The Israeli documentary “NAZA” will make its North American premiere tomorrow at the New York Film Festival on the heels of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vitriolic speech at the United Nations, which was met by mass protests, arrests, and diplomats walking out. Other Israeli documentaries have screened at Lincoln Center, including one at the New York Jewish Film Festival in January on the movement for LGBTQ+ rights or another about an October 7 hostage. But this film, co-directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has proven extraordinarily controversial in its home country, reviled by nearly every sector of media and politics.

The documentary, which is composed of anonymous interviews with those active in Israel’s military and intelligence service during the war against Gaza, depicts extensive, highly detailed confessions of their participation in the mass targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians. The film’s title comes from the Israeli military’s system for assessing collateral damage, an interface that one of the anonymous confessors says can map out every building in the Gaza Strip and predict what civilians may be killed in an airstrike. One man who used the NAZA interface remarks in a clip from the film that the military once approved a single strike the system calculated would kill 500 Palestinians, and said the system makes no distinction between adults and children.

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The revelation of the film’s existence — its world premiere was at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month after being produced in secret for three years — sent shockwaves through Israeli society. Two contradictory claims have begun to dominate discussions of the documentary, at the highest levels of both the Israeli government and the military brass, both aiming to neutralize the film’s reach and the ability of its filmmakers to continue working. The first is that the film released highly sensitive and classified information about the Israel Defense Forces’ operations in Gaza, contravening the law. The second line of attack claims the film is a complete fabrication, a hoax, and in the words of IDF Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir, a “blood libel.” Key Israeli politicians argue Abraham and Szor are aiding the enemy in wartime, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calling them  “friends” of Hamas who should be held accountable as such.

While some opponents of the current Israeli government, such as Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, have attempted to tack in a more liberal direction by saying “criticism is legitimate” — while also decrying the film for “present[ing] a distorted and one-sided picture” at a time when “the State of Israel [is] in a time of distress” — both the Israeli state and the army have begun proposing legal action be taken against the filmmakers, with their citizenship in particular coming under attack from not only Culture Minister Miki Zohar, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

In an unprecedented move, Netanyahu announced on September 16 in a video message posted on social media that his government would “revoke citizenship from anyone who defames IDF supporters abroad” in addition to raising the fine for defamation “twentyfold” to 1 million shekels (nearly $330,000 at the current exchange rate) to punish them further. Calling out the “NAZA” filmmakers specifically, Netanyahu went on to say “their place does not belong with us.”

The phenomenon of revoking Israeli citizenship is not novel. Earlier this year, two Palestinians from East Jerusalem were convicted of security offenses and stripped of their Israeli nationality, which paved the way for their deportation to either the occupied West Bank or even the Gaza Strip. But revoking the citizenship of Israeli Jews on any kind of similar grounds is without historical precedent. Both Abraham and Szor — who also co-directed the documentary “No Other Land” — are Jews born in Israel, have no Palestinian ancestry, and no public record of citizenship for any other country.

Proposals have been made in the past for the revocation of Israeli citizenship from certain Jews, most notably Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The far-right assassin, who is from an Orthodox Jewish family, was the subject of a public petition demanding his citizenship be revoked. But the Israeli Supreme Court rejected it on the grounds that “the dignity of the right” for every Jew to acquire and have Israeli citizenship overruled the “dignity of the murderer.” Now, for the first time, a sitting Israeli leader is advocating for the so-called “dignity of the right” to be overturned, not for murder, but for mere “slander,” in Netanyahu’s description, against the Israeli military.

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Although Israeli politicians and other officials have categorized the filmmakers as antisemites spreading lies about the Jewish people, Abraham and Szor are not explicitly anti-Zionist in the way that other prominent critics of Israel, like the historian Ilan Pappé and the architect Eyal Weizman, have defined themselves, or even how a Communist member of Israel’s Knesset, Ofer Cassif, has defined himself. Both co-directors have openly stated their belief in a future where both Israelis and Palestinians “are equally sovereign and free.” Abraham himself has said Israelis have a “right” to “sovereignty and security in this land,” just as Palestinians do.

Despite these threaded needles, the Jewish filmmakers of “NAZA” now find themselves in the position of being treated much the same way Palestinian citizens of Israel are: as though their citizenship was bestowed upon them in error, a mistake of history where convenience trumped logic, a catastrophe that needs to be rectified immediately.

The Law of Return — the idea that every Jewish person, even those who converted to the religion and have no ancestral ties to the land of Palestine, should be allowed to “return” to their homeland, to settle, to live, and to be treated as an equal alongside every other Jewish person, no matter their birthplace — was one of the fundamental building blocks of the Zionist project. But the Law of Return did not become law until 1950, and the Citizenship Law, which defined the terms of its larger eligibility, did not become law until 1952, four years after the State of Israel’s founding.

For a short period in Israel’s history, citizenship had no clear definition, but it required quick clarification, not just because it is a key part of any fledgling state, but because they needed to be able to define which Arabs, who remained inside Israel’s new borders on temporary “red card” permits after the Nakba, could be allowed to stay, and who could be removed as an illegal infiltrator. Then-Agriculture Minister Dov Yosef remarked plainly during a cabinet debate in 1949: “When we publish the citizenship law and a person is found not to be a citizen, we can then deport him.”

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Citizenship was granted in limited quantities to the Palestinians who had been able to remain inside the newly established Israel and did not confer all the rights it supposedly guaranteed. Palestinian citizens of Israel remained under control of a military governance system up until 1966, with their movements strictly controlled and their political activities restricted to rein in criticism of the Jewish state they now found themselves living under. 

The Law of Return, considered “inalienable” by many politicians, where any concrete restrictions must entail tearing of the law in its entirety, contained seemingly contradictory restrictions within its formally expansive framework. Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner noted back in 1950, during discussion of the Law of Return in the Knesset, that even though Jewish citizenship was technically expansive, it still entailed restrictions to those who “endangered … the security of the state,” a vagueness that Vilner opposed on the grounds that it could be used by the government “against sections within the Jewish people.” The Polish-Israeli anti-Zionist intellectual Israel Shahak noted in 1975 that all the punishments normally doled out against Arabs, including losing their citizenship, remained theoretically possible against Jewish dissenters under Israeli law, but only “racism” against Arabs had prevented setting that precedent.

As the United States became Israel’s primary benefactor in the 1960s and 1970s, previously dormant discussions about the grounds for revoking Israeli citizenship from Jews began to reemerge. They coalesced around insufficient connection to Israel, with some aiming to establish a system of permanent residency, disallowing citizenship for Jews who did not spend enough time inside the Jewish state. After 9/11, these proposals took on a much more ideological, and much more far-right, character. 

The Israeli right was soon overtaken with the possibility of revoking the citizenship of those it considered to be aiding the enemy, with Arab citizens of Israel being the primary target. But anti-Zionist Jews were also in their crosshairs, including members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish fringe sect Neturei Karta, or Jews who were insufficiently supportive of Israel, like Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. Calls for “loyalty oaths” from both Arabs and Jews became a cause célèbre for people like then-Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman in the late 2000s, who would insist on the equality he advocated for by saying, “It’s not racism. The test is loyalty, not their religion.” 

A certain McCarthyist strain familiar to Americans under the Bush administration, looking anywhere and everywhere for national disloyalty, was confirmed in 2007 by Likud MK Gilad Erdan, who would later become Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United Nations during the height of the war on Gaza in 2023. Erdan claimed revoking citizenship would not be wrong because the U.S. also had a basis for revoking citizenship based on “disloyalty to the state,” which included “citizens by birth,” and that there was a threat that needed to be dealt with, even from Jewish people inside the State of Israel, who did not recognize Israel’s “sovereignty.”

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The Second Intifada and the disintegration of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process preceded these events, but now, the discourse about citizenship has taken on an unmistakably Americanized character, one defined by a larger “love it or leave it” mentality that allows for officials like Ben-Gvir to post about putting Jewish and Arab politicians who oppose the unfettered expansion of Zionism on planes to be deported.

By virtue of their criticism of Israel, the self-proclaimed representative of the Jewish people, they become enemies of the Jewish people, and therefore in the minds of the state’s most ardent defenders, politically Arab, and therefore able to be viewed as an existential threat just the same.

Netanyahu’s proposal to strip the “NAZA” filmmakers of their citizenship is unlikely to come to pass. It is undeniably being utilized as a political cudgel, with Netanyahu also calling for the revocation of political opponent Yair Golan’s citizenship on the same grounds, despite Golan having been a major general in the IDF. Israeli President Isaac Herzog has, in turn, dismissed the plan, calling it “completely irrelevant.” But as Shahak said in 1975, the grounds for expanding the revocation of citizenship from Jewish Israelis is there in the law, even if the precedent has not yet been set. In 2022, the court upheld a law that allowed for revoking citizenship from Israelis who “carry out actions that constitute a breach of trust against the state.” Earlier this year, in a move met with much less controversy, Netanyahu began initiating proceedings to strip citizenship from those who allegedly aid Iran through espionage, cases which have involved Jews as well as Arabs.

While the chances of the Supreme Court upholding the stripping of citizenship in this particular case are almost nil, a future Israeli administration, one that does not recognize the court’s powers, or an administration that serves alongside a court far more aligned with disqualifying the insufficiently Zionist from politics, could tell a much different story.

A future government where Israel can strip anyone’s citizenship for not only being Palestinian, but also for speaking out in any way against the state, a future where Ben-Gvir is defense minister, or even prime minister, may be closer than many defenders of the “only democracy in the Middle East” imagine.

The post The Backlash to “NAZA” Shows How Little Israeli Citizenship Really Means appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s the year of the democratic socialist. But the group that helped start the earthquake currently transforming the Democratic Party almost didn’t make it to 2026.

After suffering major losses last election cycle after a deluge of pro-Israel lobby spending, Justice Democrats, which supports progressive candidates getting elected to Congress, was on the verge of being written about in the past tense.

“Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what’s to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn’t endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC,” says communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC’s momentum and ability.”

But Justice Democrats resurrected itself, had its most successful primary season to date, and helped put democratic socialism on the map. So what changed? 

The group says it won big this year, even being massively outspent, because it tapped into the brewing frustration among voters — frustration directed at Democratic Party leaders. “We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back, and what voters were looking for as we’ve seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want,” says Andrabi. “That fight doesn’t just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Andrabi speaks to host Akela Lacy about how the group that helped elect Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib has seen their candidates make impressive gains in the primaries, and how they’re planning to leverage their wins — and what they can learn from their losses — beyond November.

This primary season, Justice Democrats endorsed 15 candidates; seven won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won.

“This work doesn’t happen overnight. These losses don’t happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress,” says Andrabi. “These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.”

“Until they start taking lessons from the left on what to actually fight for, they will continue to be running on cycle-to-cycle losses and wins instead of really looking at, long-term, how can we take back power and ensure that we don’t consistently backside into this fascist and authoritarian regime that is overrun by the same corporate interests that the Democratic establishment is also funded by.”

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

Transcript

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

Jessica Washington: I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. So, Akela, how are you doing? What’s been top of mind for you this week? 

AL: I am really stuck on this news that apparently hackers now have information on all FBI agents, which is crazy. Hackers claimed that they were able to breach a bunch of FBI services and steal a bunch of information about federal agents. 

That’s on top of another insane story that I saw on Thursday morning about yet another rogue AI agent, but this time it hacked an Australia government healthcare portal — an OpenAI agent. I don’t know if you saw that, but that really stuck with me.

JW: All of these AI attacks, everything that’s come out, I keep thinking back to our interview with Karen Hao, who wrote “Empire of AI,” and how so much of the stuff that she’s warned about is now something that people are talking about in the discourse. It’s all really scary stuff, but it’s also stuff that’s kind of been reported on before, so it is interesting to see it all blow up now. 

As someone who started in television, I have to say I cannot stop thinking about this Paramount deal. So for those who don’t know, on Monday, Paramount reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros., which would give Trump ally David Ellison control of a massive media empire, which includes both CNN and CBS News. Ellison is reportedly considering tapping Elon Musk for an investment, which would give the billionaire a stake in two of the largest news organizations in the world. 

AL: This is all happening while the White House is waging a war on mainstream media outlets: CNN, Politico, and MS Now. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the White House efforts to strip those outlets of their White House press credentials. But we saw President Trump this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York ask CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins why she was there because she wasn’t supposed to be covering him — but she wasn’t at the White House.

So the state of our media ecosystem is healthy as ever. 

JW: Things are going great in our democracy. In other news, ProPublica reported that in 2024, the FBI was seeking to launch an investigation into a potential pay-to-play scheme between Sen. Susan Collins and one of her top donors, a former defense contractor who reportedly told federal agents that he had received millions in federal contracts by donating to campaigns of politicians. The investigation was reportedly halted after President Donald Trump returned to office and gutted the entire bureau. 

Akela, you had a really interesting campaign finance story come out this week as well, relating to Sen. John Fetterman. What happened there?   

AL: I got a text on Monday from a source who had seen an email that the Fetterman campaign sent from a domain called, “gopsquad.com.” The story we basically did was about after finding several other conservative email domains that Fetterman was using to send this campaign fundraising email after he delivered a surprise video speech to the Republican midterm convention earlier this month, was that he’s either renting or buying Republican targeted email lists to raise money right now.

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We’ve been covering Fetterman’s fall from grace over the past several years, but his fundraising numbers have really struggled as he has pursued this rightward turn on issues from immigration to Iran to Israel. Many of his small dollar donors, we reported in, in recent years, were asking for their money back.

We see his campaign now pretty openly just asking Republicans for money. Something funny — well, funny or depressing —that happened on Wednesday, Republican Sen. Mike Lee from Utah was sending out emails fundraising off of Fetterman’s fundraising. I’ll just read you this email.

The subject line: “I just got this email from John Fetterman.” “Friend, I just got an email from John. He’s basically a Republican now. I need your help to draft him. Sign here. Thanks, Sen. Mike Lee.” Which is pretty chef’s kiss, if you ask me. 

JW: I have to say: gopsquad.com is probably my favorite part. 

AL: Not subtle.

JW: Not at all subtle. Is there anything else that you’re following that you want to talk about? 

AL: We’re still waiting to learn the name of the ICE officer who shot a 28-year-old Venezuelan delivery driver in Austin, Texas. I spoke with sources there who said that the local district attorney’s office and the Austin Police Department are cooperating to basically get whatever information they can from HSI — the Department of Homeland Security Investigations — which apparently has not declined to give them any information, but also hasn’t given them any information yet.

So we’re seeing a very similar playbook as to what we saw after the ICE shootings in Minneapolis, where local law enforcement and prosecutors are basically fighting with federal agencies to try to get any information — the bare minimum, this person’s name — out of this. The Travis County district attorney, which encompasses Austin, has apparently been in close touch with the Minneapolis prosecutor to learn how they navigated the situation.

I’ll remind our listeners, we interviewed Mary Moriarty, the Minneapolis prosecutor, who was working on prosecuting the ICE shootings in Minneapolis earlier in the year. 

JW: To your point, it’s been so many months, and there’s still not any kind of justice in those cases, and it’s hard to imagine that there will be in this most recent shooting.

Thinking about ICE and the election, I’ve been reporting on groups that are trying to fight back against potential election interference. They’re planning for a ton of different scenarios, one of which includes ICE potentially coming to the polls and being there to intimidate voters of color and immigrant voters as well.

These groups are trying to prevent that harassment, and so they’re there to monitor, to report, and to keep people safe against a terrifying new threat. Obviously, voter intimidation isn’t new. I spoke to the NAACP, who had mentioned, we’ve been fighting on this issue “for the last 117 years.”

But ICE at the polls is new. What Trump has been discussing in terms of election sabotage scenarios are very new, and so these organizers are trying to use the tools they learned in the resistance to ICE movement that we saw pop up in January and February to try and keep our election safe as well.

On that topic, Akela, I know you also speak with Justice Democrats communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi about how progressives are preparing for the general after a really impressive sweep in the primaries. Let’s hear that conversation.

AL: I speak now with Usamah Andrabi, Communications Director and Spokesperson for Justice Democrats, the group that brought us AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and many more.

Usamah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Usamah Andrabi: Thanks for having me. 

AL: I want to start by taking our listeners back to a different time.

It’s 2018. The “Squad” has just been elected to office, and a fresh new crop of democratic socialists and progressives are making themselves known on Capitol Hill. 

Think: AOC joining a sit-in to protest for a Green New Deal outside of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. For listeners who aren’t familiar with the legacy of Justice Democrats, they have your group to thank in large part for that moment in time and for bringing us the Squad. But a lot has changed since then. How is Justice Democrats different today from in 2018, and what’s the same?

UA: What’s the same, first and foremost, is the commitment to the values that we had then are the same commitment we have to those values, and those are the values that we demand of the candidates we recruit, support, and endorse. Because those are the values that Democratic voters share — values that put the needs of working-class people above the needs of corporations and billionaires, and taking on lobbies like AIPAC, crypto, or AI.

I think that’s a little bit of what’s changed, is what we have seen since 2018, really, is the increased appearance of more and more moneyed interest organizing against the Squad, organizing against left-wing politicians, because they are bringing working-class people into the halls of power and bringing their needs to the top of the agenda for the Democratic Party. Billionaires hate that.

I don’t think we would have seen the sort of organized construction of a United Democracy Project or a Democratic Majority for Israel or Jobs and Democracy PAC or Fairshake or a lot of these. But particularly the Israel lobby seems to really organize in direct response to the success of our candidates in Congress.

We had the Squad get elected in 2018. Then two years later, folks like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush won very specifically against deeply pro-Israel politicians like Eliot Engel and [William] Lacy Clay, and they won without compromising on those values. That’s a really scary thing for the Israel lobby, who has really had a sharp control over how Democrats unconditionally support the Israeli government and military like Republicans have for decades.

What I think has happened is, we’ve had some wins, we’ve had some losses, and we’ve had to learn a lot from those losses and understand how to organize our donors better, organize funders, organize progressives, really, to coalesce more around independent candidates and broaden this network.

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I talk a lot about how I feel like in 2024, Democrats across the board suffered a lot of losses. We suffered two of our best members of Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their seats. And obviously, the Democratic Party lost every single other thing they could have lost. It felt like the job was to go home, everyone was supposed to do their homework and come back stronger to fight back against this very clearly fascist agenda that was laid out for us.

The left went home. We did our homework. We organized coalitions, we built broader donor networks, and we really invested a lot in candidate recruitment at Justice Dems.

And it feels like the establishment came back even weaker. Despite having weeks and months and years to really prepare for what Donald Trump promised he was going to do, they came back flat-footed and continue to look as weak as possible. That’s why I think you’re seeing so many successes for the left this cycle, because we are a true balm to the ineptitude of the Democratic establishment.

AL: We’re going to run through some of those wins in a second; many of our listeners are already familiar with them because we’ve talked a lot about these candidates on the show.

But I want to go back to this money thing before we get into that because, as you mentioned, coming off of those major losses of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman to money from the pro-Israel lobby last cycle — I don’t think anyone expected you all to notch as many wins as you did in the primaries this year.

We read obituaries of Justice Democrats, right? And that outside spending, as you mentioned, still has not gone away; it’s only increased. But it still wasn’t enough to stop the candidates behind the rise of democratic socialism that everyone is talking about, who were, to your point, far outmatched in terms of spending.

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I’ll just run through the numbers quickly. You endorsed 15 candidates; seven of them won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all are but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won. Three of your other candidates won or came in the top two slots in the California primaries, which are nonpartisan, and are headed to runoffs in November. And only five candidates lost.

So what made this cycle different?

UA: First and foremost, love to prove our haters wrong at all times. [Laughter] 

A lot of spite drives that. But also, it’s exactly that. Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what’s to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn’t endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC.

The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC’s momentum and ability. Because on the other side of that, as we had been working for years to expose, was the toxic involvement of AIPAC in these primaries and the right-wing network of billionaires who are actually funding this.

It took many years for us to break down AIPAC, and it took a lot of losses to get to that point, but it was worth it. We did a lot of polling. We invested a lot of money in research to bring this message to voters. 

Cori and Jamaal’s losses unfortunately were the final nails in the coffin for a lot of people to wake up to realize how the Israel lobby really functions in our politics — paired with the fact that obviously we watched a genocide get livestreamed on our screens for years at this point, and voters began to wake up to understand: Why is it that a majority of us oppose this genocide — we support an arms embargo, we support a ceasefire — yet only a minority of left-wing politicians in Congress are responding to our demands?

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They understood that that was the role of the Israel lobby, spending infinite amounts of money and buying members of Congress to ensure that they would do their bidding. Even before the 2024 election, we were very clear that this cycle was going to have to be a cycle where we went back on the offense, made big bets, and fought back really hard.

We knew we were going to have to endorse a lot more candidates, spread the board out across the country, really, to make sure that AIPAC didn’t just have two members of Congress to target but had 15 different candidates, as well as meeting where Democratic voters were at. 

We know no matter if Kamala won or if Donald Trump won, there was still a lot of work to do to rebuild this Democratic Party to actually represent the needs of the working class. We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back.

What voters were looking for, as we’ve seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want. That fight doesn’t just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.

For so long, even people who call themselves progressive have tried to figure out, how can we go around, under, or behind these lobbies and skirt this very particular line to avoid their wrath? We try to make it clear to everyone, even in the cycle where we lost the most we’ve ever lost, that there’s no going behind, under, or any other prepositional phrase around AIPAC or these lobbies. The only way to defeat them is to go right through them and beat them head-on.

We knew that this was an existential crisis for us. As you said, people are already reading our obituaries, and we wanted to make it clear that this work doesn’t happen overnight. These losses don’t happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress.

The excitement that you are seeing from the Democratic electorate across the country for our candidates, it’s taken years to build, and it’s taken years of the Democratic establishment failing to actually live up to their potential and what the demands of working-class people across the country have been.

AL: I want to talk about this process that you’re talking about, this iterative process of bench-building that gets lost in a lot of the horse-race analysis.

But first, I just want to mention, we had one of your candidates, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, on the show earlier this year to talk about Republican gerrymandering efforts as part of this last-ditch plan to fight off what is expected to be big losses for Republicans in November. Pearson is running in one of the districts at the forefront of that gerrymandering fight.

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Even with the momentum we’ve seen against Republicans and against the Democratic establishment, as we’re talking about, what can Democrats do in the face of this massive gerrymandering push? How do you think that could potentially affect Pearson’s race?

I’ll just mention this again: Justin Pearson is running in a seat that was vacated by longtime Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who is the last Democratic representative in Tennessee, so this is an important race. 

UA: First and foremost, it’s doing exactly what Justin is doing, which is really not surrendering to the Republican gerrymander. 

It’s very easy for us far away in the Democratic establishment to see these sort of Republican gerrymanders and say, “All right. Well, it’s cooked. There’s no chance of us doing anything here. We can put forward our standard DCCC candidate and talk about it a little, but we’re not going to invest any resources in there.”

I think that would be a failure. This is the tip of the spear of our modern civil rights movement. We are seeing the Voting Rights Act gutted in front of our face, take away the last Black-majority district in the state of Tennessee at a time when Justin J. Pearson was ostensibly going to win his Democratic primary against Steve Cohen.

When he talked about whether or not he wanted to do this, he understood no matter if he wins or loses, this is a fight worth having. It’s worth showing Democratic voters in the electorate, and the establishment more than anyone, that we can go into these Republican districts and these rural communities and not compromise on our most basic values.

Justin has not changed the policies and agenda he was running for when he was running against Steve Cohen to what he’s running for now. He has been the leader in that state on taking on AI data centers, and he is still the leader taking them on as his Republican opponent has unleashed them on Republican areas of this district.

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He’s uncompromised on standing up against the genocide and endless wars abroad and U.S. taxpayers funding for that, and he’s demanding Medicare for all. These are extremely popular policies, not just in the bluest districts across the country, but across the board ideologically. He is showing an example of how we don’t have to run Amy McGraths everywhere we go in these red districts to win over “red voters.”

These are working-class voters who are also been shivved and fucked by the same establishment that is run by Republicans and Democrats. These are people who are getting their hospitals and schools closed down in rural communities, who are getting their ACA subsidies cut and Medicaid subsidies cut.

This is a failure of the establishment of both parties. We can show that a different way is possible. Obviously, we need to fight to restore the Voting Rights Act, and we need to expand the Supreme Court and reform this court so we cannot continue just to see fights that people who are still living have fought for to be taken away in the same breath.

There’s a lot of work to do. It feels really difficult to know how we can claw back some of this institutional power when our institutions are so broken and corrupt. But I think that visionary agenda and ideals are what we need to see more from the Democratic Party, rather than simply being a party that is not Republicans.

That’s what these candidates have been so exciting for voters across the country about are that they, for the first time, are giving Democratic voters in a lot of these districts an affirmative positive agenda that centers their most urgent crises and actually has bold enough solutions to tackle those crises.

