyond climate too — criminal justice reform, racial inequality, et cetera, talking about issues in a way that can feel inaccessible or stuck in the ivory tower. Are there other policy issues where you see Democrats making that same mistake?

AES: I think a lot of them. I think AI is one of them. I think we need to be talking about the closest risk that people perceive, rather than the long-range risk that people don’t. It’s particularly hard when the causes of the problem feel less connected to the outcome of the problem.

Then when we don’t take seriously a lot of the pushback in the short run when it comes to the climate crisis, we all know that the pathway to solving it needs to be to get to 100 percent renewable energy. But so often we’ve situated it in the well-being of polar bears or the melting of ice caps, and I don’t know, I’ve never seen an ice cap. In fact, if I ever see an ice cap, I live in Michigan, I’m trying to get it off of something. I’ve never met a polar bear, and if I did, I would run like hell.

It’s a lot easier to just talk about the smokestacks that are pushing putrid chemicals into the lungs of our kids. It’s a lot easier to talk about how we could create an insane number of really high-quality jobs and reduce the price of your electricity in the process by investing in a renewable energy future.

But because we’re so busy talking about these other things, we’ve allowed those who want to continue to run interference for the worst actors — Chevrons and Exxons of the world — to win the argument about jobs and the price of electricity. They’ve used that to drive us backwards, even though our argument is the better one.

It’s because we’re out here having this academic conversation about 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius, rather than have a conversation about, “Hey, we can create a whole lot of jobs that they want to end. We can bring down the price of your electricity, which they want to jack up, and we can do it without burning stuff into the lungs of your kids, which they seem dead-set on doing.”

We win that argument every single day, but, like, enough with polar bears.

AL: Talking about this messaging question, talk about Democrats messaging on criminal justice reform. You’ve been criticized over talking about defunding the police in 2020. You’ve addressed this, and this issue has been litigated over and over in many races, not just yours.

But distinguishing the fact that calls to defund police meant in practice funding social services and addressing the root causes of crime. You’ve deleted some of those posts and said you didn’t want them taken out of context. I’m not asking you about this to relitigate it because I think it misses the broader point and can be an exercise in beating a dead horse or confirming priors rather than clarifying something about your policy position.

But I do want to ask you about this line of attack from a strategy standpoint because you’ve talked about Democrats always being on the defensive. I think we really saw that in the aftermath of calls to defund the police in 2020. Democrats didn’t just shy away from that slogan — they shied away from doing anything meaningful to address concerns around policing.

We’ve seen this narrative coming out of midterms that this cycle, candidates who backed away from campaigning on addressing police abuse are winning. What happened there?

AES: I’ve spent the last several years leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services. Among the roles that I performed in that job was overseeing health in the jail, and that meant overseeing a privatized contract — which taught me that you shouldn’t be privatizing anything having to do with incarceration. Because at the end of the day, who wins? It’s some private contractor. Who loses? It’s the whole system. Everybody whose job is to be taken care of, everybody who works in the system — all of those folks lose.

I also got to work alongside law enforcement. At the end of the day, all of us want to get home safely. That’s the goal here. And often, our answer to that has been a person with a gun for every problem. Turns out that there’s a lot of ways to make sure everybody gets to get home safely that is not that.

So the question of what we want is about investing in the kinds of intervention programs that can prevent a beef from turning into a full-on gun crime. The kinds of things we want are behavioral health responders who can answer a call when somebody’s in a mental health crisis. We want the mental health infrastructure that we have not funded and need to have in local communities.

And we want law enforcement, in the circumstances where the answer to a call needs to be a person with a gun, we want that person with a gun to come from the local community. So that instead of thinking of themselves as policing against that community, they’re policing with the community because those folks are their neighbors.

That means you gotta invest in recruitment, retention, retirement, so people can see themselves having a good, long-range career. If you’re underfunding the folks that you ask to show up with a gun — ask yourself whether or not you’re getting the best-equipped, most empathic folks that have the gun.

It’s about what we want. And I think the hard part with sloganeering — which is the way we did all things in the early 2020s — is that no slogan really captures the complexity and the nuance of what we really want. But all of us are on the same idea: Everybody should get home safely. Whether you’re somebody who’s being policed against or you’re law enforcement doing the policing, everybody should get home safely.

If we keep that in our minds, I think you can architect a set of solutions that get us past the lack of nuance of a slogan and into the kind of future where people are protected, their bodily autonomy is protected, and that you are answering the call with the right kind of resource to actually make sure that you get to that goal where everybody gets home safely in the end.

AL: There’s been an effort to paint you as a socialist, right? Particularly among Republicans, but also among some centrist Democrats, though you’re not a democratic socialist. You’re not affiliated with DSA. And you’ve said you’re a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.

But why do you think it’s important to tell people that you’re not a socialist, despite having endorsements from the two biggest Democratic socialists in the country? If your policies are similar, why is that a meaningful distinction?

AES: Honestly, I’m just not out there really talking about it. I get asked about it all the time. But it’s not something I’m out there talking about. I’m trained as a scientist, and anybody who knows me knows that I demand data all the time. Make a claim, and then show me why your claim is correct.

Right now, I don’t really ascribe to any one ideology. I want solutions to problems. I know what our goal is. We want a America where everybody can get the healthcare they need, when they need it, without going into bankruptcy or worrying about their financial future.

We want to be able to breathe clean air, drink clean water. We all want to get home safely. We want an economy where everybody is dignified, they have the wages they need to be able to live their life, and nobody is oppressed upon by a few people who can extract from them. Those are all goals that we have.

So I’m just trying to identify solutions around those problems, which is how I come to my policy positions. I just don’t come at it from an ideological bent, which apparently is what folks want me to do, but I just don’t. It’s just not how I operate in the world.

You get arguments from every side: “Why won’t you say this? Why won’t you—?” I’m like, because, I read a lot, unfortunately. For better or worse, I try to read about the things I talk about. The reality of it is that you might agree about a solution set to a particular problem, but when you ascribe to an ideology, what you’re also ascribing to is the extrema of both ideologies, right?

So I’m not a corporatist. I don’t want corporate capitalism; I want regulated capitalism. I’m also not a socialist because I don’t agree on the extreme on that part, either. I’m trying to solve problems in the actual world. That’s what I’m actually trying to do.

When I think about that, I want everybody to bring data — and maybe it’s just because of my training as a scientist, maybe it’s because of my training as a doctor. But at the end of the day, we’re like, all right, what actually works here? Show me what works, and we’ll do the thing that works. If we can do the thing that works, and we can get all the problems out of the way of the thing that works, then more people have the things that they need, and I’ve done my job.

AL: Turning back to money in this race, this is a big topic of discussion. As we’ve already mentioned, this is one of the most expensive primaries of this cycle. AIPAC has made its biggest investment ever spending against you.

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But your opponent has been focused on your tax returns and claimed that the $2.1 million in wealth that you disclosed, including a home in Dubai and earnings from consulting and capital gains and other incomes, undermines your working-class message.

This came up in your debate with Stevens on Monday.

Rep. Haley Stevens: And you have not released your full tax returns. $300,000 in other income, while you sat in the podcast chair and you hawked junk healthcare cures that RFK Jr. would thumbs up. You talk about getting money out of politics and putting money in people’s pockets, but still no one knows who’s putting the money in your pocket.

AL: But you released your tax returns after requesting an extension that would have released them after the primary. Why did you request that extension originally?

AES: You know that property that you mentioned? It’s not mine. It is in the name of my wife, shared with all of her siblings and her parents. They inherited property, and then they sold it, and they purchased a different property. And if you’ve ever transacted with the real estate system or any system in India, it’s not the fastest system. And I would have loved to put everything out immediately. The hard part is that all of the powers that be to get us the forms to do all of those things just did not comply.

In the end, I love my wife, and I’m so grateful for her contribution in this race, and she happens to have property in different places, and that transaction happens to have happened this year, and it takes time to get those numbers.

AL: I know you’ve said you’re focused on Michigan, but you’ve also articulated, at least in private, a vision beyond this cycle for progressives in the left more broadly, talking about how progressives can win other races, primary someone like Sen. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and even put forth a presidential candidate ahead of 2028.

That approach has struck fear in the heart of the Democratic Party apparatus, which has been part of the efforts we discussed to drive fear around this idea that you’re another piece of this insurgent wave that’s threatening their existence, which in many ways you are.

But it sounds like you’re saying that in some ways, your campaign is part of this insurgent wave, but in other ways, it’s not. Is that right?

AES: My job is to serve Michiganders. Everything I’m doing is about trying to make sure that they can afford their groceries, that they know that they have stable housing, that they can get healthcare when they need it, and that their money is kept here.

