The Intercept

Hegseth Survives Impeachment Attempt

Matt Sledge — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 00:23:03 +0000

Self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth narrowly avoided impeachment Tuesday night, as solidarity from House Republicans blocked a bill introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., charging Hegseth with “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Though Democrats overwhelmingly joined Massie’s effort following their midterm election landslide, the House voted 211 to 204 to refer the charges to a committee, allowing Republicans to slow the process. With 11 Democrats absent, they lacked the numbers. Massie, however, dismissed the impact of Democratic absences to The Intercept. “No, there were enough Republicans to rally to get here,” he said.

The procedural vote spared Republicans a more difficult vote on whether to impeach Hegseth on Massie’s eight charges, including waging wars without congressional authorization and undercutting measures to prevent civilian casualties. It followed a week of increasingly desperate efforts by the Pentagon chief to shore up congressional and White House support, including a campaign-style video intended to influence Trump, a social media campaign by underlings, and a rare appearance by Hegseth himself before the Pentagon press corps.

For half an hour on Tuesday morning’s news conference, Hegseth wove a web of lies designed to refute or obfuscate Massie’s eight charges. He claimed that the effort to impeach him was a stunt by just “one disgruntled congressman.” That, too, turned out to be false as 203 members of Congress voted with Massie.

On Tuesday, a coalition of more than 40 civil society organizations — including Oxfam America, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Common Defense, Demand Progress, MoveOn, and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft — sent a letter calling on all House members to vote for every article of impeachment filed against Hegseth.

“Pete Hegseth’s time at the Pentagon has done grievous harm to the nation and to the Constitution,” said Demand Progress senior policy adviser Cavan Kharrazian. “This is a man who ignored the will of Congress to execute an illegal war in Iran, kidnapped a foreign leader for oil, restarted war on Yemen, sent missiles to kill suspected drug traffickers and weaponized the Pentagon against a political enemy.”

“They diagnosed why they lost the election. But tonight they were paralyzed to do anything about it.”

After the vote, Massie called out the display of inaction from his Republican colleagues.

“They diagnosed why they lost the election,” Massie said of fellow Republicans, following the vote on Tuesday night. “But tonight they were paralyzed to do anything about it. And that’s the story of Congress.”

Absent from the vote were Democratic Reps. Julia Brownley, Lou Correa and Nancy Pelosi, of California; Laura Gillen of New York; Steven Horsford of Nevada; Jonathan Jackson of Illinois; Brittany Pettersen of Colorado; Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico; Haley Stevens of Michigan; Marilyn Strickland of Washington; and Frederica Wilson of Florida. The absent Republicans were Reps. Monica De La Cruz of Texas; Neal Dunn of Florida; Russell Fry of South Carolina; Julia Letlow of Louisiana; Tom Tiffany and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin; and Rudy Yakym of Indiana.

A senior congressional staffer predicted that Hegseth would face a very rough road if he survived impeachment. “Oversight is going to come crashing down on his head,” that staffer said. “Will Hegseth continue to obstruct? Yes. But wait until the subpoenas start.”

Congressional committees have broad investigative powers, including the authority to subpoena administration officials to testify under oath and compel them to turn over documents. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who will head the House Armed Services Committee in the next Congress, said Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg would be first on the list to testify.

Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., one of the leading voices for Hegseth’s impeachment, told The Intercept there were “many ways” for Democrats to hold him accountable in the next session, specifically compelling him to testify before the American people. “I would be surprised to see him last the next two years in this administration,” she told The Intercept. “I think that he is not only one of the most incompetent members of the administration, but also the most unpopular — and it’s on a bipartisan basis. So the pressure will continue to grow for there to be some change at the Pentagon.”

“I want Pete Hegseth not just impeached, I want him prosecuted.”

Rep.-elect Richard Ojeda, D-N.C., told The Intercept that the incoming Democrats have Hegseth in their sights. “I want Pete Hegseth not just impeached, I want him prosecuted. They murdered people in the Caribbean. And we killed 163 little girls in Iran,” he said. “Everybody in my class is ready for him to go. We tried it. It didn’t work. We’ll do it again.”

In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump celebrated the outcome while expressing confusion over the vote. Trump called it the “Democrats’ attempt to impeach” Hegseth, despite the fact the effort was introduced by Massie, a Republican, who he called “a major LOSER.” He claimed it was an “EXONERATION” of Hegseth and added: “The Democrats continue to weaponize and abuse the United States of America. They must be stopped!”

The post Hegseth Survives Impeachment Attempt appeared first on The Intercept.

Debunking Pete Hegseth’s Bullshit Impeachment Defense

Nick Turse — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 18:47:26 +0000

On the eve of a House impeachment vote, self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made a rare appearance before the Pentagon press corps. Over half an hour, he declared every military operation he has overseen “lawful” and claims of civilian harm “slander.” He said the Iran war was a great victory and only 18 Americans have died in the conflict. He also claimed that the effort to impeach him was a stunt by just “one disgruntled congressman.”

None of it is true.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced articles of impeachment on the House floor Monday afternoon, charging Hegseth with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Democrats are overwhelmingly expected to join Massie’s effort following their midterm election landslide. “I am a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the presumed next House speaker.

Massie wrote on X that if his impeachment resolution advances Tuesday evening, he will request a separate vote on each of the eight articles. “I’ve heard from several members they agree with some of the Articles of Impeachment but not all of them,” Massie wrote. “If the motion to kill my resolution by referring it to committee fails, and we proceed to the Articles themselves, I’ll request a vote on each of the Articles separately.”

As Hegseth steels himself for a vote that could see him put on trial in the Senate and sink his chances of serving for the rest of Trump’s term, The Intercept is dissecting his self-defense and examining Hegseth’s false claims about his disastrous war-making.

Everything Was “Lawful” and “Notified to Congress”

“Iran, the cartels, Maduro, Yemen — every one was a lawful operation ordered by the commander-in-chief, then ordered by myself, notified to Congress, and executed by American warriors who did their jobs.”

Experts in the laws of war, a Pentagon official, and members of Congress from both parties say Hegseth’s boat strikes against “cartels,” which have now killed upward of 240 people, are illegal extrajudicial killings. The military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, said that the attack on Venezuela was also a clear violation of international law and that the administration’s justifications for the raid were baseless.

Of the Iran war, Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, a former chief of international law at U.S. Central Command, said the opening strike “clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” which requires the president to seek congressional approval to start a war in most cases. Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army officer and intelligence official and now the associate director for campaigns and policy at Win Without War, drew specific attention to the attacks on the bridges and water reservoirs in Iran. It is “quite dangerous to be conditioning the U.S. military to carry out orders that are clearly war crimes,” he warned.

Hegseth’s claims about notifications are also spurious. Congress never authorized the Iran war, and a call to the congressional “Gang of Eight” the night before is not the formal report experts say the law requires. Following the January attack on Venezuela, Republicans privately complained they were not told in advance.

“The Terrorists That We Hunt”

“As to the claim that the American military targets civilians, well, that is a lie and that is a slander against every professional who flew, sailed, and fought on these missions. The only people who target civilians are the terrorists that we hunt.”

The U.S. boat strike campaign has only targeted civilians. The summary executions of more than 240 people are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

A U.S. military investigation also found U.S. forces attacked an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. One official called it “colossal negligence.”

For months, Central Command has failed to answer questions about additional civilian casualties, including eight members of a family — the youngest, a 20-day-old infant — killed in an attack documented in an Intercept investigation.

These attacks came after Hegseth conducted a comprehensive campaign to undermine efforts to prevent and mitigate civilian harm. The Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, for example, slashed its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report.

“Dead Where They Should Be”

“More than 70 narco vessels sunk. 218 narco-terrorists dead where they should be. Maritime smuggling down at least 65 percent and dropping even further.”

Hegseth misstates the toll of his own boat strike campaign. The Intercept’s tracker counts 72 strikes and at least 243 dead. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., after reviewing classified material, wrote that the evidence suggests the military killed people not involved in drug trafficking. A top Pentagon Joint Staff official told lawmakers in a classified briefing that victims of human trafficking could be among the dead of the first strike.

The drug claims fare no better. Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

The Pentagon’s latest civilian casualty report, meanwhile, claims no civilians were killed in the boat strikes. One U.S. official said it had “absolutely no credibility.”

Iran Was a “Historic Military Victory”

“By every measure, we achieved a historic military victory. Under 40 days of sustained combat…”

The Iran war, by all objective measures, is an abject failure. The conflict undermined the decades-old U.S. security framework, as well as America’s archipelago of bases, in the Middle East. Iran determined how to overwhelm U.S. air defenses, offering up a playbook for U.S. adversaries around the world. This, in turn, damaged U.S. military security across the globe. From Jordan to Kuwait to the United Kingdom, U.S. outposts are now increasingly vulnerable to attack. As a result, the Iran war has left the military on the brink of a “breakdown.”

The Trump administration’s attempt to rebrand its faltering forever war hasn’t slowed the mounting toll of U.S. casualties, either. While Hegseth focused on the conflict’s first 40 days, the U.S. has suffered more casualties as a result of the conflict since the war formally ended and, in July, underwent a name change to “Overseas Operations.”

Voters did not see a victory either: About 6 in 10 told The Associated Press the war was the wrong decision, and Vice President JD Vance agreed, writing of the GOP’s crushing defeat in last week’s midterms: “The reason we lost is the war.”

18 Americans

“Eighteen Americans have given their lives in Operation Epic Fury.”

Hegseth spent his rare press conference using the troops under his leadership as a shield, claiming that indictments of him were actually indictments of them. When not using them for cover, Hegseth praised them. “They are the best of our nation. Like the president, I will defend them with every fiber of my being every single day,” he crowed.

What he didn’t care enough to do was offer an accurate count of the war’s toll. The official Pentagon count of deaths during Epic Fury is 15, not 18 — but that’s misdirection at best and a lie at worst. At least 23 military personnel have died in Operation Epic Fury and “Overseas Operations,” the new moniker for the war introduced in July, according to the Pentagon’s official count. (This includes 11 killed by hostile fire.) The actual number of troop deaths in the region since the war began is higher.

“One Disgruntled Congressman”

“This is one disgruntled guy who drew up some really flimsy articles.”

In Hegseth’s telling, Massie is pursuing his impeachment out of resentment over the loss of his Kentucky congressional seat to Trump-backed far-right candidate Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL. But Massie’s impeachment effort has strong bipartisan support. The entire House Democratic caucus is widely expected to vote in favor of the impeachment effort. While no House Republicans aside from Massie have openly committed to voting yes, the outgoing congressman said Monday that he believes “several” Republicans will vote for the measure.

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz agreed. So did Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., one of the leading voices for Hegseth’s impeachment. “I think there’s a high chance that it will be successful,” she told The Intercept of Massie’s effort. In April, Ansari filed six articles of impeachment against Hegseth, including violations of the law of armed conflict and targeting of civilians, abuse of power, and obstructing congressional oversight.

Discontent with Hegseth is widespread within the military establishment as well. The Intercept recently spoke with six current and former defense officials who said Hegseth had undermined the rule of law; irreparably harmed the U.S. military through purges of top commanders; spurred religious extremism; and diminished the department he leads due to an almost endless raft of scandals and culture-war clownishness. In fact, 64 percent of active-duty service members, veterans, and military families disapprove of Hegseth, according to a recent poll conducted by Common Defense, a grassroots veterans organization.

The American people, writ large, appear to agree with Ansari, Massie, the U.S. officials, and those in the military’s orbit. Just 32 percent of voters approve of the way Hegseth is handling his job, while 57 percent disapprove, according to a Quinnipiac University poll in September.

The post Debunking Pete Hegseth’s Bullshit Impeachment Defense appeared first on The Intercept.

Arizona Town’s Probe on Sex Abuse Claims Could Block Prison Firm Building New ICE Camp

John Washington — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 18:02:25 +0000

This story was published in partnership with LOOKOUT News.

An official from Marana, Arizona, is seeking clarification from the private prison giant Management and Training Corporation about its handling of sexual abuse allegations at the former state prison in the town, following an investigation from LOOKOUT and The Intercept.

In an October 28 letter, reviewed by LOOKOUT and The Intercept, Marana Finance Director and License Inspector Yiannis Kalaitzidis asked MTC Senior Vice President Mary Calvin for a written explanation of what the town official called an “apparent inconsistency” between state records and the facility’s 2023 Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, audit, a report required by the federal law.

MTC ran a former state prison in Marana, Arizona, and plans to reopen it as an ICE detention camp.

The request is part of the town’s review of MTC’s October 1 application for a business license to “Operate Marana Detention Facility.” The company ran a former Arizona state prison in Marana and plans to reopen it imminently as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention camp.

The letter cites a September 29 LOOKOUT and Intercept investigation about how state records reference three allegations of sexual misconduct at the prison in 2022 and 2023.

PREA audits — which are required for jails, prisons, and detention centers at least once every three years — must record all allegations of sexual misconduct at detention facilities, whether they are substantiated or not. Certified in December 2023, MTC’s report for the Marana prison, however, recorded none.

Kalaitzidis noted in his letter that the audit says the finding of zero incidents was verified by the warden, chief of security, PREA compliance manager, and internal investigator. He also wrote that, despite the apparent reviews by several company officials, the report “does not appear to be certified or signed by any MTC personnel.”

The letter says the town of Marana is requesting the explanation as part of an investigation into whether MTC “made a material false statement in conducting the business” of the state prison facility, which would be grounds for denial of a business license according to the town’s code.

“The Town of Marana is currently reviewing MTC’s business license application,” said Andrea De La Cruz, the assistant town manager, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept by email. “As part of our review process and due diligence, the Town has contacted MTC to request additional information. The application remains under review, and no final determination has been made at this time.”

MTC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Changing Political Context

Local residents and officials say the state, the federal government, and MTC left them out of meaningful discussions about reopening the prison as an ICE camp, LOOKOUT and The Intercept previously reported.

For now, a town business license is among the few levers local officials have.

In an October 2 letter from the local group Pima Resists ICE, or PRICE, to a Marana official who specialized in licensure, organizers cited not only the discrepancies between state investigations into sexual abuse and the PREA audit, but also alleged violations involving an escape from an MTC prison in Kingman, Arizona, in 2010, as well as abuses in a New Mexico immigration camp run by MTC as revealed in a 2017 DHS Office of Inspector General report.

The inquiry comes as Arizona’s political landscape is shifting. The midterm election gave Democrats control of both chambers of the state legislature as well as the governor’s office — a historic change in state power. Republicans will be in the minority at the state Capitol for the first time in 60 years.

That has Democratic lawmakers talking about taking on one of the most contentious laws in recent Arizona history. Following protests across the state, Democrats took up the cause of repealing a controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law known as Senate Bill 1070. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down three of its provisions, leaving a requirement that police check the immigration status of people they stop under certain circumstances.

“I would absolutely love to see a repeal of SB1070,” state Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Democrat from Glendale, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept. “There are still parts of that law on the books that are enabling cities to collaborate with ICE to rip families apart, and that needs to stop.”

State Rep. Betty Villegas, D-Tucson, echoed Ortiz: “We already have bills aligned to focus on what other states have done to control ICE from coming into private property.”

Following the lead of neighboring New Mexico’s prohibition on local jurisdictions entering into contracts with ICE for immigrant detention camps, Villegas said Democrats in Arizona see an appetite for doing something similar in their own state.

“We do not want the Democrats to wait until things get bad to investigate conditions.”

Ortiz agreed, saying there is “likely an appetite” for something similar in Arizona, and that the Latino Caucus would address the issue.

Local nonprofits said lawmakers should also conduct a review of no-bid contracts like the one inked between the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and MTC.

“This was literally handed to them with no review and no public input,” said Caroline Isaacs, the executive director of Just Communities Arizona, a nonprofit working on criminal justice reform. “We do not want the Democrats to wait until things get bad to investigate conditions.”

“We want them to do this now, before people get hurt.”

The post Arizona Town’s Probe on Sex Abuse Claims Could Block Prison Firm Building New ICE Camp appeared first on The Intercept.

Kalshi Is Cozy With Trump — But It’s Ramping Up Dem Hires and Campaign Spending

Matt Sledge — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 17:35:50 +0000

Since the start of the year, the prediction betting site Kalshi has two hired former officials from Joe Biden’s White House as a policy adviser and a top lobbyist.

The company’s co-founders have also spent nearly $1 million on donations to federal candidates, with more than a third, or $377,000, going to Democrats like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., according to a new report.

Kalshi’s spending spree shows how much prediction market sites have ratcheted up their presence in Washington as regulators craft rules for the industry. While the sites’ close relationship with the Trump administration has drawn headlines, the report from the progressive group Demand Progress details how the industry’s influence operation crosses party lines.

“They’ve been hopeful that they can have Democratic champions for their policy agenda.”

The push for bipartisan relationships began months ago, but it could pay dividends as Democrats take over both chambers of a Congress, said Ella Fanger, the corporate power policy adviser for Demand Progress. A betting market critic, Fanger predicted that the companies will keep trying to win allies on both sides of the aisle.

“They’ve been hopeful that they can have Democratic champions for their policy agenda,” she said, “and not just have Trump’s cronies sticking out their necks for them.”

The hiring spree of former Biden officials and spending on Democratic candidates come as prediction markets are facing increasing scrutiny over betting on elections and a spate of suspicious trades from Washington about policy moves and even military action.

On Tuesday, Democrats on Capitol Hill called for Trump to bar White House staffers from using the betting sites and, with Democrats taking Congress, many observers expect investigations into their use in Washington.

In a statement, Kalshi said it was willing to work “across the ideological spectrum.”

“Kalshi has had substantive conversations with policymakers over the past year regarding legislation that protects consumers, keeps minors off our platform, makes insider trading bans standard across the industry, and ensures the CFTC” — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — “has the resources they need,” said the company’s head of government relations, John Bivona, a former Democratic congressional staffer and Biden White House official.

“We’ve come out in support of legislation introduced by members across the ideological spectrum,” Bivona said, “and we’ve worked with dozens of lawmakers from both parties on these priorities.”

Hiring Republicans — and Dems

Kalshi and its rival Polymarket are the dominant players in the prediction market industry, which has flourished since Donald Trump became president thanks to his administration’s hands-off approach to regulation.

The ties between the prediction betting sites and Trumpworld go all the way to the president’s inner circle, as evidenced by Donald Trump Jr.’s financial stakes at both competitors.

Polymarket has also hired as a lobbyist a Republican former top official at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The federal regulatory body has, under the Trump administration, sued states for trying to regulate sports betting as gambling.

The Demand Progress report covers Trump Jr.’s ties to the industry, but it also shines a light on the role of former Democratic congressional and executive branch staffers.

Kalshi’s hires have tended toward establishment Democrats. Among them are Stephanie Cutter, a political strategist whose work spanned the Obama and Biden administrations as well as Kamala Harris’s campaign for president. Cutter was tapped as a policy adviser for Kalshi in April. Bivona was hired by Kalshi as its head of government relations in January.

Tripled Lobbying Spend

Overall, Kalshi has spent $1.8 million on lobbying in the first half of 2026, compared to $615,000 in all of 2025, according to the Demand Progress report.

Polymarket spent a relatively meager $180,000 during the same period this year, compared to $360,000 last year.

“It’s important for states to be able to regulate this industry as gambling, which is what it is.”

Fanger, whose group is critical of the prediction markets’ attempts to neutralize state sports gambling regulators, said she is worried that a pliant Congress could approve the Trump administration’s favorable regulations.

