One of the most enduring points of contention between the Democratic Party’s left and right wings is “vote blue no matter who,” a demand almost exclusively made of progressives to shelve principle over party when it comes to elections. 

But as we head toward the midterms in a year where the base is angry and ready for a change, centrists are now hearing that familiar refrain aimed at them — much to their horror. 

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat, was confronted with this new reality earlier this week. He told CNN on Monday that he hoped Maine voters would reject Graham Platner, the state’s presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate, over his controversial tattoo, which Auchincloss called “personally disqualifying.” Critics quickly pointed out that the congressman was effectively offering a tacit endorsement of Sen. Susan Collins, the milquetoast moderate Republican incumbent who has for years infuriated Democrats.

By Tuesday afternoon, the congressman issued a mea culpa on X and disputed that his remarks were an endorsement.

“If it were me I’d vote for someone else in the Maine Democratic primary,” he said, without indicating who that “someone else” might be. “Regardless of what happens in Maine, Democrats need to take back the Senate and I’ll keep working hard to make it happen.”

Platner’s campaign exemplifies the kind of coalition-building that the left has engaged in over the past decade. He goes across the state, meeting voters where they are, and has built relationships with community groups and activists. It’s a marked difference from the campaign of Gov. Janet Mills, Sen. Chuck Schumer’s pick for the seat who dropped out of the race last month after failing to gain momentum, and the retail politics go a long way toward explaining Platner’s success.

Outside of Maine, Platner has been a lightning rod for centrists eager to seize on his Senate race as a battleground for litigating broader divisions in the party’s anti-Trump coalition. Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, said on social media on Tuesday that anyone who endorsed the Uncommitted movement, which aimed to hold President Joe Biden accountable for his role in supporting the Israeli genocide of Gaza, couldn’t object to centrists doing the same over Platner — a comparison so out of proportion it defies rational explanation. 

Score-settling seems more important than keeping the party together and taking the Senate. Melissa DeRosa, the Andrew Cuomo loyalist, told Fox News on Tuesday, “There are a lot of moderate Democrats like myself who will not cry tears should we lose Maine.” John Fetterman, who has broken with his party over his zealous support for Israel, bemoaned Platner’s presumptive nomination after Mills dropped out. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia centrist who served in the Senate for over two decades as a nominal Democrat, implicitly endorsed Collins in a glowing address in late April. 

Politicians who are actually popular with Democratic voters, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., are backing Platner. The former hosted two raucous get-out-the-vote events for Platner over the holiday weekend; the latter is coming to Maine on June 5 to show his support. 

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With a glide path to the nomination — state Democrats are expected to fall in line after the vote out of respect for Mills — Platner is consolidating his support. National Democrats like Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom are in party leadership in the chamber, have pledged their support (however begrudgingly). 

Platner’s consistent presence across Maine and his populist, left message are resonating with voters. On Memorial Day, Sanders went as far as to compare the energy around Platner to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “Maine now has the opportunity to show the world that we could do the same thing in one of the most rural states in this country,” Sanders said. 

In an off-year election where Democrats are expected to deliver a shellacking to the GOP — a prospect that doesn’t seem to bother President Donald Trump much at all — the appeal of progressive politics a Platner win would represent has the centrist wing of the Democratic Party in an existential crisis. 

After decades of scolding the party’s left flank and left-leaning independents over their hesitation to vote for corporate, hawkish Democrats, the shoe is finally on the other foot. Now, centrists are going to be expected to fall in line vote for the likes of Platner. It’s a daunting proposition for the party’s more conservative wing, who will have to either bite the bullet and pull the lever for their ideological opponents or risk another two years of unfettered Republican rule. 

Perhaps that’s preferred. A GOP win means redoing the election in two years with potentially better results, and in the meantime, blaming the left for losing.

There’s precedent for supposed liberals choosing Republicans over progressive Democrats. After Barack Obama won the party’s nomination for president in 2008, a number of Hillary Clinton supporters went over to John McCain. Dubbing themselves “PUMAs” — for “Party Unity My Ass” — these diehard Clinton-backers were thrilled at the opportunity to cast their ballots for McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin. “I’m voting Republican,” Amy Siskind (yes, that one) said at the time. 

But in 2026, the likelihood of conservative Democrats throwing the midterms to the GOP by switching sides or sitting out is low (although a rash of redistricting in the South has somewhat narrowed the gap). The base is fired up, angry at the establishment, and primed to turn out in droves to vote out Trump’s enablers.

For centrists, this is the worst possible outcome: Their vote-scolding tactic exposed as a lie and a failure to prove they still have the clout to swing an election. For progressives, it would be a welcome break. 

The post Graham Platner Is Forcing Centrist Dems to Reckon With “Vote Blue No Matter Who” appeared first on The Intercept.

Within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, Republican lawmakers across the South moved with remarkable speed to carve up Black constituencies and consolidate political power. Tennessee rushed to dismantle Memphis’s majority-Black district. Louisiana went further, postponing an ongoing election and moving to eliminate a majority-Black district that snakes for more than 200 miles, from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. South Carolina and Georgia began maneuvering toward special sessions to redraw districts to be even more favorable to Republicans.

Democrats have warned that up to one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus could disappear, and Republicans aim to pick up as many as 15 House seats. 

The immediate reaction shattered the comforting fiction that America has somehow transcended race in its democratic life. The court may describe these protections as outdated relics of another era, but the swift political response revealed something older and more durable beneath the surface: preserving racial hierarchy remains one of the most potent organizing instincts in American politics.

The Supreme Court’s continued dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is often framed as a tragedy that primarily affects Black Americans. It is that. But in a much larger sense, it also reveals how willing the country is to weaken its own democracy to keep these racialized systems of power intact.

Jim Crow for All

It is no surprise that many of the former slaveholding states have once again moved to cheat the nation out of its democratic values. While most Confederate soldiers did not personally own slaves, the poison of white supremacy still convinced countless poor and working-class white men to fracture the country, slaughter their fellow Americans, and march themselves into mass death on the battlefield to preserve a racial order that benefited an elite planter class more than it ever benefited them.

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After the Civil War, the South could have become a multiracial democracy built around poor Black and white laborers with overlapping economic interests. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black Americans briefly helped build some of the South’s first systems of universal public education and expanded democratic participation across the region. But Southern elites responded by enacting Jim Crow laws — not merely to dominate Black Americans, but also to preempt any nascent democratic solidarity. As historian Heather Cox Richardson has written, wealthy Southern landowners understood that interracial democracy threatened the entire economic order that had sustained plantation rule. 

The system harmed Black Americans most brutally. White racists got what they wanted: segregation, lynchings, and Black exclusion from political life. But it also left millions of poor and working-class white Americans trapped inside oligarchic state structures, one-party political machines insulated from accountability and designed to serve landowners, industrialists, and political dynasties. As Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia University, found in his study of postbellum Southern disenfranchisement that poll taxes and literacy tests didn’t just suppress Black voters — they also hurt democratic participation across the South as a whole, reducing overall voter turnout by 8 to 22 percent.

As a result, public goods, such as schools and sanitation, weakened, labor organizing collapsed under racial division, and political options narrowed for Southern whites. These shadows still haunt the South, the region that accounts for the nation’s highest poverty rates and lowest per capita GDP compared to other regions.

Southern Comforts 

Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act into law, infamously observed that “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” Johnson was articulating a fundamental truth about American political history: Racial status has often been used as compensation for democratic and economic weakness.

It’s a system that has never disappeared. 

The erosion of democracy in our current era also cuts both ways. As the Voting Rights Act is chipped away, blue states are increasingly incentivized to answer Republican gerrymandering with politically motivated maps of their own. The country drifts further from representative democracy and deeper into a retaliatory system where both parties manipulate their electorates for survival.

Ordinary Americans become pawns in a larger struggle over racial hierarchy and entrenched political power. Millions of voters — many of them white Americans — are treated as acceptable political sacrifices in the effort to preserve white conservative hegemony across the South. Their votes become collateral damage in a campaign of anti-Blackness. 

It is an odd gamble to watch: these southern Republican yes-men rushing to exploit the hollowed-out voter protections at a period of time when their states have so much to lose. As other Republicans have voiced concerns about Trump’s unilateral war on Iran, it is actually the bodies of the South that stand to risk the most, as Southern states have long supplied a disproportionate amount of the nation’s combat troops.

Trump’s tariff wars have also hammered away at that historic pillar of Southern agriculture, particularly the soybean, cotton, poultry, and manufacturing sectors that rely heavily on exports to foreign markets. Farmers across states like Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas have been forced to depend on bailouts after retaliatory tariffs slashed export demand and destabilized prices.

The South’s democratic decline has carried material consequences far beyond voting booths. Today, many of the same states most aggressive in restricting voting rights also rank among the nation’s worst in healthcare access, maternal mortality, and rural hospital closures. And as I’ve written before, the South also leads the nation in rates of gun violence. 

Millions of poor and working-class white Southerners now live with the realities of political systems shaped by a stark lack of public investment and democratic accountability. In trying to keep Black Americans farther from opportunity and power, white Southerners ultimately moved those civic possibilities farther from themselves, too.

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What we stand to be left with is an electoral system based on voting blocs engineered by the elites, for the elites. Researchers found that when politics harden into insulated gerrymandered coalitions, democratic systems become less responsive, less representative, and more vulnerable to authoritarian behavior. Politically jaded Americans, who increasingly identify as independents or report feeling disenfranchised by both parties, have now catapulted themselves into an arena with even fewer choices and no real levers left to pull to exercise political power.

In response, the Democrats have largely offered a restrained, institutional response, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urging Americans to “summon the courage, character and conviction” of civil rights figures like Rosa Parks and John Lewis, which feels backwards as hell as the Supreme Court incinerates their legacies.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is populated with politicians and legal thinkers who have long resented the hard-fought civil rights victories in the 1960s. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest political advisers, has railed against the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the law which banned European preferences in immigration. Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and Trump’s current director of the Office of Management and Budget, has argued that the post-1960s civil rights bureaucracy should be remolded away from protecting diversity and toward defending the interests of white Americans.

The right-wing campaign to roll back civil rights protections has always rested on a myth, on a dismissal of the role Black Americans have served throughout American history. It assumes the long battle for equal protections, fair labor, and true democracy was only for the benefit of Black people. It’s a falsehood that serves only to deepen racial divisions to discourage any form of class-based solidarity. Instead, we have been here through time to hold America to its promised principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — a stress testing of its legitimacy for all. 

But for a court so convinced America has made “great strides” in ending racism, it is worth asking why its allure is still so powerful, and why so many white Americans are willing to trade away parts of their own freedom in its service. Perhaps it lies in the pervasiveness of understanding racism as only a “Black problem” — an unfortunate deviation from an otherwise “normal” white arrangement. As sociologist Robert Terry once put it, “To be white in America is not to have to think about it.” But that lack of self awareness carries a cost: generations of white Americans re-ushering in white hegemony so reflexively they often fail to see how it has shrunk their own democracy, political imagination, and livelihoods in the process.

The post The End of the Voting Rights Act Isn’t Just a “Black Problem” appeared first on The Intercept.

In an escalation of its efforts to criminalize and eradicate trans healthcare, Donald Trump’s administration has sent its first known criminal subpoenas to hospitals that have provided gender-affirming care for young trans people. 

New York University Langone received a criminal grand jury subpoena last week from the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas demanding information about teens who received care from the hospital’s now-shuttered trans youth health program, as well as information on the medical staff who provided that care. 

