In the U.S., Rowan is simultaneously helping ensure a pro-Israel political project has no problem with money. Since the start of this year, according to Federal Election Commission filings, the billionaire CEO of Apollo Global Management has donated $1.5 million to the United Democracy Project, a super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spending a fraction of his vast wealth to preserve a foreign policy defined by support for Israel’s genocide and the flow of U.S. weapons to Israel. 

Rowan — who is worth more than $8 billion and reportedly consulted on his business with convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — is an executive member of Trump’s “Board of Peace,” a United Nations-approved body tasked with carrying out Trump’s stalled plan for Gaza. He made his first donation to UDP of the year in early March, giving $1 million, filings show, just as the group began spending aggressively against the now-ousted Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., a loud critic of U.S. support for Israel. 

A second donation for $500,000 arrived on July 23. The same day, the AIPAC super PAC shelled out nearly $50,000 in campaign mailers in Michigan to attack the progressive pro-Palestine candidate for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed. In Missouri, it dropped another $100,000 for phone banking services against former Democratic Rep. Cori Bush in her race against pro-Israel incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell. 

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It’s not clear which specific UDP efforts have been backed by Rowan’s largesse, and neither Rowan nor UDP responded to requests for comment. But Raed Jarrar, advocacy director with Democracy for the Arab World Now, connected Rowan’s position on Trump’s Gaza board and his major part as a donor to AIPAC’s super PAC as a matter of transparency. 

“Now he sits on a board that will decide Gaza’s future,” Jarrar told The Intercept. “Palestinians did not choose him, and neither did American voters. Americans and Palestinians alike deserve to know whose interests are actually being served.”

Rowan, a major donor to Trump’s failed 2020 presidential campaign, has long made his animus toward critics of Israel known. In recent years, he has been a fierce advocate against student protesters calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, broadly mischaracterizing their anti-genocide calls as “antisemitic,” and played a key role in ousting leaders at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, over their handling of the protests. In 2025, he served as a consultant to the White House in its recent attacks on higher education. He donated an initial $250,000 to UDP in 2022, the year the AIPAC super PAC was founded, and more than quadrupled his giving by 2024. Trump appointed him to the Board of Peace this past January.

“Marc Rowan has used his position to try to silence Palestinians and smear students protesting Israel’s genocide,” said Margaret DeReus, executive director of Peace, Accountability, and Leadership PAC, which launched this cycle as a pro-Palestine counterweight to the pro-Israel lobby. PAL PAC backed both El-Sayed and Bush, who have committed to cutting military aid to Israel. (El-Sayed prevailed in his Democratic Senate primary against Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens, while both Bush and Massie lost their races.)

Rowan “gives millions to fund the now-fringe idea that billions of our tax dollars should fund the Israeli military and targets candidates who are calling to stop sending U.S. tax dollars to Israel’s genocide,” DeReus said. She added that his presence on “Trump’s corrupt board” lays bare the actual goal of the governing body: “the continued genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians living in Gaza.”

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As support for Israel among the American people has plummeted, and more leftist candidates run on promises to enact an arms embargo on Israel, AIPAC has broken its own spending records and set new ones, helping make El-Sayed and Massie’s primaries among the most expensive ever. In Congress, the lobbying giant has also worked to consolidate power among its pro-Israel base. In July, AIPAC lobbied members for the passage of a Pentagon program that further enmeshes military technological sharing between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Last week, Democratic leadership appointed three hawkish, pro-Israel, and AIPAC-backed Democrats to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In addition to his AIPAC super PAC spending, Rowan has also directly given to a host of pro-Israel candidates this cycle, including New Jersey Democrats Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Sen. Cory Booker, as well as Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig in her failed Senate bid.

The majority of Rowan’s spending, however, has been in favor of Republicans, including Mike Rogers, who is facing off against El-Sayed; Florida Sen. Ashley Moody, a vocal opponent of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement; and Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and former Israeli Defense Forces volunteer who famously wore his IDF uniform to Congress.

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AIPAC has long championed Trump’s plan for Gaza, which has included overt calls to displace Palestinians, and supports Israel’s hard line in its negotiations with Hamas leaders. Israel, which occupies nearly 70 percent of Gaza, has refused to withdraw its military from the Strip. Israel blames Hamas for refusing to disarm, though the Palestinian militant and political group has said it would only surrender its weapons in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state — conditions the Israeli government has refused.

AIPAC also regularly celebrates the ongoing bombardment of the Strip, where more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since the so-called ceasefire was brokered, including this week when bombing killed two children.

In Rowan’s view, there’s money to be made from the carnage. At the meeting in Washington, D.C., this past February — when Trump also pledged $10 billion in public funds to the board — Rowan fired off property value estimates in Gaza, more than 80 percent of which lies in ruins. He cited a coastline valued at $50 billion; a housing stock, if rebuilt, worth $30 billion; and infrastructure projects worth another $30 billion. Rowan spoke next to generic renderings of glistening high-rise apartments, palm tree-laden highways, solar power plants, and coastal oil depots. Consolidating all of these assets under the supervision of Trump’s Board of Peace, Rowan said, would allow for “conflict-free management of the resources to benefit the Gazans.”

“One hundred fifteen billion of value,” he promised. “It just needs to be unlocked and financed.” 

The post “Board of Peace” Billionaire Backs AIPAC Fund Targeting Pro-Palestine Candidates appeared first on The Intercept.

In a federal court filing in New York, the Justice Department argued that the U.S. has a vested interest in OpenAI having access to a vast array of intellectual property. The Trump administration warned that restricting OpenAI’s access to the data could hamper scientific progress and harm the country’s dominance in the race for artificial intelligence.

“The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally,” said the filing, which was signed by associate attorneys general Stanley Woodward Jr. and Brett Shumate, along with the attorney general’s senior counsel Michael Weisbuch.

Matt Topic, the litigating attorney representing The Intercept in its lawsuit, warned that the Trump administration’s position was out of touch and a threat to the financial survival of media outlets.

“This is pretty reflective of the administration’s pro-AI policies, which are out of step with the public skepticism of AI and out of step with our long tradition in this country of protecting human expression,” said Topic. “If the administration’s position was accepted, it would result in an unprecedented, uncompensated transfer of IP rights from news organizations to tech companies.”

The Intercept originally filed its lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in February 2024, arguing that OpenAI’s use of work reported and written by its journalists constituted a breach of copyright law. In November 2024, the judge then presiding over the case dismissed all of The Intercept’s claims against Microsoft, but allowed its claim against OpenAI to proceed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The Intercept’s case was later consolidated under U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein alongside a number of other media plaintiffs, including the New York Times, Tribune Media Company, and Ziff Davis. 

OpenAI has argued that its practice of hoovering up staggering amounts of copyright-protected materials to feed its large language models — the underlying technology powering generative AI tools like ChatGPT — falls under the domain of “fair use,” a doctrine protecting the unlicensed use of copyrighted material under certain circumstances.

In its filing, the Justice Department supported OpenAI’s fair-use defense, accusing the Times and other plaintiffs of taking an overly narrow definition of the doctrine. OpenAI’s use of the material, the government argued, met the criteria for “transformative” use, one of the ways in which “fair use” comes into play.

“In this litigation, the New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs). That result would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and severely hamper ‘the Progress of Science and useful Arts,’” the filing says. “An erroneous fair use ruling would hamper competition in the market for LLMs, because only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees.”

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The filing is the latest move from the Trump administration to protect the interests of U.S.-based artificial intelligence companies amid an AI arms race with companies based in other countries, most notably China.

In December 2025, Trump signed an executive order aimed at creating a federal standard, applicable in all 50 states, to “ensure that the United States wins the AI race, as we must.”

Topic, The Intercept’s attorney, said this position — combined with the fact that the Justice Department has not been privy to any discovery in the case — shows that the Trump administration is operating from a fixed position in support of tech companies, rather than arguing the merits of the case.

“What they’re saying isn’t based on any understanding of actual facts,” Topic said. “It just reflects what Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s PR machines have been putting out into the public.”

The post Trump Admin Tells Court: Let OpenAI Rip Off The Intercept’s Articles appeared first on The Intercept.

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey comfortably defeated Rep. Seth Moulton in his Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, in what the media — and Moulton himself — had described as a “generational” challenge.

The framing is understandable: In a country suffering under gerontocratic rule, Markey is 80 and Moulton is 47.

Age, however, was the least of what was at stake in Moulton’s run from the decaying center of the Democratic Party. Moulton ran on a conservative line, recycling right-wing talking points and echoing Donald Trump to suggest, erroneously, that Democrats have been failing because they have not been conservative enough.

Markey may be 80 years old, but his campaign did precisely what Democrats must if they want to appeal to progressives and bring in a broad working-class voter base: He ran on issues of economic inequality, taxing billionaires, green energy, and universal health care — all while refusing to jettison support for vulnerable minorities, especially trans people.

Meanwhile Moulton, claiming to represent a break in the status quo, repeated precisely the tired centrist playbook that has both failed America’s multiracial working class and failed to win elections. He punched left and, as Markey himself highlighted, threw trans kids “under the bus.”

In a risible misreading of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential election loss, Moulton suggested that his party had shown too much care for trans rights. (It had not.)

“I have two little girls,” Moulton told the New York Times just after the November 2024 election. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

It was only last month that Moulton offered a tempered apology for the anti-trans remarks — and only because Markey had lambasted him during a debate.

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“He just took the whole playbook of MAGA and Trump, and he blamed those kids for the loss,” said Markey, who has been consistent in his advocacy for trans rights. “We should have been loving those kids. There’s only 12 trans athletes in the whole of the NCAA. We should have been embracing them.”

Indeed, we should question the validity of this so-called “debate” entirely: Why did the moderator of a Senate primary debate even feel the need to ask a question about trans girls in sports at all?

This is not, after all, a political problem in need of addressing in Massachusetts, or anywhere else. It is a ghoulish far-right panic that has been baselessly elevated into a hot-button issue, with the help of Democratic cowardice.

Fox News, of all places, noted that Markey is “one of the few Democrats running this midterm cycle who is continuing to push for transgender rights, particularly in sports” — as if that were a bad thing.

“There is good evidence that transgender issues were a major part of Markey’s victory, too,” wrote reporter and trans advocate Erin Reed. “In the final days of the campaign, a UMass/Amherst poll asked primary voters how a candidate who embraces anti-trans positions or policies would impact their vote. In that poll, a whopping 67% stated it would make their vote less likely for that candidate.”

Markey, the longtime incumbent, was already at an advantage. And no doubt proselytizers for Democratic Party conservatism will stress that Markey’s victory in deep-blue Massachusetts cannot offer lessons for Democrats running in less progressive territory. This again would be to selectively learn the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris’s spectacular 2024 failure.

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It should not need repeating that Democrats in 2024 campaigned on Republican talking points, with Harris donning khaki for photo ops at the Arizona border. If Donald Trump’s campaign attacking trans people gained purchase, it is because Democrats roundly failed to answer it by demystifying right-wing anti-trans fearmongering. They also failed to offer a robust, class-focused platform to vote for.

Being nearly half someone’s age does not constitute a generational challenge; contesting the staid ways of a generational establishment does. Moulton did nothing of the sort.

Markey said it best on Tuesday: “Generational change isn’t about compromising.”

The post Seth Moulton Sold Out Trans Kids — and Lost His Senate Race appeared first on The Intercept.

It always felt inevitable that Bari Weiss’s tenure at CBS News would see the network devolve into rank Islamophobia — but even for most of us, who took a dim view of her takeover of the news behemoth, tying Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to the 9/11 attacks was an unexpected new low. To make matters worse, many centrist Democrats and their allies cleared the way for just this kind of attack. 