AL: This criticism came up a lot in this cycle, and this is the kind of thing I think that often says more about the person that is saying the criticism than the people they’re actually targeting. This is often lodged against candidates on the left or candidates backed by Justice Democrats that, “OK, all this is great, congratulations on your win, but once you get to Congress you’re not actually going to be able to do anything because there aren’t enough of you yet.” What do you say to that? 

UA: You could have said that to us nine years ago, right? That would’ve been the case. Yet one of the most popular politicians in this country is AOC, and the most popular politician is Bernie Sanders, who has these same values. So clearly there’s an appetite from the American electorate for more voters like that.

People know who Ilhan Omar is, people know who Rashida Tlaib is, and it’s not simply because Fox News uses them as an attack every other week. It’s because they have been standing up and been the most courageous leaders in Congress, standing up for the values they need, not only on Palestine, but no one is louder about needing clean water in the state of Michigan than Rashida Tlaib. Ilhan Omar is the reason that the state of Minnesota has universal school lunches for children. These are leaders who have actually delivered on the promises that the Democratic Party has only hypothetically talked about. 

Coming off a cycle where we lost two members, it’s very easy for people to say “Well, you have no power in Congress.” Yet we are sending seven new leftists to Congress this cycle, at least. It’ll be really telling how big the hypothetical Democratic majority is in Congress, because if it is seven-member majority, then you’re starting to ask a lot more different questions of, well, now you have a block of new members of Congress who can actually sway what policy and what agenda we are fighting for in this party.

So this shit doesn’t happen over fucking night. It takes years and years and cycles to build this block in Congress. You have to bring the people with it, and it takes time to organize and convince the masses of the working class to really buy into an electoral project that has screwed them time and time again, and to have that revolutionary optimism that there’s something to be done here.

There’s a lot of promise with this new class of members who are now joining an already existing class of members. We will nearly double our size in Congress, and that’s a big deal. You can look at far smaller groups of members of Congress that have wielded much more power than the amount that we’re sending to Congress.

These leaders were elected with the mandate to challenge the Democratic establishment, and so they will have to do that. More than anything, it’s up to the Democratic establishment on how they want to respond to the clear demands of their voters. These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.

AL: I do have to ask here, Cori Bush is the anomaly in the success stories that we’re talking about, right? What happened in that race? Why do you think that this momentum did not extend to her challenge to take back her old seat from Wesley Bell in Missouri?

UA: She is not the only loss we’ve had this cycle. The first race of the cycle was Nida Allam, who had lost a really close race. 

AL: In North Carolina. 

US: In North Carolina. We saw two races, Kat Abughazaleh and Junaid Ahmed in Illinois, lost at the hands of big money from AIPAC, crypto, and AI. Saikat Chakrabarti in Nancy Pelosi’s seat also lost the primary as well to a lot of big spending from seemingly pro-Israel donors.

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The truth is, we are always going to be up against this insurmountable amount of money. To the best of our ability, we have to organize our resources and organize our people to fight back against that. But it’s also the truth that we don’t take corporate PAC money. We don’t take money from billionaires, and so our resources are limited, and we’ve grown that. We’ve grown that pool. We’ve expanded our donor network to be able to run 15 candidates and win seven races.

But there’s not an infinite amount of resources, and so those losses are proof that the left still also has work to do. We do need to build more resources. We do need to build better connections to ensure that champions and fighters like Cori Bush, who to me really embody the fighter that Democratic voters are talking about, can be sent back to Congress.

Because in the absence of them, we have useless corporate shills like Wesley Bell, who have done absolutely nothing for their community since they got to St. Louis — and it shows.

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Wesley Bell Again Defeats Cori Bush — With Plenty of Help From AIPAC

A big part of that is a resource constraint, also, the truth is, Cori had to go up against nearly $15 million of attacks last cycle, and that’s really recent. It’s not just the money that was spent against her this cycle. You have to look at what happened last cycle, because it’s all the same attacks. They ran the same playbook all over again, and it’s effective.

When you have a 20 to 1 outspending situation, and the only thing you’re seeing on TV and mail is how much you should dislike Cori Bush, it works at a certain point. That’s why it worked last cycle. Cori is a deep proof point that the left still has some work to do to really ensure that all of our champions can get to Congress. 

AL: I want to move now to some of the news of the week. This week, ICE shot yet another person in Austin, Texas: 28-year old food delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez from Venezuela. After he was released from the hospital he was taken to an immigration detention center with a bullet still in his back, according to him and his lawyer.

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If Justice Democrats candidates make it to Congress in November, what power do they have to push Democrats to do more to stop ICE from killing and terrorizing people? What can they do, particularly in a House session where we expect Democrats, if they win power to be putting a laser focus on investigating Trump’s corruption, for example? 

UA: We should first and foremost be bold and listen to where voters are at. A majority of voters do not believe that ICE needs to exist. That’s understandable because both you and I were alive at a time when ICE didn’t exist — and yet I’m still living. 

AL: What a time. 

UA: What a time that was. The proof is in the pudding that we don’t need an ICE to have a “safe” America, whatever that means. But clearly the fascist governments need ICE to execute immigrants in this country and shoot down our neighbors and kidnap our families.

First and foremost, we should start from pushing to abolish ICE and ending this agency for all. Delia Ramirez, one of our Justice Democrats in Congress, has been leading the charge on this, calling to abolish ICE and also to dissolve the Department of Homeland Security, [which] in many ways, is also a relic of our lifetime. It is a relic of the George W. Bush era.

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I am baffled when there are Democratic leaders in this country who are so obsessed with defending an institution created by George W. fucking Bush. I remember when we didn’t like George W. Bush, and we didn’t agree with his policies. I’m not sure why the Democratic Party of 2026 should be the same as the Republican Party of 2004.

It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, and I think we are always, on immigration over the last 20 years, have always been allowing the right to dictate what the agenda and our playground should be on immigration policy, on border policy, on all of these policies. And as a result, have always tried to be a diet Republican Party on immigration policy, when the most popular policies we ever put forward on immigration were things like a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers and abolishing ICE, now. 

We have to be bold and not only end this agency, but also, as many people are talking about, prosecuting the people who were in charge of ICE and these officers who were killing folks. 

The ICE agent who was the shooter in Austin wasn’t even wearing a body cam. As if that’s enough anyway. Then there’s so many different accounts and these lies. We are living through another evolution of our criminal legal system being so extrajudicial and so outside of the bounds of what should be legally allowed that I think we have to massively reign in this agency. We cannot do it in a mealy-mouthed way that says we need to pay lip service to this right-wing propaganda, while continuing to allow our immigrant neighbors and families to be murdered and shot down in the streets while they’re trying to deliver food to your house.

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AL: In the Austin shooting the district attorney in Travis County, which is where the shooting happened, which is where Austin is, they are still trying to figure out the name of this officer, and they are waiting on getting footage from other ICE officers in the vicinity who had body cameras on, and they’re also trying to get footage from local hospitals to figure out where this officer who was allegedly injured went, because they do not yet know his name.

UA: But they know the man who he shot’s name, so.

AL: Yes. Much of the news this week centered on President Donald Trump’s attacks on the news media and his trip to New York City, where he met with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and attended the United Nations General Assembly. 

Outside the UNGA, Jewish leaders protested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday. Mamdani once said he would arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York, though he didn’t have the authority to do so, and the two battled publicly this week. 

Many people praised Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Netanyahu, even though it had not really any teeth, but as an example of what we’re talking about, of just wanting Democrats to do something — the kind of sentiment that has animated many voters who’ve supported Justice Democrats candidates this cycle.

Democrats are heading into this lame-duck session for Trump where there is still little appetite among leadership to do something substantive on Israel — though last week we saw an unusual refusal from top Democrat Rep. Greg Meeks to approve Trump’s latest proposed $2.8 billion sale of more bombs to Israel. 

What is the strategy for the progressive bench on this issue right now? It seems like every time one of these packages comes up, there’s this big dust-up over OK, what’s going to happen? And every time, a few more Democrats either vote against it or, as in this case, voice some sort of opposition. But where do you see this going in the next Congress? 

UA: The writing is on the wall if even Chairman Greg Meeks is suspending some of these things. You can go to the FEC’s website to see why that is an interesting development. 

AL: [Laughter] Just in terms of support that Meeks has gotten from the pro-Israel apparatus in the past is what you’re referring to, I’m assuming.

UA: Yes. He’s been a dear ally to the lobby historically. But I think, like we saw on the vote on the Massie amendment, for the first time a majority of Democrats are voting to say, “We’re not going to send money to Israel.” A lot of people can say, “Well, that’s just a performative vote,” all these things.

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Look, I worked in Congress. Those performative votes don’t happen in that sort of way, unless the people are pressuring members of Congress to get to this point. That’s what we’re seeing, is that you are seeing Democratic voters across the country reject you if you have an endorsement from AIPAC or you take a single dollar from AIPAC, which is why AIPAC has to hide its money so much this cycle.

That’s what we’re going to see coming into this new Congress, is a real thrust of energy for the pro-Palestinian movement within Congress now that you are really doubling the amount of leaders in Congress who are unabashedly against the endless supply of military funding and resources to the Israeli government.

You have a renewed movement to really organize even more members. You can look at the co-sponsor for the Block the Bombs, Delia Ramirez’s arms embargo bill has a lot of members you would not have expected even a cycle ago to do so. But that’s the power of not only these elections, but also mass movements across the country demanding that their leaders actually stop the endless supply of weapons.

There will absolutely have to be a fight in Congress for this next Congress to say we need to stop funding the Israeli government and military, and the Democratic voters are behind us. That might be a fight that has to challenge leadership on that fight, because obviously leadership has historically been more aligned with funding the Israeli military and government.

But at a certain point they have to also see the writing on the wall. They are beginning to see that. There’s a lot of opportunities with a Democratic majority to show voters that we are hearing them, that we also don’t think your tax dollars should fund a fucking genocide for three to four to five years after also already funding decades of apartheid.

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That’s where we have to move next is not only ending funding right now, but ensuring that we never fund this military and government, and actually push towards a solution where we can end the apartheid state that Israel is running over the Palestinian people, and actually have a place where everyone has equal rights and dignity, which currently does not exist, obviously.

AL: You mentioned that you used to work in Congress, and I’m taken back to the fond days when I first met you around circa 2018 when you were working for then Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Mark Pocan. And since that time, we have been having this same conversation about the fight over the future of the Democratic Party.

Where do you see Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and party leadership more broadly, either fitting into or obstructing your vision for the future? In that vein, I’m curious there’s been a lot of talk about where will Justice Democrats’ candidates land on, supporting a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries in 2027? What conversations are you having around that? Where do you see this conversation going? 

UA: Look, the corporate establishment will always be a barrier to progressive change and delivering for the needs of the working class. That, they have proven. They have made it clear. They have said it on the record.

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These are not my feelings. They’re theirs. These elections, these campaigns, have proven that they are on the wrong side of the Democratic Party electorate, and they are in the minority, as they always have been. But it’s really eye-opening for people in leadership to have races like people like Claire Valdez, and Zohran, and Darializa become these leaders in New York, in your backyard, speaking of both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who obviously represent New York in the Senate and the House.

It doesn’t stop there. As much as people want to say every city is not New York — well New York is not Philly, is not Denver, is not Dallas, is not California, is not Tennessee. Let’s be fucking for real. This is happening across the country. There is a bloc of leaders across the country who are actually responding to the needs of the working class.

Like I said, they got elected on a mandate to challenge the Democratic establishment. They will be pushing this Democratic Party to meet the needs of voters, be it pushing for Medicare for All, or an arms embargo on Israel, or a stop to AI data centers, or raising taxes on billionaires. All universally popular fucking policies that the Democratic Party could lead on. 

So often this question has been framed as, what will the left do when they get to Congress? How will they deal with these sorts of institutions? We should be asking Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and everyone else that question far more, which is: What are you going to do about the fact that your electorate is making clear that you are not fighting for the policies they are looking for?

When you come out to say you oppose Medicare for All after being a co-sponsor for it for a few cycles, you are in the minority of Democratic voters. I promise in your district particularly I imagine maybe, what, 5 percent of voters agree with you. It’s incumbent upon Democratic leadership to wake up and decide where they want to be on these issues and how they want to lead this party, because do they want to be a one-term House majority? 

They can win back the majority a lot because Republicans are failing and because the left is showing voters what an opposition party could actually look like and what a governing party could actually look like. The establishment is not doing that. Until they start taking lessons from the left on what to actually fight for, they will continue to be running on cycle-to-cycle losses and wins instead of really looking at, long-term, how can we take back power and ensure that we don’t consistently backside into this fascist and authoritarian regime that is overrun by the same corporate interests that the Democratic establishment is also funded by.

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We absolutely are looking at this new crop of leaders joining this already existing group of progressives to really have a sizable influence in bringing the people’s power to the halls of Congress more than anything, and using their coordinated megaphones in many ways to bring light to the issues that people need them to.

Because even if we take back the House majority, Donald Trump is still president, even if we take the Senate back. He can veto any bill, and that’s a reality, but that should not stop us from showing people what we could do if we had power.

And what we could do if we had power should not simply look like turning back the clock to what it looked like before Donald Trump, which is what some of the agenda I’m seeing from Democratic leadership is, let’s roll back this. Let’s get this back. The status quo three, two, five, seven, eight, pick a fucking year, was not good enough for working-class people, so why would we go back to that? 

Obviously, we need to roll back all these attacks. We need to claw back the destruction that the Trump administration has done, but that’s obviously also not enough. We need universal healthcare. We need housing for all. We need to make billionaires pay their fair share. We need to stop fucking AI data centers from destroying every community, and raising our utility bills and poisoning our water. There are a litany of crises that we are facing. Mealy-mouthed solutions are not what Democratic voters are looking for.

They are making that deeply clear, and no matter how much fear-mongering around socialism or the Red Scare you want to do, the truth is, voters support these policies because these policies support voters. 

AL: If we’re picking years, I pick 2004. [Laughter] I think you’re onto something there. We’re going to leave it there, Usamah. Thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

UA: Thank you, Akela. 

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

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post The Blueprint for Democrats to Win Back Voters  appeared first on The Intercept.

But a new map published Wednesday by a cybersecurity researcher reveals Flock’s nationwide reach is even bigger. Based on location coordinates from Flock’s own database, the map shows more than 170,000 cameras, plus more than 130,000 accompanying gadgets that play a part in the company’s expansive American surveillance network.

Joshua Michael’s Flock Surveillance Map highlights the locations of what he says are 300,000 Flock surveillance devices spread across the country. His findings — which were cited in Wednesday’s Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing on Flock — differ from existing maps of Flock’s automated license plate readers in scope and methodology.

Unlike crowd-sourced projects such as DeFlock, which are built on locations submitted by users, the Flock Surveillance Map relies on location data culled from a snapshot, archived by Michael in December 2025, of Flock’s own records. In addition to cameras, it maps supplemental devices — including 27,000 acoustic detection devices, as well as networking equipment that integrates third-party cameras — to illustrate the scale of Flock’s surveillance web.

“These cameras form a nationwide surveillance network that tracks where everyone drives,” Michael told The Intercept, “so foreign nations don’t need to send spies to harm our country. They can simply watch where our soldiers, federal agents, and politicians go.”

The Intercept visited six random Arizona locations on Michael’s map; each location had a Flock camera present at the indicated coordinates.

The Flock Surveillance Map also color-codes each Flock device according to its model — showing, for instance, whether the device is a Flock camera, known as a Falcon, or an accompanying processing unit known as a Picard. (Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The accompanying searchable dataset table also lists each camera’s individual name, as outlined in Flock’s database, which typically includes a street address and sometimes other identifying characteristics. A camera with the name “FBI Pilot Camera,” for example, is shown to be located at the J. Edgar Hoover Building — the FBI headquarters in Washington.

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The map illustrates Flock’s national spread, but also its clustering in certain areas. For example, 860 Flock devices appear to be concentrated just outside Chicago O’Hare International Airport, at the Rosemont Public Safety Department, which provides police, fire, and emergency medical services in the Chicago suburb.

Numerous Flock cameras appear to be installed inside detention centers. A camera titled “C-F-23 FOXTROT MALE HOLDING 2/SHOWERS” appears at the coordinates of the Silverdale Detention Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In November 2025, Michael discovered a novel way to identify the location of Flock’s devices. Trawling the company’s website, he realized that Flock’s servers were publicly leaking data in the form of an access token that could be acquired without needing to log in. With that token, Michael said he could query ArcGIS, a third-party geographic information system platform used by Flock, to retrieve the locations of Flock devices.

Michael told The Intercept he promptly contacted Flock and described his findings. As Michael wrote in his initial email to Flock on November 13, 2025: “all testing was strictly non-intrusive, limited to open unauthenticated endpoints, and did not involve bypassing authentication, modifying data, or invoking any billable ArcGIS or Google operations.” Michael said he didn’t receive a reply, so he followed up with Flock the next day, and a third time several days later.

After his third attempt to inform Flock of the discovered vulnerability, Michael received a reply from a Flock that said, “Thank you for the findings. We are internally triaging them and will reach back out with next steps soon.”

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Michael said he never heard back about it from Flock.

In December 2025, Michael downloaded the Flock device location data, and in January wrote an in-depth technical blog post about what he had found. After Michael’s post, it appears that Flock fixed the vulnerability.

Despite being alerted of Michael’s findings in November 2025, Flock published its own blog post the following January saying it hadn’t had any data breaches. “Flock has never been hacked, and there has not been a leak of Flock information,” the company claimed. “Flock Safety’s cloud platform has never experienced a data breach.”

The Atlanta-based startup has faced mounting criticism for its practices and lack of transparency in recent months. An American Civil Liberties Union report found “a pattern of Flock regularly misleading or even lying about its business practices, safety record, commitment to privacy, and efforts to protect vulnerable populations.”

Michael told The Intercept that Flock’s recent claims about its data security record don’t reflect reality. Flock has publicly claimed multiple times that the company has never experienced a data breach, “and this was after I pulled their database of devices.”

“That leaves two possibilities,” he said. “Either they knew and chose not to disclose it for fear of bad press, or they didn’t know I exfiltrated the data at all. The first is a transparency failure. The second is a detection failure with national security implications.”

On Thursday, Michael was notified that Doppel, which describes itself as an “AI-native social engineering defense platfom,” filed a trademark infringement complaint regarding his site, claiming to be working on Flock’s behalf. Doppel says that the site is using the trademark “FLOCK SAFETY” without authorization, which “may cause customer confusion / harm.” Doppel requested the site be taken down.

When he posted the Flock Surveillance Map, Michael included a pop-up disclaimer saying that the site is “not affiliated with or endorsed by Flock.”

The post Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline appeared first on The Intercept.

National Iranian American Council Action on Thursday filed its suit in a Washington federal court asking a judge to declare the war on Iran illegal on the basis that it violates the Declare War Clause of the Constitution.

“No President should have the power to take this country into an indefinite war by himself,” NIAC President Jamal Abdi said in a statement. “Congress never authorized this war. Yet Iranian families are being bombed, American service members have been killed, and communities on both sides are being forced to bear the consequences. This lawsuit asks a fundamental question: Can one person decide, on his own, to keep an entire nation at war?”

The lawsuit was filed as the Senate prepared to vote on a resolution seeking to stop the war. A floor vote on the resolution, which already passed the House of Representatives, failed in the upper chamber Thursday afternoon after senators shot it down in a 49–50 split.

“We’ve unfortunately seen this Congress fail its job of standing up for their constitutional role as the sole body empowered to declare war,” Abdi told The Intercept. “That’s why we are pursuing every option at our disposal, including taking the challenge against this unconstitutional war to the courts.”

Both the Senate vote and NIAC Action’s lawsuit took on new urgency after Trump used his United Nations General Assembly speech on Tuesday to threaten to “annihilate” Iran, a country of 90 million people.

“When Trump is threatening annihilation of another country in a war of aggression,” Abdi said, “it is all hands on deck to stop this full-blown constitutional crisis before it gets worse.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Seven Months of War

Trump, in partnership with the Israeli military, launched the war against Iran on February 28 with a sudden barrage of airstrikes and missile attacks that left numerous top Iranian leaders dead and killed hundreds of civilians. The early days of the attack saw a missile strike on a school in the town of Minab that killed more than 100 children, which the United Nations declared to be a possible war crime.

It was days later, on March 2, that Trump notified Congress of the initiation of hostilities. In the ensuing months, the war has turned into a regional conflagration. Israel invaded Lebanon, leaving thousands of people killed and tens of thousands more displaced.

Meanwhile, retaliatory missile and drone strikes by Iran against the U.S., Israel, and their allies in the Persian Gulf have severely impacted the region and led to a shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz that has hobbled global fuel markets. And missile fire from the Houthis, the militant group that controls much of Yemen, shut down shipping through the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab Strait, further straining the global economy and spurring a Saudi military response. 

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The initial attacks, thousands of deaths, and cascading economic fallout of the war all took place without the consent of the American people, a fact that NIAC Action’s attorneys cast in the lawsuit as a clear violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war.

“The Constitution does not permit a President to wage war indefinitely and ask Congress for permission later,” said attorney Alan Morrison. “Congress never authorized this war, yet months later the bombing and blockade continued. We are asking the Court to enforce the constitutional line between the President’s authority as Commander in Chief and Congress’s exclusive authority to take the country to war.”

Though Trump has sought to bypass Congress in pursuing the war through the use of semantics, he has repeatedly undermined that effort with public statements declaring that his military action is a war, NIAC Action’s complaint noted.

“Calling a war a ‘military operation’ or an ‘excursion’ does not erase the Declare War Clause,” said attorney Bruce Fein in a statement. “The question before the Court is whether the President can continue these hostilities without the authorization the Constitution requires.”

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The lawsuit was filed on behalf of several NIAC Action members who have been personally impacted by the war. Several of their family members have been killed, wounded, or otherwise terrorized by the monthslong campaign of airstrikes carried out by the U.S. and its allies. One member joining the suit, Nilma Dilmaghani, described the horror of learning that a cousin had been badly wounded in an airstrike that destroyed a family apartment.

“When I learned that my cousin had been trapped under the rubble, that they had lost their home and suffered such serious injuries, I felt completely helpless,” said Dilmaghani. “It is unbearable to watch your family live through this from thousands of miles away and know there is nothing you can do to keep them safe.”

The post Congress Failed Again to Stop Trump’s Iran War. This Group Is Trying Through the Courts. appeared first on The Intercept.

Gold Rush in the Desert

Only ghosts and ruins remain in this dusty old town. Tucked under scenic hills of volcanic rock are the remnants of a bank, a railroad depot, and what looks to be a school, along with a handful of other deteriorating structures that are hard to make out. This is Rhyolite, Nevada, whose heyday was fierce but short-lived, something of a one-hit wonder. In 1904, after gold was discovered in the nearby Bullfrog Hills, prospectors descended upon this dry corner of the Mojave Desert with hopes of striking it rich.

Of the several mining camps that quickly sprang up in this part of the Great Basin, Rhyolite was one of the liveliest. By 1908, the town’s population had surpassed 5,000, and at its peak, there were 50 saloons, 35 gambling dens, brothels, a bathhouse, a newspaper, and over a dozen restaurants.

Rhyolite’s flame would burn out fast: The Wall Street panic of 1907 scared off would-be investors, and by 1910, just a few years after the mine opened, most of the gold had been extracted. With no mining jobs left, the town was soon abandoned. All three banks eventually shuttered, and by 1914, the last train departed the Rhyolite station, never to return. Entire buildings, including the old Union Hall, were relocated to a neighboring town, where they still reside. The leftover Rhyolite town site, now a tourist stop, is managed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management and has been a not-so-popular location for a string of low-budget Hollywood films you’ve never heard of, like “Six-­String Samurai” and “The Island.”

The Southern Paiute (Nuwuvi) and the Western Shoshone (Newe) inhabited this arid region between the northern Great Basin and the southern Mojave. This ancient land holds many tales. In the 1980s, archaeologists discovered what appear to be aboriginal campsites dating back at least 10,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. West of Rhyolite is Beatty, a town with a certain rural desert charm. It could be the wild burros roaming the streets or the raggedy Sourdough Saloon with hundreds of dollar bills tagged to the walls. Whatever it is, I understand the appeal for those uninterested in city life. The residents I spoke with told me it was the quiet landscape that drew them there.

I find myself in Rhyolite — just seven miles east of the broiling Death Valley National Park — to meet up with two activists who’ve dedicated their lives to protecting the surrounding Mojave Desert. Kevin Emmerich and Laura Cunningham, founders of the Beatty-based Basin and Range Watch, are concerned that two major solar projects on nearby BLM-managed lands will destroy the desert ecology and provide little benefit to the local community.