In accordance with a New York state shield law, the hospital posted a public notice to inform affected patients. The notice also said “several” other institutions had received similar subpoenas, which the hospital said demands “information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care” between 2020 and 2026.

Previous administrative subpoenas for confidential patient information have been reliably quashed in courts around the country as blatantly unconstitutional, illegal intrusions into patient privacy. So far, these have been related only to civil investigations. The Langone subpoena means that the federal government has now launched a criminal investigation into trans youth healthcare providers, and in Northern Texas, a judicial district prone to extreme, right-wing decisions. 

It appears that providers, not the trans patients or their guardians, are the target of the criminal investigation. Since federal grand juries are the black boxes of the criminal legal system, little information is available about the details of the case. It is not even publicly known what charges the prosecutors could be pursuing. The subpoena demands sweeping information including medical records relating to any patients under 18 who received gender-affirming treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or any other “clinical services.” What we do know for certain is that resisting every government demand here is the only acceptable path forward. 

When it comes to healthcare providers, New York’s Shield Law is specifically in place as a protection from out-of-state prosecution. But the law has not yet been robustly tested against a federal case. 

“The hospital may try to fight the subpoena, in whole or in part, in court — but because the federal government is strategically pursuing the case in one of the most conservative courts in the country, Langone faces an uphill battle,” S. Baum wrote in the trans news and advocacy site Erin in the Morning. “This round of litigation could also put the efficacy of Shield Laws to the test.”

The Justice Department’s aim, whether or not the grand jury leads to prosecutions, is to further intimidate and harass healthcare providers and hospital administrators nationwide into preemptively ending services for trans young people. Many institutions, including NYU Langone, have already complied and stopped providing such care. Convening the grand jury is yet another direct and immediate attack on trans kids and adults, and a threat to bodily autonomy and medical confidentiality more broadly.

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We also know by now that the Constitution or our country’s laws are no constraint on the Trump administration. Prosecutors and lawmakers will continue to throw everything they can against the wall until something sticks to establish a new political-legal reality — one usually achieved after a case winds its way up to a favorable federal judge, and eventually the far-right Supreme Court. 

Meanwhile, NYU Langone has shown itself to be an easy target. In response to threats from the federal government last year to withhold funding, the hospital ended its Transgender Youth Health Program. Despite the fact that a federal court in April ruled that the government cannot withhold funding over trans healthcare provision, more than 40 hospital systems have stopped providing necessary medical care to trans youth based on the Trump regime’s threats. 

The fact that Langone already bent to Trump’s demands by shuttering the program but is still facing a potential criminal probe only proves the folly of compliance. Should the hospital, or any other hospital system, supply federal prosecutors with patient’s or worker’s personal information, patients would be well within their rights to sue for HIPAA violations and potentially even civil rights violations given the discriminatory nature of the request. Patients and their families can also file a motion against the subpoena — a precedent that has been set when it comes to administrative subpoenas asking for trans patients’ information. 

Earlier this year, for example, the families of six trans teens who had received treatment at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles filed a motion to quash an administrative subpoena on behalf of themselves and more than 3,000 other transgender youth patients and families whose identities and private medical information the subpoena demanded. A settlement was reached, in which the government withdrew the subpoena requests seeking patient-identifying information and instructed Children’s Hospital to redact all such information from any documents produced.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas — from the same district where the criminal grand jury is empanelled — ruled earlier this month that Rhode Island Hospital in Providence must comply with a Justice Department administrative subpoena for trans youth patient information, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and medical records. In response, the Rhode Island Office of Child Advocate filed an emergency motion to quash the request. In a hearing over the motion in a Providence court, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy slammed the Justice Department for conducting a “fishing expedition” by seeking medical records and patient information in a scrambling effort to criminalize healthcare provision; she also said the case was quite clearly “shopped” to Texas. 

For institutions and individuals, the stakes for resisting a criminal grand jury subpoena are higher. Individuals can be jailed and fined for the length of the grand jury in order to compel them to testify, and institutions can be slapped with hefty fines. But the consequences of giving in are graver still: Hospitals that capitulate to these demands could be subject to costly patient class action over privacy and rights violations. Institutions that hand over information are also aiding the potential criminal prosecution of medical care providers — an attack on the entire medical profession.

“If NYU Langone and other providers turn the confidential data of their patients over to the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Northern Texas, everyone’s privacy, everyone’s healthcare, everyone’s civil rights are compromised,” Brad Lander, the former New York City comptroller and congressional candidate, wrote on Bluesky.

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In March, a federal court ruled that a case brought by Columbia University students could proceed against the university. The lawsuit argues the university became a “third-party collaborator” in unconstitutional actions when it supplied the names and disciplinary records of students involved in Palestine solidarity organizing. The court determined Columbia could be found liable as a “state actor” for acting under government coercion to suppress student speech. Students and civil rights advocates sued the school for handing over student information in response to a congressional subpoena. While a civil, rather than a criminal, case, the finding should make institutions reflect on their readiness to comply with discriminatory and unconstitutional requests from this administration. 

“If the calculus before was that it’s better to comply with the federal government because it is either face saving or economically saving for these private institutions, now there’s the counterbalance: If you capitulate, you’ve actually opened yourself up to liability for selling out your constituents,” civil rights attorney and CUNY law professor Zal Shroff, who is representing plaintiffs in the case against Columbia, told me. 

Given that a federal grand jury subpoena is itself explicitly coercive, it’s unclear whether exactly the same legal claim could be made against NYU should it comply with the government’s demands. Shroff noted, “It may be that they are seeking to use the criminal process to avoid what has been found in the civil process,” but that nonetheless, “legal consequences work in multiple ways” when it comes to people’s ability to challenge private entities for their compliance with the administration’s harms. Continued complicity with Trump’s regime, however, has a known result. 

“NYU caved and ended care and they’re still being hit with a grand jury subpoena. It’s incredibly clear that no amount of preemptive compliance will stop this attack,” Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky. “You either fight or you will be destroyed by this administration. Caving will not save you.” 

The post DOJ Escalates War on Trans Youth Healthcare With Criminal Subpoenas appeared first on The Intercept.

Armed federal agents recently arrested Dr. David Morens, a 78-year-old retired government scientist, strip-searched him, and charged him with crimes that could carry decades in prison — all for allegedly using his personal email to try and evade Freedom of Information Act requests.

According to prosecutors, Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, used personal email accounts to dodge FOIA, deleted records, and sought to circumvent federal records requirements. In one message about communications about Covid research, he allegedly wrote: “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I’m FOIA’d but before the search starts. … Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to my Gmail.”

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If true, his actions were egregious and wrong, and accountability should be both proportional and consistent with previous cases of records destruction and FOIA evasion. 

But the Justice Department has, for decades, largely taken a hands-off approach to enforcing FOIA. When it has enforced the law, it’s usually landed in civil rather than criminal court. The DOJ has almost never treated FOIA evasion behavior as a crime — at least until now.

Even in high-profile cases involving far more sensitive material, such as Hillary Clinton’s infamous use of a private email server or Bill Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger’s repeated removal of classified documents from the National Archives, penalties were limited. Berger, for example, received probation, a fine, and community service, and Hillary Clinton wasn’t charged.

Morens, by contrast, faces real prison time if convicted: up to five years for conspiracy, up to 20 years per count for destruction of records, and additional penalties for concealment.

It should be irrelevant that Morens allegedly tried to evade FOIAs from a mix of organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and U.S. Right to Know. But it raises a question the Justice Department has not answered: Would similar charges be brought if the requesters were environmental groups, press freedom organizations, or others less politically aligned with the current administration?

The answer is likely no, and that’s the real danger: making it so FOIA evasion is only a crime if the administration has a score to settle.

This prosecution also comes at a moment when the federal government’s commitment to FOIA has never been lower. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hollowed out most of his department’s FOIA offices, and the FOIA office for the bureau where Morens used to work is drowning, with over 1,100 backlogged requests right now as a result. The agency is also more than two months late posting its annual FOIA report, which would give us a better idea of how well (or not) it is responding to public records requests for the first year of this Trump administration.

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At the same time, public health, environmental, and scientific information has been removed from federal websites at an unprecedented pace, FOIA officials are being fired for lawfully releasing information that the administration doesn’t like, and the Justice Department is actively helping the White House evade record-keeping laws.

Against that backdrop, targeting a single retired official while systemic transparency failures go largely unaddressed is absurd.

There are legitimate arguments for stronger consequences when officials deliberately evade transparency laws. But selective criminal enforcement carries its own risks. It invites politicized prosecutions and risks reshaping FOIA itself into a system where compliance is influenced, consciously or not, by who is making the request. That would undermine the core purpose of FOIA: equal access to government records.

If the goal is better compliance, structural incentives may matter more than individual prosecutions. Agencies routinely under-invest in their FOIA operations, leaving small offices to manage massive backlogs with limited resources and political support. One way to change that would be to tie agency leadership’s discretionary budgets to FOIA performance, thus rewarding timely, lawful disclosure and penalizing chronic failure.

That approach would address not just willful evasion but also the broader system that allows noncompliance to persist.

Morens’s alleged actions warrant scrutiny and accountability. But this case is about more than one official. It is about whether the government is establishing a new standard for enforcing transparency, and whether that standard will be applied fairly.

If evading FOIA is now a crime, it must be enforced evenly. Otherwise, the transparency law risks becoming what it was meant to prevent: a tool that, when applied selectively, only serves the powerful.

The post Dodging FOIA Could Now Mean Arrest and Strip Search, Depending on Who’s Asking appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Prophet of Male Despair

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

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

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

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

Blackpilled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Disappearing Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Never Apologize appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every time you turn around recently, it feels like there’s new reporting about insiders cashing in on prediction markets. On Thursday, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who was involved in the raid to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela was arrested on charges that he used classified information to make more than $400,000 by betting on the operation before it happened. In the hours before the U.S. attacked Iran, hundreds of anonymous bets over $1,000 were placed on the U.S. striking Iran by the next day, which the New York Times said suggested that some users might’ve “seen the strike coming.”

Prediction markets, such as industry leaders Polymarket and Kalshi, have exploded in popularity. They create or exacerbate an array of problems, but at the Media and Democracy Project, or MAD, we believe they have the potential to severely harm the way news is reported, perceived, and engaged with — threats that deserve far more attention from the public.

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These Apps Let You Bet on Deportations and Famine. Mainstream Media Is Eating It Up.

MAD calls the use of prediction markets in news stories “casino journalism.” There is too much already, and it is likely to get much worse if not nipped in the bud. But we are optimistic it can be stopped if news organizations recognize the threat and respond.

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones, announced a partnership with Polymarket. The Associated Press, CNN, Substack, and CNBC have all made similar deals, the terms of which have not been disclosed. So it was extremely troubling to see the Wall Street Journal report that “Polymarket Bets See Over 70% Chance of U.S. Forces Entering Iran in Next Month” on March 30, and not just because of the fear of a broader war. This so-called news story provided none of the journalistic insight that was touted when the partnership was announced — just the betting odds. It looks more like an advertisement for their new partner than real journalism and, while the betting market was active, had a link to Polymarket.

Do news organizations and journalists really want to gamify the news? What are the long-term impacts on a paper if they make a practice of such reporting? Should news outlets see the betting markets as partners? News organizations, the practice of journalism, and the public are all much better served if the media outlets instead set policies constraining the use of these markets in their reporting and altogether forbidding financial deals where the outlet profits from the success of the prediction markets.