Now, I’m going to the U.S. Senate because I want the U.S. Senate to vote for legislation to do those things. So part of my job is to make sure that we’ve got a U.S. Senate that can actually do that work. And my hope is that the conversations I can share with the 99 other senators, the persuasion that we can all do for the world that we want to build is enough. But also, let’s be clear, I want to serve Michiganders, and part of doing that is making sure that the U.S. Senate serves their interests.

I think that a lot of people are paying attention to this race because Michigan’s a microcosm of this country. It’s the most important state in the entire country — I’ve always known that — but I think people are starting to figure out why. And that’s because the things that Michiganders need and deserve, frankly, are the things that people across this country need and deserve.

AL: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, thank you so much. We’re going to leave it there.

AES: Thank you.

AL: 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.

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 

Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept 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. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Abdul El-Sayed on The Intercept Briefing appeared first on The Intercept.

The spurious allegations played a key role in Donald Trump’s massive — and deadly — immigration crackdown in Minnesota over the winter.

A semiannual report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General to Congress, however, highlights a different narrative.

The report, which covers enforcement actions over a six-month period, highlights the obvious: Corporations — not small immigrant-oriented healthcare providers, or undocumented immigrants illegally taking benefits — are responsible for the vast majority of alleged fraud in the American health care system.

Released earlier this month, the report highlights billions of dollars’ worth of healthcare fraud from corporate executives.

One CEO ran a scheme to target Medicare beneficiaries with medically unnecessary medical devices. An insurance broker and marketing executive orchestrated an Affordable Care Act enrollment scam that preyed on vulnerable people experiencing homelessness and substance abuse.

While C-suite fraudsters are the stars of the congressional report and most credible research on the topic, immigrants are at the cynosure of the administration’s public fraud campaign.

Freeing Actual Fraudsters

Experts on immigrant rights and healthcare say the administration is using immigrants as a scapegoat for systemic fraud in the healthcare system that can be attributed to corporate greed, while shielding actual bad actors who profit from a broken system.

“There isn’t really clear evidence of any systemic issues implicating immigrants,” said Sarah Krieger, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “The administration’s public messaging is focusing on immigrants and immigrant workers, but that’s constructing a narrative with the intent of hurting immigrants, not with actually rooting out any problems.”

Krieger pointed to examples of the Trump administration using clemency and pardons to get corporate healthcare fraudsters off the hook.

In May, President Donald Trump granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, the owner of a mental health company, American Therapeutic, who was sentenced to 50 years for “orchestrating a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme.”

An analysis by the California governor’s office found that Trump’s pardons had wiped nearly $2 billion in victim repayment and taxpayer recovery for Medicare and tax fraud, as well as other types of fraud.

Trump Focus on Immigrants

Though immigrants aren’t mentioned once in the report itself, they have been the relentless focus of the Trump administration.

In May, Vice President JD Vance and Mehmet Oz, a television doctor who is now head of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, hosted an anti-fraud press conference.

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At the event, Vance erroneously warned that “there could be tens of billions of fraudulent payments in the California system” going toward “illegal aliens, going to fraudulent businesses.” Oz — best known for promoting diet pills — similarly claimed that hundreds of millions of dollars of “questionable expenditures” were linked to “immigration-related costs,” and that “folks who are undocumented” were fraudulently getting access to Medicaid funds in California.

The language is par for the course from administration officials. Later that month, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller went so far as to blame the national debt on immigrants committing benefit fraud.

“We could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the Treasury went to individuals who were properly lawfully correctly eligible to receive them,” Miller said at a press conference.

The public rhetoric from Trump officials would lead one to false conclusions about who commits large-scale healthcare fraud — and who benefits.

“We are seeing a trend around the administration scapegoating immigrants and not pointing to the actual bad actors: corporations,” said Isha Weerasinghe, director of the public benefits justice team at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates for people with low incomes.

$300 Billion a Year

The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association estimates that the cost of healthcare fraud could be as high as $300 billion a year.

Most of that fraud is from providers scamming patients and insurance by billing patients for services not rendered or performing medically unnecessary services for the purpose of generating insurance payments.

The administration does not want to highlight that type of fraud in their public rhetoric because they’re enabling it, said Krieger, of the National Immigration Law Center.

“The administration has cut funding for all sorts of internal enforcement mechanisms. They have provided clemency to people convicted of government fraud in the past. They’ve fired inspector generals for overseeing accountability,” she said. “They’re not actually interested in solving the problem.”

Data suggests that noncitizens are less likely to commit welfare fraud than citizens.

Weerasinghe said that the administration is using a well-worn tactic of blaming marginalized groups to take away benefits from the population more broadly. 

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“All of us know about the ‘welfare queen’ narrative, and that worked,” said Weerasinghe, referencing a racist trope popularized by Ronald Reagan to characterize Black people on benefits as greedy fraudsters. “It created a lot of hatred toward public benefits, and also this willingness for the public to be OK with this kind of crackdown that was absolutely unnecessary.”

Weerasinghe said the administration is using “the immigrant narrative in order to make their case to defer to defer funds.” Trump, for instance, recently froze more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota.

“They’re not interested in tackling any systemic issues that may exist,” said Krieger. “They’ve kind of constructed a problem in search of a solution, and the solution always is to blame immigrants.”

The post Corporations, Not Immigrants, Are Responsible for Vast Majority of Healthcare Fraud, OIG Report Shows appeared first on The Intercept.

The frontman of British punk rap band Bob Vylan was denied entry to Germany, detained at the Berlin airport, and ultimately deported to the United Kingdom last month due to his pro-Palestine statements.

German federal police justified deporting the band’s vocalist on June 15, referencing a performance at the Glastonbury Festival in England in 2025 where Bob Vylan led a chant of “Death, death to the IDF,” or the Israel Defense Forces.

Authorities later revoked the entry ban against the singer, whose legal name is Pascal Robinson-Foster, in a letter in late July, but refused to explain why it had been rescinded — or how the decision to impose it had been made in the first place.

A police file on Robinson-Foster obtained by The Intercept alleges that he disseminated antisemitic narratives and Hamas propaganda that could “radicalise certain segments of the [German] population” and serve as “ideological justification” for terrorist groups or individuals. It also says that Robinson-Foster poses a threat to Germany’s public security and public order. Allowing him into the country would cause “considerable reputational damage” by creating the impression that Germany was making “no effort to prevent the spread of the propagated antisemitism and the associated calls to violence.”

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The German Federal Police declined to answer detailed questions about the now-revoked entry ban, citing public security interests and data protection. In response to a list of questions about the decision-making process behind the ban, its legal basis, and why it was lifted, Bundespolizei spokesperson Nikolai Jaletzke told The Intercept the agency does not comment on individual cases, internal threat assessments, or inter-agency coordination.

“It’s frankly absurd to suggest that I’m a threat to German national security,” Robinson-Foster told The Intercept. “It’s equally absurd to claim that we spread propaganda on behalf of any proscribed organization.”

Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance last year drew widespread international attention at a moment when an increasing number of artists were speaking out against Israel’s destruction of Gaza. The performance — and the chant of “Death, death to the IDF” — also drew condemnation from politicians, including then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and several pro-Israel Jewish organizations. Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein, described the performance as “hate speech and incitement” and called on concert organizers in Germany to cancel Bob Vylan shows.

Following that performance, Robinson-Foster and his bandmate Wade Laurence George had their U.S. visas revoked. However, Germany is the first country to deny entry and deport a member of the band.

The documents reviewed by The Intercept concern only the implementation of the ban — not the decision-making process behind it. “Our position is simple,” said Alexander Gorski, the German lawyer representing Robinson-Foster. “There is a constitutional right to know the file on which such a decision is based.”

Following Robinson-Foster’s deportation, Gorski submitted a request with the Federal Police headquarters in Potsdam seeking both the deletion of the entry ban from Germany’s national register and access to the files underlying the decision. Soon after, federal police rescinded the entry ban without explaining why it had been lifted. The two-page response, reviewed by The Intercept, states that no additional information could be disclosed.

“It is, of course, good that the ban is now lifted,” Gorski told The Intercept. “But from a rule-of-law perspective, it is deeply problematic that someone can be barred from entering the country over a political statement that is not a criminal offence — and then be denied access to the files.”

Gorski filed a formal objection seeking access to the internal files that led to the decision. He argues that Robinson-Foster has a right to know the factual and legal basis on which he was barred from entering Germany — not only to challenge the lawfulness of the measure, but also to understand what conduct German authorities consider grounds for refusing entry in the future.

“If an artist wants to comply with the law, they have to know what the rules are,” Gorski said.

It’s unclear how a British musician who hasn’t been charged with an offense in either the U.K. or Germany came to be classified by German authorities as a threat to public security. British police previously closed an investigation into Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance, concluding there was “insufficient evidence to support a realistic prospect of conviction.”