“The concern is basically just that we could get legislation that would codify the rulemaking that the CFTC has already begun,” she said, referring to the agency’s efforts to formally exercise jurisdiction over sports, political, cultural, and weather betting contracts. “And we think that it’s important for states to be able to regulate this industry as gambling, which is what it is.”

The industry may need all the lobbyists it can get if progressives gain power in the next Congress. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who is angling to chair the House Financial Services Committee, said in a letter last week that she wants to “rein in predatory lending and predatory platforms, including prediction markets, so that our constituents keep more of their hard-earned dollars in their pockets.”

Waters is also a longtime foil to the crypto industry. Crypto currency interests alienated Democrats by spending tens of millions of campaign dollars on Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who lost his seat to Democrat Sherrod Brown in the midterm election.

While crypto has lavished money on campaign spending through a super PAC, the prediction market industry has opted for a quieter campaign of smaller donations routed through more traditional channels.

The post Kalshi Is Cozy With Trump — But It’s Ramping Up Dem Hires and Campaign Spending appeared first on The Intercept.

Impeachment Vote Looms for Hegseth

Nick Turse — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 19:15:52 +0000

Calls for self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ouster have grown louder on Capitol Hill as a possible impeachment vote looms this week. At the same time, Hegseth has shored up support at the White House and among MAGA faithful, according to dismayed Pentagon officials.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced articles of impeachment on the House floor Monday afternoon, charging Hegseth with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Top Democrats have indicated a desire to join Massie’s effort since their midterm election landslide. “I am a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is poised to be the next House speaker, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the current House Oversight Committee chair, told Newsmax on Friday it is “very possible” the votes exist to impeach Hegseth.

Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., one of the leading voices for Hegseth’s impeachment, agreed. “I think there’s a high chance that it will be successful,” she told The Intercept of Massie’s effort. In April, Ansari filed six articles of impeachment against Hegseth, including violations of the law of armed conflict and targeting of civilians, abuse of power, and obstructing congressional oversight. She called for a floor vote on his ouster this week.

“Hegseth has demonstrated that he is wholly incompetent. He’s committed what I believe to be war crimes in Iran and the Caribbean and he is ill-equipped for the job,” said Ansari. “My reason for introducing the articles of impeachment back in April had a lot to do with his conduct and the war crimes in Iran, including the bombing of the children’s school. But it’s refreshing to see that since then, more and more Republicans are also recognizing that his leadership has failed and that he’s putting all of us in danger.”

In the wake of a devastating election rout of the GOP that handed Democrats firm control of the House and the Senate, Congress begins a five-week lame-duck session on Monday. With dozens of Republican lawmakers ending their tenure in the House, it’s unclear how many will even show up for votes. Such absences, as well as outright defections in the GOP ranks, make it increasingly likely that Massie’s measure will pass, staffers on Capitol Hill told The Intercept.

On Sunday, GOP Rep. French Hill of Arkansas left open the possibility of backing the measure. “I want to hear the debate on it to see if it merits impeachment versus some other disciplinary action or action by the president,” he said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” Outgoing House speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., did not answer when asked by Politico if GOP leaders would whip the Hegseth impeachment vote. House leaders must take up the matter within two legislative days; opponents could table the resolution or refer it to committee instead of voting directly on impeachment.

After narrowly being confirmed by the Senate, which required Vice President JD Vance to break a 50-50 tie, Hegseth’s tenure has been marked by fiascos and failures beginning with Signal-gate, the sharing of secret war plans in a chat group with a journalist. In that case, according to the Pentagon’s own inspector general, “Hegseth violated security protocols and endangered U.S. troops and objectives.” Since then, Hegseth has been under perpetual fire for the unsuccessful Iran war in 2026, specifically a strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children. He faces pressure over his campaign of extrajudicial killings in attacks on so-called drug boats in the waters off Latin America. And questions continue to mount about his purge of top military leaders — many of them women and minorities.

“The fact that many career officials from the department have left citing his leadership, I think, is very telling,” said Ansari. Last week, The Intercept published an exposé quoting six current and former defense officials who currently serve or served under Hegseth and called for his ouster. “He is conducting state terrorism. He is 100 percent a war criminal. He needs to be prosecuted,” said Wes J. Bryant, one of those officials and, until last year, a senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the Pentagon who was pushed out of his job for blowing the whistle on Hegseth’s efforts to undermine protections for civilians.

As calls for his ouster have grown louder, Hegseth launched a desperate bid to whip up support at the White House, including a nakedly obsequious video seeking Trump’s support that he posted on X. It was accompanied by a coordinated campaign of social media posts by Pentagon underlings tying Hegseth’s fortunes to the president with the text “STAND. FIGHT. DEFEND THE REPUBLIC.”

Hegseth’s hand was strengthened on Friday when Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles stepped down and was replaced by his hard-line domestic policy adviser, raging xenophobe, and illegal boat strike proponent Stephen Miller, according to two Pentagon officials. The embattled war chief was quick to offer “Huge CONGRATS” to Miller on X, and posted a photo of himself alongside Trump’s new consigliere. The same coterie of Hegseth devotees at the Pentagon followed with similar posts featuring Miller.

Wiles had reportedly soured on Hegseth, blaming his woeful management of the Iran war for flagging Republican fortunes. A senior Trump administration official also told MS Now that Miller and Hegseth “have been extremely close since the beginning of the administration.”

If the House impeaches Hegseth, removing him from office would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate — a high bar, even when Democrats take control of the chamber in January. Neither of the two Cabinet secretaries impeached by the House — William Belknap, the secretary of war, in 1876; and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, in 2024 — were convicted by the Senate.

An Armed Services Committee staffer who spoke with The Intercept was skeptical that Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., would bring the measure to a vote. Ansari held out hope. “Thune is very much aligned in terms of his view that Hegseth is not fit for the job,” she said, adding, “I do think that the resounding victories on Tuesday night will impact the way Republicans operate moving forward.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is retiring at the end of the year, has said for months that he regrets his vote to confirm Hegseth and rebuked the war chief for his desperate video address aimed at Trump. “[C]abinet secretaries shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer dollars on campaign style videos. Kristi Noem learned that the hard way,” he wrote on X on Friday, also laying into Hegseth for “the incompetence you’ve displayed, the bad advice you’ve given to president, and your shameful and embarrassing episodes from firing our top generals to texting war plans to reporters.” Tillis had also previously said Hegseth “needs to go.”

Massie suggested his impeachment resolution is the legislative equivalent of a mercy killing, calling it “a much gentler version” of what Democrats will do when they take control of Congress in January. Congressional committees have broad investigative powers, and Ansari said that if Hegseth survives this year’s impeachment push, there were “many ways” for Democrats to hold him accountable in the next session, specifically compelling him to testify before the American people. “I would be surprised to see him last the next two years in this administration,” she told The Intercept. “I think that he is not only one of the most incompetent members of the administration, but also the most unpopular — and it’s on a bipartisan basis. So the pressure will continue to grow for there to be some change at the Pentagon.”

Trump expressed mild “confidence” in Hegseth in a “60 Minutes” interview taped on Friday, touting the U.S. victory over Venezuela, but stopped short of praising his Pentagon chief for it. Asked if he credited Hegseth for what he considers a major victory, Trump replied: “No, but he was a part of it.” On Saturday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that calls for impeachment of administration officials amounted to “extortion at the highest level” and ordered the Justice Department to investigate those making the push.

Attorney General Todd Blanche, himself a potential target of impeachment, said on Sunday that the Justice Department would represent Hegseth during any impeachment proceedings. He added that he “would be very worried” if he were a Democrat threatening to investigate administration officials. Asked if he considered those threats to be a crime, Blanche said, “It depends on what’s said. So yes, there could be.”

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s support for Hegseth.

Update: November 9, 2026, 2:50 p.m. ET
The article has been updated to note that Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced articles of impeachment against War Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday afternoon.

The post Impeachment Vote Looms for Hegseth appeared first on The Intercept.

Tons of “Bunker-Buster” Bomb Parts for Israel Go Through JFK Airport

Noah Hurowitz — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 11:05:00 +0000

An Israeli airline shipped thousands of pounds worth of parts for controversial “bunker-buster” bombs through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York during the height of the Israeli–U.S. war against Iran, according to a new investigation by a left-wing research group.

Challenge Airlines, a cargo hauler based in Israel, made three flights this spring carrying the bomb casings for BLU-109s — a 2,000-pound munition that has been tied to numerous mass-casualty attacks on civilian neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Iran in recent years — according to open-source data obtained by the Movement Research Unit and reviewed by The Intercept.

The airline also made more than 100 shipments of guidance kits known as joint direct attack munitions, or JDAMs — which are used to convert so-called “dumb bombs” into GPS-guided munitions capable of striking a specific target — according to data shared with The Intercept. Many of the guidance kits were marked for use on the MK-84, another 2,000-pound bomb Israel used in its campaign to level Gaza, where fragments of JDAMs have repeatedly been found at the site of airstrikes.

The 2,000-pound bombs present a serious risk of civilian casualties, according to Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned at the outset of the war in Gaza to protest the Biden administration’s sale of weapons to Israel.

“If you look at historic U.S. use of 2,000-pound bombs, in the entire counter-ISIS campaign, there were just two that were dropped in the vicinity of the city of Mosul precisely because there is no way to use a 2,000-pound bomb discriminately in an urban environment,” Paul said, referring to an American air war during the final years of the Obama administration to end the Islamic State’s control of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Israel hasn’t shared the United States’s reservations. The country made extensive use of the weapons to attack targets in Gaza and Lebanon, including a deadly strike on Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp that killed dozens of civilians, according to an analysis by the New York Times.

“If you look at a picture of Gaza right now, I would say Israel’s use of these weapons is functionally indistinguishable from indiscriminate bombing,” Paul said.

“There is no way to use a 2,000-pound bomb discriminately in an urban environment.”

Challenge Airlines, and the Israeli military did not respond to request for comment.

“We work closely with all airport partners to ensure the safety of public, neighboring communities, and airport personnel,” said a spokesperson for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates JFK Airport. “The federal government and commercial airlines have primary responsibility as to what is allowed to be shipped on aircraft. We are pre-empted under federal law from interfering with these activities.”

While the shipments of JDAMs and bomb bodies for BLU-109s did not include active munitions, previous shipments of weapons through JFK have included explosives, including 14 tons of nitrocellulose bound for Israel in May 2025.

The Intercept verified the data showing all three shipments of bunker-buster bomb bodies, and verified a portion of the data showing shipments of JDAM kits. Movement Research Unit, an investigative outlet whose prior work has uncovered shipments of drone tech to Israel and the transport of fighter jet parts by United Airlines onboard civilian passenger flights, shared the data on the condition that some specifics of its methods be withheld to prevent a crackdown on the availability of such data.

In response to the flow of weapons and materiel through JFK, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has been organizing a campaign to stop the flow of weapons to Israel through the airport.

“This is another example of a growing body of reporting that shows how civilian infrastructure is used for the genocide in Gaza,” said a DSA member named Henry, who asked to be identified without his last name in order prevent retaliation from his employer. “Civilian air travel should prioritize passengers, travelers, and the international community — not weapons — and no worker should be forced to serve the militarized supply chain.”

Tons of Pressure

Challenge Airlines shipped the bunker-buster bomb bodies on flights leaving JFK for Tel Aviv on March 12, April 30, and May 6, according to the data shared with The Intercept.

They shipped the guidance kits far more frequently, with 109 shipments leaving JFK for Tel Aviv between December 22, 2024, and June 7, 2026. Cargo documents indicate that most of the shipments were of JDAM kits designed for 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs but also included at least one shipment of kits for bunker-buster bombs.

In total, the airline shipped 175,884 pounds of BLU-109 casings and more than 5 million pounds of JDAM kits between December 22, 2024, and June 7, 2026, according to the data obtained by Movement Research Unit.

JFK Airport is the main export hub for such munitions flying by air to Israel, according to federal data: More than half of all Israel-bound air shipments of weapons that fit the government export category for bombs and missiles was sent abroad from JFK.

It was not immediately clear where the bunker buster and JDAM shipments originated, but sales of military hardware to Israel typically either come from deals between the Israeli and U.S. governments or direct commercial purchases under a special export license made by the Israeli military from private companies.

In the first two years of Israel’s war on Gaza, the U.S. spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, according to a study by analyst William Hartung. That has included multiple shipments of 2,000-pound bombs like the BLU-109 and the MK-84, as well as JDAM kits to equip the weapons with GPS guidance.

The Biden administration in May 2024 halted the shipment of MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, citing the potential harm to civilians, but President Donald Trump resumed shipments of the heavy munitions within weeks of retaking the White House.

News of the shipments comes just over a month after the Associated Press revealed plans in the works for the U.S. to ink a vast $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel that would include thousands of 2,000-pound bombs.

The ongoing sale of such heavy weapons to Israel underscores the need for a federal solution, according to Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who sponsored last year legislation dubbed the “Block the Bombs Act,” that would bar the U.S. from selling BLU-109s, JDAMs, and other munitions central to Israel’s war effort.

“It’s good that people are putting pressure locally, but ultimately it is Congress’s responsibility to make that happen.”

“It’s the only bill that prohibits these weapons transfers from happening, and the only bill that creates a comprehensive process of oversight,” Ramirez told The Intercept. “There’s been a big push, particularly in New York and around JFK, to block these transfers and it’s good that people are putting pressure locally, but ultimately it is Congress’s responsibility to make that happen.”

First introduced in May 2025, the bill has gathered more than 80 co-sponsors but has thus far languished in legislative limbo. With the House of Representatives soon to be under Democratic control, Ramirez said she plans to bring the bill to the floor next session.

The post Tons of “Bunker-Buster” Bomb Parts for Israel Go Through JFK Airport appeared first on The Intercept.

The Pressure on LA’s First Self-Proclaimed Socialist Mayor

Jonah Valdez — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000

On paper, the second-largest city in the country has its first democratic socialist mayor.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman declared victory on Thursday over the embattled incumbent Karen Bass, joining a list of socialist mayors who have risen to power in recent years, including Zohran Mamdani in New York; Seattle’s Katie Wilson; and most recently Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., who won in a landslide this week.

Raman, however, did not campaign unabashedly as a socialist. Though she ran as an endorsed member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter, the national DSA threatened to override the local chapter and rescind the endorsement over concerns around her stances on Israel and Palestine.

Unlike her counterpart in New York, to whom she draws most comparisons, Raman did not make sweeping socialist promises, such as free public transit, universal childcare, or taxing the rich. Instead, she focused on what’s wrong with the city. Riding a wave of resentment for Bass’s alleged mismanagements of the Palisades fire and the Lineage Logistics warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, Raman talked about filling potholes, fixing street lights, and making roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists.

In addition to DSA-LA support, she earned the endorsements of popular anti-corruption City Controller Kenneth Mejia and Unite Here 11, a major local hospitality workers union, whose large membership canvassed for her in the general. But she lacked endorsements from most key labor groups and social justice nonprofits, and the organizing base they provide. Her fellow DSA members on the Los Angeles City Council all pulled for Bass, forcing Raman to battle back the perception that she struggles to build coalitions.

While Mamdani, 10 months into his term, now finds himself under pressure from New York’s left for refusing to fire NYPD’s police commissioner, his massive base of organizer support offers a buffer to criticism. Raman won over the city’s voters, but it’s not clear how much time that will buy her to tackle the city’s most vexing problems once she takes office.

“Folks in New York are willing to cut Mamdani more slack on the movement side, because he was one of them on a bunch of issues,” said David Levitus, executive director of LA Forward, a progressive nonprofit that endorsed Raman in the general election. ”I think Nithya” — who did not come from the ranks of DSA organizing like Mamdani — “has more skepticism from parts of the left because of that.”

Raman will face scrutiny from LA’s progressive left on a host of issues: bloated police department spending amounting to roughly a quarter of the city’s nearly $15 billion budget; fear of collaboration between ICE and law enforcement agencies; the 2028 Olympics prompting an expansion of surveillance; rising homelessness; and failing infrastructure.

Weeks before the November election, Raman seemed less concerned with movement-based allegiances or ideological labels, saying she is “a capitalist and I’m also a democratic socialist.” Before the primary in June, she said she was “one of the most independent voices in City Hall” when asked about her membership with DSA. The statements and her votes in city council have prompted intense debate among DSA-LA’s members over whether Raman holds up to democratic socialist ideals.

While most Angelenos do not care about such fine distinctions, Raman’s measured embrace of the socialist mantle has created among some activists the perception of a more responsive audience in city hall compared to previous administrations. Yet to others on LA’s progressive left, Raman’s ideological elusiveness reads as political unreliability.

“I don’t think Nithya Raman is accountable to anyone in the movement,” said Kris Rehl, an activist who volunteered for Raman during her 2020 city council run and now runs the mutual aid group LA Street Care. “If you do not subscribe to any ideology, you can’t be held accountable to it.”

Rehl, who advocates for abolishing anti-camping bans that criminalize homeless encampments near schools and daycares, expressed dismay over Raman’s previous votes on expanding the police department despite running on defunding the police in 2020.

Others like Tal Levy, a member of DSA-LA’s electoral politics committee, remain more optimistic about what Raman can deliver as mayor. While DSA-LA is pushing for reallocating funds from the police budget into social services, Levy sees the value of Raman’s pledge to support LA Forward’s initiative of citywide expansion of unarmed crisis response teams, which divert certain 911 calls to teams of social workers and clinicians, rather than police.

“Even if Nithya were a fire-breathing abolitionist, it would still be a long fight to make those changes,” said Levy, who has been organizing with DSA-LA for nearly a decade. “But I believe there is plenty of room for us to make material wins in the short term.”

Room to Push

While there is debate over how much power DSA-LA has within LA’s political landscape, the group provided Raman additional attention and credibility among leftist voters, which was only bolstered by the successes of other DSA-endorsed candidates in New York and in congressional races across the nation.

The DSA’s National Political Committee, however, spurred one of the biggest public rifts during Raman’s campaign. The committee held a vote to un-endorse Raman over her perceived lack of support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which hadn’t been included by the DSA-LA on its endorsement questionnaire. After a week of debate and dueling resolutions, and an email from Raman, in which she wrote, “the best way for working Angelenos to stand in solidarity with Gaza is through non-violent protest, legislative action, and diplomatic pressure, including BDS,” the national committee decided against rescinding its endorsement of Raman by a narrow margin.

Frances Gill, one of three DSA-LA members on the DSA national political committee, voted against rescinding the group’s endorsement. She opposed the idea of alienating the organization’s second largest chapter as “bad organizing and bad leadership,” especially in a high-profile race when the stakes for the regional and national chapters were so closely intertwined.

“The public ties us to one another,” Gill said of the DSA and Raman, “and there’s not a lot of other key players who have also played such a critical role in her being able to win. So I think that gives us an outsized seat at the table.”

She was a part of the faction among national leadership that instead called for a long-term pressure campaign on Raman on the issue of Israel and Palestine. The group is planning to push Raman on what she can do as mayor to halt the transportation of military hardware that makes its way through the Los Angeles International Airport to Israel. Organizers also plan to call for an end to real estate events in LA facilitating the sale of housing illegally built in the occupied West Bank. They will also examine whether the city itself is invested in companies that are profiting off Israel’s genocide in Gaza and apartheid rule of Palestinians.

“I think there is room to push,” Gill said.

Another major public spat between progressives and Raman took place in January before she announced her candidacy for mayor.