On Monday, CBS reporter Zak Hudak published an article headlined with the critique that El-Sayed’s “deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.” Weiss, whose time in charge of CBS has been rife with controversy, was reportedly deeply involved with the story’s promotion and framing, going so far as to praise it in a newsroom meeting and champion it “to the entire network,” according to media-industry newsletter Status. She “even personally directed the headline to be tweaked to specifically mention” the 9/11 angle. 

The story immediately came under harsh criticism, even from people whose politics when it comes to Muslims are virtually indistinguishable from Weiss’s. Atlantic writer Jonathan Chait, for example, called the tweets a “non-story.”

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CBS declined to mention that two of those three deleted posts were asking Americans to take the death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic as seriously as the attacks. It’s worth noting — CBS did not — that invoking 9/11 to put the Covid death toll in perspective wasn’t unusual at the time; then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo directly compared the pandemic, which ravaged New York City, to the attacks the same month that El-Sayed did.

Another post at issue was a rather anodyne comment about the consequences of the decadelong war on terror and a call to action: “We could save lives rather than take them.”

El-Sayed’s campaign previously told Politico that all posts older than July 2023 were deleted “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context.”

Weiss’s guidance led to CBS News’s racist framing that there’s just something different — even untrustworthy — about El-Sayed, and that the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 is the right time to ask what that is.

In doing so, she’s embracing a long-standing bipartisan tradition of Muslim dehumanization — a playbook still being deployed on both sides of the aisle. The current anti-Muslim environment reflects the growth and regression in the country since the 9/11 moment: growth in the number of Muslims in political and public life, and the regressive backlash to multicultural liberalism that’s defined the Trump era. 

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This kind of bigotry was rampant during the early 2000s, particularly in 2002 and 2003, when the George W. Bush administration weaponized Americans’ anger and shock over the attacks to gin up support for its war of choice on Iraq.

More recently, in the wake of mass protest and opposition, mainly from the left, to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, institutional power on both sides of the partisan divide has cracked down on dissent. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, expressing sympathy for Palestine was enough to engender severe career consequences. 

Since 2023, the landscape of public opinion has shifted significantly. A supermajority of Democratic voters are opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza and support sanctions on Israel. Increasingly, primary voters are punishing incumbents who have been diehard supporters of Israel. The callback to the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the post-9/11 era has also fallen flat with the base, who are more concerned with affordability and opposing Trump than they are with ensuring U.S. dominance over the region.

Rather than adapt to this new political reality, some of the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders are fighting back by playing dirty. Neera Tanden, president of the powerful Democrat-aligned think tank Center for American Progress, has turned attacking El-Sayed and the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker — who was raised Muslim — into her main focus. 

Tanden’s venomous online behavior has gained traction with anti-Muslim voices on the Democratic side, including activists Fred Guttenberg and Shannon Watts, who made their names protesting against gun violence against children — unless they live in Gaza.

But Tanden, with her reach and influence in the party, which has included stints in both the Biden and Obama administrations, is far more influential, and she wields that influence to her advantage against progressives and Muslims in her own big tent. 

She’s reposted commentary from white supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes and arch-right provocateur Laura Loomer, in the latter case boosting a comment accusing Piker of using “Ninja Taqiyya,” a white nationalist meme referring to a secret Muslim plot to infiltrate Western society with their Islamic faith. Tanden later deleted it, claiming it was a “mistake,” but didn’t disavow the content.

A number of Democratic politicians eager to revive the party’s Islamophobic war on terror days have joined these attacks. Piker, a public figure aligned with progressives but just outside the mainstream enough to threaten the establishment, is a perfect foil for centrist Democrats fighting against a lefty uprising. 

Democratic senators and representatives have in turn targeted Piker as a way to swipe at the party’s ascendant left in more and more deranged and defamatory ways, and have repeatedly called on El-Sayed to disavow the streamer, who campaigned for him in the primary. 

Piker’s recent comments that Israel’s actions are making Jews around the world less safe — echoing remarks previously made by Ezra Klein and others — were were cynically used as another example of the streamer’s “antisemitism” by right-wing Democrats, with Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer telling CNN, “There’s no way I’m ever coming out for El-Sayed.” 

Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, claimed Piker endorsed Hamas fighters raping children. And Sen. John Fetterman, the nominal — at the time of this writing — Democrat from Pennsylvania has mumbled at various moments about Piker’s opposition to Israel as part of a dealbreaker for him staying in the party.

This mainstreaming of liberal Islamophobia at the party and think tank level has emboldened media figures to indulge in the same bigotry.

At CNN, it’s anchors Dana Bash and Jake Tapper who are most enthusiastic about smearing critics of Israel and engaging in open hate toward Muslims. As Intercept contributor Adam Johnson has pointed out, CNN’s “State of the Union,” the network’s flagship Sunday news show hosted by Tapper and Bash, “hasn’t had on a Palestinian or Palestinian-American guest in over 7 years, and the last time they did it was Rashida Tlaib and Jake Tapper asked her if she believed in Israel’s ‘right to exist’ three different times.”

Over at The Atlantic, writers like Chait are often so hostile toward El-Sayed and Piker that they’re earning the kinds of rebukes mostly left to private conversations. Chait’s latest smear of El-Sayed was so dishonest it prompted former Atlantic associate editor Siddhartha Mahanta to publicly question the writer, asking if he had requested comment for the claims he was making about the candidate. Chait snapped back that as an opinion writer, he wasn’t subject to those kinds of ethical requirements — a familiar retort.

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But tying El-Sayed to 9/11 is an escalation. Weiss’s choice to push Islamophobia in mainstream discourse past the point of plausible deniability, regardless of how one feels about that plausibility, will have an impact. When you find yourself in common cause with the likes of virulent anti-Muslim bigots like Loomer, it’s time to take a long look in the mirror, and consider the fact that you’re doing the Republicans’ work for them. A closing argument for the GOP in Michigan, and nationally, that focuses on the otherness of Muslims is ideal ground for the right, and highly preferable to talking about the domestic issues El-Sayed has built his campaign around. 

It would be helpful if Democrats presented a united front against racist attacks on members of their own party. Unfortunately, it appears that for some on the party’s right wing, welcoming Muslims into the tent is a nonstarter.

The post CBS News Spins El-Sayed’s 9/11 Tweets Into a Manufactured Anti-Muslim Scandal appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit that led to the settlement was in reaction to EEOC guidance issued under the Biden administration and after a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that Title VII protects against gender identity discrimination.

In the settlement, reached on August 18, the EEOC pledged to not pursue any claims of gender identity-based discrimination against the Christian Employers Alliance — and made the pledge in perpetuity.

The EEOC provides free investigation into complaints of discrimination and, in some cases, will bring lawsuits on behalf of employees at no cost to the plaintiffs.

Now, however, anyone who works for a company with membership in the Christian Employers Alliance who believes they suffered gender identity-based discrimination won’t be able to avail themselves of the EEOC’s process.

The settlement also contains an unusual provision: It applies not just to the more than 20,000 employers that are already members in the Christian Employers Alliance, but also to any future members, so long as they are members at the time that any claimed discrimination occurred.

That means that any employer that decides to sign up for Christian Employers Alliance membership will get the benefit of blanket protection from the EEOC against all claims of gender identity discrimination, such as harassing someone for being nonbinary or firing them for coming out as trans.

“I am not aware of any settlement that just creates in perpetuity a freedom from investigation,” said Karla Gilbride, a former EEOC general counsel under President Joe Biden who is now at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I’ve never seen an organization get a settlement that allows protection to future members in this way.”

The settlement will stay in place even if Andrea Lucas, the current Republican chair of the EEOC, is replaced with a Democratic chair under a future Democratic president. (The Christian Employers Alliance declined to comment, and the EEOC did not respond to an inquiry.)

In Perpetuity

The CEA notes the blanket protection on its webpage for signing up new members.

“Join CEA and stop being exposed,” the site says, under a banner that reads “Protected the Moment You’re In.”

“It’s like they’re selling an insurance policy against EEOC investigations,” said Gilbride. “I’m concerned about the incentive that that creates for employers, especially when the organization is explicitly marketing itself in that way.”

The settlement also has no expiration date. Nearly all settlements, Gilbride said, have an end point; they will remain in force for a certain number of years, during which a court will monitor to make sure the terms are met.

“What makes this settlement unusual,” she said, “is that, in exchange for agreeing to dismiss certain claims in this case, the EEOC is committing to these terms for what seems to be an indefinite amount of time.”

The settlement is of a piece with the EEOC’s recent turn toward policies aligned with the aims of the Christian right in the United States. Lucas, the commission chair, has already pursued a broad agenda of eliminating trans rights.

The Christian Employers Alliance has been at the forefront of pushing conservative religious views into policy. The alliance was represented in its EEOC lawsuit by Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal group behind the overthrow of Roe v. Wade.

The Christian employers’ group also boasted in its promotional materials for new members that, like the protection from gender discrimination complaints, a court injunction it secured against the government that allows members to refuse to cover contraception will “cover you the moment you join.”

Blanket Carveout

The blanket carveout for members of the Christian Employers Alliance is also out of the ordinary for giving across-the-board protections from complaints. The EEOC already has ways to consider the rights of religious employers, but they require going through established processes. These employers, for instance, can raise a religious defense against a complaint of discrimination, and the agency will then consider it.

The new settlement, however, blocks EEOC investigators from even looking into a complaint of discrimination and evaluating the merits; instead, it stops all gender identity discrimination complaints against these employers dead in their tracks. All the agency can do is tell workers to sue their employers on their own in the courts.

“That categorical exclusion from investigation based on being a member of a group is unprecedented,” Gilbride said.

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These victories for the Christian Employers Alliance closely mirror much of what the organization had originally sought when it filed for an injunction as part of its lawsuit. In its request, the group sought a permanent ban on the EEOC enforcing gender identity rights against its “present and future members.”

And there are close relationships between the Christian Employers Alliance and the EEOC.

In early 2025, Lucas, the current commission chair, hired Shannon Royce to be her chief of staff. Royce’s job immediately prior to accepting her role at the EEOC was president of the Christian Employers Alliance, which she led in 2021 at the time of the lawsuit over gender identity discrimination.

“Normally a settlement happens because the parties don’t want to keep litigating,” Gilbride noted. “But it seems like there might be a lot of alignment between the two sides in this particular situation, and that raises questions about whether the settlement is in the broader public interest or whether it’s just in the interest of these particular individuals and organizations.”

The Anti-Trans Agenda

The settlement fits with the anti-trans agenda pursued by Lucas, the EEOC chair.

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One of her first actions was to announce that a priority for the agency is “to defend the biological and binary reality of sex.” She instructed agency staff to focus on pursuing such cases, such as complaints from cis women of trans women sharing bathrooms with them. Harassment guidance that included protection from gender identity-based harassment and federal workers’ ability to pursue complaints of gender identity discrimination were both eliminated under Lucas’s leadership.

Lucas also withdrew the EEOC from lawsuits that it had brought on behalf of transgender and nonbinary workers, and she halted the processing of all worker claims of gender identity discrimination.

With Lucas at the helm, the Christian Employers Alliance already didn’t have to worry about gender identity complaints. Now, tens of thousands of employers with membership in the group won’t have to worry about complaints under the commission’s future leadership either.

Gilbride said, “I am not aware of a settlement that looks exactly like this.”

The post Christian Employers Can Now Discriminate Against Trans People appeared first on The Intercept.

It was a departure from the group’s typical mandate: helping Latino families get outside in natural areas like Wilson Creek, a popular summer recreation site in the forest stretching north of the mountain-flanked city of Asheville, where President Donald Trump will welcome G20 leaders on Saturday. Since the devastating 2024 hurricane — the deadliest to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina — North Carolina has received just a fraction of the disaster aid it’s sought from the federal government. Short on federal dollars, local volunteers like Latinos Aventureros tried to fill in the gaps. “We didn’t wait for permission. We didn’t wait for funding,” said Vivianette Ortiz, one of the group’s leaders. “We just showed up.”

