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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s Larger Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JW: Ari, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your reaction to that redistricting effort?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Break]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JW: And that does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Claire Mullen mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us. Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four-Way Race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diversity Without Discrimination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spending Big

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dream Denied

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berns Shifts Gears

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past Discrimination Allegations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protests at Park East

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Prophet of Male Despair

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

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

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

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

Blackpilled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Disappearing Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 Shipments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israeli Targeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portland Protests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. These summary killings are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another writer once told me that she never, ever apologizes. How unenlightened and abrasive, I thought at the time. This was circa 2019, when the specter of cancellation loomed large, where old tweets were being dug up, and public apologies abounded.

I like to think we’ve come out on the other side a bit more canny. The era of overcorrection converted me to the idea that, with few exceptions, you should not publicly apologize, and you should not retreat.

I’ve been thinking about this again in the wake of former FBI Director James Comey’s second indictment stemming from a dumb joke he literally wrote in the sand. While on a beach vacation last year, Comey spelled out the words “86 47” and posted the photo online. For this limp act of resistance, he’s been charged with threatening to kill the president and transmitting the message via interstate commerce, i.e., Instagram.

For those who’ve never worked a service industry job and are not unruly, public drunks — which would make for an interesting Venn Diagram for members of this administration — “86” is slang for removing someone from an establishment. It’s ludicrous to imagine this being read as a threat on Donald Trump’s life, but that was hardly the point.  

What matters is that Comey made a critical misstep: He deleted the post and retreated, giving his detractors exactly what they so richly desired. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said at the time.

Now, some necessary caveats: There is great value in addressing specific wrongs to the specific people you’ve wronged. This is best done in private. If you find yourself apologizing to a large group of unspecified people for hard-to-pin-down or ever-evolving wrongs, it should give you pause, ditto if you start by opening up your Notes app. Consider who is asking you to apologize and their motivations for doing so. Are they trying to exert control over you? Do they want to gain leverage for future use?

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Comey’s de facto apology not only didn’t matter to its intended audience, but it also telegraphed the former FBI director as weak. Announcing himself as willing to capitulate only chummed the water further, the sharks circled, and he bent the knee to the worst actors rather than stand his ground. Deleting the post, in the modern era, ends up looking like an admission of guilt — or, at least, an admission that the bad guys got under your skin, which means they can do so again, at will, in the future.

Once you start apologizing to appease the nameless, faceless ombudsmen looking to catch you out, you might find it’s impossible to stop. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is experiencing this firsthand. Early in March, the right-wing website Jewish Insider thought they were onto the scoop of the century when they published a story blaring: “Zohran Mamdani’s wife liked social media posts celebrating Oct. 7 attacks.” That premise was hardly borne out by the posts that Rama Duwaji, an interdisciplinary artist, had “liked” — which included such incendiary phrases as “Systemic change for collective liberation” — but the damage was done. A Mamdani spokesperson responded to the report with a conciliatory statement: “Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7th was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally.”

It’s safe to say this apology was not accepted, and bad actors in the media doubled down on attacking Duwaji. One week later, a gotcha reporter manufactured outrage with a story for the conservative Washington Free Beacon about one of Duwaji’s illustrations running alongside a collection of essays edited by Susan Abulhawa about the indignities of living under Israeli occupation — in this case, a Gazan woman’s search for something as simple as a bathroom. The publication attempted to hold Duwaji accountable for everything the editor has ever said, none of which was contained in the piece itself, which was actually written by Diana Islayih.

Mamdani apologized for the editor, saying, “I think that that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible.” But the mayor’s critics were quick to seize on what was left unsaid, with an Anti-Defamation League leader crediting his apology with one hand while offering with the other: “However, we have not heard from [Duwaji]. Does she have a problem with the author and her statements? We just don’t know.” (Abulhawa, for her part, nailed it in a withering response to Mamdani’s apology: “You succumbed to forces that seek to pick away at you, at your talented, beautiful wife, and at your work, clawing harder with each apology or concession you make.”)

It wasn’t over, and we likely haven’t heard the end of it. The Free Beacon doubled down on its intrepid reporting by advanced-searching up some of Duwaji’s off-color tweets from when she was a teenager. This seemed to break the dam, and New York’s first lady publicly apologized earlier this month in an interview on the art site Hyperallergic.

“I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn’t excuse it,” she told the site. “I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry.” 

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This all comes after Mamdani was only a few months off his historic win in an election where the most votes were tallied since 1969 — one in which he overcame wave after wave of Islamophobic fearmongering and political opponents smearing him as “antisemtic” for refusing to roll over on supporting Palestinian liberation. He stood up for something people believe in and was rewarded for not backing down, which makes it all the more mystifying that he would start apologizing now.

But Mamdani and Duwaji are far from alone. Years back, Rep. Ilhan Omar was famously disciplined for her “all about the Benjamins” tweet, which suggested, apparently quite controversially, that money was involved in lobbying. (After being tarred as trafficking in antisemitic tropes, Omar tweeted, “I unequivocally apologize.”) The attacks on Omar — again, brought by bad actors — have not stopped since then.

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The door on all this apologizing only swings one way. You’ll never get an apology out of Donald Trump, AIPAC, or the vast majority of elected Republicans. This should force you to consider that, just maybe, your opponents weren’t actually offended in the first place; they were exercising power over you in a way you’ve already proven works. It’s akin to political blackmail: If you prove you’re willing to pay the bad guys off once, there’s nothing to stop them coming back again and again for another pound of flesh.

Being involved in public life — and politics in particular — means offending people. It means making enemies of the types of people who strenuously fight against everything you stand for. What the left should stake out is the courage to stand on principle and be willing to have the bad people dislike you. Because without a spine, an elected lefty is just another politician.

The post Never Apologize appeared first on The Intercept.

The Democratic Party’s centrist wing is doing a 180 on Maine senatorial hopeful Graham Platner after Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race — a major setback for their side in an ongoing intraparty war for the future of the party. 

The June primary was shaping up to be another proxy fight for the ongoing power struggle between the party’s progressive and centrist wings. Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego, and Martin Heinrich, backed Platner early on; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as well as EMILY’s List, threw their support behind Mills. 

But the Democratic voters of Maine didn’t appear interested in a protracted back and forth, nor were they impressed by the party establishment’s perceived shoehorning-in of Mills as an alternative to an upstart, energetic, young candidate they already liked. Some more mainstream Democrats already get that, like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who previously lent his powerful email list to Mills during her campaign announcement; he will host a general election kickoff event with Platner on Friday. Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, meanwhile, announced they “will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Graham Platner” to defeat Collins.

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Others should get on board with the new reality. The primary map is only getting more challenging for centrist Democrats. In Michigan, their preferred candidate Rep. Haley Stevens is in a tight race with state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and public health official Abdul El-Sayed. Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek, Schumer’s pick, is neck and neck with state Sen. Zach Wahls; in Minnesota, Schumer’s favored candidate, Rep. Angie Craig, has a significant cash advantage, but Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan regularly trounces her in early polling.

The writing was on the wall for Mills weeks ago. She was never able to catch up to Platner’s polling, and her campaign stopped ad spending after attacks on Platner over his past controversies failed to gain traction. It was clear the governor was throwing in the towel last week when she vetoed a data center moratorium bill backed by the Maine Democratic base but opposed by business interests in the state. That choice raised eyebrows; the governor’s suggestion in mid-April that she would have voted against a Senate bill restricting U.S. aid for 1,000 pound bombs and armored bulldozers only confirmed suspicions that Mills was out of touch with the party faithful.

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Platner, who spent the late summer and early fall of 2025 criss-crossing Maine doing town halls and other events, has been drawing huge crowds since August. That outreach to voters, as New York magazine writer and Mainer Rebecca Traister noted on Thursday, probably saved him from the scandals around a Nazi-related tattoo he got during his time in the Marines and the drudging up of old, controversial Reddit posts. 