Catching housing advocates by surprise, Raman introduced a motion to reform the city’s “mansion tax” to make exemptions for developers. Raman claimed that the tax, known as Measure ULA, was inadvertently preventing construction of new multi-family housing. Organizers opposed the idea, since the tax generates funds for services to support existing affordable housing and keep people housed, and that carveouts for developers would only fuel displacement of low-income renters, possibly pushing more people to the streets.

LA Forward was among those blindsided by the motion, which she eventually withdrew. Before endorsing Raman, Levitus and the group met with the candidate alongside organizers in an activist’s home.

“She talked about, ‘The times when I’ve succeeded, it’s because I built a coalition, the times when I failed, it’s because I didn’t, and I didn’t bring people along,’” Levitus recalled from the July meeting. “She really owned her mistake. I don’t know how much her mind has changed intellectually about the policy, but think clearly she recognizes that she needed to do something different — and that might lead to her pushing for a policy that is different from what she had pushed for before.”

Police Chief Dilemma

Among Raman’s early tests progressives will be watching for is how she fulfills her pledge to fire LAPD police chief Jim McDonnell. Raman was among the councilmembers who approved his appointment in 2024, despite concerns around his track record of collaborating with ICE as LA County sheriff. She has since said she would fire McDonnell over his response to the ICE raids and his refusal to enforce a state law that banned federal agents from wearing masks.

Yet the pledge to replace McDonnell may present a political quagmire for Raman, given that the mayor in LA cannot unilaterally force out a police chief. The city’s police commission, consisting of five civilians appointed by the mayor, must make that decision. Raman first will need to assemble her own commission, but that process also requires approval from a city council that remains largely supportive of the police department.

William Gude, a vocal police accountability advocate who supported Raman in the election, said he planned to push the mayor to circumvent the process by asking McDonnell to resign. “I’m putting pressure on her from day one,” he said. “There’s some promises that she made, and those promises need to be kept.”

In her first press conference as mayor-elect, Raman sidestepped a question about whether she still planned to fire McDonnell, amid public threats from the police union warning of “Armageddon.” “Public safety is the most important service the city is delivering to its people,” said Raman, noting the chief was one of her first phone calls after winning.

Activist pressure could be a burden for Raman — or a tool she could use to force legislation through a city council she knows well, according to Gude. “Does she want to have activists coming after her, also while battling 15 council members?” said Gude, who goes by @FilmthePoliceLA on social media. “Or would she rather have the activist base going after the council members that are coming after her, to create a buffer, to do a lot of her heavy lifting? It’s a choice she has to make.”

Hamid Khan, who heads the Stop Spying LAPD Coalition, is among those who is closely watching who Raman appoints to her police commission. But he sees Raman’s pledge of firing McDonnell as “a band-aid” for the more glaring structural issues of the department. While crediting Raman’s opposition to automated license plate readers from Flock Safety and Axon, Khan also pointed to Raman’s historic support for expanding the police department.

While in city council, Raman voted to expand LAPD’s budget three times: in 2021, 2022, and 2023. But she also voted against police raises in 2023, and this year, she opposed a plan by Bass to hire 170 more officers. She has said on the campaign trail she does not wish to expand the police budget, but also said she would not cut into it either.

In the span of her time in city council, the LAPD has expanded its surveillance reach, Khan said. The department is slowly unrolling its Real-Time Crime Centers, which meld automated license plate reader technology, social media monitoring software, and CCTV cameras into a constant surveillance tool. He warned such a technology, while marketed to curb retail theft, will disproportionately harm Black and brown Angelenos.

“We have to situate the people’s expectations in Los Angeles that they’re not based upon the comment, ‘I’m gonna fire Jim McDonald,’” said Khan, who advocates for abolishing the budding police outposts. “What does that do? The fundamentals still remain the same.”

A True Outsider

There is a notion among some on the left that Raman is very much a part of the political machine that bred some of LA’s ongoing problems. She has served on city council for five years and was an ally to Bass, having endorsed Bass just weeks before jumping in the race herself. Yet Raman, a Harvard-educated urban planner and former entertainment director of Time’s Up, is in many respects an outsider to the political establishment.

Former City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who now runs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, called Raman’s victory a “reordering of the governing class in Los Angeles.” For the past several decades, LA politics has been run by establishment Democrats, such as Bass or her predecessor, Eric Garcetti, son of a former LA County district attorney; the chambers of commerce; lobbyists; longtime city hall staffers; all riding the influence of homeowners.

Lex Steppling, an organizer with Los Angeles Community Action Network and a critic of Raman’s time in city council, said in his personal capacity that the “political recalibration” with her victory in city hall was a welcome sight.

Steppling grew up in a generation of LA political activists who got their start organizing with Community Coalition, which Bass founded in 1990 and for a long time was the only progressive organization in the city offering paid political work. He watched as his peers grew to leading campaigns on issues such as policing and mass incarceration, then began running for elected office. They brought with them their organizing chops, but also their relationships with the organizations that gave them their start. Steppling described this as a “relational ecosystem,” in which movements would be co-opted into electoral politics — in which scoring political points became more important than addressing the issues.

He blamed the lack of gains on policing and mass incarceration since the 2020 George Floyd uprising on such a relational ecosystem. A victory for Raman could mark a reset to such an establishment, and he hopes activists will capitalize on the opening.

“The right kind of openings to do the right kind of work will reemerge,” said Steppling, who helped lead a successful anti-incarceration measure in 2020. “It’s gonna once again start to be about the demands.”

Raman’s election evoked for Bonin memories of the last time an LA incumbent mayor was ousted. In 2005, then-state Assembly member Antonio Villaraigosa beat James Hahn, becoming the city’s first Latino mayor. Villaraigosa, previously director of Southern California ACLU, was seen as a progressive candidate at the time. That’s not how he governed. An early sign of his establishment politics was hiring a longtime political insider as his chief of staff.

Raman will also signal her governing priorities with the hires for her transition team and cabinet.

Some organizers were encouraged to see progressive figures added to her campaign, such as Faizah Malik, a civil rights attorney and former city council candidate also endorsed by DSA-LA, and Jamie York, an advocate for greater transparency in city politics whose high-profile rejection by the city council as an ethics commission appointee drew public scrutiny. It remains unclear what if any role they would play in city hall.

The LA Times reported that Rick Cole, former deputy mayor, is expected to supervise Raman’s transition team alongside Andrea Conant, Raman’s chief of staff in city council.

“How big is the table,” Bonin said, “and how much of the activist community is at the table?”

Update: November 9, 2026
This story has been updated to note that Lex Steppling was speaking in his personal capacity, not as a representative of the Los Angeles Community Action Network.

The post The Pressure on LA’s First Self-Proclaimed Socialist Mayor appeared first on The Intercept.

How a Socialist Can Govern a City Under the Thumb of the Trump Administration

Jessica Washington — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Socialists will soon govern three of the United States’ most influential cities: Los Angeles, New York City, and the District of Columbia.

Janeese Lewis George joins Zohran Mamdani and Nithya Raman as part of a new wave of socialist local executives. But unlike Mamdani and Raman, Lewis George will govern a city under federal rule.

D.C. is a “federal district,” subject to the whims and micromanagement of the president and Congress. If the federal government doesn’t like the city’s legislation, it can override it. This poses additional challenges if Lewis George wants to change how things are done in the nation’s capital.

Lewis George, a current D.C. city councilmember, has promised to usher in sweeping reforms centered around affordability, including stronger tenant protections, investments in affordable childcare, and long-sought-after reforms on the city’s restrictive zoning laws. She rose to political prominence as the first socialist on the city council, winning her seat on a platform of defunding the police in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests in 2020. (She has since called for hiring additional Metropolitan Police officers.)

For Lewis George to fulfill her campaign promises is “going to require Janeese to use her position and her longstanding reputation as an organizer to convince members of Congress that we can exercise Home Rule and that we deserve the dignity of any other collective body, like a state, in this country,” said Kurtis Hagans, chair of Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Lewis George in the primary.

All local D.C. bills are required to go through a congressional review period of 30 working days for civil legislation and 60 working days for criminal bills. If Congress doesn’t like the bill, it can either decide to let that review period lapse, allowing the legislation to go into effect, or pass a joint disapproval resolution in both the House and the Senate. If they pass a disapproval resolution, it goes to the president’s desk, where they can choose to veto and let the new law stand or sign it and override the legislation.

Speaking to The Intercept on Election Day, voters said they supported Lewis George because they wanted to elect someone who would fight for everyday Washingtonians.

“I was certainly motivated by wanting really strong leadership for D.C. and people who are going to put D.C. first, in the sense of the residents and the community members and not solely as our role as the capital city,” said Izetta Mobley, a voter in Ward 4, where Lewis George serves as a councilmember.

For Mobley and other voters, that primarily means tackling issues of affordability. “Affordable housing and the rise in unhoused folks, and making sure that unhoused folks have support and city resources …those were very important to me,” said Mobley.

Although Democrats took both houses of Congress on Tuesday, paving a clearer path for the district to flex its autonomy, Lewis George will still have to contend with Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, both moderates, who are likely to lead the Senate and the House next session. Schumer and Jeffries were often critical of Mamdani when he was running for mayor in their home state of New York, though they seized primarily on his stance on Israel.

Hagans pointed out that Lewis George has the longtime support of former at-large councilmember Robert White, who was elected as Washington’s non-voting delegate on Tuesday. But Hagans said the DC Metro DSA is also preparing to organize residents to put pressure on Congress, given ”the relative powerlessness of the district in the face of Congress.”

Governing Washington has other pitfalls. The district is hamstrung by the fact that the D.C. Council is required to pass a balanced budget and is prohibited from carrying it over into the following year. (Congress also gets to approve it.) The city is already struggling to close a $1.1 billion budget deficit for the upcoming fiscal year — caused by Congress.

In order to achieve her agenda, Lewis George has suggested raising taxes on businesses and the city’s wealthiest residents. For that, she’ll need the support of the city council.

Lewis George is aided by the fact that Tuesday also ushered in a record number of socialists on the city council, adding two, Aparna Raj and Oye Owolewa. “A big part of the vision for the district is to have these organizers on the council as well as an organizer-in-chief at the executive level,” said Hagans.

Aside from bold economic policies, many voters who spoke to The Intercept said they want the new administration to prioritize resistance to the federal takeover of Washington, D.C., and ending the scourge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We’ve seen ICE raids in our neighborhood, literally where our kids used to go to school,” said Jason Cherkis, another Ward 4 voter. “That’s one reason we voted for Janeese for mayor because she was out front and speaking about ICE in a way our current mayor never did.”

Despite the restrictions placed on a D.C. mayor, immigrant advocacy and civil rights groups concerned about the incursion of ICE in the district are pushing for Lewis George to take a stand.

“We want to see the next mayor doing everything possible to protect these most vulnerable communities from continued attacks,” said Peggy Ramin, policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia. “Whether that is legislation or the mayor ensuring that the administration’s agencies are well educated as to what that means in terms of limiting cooperation and even prohibiting cooperation.”

In particular, Ramin said that her organization is calling on the D.C. council and Lewis George to pass legislation that would allow residents to sue any officer — local or federal — who violates constitutional rights.

Ramin is aware of the challenges facing the district to pass this type of legislation without incurring interference from Congress or President Donald Trump — who has personally vowed to oppose Lewis George.

“No matter what Congress ends up doing, whether it disapproves or passes a disapproval resolution or not, I think people here in D.C. are really demanding and asking our council to step up and pass this sort of legislation,” said Ramin.

Aside from federal immigration officials, residents also complained about the National Guard, whose presence was felt even on Election Day. “I have two boys, Black men,” said one voter, Tamika Jackson, “and the harassment is out of control.”

As evidenced by the record number of socialists winning power across the country, Hagans says it’s clear both D.C. and the nation are looking for fighters.

“Democrats have promised a lot for a long time, but they seem unwilling to stand up to Trumpism,” said Hagans. Voters are noticing “this new class of democratic socialists,” he said, concluding, “Maybe I don’t know what that means entirely, but let’s give it a shot.”

The post How a Socialist Can Govern a City Under the Thumb of the Trump Administration appeared first on The Intercept.

Republicans Are Desperate to Pretend They Never Supported the War With Iran

Alain Stephens — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 21:24:17 +0000

Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks during a midterm campaign rally at JRJ Construction on Oct. 29, 2026, in Weatherford, Texas. Photo: Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images

To say that Americans were pissed off is an understatement.

On Tuesday, Democrats didn’t just seize control of both houses of Congress. They redrew the American political map, capturing offices that had remained reliably Republican for generations, from the Deep South to Kansas and Texas. The Lone Star State alone, with its 40 Electoral College votes, now raises the possibility of a seismic shift in the calculus of future presidential elections.

The sheer scale of the historic Democratic surge⁠ delivered an unmistakable rebuke to America’s supposedly populist president. The message was clear and simple: We do not like you.

Much of Americans’ rapid disillusionment with the Trump administration can be traced to a single word — Iran — and the cascading economic hardships Americans have endured as the war has dragged on.

The Iran war has gone from a Republican loyalty test to a political albatross.

For the GOP, the threat is existential. The war has gone from a Republican loyalty test to a political albatross for many of its former supporters, one that many Republicans are now jettisoning themselves away from to salvage their own political futures.

By Wednesday, it had become the chief explanation for the party’s sweeping electoral defeat, with Vice President JD Vance declaring unequivocally on X that “the reason we lost is the war.”

“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest,” he wrote. “But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” Coming from Trump’s own vice president, it was a striking about-face.

The tirade also raised an awkward question ahead of the 2028 presidential race: How does a potential successor to the MAGA mantle campaign against a war waged by his own administration?

Trump, however, has not gone nearly as far as his VP. Although the president acknowledged the war hurt Republicans, he still defended it on its merits. Speaking with reporters Wednesday after expounding at length about his White House ballroom, Trump said, “The Iran thing we had to do, and we continue to do it.”

Where Did All the Warmongers Go?

But on the campaign trail, Republicans were not completely oblivious to Americans’ collective frustration with the Iran war.

In September, ABC News identified 17 Republican lawmakers and candidates who had called for ending the war through public statements or votes. Much of the pressure came in competitive midterms races, as the conflict’s effects on oil, diesel, and fertilizer prices reached American households.

In Iowa, Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson called for a “successful and immediate end” to the war in September, warning that voters were paying the price at gas pumps and grocery stores. Yet she voted six times against House measures directing Trump to halt the attacks. During an October 25 ABC interview, Hinson said she would not rule out a post-election U.S. offensive and said she trusted Trump and the military to choose the right timetable. Despite the president praising her weight loss at a recent rally, tepidly breaking with Trump wasn’t enough to get Hinson over the line, and she lost to Democrat Josh Turek by 4.5 percentage points.

Michigan also had its share of Iran backtrackers. Republican Senate hopeful Mike Rogers described Iran as an “imminent threat” when the bombing began on February 28. In May, he called the conflict a potential “win-win-win.” But with the midterms fast approaching, Rogers released a campaign ad declaring “the war with Iran needs to end” quickly and warned Michigan families could no longer afford the economic fallout.

Rep. John James, the Republican candidate for Michigan governor, likewise praised Trump’s use of force early in the war, saying the president “had the balls” to “assure the survival and success of liberty.” He voted against six House war-powers resolutions, including as recently as September. Days after that vote, he said the war needed to wrap up “quickly.” He went on to declare in an interview, “the position has always been, I hate war.”

Both Rogers and James lost their races.

Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a possible contender in the Republican Party’s next presidential contest who could reportedly be up for Pete Hegseth’s job, warned Monday that the war was a “big, big drag” on his party. Trump, DeSantis pointed out, campaigned against another Middle Eastern war. Now voters are dealing with higher fuel costs, and Republicans who refuse to acknowledge the connection are “gaslighting” them. But back in spring, DeSantis defended the strikes on Iranian leadership, describing its government as “a fanatical, apocalyptic, militant Islamist regime.”

The polling helps explain the Republican panic. An Associated Press poll found roughly 6 in 10 voters believed the U.S. made a “wrong decision” in attacking Iran. And it’s not as though Republicans weren’t warned. A handful within their own ranks, including Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, opposed the war from its earliest days and backed efforts to rein it in. But those criticisms seemed to fall on deaf ears.

A Hasty Retreat

With plenty of blame to go around, the criticism has gone beyond candidates and into the conservative media ecosystem.

During the network’s primetime Election Night coverage, Fox News host Sean Hannity told his colleague Bret Baier that the results would have been different without the Iran war. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh called the war a betrayal of America First principles, demanded new Republican leadership, and labeled the conflict a “catastrophically stupid decision.”

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Trump breaking his promise not to start another foreign war his “biggest betrayal” and said “Americans are fed up with it.”

Other commentators placed the responsibility squarely on Trump himself for sucking his own party into a political quagmire. In The Federalist, senior editor John Daniel Davidson blamed the party’s collapse on Trump’s undermining of a GOP coalition built upon rejecting the interventionist politics of the George W. Bush era.

Some prominent Republican operatives are sure to be thrown under the bus by their own party in the retreat. The first to get the boot may be none other than Hegseth, America’s chief “warfighter,” who has been one of the war’s most enthusiastic, and public, cheerleaders. The defense secretary responded to the criticisms in a nearly six-minute-long video posted online on Thursday, in which he seemed to make the case for keeping his job, touting his elimination of the “Marxist ideology” of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and tarring transgender troops as having a “mental illness.”

“Regardless of how people care about the war, which I believe is a courageous and historic effort that will ensure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon, we need to continue, as President Trump did in his first term, to rebuild our military,” he said. “This is not about me, but of course, the other side, in case you noticed, they’re obsessed.”

Already facing growing Republican dissatisfaction and a ballooning roster of disgruntled and ousted senior military officials, Hegseth now faces the prospect of investigations by a Democratic-controlled Congress and an impeachment effort led by Massie. And while Trump has so far publicly defended his defense secretary, he has also reportedly consulted allies about whether to hit the ejector seat on Pete.

Tuesday’s results show voters are increasingly willing to hold politicians accountable for needless war.

But while Republicans and Democrats read polls and calculate the political currency of war and economic hardship, the human cost cannot be measured in votes. At least 3,636 people had been killed in Iran as of early April, including 1,701 civilians and 254 children, according to human rights monitors. More fighting has followed and likely driven that number far higher.

At least 23 American service members have died in operations connected to the war, with almost 900 wounded by enemy fire. But these are estimates, and the Trump administration has worked to actively obfuscate the true casualty rates of the war. These are not electoral statistics. They are lives lost, families shattered, and consequences that will endure long after administrations swap office spaces.

For Republicans now scrambling to distance themselves from a deeply unpopular war, the political consequences may be harder to escape than their own voting records. Tuesday’s results show voters are increasingly willing to hold politicians accountable for needless wars, and the suffering inherited from them.

The post Republicans Are Desperate to Pretend They Never Supported the War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Pentagon Officials Float Names of Hegseth’s Replacement

Nick Turse — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 19:57:03 +0000

Replacements for embattled War Secretary Pete Hegseth are increasingly being discussed at the Pentagon, according to current and former defense officials. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is at the top of many lists. Mike Waltz, the disgraced former national security adviser at the center of the 2025 Signalgate messaging scandal and currently U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has also been mentioned.

Those and other names have emerged as Hegseth is facing down a bipartisan impeachment effort as early as next week and is in a mad scramble to hold onto his job.