The Trump administration has pointed to Asheville’s recovery as a marker of success, and its selection to host the international economic summit “reflects the Trump Administration’s commitment to the revitalization and resilience of western North Carolina,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But the view from the ground tells a different story. Damaged roads and infrastructure remain; some residents are still living in trailers; and empty lots mark where homes and businesses stood before Helene. And instead of receiving still-needed federal assistance, earlier this summer, Western North Carolina got Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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ICE agents, U.S. Forest Service personnel, and Caldwell County sheriff’s deputies arrested 13 people at Wilson Creek on July 26. Among them was a father there with his partner and their 4- and 10-year-old children, who had to watch their dad be taken into custody. ICE claimed some of those arrested had criminal records, but it hasn’t said who or how many.

To Ortiz, there was “a real sense of betrayal.” Volunteers with Latinos Aventureros had helped clean the recreation area, where the organization encouraged families to swim, hike, fish, and picnic on public lands. Families have since said they are afraid to use outdoor spaces because they fear encountering immigration enforcement.

“A huge part of our work has always been telling Latino families: These public lands belong to you, too,” Ortiz said. “If people are afraid to walk through that gate, then meaningful access has already been damaged.”

It takes just an hour by car to reach a different reality, where finance ministers and central bank governors representing the world’s largest economies are rolling into town for a meeting of the G20, the international economic forum whose members account for roughly 85 percent of global economic output and two-thirds of the world’s population.

They’re meeting up at the Grove Park Inn and Spa, a luxury resort overlooking Asheville and largely removed from the destruction Hurricane Helene left along the region’s rivers and valleys. Federal contracting records show the Treasury Department awarded Omni Hotels Corporation, the hotel’s owner, a $1.03 million contract to use the space. A separate Treasury planning document names Grove Park as the event’s “primary place of performance” and calls for gifts representing Western North Carolina and cultural programming highlighting the region’s “history, culture, and character.”

The city awaiting G20 delegates offers only a partial picture of recovery, said Jaime Byrd, a local resident and art gallery owner.

“They will get that beautiful experience of being at the Grove Park Inn, most likely, and maybe a couple of them might make it downtown, which looks completely normal,” Byrd said. “It’s unfortunate.”

Beyond Asheville’s tourist corridors, Helene remains written into the landscape. Debris left along rivers and roads has disappeared beneath nearly two years of vegetation, while damaged infrastructure remains. Elsewhere, recovery resembles absence: Buildings swept away by the storm have left empty ground where homes and businesses once stood.

Byrd’s gallery, located in Asheville’s River Arts District, took roughly six feet of water during Helene, destroying much of her artwork and causing at least $80,000 to $100,000 in losses, she estimates. Across town, roads near her home washed out, largely cutting off the neighborhood. Without electricity to power their wells, residents collected drinking water from an open spring on a neighbor’s property. They laid rocks and large pieces of metal across damaged roads to make them passable. Helicopters eventually arrived with “meals ready to eat” and evacuated residents who needed medical care.

“Most of this help came from self-help and community efforts,” Byrd said.

Federal assistance covered about 20 percent of the repairs needed at her home, Byrd estimates, but she received no Federal Emergency Management Agency help for her gallery. She launched a GoFundMe, spent her own money, and salvaged what artwork she could. Her collectors bought every recovered piece, which helped her keep the business alive.

Two years later, she said one of her neighbors still lives without water, while others remain in trailers.

In East Asheville, Linda Tetens said flooding and fallen trees effectively turned her neighborhood into an island, while residents cleared roads and helped one another through days without power or reliable access to food and water. Tetens relies on a CPAP machine to breathe while sleeping and said that after about 10 days without electricity, the effects of going without it forced her to leave Asheville for a motel in Greensboro.

FEMA initially approved the hotel stay, Tetens said, but later denied her reimbursement. She spent nearly a year repeatedly submitting documents before receiving roughly $1,400.

“It was like a full-time job, trying to negotiate with FEMA,” Tetens said. “I understand why people gave up.”

Tetens points to damaged roads and residents still awaiting government buyouts as evidence of how much work remains.

“We’re not even close to being back,” she said.

Nearly two years after Helene, billions of dollars sought for North Carolina’s recovery remain outstanding. The state had received $7.8 billion in federal disaster aid as of March 31, according to state recovery data cited by the local newsroom Asheville Watchdog, compared with $25.6 billion requested after the storm. In June, Gov. Josh Stein traveled to Washington seeking more than $10 billion in additional federal funding for housing, infrastructure, and small businesses; on Thursday, FEMA announced an additional $137 million for North Carolina disaster recovery.

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The fear of immigration enforcement could bring additional anxiety to a region struggling to recover, Asheville officials warned in 2025. “Our community is still recovering from Hurricane Helene,” Mayor Esther Manheimer and other local officials said at the time. “We do not need additional stress and fear.”

Asked whether those concerns extended to recent immigration enforcement in Western North Carolina, a city spokesperson told The Intercept she would not engage with questions characterizing federal immigration operations as harassment.

In response to questions from The Intercept, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson called the response part of “the long list of FEMA failures under Biden.” (Joe Biden was in office when Helene hit in September 2024, but recovery efforts have continued into the second Trump administration.)

“Under the Trump Administration, FEMA is mission focused and dedicated to disaster response,” wrote spokesperson Micah Bock, who previously worked for former Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C.

For Ortiz, the administration’s decision to showcase Western North Carolina’s recovery to the G20 makes the contrast particularly difficult to ignore. Latino and immigrant families, she said, were among the people who helped the region recover, but their right to belong should not depend on what they contributed after the storm.

“Our community shouldn’t have to say, ‘Look at everything we did after Helene, therefore we deserve to be here,’” Ortiz said. “We deserve to live here, raise our families here, enjoy our public lands, and move through our communities without persecution regardless of whether we drove a relief truck after a hurricane.”

Correction: August 29, 2026, 12:38 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct a misspelling of Jaime Byrd’s first name inserted due to an editing error.

The post Western North Carolina Pleaded for Hurricane Help. It Got ICE Instead. appeared first on The Intercept.

What he didn’t realize was that he could be hit with U.S. sanctions five years later for his past ties to a so-called terrorist organization. 

The Trump administration on Wednesday announced sanctions against the U.K.-based anti-genocide protest group Palestine Action, which organized the 2021 demonstration and dozens of subsequent actions at U.K. factories owned by Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. The goal, in the U.S. government’s words, is to “protect Americans from the risks posed by far-left terrorism.”

“A major threshold has been crossed,” said Geller, who was previously Palestine Action’s spokesperson but left the group in 2025, when the British government made membership punishable by 14 years in prison. “They’re now treating regular Americans who want to effectively oppose genocide as terrorists.”

The specific parameters of the U.S. sanctions are not yet clear, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pledged the government would “continue to cut the financial lifelines of these groups until they are eliminated.” Sanctioned groups and individuals cannot receive funds, goods, or services from American people or business — meaning they’re cut off from both the U.S. banking system and from any donations from Americans who might want to support them. They can have an isolating global effect: Financial institutions outside the U.S. that do business with American companies are often hesitant to affiliate with sanctioned individuals.

As a result, the sanctions could severely curtail their organizing abilities — and restrict their ability to try to stop the flow of weapons that Israel is using to carry out its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“We are facing unprecedented attacks on dissent by the same powers that are committing genocide in Gaza,” said Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, in an interview with The Intercept. “We are at a point in history where it’s extremely crucial to continue to resist and grow in our movement, rather than back down and to adapt and become less reliant on institutions which are essentially controlled by the powers we’re fighting against.” 

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While the new U.S. sanctions are a part of a long history of post-9/11 policies in its so-called war on terror, the U.K. government has made itself notorious for its specific draconian crackdown on pro-Palestine dissent. Last year, as Palestine Action members began to face terror charges in court for their demonstrations, the U.K. government proscribed the group as a terrorist organization. The organization in the U.K. immediately ceased operations after the terror proscription. Dozens of members in the U.K. are facing criminal trials for their actions at Elbit weapons factories, and more than 1,200 people have been arrested and charged under the U.K.’s Terror Act for attending rallies merely supporting the group. 

Reporting from The Telegraph, which first reported the sanctions, suggested Ammori and fellow co-founder Richard Barnard would face lifetime bans from traveling to the U.S., and that British citizens who continue to support the group would be met with harsh visa restrictions.

Geller, who lives in London, wondered if his bank accounts would be frozen, along with his Venmo and PayPal accounts. He said he normally travels back and forth between the U.S. and U.K. to visit his elderly parents — and the thought of doing so now “suddenly has become scary.”

“They want people scared to even think about supporting or engaging in this kind of work,” Geller said. “This is about materially hurting Palestine.”     

The new sanctions against Palestine Action, which were announced alongside sanctions against Autistici/Inventati and Masar Badil, were the latest attack in President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to suppress advocacy for Palestinian rights and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Last year, Trump issued sanctions against the International Criminal Court after the court ordered war crime arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders. Those sanctions targeted people and organizations that work with the court, such as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, who has been outspoken about the crippling effects of the sanctions. The administration has also sanctioned long-standing Palestinian human rights organizations for their work with the ICC.  

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“The Trump administration is once again weaponizing counterterrorism authorities to criminalize Palestinian political organizing and solidarity,” said Raed Jarrar, advocacy director with Democracy for the Arab World Now, which last month sued to reverse the Trump sanctions on the ICC. “Sanctions are supposed to target genuine threats to national security, not serve as a political weapon against movements challenging Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”

The vagueness of the new sanctions is meant to strike fear in anyone who is considering support for the sanctioned group, civil liberties advocates told The Intercept. Does a social media post expressing support violate sanctions? How about hosting a talk with an individual in the group?

“Treasury hasn’t been clear on where the line is, and that’s part of the chilling effect,” said Xiangnong (George) Wang, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute who specializes in U.S. sanctions. “In sanctioning Palestine Action, I think their target is more broadly a community of people and groups, including Americans who engage with Palestine Action.”

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

The sanctions also follow the government’s case against pro-Palestine organizer Fergie Chambers, a past supporter of Palestine Action who was detained for extradition in Spain last month on alleged charges of funding terror groups. The humanitarian aid group Sameer Project, which provided meals and services to Palestinians in Gaza, previously received financial support from Chambers and this month announced it had paused operations in Gaza due to lack of funds.

The Trump-era crackdowns have extended beyond Palestine and Israel, targeting leftists groups in the U.S. who most recently have resisted Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mass deportation campaign. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, the administration has used post-9/11 terrorism laws against protesters, such as pursuing terrorism charges and decades-long prison sentences in the Prairieland Detention Center trial and the government’s case against protesters in Minneapolis.  

The repression, said Ammori, has “expanded much more overtly to be used to crush any type of dissent.”

Despite the U.K.’s crackdown on Palestine Action, support for the group and Palestine remains energetic. Rallies in solidarity with Palestine Action and Palestinian rights continue to sprout up across the country even as the government has arrested at least 3,000 people for simple actions such as holding signs that read “I support Palestine Action.” And last year, Elbit closed its facility in Bristol after being targeted by Palestine Action, days before the government outlawed the group.

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In the U.S., the group formerly known as Palestine Action U.S., now called Unity Fields as of August 2024, no longer has ties to the U.K.-based group. Though Palestine Action in the U.K. is dormant, secretive cells of Palestine Action are based throughout the U.S. and are continuing to carry out actions. Other Palestine Action cells are targeting the Israeli weapons supply chain in other countries such as Spain, Germany, Ireland, and Poland.