Equally important was the feeling for many in Maine that D.C. Democrats were putting their thumb on the scale and trying to take the decision away from the people. It’s part of a national souring on the party’s centrist, corporate wing, which has dominated the internal levers of power for decades, that came in the wake of Trump’s election in 2024. The party base has become radicalized and is demanding fight and action. 

Go to a No Kings protest, and you’ll see liberals holding signs calling for the imprisonment of Republicans like Donald Trump and implying that members of the administration should be dealt with more permanently. It’s become a bit of a meme to remark on the normie bloodlust that’s pervaded liberalism since November 2024, but only because it’s true. 

Despite polling showing voters are eager to throw out the GOP and put in Democrats in the midterms, approval for the Democratic Party is at historic lows. Liberals aren’t going to settle for what’s become the rote Democratic response to Republican misbehavior: objecting on process grounds when out of power, half-assedly pushing ineffective institutional fixes once they reclaim Congress, and then brushing it all under the rug when they win the White House. This time they want accountability, none of the “looking forward, not backward” that Barack Obama placated the base with in early 2009.

Fuel for your fury isn’t hard to find. Sen. John Fetterman’s fervent support of Israel and willingness to buck his party in favor of the president has made him a villain to liberals and progressives alike, so much so that “another Fetterman” has been deployed as a slur by both sides in hotly contested primaries. Politicians whose popularity was once unimpeachable, like Obama, have been confronted over the Gaza genocide in public appearances. Members of Congress are regularly harangued at public events over the party’s weakness and apparent disinterest in meaningfully opposing Trump. 

Platner’s got a good shot at winning. And for all the valid concern that Collins can once again pull off a victory, she appears to be taking this threat seriously, breaking with Trump over Iran war powers on Thursday. It’s a small act of resistance, and not one that should be expected to be of any actual consequence, as is the pattern for the senator. But the fact that she’s doing it now, after Mills dropped out, says that Platner — and the energized movement he represents — is a clear challenge to another six years for the Republican. 

Platner isn’t perfect — no politician is. But as he shifts his campaign to the general election and against Collins, all but the most marginal and fringe diehards in the Democratic coalition are coalescing around him. At 41, he presents himself as a new, more energetic fighter of a Democrat, one who’s promised to confront both the GOP and the centrist corporate elements of his own party. Time will tell if he can deliver, and what compromises he’s willing to make. 

The post Graham Platner Handed Centrist Dems a Bruising Defeat in Maine appeared first on The Intercept.

Musk’s break with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, is in a sense a lawsuit about safety. He contends that Altman betrayed the company’s original nonprofit mission of safely and responsibly pursuing artificial intelligence for the public benefit by converting it into the revenue-maximizing behemoth it has become. According to Musk, the stakes of this are existential for the human race: “It could kill us all,” he testified on Tuesday. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome.”

The AI safety community frequently invokes these dystopian scenarios to both warn the public about the technology’s risks and implicitly boast of its great power. While such a science-fiction future may lay ahead, these warnings overlook the deadly present. Artificial intelligence is already targeting humans with the blessing of Musk and his rivals.

Musk and others who caution about an uprising of sentient killer machines are anticipating the emergence of “artificial general intelligence,” an ill-defined form of superior machine reasoning that may never come to pass. But their fear that AI could kill us all is less hypothetical for those living in places targeted by the Trump administration’s global wars. In Iran, for instance, Anthropic’s Claude AI model “suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance,” according to the Washington Post.

“The risks of integrating frontier AI into the nation’s most lethal capabilities are already existential, both for civilians swept up in the violence and destruction of AI-enabled wars, and rank-and-file troops that have to live with the consequences of potentially unsafe weapons they can’t control,” Amoh Toh, senior counsel at Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept. “Existing AI models are already pushing policymakers and militaries toward nuclear escalation — there’s a real danger of Skynet-like outcomes even without a Skynet-style takeover.”

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Silicon Valley has widely embraced AI military contracts despite its worries over lethal AI. Amazon, OpenAI, Musk’s xAI, and Microsoft all earn money from selling large language model services to the Pentagon. Even Anthropic, accused of “betrayal” by War Secretary Pete Hegseth and declared a national supply chain risk for mounting the smallest of opposition to the Pentagon’s terms, is still keen to participate in the national kill chain. “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post a week after the United States bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing more than 100 children.

Google offers a telling illustration of the industry’s increasing coziness with selling AI to the military. Following a 2018 employee revolt over Project Maven, a contract to help target Pentagon airstrikes, CEO Sundar Pichai pledged his company would swear off the business of killing. He wrote in a company blog post that Google would not pursue deals that could cause harm, including applications whose “principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.” He added: “These are not theoretical concepts, they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.”

After watching AI help wage a war that has already killed over 1,700 Iranian civilians, Google this week sent a clear message: We want in. In a deal that makes explicit the extent to which company leadership has abandoned its AI principles, Google agreed to provide AI services to the Pentagon that allow for “classified workloads,” sensitive military work that encompasses tasks like intelligence analysis and targeting airstrikes, The Information reported.

According to the tech news outlet, the deal allows the U.S. military to use Google’s AI models for “any lawful government purpose” — a carveout that could allow any uses the administration deems legal. Take, for example, the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear, the ongoing aerial assassination program against civilian boats accused of drug trafficking that has killed more than 180 people to date. The campaign has been widely condemned as illegal under both international and U.S. law, but the administration has deemed its own actions legal through a Department of Justice memo that remains secret. On Friday, the Pentagon announced additional “lawful operational use” deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon as well.

The Google contract reportedly includes a toothless and unenforceable provision gesturing at concerns over autonomous and spying. “We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight,” the clause reportedly states.

“When I worked at Google, they would spend a lot of time punting into the future, promising a future that would never come,” said William Fitzgerald, a former Google employee who helped organize the 2018 worker-led campaign against the Maven contract. “‘Don’t regulate us or it’ll kill innovation.’ The talking point is the same today. The reality of Google’s work with the military is it’s part of a tech-military ecosystem that’s killing people today.”

Google spokesperson Kate Dreyer did not respond to questions about the contract’s language, instead touting how the company’s military work applies “to areas like logistics, cybersecurity, diplomatic translation, fleet maintenance, and the defense of critical infrastructure.”

There is little evidence the people in charge find this technology enticing because of its diplomatic translation prowess. In a January address to Musk’s employees at SpaceX, another Pentagon contractor, Hegseth explained how “an embrace of AI” would make the military “more lethal.”

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Musk and Altman, though foes at the moment, can at least find common ground in their support of Hegseth. Musk, a longtime defense contractor, similarly wraps himself in the flag, tweeting in 2023, “I will fight for and die in America.” Altman, who once expressed skepticism toward military work, now frames OpenAI’s mission in terms of patriotic nationalism. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Between Musk’s courtroom visions of the apocalypse and Google’s plunge into classified workloads, the week’s news illustrates the disjointed state of AI industry ethics, where executives say they’re terrified of the technology killing by accident, while wholly supportive of using it to kill on purpose.

Though AI executives clearly find this a virtuous revenue stream, some of the people who actually built the technology do not. Andreas Kirsch, a research scientist at Google’s pioneering DeepMind laboratory that produced much of the work on which xAI and Anthropic rely, responded to this week’s news with dismay: “I’m speechless at Google signing a deal to use our AI models for classified tasks. Frankly, it is shameful,” he wrote on X. Alex Turner, a DeepMind colleague of Kirsch’s, described the contract in a single word: “Shameful.”

The post Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills appeared first on The Intercept.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend became the site of the third failed attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump. “I remember the feeling was very similar to when it was clear that the House had been invaded on January 6, 2021,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who was in attendance, tells The Intercept Briefing. “Everybody was afraid that somebody had come in with an AR-15 or something like that.”