“There is a lack of crime, not a lack of evidence,” Robinson-Foster told The Intercept in response. “It’s on the BBC. They can just go and watch it.”

According to Gorski, the case is yet another example of a broader shift in the use of German migration law against pro-Palestine figures. Last year, Berlin authorities moved to deport four foreign residents over their participation in protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

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Gorski argues that German authorities are increasingly using immigration law “to silence unwanted voices” by preventing critics of Israel from entering Germany or removing them from the country. Similar concerns have been raised by others, including Thomas Oberhäuser, chair of the German Bar Association’s executive committee on migration law, who argues that immigration law is increasingly used for political ends.

Gorski pointed to previous cases involving the British Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, both of whom he has represented in similar proceedings. German authorities sought to prevent them from entering the country to participate in Palestine-related events.

Robinson-Foster told The Intercept that he traveled to Germany in June in a private capacity to visit friends and music collaborators ahead of the release of the band’s new album. Bob Vylan has toured Germany in recent years, and Robinson-Foster hopes to return soon. Even though authorities rescinded the entry ban, Robinson-Foster said the incident continues to shape his travel plans, saying it “opened a Pandora’s box.”

“It would seem as though the refusal of entry into Germany has now sparked this continued border confusion whenever we try to enter countries,” he said.

Since his deportation, Robinson-Foster said both he and his bandmate have been stopped for questioning at European borders. In one instance, Belgian border officials questioned the band’s drummer about the incident in Germany despite not having traveled there himself, Robinson-Foster said.

“We have shows that we are wanting to put on in Germany,” he said. “It’s a place that we’ve toured for the last five years. For us not to be able to connect with the people that support us there would be a shame.”

The post Free Speech Crackdown: Germany Deports Bob Vylan Frontman for Anti-Israel Chants appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has made it his mission to put Dr. Anthony Fauci in prison.

Last month, the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subpoenaed Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who led the nation’s response to the Covid pandemic, to answer still more questions related to the origins of the disease.

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Paul insists the novel coronavirus was the result of the National Institutes of Health having funded gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology — essentially that the virus was created in a lab in China and unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Fauci has maintained that while the mostly likely source of the Covid-19 virus was animal-to-human transmission but that we cannot know for certain. Paul thinks he deliberately misled the public about the coronavirus’s origins and called him to testify before the Homeland Security Committee based on supposed new evidence that comes from Fauci’s diaries.

Over 7 million people worldwide have died from Covid, with about 1.2 million of those deaths occurring in the U.S.

While the quick work to produce a vaccine undoubtedly saved many millions of lives, that level of loss is difficult to account for and has certainly taken an emotional and psychic toll on the world since. We, the public, deserve answers about what went wrong during that time and how our governments are preparing for similar outbreaks in the future such that they can prevent the loss of so much life.

That is not what Paul and his Fauci subpoena are focused on. Instead, Paul sunk his libertarian teeth into a xenophobic conspiracy theory that reinforces his ideological priors: too many government agencies that spend too many public dollars.

It’s the same reason Paul avoids the real, persistent public health crisis underlying huge spike in deaths in the U.S. from Covid — and a host of other diseases: the lack of universal healthcare.

Did the virus come from a lab in Wuhan? I certainly don’t trust Paul’s ideologically infused takes, but I’ll leave it for others to decide.

To focus on it at the exclusion of all other public health policy, though, is clearly a mistake. It’s learning the wrong lesson from the Covid pandemic.

The United States remains the only “developed” country without universal healthcare coverage.

The insurance companies and for-profit medical system insist that this is the best system to provide people with the best healthcare, but during early days of the Covid pandemic, its limitations came into stark relief. The pandemic put so much stress on our system that resulted in shortages in staff, and a decreased quality of care for those infected with virus, and all others who needed care.

Underlying medical issues exasperated Covid deaths. These are exactly the types of chronic illnesses that people suffer from because of a lack of preventative care or a failure to get treatment because of prohibitive costs — respiratory diseases, heart conditions, blood pressure issues.

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It’s notable that some of the greatest successes of Covid policy arose not from private health insurers acting on their mandates for profit, but rather by mandates and funding from local, state, and federal government. Acts of Congress forced healthcare insurers and providers into covering certain services. When testing became a feasible method of helping to prevent the spread of Covid, federal funding made it far more widely available — even for the uninsured, with the government providing reimbursement for healthcare providers who tested those without coverage.

This is to say nothing of a federal program to speed along a Covid vaccine and rush its distribution — the key to creating enough immunity to weaken the virus and lower death rates. For those who got Covid, antiviral medication, which could drastically reduce symptoms and prevent hospitalizations and even death, was available for free thanks to federal funding. In the first two years of the pandemic, around 6 million people took the drug without paying a thing.

In 2020, the American Public Health Association released a policy statement that began: “The COVID pandemic adds a new sense of urgency to establish a universal health care system in the United States. Our current system is inequitable, does not adequately cover vulnerable groups, is cost prohibitive, and lacks the flexibility to respond to periods of economic and health downturns.”

This remains true, as the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress continue their assault of existing forms of federal healthcare spending.

While Paul is focused on trying to place Fauci in prison for not confirming a conspiracy theory, more people are being crushed by the weight of medical debt due to our inadequate system, more people aren’t getting the care they need because of the costs, and more people are dying.

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The fight for universal healthcare coverage remains a vital one, as the uncertainty of when we could face another pandemic looms over us all. The longer the delay, the more unprepared we become for what’s next.

Whatever Fauci said from his perch at the National Institutes of Health about the virus’s origins, the fact of the matter remains that the government’s interventions during the Covid pandemic were overwhelmingly lifesaving. Its biggest failure — then as now — was the inability to provide healthcare coverage for all Americans.

There should be accountability for whatever role the government played in the Covid pandemic, but let’s be clear that deaths spiked in large part because of the failures of our healthcare system to cover all Americans, not because of what Fauci said in his diaries.

The post Fauci’s Diary Isn’t the Key to Why Covid Ravaged the U.S. — Our Broken Healthcare System Is appeared first on The Intercept.

The Me, Me, Me Presidency

There’s no I in war. But there is in Iran. And in Iraq, too. Both these wars were about ME — that is, the Middle East. It’s a region rife with supposed American security interests, but this wordplay points to another very all-too-real dynamic: These wars are as much about the “I” and “ME” of the White House as they are about the countries we attack. Or to put it another way: It’s the presidential psyche, stupid.

Way back in 2002, then-President George W. Bush warned that Iraq, Iran, and outlier North Korea comprised a grave threat. “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” he warned. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.” North Korea built a nuclear arsenal, and with it, purchased a guarantee of security. The other two countries produced no nukes, and the story has been radically different.

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The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003. Two months later, the war was won. Except it wasn’t. Despite President George W. Bush’s unforgettable May 1, 2003, “mission accomplished” moment when, from the deck of an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego, he declared “major combat operations in Iraq … ended,” the American war there somehow never actually stopped. An insurgency was raging, U.S. bases were being mortared, and American officials feared a civil war between the country’s formerly reigning Sunni minority and its rising Shiite majority was brewing. It became a forever war that lived up to the moniker. Last week, almost a quarter century since Bush made the case for war in Iraq, a U.S. soldier was killed in an Iranian attack on an American base there.

President Donald Trump was elected on a promise to say goodbye to all that. American-style wars of choice were going to be a thing of the past: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end.” And yet Trump’s America is now deeply involved in a seemingly ever-escalating and never-ending conflict with — yes! — Iraq’s neighbor, Iran.

No one, I suspect, not even Trump, has the faintest idea why he did this, though maybe he felt left out of the club of forever-war makers, co-chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe he just sensed that he had to give this country a shot at being globally competitive when it came to making endless (and endlessly unsuccessful) war, if the U.S. was to remain the superpower on this planet.

Not everyone thinks, however, that you need to fight ruinous wars to be a superpower. There’s China, which is the quietest rising power in recent history because — except for a few border flare-ups with India early in this decade, and saber-rattling when it comes to Taiwan, the island nation off the coast of the mainland — it hasn’t been at war since 1979.

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In lieu of pursuing fruitless conflicts around the world, it’s been silently leading the global production of green energy technology. China’s exports of green tech shot up by more than a third in the first six months of the year. This included a reported rise in shipments of lithium batteries and wind turbines by 38 percent and 36 percent, respectively. “In the first half of this year, the situation in the Middle East was tense and global supply of chemical products was tight,” Wang Jun, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Customs said at a recent press briefing. “China, with its complete industrial system and full-chain supporting capabilities, quickly seized the sudden external demands.”