“We have a responsibility to create a huge dent in the Israeli war machine,” Ammori said. “They need to be profitable to operate, and if they’re operating, they’re killing Palestinians — it’s really as simple as that.”

The post “They Want People Scared”: Former Palestine Action Member Blasts Trump’s Terror Sanctions appeared first on The Intercept.

Alexander Vindman lost to Angie Nixon in the Florida Democratic senatorial primary on Tuesday, marking a long-overdue end to one of the worst liberal mass delusions of the Trump era: Russiagate.

Vindman’s loss offers a number of opportunities for schadenfreude, from the comeuppance for his wife’s sneering at Nixon’s clothes to the staggering spending advantage he had over his opponent, a Democratic Socialists of America member — but it’s the bell tolling for neocons cynically taking advantage of conspiracy theory-minded liberals that’s the most gratifying reason for the loss.

This cohort faltered at the ballot box in 2026. Vindman follows heroes of the Trump 1.0 #Resistance like George Conway and Dan Goldman, both of whom found that resting on the laurels of opposing Trump six years ago wasn’t enough to push back against more dynamic opponents who offered actual policy plans. 

Over the past decade, these conservative Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans relied on liberal fears of Russian election interference and shadowy Moscow kompromat over the president to leverage influence in the party. 

From the beginning, Russiagate was used by a shellshocked liberal establishment to explain away Trump’s victory in a way that didn’t implicate the Democrats. Rather than address what it was about Hillary Clinton’s political platform — and the preceding eight years of President Barack Obama — that opened the door to MAGA, many Democrats and their allies in the media fully bought into the idea that only a nefarious, Kremlin-driven plot could have led to America electing Trump. 

This was an attractive proposal, and it found an enthusiastic, if niche, audience. Democratic voters responded well, notably to commentators at MSNBC like Rachel Maddow, who went all in on the conspiracy and pushed it far beyond what was plausible.

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As MSNBC and, to a lesser extent, CNN, found ratings success with the largely fabricated scandal, the infection spread across legacy media. The New York Times published Louise Mensch, a serial fabulist whose Twitter feed was a laundry list of delusions, in the opinion section. The Washington Post reported an implausible story that Russians were targeting the Vermont energy grid. 

Grifters of all stripes quickly adapted their cons to the new game. In one notorious example, a Twitter user named Eric Garland skyrocketed himself to online notoriety by spinning up a “game theory” Russiagate fantasy where a secret, Avengers-esque team of liberal politicians were using the scandal to beat Vladimir Putin at realpolitik (how, exactly, this was going to happen went unaddressed). The thread was praised as “great writing” by notable media figures; today, Garland is a gutter-level antisemite aligned with far-right gadfly Chuck Johnson whose conspiracy theories are utterly incomprehensible.

In one of the more amusing, and egregious, examples of the hysteria, pundit Jonathan Chait improbably claimed that Trump may have been an agent of the KGB going back to the early 1980s — a preposterous story that nevertheless netted him primetime appearances on cable news. 

In Washington, Russiagate mania supplanted actual policy priorities for Democrats both before and after they retook the House in the 2018 midterms. As I wrote nearly nine years ago at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, establishment media allies like Maddow were so narrowly focused on Russiagate in the early Trump years that they often ignored or papered over instances of corruption and corporate power in lieu of fomenting the conspiracy theory. 

Whether this effort was intentional or not is somewhat irrelevant; the net result was the stifling of the Bernie Sanders wing taking over the party and a reassertion of the neoliberal, corporate-friendly establishment’s control of the levers of power. 

Unsurprisingly, many of the same figures are endorsing that approach again as progressives are winning primaries by focusing on affordability and ambitious policy proposals rather than simply “Trump bad.” In an essay for The Atlantic on Thursday, Chait argued Vindman’s loss didn’t detract from the correctness of resistance liberalism and its singular focus on Trump — and instructed Democrats not to try to offer voters any actionable policy: “Rather than promise to change everything about American politics, focus relentlessly on Trump’s unfitness.”

That’s a message that’s soothing to the elite liberal class Chait writes for, but it’s unlikely to find much purchase among voters, Democratic or otherwise. The public is burnt out on one-trick-pony versions of escaping the Trump era. And Trump’s second administration has exposed the rotten house of cards keeping the U.S. state afloat, making systemic change an imperative. 

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For Democrats, that has meant turning to candidates like Nixon, as well as Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson. It leaves the neocons who used Russiagate as a way to pivot and rebrand their way out of a party singularly devoted to Trump and into the welcoming arms of the Democratic establishment in a predicament. They’re realizing, with rising panic, that they’re not going to be able to dictate the party’s future as Democrats shift away from Israel and express their support for Palestine and a robust welfare state. 

Some of the Russiagaters are already pivoting back to the right, like Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer who became the toast of liberal media after deciding to oppose the president in a self-serving effort when facing prison time. On Thursday, Cohen had his former client on the radio Thursday for a friendly chat. 

Others, like The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol, are bullish on liberalism (although, as anyone who remembers the Iraq War knows, they still can’t be trusted an inch). Count Vindman, for now, in the latter camp; however, despite his disagreements with Nixon on Palestine and domestic politics, he endorsed her and promised to support her in November. 

If this is truly the end of Russiagate’s stranglehold on U.S. politics — and we should all hope that’s the case — then its beneficiaries had a good run. Grifters and partisans were able to use the conspiracy theory to push their agendas and further their careers. Neocons secured a foothold in the liberal establishment which will be difficult, though not impossible, to excise. And the Democratic leadership was able to put off actually offering voters tangible policy that would improve their lives for a decade by focusing on delusional fantasies — a strategy that’s now coming back to bite them at the ballot box. 

But for the rest of us, Russiagate was a black hole of political inertia at a time when the country needed strong moral leadership and new ideas. Let’s bury it for good by moving past the conspiracies toward more progressive policy prospects and to political change that does more than focus on Trump.

The post RIP to the Russiagate Liberals appeared first on The Intercept.

The group sent text messages in recent days calling on Californians to pressure Democratic state Attorney General Rob Bonta in support of the merger, which he has sued to block in court.

The text messages are the latest escalation of the increasingly bitter battle between Bonta and Paramount CEO David Ellison, who has threatened to move his movie studio to Texas or Tennessee, according to reports from multiple outlets, if a coalition of state attorneys general led by Bonta keeps fighting the merger.

The group behind the text campaign, Neighbors for Strong Communities, cited Ellison’s threat in messages encouraging support for the merger.

The group denied the allegations that it is mounting an “astroturf” campaign, but declined to reveal its donors. The lack of transparency led free-speech advocates to issue a scathing press release this week.

“The behavior we’re seeing is what powerful corporations do when they are losing control of the story,” Rashad Robinson, co-chair of the Committee for the First Amendment, said in a statement. “The more the public understands what’s at stake — fewer jobs, fewer stories told, and even more power in the hands of a few billionaires — the harder the deal becomes for Paramount to defend.”

A spokesperson for Neighbors for Strong Communities, Tanner Kelly, declined to disclose the group’s donors.

“We don’t disclose funders, but this campaign is operated independently of Paramount,” he said.

In a statement to The Intercept, Warner Bros. Discovery denied funding the text message campaign. Paramount Skydance did not respond to a request for comment.

Neighbors and Nemeses

Ellison’s merger plans have divided Hollywood unions, leading proponents and opponents to engage in a heated war of words over who speaks for the entertainment industry’s working class.

Into that fray jumped Neighbors for Strong Communities, which was incorporated in Washington in June, a little over three months after Paramount launched its takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

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The national debate over the mega merger has focused on suspicions that Paramount CEO David Ellison might be willing to tilt coverage at Warner properties like CNN in favor of Donald Trump. Ellison, whose billionaire father is a close ally of Trump’s, has courted favor with the White House as the merger moves forward.

The debate over the Paramount merger in California, however, has often centered on jobs.

In text messages to Californians that went out earlier this week, Neighbors for Strong Communities asked recipients to send Bonta messages raising the concern that his opposition to the merger will cost the state thousands of jobs — because of Ellison’s reported threat to move Paramount to Texas.

Those messages and the group’s generic website offer little insight into Neighbors for Strong Communities’s origins. Its incorporation papers in Washington show that several listed directors have worked as political consultants.

In a statement to The Intercept, one of those directors, Tanner Kelly, described the group as a “community advocacy organization that helps everyday people participate in public decisions affecting their lives, livelihoods and futures.”

Bonta is months away from an election he is expected to win handily. Kelly said the group’s pressure campaign against Bonta is “not related” to the pending attorney general election, and Neighbors for Strong Communities has not filed campaign finance disclosures with the California Secretary of State.

Kelly pushed back on the idea that entertainment industry professionals are uniformly opposed to the merger by sending messages from actors who have spoken out in favor of it.

“To the claims this is AstroTurf, tell that to the hundreds of real people participating in our movement who have real concerns, real struggles, and real livelihoods on the line that just want to be heard,” said Kelly, who was registered as a lobbyist in California last year.

“Grassroots Opposition”?

Advocates who oppose the merger suspect there is something more at play, pointing to the circumstances of the group’s creation.

“The sender organization’s website is less than three months old. It discloses no founders, board members, staff, or funders, and the organization does not appear in ProPublica’s nonprofit database,” the Committee for the First Amendment, an anti-merger group co-founded by Jane Fonda, said in a press release earlier this week.

The Committee said that Neighbors for Strong Communities has the “classic hallmarks of a corporate-backed astroturf campaign designed to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition.”

The effort to make it seem like the merger has popular support will fail, predicted Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press Action.

“These corporations know where the grassroots movement actually is: with the industry professionals fighting to block this merger,” she said. “This PR campaign is yet another face-off between the many and the money.”

The post This Mysterious “Astroturf” Group Popped Up to Defend the Paramount Merger appeared first on The Intercept.

The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino (2005)
This is one of those books that stays with you long after you finish it. The hit from Japanese mystery writer Keigo Higashino, who died last month, puts a dark twist on a story about loyalty and the obligations that come with it. This was my first interaction with Higashino’s famous “Detective Galileo.” Think of a police procedural wrapped in a shroud of mathematical philosophy. This book is a dark gem.
— Akela Lacy

Good People, Patmeena Sabit (2026)
It’s easy to be lulled into thinking this propulsive, polyphonic novel is a true crime beach read: The book opens with a disclaimer about police refusing to weigh in on an open investigation, followed by short vignettes that serve as witness testimonies to an unfolding crime narrative. But it’s actually a beautiful picture of community, family tragedy, and the court of public opinion, and a wonderful reminder that, despite the current political climate, we should be proud to be a nation of immigrants.
— Celine Piser

Questions 27 & 28, Karen Tei Yamashita (2026)
It’s become almost cliché in this era of wanton imprisonment of immigrants to invoke the incessant relevance of the United States’ WWII concentration camps for Japanese Americans, but Karen Tei Yamashita brings hundreds of new lives to one of the country’s most infamous domestic crimes. She once thought “that about ‘the camps,’ we’d been there, done that,” she writes in a postscript to Questions 27 & 28, “but as those who continue to research and write about these events know very well, it’s never done.” The questions that make up the novel’s title were the last two in an infamous loyalty questionnaire administered to incarcerees: The first asked if they would enlist in the Army for the same United States of America that had incarcerated them; the second if they would swear undying allegiance to the U.S. and forsake any ties to Japan. Between those two questions, “There are eight possible answers,” Yamashita writes, some of which would get you sent to war, others that would deepen your incarceration. “But or if answers are useless … it doesn’t matter what you think or believe; only your answers to 27 and 28 matter.”

