Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley beat the odds to eke out a victory by less than a 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 re-entered 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 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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freeing Actual Fraudsters

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Focus on Immigrants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$300 Billion a Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presidential Run?

Antipathy to the left now defines much of his politics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Negotiate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet some prejudice has also been expressed in real life. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Center of Global Conspiracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic Freedom at Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

“War on the Cuban People”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Low-T Issue

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth has a problem with low testosterone. It’s left him suffering from what you might call an acute crisis of masculinity. And I’m pretty sure that he caught it from Teddy Roosevelt.

Bear with me. I’ll explain.

Last week, the Trump administration’s preening, strutting, wanna-be he-man announced a new mandatory annual screening for troops age 30 and older, including women, for testosterone deficiency. Troops under 30 can volunteer to be screened, and anyone with low hormone levels will have the option to receive testosterone replacement therapy.

“It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capability,” said Hegseth, by ensuring “you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight” on the “brutal and unrelenting” modern battlefield. Like all Hegseth initiatives, he linked it to “lethality” — now the animating feature of his life. He called topping off troops’ testosterone levels a “sacred duty.” 

Anyone who has observed Hegseth for more than 15 seconds in the last 15 years could tell you the man is riddled with deep insecurities. His quest to fully transition the Defense Department to what he calls “The High-T Department of War” is just the latest manifestation of nagging anxieties about himself and the wheel-spinning, never-winning military he leads. 

Poor Pete’s woes have been piling up since he headed off to college at Princeton, if not before. Hegseth acts like he was drafted against his will by the Ivy League and escaped it by joining the Army National Guard as an infantry officer in 2003. He fondly recalls guarding “Islamic assholes” at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, alongside “hard-working, God-fearing, America-loving middle-class men” whom he contrasts with “millionaires at Princeton,” a school he derides whenever he can.

Stuffed in Hegseth’s Army-issue green duffle bag when he arrived at Gitmo was a sheet of plain white copy paper inside a black plastic frame with a quote from his hero, former President Teddy Roosevelt. This long love affair with TR has continued over the decades. Pete wrote a ridiculous 2016 book, “In the Arena,” based on the “timeless truths of Teddy Roosevelt’s iconic ‘Man in the Arena’ speech” from 1910. And he still references that speech to this day and routinely works Teddy into his public remarks whenever he can.

Last year, Hegseth wanted the Pentagon to cut ties with the Boy Scouts of America because, he believed, “the organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt” had strayed from their mission to “cultivate masculine values.” (He later bullied the Scouts into submission.) And just last month, he talked up TR to U.S. troops in Cuba — where Roosevelt fought during the Spanish-American War — using his hero as proof of America’s right to intervene “in the affairs of Latin American nations.”

No one more exemplified the anxieties of privileged men of his time than Teddy Roosevelt, who grew up in the swirl of post-Civil War America in which urbanization, industrialization, a new emphasis on “brainwork,” and new technologies led to a crippling novel condition dubbed neurasthenia: nervous exhaustion, or a deficiency of “nerve-force.” This affliction was “modern and originally American,” according to the then-most influential expert on the now-archaic medical diagnosis.

Rich, white Anglo-Saxon men like Teddy professed complete cultural, racial, and sexual superiority but grew extremely anxious it was being stolen from them. (Yes, you guessed it: Immigrants, radicals, and independent, unduly educated, or otherwise unruly “new” women were prime culprits.) Men were fast becoming feeble and feminized; only through manly endeavors like weightlifting, hiking, hunting, sports, horseback riding, and excursions into the wild could they counteract the debilitating effects of over-civilization. Roosevelt, for example, transformed himself from a frail, sickly weakling who was called a “sissy” by peers and “Jane-Dandy” by the press into a man’s man via boxing, shooting, wrestling, and travel out West, where he reinvented himself as a cowboy.

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The scholar Yeonsik Jung summed up the neurasthenic age nicely, writing: “Channeled through the medical knowledge of neurology, it made American men’s racial, sexual, and spatial anxieties function to act out their racist, misogynist, nativist, and imperialist impulses which legitimized exclusionary political techniques toward the racial and sexual others such as the U.S. imperial expansion in the 1890s and 1900s.” These white American men had to win back, as another scholar put it, “the potency of their violent masculinity—their ability to out-savage the savage” on the American frontier before turning overseas to places like the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua. Roosevelt’s own expansionist imperialism and his campaign against “race suicide” were firmly rooted in this toxic ferment. When the United States initially failed to annex Hawaii after a group of missionaries and pineapple plantation interests took over and set up their own government in the 1890s, for example, Roosevelt called the reluctance “a crime against white civilization.”