This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Raskin about his experience at the dinner and later being asked by CNN’s Dana Bash about whether he’s thinking twice about his “heated rhetoric” toward Trump. “It was curious that, in the wake of this terrible episode, that she would try to equate the way that Democrats talk and the way that President Trump talks,” says Raskin. “He calls people crazy, insane. He calls people evil, wicked. He will buttonhole reporters and tell them that they’re stupid, they’re ugly. … But we try to keep it at the level of policies and their actions.” Some examples, which Raskin discusses, is his forthcoming investigation into Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role in the administration and conflicts of interest, and his fight in Congress to stop the reauthorization of warrantless surveillance on Americans.

After this latest assassination attempt on Trump’s life, claims that it was staged flooded the internet, from comments section to social media posts to videos of influencers dissecting alleged evidence.

“We are so conditioned to distrust what we are being told by authorities that people immediately began concocting conspiracy theories about it even before we even knew what had happened. Whether it was a shooting or just dishes breaking,” says journalist Mike Rothschild. He’s the author of “The Storm is Upon Us,” the first complete book on the QAnon conspiracy movement, and more recently, a 200-year history of conspiracy theories called “Jewish Space Lasers.”

Rothschild joins Lacy to unpack the growing world of conspiracy theories that question whether the multiple assassination attempts against Trump were staged. They also dive into other conspiracy theories currently capturing the public imagination, such as the dead and missing scientists and a wildfire in Georgia. “This is one of our more fun and disturbing interviews,” says Lacy.

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

Correction: May 4, 2026
In a previous version of this episode, there was an errant reference to Janet Mills and Graham Platner being close in the polls before Mills dropped out. That reference has been removed; Platner was ahead of Mills in polling.

Transcript

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

Katherine Krueger: And I’m Katherine Krueger, the Voices editor at The Intercept.

AL: Katherine, do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about what Voices is before we jump into the show today?

KK: Voices is basically The Intercept’s op-ed section we run. Things that are more narrative, things that are a little more first-person-driven, things that advocate for a specific point of view.

AL: An Intercept editorial board, if you will.

KK: Yes, I’m a one-woman editorial board. [Laughs.]

AL: Speaking of opinions on the news of the day, I am going to throw several topics at you. [Laughs.]

KK: OK. Hit me.

AL: On Thursday morning, news broke that Janet Mills is dropping out of the Maine Senate race. Katherine, what was your reaction to seeing that? 

KK: So Janet Mills is the current governor of Maine, former attorney general, running against Graham Platner in the Democratic primary to be the next senator of Maine.

In a statement she put out, she’s blaming a lack of money for not continuing the race, which is also strange to me because she had all of the backing of the Democratic Party. No one at DNC national was pulling for Platner.

AL: Yeah, this was pretty shocking to me. I also got an AP alert on Wednesday evening. The title was “Underdog Governor,” and the dek was “Democratic Maine Governor Janet Mills says she’s used to being underestimated even as she runs for Senate at age 78.”

Literally 12 hours later, Janet Mills is dropping out of the race for U.S. Senate.

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I was also pretty shocked at the statement that Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand put out after she dropped out of the race, which was “[Maine Sen. Susan] Collins has never been more vulnerable” — what? “We will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, to defeat her.” [Laughs.]

KK: Yeah, it’s a bit strange. Also, I just love the framing in that headline, which is “underdog governor” — don’t those things pull in opposite directions? Also, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer were fully behind Janet Mills. It all strikes me as a bit strange. My jaw dropped when I saw the news. It seems out of nowhere.

AL: Also in midterms and voting rights news, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a decision that rolled back voting rights. This was focused on a case in Louisiana. After that decision, Louisiana postponed its May 16 primary. Which is kind of insane, considering that that was supposed to happen in two weeks.

KK: It does seem like an existential threat for the Democrats to respond. Gerrymandering has been an issue for a long time. The Republicans are fully aware that without gerrymandering, the force of the electorate is against them. Democrats need to respond as other states, I’m sure, will look to redraw their maps in even more draconian ways.

AL: In that vein, Democrats are also facing intense scrutiny over a series of key votes in the house this week, including on extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which 42 Democrats voted to support and 22 Republicans opposed on Wednesday. This version would authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans.

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There’s also been some developments in the fight to end the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. After a monthslong shutdown, the House passed legislation to reopen DHS on Thursday.

After federal immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year, Democrats had attempted to block additional funding for DHS until the agency could make some very modest reforms to ICE and Border Patrol. Democrats’ demands have so far gone nowhere. Though some places are framing the vote on Thursday, which did not fund ICE, as a win for Democrats. Katherine, what do you make of all of this?

KK: Well, it does seem that the Republicans are pretty desperate to restore this funding. You know, as an op-ed editor — Democrats need to hold the line on this.

AL: It’s my understanding that this bill will pay for DHS operations except ICE and parts of Border Patrol through September 30. Those agencies are already being generously funded by the Trump so-called Big Beautiful Bill that approved a record $85 billion for immigration crackdowns. 

KK: Right. So for now it appears to be all eyes on the Democrats to see what they can do, if anything, to gum up the works on billions in new funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

AL: And of course, this is all coming on the heels of the third assassination attempt against President Donald Trump over the weekend, which we talk about with Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who was present at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during the shooting attempt.

Later in the show, we hear from journalist Mike Rothschild about the world of conspiracy theories swirling around the shooting and other recent events in the U.S.

KK: Akela, you got really great details from Rep. Raskin from inside the Correspondents’ Dinner. So let’s listen to that conversation now.

AL: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing, Rep. Raskin.

Rep. Jamie Raskin: Great to see you, Akela.

AL: So you were at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday evening. Tell us what you witnessed.

JR: I entered maybe 10 minutes before the incident happened and the violence and the confusion and the melee and the chaos. All of a sudden, we heard the loud noises, boom boom boom, glasses flying, plates flying — horrific noises taking place. And then people yelling, “Get down, get down.” Somebody, I think it maybe was a Secret Service agent or an officer, somebody threw me to the ground.

Then we stayed on the floor for two or three minutes before people started saying they got the guy, or it’s OK, you can get up. But there was a lot of confusion.

I remember the feeling was very similar to when it was clear that the House had been invaded on January 6, 2021, and everybody was afraid that somebody had come in with an AR-15 or something like that.

It was a scene of crowd chaos and fear in America, which means people are going to be thinking about the possibility of an assault weapon or some kind of deadly gun attack.

AL: The day after the shooting, you spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash about the incident in an interview where she asked you about the responsibility of Democrats whose rhetoric toward Trump she described as “heated.” Let’s hear that clip.

[Clip from CNN]

Dana Bash: And you have, and as many of your fellow Democrats have, used some heated rhetoric against the president. And do you think twice about that when something like this happens?

Rep. Jamie Raskin: What rhetoric do you have in mind?

DB: Just talking about some of the fact that he is terrible for this country and so on and so forth. I understand that’s your democratic right, but overall, do you have no responsibility?

JR: I have no personal problem with Donald Trump at all. I talk about the policies of this administration. The authoritarianism, like we saw on display in Minneapolis where two of our citizens were gunned down in the streets simply for exercising their First Amendment rights; Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and others have died in custody. I’m talking about policies. I don’t personalize it, and I certainly have never called the press the enemy of the people. I think the press are the people’s best friend, and that’s why it’s written right there into the First Amendment.

We need the press to be a vigilant watchdog against every level of government, federal, state, local, all of it.

[Clip ends]

AL: I also want to note that on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democrats who have criticized Trump for the shooting, naming several members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

What did you make of Bash’s question to you and the idea behind it, that somehow the real problem here is criticizing the president and his policies, no matter what those policies are?

JR: The freedom of speech has to be wide open, vigorous, and uninhibited in America. But the point I was trying to make was that we should keep to policy matters and political matters, and not personalize it.

So I literally didn’t know what she was talking about. I do not use, or at least I try not to use, the kind of rhetoric that President Trump routinely and habitually uses where he calls people communists, he calls people terrorists. He calls people crazy, insane. He calls people evil, wicked. He will buttonhole reporters and tell them that they’re stupid, they’re ugly, all those kinds of things.

