The day Graham Platner became Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, he spoke behind a podium bearing his indignant campaign slogan: “They don’t know Maine.” But when sexual assault allegations against the candidate broke this week, supporters and political allies in the state were left wondering instead if they ever really knew Platner — and uncertain about what’s next for the movement that rallied around him.

On Monday, Jenny Racicot alleged in a Politico article that a “deeply intoxicated” Platner broke into her home and raped her in late 2021, while the two were dating casually. In June, Platner faced claims from conservative activist Lyndsey Fifield that he was physically abusive toward her; on Tuesday, Fifield went on the record with the Washington Post to allege that during their relationship, Platner repeatedly removed condoms during sex without her consent.

The oyster farmer-turned-politician called Racicot’s allegations “false” and “categorically untrue” to Politico and deemed Fifield’s new allegation “categorically false and politically motivated” to the Post.

The revelations come on the heels of a long line of scandals that dogged Platner’s campaign, beginning in September 2025 with the revelation that he had a Totenkopf Nazi symbol tattoo from his time in the service. Maine voters and the state Democratic Party have had enough — and Platner’s chances appear to have run out.

Related

Graham Platner’s Exit From Senate Race Leaves Maine Dems “Hobbled” in Scramble for New Nominee

Still, the populist politics and campaign style the candidate espoused were highly effective in Maine. He relied on a simple message, delivered at town halls and meet-ups across the state. This retail politics allowed to weather earlier storms and, most importantly, to decisively beat his only serious challenger, 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills, who chose to drop out of the race before the June primary election.

But while the message was effective, the cascading scandals that have derailed and effectively ended his campaign reveal a problem for progressives ascendant in the Democratic Party: vetting candidates. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Dan Moraff, who recruited Platner to run, spent $6,250 on an expedited risk-assessment memo.

Some centrist Democrats, like Center for American Progress CEO Neera Tanden, have seized on Platner’s fall as a chance to score political points against the left wing of the party on the heels of its high-profile election wins. In a post on X, Tanden smirked: “Say what you will, but the establishment vets candidates.” She did not, however, address the lack of vetting for establishment candidates like Eric Swalwell or the long list of losses for her wing of the party, showing that this back and forth is ultimately useless and counterproductive.

As CNN reported on Wednesday, Platner could drop out of the race as soon as this afternoon as pressure continues to mount from the Democratic Party and key allies. The campaign team — which includes wunderkind Morris Katz, the Gen Z political strategist who helped Mayor Zohran Mamdani win in New York last year — is reportedly attempting to negotiate Platner’s exit in exchange for some control over the selection of his replacement, although the state party said Tuesday the campaign should have “no role” in that process. On Wednesday afternoon, the campaign sent a poll to volunteers asking for feedback on next steps.

“We firmly believe that the supporters and volunteers who built this movement deserve to have a real role in any nomination process,” Ben Chin, Platner’s campaign manager, said in the Wednesday text blast.

Platner’s leverage shouldn’t be mistaken for having the support of a movement that has swiftly distanced itself from him. Almost every single one of his high-profile endorsers, from Bernie Sanders to the advocacy group MoveOn, have issued calls for Platner to leave the race. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also said it would not spend money on ads in the race if Platner stays in. 

It’s far from out of the question for the left movement that backed his meteoric rise to have an outsized say in who takes his place, especially after the political message that Platner ran on resonated deeply with voters. 

Related

The People Who Stood By Graham Platner — Until He Was Accused of Rape

A reasonable path forward would involve Platner resigning before July 13 — the last day he can drop off the general election ticket — which would give state Democrats until July 27 to nominate a replacement. In a message to party committee members Tuesday, Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson asked for patience. There’s no accepted process in place by law, but however the party proceeds, it “must reflect our Democratic values,” Murphy-Anderson wrote. “It should be open, inclusive, transparent, and fair.”

This is uncharted territory, but due to Maine’s ranked-choice voting system, there are a number of potential replacements who just spent months talking to voters for the governor’s race. Of the losing candidates, Nirav Shah, Troy Jackson, and Shenna Bellows are most likely to make a strong case for facing off against Sen. Susan Collins in the fall. 

Shah placed second in the final count to ultimate nominee Hannah Pingree but has work to do to appeal to the progressive Democratic base that propelled Platner to his dominant showing in the primary. It looks like he’s already making moves to position himself as a possible candidate, telling one user on X that he would vote against military aid to Israel and is calling the Gaza genocide a genocide.

Jackson, a former state Senate president, is widely seen as Platner’s most obvious successor and the progressive lane darling; he’s already filed paperwork to run in Platner’s place. But due to his closeness with Platner’s campaign, he will have to answer questions about what he knew about the allegations and when — as well as addressing a history that includes opposition to marriage equality and anti-abortion positions that, in fairness, he has done an admirable job of making up for in recent years. 

If the decision comes down to a mini-convention or a caucus, Bellows has a good shot. As Maine’s secretary of state, she has visibility and name recognition, she’s pushed back against Trump on the national stage, and she appeals to progressives and centrists alike. Her last time running for Senate, in 2014, resulted in a blow-out win for Collins by more than 35 percentage points; in order to make a strong case for her candidacy, Bellows will have to convince Democrats that this time would be different. 

Platner became a political sensation on the back of his ability to articulate a humane, progressive politics to the public. That political message, more than anything about the candidate, was the core to his appeal. For Maine Democrats, the mission is clear: They need to replace Platner with someone who can win. The key is to find a candidate who can embody the politics that lifted Platner to success while moving on from a figure who has lost the moral and ideological right to be that movement’s standard bearer. 

The post It’s Time for Maine to Ditch Platner — But Not the Politics That Won Over Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

The Democratic Party is rife with internal caucuses and factions. There’s the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Blue Dog Coalition, the “Squad,” and so on. But since 2019, when Elissa Slotkin and Abigail Spanberger first took seats in the House of Representatives, the party has had another, more sinister emerging faction: the CIA Spook Caucus. 

In the last seven years, the Spook Caucus has only gained in strength. Both of its core members have graduated from the House to higher office, with Slotkin elected to the Senate in 2024 and Spanberger elected the governor of Virginia the following year. Soon afterward, Spanberger was selected by the Democratic leadership to deliver the rebuttal to Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union Address, which elevated her to the national stage. Slotkin, meanwhile, has floated the idea of a 2028 presidential run.

And in the 2026 midterms, the Spook Caucus might expand further: In the Democratic primary for Virginia’s 8th Congressional District, former CIA officer Adam Dunigan is running for the opportunity to challenge GOP nominee Anthony Sabio, who is also ex-CIA. But if you happen to care about concepts like “human rights” or “democracy,” this influx of intelligence operatives into our elections is extremely bad news. 