The framed quote Hegseth stuffed into that Gitmo duffle, which he also took to the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are lines from “The Man in the Arena” speech:

Am I striving valiantly?

Is my face marred by dust and sweat and blood? Am I spending myself in a worthy cause?

Am I daring greatly?

Am I in the arena?

“Spending myself” is an intriguing phrase here that’s key to my diagnosis of Hegseth. I’m not a medical doctor, but long ago I studied the intersection of medicine and masculinity in the late 19th and early 20th century en route to my Ph.D. A great panic of the era surrounded what historians came to call the “spermatic economy,” the belief that a man’s semen was a finite reserve of vital energy — like money in a bank account — and “spending” this essential life force through masturbation or excessive sex would leave him depleted, leading to nervous exhaustion’s below-the-waist variant: sexual neurasthenia. (President Donald Trump, who espouses pseudoscientific claptrap about good and bad “genes” also reportedly believes humans are closed-loop systems that, like a battery, have a finite amount of energy.)

Such fin de siècle fears of debilitation led to “rejuvenation” cures like French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard injecting himself and others with crushed guinea pig testicles — launching the field of “organotherapy” — and Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach’s surgical procedure, a partial vasectomy to restore vigor which found favor with patients from psychoanalysis founder and noted head case Sigmund Freud to William Butler Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet. (“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”)

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Hegseth is heir to this utter nuttery — obsessed as it was with limits on semen spending and banking one’s virility. His hysteria over the military becoming “effeminate” has led him to conclude that those who wish to “master the profession of arms” must have their testosterone tanks topped off. And he claims, without evidence, that pumping troops full of this hormone — which people of every sex and gender produce — will improve “combat readiness.” Hegseth also thinks his new policy will make troops “strong, resilient and capable.”

But while testosterone is tied to muscle mass, it isn’t linked with actual strength. A 2019 study found that men who received injected testosterone while engaged in intense exercise and a restricted diet — meant to mimic “strenuous military operations” — did not see gains in strength or endurance; a 2022 follow-up also found no increase in physical performance. Moreover, supplementing testosterone actually signals the body to shut down its own natural production, which can shrink the testicles and reduce one’s sperm count. (Paging Dr. Steinach!)

Hegseth appears to believe more is better, advocating for a “high T” fighting force. But high levels of testosterone — which is currently classified as a controlled substance with potential for abuse — can lead to acne, balding, breast tissue growth, impaired ability of the heart to pump blood, infertility, erectile dysfunction, and increased risk of death.

Of course, it’s hard to say what’s normal if you’re testing millions of healthy people. Testosterone levels can change depending on when a patient is tested, whether they have recently eaten, exercised heavily, or are sick, among other factors, Dr. Alvin Matsumoto, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine, recently told The Intercept. For example, in about a third of men whose testosterone initially tests low, a second test produces a normal result. Tests also have high inter-lab variability. On that front, doctors usually assess testosterone levels only when symptoms of low T appear, and less than 6 percent of men between 30 and 79 actually have a deficiency.

Last week, a group of senators called out Hegseth for his bizarre obsession with troops’ testosterone, noting his department “provided no evidence that this sweeping new policy will improve force readiness or health, nor has it explained the scientific basis, costs, or risks associated with implementing it across the force.” They also pointed to “recent repeated efforts to redefine military culture around an exaggerated conception of masculinity.”

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Exaggerated masculinity is an apt description for Hegseth. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” he bemoaned a plot to manufacture “soft men, and a weak military.” He describes an effort to make the armed forces “fatter,” “slower,” and “effeminate” by those “obsessed” with “neutering our military,” and delves into the dangers posed by “Pentagon pussies.”

After 18 months of crackpot policies and puerile posturing at the helm of the War Department, Hegseth’s hysteria has only grown. Like Roosevelt, Hegseth is forever struggling to display his manhood through physical exertion — posting videos of himself engaging in humiliating fitness challenges. Similarly, he’s been propping up America’s long-sagging martial prowess by beating up on the likes of Venezuela, attacking elementary school kids in Iran, blowing up unarmed boats packed with civilians in the Caribbean Sea, and threatening tiny Cuba, where his hero Teddy won fame for a Spanish-American War charge up San Juan Hill.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick” was Roosevelt’s foreign policy prescription. But from the war against the Houthis last year to the war on Iran today, Hegseth has found that his stick just doesn’t measure up. The resulting insecurity has led the emasculated War secretary to fire women and Black men from top leadership positions, block the promotion of women military officers, banish transgender service members, and denounce “fat generals and admirals” and “females” whom he believes “can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men.” He has now added low-T troops to the list of scapegoats for his department’s underperformance, instead of examining his failings as a leader.