I just thought it was curious that, in the wake of this terrible episode, that [Bash] would try to equate the way that Democrats talk and the way that President Trump talks, because we are indeed very vigorous and aggressive in standing up to violent insurrections and attempts to overthrow elections. And we’re very vigorous and aggressive in opposing illegal wars because Congress has been cut out and so on. But we try to keep it at the level of policies and their actions.

AL: A letter that you sent a few weeks ago to the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner opened by saying, “You are now reportedly participating as ‘Special Envoy for Peace’ in negotiations on behalf of the United States government to address the roiling conflicts in the Middle East. At the same time, you are soliciting billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies for your private business ventures while already managing billions of dollars of their money in your international investment firm.”

The letter is meant to notify Kushner about a forthcoming investigation into his role in the administration and conflicts of interest. What do you hope to investigate here, and can you talk about what you find most concerning about Kushner’s role in trying to negotiate an end to the war in Iran and being involved in other foreign policy ventures?

JR: Any reasonable person would see this as an absolute conflict of interest — that you can’t serve two masters at the same time.

So on the one hand, he’s got billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and they have specific interests of their own. Their leaders do, like Mohammed bin Salman, the homicidal crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. They’ve got particular interests.

It’s been reported widely that his interest — and therefore Saudi Arabia’s interest — is to keep the war going for as long as possible. There’s money to be made there, and they also want to do everything they can to degrade the power of Iran. That’s one set of interests that Jared Kushner is representing. Those are his business partners, those are his clients.

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And at the same time, he’s representing the United States. And I asked him the question straight up: Are you representing, 100%, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and Qatar and your business with all of those people? Or are you representing, 100%, the people of the United States? Or do you think you’re doing 50/50? Everybody would see that as a dramatic, egregious conflict of interest to do it.

But, of course, in the Trump era, the Trump officials see it not as a conflict of interest but as a convergence of interest. The way they think of it is, “Oh, this is great. We can go over, and we can talk about the war, and we can also talk about our business deals and recruit more clients and get more money from them.”

There was reportage about how he’s seeking to get even more billions of dollars from them, which obviously means they have additional leverage beyond the money that they’ve already put in. This has never happened in another presidency, anything remotely like it.

So we want to investigate, to get to the bottom of exactly who he’s representing. How is he representing himself? What is the mixture of private and public business he’s conducting when he goes on these trips?

AL: The BBC also just published a report on insider trading around Trump’s presidency amid questions about how markets have responded to the Iran war. The House Oversight Committee released a report earlier this year on Trump and his family profiteering from his administration.

Do you know if that’s going anywhere, and are you looking into any of those issues in your capacity on the Judiciary Committee?

JR: Yes, because his sons clearly are venturing into defense contracting and are participating in various ventures where they are selling goods to the Department of Defense.

So look, this is a president who started off in his first administration dipping his toes in the water to see what kind of reaction there would be to collecting millions of dollars from China and Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and Egypt and all of these countries at the Trump hotels, at the Trump golf courses, the Trump resorts, some other independent business ventures — but it was basically “ma and pa” brick-and-mortar-type ventures.

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Now they’ve gone digital. They’ve gone from millions of dollars to billions of dollars with the crypto schemes and scams that they’ve put together, with the military–industrial complex. All bets are off at this point. They have thrown off any kind of guardrails or inhibitions. 

I fault us for not having impeached him in the first term for violating the foreign emoluments clause and also the domestic emoluments clause, which says that the president is limited to his salary in office and cannot receive any other money from the United States — and yet was regularly billing the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the Department of Commerce, every other federal department for staying at his hotels, making them stay there, then billing them for it, and the golf courses, and so on and so forth. 

The Constitution tried to create a wall of separation between the president’s private businesses and the public Treasury and the public good. Congress has to act. Obviously, our friends on the MAGA side are not going to act on this. But the Democrats will. We need to reestablish that wall of separation.

AL: While I have you, I know you were on the floor on Wednesday for debate on extending FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and whether the government can conduct warrantless surveillance on the public. The House voted to pass the surveillance program extension in the face of fierce opposition from critics and civil liberties advocates. What is the latest here?

JR: It’s an interesting situation because Chairman Jim Jordan, my counterpart on the Judiciary Committee — I’m the ranking member, he’s the chairman for the Republicans — he represented. Nobody else was willing to speak for the FISA bill on the House side. He had no speakers participating in his roster.

I had tons of people who wanted to speak against it and was able to have several of them do it. He was even uncharacteristically subdued in his presentation because he had taken the position historically that there needs to be a warrant requirement and probable cause before you start searching the foreign intelligence database drawn from all the communications companies, emails, texts, phone calls. But he’s changed his position in working with the White House. 

The press at least, is reporting this has to do with his desire to become the next minority leader. So I do not think he advanced the most coherent arguments for this. 

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Our position was simple, which is that before you go searching about in querying information that exists in a foreign intelligence database that was gathered without any Fourth Amendment standards — no probable cause, no search warrant, none of it — before you go searching for the information about hundreds of millions of Americans, you’ve got to go and talk to a judge first. The Fourth Amendment says search warrants have to be based on probable cause, and you need to interpose a neutral, independent magistrate between the government and its detective work and its searches.

They say, no, let’s just leave it up to the FBI director to be reasonable. Well, that’s Kash Patel. When there were complaints about that, even on the Republican side, they added something to say, Kash Patel has got to report what he’s doing to Tulsi Gabbard. So if you think having Kash Patel report to Tulsi Gabbard is a great substitute for the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, go ahead and vote for this.

But if you want to stand by the Constitution, this is not legislation for you. So the wheel is still in spin as we work our way back and forth between the House and the Senate.

Kash Patel had been spending a lot of taxpayer money by getting FBI agents to shepherd and chauffeur his girlfriend around the country for security and for transportation. When the New York Times somehow got ahold of that, somebody leaked it and wrote a story about it, Kash Patel’s response was not, “Oh my God, I’ve made such a mistake, I’ve gotta apologize and stop using taxpayer money and SWAT teams to chauffeur my girlfriend around America.” No. His response was, let’s investigate her. Let’s search all the databases that we’ve got. 

So if you think that’s the guy you want to trust to be respecting the privacy rights of the American people and the Fourth Amendment rights — fine, this is for you. But we had more than a dozen Republicans join us after our debate in opposing it, the vast majority of Democrats voted against it, but they were able to win that one on the floor. We’ll see where it goes, and whether our friends on the Senate side can hang tough.

AL: Thank you so much, Congressman Raskin.

JR: Thanks for having me, Akela.

Break

AL: After the latest assassination attempt on President Donald Trump over the weekend, claims that it was a false flag, another orchestrated and staged incident flooded the internet, from the comments section to social media posts to videos of influencers dissecting the alleged evidence. 

Today I speak to journalist Mike Rothschild about the growing world of conspiracy theories that question whether the multiple assassination attempts against Trump were staged. We’ll also dive into other conspiracy theories currently capturing the public imagination, from dead and missing scientists to a wildfire in Georgia. 

Mike writes “Rough Edges” for TPM, covering fringe groups, conspiracy theories, moral panics, and how the internet broke our brains. He is the author of the first complete book on the QAnon conspiracy movement called “The Storm is Upon Us” and, most recently, a 200-year history of conspiracy theories called “Jewish Space Lasers.” 

Mike, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Mike Rothschild: Thank you for having me. 

AL: Last week’s attempt to assassinate Trump already feels far away. But this was the third such attempt, after two other failed attacks in recent years. One in Butler, Pennsylvania, and another in West Palm Beach, Florida. Mike, one of the reasons that we wanted to bring you on the show is to discuss a growing chorus of online chatter claiming these assassination attempts were staged.

Even before the latest attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, prominent MAGA voices like Marjorie Taylor Green were raising questions. Greene wrote on X, “I’m not calling the Butler assassination a hoax. But there are a lot of questions that deserve public answers. I’m asking why won’t Trump release the information about Matthew Crooks?” Crooks being the 20-year-old gunman killed by Secret Service while trying to attack Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania two years ago.

