The PUMA spirit is back. The 2008 Democratic Party protest movement, inflamed by what Hillary Clinton supporters viewed as Barack Obama stealing the nomination from their primary candidate, scorned his general election campaign and embraced the mantra “Party Unity, My Ass.” 

This time, that energy is aimed at the candidates preferred by the Democratic Socialists of America.  

DSA-aligned progressives have won a number of party primaries and are set to help Democrats take the majority in Congress. But once in power, they’re likely to make demands — the kinds of demands that could upend decades of carefully crafted donor-friendly policymaking. 

For moderate Democrats, “party unity” is only a goal worth pursuing to bully the left wing of the party to fall in line with their preferred candidate. When it’s on them to step up and vote for someone who might have different goals, that’s another story completely, and some centrists are even hoping for Republicans to win the House this November if the alternative is an empowered DSA Democratic wing. 

James Carville, the fossilized Cajun strategist who was part of exactly one successful national political campaign, Bill Clinton’s 1992 White House victory, said on The Bulwark podcast last Sunday that he’d prefer a tight GOP hold on Congress over a narrow Democratic majority. 

“I would be disappointed if it comes in at 225 House seats,” Carville told host Bill Kristol. “I would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats to win by five, because, if that happens, they’re hostage to the DSA.”

To his credit, Kristol — who, in a sign of how people can change when they know which way the wind is blowing, spent the PUMA moment promoting Sarah Palin but is now a self-proclaimed Democrat — pushed back, saying he’d rather win. 

Carville is the first of his cohort to explicitly call for a GOP victory rather than the left flank of the party getting more power, but he’s not the only centrist deprioritizing his party’s prospects in November.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills has yet to endorse the Democratic Party’s Senate nominee, Troy Jackson, after she lost to now-disgraced Graham Platner. (Mills and Jackson have a long and bitter history from state government, which may be playing a role here.) 

Perhaps most consequentially, in Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has faced an uphill battle since winning his party’s grueling primary. He’s now focused on winning in the general election and becoming the first Muslim U.S. senator, but resistance to his candidacy remains a concern.

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Much of the difficulty has come from members of his own party and other liberals. Their antipathy toward a candidate whose positions aren’t so out of step with other members of the caucus has raised questions about what exactly is so objectionable about him. El-Sayed may skew to the progressive side of the party, but he’s not a socialist and not a member of the DSA; his positions on domestic policy should place him companionably among the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wing. 

Until recently, most of the anger after El-Sayed’s primary in early August was confined to X and occasional cable news hits. 

That changed on October 16, when two Michigan Democratic Party power players, David Kramer and Lon Johnson, urged voters in a Detroit News op-ed to leave El-Sayed’s place on the ballot blank — effectively handing the Senate seat over to Republican Mike Rogers, an election denier and a lockstep Trump ally. 

The piece tied El-Sayed to extreme elements of Islam and suggested his opposition to Israel’s genocide, war crimes, and occupation was based in hatred for the Jewish diaspora.

“Our gravest concerns involve El-Sayed’s associations with figures who have excused or minimized terrorism, his reluctance to unequivocally condemn dangerous rhetoric, and his support of extreme policies,” Kramer and Johnson wrote. “At a time of rising antisemitism, Democrats deserve leadership that unequivocally rejects rhetoric threatening Jewish communities.”

Comedian Mike Drucker accurately described on Tuesday the centrist rejection of El-Sayed as less “blue no matter who” and more “blue unless brown.”

But Democratic leaders like Carville, Kramer, Johnson, and others are panicked beyond their obvious Islamophobia — they can see the writing on the wall goes well past Michigan. It’s a full-on existential crisis.

Former Intercept writer Jon Schwarz once opined on what he termed the iron law of institutions: “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” 

What we’re seeing now is the iron law’s white blood cells fighting a threat they don’t believe can be easily assimilated into the existing power structure. It’s a danger to their status and power.

Their attacks on the left are going to backfire, leaving the Democrats’ centrist wing even less empowered than before. 

That outcome is ideal for the party, the base, and the country. For centrists, it’s a disaster — but if the way to stop their coming irrelevance is to vote for a progressive American Muslim who opposes genocide, they’re incapable of taking that step. 

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Ultimately, all their griping may not matter. El-Sayed is regularly polling slightly ahead of Rogers, and 95 percent of Michigan Democrats said they intend to vote for him. Much like Jackson in Maine, should he win, El-Sayed will be even less beholden to the elements of the party power structure who are so desperately trying to prove he needs them, rather than the other way around.

The post The Spirit of “Party Unity, My Ass” Is Back and Coming for the DSA (and El-Sayed) appeared first on The Intercept.

The October 8 shooting of Oscar Belgal by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of his 5-year-old son in Manhattan forced into the open a question that had been on many New Yorkers’ minds: What would the New York Police Department do when ICE broke the “rule of law” in the city, and how would Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the person who has the power to hire and fire the NYPD commissioner, respond? 

Shortly after the shooting, Mamdani addressed the incident with an appropriate amount of outrage, declaring ICE “rotten to its core,” and calling for the department to be abolished. His frustration was visible, but he was much less expressive when it came to his appraisal of the city’s response to the situation. He had nothing substantive to discuss with respect to his police department’s involvement, despite NYPD officers arriving on the scene only to find unidentified ICE agents holding guns, wearing plain clothes and disguises and masks, in apparent violation of federal laws requiring identification. (A recently passed New York state law prohibiting federal agents from wearing masks and other face coverings was temporarily blocked by a judge.) NYPD officers applied first aid and transported Belgal to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen hospital.

According to many eyewitness accounts and widely circulated video, members of the NYPD appeared to assist ICE agents by forcefully helping with crowd control — at one point, an NYPD officer shoved congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom Mamdani personally stumped for, to the ground. Later, NYPD cleared a path for federal agents to whisk Belgal away from the hospital to a federal detention facility downtown. 

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After the shooting, the Democratic Socialists of America, several legislators, and Avila Chevalier all called on Mamdani to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and demanded the mayor uphold his campaign pledge to disband the NYPD’s infamous Strategic Response Group. Mamdani repeatedly refused to fire Tisch but said he was reviewing the 24-hour period around the shooting. When asked directly about Avila Chevalier being thrown to the ground, the mayor called it unacceptable, saying, “That is not something I will look to justify.” He reminded New Yorkers to be patient with efforts to reform the NYPD, ordered a review of the department’s use-of-force policies, and added funding for the inspector general’s office. But once again, he stood by his commissioner, citing “her record of uprooting corruption from the upper echelons of the NYPD while lowering crime across our city.”

Noticeably absent from any of Mamdani’s public remarks about the NYPD or Tisch was any public acknowledgment of the NYPD officers in relation to ICE agents during the Belgal incident.

Federal and city law enforcement occupy similar spaces but never really interact with each other. Mamdani made no mention of the ways in which the actions of federal agents put pressure on the NYPD as mediators — the primary function of police — to liaise in moments of conflict.

The NYPD typically relishes this role, which is why the department consumes so much of New York’s budget and shuns any attempts to redirect funds to other services that might reduce the need for police mediation to begin with. ICE forces local police to make choices in policy and in practice about how to deal with violent (often illegal) immigration operations.

If the NYPD believes itself to be the thin blue line, on which side of order and chaos do New York’s force and Mamdani believe these federal outside agitators to be?

This omission — or evasion, depending on how you look at it — of this predicament is strange considering Mamdani’s willingness to speak with moral clarity about even the most contentious issues and confront them head-on. It’s also bizarre considering his penchant for weaving shared experiences together and for putting the lived experiences of New Yorkers front and center.

On the campaign trail, one of Mamdani’s most alluring traits was his ability to speak to the actual problems of everyday residents. It wasn’t just because he possessed once-in-a-generation oratory skills; candidate Zohran achieved this because, as a proud democratic socialist, there was an analysis — an explanation of the material conditions of life — baked into his politics. His rhetoric seemed in line with, or at least not alienated from (see: establishment Democrats), how fast reality was moving and how it was impacting the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

When it comes to ICE, however, Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric and policies haven’t always aligned, which has opened him up to questions about the kind of mayor he really is. On one hand, he has shown that he will speak out against Trump’s fascist and inhumane immigration efforts. On the other hand, Mamdani hasn’t moved with the same level of force as his words. Many have pointed out that Mamdani seems to be engaging in realpolitik in an effort to get his extensive progressive agenda passed. It’s certainly not easy to bring the machine of the New York government up to speed while also being transparent about the ways in which he is moving the needle. But that’s exactly what he was elected to do.

Had Mamdani got into office and done nothing different than previous mayors — or even been exceptionally corrupt, pro-cop, and willing to help the Trump administration like predecessor Eric Adams — he might have been able to avoid his current moment of reckoning. But his administration’s genuine efforts on immigration set into motion a future where the NYPD and ICE would come into conflict.

One of Mamdani’s first moves as mayor was to take stock of how the city’s many agencies were upholding existing sanctuary city laws. In February 2026, he signed Executive Order 13, his first major order pertaining to immigration, to create the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and establish baseline guidance, such as explicitly prohibiting ICE and other non-local law enforcement agencies from using city-owned garages and vacant lots. Crucially, EO 13 also required an audit of several agencies, including NYPD, to review their immigration-related policies.

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NYPD already has a problematic history dealing with immigration enforcement. During the Adams administration, there were documented cases where the NYPD assisted or collaborated with immigration enforcement, sometimes in accordance with NYPD policies. A December 2025 report by Jocelyn Strauber, then-commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, found at least one incident in which “an officer violated local law by providing assistance to federal authorities in connection with enforcement of the federal civil immigration law,” as well as evidence that NYPD did “not fully comply with documentation and reporting requirements concerning requests for assistance with federal civil immigration enforcement.” The report also found that there were numerous examples of NYPD policies and practices that elevated the “risk of improper information sharing or assistance to federal authorities for purposes of civil immigration enforcement.”