Officials acknowledged that both DeSantis and Waltz were dismal choices, but all who spoke with The Intercept said even the most problematic picks would be preferable to Hegseth, who has been excoriated at the Pentagon and beyond for Signal-gate, his purge of top military leaders, his inability to defeat Yemen’s Houthis in 2025 or win the Iran war in 2026, his campaign of extrajudicial killings in attacks on so-called drug boats, his efforts to weaken transparency and scuttle accountability, and his obsession with troops’ testosterone levels, among other distractions.

In the wake of an election rout that handed Democrats firm control of the House and the Senate, Hegseth is in the crosshairs of lawmakers whom he has treated with contempt for two years. “Dead man walking,” said one official in an exposé published by The Intercept Thursday. Hours after publication of that report, Hegseth launched a desperate bid to stave off his ouster, employing his Fox News-host-honed skills at fanning culture war flames to air his grievances and whip up the support of his boss and the MAGA faithful.

In a video posted on X, the self-styled secretary of war pulled out the stops: “He literally took a bullet for this nation,” Hegseth said amid obsequious flattery of Trump. “He shook his fist and said ‘fight, fight, fight,’ and so will we.”

The chief of what he recently called “the most powerful, most lethal and most prepared military on the planet,” Hegseth cast himself as a besieged victim and tied himself to Trump in a naked attempt to save his job. “A disgruntled, defeated congressman, along with all his Democrat allies, has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly, just like they tried against President Trump twice,” Hegseth carped in a video filmed outside the Pentagon.

Hegseth was referring to outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who said Wednesday that he plans to reintroduce articles of impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors when the House is back in session next week. Numerous Democrats have indicated a desire to join Massie’s effort to oust Hegseth since their midterm election landslide, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is poised to be the next speaker.

Hegseth’s missive to Trump hit many hot-button issues that Americans seemingly repudiated in Tuesday’s electoral landslide. He boasted about driving “the weird and the woke” out of the military and took aim at his and Trump’s enemies. “Why do the Democrats and the deep state radicals really hate us? Because we tore down their sacred cows one by one and without apology,” said Hegseth, who rattled off a list of things he has torn down, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; military efforts to combat climate change; the rechristening of military bases named for Confederate leaders; and the rights of trans service members.

Hegseth’s video rant was part of a doomsday plan coordinated by chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, first reported by CNN and corroborated by a defense official who spoke with The Intercept. It was accompanied by a coordinated campaign of social media posts by Pentagon underlings trying to tie Hegseth’s fortunes to the president, consisting of photos of the war secretary posturing accompanied by the text, “STAND. FIGHT. DEFEND THE REPUBLIC.”

While it was a brazen attempt to cast any future effort by Trump to cut him loose as an enormous defeat for the president, officials said Parnell’s Hail Mary could succeed. “It’s sad. But it may work because Trump is so easy to manipulate,” said one defense official. “Hegseth knows he is dealing with a president with the mind of a three-year-old.”

During the Pentagon’s Thursday afternoon social media blitz, one of those Hegseth underlings messaged this reporter a clip from the 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s stockbroker character pivots mid-way through announcing his resignation and a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission, declaring: “I’m not fucking leaving! … They’re gonna need a fuckin’ wrecking ball to take me outta here!”

The House has only impeached two Cabinet secretaries: William Belknap, the secretary of war, in 1876; and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, in 2024. In neither case did the Senate vote to convict. Should Massie’s lame-duck impeachment measure succeed in the House, it would likely languish in the Senate where Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., would have little incentive to bring it to a vote, said a congressional staffer for a member on the Armed Services Committee. Still, some pundits predict Hegseth may not survive the weekend, much less the month or the year.

If and when Hegseth is ousted, there will be no shortage of people jockeying to take his place. In addition to DeSantis and Waltz, other names bandied about at the Pentagon or on Capitol Hill include Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, a retired military officer who chose not to run for reelection this year, as well as failed Republican Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who was defeated by Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. Some of those names were mentioned in a Thursday post on X by James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral, former supreme Allied Commander of NATO, and partner and vice chair of Carlyle, a global investment firm with deep Pentagon ties. Stavridis also named Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former secretary of state.

While DeSantis and Trump had been bitter rivals during the 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign, the outgoing Florida governor and assumed 2028 GOP presidential hopeful has since vocally supported Trump’s crackpot initiatives. To advance Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, DeSantis hastily constructed (and then quickly shuttered) “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention hellhole that the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog found did not comply with a slew of federal and state standards. The Florida governor was also the first official to use Trump’s renamed “Gulf of America” for the Gulf of Mexico, in an official document.

Amid the rubble of a devastated Republican Party, DeSantis — a longtime culture warrior who rode what he called what he called “woke gender ideology” to national prominence — quickly pivoted. “The ground shifts and the emphasis, then, is on different things,” he said on Wednesday. “Four years ago, we were in that peak woke era. … Now, the issues are different and Republicans, it seemed like, in some of the ads I was seeing, with how much money they were spending, they really were fighting yesterday’s battle.”

DeSantis also has a troubling military background. As a lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps — a role akin to that of a first-year associate at a law firm — he served at the notorious American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He also served in the failed forever war in Iraq, as a senior legal adviser to the commander of SEAL Team One in Fallujah.

Asked about DeSantis’s standing within the Pentagon, an official said: “Anything is better than Hegseth.”

The post Pentagon Officials Float Names of Hegseth’s Replacement appeared first on The Intercept.

Is There a Left Candidate for President?

Akela Lacy — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:06:47 +0000

The race for 2028 is already starting, and progressives are all asking one question: Who will take up the left’s mantle in the next presidential election?

An obvious first choice for many self-described leftists, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has said she is seriously considering a run. Ocasio-Cortez laid the groundwork for a potential presidential bid rooted in economic populism and “fighting oligarchy” while campaigning alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for midterm candidates around the country this cycle.

Democratic strategists, however, have pointed out it would be far easier for Ocasio-Cortez to run for Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer’s seat in 2028; and it’s even possible the 75-year-old presumptive majority leader will retire.

There isn’t a clear pick for another Democratic candidate with star power who could mount a truly progressive campaign — presenting the left with the threat of losing the momentum that fueled a democratic socialist wave during the primaries and animated campaigns across the ideological spectrum on Tuesday.

That, said her former spokesperson Lauren Hitt, is not Ocasio-Cortez’s problem.

“The wrong reason to run would be because nobody else is running in the progressive lane.”

“I think the wrong reason to run would be because nobody else is running in the progressive lane,” said Hitt, who now advises progressive and moderate candidates. “She has made a lot of good investments in the midterms and in helping build up the progressive bench, but it was not her job to make sure we had another person to run.”

(Representatives for Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

So if Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t run from the left, who will?

The Field So Far

Candidates exploring potential presidential bids include a few newer faces alongside a very similar cast of moderates who campaigned for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 and 2020 primaries.

Names like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and even the party’s former nominee Kamala Harris are making the rounds; Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., has also laid the groundwork for a run. The recently reelected Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has long been viewed as a potential contender, as has Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, though he said last month he’s not planning on a run.

None of them are people you would necessarily liken to someone like Ocasio-Cortez or the grandfather of the movement behind her, Sanders himself.

Rep. Ro Khanna of California is so far the most “progressive” person openly considering a run. Khanna served as national co-chair of Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, and he’s long been a voice for an anti-interventionist foreign policy. He drew the ire of tech billionaires for supporting a wealth tax in California.

Yet there’s a palpable skepticism around Khanna among leftists, even if they can’t quite put their finger on why. Some weren’t impressed when he defended his support for funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system after publicizing an arrest in the West Bank earlier this year. (Khanna later came out against funding the Iron Dome). And as a multimillionaire, he’s also drawn criticism from the right and the left for his personal wealth.

There’s a palpable skepticism around Khanna among leftists, even if they can’t quite put their finger on why.

Like Ocasio-Cortez, Khanna has said he will back Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., for House Speaker despite pledges from other candidates to withhold their support for either Jeffries or Schumer, both moderates, for leadership positions next session.

Leveraging Economic Populism

It’s still incredibly early, but there’s one unifying theme emerging from Tuesday’s results for whichever candidate decides to try to court the progressive vote.

“All I know is that the populist lane is wide open for someone to seize it,” said Ravi Mangla, the spokesperson for the Working Families Party.

Victories over the past two years, from Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City to the clutch of democratic socialists and progressives heading to Congress in January, show that Democrats can marshal discontent with Donald Trump and the far right to elect candidates running on progressive policies.

”Voters were very clear: People are very, very angry,” said Greg Krieg, a progressive Democratic strategist who works with Slingshot Strategies and is the spokesperson for the pro-Palestine super PAC American Priorities. “There is a focus on economic populism that transcends the ideological splits in the party.”

With the rising cost of living, and candidates tapping into that populism, the question for progressives is how to best wield the blue version of economic populism against the right-wing version that powered Trump’s rise.

“Right-wing populism didn’t really defeat left-wing populism, it just ran against a kind of corporate slop for many years,” Krieg said.

This era’s new “kitchen table” issues are a constellation of economic woes that voters are increasingly connecting to the forces concentrating wealth and political power in the hands of the few. Democrats should respond to that by fighting, visibly, against the things that take money out of people’s pockets, corruption and price-gouging among them, Krieg said.

“I think that the American people, if they are presented a choice of right-wing populism and left-wing populism, will opt for the left-wing populism,” Krieg said. “And I think that’s quadruply true now that we’ve done the right-wing populism experiment and it’s been such a fiasco — so let’s give them that option.”

The factors influencing how Democrats approach 2028 are taking shape now. They include the debate over who will lead the party in the House and Senate, though any effort to stop Schumer or Jeffries from leading roles would face long odds. And how Democrats fare in the next presidential race will depend in large part on what they do with their control of Congress during the last two years of Trump’s final term in office.

DSA Endorsement?

Then there is the group that helped power the rise of Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, the next mayors of Washington and Los Angeles, and the largest incoming bloc of socialist members of Congress in history: the Democratic Socialists of America.

Any candidate that gets buy-in from DSA will have to support policies like Medicare for All, taxing the rich, a Green New Deal, and an embargo on U.S. arms to Israel. DSA, which endorsed both Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 primary bids, is running a presidential exploratory committee that will eventually vote to endorse a candidate after collecting input from its members.

DSA passed a resolution to explore a 2028 endorsement at its national convention last year. And there isn’t necessarily a consensus among its members — more than 125,000 people across 130 chapters in 43 states — on whether or not they want to see Ocasio-Cortez run, said Ella Teevan, who chairs the group’s presidential exploratory group and sits on its National Political Committee.

“The Bernie case feels just a little bit different because I think the membership was a little bit more united around Bernie, although by no means unanimously,” Teevan said. “If and when we do consider an AOC endorsement, hers will be a little bit more contentious. But like I said, that’s the beauty of DSA.”

Though Ocasio-Cortez is no shoo-in, DSA members haven’t coalesced around any other candidate — and it’s not clear they will.

“I know that there are other quote-unquote progressives who might be considering a presidential run in 2028, but I think it’s really clear for us that they need to support DSA’s core demands that most people in the United States support,” Teevan said.

“If a candidate were to come along who supported those policies, I think a considerable portion of membership would think about whether we should endorse them,” she said. “But yeah, I don’t think that there’s a natural other person with name recognition in the field that, at least, I can think of right now.”

And there may yet be candidates who enter the race who aren’t yet on the radar, said Hitt, Ocasio-Cortez’s former spokesperson: “It’s totally possible there’s a progressive champion who could fill that lane that we aren’t even thinking of yet.”

The post Is There a Left Candidate for President? appeared first on The Intercept.

Defeating Zionism to Free Palestine

Noura Erakat — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Abdul El-Sayed defeated Mike Rogers in the U.S. Senate race in Michigan after months of Islamophobic abuse, most notably from President Donald Trump, who referred to El-Sayed as “Mohammed.”

“Mohammed goes back to the days of the Jihad. He is a RADICAL Extremist, Terrorist Sympathizer,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last month. “Mohammed’s Values are not exactly those of Michiganders, or those of our Great United States of America!” The people of Michigan thought otherwise.

El-Sayed will be the first-ever Muslim U.S. senator. “He rose to victory,” my Intercept colleagues Matt Sledge and Jonah Valdez wrote, “with a campaign animated by his opposition to U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, making him a key figure for a left critical of entrenched foreign policy interests and a target for a political establishment intent on preserving the U.S. relationship with the Israeli government.”

In an Election Day equivalent of a Hail Mary, as El-Sayed and Democrats from coast to coast were in the midst of a rout of the GOP, Trump went on Fox News to announce the U.S. would stop providing $4 billion in annual aid to Israel, specifically blaming El-Sayed for making it a hot-button issue. “The left uses the $4 billion payment — that everybody knows about, it’s no secret — as a signal of unfairness,” said Trump.

There is no reason to believe the aid will stop. Trump is an inveterate liar, and structural issues with U.S. assistance make it unlikely. And even if it did end, Israel’s genocide will continue. Almost 75,000 Gazans have been killed since October 2023, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. A recent U.N. report said, “Israeli authorities and forces continue to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza.”

Ending the genocide will mean decolonizing Gaza and offering Palestinians a path to justice. That, Noura Erakat and John Reynolds write in their new book, means “confronting the problem of Zionism” and everything fundamental to it: racism, conquest, settler colonialism, and apartheid laws. Today, Erakat and Reynolds offer an essay adapted from “Confronting Zionism,” exploring how the Zionist project can be dismantled and Israeli colonialism can be demolished, leading to Palestinian liberation and a future built on redistribution, reparations, and refugee return.

—Nick Turse, editor and TomDispatch

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The World at a Crossroads

Three years on from the onset of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we are at a crucial hinge point. The world today, when it comes to Palestine, stands at the crossroads: meaningful support for liberation and decolonization, or the normalization of colonial expansion and erasure.

Since the 2021 “Manifesto of Dignity and Hope” and the unified call of Palestinians to confront Zionism, the Israeli political sphere has only continued to sustain and entrench its fascist trajectory and its racist laws. After 2023, Israeli settler colonialism and domination escalated into all-out destruction and elimination. Palestinians who had been enduring suffocating apartheid and siege for far too long were now subjected to genocidal assault. Though the context on the ground shifted, the urgent need for a better understanding and challenge to Zionism on political, legal, structural, and ideological grounds remained.

It was a new generation of Palestinian activists who produced the Manifesto of Dignity and Hope, but their text was shaped by the legacy and spirit of Palestinian revolutionaries and anti-colonial thinkers from earlier periods. Common language echoes through the generations. A quarter-century ago, Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote the core of the issue of Palestine “is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid. We should concentrate our resistance on … fully confronting the apartheid provisions inherent in Zionism.” And as diplomat Fayez Sayegh captured it in 1965: Racism is not an acquired or incidental or passing feature of the Israeli state; it is “inherent in the very ideology of Zionism.” Today, we can draw inspiration from these intergenerational reverberations across Palestinian theory and activism, in their consonant commitments to confronting Zionism.

Part of our own task as anti-colonial legal scholars is to expand our analysis of the limitations of narrow liberal legal readings of apartheid and inequality, and to highlight how a radical critique of Israeli apartheid is essential to dismantling Israel’s apartheid regime. This requires scrutiny not only of Zionism and Israeli settler colonialism, but also of the concept of apartheid itself. Apartheid was previously understood in the context of the African anti-apartheid struggle, in a formulation originally coined by the South African Communist Party, as “colonialism of a special type.” By the late 1990s, however, apartheid had been stripped in mainstream understandings of its global character and colonial essence, and effectively reframed as “racial discrimination of a special type.”

One factor in this analytical shift was the domestication of racism in international law, which has obscured its relationship to global capitalism and transformed racism into a problem for individual countries to resolve through juridical reform or diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Racism is not merely abhorrent because people’s feelings are hurt or one feels unseen, however, but because it is entangled with power and economic structures, and because materially, the continuum of racist violence culminates in genocide, which is squarely understood as a global phenomenon. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed to this in 1967 when he said: “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide. … If one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.”

International law attempts to capture this continuum. Three of the specific acts conducted to maintain apartheid are identical to the acts conducted to commit genocide under their respective legal definitions. In the former, they are done with the intent to dominate; in the latter, with the intent to destroy. These are not mutually exclusive, but rather interact with each other: Colonialism, apartheid, and genocide combine under the Zionist project in Palestine to produce a system of oppression based on conquest, structural racism, dispossession, and elimination.

Palestinian opposition to Zionism and the imperatives of decolonization — for political emancipation, material survival, and cultural flourishing — are the central thrust of our work. The colonial origins and early legal mechanics of Zionist settler colonialism and Israel’s apartheid regime reveal how Zionism functioned both as a colonial initiative and a racializing project. This manifested in colonial institutions even before the state was established in 1948, after which they were enshrined in racist legal regimes. A broad structural analysis of the institutional and economic processes of land and capital accumulation that have occurred under settler colonialism in Palestine is necessary to understand the machinery of conquest and dispossession — and the role that racism has played in driving it forward. Drawing on the anti-colonial Palestinian intellectual tradition, we can see that an antiracist analysis has been organic to the Palestinian liberation struggle and is precisely what shaped U.N. initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s that condemned Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination alongside apartheid and colonialism.

Despite all the analysis of Israeli state racism and colonial violence since 1948 and all of the mass popular mobilizations and legal advocacy against Israeli apartheid, nothing substantive was done at an international, political, or institutional level to address or redress it. This inaction and the impunity afforded to Israel inevitably culminated in the situation that the world found itself in after October 2023: unsanctioned apartheid accelerating into unadulterated genocide — and given the green light by those who had the power to stop it. There was a decade of increasingly flagged warning signs leading up to this. But Palestinian scholars and international lawyers who had warned of a “prelude to genocide” or “slow-motion” genocide over the years were largely ignored, and in some cases castigated. The consequences have been catastrophic. The United States actively funded, armed, and cheer-led the butchery in Gaza. European Union leaders chose to “stand with Israel” as it announced its starvation policy and war of annihilation.

“Confronting Zionism,” by Noura Erakat and John Reynolds. Available on Bookshop.org

We would not have ended up in this present moment if the critiques of Zionism as colonialism and racism and the reality of Israel as an apartheid regime had been taken seriously. In 1975, the U.N., led by a Third World majority, declared “international co-operation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neocolonialism, foreign occupation, zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination.” Against this, the Western world, led by the United States, has worked to normalize Israeli apartheid.

We see part of our task now as one of continuing to build on the recent “mainstreaming” of condemnations of Israeli apartheid and genocide, but in a way that decisively resists the drift toward narrower, liberal articulations and insists on the importance of radical, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial analysis and praxis. In our work as critical legal scholars, we situate apartheid and the shape it has taken as a category in international law, and we explore the limits and potential of legal tactics, arguments, and institutions to dismantle Israeli apartheid and end the genocide in Gaza. We argue that while legal actions should be pursued in the service of political and social movements, legal logic is insufficient in itself — and can risk narrowing or distorting the horizon of Palestinian liberation. In our view, the proliferating condemnations of Israel by major human rights organizations and mainstream figures in recent years have belatedly reflected the popular consensus and a political reality that Palestinian activism had made undeniable. They also fit, to varying degrees, within a wider pattern of containment.

As one example, take the case of European officials and states finally beginning to acknowledge the heinousness of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza in mid-2025, but doing so primarily in the form of calling for a Palestinian state. They did so only after almost two full years of enabling untold destruction, and refusing to impose any serious sanctions to stem the genocide. Their moves to recognize Palestinian statehood were not about any genuine support for Palestinian self-determination, but rather a way to stabilize the apartheid status quo and try to slow down the Israeli–U.S. drive to continue the erasure of Gaza and full annexation of the West Bank.