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“This type of desert out there actually sequesters carbon in the roots of the creosote,” explained Cunningham, a wildlife biologist and desert tortoise researcher who has lived in the area for over 20 years. “There’s biological soil crust [with a] deep network under the soil that sequesters carbon, literally sucks it out of the atmosphere and turns it into oxygen. And deserts, believe it or not, actually have a high level of carbon sequestration. But when you scrape it up and drive on it, you crush the lichens, shrubs, and flowers, and release carbon. Building on these habitats is actually [contributing to] climate change.”

Deserts like the Mojave, Cunningham said, play an outsized role in absorbing climate-warming carbon. Of the world’s carbon sinks — the places that soak up carbon from our fossil fuel emissions — deserts account for up to 28 percent of land-based uptake. It’s one reason why a patchwork of solar farms out here is a troubling prospect.

Cunningham’s partner, Kevin Emmerich, is what you’d call a desert rat. He’s tall, grizzled, and soft-spoken. He strikes me as a man who has spent a lot of time in remote places, and I say that with admiration. A former park ranger in Death Valley, he nods in agreement with Cunningham while pointing to a valley across the highway where two solar projects, if completed, would blanket over 8,000 acres of open space. He’s frustrated that the people who usually oppose wrecking biodiversity aren’t warier of the large-scale energy projects proposed for public lands.

“Other environmental groups are really conflicted about ‘green’ energy,” Emmerich said. “We just had a little spat with one group. They want some of this public land development. … If we do use renewable energy, we want to put it in the built environment where it doesn’t have much of an impact.”

A Battle for What Remains

While some environmentalists may be on the fence, others, like the small outfit Basin and Range Watch, are working tirelessly to halt the development of these solar farms. In 2010, in coalition with community groups and the Quechan and Cocopah tribes, it blocked the Imperial Valley Solar Project in California, which would have destroyed nine square miles of habitat and decimated more than 400 Quechan cultural sites. Basin and Range also supported the “Save Our Mesa” campaign, which succeeded in stopping the controversial Battle Born solar project near Moapa Valley, Nevada. Battle Born was proposed as an installation of solar panels covering 14 square miles of public lands. The grassroots pressure was so strong that the developer, California-based Arevia Power, told BLM they wouldn’t move forward.

When it comes to impacts, at least on paper, solar energy may have the fewest downsides (although they certainly exist). The technology requires less mining and is inexpensive and easy to deploy. But as Basin and Range Watch argues, it’s not enough to simply let these vast, open spaces be blanketed with fields of solar panels. There are better locations for solar that will yield better results for people and the environment. Many of our popular ideas about places like the Mojave — such as the idea that they’re lonesome, empty wastelands, devoid of life — sustain the myth that desert solar farms have fewer drawbacks and are essential in the fight against climate change. Not many assumptions could be more untrue.

BLM has considerable sway in the West and has, for decades, had the power to radically shape the region, from its fragile ecology to its resource-dependent economies. It manages 245 million acres of land and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights in the United States. In all, BLM oversees one-tenth of the country. It divvies up rights to mine, drill, and graze. What the bureau say goes, and even under the antagonistic Trump administration, which is no fan of renewables, it is still overseeing massive green energy developments.

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While Trump and his allies in Congress have drastically reduced subsidies for renewable energy projects, those incentives aren’t set to expire until December 2027. As a result, companies are hurrying to build out solar farms, wind turbines, and commercial battery storage. While Trump’s actions have hampered long-term growth projections for the renewables industry, it’s booming, for now.

“The energy transition is still underway, but the whiplash has very serious implications for our economy and for the investment culture of America,” explains Sanya Carley, the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “Solar has still been on a phenomenal growth trajectory, especially across the entire world. … [It’s still] the leading source of growth in the energy industry in the United States.” Trump’s rancor has turned out to be more of a speed bump than a roadblock.

Whose Land Is It?

In Nevada, BLM has parceled around 12 million acres for large utility-scale solar project construction. In 2024, the agency announced its Western Solar Plan, which would reserve 22 million acres of public land for future solar development. As of early 2024, seven major projects were proposed or in the works, covering 140 square miles of land. The Western Solar Plan would locate high-solar-producing areas on public lands across the dry flatlands of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, and on millions of acres of federal land in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, believes this massive, swift expansion of industrial-scale solar could destroy many of the region’s “crown jewels.” He’s worried solar arrays could surround Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon — ditto for the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

“It’s insane,” Donnelly, who isn’t shy about his frustrations, said. “BLM is going to make lanes available for solar at the foot of the Sierra Nevada,” which he calls “possibly the most beautiful place in the country.”

It’s hard to argue with Donnelly about the stakes. I spend weeks each year wandering the Mojave, decompressing from urban life. The desert is a refuge. As a teenager growing up in Montana, I used to believe wilderness only included trout streams, mountains, grizzly bears, and wolves. I was youthfully naive, and I now realize that wilderness includes saguaro, rattlesnakes, desert tortoise, and bighorn sheep. We shouldn’t exploit these places for our energy needs, whether for fossil fuels or solar power. These desert lands are crucial not only for the animals that inhabit them but also for their roles they play, such as carbon sequestration, in helping mitigate the climate crisis.

These lands are significant to Native Americans, who have inhabited this land long before Europeans showed up. For years, members of the Western Shoshone and Goshute tribes in Nevada have worked to designate a 25,000-acre monument called Bahsahwahbee near Great Basin National Park. The Western Solar Plan will carve out 7,000 of those pristine acres for development.

“Our ancestors were massacred at Bahsahwahbee. It is unconscionable that the site would be considered by the federal government as a development zone instead of a place to be preserved and commemorated,” Ely Shoshone Tribal Elders Delaine and Rick Spilsbury wrote for the Great Basin Water Network. “The federal government doesn’t propose developments in other cemeteries or seek to bulldoze other peoples’ churches. In fact, graves and churches are generally protected under federal and state laws. But for the resting place of our ancestors, we have to wonder why it’s OK?”

These large solar projects are sure to raze more Native lands to power hundreds of thousands of homes across the West, often in cities far from where the energy was first produced. Once the solar installations are built, few jobs are likely to remain in those regions, which contradicts the central arguments local governments make in support of the projects.

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When it comes to the Western Solar Plan, most of the major environmental groups have either stayed silent or, like the Wilderness Society, uncritically supported it as a positive step to help California shift its grid to 100 percent clean energy by 2035.

“I feel like we are working out here on the marginalized fringe, and we’re sort of pushed more to work with grassroots groups, local communities, scientists, and people who aren’t beholden to their big climate donors [like other environmental groups],” Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch said. “[Energy developers] call this a wasteland, like there’s no biodiversity, and we push back against that. We support photovoltaic solar panels, first on rooftops, parking lot canopies, or on really disturbed ground. But this desert has life. The very, very bottom of the list [for solar development] should be public lands. Ecosystems built on utility-scale solar projects are the last thing we should support in the fight against climate change.” 

Cunningham’s argument is convincing, and it’s hard not to think that much of this has to do with people’s perception of the desert as a wasteland, as she puts it. Even the late David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club who was forced out for his radicalism, once remarked that he’d be willing to sacrifice the Mojave under the guise of diplomacy and compromise if it meant protecting scenic wilderness elsewhere. He later retracted the sentiment, but this reasoning still permeates much of the mainstream environmental movement, which is focused on slowing climate change at almost all costs — even if it means harming wild places in the process.

Perhaps it will take an expert like Laura Cunningham and a desert-lover like Kevin Emmerich, who have a deep admiration for and understanding of desert ecology, to alter people’s perceptions. At least I hope so. It’s easy to imagine the public outcry that would ensue, for instance, if giant redwoods were on the chopping block to make room for a gargantuan solar field in the Sierra Nevadas. But, strangely enough, Joshua trees and desert tortoises don’t seem to hold the same intrinsic value.

Excerpt adapted from “Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future,” published by Haymarket Books in September 2026. © 2026 Joshua Frank.

The post Green Energy Is Coming for the Desert appeared first on The Intercept.

Leevin Camacho was brushing his teeth one day last fall when his mother called. The water is contaminated, she said. Moments later, she texted him a photo of a flyer issued by the local water authority. “Cancer risk,” it warned. “Increased likelihood of adverse impacts on the liver.” And in bold capital letters, “DO NOT DRINK.”

Camacho stared at the message. Water flowed from the faucets as his children, who were 10 and 12, gulped and spit, their faces reflected in the mirrors above the two bathroom sinks.

Thumbing at his phone, Camacho looked up dieldrin. The search results included words like “organochlorine” and “insecticide” and “persistent environmental pollutant”; the United States had banned it in 1987. Worse, high levels had been detected in his community’s water since at least 2008. “Our kids have been drinking the water,” he realized. “They’ve been cooking with the water for almost their entire lives at this point.”

Camacho lives in Yigo, a northern village on the island of Guam. In time, he would learn that the U.S. Air Force base next to the well serving his house had reported “very high levels” of the pesticide, which it had listed as a “chemical of concern” since at least 1993. The Pentagon’s investigation, led by officials at Joint Region Marianas, is in its early stages. Local officials caution that although they suspect the base is a source of the pollution, there may be others because dieldrin was once widely used.

For Camacho, the news felt like the unfolding of a familiar story — one both predictable and infuriating.

Camacho had grown up as an Army brat, raised to think of the United States as Guam’s liberator from Japan during World War II. But over the past two decades, his understanding of that legacy has changed.

“There are certain actions that the military takes that are contrary to the interests of the people who are from Guam and who live in Guam,” said Camacho, whose measured tone rarely changes, even when discussing something as emotional as what his children have been drinking. 

To Camacho, dieldrin is the latest reminder that the people of Guam continue to bear the costs of militarization. Unexploded ordnance litters jungles and lagoons. PCBs contaminate the fish. Pollutants taint the groundwater. The island and its people, who are U.S. citizens, have been inalterably changed by more than a century of American military presence.

Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, the head of Joint Region Marianas, the U.S. Navy’s regional command for Guam and neighboring islands, said he can’t speak to past pollution but the command is committed to protecting the environment and the people of Guam. 

“We spend a lot of time and we spend a lot of money making sure that we meet every U.S. regulation when it comes to anything that we’re going to do here,” he said. “We’re meeting every letter of every law for environmental regulations and rules, and we’re doing that while we’re spending a ton of money to defend this island from the most advanced missiles in the world.”

Today, Guam sits at the center of an ongoing military buildup, one that is reshaping the island even as it spreads across the Pacific. On nearby Yap, more than 1,000 graves could be disturbed to make way for an American seaport and airfield. Indigenous leaders on Palau are suing to protect their lands.

Less visible but just as impactful are the climate impacts of this expansion. The Pentagon is already the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, and its buildup will do more than contribute to the destruction of the region’s reefs, forests, and Indigenous sacred sites. It will accelerate the climate crisis that threatens the survival of Pacific islands.

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The Pentagon often cites growing geopolitical tensions to justify the buildup. “The security environment in the Indo-Pacific is becoming more dangerous and defined by an increasing risk of confrontation and crisis,” Navy Adm. Sam Paparo, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told Congress in April while seeking $122 billion for new weaponry to counter China, including offensive missiles on Guam. Three months later, a ballistic missile launched from a Chinese submarine flew near Guam, underscoring why many on the island see America’s military presence as both a source of vulnerability and protection.

Sometimes it can be too much to think about. “I need to compartmentalize these things,” Camacho said. “That’s sometimes the only way that you can do this, because otherwise you will just be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things that are out there, the amount of injustice that is out there.” 

Those injustices collide in Yigo. Neighbors lost their homes earlier this year to typhoons fueled by warming seas. The Army Corps of Engineers will soon begin clearing bombs from a nearby dump site created in 1945. A new machine-gun range just opened alongside a federal wildlife refuge to support the arrival of 5,000 U.S. Marines from Okinawa, Japan.

Then there’s the dieldrin contamination. “At some point,” Camacho said, “someone has to force them to do what’s right.”

II.

Years before he became one of Guam’s leading critics of the military buildup sweeping over the island, Leevin Camacho was a young lawyer who liked to run before work. As his sneakers hit the pavement, the sun rose over Yigo. Roosters crowed and streaks of pink lightened the sky. The road, little used and lined with jungle brush, was one of the few places he could run without encountering stray dogs or morning traffic. He always ran at first light, before oppressive heat would reflect off the asphalt and the concrete buildings. It was the perfect start to what was often a day spent listening to depositions and wading through case law.

It was 2009. Camacho had returned to Guam after law school and was making more money than he ever had as a school teacher. “You dream of going to law school to provide services and to fight for people who don’t have the ability to fight, right? I’ll be honest with you, I lost my way,” Camacho said. “I had a bunch of student debt, and I was satisfied just kind of going by day to day and just focusing on myself and my family.” 

The U.S. military was the backdrop to Camacho’s life but not something he worried about. He didn’t think much about the invasive tangan-tangan trees lining his running route, or the fact that they had spread across Guam after the U.S. scattered their seeds to reforest the island following the war. On his morning runs, he was more likely to hear a military jet overhead than a native birdsong. 

It hadn’t always been that way. Guam was among the first Pacific islands settled by seafarers, from what is now the Philippines, who navigated by the stars and waves an estimated 3,500 years ago. The CHamoru people built a thriving island society known for its towering latte stones and swift outrigger sailing canoes.

That changed when Magellan landed on Guam in 1521. Spain claimed the island and the rest of the archipelago, beginning more than 500 years of ongoing colonization. The Spanish forced the Indigenous people to embrace Catholicism and banned their canoes. The United States took over the island from Spain in 1898 and imposed military rule. Naval governors burned CHamoru language books and blocked Indigenous efforts to gain U.S. citizenship. 

Then came Japan. Its invasion in 1941, on the same day it attacked Pearl Harbor, wasn’t unexpected. The U.S. Navy evacuated sailors’ dependents but left 20,000 CHamorus to endure nearly three years of forced marches and labor, malnutrition, and sexual servitude. More than 1,000 would die. When American forces retook Guam in 1944, they were welcomed as liberators. The island still celebrates Liberation Day every July. “I can’t remember a single discouraging remark that my maternal grandmother would have made about the U.S.,” Camacho said. But he does remember her saying of the Americans, “‘They saved us.’”

That was the narrative that Camacho grew up with. Even the military taking his family’s land — part of a massive military land grab after World War II — was accepted by his grandparents as the price of freedom from Japanese oppression. It wasn’t until Camacho learned that the Pentagon’s expansion plans would close his running route that he began to question what it meant for Guam to be an American military outpost. He pored over the buildup’s planning documents and was struck by the disconnect between how the military described its plans and the reality as he knew it. “They paid consultants a bunch of money. The comment was, ‘We drove by and we didn’t see any cars, so there’s no impact,’” he said of the running route. “And that was it.”

As Camacho read thousands of pages of documents, he saw the same pattern again and again. Proposals for bombing and machine-gun ranges, expanded undersea explosives, and projects that threatened forests and ancient latte stones were accompanied by detailed assessments that minimized what they would mean for the islands.

On a flight home from Honolulu, Camacho was reviewing the environmental analysis of the buildup on his laptop when one passage stopped him. The proposed influx of 80,000 people would leave too little water for fire suppression, particularly in Yigo. The solution, according to the document, was to send surplus water from Andersen Air Force Base to civilian communities. “That was the first time I just kind of lost it, just how stark it was,” he said. “The aquifer is our aquifer, right? Like, you’re taking our water for your people and then we don’t have enough and they’re going to divert whatever you’re taking from us that is extra.” 

Camacho and other concerned residents started We Are Guåhan, a community group focused on raising awareness about what was happening. (Guåhan is the CHamoru word for Guam.) He sued to stop a machine-gun range from being built at Pågat, an ancestral village that’s home to millennia-old latte stones. Their campaign protected the site and helped persuade the Navy not to expand its landholdings on Guam. The Department of Defense also reduced the planned transfer of Marines from Okinawa from 9,000 to 5,000. 

But it didn’t stop the buildup. The Pentagon activated Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz six years ago and opened a new machine-gun range alongside a federal wildlife refuge just north of Yigo. “It’s so heartbreaking,” said Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero, another member of We Are Guåhan. “All of that effort, and it still happened.”

III.

The yellow excavator scraped away at the pale rock that lies beneath Camp Blaz under the hot May sun. A limestone forest had already been bulldozed to make way for a new machine-gun training range. A sign next to the fence read “Guam National Wildlife Refuge” with an arrow pointing to the left and a picture of a turtle.

“Wow,” said Monaeka Flores, executive director of Prutehi Guåhan, one of Camacho’s clients in the lawsuit he filed against the Navy to protect the island’s endangered species. She stopped at the side of the road to watch the digger work. It had been months since she’d been here, and they’d cleared so much more forest than she realized.

Busy construction vehicles are the most obvious sign of the Pentagon’s buildup. Beyond the new Marine Corps base, the Department of Defense is upgrading the island’s port and strengthening its infrastructure to support docked nuclear submarines. The agency is also pouring $8 billion into 16 new missile defense sites. After World War II, the Navy took two-thirds of the island. “Whatever made most sense for the military, the island was theirs for the taking,” said Michael Clement, a historian at the University of Guam. “Everyone was in refugee camps. They had the bulldozers. They built where they wanted to build. And then a year or two later, they started saying, ‘OK, where are we going to put the natives?’” 

The military later relinquished some land but still owns at least a quarter of the island. “If you look at where the villages were set out in 1946 and ’47, it’s the land the military didn’t need. So that’s why Guam is kind of weird to drive around, right?” Clement said. “To go across from Tumon to Mangilao, you’ve got to go around Tiyan and the airport. It wasn’t redesigned for civilians. It was redesigned for military purposes.” 

Even the island’s main highway, the six-lane Marine Corps Drive, was designed for the military, not the people. It connects Andersen in the north and Naval Base Guam in the south.

Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero (no relation to Victoria-Lola Leon Guerreo) is among the many who welcome the financial boost that comes with the military’s investments. “They’re spending billions on their readiness plan,” she said. 

One in 9 Guam residents joins the armed forces. Last year, a local economist told the Legislature that every dollar the Pentagon spends adds 75 cents to the island’s GDP and called the buildup an “unprecedented economic opportunity.” The funding infusions have helped Guam become far more commercialized than other Pacific islands, with multiple shopping malls, numerous high-rise hotels, and a growing real estate sector. 

Leon Guerrero thinks activists should pursue political self-determination instead of resisting the buildup. “These guys can yell and scream all they can,” the governor said. “They’re going to do the military buildup regardless, right? So why don’t we work with them and see how we can benefit?” She wants the Defense Department to help harden local power lines and fund a hospital. “Our hospital cannot absorb mass casualties,” she said.

There are about 20,600 military personnel, civilians, and dependents on Guam, a figure that’s expected to reach 29,400 by 2037. While the military is investing in additional housing both on and off base, the population influx will almost certainly continue pushing up construction and housing costs. The median home price on Guam was $216,100 in 2010, when Camacho sued the military to protect Pågat. Today it is approaching half a million dollars.

Fear of another war also fuels support for the buildup. “We’ve always been a target regardless, because of where we are geographically located,” Leon Guerrero said. Guam is the largest island in the Micronesian region of the Pacific. It’s just north of the equator, a three-hour flight from Tokyo, and has a deep-water harbor that supports naval submarines. “We were a target for Spain. We were a target for the U.S. We were a target for Japan.” She worries about China, which has a ballistic missile nicknamed the “Guam Killer.” “If I’m going to have a choice, I’d rather be under the U.S. than China.”

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To Flores, more military presence on Guam heightens the risk of war. In March, President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran prompted military bases on the island to raise their threat level. She feels that, as in World War II, the Indigenous people of Guam are expendable in a broader contest between empires. “What are they really here to protect if there’s so much harm taking place? Are we just collateral damage?” she said. “Because just looking at our history of being occupied by war, being used for weapons testing, it feels like the message is that we don’t matter. Our future doesn’t matter. Our survival doesn’t matter.”

Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, at Joint Region Marianas, said he understands such skepticism. “If I was born and raised on Guam, I would have similar concerns,” he said. But he believes the military’s investment proves the opposite of what Flores fears. “Choice A is not to defend Guam against ballistic and hypersonic missiles,” he said. “Or the other choice, which is the one that we’ve made, is to spend billions of dollars to defend Guam from hypersonic and ballistic missiles. And so from my perspective, that shows a commitment not just to the military things that are on Guam, but also to the people of Guam.”

Yet Flores is far from the only Guam resident who feels expendable. When Pedro Blas, the vice-mayor of Yigo, first learned about the dieldrin in his village’s water, his first thought was of his autistic sister. “All of us growing up, all our lives, our water bottles, we fill it up with the tap water, put it in the fridge: That’s our cold water,” he said. “Because we were instilled in our heads our whole lives: Tap water is OK.” 

So far, Camacho’s firm has helped file more than 700 claims, worth $360 million, against local authorities on behalf of village residents. He hopes that pressures the island to seek compensation from the Defense Department. “I’m so glad [Camacho] got involved,” Blas said. “We’re not letting it get swept up under the rug.” Mietus noted that Joint Region Marianas has not found high levels of dieldrin in military wells, and the Pentagon is working with local officials to determine the source of Yigo’s pollution.

Still, Blas wonders why the investigations at Andersen Air Force Base are occurring quietly behind the fence, while he hasn’t seen anyone in uniform hand out water to his constituents. “It’s beautiful to be a U.S. citizen, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But if you really take a step back and look at exactly the impacts that [the military] brought to us over the years, we should have a say in whether or not these practices are going to happen to our island. Even just being called the ‘tip of the spear’ — we’re susceptible to any war that they’re going fight, and we just have to be OK with it.”

“This contamination they bring to our island, it kind of just shows how much they really care about our people,” Blas continued. “And frankly, I think they look at Guam as real estate rather than ‘Those are our U.S. citizens. Those are our people. Those are Americans.’”

IV.

The men and women gathered in the p’ebay, the traditional open-air Yapese meeting house with a triangular tin roof, and settled quietly on the tiled floor along each wall to listen to Camacho speak. A projector, perched above a cardboard box stacked on top of a red cooler, cast his PowerPoint presentation onto a screen. Slide after slide described the American military’s plans. A cool breeze fluttered the fronds on the palm trees surrounding the p’ebay.

It was April in the village of Tamil on Yap, one of four states in the Federated States of Micronesia. Camacho’s dieldrin work was far from over, but he’d put that aside when the island state’s government asked him to help dissect a Navy proposal to expand the seaport and airport. Tamil was one of several villages he visited to explain the plan. 

Over the past decade, Camacho has become one of Guam’s leading environmental lawyers. “The one thing about Leevin is he shows up. Again and again,” said Julian Aguon, a human rights lawyer on the island. “And he brings with him not only deep competence but a deep sense of responsibility to the people and places he serves.”

“Regulatory agencies will bend over backwards to not pick a fight with the military because of the mission and the protection and all of that,” Camacho said. “And ultimately, it’s people who aren’t lawyers who end up paying the price.”

He was elected attorney general in 2018 for one term and led a historic lawsuit to force the Navy to clean up a hazardous landfill it had abandoned in the 1940s. A lower court dismissed the suit, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2021 that it could proceed — a decision that eventually prompted the federal government to pay Guam $48.9 million. 

He has sued the Navy to protect endangered species harmed by the construction of Camp Blaz. “For too long, our island has been treated as a sacrifice zone,” he said.

The risk of Guam falling into enemy hands, as it did in World War II, is so tangible that America’s Pacific military strategy involves spending billions of dollars to spread airfields, seaports, and training ranges across the region to remain competitive in case Guam is once again occupied by enemy forces. The U.S. is invoking decades-old agreements with the peoples of the Republic of Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia to expand its presence on those islands and upgrade World War II-era seaports and airfields. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. even signed a new agreement with Papua New Guinea to use its seaports. 

On Yap, the U.S. military wants to dredge the lagoon, including two-thirds of an acre in a marine protected area, to create a seaport. The plan would remove enough sediment to fill 334 40-foot shipping containers and impact sea life, Indigenous fishers, and divers. “Plume spreads up to 800 m from disposal sites,” Camacho’s presentation noted. “Long-term reef decline and impact on reef species (fish, clams, sharks, turtles) not assessed.” 

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The Navy also plans to expand the airfield to facilitate two military exercises, each two weeks long and involving up to 200 personnel, per year. The project could disturb more than 1,000 graves, including the 19th-century tombs of Chief Orothin and Chief Yaloth. Camacho noted that the military’s draft plan acknowledges a “significant adverse impact” to these cultural sites and doesn’t commit to rebury the dead or preserve ancestral sites.

Yap has a population of just about 11,500, compared to Guam’s 170,000. Although Yap is less than a 90-minute flight from Guam, it has none of the military bases, six-lane highways, or big-box stores that define the American territory. “In some ways, this will be more transformative for Yap State than the buildup was for Guam because there’s no military presence there today,” Camacho said. On Guam, he said, “It’s normal to hear a fighter jet flying over. It’s normal to see a bomber or C130. They don’t have any of that there. So this would be such a radical change.” 