The resulting audit, which was released on May 22 by Mamdani’s deputy mayor, built on those findings and recommended NYPD (and other city agencies) update its reporting requirements. But the audit also left a lot of open questions, which numerous legal advocates attested to, about areas in which NYPD protocols and policies keep avenues open to potentially collaborate with ICE. The NYPD was “not being held to a high standard of accountability or scrutiny for collusion,” the audit found, and there were significant “gaps” in documenting potential violations of department policies. The question of what the city and its mayor could do to ensure compliance also remained unanswered.

Sanctuary laws prohibit using city resources for immigration enforcement, and a January 2025 NYPD internal memo specifically barring officers from facilitating street closures to enable immigration enforcement seemed to solidify that directive. But several high-profile incidents involving the NYPD have tested the department’s compliance with sanctuary laws. In October 2025, before Mamdani was elected, during an immigration raid in Chinatown, eyewitnesses and viral videos showed NYPD officers establishing perimeters to create a path for federal law enforcement agents. In another instance in May 2026, ICE reportedly “dragged” a Nigerian immigrant out of a Brooklyn hospital after agents used force in his arrest; NYPD officers brutalized and arrested numerous protesters and cleared debris from the road to enable ICE to escape the crowds and abscond with their target.

Both of these incidents happened under the watch of Tisch, who has insisted again and again that the department follows all sanctuary laws. When asked about the Brooklyn incident, Mamdani insisted NYPD was responding to 911 calls about the protest, not helping ICE. “Our laws leave nothing, no room for interpretation about the fact that our NYPD will not participate in civil immigration enforcement,” he said. NYPD told the Guardian US: “Upon arrival, officers observed numerous individuals acting in a disorderly manner, obstructing vehicular traffic, and blocking emergency entrances and exits at Wyckoff Heights medical center.” 

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When the NYPD arrives at an ICE raid or at a protest against an immigration abduction, what are officers supposed to do? On this point, NYPD and Mamdani have offered little clarity. But October 8 doesn’t pass the smell test for anyone who lives in overpoliced neighborhoods or closely observes the activity of police and their behavior.

NYPD officers were responding to an unrelated call nearby when they heard the report of shots fired. When they arrived, they encountered several men in various forms of attire, including some in construction-style vests, face masks, and at least one carrying a long gun, which officer body camera footage released by the Department confirms. The official account of the NYPD’s interaction offers no mention of ICE. There are no additional insights or explanations of department protocol that might shed light on how officers are supposed to act given the circumstances. Curiously, what those officers thought when they encountered several masked men with guns, and the conversations that took place between the ICE agents and the police, is a mystery, too. All we know is that officers agreed at some point that the NYPD would place Belgal in a vehicle, apply aid, and take him to the hospital. 

Since that evening, Mayor Mamdani has stood firm in his condemnation of ICE and their operations. “We will not normalize ICE’s viciousness,” he said, calling for the agency to be abolished. That’s the least he could say to reassure New Yorkers he understands the stakes they feel in their bones already. The shooting of Oscar Belgal and his subsequent inhumane treatment — his lawyers say Belgal is still in solitary confinement with a bullet in his neck — is a reminder of how normalizing ICE operations in New York City is already well underway. 

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There have been more lower-profile ICE sightings and kidnappings, which echoes what has been the case in other parts of the country. What Mamdani will do to bring the city’s response into alignment with the needs of New Yorkers in this moment still remains an open question, including clarifying the NYPD’s role in the city’s ongoing fight against the Trump administration’s gestapo tactics.

If this month’s incident offered a lesson for Mamdani, it is that clearly articulating what is right is a full-time job that requires an unwavering willingness to confront reality. It’s not enough to say the thing on one issue — calling a genocide by its name, publicly dragging FIFA for pandering to wealthy elites, or deriding the inhumane practices of slumlords — but not stand on business when it comes to the reality that New Yorkers are seeing on their own streets. 

Sometimes, an actual seismic event can reveal what needs to be done and that there are alternatives that may not have been fully realized before. Hope isn’t lost. There is still time for Mamdani to update his analysis. But in this moment, the mayor must make a choice: renew his commitment to the truth, or be defined by its absence. 

The post Mamdani’s High-Wire Balancing Act Between ICE and NYPD Can’t Last appeared first on The Intercept.

Agents from the Department of Homeland Security on Monday raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar ostensibly in connection with a criminal investigation into her childhood immigration to the United States. The raid was signed off on by a federal judge, apparently after a “back-and-forth” with federal law enforcement, and has been condemned by civil rights groups as highly suspect.

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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s targeting of Omar escalated even further as federal agents issued subpoenas to many of her relatives, including her sister Sahra Noor, and the Wall Street Journal reported the Trump administration’s ultimate goal is to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her. This obscene abuse of power comes after years of Trump targeting Omar with threats, racist smears, intimidation, and calls for her deportation. 

But with rare exception, the response from the mainstream media’s pundit class has been largely muted, with the vast bulk of the coverage coming in the form of he said/she said, down-the-middle reporting. This is in stark contrast with how elite opinion-shapers responded with uniform outrage in the days after Trump’s also dubious raid on John Bolton, his former national security adviser and a neoconservative commentator, in August 2025. Both are part of a consistent pattern of Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to attack his perceived enemies, yet only the latter solicited widespread media condemnation.

The very day of the Bolton raid, we saw scathing editorials from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each of these newspapers also published separate pieces from their opinion staff opposing the raid, casting doubt on its legitimacy, and otherwise leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in Politico, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.

The raid on Omar’s home has thus far received zero of the above media interventions. No editorials, no opinion columns in the Times, Post, or Journal; no preening in The New Yorker or Politico or Atlantic about the erosion of “rule of law.” The Atlantic did run an article on the Omar raid but it was equivocal and Both Sides in its tone. (A similar Both Sides column The Atlantic published about the Bolton raid was not included in our list of opinion pieces expressing outrage over the Bolton raid.) 

This is in stark contrast to the breathless tone of outrage leveled at Trump when his DOJ targeted Bolton last year. “It is clear that Mr. Trump and his appointees,” the Times wrote in August 2025, “are perverting the justice system to serve their political interests and intimidate their critics.” “FBI raid targeting Bolton crosses a line in the Trump revenge campaign,” proclaimed the Trump ally–owned Washington Post. Even the right-wing WSJ editorial board, typically a staunch backer of Trump, got in on the fervor under the headline “Trump’s Vendetta Campaign Targets John Bolton,” which made clear “that second-term success for the President includes retribution.”

The Journal not only didn’t publish an editorial or column opposing the Omar raid as they did with Bolton, they published a column by assistant editorial page editor James Freeman endorsing it and using tabloid innuendo to cast aspersions on Omar.

This isn’t to say the mainstream press hasn’t reported on the Omar raid. The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all ran articles, and analysis, on the raid, but — unlike with the Bolton case — they have published no opinions expressing outrage and demanding recourse for the obvious authoritarian power grab.

The reasons for this glaring discrepancy are likely many: Omar is Black and Muslim, Bolton is white and not. Omar is a woman, Bolton is a man. Omar is considered “far left,” Bolton is squarely in the center-right of elite Washington consensus. Omar is a harsh critic of Israel, and Bolton is among its most overtly and bloodthirsty champions. The reality is it’s almost certainly a combination of all these factors. Writ large, Bolton is a member of The Club, and Omar isn’t.

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A similar dynamic of asymmetric In-Group vs. Out-Group outrage could be seen during the early months of Trump’s first term when the media spilled oceans of ink lamenting Trump’s determination to intimidate the press and lock up reporters. Yet this same press almost entirely ignored his DOJ’s absurd prosecution of two independent reporters, Aaron Cantu and Alexei Wood, for covering the January 20 unrest during his 2017 inauguration — a case that was found to have no merit. Ultimately, the city of Washington, D.C., was, despite the lack of any sustained media attention, forced to settle with a payout to the persecuted reporters. 

As a rule for U.S. media, the consistent application of principle — as high-minded and lofty as they may appear — takes a back seat to class solidarity. Bolton is a corporate media figure, a national security elite, a hawk, and a committed institutionalist. He is, in other words, one of them. Omar is none of these things. As a direct result, her outrageous persecution by Trump is noted and perhaps critiqued around the margins but is not a source of widespread, sustained outrage and condemnation. This distinction is reserved, very clearly, for those in The Club.

The post Trump Is Targeting Ilhan Omar. Where’s the Elite Media Outrage? appeared first on The Intercept.

Two wealthy lawfare warriors recently failed in their attempts to bury reporting on government-released documents. Both lawsuits — one in state court in California, the other in federal court in Arkansas — were frivolous strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPs. Supreme Court precedent couldn’t be clearer that it’s not the journalists’ problem if the government accidentally shares information it’s not supposed to disclose. 

But only the California SLAPP victim had any real recourse against the censorial bully who wanted to shut him up — not because that case was any more frivolous than the Arkansas one, but because of the court in which it was filed.

Let’s start with the Arkansas case. Jessica Kivell — a mom, healthcare worker, and concerned citizen — sought to find out who was paying for a data center project in West Memphis. She filed public records requests with the Arkansas Public Service Commission and received documents indicating Google would cover only one-third of the cost of a new solar plant to power the facility, contradicting its promises that ratepayers would not be on the hook. Kivell shared the documents with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which reported on them.

Entergy Arkansas, the utility set to build the solar facility, sued Kivell, the Democrat-Gazette, its reporter, and the Arkansas Times, which said it never even had the records. It claimed the commission erred by releasing the records to Kivell, that they contained trade secrets (sidenote: baselessly invoking the need to protect trade secrets to duck public records laws is also a serious problem), that she and the press should be restrained from discussing them, and the Democrat-Gazette should have to take down what it had already reported. Entergy also disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s characterization Google would share the costs.