In a rigorous history lesson coated in a fun, twisty work of fiction, Yamashita sets out to capture the varied political leanings and personal narratives that might lie behind a single checkbox marked yes or no or left blank. The novel — and it is one, despite being stuffed with historical figures who really lived through the incarceration — is multi-formatted and polyvocal, making use of the kind of staggeringly varied structure that has become something like Yamashita’s signature. It’s broken into three “boxes,” as if in a historical archive, which Yamashita plumbs for precisely reproduced documents and imagined conversations about how they came to be. With stories spanning more than a century, it grapples with the role of Japanese imperialism in constructing racial identity, the place for violence in politics, what it means to be a citizen of a state — and whether one that would lock people up over race or nationality is worth having at all.
— Maia Hibbett

The Vivisectors, Missouri Williams (2026)
I read a lot of contemporary fiction and have the scars to prove it. And, candidly, I haven’t even finished Williams’s sophomore novel, which takes place in a lightly dystopian college town being consumed by enemies both plant and animal. Let that make this endorsement all the more ringing: It’s truly rare that I slow my reading of a novel because I want to take in each sentence fully, and that I want to immediately start re-reading before I’ve even closed the hardcover. Williams is a sly, darkly funny observer of our world and what she imagines as the next. Jump on board now, or risk being left behind on one of literature’s up-and-coming voices.
— Katherine Krueger

The Full Catastrophe, David Carkeet (1990)
We often say a string of words in a very specific order that intentionally has no meaning. Or spit out a different combination of them that has the opposite meaning of what is spoken. Why is it hard to say what we want to really say?

A lovelorn, laid-off linguist who gets enraged by empty expressions like “Have a good one” and “We’ve come full circle” finds a new job at the Pillow Agency, run by the rich, eccentric, incomprehensible Mr. Pillow, a believer of love. The linguist is to embed (“occupy”) with an assigned couple at their home, listen to their verbal interactions, and analyze whether this marriage can be saved, despite his own lack of experience in the field of commitment. This is somehow not the premise of a couple’s therapy reality TV show today; it’s much funnier and less self-conscious! Perhaps because it published in 1990? I thought it was headed in a surreal “Being John Malkovich” direction at the start, but The Full Catastrophe author, David Carkeet, takes a more difficult path and, with serious honesty, tackles the later-stage, post-honeymoon relationship troubles — excavated down to their true awkwardness — that come from miscommunication. Brutal things get said and heard! Because of that, I was surprised by how romantic (and hilarious) this book is. Pairs well with Ross McElwee’s 1986 film “Sherman’s March.”
— Nara Shin

The Makioka Sisters, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1948)
This quiet, deeply thoughtful novel follows several years in the lives of four sisters in a once-prominent upper-middle-class family in a suburb between Kobe and Osaka in the late 1930s. The slowly building characterization of each sister’s personality and how she moves through the world is one of the most artfully realistic portraits of family life I’ve ever read.

While mostly focused on the relationship between the sisters, the novel takes place in the shadow of the impending world war, and in scattered moments throughout the book Tanizaki sketches a compelling depiction of people who — despite being otherwise caring, empathetic, and worldly — are reflexively loyal to a government that is, at the time of narration, actively committing unspeakable crimes abroad.

For fans of: Thomas Mann, Colm Tóibín, Elena Ferrante.
— Noah Hurowitz

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (2017)
A great contrast from the Nolan movie, which simply regurgitates the male heroic stereotype — I think (I have not seen it).
— David Bralow

Nonfiction

The Kentucky Cave Wars, David Randolph Kem (2014)
Soliciting recommendations, our editor helpfully intoned that “It doesn’t have to be a nonfiction book about war!” So, naturally, this is a nonfiction book about war. 

Beneath the gentle rolling hills of Kentucky are hundreds of both mapped and hitherto yet uncharted miles of labyrinthine subterranea which have wormed their way through hollowed limestone over queer aeons. Yet all is not sanguine in these netherworlds, the mirthful perusal of which has been rendered “quixotic” if one is attempting the maintenance of a fairly fairy tale vernacular (or “illegal,” if one is not) through the corrosive joint forces of State and Capital, which seep hideously into the ground, oozing from the words and deeds of those who have no business being alive. 

And so, we have the Kentucky Cave Wars, wherein to stop people from killing one another over rival private cave enterprises, the government stepped in and closed off miles of caverns under the standard doublespeak veneer of ostensibly opening them up under the hollow promises of a cavernous national park. This is America, land of the free, where entry into cave systems now requires government permission. 

The real losers of the cave wars weren’t manipulative businessmen, who were arguably already losers by simple clear cut reason of being businessmen in the first place; no, they were those of us who were imprisoned in the outer realm by the unbridled malignity that is the National Park Service, condemned to beg for entry into the Earth on which we live, and into which we die.
— Nikita Mazurov

Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li (2025)
“Grieving mother’s resilience in the face of repeated tragedy” doesn’t feel quite right here. While I hesitate to call the word “resilience” trite, the way Yiyun Li narrates the process through which she navigates her two sons’ deaths makes me feel like the word does not encompass enough — that living through Terrible Things necessitates a kind of self-justification, but also doubt, denial, and optimism, that threatens the living and spurs it on. Things in nature do merely grow, and they’ll develop based on different external conditions. But their interiority, we’ll never know.
— Fei Liu

Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing, Molly Gebrian (2024)
Some really interesting discussion that is applicable to everything we do.
— David Bralow

Double Eagle, Charles McCarry (1979)
A chronicle of the first successful balloon journey across the Atlantic. Previous attempts claimed five lives. Written in 1970s magazine style with occasional odd asides about the crew’s marriages, it’s a fascinating tale of rich men determined to do the impossible for no particular reason.
— Matt Sledge

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey (launched October 2018)
Fair warning: Host Andrew Hickey is the kind of obsessive cataloguer of popular culture who never met a parenthetical — say, about the session drummer’s later production credits — that wasn’t worthy of explication. So while I can’t recommend this podcast for the kind of casual half-listening that the medium often invites, I can promise that your attention to detail will be well rewarded.

Over and over again, Hickey offers a helpful corrective to the various mythologies of early rock ’n’ roll, especially by later (mostly white) critics who have policed genre boundaries and exalted a narrow range of guitar gods and studio auteurs. From the beginning, he is careful to emphasize the communal and collaborative nature of musical production, drawing attention to figures who’ve been marginalized in other histories. Along the way, he smuggles in some fascinating lessons in social history, political economy, and even music theory.
— Michael Sherrard

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan (2021)
It is incredibly well-written and easy to read. The book grapples with the realities of gender, class, race, and politics in really thought-provoking ways.
— Jessica Washington

Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution, Anand Gopal (2026)
Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria, Loubna Mrie (2024)
The constant onslaught of news these days can make us forget that, just a decade and a half ago, the Middle East and North Africa were rocked by a series of uprisings and revolutions that changed the face of the region. Perhaps none was more consequential than Syria’s eventually successful revolution, and yet so few people have an in-depth understanding of the circumstances. If the old saw about being doomed to repeat history holds true, we would do well to educate ourselves, to better understand the pitfalls and potentials of our paths. That’s where two new books from Anand Gopal and Loubna Mrie come in.

Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage traces the story of the Syrian Civil War through the eyes of the mid-sized city of Manbij. A masterwork of literary reporting, Gopal’s hearty volume recounts the waves of political power that swept over the city — a revolutionary movement, a more neoliberal city council, the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic State group, and so on — with Gopal deftly reporting out intimate views of each, provided by those who fought for, against, or simply lived through them.

Loubna Mrie’s striking memoir about the war, Defiance, provides the one view Gopal doesn’t go deep on: Syria’s ruling Alawite sect. Neither does Mrie, however, provide a straight-ahead understanding of the regime that controlled the country for more than half a century. Instead, it provides a window into that world precisely by departing from it. Mrie’s family was firmly in the pro-regime fold, but her observations, empathy, and intellect quickly led her to become a revolutionary. What follows from there is a harrowing personal journey whose contours are best left to Mrie herself, who lets the reader so far into her travails and inner life that it feels almost intrusive to keep reading — but also makes it impossible to stop.
— Ali Gharib

Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple (2026)
At this point it is perhaps redundant to recommend this extraordinary, beautifully written history of the Jewish Labor Bund, by friend-of-The-Intercept, Molly Crabapple. But for those who have yet to read it, I couldn’t recommend a book more highly. Molly offers us a gift: richly rendered revolutionary characters, rigorously researched history, and a corrective to Jewish historical narratives that treat Zionism as transhistorical and inevitable. Here’s to Molly!
— Natasha Lennard

The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977)
I first read German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey about 20 years after it was published. My mind wasn’t blown. It was blown up.

I suspect that almost 50 years after it was published, the book still packs a formidable punch. Every page seemed to be a revelation, drawing on myriad sources from 19th century philosophy, sociology, psychology, literature, physics, medicine, and, seemingly, everything else. The volume was slim, but it seemed to be packed with more startling information than any three great books. It wasn’t a history of train travel, it was an exploration of modernity and an explanation of how human perceptions of distance, time, space, speed, personal autonomy, psychological integrity, and physical trauma were shattered and remade by the advent of railway travel, creating a new “industrialized consciousness.”

Much of The Railway Journey now exists as a blur in my mind, much like the sheer speed of the train fundamentally changed how people experienced the landscape, forcing passengers to focus only on distant vistas and transforming what had been an immersive experience in nature to a series of (window-)framed, here and gone, two-dimensional images of a panoramic landscape. But for all that I’ve forgotten of the book, for every fact that has long since fled my mind, I have never looked at the world in the same way again.

“The notion that the railroad annihilated space and time was not related to that expansion of space that resulted from the incorporation of new spaces into the transport network,” Schivelbusch observed. “What was experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology.” Travelers had, that is, experienced the physical space between cities as a “living entity” and had been embedded in that landscape before the train obliterated such “travel space.” Schivelbusch called on 19th-century poet and writer Heinrich Heine to explain the incredible disorientation experienced by early train travelers. Without The Railway Journey, I would probably have been ignorant of the existence of Heine (and so many other forgotten thinkers past). But I’d pick up a copy of the book for Heine’s commentary on the opening of railway lines from Paris to Rouen and Orléans in 1843, alone:

What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone. … Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.

— Nick Turse

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This year, however, he’s facing a challenger attempting to flip that strategy on its head. A Democratic Socialists of America member, Oliver Larkin, is trying to win a primary against Moskowitz by running far to his left on both foreign and domestic policies.

The pair presents a striking contrast: Moskowitz has drawn heavy support from donors associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and an artificial intelligence super PAC, while Larkin, a 34-year-old union organizer, calls himself an anti-Zionist and leans on small-dollar funders.

Polls of the race have produced vastly different results, with one commissioned by Larkin putting him within striking distance, while another from Moskowitz’s campaign showing the incumbent far ahead.

Susan McManus, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of South Florida, said in an email that the race will be a significant tell of the mood in the Democratic electorate.

“Of all the Florida congressional districts, this one will be the biggest test of how deep is the generational and ideological divide in the Florida Democratic Party, and to what extent the socialism label may splinter the Latino vote,” she said.

Theory of Change

That label is one that Larkin wears proudly, describing himself on his website as an active member of the Broward County Democratic Socialists of America. He supports Medicare for All while opposing the embargo on Cuba and weapons transfers to Israel.

In an interview with The Intercept ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Larkin said he rejected the Florida Democratic Party’s tendency to lean right to win Republican and independent votes. That strategy has not worked, Larkin said, pointing to Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist’s big loss to Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2024.

Instead, Larkin argues that an openly leftist candidate can energize the Democratic base while winning over disaffected independents.

“I think another false choice that corporate Democrats make is that non-party affiliated or independent voters want to see candidates split the difference right down the middle. I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “They see the status quo politics as completely broken.”

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Moskowitz’s campaign did not respond to an interview request. On his campaign website, however, he leans heavily on his bipartisan bona fides, noting that he served in DeSantis’s cabinet as emergency management director until his election to Congress in 2022.