Hegseth believes you can measure manhood by testing testosterone, the same way he believes you can kill your way to victory on the battlefield. It’s part of a mélange of flaccid fallacies and fantasies that seem to dominate the worldview of a man who paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of raping her, whose former sister-in-law accused him of “abusive” behavior toward his second wife, and whose own mother once called out the fact that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” And as America’s wars go south, Hegseth has become ever more unhinged and his public tantrums more pronounced. “You have Trump derangement syndrome!” he snapped at Michigan Sen. Gary Peters this week, after failing to admit earlier claims about victory in the Iran war were premature. 

Hegseth is exactly where he wants to be — “in the arena” — even though it’s abundantly clear his crisis of masculinity is becoming a catastrophe for his department, the rest of America, and great swaths of the globe, from the Caribbean to Iran. All the testosterone in the world isn’t going to win America’s wars, achieve Hegseth’s dream of turning “soft men” hard, or transform “Pentagon pussies” into something more in line with his fantasies, much less cure the crushing insecurities swirling in the brain of America’s fragile war secretary and the deep deficiency that has long plagued him.

The post Pete Hegseth’s Crisis of Masculinity appeared first on The Intercept.

Seven Democrats issued a statement Wednesday night lamenting that they cannot vote for the latest draft of the bill, citing weak provisions aimed at tamping down Donald Trump’s crypto self-enrichment, among other issues. In a joint statement, they pledged to keep working with Republicans to “get this over the finish line.”

Other Democrats say they have had enough of crypto, however. The problems with the bill run much deeper than Trump’s corruption, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said at a Wednesday speech, and it is time for Democrats to openly break with the industry and its $189 million in campaign funds.

“This bill is in front of the Senate because the industry paid for it,” Murphy said. “We should, in this election, make crypto’s purchase of our political process, AI’s purchase of our political process, a major campaign issue.”

The two sides staked out their position as Republicans released a draft text of the far-reaching bill known as the Clarity Act, which would create an industry-friendly regulatory structure for cryptocurrencies.

Critics say there are many problems with the bill, including lax consumer protections and loopholes that would enable money laundering. Nothing in the monthslong fight over the legislation has generated as much controversy as Trump’s self-dealing, however.

Between the $TRUMP meme coin and other ventures, Trump profited at least $1.4 billion off crypto last year. Democrats have proposed requiring Trump to divest himself of his crypto ventures and put enforcement in the hands of Democratic state attorneys general.

Instead, Republicans issued a proposal, with Trump’s blessing, that would prevent him from issuing new meme coins and put enforcement in the hands of his own Department of Justice and would not be enforceable after he leaves office.

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No matter what’s in the legislation, the bill is meaningless if it leaves enforcement to Trump’s own administration, said Mark Hays, the associate director for cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress.

“I don’t think anybody who is following the DOJ seriously thinks they will do that,” he said. “That is just not how this administration works.”

Even Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has often sided with crypto in the past, said he opposes the language in the bill addressing Trump. Schiff told reporters at the Capitol that that text gives the appearance it applies to Trump and his family without actually doing so.

“It’s a complete nonstarter,” he said.

The bill’s flaws led the seven mostly centrist Democrats to issue a statement hours after the release of the draft text saying that they could not vote for it in its current form.

“Key provisions including those addressing ethics for elected officials, consumer protection, illicit finance, conflicts of interest and market integrity must be strengthened. We have been working in good faith with our Republican colleagues for the past year and will continue doing so to get this over the finish line,” said the group, which included Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., one of the top negotiators on the bill.

The time for Democrats and Republicans to reach a compromise is slipping fast, however. The Senate goes into recess on August 7, and few observers expect Congress to take the measure up again as the midterms approach.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that he hopes to put the measure to a vote before senators leave town.

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Democrats are nervously eying the industry’s war chest if they are put on the record as opposing the Clarity Act. Companies including Coinbase, the largest publicly traded crypto company, have contributed $189 million into super PACs and candidate campaign funds to influence the midterms.