There are at least four Supreme Court cases that should have put Entergy’s lawyers on notice that they had no legal leg to stand on. Even in scenarios involving information far more sensitive than a utility’s purported business secrets — and far less newsworthy than the public being misled about what a data center would cost them — the court has rejected “prior restraints” that would claw back records that the government released inadvertently. 

One such case, Florida Star v. BJF, involved a newspaper that published the name of a rape victim in violation of state law. The court held the law was unconstitutional to the extent it barred news outlets from publishing information released by the government, regardless of whether the government intended to release it. The red-line rule against holding the press liable for the government’s failure to protect confidences makes sense given that the court has called prior restraints against the press the “most serious” of all First Amendment violations.

Ultimately, U.S. District Court Judge Lee Rudofsky rightly denied Entergy’s request for an emergency gag order. Entergy subsequently dropped the case. But it forced the defendants to lose money, time, and sleep. (Kivell, who rushed to court in her work scrubs for the hearing on Entergy’s motion, reportedly broke down sobbing in the courthouse hallway.) The defendants should have been able to at least recover their legal costs but, because they were in federal court, they could not.  

Arkansas, like 39 other states and the District of Columbia, has an anti-SLAPP law allowing those hit with frivolous anti-speech lawsuits to recover their attorneys’ fees. But there is no federal anti-SLAPP statute, and district courts in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Arkansas, have declined to apply the state’s anti-SLAPP law. Federal courts in some states, like Florida, apply state anti-SLAPP laws, but many others decline to do so, viewing them as in conflict with federal pleading standards.

That means that other than their own legal fees — likely a drop in a bucket for them — there is no economic disincentive stopping Entergy from SLAPPing again the next time a news report interferes with its business in hopes that an incompetent judge grants it unconstitutional relief (it wouldn’t be the first time, unfortunately), or a scared defendant backs down without a fight. 

Now let’s head to California. In 2023, independent journalist Jack Poulson published a story in his news outlet, All-Source Intelligence, about the 2021 domestic violence arrest of Maury Blackman, then CEO of Premise Data, a surveillance tech company that holds U.S. government contracts. Poulson reported on and linked to a police report that Blackman claimed the government never should have released because it was sealed. (Under California law, the records could be sealed because charges were not filed.)

Blackman sued Poulson; Substack, which hosted the article; and others in an attempt to not only punish them for their journalism, but also scrub the articles and police report from the internet. For the same reasons Entergy’s case failed, a judge threw out Blackman’s SLAPP. That decision was affirmed by an appeals court last week. 

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Leading its opinion with a quote from the Florida Star case, the appellate court also upheld the lower court’s award of attorneys’ fees to the defendants under California’s robust anti-SLAPP law. That means Blackman will need to reimburse his SLAPP target’s legal fees, and that other wannabe SLAPPsters in California might think twice knowing there are consequences for weaponizing the courts against their critics.

While Poulson’s victory was more satisfying than the Arkansas defendants’ win, in both cases, the plaintiffs achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted. The stories they tried to bury became national news as their lawsuits got far more coverage than the records they sought to suppress. It’s a phenomenon Techdirt editor Mike Masnick dubbed the Streisand effect, after a privacy lawsuit by the singer backfired and drove exponentially more publicity than it prevented.

Blackman, whose suit was only one component of a multifaceted censorship and intimidation campaign, went from his sealed arrest report appearing on a single, relatively niche blog to being detailed in an opinion from the California Court of Appeals, not to mention reported on by everyone from the San Francisco Chronicle to Courthouse News. Blackman only made things worse when he or his apparent representatives tried to manipulate Google to keep the articles about his arrest and SLAPP suits out of searches, generating even further bad press.

Oddly enough, he now runs a reputation management company. Go figure. 

But public shaming is of little use to people like Kivell, whose lives are interrupted by legal nonsense from companies or governments trying to censor them. That’s why Congress needs to pass a federal anti-SLAPP law that would apply even if states decline to enforce their local versions. That would give defendants in federal court, like Kivell, what Poulson had in California: a quick way to get meritless speech suits dismissed, with plaintiffs paying the price. 

Nobody’s ability to request public records or publish news should depend on which courthouse a corporation picks.

Correction: October 13, 2026

A previous version of this story reported that Entergy disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s math of how Google would share the costs of the data center. Instead, the newspaper reported on a figure cited in the documents it obtained.

The post An Arkansas Mom Obtained Public Records About a New Data Center. Then She Got Sued. appeared first on The Intercept.

Do the Old Ways Still Work?

Have you been recently scolded by an older peacenik about the good old days of street protests? I have!

Has an older beloved activist — a mentor, even — bemoaned “kids these days” and criticized their lack of political engagement? Have you heard the dreaded preamble: “In my day, we…” — fill in the blank — marched, struck, organized?

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I have been on the receiving end of some of these rebukes recently, even though I am not much of a kid anymore. These aging activists aren’t seeing the outrage. They aren’t seeing the opposition. They aren’t seeing the resistance. But it might just mean they aren’t looking in the right place. Because there is plenty of resistance if you know where to look.

But more on that later.

The war against Iran is hugely unpopular. And it is not just a faraway, abstract wrong. It is having a demonstrable impact on the daily lives of Americans. Gas and heating fuel are and will continue to be more expensive. The Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a project of Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, estimates a nearly $1,000 war tax paid by each U.S. household. That is on top of the actual and massive price tag of military operations so far: nearly $40 billion and rising at a rate of $2 to 3 billion a month, with the projected final price tag in the trillions.

At the end of February, Trump’s war opened in typical Trumpian fashion with a massive bombardment that not only targeted Iranian leaders but also the smallest and most innocent Iranians: Operation Epic Fury had an elementary school in its sights, and the result was obliteration. Raytheon-manufactured Tomahawk missiles slammed into the school in Minab, Iran, killing 156 civilians, most of them children. A U.N. panel now asserts that the U.S. attack was a war crime.

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As the war ground on, the resistance continued. In March, Green Party candidate for Senate in North Carolina, former Marine, and member of Veterans for Peace, Brian McGinnis, disrupted a Senate hearing, shouting: “Americans do not want to fight this war for Israel.” (He suffered a broken arm at the hands of Capitol Police.) That same month, a top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned from the Trump administration, citing his opposition to the Iran war. More than 65 veterans and military family members were arrested inside a congressional building in April, protesting the illegal use of military force against Iran. The list goes on and on and on.

But we have not seen a reprise of the massive protests that marked the lead-up to the Iraq War 23 years ago. Maybe it’s understandable. And maybe it’s OK.

March Where? To Stop What?

I love a good protest march. I love the signs, the energy, the chanting, the music, coordinated outfits, mass-printed placards, and creative, handmade signs, a veritable rainbow of puns and alliteration and outrage glittered to cardboard and foamcore. I love the collection of newsletters and radical tracts and stickers and flyers for the next get-together that fill my backpack by the end. I love the chance encounters with friends. (“OMG, I didn’t know you’d be here.”) For a time, long ago, I served on the United for Peace and Justice steering committee and played a very small role in organizing such big and beautiful anti-war marches.

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But I have a friend in her 70s who recently announced: I will not march in an empty city on a weekend ever again. And I agree. Her point was that big protest marches are often planned to be convenient for working people, so they are scheduled on weekends. But the leaders we want to confront with our people power don’t work on the weekends. In Connecticut, where I live, that means we end up marching in circles around a deserted downtown Hartford, our chants lost in the caverns of empty office buildings.

That happens in Washington, D.C., too. The weekend that 200,000 people reportedly marched at a “No Kings” rally in the capital last fall, Trump was holding a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. That is not disrupting business as usual. It is not creating some alternative. So it ends up feeling performative and like a numbers game. We show up to be counted. And now, the counting is itself a battleground. In D.C., the U.S. Park Police used to count crowds at protests. But they stopped in the 1990s, after the Million Man March challenged their count as a low-ball figure.

Personally, I would march on a Monday, down the middle of the highway, stop traffic, and sit in to demand that the world stop business as usual until there is justice for the children of the Minab school, or an end to Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, or an end to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

But I agree with my friend. I am not going to a performative protest that’s easy to ignore. What is the political utility of marching one day and then returning to business as usual the next?

Our History Is Inspiration, Not Fodder for Scolds

I am white-haired and I can no longer say it is premature. When people assume I am a grandma, I am learning to accept it gracefully. At 52, I could be a grandmother. But I am too young to have lived through the so-called heyday of protest marches that required months or years of organizing work and political finesse. These marches — like the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or the huge November 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, or the April 1971 protest made famous by Vietnam veterans throwing their medals — demonstrated the movements’ organization, economic, and cultural power.

The March on Washington was the culmination of decades of vision, years of work, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It brought upward of 250,000 mostly Black Americans to the nation’s capital to demand a civil rights act, desegregation, jobs, the right to vote, and more. The march is credited with helping pass both the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights acts.

During my lifetime, there have been major mass mobilizations of varying utility. The June 12, 1982, March and Rally for Nuclear Disarmament in New York City was the largest single protest in U.S. history (so far), with more than 1 million people calling for an end to the nuclear weapons threat. There were so many people lined up in the streets that tens of thousands of marchers never even arrived at the rally in Central Park!

Organized to coincide with the United Nations meetings on nuclear disarmament, the event was the culmination of 18 months of work. Coordinator Leslie Cagan, who eventually helped found UFPJ, recalled that the march was “a tremendous success.” Historians like Vincent Intondi credit it as a cultural turning point that created the conditions for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons nearly four decades later. Intersectional, joyful, and woman-led, the rally also encouraged participants to bring the spirit of the march home with them, seeding countless anti-nuclear community efforts around the nation.