MAD has long called for less horse-race journalism and more substantive reporting. Many others have done so for even longer, including New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who has pushed for a focus on “not the odds, but the stakes.” But prediction markets are horse-race journalism taken to its most cynical end point, one that will only serve to supercharge reporting on who’s up and who’s down at any given moment, particularly because these markets are open 24/7.

There are many ways prediction markets can be manipulated or misbehave in other ways, but let’s consider their stated best-case use. Suppose that prediction markets achieve their claims of providing better forecasts than other methods. Even if that were true, casino journalism is bad for journalism and the public. Predictions crowd out coverage of substance. In politics, this means less information to help voters evaluate candidates. Focusing on the odds gives the impression that the horse race is more important than the issues. Prediction markets turn events that have an impact on people’s lives — and carry a real human cost — into pure entertainment.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, has said it does a “very, very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth to people,” even as it seeks to “financialize everything.” He presents it as providing a new, better source of information and as changing the way their readers digest the news. In an interview with the Financial Times in February, he said, “Prediction markets don’t make money off somebody’s losses, they make money off somebody’s engagement.” But the type of engagement matters a great deal. Increasing the nicotine content of cigarettes increases smokers’ “engagement” with the tobacco industry. Gambling is also addictive; as sports betting has become commonplace, participants have found that, over time, they mostly lose. Promoting these markets as part of the news is likely to damage readers’ trust and can also harm their overall well-being.

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Quite apart from the questionable news content of prediction market bets, the news industry needs to recognize how implicated it is in shaping how these markets function. Most of the “propositions” offered on these markets are based on news reports; reporters provide the raw material on which these bets are made. In effect, traders on prediction markets are betting on the content of news stories. 

This has tremendous potential to be a corrupting influence on journalists. An Israeli journalist recently received death threats over his refusal to rewrite his report on an Iranian missile strike, on which $23 million of prediction market “investments” were riding. As the markets become larger, and their use in news increases, the incentive for market manipulation will also grow. There could be intense temptation for insider trading of all kinds that would destroy the credibility and integrity of these markets, bringing the news business down with it. There are already many worrisome incidents related to these markets, such as the soldier who enriched himself based on classified info. Centering prediction markets will create a substantial risk of scandals that will implicate and embarrass news organizations.

MAD is heartened that most news outlets have not engaged in deals or embedded prediction market prices as news. The New York Times’ Guidelines on Integrity begin with the statement, “Our greatest strength is the authority and reputation of The Times. We must do nothing that would undermine or dilute it and everything possible to enhance it.” So we are hopeful that the Times and other responsible news outlets will defend their reputations by setting clear public policies limiting how prediction markets may be used and what kinds of business relationships they will engage in.

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Any news organizations that have already signed on with Kalshi or Polymarket should publicly disclose the terms of these relationships. Reporters should be forbidden from citing the markets as valid forecasts and should be barred from using the platforms themselves. We encourage more reporting on substantive impacts of governmental actions and less speculation on the prospects that the policies will be implemented.

Horse-race journalism was already a detriment to nurturing an informed citizenry. But casino journalism has no place at all in any functioning democracy.

The post We Need to Kick Prediction Market Betting Out of Journalism While We Still Can appeared first on The Intercept.

Smarting from the humiliation of a report published at The Atlantic about his time in office, FBI Director Kash Patel did what conservatives have done over and over in the age of Trump: He sued for defamation. 

The Atlantic’s story detailed allegations about Patel’s mismanagement of the office and FBI staffers’ concerns that his behavior has become borderline dangerous. According to the magazine’s reporting, staffers have observed that the director frequently drinks to the point of intoxication and has been unreachable behind closed doors multiple times, at one point necessitating agents breaking down a door. In his lawsuit, Patel said that the allegations are demonstrably false.

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Patel’s case — which names the publication and the writer as defendants and demands $250 million in damages — doesn’t appear very strong; it’s unlikely he’ll win in court. But a legal victory isn’t necessarily the goal. Such lawsuits apply financial pressure and ensure newsrooms think twice before publishing critical articles in the future.

For all the modern right-wing movement’s bleating about its commitment to free speech, in practice they’re anything but, with a demonstrated penchant for using the legal system as a cudgel against people who say things they don’t like. Known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP, they are a tool of the powerful — and have multiple levels of use.

Most immediately, SLAPP allows plaintiffs the potential to muzzle their critics, who will be less likely to launch attacks against someone who has already proven litigious. This applies not only to the defendant, whether it’s an individual or an institution, but also to others like them who will think twice rather than risk a protracted (and expensive) legal battle.

Typically, the more deep-pocketed someone, or their backers, are, the more they can bleed out defendants by dragging on court cases for as long as possible, racking up legal bills that will have to be paid. Most publishers and newsrooms have lawyers on retainer or in-house, but their legal insurance deductibles are still high, potentially running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per case. 

Even if these anti-free speech crusaders don’t win a judgment, they have a good chance of draining their opponents’ bank accounts — and breaking their spirits. 

Federal action is is sorely needed to make sure the use of SLAPP doesn’t spiral further out of control. Many states, including New York and Minnesota, have anti-SLAPP laws on the books, but their application in federal courts remains unsettled. Patel filed his suit in D.C. federal court, where the appellate court says the anti-SLAAP statute does not apply. 

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Universal application of these laws is needed so the powerful can’t turn to federal courts for meritless filings, and some lawmakers, like Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have introduced legislation to that end. So far, however, those bills have not made it to law. 

Patel is far from the only conservative figure to deploy the courts as a weapon against his critics, and this isn’t even his first shot at it; he has an ongoing 2019 lawsuit against Politico, for that outlet’s reporting on his time with the National Security Council during Donald Trump’s first term, and another defamation action, against former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi for comments on MS NOW, was dismissed on Tuesday.

Trump’s manipulation of the legal system to punish detractors predates his time in politics, but it’s gone into overdrive since his first term. The president has filed multiple defamation suits against members of the media and their organizations, including $475 million against CNN in 2022 (which was dismissed in 2023); the Pulitzer Prize Board for an award he objected to in 2022 (ongoing); journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster in 2023 (dismissed); ABC News in 2024 (settled for $15 million); CBS parent Paramount in 2024 (settled for $16 million); the Wall Street Journal in 2025 (dismissed), the New York Times in 2025 for $15 billion (ongoing), the BBC in 2025 for $10 billion (ongoing); and others. To be clear, this is not an exhaustive list. 

Trump and Patel are two of the better known conservative figures attacking free speech via the courts, but it’s a mainstay tactic in MAGA world. Laura Loomer, an Islamophobic off-and-on ally of Trump, sued late-night personality Bill Maher over comments he made about her relationship with the president (the case was thrown out on Wednesday evening). In 2013, Trump sued Maher for breach of contract after the HBO pundit promised $5 million to charity if the then-real estate magnate could prove his mother was not an orangutan. (Trump withdrew the case.) 

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Elon Musk, the tech billionaire with close ties to the White House, used his X social media platform to file a suit against Media Matters for America over its reporting on ad content running alongside antisemitic posts on the site. And David Sacks, another tech billionaire who worked as Trump’s crypto and AI czar, threatened the New York Times over its reporting on his conflicts of interest in a public legal letter last December. 

Closer to home, I’m currently being sued, along with my publisher, Hachette, for more than $1 million by conservative pundit Matt Taibbi over my book, “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” which delves into his ideological shift to the right. And the editor of this piece you’re reading now, Katherine Krueger, was sued for $100 million alongside her former employer Splinter by 2016 Trump spokesperson Jason Miller for a story about a court filing that alleged he drugged a woman with an abortion pill. Miller refuted the allegation, but that case was thrown out on summary judgment because it accurately reported what was in the court filing; mine is ongoing.

In some circumstances, as Trump found after he was elected to a second term in 2024, SLAPP lawsuits can succeed, irrespective of the strength or weakness of the claim. ABC News and Paramount settled with Trump in what are widely regarded as payoffs to a powerful figure who can control their corporate future. Corporations have made the calculation: Better to get on his good side than risk four years of retribution, and, after all, what’s a few million dollars compared to the benefits of having the world’s most powerful person looking kindly on you?

But for the right wing, SLAPP suits also serve to make an ideological point. Whether or not Patel expects to win a $250 million judgment, a central claim in his lawsuit is that his word is enough to shut down speech. 

Because he told The Atlantic the claims in their article weren’t true, they shouldn’t have published it, the complaint argues: “Defendants published the Article with actual malice, despite being expressly warned, hours before publication, that the central allegations were categorically false.” The objections of a powerful man should be enough to avoid bad press, this line of reasoning goes; publishing anything to the contrary is wrong. 

That’s the animating principle behind the right-wing’s relationship with the media. If they disagree with it or find it embarrassing, you shouldn’t publish it; if you disobey, you must be punished. 

It wasn’t until Trump — and decades of ideological capture of the courts — that there was the potential to regularly use the legal system as a weapon against critics. Until there are First Amendment protections against SLAPP, we can expect the powerful to continue dragging their detractors to court. 

The post Kash Patel Is Using MAGA’s Favorite Tool to Muzzle the Free Press appeared first on The Intercept.

For the first time in history, the Lebanese ambassador to the United States, Nada Moawad, and Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, sat in the same room at the State Department in Washington, D.C., facing one another as two states ostensibly on equal ground, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials presiding over the talks. Lebanese and Israeli officials had been in the same room before, having held indirect negotiations in 2022 and direct talks last in 1993, but this was the first time that Israel and Lebanon’s flags were hung next to one another — a high-level public meeting of a kind never before attempted.

A 10-day ceasefire inside Lebanon was finally implemented on Friday, one previously agreed to during the Iran ceasefire talks in Pakistan and then almost instantaneously undermined by Israel. The United States, and the Israeli state to a certain extent, have portrayed this ceasefire as the result of this breakthrough, a direct negotiation with an enemy nation that, as Netanyahu said on Thursday, could lead to the “opportunity to forge a historic peace agreement” with Lebanon. 

Many Lebanese have been able to return to their home villages under the ceasefire, but this was also the case in 2024, which then was followed by the implementation of an Israeli military buffer zone that left much of the south even more in ruins than from the war itself. The danger of these negotiations lies not in the immediate short term, as the residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south experience a reprieve from intensive bombardment, but in the long term, beyond the 10 days.

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Israel has now reaped the fruits of unilaterally declaring Lebanon outside of the Iranian ceasefire, against its previous agreements, and has now made permanently ending the war, as Iran has desired, a much more difficult prospect. Such a long-term cessation is now reliant on the ability of the Lebanese government to do what America and Israel demands, dismantling Hezbollah by any means necessary even if it means speeding headfirst into a civil war.

While Lebanese President Joseph Aoun hailed the ceasefire as evidence Lebanon is “no longer a card in anyone’s pocket,” Hezbollah members of Parliament, as well as Iranian officials, have told a different story. Even if Hezbollah “will cautiously adhere to the ceasefire,” the deal did not come about from these talks but instead from Iranian pressure to reach a ceasefire as a precondition to another round of negotiations between Tehran and Washington, now set for Monday, albeit looking increasingly fraught. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announced after the ceasefire that it was the result of the “resistance and steadfast struggle of the great Hezbollah and the unity of the Axis of Resistance.” Hezbollah MP Ibrahim Moussawi was more blunt, telling Drop Site News that this was the “same ceasefire agreement” reached in Islamabad days ago, only now stamped with Israel’s belated co-sign.