That credential could help win over voters in a redrawn district spanning much of the coast near Fort Lauderdale that would have voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Moskowitz already represents about half of the new district’s voters in his current 23rd Congressional District.

The new 25th District also has one of the nation’s largest Jewish populations, making Moskowitz’s outspoken support for Israel particularly salient. Last week, pro-Israel activists in south Florida pressured multiple venues to cancel a joint rally that Larkin was to hold with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of the Democratic Party’s most outspoken critics of Israel.

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Moskowitz has also accused Larkin — without offering any evidence — of running against him based on his religion, in a letter to the Sun Sentinel where he declined to participate in a joint interview with Larkin.

The South Florida newspaper called that charge “demonstrably untrue” and dinged Moskowitz for dodging opportunities to face off against his opponent.

“The Sun Sentinel has endorsed Moskowitz in all of his previous races. But in this case, his continued avoidance of Larkin shows a lack of respect for voters and can be viewed as an unwillingness to defend his own record,” the paper’s editorial board said.

Dollar Deficit

Larkin was born in Florida, but after his stint as a volunteer and staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, he worked for a consulting firm aligned with the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C. He returned to the Sunshine State in 2022. During his run for office this cycle, he has posted respectable fundraising numbers for a first-time candidate taking on an incumbent. In an August 13 press release, his campaign said he had raised over $1 million.

Still, that puts him far behind Moskowitz, who reported receipts of nearly $3 million during this election cycle in his most recent campaign finance report, with $1.8 million remaining on hand.

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While some pro-Israel candidates have sought to avoid association with AIPAC this year, given the group’s increasingly toxic brand, Moskowitz has defended its donations to his campaign. His fundraising reports show that he has raised $953,000 from donors associated with AIPAC, according to the transparency website Open Secrets.

An artificial intelligence super PAC is also spending heavily on Moskowitz. The super PAC, Leading the Future, has spent more than $300,000 thus far.

Larkin believes he can make up the divide in spending on advertising with old-fashioned door-knocking. His campaign boasts of having made more than 200,000 voter contacts — and he says there has been little evidence that Moskowitz’s campaign is attempting to match their ground game.

“He’s got ads on TV. He’s got mail. He has no ground game to speak of. I don’t believe he is even attempting to knock on doors,” Larkin said. “He doesn’t have a volunteer base, because nobody wants to volunteer for him.”

The post A Democratic Socialist Aims to Oust a Top AIPAC Beneficiary in Florida appeared first on The Intercept.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley beat the odds to eke out a victory by less than 1 percentage point on election night, a surprise upset after Crowley, who would be Wisconsin’s first Black governor if he wins in November, dropped out of the race and then reentered with the support of outgoing Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers. 

The race became dominated in the final days by inane issues like whether Hong believed that Thanksgiving should exist, based on old tweets criticizing the holiday, echoing and accelerating the annual Fox News “War on Christmas” panic. The sudden fury over old tweets was a distraction from a concrete issue that Hong had made a key focus of her public talking points and likely drove her surge in popularity: data centers.

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Hong’s campaign repeatedly emphasized that she was the only candidate in the race to support a data center moratorium, which would pause construction of any new data centers, giving the state time to create regulations and study their environmental and energy impact. The moratorium would not extend to data center projects already underway in the state.

“It’s time to press control+alt+delete to put a stop to this AI data center crisis, a full moratorium until we have the new regulations we need to protect our energy costs, our economy, our environment,” Hong said in a campaign video.

By all indications, it’s a popular position: A Gallup poll in May found that seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their area, and politicians from Maine to Texas have had to grapple with the public’s calls to bar the resource-hungry projects from their backyards.  

Hong’s narrow defeat is a loss for the data center moratorium movement, particularly in Wisconsin, which already has dozens of centers littering the state. Crowley, now the Democratic nominee, has called for more regulation of data centers, but has explicitly denounced a data center moratorium, calling it a “short-term” solution. “I don’t think he’s going to make [data centers] a front and center issue,” said Michael Ceraso, a democratic strategist and founder and director of Winning Margins. “It might pop up peripherally.” 

But Hong’s loss is far from a death knell for the anti-data center movement. While most voters would be hard-pressed to tell you what a data center was a few years ago, it has slowly become a major political issue that has helped to fuel the rise of insurgent progressives across the country. In this year’s midterm primaries, anti-data center candidates from Colorado to Kansas have been running and winning on the issue. 

The data center issue has distilled multiple grievances with establishment politicians into a simple message: The people who represent you are selling you and your community out to the highest bidder.

“It turns out that if you’re not taking money from Silicon Valley, you can fight hard for a federal moratorium on data centers,” said William Lawrence, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, in a victory speech last week after he won his House primary race in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. 

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In his Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed won after vehemently opposing the construction of new data centers. At a rally in front of a massive new OpenAI and Oracle data center campus in Saline Township, Michigan, El-Sayed denounced the proliferation of data centers. “I stand with local and state elected officials saying that we cannot approve any more of these until we have federal-level guardrails,” El-Sayed told the crowd.

In Kansas, Democratic state Sen. Cindy Holscher won her Democratic gubernatorial race after calling for a moratorium on data centers. Holscher had previously voted for a bill that would have expanded the centers. And in Colorado, Melat Kiros unseated a 15-term incumbent, Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., while running on a data center moratorium platform. 

Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of the political recruitment group Run for Something, told The Intercept that Hong’s formidable campaign underscored how motivating data center opposition is for voters.

“Francesca Hong went from unknown state legislator to within a half point of winning the Democratic nomination in large part because she clearly spoke to the frustration and fear people have about what’s happening in the economy, especially around data centers,” Litman said.

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The Sunrise Movement, which has backed anti-data center candidates, including El-Sayed, Lawrence, Kiros, and Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who won his House race last week, said that Democrats need to be at the forefront of this issue. 

“The fight against unchecked data center expansion is quickly becoming a defining political issue,” said Denae Ávila-Dickson, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement. “Democrats must be the party that stands up for people over the corporations profiting from data center expansion in our backyards, and progressive candidates are leading the way in that fight.”

The post Francesca Hong’s Loss in Wisconsin Is a Win for AI Data Centers — for Now appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit is in response to a scheme announced last month by the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social platform to charge as much as $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts. 

By offering preferred access to presidential missives, the monetization plan, dubbed “Truth API,” would violate the First Amendment rights of journalists and other members of the public to equal access to official information, the lawsuit argues, while allowing Trump to trade his public statements for cold hard cash.

“Trump is trying to enrich himself by privatizing government information that he has no right to sell,” said Ben Muessig, editor-in-chief of The Intercept. “We won’t let it stand.”

The complaint filed in the Southern District of New York also asserts that the monetization scheme, which it described as an “out-and-out plan of extortion,” would violate the Fifth Amendment by charging “unreasonable sums” for equal access to government information and by undermining the right to equal protection under the law.

“This lawsuit seeks to vindicate the principle that the president of the United States cannot profit from the official government statements of the president,” said Nikhel Sus, Chief Counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which provided legal support for the lawsuit. “Every American is entitled to equal access to the president’s public statements. Individuals who pay $100,000 to the president’s personal company do not have any greater entitlement to those public statements.”

Truth API is part of a broader effort to bring Trump Media & Technology Group into the black. Despite a steep up-front cost ranging from $60,000 to $100,000 per month, the company’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn has been explicit about the potential dividends awaiting customers willing to pay — and the potential gain for Trump and other shareholders.

“Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream,” McGurn said in a July 16 press release. “As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.”

No shareholder stands to benefit more than Trump, who holds the largest single stake in the company through a trust established when he retook the White House in January 2025. At the time, his 52.1 percent stake in the company was valued at $4 billion. The company’s stock has plunged in value since entering the market, causing the value of Trump’s stake to fall to around $1 billion, according to the complaint. 

In addition to the president, the lawsuit names as defendants Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Daniel Scavino, the Executive Office of the President, and the White House Office. Representatives for the defendants and for Trump Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Truth Social has its roots in the interregnum between the two Trump administrations, when Trump, an early adopter of X who used the platform extensively in his first term as president, was banned from his beloved app and other social media platforms in 2021 in the wake of the attempted insurrection on January 6. 

Weeks after the ban, he formed Trump Media & Technology Group and announced plans for a proprietary social media platform to be known as Truth Social. The platform, essentially a right-wing clone of X, launched in 2022, and Trump Media went public in 2024 via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a process of entering the stock market that is typically subject to less scrutiny than a traditional initial public offering.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter and renaming it X, Elon Musk allowed Trump back onto the platform, and other social-media companies later followed suit. But Trump has continued to use Truth Social as his first and primary means of communication with the public. 

Still, despite enjoying the benefits of Trump’s universal name recognition and the potential for access-granting fringe benefits of investing in the company, Trump Media & Technology Group has been something of a financial loser. Just days after announcing Truth API, McGurn revealed in an earnings call on Monday that second-quarter losses had totaled $238 million.

Despite such dismal numbers, the potential return on investment for parties sinking money into the company goes beyond earnings by acting as a potential side-door for influence peddling and buying access, according to critics. Although his relationship with the administration has recently soured, few cases illustrate this more clearly than that of Justin Sun, a billionaire crypto kingpin who swiftly resolved an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission after investing $30 million in the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Other major investors with a clear interest in gaining Trump’s favor have included an Emirati powerbroker and a failed businessman under investigation for money laundering.

“If you look back through the American presidency, there’s really no comparison for this kind of self-enrichment,” said Molly White, a researcher who has written critically of Trump’s crypto ventures and their various backers. “People have made quite a stink in the past about presidents selling books or family members of presidents peddling off of their connections, and that’s certainly true. But I mean, the scale here is just unprecedented.”

Critics of the president have raised similar concerns about Truth API. In a letter to the SEC last month, Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., pointed to numerous instances in which Trump had used Truth Social to hype individual stocks, including CitiGroup, Palantir, and Intel.

“The Trump Administration is the most corrupt in the nation’s history, and questions about inappropriate insider access to information about its policies and actions have raised questions on multiple occasions,” the senators wrote. “But even amid these clouds of corruption, Trump Media’s plan to disseminate market-moving information through the President’s own company, while charging insiders for access ahead of the public for the benefit of his company — and to the detriment of the investing public — represents a shocking abuse of the office of the President and the trust of the American public for his personal gain.”

The post The Intercept Sues Trump for Selling Premium Access to Truth Social Announcements appeared first on The Intercept.

In the ever-shifting theater of America’s culture wars, conservative media has found its newest gladiatorial conscript: Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham.

It’s an unlikely promotion — and from backers who, until recently, probably couldn’t have named five WNBA players.

The reason for her esteem probably has little to do with her faultless three-point precision. In an interview with ESPN, Cunningham declared she opposed transgender women — whom she referred to as “biological men” — competing in women’s sports, arguing the issue was about “protecting young girls.” Later, she cheekily doubled down on the statement, posting an outfit photo on Instagram with the caption: “I said what I said” with a saluting emoji.

That was enough.

Almost overnight, Cunningham became more than a WNBA player. She became one of conservatism’s newest culture-war combatants: blonde, white, conventionally attractive, and playing in a league overwhelmingly composed of players of color, and with one of the largest openly LGBTQ+ player populations in professional sports.

Within days of Cunningham’s remarks, conservative media had found its new protagonist. 

Fox News host Riley Gaines, who herself rose to prominence as an anti-trans NCAA swimmer, called Cunningham “the first current high-level female athlete” willing to publicly oppose transgender participation in women’s sports, and praised her for speaking out from inside what Gaines called “the most woke league of all time.” The Daily Wire cast the now-famous finger-pointer — and on-court defender of Caitlyn Clark, another white player whose first season with the WNBA sparked racialized conversations that cast her Black opponents as too “aggressive” — as someone “now fighting for us.” Trump’s Department of Education joined in, posting a Grok AI-generated image of Cunningham wearing a crown with the caption: “Common sense prevails.”