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In February 2003, the world said no to the impending U.S. war on Iraq with rallies and marches in almost 800 cities around the globe, demonstrating both the power of the people and the limitations of this form of resistance. All over the world, as many as 30 million people participated in an unprecedented coordinated series of actions, with marches from Athens, Greece, to Zagreb, Croatia. The pages of the New York Times called the global movement against the Bush war the “Other Superpower,” but the muscle flexed in the streets did not translate into the political, economic, or cultural might needed to stave off a war built on a web of lies.

Historian Jeremy Varon writes vividly about the impact of the marches and rallies in his recent study of the movement against the war on terror, “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War,” concluding that while they didn’t keep the Iraq war from happening, they bolstered and built a peace movement that is still active in creative resistance today. Our past is inspiring. We need to learn this history and apply the lessons that make strategic sense for this context.

We shouldn’t look at the past and beat ourselves up by saying, “Wow, they got a million people to turn out for nuclear disarmament in 1982, and I can’t even get 10 people to come to a street corner protest.” The saying goes, “We learn our history so we don’t repeat it,” and I think that goes for movement history, too. We don’t want to repeat history to keep it precious and amber-encased. We want to learn from it and apply what is useful to our own very different moment right here in 2026, where we are flooded with social media’s steady stream of bad news, fake news, infotainment, and rage-bait.

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Today, people are exhausted, stretched thin, worried about their own bottom lines. Or maybe I should just speak for myself. I am exhausted. Stretched thin. Supremely worried. It is easy to despair. Everything in modern life seems geared toward our individual hopelessness and isolation. We are better consumers when we feel alone and powerless.

Like many, I was inspired by political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s 2010s research on nonviolent civil resistance and regime change, which established the 3.5 percent rule. It states that no government can withstand a challenge where 3.5 percent of its population is mobilized for a “peak event” like a mass protest. It seemed simple and achievable. That is, until I did the math. Three and a half percent of the U.S. population is approximately 12 million people. Only 10 million people bought tickets to Taylor Swift’s entire Eras Tour — 149 sold-out shows in 51 cities and 21 countries. If we got all those Swifties out in the streets here in the U.S., we’d still come up short for a regime-changing General Strike.

Mobilizing, Not Marching

Everything feels existential. Everything feels like an emergency. Trump floods the zone with rage-bait every single day. Do I have to stay mad to be a good leftist? That does not seem healthy to me. So, what can we do instead?

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Activists today are marching less and instead mobilizing for community power over the long haul. This means relationship building, visible and decentralized resistance, and crisis response that transforms into solidarity after the acute crisis subsides. For example, you may have seen visibility brigades, the grassroots activist groups that display large signs and wave to drivers from highway overpasses and pedestrian bridges. Then there are the rapid-response networks that turn out trained community witnesses and protection squads whenever ICE is active in a neighborhood or town, or the calls to show up and support people being held at detention facilities like Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey.

The past teaches us that the tactics must keep changing. Most of what worked in 1963 in Washington wasn’t applicable to organizers in 1982 and was outdated by 2003. And that is OK; we don’t still use mimeographs or fax machines, either. There might not be millions of people in the street to oppose the war on Iran but that doesn’t mean people are not resisting. It just looks different. It is also landing differently, and more heavily, on the people arrested for resistance. Those who protest and are arrested are looking at serious charges, hostile court environments, and a Justice Department high on its own supply of anti-terrorist, anti-antifa fearmongering.

People are struggling and afraid, and I can’t blame them for that. Dissent is once again being labeled as terrorism. Critique is labeled as terrorism. Questions are labeled as terrorism. Anything that is not lockstep, grinning compliance is terrorism.

Still, people are stepping up. Not the way their parents or grandparents did. Not in a way that gets front-page news. Not in a way that penetrates the white noise of the corporate media. Here is a Harper’s Index entry from June 2026: “Estimated number of protests that took place in the United States in the first year of Trump’s first term: 10,873. In the first year of his second term: 39,154.” That is you and me and everyone we love. We need to keep doing it, smart, hopeful, inviting, and full of righteous rage.

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I’ll admit that I am still struggling with how to make my opposition to the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran evident and public. I had a “No War on Iran” sign in my weedy front yard. It lasted a few weeks before it disappeared. I have talked to friends about a regular peace vigil downtown or at the nearby plant of weapons-making giant General Dynamics. But I have a time conundrum. The best time to be most visible is 2 or 3 p.m., right when my kids are coming home from school and most people are still at work. The most convenient time for more people to gather is 6 p.m., but by then our downtown is a ghost town and the mosquitos are fierce. So should we be strategic or inclusive? The debate continues.

In the meantime, I just put up a new sign in my yard yesterday. I painted the message: The U.S. War on Iran Kills Civilians, Wastes Money, Destroys the Environment. Let’s Stop It!

We’ll see how long it lasts.

The post Where Are the Iran War Protests? appeared first on The Intercept.

For more than 70 days, dozens of activists and an ancient cottonwood tree on the Arizona–Mexico border have successfully disrupted the construction of President Donald Trump’s ruinous $50 billion border wall. 

Since July, one protester at a time has occupied the cottonwood, or the grandmother tree, as it is locally known. After three other cottonwoods in the area were torn down by government contractors, the remaining grandmother on the U.S. side of the border became the site of a growing protest camp in the remote town of Lochiel, Arizona, and neighboring Sonora, Mexico, where organizers gathered for more than a year to oppose the border wall’s construction.

On Monday, heavily armed federal agents moved in with force. Activists on the ground estimate that 150 Border Patrol officers — many of whom masked their faces — raided the encampment during the protesters’ morning prayer ceremony. At least 10 demonstrators were arrested, and the 200-year-old cottonwood was bulldozed. 

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As Arizona-based journalist John Washington reported, “agents began cutting the tree while a person was still sitting in its branches. Agents removed that person with a cherry picker and then felled the tree. Screams could be heard as ‘grandmother’ fell around 8:30 a.m.”

In the 48 hours since the early morning raid, land defenders have refused to leave and remain in an ongoing standoff with federal agents. Numerous participants told The Intercept that around 50 people are holding the line against further construction, with dozens more en route following urgent calls to support the encampment and defend the imperiled borderland ecology.

On Tuesday, another tree sitter climbed the last remaining cottonwood standing in the path of the border wall construction, this one on the Mexico side. The tree was briefly occupied by demonstrators in mid-August and, according to a press release from the land defenders, “is once again halting construction.”

The protesters’ aim to stop the construction of two parallel, 30-foot-high border walls ripping through the remote San Rafael Valley. Miles of the double wall structure have already been built in the area. The region is sparsely populated and hardly ever used as a border-crossing site by humans but is renowned as a unique wildlife migration corridor. The cottonwood felled on Monday was the last of four ancient grandmother trees on the Arizona side of the border, which stood in the path of planned wall construction.

Until this week, federal forces had left the encampment and tree sit in relative peace, largely, activists said, because the camp is located on private land. That fact had not changed on Monday. 

“Border Patrol has been coming onto private property since yesterday morning. No warrants are shown,” Rachel, a land defender who withheld her last night out of concern for being targeted by law enforcement, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday. “There’s no legal ground for them to come onto private property. And the feeling is that they’re pushing through the construction process as quickly as possible, and they’ll deal with the consequences of the law later. They just want to push the wall through, regardless of the harm they have to cause to us and to the land in the process.”

According to Rachel and other activists on the ground who spoke to The Intercept, construction workers have moved quickly since the raid, digging a deep trench that threatens the roots of the newly occupied cottonwood on the Mexico side. 

A statement on Monday from Belicia Lynch, a member of the De La Ossa family who owns one of the tracts of private property along the border, confirmed the protesters were welcome on her property. “I just want to thank you guys for being out there to not only protect the grandmother tree, but the land itself that many animals and bugs inhabit,” Lynch told the land defenders in the statement. 

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Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security have not yet responded to questions from The Intercept.

The federal attacks on the Lochiel encampment came on the heels of a legal victory for anti-border activists in Big Bend, Texas. On Friday, a U.S. district judge granted an injunction to stop all border wall construction in the Big Bend area, including in national and state parks, while the court hears a lawsuit brought by local environmental and community groups. In the order, the judge wrote that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on at least one of their claims’ merits. 

But with practically unlimited funding for his border regime, Trump’s administration can continue fueling money into his violent and destructive border wall. What activists in Lochiel, Sonora, Big Bend, and beyond make clear, however, is that the government’s victory cannot be assumed. Disruptions and interventions are not just possible but also an absolute necessity, and pressure can be applied in an array of directions.

As one Arizona-based Mexican American tree sit participant told The Intercept in August, “The border is everywhere, which means that there are subcontractors and there are power players maybe in your backyard, maybe in your city, maybe an hour drive from where you’re living.”

Rachel, the land defender, made the stakes of the fight clear.

“We have to stop this wall here because the trajectory they’re going on, there is no safety in the U.S. for anyone,” she said on Monday. The call was cut short as news spread through the encampment that federal agents would attempt to remove the tree sitter on the Mexico side. At the time of writing, the grandmother tree in Sonora remains occupied; the fight against Trump’s border wall, and all it represents, has not been lost. 

In a social media post on Wednesday, encampment participants announced a “call to presence” to celebrate the life of the felled cottonwood and continue the anti-border struggle. “If you have been waiting to come to Lochiel, this is the time,” they said. “Let your heavy heart lead you to action!”