To start, can you lay out what we know so far about what happened on Saturday and the suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old from Torrance, California? And then we’ll get into the various conspiracy theories surrounding the shooting.

MR: For an incident that happened fairly recently, we know quite a bit. We know what his motive was because he sent a manifesto to his friends and family. We know what he did because it was caught on camera. He was armed with a shotgun and knives. He ran toward a medal detector on the floor above where the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was taking place. He never got in the room. He never actually fired a shot at Trump or was even close. And he was subdued by the Secret Service and security and taken away. This is not the kind of thing where you would think that there would be conspiracy theories about it being fake because we have a timeline of what happened almost immediately.

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But we are so conditioned to distrust what we are being told by authorities that people immediately began concocting conspiracy theories about it — even before we even knew what had happened. Whether it was a shooting or just dishes breaking. 

AL: Let’s unpack some of the “fake shooting” claims. You wrote on Bluesky, “‘Trump keeps staging assassination attempts’ is the same Infowars brainworm strain as ‘Obama keeps staging mass shootings.’ Different party, same paranoia.” What are the conspiratorial claims surrounding the assassination attempt on Saturday? 

MR: The biggest one is that it was staged — that Trump hired this person and set all of this up, and that everyone in the room who needed to know where they were going to go knew about it, and you could tell from the looks on their faces and the way security acted, and he was staging all of this so that he could bump his approval ratings or that he could create more interest for his super-mega ballroom bunker.

All of these are things that have been said about other incidents involving Trump. It’s just that it happened incredibly quickly. I don’t think we even had the name of the suspect before people started saying that it was staged.

AL: You also had Karoline Leavitt having said there will be shots fired tonight, and people taking that and running with it as the verbal version of numerology. I don’t know what the word for that is. 

MR: Right. There is actually a term for it. It’s this term called “predictive programming.” 

AL: Thank you. Thank you. 

MR: Yes, I wish I didn’t know that. In the conspiracy world, it means that the cabal that perpetrates these plots has to tell us what they’re going to do for karmic reasons, but they do it in a way that we won’t understand it. You get this a lot with “The Simpsons” ironically, or other pieces of entertainment where there’s a clue to some upcoming event that’s hidden in a cutaway on the Simpsons or in the plot of something, and it’s the cabal telling us what they have to do.

I once had somebody say, “Oh, it’s like vampires, they have to be invited into your house.” And I said, “Well, vampires aren’t real either.” It’s like come on, what are we doing?

AL: [Laughs.] What are we doing? That is the question, though. What makes these conspiracy theories take hold, as opposed to coming out of something like this with more of a collective sense of an effort to address gun violence, or talk about how these incidents are used to police dissent and criticism of the president?

Last year, we had the Minnesota lawmaker and her husband who were killed in their home by a Trump supporter who had radical anti-abortion views. This is in the vein of our long-standing inability to address mass shootings, but what makes it easier to respond to something like that with a conspiracy theory rather than some other kind of response?

MR: Conspiracy theories are easy. They don’t require any evidence. They don’t require any research or self-reflection. Looking at an incident where the highest-ranked people in the United States are all in one room, and the security isn’t as tight as it should be, and guns are too easy to get, and there’s too many people who have mental illness because they’ve been radicalized and brain-poisoned on the internet — those are really difficult issues to solve. They go to the core of American politics and communication right now. But just deciding that it was staged so that the president could get his ballroom bunker or get 5 points on his approval rating, that’s easy. That doesn’t take any effort. 

And then you can do it immediately. If you do it well, you can get viral clout out of it. You get clicks, you make money. It’s a very easy solution to a very, very complicated problem. 

AL: Right now, in the political environment that we’re in there’s always a rush after these shootings to ascribe either far-left or far-right extremism to the suspect or the assailant.

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We saw that in this case, where it turns out he seems like a pretty normal centrist, liberal Democrat. After the Minnesota killing of Melissa Hortman and her husband, we spoke to journalist Taylor Lorenz about how quick prominent figures on the right took to social media to blame the left for their deaths.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee said it was due to “Marxism.” Elon Musk claimed it was the “far left.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, said it “seems to be a leftist.” Lorenz said, “There’s an entire right-wing media machine aimed at pushing disinformation around breaking news events and specifically attributing violence to the left.”

What’s your assessment of how this dynamic works and how it worked in this last shooting as well? 

MR: There is. We don’t know how organized or coordinated this apparatus is, but it clearly exists. Minutes after this incident broke on social media, you already had people, “Oh, that’s why we need the ballroom. We gotta have more security around the president. He needs to have his bunker where he can never leave.” You had dozens of extremely popular influencers and politicians all saying this at the same time. These people they coordinate their messaging because that’s what you do in politics.

So I think there is a very real apparatus designed to push the blame onto a convenient scapegoat. Usually someone who is not aligned with the president’s values, and to turn it into something that the president can use for his own ends. Some of that I think revolves around this particular president having a very vocal cult of personality around him.

But I think it’s also that we are so used to things happening very quickly and immediately being seized upon for political ends. We all do this now. It’s just that the right is a lot better at it. 

AL: The other piece of this is that Donald Trump himself — his political career — has been fueled by conspiracy theories that propelled him to the White House. How has Trump in particular used that race that we’re talking about to ascribe blame and the current media environment that has elevated conspiracy theories to where they’re now shaping national discourse and even policy? We could talk about RFK Jr. all day. 

MR: Donald Trump was really the first conspiracy theorist presidential candidate. He rose to political power certainly based on his celebrity and his apparent wealth, but also because he was able to say things that had been very popular on the fringes for a long time that the mainstream right really didn’t want anything to do with. 

Things like Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Antonin Scalia was murdered. Obama is secretly a Muslim. Vaccines cause autism. These are things that mainstream Republicans wanted absolutely nothing to do with. But they were incredibly popular on the sort of fringes and sometimes not the fringes of the far right. 

If you look in the history of these things, you look at some of the more popular conspiracy theory books — and I’ve written about this before — you have the 1970s book, “None Dare Call It Conspiracy,” which was written by two members of the John Birch Society, the far-right anti-Communist group. It sold 5 million copies in the United States in the early ’70s. Clearly there is a market for this, and clearly there are a lot of people who believe this.

Trump was just the first person to say it in a way that made it mainstream grist for discourse. And, of course, everybody’s now catching up to him. So when Trump spouts these insane conspiracy theories or pushes these ridiculous memes, he’s doing something that he’s been doing for the last decade and he’s very good at, and that people expect from him and want from him. He’s filling this niche that I think a lot of people didn’t want to believe was there. 

AL: If you look at the current podcast charts in the news or politics category or the top YouTube shows, you’ll find shows swimming in conspiracy theories topping those charts, like Candace Owens’s podcast. We know the media environment is fragmented. We have a problem with media literacy, yada, yada, yada. But is there a way to come back from that level of saturation of, conspiracy is now the most popular form of media consumption? What do we do with that? 

MR: Unfortunately, I don’t know if there’s a way to do it at scale. I don’t know if there’s a way to glue everyone’s brains back together after 10 years of this insanity, because I think it is extremely lucrative. 

AL: What an image. 

MR: Yeah. It’s extremely lucrative, and it really fills a need that a lot of people have. These are very chaotic times. I think people flock to conspiracy theories and conspiracy theory content creators because these are the people who are saying, “Yeah, this is all crazy, but here’s what’s really going on.” 

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There’s a kind of a smugness to the conspiracy theory world: this idea of, I know something you don’t know. I’ve got the secret knowledge. I know what’s really happening. And I’m going to share it with you because you think I’m the crazy one, but I think you’re the crazy one. And that’s just a very basic human nature kind of thing.

AL: When you talk about filling this need, I think that’s really a key piece of it, because it brings to mind what Cole wrote in his manifesto about feeling like he was filling this role that no one else was taking up — this responsibility to fight back against these raging evils in the administration, some of which is fueled by conspiracy. He writes a lot about the Epstein stuff, which we’ll get into, which is ironically the least conspiratorial part of this. It’s just real and horrible. 