Cunningham’s ascent into the right’s zeitgeist is by design. For generations, conservative movements have sought to anoint and weaponize cisgender white women as public-facing enforcers of social and racial hierarchy. 

While the specific rallying cry has changed throughout history, their use and ideological framing to the conservative movement has remained largely intact: They serve narratively as bulwarks against some grave impending demographic or social upset, which if allowed to come to fruition would be an assault on the current status quo of women at large. 

Ride of the Valkyries

American political history is thick with appeals to white womanhood as something endangered and therefore requiring protection, particularly against the encroaching civil rights gains of Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ communities. Since the Academy Award-winning “Birth of a Nation,” the idea that straight white women are in peril simply by living in proximity to minority groups has been repeatedly used to justify racial exclusion and stir up moral panic.

In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, southern governments launched what’s now known as the “Massive Resistance,” a series of laws to prevent integration. The campaign mobilized a movement of white women to organize through schools, newspapers, and civic groups in an effort they sold as defending white children, neighborhoods, and public education. It was largely these communities that performed the on-the-ground enforcement of segregation, going so far as to pluck out children suspected of being mixed-race from white schools. This changed the packaging of the politics of segregation: Rather than snarling racism, the message could be framed more politely as a threat to the sanctity of motherhood and child welfare.

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By the 1970s, overt defenses of racial segregation had become politically untenable on the national stage. The conservative movement’s next great cultural fight shifted toward gender. As the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and the promise of the Equal Rights Amendment changed family structures and challenged traditional gender roles, conservatives increasingly looked to white women to make the case against the nation’s expanding vision of female equality.

In the impeccably dressed mother-of-six Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative movement found its most formidable duelist against progressive feminism. Through her “STOP ERA” campaign, Schlafly argued the Equal Rights Amendment wouldn’t liberate women — it would endanger them by exposing women to the military draft, undermining mothers’ custody rights, and destabilizing the American family. 

Her message was overwhelmingly effective; the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified. As prominent legal scholar and feminist theorist Joan Williams put it, “the ERA was defeated when Schlafly turned it into a war among women over gender roles.” 

For decades, conservative politics has repeatedly tapped into this vein, transforming cultural anxieties — over motherhood, children’s safety, crime, sexuality, and gender roles — into mass movements by placing cisgender white women front and center. 

At the turn of the late ’70s, conservatives promoted Anita Bryant, a wholesome pop singer who warned that gay rights threatened America’s children. During the rise of evangelical moralism of the 1980s, the religious right elevated Patricia Pulling, the suburban Virginia mother whose campaign against the role-playing game “Dungeons & Dragons” helped ignite the Satanic Panic. From matronly children’s book authors to buxom blue-jean models, the conservative avatar is exceedingly familiar: a woman whom white men are encouraged to protect and one whom other white women are encouraged to empathize with and emulate. 

The Girls We Don’t Protect 

In her research on anti-feminist women, sociologist Rebecca Klatch found “most … are white, middle-aged, housewives, married or widowed, new to politics, and oriented toward single issues.”

But by screaming to “remember straight white women,” the right aims to make us forget anyone who sits at the edges of that definition, those long underserved by America’s promise of a truly free and equitable land. It dehumanizes women of color even further in a league where all athletes still earn a fraction of the paychecks their male counterparts take home. It shuts down any future good-faith conversations on how to allow trans athletes to compete and the sheer danger to a trans community increasingly excluded from social participation. It also serves to drown out the voices of women who support trans athletes, and often becomes a political Rorschach test to attack civil rights far beyond who makes a starting line-up. 

I don’t know if that’s what Cunningham signed up to represent, and quite frankly, I don’t know if she did either. She most recently told the press that she wants to “get back to basketball.” 

In a free-speaking democratic society, Cunningham, and every athlete, is entitled to be human: to hold opinions, and feelings, and have a political voice. She is not the first, nor will be the last, fair maiden to be cast as a sword-bearing champion for a conservative culture war. 

But if a movement’s cause is about truly protecting women, then perhaps the more revealing question to interrogate is which women it has deemed worthy of protection in the first place. Whose womanhood is treated as universal, whose safety becomes a national rallying cry, and whose voices — including those of Black women, queer women, and transgender women — are left at the margins. That hierarchy often tells us more about the movement behind it than the woman standing under the net.

The post Sophie Cunningham Is the Anti-Trans Right’s New White Woman Mascot appeared first on The Intercept.

More than three weeks later, however, it’s not clear how Rubio and the State Department intend to use the policy. Their silence since the announcement has left some advocates wondering if the policy is really just a public-relations push by the Trump administration.

Existing law already allows the State Department to block terrorists from visiting the U.S. But tucked inside the policy is language about “economic sabotage” that advocates worry could empower a broad crackdown against people associated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and campaigns to divest from fossil fuels.

“The message is to the public at large and particularly to anybody who would disagree with the government’s policies that they should tread carefully, lest they be considered a member or aligned with what the government considers to be a far-left terrorist group,” said Carrie DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute.
“I think the vagueness is the point. It’s intended to send a broad chilling effect through the public and discourage dissent.”

Rubio’s Right-Wing Fever Dream

Rubio announced the policy at a July 16 gathering of foreign diplomats where he played up the threat of what he called “far-left terrorism,” which he said had been overlooked after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot — a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy,” Rubio said.

In a press release, Rubio said that State Department officials had been instructed to deny visas to “members of Far-Left Terrorist and other aligned groups who have supported or incited acts of terrorism; supported violent criminal activity; participated in economic sabotage; financed, recruited, or provided logistical support for violent or criminal actions committed by Far-Left Terrorist and other aligned groups; and/or facilitated the convergence of Far-Left Terrorist and other aligned networks for the purposes of violent action.”

The State Department has not elaborated further on how it decides whether a foreign national is a member of a “far-left” terror group or “aligned” groups. The department did not answer questions from The Intercept about its definitions for those terms.

The policy raised major concerns, however, for Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University.

Nothing in the policy appears to restrict it to foreign nationals residing abroad, Margulies said. He is concerned that the State Department could attempt to apply it to students living in the U.S. or to other people with legal status who are applying for different visas or renewals.

“The worry is that this will be used who are already in this country, for example, foreign students,” he said. “This gives the administration a hammer to go after these people, that I think is problematic under the First Amendment, and also exceeds the authority that Secretary Rubio has.”

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Other parts of federal immigration law already give the government wide discretion to block people accused of links to terrorism, making it something of a puzzle why the government would need a new policy to block people accused more specifically of “far-left” terrorism.

Yet one provision of the policy appears to mark a shift from existing policy, Margulies said: a section singling out people accused of “economic sabotage.” That kind of language could be used to target people who have supported Palestinian calls for the boycott of Israel, or environmental activists protesting fossil fuel companies, he said.

“That’s a term broad enough to get a tank through, and so that would really be problematic under the First Amendment, because of course people in this country have a right to criticize corporations as well as government,” he said.

The Vagueness Is the Point

When Rubio announced a new policy last May targeting misinformation researchers for visa denials, the State Department followed up seven months later by announcing that it would block or deport five foreign nationals.

So far the State Department has not announced any visa denials under the latest policy. For an example of the type of people that Rubio considers to be supporters of far-left terrorism, DeCell pointed to a State Department report about Cuba’s influence network issued last month. That report named streamer Hasan Piker, Amazon Labor Union founder Christian Smalls, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Baher Azmy, the legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said it was possible that the new visa restriction policy is simply another part of the multipronged effort to build up the threat of the left ahead of the midterms.

“This is coming at the same time they’re starting this once moribund terrorist court, they’re calling Amy Goodman a far-left enemy of the state,” he said. “It might be a midterm strategy, because it does seem to be coming all at once.”

DeCell’s group recently won an injunction blocking the State Department from implementing its visa restriction policy against misinformation researchers. She expects the State Department to eventually get around to announcing visa denials, as it did with them. “The justifications for their targeting likely would be made on X, if it follows the same path,” she said.

When it does, the latest restrictions could also be vulnerable to legal challenge. While the State Department has broad discretion to deny visas to foreigners, Margulies said, it is not unlimited, particularly for those living in the United States.

“Watch this space. They may have particular people in mind. Then we may see some developments very quickly how they intend to apply this,” he said.

The post Rubio Is Trying to Keep Leftists Out of U.S. by Banning Supporters of “Economic Sabotage” appeared first on The Intercept.

Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Senate in Michigan after besting Rep. Haley Stevens by less than 1 percentage point. Not long after The Associated Press called the race on Wednesday morning, Stevens threw her “full support” behind El-Sayed. While the votes were still being counted on Tuesday night, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow — who had dropped out of the running in July — also endorsed her former opponent, acknowledging that despite a “brutal” primary race, what is most important now is to head into November as a “unified party.”

What remains to be seen is whether moderates and Democratic Party pundits will follow suit, get on board, and vote blue no matter who. 

But centrists seem more interested in saving face than a Senate majority. Complaining that primary voters picked the candidate more likely to lose on Election Day has become a face-saving tactic for moderates as they’ve watched their preferred picks lose against upstart insurgent campaigns like El-Sayed’s.

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Among them are The Atlantic’s Jon Chait, who’s never met a progressive candidate he won’t sneer at. In typical form, Chait concern-trolled last weekend over the potential that Democrats would lose Michigan’s Senate seat by picking the charismatic El-Sayed over Stevens.

“Is there a single el-Sayed supporter with enough self-awareness to admit they’re willing to accept a higher risk of defeat to elect a left-wing candidate?” Chait asked on X, citing polling showing Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers with a slight but consistent lead in the Senate race just outside the margin of error

A more honest commentator might have pointed out that El-Sayed beat back an establishment campaign with tens of millions of dollars behind it: a staggering $62 million poured into the state to boost Stevens, half of it from AIPAC, giving her and her allies a 9-to-1 spending advantage over El-Sayed. But honesty has seldom been important for Chait’s left-bashing. 

By Wednesday morning, Chait had once again reframed the race, this time as a key battle in an existential war for liberalism. He groused variously about the streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned for El-Sayed; democratic socialism; and James Carville.

“The left has played down every success by the establishment while forcing it to own every failure,” he wrote in The Atlantic. “This dynamic points to a broader asymmetry between the two factions. The mainstream liberals of the Democratic Party have focused their energies on defeating Republicans. The left-wing faction has focused on defeating them.”

Chait certainly understands that this is how power is accumulated in the Democratic Party but is upset that, for once, it’s not benefiting his wing.

He wasn’t alone. Matt Yglesias — the ubiquitous blogger whose self-styled branding as a sensible, middle-of-the road liberal belies his support for Israel and antipathy for trans people — had warned about El-Sayed’s ability to win in the general for months. 

In a post on X citing one outlier poll showing Rogers with a 10-point lead on El-Sayed — the rest of the polls show a very tight race — Yglesias whined he was “kinda dooming on this situation.”

By early this morning, the blogger was downplaying the Michigan results, saying the Democratic nominee “should be good enough” to beat the Republican this year, even though El-Sayed “seems like a distinctly bad candidate” who is likely to “underperform the fundamentals.”

This is the kind of frustration that sets in when you realize that lurching to the right is putting you out of step with the party as whole, but you still want to be sure to appeal to the people who pay the bills.

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Making sure donors and power brokers are confident their interests are still being represented fuels how some party hacks are waging war against the left flank. Center for American Progress president and CEO Neera Tanden’s war on El-Sayed, waged on X, her platform of choice, was prosecuted in shockingly bad faith, even considering the source. Tanden implied that El-Sayed is a toxic misogynist, said his campaign had a “serious sexism” problem, and went all-in on every single attack line that came out of the Stevens campaign and the special interests that funded it.