With all of that in mind, it is important to situate the political moment we are in — the increasing focus on Israeli apartheid in recent years and subsequently on the genocide in Gaza — alongside the urgency of thinking about Palestine’s future and our collective responsibilities. In doing so, we have several core aims: to offer a deeper understanding of the nature and extent of Israel’s colonial rule over Palestinian lands and lives; to think through the relationship between the practices of Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide on the one hand, and the institutions and ideology of Zionism on the other; to situate Palestinian liberation and its global solidarity alliances as an antiracist struggle and an anti-colonial movement; and to insist on the need for systemic anti-imperial understandings and critiques of Zionism. To properly confront Zionism and avoid the pitfalls of neo-apartheid, we must be attentive to the necessities and practicalities of decolonization.

The decolonization of Palestine today continues a legacy of other liberation struggles — against European colonization globally, against domestic regimes of fascism, against apartheid in southern Africa, and against white supremacy in the United States and elsewhere. These are political orders that Third World, antiracist, partisan, and socialist movements have fought against throughout the past century and more. We must continue that tradition in the service of decolonization by fleshing out the political, legal, historical, and moral reasoning of anti-colonial and anti-Zionist thinking and movements. In our own writing, we feel we are merely providing footnotes to the political education and organizing that has fanned out from Palestine around the world, and that has shaped what millions of activists and people of conscience have viscerally felt: that Zionist colonial rule should and can be dismantled, and that Palestinians must be supported in their struggle to do so.

The stakes of confronting Zionist settler colonialism are high for the entire world: first and foremost for Palestinians’ own liberation, but also because their struggle is at the epicenter of wider global struggles against structures of domination and exploitation. Zionism is a colonial project in Palestine, but also a vehicle of imperialism in the region — agitating for U.S. war and intervention, acting as an antagonist of imperial aggression against Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen and beyond, and actively collaborating with reactionary geopolitical forces globally. Zionism has been further mobilized by ethnonationalists and imperial projects as a proposition on how to organize a society on a basis of racial hierarchy that leaves its excluded groups to perish. Palestinian revolutionary intellectual Ghassan Kanafani always insisted on the importance of understanding the Palestinian struggle in the context of “the alliance between Zionism and imperialism.” And in positioning Kanafani’s analysis in the context of global movements against imperialism today, educator and organizer Layan Sima Fuleihan reiterates the Palestinian cause is “a banner for all of humanity.”

Naji al-Ali, the Palestinian political cartoonist famous for his iconic Hanzala (or “Handala”) character who symbolizes Palestinian resolve and future return, was himself displaced from northern Palestine as a boy during the Nakba and grew up in refugee camps in Lebanon. Kanafani came across Al-Ali and his artwork in Ein al-Hilweh camp and began to publish his drawings in the early 1960s. Al-Ali went on to produce tens of thousands of cartoons over the next 25 years, and through his art was renowned as a voice of Palestinian and Arab political consciousness. In 1984, just a couple of years before he would be assassinated, Al-Ali reflected on what Hanzala and Palestine represented:

I feel that I can recall and sense every bush, every stone, every house and every tree I passed when I was a child in Palestine. The character of Hanzala was a sort of icon that protected my soul from falling whenever I felt sluggish or I was ignoring my duty. That child was like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to attention and keeping me from error and loss. He was the arrow of the compass, pointing steadily towards Palestine. Not just Palestine in geographical terms, but Palestine in its humanitarian sense — the symbol of a just cause, whether it is located in Egypt, Vietnam or South Africa.

In the decades since then, the idea of Palestine as the compass has resonated in struggles for justice around the world. Most recently, in 2025, the Palestinian Youth Movement and a coalition of solidarity groups brought thousands of activists together for the People’s Conference for Palestine, under the banner “Gaza is the compass.”

A wide array of voices, from community activists to trade union organizers to political representatives, emphasized how central Palestine is to all of the social struggles they are engaged in.

Palestinian doctor Mohammad Mustafa articulated the perspective of the many involved in movements for justice across the globe: “Gaza is the measure of our humanity. It is the litmus test that reveals who we are; as individuals, as a nation, as a world. … The compass points in one direction no matter who you are or where you are. In this way it provides a mandate and direction towards freedom for everyone.”

Lawyer and organizer Huwaida Arraf echoed these ideas: “Gaza is our compass because it points us to the truth. … When we’re fighting for Gaza, we’re fighting for a world where no people live in cages or under siege, under the boot of militarism or of fascism.”

Monadel Herzallah from Gaza, who lost five family members in the genocide, insisted the same: “To fight for a free Palestine is to fight for a free Haiti, a free Congo, a free Sudan — a free and just world which will be molded by all of us.”

Palestine is the compass because of what it represents as a banner for all humanity, and because of the horizons it opens up everywhere in imagining and building a new world.

Excerpt adapted from “Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew,” coming from Haymarket Books on November 10, 2026.

The post Defeating Zionism to Free Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

Abdul El-Sayed Won His Senate Seat With a Mandate on Palestine. Can He Deliver?

Jonah Valdez — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 21:28:20 +0000

One senator out of the 100 who will fill the upper chamber of the 120th Congress was elected to his seat on a loud campaign promise to end U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Abdul El-Sayed will walk into a newfound Democratic majority after animating his base with pro-Palestine pledges seldom heard from a U.S. Senate contender. As a first-term senator, he’ll lack seniority on the committees to which he’s assigned. And although his critiques of the U.S. relationship with Israel have proven overwhelmingly popular in public opinion surveys and among voters at the polls, the same can’t be said for most of his soon-to-be colleagues.

“It’s going to be a fight,” said Beth Miller, political advocacy director for Jewish Voice for Peace Action, which supported El-Sayed’s campaign. “The Democratic establishment, when it’s in control, has not taken measures in support of Palestine in the past. And so this is about making sure that now they finally start listening to what the overwhelming majority of their bases say.”

El-Sayed’s run marked the first time the Jewish-led, anti-Zionist group backed a Senate campaign. Pro-Palestine lobbying groups like JVP Action have been pushing for legislation to block weapons transfers to Israel for years, aligning themselves with a small but growing number of left-leaning House members. The group helped author the Block the Bombs Act, introduced by Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., which netted 82 co-sponsors and became a pro-Palestine litmus test in some Democratic primary campaigns.

Building consensus around a single bill in the Senate is harder, but the upper chamber offers stronger levers to pull. Senators can force votes called Joint Resolutions of Disapproval that would block foreign security assistance, such as weapons sales to Israel. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has exercised this option repeatedly throughout the genocide in Gaza to try and block the sale of certain bombs, firearms, and other military equipment to Israel. While his resolutions failed in the Republican-controlled Senate, the most recent ones drew support from wide majorities of Democrats — soon to be the party in power.

Yet with the looming threat that Democrats might actually be able to pass legislation, El-Sayed would find himself under pressure from the likely Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who has long maintained the support of the pro-Israel lobby, to fall in line with party priorities.

“The question is, ‘Who does he want to be?’ Does he want to be someone like Bernie, who is willing to sometimes stand up to leadership?” said Hamid Bendaas, communications director for the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, which also backed El-Sayed’s run. “It’s hard to do that as a freshman and someone who’s just getting in there.”

Bendaas expressed confidence that the Michigan senator would be a champion of pro-Palestine legislation, but he noted that El-Sayed would have to balance his priorities, especially after running a campaign focused on economic populism and providing universal healthcare through Medicare for All.

Shifting Winds

There is a tension revealed by the dilemma facing Sen.-elect El-Sayed: While a growing share of Americans — and an overwhelming majority of Democrats — disapprove of the U.S. spending billions of dollars on aid to Israel, voters’ clear No. 1 concern in the 2026 election cycle was the cost of living and their own economic precarity.

Some pundits have encouraged pro-Palestine candidates like El-Sayed to put their anti-genocide principles aside, arguing that more moderate Democrats performed better on Tuesday night. They compare El-Sayed’s 7-percentage-point defeat of Mike Rogers to James Talarico’s 12-point win over Ken Paxton in Texas — and some have already asked Talarico to defy his new colleague.

But on the campaign trail, El-Sayed often connected the issues of a high cost of living and outsized U.S. spending on aid to Israel. “We ought to be spending our money here, to build schools and provide healthcare and child care here, rather than sending our money abroad to a foreign government that’s done terrible things with our money,” he said in a September interview with Bloomberg TV. El-Sayed’s approach made him the target of nearly $40 million in outside spending from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which supported widespread anti-Arab and Islamophobic attacks and accusations of antisemitism in an attempt to keep a vocal critic of Israel out of the Senate.

“None of it mattered,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington D.C. who likened the gravity of El-Sayed’s win to that of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “And this is not the Commie Corridor. This is a swing state. A lot of taboos here have been shattered, and people are going to learn from this and be emboldened now.”

“This is not the Commie Corridor. This is a swing state. A lot of taboos here have been shattered, and people are going to learn from this and be emboldened now.”

In addition to bringing joint resolutions to block future weapons transfers — like the Trump administration’s planned sale of $2.8 billion in 2,000-pound bombs to Israel — El-Sayed could introduce resolutions citing the Foreign Assistance Act; Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., used one to demand a State Department report on Israeli detention of Palestinian children and Israeli military and settler killings of American citizens in the West Bank. He would also be able to introduce amendments to the Pentagon’s annual spending bill that carves out billions of dollars in joint U.S.–Israel weapons research. (The Senate is currently sitting on this year’s $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act, which would even more deeply enmesh Israeli technology within the Pentagon’s programs and supply chain.)

Munayyer, the former head of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, said that despite the uncertainty over whether moderate Democrats will be willing to link arms with progressives next session, El-Sayed’s win creates an environment ripe for accountability over Israel.

“You have a climate now where there’s going to be a lot less intimidation felt by people who had previously been hesitant to speak out on these issues because they thought it was political suicide,” he said.

Even Republicans are beginning to feel the shifting winds. On the morning of Election Day, President Donald Trump made a surprise announcement on Fox News that the U.S. would halt the annual $4 billion in military aid to Israel. The move would only cut off one path for Israel to get weapons from the U.S. — still allowing direct weapons sales to Israel from U.S. companies and weapons development and sharing with the Pentagon — and Trump said it was made in agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been previewing it for months. Tactically, Trump said the goal was to take a “talking point” away from Democrats. He cited El-Sayed by name.

While ballots were still being counted on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, an expected 2028 presidential contender, posted on X an early post-mortem of the massive GOP losses across the country. He wrote that the party could bring back “voters who had abandoned us” if they “End the war” in Iran and “Change our relationship to Israel.”

Such recognition from the Trump White House is new territory for U.S. politics, Munayyer said.

“We are about to witness, in my view, something we have never seen before in American politics,” Munayyer said. “A robust debate in the presidential primary campaigns in both parties, where the question of the U.S.-Israel relationship is going to come up time and again. That’s never happened before, and it’s gonna be seismic.”

“We are about to witness, in my view, something we have never seen before in American politics.”

The question is whether Democrats will stay on top of the wave. If Schumer, a staunch supporter of Israel, remains in charge of the Senate majority, he’ll have power over appointments to key committees — giving him the opportunity to curb the influence of a figure like El-Sayed.

“I don’t think that Democrats want to have a messy fight about this stuff when the base is largely in agreement on it,” Munayyer said. But while Senate Democrats have evolved on the issue of Israel and Palestine — even Sanders expressed far weaker critiques of the Israeli state a few years ago — it’s one thing to be the dissenting party when you’re in the minority. It’s another to wield serious power.

Constant Pressure

El-Sayed is perhaps the most vocal supporter of Palestinian rights of any U.S. senator elected since James Abourezk of South Dakota, who in the late 1970s became the first Arab American to serve in the Senate. Abourezk frequently advocated for a Palestinian state and was an early critic of the pro-Israel lobby. After his time in Congress, he founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

El-Sayed, now the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate, frequently referred to Israel on the campaign trail as an “ethnostate” and said he opposes any nation that organizes its government by ethnicity and religion. In an appearance on ABC News, El-Sayed argued Israel was not a U.S. ally. Two days before the election, he spent a large portion of his sit-down with “60 Minutes” calling for Palestinians’ right of self-determination and repudiated the question of whether Israel had a right to exist. In his victory speech, he criticized attempts by pro-Israel critics to conflate advocacy for Palestinians rights as “hate.”

Even so, in the lead-up to the general election, El-Sayed started being subjected to pressure from some on the pro-Palestine left. Critics chastised his decision to stump with former Vice President Kamala Harris over her complicity in the Biden administration’s support for the genocide in Gaza. Similar ire was directed at his partnership with former President Barack Obama, who has yet to name or condemn the genocide and governed over U.S. wars in the Middle East that saw the United States kill thousands of civilians.

Advocates for Palestinian rights, however, told The Intercept they recognized the utility in El-Sayed’s campaigning with the highest-profile members of the Democratic Party, and they counted it as a success that he earned their support. But they said they were not pinning all their hopes on a single individual.

On top of all the other calcified interests and long-standing political biases that shape the U.S. Senate, there’s the influence of the sprawling U.S. weapons industry, with manufacturing giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing lobbying for their interests and showering politicians in campaign cash. That industry wants to keep profiting off the genocide in Gaza, said JVP Action’s Miller, and El-Sayed alone is not enough to stop that.

“This is not gonna be that one man comes into the Senate and changes everything,” she said. “This is that one person has been elected with a mandate that has demonstrated where the masses of people are at on this issue, and now we have to keep fighting harder than ever before.”

The post Abdul El-Sayed Won His Senate Seat With a Mandate on Palestine. Can He Deliver? appeared first on The Intercept.

“Dead Man Walking”: Officials Say Hegseth Has to Go

Nick Turse — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 18:55:59 +0000

In the run-up to the midterm election, seen by many as a referendum on the Iran war, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth unveiled FORTRESS America — a project to allow U.S. military bases to survive a 90-day siege. But following the landslide Democratic victory, it’s Hegseth who finds himself increasingly besieged within his own fortress, the Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill where he stands on the brink of bipartisan impeachment.

In the wake of an election rout that handed Democrats firm control of the House and the Senate, Hegseth is in the crosshairs of lawmakers whom he has treated with contempt for two years, as he has withheld basic information from Congress and purged bipartisan-backed senior military leaders. “One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who is now in line to be speaker of the House, announced at a campaign rally just before Election Day. Asked about the self-styled War Secretary on Wednesday, Jeffries replied: “Is Pete Hegseth still around?”

As the blue wave crested on Tuesday, storm clouds stacked up on Hegseth’s horizon. “We’re going to go after Hegseth,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., in line to return to the helm of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, announced after cruising to victory on Tuesday. “LAWYER UP,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, posted on X. Both will be joined in the House by Democrat Nancy Lacore, a former Navy admiral who was fired by Hegseth, who declared victory in a traditionally red district in South Carolina.

By Wednesday evening, sentiment within the Pentagon suggested that Hegseth’s days are numbered, with names of potential replacements already being bandied about. “Dead man walking,” said one official. A former defense official agreed: “They pinned the failure in Iran on him. Now it’s only a matter of time.” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, with support from Democrats, is slated to take aim at Hegseth as soon as next week with eight articles of impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors.

With Hegseth increasingly under fire within the ranks, at the Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill, and with rumors swirling that the White House may cut him loose in the face of the staggering electoral defeat, The Intercept spoke with six current and former defense officials as well as additional sources on Capitol Hill, most on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely. Hegseth has, they said, undermined the rule of law; irreparably harmed the U.S. military through purges of top commanders and those who refuse to pledge fealty; pursued relentless leak investigations; spurred religious extremism; and diminished the department he leads due to an almost endless raft of scandals, culture-war clownishness, and senseless policies.

Hegseth “is 100 percent a war criminal. He needs to be prosecuted.”

One of the officials, Wes J. Bryant — until last year a senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the Pentagon — gave voice to Massie’s more technical articles of impeachment which indict Hegseth for extrajudicial killings and waging unlawful war, among other crimes. “He is conducting state terrorism. He is 100 percent a war criminal. He needs to be prosecuted,” said Bryant, who was pushed out of his Pentagon job for blowing the whistle on Hegseth’s efforts to undermine protections for civilians.

Hegseth — a former Army National Guard officer turned Fox News host turned secretary of war — came into office amid a firestorm of scandal from his confirmation process, including a swirl of allegations of financial mismanagement at veterans’ nonprofits where he once worked, excessive drinking and public drunkenness, marital infidelity, and sexual assault.

His reign at the Pentagon has been no less tumultuous and marked by a string of appalling episodes of both major importance and more symbolic disgrace, beginning with Signal-gate — the texting of secret war plans that put troops in harm’s way — and follow-on digital security lapses. The Pentagon’s own inspector general concluded last December that “Hegseth violated security protocols and endangered U.S. troops and objectives by using a personal device to share sensitive operational details on the unclassified messaging app Signal.”

Those scandals, however, turned out to be the high point of his tenure. Since then, Hegseth has been under perpetual fire for his purge of top military leaders — many of them women and minorities; an inability to defeat Yemen’s Houthis in 2025 or win the Iran war in 2026; a strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children; his campaign of extrajudicial killings in attacks on so-called drug boats; overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict; openly advocating for offering enemies “no quarter,” a war crime; his installation of a Pentagon makeup studio at taxpayer expense; an unnatural and immature fixation with violence; an obsession with troops’ testosterone levels, a censorship campaign that replaced the Pentagon press corps with cheerleading influencers, among other distractions, dysfunctions, and tantrums.

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson and other top spokespersons did not respond to detailed questions and repeated requests for comment.

The Heat on Hegseth

In April, Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., filed six articles of impeachment against Hegseth, including violations of the law of armed conflict and targeting of civilians, abuse of power, and obstructing congressional oversight. “Impeach Pete Hegseth,” Ansari wrote in a quote tweet of a Hegseth post on X on Wednesday.

In September, Massie was poised to force a vote to impeach Hegseth on eight charges. As the initiative gained bipartisan momentum, House Speaker Mike Johnson decided to punt and dismissed members of the House before the scheduled vote. But Massie, who was defeated in a GOP primary in May — the most expensive House primary in history — remains committed to ousting Hegseth and plans to force a vote on the measure.

“I give it better than a 50 percent chance of passing,” Massie told Roll Call just prior to Election Day, expressing confidence that all Democrats and some Republicans would join his effort. On Wednesday night, Massie took to X to double down on his commitment. “There is one contingency in which I won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment,” he wrote. “Hegseth resigns.”

Massie’s office did not return a request for comment.

In the wake of Tuesday’s stunning electoral landslide, a senior Hill staffer told The Intercept that he believed mounting anger might cause top outgoing Republicans to vote to impeach Hegseth. “There are very angry senior Republicans in the national security space who honestly pin a lot of their election losses on him. They are furious,” he said. “They need some place to put their anger. So they’re asking themselves, ‘What is even the harm in voting to impeach Hegseth?”

“Democratic leadership wants to focus on people’s everyday lives and affordability, not impeaching Hegseth. But here we are. We are going to vote on impeachment because of Tom Massie. It’s happening,” said the senior staffer. “This reckoning is coming whether we want it or not. So why not?”

California Democrat Ro Khanna, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and has repeatedly sparred with Hegseth during hearings, told The Intercept that he supports impeachment and thinks its odds of succeeding are “decent.” Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on that committee, vowed on Wednesday to conduct aggressive Pentagon oversight and backed efforts to impeach Hegseth. “Going after the corruption, and going after the lack of transparency,” Smith told the Seattle Times of his plans to hold the department accountable while expressing support for Massie’s impeachment push.