One month after Camacho visited Yap, dignitaries from across the Pacific gathered in an air-conditioned conference room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Guam. The hotel sits on a long stretch of white sand beach and looks out over Tumon Bay, where high levels of dieldrin have also been found in fish samples. 

Once everyone had taken a seat, the lights dimmed and the glow of a projector filled the room. A screen showed a map of military activity across the western Pacific: not just bases, but training exercises and the routes of research vessels searching the sea floor for the critical minerals essential to many military technologies.

“We’re faced with the reality that we’re part of a larger strategic vision,” conference organizer and former Guam congressman Robert Underwood said. “All of you are in someone’s strategic plans whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. All of us are in someone’s strategic plan.” 

In Palau, Indigenous people are fighting the Pentagon’s expansion in local courts and international forums. Leaders of Angaur, one of 16 states there, filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. of violating environmental rules and its treaty with the island nation when it cleared land for a radar facility. Indigenous chiefs from Peleliu are suing to prevent a land transfer that would support American goals. Indigenous Palauan youth filed a complaint at the United Nations alleging the U.S. military violated their right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.

In the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands, the U.S. military presence that started with World War II is ramping up. On Tinian, the Marine Corps is building an airfield and two live-fire training ranges, one of them for explosives. The Navy is extending its undersea sonar and explosives training across half a million square nautical miles, along with bombing practice on the neighboring island of Farallon de Medinilla.

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Some hope the military’s regional expansion will enable other island nations and territories to experience the economic growth seen on Guam. But others worry about the pollution and cultural loss, and other risks that come with being a U.S. military stronghold. 

In public comments written in response to the Navy’s proposal, Jennifer Dugwen Chieng noted that Camacho’s fight to have the Navy address hazardous waste at Ordot Dump went all the way to the Supreme Court. “Additionally, there are sacred private lands and culturally significant ecosystems that no amount of money can ever replace,” she wrote. “The desecration of graves violates the general principles of respect for burial sites and human remains upheld in Yap’s traditional custom.”

She’s also worried about becoming a target in the next war. Like Palau, Yap was held by the Japanese during World War II and experienced heavy bombardment by the United States. Since then, the Pentagon hasn’t paid much attention to the island state — until now. 

“With rising tensions in the region between the U.S. and China, what does the DoD envision combat to look like?” Chieng wrote. “Will it be based on a WWII tactic of island hopping? What is the likelihood of the island becoming a battlefield if tensions were to escalate into war? Yap will be caught in the crossfire. Does the DoD intend to protect and defend the people of Yap, and if so, how does the DoD intend to do that?”

Mietus, the Joint Region Marianas commander, said there’s always a level of risk in being allied with the U.S. during a conflict.

“Sometimes people believe it’s a plan to evacuate U.S. service members or family members if a war starts — there is not,” he said. “I’m in this, living in the same risk as every other person here.” He’s pushed back against Guam lawmakers’ calls for the Defense Department to fund bomb shelters for civilians, contending that the existing military projects like strengthening Guam’s harbor are a better investment. “Oftentimes people see this Department of War as kind of having an infinite amount of money, and we don’t.”

V.

Unlike Guam, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia are independent countries that have achieved the political self-determination that Indigenous CHamoru on Guam have been denied for centuries. 

Camacho wants a plebiscite to determine Guam’s political status. He believes the island’s status as a U.S. territory — without a vote for president or voting representation in Congress — isn’t working. But while some of his colleagues in We Are Guåhan have focused on independence, Camacho sees his own role as making the government answer for its actions.

“Unless someone’s forcing the issue,” he said, “the Department of War isn’t going to voluntarily agree to be held accountable and agree to do all the things that it’s supposed to do.”

That’s why he feels compelled to seek reparations for the dieldrin contamination. So often, toxic pollution lingers on Guam and no one takes responsibility. “As a lawyer, I don’t want to fall into this situation where we’re like [the village of] Malesso, and they show up every year and say you still can’t eat the fish. That’s just not satisfactory,” he said. 

One question that drives him is what Guam will be like when his kids are grown. Will they be able to afford living there? Will they want to, given how much the island is changing? It’s a constant effort to find the right balance between working toward their future and being there for them day to day.

“I’m going to try to do the best that I can to protect my island and to have a safe place for my kids to want to live on Guam,” Camacho said. “But also be there for them and help them get better dribbling with their left hand and be good human beings.” Even though Camacho moved a lot growing up, his family never considers leaving. “That is not a choice,” he said. “Guam is home — there is nowhere else we are going to be.”

Correction: September 25, 2026
This story originally misspelled Monaeka Flores’s name. It also has been updated to clarify her organization’s relationship to Leevin Camacho and to reflect that the number of military personnel on Guam includes civilian employees, dependents, and others.

The post As the Pentagon Expands Across the Pacific, Guam Offers a Warning appeared first on The Intercept.

This article and video are being co-published with Responsible Statecraft.

For the first time, the Pentagon budget topped $1 trillion, and private contractors now receive more than half of all the tax dollars flowing to the Pentagon.

Few have profited from this privatization of the U.S. military more than the CEOs of Pentagon contractors.

While these companies often advertise their work as supporting the troops, the fact is that many service members live in appalling housing conditions, while military–industrial contractors’ profits soar and their CEOs live in luxury.

The lavish lifestyles of these CEOs is laid bare in the new mockumentary “Lords of War,” co-produced by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, that lampoons an industry held aloft by hundreds of billions of public funds every year.

“Lords of War” connects exorbitant Pentagon spending to the luxury enjoyed by the CEOs of its top contractors. As the film notes, Lockheed Martin is regularly the largest recipient of Pentagon contracts, raking in $75 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than 72 percent of which came from the U.S. government.

As “Lords of War”’s faux real estate aficionado explains, Lockheed’s CEOs have used their $20-million-plus compensation packages to buy luxury real estate from the D.C. suburbs to the shores of Miami.

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Despite its care-free tone, the film highlights very real problems within the military–industrial complex. As research by William Hartung and Stephen Semler for Brown University’s Costs of War Project showed, 54 percent of the Pentagon’s annual spending now goes to private contractors — up from 41 percent in the 1990s.

The top Pentagon contractors’ revenues and stock prices also skyrocketed as they’ve begun to devour an ever-larger share of the military budget.

They converted their revenue from the military into line items on their own budgets that do nothing to improve U.S. national security: armies of lobbyists that now outnumber all members of Congress by a nearly 2-to-1 margin; billions of dollars in stock buybacks; and, of course, CEO compensation packages on par with those of NFL quarterbacks.

The contrast of these CEOs’ rock-star lifestyles — “Lords of War” reveals that one chief executive bought Lenny Kravitz’s Miami mansion — with those of the military service members they purport to serve is striking.

As the film notes, former Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson received $33.7 million in compensation in 2015, which is more than 150 times as much as the average compensation package for an enlisted service member. While Hewson and other Pentagon contractor CEOs have been buying up mansions, the basic pay of service members has been relatively stagnant for the past 20 years when controlling for inflation.

Worse, the conditions service members have been living in are deteriorating. A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that two-thirds of service members think their housing is unaffordable. And service members often face “long commutes, leave families behind in other states, and work 2 jobs to afford housing,” according to the GAO report.

A July 2026 Senate investigation, meanwhile, revealed dangerous living conditions at military bases in Georgia, including “reports of lead exposure affecting newborn health, severe mold contamination leading to emergency room visits, flooding in living areas, and more.”

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Wartime environments have been no better, as evidenced by the deplorable conditions — including food shortages and inoperable plumbing — during the USS Abraham Lincoln’s extended deployment near Iran, which ultimately led multiple sailors to attempt to jump overboard.

Unfortunately, it’s your tax dollars that are paying for this gaping chasm between the lives of contractor CEOs and the troops.

“Lords of War” is one of the few films about military–industrial complex that you find hilarious, but its subject is no laughing matter. The private firms we’re entrusting with U.S. national security are doing more to defend their own share prices than they are to defend the nation. If we keep trusting this broken system to keep us safe, then, ultimately, the joke is on us.

The post Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous War Profiteers appeared first on The Intercept.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta remains embroiled in litigation over whether its products are designed to hook kids. But Zuckerberg’s got nothing on another centibillionaire pushing to expand his influence over the next generation: Larry Ellison, the octogenarian oligarch of Oracle. Ellison not only brags about having even more data about us than Meta but runs a global surveillance machine and is a major military contractor. 

A toothless consent decree intended to resolve an antitrust case brought by a group of state attorneys general may clear the way for his and son David’s President Trump-facilitated takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, HBO, and a major film studio, Warner Bros. Pictures. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin still needs to approve the decree, and she noted in an order on Tuesday that she has some questions about its “factual and legal underpinnings.”

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If it goes through, the merger will give the Ellisons unprecedented control over what the next generation watches and reads on social media, news, TV, and in movies. Trump steered co-ownership of TikTok to Oracle earlier this year, a move enabled by the Biden administration’s misguided TikTok ban. And last year, David’s Skydance Media became Paramount Skydance, gaining control of CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, and more in a massive consolidation bankrolled by Ellison senior.

We’ve seen the Ellisons’ willingness to censor content in exchange for Trump rolling out the regulatory red carpet for their media acquisitions. Larry Ellison reportedly promised Trump to overhaul CNN if the deal went through, and David Ellison echoed promises of “sweeping changes.” A Paramount spokesperson said “no [such] commitments” were made regarding CNN, but there’s no dispute that David made editorial concessions to the Federal Communications Commission in exchange for approval of the Paramount–Skydance merger, and the Bari Weiss-helmed network is already following through.

Just how far they will go to push narratives that bolster their far more lucrative interests in war and surveillance tech (and suppress ones that don’t) isn’t yet clear, but it’s not looking good. For a preview, take a look at this Flock Safety commercial masquerading as a short-form news segment, recently published by The Free Press, the blog Paramount bought from opinion columnist Weiss to pave the way to put Weiss in charge of CBS News.

Proponents of the lawsuits against Meta worry about algorithms warping kids’ minds, while critics are concerned with surveillance and user privacy, as well as the First Amendment implications of liability for sorting content. Now both sides can find common cause: The future $111 billion “Warner-Mount” deal threatens to brainwash kids and bolster surveillance all at once. 

Like Meta, Warner-Mount will have a profit incentive to design algorithms that keep kids glued to their screens, even if it leads them to dark corners of the internet. But the Ellisons’ agenda reaches far beyond likes and follows. Their “really profoundly scary technology” empire (that’s a quote from Oracle Vice Chair and former CEO Safra Catz about the tech it provided Israel after October 7) relies on government spending which requires a public primed to accept its tax dollars being diverted to those scary technologies under the guise of keeping us safe.

There’s no better way for the Ellisons to accomplish that end than buying up as many media holdings as possible while their buddy is president. It’s the perfect feedback loop: Stoke America’s fears about crime, terrorism, and anything else they choose to inspire further public investment in Oracle’s products.

Before handing the Ellisons control of even more of our media, we should remember their track record, which dates back long before they took control of CBS News.

A decade ago, Larry boasted about Oracle’s invasive surveillance products tracking how long a person lingers in a particular aisle of a specific store, which led to a privacy lawsuit that settled for $115 million. He bragged that 5 billion people were in Oracle’s “ID Graph” back then. “How many people are on Earth, 7 billion? Two billion to go,” he added at the time. In fact, Ellison and his companies have settled all manner of consumer and investor fraud lawsuits. But those dings are just the cost of doing invasive business for a behemoth now valued at somewhere around $440 billion. 

For a glimpse into how Ellison sees Oracle’s role in shaping the future, he told investors in 2024: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” 

At the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2025, he said countries worldwide should “unify” all of their national data into a single database an AI model could study, as he argued this is the only way to unlock AI’s full value for governments.

Oracle already has a nearly $7 billion contract to run its software across the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the Coast Guard. It’s a founding partner of Stargate, the $500 billion data center buildout Trump announced during his first week back in office, with Ellison by his side.

So the same person who wants to surveil us to keep us on our best behavior, sell “profoundly scary weapons” to foreign armies, and unify the world’s data into one AI brain will now control a huge slice of the news and entertainment industries? It goes far beyond foxes guarding henhouses.

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Of course, there’s never been a firewall between elite interests and the media. Hollywood framed U.S. regime-change wars and foreign interventions as heroic underdog stories. TV shows and news outlets have done their share of propaganda-laundering as well. 

But as with Meta and its algorithms, the entertainment industry’s motives have, until now, been more straightforward, like gaining access to government sources and selling movie tickets. War profiteers that do news and movies as a side hustle have far more to gain, and they’re likely to push their narratives far more aggressively because the stakes are so much higher.

Ellison-owned outlets are already deploying their playbook to counteract the public backlash to surveillance. The Free Press segment is not the only time Oracle and Flock’s interests have converged. The Intercept recently reported that a shady astroturfing firm called Neighbors for Strong Communities, which ran deceptive AI-generated campaigns in support of the Paramount–Warner merger, has also “partnered” on PR campaigns with Flock. (There’s no known corporate partnership between Oracle and Flock, but both companies are undoubtedly invested in shifting the conversation around surveillance in a less skeptical direction.)

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But that’s nothing compared to what the Ellisons and their ever-expanding pool of our personal data could accomplish in the AI era, especially when paired with a media juggernaut created by cozying up to the same authoritarians that Oracle hopes will buy more of its tech.

Despite their billions, the Ellisons would likely never have gained their media stronghold without their social, political, and economic ties to Trump. So while there’s plenty of room to disagree on what role the courts should play in checking predatory practices by tech companies like Meta, this much shouldn’t be controversial: Oligarchs should not be colluding with the government to shape what the next generation thinks.

The post The Ellisons Could Make a Killing in Big Surveillance With the Paramount Merger appeared first on The Intercept.

At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race — and faced criticism from other candidates in the race. The food delivery giant’s settlement agreement, the largest worker settlement in the city’s history, brings further scrutiny to those donations.

Through that election cycle, DoorDash spent around $1.4 million against Mamdani and in favor of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The company was one of the top donors to the biggest outside spender in the election, a virulently anti-Mamdani super PAC called Fix the City. 

While on the campaign trail, Mamdani had promised to regulate delivery apps and further protections for delivery workers, proposals that earned him the support of delivery worker groups.

At the time, DoorDash’s large spending raised eyebrows. Now, the company has to pay its workers around 100 times the amount it spent attempting to influence the election, owing to a mayoral administration that refused to overlook concerns with the company’s conduct.

“It’s not a contribution, it’s an investment, with the donor or investor expecting something in return,” said Greg Coleridge, a former co-director of Move to Amend, an advocacy group that seeks stringent regulations against corporate money in elections. “Here is an instance where organized money from a company that was trying to avoid being responsible and accountable, was unsuccessful.”

Announcing the new settlement, Mamdani said, “The size of this settlement shows the damage done to workers by wage theft. But it also shows that enforcement matters.”

In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)

The Smear Campaign Against Mamdani

DoorDash contributed $1 million to Fix the City, a super PAC that spent $31 million in the mayoral election, accounting for close to half of the total outside spending in the race, largely funded by big corporations and billionaires. DoorDash made the payment in May 2025, at a time Mamdani’s campaign was gaining significant momentum ahead of the mayoral primaries in June.

Fix the City ran a barrage of ads, phone calls, text messages, and other forms of political communication seeking to prevent a Mamdani victory and portraying him as a politician with “radically dangerous ideas” and “a risk New York can’t afford.”

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The group artificially altered Mamdani’s beard in a campaign mailer and made it appear longer and darker, an act that the Muslim mayoral candidate had called out as “blatant Islamophobia.”

At the end of video ads by Fix The City, a campaign finance disclosure in small text at the bottom of the screen read, “The top three donors to the organization responsible for this advertisement are Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, John Hess.”

DoorDash also gave $1.8 million to Local Economies Forward NY, a super PAC that contributed more than $360,000 to Cuomo’s campaign.

Aided by corporations like DoorDash and billionaires like Bloomberg, the overall independent spending by super PACs seeking to defeat Mamdani was more than eight times what was spent in his favor, according to The Intercept’s analysis of data published by the NYC Campaign Finance Board.

A Historic Settlement

DoorDash’s settlement followed an investigation by the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The Mamdani administration said that the investigation “found that DoorDash deliberately paid workers below the Minimum Pay Rate or not at all.” 

Under the settlement with the city, the food delivery giant will pay over $115 million in worker restitution and over $16 million in civil penalties and administrative fines.

Two weeks after assuming office, the Mamdani administration warned delivery apps to comply with worker protections, sending notices to DoorDash and others, and announcing a lawsuit against the delivery app Motoclick.

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The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s citywide investigation into DoorDash began after dozens of workers reported that the company had failed to pay them or had paid them late for work they had performed.

As part of the settlement, DoorDash must submit detailed compliance data reports to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection every month for three years, and the company’ activities will also be monitored through workers sharing data with the city.

The settlement announced by Mamdani is not the first run-in that DoorDash has had in recent years with restitution payments in New York. 

In May 2024, the company agreed to pay $75,000 in a settlement after New York Attorney General Letitia James found that the company routinely rejected applicants with criminal histories in violation of the New York City Fair Chance Act. In February 2025, the attorney general settled with DoorDash for $16.75 million after the company used tips to subsidize workers’ guaranteed pay.

“They knew that by having a mayor who’s willing to put resources [for workers], it’s gonna be detrimental to their corporate model,” said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, a group that organizes for low-wage immigrant workers and had helped several DoorDash workers file complaints with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “DoorDash decided to invest money in trying to buy our city’s democracy.”

The post DoorDash Spent $1.4 Million Trying to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why. appeared first on The Intercept.

Another U.S. soldier died this month, according to newly released Pentagon statistics that classify the death as “non-hostile.” A female soldier was on a military flight headed to Saudi Arabia when she suffered an undisclosed “medical incident,” a defense official told The Intercept. Another 66 U.S. personnel have also been wounded in action just this month, according to that official. This has pushed the official count of war casualties above 850. Almost half the total — 419 wounded or dead — have occurred since Iran stepped up attacks in early July.

The Pentagon’s official total of dead and wounded personnel, as documented over almost six months of reporting by The Intercept, has been a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

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Since the beginning of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, the War Department has posted the official count of military casualties on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the White House. Casualties were initially tallied under Operation Epic Fury. Since July 7, they are now counted separately on a webpage with a generic title: “Overseas Operations.” 

Prior reporting by The Intercept found DCAS is missing hundreds of wounded or dead personnel from the Iran war. The Pentagon’s list of the names of the dead is, for example, missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.” 

Three U.S. contractors based in the region have also died during the conflict, according to an official who spoke with the Washington Post. 

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

A U.S. government official previously told The Intercept that scores of casualties added to DCAS last month was “an accounting trick” designed to dampen depressing statistics. That official accused the Pentagon of “slow-walking” the total for weeks. “They wanted the heat on them to slow down after the really devastating attacks,” that source told The Intercept, referencing attacks on U.S. bases in July that exposed the vulnerability of U.S. troops to Iranian attacks. Official statistics now show that the Pentagon admits that 352 personnel were wounded or killed in July and none died or were injured in August.

DCAS counts 11 hostile deaths in 2026, all resulting from the Iran war. This is the highest total of military personnel killed in action since 2021. Including non-hostile deaths, DCAS counts 19 dead due to the Iran war, but fails to count Davius. Also missing is Sgt. Devin Seibel who died in Irbil, Iraq, on May 31 in a training accident, according to a military press release.

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More than 580 military personnel have died this year, across the world, according to Pentagon statistics. The War Department lists 114 as accidental and 14 as homicides. As of September 21, there are also eight personnel whose deaths are listed as “undetermined.”

The female soldier who died this month has yet to be identified but was over 35 years old, according to DCAS information.

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez did not reply to repeated requests for comment or clarification for this article.

The post Another U.S. Soldier Is Dead as Iran War Casualties Rise appeared first on The Intercept.

This is the story of how — and why — it happened.

The deal had been in motion for more than a year before the Leavenworth City Commission conceded to the controversial project, one that would allow the private-prison operator CoreCivic to reopen its notorious prison and fill it with immigrants. They did so after a protracted battle with the company, one that made them cogs in a vast deportation machine. 

“I don’t want them to be in jail,” Leavenworth Mayor Nancy Bauder said of the more than 500 immigrants held at the facility as of August, the last publicly available count. “I think it’s horrendous. My moral objection to this is very strong.”

But as the Trump administration and CoreCivic carried out an aggressive campaign to expand the federal detention network, city officials said they concluded they couldn’t afford to fight it. They tried to sue to stop the project, but instead spent more than a quarter-million dollars fighting it in court, draining city funds, before CoreCivic offered a $1.5 million impact payment to reimburse the city’s legal costs and pledged $400,000 a year to the local government. 

“They just bought their permit,” said Michael Sharma-Crawford, chair of the Missouri/Kansas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, or AILA.

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The Leavenworth facility, for years marred by an ugly history of overcrowding and understaffing, is now the Midwest hub for the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants. Under this hub-and-spoke model, which has gone little noticed by the public even now, ICE moves detainees and staff between smaller facilities — the “spokes,” which include facilities such as regional jails — and a larger facility as a center of operations — the so-called “hub.” Using this model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked deportation flights out of the country.

“Leavenworth’s capacity is going to be that hub in the Midwest, to draw down from Minnesota, Chicago, Indiana, to house all that detention,” Sharma-Crawford said. Two other immigration attorneys who represent clients in the region corroborated the operational pattern through their own clients’ transfers and named additional “spoke” facilities feeding the pipeline.

The Midwest Regional Reception Center, as it’s now known, in Leavenworth is a critical site for the Trump administration, whose promises of 100,000 beds for immigrant detention stalled out at around 66,000 in July and had run into multiple obstacles across the Midwest. In Illinois, a 2021 state law ended immigration detention statewide. Minnesota remained a possible location for a hub, but the process moved slowly; CoreCivic’s shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton had long sat idle before its recent sale, and ICE needed to get a Midwest hub up and running immediately. Proposed sites were contested one after another: A potential warehouse for up to 10,000 detainees in south Kansas City was killed by community opposition, and facilities were either blocked or contested in Shakopee, Minnesota; Romulus, Michigan; Hudson, Colorado; and McCook, Nebraska. The Midwest’s largest operational ICE detention center, GEO Group’s North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan, is geographically isolated, hours from any major airport, and has been mired in controversy over a hunger strike, a death in custody, and hundreds of unlawful detention rulings. 

Leavenworth, a town with a corrections history stretching back over a century, seemed to offer the path of least resistance.

“Aggressive and Unlawful”

The City of Leavenworth fought the facility in court for months. CoreCivic countersued, and the Department of Justice intervened on CoreCivic’s side, accusing Leavenworth of “aggressive and unlawful” interference.

In the meantime, the fight threatened to bankrupt the city. Records obtained through the Kansas Open Records Act show the city paid roughly $820,000 in legal fees to Spencer Fane LLP over 12 months, about 6 percent of its general fund. The bill was a drain, but not a death blow. The city’s foremost concern was the takings clause, which allows the government to seize private property for public use, City Manager Scott Peterson said. A state judge had directed CoreCivic to follow the permit process, and if Leavenworth denied the permit, CoreCivic could argue bad faith, claim the city had effectively seized its property, and sue for damages, Peterson said, leaving Leavenworth to choose between greenlighting a facility it opposed or gambling on a lawsuit it might not survive. The alternative, Bauder, the mayor, said, was the federal government acquiring the building, which would eliminate local oversight entirely.

Both the city and county rejected the facility early on, local officials said. Residents protested its reopening and offered impassioned testimony against it at public hearings.

CoreCivic structured the $1.5 million impact payment in part to reimburse the city’s legal costs from the company’s lawsuit. When asked about the arrangement, CoreCivic instead reiterated its promised $1 million one-time impact fee, $250,000 a year to the city, and $150,000 a year to the police department.

Mayor Pro Tem Rebecca Hollister, who cast the sole dissenting vote on the 4-to-1 decision, explained her objection was procedural and understood it had no bearing on the outcome: “It was an inevitability.”

The Hub 

On January 14, two months before the vote, CoreCivic detention officer Brittany Williams reached out to city leadership to voice her support of the facility, an unusual move for a rank-and-file corrections officer with no role in the municipal permitting fight. In the email to Assistant City Manager Penny Holler, Williams said the company transferred her to Oklahoma to help open Diamondback, a sister CoreCivic facility. She wrote that she was currently assigned to TransCor America, a private transportation company that contracts with ICE to move detainees around the country, in her case from ICE’s Kansas City, Missouri, field office “to where they are needed to go.” The email, which was entered into the public record before the February 2 hearing on the special use permit, or SUP, to allow the facility to house immigrants, inadvertently revealed ICE’s hub-and-spoke detention model was already in motion in the region, shuffling detainees and staff between facilities and states.