While Hezbollah had significant leverage to force a ceasefire on its behalf — with Iran’s threats to return to war with missiles already reportedly on the launchpad if Lebanon was not included in the deal — it is unclear what leverage the Lebanese government had to negotiate a ceasefire on its own. Throughout the previous ceasefire and into this war, Israel argued Lebanon’s government was incapable of disarming Hezbollah, with Israeli government-aligned newspapers deriding the state’s inability to even expel the Iranian ambassador after Lebanon’s foreign minister ordered him out in March. Israel’s Foreign Ministry routinely criticized the Lebanese government for being “all talk and no action” on disarming Hezbollah, and Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened that the Lebanese state itself would pay a “very heavy price” by way of Israel destroying “Lebanese national infrastructure” and the “loss of territory” to Israeli occupation.

After Israel’s military launched “Operation Eternal Darkness” on April 8, killing more than 300 Lebanese civilians and bringing war to places in Beirut that had not been attacked since the 1980s, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam came out and insisted that “no one but the Lebanese state can negotiate on behalf of Lebanon.” Aoun further said Lebanon could not accept negotiations on its behalf by anyone else, and that this was a “sovereign matter” above all else, even amid ongoing Iranian military pressure to bring Lebanon into the ceasefire. Israel, whose diplomats refused to speak with the Lebanese government in early March on the basis that Lebanon was not “credible,” and whose U.N. ambassador said “dialogue with the Lebanese government cannot stop the fire from Lebanese territory,” suddenly decided to focus all its efforts on arranging unprecedented negotiations.

Lebanon’s ambassador claimed after talks concluded that she had raised the ceasefire with the other representatives (Axios confirmed the prospect was brought up “informally”), but neither the Israeli nor the American officials stated the talks were to achieve a ceasefire. The prospect was in fact “peace,” a long-term settlement between the two nations, or as Leiter, Israel’s ambassador, put it, to affirm “we are on the same side, we and the Lebanese” and that Lebanon would “no longer be occupied by Hezbollah.”

Leiter has made the issue of peace with Lebanon one of his top priorities since being appointed in early 2025, saying in an interview with PragerU last May that he was “upbeat” about Lebanon, as well as Syria, potentially joining the Abraham Accords, perhaps even before Saudi Arabia. He also told reporters this week that he had spoken with Lebanese officials about a future in which one could cross the border in a “swimsuit to vacation on the beaches of both countries.” Beyond these liberal platitudes, Leiter himself has had a significant past — one deeply intertwined with Israeli expansionist politics that he now strenuously denies applies to Lebanon.

The first West Bank settler to be selected as ambassador to the United States, Leiter was an early member of the Jewish Defense League, an organization the FBI later described as a right-wing terrorist group and led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose members committed mass shootings of Palestinians, plotted to bomb American mosques, and attempted assassinations of U.S. politicians. Leiter was then a member of Kach, Kahane’s political party, which was later banned as a terrorist organization inside Israel itself. During this period, Kahane advocated for a wide-scale deportation of Arabs from Israeli-occupied areas as well as from Israel itself, and labeled southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s “minimal” borders. Leiter left the party in the 1980s, claiming Kahanism came from “a weakness of character,” but made these criticisms in his capacity as a leader of the Hebron settlement movement in the occupied West Bank, attempting to paint those who advocated peace with the Palestinians as just as misguided. 

As ambassador to the United States, Leiter told the Lebanese news outlet This is Beirut in late 2025 that Israel and Lebanon “have a history,” recalled the disastrous economic conditions in Israeli-occupation southern Lebanon with a smile, and said southern Lebanese used to line up in early in the morning at the border every day to seek economic opportunities in northern Israel. “We’d be more than happy to see that again,” Leiter said.

While the Israeli government has constantly demanded the Lebanese Army do more to disarm Hezbollah and impose Lebanese sovereignty over the country’s south, Leiter has made no indications that Israel would accept any military build-up, even by Lebanon, at the border with Israel, saying in a visit to occupied Syrian territory last November alongside Netanyahu and Katz that Israel could no longer tolerate “foreign armies” on its border. Leiter has also warned certain other Lebanese allies, such as France, should stay “far away” from these negotiations, and said, “they are not a positive influence, particularly not in Lebanon.” France had previously advocated for direct talks between the Lebanese government and Israel but had also condemned Operation Eternal Darkness and called for the Iranian ceasefire to apply to Lebanon as well.

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While the Israeli negotiating team has been explicit that the talks were intended to get the Lebanese government to ally with their country against Hezbollah, there was another goal at work, one not reflected by the photo ops: to legitimize the indefinite occupation and depopulation of southern Lebanon. 

In an interview on Israeli TV about Israel engaging in negotiations with Lebanon, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich asserted that “no one will disarm Hezbollah for us” and said a peace agreement between the two countries would serve to “greatly legitimize” Israel’s position. He also said he would push for the Israel Defense Forces to remain up until the Litani River, which Smotrich last month described as the location where Israel’s “new border” must be. 

Israel’s Channel 14, which is considered close to the right-wing Israeli government, has also reported that Israeli diplomats had been promoting a “Yellow Line” plan of their own for Lebanon modeled on Gaza’s as part of a long-term settlement. Under such a plan, Israel would dismantle “Hezbollah infrastructure” up to the Litani, only giving the Lebanese Army control after they had completed destroying it in one particular area, and with no timetable to hand back control to the Lebanese Army the area behind the Yellow Line, 7–8 kilometers from the area. Israel’s Defense Ministry has justified the complete razing of villages in southern Lebanon by saying that the homes themselves count as Hezbollah infrastructure.

Netanyahu has since affirmed the existence of a “Yellow Line” in Lebanon post-ceasefire, and in the ceasefire text, there is also no mention of any withdrawal for Israeli troops — only that the ceasefire’s extension relies on “Lebanon effectively demonstrat[ing] its ability to assert its sovereignty.” Israel, for its part, “shall preserve its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks” and that such actions would not violate the agreement.

The groundwork is being rapidly laid for further and further demands on the Lebanese state — more disagreements, more violations — and potentially binding the future of the Lebanese state with an Israeli one that seeks to impose the depopulation of wide swathes of its territory, and considers its Shia population as its enemy. In response to criticism that he was being deceived by the Lebanese government, Smotrich replied that amid peace negotiations, Israel was still acting to annihilate towns and cities where tens of thousands lived: “We are erasing Khiam, and we are erasing Bint Jbeil.” Amid all of this outpouring of peace, those supposedly advocating for it are in the same government as those advocating Lebanon’s destruction.

The post How the Lebanon Ceasefire Could Make It Harder to End the War on Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump recently threatened genocide as political leverage on social media, which begs the question whether there are even more extreme conversations happening in private in the Oval Office, or if anyone in Trump’s orbit is cautioning him against this immoral threat of mass violence.

Access to these discussions is critical not only for accountability, but also for future administrations who want to re-engage in rational diplomacy. That’s why the Department of Justice’s recent opinion that grants Trump, and every president who follows him, a license to steal American history is so dangerous.

In a sweeping new memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel, the DOJ claims the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. The department’s edict, which is already facing legal challenges, argues that a president’s records are private, rather than public, property. This is an extreme reinterpretation of executive power that seeks to undo nearly 50 years of transparency.

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The PRA was signed into law after the abuses of the Watergate era and established that the records of every president since Ronald Reagan are public property and must be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, at the end of a president’s term. 

This law is the reason the public has insight into the inner workings of everything from President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and the George W. Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina to records on the nomination of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and other Supreme Court nominees.

That’s because the PRA states that, starting five years after the end of a presidential administration, those records become subject to public release under the Freedom of Information Act. 

This history-killer memo attempts to undo this route for public access to presidential records and build a brick wall where there once was a window into the highest office in the land.

By declaring the PRA unconstitutional, the Justice Department is effectively claiming that the presidency has private ownership over the American story.

The timing of this memo adds insult to injury. Just days before its release, Trump’s son Eric unveiled renderings of a “Trump Presidential Library” skyscraper in Miami, which appears to be designed primarily to solicit private investment for the president’s personal foundation. News outlets parroted this branding, even though there’s no indication the Trump foundation will work with NARA to build a proper library. So while there may be a building where the public can go to gaze at a gold statue of Trump, it’s not clear there will be a physical place for journalists and others to file declassification requests and research his administration.

It’s no surprise that a president who spent his first term repeatedly violating the PRA now wants to eviscerate it. But the danger to our democracy cannot be overstated: The president’s decisions are the most consequential in government, and the PRA is the only reason we have a front-row seat to them, even belatedly.

At Freedom of the Press Foundation, we know what is at stake. We have filed more than a dozen FOIA requests for key records from the first Trump term that are currently held at the digital Trump Presidential Library run by NARA (not to be confused with whatever monstrosity is being built in Florida). These include:

• A copy of the Senate’s 2014 report on the CIA’s torture program, which the Trump administration helped keep secret in 2017.
• Records concerning election integrity, voter fraud, the certification of the Electoral College, and the events of January 6, 2021.
• Documents about the violent clearing of protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 2020.
• Communications documenting Trump’s reaction to the 2019 and 2021 impeachment proceedings.
• Memorandums of conversation with foreign leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, as well as written correspondence, such as Trump’s “love letters” with the North Korean leader.

If the DOJ succeeds in claiming presidential records are private, these chapters of our history could vanish, and Trump will be able to do whatever he wishes with these records — whether that’s storing them in his bathroom or selling them to the “highest bidder.”

This isn’t just a Trump problem; it is a bipartisan emergency. If the Justice Department’s memo stands, it won’t just be this administration’s secrets that are locked away — it will allow every future president, Democrat or Republican, to operate with total impunity.

We cannot let the presidency be transformed into a black box. Democrats and Republicans must work together, in Congress and in the courts, to ensure that no president has free rein to hide their own corruption or claim that American history belongs to them alone. Because if we lose the right to know what the president has done in our name, we lose the ability to call ourselves a democracy.

The post DOJ Wants to Scrap Watergate-Era Rule That Makes Presidential Records Public appeared first on The Intercept.

Neither Josh Hartnett nor Ewan McGregor was there, but the way the mainstream media is telling it, they might as well have been. The Sunday morning rescue of a U.S. airman shot down over Iran launched a thousand breathless tick-tock retellings from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and many, many more — helpful water-carrying for an administration prosecuting a deeply unpopular war without a clear end in sight.

“The rescue had unfolded with near‑perfect precision. Under cover of darkness, U.S. commandos slipped deep into Iran, undetected, scaled a 7,000‑foot ridge and pulled a ​stranded American weapons specialist to safety, moving him toward a secret rendezvous point before dawn on Sunday,” Reuters’ report on the rescue opens. “Then everything stopped.”

The operation was a “harrowing race against time,” according to the Times. As Politico put it, citing an anonymous senior administration official, it was “the ultimate ‘needle in a haystack’” mission, made possible by a CIA “deception campaign” in the country disseminating the misinformation that the airman had already been located and was being extracted by ground to confuse the Iranians’ search.

The White House frequently hosts widely attended “background briefing” calls for large groups of reporters. Maybe that’s how Axios chimed in with the same evocative “needle in a haystack” line, which it also attributed to a senior administration official.

“This was the ultimate needle in a haystack but in this case it was a brave American soul inside a mountain crevice, invisible but for CIA’s capabilities,” the unnamed source told Axios.

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CBS News called locating and extracting the service member, who was aboard a craft known by the call sign “Dude 44,” “a herculean U.S. government effort.” Even The Associated Press characterized the mission as “a daring rescue,” and multiple publications reported that when the airman was able, they radioed the line “God is good” just ahead of Easter Sunday — a plot point that would make even devotees of the show “24” groan.