And this Chinese green technology boom was in full swing even before Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen declared a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia and began attacking the kingdom’s oil ships in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, briefly driving the price of oil back above $100 per barrel, about 40 percent higher than before the conflict began.

As his war with Iran has gone off the rails, Trump has begun redefining the conflict from a war to “a little excursion,” which just kept going on and on, leading him in March to sum things up this way: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough. We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long running danger once and for all.”

You’ll recall that Trump also said on March 2 that the war was set to last “four to five weeks.” And three days later, that the U.S. and Israel continued “to totally demolish the enemy far ahead of schedule.” By March 9, Trump said that the conflict was “very complete, pretty much.” And two days later, the president declared victory. “Let me tell you, we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won,” Trump announced at a rally in Kentucky. “We won.”

Like Bush’s “mission accomplished” moment, Trump’s was also decidedly short-lived. On March 15, the president said Iran still had “a little bit of fight back, but not much.” In a Truth Social post five days later, he wrote: “We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down” the war. On April 1, Trump announced the U.S. was “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly” and on the 6th said the war “could end very quickly.” But it didn’t. “The war in Iran is going along swimmingly,” he declared on April 16. And in a May 1 letter to Congress, Trump said: “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.” Except Iran never got the memo.

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As the war has simply gone on and on, Trump has continued to tweak his terminology and rebrand the conflict with Iran as “a skirmish.” (Tell that, of course, to all the dead Iranian children!) Here’s how he put it, in fact, on July 22: “I call it a skirmish. This is, with this skirmish we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I call it that, because, let me tell you, they’re getting hit so hard and they want to make a deal. But I say they’re not ready to make a deal.” And if the Iran war doesn’t end in the coming weeks, Trump will undoubtedly have to tweak terminology further, perhaps relabeling his skirmish with Iran a tussle, a scuffle, or even a full-scale kerfuffle.

As Trump insists the war is a minor engagement, he continues to dish out immense amounts of pain on Iranians and threatens even worse. He seems increasingly eager to blast civilian infrastructure and smash Iran into submission. As he put it all too bluntly when it came to those civilian targets: “Any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by missile, rocket, drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy one bridge or power plant.” And he’s also been threatening to launch “a massive attack. Bigger than ever before.”

His Secretary of War Pete Hegseth certainly understands the president, or why would he start insisting on checking the testosterone levels of American troops and begin referring to what, in the Trump years, had already gone from the Department of Defense to the Department of War as “the High-T Department of War”?

But while Hegseth is hoping to amp up the military’s potency, Americans want to bring the Iran war to a close. Only 29 percent of Americans approve of the way Trump is handling the Iran war, according to a recent Washington Post poll. Even a Fox News survey (yes, Fox News!) found disapproval ratings hit a record high in July, with 56 percent of Americans opposing U.S. military action against Iran, including 40 percent who “strongly” oppose it. Nearly two-thirds of respondents now think the conflict will last at least a year.

Even worse was a recent CBS News/YouGov poll that found 21 percent of Americans think the conflict will last multiple years! That same poll found that 67 percent of respondents say the U.S. should end the war with Iran now. Young people are the most fed up, with 83 percent urging the president to stop the war posthaste.

And even among his most fervent followers, support had already dropped by 13 percent over the previous two months, according to a Politico poll, while almost 1 of every 5 MAGA voters had come to believe that the U.S. should end its war in Iran, no matter the cost or results.

Of course, Trump doesn’t really care about young voters or Republican voters or even MAGA devotees. As he put it last week: “A poll just came out: Americans don’t want high gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war.” His war in the ME is wrapped up in his egocentric narcissism and his me, me, me world. The phrase “wars of choice” now means wars of Donald’s choice. But the Iranian government has a say in the matter and has made a choice to hold out amid renewed threats and attacks. And despite what Trump seems to think, the public in the U.S. can make choices, too. If Trump keeps on fighting in Iran, he may sooner or later also find himself in a distinct “skirmish” with the American people.

The post Donald Trump and Wars of Choice appeared first on The Intercept.

The military personnel, clad in a mix of combat fatigues and gym attire, piled into a bunker, huddling in the darkness. “Guys, off the walls if we can,” a woman, likely a medic, advised, warning about the danger of traumatic brain injuries.

The footage, reportedly from Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where three U.S. troops were killed during Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on July 17 and 18, offers a glimpse of the dangers faced by U.S. forces across the Middle East.

The attacks are continued demonstrations of Iran’s ability to target U.S. bases across the Middle East and kill U.S. troops, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated. As this fiction has collapsed, U.S. Central Command has refused to discuss the number and scale of the strikes. “I have nothing for you on that,” Maj. Emma Thompson, the command’s media operations chief, told The Intercept.

Iran has attacked at least nine U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a U.S. official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press. Several of these bases suffered “significant” damage in the attacks, the source said.

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Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, according to the official. Numerous factors make the missiles difficult to defeat, the source said: They travel at hypersonic speeds, have complex navigational capabilities including methods to circumvent jamming, and some can be guided or steered.

Stocks of advanced air-defense missiles, like Patriot and THAAD interceptors, are so depleted that U.S. forces are not shooting down all Iranian missiles and drones aimed at U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, the official said, referencing a Friday report by NBC News that revealed the tactic. The official told The Intercept that the U.S. allows missiles through its defenses only in cases where a strike is judged not to imperil U.S. lives.

The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. The report predicted then that U.S. forces were about a month away from running out of THAAD interceptors. An April report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that “diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk.” A follow-up report the next month warned that it would “take three or more years from today to return to prewar inventory levels” of Patriot and THAAD missiles.

Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesperson, said that “Patriot systems have been weakened to such an extent that Iranian missiles and drones are reaching their targets without being intercepted.” He said that during a flurry of attacks from July 8 to July 22, Iran struck numerous air defense and radar installations, including six “Patriot air-defense radars.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on the claims by the U.S. official or Mohebbi.

The official confirmed that Iran also recently attacked Tower 22, a U.S. military outpost on the northern Jordanian border with Syria. Satellite images as well as photos and videos circulating online indicate the base suffered extensive damage. (In 2024, a drone attack on Tower 22 by an Iran-backed militia killed three U.S. troops.) 

Iran says it also attacked U.S. military facilities at Jordan’s Prince Hassan Air Base, King Faisal Air Base, and Al-Azraq Air Base; Kuwait’s Al-Adiri base, Ahmed Al-Jaber Air Base, Camp Doha, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Camp Arifjan; Naval Support Activity Sheikh Isa in Bahrain; and Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Thompson refused to confirm Iranian attacks on various U.S. bases across the Middle East. “We don’t comment on battle damage assessments,” she said.

Iran has fired between 8,000 and 9,000 drones and missiles at targets across the Middle East since the U.S.–Israeli war began in February, according to the official. Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps recently warned residents of countries that host American forces to keep at least 1,650 feet away from any buildings housing U.S. personnel. The group is also fielding crowdsourced information on “new locations of the American occupying forces” from people in these countries.

The IRGC specifically mentioned “covert and secret” facilities in a statement posted on their website. CIA sites in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the region were reportedly struck, possibly with Russian assistance, according to Reuters. A former Pentagon consultant with ties to the defense industry told The Intercept that Russia has certainly provided “targeting support” to Iran during the conflict but did not comment directly on attacks on CIA facilities.

Despite Trump’s insistence that Russia and China are “not participating” in the Iran war, Hegseth recently said both are “enabling some of the things Iran is doing.” In March, CIA Director John Ratcliffe told senators that the “Iranians are requesting intelligence assistance from Russia, from China and from other adversaries of the United States,” but said he would only talk about what they might have provided in a classified setting.

The lethal strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan killed Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas; Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii; and Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, New York. All three soldiers were from air defense units. They were “not actively engaged in anti-aircraft activity” during the attacks, according to a different “defense official” who spoke on background because they were not authorized to disclose the information.

An Iranian drone attack on Erbil Air Base, Iraq, on July 18 led to the death of Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and left another soldier injured during what CENTCOM called a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft.

In April, Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “CENTCOM had every possible measure they could to ensure that our troops are protected.” The U.S. official would not address possible failures of force protection measures that led to the most recent deaths, due to operational security. But the official said that Hegseth’s claims “obviously were not true.” They noted that it was no secret that earlier casualties were caused by a lack of sufficient overhead protection, referencing a March 1 drone attack on the U.S. base at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, that killed six troops.

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Hundreds of U.S. personnel have been killed or wounded in the war. Months of reporting by The Intercept found the Pentagon’s official casualty tally is a gross undercount, which another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.”

Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Qatar said they intercepted attack drones on Monday, two days after the United States abruptly suspended a two-week campaign of airstrikes against Iran amid concern over the dwindling stocks of air defense missiles and a reported dearth of Iranian targets. Trump insisted on Tuesday that there had been some “very good talks” with Iran but failed to offer evidence when confronted with Iranian denials.