But he talks about feeling like nobody else was going to pick up the torch and do this. It’s interesting to me that that sense of finding meaning in something or taking responsibility where no one else will take it, is also caught up in how we come to believe these conspiracy theories in the first place.

MR: There’s a grandiosity to this. There’s a messianic fervor to a lot of these things. You hear it if you listen to Alex Jones. “I’m standing in the gap against evil, and they’re all coming after me because they know I’m a threat!” It’s the same thing, it’s the same delusions of grandeur.

Now with somebody like Alex Jones or Candace Owens or Tucker [Carlson], you wonder how much of that is a character. Not all of it, but some of it is. 

With a guy like Cole, it’s not. He really believes this, and there is, of course, an inherent irrationality to strapping up a shotgun and going to try to kill the president. It’s not something a rational person does. 

AL: In Trump’s second term, there are also some signs that some of these conspiracy theorists are breaking with him, including prominent figures that we’re talking about, like Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Where and when did you begin to see cracks in that part of Trump’s allies, and what is driving those fractures? 

MR: The Trump relationship with the conspiracy community — it’s very hot and cold. They will turn on him, but then they’ll always come back. But when they really did start to lose faith, I think, for good and much more vocally was Epstein.

This idea that we’re going to break open the Epstein files, we’re going to put everything out there. They had that infamous meeting at the White House with the Epstein files, phase one binders, and they’re all standing there looking very smug. 

Then Trump goes, oh, there’s nothing there. There’s no Epstein files. It’s a hoax. The Democrats did that. Biden and Obama did the Epstein files. You know anyone who thinks that is an idiot. 

These are influencers who helped get him back into office. And trump is now telling them they’re idiots for believing what he said he was going to do about Epstein. You can only humiliate somebody so many times before they actually start to have feelings.

So I think we started to see it happen with Epstein and then it really happened with Iran. The Iran war really was an abrogation of what Trump said he stood for. He said up and down, I’m the peace president. There’s not going to be any more stupid Middle East forever wars. We’re going to be America first. We’re going to go back to isolationism. We’re not getting involved. Maybe we’ll bomb them if we have to, but we’re not going to war.

Then we go to war. And we go to war for reasons nobody can articulate. The reason changes constantly. We don’t know what the objective is. We don’t know how we know if we’ve achieved the objective. It just looks like yet another Middle Eastern misadventure. 

A lot of these people realized their audiences are turning on Trump. If you’re somebody like Tucker or Alex or Candace Owens, you kind of know that you can’t trust Trump, but you still feel stupid. You have feelings, you’re still a person. So I think there is a sense of betrayal and of feeling dumb.

But more than that, they know their audiences are feeling betrayed and dumb. They know their audiences thought we were going to get $2 gas prices — that hasn’t happened. Our electric bills are going to get cut in half — that hasn’t happened. We were going to have so much tariff money we wouldn’t need to pay income tax — that hasn’t happened.

So these people are feeling the effect of Trump’s lying and storytelling in their pocketbooks and in their fuel tanks. And now they’re getting told, yeah, Iran, we gotta go to a war with Iran. You said you weren’t going to go to a war with Iran.

His audiences are feeling betrayed and the influencers are going where their audiences are going because they know they’ve got to start getting ready for a post-Trump world. They just have to do it a little bit faster than they thought they were going to have to. 

AL: You’ve also written extensively about the right-wing conspiracy movement QAnon.

In a story you wrote for TPM recently, you wrote about how the movement differs from the Epstein case. You wrote, “Where QAnon was different, and where it failed spectacularly, was in promising that justice would finally be delivered to these untouchable insiders. It offered believers not nihilistic scapegoating, but a utopia that was just a few executions away. The basis of Q, and why it was so compelling to so many people, was that the monsters were finally going to be brought down by Donald Trump, a figure of outsider wealth beholden to nobody except those who elected him.”

Can you talk about how these worlds intersect — the Epstein and QAnon conspiracies — and what it says about both our political discourse, but also accountability and lack thereof? 

MR: Lack thereof. Yeah. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds on the Q drops because no one will survive that. But Epstein is a central figure in this world. This idea that he’s got this satanic temple and these tunnels and he’s trafficking all these girls on the planes with Bill Clinton and all these super elite power brokers and Trump is going to take them down. That was always the biggest part of it. That these people have been an untouchable cabal for thousands of years, and it’s Donald Trump who’s finally going to take them down. 

But of course he’s not. So you need an explanation for why he’s not doing it. So something like QAnon invents an explanation of, he’s doing it — it’s just in secret. And it’s happening in all of these ways that the public doesn’t know about, but I’m going to tell you about them so that you don’t lose faith. 

At some point you have to start delivering. I think there was a sense when Trump came back into office of, “OK we’re going to get rid of all this. We’re going to undo the stolen election, we’re going to undo all the Covid stuff. We’re going to finally bring down the elite trafficking rings. Like no one’s standing in Trump’s way.” Then he just says, the whole thing is stupid and nothing’s going to happen, and you’re an idiot if you believed him.

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So the idea of Q was right because there’s elite traffickers. Well, there’s always been elites who’ve gotten away with terrible things that the rest of us would all be in prison for. The point of QAnon was that they were going to go down, they were going to be punished, they were going to be executed, they were going to be mass arrests, and Trump was going to get rid of all of these people.

Trump hasn’t gotten rid of them. He’s protected all of them. You’re finally seeing some of the rank-and-file Trump believers who are still maybe hardcore conspiracy believers going, “Yeah, this guy lied to us. The whole time he’s lied to us.” It is a moment where everything that you have created for yourself over the last decade is starting to fall apart because there was never anything there. 

I think that’s actually how a lot of deradicalization starts, is one thing doesn’t make sense in the world of conspiracies. And when you start looking into that one thing, the whole thing falls apart. Now, I don’t know that these people are going to be deradicalized.

I don’t think a lot of these conspiracy influencers are giving up on the precepts of Trumpism, but they’re giving up on Trump. That’s at least something for us to grab onto. Not with Tucker Carlson, but with the people who listen to Tucker Carlson.

AL: I want to move on to the other conspiracy theories that have been capturing the public’s attention right now.

We’ve been talking a lot about Trump-world conspiracy theories, many of which are now coming back to bite him. But there is a sort of unrelated conspiracy theory that’s been gaining momentum recently that the president is paying attention to and that Republicans are now trying to capitalize on, I would say. This is about the dead and missing scientists. Walk us through that, I know you’ve written about this recently. 

MR: So this conspiracy theory is a very old one. There have been many other conspiracy theories that involve lists of people that are being bumped off by certain powerful figures because they knew too much or it’s part of a plot. 

You had this with the Clinton body count, the Kennedy witnesses. You go all the way back to King Tut’s curse — people who were involved in the opening of King Tut’s tomb were all being killed. So in the case of the missing scientists, it’s this list of around a dozen people who are said to be scientists — not all of them are — who supposedly work in high technology, defense, aerospace, but also UFOs, free energy, anti-gravity, exoplanets. 

It’s been turned into this, “All of these scientists involved in alien technology are being kidnapped, and what are they really doing? And oh my God, it’s so horrible.” I’ve seen these things before and actually one of the clusters of these missing scientists is where I live in Pasadena, California, at [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory].

I know a lot of people who work at JPL. I’ve toured JPL. Thousands of people work there. The idea that three or four of them over the course of a couple of years would have something unfortunate happen to them is not at all a conspiracy, just the same as a few people working at Los Alamos in New Mexico, bad things happening to a few people there. Not a conspiracy, it’s just statistics. 

Linking all of these people together creates a conspiracy theory out of nothing, and there’s no indication of what this plot actually is. So one of these people was an expert in plasma physics. One was an expert in exoplanets. One was a pharmaceutical executive. One of them was an administrative assistant who worked at Los Alamos. One was a construction foreman at JPL, I think. None of these people have anything to do with each other, except they all are sort of science-adjacent — like millions of other people in the United States.