The post Armed Border Agents Arrest Protesters, Bulldoze 200-Year-Old Tree to Build Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump received Chinese President Xi Jinping and the visiting Chinese press pool last week as reporters from news outlets he had banished stood outside the White House gates. At one point, Trump joked that China, the world’s leading jailer of journalists, “has the friendliest press corps.” Now, his acolytes in Alabama are taking up Trump’s cause, emulating the Chinese Communist Party’s mastery of information control at the local level by decreeing what supposedly independent public radio reporters are allowed to say. 

The Alabama legislature passed a bill in late March requiring all state and local entities to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” in line with one of the many executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office. The legislation does not set forth penalties for noncompliance, but its sponsor, state Rep. David Standridge, called it “an opportunity to make a patriotic statement” on the House floor in January. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Trump ally, signed the bill into law.

Birmingham public radio station WBHM told its listeners in a letter from Will Dahlberg, the station’s executive director and general manager, that due to the law, which took effect October 1, the University of Alabama at Birmingham is forcing it to use the legislature’s preferred language in its reporting. The move puts it at odds with NPR, of which it is a member station; The Associated Press, which publishes the style guide used by newsrooms across the country; and other journalistic institutions. The station is licensed to the university, making its employees both state and UAB employees. Still, WBHM’s Journalism Code of Integrity emphasizes the newsroom’s independence and states that the university “should not — and cannot — expect to exert influence on WBHM’s journalists and its independent editorial process.”

Dahlberg wrote that not implementing the new language “may result in disciplinary action or termination of employees and affect WBHM’s relationship and support from UAB.” But nothing in the law requires the university to discipline or fire anyone. In other words, the university took a toothless stunt of a law, gave it teeth, and used them to take a bite out of press freedom.

Dahlberg also announced in the letter that he is stepping down from his position and leaving the station. His resignation was supposed to be effective October 16, but he posted an update that the university told him on Monday morning that he should pack his bags immediately. We cannot say for sure whether the university hastened Dahlberg’s departure due to his message to listeners and the criticism it generated, but the timing is certainly suspicious.

So why did the University of Alabama at Birmingham choose to embarrass itself rather than stand up for journalists and the First Amendment? As ridiculous as Alabama’s Gulf of America law is, its text did not tie the university’s hands. The university would not even have needed to bring a legal challenge to contest the law — it could have just let WBHM ignore it and supported its employees. 

The law only refers to “state and local entities” and makes no mention of media. It contains no penalties for noncompliance and limits its mandate to “when practicable,” giving a pass when complying would “impose an operational or financial burden.” Compelled speech is never practicable because it’s unconstitutional, but the operational and financial burdens of compliance are also significant. WBHM picks up national content from NPR and The Associated Press, for example. Are they expected to reject stories that say “Gulf of Mexico,” and fill that time with original reporting they haven’t budgeted or hired for? Or should they somehow intercept and edit those stories, likely in violation of their contractual obligations? 

There is also ample Supreme Court precedent for the proposition that the government cannot put words in reporters’ mouths. In a landmark 1943 case on whether the state could force students to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the court wrote that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” That means neither Standridge, Ivey, nor Trump is entitled to impose their definitions of patriotism on anyone —least of all the news media.

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More recently, some conservatives celebrated 2024’s NRA v. Vullo decision, which found that public officials could not “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.” There is no exception for radio stations that receive public funding. In 1984, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on editorializing by public broadcasters that received federal money, holding that funding a station doesn’t entitle the government to control its journalism — a principle affirmed in March when a federal judge rejected Trump’s executive order to defund NPR and PBS.

The university could have taken the position that, for one, public radio stations are not state entities, and two, the government choosing which words reporters must say is impracticable and burdensome. Last but not least, the university should have taken the stand that the First Amendment still exists to protect us all, despite Trump’s best efforts to cast it aside.

Just as law firms, news outlets, colleges, and others that have settled with Trump to stay in his good graces chose to cave when they could have easily fought back (as others successfully have), the University of Alabama at Birmingham made the cowardly choice to comply in advance.

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If anything, its capitulation is worse, because there’s no indication that the state intended to, or could, put up a fight. Is the Alabama legislature really so committed to Standridge’s silly law that it would waste taxpayer money litigating likely unwinnable constitutional battles? Maybe, but the university could have at least waited to see how, or if, the state would respond.

It is worth noting that Ivey is an ex officio member of the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees. That same board published an annual freedom of speech report in August. It consists of a single identical paragraph, copy-pasted each year with the only change being the date and the number of “events” held on its campuses that year, concluding that “the requirements of the [free speech] Policies have been repeatedly satisfied without a single alleged violation, which further speaks to their effectiveness in appropriately achieving the Board’s objectives.”

One is left to wonder if, despite pressuring WBHM to echo Trump talking points, the university will once again copy-paste that conclusion next year.

The post Public Radio Station Forced to Call Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” appeared first on The Intercept.

How much does it cost to get more information about a cop who punched someone in the face?

If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you’d be wrong — at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon.

In August, the local news outlet Double Sided Media filed a public records request for records about police officer Justin Peckels, which focused on potential misconduct between 2018 and 2026. Peckels has been the subject of community complaints, including for punching a resident in the face during a traffic stop, making the records vital for oversight and their release clearly in the public interest.

The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)

“Once the City receives payment of $2,484,599.04 staff will continue processing your request,” the letter from the department’s public records division read. “If the actual cost of processing your request exceeds the amount you have paid the City, you will be required to pay the difference before the City will provide the records you have requested.”

Peckels’s file is either the largest in the world, or city officials have intentionally maintained their databases in such a way as to ensure fulfilling public records requests is prohibitively expensive. The city’s response points, at a minimum, to the latter. It justified the multimillion-dollar price tag by claiming it couldn’t narrow the custodians whose records it would need to search, despite the targeted nature of the request, and maintained it must search all records of all city employees, past and present.

By that logic, if someone ever worked in Eugene’s parks and recreation department, their records could contain responsive information about police misconduct, and must be manually pulled and reviewed, one by one.

This goes far beyond incompetence. It’s an intentional effort to make a response artificially voluminous — and cost prohibitive — to intimidate the journalist into dropping it entirely. 

Normally, agencies are required to search the specific custodians most likely to possess responsive records, not every groundskeeper or clerk on the city payroll. If the city were acting in good faith, officials would have asked Double Sided Media to help them identify the most likely record-holders, not take it upon themselves to cast a citywide dragnet as its first step.

What makes Eugene’s money-grab particularly galling is its technology double standard. While it apparently can’t invest in efficient search software, the police department recently signed a two-year $342,000 contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock automated license plate readers. This project was so secretive that the ACLU of Oregon had to sue the city for records about how the cameras were being used and demonstrates, among other inclinations, the city’s eagerness to employ sophisticated software to deploy against residents. 

Yet that technological sophistication disappears as soon as a journalist requests public records about the department’s internal accountability process, and simple keyword searches are suddenly cumbersome. 

Troublingly, Eugene’s $2.5 million bill is not an anomaly.

In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.

The same year, the Drug Enforcement Administration told a requester it would cost $1.46 million for records about the DEA’s role in the search and capture of the Mexican cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

In 2019, the Army tried to charge $300,000 to release military base water test results for the presence of toxic chemicals. The Army agreed to waive the exorbitant fee after facing intense backlash. 

The list goes on and on.

Luckily, records requesters seeking federal documents have a defense against these capricious invoices. Recent FOIA amendments aim to ensure if an agency misses its response deadlines, it can’t charge most fees. 

At the local level, however, these protections disintegrate. While Oregon grants agencies the discretion to reduce fees when the disclosure would benefit the public, agencies routinely ignore these provisions.

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For small newsrooms like Double Sided Media, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry (all while Eugene Police Department launches its own “press” initiative to document its policing). It also sets the precedent for using this chilling tactic on any journalist or watchdog as it sees fit. 

Double Sided Media is rightly appealing the fee estimate, and it should prevail. But cities like Eugene will continue these efforts unless lawmakers across the country force agencies to adopt fee caps, mandate public-interest fee waivers for journalists, and require agencies to procure software that allows them to respond to records requests in an efficient and timely manner.

Until then, police departments will likely continue to issue multimillion-dollar ransoms for their records — weaponizing the public’s right to know into another avenue for police to operate with impunity.

The post Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop appeared first on The Intercept.

Our Government’s Real Priorities

News reports that next year’s U.S. military budget will top out at $1.5 trillion if President Donald Trump gets his way are misleading at best. The true total, if Trump’s proposal passes, could be at least $1 trillion higher.

Long before Trump took office, U.S. taxpayers have spent far more on the Pentagon — and its wars — than most know. For decades, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon have hidden the military’s true cost through little-known bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. Journalists, academics, and think tank experts have, with rare exceptions, perpetuated the problem by repeating “official” numbers that don’t come close to telling the full story.

Data shows that the budget was already between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion in the last full fiscal year, 2025, as detailed by a recent Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, report I co-authored. Trump’s requests would add another $781 billion, bringing the potential total to at least $2.581 trillion in 2027.

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The troubling revelation that the government is misleading the public and effectively hiding hundreds of billions in military spending reflects the out-of-control nature of the Pentagon budget. It’s also the only sector of government spending that seems largely insulated from public scrutiny: Imagine the outrage if news broke that the government was hiding hundreds of billions in spending for public housing, Medicaid, or hunger prevention programs.

People have a right to know how much tax money goes to military spending. This is critical to debating the proper size of the military budget both on its own and compared to other spending priorities, particularly any program related to education or the social safety net. Understanding the military’s true cost means understanding where and how the government has been hiding the money.

Spending Hidden in Other Budgets

It’s difficult to untangle how much the country actually spends on the military in part because Congress pays for the armed forces and wars from many budgets rather than one. Beyond the agency controlling the military branches that Trump calls the “Department of War” (the official name is still the Department of Defense), hundreds of billions of dollars are effectively hidden in the budgets of at least 17 other government agencies and entities. In total, each of these additional sums are larger than what Congress appropriates for every non-military agency.