Saudi Arabia said on Monday that the drone attacks it suffered were “carried out by Iran-backed militias operating in Iraq.” On Tuesday, Jordanian authorities said they downed a drone in the east of the country, near its border with Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The post Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses appeared first on The Intercept.

On Saturday night, a man drove a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride Festival, before getting out and stabbing several people, leaving one woman dead and dozens injured.

The suspect, identified as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, a German national and reported supporter of the Islamic State group, was shot dead by police on Sunday following a daylong manhunt.

“We do not want this deed to be used for political ends,” said the organizers of the festival, also known as Christopher Street Day, in a statement on Sunday before the attacker had even been located. “We don’t want any groups to be placed under suspicion for this. People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others. We will not allow this.”

Amid the shock and grief, the organizers saw the immediate need to stop malign political forces using the horrific attack and the queer community’s suffering to fuel Germany’s already fervent anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-immigrant sentiment.

They had reason for concern. The far-right Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD — which decries trans people as a “cult,” opposes marriage equality and gay adoption, defines a family as only “father, mother and children,” and condemns so-called “gender ideology” — had moved to weaponize the attack within hours.

“The AfD has been warning for years: Islamism is and remains the greatest security threat to our country,” said AfD member of parliament Martin Hess in a statement. He remarked that “we also urgently need a genuine shift in migration policy” — despite the fact that Saturday’s suspect was born and raised in Germany.

The AfD, which is currently the most popular German party according to recent polls, boasts numerous state-level branches classified as extremist organizations by Germany’s intelligence agencies.

Alliance for Bigotry

The party is using a familiar playbook. In 2016, the day after the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a total ban on immigration from Muslim countries. His two presidencies have since been dedicated to destroying both trans lives and Muslim lives with vigor.

Trump has sought to leverage attacks abroad, including in Germany, to galvanize his anti-Muslim base. The president was quick to condemn the 2016 massacre at a Berlin Christmas market to double down, once again, on his Muslim ban plan.

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So far, Trump hasn’t said anything about the Berlin Pride attack — perhaps his demonization of Muslims has been so thorough that he no longer needs to feign concern about queer lives to gin up Islamophobia — but the alliances that inform these bigotries nonetheless remain a powerful political force.

Trump and his allies have long boosted the very German politics that is cynically leveraging the Berlin attack for political gains.

Last year, anti-trans zealot Elon Musk threw his support and his social media platform behind the far-right party.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he wrote on X.

The Right’s Own Attacks

Day in and day out, meanwhile, it is the likes of the AfD and other conservative German parties, and the Republicans at home, who are assaulting the LGBTQ+ rights.

A spike in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in Germany in recent years has been directly linked to a rise in far-right extremism, including more than two dozen attacks at Pride events.

The attacks themselves, however, are only part of the story.

“Politicians are now shamelessly exploiting the suffering of the queer community for their own agenda, while cutting funding for queer organizations, aid projects, and cultural initiatives,” wrote Mohamed Amjahid, a columnist for German newspaper, Taz.

It’s true. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Party, in its role in the coalition leading Berlin’s municipal government, has cut funding for queer community programs in the city and banned drag story hour readings in public libraries.

Of the perpetrators of Saturday’s brutality, Merz said: “They want to take away the most important things we have: our openness, our freedom.”

This purported shared “openness” and “freedom” had not been on display when Merz opposed plans to fly a rainbow flag atop the Reichstag Building to honor Pride last year.

“The Bundestag is not a circus tent,” the conservative chancellor said.

Just hours before Ballout rammed a truck into Pride attendees, Berlin riot police had focused their energies on making arrests and aggressing attendees at the explicitly anti-colonial, anti-capitalist Internationalist Queer Pride march elsewhere in Berlin.

Part-Time Solidarity

As Berlin-based journalist James Jackson noted, Merz’s statement on the attack, along with statements by three other senior conservative politicians, wholly failed to explicitly mention gay or queer people.

The statements defended “tolerance” and “freedom,” but when queer and trans people are attacked and killed, it is not “freedom” that is threatened in the abstract, it is specific forms of life — the very ways of being in the world that have been under assault by far-right politics and centrist complicity, across Europe and the United States.

On Sunday, thousands gathered for a vigil in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which was lit up in rainbow colors by night.

“Last year they refused to let us fly the rainbow flag in front of the Bundestag, because it’s not a circus tent, after all,” said one vigil speaker who identified as Muslim and gay. “Today the flags are flying at half-mast. But solidarity shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction after a tragedy.”

It’s a lesson that self-identifying allies in the U.S., above all Democrats who continue to fail trans people, would do well to learn, too.

The post The Right Seeks to Capitalize on Berlin Pride Attack — Even as It Poses Its Own Existential Threat to Queer Lives appeared first on The Intercept.

The House Ways and Means Committee last week carried out an attack on journalism that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. The committee subpoenaed BreakThrough News, a left-wing outlet with deep ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation that is highly critical of the United States and Israel, along with two other nonprofits with similar ideologies, The People’s Forum and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. 

The subpoena deserves the same scrutiny as those issued to New York Times reporters over their reporting on security issues with President Donald Trump’s Qatari jet, which, after significant pushback in the courts of law and public opinion, the government withdrew Thursday — the same day BreakThrough announced its receipt of the legal orders.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney for BreakThrough, called the committee “a modern day HUAC,” the McCarthy-era committee on so-called “un-American” activities. Communists aren’t the only ones who should be concerned. As Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, put it: “Attacks on independent, alternative, or radical media have troubling history. It is always the I.F. Stones or the WikiLeaks who are first on the firing line.”

The Ways and Means Committee is claiming its investigation is a tax-related probe into more than $39 million that flowed from Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. citizen and tech financier based in Shanghai, to the groups, which it claims advance Chinese Communist Party-aligned interests. But we’ve seen that playbook before: Around the globe, financial probes have been used as pretexts to stifle journalism and dissent, and there’s every indication that this is the latest example. 

BreakThrough News has been criticized for favorable coverage of China and other U.S. adversaries, which it indeed publishes. But favorable coverage of foreign adversaries — even in the form of propaganda — is protected by the Constitution. And BreakThrough’s leadership held those positions long before they had any alleged connection to Singham.

BreakThrough’s editor-in-chief, Ben Becker, had a common-sense observation: “The First Amendment was specifically written to protect journalism that the government does not approve of. Journalism approved by the government wouldn’t need protection,” he said. “That’s why so many of the country’s decisive free speech cases involved the abolitionist press, the radical labor press and the antiwar press. … But history looks back on these episodes for what they were — shameful violations of free speech — and that’s the same thing that’s happening here.”

Though the committee denies it is engaging in content-based retaliation in its most recent letter, past correspondence does little to refute Becker’s framing, citing no evidence of any kind of financial illegality and instead focusing on BreakThrough News’ critical coverage of ICE and Israel and criticizing its connections to the PSL, a lawfully organized domestic political party, which it says, “orchestrated the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement riots in Los Angeles resulting in violence and dozens of arrests last June.”

My Freedom of the Press Foundation colleague Adam Rose, who also serves as press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club, found that last part particularly infuriating (PSL and its leadership have not been charged with any offenses relating to violence in LA). The government, Rose said, has “failed to investigate the documented wholesale violence by federal agents against press and protesters” in LA. “Maybe instead of a foreign state, our elected representatives should be more concerned about our own state violence against innocent civilians in our local streets.” 

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There’s another problem with the probe of BreakThrough. Putting aside the subpoenas’ flimsy evidentiary backing, House subpoenas must carry a legislative purpose. Why would the committee need a fishing expedition into the finances of a few leftist nonprofits to decide whether legislative reforms are necessary? The committee’s letter claims to have already spotted the gap in nonprofit tax law they contend Singham is exploiting, and it cites plenty of public reporting on his network, so it’s unclear what other information its members need that could conceivably justify congressional action as extreme as subpoenaing news outlets. If the best argument they can come up with for their contemplated legislation is that three obscure organizations were funded by an American citizen living abroad, maybe they should find other fish to fry. 

As Breakthrough’s chief correspondent Rania Khalek recently said, “I think this is really just about trying to bury us in legal proceedings until we’ve basically run out of money or stop reporting out of intimidation.

BreakThrough is far from the first victim of this censorial playbook. Rodrigo Duterte’s government in the Philippines, for example, filed a series of tax evasion cases against Rappler, the investigative outlet led by journalist Maria Ressa, due to its alleged acceptance of foreign investments (Ressa is a former board member of The Intercept). Advocates described the cases as part of a broader legal campaign designed to wear the outlet down. It took years and a change of administration before courts acquitted Ressa and Rappler. Authorities in Azerbaijan have also repeatedly brought pretextual financial charges including tax evasion against investigative journalism they sought to suppress.