So you have a conspiracy theory that is working purely on people’s lack of understanding about statistics, lack of understanding about science, and of course, this [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena] craze that we’re going through right now. So it’s taking a fragment of pop culture and turning it into a dastardly plot. 

And because of course, the White House is full of conspiracy theorists, they’re able to talk about this, and then they go, oh yeah we’re investigating that. We’re going to get to the bottom of it. There’s nothing to investigate, there’s nothing to get to the bottom of, except they need more content. They know that people are hungry for more conspiracies. Here’s a really juicy one that you can just serve up to people. 

AL: So you mentioned JPL, that’s NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and UAP is what we’re calling UFOs now?

MR: What we’re calling UFOs. 

AL: The new term for UFOs.

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I will mention that the FBI is now saying that it is looking into connections between these missing and dead scientists. And on Monday, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced that it is also investigating reports of the deaths and disappearances.

They released a statement saying that “reports raise questions about a possible sinister connection between … [these] disappearances.” 

MR: [Laughs.] Oh, God.

AL: So, that is how the government is addressing this right now. 

Then actually, I saw this as we were preparing for the show. I had not heard about this, but I don’t know if you’ve seen, there’s another story about conspiracy theories that this wildfire in Georgia was staged to clear the path for a data center.

Have you heard about that? 

MR: I’ve heard a little bit about it. I am not surprised. I can tell you firsthand about wildfire conspiracy theories. We lost our home in the Eaton fire in January of 2025. I’m actually writing a book about it right now. 

AL: Oh, gosh. That’s awful, I’m sorry. 

MR: Yeah. Not been my favorite couple of years, but hey, that’s OK. The exact same theories were spread about the fire that I went through — that it was set to clear land for a smart city in Malibu, that it was set to destroy evidence of trafficking or to build Olympic venues. It is the same strain of paranoia as the missing scientists.

It’s something that wasn’t supposed to happen, and we don’t understand why it’s happening, and therefore there must be a plot behind it. There is something behind it: It’s climate change. 

AL: It’s climate change.

MR: But that’s the thing that people people don’t ever want to talk about. So they make up something so they don’t have to talk about the actual reasons why these things are happening more frequently. Climate change isn’t the only reason, but it’s a big reason. The more you create these fantastical conspiracy theories, the less you have to talk about the actual thing that’s happening.

It’s a psychology that we’re seeing over and over again. 

AL: You wrote a 200-year history about conspiracy theories. They obviously aren’t new, but what does that history tell us about American political culture? Is this unique at all to the United States? How has it evolved over the centuries and how would you characterize the moment that we’re living in now?

MR: It’s a useful question in the context of the speed that everything is happening at. Conspiracy theories are not new to the United States. They’re not inherent to the U.S. They have been part of human interaction always. If you go back to the great fire of Rome, there were whispers that Nero had set it on purpose for his own political ends.

That’s just how we look at things. We look at things we don’t understand, that are dangerous, and we create a plot and we create reasons why these things are happening. 

We live in these extremely chaotic times where a lot of things are happening very quickly. We don’t understand them. We don’t have the trust in the authorities who are supposed to tell us why these things are happening and break them out for us.

So we listen to people who are telling us what we want to hear, who are making us feel better, and making us feel like someone is in control of all of this. It hits on a very particular human need for patterns and for order and for understanding. 

So yes, we are certainly in a time when conspiracy theories are much more mainstream than they’ve ever been, much more lucrative than they’ve ever been. But we’ve always had a strain of distrust and paranoia. 

It’s very American, but it’s not exclusively American. It’s just that right now, we are in a time when we can all connect with each other. These people used to be siloed and isolated; no one wanted to talk to them or be around them. Now they find each other and they create communities, and they create Facebook groups and message boards.

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Sometimes if they’re really good at what they do, they can get elected to office or write bestselling books. This stuff is just everywhere now. Everybody seems to know somebody who’s going through some version of this, and it’s very unfortunate. 

AL: We’re going to leave it there.

Mike Rothschild, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. This is one of our more fun and disturbing interviews. 

MR: Fun for me maybe. Thank you. This was great.

AL: And that does it for this episode. 

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories appeared first on The Intercept.

There were 279 FBI personnel working on “immigration-related matters” before Trump took office in January 2025, according to bureau records The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. By September, that number had ballooned to more than 6,500.

In total, 9,161 people at the FBI worked on immigration between Trump’s inauguration and September 7 of last year, out of a total of 38,000 FBI employees. 

“That is a huge, huge number of people,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who has testified before Congress on the cost of mass deportations. “This is just a somewhat shocking scale that we’re looking at.”

The flood of FBI personnel into immigration work came in the early days of the tenure of Director Kash Patel, who has shown a willingness to follow Trump’s orders without question or exception. According to David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, the redirection may have hampered the FBI’s ability to perform criminal investigative work.

“That’s a striking diversion of resources away from public safety,” Bier said. “We’re talking about the FBI diverting people away from criminal investigations and ongoing criminal activity and into civil immigration enforcement. This is showing the extent to which the resources of the FBI were put at the disposal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement contrary to the intent of Congress, and the abuse of the funds that Congress grants the FBI to accomplish its mission.”

The documents The Intercept received did not make clear if the employees assigned to immigration were part of the FBI’s total workforce or its smaller subset of 13,700 special agents. In September, the Cato Institute published a disclosure from ICE reporting that 2,840 out of 13,700 FBI special agents — 1 in 5 — were being redirected to work on ICE enforcement and removal operations.

“While the FBI does not comment on specific personnel numbers or decisions, FBI agents and staff are dedicated professionals working around the clock to defend the homeland and crush violent crime,” an FBI spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “The FBI continuously assesses and realigns our resources to ensure the safety of the American people, and we surge resources based on needs.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment

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Trump has diverted thousands of agents at a number of federal agencies — including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — to aid in his administration’s deportation machine. 

The shift started as soon as he returned to office. By January 26, 2025, just six days after Trump’s second inauguration, the FBI had 1,390 employees working on immigration. In the first months of Trump’s second term, he ramped up arrests of immigrants around the country and authorized federal law enforcement at agencies that don’t work on immigration to help his administration carry out its deportation policies.

The FBI reassignments exploded the following month. As the Trump administration issued a directive to allow law enforcement to enter the homes of people it claimed were suspected gang members without a warrant, the number of FBI personnel working on immigration rose to 2,941. 

September’s 6,500-employee number wasn’t even the peak. The number continued increasing throughout the spring and reached over 5,700 in May, when the administration set a new quota to arrest 3,000 people a day. 

Another shocking detail, Bier said, was that the number of FBI agents being diverted to immigration work remained high even after Congress passed July’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, which directed an additional $170 billion in funding for immigration and border spending. 

The law “infused tens of billions of dollars” for immigration enforcement,” Bier said, ” — “and yet there’s no let-up.”

“This is not about ‘ICE doesn’t have the money,’” Bier said. “ICE has the money, and they’re going ahead with using criminal law enforcement for mass deportation purposes.”

It’s not clear what the FBI’s “immigration-related” work entails, but the rapid expansion suggests FBI staff are working on issues unrelated to the FBI’s mandate, Reichlin-Melnick added.

“If you look at how quickly the scale of this ramped up and compare it to what we know was happening at the time, it’s very clear that a lot of this — probably the significant majority — was immigration enforcement,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

The increase coincides with an increase in FBI presence at immigration raids. On Wednesday, FBI agents were among the federal law enforcement personnel carrying out raids in Minnesota related to the right-wing allegations of fraud against the Somali immigrant community. 

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The number of FBI personnel working on immigration also raises national security concerns, Reichlin-Melnick added. The FBI had to reassign agents to work on counterterrorism, after previously diverting them to work on immigration, following the U.S. bombing of Iran last summer. 

“The national security implications of this are likely significant. In September 2025, 6,500 FBI personnel were working at least an hour of their day on immigration-related matters,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “There is no situation in which the administration has made the security of the nation better by reassigning these agents.” 