In 250 years, the House has impeached just two Cabinet secretaries: William Belknap, the secretary of war, in 1876; and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, in 2024. In both cases, the Senate did not convict. Should Massie’s impeachment measure succeed in the House, it would likely die in the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., would have no incentive to bring it to a vote, said a congressional staffer for a member on the Armed Services Committee.

But some pundits predict Hegseth may not survive next week, much less the month or the year.

The president “always loves you right up until he throws you under the bus.”

Trump was asked Wednesday afternoon whether he was considering replacing Hegseth, and he told reporters, “No, I think he’s doing a very good job.” One former Pentagon official called such public support from Trump “the kiss of death.” Another current defense official agreed. “He may lose his top cover,” said that official, using military slang for protection from above. The president, the official said, “always loves you right up until he throws you under the bus.”

As Republicans make sense of their loss, many are pointing to the Iran war, including Vice President JD Vance. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote on X. A Republican staffer on Capitol Hill said Hegseth “could easily become the president’s fall guy.” The senior staffer agreed, saying Hegseth “might be purged, himself, to avoid additional embarrassment.”

“If Hegseth does stay and he survives this moment, Oversight is going to come crashing down on his head,” said the senior staffer on Wednesday. “Will Hegseth continue to obstruct? Yes. But wait until the subpoenas start.”

Congressional committees have broad investigative powers, including the authority to subpoena administration officials to testify under oath and compel them to turn over documents. Smith said Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg would be first on the list to testify. “We haven’t gotten a report back from the Minab girls’ school strike. How come we haven’t gotten clarity on the strike in Kuwait that killed six service members? How come they haven’t told us what the true cost is that’s been absorbed by all of our bases that have been destroyed in the Middle East?” Smith said to the Seattle Times. “There’s a host of issues we could dive into.”

Another staffer said renewed scrutiny of abuses of war powers like the boat strikes, especially the initial double-tap attack first disclosed by The Intercept; the secret memorandum by the Office of Legal Counsel laying out the legal rationale for the strikes; and the hidden costs, U.S. casualties, civilian casualties, and destruction of U.S. bases during the Iran war, would open a Pandora’s box for Hegseth.

In the Senate, Democrats have floated Hegseth’s removal as the price for cooperation on key legislation in the lame-duck session. Their Republican colleagues have also increasingly soured on Hegseth as he has purged top military commanders with whom they have strong ties. “They see Hegseth as the next Kristi Noem,” said one Capitol Hill source, referencing the former secretary of homeland security who was demoted this year to special envoy for the newly founded Shield of the Americas coalition after influential Republican senators turned against her.

On Tuesday, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican who is retiring, warned Hegseth of a coming “reckoning” in the lame-duck session. “He is one of the reasons why we don’t have the funding or guarantee for defense that we need,” he said. “I think after the election, we need to determine whether or not he’s the best person to bring those needs to Congress.”

Antipathy to Hegseth also extends far beyond the Beltway. Just 32 percent of voters approve of the way he is handling his job, while 57 percent disapprove, according to a Quinnipiac University poll in September. It was his lowest approval ever and historically dismal. (Fifty percent approved and only 13 percent disapproved of Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, late in his tenure in 2018.) Hegseth is even less popular in military circles. Sixty-four percent of active-duty service members, veterans, and military families disapprove of Hegseth, according to a recent poll conducted by Common Defense, a grassroots veterans organization. Last month, a Politico poll found that 63 percent of Democratic midterm voters would support impeaching the Pentagon chief.

Enemies Within

The war secretary is also under withering fire within the Pentagon, according to the current and former officials. They say Hegseth is reviled across the building by officers biding their time, waiting for him to flame out or be pushed out.

Derided in the Pentagon and the ranks by a variety of monikers such as “No Tab Pete,” a reference to his lack of prestigious military qualification patches such as the Ranger tab; “Whiskey Pete”; and “Dumb McNamara,” a reference to the Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, responsible for unfathomable death and suffering; Hegseth has been excoriated within his department for unhinged behavior — especially his relentless purge of top brass and high-ranking officials, which insiders see as an attempt to root out dissenting viewpoints, racial minorities, and women.

To enforce strict discipline, tamp down scandals, keep basic information from the American people and cow dissent, Hegseth has unleashed unrelenting polygraph tests of officials, even senior leaders. Several officials would not respond to questions citing this reason. One likened their situation to life under a totalitarian regime. Hegseth’s minions have also engaged in browbeating “leaky” offices. These efforts have generated further ill will throughout the Pentagon and the wider defense establishment. “The more good people he forces out of the military, the more the resentment grows,” said a current official.

Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia — who served as director for strategy, plans and policy on the Joint Staff assisting Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Dan Caine — was recently ousted. “She’s gonna have big problems, said Trump, who apparently thought the male general was a woman. “We’re very much looking for leakers.” Sylvia replaced Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee, whom Hegseth forced out last year. While not naming Sylvia, Pentagon mouthpiece Sean Parnell issued a social media broadside. “Following an extensive Air Force OSI investigation, the Department took necessary personnel action to protect sensitive information,” he crowed on X. “We vowed to find you, and we meant it.”

Other casualties of Hegseth’s campaign include Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. (chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Adm. Lisa Franchetti (chief of Naval Operations), Gen. David Allvin (Air Force chief of staff), Adm. Linda Fagan (commandant of the Coast Guard), Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short (senior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense), Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield (U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee), and Lacore, the former vice admiral and Navy Reserve chief, now likely representative-elect, among others.

The officials said that Hegseth’s efforts to remake the military have done grave damage to the armed forces. “When you put people on polygraphs and fire a bunch of people who question the status quo and consistently shut down the conversation, then you absolutely lose the best leaders,” said a former field grade officer who served in Hegseth’s Pentagon. “You’re strangling initiative and creating a culture of yes men and yes women.”

Officials repeatedly lamented long-term harm to the Pentagon, whenever Hegseth leaves the helm. “He’s purging a generation of great leaders of the military, and it’s going to take a generation to recover from it,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a former Navy combat pilot who has been targeted by Hegseth. The former field grade officer echoed this. “If you’re doing it right, the talent selection is being done ten years out,” the source said, noting that promotions are a long-term process. “It’s about years down the road. And these people are being fired and forced out. We’re losing them. That’s generational impact that’s harming the force.”

In his September “state of the force” address to more than 500 junior officers and enlisted troops, Hegseth announced, “We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department. Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.” He added, “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in — with testosterone testing on top.”

Several officials drew connections between Hegseth’s fixation on manliness and testosterone with his childish fixation on “lethality,” his glorification of violence, and bloodlust. “‘Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,’” said one official quoting a Hegseth line. “That kind of language and the very, very real killing of civilians — and the posting online of what are outright snuff films, the narco-boat strikes, is evidence of a sickness of his mind.”

The real-world effects of Hegseth’s lethality obsession have been devastating. His Pentagon has gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones. He also removed constraints on military commanders, “letting his preferred generals do anything they want,” said one of the former defense officials. This resulted, for example, in significantly more civilian casualties during attacks on Yemen’s Houthi government in 2025, while failing to achieve military objectives. The Pentagon’s own accounting of civilian casualties found that U.S. attacks killed 153 civilians and wounded almost 250 during the campaign of air and naval strikes, code-named Operation Rough Rider. A current official told The Intercept these were “lowball numbers.” At least 238 civilians were killed and 467 injured, according to the Yemen Data Project.

“This obsession with performative violence is a hallmark of fascist dictatorships.”

Several sources drew special attention to Hegseth’s effort — ultimately blocked by Trump — to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people when he opened fire at Fort Hood in 2009. “This obsession with performative violence is a hallmark of fascist dictatorships,” said Bryant. Hegseth’s lethality doctrine, he continued, “is not only in line with the glorification of and reveling in violence and killing that defines him but is juvenile and ignorant from an operational and policy standpoint, as killing and lethality is only one relatively small aspect of what the military does.”

Officials also keyed in on Hegseth’s stilted version of violent Christianity. One former official pointed to Hegseth’s monthly Pentagon prayer services as sowing dissent within the building. “I would never go to that shit,” said a current official, drawing specific attention to a March service in which Hegseth quoted Psalm 3, praying for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly,” and asking God to back troops’ “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” That official said Hegseth’s Christianity was an “abomination” and “an affront to the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

Bryant, a retired Air Force Special Operations targeting specialist and co-author of “Hunting the Caliphate: America’s War on ISIS and the Dawn of the Strike Cell,” likened Hegseth’s interpretation of Christianity to the puritanical brand of religion practiced by America’s enemies during the war on terror. “His so-called war on woke is actually a far-right Christian nationalist crusade. His skewed version of Christianity is as extreme as the sharia of ISIS and the Taliban are to Islam. And that’s what he is infusing into, and proliferating across, the force.”

Hegseth has been quick to smear everyone from veterans serving in Congress to members of the press as treasonous, calling rigorous reporting on the military “fundamentally anti-American.” He added: “It’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason, actually.” Hegseth frequently tries to paint criticism of his department as smearing troops to foster an us-them divide between the military and the American people they serve.

During his September state of the force address, Hegseth cast troops as superior to those in the civilian world. “See, the Ivy League faculty lounges, they’ll never understand you, and that’s OK, because they could never, ever do what you do. The media will mischaracterize you, and that’s OK. Because deep down they know you’re the real reason they live free. They envy you because you do real things every single day,” said Hegseth, an Ivy League-educated millionaire who used to work for Fox News. “Lethality is your calling card. … The outside world can’t understand this, so stay true to this department. You don’t want to look like civilians, because you are different, you are set apart. You are warriors.” He added, “You are the real 1 percent.”

Several officials said Hegseth’s effort to cast the armed forces as superior to the rest of the American people was antithetical to military values and especially alarming under an administration that has dispatched troops to American cities and threatens to do so, again. “The worst thing would be if we deploy the military in the streets of cities like they did last year in California. I’m talking about where the military is violently interacting with our citizenry,” said the former field grade officer. “You’ve paved the way for a more obedient military and then you have guys and gals with the guns having to decide whether orders — from the president that we elected and the secretary of defense that he’s appointed — are lawful. It’s dangerous.”

Bryant, who served as branch chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, pointed out that Hegseth’s dichotomy embraces the elitism that he claims to despise. “Our military, just as our government, is meant to be not only for the people but of the people,” he told The Intercept. “When we look at fascist military regimes, now and in history, another hallmark is this strict separation of soldier or warrior class from the civilian population. It is fundamentally anti-American and it is dangerous.”

All six officials, in one way or another, assailed Hegseth as juvenile, embarrassing, and unserious. “Imagine any other SecDef talking about packing the Pentagon with ‘patriotic cowboys,’” said one of the former officials. “Any one of them would have been run out of town.” A current official said Hegseth was unequivocally the “worst SecDef in memory” and that Massie’s impeachment vote couldn’t come soon enough. That official said it would take years to undo the harm Hegseth has done to the military but whether he was removed by impeachment, was fired by Trump, or quit under duress, the first step was ridding the Pentagon of his presence. “Hegseth,” he said “has got to go.”

The post “Dead Man Walking”: Officials Say Hegseth Has to Go appeared first on The Intercept.

Blue Tsunami’s Clearest Takeaway: People Hate Data Centers

Sanya Mansoor — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:14:15 +0000

America’s data center buildout suffered a resounding defeat in the midterms at all levels of government. Candidates and ballot measures in favor of restricting or altogether stopping the development of the facilities powering the artificial intelligence boom won overwhelmingly on election night.

Newly elected Democratic governors in Georgia, Ohio, and Texas have promised moratoriums on new data center construction and all took tougher stances on regulation than their incumbent Republican opponents. The trend carried over in various congressional races, in which candidates who were critical of their competitors’ record of promoting data center development came out on top, even flipping key districts in Ohio and South Carolina.

Many local communities, mostly in Ohio and Illinois, voted directly on their AI concerns and passed a flurry of ballot initiatives restricting data center development — close to 40 proposals, according to a tracker by research firm Redbud Consulting.

“What’s good for the AI industry is clearly not good for average voters,” said Shobita Parthasarathy, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. “I wish that data center operators and the AI industry really take this as a sign that they’re done a very poor job of considering public concern and taking it seriously.”

Parthasarathy pointed out that many Americans are now deciding how they feel about these energy-guzzling facilities based on their experience of living near one and “real knowledge” about their deficiencies. Those concerns range from negative impacts on energy bills, to the environmental and health issues, but also include anger toward the outsized power that the tech oligarchy wields.

Americans’ vote in the midterms has given them a tangible way to fight back, Parthasarathy said: Blocking the brick-and-mortar, water-sucking, heat-spewing buildings that power tech billionaires’ rapid wealth accumulation.

Tech Money ≠ Change Minds

A long track record of polls have recorded Americans’ anger about data centers. About three-quarters of voters polled by NBC News on Election Day said they opposed building these facilities in their communities. Those sentiments are consistent with a Heatmap survey from August that found a similar proportion of Americans would strongly oppose a new data center near where they live.

More than half the voters polled by NBC this week said AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in their decision, though they were almost equally divided when it came to deciding which party would be better at addressing their AI concerns.

The AI industry tried to make a dent in the midterms, but much of their money was focused on a congressional primary in New York, where the cash helped defeat AI critic Alex Bores.

In the general election, an Intercept analysis found, AI super PACs dramatically scaled back their spending on congressional races compared to primaries amid growing anger toward data centers; only 5 percent of their direct expenditures went toward contested general election races. Industry observers told The Intercept that this suggested developers and tech CEOs have taken note of the electorate souring on AI and data centers.

That’s not to say that tech magnates, more broadly, have been stingy with their money. Elon Musk spent nearly $450 million ahead of the midterms, including more than $200 million in Texas, where his companies are headquartered.

“It shows when an issue is deeply and broadly felt by American people, no amount of money can change their minds.”

“If Elon Musk wants to continue to burn half a billion dollars to get no results, there are probably other ways he can do that,” said Mitch Jones, deputy director of Food & Water Action, which has advocated for regulations on data centers on the federal, state, and local level. “It shows when an issue is deeply and broadly felt by American people, no amount of money can change their minds.”

Musk’s money wasn’t enough for the races in Texas to go his way. Surprise upsets in the state’s Senate and gubernatorial races resulted in victories for, respectively, Democrats James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa.

Talarico promised to end tax breaks for data center developers and minimum federal requirements to protect the grid, environment, jobs, and transparency. Hinojosa called for a moratorium on all data center approvals “until laws can be passed by the Legislature to protect Texans.” Outgoing Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had already temporarily halted environmental permitting and grid connections until about the end of the year, but Hinojosa’s proposal would last longer and be more expansive.

Promises to Rein In AI

Congress’s new incoming class includes many Democrats who have promised to rein in the harms of AI. Ohio’s Democratic Sen.-elect Sherrod Brown flipped a district after portraying his opponent in ads as cheerleading the data center industry.

In typically red South Carolina, Democratic Sen.-elect Annie Andrews defeated her opponent, Sen. Darline Graham, after accusing her of being bought by developers. Pro-AI super PAC Building the Future spent $2.5 million to support Graham, according to Politico.

In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom, who called for a temporary ban on data centers, was narrowly ahead of his incumbent opponent on Wednesday evening in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in more than four decades.

Just because Trump is expected to veto Democrats’ proposals to regulate AI, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t push for them, said Jones, of Food & Water Action. He’s hoping Congress will approve a ban on “artificial superintelligence,” as well as a federal moratorium on new data centers.

“They should show the American public they are standing with us and taking actions to force Trump to veto those bills,” Jones said.

Although moratoriums typically target new construction and not existing data centers, Jones says they are still necessary to prevent an even more expansive buildout.

“We don’t need any more,” he said, citing a Forbes estimate that the total cost of the projected buildout ranges from $2.8 trillion by 2030 to $10.30 trillion by 2032 in the U.S.

With Trump still in charge, states led by Democratic governors may be where more forceful regulation on data centers occurs.

In Georgia, Democratic Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms promised a temporary statewide pause on data centers. Ohio’s new incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Amy Acton proposed an “immediate moratorium upon taking office on any new construction.” And in Kansas, Democrat Cindy Holscher, who declared victory in the gubernatorial race, has advocated for halting new development.

Ballot Measures

Local communities are getting creative, too. Jones said that some towns and cities have turned to ballot measures to bypass “elected officials who are not keeping pace with their voters.”

About half of the roughly 40 ballot measures in the midterms were in Ohio. Most succeeded by a wide margin, and as of Thursday morning, all but one vote were in favor of restrictions, according to Redbud Consulting’s tracker.

Nick Owens, who helped draft 10 local ballot measures in Ohio that restrict data center development after an unsuccessful attempt at a statewide petition, said this gave voters quicker and easier access to the ballot to curtail the “humongous growth of hyperscale data centers.”

“Communities know how best they want to govern themselves,” said Owens, who was a Trump delegate at the 2024 Republican National Convention and is currently co-founder of grassroots group Conserve Ohio. The results “just validated everything I’ve been seeing on the ground, talking to people, and in nationwide polling,” he added.

Owens is looking ahead, once again, toward pushing for a statewide moratorium, as well as curtailing the secretive use of non-disclosure agreements by tech companies and developers.

“They might move into localities where there is less organized pushback.”

Parthasarathy, the public policy professor, said more communities may explore ballot measures as a response to developers’ lack of transparency and drive to build more.

“I don’t think their thirst for data centers is going to go away,” she said. “They might move into localities where there is less organized pushback.”

The post Blue Tsunami’s Clearest Takeaway: People Hate Data Centers appeared first on The Intercept.

How Democrats Changed Everything

The Intercept Briefing — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 02:00:00 +0000

The size of the Democrats’ victory Tuesday night shattered records and even the most optimistic expectations, handing the party a governing mandate with a clear demand for change.

But what do voters want that change to look like? This week on The Intercept Briefing, politics reporter Jessica Washington and managing editor Maia Hibbett break down Tuesday night’s election and hear from voters in Maine, Michigan, and Texas about what drove them to the polls in the midterms that saw a so-called “blue tsunami.”

“The rich get richer, the poor get poorer,” said one voter in Maine. In Michigan, a voter told The Intercept that politics “feels like a game that the rich play sometimes.” A Texas voter expressed anger that President Donald Trump was “spending taxpayer money to renovate the White House and turn it into this gold sanctuary.”

Frustration with wealth inequality and money in politics came up again and again in The Intercept’s conversations with voters. So did a desire for more social welfare spending, Medicare for All, freedom for Palestinians — and responses to transphobic and Islamophobic fearmongering on the campaign trail.

“When Democrats win so far across the board, you can make an argument that any faction of the Democratic Party has the mandate,” said Hibbett, “because Democrats of all stripes won Tuesday night.”

In any case, the results indicated a clear disapproval of the way the Trump administration is governing and the use of fearmongering as a tactic of distraction.

“One lesson maybe for Democrats is there’s no point in attempting to placate people when it comes to bigotry,” said Washington. “The thing that’ll motivate voters is if you can convince them that you’re going to make their lives better, not if you can convince them that you’re playing the middle on an issue of civil rights.”

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

Transcript

Bruce Bryan: We’re just hoping that people step up and tell Washington to go fuck itself.

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

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor here.

JW: Over the past few days, Intercept reporters hit the ground in key states to speak to voters about the issues driving them to the polls. We went to Texas.