There are also examples closer to home — not just from Red Scares decades ago, but in present-day Florida. A 2025 state law restricts nonprofits from accepting funds from broadly defined “foreign sources of concern” tied to countries like China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran, while a related “Honest Services Registry” asks charities to affirm they’re free of such foreign influence. A separate domestic terrorism law lets state officials designate organizations as terrorist groups — organizations like the Muslim civil rights group CAIR and the amorphous non-entity the government calls “antifa” have already received the designation.

Florida First Amendment Foundation executive director Bobby Block explained the agenda in an email: “Make people wonder whether joining an organization, donating to a cause, attending a protest or expressing an unpopular viewpoint could put them under a government microscope, and some will simply decide to remain silent. That’s the chilling effect the First Amendment is supposed to protect against.” 

Combined with the administration’s crackdown on purported domestic terror outlined by National Security Presidential Memorandum 7; Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s bizarre memorandum claiming a Cuban conspiracy to spread communism stateside; and the countless other suppression of dissent we’ve seen from Trump allies, all of them predictably targeting speakers whose politics differ from the president’s — it’s not hard to spot the endgame.

BreakThrough isn’t the only news outlet recently swept into this broader crackdown. Earlier this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents detained Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal and seized two smartphones after he returned from reporting in Iran. Like BreakThrough, Grayzone is highly critical of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, and its detractors accuse it of being soft on U.S. adversaries. It’s the kind of outlet governments know they can harass without nearly the blowback that comes with subpoenaing the New York Times.

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After Blumenthal sued, authorities let him pick up his phones, but he remains concerned about whether their content was searched or copied. Blumenthal said officers asked him to unlock his phones and when he refused, they told him they’d “hook them up to machines,” presumably to extract their contents. Blumenthal, of course, is far from the only reporter who has reported from Iran or who visited the country to cover Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s state funeral. But, to the best of our knowledge, he’s the only one who has had his phones searched and seized.

Whatever leeway the law affords border agents to conduct searches that would otherwise be unlawful cannot be abused to punish constitutionally protected speech because they dislike its content. The federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — which prohibits searches of journalists’ files absent probable cause to suspect criminality — contains no exception for border searches. It is likely not a coincidence that the attack on Blumenthal’s rights followed calls by the pro-Israel doxxing organization Canary Mission and MAGA influencer and Trump ally Laura Loomer for government retribution against Blumenthal based on his coverage.

Gibbons is right that attacks on press freedom historically start on the edges. Trump has arguably been an aberration, though. Although he certainly draws inspiration from outliers, taking legal theories that were laughed at the court on the local level and turning them into federal policy, his own strategy is generally to start big.

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Likely because he still mentally resides in a skyscraper in 1980s Manhattan, Trump is far more focused on outlets like the Times than on the independent press. He files SLAPP suits against mainstream journalists at a pace that would land anyone else on a restricted filers list; his Federal Communications Commission continues threatening the licenses of broadcasters who don’t kiss the ring emphatically enough for his liking; his Pentagon tried to extract loyalty pledges from the country’s most prominent outlets; and his Justice Department and FBI can’t seem to stop raiding and subpoenaing journalists no matter what the judiciary has to say. 

These efforts have certainly had an incalculable chilling effect on the press, but they’ve largely fizzled in court. The prospect that the administration may have caught on to that pattern and shifted its focus to outlets with less mainstream support, less money, and fewer lawyers on retainer is an alarming one.

As Gibbons put it, “Those who are serious about press freedom cannot be selective in their solidarity.” 

The post House Investigation of BreakThrough News Is an Attack on All Journalism appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. John Fetterman may switch parties, and the reason is simple: The Democrat from Pennsylvania loves nothing like he loves media coverage.

Adam Jentleson, Fetterman’s former chief of staff who now heads the centrist Searchlight Institute think tank, said as much this week.

“I think, if he is the majority-maker, he will flip, because it would give him a massive amount of attention,” Jentleson said.

It’s not hard to see why someone as addicted to attention as Fetterman would make a big deal out of leaving his party, nor why he has doubled and tripled down on it in the past week. After all, this is the same man who has made a spectacle of his appearance, walking around the Senate halls in a hoodie and shorts rather than conform to the business dress code of his peers.

Since October 2023, his relationship with the progressive wing of his party has been strained, primarily because of a divide over support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Fetterman is now willing to use his leverage as key player for control of the chamber to help Israel — the main reason he’s said he could change sides. If Democrats continue to oppose Israel, he said, specifically if they do so in their party platform, Fetterman says he’s likely to split.

“If our party ever becomes, and just makes it official, the anti-Israel party, that’s when I would leave because that’s been a moral clarity for me,” Fetterman said at a convention in Washington last week.

Swiping at his own party aren’t out of character, and are part of what has led to a rift with the Democratic base. Fetterman’s closeness to right-wing media and penchant for punching left, as well as his loyalty to Israel, make him both a target of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and one of the least popular incumbents in the country.

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Predictably, a bare majority of Pennsylvania Democrats want him to leave the party, almost assuring he won’t make it out of a primary. But switching to the GOP wouldn’t lead to a cakewalk reelection either.

By his own admission, Fetterman would be dogged by his own very socially liberal voting record in a Republican primary where he’s also certain to face defeat.

That leaves running as an independent who caucuses with Republicans, a move guaranteed to play spoiler for one party’s hopes to control the Senate in 2028, though it’s unclear who he’d hurt more.

Presidential Run?

Antipathy to the left now defines much of his politics.

Earlier this year, in June and July, Fetterman was receiving lots of attention for his criticisms of former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, repeatedly claiming that there were intimate images of the upstart Democrat online and referring to him as his Reddit moniker, “P-Hustle.”

On June 10, the day after Platner won his primary, NOTUS reporter Igor Bobic posted on X that Fetterman was haranguing him about the Maine Democrat — “You wanna talk about P-Hustle? You wanna talk about P-Hustle?” — as soon as Bobic entered the Senate building. Fetterman continued with a line that must have been rehearsed: “Have we become the pro-dick party?”

He ignored that due to pressure from the Democratic Party that Platner dropped out of the general election race earlier this month.

This level of embarrassing, childish behavior calls to mind Elon Musk, whose awkward hamming it up to fulfill his need for attention culminated in a number of humiliating appearances on the campaign trail alongside Donald Trump in 2024.

Fetterman doesn’t appear to be quite ready to go onstage and leap around with a MAGA hat on, but testing the waters for a party switch is certainly a step forward into whatever comes next.

There are signs the next move could be Fetterman’s own run for president.

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According to reporting from the Philadelphia Inquirer in May, Fetterman lost interest in the day-to-day of the Senate and has his sights set on the White House. One aide described the senator as “disengaged” and said “he doesn’t read memos, he’s taking very few meetings … the job is just a platform for him to run for president, that’s all he cares about.”

A run for president would be welcome news to friend Bill Maher, the acerbic right-wing comedian, who has been pushing for a Fetterman 2028 run since last year.

Maher isn’t the only conservative giving Fetterman a platform. Fox News hosted him more than 50 times in 2026 alone, according to the Washington Examiner, giving the senator the incentive to continue to make news by attacking fellow Democrats.

He’s taken to the role with gusto, recently attacking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for protecting Haitian migrants from the federal courts and scolding Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for endorsing Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed.

Anything for attention — and Fox is smart enough to take advantage of that.

Don’t Negotiate

One might try to explain away this behavior by pointing to Fetterman’s well-publicized health struggles.

Last May, New York Magazine reported his behavior has become increasingly erratic since a stroke in 2022, shortly before he was elected to the Senate.

The article lists several serious claims, including that Fetterman reads news articles on his phone while driving at high speeds, got into a car accident that injured his wife, and bought a gun.

Putting this all on the stroke and subsequent health issues, however, is too easy. Fetterman’s affinity for Israel was enough of a selling point for Democratic Majority for Israel that the group celebrated his willingness to “lean into” the relationship in an April 2022 press release.

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And for all the progressive political rhetoric he relied on to make his pitch to voters, Fetterman has always prioritized the stingy approval of his hard-right Republican father, who now calls the senator to congratulate him whenever he appears on Fox News.

Whatever the case, the attention-seeking, left-punching Fetterman is who we have now.

The best way to handle a child who is acting out is to ignore them and not reward their behavior. As Jentleson put it, they “should not debase themselves by trying to negotiate with him.”

That’s the approach Democrats should take: Leave Fetterman to serve out the rest of his term as a marginal member of a bare majority, should it come to that.

The post Fetterman Might Leave Democratic Party Because the Only Thing He Loves More Than Israel Is Attention appeared first on The Intercept.