As government sources are telling the tale to eager reporters at national publications, the F-15E Strike Eagle was the first jet shot down Friday over enemy territory in this war on Iran. After coming under Iranian fire, the two-man crew ejected themselves, and the aircraft’s weapons systems officer was separated from the pilot, who was “quickly” rescued, according to the Journal.

While the initially missing service member’s identity has not been revealed, Trump said he is a colonel who was injured but managed to hide out in a mountain crevice to await rescue. Two Black Hawk helicopters involved in the search were also hit by incoming fire; in another incident, an A-10 Warthog was hit and crashed in a neighboring allied country, where the pilot was rescued.

“When airmen go down, you can’t get them in very tough countries, like in Vietnam,” Trump told the Journal, in a revealing comparison.

“He was able to climb, climb up as wounded as he was, he was able to climb up into a crevice,” Trump went on. “A lot of great things happened.”

To say it would be naive to take the Trump administration at face value is an understatement. Yet the complete lack of any skepticism of this Hollywood story from mainstream news would make even Breitbart writers blush.

Even the timing of the premiere was perfect for the Trump administration, which is acutely aware of how unpopular this war is at home. Is America winning this war? Don’t worry about that, check out this action sequence.

One of the ironies of all this is that it exposes exactly why the Trump administration can’t be trusted. Just two days before the fighter jet was shot down, Trump was blustering about how U.S. strikes had left Iran with “no anti-aircraft” capabilities. The daring rescue, however, is predicated on the very clear fact that Iran absolutely still has the ability to shoot down American planes.

The U.S. can certainly bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age” — a line both Trump and Hegseth deployed — but all that hellfire rained down on civilian targets won’t yield the political dividends they so desperately desire.

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It’s all eerily reminiscent of the way the media covered the lead-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when papers of record like the Times and The Atlantic and respected broadcast outlets like “Meet the Press” were more than happy to launder the Bush administration’s quarter-baked intelligence to make the case for war to the American public.

Even voices from the emergent, supposedly left-wing media — like the wonks making their name through a new format called “blogs” — were overjoyed to fall in line with the war effort. After all, the logic seemed to go, how could you be taken seriously if you were reflexively anti-war — the province of far-left nuts who are cast into the political wilderness? It was far safer and, in the long term, professionally beneficial to sell out any principles you had to enlist as junior partners in the pro-war coalition.

Even if, in this moment, the media is vaguely more skeptical of the war with Iran, national reporters simply couldn’t resist retelling the story of a Great American Rescue Mission, consequences, or the broader truth, be damned. Americans’ memories, especially for failing wars, are short.

As the fog clears and a fuller picture emerges, maybe we’ll see whether it shakes out the same way these serial liars sold it to huge swaths of the media.

The post The Media Just Can’t Help Turning Iran Fighter Jet Rescue Into “Black Hawk Down” appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the Trump regime launched its war on Iran, his administration has gotten a lot more biblical.

In the last few weeks, Trump and his circle have delivered a chorus of mandates — many sounding as if sent from the Almighty himself — from encouraging lawmakers to support legislation “for Jesus” to billing America’s 250th anniversary as a moment to rededicate the nation under a single, unified God.

Trump has surrounded himself with a constellation of evangelical advisers who not only support his policies but also frame them as divinely sanctioned. Their specific strand of evangelical theology interprets global conflict, especially in the Middle East, as a precursor to the end times. For Trump, this alignment may well be transactional, another way to energize and consolidate a critical voting bloc. But for many of the religious figures now orbiting him, the stakes are far more cosmic: The war is not simply geopolitical; it is eschatological.

And it’s already bleeding influence into America’s war machine. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has overseen a steady infusion of Christian symbolism and practice into military life — hosting prayer gatherings, elevating hard-line evangelical figures, and pushing a more overtly religious tone across the force.

Reporting shows his tenure has included efforts to reshape the chaplain corps and integrate his Christian worldview more directly into military culture. The aesthetic is not subtle: Hegseth has embraced Crusader iconography — he has tattoos of the Jerusalem cross and the phrase “Deus vult,” which means “God wills it” — while framing America’s conflicts in civilizational and religious terms. In a prayer given last week at the Pentagon, Hegseth asked God to aid in pouring down “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Even some on the right have begun to voice their unease. One conservative commentator, reacting to the growing influence, bluntly described Trump’s leading faith adviser Paula White-Cain as a “psychopathic doomsday cultist,” warning about the theological currents shaping the administration. 

As someone well-versed in Christianese — I was raised deep in the evangelical Bible Belt of Texas, and even met a young Paula White growing up — this dialect signals a real shift.

In evangelical media ecosystems, Iran is not just a strategic adversary but part of a prophetic story — one tied to interpretations of the Book of Revelation and the battle of Armageddon. Suffering, in this worldview, is not merely tragic; it is necessary to actuate the return of Christ.

And as White-Cain, now the head of the White House Faith Office, put it: “To say no to President Trump would be to say no to God.”

This tension — between political expediency and apocalyptic belief — is no longer theoretical. It is being operationalized.

Prophetic Gospels

Days after launching unilateral strikes on Iran, Trump convened nearly two dozen evangelical leaders for private counsel. The pastors stood around him, laying hands to pray for strength and protection for his latest military campaign. At the center of that circle is White-Cain, a longtime Trump ally who has served as his “spiritual adviser” since his first presidential run.

White-Cain’s rise is emblematic of the fusion now underway. Once a televangelist with deep ties to charismatic Christianity, she built a following through prosperity gospel preaching — a theology that links faith with material success — before being elevated as a key Trump confidant.

Early on, she rose to prominence through her connections to figures like Bishop T.D. Jakes and appearances on networks like BET, positioning her within both Black churches (which is where I met her) and evangelical media spaces alike. During his first term, Trump established the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative and appointed White to lead the newly minted office.

But White-Cain is not just a political ally. She is part of a broader network of evangelical leaders who have long framed global conflict in explicitly prophetic terms. Figures in this sphere have publicly described Middle East wars as signs of the “last days,” argued that geopolitical upheaval fulfills biblical prophecy, and emphasized that spiritual warfare is inseparable from physical conflict.

White-Cain’s own writings and appearances wrap modern politics in stark, spiritually dispensationalist end-times framing. Dispensationalism, for the uninitiated, is a strain of evangelical Protestant theology that reads the Bible literally, divides history into distinct eras of God’s plan, separates Israel from the Church, and anticipates a coming rapture and a thousand-year kingdom on Earth.

In an April 2025 interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, White-Cain opened by asking whether the world was ready to kick off Armageddon itself.

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“The Christian vision of the End of Days foretells of some profound transformation and redemption,” she said in the interview, as reported by the Times of Israel. “Based on the events that are unfolding today, do you feel that we are seeing these signs of that vision come to fruition?”

The stakes, by her telling, are nothing less than annihilation. This matters when those voices are whispering prayers into the decisions of a president directing military force.

She’s not alone. She’s brought others into Trump’s religious power network — including Alabama pastor Travis Johnson, who has been spotted around Trump’s religious events and moving in the same circles. 

He presents himself as a global traveler spreading Christian “love” and “peace.” On X, he also told his followers, “Islam is not just a religion, but a system of military conquest” — casting American Christianity as a necessary bulwark against it.

After Israeli missile strikes — which coincided with the start of Ramadan — decimated Iranian leadership, Johnson posted with a glib jab: “Bye, Felicia. Khamenei has left the building.”

Robert Jeffress, pastor of megachurch First Baptist Dallas and one of Trump’s most visible religious defenders, is also among those lending supernatural support to the president. Jeffress has spent years advancing a worldview that injects Christian nationalism with cultural and religious exclusion. He has described Islam as “a false religion” that is “inspired by Satan,” and once declared, “America’s collapse is inevitable and there is nothing we can do to stop it.”

Others in Trump’s spiritual cadre push similar lines with parallel prophetic and apocalyptic bluster. California pastor Greg Laurie, another regular in Trump’s prayer closet, linked the assassination of Iran’s ayatollah to end times gospel in a video he posted on X.

“As far as I can see the next event on the prophetic calendar would be the rapture,” he told his audience. “Then of course the great tribulation period … culminating in the Battle of Armageddon.” 

Laurie, like many evangelicals, reads Iran as biblical Persia, which is named in the book of Ezekiel as an ally of Magog, a prophesied war machine that will one day converge on Israel in the final chapter of human history.

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There are those in Trump’s religious sphere who haven’t given up hope — but only because they see themselves as locked in a holy war for the soul of a nation. Josh McPherson, a rising voice in Christian nationalist circles, has been blunt in his preaching for a theocratic military force, often teaching in camouflage and combat boots. He has advocated that “godly righteous men and women submitted to the Heavenly Father” should be running the most powerful military in the world.

In a recent podcast interview, McPherson frames American Christians as a critical line of defense against the spread of Islam, which he describes as “demonic” and a “scourge” while advocating for mass deportations. If action isn’t taken now, he predicts the apocalyptic vision where future generations of Christians will have to respond to an “Islamic Jihadist invasion, where the only way to push back is with bullets and guns.” 

Taken together, this is not a random assortment of fringe pastors. It is a coherent theological ecosystem, one that frames war as prophecy, opponents as demonic, and global collapse as necessary to bring about the return of Christ.

That convergence — of theology, rhetoric, and military power — is now drawing scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have formally called for an investigation into Hegseth and the Defense Department, warning that “extreme religious rhetoric” may be seeping into the chain of command and shaping how the war on Iran is being prosecuted.

The danger is not just metaphysical. There is a long body of research showing that when political power fuses with religious certainty, war intensifies. Religious framing makes wars far more difficult to end, not easier. Conflicts become existential, not negotiable. Identity replaces strategy. Destiny replaces diplomacy. 

And for volunteer troops fighting in a pluralistic democracy, intention matters.

For a soldier, sailor, or Marine who pulls the trigger or launches the missile, it muddies the distinction between national defense and participation in what could amount to religious ethnic cleansing.

Where strategic decisions are guided not by how to end wars, but how to beget new prophetic ones.

Where the end result could mean dying not in service of your country, but instead as a preordained martyr. 

A soldier should not be asked to die for a religion he does not serve, to usher in an ending he does not want, or to fight for a vision of the world rooted in prophecy rather than policy. That is not national defense; that is ideological conscription. And when a state begins to wage war on those terms, it is no longer defending itself — it is surrendering its power to something far more dangerous than any enemy abroad.

The post Far-Right Religious Leaders Advising Trump See Iran as an End Times Holy War appeared first on The Intercept.

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” U.S. President Donald Trump told the New York Times in a March 1 interview about his plans for war on Iran. Things have not gone as Trump hoped, to put it mildly. Trump’s search for the Iranian Delcy Rodríguez — a regime insider willing to comply with U.S. demands, as Rodríguez has since she ascended from Venezuela’s vice president to acting president following the January 3 U.S. attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro — hit a snag when the U.S. and Israel killed most of the would-be successors to Ayatollah Khamenei in the opening days of the war. During a March 3 meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump told reporters, “Most of the people we had in mind are dead.” (Trump omitted the crucial fact that the U.S. is to blame.)

As the war passes the four-week mark, it is abundantly clear Iran will not be the next Venezuela. Operation Absolute Resolve, the code name for the U.S. attack on Venezuela, was a spectacular success in tactical terms. The U.S. achieved its military aim of removing Maduro in just a few hours and suffered zero U.S. service member fatalities and only a handful of injuries, although the operation cost the lives of around 70 Venezuelans and 32 Cuban security forces. While this toll should not be minimized, it pales in comparison to the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran, which as of mid-March has led to at least 3,000 deaths in Iran, Lebanon, and beyond. In contrast to Trump’s “brilliant operation” in Caracas, the war on Iran has exploded. Well over a dozen countries are now involved, and the war threatens to bring the global economy to a halt due to the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a pivotal passage for oil, liquid natural gas, fertilizer, and other crucial commodities.