Spanberger’s honeymoon period with the Virginia Democrats is already over. Less than a year into her tenure as governor, she has vetoed 31 of the General Assembly’s bills, including “high-profile Democratic priorities” like collective bargaining rights for public workers and protections against ICE agents making warrantless arrests inside courthouses. On the labor bill, local unions say Spanberger betrayed a campaign promise she’d made to them. After vetoing two bills to limit ICE arrests, the ACLU of Virginia said her actions “constitute a voluntary surrender” to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

But this about-face shouldn’t be surprising, because the public doesn’t really know who Abigail Spanberger is or what she believes, deep down. That’s the problem with electing a CIA officer: They’re professionally trained liars. In a 2025 interview with the Washington Post, Spanberger said she used to have five different passports and identities: “I would travel in ‘true name,’ but then I would meet people not in ‘true name.’” The profile explicitly calls this spycraft “interpersonal skills transferable to politics.” In other words, this is someone who was accustomed to saying whatever people want to hear while concealing her true intentions. So whenever she speaks to Virginia voters, they have no way of telling whether she’s “in true name” or not. The unions found that out the hard way.

As usual, then, we have to judge by actions over words. With this spring’s veto spree, Spanberger’s actions are wildly out of step with the wishes of the voters who elected her, who overwhelmingly support unions and are growing more distrustful of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Seeing your fellow Americans shot dead in the street will do that.) But the vetoes are perfectly in tune with the interests of the national security state, from the drug enforcement agents who still want to make weed busts to ICE itself. Those are Spanberger’s colleagues, and the former CIA agent has moved to protect their power to surveil and police the people she supposedly represents.

Instead, she’s reserved her harshest attacks for socialists. In 2020, after Joe Biden squeaked his way into the presidency, Spanberger told party leaders, “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” a clear shot at rising left-wing leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was an intervention in the ongoing conflict over the future of the Democratic Party, intended to prevent it from ever becoming a truly progressive one — as the Bezos-owned Washington Post also noted with approval.

Hostility to socialists is baked into the institutional culture of the CIA. It’s practically the agency’s reason for existing, and over the course of the 20th century, the CIA and its handpicked dictators massacred countless socialists around the world, from overthrowing President Salvador Allende in Chile, to sponsoring terrorist attacks against Cuba, to the mass slaughter of Indonesian communists via the “Jakarta Method.” Today, though, Spanberger’s anti-socialist stance is directly at odds with the will of Democratic voters, who now approve of socialism at a higher rate (66 percent) than capitalism (42 percent).

What about Slotkin, who now says she won’t rule out a run for president? Like Spanberger, her track record with the CIA is a black box. On her official biography webpages, we’re told only that she chose to join the agency shortly after 9/11, and served “three tours in Iraq alongside the U.S. military” as a “Middle East analyst.” In a 2020 interview with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, she volunteered that she was specifically an “Iraqi Shia-militia expert.” After that, it was on to a role as a national security adviser for both the late Bush and early Obama administrations, a few years as an acting assistant secretary of defense, and then the House and Senate.

This raises some nasty questions. Exactly what information was Slotkin “analyzing” in Iraq, and how was it obtained? We know that one of the primary ways the CIA gathered “intelligence” about “Iraqi Shia militias” was by grabbing and torturing people it suspected of being militants at black site prisons like Abu Ghraib. We know, too, that only a small fraction of those people actually had anything to do with terrorism. So it’s plausible that at least some of Slotkin’s “analysis” was based on the supposed “intelligence” gleaned when you subject a random Iraqi farmer to waterboarding, stress positions, or “rectal rehydration.”

Worse, Slotkin graduated to an adviser to the Bush/Cheney administration in its last days. In that role, she might have known about some of the CIA’s abuses before the infamous “torture memos” came out in 2009. She might have had the opportunity to blow the whistle. It feels highly unlikely that we’ll ever know for sure.

Slotkin’s more recent statements about the Middle East don’t exactly inspire confidence, either. Like many liberals, she’s willing to criticize the GOP’s war-mongering, but only on tactical grounds, not basic moral principle. For instance, she has said the Bush administration “completely misread how difficult it would be to try and be the government for another country.” Similarly, she told Chotiner that Trump’s 2020 assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani might be unwise and provoke a “strong reaction.”

Related

Why Dems Keep Saying Trump Has “No Plan” Instead of Calling to End the War With Iran

What she doesn’t say is that invading other people’s countries and killing their leaders, and then trying to “be the government,” is inherently illegitimate and criminal. But she can’t, not really, because having worked for the CIA, she’d be condemning her co-workers — and her own record of service. 

We can see the same pattern play out with more recent cases of U.S. aggression. When the Trump administration attacked Iran and Venezuela earlier this year, Slotkin moved in lockstep with the majority of the Democratic Party, voting for war powers resolutions against hostilities with both countries. (This, to her credit, makes her more reliable than John Fetterman, who has voted to preserve Trump’s power to attack Iran on multiple occasions.)

But her public statements tell another story. When the Trump administration made a request for $50 billion in additional funding for the Iran war, Slotkin was open to the idea, telling Politico reporters only that “I need to know the goals and the plan. … I don’t rule anything out.” And when Trump deposed and kidnapped Nicolás Maduro, she criticized him for working with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez’s “illegitimate government” rather than following through on his promise to “[get] rid of that administration” entirely. Again, there’s no indication that waging regime-change wars is wrong in itself; only that Trump had bungled the job by not going far enough.

China, though, is Slotkin’s biggest bête noire. Like a lot of centrists who have taken the wrong lessons from the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Slotkin has taken to making short-form video content. She calls these videos her weekly “Intel Briefings,” and they’re skin-crawling to watch, like something you’d see on a TV in the background of a Paul Verhoeven movie.

Beating the drum for conflict with China is a constant theme. In one representative “briefing,” Slotkin tells viewers about “an issue that a lot of Michiganders know about: China and the threats that they pose.” (The “threat” turns out to be that China may buy computer chips from Nvidia, which is apparently “the equivalent of President Truman giving Russia some of our best nuclear blueprints.”) In another video, she condemns Trump for putting out a national security strategy that fails to “go hard against China.”

It’s all like this. We’re told that China has a worrying “chokehold” on the supply of “critical minerals” like lithium and cobalt; China “often undercuts our ability to sell our products,” so we need to “clamp down on what the Chinese are doing in international trade”; Chinese military technology could “make us go blind, deaf, and dumb in the first moments of a conflict,” perhaps over Taiwan; Chinese cars in particular are a “national security issue” that can’t be allowed to enter the country.

The tone is always slightly condescending: At one point, Slotkin tells us about “the leader of China, Xi Jinping,” as if we’ve never heard of the guy before. The content is pure paranoia, with a new Cold War accepted as a normal and even desirable state of affairs.

Related

Washington’s TikTok Ban Hypocrisy: Internet Censorship Is Good, Now

To be clear, the American people do not want conflict with China. In the most recent Pew polls from April, only 28 percent of respondents said they considered China an “enemy,” and China’s favorable ratings have been rising since 2023. 

But the CIA and the broader “intelligence community” needs global conflict, in the same way that cops need crime, priests need sin, and the Orkin man needs termites. It justifies their existence, and their mammoth, ever-increasing annual budgets. So every week on YouTube, we get a former CIA agent pushing what’s good for the CIA and bad for everyone else.