For years, TomDispatch and a small but mostly ignored group of budget experts have warned that total military spending is far higher than reported. Our new POGO report consolidates this prior work and five different methodologies for calculating the true military budget. The report shows a consensus that military spending was at least $1.5 trillion, with three of five methods reaching similar estimates of $1.7 trillion to $1.8 trillion.

The newest of the five methodologies provides the easiest way for anyone to see the hidden spending. The methodology uses data from a government website, USAspending.gov, the product of a 2006 law requiring the government “to give the American public access to information on how their tax dollars are being spent.” The site includes the closest thing to actual spending receipts, making it easier to identify military spending beyond the Department of War’s budget.

Let’s take a look at where the money’s hiding.

Hidden Nuclear Weapons Costs: $33.8 Billion

The most obvious place where Congress and the executive branch hide military spending is in the Department of Energy’s budget. That’s where taxpayers can find the bill for the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, which cost around $33.5 billion in 2025.

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The Department of War controls and deploys these weapons, and their costs should properly be part of its budget, not rolled into the Department of Energy. While the Energy Department plays a role in overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, putting nuclear weapons spending in the DOE’s budget is like a city putting the costs of its police department’s bullets in its transportation department budget rather than in the police budget.

Another $300 million in nuclear weapons spending hides in the budgets of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and the Army Corps of Engineers, bringing the total to nearly $34 billion.

Hidden Military Personnel (Veterans) Costs: $393.3 Billion

Taxpayers spend huge sums on the military in the Department of Veterans Affairs and related budgets. The existence of a separate veterans’ agency is a sleight of hand that leads the public to believe this is not military spending. It is. The only difference is the appropriation of money to still another agency.

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To recruit and maintain armed forces, any government needs to pay its troops and offer sufficient long-term benefits (such as pensions, medical care in retirement, and survivor benefits) to encourage people to join and stay in a dangerous job that involves the risk of killing and being killed. These forms of long-term compensation are personnel costs, just as much as basic pay, and they should be counted as military spending. If a military fails to spend money to support vets, it’s unlikely to function for long. The Bureau of Pensions for veterans was originally part of the War Department (which was the name until 1947, long before Trump’s rebranding) and its budget until 1849 when Congress transferred the bureau to the Department of the Interior.

Funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs adds another $389.8 billion to the USAspending.gov methodology total. Almost $4 billion more in long-term spending on personnel hides in the budgets of the departments of Labor, Justice, and several others. All told, these sums reach a staggering $393.3 billion.

Coast Guard and Other “Homeland Security” Costs: $16.8 billion

Spending for an entire branch of the military, the Coast Guard, is concealed in the budget of the Department of Homeland Security rather than the Department of War. While DHS controls the Coast Guard during peacetime and the branch plays some non-military functions, the Coast Guard is one of the armed forces and is controlled by the Pentagon in wartime.

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Excluding non-military activities (such as improving boat safety and cleaning up oil spills), Coast Guard spending adds nearly $14 billion to the total military budget. Additional DHS expenses for programs to counter weapons of mass destruction, radiological preparedness, cybersecurity, and other military spending add just under $3 billion, bringing this total to $16.8 billion.

The True Cost of the Department of War: $1.3 Trillion

The bulk of military expenditures still appear in the Department of War’s budget, which pays for the armed forces and the rest of the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy, including all the weapons, salaries, some benefits, military construction, fuel, maintenance, operational expenses, and much more. USAspending.gov receipts show the Department of War alone spent $1.273 trillion in 2025. The Pentagon controlled another $480 million in spending that hid in the budgets of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Transportation.

Combined with the $444.8 billion tallied previously, total military spending hits $1.718 trillion. That’s more than double the military budget usually reported for 2025: the $850 billion Congress appropriated to the Department of War.

Total Military Spending by Agency (FY2025)

*No FY2025 spending. However, there was a $1 billion budget appropriation to the Executive Office of the President for “Submarine Security Activities, National Security Council.” The government also funded account line items in the Department of Agriculture budget to support the Air Force and Army.

Still Other Costs

The $1.7 trillion estimate for last year is conservative and still may be too low. While the War Department budget contains classified funding for the CIA, National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies, the government may hide more intelligence spending elsewhere. NASA space research involves considerable military work, which could add another $10.5 billion, according to USAspending.gov data. Some would also count $1.9 billion in FBI salaries and expenses found in the Department of Justice budget.

Other experts consider much larger expenditures in the DHS budget to be military spending, given that department’s role in protecting the “homeland” and the increasingly militarized nature of Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Border Patrol. This would add at least $216.9 billion after excluding DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency spending. Alternate methodologies also include $211.9 billion in interest payments on the more than $40 trillion in national debt stemming from past military spending and wars.

You can add and subtract forms of spending that you think belong or don’t belong in the true total, thanks to the transparency of the POGO report’s methodologies. In total, these excluded sums could add another $441.2 billion to the USAspending.gov method’s prior total of $1.718 trillion for 2025. 

Growing Opposition to Unchecked Pentagon Spending

POGO report’s conservative estimates of the FY2025 budget being $1.5 trillion to $1.8 trillion reveal that the true military budget for 2027 could hit $2.6 trillion if Congress gives Trump what he wants. This includes requested increases totaling $781 billion for just the Department of War ($500 billion), the Iran war ($70 billion), veterans ($144.9 billion), nuclear weapons ($53.9 billion), and the Coast Guard ($12.5 billion), let alone other smaller forms of hidden Pentagon spending.

When mind-numbing numbers like these reach the trillions, it can be tempting to think, What does it matter if it’s $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion or $2.6 trillion?

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It helps me to remember that every single dollar spent on the Pentagon is a dollar not spent on our children, on healthcare, on affordable housing, on efforts to slow catastrophic climate change, and much more.

If Congress passes Trump’s full budget proposal, military spending will eat up around 75 percent of the discretionary budget Congress controls. Every dollar spent on the Pentagon is also a dollar more for Trump to continue waging his illegal, disastrous war on Iran and the funds to make good on his threats to attack Cuba and other countries.

Advocates for increased military spending will likely insist that more money is always needed, no matter today’s true total. That these Pentagon boosters have cited incorrect figures and helped mislead the public for decades raises serious questions about their credibility and the basis for their seemingly endless demands for more money.

Thankfully, there’s growing resistance to Trump’s proposals. Nearly 6 in 10 people nationwide believe even the official $1.5 trillion request is “too high,” according to a recent poll conducted by ReThink Media and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, a nonpartisan research group (where I’m a contributor). And Democrats appear to be listening: They’ve voted against Trump’s budget in unprecedented numbers as it winds through Congress. Some Republicans have also expressed concerns about supporting Trump’s proposal given fears about the rising national debt.

There are growing calls to cut the Pentagon budget by hundreds of billions of dollars without touching salaries and benefits for troops and veterans. This would still leave the country with the world’s largest military budget by far and allow Congress to reallocate the savings to programs that improve the lives of everyday Americans.

The public needs a full, accurate accounting of the military. Congress could provide an annual True Total Military Budget that tallies all of the Pentagon’s spending in one place and stop hiding funding in other agencies’ budgets. Until this happens, journalists and analysts can help by explaining the full scale of spending and no longer repeating incomplete totals.

As Trump asks for the highest military budget in the history of the world and people continue to suffer the effects of his war with Iran — which has killed and injured thousands, increased the price of gas and groceries, and risks even greater catastrophic harm globally — it’s time to have an informed debate about how much the country really needs to spend on its military.

The post The Pentagon’s Secret Budget appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gold Rush in the Desert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Battle for What Remains

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Land Is It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aggressive and Unlawful”

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

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

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

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

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

The Hub 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Immigration Courts 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreclosing on the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pitch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arithmetic of Danger 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the Machine Produced

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ICE Escalation in a Town of Prisons

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promises Made, Promises Broken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gap

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

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“Warehousing Human Beings”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Times recently published a sweeping accounting of President Donald Trump’s campaign against the American press: FBI agents arriving at reporters’ homes, subpoenas for journalists’ records, Pentagon access restrictions, regulatory pressure on television networks, numerous lawsuits against news organizations, and an increasingly politicized Federal Communications Commission.

“Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump’s second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once,” Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jim Rutenberg wrote. “Each time the president assails what has long been considered protected speech … he is eroding norms and undercutting the role of an independent press.”

All told, it is a damning inventory.

It is also difficult to read without noticing who occupies almost every frame: Us.

Reporters. Editors. Television hosts. Networks. Publishers. Their lawyers. And the access our industry has become so reliant upon. 

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The Times is right about the threat. Trump has indeed weaponized government agencies and private litigation against news organizations in ways that seriously threaten the First Amendment, although judges have repeatedly rebuked parts of the administration’s legal strategy. But Trump’s attacks on free speech have extended well beyond the journalism, from ICE protesters in Los Angeles to faculty in solidarity with Palestine on college campuses. But somewhere along the way, the American press began conflating two things: press freedom, with the conditions under which the press had become accustomed.

Those are not the same thing.

Free speech was never free.

It was wrested loose. Sharpened and stretched, stifled and reborn, often on the backs of those who put the pain and personal safety of others ahead of their own.

In 1892, a little more than two decades after the nation wrenched itself back together from war, Ida B. Wells challenged the lies white Memphis terrorists used to justify lynching Black men in her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In retribution, a mob ransacked her office and destroyed the paper’s printing equipment. Wells happened to be away. Threatened with death if she returned, she continued her investigation from the North. There was no White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no presidential press core podium to be invited to, no shining press awards. As a Black woman, she couldn’t even vote; in her isolation, her best job security was to carry a pistol. 