As the world’s eyes remain fixed on Iran, it is important to ask: What has the Venezuela model actually achieved in Venezuela? The short answer is a new form of colonialism in which Venezuela has lost its national sovereignty. Trump’s pledge to “run” Venezuela, made in the hours after the January 3 attack, has not come to pass. The attack instead led to regime change without a change of regime, in which the U.S. removed Maduro but left his regime almost entirely intact. Trump has boasted of this fact, telling the New York Times, “Everybody’s kept their job except two people,” i.e., Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, both of whom have spent the past three months awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail. The officials who now run Venezuela come directly from Maduro’s administration: Rodríguez; her brother Jorge, who heads the National Assembly; and the minister of interior, Diosdado Cabello. In a possible sign of future changes to come, Rodríguez on March 18 replaced Venezuela’s longstanding minister of defense, Vladimir Padrino López, all but surely in coordination with the U.S.

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The flip side of this overall continuity is the Trump administration’s stunning and continuing sidelining of far-right opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize and infamously gifted it to Trump in an unsuccessful attempt to curry his favor. Trump has supported Rodríguez because she offers that which he most wants: stability. A handover to Machado threatened to plunge Venezuela into chaos and civil war. Strictly speaking, this is not because Machado “lacks the respect within” Venezuela, as Trump claimed during his January 3 press conference. Polls indicate Machado remains the most popular politician within Venezuela. The problem, for Trump, is Machado’s longstanding opposition to any form of “collaboration” with the Maduro administration and Chavismo (the political movement associated with the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez) more broadly. This radical stance makes Machado a major threat to Venezuela’s military and state apparatus. Machado may be reevaluating her hardline position as she plans to return to Venezuela. In a March 12 press conference, Machado spoke of a “grand national agreement,” presumably a power-sharing accord, a possibility she had long rejected. Trump, for his part, has reportedly told Machado, who fled the country in 2025, not to return to Venezuela. This is purportedly out of concern for her safety but is more likely due to Trump’s (not unreasonable) fear that Machado’s presence in Venezuela would undermine the continuity Trump has sought to preserve.

For now, Venezuela remains in the hands of former Maduro officials, who have presided over a transformation of Venezuela’s domestic and foreign policy that is both stunning and limited. The details of this transformation, and the way it is happening, lay bare Venezuela’s profound lack of national sovereignty. While Trump is not “running” Venezuela in an operational sense, the U.S. is now effectively dictating the country’s policy. This is evident in many ways, starting with the fact that the Rodríguez administration must submit a monthly budget to the U.S., which has the discretion to approve or reject Venezuela’s requests. The Trump administration has also seized at least 80 million barrels of Venezuelan oil and controls the sale of this oil, with the proceeds held not in Caracas but in a U.S. Treasury account (prior to that, they were held in a U.S.-controlled account in Qatar). American Democratic Party leaders have repeatedly questioned this arrangement, which is not only blatantly colonial and opaque but also creates the clear potential for corruption and malfeasance.

Under direct pressure from the Trump administration, Venezuela’s National Assembly has implemented sweeping oil and mining reforms. In late January, the National Assembly passed a major reform of Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law regulating oil production. The reform institutes three fundamental changes: First, it dramatically lowers the taxes and royalties foreign oil companies pay to the Venezuelan state. Under the 2006 hydrocarbons law, the Venezuelan state took up to 65 percent of oil proceeds. The reform permits this to be reduced to 25 percent, lowers income taxes to 15 percent (from 30 percent), and caps royalties at 30 percent, with the executive given discretion to lower it even further. Second, the reform allows foreign oil companies to operate independently, instead of the previous mandate that foreign companies operate through joint projects with Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA. Third, the reform allows arbitration over disputes to occur in foreign courts, eliminating the earlier requirement that disputes be resolved within Venezuela. These changes give foreign oil companies dramatically greater material benefits and control over the country’s oil.

Foreign oil companies are already taking advantage. Shell and Chevron are reportedly close to signing major new deals for production in Venezuela. Chevron is the only U.S. oil major that remained in Venezuela throughout the Hugo Chávez and Maduro years, with Shell (like Exxon and others) having left the country in the wake of the 2006–2007 nationalization process under Chávez. Despite these deals, it will take significant time and resources — upward of $100 billion and a decade of work, according to experts — for Venezuela’s oil industry to approach its previous levels of production. These latest deals come in the wake of the second recent visit by a Trump Cabinet member to Venezuela. Energy Secretary Chris Wright toured Venezuela in mid-February, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum traveled there in early March, when he gushed about Washington’s desire to access Venezuela’s mineral resources. CIA Director John Ratcliffe and U.S. Southern Command General Francis Donovan have also recently traveled to Venezuela. During Burgum’s visit, Rodríguez promised to work at “Trump speed” to ramp up the U.S.’s access to Venezuela’s mineral resources. Rodríguez has been as good as her word, with the National Assembly swiftly moving to approve a new mining law that, like the hydrocarbons reform, will roll back decades-old nationalist legislation.

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The U.S. has also pushed Venezuela to sever its relations with its rivals China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. A statement from Venezuela’s foreign ministry late last month about the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran shows the profound changes underway. The statement (which was later taken down) condemned Iran but failed to condemn or even name the U.S. or Israel. This is a major shift from the Chávez and Maduro years, when Venezuela stood with Iran and regularly condemned the U.S. and Israel. The change in Venezuela’s foreign policy is most clear on Cuba, which for more than a decade relied heavily on highly subsidized Venezuelan oil. After Maduro’s capture, Venezuela ceased all oil shipments to Cuba, directly contributing to the profound energy crisis it is now facing, marked by regular nationwide blackouts. The Trump administration has done everything it can to deepen this crisis by applying heavy pressure on Mexico and other countries to stop providing oil to Cuba. Trump’s open goal is regime change.

While Venezuela’s economic and foreign policy has shifted quickly and decisively, political change since Maduro’s capture has been much more slow going. There is still no timetable for elections, and the Trump administration is not pushing for a democratic transition any time soon. According to a New York Times report, Rubio and Rodríguez have discussed the possibility of holding elections in late 2027, and Rubio has made clear that there must be a new democratically elected government in Venezuela before Trump leaves office in 2029. Rodríguez has taken a few steps toward political liberalization. She has pledged to close the notorious El Helicoide prison, and on February 19 the National Assembly passed an amnesty law, which has been greeted as a positive development but criticized for limiting the time period and offenses covered by the law. According to a March 17 report by the Venezuelan human rights organization Foro Penal, as of February 24 the government had released over 400 political prisoners.

A key question is: How do ordinary Venezuelans feel about the changes happening in their country? One answer comes from the first in-person poll conducted in Venezuela following Maduro’s removal, with 1,000 respondents interviewed between January 24 and 30. The poll indicates Venezuelans largely support the January 3 operation and feel cautiously optimistic about the future but deeply unsatisfied with their economic situation and wary of the Rodríguez administration. Fifty-five percent of respondents approve of Maduro’s removal and 77 percent view him unfavorably. Rodríguez fares a tad better, with 73 percent viewing her unfavorably, while 37 percent approve and 41 percent disapprove of her performance as acting president. 

This suggests many Venezuelans are in a wait-and-see holding pattern with Rodríguez. Tellingly, 62 percent of respondents list cost of living as their priority versus just 7 percent prioritizing democracy. The poll also indicates Venezuelans are evenly split in their views of the U.S. government and Trump, with roughly half supportive and half opposed. Of the respondents, 72 percent reported they feel Venezuela is moving in a positive direction and 83 percent feel optimistic about the future.

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These findings are in line with recent public comments by Venezuelan scholars and journalists. In a February 3 online Atlantic Council forum, Guillermo Aveledo, a political science professor at Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas, said most Venezuelans were feeling cautiously optimistic but continue to fear government repression. Aveledo also spoke of how citizens and the government will be testing the waters in the coming weeks and months to see what is acceptable in terms of public speech and protest.

During a March 11 interview I conducted with him, Andrés Antillano, a member of the anti-imperialist leftist organization Corriente Comunes and professor at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, expressed a similar but more critical view. Antillano said, “I believe Trump is more popular in Venezuela than in the United States,” and added, “there’s a consensus that what happened [on January 3] is for the better of the country.” He noted, “Government actors are happy because they’ve preserved their power. The right is happy because Trump, their great hero, is ruling. And the people are happy because of their expectation … that their life conditions are going to improve.” Antillano feels this is mistaken: “Not only have we not seen an improvement but in material terms, in economic terms, the situation has gotten worse and worse.” 

Antillano views Venezuelans’ continuing immiseration — due to years of government mismanagement and punishing U.S. sanctions (which Trump eased on March 18, in a major policy shift allowing U.S. oil companies to deal directly with PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company) — as the reason for their acquiescence to Venezuela’s subordination to the U.S.

“People don’t care about the idea of sovereignty or nationhood when they’re dying of hunger,” he said.

Antillano remains deeply pessimistic about Venezuela’s future. “We are in a subordinate, colonial relationship. We’re a protectorate,” he said. He also said: “[Machado] wants to return to the country to defend the idea of the political transition. Thus, we could see the great irony of María Corina becoming the anti-imperialist figure and the Bolivarian government, with its anti-imperialist origins, becoming the great defender of Trump. It’s crazy, very strange. Everything that’s happening is very sad.”

He continued: “As a friend told me, Venezuela has gone from being a laboratory for emancipatory practices to being a laboratory for the new colonialism.”

But Antillano doesn’t believe all is lost, and said he believes “an important cycle of protest is coming.” He said Corriente Comunes “is actively driving the processes of struggle as the illusion of improvement — stemming from the colonial relationship with the United States — gradually fades away.” Antillano said that Corriente Comunes had recently “held a workers’ gathering, and we believe a very significant mobilization is about to take place in all the country’s major cities, a mobilization for wages, wage increases, and labor rights, which will be the largest in many years.”

The mobilization occurred March 12, the day after we spoke, and videos show it was large and contentious. Protesters broke through a line of police blocking the National Assembly and forced legislators to listen to their salary and pension demands. While Trump and Rodríguez are seeking economic liberalization without democratization, Venezuela’s workers and leftist activists have other ideas. Venezuelans will seek to write their own story, despite being mired in conditions not of their own making. Time will tell what vision of the country will prevail, and for the foreseeable future, all actors in Venezuela will have to reckon with the imperial behemoth to the north.

The post Trump Wanted to Replicate His Venezuela “Success” in Iran. What Has It Even Looked Like? appeared first on The Intercept.

A judge last week struck down the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists seeking “unauthorized” information, siding with the New York Times in its lawsuit against the government. In response, the Pentagon on Monday added some meaningless window dressing and essentially reissued the same restrictions. The administration pledged to “immediately” appeal the decision on the original policy, and on Tuesday, the Times filed a motion to compel the administration to comply with the judge’s order. 

As alarming as the Pentagon’s antics are, the Times’ lawsuit is not the only case about whether reporters have the right to ask questions. It’s not even the only one in the news this week. 

In 2017, police in Laredo, Texas, arrested citizen journalist Patricia Villarreal under an obscure and never previously used law making it a felony to ask government employees for nonpublic information for personal benefit. Her supposed crime was asking a police officer about two local tragedies — a suicide and a deadly car wreck.