More basic than any of this, though, is that the concept of “the intelligence community” is elitist to the core. Its first principle is that the American public, unwashed reprobates that we are, aren’t even qualified to know about the most important decisions being made in terms of foreign policy, let alone influence them at the ballot box. Only the “intelligence community” with its experts and analysts should do that, and always behind several layers of official secrecy. It’s a fundamentally anti-democratic notion, and it comes from a set of agencies which have overthrown a long list of democracies over the years. So there’s no reason to expect they’d respect our democratic choices at home, either. If you’re the Democratic Party, you can’t really position yourself as champions of “our democracy” and also embrace the CIA Spook Caucus as an unalloyed good. 

As the maxim goes, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” To that end, the purpose of the CIA is to lie, manipulate, torture, and kill, all to preserve the existing global power structures, not to mention the agency’s own power and prestige. That’s what it does; that’s what it’s for. There’s no way anybody, anywhere should trust a former CIA officer within 100 miles of elected office. Personally, I’d vote for a Satanist or my local weed dealer before any member of the “intelligence community.” We should look at would-be Democratic politicians like Slotkin, Spanberger, and now Dunigan with the same horror as if Allen Dulles had run for Congress as a Democrat in 1965. Under no circumstances should we trust these people — and if we offer them our votes, we do so at our own peril.

The post Why Would Anyone Trust Ex-CIA Agents in Elected Office? appeared first on The Intercept.

When Maine Democratic Senate hopeful Graham Platner sealed the deal on his resounding primary victory in June, the oysterman turned political lightning rod sounded a note of defiance — one that resonated with another would-be candidate on the other side of the country. 

In Washington state, Alex Scheel, who is also a veteran of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saw Platner’s win and decided to take the plunge. He officially launched his congressional bid to unseat incumbent Rep. Marilyn Strickland on June 13. 

“Platner is an inspiration for this, he’s got a similar background to me with the veteran thing,” Scheel said in an interview with The Intercept. “I think Americans are so tired and disengaged. … There’s hope for more left-wing candidates to challenge Trump and the corporate Democrats.”

At 38, Scheel is a few years younger than Platner, but he’s a more seasoned organizer; a longtime member of Democratic Socialists of America, Scheel has been his local branch’s housing justice chair, secretary-treasurer, membership coordinator, and campaign coordinator.

Related

The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover

Scheel’s hopeful that his experience with the DSA — which is currently riding high after primary electoral upsets against entrenched incumbent Democrats in Colorado and New York — as well as the political moment that Platner and other insurgent candidates have tapped into will propel him through the state’s August 4 primary. Like California, Washington has jungle primaries, where the top two finishers (of any party) advance, meaning that if his long-shot candidacy pays off, he wouldn’t have to beat Strickland outright until November.

“People are hungry for normal, regular, working-class people to step up and say, ‘If we get together, we can build power, and we can make America, we can make the world a better, safer, peaceful place,’” Scheel said. “It’s obvious that we’re ready for that. Whether it’s Mainers or whether it’s Washingtonians, we don’t want the same old neoliberal politics.”

While more left-leaning than many of their peers, Platner and Scheel are part of a large cohort of former military service members running for office this cycle. According to data from the advocacy group With Honor, which tracks veterans in politics, 2026 has seen a 47 percent increase in candidates with military backgrounds from 2024, with 752 running so far, up from 513.

Born in San Diego in 1987 and raised in northern Michigan, Scheel joined the military in 2007. He served as an interrogator in Iraq until 2011 and in 2012 worked in intelligence in Afghanistan. That experience “radicalized” him, Scheel said. Speaking to men his age who were potential “enemies,” he instead found common ground with their frustration and could relate to their rage.

“As an interrogator, I sat and talked to Iraqis and Afghans every day and got to know them and got to understand where they were coming from,” he said. Scheel said his interaction with one man, Muthanna, sticks with him in particular. He told Scheel “how the Americans came in, invaded, bombed the electricity plants, and bombed water treatment plants. They had four hours of electricity a day and no clean drinking water, [the U.S.] killed his dad in the invasion, and they threw his uncles into prison.”

Scheel continued, “He was painting this horrible picture. I had enough empathy to put myself in his spot and go, ‘Holy shit, I would do the exact same thing. I would join any sort of group that tried to defend my country and my family and friends.’”

In 2014, Scheel left the military and relocated to Washington, where he attended Evergreen State College. Four years later, he got involved in community activism after joining the Tiki tenants fight in Tacoma, where a developer attempted to displace poor, disabled, and elderly tenants of an apartment building. (While the organizers won some concessions, the project ultimately went forward.)

“Because of my service, I realized that our government is often just straight-up lying to you,” Scheel said. “We can go bomb and kill and do all this horrible shit in the name of democracy or whatever, and your average person doesn’t know it.”

While Democrats can point to politicians like New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill as proof of concept that veterans get elected, it’s not, necessarily, an indicator of long-term success.

For decades, centrist Democrats, perhaps most notably Rahm Emanuel during his time as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, have looked to recruit veterans to topple popular Republican incumbents, often to little lasting electoral gain. In the last 10 years, liberals have poured money into losing campaigns like Kentucky’s Amy McGrath, MJ Hegar in Texas, and Marcus Flowers in Georgia, with the hope that moderates and disillusioned Republicans would cross the aisle.

Scheel is disrupting that model by running on Medicare for All and housing justice, among other progressive policies he believes will resonate in his 10th Congressional District, which includes the left-wing cities of Tacoma and Olympia. He faces an uphill climb: The establishment Democratic incumbent has around $800,000 campaign cash on hand and the backing of the local party. But he’s betting that his time organizing in the area will help to narrow that disadvantage. He’s raised around $5,000 so far, he said.

Related

Democratic Leaders Avoid Criticizing Trump’s Iran War. Now Voters Will Have a Say.

In a sign of how the party’s primary contests are splitting down new lines, Scheel is setting himself apart from Strickland by running an anti-war campaign that highlights his opposition to military aid to Israel. Adam Arafat, a fellow veteran who is also running in Washington’s 10th District, led off a candidate questionnaire question about the issues in the race by saying he would refuse “corporate PAC money and AIPAC money.”

The incumbent offers a rich target for this line of attack: Strickland went on a trip to Israel in March 2024 sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, an arm of AIPAC, and is a leadership member of the moderate New Democratic Coalition. 

Nationally, there is a real hunger for change — and Scheel believes he can offer a new way forward. The party establishment is failing a base that’s expecting them to fight and stand up for what’s right and has been repeatedly disappointed. Scheel told The Intercept he believes Democrats, including his opponent Strickland, have fallen down on the job, which has created an opening for the left wing of the party.

“This last presidential campaign failed because they didn’t deliver on their promises to fight Trump and to make the country a better place,” he said. “Standard of living is horrible, affordability is horrible, and it shows in their polling. Their polling is almost as bad if not worse as Trump. So there’s an opportunity.”

The post Graham Platner Inspired Another Left-Wing Veteran to Take On an Establishment Dem appeared first on The Intercept.

Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s sixth prime minister in a decade, has resigned. Even allowing for the weariness of repetition, this should theoretically be a big deal.

Within that benighted kingdom, it will be for some — the John Fetterman-esque cartoon Andy Burnham, now widely considered Starmer’s all-but-inevitable successor, looks set to grip the poisoned chalice that is leadership of the British Labour Party, for all the good it will do him. The ascendant far-right outfit Reform U.K. will likely regard Starmer’s downfall as another stepping stone to turning Oswald Mosley’s deferred dreams of Anglified fascism into reality.

The Greens, who have enjoyed some recent success with their novel proposal that left-wing people might actually want a left-wing party to vote for, may see this as further proof of the once-verboten idea that — whisper it — maybe the Labour Party doesn’t need to exist. And those constituent nations of the U.K. which are not England but are nevertheless forced to abide by its whims will be reminded that the British state they are bound to has not enjoyed stable government for quite a while.

The question of whether the wider world should take heed of the U.K. and its travails remains open, and for good reason. The centuries long legacy of Britain’s various eccentric neuroses being imposed outside of its island isolation is horrifically grim, and I would not blame anyone for wishing to see it quarantined like patient zero in a zombie outbreak. Yet there are lessons to be learned from Starmer’s short, sad tenure, especially as the international left will continue to face manifestations of the worldview he represented — not least the U.S. Democratic establishment, as New York primary voters will need no reminding this week, who seem stubbornly resistant to learning them.

It shouldn’t be controversial to say that Starmer’s rise was not achieved on his own merits. As Labour leader, Starmer’s role was essentially pest control: He was installed as head of a party that has historically, if intermittently, pretended to belong to a species of socialism, and was tasked with disinfecting Labour of any threat it might genuinely embody that ideology. In this mission, he was nominally successful, purging the party of anything associated with his leftist predecessor Jeremy Corbyn (whose specter continues to haunt Britain’s commentariat, despite achieving precisely zilch). Starmer, the best that central casting could produce, was then delivered to Downing Street with a ridiculous majority by an electorate exhausted by more than a decade of Conservative government.

In power, the Tories had alternated between brutality and incompetence, and Starmer did not buck that trend, reaffirming Gore Vidal’s contention that trying to find much difference between Labour and the Tories was like bringing “a measuring rod to Lilliput.” At every turn, Starmer pursued the credo of centrism by meeting his government’s increasingly psychotic right flank where they were, and was somehow shocked and dismayed to find this only made him more despised, while also emboldening and empowering reactionary forces.

Under Starmer’s health secretary and supposed human being Wes Streeting, trans youth in the U.K. were stripped of gender-affirming healthcare, and Britain’s frothingly transphobic “gender-critical” lobby — from which their equally exterminationist American sympathizers have taken much inspiration — fumed that young trans people still existed.

Related

They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway

Starmer’s government saw Palestine solidarity activists criminalized under a dubious interpretation of anti-terrorism law, yet British right-wing media continued to grumble that pro-Palestinian protests were still possible at all. Within a year of Starmer vowing his government would curb legal immigration and “take back control” of the U.K.’s borders, immigrants in Britain were subjected to pogroms and firebombing.

It should not need to be spelled out, but Starmer and his backers have shown time and again that it still does — if the mythic Overton window shifts to the right, and you obligingly follow suit, it will simply move further toward that extreme, and reward only the tip of the spear. Those in the U.S. who saw Kamala Harris struck mute on trans rights and blind in the face of genocide in Gaza know too well the stakes of “moderating” to the right in the interest of “consensus.”

Since his resignation, a small and desperate coterie of British pundits have urged their dwindling readership to focus on the positives of Starmer’s reign by emphasizing those instances in which he stood firm on the rock of not-quite-fascism, particularly in foreign affairs. After all, they point out, he recognized a Palestinian state (while simultaneously offering precious little resistance to killing the people who would otherwise live there). But whether in the United States’ kidding-but-not-really bid to colonize Greenland, its pursuit of regime change in Venezuela via the enactment of a lousy ’80s action movie, or a war with Iran — the sheer sloppy-drunk incompetence of which stunned even its most vociferous critics — the Starmer administration never achieved any greater fortitude than weakly suggesting, “I say, steady on …”

There was never any realistic hope that this erstwhile human rights lawyer was going to seriously confront a sclerotic superpower ruled by a meat-headed fascism which treats human rights as a laughable suggestion. It is appropriate that in his resignation speech, Starmer expressed pride in supposedly protecting Britain’s youth from social media; this feat of Herculean self-aggrandizement was, in its own way, telling of Starmer’s entire premiership. Given the choice between taking on the entrenched power of social media platforms (to which the U.K.’s political class remains unashamedly addicted) or restricting the liberties of a constituency not particularly useful to him, Starmer inevitably chose the latter.

Related

The Democratic Party Gets Its Populist Takeover

Less than a decade ago, the idea that the American progressive left might be in a healthier state than its British equivalent would have drawn hoots of derision from those smugly confident in Corbyn’s brief ascendance. Yet the left in the United States — from the days of Occupy Wall Street through Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, and on-the-ground anti-ICE resistance — has wised up to the idea that it must move in an independent and extra-parliamentary manner. They may take heart in developments such as the rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani, but they seem to understand that real political change requires mass organizing beyond party structures and a willingness to break with the accepted norms and niceties of the political process.

This understanding passed entirely by all those on the British left who invested in Labour, along with those centrists and liberals who warned against the insidious influence of identity politics and “culture wars” that would require giving a shit about the rights, liberation, and lives of embattled and persecuted minorities. Starmer’s premiership, and its ignominious end, are the consequence.

The lesson of Keir Starmer’s undistinguished spell as prime minister is that — in the U.K. or anywhere else — if you throw red meat to a bloodthirsty right, it is only a matter of time before they are devouring your own flesh. You will not defeat fascism, or even delay it — you will simply make sure that when it arrives, much of its work has already been done.

The post Keir Starmer’s Downfall Is the Only Reward for Simpering Centrism appeared first on The Intercept.

The Trump administration attacking the right to publish or report information is a given at this point. The president has threatened journalists for everything from questioning the wisdom of his failed war with Iran to touching the peeled lining of his renovated reflecting pool. 

Tantrums like those may now feel routine, but this week marked a new front in Trump’s war on information: Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write. He’s one of eight defendants sentenced on Tuesday to a combined 450 years — the first prison sentences against so-called “antifa” handed down under the framework of NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s sweeping “counterterrorism” memorandum to clamp down on dissent from the left.

Related

Prairieland Defendant Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Moving a Box of Antifascist Zines

The prosecution’s theory was that Sanchez moved the zines, which discussed anarchism and other anti-government ideas, to conceal evidence in the case against his wife, Maricela Rueda. Rueda attended a July 4, 2025, protest at the Prairieland immigration jail in Texas where a police officer was shot. (She was not accused of shooting him or having anything to do with the shooting but was herself sentenced to 70 years.)