Bier agreed the diversion was potentially dangerous, pointing to the risks brought on by the current U.S. war on Iran.

“Anytime you’re involved in a war — and we certainly are — you should be careful about retaliation and monitoring those threats,” Bier said. “It makes little sense to divert people away from that during this time, especially.”

Update: May 1, 2026, 12:32 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from the FBI sent after publication.

The post FBI Redirected a Quarter of Staff to Target Immigrants Under Trump’s Deportation Push appeared first on The Intercept.

The area, in a remote corner of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, is a roughly 280-by-50-foot etching in the desert sand known as an intaglio.

Last Thursday, without any notice, a contractor working for DHS cut a roughly 60-foot swath across the middle of the intaglio, doing irreparable damage to the 1,000-year-old artifact.

Cabeza Prieta, one of the largest wilderness areas outside of Alaska, also encompasses lands sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, which borders the refuge to the east. The O’odham have fought to prevent border wall construction across their reservation and during Trump’s first term largely prevailed; they also managed to protect the intaglio and a nearby burial site that they consider to be part of their ancestral lands.

“I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting. Not destroying,” Rick Martynec, an archaeologist, said in a phone interview, referring to the hundreds of figures drawn into the deserts of southern Peru.

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed the destruction in a statement to The Intercept and said the agency was coordinating with tribal authorities to figure out its next steps.

“On April 23, 2026, a border wall contractor inadvertently disturbed a cultural site known as Las Playas Intaglio, located west of Ajo, Arizona along the border,” said the spokesperson, John Mennell, who is working on the construction of the second barrier in Arizona. “The remaining portion of the site has been secured and will be protected in place.”

Well known to government officials, including the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, the intaglio lies just 10 or 15 feet from the massive steel wall that now runs along the U.S.–Mexico border. The destruction to the ancient site was first reported by the Washington Post.

Rick and Sandy Martynec, his wife, also an archaeologist who has studied the site for more than two decades, said the refuge was in talks with DHS and the contractor to make sure the site was protected as the Trump administration moves forward with a second set of barriers in the ecologically sensitive region.

The Martynecs even visited the intaglio in mid-April and observed stakes that had been put in place by an engineer to mark its boundaries.

The Martynecs were first notified by FWS staff on Monday when they called the refuge to see about visiting the site and to check on its status. According to the archaeologists, Rijk Morawe, the refuge manager, had already been out to survey the damage and told them what had happened.

The news took the Martynecs and others by surprise, since the agency had been in dialogue with DHS and the contractor to come up with an alternative route that would avoid the intaglio, similar to the negotiations that had taken place during Trump’s first term. (DHS’s Customs and Border Protection in Arizona did not comment by press time. FWS declined to comment, referring all border inquiries to CBP.)

“The refuge was pushing as hard as they possibly could to come to a resolution,” Martynec said.

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Members of the O’odham Nation had also been keeping a close eye on border wall development. On the day before the site was bulldozed, a group of O’odham runners observed construction getting dangerously close to the protected area. That morning they called Lorraine Eiler, an O’odham elder and co-founder of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, who lives in the town of Ajo where the Cabeza Prieta Refuge office is located.

According to Eiler, the runners told her that the contractor was indiscriminately clearing the area.

The runners told her, “They’re coming with their bulldozers and they’re knocking down trees and cactus and everything that’s along the border. They’re just bulldozing everything down and they are getting near the intaglio.” 

Eiler made a round of phone calls to tribal officials and environmental groups, but the next day, the contractor moved in and destroyed the site.

“I alerted people, but all I got was, ‘We’re going to have meetings, we’re going to discuss it,’” Eiler said.

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During Trump’s first term, border wall construction had widespread impacts on protected landscapes and sacred sites. In one case, DHS blasted through several hills that were too steep to build on directly, including one in Organ Pipe National Monument, east of Cabeza, that was a well-known burial ground. A contractor also bulldozed a road through an archaic Hohokam burial site on the border in Coronado National Forest, even though they’d been briefed by the tribe beforehand.

Border security continues to be a priority for the Trump administration, which has allocated more than $11 billion for new barriers and surveillance technology. The path that was cleared through the intaglio is part of an effort to build a so-called “smart wall” that CBP says will allow it to monitor activity in the desert day and night.

To do so, according to the Martynecs, the agency will have to clear a wide swath of land between the original wall and the secondary barrier.

“There won’t be any vegetation on it at all,” Martynec said. “This doesn’t bode well for the desert.”

Correction: May 1, 2026
This story has been updated to correct an errant reference to the day the intaglio was damaged. It was bulldozed on April 23, 2026. The story has also been updated to include a statement from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that was received after publication.

The post Trump Bulldozed a 1,000-Year-Old Archaeological Site to Make Room for a Second Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

Wyden said the public needs to know about a secret court opinion that found fault with the Trump administration’s use of data collected by the National Security Agency, prompting Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to warn of “consequences” for “distorting highly classified material.”

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The unusually pointed back-and-forth came amid a fight over the reauthorization of a controversial domestic spying program. The barbs exchanged by the senators highlighted how much Wyden has angered colleagues aligned with the NSA who want the spy program to be renewed without changes.

By the end of the day, Congress voted to give the program a 45-day extension to allow further negotiations over its fate.

Wyden had argued for a shorter extension, but he was able to secure a concession. Cotton and the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, agreed to pen a letter to the executive branch asking for the court opinion to be declassified within 15 days.

Wyden says that opinion details serious violations of the program’s guidelines.

“That ruling found serious violations of Americans’ constitutional rights and how the Trump administration has used Section 702,” Wyden said. “Congress should not vote — should not vote — to renew Section 702 when Americans are left in the dark about these troubling abuses,” Wyden said.

Wyden has a long history of trying to pry loose evidence of civil liberties violations by intelligence agencies. Most famously, in 2013, he attempted to force then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to acknowledge the existence of a phone record dragnet months before NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures made it public.

His sometimes-cryptic statements warning about secret spy programs have been dubbed “the Wyden siren.”

Most recently he has zeroed in on the court opinion. He irritated supporters of the NSA program on Thursday by initially refusing to give his consent for a 45-day extension of the program, until he secured the letter from Intelligence Committee leaders.

While speaking on the floor about why he opposed that extension, he accused Cotton of ducking the court opinion, prompting a pointed response.

“I am ducking nothing. I am pointing out the senator from Oregon’s long-standing practice of distorting highly classified material in public,” Cotton said. “One of these days there are going to be some consequences, and it may be while I’m the chairman of this committee.”

Cotton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Members of Congress are protected from prosecution for comments they make on the floor under the speech or debate clause of the Constitution.

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Little has been revealed about the court opinion besides a New York Times report earlier this month that it centered on searches of information about Americans in a vast database of communications that gets around laws on domestic spying because the data is collected abroad.

Wyden noted that current law already requires the court opinion to be declassified and released to the public at some point. He wants that process sped up so that it can take place before Congress votes on a long-term extension of the surveillance program.

“Congress must use a short-term extension to openly debate the critical issues in front of the American people. I am disappointed that, instead, it sure feels like the other side of the aisle is covering the abuses up,” he said.

Although the debate that was resolved later in the day hinged on a seemingly mundane issue — whether Congress should have three weeks or 45 days for further negotiations — it exposed hard feelings between the committee colleagues.

Wyden said a three-week extension was “more than reasonable,” given that Congress has had months to work on the issue.

Cotton said a longer extension was necessary because Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking member of the committee, recently suffered a family tragedy. Warner’s 36-year-old daughter died earlier this month, and he returned to the Senate this week after taking time off. As the highest-ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Warner will play a key role in the negotiations in extending the law.

“I would suggest that comity also counsels that we give a little bit longer than two weeks to a grieving colleague who just had a terrible family tragedy,” Cotton said.

Warner’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Update: April 30, 2026, 5:29 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include Congress’s extension of FISA after publication.

The post Ron Wyden Is Pissing Off the NSA’s Biggest Backers. Tom Cotton Warns There Will Be “Consequences.” appeared first on The Intercept.