The Leavenworth facility was in a strategically advantageous position to become a new hub for ICE, and Sharma-Crawford, the immigration attorney, said ICE had been eyeing the location since it closed as a federal prison. It sits just 10 miles from Kansas City International Airport, where ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations field office is a six-minute drive away. It also allows ICE to hold detainees at Leavenworth then move them through KCI to staging areas for deportation flights in Louisiana or Texas. 

“They want it short, quick,” Sharma-Crawford said. It allows ICE to claim “‘I gave them due process,’” he said, “and they’re out the door.”

On March 25, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a bond decision holding that anyone who entered the United States without authorization is ineligible for bond, a ruling that covers Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, and Minnesota, the states Sharma-Crawford said he expects to feed into Leavenworth. Mandatory detention across those seven states meant the government needed greater capacity from the region’s jails. Genevra Alberti, former chair of the local AILA chapter, whose attorneys represent clients throughout the area, named additional “spokes” in the system: Chase County in Kansas, and Greene, Ste. Genevieve, Phelps, and Ozark counties in Missouri. Enough local jails plus a CoreCivic facility, she said, can hold and process as many people as a mega-detention center. 

“It makes sense that they’re doing this in smaller areas, because no one’s paying attention,” Alberti said. “There’s definitely a method to this. They know if they do this in the massive cities, there’s going to be more light shed on what they’re doing.”

In Leavenworth County, the CoreCivic-run ICE detention center is one of five major correctional facilities, which provide a total of roughly 6,000 beds. Up the road, FCI Leavenworth, a federal Bureau of Prisons facility, held ICE detainees in what Alberti called a “black hole” for a full year before the SUP was approved. Last May, the ACLU wrote to the warden documenting limited time outside and no exercise for detainees. Peterson, the city manager, confirmed the federal prison doesn’t answer to the city, and there have been no community relations meetings for more than a year.

The county’s other major prisons are the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks and the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth and Lansing Correctional Facility. Rounding out the cluster is the Grossman Center, a federal halfway house run by the private prison giant GEO Group adjacent to CoreCivic’s site.

The SUP the city approved authorizes “jail or prison” use at the Leavenworth site without restricting it to ICE detention. The concentration of prisons meant the workforce, the infrastructure, and the institutional muscle were already there. Reopening one more facility for ICE required little more than a single municipal approval.

The Immigration Courts 

Once their clients are fed into one of the deportation regime’s hubs, immigration attorneys say it’s become an increasingly byzantine process to find them, plan their defenses, and get them out of detention.

Working with clients imprisoned at Leavenworth is chaotic and difficult from the moment they arrive, the attorneys said. To schedule a televideo call the lawyers must email their state bar cards and licenses, and they are subject to automatic, one-hour cutoffs. CoreCivic has repeatedly demanded attorneys file formal representation paperwork before they’ve even met the detainee or agreed to take on the case, Alberti said. 

Valerie Sprout, a Kansas City immigration attorney with 15 years of experience, said she wasn’t even able to locate the facility in ICE’s call-scheduling portal. 

“We didn’t know how to contact that client,” Sprout said. “We were on our listserv, frantically sharing information, because you have people there that you have no access to.”

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Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, rejected these characterizations, saying video visitation calls run in 30- and 60-minute sessions, calls are not automatically cut off, and staff accommodate requests for more time. He said the forms identifying a detainee’s lawyer are standard and a pre-representational visit can occur without one, adding that legal representatives may visit their clients seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Some of the details of the internal dysfunction detainees face only come to light after they’re released. According to Alberti, a former client took over running the laundry for roughly a week because no one was washing detainees’ clothes. She was promised token pay, either a dollar an hour or a dollar a day, but was never paid.

The obstacles extend into the courtroom. Detainees are increasingly given remote, on-camera hearings, never physically appearing before a judge. The Kansas City Immigration Court, part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, holds jurisdiction over Leavenworth’s detainee docket. Just six judges, working across three courtrooms and a small pro bono room, carry more than 1,000 cases. 

“So far, I haven’t seen any of them in person,” Alberti said of the judges, which she said makes it more difficult to tell how they’re weighing cases.

Sprout, who is also a board member of Asylum Clinic Kansas City, has witnessed the shift to teleconferenced hearings firsthand. 

“All detained cases are over video. No detained cases are in-person, which I feel is just an incredible violation of due process, especially in asylum cases, because the threshold issue in every asylum case is to determine whether the respondent is credible,” she said.

Former prosecutors and military lawyers preside over the hearings. Allan F. John-Baptiste, a former Bureau of Prisons lawyer, was appointed during the first Trump administration. Jared Grimmer, a former Air Force judge advocate general, accepted a temporary appointment in October 2025. Katherine Estes ran military personnel law at the Pentagon. Scott Ison is a local-level Missouri prosecutor. After the Trump administration fired or pushed out more than 100 judges last year, none of the newly appointed Kansas City judges have a background in immigration law, according to the official bios provided in a DOJ press release announcing their appointments.

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Created in the wake of 9/11 and historically invoked only sparingly, the EOIR-43 automatic stay allows the government to override an immigration judge’s bond order without review or appeal. Records obtained by Documented through a records request show the Department of Homeland Security used it 877 times over a three-month period in mid-2025. Faced with these stays, Alberti has filed two federal habeas corpus petitions for clients at CoreCivic Leavenworth. The first was for a young woman with a pending petition for legal status as a victim of crime and no criminal history who entered the country as a baby; she was released after roughly two weeks. As of this spring, the second remained in detention. 

Another recent petition put the conditions themselves before a federal judge. Katsiaryna Bartko, a Belarusian asylum-seeker detained at Leavenworth, filed a pro se petition in August over her medical care. In an order appointing her counsel, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree found she brought “a viable deprivation-of-medical-care” claim and noted it was undisputed that her recent test results showed worsening thyroid levels. Bartko, who depends on hormone medication after surgery for thyroid cancer, had not seen a specialist since her transfer, according to court filings. CoreCivic and ICE dispute she was denied appropriate medical care. After a fourth hospitalization and 106 days in ICE in custody, she was released on recognizance on September 16.

One of Alberti’s clients, who was detained at Leavenworth but has now been released, told her that guards and ICE officers sometimes asked her to act as an interpreter for other detainees without pay. No one on staff spoke Spanish, the client told Alberti, and when officers needed to communicate, they relied on a translation app rather than a live interpreter. 

Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said in a statement to The Intercept that “any claim that a detainee is required to translate for staff communication is false” and that the facility uses a contracted translation service with a live translator reached through devices, computers, and phones. 

About six weeks after the facility began accepting detainees in May, Sharma-Crawford reported at the first community oversight committee meeting that detainees did not have access to their own charging documents. Without them, he said, the lawyers weren’t able to formulate a defense for their clients.

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When asked about that allegation by The Intercept, Gustin said that concern involved a single detainee whose documents were provided upon request. He also said detainees keep their charging documents with them from the time they arrive and any suggestion to the contrary was “false.”

But for those who’ve been made party to the system, the situation has begun to feel intractable.

“We cannot stop the federal government from incarcerating these people,” Bauder, the mayor, had said. “We can’t stop them, but we can try to make it better for them here.”

The community’s only check on CoreCivic was the CoreCivic Community Relations Advisory Board, required as a condition of the special use permit. But while the board streamed their meetings publicly, it existed in a purely advisory capacity, Peterson, the city manager, said. Enforcement power lay with the city, not the board, and to act on any issues it flagged, the city of Leavenworth would have to sue. 

On the city’s working relationship with CoreCivic in the first weeks, Peterson said, “For now, things are great,” before adding, “How long is this sustainable? How long does it go?”

Foreclosing on the Future

With the hub-and-spoke model, the Trump administration planned for mega-detention centers with 7,500 to 10,000 beds as the hubs, but the 1,033-bed Leavenworth facility became a hub at a fraction of the size, inviting far less scrutiny than a mega-center would. Its reopening spurred community mobilization, but not the same national level of fanfare or resistance — as was the case with “Alligator Alcatraz,” the now-shuttered detention center in the Florida Everglades — which has worked in the Trump administration’s favor.

“DHS has taken a two-pronged approach to this,” Peterson said. “They are both contracting with private organizations like CoreCivic and GEO Group to manage their detention population, but then they are also just directly acquiring properties to manage themselves.”

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The administration’s mass deportation agenda has remained paramount despite its growing unpopularity with the American public. The Leavenworth location had been a federal priority from the start, identified in ACLU Freedom of Information Act disclosures alongside other proposed reopenings. It was named in ICE’s emergency justification as one of three publicly identified among nine no-bid detention contracts. It was selected for its central location within ICE’s Chicago area of operations. With warehouse acquisitions stalled, Leavenworth, the Midwest regional hub, may represent the Trump administration’s new default model when ambitious, public-facing expansions become too politically or financially costly to defend. 

In July, CoreCivic’s sold two of its largest California facilities, Otay Mesa and California City, to DHS for $1.5 billion. The company will continue operating both and plans to sell off more jails. Under this hybrid arrangement, federal ownership can put facilities beyond the reach of many state and local regulations, limiting outside scrutiny even as courts test its limits.

Last month, the pattern played out again. On August 4, CoreCivic announced the sale of the shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota. The following day, in a second press release, it announced the $238 million sale of Leavenworth’s Midwest Regional Reception Center, recasting both as a single $734 million deal. Under the arrangement, the company expects to keep operating both facilities through their existing ICE contracts.

At Leavenworth, the contract expires in September 2027. City officials learned of the sale the morning the news broke and were notified by CoreCivic rather than the federal government, raising questions as to whether its permit and oversight conditions would survive federal ownership. Even as these sales closed, CoreCivic said it had opened preliminary discussions with ICE about selling still other facilities.

Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat who toured the facility on September 9 to meet with two detained constituents, said it was under active construction to add capacity, telling reporters “everywhere we went, they were building.” A DHS spokesperson confirmed the agency acquired Leavenworth and the Appleton facility to create additional detention space.

Alberti sees these actions as the administration waging a “war of attrition” on immigrants, their families, and their advocates.

Leavenworth fought this outcome through every channel available to a local government — in the courts, at the commission, through public protests, and in open hearings packed with residents. Nevertheless, CoreCivic and DHS jammed the approval through. Once the facility was operational, the federal government purchased the building outright, severing the meager leverage the city extracted as the price of its consent. In May, DHS quietly disbanded its own internal detention oversight office after a funding lapse, leaving no federal watchdog to fill the void. Rebranded as an expansion of ICE’s immigration capacity, this series of federal acquisitions represents the quiet desecration of the public trust. More troubling still is the notion that across America, other Leavenworths may still be unaccounted for and effectively shielded from the public’s knowledge or scrutiny. Without the tools to meaningfully oppose the expansion of Trump’s anti-immigrant regime, communities are left without recourse, making them nodes of a vast, and violent, machine.

This story is part 2 in a two-part series. Read the first part here.

The post How a Small Kansas City Became a Critical Hub for Trump’s Deportation Regime Against Its Will appeared first on The Intercept.

Volunteers who showed up a few months ago asking, “Where do I buy a whistle?” are now trained and committed members of an “ICE Watch” movement, said Zach Mueller, whose anti-authoritarian group States at the Core started hosting trainings earlier this year. “They’re not in the normal cast of characters that have been showing up to rallies over the last several decades,” said Mueller. Now, they’re planning to fan out to their local polling places and defend their neighbors’ rights to vote.

The ICE-watchers-turned-poll-watchers are preparing for the worst despite a temporary win the voting rights movement secured last week, when the Supreme Court upheld a decision to block a Trump administration rule that would have let the U.S. Postal Service refuse to deliver ballots from states that don’t share their voter rolls with the federal government, among other new constraints, which advocates warned would lead to chaos and uncounted votes. While that plan was foiled for the midterms, other electoral threats abound.

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“There are 100 different scenarios that you can run through,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible. “Could be ICE at the polls, could be Trump getting every Republican to swear to sabotage the results … Could be something after the fact, seizing ballot boxes or refusing to acknowledge the results. Who knows?”

What is clear, Levin said, is, “If you think that some Democratic politician is going to have some neat trick in the back pocket that they going to pull when it happens, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Federal interference at the polls is illegal. Despite lawsuits seeking to block federal immigration officers from poll sites, administration officials have continued to threaten their presence anyway. Earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that immigration agents could be deployed at polling places if there is a “threat” or if they’re serving a warrant. And President Donald Trump has previously said that federal agents and the National Guard could be sent to polling locations.

Levin’s organization, which co-sponsors the No Kings protests, has launched “election protection” training programs to help people prepare to mobilize for different election sabotage scenarios, including federal immigration agents at the polls, and Mueller’s group has expanded its trainings to include election protection trainings known as “Beyond ICE Watch.”

“Ultimately this is going to come down to: Do you have a sufficient number of people organized and prepared to push back when shit hits the fan, or don’t you?” said Levin.

In the past two years, Levin said, an elite class composed of “media and business and law firms and universities” and parts of the Democratic establishment, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have capitulated to the authoritarian whims of the Trump administration.

“The only thing that has changed anything over the last 22 months has been normal, everyday people deciding they weren’t going to put up with this shit,” said Levin. “They organized, they reached out, they formed communities, and they pushed back.”

Last year, the Save America Movement, a nonprofit political and pro-democracy organization that rose up in opposition to Trump, launched “liberty vans” in Los Angeles.

The vehicles are staffed with organizers trained in documenting and deescalating violence from federal law enforcement agents. “Our perspective was that if everybody in America knew what it felt like to be in Los Angeles during that summer, nobody would be OK with this,” said Mary Corcoran, who serves as the group’s executive director.

The project later expanded to other cities including Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis.

Now, Corcoran plans to deploy a similar strategy in battleground states. The group is working with major civil and labor rights figures like Rev. Al Sharpton and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to send volunteers — including trusted community leaders like clergy members — trained in deescalation, documentation, and local voting laws to precincts with large Black, Latino, and Asian populations in North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan.

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Corcoran said the precincts they chose are all electoral power centers with large minority and immigrant populations. “If they were successful in intimidating even 10 percent of those voters from coming back this midterm cycle, it could easily swing the outcome statewide,” she said.

Corcoran is hopeful that people knowing they will not be alone at the polls will help them feel safer, but she acknowledges that this election cycle will be a new test. “Voter intimidation has always been around,” she said. “But ICE is a new X factor in this election.”

For the NAACP, voter intimidation is a familiar threat, even if the players have changed, explained Dominik Whitehead, the group’s head of membership. “Much of this we’ve seen before,” said Whitehead. In Georgia and other battleground states in 2024, there were at least 227 bomb threats targeting polling locations and election-related offices, many of them in Black precincts.

The NAACP is “going to defend democracy and ensure voters have access to the ballot box, as we have done for the last 117 years,” said Whitehead. But like Corcoran, he acknowledges that these are “different times.”

ICE has “no jurisdiction” to prevent anyone from voting, something the NAACP has been including in their messaging to voters, he said. However, Whitehead said that they’re still anticipating the agency’s presence. He said the NAACP is “working closely with immigrant organizations” and focusing their election monitoring efforts in places like Michigan, Florida, and Texas, where they expect threats against Muslim, Latino, and Black Caribbean immigrant communities.

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Voting by mail has already begun in several key states, including Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. For Mueller and States at the Core, the real test will come after Election Day.

“There is a real question mark in my mind about what is the reaction from the authoritarian movement to this election,” said Mueller. “And it’s worth thinking more about how folks are planning, not just for the lead-up version to this, but what happens on November 4th and afterwards.” 

The Trump administration’s attacks on mail-in voting, for example, will likely become an issue again. Concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the new rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that his issue with the new rule was its timing.

The post They Trained to Protect Immigrants From ICE. Now They’re Prepping to Defend the Midterm Elections. appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, a new petition signed by more than 160,000 people, including the backing of actor Javier Bardem, is calling for Pink’s removal from her UNICEF USA role. The petition organizers, Swifties Against Genocide, named for fans of the pop singer Taylor Swift, said that Pink’s remarks sidelined concern for Palestinian children and “fueled ongoing conflict and struggles for visibility and empathy.” 

“As individuals who care deeply about the welfare of children around the world, we must hold UNICEF Ambassadors to the highest standards of neutrality and compassion,” the organizers wrote. “Palestinian children, like all children affected by genocide, deserve ambassadors who unequivocally extend support and empathy towards their plight.”

The petition is the latest example of the type of public pressure supporters of Palestine are seeking to exert amid a tidal shift of sentiment in the U.S. on Palestine and Israel over the past three years. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has dramatically soured U.S. opinion on Israel, with a majority viewing Israel unfavorably and more Americans taking a sympathetic view of Palestinians. 

The transformations have played out in the current midterm election cycle, with candidates pushing to sever military ties with Israel winning in primaries across the country. In the past several weeks, the subject has upended mainstream popular culture, with battle lines being drawn over a stadium concert tour by pop icon Ed Sheeran.  

The pressure on UNICEF to part ways with Pink is tied up with a strategy among Palestine solidarity activists to extract a price from Israel for its continued occupation and genocide of Palestinians. 

For Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow with Al-Shabaka U.S., the petition is “a clear attempt to draw a new line in the sand and make the point that choosing to take the moderate lane is unacceptable.”

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“These past couple days have proven that being shamelessly pro-Israel, or even refusing to take sides in the face of a genocide, is no longer the safe route,” he said, citing a shift of the “cultural hegemony” in the West.

Though Sheeran himself — who said at his latest concert that he was listening to both sides — is not a target of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, the cultural backlash to his move to take Macklemore off the tour reinforced the logic of the growing movement, Natasha Lennard recently wrote in The Intercept.

Representatives for Pink, UNICEF, and Change.org did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Other advocates for Palestinian rights reaffirmed the petitioners’ aims.

“Pink should step down. UNICEF itself has called Gaza a graveyard for children. Its ambassadors are supposed to speak for those children, not attack the people who do,” said Raed Jarrar, the advocacy director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “Whether UNICEF removes her or not, it’s time for her to step down.”

Attacking Pro-Palestine Speech

The controversy involving Pink kicked off during Sheeran’s show at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4.

Macklemore, one of the opening acts, spoke out against Israeli apartheid and the genocide of Palestinians, addressing Jewish people in the crowd to say that criticism of genocide and the Israeli government “is in no way a criticism of you.” 

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After backlash from pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League — and perhaps more critically, pressure from billionaire Robert Kraft, the deeply pro-Israel owner of the New England Patriots and Massachusetts’s Gillette Stadium — Sheeran dropped Macklemore from his tour. Then came the backlash to the backlash, with other opening acts on the tour and even Sheeran’s backing band dropping out in solidarity with Macklemore. 

Pink, the pop star who rose to fame with a string of hits in the early 2000s, waded into the controversy early on. After attending the September 4 show, Pink reshared a social media post from the group Stop Antisemitism that said Macklemore’s claims of a genocide were “false” and that concertgoers were owed apologies and refunds.

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“I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund,” she later wrote on Instagram, explaining why she reshared the post. “What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, ‘That scared me, and it scared people I love’ — without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I’m somehow cool with genocide because I noticed?”

She added that the protest slogan “From river to the sea” and the use of the term “Zionist” have become “a slur.”

Pink said that “nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child.” She mentioned her experience as a UNICEF ambassador visiting children born in war zones. She “grieved every one of them, on both sides of that fence,” she wrote.

Yet Pink’s grief, or any celebrity’s, has done little to change conditions on the ground for Palestinian children. Just on Monday, an 11-year-old boy was shot to death by the Israeli military in one of Gaza’s apparent “safe zones.”

UNICEF, which operates in Gaza, itself reported that Israeli attacks have killed at least 300 children in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire agreement last October. Food insecurity and lack of access to clean water also remain issues due to Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid from entering the Strip.

In her social media post, Pink said she does not speak for Israel but reiterated her stance that “Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations.” She said she was not “going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption, and I’m not going to recite anybody’s slogan to earn back a follower.”

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Over the weekend, the petition calling out Pink also drew the support from Javier Bardem, an outspoken advocate for Palestine and major funder of the Palestinian film “All That’s Left of You,” who shared the petition on his Instagram profile. 

“She can not defend children’s rights,” Bardem said, “while not condemning the genocide in Gaza.”

The post Pink Supported Macklemore’s Firing. Now Activists Want UNICEF to Cut Ties With Her. appeared first on The Intercept.

An email first sent over the weekend sent by Fetterman’s campaign came from the address “info@gopsquad.com” and vowed: “I’m always going to reject Socialism and the Anti-American way of life.” Other recent appeals sent from the same address encourage readers to help President Donald Trump pass new voting restrictions, to read an “urgent memo” from House Speaker Mike Johnson on fighting the left, and to back Republican Mike Rogers for Senate in Michigan over Abdul El-Sayed, whom the email compared to a terrorist and a “threat to our way of life.”

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The email from Fetterman’s campaign comes as the senator has moved closer to the Republican caucus, rankling his Democratic colleagues and spurring rumors that he might switch parties. He received the maximum allowed contribution from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, as The Intercept reported in July. But the use of Republican fundraising infrastructure represents a new step in Fetterman’s confounding electoral strategy.

The Fetterman campaign also sent copies of the fundraising email from alternate GOP domains including “unshakeableconservatives.com” and “freedomfaction.net.” It’s possible that Fetterman for PA rented or bought a GOP email list, something campaigns commonly do for targeted outreach, but the campaign’s specific arrangement is unclear. The text retreads major talking points that the Democratic senator delivered in a controversial video appearance at the Republican party’s midterm convention earlier this month, where he railed against “extremes” and promised to “stand with America.” 

Fetterman’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Former Fetterman staffers, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal, condemned their old boss’s pivot and suggested he’d betrayed his previous supporters.

“After taking contributions from millions of small-dollar donors who wanted a Democratic Senate, John Fetterman turned around and became Donald Trump’s useful idiot,” said one former staffer. “Now, it’s no surprise that he has to resort to GOP donors to prop up his dismal fundraising numbers.” 

With two years left in his first term, Fetterman has made himself the subject of a series of political upheavals and dramatic reversals. The image he was heralded for upon his 2022 election — a gritty, heterodox, and unpredictable model for the future of the Democratic Party — has all but crumbled.

Staffers, donors, previous supporters, and his Democratic colleagues have fled from Fetterman’s orbit in droves as he’s aligned himself with Republicans on Trump’s war with Iran, U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, and funding the Department of Homeland Security amid a slew of killings, shootings, and misconduct by federal immigration agents.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported on his resistance to carrying out his daily responsibilities as a senator — which marked a stark contrast from his energy for showing up on Fox News, where he made more than 50 appearances in the first six months of this year. The senator has particularly alienated former supporters on the left with his hardline support for the Israeli government, which he has offered unconditional support throughout its genocide in Gaza.

Fetterman’s critics are looking for a candidate to primary him in 2028 as he fields questions about whether he plans to join the GOP — or run for reelection at all, given his sinking popularity among his own party and outrage from former supporters over his rightward turn. 

Fetterman’s coziness with — and popularity among — Republicans doesn’t necessarily mean he’s likely to join the GOP conference, said several former Fetterman staffers who spoke to The Intercept. They predicted that Fetterman might follow in the footsteps of former Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who consistently blocked their party’s more progressive measures and then became independent. That, according to one former staffer, would let him maintain the wildcard he’s curated over four erratic years in office. 

“He loves being the enigma,” another former staffer told The Intercept. “He loves the, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to see what happens.’”

As Fetterman’s staffers struggled in recent months to get him to do basic parts of his job — including fundraising — his office reached out to staffers for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to ask him to talk to Fetterman in an attempt to right what they saw as a sinking ship, according to a former staffer. The staffer said that Schumer agreed, but Fetterman refused to talk to him. Schumer’s office has said the two are in communication and met for dinner in August. 

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If there’s a lesson to be learned from Fetterman’s explosion onto the national stage and the trail of disgruntled staffers, organizers, and small-dollar donors left in its wake, it has little to do with political ideology and more to do with psychology, former staffers told The Intercept. Fetterman views himself as a renegade and an outsider above all else, according to his former staff. He has long struggled with depression, and while campaigning in 2022, he suffered a stroke whose effects led him to use assistive technology in the Senate and continue to be felt in other ways.

Notwithstanding any decision he might make about switching parties, the conservative world has welcomed Fetterman with open arms. In July, Fetterman attended a retreat in Montana hosted by Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media scion behind Fox News, at the network’s invitation, according to two former Fetterman staffers. At the retreat, Fetterman spoke on a panel alongside Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala. Fetterman’s attendance at Murdoch’s event came several days after he launched an unusual bipartisan fundraising committee with his Republican counterpart in Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick. 

While Fetterman’s campaign has previously used the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue for communications, including in a recent text for a joint fundraiser with McCormick, his campaign sent recent fundraising texts using another platform, including a link with the name “Save America 26.” 