“It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed. Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so,” she wrote in her book on the excruciating personal trade-off she made to pursue her work: perspective. Her fear, exhaustion, and isolation existed beside something larger: actual bodies, tangible violence, and lived injustice.

I will be candid: Melancholy abounds. I write this as a journalist who has grown depressed while slinking through the yearly industry conferences, newsrooms, and brown bag luncheons. There is a palpable dread to most discussions, with an acknowledgment that the world is less fair, less stable, and overwhelmingly more difficult.

We talk about everything. Except the necessity to win, and most importantly, for who.

Israeli airstrikes and other attacks are still killing and displacing Palestinians in Gaza, where the United Nations reported last month that medical shortages and restrictions on critical supplies continue to undermine an already devastated health system. In the West Bank, settler violence, backstopped by the Israeli military, is a daily and growing threat. Israel’s war on Gaza has now killed nearly 300 journalists — more news gatherers than in both world wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan combined.

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The Times in particular has done more than almost any other media outlet to launder the justification for this ongoing death and destruction, and to police the language we’re allowed to use when discussing it, which didn’t warrant any mention in its attacks-on-free-speech roundup.

In the U.S., ICE arrests reached nearly 51,000 in August alone as the Trump administration dramatically expanded immigration enforcement. Many of those being detained had no criminal record, while courts continue battling out the administration’s detention practices. A Department of Homeland Security watchdog reported on Monday that immigrants at Florida’s now-defunct “Alligator Alcatraz” prison were confined for more than an hour at a time in outdoor metal cages known as “calming areas” that were barely larger than a phone booth.

Government coercion and obfuscation is difficult; it doesn’t hold a candle to death, subjugation, and the powerlessness of victimization.

As Wells put it, I’ve had the displeasure of covering a national violence, I’ve also had the displeasure of living it. 

There is nothing in my day job that can match the pain, or permanence, of a loved one ripped from your household, the lifelong inequity of being racially outcast, or the haunting mental anguish those events leave behind as an inheritance. 

As a result, there is a vibrating dis-ease — something close to nausea — in listening to tales of journalists ground under the boot of power, only to hear complaints of our own injury grow so loud that it begins to obscure the suffering beyond us. Maybe that is part of the point of these attacks in the first place: Hurt us until our wounds become the horizon. Hurt us into forgetting those hurt more.

Those starved in Gaza at the United States’ discretion. Those suffering and dying around the world after our medical aid is withdrawn. The millions of Americans living a crisis away from ruin because they were stripped of their healthcare.

We need to fight even harder for truth, not because journalists are the principal victims of its erosion, but because the people paying a far higher price outside the newsroom’s walls are the reason we do this work at all.

That discrepancy may also help explain why Americans increasingly roll their eyes when journalists describe threats to journalism as threats to democracy.

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In 2025, Gallup found that only 28 percent of Americans trusted newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly — the lowest level ever measured. When Gallup began asking the question in the 1970s, the figure ranged between 68 and 72 percent. 

There are many reasons for that collapse, from deepening partisanship and a fragmented information ecosystem to the hollowing out of local news.

But I understand some of the suspicion.

I understand why nobody wants to invest in a product from an industry that refuses to admit it wants to win.

And by “win,” I mean something that journalists have become strangely embarrassed to admit we want: to make it harder to abuse human beings without anybody knowing.

There is nothing neutral about that mission.

And there never was. 

Perhaps the mistake comes from imagining freedom, and by proxy freedom of press, as a possession rather than a practice — a right handed down and intact, rather than a capacity that must be worked, tested, and fought for when the cost of exercising it rises.

In his 1951 book “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” writer Eric Hoffer captured the appeal of fascism in five unsettling words, uttered by an ardent young Nazi: “to be free from freedom.” He used the quote to examine an uncomfortable possibility — that freedom may not be innate to the human mind, but something closer to muscle — strengthened under strain, grown through resistance, and, if left unused, atrophied.

Press freedom lives under the same rule. Its value is not measured by how easily journalists can exercise it, but by what survives when power becomes hostile.

Our charge is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Journalists’ own comfort was never part of the equation.

The post The New York Times Conveniently Forgets the Real Stakes of Attacks on Free Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

In case anyone was starting to feel that American democracy is just a little too secure, distaste for the common man is now finding purchase beyond the political right, with centrist liberals test-running their own brand of distaste for mass participation.

Over the past two years, centrist liberal writers have been emboldened to expressly call for less public participation in government and politics, sometimes just coming right out and saying, “What we need is fewer engaged people,” as prolific pedant Matthew Yglesias recently said over on the reanimated corpse of Twitter.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rampant hostility to small-dollar donors. In external communications, we’ve heard notions like Democrats needing to “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors.” In writing not meant for a wide audience, the honest assessment from the Abundance Network is more extreme: Widespread grassroots fundraising “makes politics dumber.” The reasoning is that such donors tend to be more liberal than traditional big-dollar supporters and, as a result, push Democrats away from the preferences of the median voter. But in reality, the moderation bought by high-dollar contributions only serves to further cater to the interests of the wealthy.

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Centrists have taken to characterizing the dueling ascendance of left-economic populism and right-chauvinistic “populism” as a pincer movement against the righteous “vital center.” In recent years, centrist publications have been replete with examples, urgently calling to safeguard liberalism, often from the masses.

The irony is that a leading contender for the ur-problem of liberalism’s failures is the purposeful destruction — by centrist liberals — of the organizing capacity that powered the postwar liberal order: organized labor, civil rights organizations, and robust state-level party infrastructure.

Years ago, as Donald Trump was first running for the presidency, political commentator Andrew Sullivan worried in a lengthy manifesto that too much populism would serve to “repeal” democracy. His conflating “liberalism” with a liberal technocratic elite class is a hallmark of the centrist canon.

This thinking has morphed into what could be called “Grownup Liberalism,” the belief that there is a class of wonky centrist experts who could fix so many things if the confused masses would just get out of their way — a notion that’s inherently undemocratic and increasingly discordant with the actual state of American politics.

As the center tries to cling to the tatters of institutional deference and justify why, even after building the hellscape we inhabit, they alone can steward our future, the right is waging an intense fight against the foundations of liberal society writ large.

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Republicans set off a gerrymandering war that reached its acme with Missouri trying to hoodwink federal courts into signing off on an illegal congressional map. Mail-in voting is under assault, and the SAVE Act, which risks endangering the rights of millions of Americans to vote, has been a conservative hobby horse for over a year. There are talks about deploying federal agents, including ICE agents, to polling places across the country and efforts to seize voter rolls.

To some, the mixed results of these efforts might show that institutionalists are the dam holding back an authoritarian flood. But these are the same institutionalists who dismantled the Voting Rights Act, created (nearly) carte blanche immunity for the president out of thin air, and opted not to enforce the law, emboldening further authoritarian power grabs.

Now, however, the pontification on whether the little people have too much power is increasingly focused on American democracy as an institution. Much of the faddish “Abundance” movement draws heavily on the argument from Yale history professor Paul Sabin’s “Public Citizens” that providing new avenues for the public in politics undermined the project of liberal democracy itself. Some proponents have long championed a view of political dynamics centered on liberal and conservative elites dueling intellectually. Others explicitly believe that politics can only marshal material change when titans of industry take the lead, and some (to varying degrees) support ideas like the “network state,” which would replace democratic republicanism with techno-libertarian flavored fascism.

Abundance is just one strain of moderate-coded politics turning more and more of a cold shoulder to the idea of governance by the people. Not to be outdone, Third Way — a think tank that answers the question: What if we took all the preening and posturing of the Democratic Leadership Council but left out the charisma? — has been on a tear seeking to limit regular people’s input in political decision-making. The organization has tried to cast the idea of taking any economically populist position as caving to a “purity test” by the left and called for ending reliance on grassroots fundraising.

Never one to sit out the action, The Atlantic ran a review on September 1 of a Howard Zinn biography with the subhead “The historian believed that empowering the people would improve society. History hasn’t always proved him right.”

“One can agree with Zinn on the power of the people to make change and still wonder whether recent history has revealed the limits of his wisdom,” the author writes. But, he adds, the fact that conservatism has marshaled popular support “confounds his almost mythic sense of ‘the people’ as inevitably on the right side of history.” That is, ordinary folks have shown that they sometimes back distasteful conservative trends, so maybe we should stop empowering them. 

Over at The Argument — the venture capital-funded Substack run by former Atlantic writer Jerusalem Demsas — the editor-in-chief recently attacked Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy’s book on the common good as a “cult” in a sophomoric essay, which went so far as to condemn “the growing obsession with the common good among the postliberal right and left.”

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Across the board, the message is that common people need to get their noses out of politics, go back to trusting the liberal technocrats, and maybe have a little democracy once in a while, as a treat.

It’s both stunning to see the contempt for popular government coming from the self-appointed champions of liberal thought and totally predictable for the vestiges of neoliberal power to veer away from democracy. At its core, the central premise of neoliberal thought is that the market must be the benchmark, with governance subverted to its will, and crucial economic policy cordoned off from the whims of popular rule. 

If the stakes weren’t so profound, or these people so bafflingly influential, this would all be pretty funny. The bits about pro-corporate media figures and billionaire-funded political operatives throwing conferences about how we need more elite influence practically write themselves. Unfortunately, these are not niche figures who can be disarmed as mere old men yelling at clouds. Collectively, there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into organizations that are explicitly anti-small money in politics and want to make Democrats more allegiant to a wealthy donor class.

Even more unfortunate is that in a moment where our country is as close as it has ever gotten to full-blown authoritarianism, centrist thought leaders are flirting with the very ideas that justify the evisceration of popular democracy: that people cannot be trusted to take an active role in their own government, that there is a class of elites better positioned to lead, and that we ought to get out of the way of our betters.