But that nuance is cold comfort: It assumes that simply possessing years-old political pamphlets that said nothing about the protest or shooting could somehow constitute evidence of a crime. Sharing the political ideology of the shooter, the government contended, meant Rueda and her co-defendants were culpable for the shooter’s actions — and by allegedly attempting to prevent officers from finding out about Rueda’s ideology, Sanchez shared in the blame as well.

We’ve reached the point in the erosion of the First Amendment where the government considers possession of anarchist zines and membership in a terrorist cell to be more or less the same thing. Once the box of zines was discovered, there was no need to prove Rueda planned or had any idea that anyone would be shot at the protest. 

What’s worse is that this will likely only ramp up the administration’s efforts to criminalize being in possession of information. Whatever you may think of former CNN host Don Lemon, he’s no anarchist or extremist, and the content of his broadcasts bears little resemblance to the zines Sanchez was convicted of transporting. And yet, after indicting him and independent journalist Georgia Fort on frivolous charges relating to their livestreaming of a protest at a Minnesota church, the government sought a warrant to obtain the identities of subscribers to their YouTube channels.

Fortunately, a judge rejected that warrant. But it’s a chilling revelation of the administration’s modus operandi. Lemon and Fort’s YouTube subscribers would, of course, have no knowledge of what happened at the church protest beyond what was publicly broadcast. Their identities are as irrelevant to whether Lemon and Fort committed a crime as the box of zines was to Rueda’s case. The only conceivable reason the government might want a list of YouTube subscribers is to keep an eye on people who watch disfavored shows. 

And let’s say someone who’d watched Lemon and Fort’s livestreams and then heard about their arrests had cleared their browser history because they (rightly) feared the administration might target them. Could they then be prosecuted for concealing evidence under the same logic applied to Sanchez? If they’d downloaded the video, could they be accused of possessing contraband? Would forwarding a link equate to trafficking? 

Related

Prison-Style Free Speech Censorship Is Coming for the Rest of Us

It all sounds preposterous, but virtually nothing is too absurd for this Department of Justice. In fact, it’s already argued that documents investigative reporters receive from whistleblower sources can constitute contraband. (It’s worth pointing out that Joe Biden’s DOJ used this same logic when it pursued its own ridiculous “transporting” of information case against Project Veritas for moving Ashley Biden’s diary across state lines). 

These frivolous actions create a catch-22 for all Americans. The more people are investigated for engaging with ideas the administration deems dangerously anti-government, the more likely others are to conceal evidence of their own controversial beliefs — not because they are evidence of any real crime but because prosecutors are out of control. But if they do so, they risk incriminating themselves. 

NSPM-7, which was issued last September, tasks federal agencies with dismantling networks of “anti-fascist” actors, a purposely overly broad term since expanded to include those with “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” 

Given that antifa, as a singular, cohesive organization, is a figment of the right’s imagination, agents cannot accomplish that task by uncovering a membership registry. They can only do so by identifying people with viewpoints they consider “extreme,” like anti-ICE protesters officers have told they’re being added to watchlists, or pro-Palestine opinion writers they’ve sought to deport. 

In Chicago and other cities ICE invaded, activists and organizers packaged whistles and zines to distribute to residents. Under the logic of NSPM-7 and Sanchez Estrada’s conviction, that is a network of actors engaged in organized political violence. If you read one of their zines, you could be deemed a member of an illicit enterprise, and if you hide one, you’re covering for criminals.

The government argued that the Prairieland defendants are different. One prosecutor said: “People with that kind of extremist beliefs need extra time in prison. They believe violence is justified.” U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, in handing down the sentences, reportedly said he wanted to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.” But lots of people believe political violence is sometimes justified. If someone who believes punching Nazis is justified attends an anti-Nazi protest where someone else punches a Nazi, are they at risk of being convicted of assault alongside the actual assailant, particularly if they have some anti-Nazi literature on their bookshelf? The answer is far less obvious than it used to be.

Related

Trump’s Spaghetti-Against-the-Wall Indictment Against ICE Protesters — and How to Fight It

The administration has vowed the Prairieland case “will not be the last” of its kind. We must take it at its word. The next one might also involve protesters from the political fringes rather than ordinary Americans reading, say, The Intercept, or watching Don Lemon on YouTube. But what about the one after that? We’re not as far away as you might think. Stephen Miller has called the whole Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” — clearly invoking the language of NSPM-7. Trump has labeled his political opponents “the enemy within” and the press “the enemy of the people.” 

Whoever said slippery slopes are a fallacy never met Donald Trump. If Sanchez Estrada indeed moved the zines because he foresaw their being used to tie his wife to a nonexistent terrorist network and a shooting, he should be commended for his prescience. Maybe more of us should think like Sanchez Estrada.

Or would that be a crime?

The post 30-Year Sentence for Transporting Zines Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Free Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

When Hakeem Jeffries, who’s positioning himself to be House speaker if the Democrats retake the chamber come November, was shown on the screen at an election party full of socialists in Brooklyn Tuesday night, the crowd chanted, “You’re next! You’re next!” Before polls closed on the night that would see the Jeffries-endorsed candidates fall and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s candidates win, the New York congressman told reporters that he and the mayor have “agreed to strongly disagree” and that “a handful of primaries that go in one direction or the other in a given state or two aren’t going to reshape who we are as House Democrats.”

He may be right in the short term; it will take many nights like Tuesday to remake the face of the party. But what’s underway is nothing less than an existential threat to the version of the party that has made Jeffries its standard-bearer. If middle-of-the-road Democrats fail to reckon with this escalating reality and shift to the left, they risk making themselves irrelevant forever — and ceding even more ground to the Republicans as they cut off their nose to spite their face.

Related

Socialists Are Setting the Agenda in New York City

After all three congressional candidates that earned Mamdani’s endorsement — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez — won handily, as did nearly all of the Democratic Socialists of America’s down-ballot slate in New York, Jeffries and his ilk were quick to discount Mamdani’s political project as one that could never take root beyond the New York City meeting halls of Williamsburg and Bushwick. But as other primary races this cycle have shown us, that’s simply not true.

In Maine, Graham Platner delivered a crushing defeat in the Democratic Senate primary to Gov. Janet Mills, whom Chuck Schumer reportedly “aggressively recruited” to enter the race at all (and as we’ve covered, her campaign never really got off the ground or found anything approximating grassroots support). Platner’s victory — amid a spate of scandals over his online posts and alleged mistreatment of women — is now exposing the lie of one of his party’s favorite refrains for disciplining the left: that for all our differences, we must “vote blue no matter who.” 

In the Senate race in Michigan, polling is strong for Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official pushing Medicare for All and centering Israel’s genocide of Palestinians while competing with a both-sides-ing progressive and an outright AIPAC Democrat. Philadelphia nominated Chris Rabb, an outspoken anti-genocide democratic socialist, over the party’s political machine-mined candidate in Philadelphia, and Dr. Adam Hamawy, a 9/11 first responder who saved Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s life as an Army medic but was also tarred with Islamophobic attacks that tried to frame him as a supporter of terrorism, won a crowded 12-way primary in New Jersey earlier this month. (The latter three have all appeared on the trail with Hasan Piker, the popular streamer who’s become a potent political force for left-wing Democrats, much to the dismay of centrists who condemn him as “controversial” and worse.)