Her arrest was widely ridiculed, and a judge quickly threw out the charges. When Villarreal sued over her arrest and mistreatment by officers, the legal question wasn’t whether the charges against her were permissible but whether they were so obviously bogus that she could overcome qualified immunity, the unjust and expansive legal shield that protects government employees from liability for all but the most blatant violations. That issue went to the Supreme Court twice, but on Monday, the Court declined to review a federal appellate court’s ruling that the officers were shielded from liability. 

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No matter what our severely compromised Supreme Court thinks, the local cops who arrested Villarreal were embarrassingly ignorant of the Constitution. But they were also ahead of their time: The Department of Justice is making the same claims that turned the Laredo police into a First Amendment laughingstock — that reporters simply asking questions to the government is criminal — to federal district Judge Paul Friedman. 

Most discussion of the Pentagon’s restrictions has focused on their conditions for reporters to receive press credentials, which the Pentagon says can be revoked if reporters publish “unauthorized” information. That policy is wildly unconstitutional on its own, and every mainstream outlet gave up their press passes rather than sign on, leaving war coverage inside the Pentagon to the likes of Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s LindellTV streaming service. 

But the Pentagon’s legal filings imply that reporters who don’t follow the rules risk more than their press passes. On March 12, the DOJ filed a brief to clarify its lawyers’ earlier comments in a discussion with Friedman at a hearing of “whether asking a question was a criminal act.” The government argued that although journalists may lawfully ask questions of “authorized” Pentagon personnel, “a journalist does solicit the commission of a criminal act, and that solicitation is not protected by the First Amendment, when he or she solicits … non-public information from individuals who are legally obligated not to disclose that information.”

There you have it. What was once a fringe, failed legal theory concocted by some local cops in one Texas border city is now the official position of the federal government’s lawyers, which it felt compelled to put in writing in case anyone wasn’t sure where it stood after the hearing. Both the rogue cops and the DOJ’s lawyers contend that journalists merely asking questions to government officials constitutes unlawful solicitation. 

As JT Morris, supervising senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (which represents Villarreal) told me in an email last week, the First Amendment “unquestionably protects our right to ask questions, whether it’s a citizen asking police about a local crime or the New York Times asking Pentagon officials about matters of national security. Officials can always respond, ‘no comment.’ But they cannot jail Americans for asking.”

The government’s argument would have turned countless Pulitzer-winning national security reporters into criminals. As Friedman put it in his ruling, the “role of a journalist is to solicit information. … [A] journalist asking questions is not a crime!” (You can tell a judge is miffed when scholarly language fails and they resort to exclamation points.)

The DOJ’s “concession” in its clarification brief (and later in its revised policy) — that journalists can direct questions to authorized spokespeople — makes no difference. That the administration even felt the need to state something so obvious, presumably because they thought it would make them sound more reasonable, signals the extent to which they’ve threatened the First Amendment. 

Government agencies have long routed journalists’ inquiries to PR flacks and instructed non-public-facing staffers not to answer reporters’ questions. That’s unconstitutional in its own right; earlier this month, the Village of Key Biscayne, Florida, became the latest government agency to settle a lawsuit over its employee gag rule. But until this administration, the government at least placed the burden on its own employees to comply with restrictions on talking to reporters. 

Now, the government expects journalists to make themselves a party to its censorship directives, and ignore Supreme Court precedent that they can print any government information they lawfully obtain, even if it shouldn’t have been released. “A contrary rule … would force upon the media the onerous obligation of sifting through government press releases, reports, and pronouncements to prune out material arguably unlawful for publication,” the Court reasoned. 

Journalist Kathryn Foxhall, who has for years sounded the alarm about “censorship by PIO,” including in collaboration with the Society of Professional Journalists, says the press has failed to meaningfully oppose these policies. “The media have done little to fight the ever-tightening rules at federal agencies and elsewhere banning reporters from buildings and prohibiting employees from speaking to journalists without the authorities’ oversight. With amazing negligence journalists just assume whatever reporters get is the whole story, even in the face of the many thousands of gagged staff people. Now these Pentagon policies remind us that people in power will stop literally at nothing to control the story,” she told me.

The Pentagon’s position that newsgathering is a prosecutable offense is not just theoretical. Although the DOJ’s brief didn’t explicitly reference it, just like the officers in Laredo, federal prosecutors have their own archaic and constitutionally dubious law on the books to sane-wash their nonsense arguments — the Espionage Act of 1917. Read literally, that law (Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently introduced a much-needed bill to reform it) arguably prohibits reporters and anyone else from obtaining or attempting to obtain national defense information.

But reading it that way to go after journalists would be unconstitutional and politically toxic, which is why past administrations have refrained. Had the Supreme Court denied the Laredo officers’ qualified immunity in Villarreal’s case, it would have signaled that arguments for expansive interpretations of arcane laws to criminalize routine reporting are a nonstarter. 

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The Court ducked the issue despite being fully aware that the present administration is looking for any excuse to punish reporters that dare to undermine its narratives. They’ve already claimed Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson — whose home they raided, seizing terabytes of data — violated the Espionage Act by obtaining leaked information. The Trump administration is barging through the door the Biden administration left wide open, when, despite warnings from First Amendment advocates, it extracted a plea deal from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Espionage Act charges for obtaining and publishing government records, including about Iraq war crimes. 

The DOJ’s adoption of the Laredo police’s discredited theory is an extension of the Assange and Natanson cases; the claim that publishing leaked documents is criminal has evolved into a theory that merely asking questions is, too. The administration lost in court this time, but it said it will appeal, and may be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s cowardice in the Laredo case. 

If this administration succeeds in chipping away at constitutional protections for journalistic practices as basic as asking questions, reporters who wish to do anything more than regime stenography may risk imprisonment just by doing their jobs. In her dissent to the Villarreal ruling, Justice Sotomayor put it well: “Tolerating retaliation against journalists, or efforts to criminalize routine reporting practices, threatens to silence ‘one of the very agencies the Framers of our Constitution thoughtfully and deliberately selected to improve our society and keep it free.’” 

The post Pentagon Wants It to Be Illegal for Reporters to Ask “Unauthorized” Questions appeared first on The Intercept.

“Take a picture of a bus, if you see one, because it’s the last one you’ll see here in Cuba,” my taxi driver said. We were headed into Havana in his Chinese electric car during a trip I made to the island earlier this month.

The car is a novelty on Cuba’s crumbling streets, which are crowded with bikes and electric motorcycles and flanked by new solar parks and in-demand diesel generators. It’s also a lifesaver now more than ever amid a near-total oil blockade that has plunged the island’s residents into a profound state of uncertainty, fear, and hopelessness.

As the Trump administration starves Cuba of fuel in an attempt to force political and economic change on the island, conditions on the ground have grown more dire than I’ve ever witnessed in the 11 years I’ve been traveling there — including several years working as a journalist during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the country’s tourism-dependent economy was brought to a standstill.

Signs of the oil blockade are everywhere you look. Street corners are turning into trash dumps, transportation is prohibitively expensive, inflation is climbing, food is rotting in ports and refrigerators, and access to running water is intermittent, at best. 

A friend will not get to see his child be born, as his wife — one of many Cubans with dual Spanish citizenship — has flown across the Atlantic to give birth in Spain due to the dire state of Cuba’s state-run hospitals, once among the region’s best. 

Another friend with severe cataracts, who had undergone months of tests and lab work ahead of a surgery finally scheduled for February, learned the week before that it had been postponed indefinitely. Now, she can no longer see out of her left eye.

A third friend saw the cost of the wedding for which he’d been saving up for years double from one day to the next, as prices soared when the small reserves of fuel his vendors had got down to the last drops.

The Trump administration’s wager that depriving Cuba of oil would either provoke a mass uprising, browbeat the island’s authorities into subservience and a change in leadership, beget a free-market paradise — or some ill-defined combination of the three — is just the most recent in a series of “maximum-pressure” actions Secretary of State Marco Rubio has devised in an attempt to dislodge Cuba’s rulers from power, a longtime goal for him and for many Cuban Americans. 

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This campaign has been ongoing since Trump’s first term, when Rubio, the president’s de facto secretary of state for Latin America, helped restrict Americans’ ability to travel and send money to the island; cut off Cuba’s access to international finance; shutter the U.S. Embassy in Havana; and deploy dozens more sanctions over everything from hotel contracts and cruise lines to banking and investment, most of which were kept in place under the Biden administration. 

Now, in Trump’s second term, the maximum-pressure strategy for which Rubio has taken full credit has accelerated into full gear. Not only has the administration coerced Venezuela and Mexico, until recently Cuba’s two largest fuel suppliers, into halting oil shipments to the island, it has also pressured Central American and Caribbean countries to drop their medical services contracts with Cuba, privately encouraged regional neighbors to sever diplomatic ties with the country, and stopped issuing most visas for Cuban nationals, including for family reunification, scientific and business exchanges, humanitarian parole, and other purposes.

In part due to these sanctions, the island’s economy is projected to shrink by more than 7 percent in 2026, while over the past several years, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has nearly doubled, and some 20 percent of its population has left.

And yet, the Cuban people — adaptive, proud, and resilient as ever — have found ways to eke out a living on the island, despite being subjected to the longest and most comprehensive U.S. sanctions regime anywhere on Earth and stymied by insufficient Cuban government efforts to kickstart an outdated economy.

Thousands of private businesses, which have also been hamstrung by Trump’s oil siege, continue to sell imported, even American, goods, albeit at prices that are exorbitant for the majority of the population. Community projects, churches, and civil society organizations organize ad-hoc soup kitchens to feed the most vulnerable. Foreign governments, even those that have buckled under U.S. pressure like Mexico, continue to send vital aid to the island, as do U.S.-based activists, religious groups, and Cuban Americans.

Despite limited access to the most basic supplies, engineers are rolling out new solar infrastructure faster than any other country in the world, electrical technicians are restoring the country’s collapsed power grid even quicker than before, doctors are saving lives against all odds, and Cubans are inventing workarounds to conditions that seem totally unworkable.

Trump’s gambit is to once again make the island dependent on the United States by simultaneously engineering state collapse while controlling the resources entering the country’s nascent private sector. This strategy will only exacerbate rising inequality on the island by drawing clear lines around who gets to live and who is condemned to die.

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As the president floats “taking over” Cuba by means “friendly” or not — amid secret negotiations rife with speculation, misinformation, and trial balloons — it’s those who depend the most on public services to survive, rather than well-connected, middle-class entrepreneurs, who will have no other choice but to seek refuge on U.S. shores or perish before making it that far, if the state collapses.

Despite these dire circumstances, Cubans are increasingly optimistic that a negotiated solution with the U.S. that avoids military action and tangibly improves quality of life on the island — not entirely dissimilar from the one President Barack Obama pursued a decade ago — might be possible.

While Rubio has disputed recent reports that the U.S. only seeks to remove Cuba’s president and keep the rest of its power structure intact, he also indicated he may be open to gradual, economic reforms on the island, as opposed to the maximalist, unconditional political changes he has long demanded — a red line for Cuban authorities. To prevent outright humanitarian collapse, the administration has authorized fuel sales, including from Venezuela, to Cuba’s private sector — some of which are already arriving — and sent humanitarian aid to hurricane-stricken eastern Cuba through the Catholic Church.