Jermiah Robinson: The food prices, for one, and the gas prices.

Darryl Moore: Gotta work two jobs just to make it.

Tiffany Williams: I never really understood, like, how important it is for the minority to vote.

Lenna Tasby: This election is important because this election is going to make or break whether we have a vote or not. There’s a reason why they’re shutting down these polling places.

Intercept reporter Akela Lacy: What are the issues that motivated you this cycle?

Charles Senter: Well, I love Trump.

Helen Dexter: Red ticket all the way. The stop of the Muslim influx.

Lenna Tasby: If you’re spending taxpayer money to renovate the White House and turn it into this gold sanctuary, that’s money that can be used for our military veterans. That’s money that can be used to help with this homeless population. The government needs to be held accountable.

MH: We heard from voters in Michigan.

Erin Horne: The election this year is very critical because Trump’s got two more years.

Zouheir Alawieh: Our democracy is in danger.

Noora Iskander: I believe in Medicare for All. People have a right to self-determination, especially in Palestine.

Wendy: There’s a lot of concern about, of course, the economy, but the data centers, our children’s education.

JW: And we spoke to voters in Maine.

Intercept reporter Noah Hurowitz: What mattered to you as a voter this election?

Tyler Echard: Cost for the most part. Everything keeps going up.

Bryan Golay: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. At least 30 years ago, there was like a veneer of caring, and now there’s just blatant corruption and greed.

JW: So Maia, what a night.

MH: Yeah, it’s honestly embarrassing if you’re a Democrat and you did not win. They swept the House and the Senate by just about the biggest margins that the pollsters could have predicted. So luckily, the audience I’m concerned about, the pollsters, can rest easy. As of 11:00 a.m. [ET] on Wednesday morning, they had 228 seats in the House, Democrats did. They only needed 218 for a majority, so obviously that is more, and they’re expected to pick up some more seats as some more races get called. They had 54 seats in the Senate, which means that they have a big enough margin that they can’t be stopped from legislating by one lone senator, if one senator wanted to gum things up.

JW: And not at all surprising. The White House tried to spin Republican losses on Trump not being on the ballot and the quality of candidates, despite the fact that Trump repeatedly said at rallies across the country, “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Donald Trump: We’re going to ask you to pretend I’m on the ballot, because when I’m on the ballot, this has nothing to do with ego, I just get 49.2 percent more vote. And if we get even a good percentage of that, we’ll have the biggest victory that you’ve ever seen.

MH: He’s saying, “We’ll have the biggest victory ever” — and it was a very historic night. I think people will hear the word “historic” a lot in the coverage in the coming days because of this huge blue wave, not the kind of history Trump wanted, but also because there are some really surprising major firsts.

One of them was that last night, very early, like at 2:30 a.m. [ET], Abdul El-Sayed became the winner of the Senate race in Michigan, which means he will be the first ever Muslim U.S. senator.

Abdul El-Sayed (acceptance speech): To all the kids who watched this last month, to all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked someone for their name or how they pray, let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost.

JW: That race was filled with Islamophobia, both in the primary and in the general election. His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, just peddled in a million different Islamophobic tropes. Voters told our colleague, Matt Sledge, who was out in Michigan speaking with them, that they really didn’t like hearing all of this hate speech.

Zouheir Alawieh: They don’t have any programs for our economy, for our health, for our future. So that’s why they are attacking us as Muslims and as human beings.

Tea Edwards: Just, like, all of the Islamophobic hate campaigns that have been going around will probably sway a few people. The people who are actually researching what will be good for communities I think will see right through it.

MH: This was a campaign that was defined by so much panic about El-Sayed being Muslim. The race ended 25 years after 9/11, and there were all of these really kind of vitriolic Islamophobic tropes. It reminded me a lot of the campaign against [Mayor] Zohran Mamdani here in New York last year. There’s all this fear of the left and this fearmongering suggesting that there’s no way a Muslim candidate could represent American interests.

And of course, one of the big differences between El-Sayed and Mamdani is that El-Sayed is not a socialist.

JW: Say that again for the people in the back, because they are not going to believe you. El-Sayed has described himself as a capitalist who understands how capitalism works, so definitely not a socialist.

I’ve heard him described as much more of a [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren than someone in the Bernie Sanders mold.

MH: But he still faced millions of dollars in outside spending in this race, mostly because of his stance on the United States relationship to one other country.

We’ve heard in some of these deep-blue districts in the House races where socialists were elevated in the primaries, there was a lot of rhetoric on opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and fighting U.S. weapons flows to Israel. But it’s pretty rare to hear that from a U.S. Senate candidate, and now from a senator-elect.

JW: It also caused some really ugly drama with his former primary opponent, Haley Stevens.

MH: Do you want to try to recap that as fast as we can, or should I?

JW: I’ll get started and see if you can add in anything that I miss.

So essentially, on the Friday right before [Election Day], Haley Stevens released a statement condemning an ad that was not even created by the El-Sayed campaign, calling on him to condemn the ad, which he did disavow. She also asked him to take back his statements on Israel.

Now, things seemed fine for a second. Haley Stevens had all of these Democratic surrogates going on air saying that she promised to support him. While Haley Stevens’s staffers were at an event for El-Sayed, Haley Stevens popped up at an event supporting the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, giving him her endorsement.

Maia, is there anything that I missed in that?

MH: Jessie, I think the only thing you missed was just how baffling and strange this episode was. So you mentioned this ad that kicked it off. It was produced by this outside group Rebellion PAC, which is the group headed by Cenk Uygur, who some listeners might know from The Young Turks. He is also famously Hasan Piker’s uncle.

Haley Stevens, as she was struggling to explain why she switched from El-Sayed to the Rogers camp, kept citing Hasan Piker and the “uncle.” It was this kind of almost incomprehensible move where Anderson Cooper, the CNN host, was pressing her at one point, saying, well, you cite his affiliation with Hasan Piker and this part of the Democratic Party you don’t like, but you knew about this before — so what changed?

It really seemed strange. So we sent Matt Sledge out in Michigan to ask some voters what they thought of it, and if they thought that this was a politically savvy move that would have any resonance. And here’s what they said.

Kathleen Britton: I’m so disappointed in Haley Stevens. I gave her serious consideration during the primary.

Jesse Craft: She fought against Mike Rogers, then said somehow he earned her vote. I don’t really understand it. I kinda think it’s career-ending for her.

Wendy: How embarrassing to use an African American church. How embarrassing for you to use our votes and then disregard them because of your own personal issues.

Intercept reporter Matt Sledge: So you don’t think it’s gonna help Mike Rogers?

Kathleen Britton: I do not.

Erin Horne: No, I think she actually helped Abdul.

[Break]

JW: Maia, before the break, you started talking about money and politics, and I want to get into how that shaped the midterms. Last week, we talked about how this election cycle became the most expensive on record. Midterms ad spending is expected to reach north of $11.6 billion. Mega-donors overwhelmingly gave to Republican candidates, including Elon Musk, who spent nearly $450 million, with large sums of that directed at boosting Ken Paxton in Texas, who, by the way, lost to James Talarico. Now, for context, the next highest donors under Musk are a Republican couple [Richard and
Elizabeth Uihlein] who spent $150 million, mostly in Wisconsin and Illinois.

Jesse Craft: We all see where money is coming from. It’s coming from very, very wealthy billionaires. I don’t think we should be able to buy elections.

Tea Edwards: Politics, it just feels like a game that the rich play sometimes. Kind of feels hopeless when you’re just looking at all of these people and corporations giving money to each other.

MH: You hate to see Elon Musk throw away almost half a billion dollars. It only leaves him so many billions to go.

JW: Heartbreaking.

MH: But, I mean, in Texas, as you mentioned, that money really did not pan out. It didn’t seem to sway voters. It seemed like if anything from the voters who talked to our reporters in Texas, in Michigan, and in Maine, which we’ll get to later, people were really mad about outside election spending and don’t like the idea that billionaires or corporations can buy their elections.

And in Texas, a lot of that money went to propping up this anti-trans panic campaign that Paxton was running. But all that money was not enough to save Paxton from James Talarico. Paxton was a pretty bad candidate: He was mired in too many scandals to keep track of, including a 2015 grand jury indictment on felony securities fraud charges.

In 2020, eight of his top deputies reported to the FBI that he was potentially abusing his office to do favors for a donor and friend. And just earlier this year, he offered a plea deal in a child sex abuse case that seemed to anger Texans and voters.

Remember, this is the era of the Epstein files and people being very concerned about child sex abuse. It did not seem like the wisest calculation for Paxton to offer this while running for Senate.

JW: As it turns out, there is not enough money in the world to buy Ken Paxton out of being Ken Paxton and voters recognizing that. But Republicans tried this cycle to spend big on transphobia and to blanket the airwaves with these anti-trans advertisements.

Elon Musk’s Texas PAC spent $78 million on anti-transgender ads in Texas, which actually accounted for nearly half of all ad spending in support of Paxton. Republicans’ big play in Texas was transphobia — and that play failed.

While clearly it didn’t sway the election, some of those messages did appear to trickle down to voters. Our colleague, Akela Lacy, talked to voters in Dallas and the surrounding areas, and she did come across some voters who said they wanted to support Talarico or even some voters who did support Talarico but were concerned about his stance on trans rights, an issue that Republicans really fearmongered on this cycle yet again after doing it in 2024.

Akela Lacy: When you said you saw some stuff about James Talarico that made you unsure about voting for him, can you say more about that? What did you see, and what’s your impression of him?

Jermiah Robinson: I think I seen something about the LGBTQ+ community? I mean, I don’t really care about it, but I don’t know. People were saying a lot of bad stuff. I think they said something about him —

Canvasser: Encouraging sex change.

Jermiah Robinson: Yeah, on the children. I don’t really stand for that.

Maia Hibbett: The watchdog group Media Matters also put together a montage that showed just how much Republicans really leaned into this transphobic rhetoric.

Danielle Buck: He wants to trans our kids. He believes that there are six genders.

Andrew Kolvet: They wanna indoctrinate your kids. They wanna trans your kids.

Adam Sosnick: They’re gonna trans your kids. They’re gonna Talarico your kids.

Donald Trump Jr.: Trans kids back in school, trans agendas back in school, in your classrooms, with your children.

JW: Clearly, some of that rhetoric did trickle down to voters based on Akela’s conversations, and some people even believed the misinformation being spread in those ads.

But fearmongering was just clearly not persuasive enough to distract people from their lived reality, and that lived reality is that gas prices are up, rent is unaffordable, and grocery prices are up.

I think one lesson maybe for Democrats is, there’s no point in attempting to placate people when it comes to bigotry. The right can and will distort your messages, and so you can stand in your values or not, but the thing that’ll motivate voters is if you can convince them that you’re going to make their lives better, not if you can convince them that you’re playing the middle on an issue of civil rights.

MH: We saw a parallel to this in some ways in Michigan as well, where a lot of the Republican argument was based on this perception of Islamophobia and fearmongering. Ultimately, that was not enough to elevate Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed. In Texas, there’s also, of course, the strong anti-immigrant sentiment that Republicans frequently run on, and I think the statewide results showed us that that narrative really fell apart this cycle.

JW: To your point, clearly, attacks on trans people, attacks on immigrants didn’t work in Texas. Democrats had an amazing night. Gina Hinojosa toppled three-term incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott. The state has not had a Democratic governor since 1990.

“Attacks on trans people, attacks on immigrants didn’t work in Texas.”

MH: And speaking of toppling long-term incumbents that have been hard to get out of office, our colleague Noah Hurowitz was in Maine, where Troy Jackson defeated Susan Collins last night after many Democratic attempts to get her out of office.

This issue of disillusionment with money and politics came up quite a bit when he was talking to Maine voters.

Sharon McDonnell: It’s immoral. It is immoral to have people worried about their fuel and have that much money coming into this. It’s just wrong.

“The amount of money is more than I will probably make in my lifetime, spent in this election.”

Tyler Echard: The amount they spent on just mailers, not handed at the door but in the mail, is especially, it seems, on the Republican side of things, has been absolutely insane. The amount of money is more than I will probably make in my lifetime, spent in this election.

Charlie Dingman: It’s been extraordinary in Maine, the amount of spending in this race, particularly in the Senate race. I think there’s a lot of fatigue. I think people are tired of it. I have had some conversations with voters at the doors that lead me to think that the extremely negative and extremely untruthful ads may be backfiring.

JW: It seems like those ads backfired. The last voice you heard was Charlie Dingman, Maine Democratic Party chair.

Collins campaigned on her record of securing federal investments for state infrastructure, such as rural hospitals, and she really prided herself on being a moderate Republican who apparently breaks rank with President Donald Trump. But the reality of the situation is quite different.

The Congressional Quarterly Roll Call found that her votes aligned with Trump 90 percent of the time in both of the president’s first and second terms, and voters really noticed that. They understood the difference between what she said she was, a political moderate, and her voting record, which aligned with the really far-right Donald Trump. And that’s something that Noah heard from voters as well.

Sharon McDonnell: She has had this persona of moderate cross-party stuff that’s just really eroded. If you read every article about her, it’s like, “Moderate Susan Collins.” Like, wait a minute, she’s voted with Trump. She hasn’t used her power.

Susan Collins “has had this persona of moderate cross-party stuff that’s just really eroded.”

MH: Collins really used that line about her being a moderate and being an independent voice in Washington as a go-to for her campaign.

In past cycles, it has worked. As we alluded to a little bit earlier, the Democrats have mounted challenges against her before. In 2020, they ran a candidate named Sara Gideon, who looked somewhat likely to oust Collins. And I think this cycle, there were a lot of reasons for Democrats to be nervous about this race.

Troy Jackson, the nominee, is a former state senator, and he ran on lowering costs, really centering working-class interests. But he had jumped into the race kind of hastily. If you remember Graham Platner, Jessie, he was the former nominee for Senate in Maine for the Democratic Party, and he was really considered a rising star, but had to drop out because of a series of scandals, and Jackson had to jump in last minute and fill his place.

But ultimately, Jackson pulled it off.

Troy Jackson (acceptance speech): We did it. Working people did it.

JW: Clearly, Jackson had a disadvantage going into this race. There were people who complained and said that he wasn’t as charming as Platner, he wasn’t as polished. But in this election, the ideas and running on affordability seems to have won the day in Maine and really throughout the country.

Collins had a reputation of delivering for the state, but clearly that wasn’t enough to overcome this blue wave across the country and some frustrations with Collins as well.

But Maia, taking a step back to look at the full scope of Democratic wins, what do you make of their gains on Tuesday? Are there other races that stood out to you? What stood out to you overall?

MH: Well, there’s the spin about the spin, which is that everybody is going to be framing this election and these results in their own interests. When Democrats win so far across the board, you can make an argument that any faction of the Democratic Party has the mandate, because Democrats of all stripes won Tuesday night.

But to my view, it’s hard to see how this is a world where there isn’t a clear demand for some kind of transformational change. So I’m wondering what Democrats do with their mandate now, especially as we think ahead to 2028.

If you recall 2020 and the last time the U.S. elected a Democratic president, you might remember that the Biden campaign was the sort of centrist, moderate return to normalcy choice, but they got there after a lot of left momentum in the primary and a really serious showing of support for Bernie Sanders, who remains one of the most popular politicians in the country.

Once Biden got into office, he arguably tried to give some of that kind of left, dare we say, populist economic message some service. There was the Build Back Better plan that had a lot of social safety net spending and Covid relief. There were climate infrastructure projects. There was the elevation of Lina Khan [to Federal Trade Commission chair].

For a little while, Biden was getting called the most progressive president since FDR, and then he threw it all away supporting the genocide in Gaza and really lost the support of the left, and then lost the support of the country when he was kind of visibly melting on the debate stage and refusing to drop out of the race.

So I’m curious what Democrats have learned from the Biden years and how that will convert into the next congressional term and the next presidential election.

JW: It really feels like I’ve lived a million lives in between now and that debate that really tanked Joe Biden’s entire political career at the end there.

I will say to your point, we’re already seeing Hakeem Jeffries, who’s likely to be the House Speaker, calling for unity and saying that people don’t want to fight. But you don’t really get a blue wave like this or a political wave like this when people don’t want to fight.

Clearly, there’s anger at Republicans. There’s anger at the cost of living. There’s anger at the war. If Democrats don’t deliver, they’re likely to see a red wave come the next cycle.

But I did want to take just a little bit of a step back and talk about Black voters and what’s happened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court voting rights decision. Black voters in this election really delivered historic victories in southern states for Democrats, but Black representation in Congress thus far appears to have been slightly reduced in this election. Now, for those who remember our discussion earlier this year about the Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, there were a lot of deep concerns that the decision would crater Black political representation, and so far that hasn’t come to bear, but it’s worth paying attention to in cycles that are less blue, where we’ve seen really massive redistricting.

I will shout out, there was one historic victory for Black Americans: Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, won her race for governor, becoming the first Black female governor in the country.

MH: We’ve talked a lot about these historic wins, but we would be remiss to not mention a close call in Florida, where Angie Nixon narrowly lost.

Nixon is a Black woman who’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and had a really shocking primary upset when she defeated the establishment favorite to get the Democratic nomination. The Democrats didn’t invest very much in her Senate race in Florida. The conventional wisdom says Florida’s not flippable, but conventional wisdom also says that South Carolina’s not flippable — and they did that.

“The conventional wisdom says Florida’s not flippable, but conventional wisdom also says that South Carolina’s not flippable — and they did that.”

Nixon ended up coming within about 2 [percentage] points to Ashley Moody, the Republican incumbent, who just won a full term after being appointed to hold the seat that used to belong to [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio. A lot of people on the left side of the Democratic Party are wondering what would have happened if Democrats had invested in a DSA candidate running statewide in Florida, which is kind of a crazy statement to make if you think of just two years ago.

JW: I mean, I listened to her [concession] speech, she is an incredible speaker, but obviously, that’s not enough to win elections. You need money, clearly, and investment from the party.

We’re going to leave it there, but there is so much more election coverage you can follow at theintercept.com.

That does it for this episode.

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

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Thank you to all of our reporters who worked late on election night: Matt Sledge, Akela Lacy, Noah Hurowitz, Jonah Valdez, and Austin Campbell, and the rest of our team.

Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

MH: And I’m Maia Hibbett.

The post How Democrats Changed Everything appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE Was Secretly Ordered to Stop All Immigration Raids on Election Day

Karl Loftus — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 23:29:11 +0000

Orders for what one official called a “national no enforcement day” began circulating on Monday inside U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

Handed down through ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division through internal group chats and verbal commands, the directive called for a halt to all immigration enforcement operations on Election Day, according to ICE officials across the country who spoke to The Intercept.

“We were told all operations are canceled for Election Day.”

“We were told all operations are canceled for Election Day,” said one ICE immigration official, who operates in the south and requested anonymity to protect their livelihood. “Word of mouth from our first-line supervisors, no official email notice.”

According to multiple ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept, the orders were handed down quietly to avoid media attention.

“Yesterday was the least amount of activity observed from ICE ERO throughout the entire year so far,” said Sherman Austin, the creator of StopICE.net, a crowdsourced platform tracking reported ICE activity across the United States. “You can kind of tell like from the morning. Usually, ICE gets started really early, and there’s a huge spike in activity between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. That spike wasn’t there on Election Day.”

Another ICE official, who works in the Great Lakes region, confirmed the orders ahead of Election Day, referring to it as “National No Enforcement Day.”