If you care to pay attention, there’s an obvious through line with all these candidates: They all stand for actual policy, not just mealy-mouthed “messaging,” and they have been unequivocal in their criticism of Israel. Mainstream Democrats have long lacked that moral clarity as America’s ally in the Middle East committed a genocide in Gaza and dragged the U.S. into an instantly unpopular war with Iran, and they’re being handed the losses they so richly deserve by candidates running to the left. For now, they’ve responded by making overtures of progressive change without meaningful or widespread policy shifts.

Related

When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents

The idea that the party should respond to the will of its voters has become so foreign to the Democrats that Jeffries’s political operation has sneeringly referred to even the notion of a party challenge from the left as coming from “Team Gentrification.” On no issue is the division between voters and the national party as stark as it is when it comes to Israel.

A party that wants to defeat the rise of the far right in this country should look to bring the left in, especially as it continues to win at the ballot box. But instead, establishment Democrats have continued to bash and attempt to marginalize the growing left consensus. “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” former Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison wrote on social media on Tuesday.

But you can only condescend and disregard your party’s supporters for so long until they look for another vision of the future — one that doesn’t include you.

The post The Left Just Keeps Winning. It’s Time for Democrats to Bend the Knee. appeared first on The Intercept.

The situation has only gotten worse for Dalton Eatherly, the race-baiting online pest better known as “Chud the Builder.” Earlier this spring, Eatherly was out on bond after being arrested in Nashville on theft, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest charges after allegedly walking out of a restaurant on an almost $400 tab. Days later, prosecutors say he went on to do something far more serious: allegedly shooting and nearly killing a man outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee. 

On Wednesday, a Davidson County judge revoked his bond after reviewing his conduct and new evidence surrounding the shooting.   

“It sounds premeditative, like he’s going to kill somebody,” one Montgomery County investigator said at the hearing, pointing to Eatherly’s videos and social media posts. 

There’s no mystery about what drives Eatherly, who livestreamed his violent, racist goals to thousands of supporters every step of the way. 

In an age where racist rhetoric can not only be mainstreamed but can also be monetized, Dalton Eatherly represents its newest and lowest violent common denominator. He’s part of a new wave of right-wing streamers who profit by coaxing donations to push out racist hate speech via social media.

But Chud has taken the gambit even further than his counterparts. He’d carry out his antics in public, streaming himself hurling the N-word at minorities while armed with a pistol and pepper spray. His videos show him threatening to blow his targets’ “brains out,” often fantasizing that his escalation would end in violence, legal impunity, and the start of a race war. “Series finale is dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free,” he wrote in a now-deleted X post on May 7. 

A week later, he’d be strapped to a gurney after allegedly shooting a Black man, as well as himself, during the courthouse altercation. 

Both men survived, but Eatherly now faces a torrent of charges, including attempted murder, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, and employing a firearm during a dangerous felony. He also faces up to 60 years in prison. 

Related

Trump Admin Wants to Make It Easier for White Men to Sue for Discrimination

Eatherly’s online notoriety has also translated into real-world support. In the weeks since the shooting, supporters descended on Tennessee courtrooms, turning routine hearings into spectacles. At one appearance, Jake Lang, the Trump-pardoned January 6 rioter and far-right activist, was removed by bailiffs after disrupting the court proceedings. (He received a 10-day jail sentence for contempt, the maximum sentence under state law.)

All this attention has done little to improve Eatherly’s legal position. A judge set Eatherly’s bond at $1 million in the Montgomery County shooting case. While supporters raised more than $300,000 for his defense, judges repeatedly rejected efforts to leverage that support into his release before his bail was revoked.

Part of Chud’s online appeal rests in how this new generation of white supremacists have morphed into online personalities to reach new followers. The far-right internet has spent the last decade learning how to refine the raw materials of extremism into entertainment. 

Related

The Right Wing Desperately Wants to Make Charlie Kirk Its MLK

Trump institutionalized hate speech into a legit political currency, but the new brand of online white supremacy often eschews institutions or electoral politics completely. Instead of espousing militant insular doctrine, figures like Nick Fuentes have used social media to soften their appeal to a broad group of nihilistic young men. 

Young conservatives came of age during a period of collapsing institutional trust. Surveys from Gallup, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins have found young Americans increasingly distrust government, media, political parties, and other traditional institutions. For a segment of the online right, that disillusionment has curdled into political alienation — a belief that the system is not merely failing, but fundamentally incapable of delivering the future they were promised. Figures like Chud offer them convenient explanations for why those promises have been broken by pointing to anyone who isn’t a white American. 

They have also seized on this edgelord disillusionment for their own personal gain and notoriety. Envisioning an America that isn’t white or right fast enough. Often wrapping their rhetoric in a plausible deniability of shock content and prank. In this era, online racist rhetoric did not simply become more visible, it became more permissible, migrating from the internet’s fringe communities into mainstream political and social media culture.

Chud frequently targeted Black neighborhoods in his livestreaming, constantly hurling racial epithets and labeling his enemies “chimps” while framing these racist stunts as renegade expressions of “free speech.” In one video, he’d antagonized a pedestrian before pepper-spraying him and a crowd of onlookers.

In the initial Nashville incident, Chud livestreamed himself hurling racist insults at a restaurant before staff kicked him out. Police later arrested him for allegedly leaving without paying his sizable bill. 

Eatherly’s story is less remarkable than many would like to believe.

The internet is now littered with young men and women chasing some version of the same racist, rage baiting, and accelerationist fantasy. Chasing hate can now yield significant online clout and even revenue. Researchers who study online hate have found social media’s reward systems can reinforce and escalate extremist behavior, with an audience’s approval often encouraging users to produce more hateful content.

Federal prosecutors have spent the last several years prosecuting people who moved beyond posting. In September 2025, prosecutors charged organizers of “Terrorgram,” a white supremacist online group, with soliciting hate crimes and soliciting the murder of public officials. Authorities have subsequently linked recent racially motivated shooters in San Diego and Buffalo as adherents of the online extremist ecosphere. 

Fortunately, Chud the Builder was blunted before any stunt went too far off the rails. 

Now, instead of broadcasting from a sidewalk, Eatherly sits in custody facing charges that could keep him behind bars for decades. He didn’t start the “race war” he framed as inevitable, and the legal immunity he joked about has yet to materialize. What remains is a criminal case and a growing pile of evidence documenting months of public provocation.

Eatherly’s days of online shock content may be over, at least for now, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others ready and willing to step up to fill the void. We exist in a social media-driven world that rewards the Chuds of the world, and where, at a moment’s notice, you too could be unwillingly cast as the subject of someone’s livestreamed hate stunt.

The result is a generation of online personalities chasing attention through violent escalation, with each trying to outdo the last for their chance at virality. Most will never pull a trigger. But as Eatherly’s case demonstrates, when your audience rewards and even craves confrontation, eventually someone will try to turn the fantasy into reality.