“If I was the El-Sayed campaign, I probably wouldn’t want to be associated with Platner advisors’ previous push for [Graham] Platner as a future President given that it sounds grotesque today,” Tanden said on July 9. She continued forebodingly: “But then again, his campaign has all the same advisors so maybe he will be next.”

El-Sayed’s detractors have powerful friends. The biggest money targeting El-Sayed comes from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has already spent over $100 million on midterm races around the country, including more than $30 million directly boosting Stevens against El-Sayed.

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That massive spending comes as no surprise for two reasons: First, El-Sayed has been a critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the country’s conduct in general. Second, he’s of Egyptian descent, which is almost certainly a motivator for AIPAC, which didn’t throw much of any cash against Graham Platner, a white man in Maine, during his Senate campaign — despite Platner taking equally strong stances against Israel. 

Instead, AIPAC bundled $538,000 in donations for incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, and groups linked to its powerful super PAC pushed at least $750,000 into a state PAC opposing Platner. It’s a far cry from $60 million, but perhaps in the general election, Troy Jackson, who took over from Platner, will face larger financial attacks. 

In the waning days of the campaign, Stevens leaned into her support from AIPAC, all but overtly accusing El-Sayed of being an antisemite. Many of her supporters, including Angie Smith, a school board secretary in suburban Detroit whose backing Stevens continued to celebrate, have engaged in the kind of blatant, ugly Islamophobia that’s been simmering for a decade but was at its height during the Bush and Obama presidencies. Smith went viral for saying in an interview: “Don’t come out speaking only Arabic. Don’t come out with your Arabic music on.”

Stevens herself spent the last week of the race emphasizing her Michigan roots, a clear comment on El-Sayed’s “otherness,” and hit her opponent with broadside dog-whistle attacks, tweeting at her opponent: “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.”

But while Israel and racism were undeniably motivating factors for some of El-Sayed’s Democratic naysayers, and will surely continue to be, the real issue is the ongoing struggle for control of the Democratic Party between the increasingly out-of-touch, more conservative establishment and the increasingly progressive, pissed-off base. 

Over and over again in this primary cycle, progressive insurgents have defeated centrist picks — incumbent and otherwise — and even disasters like Platner haven’t stemmed the rising tide around the country.

Yet even in the context of a progressive insurgency, El-Sayed’s win is notable. He not only faced down AIPAC, but also nearly the entire weight of the entrenched Democratic establishment — and won. Stevens touted her backing by party leaders like South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, and a host of local, state, and national leaders. Meanwhile, El-Sayed had the support of progressive party leaders, with Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among many others, in his corner. 

Now that El-Sayed is the party’s nominee, Stevens’s supporters, both in Michigan and nationally, will have to decide if they want a progressive Muslim in the Senate for six years or to risk continued GOP control. If they’re really worried about the outcome and truly committed to Democratic success in November, they’ll set aside whatever issues they have with El-Sayed and go all-in on his candidacy. 

Any attempt to rationalize another way forward means that they’re more concerned with maintaining control over the levers of power of the party and disciplining their own voters. What they fail to realize is that you can’t enforce the iron law of institutions when there’s nothing to rule over. 

The post There’s No Time for Centrists to Be Doomers About El-Sayed’s Victory appeared first on The Intercept.

Voters in the key swing state chose El-Sayed over the establishment’s choice of Rep. Haley Stevens, whose campaign received about $60 million in support from pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs, making the race the most expensive Democratic primary ever. El-Sayed won by a margin of around 1 percentage point, according to The Associated Press, which called the race in his favor Wednesday morning. 

The victory of El-Sayed, a former public health official endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is the latest sign of the growing influence of the Democratic left. And it’s the most staggering illustration yet of the party establishment’s waning grip on power and the unpopularity of the pro-Israel lobby giant, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, amid shifting American sentiment on Israel and Palestine. 

Through its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, AIPAC broke its own single-race spending record by funding $30 million in attack ads against El-Sayed. Ads that dominated airwaves, flooded streaming services, and stuffed mailboxes in the final month of the race misrepresented El-Sayed’s previous comments about Michelle Obama and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to allege misogyny, and attempted to paint El-Sayed as a terrorist sympathizer. 

El-Sayed’s platform, boosted by an army of 12,000 door-knocking volunteers, centered on policies such as Medicare for All policy, addressing cost of living issues in the state, and removing corporate spending from politics. But it was the two candidates’ stances on Israel and Palestine that came to define the race. El-Sayed condemned Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and committed to ending U.S. military aid to Israel. His criticism of Israel also extended to its joint U.S. war on Iran, which he decried as military glut that could be spent instead on healthcare and education in his state.

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Stevens opposed any conditioning of military aid to Israel. She has consistently voted in favor of weapons transfers since first assuming office in 2019, including last month when she sided with Republicans against an amendment in a Pentagon budget bill that would have cut military spending for Israel. When AIPAC began pouring money into the Stevens campaign, El-Sayed effectively turned those millions of dollars into a key campaign issue, pointing to Stevens as an illustration of the danger of lobby spending and corporate money in politics.  

It’s not the first race in Michigan shaped by AIPAC money. Former Rep. Andy Levin — who was considered the most progressive Jewish member of the House because of his support for Palestinian statehood — lost his seat after redistricting forced a showdown with Stevens in 2022. In that race, Levin was also dramatically outspent by outside money, with AIPAC buying $4 million in ads to attack him and boost Stevens. 

El-Sayed’s success, however, shows a major shift in politics since the start of Israel’s most recent war on Gaza. Cutting off military support to Israel has become a mainstream position among Democrats. And AIPAC has since become a politically toxic entity — “a four letter word in Democratic politics,” Levin told The Intercept.

“Most people still don’t vote on Israel and Palestine, they vote on their pocketbooks,” said Levin, who endorsed El-Sayed. “But if you’re not willing to say that Israel perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, Democratic primary voters are like, ‘OK, you’re bought and paid.’ The kind of truth-telling about Israel and Palestine is tied into the truth-telling about the economy, and people wanting real solutions.”  

Leftists have claimed victories against establishment picks throughout this year’s midterm primaries, running on similar platforms addressing affordability and support for Palestine. But those wins have so far been in House races, mostly in metropolitan areas where leftist progressive politics have gained a foothold in recent years, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Jersey, and California. In House races in Michigan, leftists also found success with wins for Donavan McKinney, a state representative who defeated the AIPAC-backed incumbent Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar, and Will Lawrence, a progressive climate activist who beat a pair of moderate Democratic opponents. 

Both McKinney and Lawrence, a co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, had an endorsement from Sanders and a mutual endorsement from El-Sayed. And both ran on a similar platform of lowering the cost of living and opposing war — including Israel’s genocide in Gaza — and for Lawrence, opposing AI data centers. While McKinney is expected to win the general election in a solid blue district, Lawrence now faces a Republican incumbent, Rep. Tom Barrett, in a purple district that had previously been held by Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin.  

El-Sayed’s win is the first leftist victory in a Senate race this election cycle. 

Unlike other leftist wins so far in the midterms outside of Michigan, El-Sayed faces a difficult challenge in the general election from a formidable Trump-endorsed opponent. Polls have shown El-Sayed neck-and-neck with Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman and FBI agent who ran unopposed in Tuesday’s primary. In 2024, Rogers ran for Senate and lost to Slotkin by less than 20,000 votes. In Michigan, where voters swung for Trump by about 1 percentage point over Kamala Harris in 2024, the November election is expected to be the most significant midterm test for the left. An El-Sayed win in November is essential to the Democratic effort to regain control of the Senate.

Electability has been among the largest criticisms from Stevens and her supporters against El-Sayed. Conventional establishment thinking maintains that progressive policy is not popular among most Americans. To beat Republicans, the centrists say, Democrats need to run a more moderate candidate who can appeal to more conservative voters. Late last month, the Stevens campaign circulated a quote from Rogers, who called El-Sayed “radical” and claimed “I don’t think he likes America.” Stevens suggested Rogers would prefer to face El-Sayed because of his leftist platform.  

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Last week, Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., a Stevens surrogate, said El-Sayed was so polarizing that she could not back him against Rogers in the general election. “I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue,” she said, a reference to his campaign events in April where political streamer and commentator Hasan Piker stumped with El-Sayed at university campuses. Despite efforts by the Stevens campaign, AIPAC, and corporate media outlets to play up Piker’s comments faulting U.S. foreign policy for 9/11, there’s little evidence that criticism has resonated with voters.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee released its first attack ad against the “radical” El-Sayed on Wednesday, referring to him by his full name and referring to Piker’s 9/11 comments, a preview of the continued anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tactics that are expected to ratchet up in the general.

The progressive left has long argued that its platform will perform better in front of a broader electorate hungry for political and economic change. Michiganders have paved the way for El-Sayed to try and prove just that. His fate in the general election might reverberate into the 2028 campaign cycle, as the Democratic Party looks to decide what type of candidate to nominate for president. 

Soon after NBC News made its call, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow — who dropped out of the U.S. Senate race in July — offered her endorsement to El-Sayed. On Wednesday, Stevens — along with Democratic minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand — endorsed El-Sayed. Stevens said she had spoken with El-Sayed and was “proud to offer my support as he takes on Mike Rogers in the general election.”

“We’re gonna build a movement that reaches out to everybody — I know not everybody’s gonna agree with me on everything, that’s not how this works. But I know they agree with me on the need to beat Mike Rogers and the need to hold Donald Trump accountable, and the need to provide people healthcare, and the need to address the affordability crisis,” El-Sayed said at the Wednesday press conference, flanked by McMorrow and Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel Jr. “I’m looking forward to unifying together,”

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El-Sayed argues the same anti-corporate messaging that has appealed to his progressive base translates to all voters, transcending partisan political framing. A week before Tuesday’s primary, El-Sayed told The Intercept’s Akela Lacy, “Most people don’t walk around asking, ‘Where do I sit on the left–right spectrum?’ Most people are walking around asking, ‘What the hell’s going to happen if I get sick? What’s going to happen if I lose my home or I lose my job?’ … I think those are the things that unite most Michiganders … I’m looking to build a movement that pushes back on the bipartisan consensus that we ought to build a politics that is paid for by corporations.”

Levin said that voters want a candidate who is “authentic,” “brave,” and “speaks truth to power.” He pointed to Michigan’s historic embrace of progressive Democratic politics, such as the nominations of Jesse Jackson’s presidential candidacy in 1988 and Sanders’s in 2016. 

It was in Michigan where Democrats in 2024 started the Uncommitted Movement as a protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel during its genocidal war in Gaza. El-Sayed voted “uncommitted” in that primary. Stevens and her surrogates have attacked his “uncommitted” vote to try and show El-Sayed’s lack of loyalty to the party, despite his immediate endorsement of Harris one day after Biden dropped out of the running.

Levin describes Michigan as the “ultimate swing state,” but cautioned that many political pundits misunderstand what that says about the state’s electorate.

“People act like it means we all must run to the mushy middle. But that’s not what a swing is at all. If a swing just sat in the middle, you would never get on it. It’d be boring. That’s not what it’s about,” Levin said. “We have to realize that ‘swing’ means that people go back and forth. And people in both parties right now — this is national — they are so sick of politics. They are so sick of the money in politics. They are so sick of the rich people and the corporations and the special interests [that] basically do whatever they want in American politics.”

Update: August 5, 2026, 1:22 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include news of Donavan McKinney’s victory, a National Republican Senatorial Committee attack ad, Haley Stevens’s endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, and remarks from El-Sayed’s victory speech.

The post Abdul El-Sayed Beats the Democratic Establishment and AIPAC in Michigan appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Paths From Ferguson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grassroots Energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Perfect Foil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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