Cuban authorities — with their backs up against the wall and no assurances that a Russian crude oil tanker barreling toward the Caribbean won’t be intercepted by U.S. Coast Guard cutters off the island’s northeast coast — have responded to U.S. pressure by releasing political prisoners, loosening restrictions on private enterprise, and making important, if long-overdue, overtures to Cuba’s diaspora to reconcile with their homeland. Rubio has responded that these changes aren’t “dramatic” enough and the island needs “new leaders,” while other administration officials prepare indictments against Cuban leaders and threaten that the switch from negotiation to military action could be imminent.

No matter what agreement, if any, ultimately emerges between the two governments, what’s clear is that the Cuban people want a deal — whether economic or political — to happen now, not later. As the situation on the ground becomes increasingly unsustainable for the Cuban people, that may mean leaving in place for the time being the regime that Trump has promised to topple and allowing fuel to flow once again in exchange for a few meaningful concessions, even if further-reaching reforms get pushed down the road.

As prominent Republicans grow concerned about the potential for humanitarian catastrophe and a migration crisis brewing just off U.S. shores, nothing is stopping Trump from achieving the deal with Cuba he has always wanted — one that’s hammered out, as Rubio has said, by “mature and realistic” negotiators on both sides who understand the country “doesn’t have to change all at once.”

With tensions continuing to mount, military preparations underway on both sides, and Trump assuring he’ll be turning to Cuba “very soon,” it’s more urgent than ever that an agreement — the contours of which are still not publicly known — be reached as soon as possible. Countless Cuban lives may very well depend on it.

The post U.S. Oil Blockade Could Condemn Cubans to Die Without a Deal appeared first on The Intercept.

The Trump administration is on its way to creating every authoritarian’s dream: a centralized database containing intimate details about every resident of this country, fully searchable by artificial intelligence. This powerful tool would empower the government to conduct previously unimagined levels of surveillance and harassment against its own people. 

Freedom of the Press Foundation is suing the administration for documents behind the database. We know that this isn’t just something that the Trump administration would exploit; once built, it’s unlikely any administration could resist the urge to weaponize our personal information. 

This nightmare privacy scenario began one year ago, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order that expanded data sharing across the federal government. The administration touted the order, “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos,” as a way to target fraud within a supposedly bloated government.

The order was no such thing.

Instead, it took a machete to long-standing privacy protections that mandate agencies can only share our data when absolutely necessary, to install a massive data-mining operation in their place. 

To do so, Trump’s executive order required agency heads to submit reports to the Office of Management and Budget on the following:

1. Which agency regulations governing unclassified data access should be eliminated or modified.
2. Which policies governing the sharing of classified information need to be scrapped to meet the administration’s goals.
   

The public has never seen the reports agencies submitted by OMB, despite their impact on our privacy. However, thanks to intrepid reporting and litigation, we do have glimpses of how this is starting to play out:

• The Central Intelligence Agency has been granted increased access to domestic law enforcement databases, further blurring the line between foreign intelligence and domestic policing.
• The so-called Department of Government Efficiency got direct access to Treasury Department payment systems, including Social Security numbers, names, and birthdays, according to a whistleblower.
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement got access to Medicaid recipients’ data and banking information. 
• The Transportation Security Administration is now sharing biometric passenger info with immigration enforcement, turning every airport check-in into a potential trap.
  

But these incursions are only the tip of the iceberg. 

Reports indicate the administration’s goal for dismantling privacy protections is to build a centralized national database, which would allow the administration to create detailed reports on every American, potentially for political purposes, including retaliation, harassment, and imprisonment. 

At the same time this database is becoming a reality, the Department of Homeland Security is rapidly expanding its surveillance capabilities, and the administration is unleashing AI across federal systems to analyze the data points they are harvesting from our private lives. 

Perhaps worst of all, by “eliminating information silos,” the administration is creating a single point of failure for the privacy of every American. A centralized database that compiles our most intimate information, from our health to our finances, doesn’t just make us vulnerable to government abuse; it creates a massive, singular target for hackers and foreign adversaries.

“‘Information silos’ aren’t an inefficiency. They are a bulwark against the exact kind of abuses and negligence the Trump administration has engaged in,” said Ginger Quintero-McCall, a public records attorney with the Free Information Group. “Preventing easy, frictionless, unaccountable access to troves of sensitive data isn’t a bug — it’s a feature.”

And while the Trump administration recklessly seeks and compiles our data, it has simultaneously stopped sharing its data with the public. Vital information about the climate, immigration, federal spending, and the economy has been pulled from public view. 

The government is turning into a one-way mirror: They see everything, while we see nothing.

This is an untenable and anti-democratic information imbalance. To fight back, we need to fully understand just how badly our data and our privacy has been compromised. The agency reports submitted to the OMB are essential for this investigation — which is why Freedom of the Press Foundation is filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against OMB for these records.

This suit will not only force the disclosure of these important documents, but it will also serve to remind the administration that the federal government is required to safeguard the personal data we entrust to it. It is not allowed to become a data-mining firm that leverages our information for political gain while hiding its work from the public.

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As Kevin Bell, one of our counselors at Free Information Group, said, “This threat to Americans’ very right to an individual identity has never been so dire. The Trump administration is correlating each of its citizens’ with their transactions, emails, location tracking, missed car payments, online views or posts, and entire personal histories; the President has ordered the collection and free dissemination of every bit of data about every one of us held anywhere for any reason.”

The public deserves to see these documents. We intend to compel them to show us — and all Americans.

The post Trump Wants to Put You in a Massive, Secret Government Database appeared first on The Intercept.

Maine oysterman-turned-politician Graham Platner has been drawing consistently packed crowds across the rural state for months as he aims to take on longtime incumbent Republican Susan Collins in this year’s Senate race. He’s regularly outpolling his only other viable competitor for the Democratic nomination, Gov. Janet Mills. At 41, he could hold a seat for decades that Democrats have long had their eyes on. 

Since Mills joined the race last fall (Platner announced he was running that August), her support has stagnated and even slipped in some polls as Platner’s numbers continue to rise. Collins and Mills are in a statistical dead heat, with Collins having the edge, while Platner has a few points difference ahead of the incumbent. 

For Maine voters concerned with electability, those polls lend credibility to Platner’s campaign. He’s in position to take on an entrenched Republican whose feigned objections to Donald Trump’s excesses — usually expressed as “concern” — have long driven liberal Mainers insane. So why is he still facing resistance from Senate Democratic leadership?

Platner’s town hall tour of Maine is further raising his profile, even after a number of controversies, most notably a Nazi tattoo, threatened his campaign. The more voters get to know him, the more they like him; he’s gone from underdog to favorite in the race. And despite establishment antipathy, he’s finding some friends in other corners of the party. 

Three Democratic senators — Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, and New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich — have endorsed Platner. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., is backing him, as are individual members of the progressive wing, like Robert Reich and David Hogg, and groups like Our Revolution and the Maine People’s Alliance. Platner also has the ear of the Pod Save America crew, a group of influential Democrats aligned with the Obama wing of the party. 

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But the Democratic establishment is trying to draw a line in the sand on the future of the party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, both Democrats from New York, are actively working to elect Mills. There is speculation that the governor, who has pledged to only serve one term in Washington, is Senate leadership’s preferred candidate because she would be a more pliable member of the delegation, while Platner is seen as more independent and willing to take populist, further left stands.

The race bears similarities to the 2016 Democratic primary for president, when Sanders went up against Hillary Clinton and offered a progressive alternative. As in this contest, the machine politician was pitched by the party’s establishment as the more deserving candidate, while the populist candidate to her left ran an insurgent campaign. 

It’s another chapter in the intraparty civil war that has been simmering and often boiling over for decades. The Clinton wing, the Obama wing, the Sanders wing, and every other part of the sprawling political coalition that is the Democratic Party are all still vying for dominance. In 2008, the main dividing line was Iraq; in 2016, the failure of the Obama presidency; in 2020, Trump and Covid. 

In 2026, the party is still reeling from defeat at the ballot box just two years ago, one that was driven by a perception that the party was out of touch with voters on economic issues as well as, reportedly, its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The latter issue has become a flashpoint for conflict between the base and the establishment, especially with Schumer — who has described one of his roles in leadership as ensuring Israel gets “all the aid” it needs from the U.S.

For centrist Democrats, Mills is their pick for Maine. Seniority means a lot to a certain kind of centrist Democrat. According to Platner, he was told in no uncertain terms that he was expected to stand down — “I was skipping the line,” he told Slate earlier this month — when he notified Democratic Senate leadership that he was considering running for the seat; the response he received came with a threat to turn his life inside out.

“They essentially said, if we do this, they’re going to come after me,” Platner said. “They’re going to rip my life apart.”

It’s not hard to see what’s off-putting about Platner to the moderate wing of the party. He’s running an anti-war, economically populist campaign with rhetoric aimed at the elites who fund the DSCC and the party’s corporatist wing. He’s come out forcefully for trans rights at a time when Democratic centrist think tanks, friendly to the party’s donor class, are all but arguing the party should throw marginalized groups under the bus. He’s also been forthright in calling Israel’s genocide in Gaza what it is. 

Unfortunately for the party establishment, the issues Platner is running on are popular with voters — especially the Democratic base. The party has been shifting left since Trump’s first term and Platner, like Sanders and members of the Squad, among others, is taking advantage of those rising tides of progressivism. 

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This isn’t to say that Platner doesn’t have his own significant challenges. His posts on Reddit, which span a decade, included some language seen as misogynistic, prejudicial, and insulting to Mainers, though clearly antifascist in general and anti-Nazi in particular. Most notably, a scandal last fall became a national news story over his tattoo of a Totenkopf — a skull-and-bones symbol commonly associated with the Nazis — which led him to publicly apologize and have it inked over. Platner has claimed he got the tattoo in a drunken haze while on leave in 2007 when he was a Marine and that he didn’t know its ties to the Nazis until last October.

The tattoo has dogged him ever since, with media outlets bringing it up whenever Platner makes the news, and the controversy hasn’t stopped there. Recently, Platner was criticized for appearing on a right-wing podcast hosted by a fellow veteran, Nate Cornacchia, who has endorsed conspiracy theories like far-right streamer Nick Shirley’s attacks on Somalis in Minnesota and tying Israel to the murder of Charlie Kirk. 

But the governor has her own baggage. Mills is already 78, and if elected, she would be 85 at the end of her six years in office. It’s a hard sell to Democrats in Maine, who, like their counterparts around the country, are still smarting from the humiliation of watching a visibly declining Joe Biden spend his presidency hidden from the public and the media and, when he did appear, fumbling answers onstage or staring off into space. 

Plus, after more than 30 years in Maine politics, which also includes serving in the statehouse and as attorney general, Mills is compromised in this race in specific ways that Platner is not. As governor, Mills has had to work with Collins to get things done for the state. There’s nothing unique about that, but it has provided soundbites of Mills praising Collins — one of which, “I appreciate all that she is doing,” the incumbent already used in an ad last fall. 

Maine voters will make the final decision on who the Democratic nominee will be. Right now, that looks like Platner — so much so that local labor leaders are urging Schumer to withdraw his support for Mills. 

If he wins the primary, Democrats in leadership will have a simple decision to make: Do they want to flip the Senate with a left-leaning veteran whose message resonates, even if it’s not how they wanted to do it? Or do they want to ride out another six years of even more razor-thin margins in either direction in the chamber and bet on 2032? Let’s hope they don’t think another six years of Susan Collins is better than winning with a candidate that outran their candidate from the left.

The post Senate Dem Leaders Are Trying to Sink Graham Platner. Voters Aren’t Convinced. appeared first on The Intercept.