The post Chud the Builder Fantasized About “Race War.” Now He’s Charged With Attempted Murder. appeared first on The Intercept.

As Israel’s standing in the U.S., and among liberals in particular, continues to crater, the mainstream American media is vaguely taking notice. But when they report on this increasingly potent political dynamic, national publications continue to frame it as a tension among Democratic voters — rather than a tension between Democratic voters and their party leadership. 

“A Democrat’s Dodge on AIPAC Points to the Party’s Tensions Over Israel,” read one recent New York Times headline. “Tensions over pro-Israel lobbying group highlight rifts in Democratic primaries,” read another Reuters headline. “Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza has driven a significant, deeper-than-ever divide among Democrats,” NBC News reported last week. “The U.S.-Israel alliance has rapidly gone from a point of bipartisan consensus to a wedge issue dividing both parties,” opined the Washington Post.

All of those were just last month, but the false equivocation goes back further. “The Democratic primary electorate,” The Hill informed readers in March, “is increasingly divided over Israel.” “Israel tensions threaten Dems’ midterm plans,” Politico announced in a January headline, which continued in the piece: “Just as Democrats are finding their footing by focusing on affordability, their differences on Israel are threatening to tear them apart.” “New York City’s annual Israel Day Parade has long been considered a bipartisan tradition — but this year, the event is becoming a symbol of the growing divide within the Democratic Party over Israel,” Sinclair’s National News Desk reported last week. 

Related

DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel

There’s only one problem with the “tensions,” “divided,” and “wedge issue” framing: It is not supported by any polls. The “divide,” such as it is, is increasingly not among Democrats or even liberals; it is between the supermajority of Democratic Party voters and party leadership. While party leaders such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and big Democratic donors, are pro-Israel, actual Democratic voters have moved on from Israel with remarkable speed and consistency. Let’s take a look at the polling:

• According to an August 2025 Quinnipiac poll, 77 percent of Democrats think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza versus 11 percent who say it is not.
• According to a May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll, 74 percent of Democrats oppose “providing additional economic and military support to Israel,” while 20 percent support doing so.
• According to a June 2026 Institute for Global Affairs/YouGov poll, 67 percent of Democrats think the U.S. relationship with Israel does more to hurt the U.S. than help it, and only 5 percent think it does more to help than hurt. 
• According to a May 2026 NBC News poll, 67 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis (17 percent). Just 13 percent of Democrats have a positive view of Israel, and 57 percent, a majority, have a negative view.

To contextualize that 13 percent — which is down from 34 percent of Democrats who said they viewed Israel positively back in 2023 — it’s even lower than the number of Democrats who say they support traditional right-wing stances, such as:

• Allowing teachers to lead children in Christian prayers in public schools (18 percent, Pew 2024)
• Making all abortions illegal (14 percent, Pew 2024)
• Not mandating MMR vaccines in schools (14 percent, Pew 2025)

The media justifiably treats all of these issues as Republican or conservative-coded views. Yet support for Israel is still treated as a mainstream, if contested, liberal value.

In reality, it’s simply not: It’s overwhelmingly a Republican, right-wing view not backed by a supermajority of Democrats. So why has this consistently misleading narrative in U.S. media been allowed to persist? 

Related

The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer.

There’s an obvious tension over Israel and the U.S. role in supporting it, which has been writ large in high-profile battles, from Democratic Senate campaigns to debates over the Democrats’ platform. The media has to cover that tension, but describing it more accurately — as a divide between party elites and the rank and file — is an awkward narrative, one that requires a deeper class and material analysis.

So instead, it’s just indexed under the misleading and generic label of “party divisions.” Naturally, Israel is not a 100–0 issue in favor of Palestine among voters, but no issue is that one-sided. A minority of Democrats support all kinds of relatively fringe, right-wing opinions. Here are some of them compared alongside the issue of Israel–Palestine. The percentage of Democrats who: 

• Support sending military aid to Israel: 20 percent
• Believe teachers should be allowed to lead children in Christian prayers in public schools: 18 percent
• Say all abortion should be banned: 14 percent
• Have a positive view of Israel: 13 percent
• Support a ban on same-sex marriage: 11 percent
• Believe Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza: 11 percent
• Believe there is solid evidence of “widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election”: 10 percent

Polls are not a perfect snapshot of political beliefs and can be somewhat contradictory (a profile of the 2 percent of Democrats who think Israel is committing genocide and have a positive view of the country would make an interesting read). But polls over the past three years, and the last few months in particular, show a very clear trend that support for Israel is now an increasingly fringe belief among Democrats. It’s worth emphasizing that the issue of Democratic voters souring on Israel is not particularly sectarian, either, with Jewish Democrats, especially those under the age of 35, steadily abandoning Israel. A Washington Post poll from October found that among Jewish Americans ages 18 to 34, only 36 percent claimed to have an “emotional attached to Israel,” and half agree with the broad liberal consensus that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Related

DNC Autopsy of 2024 Loss Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel at all

But if watching how Democratic leadership and the party’s funders continue to back Israel to the hilt was your only barometer, you might assume there’s been no shift in public sentiment at all.

The dynamic is playing out over efforts to push a war powers resolution to end U.S. support for Israel’s bombing and occupation in Lebanon. On Wednesday, Axios, citing “numerous” anonymous “House Democrats” and “aides,” attempted to paint a Rep. Rashida Tlaib-led bill to end U.S. support as a provocation dividing Democrats. “An impending House vote to constrain the Trump administration from joining Israel’s war in Lebanon has some Democrats fuming that one of their own members is forcing them to take an agonizing vote,” reporter Andrew Solender lamented.

But what Solender fails to note is that Tlaib’s bill is overwhelmingly the majoritarian position among Democrats. A recent Arab American Institute commissioned poll found that 62 percent of Democrats “believe the U.S. should take more steps to pressure Israel to stop bombing and leave southern Lebanon,” and only 17 percent disagree. The substance of Tlaib’s bill is the Democratic voter position by almost 4 to 1. The tension in this story, such as it is, is between anonymous “Democratic leadership” and rank-and-file Democrats. And we know this because every single source in the Axios article opposing the war powers resolution had to be anonymous, while everyone supporting it proudly put their name on their quotes. What does this tell us about how popular support for Israel’s boundless violence in the Levant is? 

Meanwhile, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other majority pro-Israel groups are well aware of the existential shift that’s underway and have responded by intervening in primaries at an unprecedented clip. Already in this midterm cycle, as Donald Shaw at Sludge reported, “four major pro-Israel committees — AIPAC’s PAC, its outside spending arm United Democracy Project (UDP), the closely aligned Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) super PAC, and the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Victory Fund — have poured nearly $50 million into congressional races nationwide.” Receiving money from AIPAC has become politically toxic for Democrats, so much so that the lobbying group is deploying an elaborate web of shell organizations to funnel money to their preferred candidates.

Still, AIPAC is heading into the midterms bigger than ever, and its allied super PAC has a staggering war chest of nearly $100 million on hand — up from $35 million in 2022, when AIPAC first began directing funding in congressional campaigns. Since then, it has spent over $221 million, not including the $100 million set aside for the 2026 midterms.