“We were told to do ‘admin’ shit,” the official said. They said that ICE deportation officers who regularly do street-level operations were diverted to administrative office work: “I’ll be drinking coffee at the office for the first time in a year.”

In total, ICE officials working in four areas of responsibility — ICE’s jurisdictional regions — coving parts of the northeastern, midwestern, northern, and south-central U.S. regions told The Intercept that they had received orders to stand down on Election Day.

“Something Unusual Was Going On”

StopICE, the tracking website, which has roughly half a million subscribers, did record some ICE activity on Election Day, according to Austin, although most of the reports stemmed from sightings unrelated to any immigration enforcement activities.

“There were a few reports that came in about ICE being at usual spots like the jails,” Austin said, “or seen driving in certain areas in in the city, but it wasn’t the same type of activity that’s usually seen on the site. It was pretty clear that something unusual was going on.”

AntiFreeze, another crowdsourced ICE-tracking platform that allows users to report and receive real-time alerts about ICE raids, also saw abnormally low levels of ICE activity on November 3, according to Josh, the creator and developer behind the site, who requested to keep his last name anonymous.

“On Election Day, our network only logged about 56 reported ICE sightings nationwide, which is one of the quietest Tuesdays we’ve ever seen,” Josh said. “We did get about three sightings that did report ICE activity near polling stations, but most of the reports were observations of vehicles associated with ICE. We barely got any reports about actual ICE arrests yesterday.”

Local activists also observed a low level of ICE activity on the street level.

“There was no evidence of street abductions,” said an activist working with the rapid-response network in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

“ICE, in some capacity, was still out and about, but we did not see any reports of off-the-street detainments by ICE or attempts at detainments,” said the activist, who said they got word of ICE arrests at jails, but not targeted operations among the general public. “There were a lot of folks, probably more than usual, observing, and so I think we can be pretty confident that this wasn’t due to lack of observation.”

Leo Martinez, who volunteers with VC Defensa in Southern California, told The Intercept that no one in his rapid-response group reported any sightings of ICE activity on Tuesday.

It is still unclear exactly where the orders to halt immigration enforcement operations on Election Day originated from, although some ICE officials believe the orders stemmed from ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations leadership — and not directly from the White House.

“Nobody from the SDDO level” — a reference to Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer, part of ICE’s upper management — “expected it to happen until the very last moment,” said another ICE official familiar with the matter. “But I think some of us caught on that senior leadership was making this call with fears of us being at the polls.”

The official said, “It’s crazy that The White House didn’t catch on.”

The post ICE Was Secretly Ordered to Stop All Immigration Raids on Election Day appeared first on The Intercept.

The Progressive Agenda: End Iran War, Rein in AI, Get Dems to Actually Do Something

Akela Lacy — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 21:40:14 +0000

Now that Democrats have secured earth-shattering wins in both chambers of Congress, the party’s progressives are sending a message to their more moderate leaders: It’s time to deliver for voters who are demanding meaningful action.

“Even where the candidate wasn’t a self-described progressive, progressives won big last night,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar, D-Texas, during a press call on Wednesday. “Across the country, so-called moderate candidates ran on ending forever wars,” he added, pointing out that Democrats went after the GOP for voting down congressional attempts to stop President Donald Trump’s unpopular military actions — efforts that the progressive caucus had organized.

With comfortable majorities in both chambers — 54 seats in the Senate and 237 in the House, as of 4:30 p.m. ET Wednesday — Democrats now have the legislative breathing room to deliver on their promises to reduce the cost of living, root out government corruption, and end Trump’s failed war in Iran.

But they’ll have to notch these achievements under an angry lame-duck president who vowed last night — via a Truth Social post of one of his signature red hats — to wield his veto against the new class of Democrats. The current Democratic leaders in each house of Congress, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both have long track records of sparring with the left. And which of their goals will progressives prioritize when their ranks swell come January?

“We will have an H.R. 1 through 10 that focuses on costs and healthcare and corruption,” Casar said Wednesday, referring to the first 10 House resolutions he wanted to see his party push. “Every single week, we should now be sending a bill to Donald Trump’s desk that is overwhelmingly popular with the American people, that cracks down on corporate greed, that cracks down on price gouging, that cracks down on big money and politics.”

To Will Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement and a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America who beat Republican incumbent Rep. Tom Barrett in a Michigan swing district on Tuesday, the Democrats’ historically successful night translates into a responsibility to achieve transformative change.

“It’s undoubtable that this was a sweeping mandate around the entire country,” said Lawrence, who ran a campaign focused on his opposition to data centers, a notoriously unpopular area of tech development that the left has pushed Democrats to oppose.

“Every year, we see record-breaking numbers for the most expensive races in history by the millions.”

The outsized influence of the artificial intelligence industry is another critical area for progressives to tackle, Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., told The Intercept. She said that she and other progressives will push legislation to end the outside influence of billionaire and super PAC money in elections, including her bills to ban super PACs and overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

“Every year, we see record-breaking numbers for the most expensive races in history by the millions,” Lee said. “In the 120th Congress, I look forward to our party recognizing the detrimental impact of special interests and billionaire influence in our politics, whether it be from crypto or AI or AIPAC.”

Other progressive priorities include passing policies like Medicare for All, ending corporate corruption, and investing in affordable housing. The ideas are tenets of the redistributive platform popularized by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who rallied voters across the country to “fight oligarchy” earlier this year and helped elevate many of this cycle’s upstart candidates.

On Wednesday, progressives did not yet seem prepared to commit to which single issue they would push for first. Asked by The Intercept about their Day-One priorities when they return to Congress, Casar said progressives planned to keep up the legislative pressure throughout the two years of the coming congressional term.

The Working Families Party, which backed Lawrence and often works to push Democrats to the left, saw Tuesday’s results as a sign that “voters want Democrats to stop the buildout of data centers and rein in the AI industry,” said Ravi Mangla, the group’s spokesperson. Like the congressional progressives, WFP cited a range of priorities for the years to come: guaranteeing healthcare and low-cost childcare, lowering housing costs, and providing more union jobs to American workers.

In fact, candidates who signed onto a promise to push a suite of pro-labor policies organized by labor leaders in swing states were among the Democrats’ biggest winners on Tuesday night. Signatories to the “Contract with Working America” included Troy Jackson, who toppled three-decade incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine; James Talarico, who flipped the Texas seat for the first time in almost 40 years; and Gina Hinojosa, who ousted 10-year incumbent Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Jackson pointed to the pledge during his victory speech in Maine on Tuesday night and thanked the union members who canvassed for him.

“On Labor Day, brothers and sisters, I stood before you and I made a pledge to working Mainers,” Jackson said to cheers at his election night party in Portland. “And I’m going to keep that promise. Because I am a union member tonight. I’ll be a union member when I walk into that Senate chamber.”

“The way things are set up in our economy right now, the money is just moving up and concentrating at the top, and squeezing the people at the bottom,” said Maine AFL-CIO President Cynthia Phinney. Her organization helped develop the labor platform Jackson signed onto, and she said they “fully anticipate that we’re going to need to continue to organize around these issues that matter to the folks who voted for him, and a lot of folks who didn’t vote for him.”

Referring to Hinojosa, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., noted that Latino voters “delivered a gubernatorial seat in Texas,” as well as a U.S. senator. Ramirez, who has introduced a bill to abolish the Department of Homeland Security, argued that her party should not lose sight of outrage over violent immigration enforcement.

“Shame on us Democrats if we again do not meet the moment when it comes to immigration and when it comes to justice as it pertains to ICE and CBP and DHS,” Ramirez told The Intercept.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., pointed out that the issues that defined this cycle were often first championed by progressives.

“We were the first to fight back against the war in Iran. We were the first to call out corruption on so many levels. We were the first to push to rein in ICE and CBP, a shift that really drove a lot of Latino voters across the country that mattered in this election,” said Jayapal. “Hopefully, this puts to rest the idea that you can’t be a progressive and win with your ideas in any district in the country.”

If history is any guide, it won’t. As the wins rolled in on Tuesday night, Jeffries, the next likely speaker of the House, threw cold water on the idea that the vote marked a seismic rebuke of the Republican Party’s way of doing things, saying the results were “patriotic,” not “partisan.”

On Wednesday, Jeffries said voters had chosen Democrats “because they want to see a dramatic change in direction.”

“I agree, and I’ll go one step further,” Casar said. “The American people delivered a demand for bold change.”

The post The Progressive Agenda: End Iran War, Rein in AI, Get Dems to Actually Do Something appeared first on The Intercept.

Haley Stevens Destroyed Her Political Career for Absolutely Nothing

Eoin Higgins — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 19:00:50 +0000

Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., and Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers attend a service at Perfecting Church, on Nov. 1, 2026, in Detroit. Photo: Jose Juarez/AP Photo

Abdul El-Sayed handily defeated Republican Mike Rogers for Senate in Michigan early Wednesday morning, retaining Democratic control of the seat and solidifying the party’s Senate majority. To become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate, the former public health official overcame rampant, bipartisan Islamophobia and bigotry. For the country, and the Democrats, to move forward, we must cast it out of public life forever.

The Michigan Democrat’s victory felt almost like an afterthought compared to the upset Senate victories won by Democrats in South Carolina and Texas. The 2026 midterms were a referendum on President Donald Trump and his control of the GOP, and voters delivered their verdict, turning control of both houses of Congress over to the opposition party.

But we should neither forget nor forgive how we got here. El-Sayed faced an uphill battle from the beginning, which included a protracted, venomous primary, and the call was often coming from inside the house.

No detractor was as vicious as his former primary opponent Rep. Haley Stevens, whose eleventh-hour betrayal of her party’s nominee — she formally switched her endorsement to Rogers on Sunday — was a transparent attempt to turn the seat red.

Backlash was swift and harsh and came from all corners of the party. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the powerful leader of the Senate who has made little secret of his disagreements with El-Sayed on Israel, called Stevens’s actions “a despicable betrayal.” Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who finished third in the primary, went as far as to express personal concern for Stevens.

And Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., just days after implying El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani were antisemites for opposing ethno-supremacy in Israel, said Stevens chose “to dangerously betray Michigan families’ healthcare, freedoms, and future with her horrific endorsement of Mike Rogers.”

In the 48 hours-plus since she threw in with Rogers — which increasingly seems like it was motivated primarily out of spite when she was boxed out of a Sunday campaign event with Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., in Detroit — Stevens embarked on a media tour of justification that got weirder and weirder.

A 15-minute, rambling interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN Sunday night didn’t provide insight into her motivations, or much else; on Monday evening, Stevens followed up with a long statement posted on X owning the decision to destroy her political career with the Democratic Party. She also denied that her fiancé, political donor Jason Turkish, played any role in the endorsement: “I made this decision, and I am proud of it. Do not question my independence simply because you disagree with my conclusion.”

Congressional staffers to Stevens resigned en masse on Sunday, and former campaign aides told the Washington Post that they had to run defense to keep Turkish — who had endorsed Rogers before Stevens did — out of the spotlight and marginalize his influence.

“Any campaign staff being directly quoted in this article, I was made miserable by working with them,” Stevens told the Post in response, adding, “I have nothing else to say about the campaign at this time.”

But a singular explanation of Stevens’s decision lets Democrats off the hook far too easily for the anti-El-Sayed campaign waged by leaders in the House and Senate. For the party to move forward after the midterms, the Democrats need to take a hard look in the mirror and purge institutionalized Islamophobia from their ranks.

They can start with their friends in the media. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait, in a screed published Sunday, whined that “during the same period of time that El-Sayed has been winking at a political movement inflected with anti-Semitism, he has been targeted by a political message that is not merely inflected with racism but saturated with it.”

We should get ready for a long overdue, but almost certainly painful, intraparty debate on how Democrats policed dissent in their own ranks.

Political commentator Van Jones noted on X ahead of Election Day that “the Republicans are conducting a campaign of blatant anti-Muslim fear mongering.” But in the same post, he also argued El-Sayed’s “refusal to outright denounce” a little-seen ad produced by an outside PAC — an ad which El-Sayed distanced himself and his campaign from — tying the rise of grocery costs to U.S. support for Israel was comparable.

“Something is going horribly wrong in the Senate race in Michigan,” Jones added huffily. “And I am going to keep calling it out.”

After last night’s massive blue wave, it should be undeniable that the left was a major factor in flipping the House and Senate. That means the party’s progressive wing can now credibly claim a seat at the governing table without compromising on domestic or foreign policy. We should get ready for a long overdue, but almost certainly painful, intraparty debate on how Democrats policed dissent in their own ranks in this election, and how to disentangle leadership from unconditional support for Israel.

There’s always the possibility that the party’s centrist wing comes together with the left and repairs the damage. A good first step would be for leadership to make clear that Stevens, and anyone else who indulged in anti-Muslim arguments to score political points, has torched any possible future in the Democratic Party. Any advocacy or lobbying group that offer Stevens or her ilk safe political harbor should also be blacklisted.

Party discipline applied to the treacherous center doesn’t appear to be the top priority for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the presumptive next speaker, who devoted his first remarks after the election to downplaying partisanship in this “patriotic moment.”

But without backup from party leadership, El-Sayed will continue to be met with hostility. On Wednesday morning, CNN asked fellow incoming Texas Sen. James Talarico if he would “stand up” to El-Sayed and other, unnamed left-wing members of his caucus. To his credit, Talarico demurred from directly challenging his fellow future senator. Still, it’s a sign of a long battle to come.

The question for “unity”-caping Democrats remains: Who will they rally around — and who will be left out in the cold?

The post Haley Stevens Destroyed Her Political Career for Absolutely Nothing appeared first on The Intercept.

Lesson From Lansing: To Win in Swing Districts, Fight Data Centers

Matt Sledge — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:15:41 +0000

When progressive Will Lawrence beat two moderates in a Michigan congressional primary earlier this year, some Democrats were worried about his ability to win one of the nation’s most evenly divided districts.

On Wednesday afternoon, The Associated Press declared Will Lawrence the winner of Michigan’s 7th Congressional District race over Republican Rep. Tom Barrett.

A national swing in favor of Democrats helped him — but so did a campaign that leaned heavily on opposition to data centers to
situate Lawrence as a populist instead of an extremist.

Data centers were on voters’ minds everywhere, but they rarely dominated a race as much as Michigan’s 7th District. Lawrence vocally opposed data center construction almost as soon as he began running last year. A series of proposed hyperscale developments in and around Lansing pushed the issue into the limelight.

A month and a half before the election, Lawrence announced a data center platform calling for a moratorium on new development, environmental regulations, and a national jobs program to replace work taken away by artificial intelligence.

As progressives take stock of the 2026 midterms, Lawrence’s approach points one way forward for their wing of the Democratic Party. Lawrence’s opponent tried to turn his time as an environmental activist into a liability, but in an interview with The Intercept, Lawrence said his background primed him to come down on the same side as the public on a red-hot issue like data centers.

“I fought against Wall Street landlords trying to kick people out of their homes. I fought against oil companies who are polluting our air and water,” he told The Intercept in an interview last month. “So for me, this was not the first time that I’ve stood on the line against a corporate behemoth like this.”

From Sunrise to Congress

Lawrence is a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, which had one of its most famous moments when its youth activists marched into the office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to push for the Green New Deal with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., by their side in 2018.

Data centers and AI were remote issues for voters then, but they were starting to bubble up in the public consciousness by the time Lawrence announced his run for Congress in August 2025.

Two months later, one of his first moves as a candidate was to visit public meetings in two small townships in Michigan to express his opposition to proposed data center developments.

As a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he drew skepticism from many observers over his ability to win the primary in a district that narrowly voted for Donald Trump in 2024. They were equally skeptical of his ability to beat Barrett, a Republican who tried to play up his moderate bona fides in the race’s final weeks. Barrett was one of a handful of Republicans to vote in favor of a resolution to end the Iran war, for instance.

Lawrence had some major liabilities in a purple district, including tweets where he wrote “fuck the nuclear-family home” and told then-Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in a song to “hurry up and die.”

While Barrett leaned on those posts and Lawrence’s time with the DSA to cast his opponent as an extremist, the young progressive had a card up his sleeves in the form of the data center issue.

It is the rare cause that leaps across party lines to unite Republicans and Democrats who are just as worried about water sources drying up and ceaseless buzzing sounds.

At an October 5 city council meeting in the quaint town of Mason, where a developer has proposed a hyperscale data center on a plot of picturesque farmland, Democrats and Republicans alike said they were outraged. Some residents said they would sell their house and leave town if the development is built.

In a sign of how politically charged the issue has become, many of the speakers were candidates for office angling for votes. Lawrence had dropped by himself a few weeks before. His first television ad centered on his opposition to the Mason project.

Karl Sime, a Mason resident who crisscrossed the area on behalf of Democratic candidates, told The Intercept last month that “100 percent” of voters were angry about the data center proposed for the swath of farmland just outside city limits.

“Sometimes they’ll just say it unprovoked,” he said. “You can see the body language just dramatically change into anger.”

Republican Countermoves

Lawrence was hardly the only candidate who tried to tap into opposition to data centers. Some Republicans tried to catch the wave as well.

Barrett voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill, which included tax breaks that could benefit rural data center developers. But as the danger he faced in the election became clear, he proposed legislation in Congress that would ban local officials from signing non-disclosure agreements with developers and would allow local communities to set regulations on data centers without federal interference.

Some voters said they wanted to see candidates take a harder stance in favor of regulation, however. At the City Council meeting last month, Doug DeLind said he was left shaking his head at neighbors who had yard signs opposing data centers and supporting Barrett.

DeLind, a sculptor who lives near the proposed data center, said that Barrett’s position was that “we’re going to leave it up to the local communities, but we’re not going to provide any federal protection or any guidelines to what a data center can do.”

Although Mason faces a more imminent possibility of a massive data center, Americans across the country are worried about having one in their backyard. Multiple surveys showed a remarkable shift in public opinion on the subject over the past year. Half of Americans oppose a data center being built within 3 miles of their house, according to a recent Politico poll.

In recent months, data centers became a signature issue for Democrats with progressive pasts trying to recast themselves as populists. Sherrod Brown, the party’s Senate candidate in Ohio, and Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa also staked their campaigns on opposition to data centers. Both won.

“The playbook was listening to voters. I think voters across ideologies were speaking with one voice, and I think their opponents were some of the people most willing to silence voters and accept industry cash instead,” said Alex Bores, who became a national figure by arguing for stricter AI regulations during a failed New York congressional primary bid earlier this year.

As candidates ran away from data centers, the artificial intelligence industry’s most powerful super PAC stopped intervening in close races. An Intercept analysis found that the well-funded Leading the Future super PAC network, which is aligned with OpenAI, largely stopped spending in competitive general election races.

It lost in the one state where it did place a big bet, South Carolina. Incumbent Sen. Darline Graham, a Republican, fell to challenger Annie Andrews.

Bores, who now leads a pro-AI regulation group called Who Decides, said he was not surprised to see candidates increasingly market themselves as AI skeptics.

“I think it’s overdue. I think candidates and elected officials are catching up to where the electorate is, across parties,” Bores told The Intercept. “It is remarkable the agreement that voters have around wanting guardrails to protect us from the most powerful and fastest moving technology of our lifetime. Democracy is sometimes slow, but only so much.”

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

Update: November 4, 2026, 2:32 p.m. ET
The story has been updated after The Associated Press officially called Michigan’s 7th Congressional District race for Will Lawrence.

The post Lesson From Lansing: To Win in Swing Districts, Fight Data Centers appeared first on The Intercept.

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