In the past, some of the spending has benefited Democrats such as Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz. Yet it may have also contributed to Democrats losing the Senate in 2024.

Murphy, in the Wednesday speech at the Center for American Progress, said it would be better to attack the industry than try to work with it.

“They are spending money in order to get a pro-crypto bill passed through the United States Senate and House of Representatives,” Murphy said. “And there are, I guess, two approaches that the Democratic Party could take. One approach is to just do what the crypto industry wants and then cross our fingers and hope they don’t spend money against us in the next election. Good luck with that strategy. The second approach is to make the industry’s brazen attempts to buy our political process a campaign issue.”

The post Trump’s Crypto Corruption Puts Centrist Democrats in Bind appeared first on The Intercept.

The 216–212 vote on the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act passed mostly along party lines after lawmakers were denied a separate vote to remove Section 219, which would create a permanent initiative to merge U.S. and Israeli defense tech.

“Codifying the integration of our military technology and supply chains with those of any other country is dangerous,” said Massie, one of seven Republicans to buck party lines and vote against the NDAA. He was joined by Reps. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma; Tim Burchett of Tennessee; Eli Crane of Arizona; Harriet Hageman of Wyoming; Anna Paulina Luna of Florida; and Chip Roy of Texas.

Six Democrats voted for it: Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas; Don Davis of North Carolina; Jared Golden of Maine; Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Adam Gray of California; and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.

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Section 219 would establish a United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative and require the defense secretary to designate a Pentagon executive agent responsible for coordinating bilateral defense research, development, testing, evaluation, and industrial cooperation.

Massie, who sought to remove the provision alongside Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept ahead of the vote that institutionalizing the relationship would create long-term national security risks.

Doing so with Israel would create “a lopsided arrangement” in which American national security is unnecessarily compromised, he added. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., similarly referred to the provision as “an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy,” in a statement on social media.

Massie also pointed out that codifying the initiative would make it more difficult for future presidents to withdraw from the arrangement.

“Enshrining this broad agreement and the permanent position it creates in legislation removes the flexibility of future Presidents to withdraw from such an arrangement,” Massie said. He further argued that it “requires a treaty to effect, not an amendment buried in a law as presented here.”

The provision, previously numbered Section 224, has generated controversy since The Intercept reported on it in June. The Intercept found that it closely resembled the U.S.–Israel FUTURES Act, introduced by Reps. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, and Davis, with companion legislation from Sens. Ted Budd, R-N.C., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. All four lawmakers have received substantial campaign support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel groups, while the FUTURES Act itself received public backing from AIPAC and the neoconservative foreign policy think tank FDD Action. Massie lost his primary for reelection to his Kentucky House seat in the spring, after President Donald Trump and AIPAC both backed his opponent.

The standalone FUTURES Act did not advance, but many of its core concepts subsequently appeared in the NDAA.

Massie and Khanna later led an amendment to strike Section 219, joined by Democratic Reps. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts; Jesús “Chuy” García of Illinois; Rashida Tlaib of Michigan; Don Beyer of Virginia; Jill Tokuda of Hawaii; Derek Tran of California; and Joe Courtney of Connecticut. The amendment was not made eligible for floor consideration. Luna, the Florida Republican, separately sought to strike Section 219, but her amendment was also denied a vote.

Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., rejected Massie’s sovereignty concerns.

“There is no world that the United States government gives away our most elite military weaponry or technology to our allies, including Israel,” Stutzman told The Intercept. “Just because we are collaborating with our allies to work towards a common goal of safe citizens doesn’t mean we are giving away American sovereignty.”

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Stutzman’s office previously told this reporter that Section 219, then numbered Section 224, originated with Jackson’s office. Stutzman separately told Responsible Statecraft that his own proposal to replace direct U.S. military assistance to Israel with trade and defense cooperation grew out of conversations with Israeli contacts.

Also on Wednesday, House Republicans passed a $95 billion budget plan to fund the war on Iran and impose new restrictions on elections.

House passage does not make Section 219 law. The Senate’s version of the NDAA, which has yet to pass, contains its own version of the defense technology initiative, leaving the proposal’s ultimate fate dependent on further Senate action and negotiations between the chambers.

The post GOP Rep. Called Israeli–U.S. Defense Tech Integration “Dangerous.” The House Passed It Anyway. appeared first on The Intercept.

William Lawrence is running a very different campaign.