Fetterman’s campaign also recently redesigned its website to use his antagonistic persona in its favor. The website boasts that Fetterman “thinks for himself. You should too.”

Fetterman isn’t an average Democrat, his new website reads. “John doesn’t look like a typical politician, and more importantly, he doesn’t act like one.”

The post John Fetterman Is Fundraising on GOP Donor Email Lists appeared first on The Intercept.

Mohammadjamal Azizi and Hannaneh Alikaram requested asylum after arriving in the United States in late 2024, for fear of the persecution they would likely face as Christian converts in Iran, where they had twice been arrested due to their faith.

Since arriving in the U.S., they have faced sharply different versions of American justice, the result of a process advocates refer to bitterly as “immigration roulette”: Azizi — who goes by the name Liam — has been free for more than a year, after his asylum claim was granted, while Alikaram has suffered 21 months in detention, more than a year of that coming after her claim was rejected. 

Until recently, it is likely that Alikaram would not have spent nearly as much time in detention as she has. But amid the twin agendas of mass detention and mass deportation, the Trump administration has swept aside years of precedent by locking up people who would previously have been allowed to fight their cases from outside detention, while going after communities formerly protected from deportation due to the likelihood of persecution back home.

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Iranians have found themselves the crosshairs. Last year, amid the so-called 12-Day War between the U.S.–Israel and Iran, senior officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a scheme to begin deportations to Iran, a plan that resulted in three planes full of Iranian deportees being sent back to Iran on charter flights.

Those flights were suspended earlier this year after the U.S. and Israel launched the ongoing war on Iran, but multiple Iranians with final orders of removal have been deported to countries where they have no ties, including Panama and the Central African Republic. With so-called third-country flights leaving every month or so, Azizi and his wife live in constant fear that Alikaram might be put on a plane to a country where she knows no one and from which she has little hope of escaping.

Leaving detention after seven months, Azizi headed to the Iranian American hub of Los Angeles, where he has spent the past year working any job he can find to raise money for legal bills and fighting for his wife’s release. By the logic of the U.S. immigration system, that should be a simple prospect: As the spouse of an asylee, Alikaram is eligible for a status known as derivative asylum, a process intended to ensure family unification and act as a backstop against situations like the one in which Azizi and Alikaram find themselves, according to Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, a former immigration judge fired by the Trump administration last year.

“The person gets to have derivative asylum because family unity is a central tenet of our immigration system,” said Rey Caldas. “This is your money and my money that are being wasted in detaining this woman who is unquestionably eligible for asylum as the spouse of an individual that has been granted asylum.”

The couple currently has a petition for derivative asylum before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and have filed a petition for habeas corpus seeking to secure Alikaram’s release on the basis of prolonged detention. Amid the uncertainty, with no end in sight to his wife’s detention, Azizi said their separation — and his feeling of helplessness in the face of bureaucratic cruelty — weighs on him daily.

“Being separated from Hananneh is unbearable,” Azizi wrote in a statement to the court filed earlier this year. “Every night I go to sleep wondering if she is safe in detention. Every day I wake up with anxiety that she might be taken away from me and sent back to a country where she could be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed just because she sought freedom.”

Azizi and Alikaram married in 2018 and lived together in Isfahan, Iran, where both had gone to university. Azizi worked as a software engineer, while Alikaram ran a greenhouse business, cultivating plants and posting playful videos to YouTube in which she coached plant lovers on topics ranging from prepping plants for autumn to guarding against pests. In the videos, which include jokey, spliced-in clips from “Lord of the Rings” and Miyazaki films, Alikaram comes across as a happy young woman enamored with the natural world.

The couple found their way to Christianity first through friends, members of Isfahan’s sizable minority of Armenian Christians. Christians have lived in Iran for more than a millennium, and Iran’s constitution affords protections allowing ethnoreligious communities, most notably Armenians and Assyrians, to practice their faith and organize their families and communities accordingly.

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But the situation is very different for converts like Azizi and Alikaram, who are considered by Iran’s theocratic government to be apostates, and are subject to harsh punishments — up to and including execution. As a result, converts must worship in secret, in an underground network of so-called home churches.

It was in these home churches that the couple began exploring Christianity and where, in January 2024, they were baptized into the Anglican church. But it was also in a home church where the two met with their first experience of state terror, Azizi and Alikaram told The Intercept in telephone interviews and related in court documents. On March 5, 2024, they were worshipping with a handful of others in a home church in Isfahan when members of the pro-government Basij militia burst in, having been informed of the gathering by neighbors. Alikaram and Azizi, along with others, were taken into custody. Alikaram was beaten so badly she passed out and had to be hospitalized.

On June 9, 2024, after relocating for their own safety to the capital of Tehran, Alikaram and Azizi were arrested again on charges of practicing a foreign religion and inviting others to practice Christianity. She was held for two days, and he for four. After that ordeal, they decided it was time to leave. They secured a visa to enter Brazil, and left Iran on November 3, 2024. Five days later, a court in Tehran issued warrants for their arrest, according to court documents.

Azizi and Alikaram entered the United States on December 26, 2024, after an arduous trip overland from Brazil that took them through more than half a dozen countries. En route, they traveled through the infamous Darién Gap and spent two days as captives of a criminal group in Tapachula, Mexico, an ordeal that ended only after paying thousands of dollars for their release. 

In Mexico, they registered for CBP One, the mobile app designed by the Biden administration as the only method by which potential asylees could file a claim. Due to the danger in Mexico, including threats from a smuggler, Alikaram and Azizi said smugglers forced them to join a group of migrants from India, Iran, and a number of African countries in crossing the border wall separating Tijuana and San Diego.

“They told us, ‘You have to cross the border, you cannot stay in Mexico,’” Azizi recalled the smugglers saying. “It was out of our hands.”

On the other side, they soon found themselves in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol, who searched the migrants and separated the men from the women. 

“We told them we are married, we showed them our marriage certificate,” Azizi told The Intercept. “But they didn’t care. They separated us.”

In early January 2025, Alikaram was sent to Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, while Azizi was sent to another facility in Louisiana before ending up at a detention center in Houston, Texas. 

They have been apart ever since.

Alikaram went before Judge Jennifer A. May for her asylum hearing on July 2, 2025. May, who was appointed in 2018 under the first Trump administration, appears to be in line with the policy objectives of the current administration. Between 2021 and the end of 2025, she denied asylum in 91.8 percent of the cases she heard, according to data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects data on immigration judges.

The hearing took place at a time in which judges were under ever greater pressure to deny claims, according to Rey Caldas, the former immigration judge, who was fired last year amid a purge of the immigration court system by the Trump administration.

“It was evident to me when I was on the bench, and it’s certainly evident to me now that they are exerting massive pressure so that judges deny all applications,” Rey Caldas said. 

In the hearing, which was conducted over Webex, May drilled into Alikaram’s claim, asking for details about her baptism, whether or not she had owned a Bible, and her reasons for converting to Christianity. Alikaram, clearly nervous, stumbled over her words at times, and at others gave answers that clashed with evidence provided to court. Some details also appeared to get lost in translation. At one point, a reference by Alikaram to the Basij, the paramilitary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was transcribed as “a siege.” 

May did not find Alikaram to be credible. In her decision denying Alikaram’s asylum case, May focused mostly on what she described as inconsistencies in Alikaram’s testimony, including how long she’d been attending home churches and details of her arrest — inconsistencies that Alikaram and Azizi later blamed on her nerves while testifying. But May also tried to downplay the likelihood that Alikaram would face persecution if she returned to Iran.

“I find there is no independent evidence to show that the respondent would likely be tortured in Iran,” May wrote. “[T]his court is aware that Christians have been arrested and sent to jail for some period of time. But looking at the amount of people in Iran, the amount of people who are converts to Christianity, I cannot find that that percentage would be more than likely or not torture or persecution [sic] for this respondent.”

Six days later, Azizi who at the time was being held at a detention facility in Texas, went before Judge Nimmo Bhagat, fully expecting that his claim would be denied as well. To his shock, however, the judge approved his claim for asylum, and just two weeks later he was a free man.

“I was shocked,” Azizi said. “I thought if my wife couldn’t get asylum that I’d have no chance. But they gave me asylum.”

A spokesperson for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the branch of the Justice Department that oversees immigration courts, declined to comment. Neither ICE nor USCIS responded to requests for comment.

In light of his wife’s asylum denial, Azizi’s successful claim was a godsend for them both. Despite May’s decision, Alikaram should now be eligible for derivative asylum, upon which her own claim and its denial has no bearing.

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“Warehousing Human Beings”

The couple filed for derivative asylum in December, after the Board of Immigration Appeals denied Alikaram’s appeal of May’s decision. USCIS issued a notice of receipt, and even scheduled an appointment in Jackson, Mississippi, for a biometrics appointment. But ICE failed to produce Alikaram for the appointment, and the derivative asylum process now appears to be languishing in limbo.

In April, Alikaram’s attorney, Emily Trostle, filed a petition for habeas corpus in an attempt to secure Alikaram’s release from detention. That case, too, has stalled, forcing Trostle to file a petition last week to expedite the process.

In detention, meanwhile, Alikaram is suffering from poor nutrition, failing eyesight, and severe anxiety and depression. 

“I can’t bear it anymore,” she told The Intercept in a telephone interview. “I know God has a plan for me, but sometimes now I say, ‘Just kill me so my husband and my family can move on with their lives.’”

The post Immigration Roulette: Husband Granted Asylum, Wife Locked Up Awaiting Deportation appeared first on The Intercept.

The slogan reflects the city’s deep anger over the killing of two U.S. citizens by federal officers in January. It also reflects Frazier’s belief that the backlash gives him the edge in the race to serve as Minneapolis’s top prosecutor.

Frazier, a public defender turned state representative, is vying with former federal prosecutor Anders Folk in the race to become Hennepin County Attorney. The county, which includes Minneapolis, was beset by violence and chaos this winter amid a Trump administration immigration crackdown known as “Operation Metro Surge.”

Before the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the contest was shaping up as a referendum on so-called progressive prosecutions — fallout from a debate that began six years ago after George Floyd was murdered by former police officer Derek Chauvin.

Now it has morphed into something more. Either Frazier or his opponent will likely decide whether to prosecute the federal immigration agents who killed Good and Pretti. Those stakes give the race national implications, Hamline University political science professor David Schultz said.

“People are going to be looking at this race and asking: What does it tell us about holding law enforcement accountable?” he said. “If you hadn’t had Metro Surge, if you hadn’t had George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, it would be: Minneapolis is holding an election for county attorney — no big deal.”

Walking the Block

A county attorney in Minnesota has broad responsibilities that range from general counsel for local government to prosecuting crimes to pursuing child support cases.

Voters, however, only wanted to talk about one thing as Frazier canvassed the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis earlier this month: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s winter invasion. Without prompting, two voters in two blocks thanked him for his campaign promise to go after ICE.

The reminders of Minneapolis’s turbulent decade are everywhere in the city. A couple blocks away from a campaign field office, one building is still tagged with “#JUSTICE4GEORGE” graffiti. Within a short drive, the memorials for Good and Pretti are overflowing with flowers and handwritten tributes.

In an interview with The Intercept, Frazier was careful to say that he has not made any decisions about cases involving federal agents. Any explicit statement to that effect could be used to throw him off the case.

“But I don’t see it any different than saying we’re going to go after crime,” Frazier said. “We’re just making it very clear and very explicit that if you come here, regardless of what your title is, and if you violate the law here, there will be accountability for that.”

A native of the South Side of Chicago, Frazier moved to rural Minnesota for college and never left the state. He has three daughters and went from serving as a Hennepin County public defender to state representative for New Hope, a suburb of Minneapolis.

The 47-year-old built strong connections with the state affiliate of the Democratic Party and Minnesota’s powerful labor movement. His day job outside of his part-time legislative position is as an attorney for the state’s main teacher union.

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If he is elected, Frazier will likely face crucial decisions about whether to file or continue pursuing charges in the Good and Pretti killers. The sitting county attorney, Mary Moriarty, began the investigation into those killings with the aid of state Attorney General Keith Ellison, but she could leave the ultimate charging decision up to her successor. Frazier says he has no confidence in parallel federal investigations.

“I have no trust whatsoever in a Donald Trump-led Department of Justice actually getting us any justice or accountability for what happened here,” he said.

“Tagged With Trump”

His opponent, Folk, brings a strikingly different resume and support base to the race.

A Minnesota native and 49-year-old first-time candidate who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, he worked his way up through the ranks at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, where some of his most notable early cases focused on Somali American men accused of traveling to the Horn of Africa to fight for the designated terror group al-Shabaab.

After a stint at a national law firm, he returned to the U.S. attorney’s office in 2018 to serve as first assistant. He was briefly the interim top prosecutor after the resignation of the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in 2021. During that stint, he signed Chauvin’s indictment on federal civil rights charges connected to the murder of George Floyd.

In 2022, he left public service and became a partner at the white-shoe law firm Jones Day, which has helped corporations fight union campaigns.

His blue-chip resume attracted support from wealthy campaign donors and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who endorsed him early on.

Folk, whose campaign declined a request for an interview, leans on his prosecutorial experience to make the case that he is best suited to prosecute federal officers.

“These are cases we’ve never done here in Minnesota,” he said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio last month. “These are going to be cases we’re doing for the first time in the history of this state. And I think it just really speaks to how critical it is to have that deep experience doing federal criminal prosecution work because that’s where these cases are all going to end up.”

While campaigning on his experience at the U.S. attorney’s office, however, his job as a federal prosecutor also presents a liability. Frazier routinely notes that Folk rejoined the office when Trump was president. That association has hurt Folk as much as anything else, said Schultz, the Hamline law and politics professor.

“He is tagged with Trump, he is tagged with the federal prosecutor’s office,” Schultz said.

“It’s guilt by association.”

Mary Moriarty’s Shadow

Frazier took 36 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary last month to Folk’s 23 percent. That lead makes him the “heavy” favorite but not the inevitable winner, Schultz said.

Folk’s supporters have bristled at the claims that he was a Trump lackey. In the run-off, Folk played up his connections to the Biden administration.

Yet Folk has played the guilt-by-association game, too, by tying Frazier to the current county attorney, Mary Moriarty.

Moriarty ran as an outspoken progressive when voters were outraged over her predecessor’s handling of Floyd’s murder. She promised to transform the office with a restorative approach and fresh reviews of past incidents of police brutality.

She followed through on those pledges but drew political flak for the way in which she went about it.

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Former Democratic allies, including state Attorney General Keith Ellison, castigated her over her handling of a case where two teen boys were accused in the killing a young mother and she sought to prosecute them as juveniles. Democratic Gov. Tim Walz eventually took her off the case and handed it to Ellison, a move she called undemocratic.

With her political fortunes sinking, Moriarty decided not to run again last year, well before Operation Metro Surge began. During the election, Frazier’s critics have sought to cast him as her second coming.

Folk quickly name-checked Moriarty when he was asked about his differences with Frazier in a recent radio interview.

“Not unlike my differences with Mary Moriarty, I’m somebody who has stood up in court and prosecuted for the people of the state of Minnesota,” Folk said. “And Cedrick Frazier has never done that. He has never been a prosecutor and has no experience there.”

Frazier chooses his words carefully when he talks about Moriarty’s legacy. He has positioned himself as more progressive than Folk and promised to continue some priorities, such as the police accountability project. Yet he has sought to distance herself from Moriarty on other issues. Though Moriarty changed the office’s policies to avoid charging juveniles as adults, Frazier says he is open to the possibility of such charges.

“I don’t know why it’s fair for him to say I’m going to be Mary Moriarty 2.0, but we can’t truthfully, truthfully say and talk about the fact that you worked under Donald Trump and you’re a partner at Jones Day,” Frazier said.

The family of the woman slain by the two teens said they felt betrayed by Moriarty’s decision to charge them as juveniles instead of adults. Frazier said that he will be more skillful in talking to community members than Moriarty. He will bring the same approach to killings perpetrated by law enforcement officers, he said.

“I’m going to have use-of-force experts right there with me, helping to inform me when I make those decisions,” he said. “And I’ll be very clear: If the case can’t be charged, I will go out and I will have that tough conversation with the community.”

The post Decision on Charging Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s Killers Looms Over Minneapolis DA Race appeared first on The Intercept.

The facility, which had long been plagued by overcrowding, chronic understaffing, and deadly violence, closed later that year after a Biden executive order against all private prison profiteering put its century-long run to an end. 

Then came the second Trump administration and its plans to supercharge the business of incarceration in the United States.

As of March, the notorious prison is back up and running, and this time it’s being filled with immigrants, the majority of whom have no criminal conviction, as part of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s brutal deportation regime targeting noncitizens.

Last month, CoreCivic sold the facility to the Department of Homeland Security for $238.4 million, although it expects to keep operating the site under its existing ICE arrangement. But local officials tell the story of a massive for-profit prison company steamrolling community opposition as well as the city’s own established processes, and ultimately forcing their hand to participate in a project of mass detention — a system that advocates and former employees say has led to unsafe, violent conditions for both detainees and employees.

Current conditions for detainees held at the Midwest Regional Reception Center are hard to verify from outside. In its reporting on the sale, the Kansas City Star put the facility’s population at 365 men and 112 women, a count shared at a July 28 community advisory board meeting. The paper described two local groups in contact with detainees and their families, among them Northland Neighbors United, which said in a July statement that detainees have reported medical neglect, inadequate food, and prolonged lockdowns. CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin told the Star the allegations do not reflect how the facility operates.

For Esmie Tseng, the communications director for the ACLU of Kansas, coverage of these city meetings sanitizes the reality for detainees.

“We’re making a contract out of putting people in cages,” Tseng said. “This isn’t just moving widgets from one place to another, or manufacturing notebooks and pens. This is profiting off of people being put in cages.” 

The Pitch

By early 2025, the city of Leavenworth had already said “no” multiple times to deepening its involvement in immigration detention. After Trump’s reelection, CoreCivic tried again, working with city officials for three months before announcing on a Zoom call it would reopen the facility as an immigration jail without waiting for a special use permit, or SUP, to be approved. The city sued to force CoreCivic to go through its permitting process, and the company countersued, arguing its federal contract allows it to bypass local law. In June 2025, a Leavenworth State District Court judge granted a temporary injunction barring CoreCivic from operating without a special use permit. 

During that first push on March 25, 2025 — the day the city commission was scheduled to meet in closed session about the ICE contract — John Malloy, CoreCivic’s vice president of federal partnership relations, emailed Leavenworth’s commissioners with what seemed like an attractive financial offer: “300 well-paying jobs at starting salaries of $28.58/hour,” more than $1,000,000 annually in property taxes, a $1 million one-time impact fee, and annual payments to the city and police department. The final permit set CoreCivic’s impact fee at $1.5 million, which City Manager Scott Peterson said covered the city’s legal bills.

Malloy also emphasized the city’s approval process must move quickly to meet growing demand to ramp up the number of available immigration prison beds.

“While ICE’s pressing need for capacity dictates the speed at which we must move to hire and ready the facility … we do not wish this speed to harm what we hope will be a long-term beneficial relationship with the City,” Malloy wrote in the email. He added this expedited timeline would not allow for “a protracted permitting process.”

He also touted that the community response to job postings had already been strong, with more than 500 applicants “in the hiring process” and more coming in every day.

Levering, an Army veteran and Native American, heard a version of that pitch five years earlier in a cold call from a recruiting agency. Back in 2020, when CoreCivic was contracted to run the facility as a federal prison by the U.S. Marshals Service, the recruiting agency offered her 12-hour shifts and only three days a week, she told The Intercept. The schedule sold her. With four kids in school, the promise of four days at home made the job feel like an ideal fit for her busy life. She saw the work as service, an extension of her years in the Army. In hindsight, she said, “Obviously, [that’s] not the case, because it’s a private prison.”

Mike Trapp, co-founder of the Carceral Accountability Council, said CoreCivic hires people the state prison system and Federal Bureau of Prisons might otherwise have turned away over physical and age limitations, because the company has “lower standards of entry.” 

But Bill Rogers, a former guard at the facility under the Marshals contract, said there were effectively no hiring standards. 

“You gotta pass their background check … and you gotta be breathing,” he said. “Think about the people you’re going to get to work at a facility if you really just don’t care.”

One year after Malloy’s email to persuade city officials, the facility already had 150 employees on its payroll, halfway to the 300 jobs Malloy had promised. At a February 2 hearing, the city’s planning commission voted 5-1 to recommend approval of CoreCivic’s special use permit. The City Commission granted final approval on March 10 by a vote of 4 to 1.

The Arithmetic of Danger 

Levering’s schedule amounted to a minimum six-day, often seven-day, workweek, with shifts of 12 hours or longer plus mandatory overtime, she said. Levering rarely saw her four children, who were then in middle and high school. The evenings she’d pictured spending time with them at home never came to pass.

After onboarding, officers were promised 40 hours of continuing training annually, Rogers said. He received that training for about his first two years, he said, until staffing ran too thin to pull officers off the floor. Left to teach herself, Levering said she learned more from prisoners than her peers or her supervisors. They told her who to keep an eye on, how to read danger on the floor, and where to set boundaries.

In response to questions from The Intercept, Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said the company’s training “meets or exceeds” the standards of the American Correctional Association.

Levering said that during her time at the facility, shifts that called for 24 to 25 officers often had just five or six. Within months, CoreCivic began eliminating bubble officers, who monitor units from a secure, elevated central control booth known as the “bubble.” These officers are critical for safety, as they control access to different zones of the prison by electronically opening and closing doors. Their elevated position also allows them an eye-in-the-sky perspective, where they can be the first to spot emergencies before they escalate.

In an interview, Shari Rich, who worked at the facility for nearly 13 years and counts Levering as a close friend, traced Levering’s assault to CoreCivic’s decision to eliminate bubble officers.

“It should never have happened,” she said of Levering’s assault. Rich placed the blame squarely on CoreCivic eliminating bubble officers. She said she previously watched a case manager get brutally attacked by an inmate while the bubble ran with one person, a post she understood was supposed to be staffed by two or three. 

Rich is still speaking out against the company, she said, because of what happened to Levering.

Years earlier, a 2017 Justice Department inspector general audit had flagged the facility’s failure to staff mandatory security posts, warning it compromised safety and security.

Officers were increasingly posted alone, sometimes responsible for two 64-person units, Levering said. 

“They were hiring kids right out of high school,” Levering said, calling them “sitting ducks.” Without enough officers, downstream everyday functions also collapsed. Recreation stopped when there was no one to run it, Rich and Rogers said. Officers were pulled off their units for weeks at a time, according to Rogers, which left inmates in day rooms with no one to turn to. The locks to the cells were breaking, Levering said, even as CoreCivic refused to put enough people on the units to keep them secure. The ACLU and federal public defenders confirmed that detainees, unable to lock their own cells, built makeshift barricades and armed themselves.

The day an inmate split Rogers’s head open with a food tray, he said he was covering three units alone with no bubble officer watching. He had already emailed the warden about the lack of coverage. He lost his radio in the assault, stranding him and unable to call for backup. The wound took 14 staples to close, he said. Rogers also said he was required to finish his shift before driving himself to the hospital. All the warden had to say to him about the incident was that “the takedown you did was a little rough,” he recounted.

“How do we expect them to act?” Rogers asked. “We have to bear some of that responsibility. … We lost control of that place.” 

Gustin said CoreCivic does not supply specific figures about staffing in any of its prisons for “safety reasons,” but added, “We are appropriately staffed based on the number of individuals in our care.” CoreCivic attributed staffing shortages to Covid, despite the 2017 audit, which found chronic understaffing years before the pandemic. In 2021, ACLU affiliates and federal public defender offices in four states jointly documented an average of nearly 37 violent incidents per month at CoreCivic Leavenworth between May and July of that year, just months after Levering was attacked.

Asked about the 2021 conditions, Gustin said “staffing was the main contributor to the challenges.” He also said incidents from “more than five years ago” do not reflect conditions in the facility today. 

What the Machine Produced

On the day of the incident that would leave her permanently disabled, Levering said that she and her co-worker Diana Polanco were the only two officers on the floor. It was Polanco’s second day on the job, and she wasn’t yet OC certified, a prerequisite for carrying pepper spray.

Levering remembers the inmate being released directly into her path but little else about the assault.

“My eyes were closed, and I was in the fetal position on the ground. I didn’t know he was stabbing me, because your adrenaline’s going,” Levering said. According to the Leavenworth Police Department report, she was stabbed four times in the ear, once in the arm, and twice in the abdomen. Before anyone reached her to help, she remembered wondering, “Where the hell is everybody?”

Polanco tried to step in to help Levering. She suffered a broken jaw, stab wounds to her back and face, fractured ribs, and lasting nerve damage.