Related

Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

The two most powerful Democrats in the country, Jeffries and Schumer, are prominent and consistent backers of Israel, despite their party’s sizable shift. Jeffries was the largest recipient of pro-Israel money in the House last election cycle out of 435 voting members. And Schumer, who has explicitly said his “job” is to “keep the left pro-Israel,” spent last weekend marching in a pro-Israel parade in New York City alongside war criminals and self-identified “fascists.” Leadership, like its Big Donor base, is entirely out of sync with the current sentiment within the party.

It’s not just pro-Israel donors driving this “wedge.” Backing Israel and the endless arming of its military has been, and continues to be, a boondoggle for the broader U.S. military–industrial complex that captures the Washington consensus. Of the some $22 billion in military aid that Israel has received since October 7, 2023, roughly 75 percent has gone to U.S. arms companies that themselves employ an army of lobbyists and think tank boosters to promote Israel and its sprawling, seemingly never-ending expansionism and mass violence.

Despite 77 percent of Democratic voters saying Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, only 8.5 percent of Democrats in Congress have. Despite Democratic voters sympathizing more with Palestine than Israel at a ratio of 4 to 1, the number of Democrats in Congress who put the rights of Palestinians ahead of the interests of Israel could likely be counted on one hand. How long will our media continue to act like there is meaningful disagreement among Democrats, as such, when — among the rank and file — it’s an issue as settled as prayer in public schools, abortion, and climate change?

As the gap between the will of Democratic voters and its leadership grows more and more apparent, our media will continue to vaguely acknowledge this “division” without identifying the actual source of it. It’s not between the voters themselves, whose opinions are measurable and consistent, but between the voters and the leaders they elected — in theory — to represent their interests.

The post The Real “Divide” Among Democrats Over Israel Is Between Party Leadership and Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

To any reasonable person, a ceasefire is exactly what it sounds like: It is the total cessation of military attacks to end a war. But to the mainstream American media outlets covering the U.S.–Israel war with Iran, what constitutes a “ceasefire” is a rhetorical exercise.

Today, Iran launched missiles at the international airport in Kuwait. As the New York Times reported: “The barrage was one of the biggest attacks on a Gulf nation since the U.S.-Iran cease-fire took effect in April.” ABC News’s live update coverage ran with the breaking news headline “Iran targets US forces, Kuwait airport amid ceasefire.” Over at CNN, the headline was “Kuwait’s airport attacked as fresh Iran-US strikes strain ceasefire.”

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

Of course, Iran’s latest campaign didn’t come out of nowhere: It comes two days after the U.S. announced that it had bombed radar and drone sites in the country, and one day after Israel bombarded south Lebanon with airstrikes and artillery yet again, reportedly killing at least four people across two towns.

All that bombing, and all of its attendant death and suffering, sure doesn’t feel like a “ceasefire” in any real sense. Still, the Times, along with other national news outlets, continues to spin the fantasy that the ceasefire is intact — only now it’s increasingly “fragile” or “tested.” The paper of record has gone so far as to say that it “hangs in balance.” 

In a piece of news analysis in the Times last week — on the heels of the U.S. bombing Iran for the second time in three days — the paper made the case that “a truce isn’t necessarily doomed if the missiles are still flying.” It also argued that while a ceasefire might sound like an end to the bombing, the geopolitical definition hinges on whether both sides agree that a “ceasefire” remains in effect.

If government officials call it a ceasefire, who is the New York Times to question it?

For many months, another ceasefire in name only has been touted in Gaza. What that’s looked like in practice is Israel relentlessly bombing the Palestinians on a near-daily basis. Al Jazeera reported that since the “ceasefire” in Gaza was announced in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 922 people and injured 2,786.

To the people of Gaza and of south Lebanon, there is no ceasefire. Continuing to carry water for the idea that we’re no longer at war, or that there’s been any meaningful progress made to end this war, is to provide cover for the U.S. and Israel, the countries that launched this war of aggression and continue to execute it. It also provides President Donald Trump with the political cover he so desperately desires as he realizes that he’s powerless to end the deeply unpopular war he started with Israel, and that no number of testy phone calls will move the needle if our ally won’t agree to a true ceasefire.

Related

Amy Goodman on the Media’s “Access of Evil”

The mainstream media is perfectly comfortable spinning the fiction that we’re currently in a gray zone somewhere between war and peace because the stakes are an abstraction. To them, blindly supporting American imperialism and Israeli aggression are baked-in ideological assumptions, not matters of life or death. It’s no coincidence that the New York Times has done more than any other media organization to massage the language around Israel, Gaza, and Iran to an extreme degree.

But words like “ceasefire” matter a great deal, which is why it’s critically important for the media to call out acts of war for exactly what they are. In this way, the brutal fact of war is black and white: Your country is either killing people with the bombs it’s dropping, or it’s not. Failing to acknowledge that reality is worse than dishonest — it is to irrevocably deprive those paying the highest price of their humanity.

The post Stop Calling It a Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

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. 

Related

Graham Platner Handed Centrist Dems a Bruising Defeat in Maine

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.

Related

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

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.

Related

Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund Is a Handout to His Hardcore Supporters

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.

Related

Conversion Therapy Gets Speech Protections — But Trans Kids’ Existence Gets No Protection at All

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.

Related

How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image

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.”

Related

Top NIH Official Advised Covid Scientists That He Uses Personal Email to Evade FOIA

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.

Related

DOJ Wants to Scrap Watergate-Era Rule That Makes Presidential Records Public

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.

Related

Nonprofit Killer Provision Quietly Disappears From Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”

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.

Related

“We Knew They Were Paying Informants”: SPLC Donors Reject Trump DOJ Fraud Claims

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.

Related

ICE’s Private Prison Contractors Spent Millions Lobbying to Force Banks to Give Them Loans

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.

Related

The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer.

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?”

Related

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

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.

Related

Wesley Bell’s Swan Song: Felonies for Ferguson Protesters

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.”

Related

At DNC, the Squad Warns Democrats to Wake Up to the Threat of AIPAC

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.

Related

Trump Helps Alleged Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate Cross Border Into U.S.

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.

Related

Right-Wing YouTuber Behind Viral Minnesota Fraud Video Has Long Anti-Immigrant History

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.

Related

“Me Too” Comes Back to Congress

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?

Related

How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image

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.” 

Related

New York’s Billionaires Are Bending the Knee to Zohran Mamdani

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.

Related

Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories

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.

Related

The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer.

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.

Related

The Left Put Its Faith in Graham Platner. Will He Break Its Heart?

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.

Related

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.

Related

Amy Goodman on the Media’s “Access of Evil”

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.

Related

Why the Media Won’t Report the Truth About Trump

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.

Related

Kash Patel Got Arrested for Public Urination After a Night of Drinking

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. 

Related

The Real Danger of ABC News Settling Its Lawsuit With Donald Trump

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.) 

Related

Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Sues The Intercept Over Russian Mercenary Report

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.