In a purple congressional district in Michigan, Lawrence, a co-founder of the progressive Sunrise Movement, is calling for a moratorium on new data centers and labeling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

The approach mirrors that of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has endorsed Lawrence.

Both men are making strong showings in the polls, and now the centrists are fighting back. A shadowy group is running misleading ads that question Lawrence’s progressive bona fides.

The line of attack is telling, Lawrence told The Intercept.

“People are sick of the status quo,” he said. “We have seen this in many cases in other elections this cycle — that corporate centrists are attacking progressives for not being progressive enough. And it shows you what voters are hungry for is change.”

An unabashed progressive, Lawrence breaks the mold of the typical candidate to run for a seat like Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, which is centered around the state capital of Lansing and the college town of East Lansing.

The district was previously represented by centrist Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who now serves in the Senate, and is currently held by Republican first-term Rep. Tom Barrett.

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The other two candidates running in Michigan’s August 4 primary hew closer to Slotkin’s mold. Bridget Brink is a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who quit in protest of President Donald Trump’s policies on the war with Russia, and Matt Maasdam is a former Navy SEAL who served as a military aide to President Barack Obama.

Unlike Lawrence, both declined to call Israel’s war on Gaza genocide at a debate.

Lawrence also comes from a starkly different background: While Brink and Maasdam traveled the corridors of power in Washington, Lawrence focused on building grassroots power, first through his role co-founding the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which backed the Green New Deal, and more recently helping found the Michigan Rent Is Too Damn High coalition.

Mutual Endorsements

On July 7, Lawrence and El-Sayed announced that they were endorsing each other. Like Lawrence, El-Sayed is running in the progressive lane in his primary while arguing that it will not hurt his electability in the general.

“We have a lot of people who want to back both of us,” Lawrence said. “Given that the two of us both prioritize having a very robust, grassroots campaign rather than just relying on tens of millions of dollars in dark money like our respective opponents, it is especially beneficial for us to be able to integrate our grassroots operations.”

Although no independent polls of the race have been released, Lawrence’s campaign commissioned one showing him leading the pack. Another commissioned by Brink’s campaign showed her ahead.

Now that Lawrence has demonstrated that he has a shot at winning, the attacks have begun.

The Congressional Black Caucus is targeting him over a podcast episode in which Lawrence remarked to a Black anti-war activist during a conversation on organizing that he was frustrated with the position of some older Black political leaders backing “capitalist, imperialist American power.”

Lawrence says his comments have been misrepresented while apologizing for his choice of words.

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Meanwhile, a super PAC called the Crush MAGA PAC is targeting Lawrence, rather than the Republican holding the seat. The group has plowed more than $500,000 into a highly misleading ad that accuses Lawrence of investing in “Wall Street, big oil, and data centers” and campaigning against Democrats for supporting the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which sought to pressure party candidates over Israel’s war on Gaza.

The investments highlighted in the anti-Lawrence ad make up a small portion of the $11,000 Lawrence has invested in a mutual fund; the mutual fund, not Lawrence himself, chose them. And, for his part, Lawrence eventually supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

The source of the ad campaign against Lawrence is unclear, but he has speculated that it may be powered by pro-Israel donors.

Crush MAGA PAC is affiliated with another group called the Save Democracy PAC, which has received money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC, United Democracy Project. United Democracy Project, however, denied getting involved in the Michigan congressional race. (Neither Crush MAGA PAC nor Save Democracy PAC responded to requests for comment.)

If Lawrence succeeds in the primary, he will have to win in a general election in a purple district. He believes he can show that progressive candidates can win in split districts, pointing to the election and reelection of Congressional Progressive Caucus member Rep. Chris Deluzio in a swing district in Pennsylvania.

“He’s not throwing people under the bus, and he has joined the progressive caucus, and he has now turned that into a more comfortable district. He has been winning with healthy margins,” Lawrence said. “That is what I hope to be able to do as well.”

The post William Lawrence Is Running in a Purple Michigan District — on His Pro-Palestine Credentials appeared first on The Intercept.

Connie Chan, a progressive member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, already has the backing of establishment Democratic figures such as Pelosi and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., along with influential local labor groups. But the endorsement from Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, the political advocacy offshoot of TrackAIPAC, is a notable move to further differentiate Chan from her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener. Wiener came out 11 percentage points ahead of Chan in California’s June primary election, sending the two to a general election runoff that excluded Saikat Chakrabarti, then TrackAIPAC’s preferred candidate. 