Tapper was pressing Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator, on a right-wing outlet’s story exposing that he had expressed a desire to tread carefully because of potential differences of opinion among his would-be constituents. On a leaked campaign call, El-Sayed had said after Ali Khamenei’s February assassination that “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” referring to the southeast Michigan city that is home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the country. Given the ayatollah’s brutality, Tapper’s question implied, how dare El-Sayed consider that possibility?

As Michigan’s August 4 Senate primary between El-Sayed and Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens draws near, he has faced a barrage of Islamophobic attacks ranging from thinly veiled policy critiques to outright racist caricatures. The two Senate hopefuls seem to embody the forked path facing the Democratic Party ahead of the 2028 presidential cycle, with 43-year-old Stevens representing the old guard thanks to her backing by the party establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, and 41-year-old El-Sayed representing an insurgent movement skeptical of long-standing U.S. foreign policy interests and corporate capture of American politics. With the latter vision comes a form of fearmongering that’s been endemic to American politics for decades.

Nancy Khalil, an anthropologist who researches Muslims in America at the University of Michigan, called Tapper’s interview “sloppy and offensive” and pointed out that the anchor’s questions implied an assumption that because El-Sayed is Muslim and Arab, “he needs to have an opinion on this, and the opinion needs to align with whatever the media wants it to be.” That assumption is “completely racist,” Khalil said.

It was only one example in a deluge of attacks El-Sayed has faced in recent weeks that peddle in Islamophobic tropes. The pro-Israel doxxing account StopAntisemitism shared a post in June claiming that a hijabi woman arrested by the Trump administration for allegedly making pro-Palestine graffiti was a former staffer of El-Sayed’s, prompting right-wing agitator Laura Loomer to reply: “BAN Muslims from holding office in the United States.” Replies to El-Sayed’s campaign account often call him a “terrorist,” “radical,” or “jihadist,” and deploy racist memes, including one, likely AI-generated, showing El-Sayed and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wearing vests strapped with explosives and green headbands to signify Hamas. The Michigan GOP has called El-Sayed “a terrorist sympathizer,” emphasizing his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.

The attacks aren’t limited to right-wing reactionaries and obsessives on the internet. Many are issued by one of the leading groups backing El-Sayed’s Democratic opponent, Stevens: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has poured nearly $30 million into the race via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project. One UDP commercial alleges baselessly that El-Sayed “expressed sympathy for a terrorist,” and a mailer shared with The Intercept parrots the same. Others mention his decision to stump with political commentator and streamer Hasan Piker.

Scholars of Islamophobia and Muslim American communities told The Intercept that both parties and their allies were resorting to Islamophobic and anti-Arab tropes in a race where Israel and Palestine has remained an animating force. El-Sayed has committed to ending military aid to Israel, drawing a stark contrast to Stevens, who famously said: “Israel comes to me in my dreams.”

The attacks against El-Sayed reminded Hatem Bazian, a leading scholar of Islamophobia at the University of California, Berkeley, of a critical moment in 2008, when Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was accused of leaking a photo showing Barack Obama wearing garb of a Somalian elder during a visit to Kenya, fueling conspiracies that Obama — who is Christian — was hiding his Islamic faith. Whenever an actual Muslim candidate is involved, especially if they oppose the Israeli government’s policies, Bazian said, their opponents try to associate them with terrorism. 

“In the election in Michigan, we’re seeing the same type of playbook being played out,” Bazian said. “And what you’re also seeing is that much of the Islamophobia gets to be expressed in the corners of the web.” 

Yet some prejudice has also been expressed in real life. 

At a meet-and-greet in Detroit with Stevens and Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a school board member said she supports Stevens because she “represents all of us, not just one race.” When pressed by local reporter Sam Robinson, who recorded the viral remarks, the Farmington school board member elaborated: “The other candidate [El-Sayed] doesn’t work a room. … Don’t come out speaking only Arabic, don’t come out with your Arabic music on.”

The Stevens campaign has tried to distance itself from the most egregious attacks. When asked about the Smith remarks, a spokesperson for the campaign referred to a statement given to The Detroit News in which Stevens said she did not share Smith’s views and called her campaign “a diverse and multicultural best of Michigan coalition” She further claimed to have “repeatedly stood up for and defended our vibrant Muslim American community.” 

Yet Stevens’s campaign has also capitalized on bigoted rhetoric used by Mike Rogers, the Republican likely to face whichever Democrat wins next month. The campaign drew from a private call between Rogers and supporters during which he said of El-Sayed, “I don’t think he likes America, candidly.” The Stevens campaign sent out a parody of a news release designed to look like it was from El-Sayed campaign, claiming that Rogers had endorsed El-Sayed and reproducing the Republican’s quote: “I think he’s so radical. I think he’s going to lose big parts of the west part of the state. We think we can do well in part of the southeast part of the state. I think we’ll do well if he in fact is the nominee.” 

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for CNN defended Tapper’s question on El-Sayed and Khamenei’s killing, which Tapper asked regardless of “background or ideology.”

“In this case, he asked Dr. El-Sayed about his comments regarding Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei’s death because he believed they warranted explanation as part of the public debate,” the spokesperson wrote. “Providing interview subjects the opportunity to address and clarify their views is a fundamental part of responsible journalism, and we reject the implication that there was any malicious intent or bias behind the question.”

The El-Sayed campaign declined to comment on this story, but told The Intercept in April: “I am not running to be ‘the Muslim’ anything.”

“I’m running to be able to serve people in my role as a U.S. senator,” El-Sayed said at the time. “I want people to have healthcare. I want them to be able to work a dignified job that pays a living wage. I want them to have childcare and senior care. I want them to be able to know that the things that they need in their lives are affordable. So, at the end of the day it’s not about me. It’s not about my faith.”

Race and religion aren’t the only identity-related fault lines at play in the Michigan Senate race.

El-Sayed has “a long history of disrespecting women,” asserts another AIPAC-backed ad launched in early July. According to the Detroit Free Press, a mainstream local paper that fact-checked each of the ad’s claims, the TV spot misrepresented El-Sayed’s comments on figures like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom he ran against in 2018, by framing his critiques of Whitmer’s ties to the healthcare giant Blue Cross Blue Shield as inherently misogynistic. Whitmer, who is serving her second governor term, endorsed Stevens’s Senate run on Friday with a little more than a week from the election.

Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, a Stevens supporter known for going after critics of Israel online, called El-Sayed’s criticisms of Stevens and former opponent state Sen. Mallory McMorrow “sexist” with little evidence beyond their respective genders — a comment that has since appeared in another UDP ad. (Watts has said she didn’t give the super PAC permission to quote her public social media comments.)

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The new ad began its run within days of Graham Platner suspending his U.S. Senate campaign in Maine after he was accused of sexual assault. Centrist and pro-Stevens operatives have also tried to link El-Sayed with the Platner campaign, implying a guilt-by-association with left politics. Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich. recently told Semafor that “Abdul has a problematic record with women” without providing any evidence, then repeated the claim on Tapper’s show on Wednesday, parroting the Whitmer example from the AIPAC-funded commercial and saying his rhetoric carries “a uniquely sexist bent.” Scholten also claimed that El-Sayed and Platner campaigned and fundraised together, though the two never held a joint event and sent a total of two split-raise fundraising emails.

Khalil, the University of Michigan anthropologist, situated the ads as part of a long history of prejudiced tropes that paint Arab and Muslim men as controlling of women, and likewise stereotype Arab and Muslim women as subservient and docile.

“We’re seeing it come from within his own party,” she said, “reproducing tropes that have just been around for centuries.”

Earlier this month, El-Sayed called on his supporters to stop making “fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics,” likely a reference to superficial mockeries of Stevens’s voice, calling the comments “unkind and unhelpful.” Some journalists and advocates for Palestine observing the race wondered why El-Sayed made the request when Stevens had not done the same amid the wave of Islamophobia.

“Muslims are always labeled as terrorists, we’re always stereotyped, and our patriotism is always called into account,” said Adam Hamawy, a former Army surgeon who volunteered in Gaza and recently won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District. Speaking to The Intercept, he recalled an episode while treating patients from the World Trade Center attacks on September 11 when one of his colleagues at the hospital blamed Hamawy for the attacks. When Hamawy ran for Congress this year, one of his Democratic opponents called him a “radical extremist” because he gave a brief testimony at the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was convicted of planning terror attacks. A series of articles in mainstream and conservative outlets also played up the connection. 

Because El-Sayed, like Hamawy, is Muslim, his opponents are pushing the notion “that he’s radical — they’re questioning his loyalty, they are not talking about issues,” Hamawy told The Intercept. “And that was the same thing here as well: They didn’t attack me on issues, they attacked me for who I was.”