Levering’s injuries were catastrophic. She lost 24 inches of her colon and spleen, according to the incident report. A punctured lung was not disclosed to her for a year, until she says a doctor seemingly mentioned it by accident. She has received 16 facial reconstruction surgeries, and five years later, she is still undergoing medical procedures related to her injuries. She lives with permanent facial paralysis, chronic vertigo, chronic gastrointestinal issues, and walks with a cane. Her PTSD, aggravated by serving in Iraq, is debilitating. After 10 months as a prison guard, she now lives on $825 a month in disability payments.

Warren Richardson, the federal prisoner who attacked Levering and Polanco, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and assault with a dangerous weapon, and was sentenced to 300 months. The federal record describes the attack as “nearly killing” both women.

Over roughly five years at the facility, Rogers said he was assaulted seven times, and no one from CoreCivic asked if he was OK or offered counseling. Since the injuries were on the job, Rogers said the company was responsible for his medical expenses. But the invoices remained unpaid and were forwarded to a collections agency instead, he said. Trapp, of the Carceral Accountability Council, has watched the job take its toll on Rogers.

“When he gets talking about some of the deaths that he witnessed, he’s re-experiencing it. I can see it in his eyes,” Trapp said. “I’ve worked with a lot of trauma survivors, and I’m not qualified to make a diagnosis in the state of Kansas, but I see it, the hauntedness.”

Rich couldn’t understand why other injured officers were paid settlements while Levering only had her initial medical bills covered, despite suffering from permanent disabilities. With no further support from CoreCivic, the Carceral Accountability Council launched a GoFundMe to help with her continued recovery.

CoreCivic did not respond to detailed questions about the February 6, 2021, attack, the uncertified officer on the floor, or its treatment of Levering afterward, including whether it provided any support for her injuries.

The ICE Escalation in a Town of Prisons

Widely known as one of the nation’s quintessential prison towns, Leavenworth, Kansas, has been in the corrections business for more than 150 years. The Army raised Fort Leavenworth above the Missouri River in 1827, and later established what remains the U.S. military’s only maximum-security prison. Kansas opened its state penitentiary in neighboring Lansing in 1868. By 1903, the federal penitentiary had taken its first prisoners. Convicts built much of it, marching over from the old military prison at Fort Leavenworth each day. For generations, guarding prisoners has been one of Leavenworth’s steadiest livelihoods, work that has employed hundreds across the fort, the state pen, and the federal walls.

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In the U.S., the private prison industry is worth somewhere around $6 billion, much of which comes from government contracts. Corrections Corporation of America, which later rebranded as CoreCivic, opened the Leavenworth Detention Center in 1992 as the country’s first for-profit maximum-security prison under direct federal contract. Gustin, the company’s spokesperson, acknowledged “there were challenges as that contract neared expiration” but said the company was otherwise “proud of the operational track record we’ve built.” 

CoreCivic, which owns more prisons and jails than any private company in the country, has a documented history of neglect, safety failures, and worker exploitation. In 2021, while still under the U.S. Marshals Service contract, Kansas federal Judge Julie Robinson called the facility “an absolute hell hole.” 

But with the advent of the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation system, the company is looking forward to a bright — and very profitable — future. On a February earnings call, CEO Patrick Swindle called Immigration and Customs Enforcement “our first customer 43 years ago” and “our largest customer for over a decade.” The company’s profits reached $116.5 million in 2025, a nearly 70 percent increase over the previous year, and ICE revenue more than doubled in the final quarter. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law in July 2025, directed roughly $45 billion to expanding ICE detention, nearly quadrupling the agency’s annual spending. On the call, the company said it could supply ICE with nearly 13,000 more beds for the Trump administration’s expansion, a figure Swindle said “does not include additional capacity we may be able to provide through other means.”

Of those beds, 1,033 are in Leavenworth. Nine days after the city commission vote on March 10, CoreCivic reopened its doors and began housing ICE detainees. As a condition of approval, the special use permit required the city to establish a community oversight committee.

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Behind every understaffed shift and unanswered emergency code at Leavenworth is a facility expected to generate $60 million a year. To Levering, CoreCivic’s profit incentive means “they don’t see us as humans, or the inmates as humans. … We’re all numbers to produce for them.”

Promises Made, Promises Broken

The warning bells about Leavenworth started ringing years ago. The 2017 inspector general report concluded the facility had concealed triple-bunking, where a third bed was installed in several cells meant to house two inmates, from auditors staging full staffing and cleanup on inspection days. Those concerns went unaddressed, Rich said, save for a scramble to paint and clean before each audit. CoreCivic’s own internal investigation concluded the bunks had been removed “intentionally to conceal” the practice, and the company responded to its own finding by instituting ethics training and a non-retaliation policy for employees reporting misconduct.

Among the promises that haven’t come to fruition are good-paying jobs for the community. Malloy, the CoreCivic vice president, had promised “starting salaries of $28.58/hour.” But CoreCivic’s current Leavenworth listings show multiple positions below his pledge: certified medical assistant at $21.19, medical records Supervisor at $23.92, facility locksmith at $26.08, and treatment counselor at $26.96. The detention officer rate, the most dangerous and high-turnover role, sits at $28.25.

Gustin called any notion of a wage discrepancy “false” and said the figures Malloy offered were “an approximate starting wage for a detention officer position.”

Malloy also pledged to use “area construction contractors and labor.” But a building permit dated March 19, dated six days before Malloy’s email, shows CoreCivic had already hired Texas-based Bass Roofing for $1,145,600. CoreCivic hired the contractor; the contractor employed the workers. Gustin confirmed the company chose an out-of-state contractor that “handled similar work at another one of our federal facilities, which required special clearances for workers,” and said it favors providers who meet “stringent labor requirements.”

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Rogers, the former prison guard, had spoken at city commission meetings about the roofing project, alleging that instead of bringing jobs to the community, the project relied on undocumented laborers. On April 17, 2025, CoreCivic’s deputy general counsel sent him a cease-and-desist letter, copied to the Leavenworth Police chief, which sharply disputed those claims. 

“To ensure that its contractors’ employees are legally authorized to work in the United States, CoreCivic requires all contractors, including Bass Roofing and Extra Squares Roofing (whose employees are working on MRRC’s roofing restoration) to strictly comply with Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, requirements and participate in E-Verify,” the letter read. “Our review of this confirms that any representation that undocumented or unauthorized workers have worked on the MRRC project is false.”

Six days later, outside counsel sent a defamation threat demanding he retract his statements. The letter cited his 2020 termination for “excessive force,” setting an April 25, 2025, deadline for Rogers to publicly detract his allegations.

That date passed; no lawsuit has materialized. To Rogers, the letter was a clear attempt to intimidate him into silence. CoreCivic did not say whether the threatened lawsuit was ever filed, and Gustin dismissed former employees-turned-critics, saying there “have only been a few former employees who have spoken out” about the facility.

The Gap

Rogers said that at first, the schedule was easy: eight-hour training shifts, Monday through Friday. In Tennessee, a 2023 audit by the comptroller found turnover among correctional officers at the four prisons CoreCivic runs for the state averaged 146 percent, a staggering figure compared with 37 percent turnover at the state-run facilities. As of mid-August, Leavenworth reportedly holds more than 500 detainees, still well below the 1,033-bed capacity CoreCivic projected.

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There has also been a worrying continuity in top leadership: The warden running the ICE operation, Misty Mackey, was the assistant warden at the same Leavenworth facility in February 2021.

The city commissioners faced an impossible task that stood to devastate Leavenworth no matter which way they voted. 

“It’s a lot to ask five part-time citizen-legislators to put their city on the line to be singularly responsible for stopping the mass deportation agenda,” Trapp said.

Levering, who watched officers treat American inmates “like they’re subhuman,” expects immigrant detainees to fare even worse. “They’re still human beings first, just like you and I,” she said.

The chasm between what CoreCivic promises a community to set up its ICE operations and what it actually delivers may be measured in emergency rooms and disability checks. The same company that has now supercharged the mass detention of immigrants left Marcia Levering living on $825 a month with lasting disabilities and buried Bill Rogers in medical bills as he copes with PTSD.

“If they did to Marcia Levering what they did,” Rogers said. “If that’s how they treated her — then why would they care about a detainee?”

This time, the people on both sides of the door have less protection than before.

This story is part 1 in a two-part series. Read the second part here.

The post ICE Revives Former “Hellhole” Prison — And Hires the Same Company To Run It appeared first on The Intercept.

Days after pressuring pop singer Ed Sheeran to drop rapper Macklemore from his tour over the latter’s “Free Palestine” remarks, Kraft claimed in a statement posted to social media that “for decades” he has “supported efforts that create opportunity for Palestinians,” such as initiatives to “to build businesses, create jobs, and forge relationships” between Israelis and Palestinians. The claims were made as a part of Kraft’s pledge to give $2 million to “aid in the region.” 

Kraft did not disclose which organizations would receive his money.

Nor did he mention his long history of donating to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, an organization that collects money on behalf of Israeli soldiers, and the United Democracy Project, the super PAC of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies to tilt American politics in favor of Israel. Kraft has also given money to a host of pro-Israel advocacy groups that attack critics of Israel, spread content that critics warn is Islamophobic, and have steadfastly defended Israel against mounting evidence of its ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Intercept’s analysis of tax forms since 2006 show that Kraft’s charity group, the Kraft Family Foundation, has donated $196,000 to the Friends of the IDF and an additional $123,000 to other organizations — Brothers for Life and Friends of Israel Disabled Veterans — that directly benefit Israeli military soldiers. In his seven separate donations to the Friends of the IDF, Kraft earmarked the money to “Promote education for young Jewish soldiers.”

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Since 2020, Friends of the IDF has poured more than $20 million into its lone soldier program, which supports young Jewish Americans, and Israelis who have no familial support, to serve in the Israeli military’s reserve soldier program, according to an investigation by The Intercept. The program has continued throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Kraft has organized trips to Israel for former and current NFL players, including a 2017 trip in which he led a delegation of former players on a visit to an Israeli Air Force base, organized by the Friends of the IDF.  

In 2019, Kraft gave $20 million to found a new organization, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, now known as the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate. Upon its founding, Kraft pledged the organization would oppose the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, claiming the Palestinian rights movement “and other efforts to delegitimize and undermine the State of Israel are the most disconcerting times for the country I love so much.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reciprocated the love when Kraft announced the new group while accepting an award for his Israel advocacy, declaring, “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft.”

Over the years, Kraft’s foundation has also given $63,500 to the right-wing media watchdog group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, which has run pressure campaigns against news outlets, journalists, students, and scholars it deems anti-Israel and has routinely denied Israel’s genocide in Gaza, dismissing such evidence as “the Gaza GenoLie.” When Kraft gave $36,000 to CAMERA in 2018, the donation included a memo, “fighting antisemitism.”

In 2011 and 2012, Kraft’s foundation donated $50,000 to boost the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which the Council on American-Islamic Relations considers a core part of what it refers to as the “U.S. Islamophobia Network.” As Kraft gave to the think tank, it launched campaigns targeting U.S.-based groups decrying Israel’s human rights violations against Palestinians, such as attacking human rights groups Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine as having ties to “extremist groups” and claiming they were a part of a “web of Hamas support.” The group has more recently dismissed protests against Israel’s genocide as Hamas propaganda. 

In addition, Kraft’s foundation donated $150,000 from 2008 to 2018 to the pro-Israel organization, Middle East Media Research Institute, co-founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer and counterrorism adviser to several Israeli presidents. The group’s website says it exists to “bridge the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia” by translating Arab language media into English. However, journalists and experts have noted selective translations of Arab articles and statements to misrepresent policies of Arab governments as extremist or violent.

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Aside from his donations to nonprofit groups, Kraft has been an active donor to AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project. Through his limited liability company, the Kraft Group, Kraft has given $3 million to the super PAC since its founding in 2022, including $1 million in donations this midterm cycle. During this midterm election cycle, AIPAC has flooded races to oppose candidates who criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza and U.S. military support for Israel, helping make several primaries among the most expensive on record. 

It’s not clear whether these entities were the ones Kraft claims have created jobs and spurred dialogues between Palestinians and Israelis. Kraft, however, is also a regular donor to local Jewish groups in Massachusetts, such as Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston; Temple Emanuel in Newton; and Jewish Family & Children’s Services in Waltham.  

Kraft and the groups mentioned in this story did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

The post Robert Kraft Claims His Donations Help Palestinians. Turns Out He’s Funding Friends of the IDF. appeared first on The Intercept.

Yes, there’s destruction all around. But these players have carefully concocted a plan: to hasten a familiar vision that combines biblical, militant, and futuristic images of the end times so they can save themselves.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy interviews award-winning authors and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” maps the players who want to speed up the end of the world. 

“We didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this,” says Klein. It seemed to be “a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm, and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down in and taking breakdown for granted.”

“End times fascism is an alliance of three main components,” says Taylor. The religious fundamentalists who helped elect Donald Trump, wanting to hasten along a violent Armageddon so Jesus will return. The tech accelerationists “exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over.” The ethnonationalists who view immigration as an existential threat, so they fortress the border and hoard resources. “These different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage,” says Taylor.

It may sound bizarre. And it is. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it, Klein says. “This is a really dangerous pattern of thought: that out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that’s the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear,” says Klein. “When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower, he’s doing a version of that story. When Sam Altman says he’s summoning a digital god, and we’re going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it’s going to be utopia … he’s doing the story. So we have to be able to identify it — because we’re all living with the consequences of this terrible story and we need better stories.”

“In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, ‘Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it’s just humans in general.’ This is opening up a bigger fight beyond ‘I am a man’ to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there’s something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying,” says Taylor, noting that the collective uprising, across the political spectrum, against data centers shows people breaking free of one so-called inevitable future.

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

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. Today, we’re going to talk about the apocalypse. 

NBC: You truly believe AI can kill us all in less than a decade? 

Jacob Coxon: Yes, I do.

AL: If you’ve been disturbed by the increasingly dystopian flavor of today’s world, you’re not alone. It can be hard to keep track. 

And if you listen to this show, you’re familiar with the imagery: Masked agents in the streets. Soldiers clad in camo patrolling U.S cities. Mounting numbers of U.S. strikes committing extrajudicial killings of civilians in international waters. And a populace faced with a literal war against machines — not just at home but around the world. 

U.S. Central Command’s Adm. Brad Cooper: First our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools.

AL: Washington is in turmoil over calls coming from inside the house to regulate AI before it’s too late. President Donald Trump has called the whole dustup a “hoax,” even as MAGA architect Steve Bannon appeared alongside Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to promote human control over AI, as Congress balks at renewed public pressure to do something — anything — before they recess again until November.

Bernie Sanders: When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry.

Steve Bannon: All they’re trying to do is to use a crisis and turn it to their advantage, turn it to their advantage by creating a moat, a cartel, where not only can’t other aspiring companies get in, but more importantly, they’re going to have a liability shift to the American people.

AL: None of this would come as a surprise to our guests today, award-winning journalists and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose latest book documents the end-times ideology that unites the players trying to hasten just the final doomsday AI leaders are warning us about.

Today, we’re discussing the players responsible for bringing the most Orwellian features of our collective imagination to life. And we’ll break down just what their project entails: prophecy as policy, and speeding up the end of the world to save the chosen few. 

Klein and Taylor’s new book is called “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.” 

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker and also the bestselling author of “Doppelganger,” “No Logo,” and “The Shock Doctrine.” She is an associate professor of geography and a co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, and she writes a regular column for The Guardian. 

Naomi Klein, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Naomi Klein: Thank you, it’s great to be with you.

AL: Astra Taylor, also an award-winning journalist and documentarian, is a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She is the author of “The People’s Platform,” which won the American Book Award; “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone”; and “The Age of Insecurity.” Taylor regularly writes for publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times. 

Astra Taylor, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Astra Taylor: Really excited to be here.

AL: I want to start with how you conceptualized this idea. How did you come to develop the notion of “end times fascism”?

NK: It was born of the early weeks of the new, the second Trump administration — really trying to put our fingers on the continuities and the ruptures of what we were seeing. Both Astra and I had been doing a lot of public conversations, webinars, and we both remember the first Trump administration.

So we were familiar with certain things that we were seeing, but we didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this.

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For me personally, I was finding that a lot of people were reading and talking about earlier books of mine, like “The Shock Doctrine,” as a way to understand it. I was feeling like it does not actually capture the full thing. 

History does not just repeat on a loop. We often talk about how it accumulates, it compounds. So as people who are pretty keenly attuned to both political and ecological crises, we were noticing that the planet is a player in our politics, and that this seemed to be a kind of fascism that was different in that it didn’t have a future horizon. This was a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm — and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down and taking breakdown for granted. 

Those are the origins of it. We’re not saying it’s wholly new; we’re saying that history moves and takes us to new places.

AL: Astra, for people who haven’t read the book, can you tell us briefly, like, a top-level view of what you’re arguing?

AT: We’re arguing that the far right has taken a new apocalyptic turn. To emphasize what Naomi just said, we’re interested in the continuities, but we’re also interested in what has changed.

People for a while have been wondering, is this the F word? Is this fascism? If so, what does that mean for us? This book attempts to answer that question by really taking seriously what has changed. And as a consequence, how has the right wing changed? 

The fascism of the 20th century emerged out of certain catastrophic conditions, the sort of classic fascism, which also had antecedents in colonialism and Jim Crow. It also didn’t come from nowhere. But it was a phenomenon that emerged in the wreckage of the First World War and the Great Depression. It was a response to those crises. 

Today, we’re living in an age of crises that were unimaginable a century ago. Climate change, an era of nuclear weapons — nuclear weapons were not known to Mussolini or Hitler — artificial intelligence, forms of wealth that are incredibly concentrated and incredibly global, social media, incredibly networked media technologies. This planetary scale has shifted the kind of fascism that we’re responding to.

Our argument is that, as a response to these crises, the fascism of today has abandoned the idea of Armageddon ever ending, of there being a future horizon for their in-group. And that end times fascism is actually an alliance. Fascism is always an alliance, an uncomfortable alliance of different groups.

But end times fascism is an alliance of three main components. The book analyzes them, in the ways that they overlap and the ways that they actually conflict.

The religious end-timers who are a major force in the U.S. government and the Israeli government, and more broadly, who have a messianic conviction that the end is nigh and that the Messiah will come, and they want to accelerate what they see as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

The tech end-timers — the tech-right — that is playing with a similar script in the sense that they’re imagining a future where they have created a digital super intelligence or maybe we’ve left the planet.

And then the ethno-nationalist end-timers who view immigration as an existential threat and believe the only response to the increasing disasters and insecurity is to fortress the border and bunker down and save their in-group.

So these different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage. 

There’s old, classic features of fascism: a supremacist thinking, eugenics thinking; a willingness to indulge in violence; a sense of woundedness. Fascism is always a movement of the powerful injured, so their sense that they’re under siege from below. These dimensions, though, have been updated for our new risk-filled era. So the book looks at the coalition and their strengths, but also their weaknesses.

AL: The book is an exploration of how deeply so much of the far right and its grip on sectors from tech to the military has been driven by what you’re talking about, this apocalyptic worldview.

One question I wanted to put to both of you is, when you think about this, how do you understand a vision that is so destructive also being so unifying for these coalitions that you’re talking about?

NK: As Astra was saying, fascism always arises during moments of crisis. Actually, there’s always a kind of a pincer of real crisis. 

When Mussolini and Hitler rose up, the real crises of the wreckage of the First World War, economic desperation, cities choked with orphans, maimed soldiers. These were really genuinely horrific times. In response to what many people understood as the savagery of capitalism revealing itself was a rising militant left.

This was also the years after the Russian Revolution, and it was the years when socialists were saying, “We want a revolution in every country.” It was a global movement, and it was a movement that was saying, “You can’t actually have socialism in one country.”

So elites in every country were quite terrified that the response to these real crises would come for them, come up, would come for the system itself.

And so fascism pivots. It recognizes the rage, and it says, “Your rage is real. We feel it. Hey, here’s who to blame. It’s the immigrants crossing the border. That’s the real invasion. They’re coming for your stuff. They’re coming for your jobs. They’re the reason your life is painful,” and offers up all of the other scapegoats. So that can be unifying. It’s an old trick. That’s the Trump playbook. It’s the [Javier] Milei playbook. It’s the [Jair] Bolsonaro playbook. It’s a global playbook.

This is the other thing that we’re trying to do in the book, is wrench the U.S. out of its parochialism a little bit and be like, actually, the laboratory for this in many ways is more Latin America and Europe. It’s coming at a delay in the United States. And though it has particular characteristics in the United States, and in every country there’s particular characteristics, this is very much a global phenomenon.

But I think we wrote the book because we actually think it’s not that unifying. That scapegoat move is always going to be an effective move, but the nature of this alliance is almost uniquely unsteady because, where it’s useful to look at what is the same and what is different with 20th-century fascism, and — here I should add, massive asterisk: We’re not nostalgic for 20th-century fascism. Ye olde fascism. Don’t want that.

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But it is useful to look at the fact that Mussolini really did, and so did Franco, invest in major public works projects. Hitler did make the trains run on time, famously. Our fascists don’t care about trains, airports. They fly private. They can live with a level of chaos. They deliver less for their own base, for the people who elected them.

We see these ruptures really clearly. In things like Steve Bannon going off on the tech oligarchs, which I never thought people should take all that seriously because he has his own tech oligarchs who’ve been funding him all along.

But we should take seriously these extraordinary uprisings against data centers, where people at the grassroots are finding they have more in common with the people they’ve been warring with over the culture wars they’ve been steadily fed, and going like, “Actually, we all really do agree that we don’t want to live under constant surveillance by Silicon Valley, and we don’t want this data center in our backyard, and we don’t want our kids taught by AI.” Hey, like this is a hell of a lot better than what we saw a few years ago at community meetings. It’s the instability that is really most interesting to us.

By taking them seriously and highlighting how nihilistic and how apocalyptic and how exclusive the vision is, we think we make them weaker, not stronger. We’re saying, “Don’t be afraid to look at this, because actually the more you look at it, the more we drag it into the light, the more vulnerable it is.”

AL: You mentioned this, Astra, laying out the major players in “End Times Fascism” as the religious right, Big Tech, and aspiring bunker-builders, as you describe them, namely those leading the anti-immigrant movement and trafficking in great replacement ideology that’s shaping U.S. policy.

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I want to start with the religious right. This is something we’ve discussed at length on this show, but I want to ask you all, what is something you think the general public understands the least about the extent to which messianism and the end times fixation that comes with it undergirds this political moment and shapes the Trump administration in particular?

AT: People have a vague sense that Trump wouldn’t have been elected if he hadn’t had the support of white evangelicals. He famously got around 80 percent of the evangelical vote in both 2016 and in 2024. So I think people have a sense that the religious right is behind a guy who is incredibly immoral — it feels like a cognitive dissonance there, right? How is this sexual predator who’s been divorced multiple times the hero figure for this group?

Part of what explains that, though, is that they are really occupying a parallel universe. Portions of the evangelical right or Christian Zionists are committed to a version of theology where they think what’s in the Bible is literally going to happen, and that what they need to do is hasten along the sequence of events foretold — most violently and strangely in the Book of Revelation — that bad things will happen on Earth, and that means we’re moving closer to the day when there will be Armageddon and Jesus will return.

Even to a lot of Christians, this seems ridiculous. But there are people at the upper echelons of the U.S. government today who really believe it, and who see acts of violence — acts of terror — as felicitous signs.

We quote pastor John Hagee, who’s a very popular leader of a megachurch in Texas, and he’s just like: Everyone! All my thousands of followers! Call the White House and tell them that you’re so grateful for the war in Iran because that means that the end is nigh, and that means we’re that much closer to being hoovered up in a magic escalator to heaven.

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They have this theological investment in war in the Middle East and this idea that Jesus won’t return until biblical Israel is restored, which is not just the West Bank and Gaza but large swaths of other countries. They’re making common cause with Messianic Jews in Israel who, again, aren’t the whole of the government but have managed to control very powerful portions of it.

What we’re trying to convey is that we actually need to pay attention to what these folks are doing. It doesn’t need to be the majoritarian strand to be an incredibly dangerous one.

One of our recurring jokes — it’s not even a joke, really — as we wrote this book and also as we talk about it, is that to even quote these people makes us sound insane. Because they’re doing things like importing the perfect red heifers from Texas to bring them to the Middle East. Then literally the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is flying over to visit these cows and go: Oh my gosh, I don’t see any spots on them. This is so great. The Bible is coming true.

These people are running the government, and we need to take seriously the risk that that poses to all of us. Again, it’s based on this idea — we return to the narrative in the Book of Revelation because it’s sort of the fundamental mythological script that these three groups are playing with, it’s the root of this apocalyptic strain.

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It essentially is a narrative that says, in the end times, there will be war, there will be pestilence, there will be floods and fires, but that just means we’re getting closer to the end when the chosen few will reach their utopia. It’s a very dangerous script.