“In Congress, we will oppose any aid to Israel and do everything in our power to stop their government’s genocidal actions against the Palestinian people,” Chan said in a statement to The Intercept. “We are proud to stand with groups like End Citizens United and Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption to fight to fix our democracy.”

Israel and Palestine have featured heavily in the race to replace Pelosi, who is retiring at the end of the current congressional term. Days after Chakrabarti’s defeat, he dedicated his remaining campaign funds to form a PAC to support Chan, citing her position on sending U.S. weapons to Israel and her vow to “vote to end all military aid to Israel – offensive and defensive.”

To earn TrackAIPAC’s endorsement, Chan filled out the group’s questionnaire, in which politicians seeking the group’s backing swear off money from pro-Israel lobby groups like the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, agree that Israel’s war in Gaza amounts to a genocide, and promise to oppose all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, consistent with positions Chan had taken earlier in the race.

Last week, the majority of House Democrats voted in favor of cutting military aid to Israel from the National Defense Authorization Act legislation, which sets the budget for Pentagon spending. The measure failed, but the vote marked a dramatic shift in a Congress that has long granted military aid to Israel with scant opposition. With the recent endorsement and arms embargo pledge, Chan signaled her position among the changing tides in the party. She also is against U.S. involvement in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and said on her website that she would have voted in favor of the failed House resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. support for the war. 

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“We heard from many of Connie’s constituents in San Francisco, as well as supporters around the country, who wanted a clear statement of her positions on Gaza, Lebanon, and America’s role in both,” a TrackAIPAC spokesperson told The Intercept in a statement. “We were proud and pleased to offer her that opportunity through our endorsement questionnaire, an opportunity her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener, has not taken.”

For his part, Wiener makes a distinction between offensive and so-called defensive weapons to Israel. He says that he would vote in favor of the Block the Bombs Act in the House, which seeks to halt arms transfers of certain munitions to Israel, but that he backs providing U.S. support for Israel’s missile interceptor systems Iron Dome and David’s Sling. Earlier in the race, Chan had taken a similar position, telling Mission Local in January that offensive weapons should be banned while U.S. support for defensive weapons should be paired with humanitarian aid to Gaza. In recent months, she has shifted toward an arms embargo on all U.S. weapons to Israel.

Positions Wiener held earlier in his political career, such as opposing local resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and supporting state legislation that free speech advocates have said censors pro-Palestine expression in schools, continued to follow him on the campaign trail. Wiener has remained an opponent of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, while Chan’s platform calls for sanctions on Israel over the genocide in Gaza and its expansion of West Bank settlements and asserts the free speech right to boycott. The TrackAIPAC endorsement pledge also opposes efforts to pass laws that punish people who participate in the BDS movement.

Last month, Wiener was chased out of the San Francisco Trans March by attendees who called out his record on Palestine, with one attendee yelling, “I think your policy on genocide in Gaza is terrible — you do not belong here anymore.” Days earlier, another person filmed his confrontation with Wiener at a bar during a World Cup match, calling him out on his support for Israel and his housing policy. 

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Wiener decried the incidents as harassment, a line that both Chan and Pelosi also held, condemning both confrontations. Chan said she understood the role of public disagreements, but added, “As someone who has been a target of hate and threats of violence I stand firm and threats of violence and hate speech.”

Chan also came under fire just days from the primary election for supposed connections with the pro-Israel lobby. Reporting from Drop Site News revealed that Chan had received support from Pro-Choice Majority Action, a PAC with funding ties to AIPAC’s super PAC and Democratic Majority for Israel, formed as an alternative to AIPAC amid Democratic disillusionment with the flagship pro-Israel group. At the time, Chakrabarti used the revelation to claim that AIPAC had attempted to keep him out of the general election because of his support for Palestinian human rights. Chan rejected the claims and said she encouraged any groups supporting her to reject funds tied to AIPAC.

Now, with support from both Chakrabarti and TrackAIPAC, which made a name for itself by running fierce social media campaigns against lawmakers who received money from the pro-Israel lobby, Chan is trying to put allegations of coordination with the pro-Israel giant to rest.  

“Big corporations, billionaires and special interest groups are using their money to try and buy our elections,” Chan said. “But we know San Francisco is not for sale. We have never taken money from AIPAC or their affiliates, because we serve San Francisco and no one else.”

The post Nancy Pelosi’s Pick for Her SF House Seat Takes Anti-AIPAC Pledge appeared first on The Intercept.