In addition to their criticisms of the Israeli state, El-Sayed and Hamawy have both run on progressive agendas that vow to lower the cost of living and fight for Medicare for All, which both have cited as key priorities owing to their experience as medical professionals. The agenda has proven popular this midterm cycle — with insurgent candidates on the left toppling incumbents and establishment favorites in state after state.

In some ways, Islamophobic attacks can be seen as “a marker of success,” said Moustafa Bayoumi, an author whose books trace the experiences of Muslim and Arab Americans after September 11 amid the war on terror. “The more successful Muslim candidates become in American politics, the greater the degree of Islamophobia that we’re going to witness in attacks, trying to take them down.”

Bayoumi, who teaches English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, also compared the attacks on El-Sayed to those against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Despite — or perhaps because of — his popularity, Mamdani has been called a “terrorist lover” by one of his colleagues in City Council, while another local lawmaker compared his rise to the office as “Islamic conquest.”

“It’s not just an identity thing. It’s because those Arab Muslim candidates are representing the progressive ticket, and it does put some fear in a certain type of the establishment in this country, whether it’s Republican or Democratic,” Bayoumi said. “They tend to fall back on Islamomophobia and Islamophobic tropes.”

The fearmongering is amplified when it comes to Israeli policy. As Israel’s favorability has cratered globally and among U.S. voters since the start of its genocidal campaign in Gaza, the public relations battle has only intensified. The Israeli government this year approved a public relations budget of $730 million, nearly five times the budget compared to the previous year. A Drop Site News report shared polling in Europe and the U.S. commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs that concluded that highlighting “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism” are most effective in reversing unfavorability toward Israel. 

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“The reality of it is that you can’t divorce anti-Palestinian racism from Islamophobia,” said Khalil. “The anti-Palestinian industry is what fueled the emergence of the Islamophobia industry. They’re funded by the same sources.”

Stevens, meanwhile, has used El-Sayed’s proximity to Michigan’s Arab and Muslim community to question his loyalty to the Democratic Party. In 2024, El-Sayed supported the Uncommitted Movement, which started in Michigan and coordinated hundreds of thousands of protest votes in that year’s presidential primary to send a message to the Biden administration over its continued support for Israel and its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

“Make no mistake, Trump is an existential threat,” El-Sayed wrote at the time. “And that’s why we have to send a clear message to this administration that it is the height of folly to try to force people into choosing between innocent lives in G@za or our democracy here at home in November.”

He went on to endorse Harris one day after Biden dropped out of the race.

Discounting the Muslim and Arab voting population bears the risk of backfiring. Michigan, which swung for Trump in the last presidential election, was decided by just 1 percentage point. For the first time in two decades, a plurality of voters in Dearborn voted Republican. 

The post Abdul El-Sayed Faces Islamophobic Attacks From GOP and Democratic Establishment appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite Cuba being severely hobbled by in the throes of a humanitarian crisis engineered by U.S. sanctions and fuel blockades, the new report paints the country as a major threat.

The report appears to be the brainchild of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a first-generation Cuban American who has made the overthrow of the Cuban government a top priority under the second Trump administration.

Published Monday without a listed author, the report says Cuba is the “capital of 21st century communism,” ideologically immovable, and a permanent enemy committed to the destruction not just of the U.S. but also of “Western civilization” through the spread of “Third Worldism.”

If that sounds like a throwback to the long-settled Cold War, that’s because it is — something critics of the report in Congress seized upon.

Whatever truths the report contains, they’re largely overshadowed by a feverish paranoia about the alleged reach of Cuban intelligence into American civil society, according to Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., days after returning from a fact-finding trip to Cuba.

“It may be the stupidest, most fantastical, most biased thing I’ve ever read from a governmental agency,” Pocan said in a statement Tuesday. “This report focuses on the 1960s & 70s with no clear connection to today. Yet somehow, the State Department uses this report to say that this impoverished nation is responsible for everything from Black Lives Matter to Antifa, the anti-ICE protests and more.”

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who went on the fact-finding mission with Pocan, said the report was aimed at manufacturing consent for an invasion of the island — and to crack down on dissent at home.

“This report was intentionally designed to instill fear of the Cuban people and to justify a military attack on Cuba,” Ramirez told The Intercept. “It’s hypocrisy at its finest, because while criticizing the regime in Cuba, it instead attacks Americans’ constitutional rights to free speech and free assembly.”

In sketching a broad, anti-American conspiracy in nearly dozens of left-wing social movements, organizations, and educational institutions, the report also functions as a broadside on civil society in the U.S — and hardly for the first time.

“Cuba is not a new cudgel,” said Miriam Pensack, a historian at Princeton University specializing in Latin America and the Caribbean. “The Cuban revolution was a galvanizing event for the way that the United States thought about its national security, really until the end of the Cold War. And it still has an ideological utility, even as the country is limping along.”

Center of Global Conspiracy

Running 100 pages, the report lays out what its authors describe as a decadeslong effort by Cuba to foment revolutionary movements throughout the world and to build a latter-day “axis of evil” by allying with other governments opposed to U.S. interests, including the current-day governments of Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea.

“Even as it expands and revitalizes its network within the next generation of American left-wing activists, it has also forged new partnerships — or deepened and repurposed old ones — with other foreign governments and movements around the world,” the report warns. “The regime continues to act as a force multiplier for a much broader anti-American coalition, positioning itself as a staging ground for a wide range of foreign adversaries to conduct operations against the United States.”

Cuba, the authors allege, is “less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States.”

The report goes on to list a slew of left-wing groups and individuals as accomplices, both witting and unwitting, of this intelligence operation, including the Democratic Socialists of America, Code Pink, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and leftwing streamer Hasan Piker.

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In a section stretching nearly five full pages on the National Lawyers Guild, a long-standing right-wing bugaboo, the report’s authors describe the venerable progressive law association as “one of the most persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network.”

Posting to X for the first time since March, the organization quipped, “We have been called much worse, by much better.”

Academic Freedom at Home

The report took aim at universities in the U.S. for maintaining exchange programs and partnerships with Cuban universities, implying that such programs functioned as a feeding ground for Cuban agents looking to recruit spies and fellow travelers.

The report singled out Harvard University, pointing to trips by faculty to Cuba as recently as 2017.

If anything, however, the Cuban government has been wary of exchange programs with American schools, according to Alejandro de la Fuente, a professor of Latin American history and economics at Harvard who chairs the university’s Cuba Studies Program and took part in a trip to Cuba in 2017 that is mentioned in the report.

“They did their best to delimit those exchanges as much as possible because they understood that knowledge production requires freedom and a plurality of viewpoints — precisely what they do not allow,” de la Fuente told The Intercept in an email Wednesday. “Indeed, they would probably argue that it was U.S. universities that were trying to penetrate Cuban institutions and to foment subversion there!”

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Born in Cuba, De la Fuente is hardly an apologist for the Cuban government, at whose feet he laid the blame for the country’s collapse. He acknowledged that Cuban intelligence may have targeted American students and academics in the past, but scoffed at the underlying thesis of the report that Cuba continues to pose a grave threat to the U.S.

“The ineptitude and corruption of the regime have destroyed the country’s economy and society, to the point that the very existence of the nation is in danger,” de la Fuente said. “Can a country like this pose a threat to the national security of the United States today? The answer, any reasonable observer would agree, is emphatically no.”

“War on the Cuban People”

Cuba has made no secret of its support for revolutionary movements throughout the 20th century. And it was a vital partner to left-wing governments in Latin America in the 21st century.

With Cuba today crippled by sanctions and fuel shortages, however, Ramirez, the member of Congress, said the report’s notion of the country as a central node in some threatening conspiracy was a “fiction.”

Accusations about Cuba’s extensive reach into protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, antifascist organizing, and Black Lives Matter don’t square with the reality of the severe crisis that has gripped Cuba. In early January, the Trump administration tightened its embargo of the country into a virtual blockade on all fuel arriving in Cuba.

Already weakened by internal tensions and by decades of economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., the island nation has in recent months been plunged into repeated, extended blackouts; its tourism-dependent economy has effectively collapsed; and its citizens face a daily question of where to find their next meal.

Her voice on the verge of tears as she described the humanitarian crisis she witnessed on the island, Ramirez forcefully rejected the notion that the U.S. has anything to fear from Cuba.

“Under no circumstances, at any moment during my trip, did I see anything to make me believe that Cuba poses an existential threat to the United States,” Ramirez said. “On the contrary, what I witnessed was a war on the Cuban people by the United States, and specifically by Donald Trump and Marco Rubio.”

The post Rubio’s Paranoid Cuba Report Designed to “Justify a Military Attack on Cuba,” Says Democratic Rep. appeared first on The Intercept.