For this part of the end times fascist alliance, it’s a literal interpretation of that script. But it’s one that has suffused our culture more broadly. This linear narrative of: Out of catastrophe, the promised land. That narrative is being followed in different sometimes secularized ways by the other parts of the right-wing alliance.

NK: If there’s one thing I learned from writing a book about people who lost their minds during Covid and then became the U.S. government, it’s that nothing is too stupid to actually manifest in reality. I’m not being glib.

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In “Doppelganger,” I quote Philip Roth saying, “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” being a kind of a mantra for our time. But that was before RFK Jr. was put in charge of Health and Human Services. There can be this smug response from liberals of like, “That’s just too silly for me to even have to care about.”

One of the things we dug up in the book is this story that was new to me, which was that in 1969 a Christian fundamentalist named Denis Rohan actually did succeed in firebombing Al-Aqsa [Mosque]. That’s very important to this theological story because the idea is that you have to build the “Third Temple” where Al-Aqsa is in order to create the conditions for the Messiah’s arrival or return, depending on which version of the story you believe. That relates to why you need those spotless red heifers, et cetera. So they are trying to fulfill this. 

But as Astra was saying, this is both a literal threat of, like, it’s literally possible that there could be — as these ideas have become more and more powerful and more mainstream within the Israeli and U.S. government, and as people who were once seen as fringe terrorists like Itamar Ben-Gvir enter the government — it’s becomes more and more possible and more likely that people will do the self-fulfilling version of this prophecy.

Because the prophecy is, first, you have to have Armageddon. And if you were to actually destroy Al-Aqsa and try to rebuild the “Third Temple,” that’s a surefire recipe for World War III with nukes.

So they are creating the story that they claim is inevitable. It’s not inevitable, but they are actually doing their best to fulfill it for all of us. We can’t afford to ignore them. But it’s also a pattern of thought — this is a really dangerous pattern of thought that, out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that’s the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear. 

When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower — he’s doing a version of that story.

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When Sam Altman says he’s summoning a digital god, and we’re going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it’s going to be utopia, and we’ll all just be lying around just being in awe of the wisdom that AI has unleashed for us — he’s doing the story.

So we have to be able to identify it — because we’re all living with the consequences of this terrible story, and we need better stories.

[Break]

AL: This is a good segue into talking about perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of this apocalyptic project, as you mentioned, Naomi: AI and data centers, which you all situate as part of the doom cycle. You get into this question, but I want to talk with you both about how this particular issue has brought so many of us together in unified hatred.

I love this portion of the book where you talk about this. Across the ideological spectrum, why do people hate data centers so much? What exactly is so universally repulsive about them and what they represent?

AT: This is the kind of thing that gives you hope in humanity. Why do we hate data centers? Listen to the guys running these tech companies. They’re like, “Hi, we’re going to suck up all of the energy. We’re going to raise your electricity bills. We’re going to build these big, ugly city-sized buildings that have basically no jobs, that screech and scream all night long, destroy your property values. And guess what you’re going to get in return? You’re going to get no jobs in the future for you or your kids. You’re going to live in a world that is hollowed out because everybody’s talking to their chatbot, maybe dating a chatbot. Then also guess what? It might destroy everything, because it might turn on you. So how does that sound?”

AL: Doesn’t that sound great?

AT: Of course, people are like, “Actually, that sounds terrible. We never asked for this.” 

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Now, what’s interesting is these guys also have all their little podcasts where they talk amongst themselves too, so they’re like, “Geez, did we market this wrong?” And you’re like, yeah, you did, because actually you told us what you really want — which is you foresee a future with no human workers, and full of human alienation and loneliness, where one or two companies control the entire economy and maybe destroy humanity.

The reasons people object to this are obvious. It’s also building on years and years of a mounting tech-lash on both the left and the right. For different reasons, people were critical of the tech sector, and so that is also part of the foundation.

It’s really important, when Naomi said that they’re utilizing the same template — this, out of catastrophe, some kind of renewal for the chosen few. When you hear these folks talk about it, one of the founders of Google said it was “species-ist” to care about the fate of humanity, as opposed to exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over. That somehow we’re just close-minded for wanting to actually make a better world for human beings.

They literally talk about AI as a god or as a demon. And so they’re playing with these religious tropes. Of course, somebody like Peter Thiel and other high-powered people in Silicon Valley are increasingly coming out as Christians. Most famously, in his lectures about the Antichrist, which — tellingly — he says is somebody who wants to bring about control of AI, or like Greta Thunberg, some climate rationality.

So they’re playing with these overt theological elements. But ultimately what’s underpinning it is a material drive to own as much of the economy as possible, even if it destroys the lives of billions of people.

NK: On that last point, it’s a very profitable dream. I think that that’s true, honestly, for the theologians as well, that this is always, as [Karl] Marx said, there are opiate qualities to the story that heaven awaits, and yes, you’re suffering in the here and now, but do these things and you’re going to be in paradise.

That’s always been a story that has been very helpful to elite interests. The fact that the richest men on the planet are now telling it to us about their tech that is rapidly making them into trillionaires. It doesn’t mean they don’t believe it, but they certainly have motivations for telling us these stories. For telling us that we’re being speciesist and that we have to go along in this way.

But just on your point, why are people rejecting it? There’s this little detail that we came across in the story of one of the data center fights that I think people are by now very familiar with or should be familiar with. I think Intercept readers are familiar with what Elon Musk has done in Memphis. It’s a story of unbelievable environmental racism. The siting of these massive data centers that are impacting a majority-Black part of Memphis, Boxtown, which has these long roots of resistance. 

It’s called Boxtown because it was built with the discarded parts of railway cars that were then turned into homes. Because it was unincorporated — and this is true of many Black communities — it was also chosen to be a place with very high levels of industrial pollution. It has a very strong environmental justice community, and it has all of this historical resonance because this is where Martin Luther King Jr. went to stand with the sanitation workers, which the organizers that we interviewed in Memphis consciously see the struggle as being part of that lineage and see the sanitation strike in Memphis as being the beginning of the environmental justice movement in the United States because it was a fight against a toxic workplace and work conditions. 

But the detail that I was referring to, in that fight that I think often gets overlooked, is that the reason that Musk chose Memphis to build what he calls Colossus — the largest supercomputer in world history, and then he built a couple more — was because he needed to do it quickly. So he decided that he needed to find a place that would give him all the giveaways, but also where there was an empty building. He didn’t want to have to build a building from scratch. He wanted to move into a preexisting building. 

In Memphis, they found a factory that was empty and in very good condition, and it was an Electrolux factory. If you look into the history of the Electrolux factory in Memphis, it’s a story of de-industrialization and free trade and broken promises because this is a factory that actually was producing ovens and other appliances, and it was moved from Canada to Memphis — from Quebec to Memphis — under NAFTA rules chasing lower wages.

So 3,000 higher-paid jobs became less than 1,000 lower-paid jobs in Memphis with contractors and so on. You see this race to the bottom. All these things were promised. They didn’t create nearly as many jobs with the Electrolux factory as they said they would. The wages weren’t as good as they said they would be. They said that all these other factories would open up, too. They didn’t. 

So the re-industrialization didn’t happen with Electrolux. But then there’s this empty building, and Musk moves in, and it’s barely any jobs. We call it a ghost factory. That image of the abandoned factory was the image of the de-industrialization of the NAFTA years. But now we have this new image, which is a reoccupied former factory that once had almost 1,000 workers and now is just a bunch of buzzing computers, and whose end goal is to eliminate everyone’s job.

So why would people accept the trade-offs of that, because Musk also rigged together all of these polluting gas turbines in order to get it online quickly? 

This is what we mean by history compounds. It’s not a loop. It’s more like a spiral taking us somewhere.

AT: Martin Luther King, those were the famous protests, of course, with the “I am a man” sign, where the aspiration was like, “I’m a man, recognize me as equal and human.”

In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, “Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it’s just humans in general.” This is opening up a bigger fight beyond “I am a man” to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there’s something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying.

AL: You both pointed this out, and you get into this in the book, as to why tech giants like Elon Musk were so quick to jump on this right-wing train with the explosion of AI and how they abandoned progressive promises on the environment to warfare.

For our listeners, I’m wondering if you can walk us through that. As you point out, many of those promises were largely performative in the first place. But what made it so easy for tech titans to switch political teams here? What, if any, responsibility do Democrats hold in this dynamic?

NK: Lots of responsibility. [Laughter.]

Huge amounts of responsibility because I think that it was the Democrats — and Clinton, Obama — who first under Clinton accepted the idea of the internet as a frontier zone that couldn’t possibly be regulated or taxed. And then this continued under Obama with this very tight relationship with Silicon Valley and a revolving door of lots of people from the administration going off and taking jobs at Uber and Google and Microsoft.

Buying into this idea that these companies were blue and green and a new era — leaving sort of the dirty industrialization behind — and I think really participated in a lot of rhetoric that many of us understood to be hollow at the time, that they could be trusted to do voluntary net-zero, and they were greening their businesses, and it was all solar power and rainbows.

Under Biden, there did begin to be some changes. Astra can maybe talk about this more in terms of the intersection of the tech-lash and the fact that the Biden administration did start — not doing enough — but started doing things like hiring Lina Khan and introducing some regulations.

AT: The actions that the Biden administration took I think also should be credited to grassroots pressure to the tech workers who were organizing in the major companies. There were Google workers who walked out, both demanding better policies around sexual harassment, but also into certain military contracts.

There was a general sense from progressives and liberals that the tech sector was actually not bringing about the democratic transformation that they had so loudly promised in the years before. The Biden administration was making some moves that I think to us seemed pretty modest. It’s not like there were baseline privacy protections. It’s not like they were breaking up the tech monopolies, but yes, they hired Lina Khan and started to put up some basic regulations on crypto. That said, they did bail out Silicon Valley Bank, which was a crypto scandal. Then the folks they bailed out immediately made huge campaign contributions to Donald Trump. So that to me is a sort of parable for everything that went awry.

Ultimately though, end times fascism is a response to material conditions. Part of the Democratic failure was that they didn’t rein in concentrated wealth while they could. They didn’t regulate Big Tech when it was smaller and easier to do so. They never put constraints on these companies, and then at a certain point, they’re so big, they’re so powerful, that they’re like, “We don’t have to listen to our customers or to the public or to elected officials anymore.” 

This is part of what happens when they start the rollout of generative AI. ChatGPT comes on the scene in 2023, and, again, the public is not asking for this technology. They’re not asking for a job-destroying technology. The tech sector knows that they’re going to have to shove this down people’s throats. What they needed was a strongman to help them do that, and so the alliance with Donald Trump was a merger of convenience. 

What they got was a government that was going to roll out the red carpet in the sense of, “Yes, here’s the frontier,” you know, “No rules. Go for it.” What the Trump administration got was a bubble to dramatically inflate the stock market, and also a partner for the fossil fuel industry because this has given a lifeline to the fossil fuel sector, along with the attacks on renewables. It was a win-win for both camps.

Silicon Valley has a long history of libertarianism, of anti-democratic thinking that was marginal. But its moment has come. Its moment has come because of these underlying material changes. At a certain point, you’re so rich you don’t have to pretend to be nice anymore.

AL: This is a good segue into the final thing I want to end on, which is, and we haven’t really talked as much about the bunkerism and the anti-immigration as much as I wanted to get into. But it’s part and parcel of the thing that was at least in the back of my mind as I was reading this, which is like, where is all of this fricking money coming from?

How is it possible to unleash endless amounts of capital to slash red tape, for not just AI infrastructure and data centers, but also the explosion of Trump’s nationalized police force going after immigrants. When on the flip side, all we hear about policies that actually the public is asking for — to your point, Astra — Medicare for All or substantial climate policy or like green infrastructure policy, all you hear is, “We can’t pay for it.”

So I wonder if you all could talk about that contradiction, and what is the path out of that in terms of flipping that argument on its head? We have the money to pay for anything. We’re just paying for the wrong things.

NK: This is often felt very acutely in the communities that are fighting back against the data centers. We quote KeShaun Pearson in Memphis who heads Memphis Community Against Pollution. He’s also Rep. Justin Pearson‘s brother. He talks about what kind of infrastructure they actually need. We’re getting this data center, but we’re not getting transit, we’re not getting books for our schools. There’s so much else, green energy, no shortage of ideas. The money clearly is there if we decided to spend it differently. 

This is part of why we’re seeing a surge of support for democratic socialism, because people understand that they have been lied to, that there was way more that we could be asking of governments. Even if you look at Trump’s tariff regime and the abandon with which he breaks the trade deals that the U.S. has entered into, shows that these deals were not as binding as we were told, and that they also could’ve been changed, but they could’ve been changed in the interests of working people instead of in the interests of corporations. So a lot more is possible. 

But that said, Akela, it’s very frightening. The decisions that are being made are clearly designed to both hollow out the state and create a time bomb in the stock market that is rigged to explode on working people, on pensioners — and for the people who created this crisis to rapture themselves out of it.

If you look at the SpaceX IPO and the ways that it was written in such a way to force regular investors who just have parts of their pension invested in the stock market to have to invest in this very high-risk company — at the same time as Musk has completely protected himself. Or even if you look at something like the “Board of Peace,” which is an escape plan for the Trump administration. They’re hoping it will give them immunity indefinitely and control indefinitely. These are positions for life. They are thinking about the next stage. 

Part of what Astra and I are talking about is, this is not old-school colonialism in the sense that the imperialism that “discovered the New World” was based on this idea of boundlessness. What we think we’re seeing with seizing Venezuela’s oil or seizing Canada’s water or seizing critical minerals in Greenland is much more like super-sized “prepping” and making sure that as this all goes down, they have access to the resources, that this elite group of people has access to the resources they need.

It’s not necessarily as thought out as I’m making it sound. Maybe it is, but it’s more of an impulse. The impulse is not one of expansion and domination and boundlessness; it’s bringing the resources into the bunker, and also extracting from the state everything that you possibly can for this kind of next phase.

AT: Just to add on what Naomi said. It’s a really good way to put it, which is the sense of boundlessness versus the awareness today that boundaries are being crossed. So yes, they might superficially be climate denialists. We see the Trump administration killing renewable projects and scrubbing the word “climate change” or mentions of greenhouse gas emissions from websites. But these people are not idiots. 

All those guys in Silicon Valley, they know climate change is real. Many people in the Trump administration do as well. So it’s that sense that, yeah, real boundaries are being pushed past in terms of the chemistry of the planet, in terms of the concentration of wealth, in terms of what these incredibly dangerous technologies are capable of. And instead of pulling back, they’re pressing the gas on those fronts, knowing that it will be catastrophic for the majority of people.

And when you are playing with fire like that, you need an ideology to rationalize the damage. That’s where fascism is useful, because it tells you a story that you deserve everything you’ve got. You deserve to be a trillionaire. You deserve to have your luxury bunker, you deserve to have the first flight out of the disaster zone because you’re superior for whatever reason. Because of your race, because of your religion, because of your passport, because of your superior genes, because you’re a genius or whatever.

There’s a feedback loop where the sense of superiority justifies the destruction, and then the destruction fuels more fascist thought. We need to break that cycle by saying, “No,” like, “That’s totally unacceptable and won’t work out for the vast majority of us. Let’s pull the emergency brake before it’s too late.”

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AL: I want to thank you both for taking the time and remind all our listeners you can read “End Times Fascism” now. You all have a very wonderful section talking about the politics of hereness and how we chart our way out of this, and we didn’t get to talk about that, but I wish we had more time. Naomi and Astra, thank you both so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

AT: Thanks for having us.

NK: It was such a pleasure.

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

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Video production by Sean Turner. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance appeared first on The Intercept.

Hegseth’s Theology and the Question: What Would Jesus Do?

There is a question Christians have been asking for generations: What would Jesus do?

It is a deceptively simple question that is printed on bracelets and bumper stickers, taught to children in Sunday schools, and invoked when Christians are discerning how faith should shape public life. The question becomes considerably more demanding when the decisions at stake concern war, immigration, poverty, political power, and the use of military force.

In addition to the recent attention about his military strategy, social and political beliefs, and leadership style, Pete Hegseth’s public theology deserves serious attention from those unfamiliar and disinterested in religion as well as adherents of Christianity.

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As secretary of defense, Hegseth has increasingly spoken about American power in explicitly Christian language. He has hosted Christian worship at the Pentagon, invoked Scripture in connection with military service, emphasized the Christian foundations of the United States, and described some Trump administration policies — including border enforcement — as “biblical.” Indeed, speaking at a Christian media convention last February, Hegseth connected the health and founding of the United States with Christianity and characterized border and immigration policies as mandated in the Bible.

The question about Hegseth’s faith and religious practice, however, cannot simply be whether he is sincere. The question is more fundamental: What kind of Christianity is being proclaimed when the language of Jesus is attached to military power? Or perhaps a simpler but harder question: In the face of war, authoritarianism, economic, environmental, and political crises: What would Jesus do?

A Christianity of Power

The Christian faith has always contained competing visions of what it means to follow Jesus. There is a Christianity that blesses kings, armies, empires, and national ambitions. There is another Christianity that remembers a Palestinian Jewish leader who was unhoused and a migrant and was executed by an imperial power after heralding the arrival of a radically different kingdom. This distinction matters a great deal.

Hegseth routinely emphasizes strength, warriors, national identity, borders, enemies, and divine blessing. And joining forces with Israel to prosecute the war with Iran has only heightened the stakes of his rhetoric. Early in the conflict, Hegseth cited Psalm 144, including its language about God training hands for war and fingers for battle.

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There is nothing inherently un-Christian about a person in the military having a sincere religious faith. People of faith serve in the armed forces for many reasons. Generations of religious scholars and adherents have considered war and conflict as it relates to the faith through theories and practices of religious pacifism, “just war,” defensive war, theologies of self-defense, conceptions of the last days, and the ethical limits of violence in humanitarian conflicts, among others. The theological problem arises, however, when the power of the state begins to present itself as an instrument of God’s purposes.

That is a very old temptation.

Empires have long claimed divine sanction. Kings have declared their wars holy. Nations have wrapped their ambitions in sacred language. And Christians have at times sought to confuse the interests of the nation with the kingdom of God. But Jesus does something profoundly disruptive to this arrangement: He refuses to identify God with Caesar.

The People at the Margins

Consider where Jesus directs our attention. Throughout the Bible, Jesus embraces people whom those with power, military might, and wealth have pushed aside: the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, immigrants, women, children, tax collectors, and those treated as religious outsiders.

In Matthew 25, one of the most famous Bible passages — sometimes called the “Last Judgment” — Jesus identifies with the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these,” he teaches, “you did for me.”

That is not an incidental teaching. It is a political and theological reorientation. And it is directed at nations, not simply individuals or religious congregations.

The question Jesus asks his followers is not first, “How strong is your nation?” It is not, “How effectively have you defeated your enemies?” It is not even, “How faithfully have you defended your borders?” Instead, he asks: How has your nation treated the most vulnerable among you? This matters enormously when Christian language is used to justify violent and exclusionary immigration policy or when it is used to promote cutting off families from food or lifesaving healthcare.

If we claim that border enforcement is “biblical,” then Christians must practice the Bible’s extraordinary insistence on welcoming the other. After all, Scripture commands God’s people to remember that they, too, were once strangers in a foreign land, and the way to honor and worship God is by welcoming the immigrant neighbor. If Matthew 25 means what Christians have traditionally claimed, Christ is encountered precisely among the hungry, the unhoused, the incarcerated — and that as long as anyone is unfree and impoverished, it is the responsibility of the nation to do something about it.

Theology of the Enemy

There is another problem with a Christianity centered on military strength: its understanding of the enemy. Christianity does not teach that some people become less human because they are someone’s adversaries. It does not profess that God blesses battleships nor justifies genocide (even if Hegseth’s spiritual adviser claims it does).

Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies may be among the most difficult teachings in the entire New Testament. It is also one of the clearest.

Jesus does not say, “Love your friends and destroy your enemies.” He says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the powerful because they shall dominate.” He says, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the descendants of God,” and “Blessed are the poor for they shall be first under God’s reign.”

That does not mean that people of faith must be naïve about violence. It does not mean governments face no genuine security threats. It does not erase the moral complexity of protecting human beings from violence. But it does mean that people who call themselves Christians should be extraordinarily cautious whenever military violence is described as holy, righteous, inevitable, or divinely ordained.

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Christian tradition contains a long history of wrestling with war. It also contains an even deeper tradition of martyrs, peacemakers, conscientious objectors, abolitionists, human rights activists, and nonviolent movements that have insisted that human beings cannot be reduced to enemies.

On “Christ Is King”

One phrase that increasingly appears in Hegseth’s public religious rhetoric is “Christ is King.” On the surface, this is an ancient Christian confession. But Christians should be careful about what happens when it is fused with nationalism. If Christ is King, then Caesar is not. If Christ is King, then the nation cannot be God. If Christ is King, then military might cannot be the ultimate measure of righteousness. And if Christ is King, then Christians must remember what kind of king Jesus was.

Jesus did not arrive in Jerusalem on a tank. He did not establish his kingdom through an air campaign. He did not recruit an army to seize the Roman state. Jesus entered the city on a donkey. He washed his disciples’ feet. He touched people considered untouchable. He fed hungry crowds. He stood with the condemned. And when his disciples reached for weapons, Jesus told them to put them away. This is not weakness; it is a different conception of power and a different idea of violence, military and force. And it stands worlds away from the Hegseth’s professed belief in a conquering Christ.

Christian nationalism raises the question of who counts as part of the nation — and, implicitly, who counts as part of the Christian community. Hegseth’s religious politics have attracted scrutiny because of his association with a conservative Reformed Christian milieu and his willingness to amplify figures and institutions associated with Christian nationalist ideas. That should concern Christians not because Christianity should be banished from public life, but because Christianity is too important to be reduced to a tribal identity. There is no nationalism in the Sermon on the Mount; there is no exceptionalism in the Last Judgment.

Jesus did not teach his followers to build communities divided by race, citizenship status, wealth, or political loyalty. The early Christian proclamation was astonishing precisely because it created a community in which Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female could belong together.

Christianity becomes spiritually dangerous when it is transformed from a call to discipleship into a badge of national membership, and a cross becomes something very different when it is used to sanctify exclusion, violence, and war, especially against the poor and marginalized.

So, What Would Jesus Do?

Let’s stop treating “What would Jesus do?” as a sentimental slogan. Instead, ask the question concretely.

What would Jesus do when a family fleeing poverty and violence arrives at the border?

What would Jesus do when a child is separated from a parent?

What would Jesus do when a nation considers going to war?

What would Jesus do when military personnel are asked to kill (and the nation suggests canceling student debt to those who sign up to do that killing)?

What would Jesus do when poor communities are abandoned while enormous resources flow into weapons?

What would Jesus do when a government claims God has blessed its political program?

And what would Jesus do when Christians begin to believe that their nation has a special claim on God?

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The Gospels give us clues. Jesus runs toward suffering rather than away from it. Jesus challenges religious authorities who use God to legitimize their own power. Jesus feeds people rather than lecturing them. Jesus welcomes the stranger. Jesus stands with those society declares expendable. And Jesus tells his followers that greatness consists not in domination but in liberation. That is a radically different theology of power.

Another Christian Patriotism

Christianity offers an alternative to nationalism that does not require Christians to abandon love of country, but it begins by refusing to worship their nation. It means loving one’s neighbors, including neighbors who have crossed a border. It means seeking peace rather than glorifying war. It means protecting human life rather than measuring success by military superiority. It means asking whether public resources are being used to ensure that every person has food, housing, healthcare, education, dignity, and a meaningful opportunity to flourish.

And it means remembering that the Bible’s central story is not the triumph of one nation over all others. It is the liberation of an oppressed people. It is the insistence that Pharaoh does not have the final word. That is why the question “What would Jesus do?” cannot be separated from the question raised by Florence Reece’s popular song written in 1931 in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the union organizing drive of the United Mine Workers: “Which side are you on?”

Christian faith does not ask us to look down from the Pentagon, the White House, or any other seat of power and decide which people deserve compassion. Instead, Jesus teaches us to love God, love your neighbor, love even your enemy — and recognize Christ in the people that those in power tell you to hate and fear.

When Christian nationalism asks its followers to choose between faith and the stranger, between military might and peacemaking, between national supremacy and human solidarity, Christians — including the Christians in the highest reaches of power — should ask a different question. Not “How can we make America powerful enough to win?” But: What would Jesus do?

The answer begins where the Gospel always has: feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrant, freeing the oppressed, and telling the people at the bottom that God has not forgotten them. That is not a weak Christianity. It is Christianity’s most dangerous claim about power: The last shall be first. The mighty shall be brought down. And the kingdom of God belongs not to those who dominate, but to those who serve.

The post Pete Hegseth’s Unholy War appeared first on The Intercept.