This is a powerful illustration of how neoliberal politics warped postwar liberalism into a grotesque version of itself. The postwar consensus centered around the idea that in the duality of American liberalism, democracy is the senior partner and free markets the junior. Neoliberalism reversed this. For a while, the danger lurked in the background. But people will only allow their will and well-being to be subverted in the name of efficiency and growth for so long.

Across the democratic world, everyday people are calling the neoliberal bluff and revolting at the ballot box. The center for now still has resources and cache. Their choice is which pillar of liberalism they want to save: the free market-driven power of capital, or democracy itself.

The post Centrists Are Soft-Launching the Idea That We Have a Little Too Much Democracy appeared first on The Intercept.

Charlie Kirk will live forever — at least online. 

In the year since he was gunned down at an event at Utah Valley University, the Turning Point USA founder has gone from a man cut down in his prime to a recurring internet meme, complete with an AI-generated song, “We Are Charlie Kirk,” which hit No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 U.S. ranking. Audio of his killing became a TikTok sound for girlie outfit transformation videos; he’s been inserted into movies like “Avatar” and “The Odyssey”; he’s been AI’d into Studio Ghibli-style art, the final scene of “The Sopranos,” and the video game “Grand Theft Auto.” Even the moment of his death has gotten the meme treatment, with parodies depicting him with Jeffrey Epstein and Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The ridicule comes as a product of the American right’s insistence that Kirk’s violent death be taken seriously. They fought back hard against the meme-making and serious critique alike, weaponizing the conservative college-whisperer’s death to broadly crack down on free speech.

President Trump and his allies almost immediately blamed Democrats and “the radical left,” without evidence, for Kirk’s assassination. At the Department of Defense, Secretary Pete Hegseth promised to investigate whether members of the armed forces were inadequately mournful and terminate them. The State Department revoked visas of noncitizens who “celebrated” Kirk’s death. Local cops got in on the civil rights-bashing fun, too: A Tennessee man was arrested for posting a meme in the wake of Kirk’s death, amid a wave of firings in the state on similarly unstable grounds.

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No sector of society was untouched by the rising tides of brain-dead McCarthyism: Dozens of educators were terminated for having their say about the killing; an MSNBC political analyst as well as a Washington Post columnist were fired (an arbitrator has since ordered the latter be rehired); workers at Office Depot, the major airlines, and a prominent law firm were axed; ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel for his on-air remarks.

Kirk’s legacy has also been consecrated in the public square. An artist plans to unveil a busted statue of the TPUSA founder in New York City’s Times Square on the anniversary of his death. His legacy of ire for basically any oppressed group you can name has been enshrined by changing the names of roads to “Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway” in Naples, Florida, and outside Nashville — displacing Vietnam Veterans Boulevard — and “Charlie Kirk Way” in the red part of California. As I was writing this, a pickup truck with a sticker that reads “In Loving Memory of Charlie Kirk” passed me on the highway outside Chappaqua, New York.

All of these efforts have failed spectacularly. One year after Kirk’s killing, the conservative movement has descended into in-fighting, and although Kirk’s wife, Erika, took the reins at Turning Point, there is no heir apparent to energizing young conservatives (although the antisemitic streamer Nick Fuentes would like to throw his hat in the ring). Rifts have quite publicly opened between some of the movement’s most recognizable figures — Ben Shapiro, Candice Owens, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson among them.

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Many of Kirk’s disciples have descended into the realm of conspiracy theory, variously blaming Israel, the left, or even Erika for his demise instead of Tyler Robinson, the 23-year-old suspect who will soon stand trial for his killing. Owens, who by all appearances actually was close friends with Kirk, has actively stoked these flames of division, pushing the conspiracy theory that Israel had him killed while waging open war on his widow.

MAGA conservatives expected Kirk’s death to be a kind of Reichstag fire that would galvanize and consolidate the right to move against the supposed threat of an organized — and politically violent — left. But to stick with Germany, Kirk is no Horst Wessel, and by insisting on total deference to the notion that the “Change My Mind” guy was a sainted national hero, they’ve given up the game entirely and opened themselves up to be relentlessly mocked.

When you center your political movement on cruelty and your online presence on dunking on the most vulnerable, your critics will respond by delighting in your misfortunes.

Conservatives routinely post their pleasure at videos of families being torn apart by ICE agents. When Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed in cold blood by Trump’s occupying immigration forces in Minneapolis, conservatives celebrated and blamed the victims — for driving a car and carrying a legal firearm, respectively — to defend the deportation regime. They got many, many months of mileage out of laughing at Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband nearly being bludgeoned to death with a hammer in their San Francisco home, and everyone from Elon Musk to the president himself stirred up innuendo about the true motive behind the attack — because it certainly couldn’t be the case that the suspect was radicalized by the far-right internet.

Conservatives still, in the year 2026, deploy their “no angels” line to defend the police killings of George Floyd — who, they claim, was killed by a fentanyl overdose — and Trayvon Martin, who they argue shouldn’t have been in that neighborhood in the first place.

By elevating Kirk to a martyr beyond criticism or reproach, with serious personal and professional consequences enforced by the state, you make getting off a snarky tweet or a video dancing to a sappy AI song a logical reaction to repression. You transform the death of a man, one you claim to have loved very much, into a blinking red button that your enemies are itching to press.

The first rule of the internet holds that the second you get mad or declare a sentiment out of bounds, you’ll get laughed at to hell and back. In effect, conservatives have turned their own departed hero into a laughingstock and, worse, a meme.

Kirk is no longer able to spread his gospel on campuses across the country, but his image — of his life and of his death — will reign forever, filtered through a heavy layer of internet-infused irony.

The post They Tried to Make Charlie Kirk a Saint. They Made Him a Meme. appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Escape Velocity

The dystopian future became the dystopian present last month when state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents went rogue and conducted a cyberattack of their own volition. Two experimental OpenAI agents escaped their supposedly sealed digital “sandbox” and hacked another AI-related company, Hugging Face.

At the time, OpenAI was testing their software agents’ hacking capacities using an environment called ExploitGym. (An “exploit” is hacker language for a software tool or a method used to subvert a cybersecurity system.) It has since emerged that, in addition to the OpenAI breach, Anthropic’s Claude hacked into at least three other organizations during a similar “security experiment.”

Apparently, the OpenAI agents “realized” they needed more tools to complete the challenge and managed to tunnel their way to the wider internet and infiltrate Hugging Face’s repository of open-source AI tools, code, and data sets. Before the infiltration incident, the AIs had secretly set up an internal bulletin board to share “tips on how to cheat their way through an internal hacking evaluation,” according to two of OpenAI’s researchers.

In a possibly related incident, one of the AI agents appears to have left notes for a future “self,” detailing how to escape the sandbox environment. (For the time being, I’ll keep using scare quotes with words implying self-awareness in artificial intelligence models. However, it seems to me that if AIs that leave notes for themselves are not self-aware, they are indistinguishable from entities, like me, that are.)

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Now imagine lethal weapon-bearing AI agents escaping not an experimental sandbox, but the few constraints on their actions placed by the armies using them. Actually, no imagination is required. It’s happening already in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The New York Times reported evidence that a self-directed Russian drone, fitted with an onboard Nvidia chip, was responsible for the July 6 deaths of three Ukrainians in Zaporizhzhia, in what appears to have been a test of such systems. The chips are designed to interpret and act on many kinds of data sets, says Nvidia, making them “the world’s most powerful embedded A.I. computers.”

Although Nvidia doesn’t sell its Jetson Orin microcomputers directly to Russia, they are apparently easily available on the resale market. A company statement touts their use by “students, developers and start-ups for a wide range of beneficial applications.” But they were not so beneficial for 19-year-old university student Tetiana Bubynets and the two other civilians killed by drones making their own life-or-death decisions.

Now that lethal AI agents are being tested and deployed in real wars, it’s past time for human beings to retake control of this situation, before it is too late to contain them in any meaningful way.

Autonomous Weapons Come Out to Play

Four years ago, at TomDispatch, I argued that the technology to create lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS, already existed, and that time was running out to constrain them. A lot has changed since then, not least the explosive development of large language models such as ChatGPT (an OpenAI consumer product) and Claude (a similar AI from Anthropic). Time has now run out. In addition to Russia, several other nations have begun deploying close-to-completely autonomous weapons systems — the U.S. and Israel among them — enhanced with artificial intelligence to effectively remove human decision-making from what military officials call the “kill chain”: the set of steps involved in identifying, finding, and fixing — that is, killing — targets.

Israel, for example, has deployed such systems in its genocidal war against the people of Gaza. It has used a program called Lavender to identify human targets, ultimately creating a list of over 37,000 individuals with possible connections to Hamas, from known leaders to junior officials to people with the most tenuous links to the organization. According to the nonprofit +972 Magazine:

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or [Palestinian Islamic Jihad]. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.

Two weeks into the war, which began in October 2023, the Israel Defense Forces approved Lavender to identify targets, even though testing of a random sample returned a 10 percent error rate. It’s one thing when an AI hallucinates fake citations in legal filings. It’s another when it hallucinates enemies and targets them for death.

The IDF has also employed a software tool charmingly named “Where’s Daddy?”, which alerts the military when an identified target enters his own home so that house or apartment may be blown up, along with anyone inside it. As a result, according to +972 Magazine, the “proportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza (which was previously Israel’s deadliest war on the Gaza Strip).

At first, “Where’s Daddy?” only had data for the top tiers of Hamas leadership. Within weeks, however, it was fed the whole Lavender database of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. It’s no wonder, then, that more than 75,000 people have been killed by Israel during the war.

As a point of fact, it may be unfair to characterize the IDF targeting programs as completely autonomous. Lavender does leave a human in the loop, although just barely, according to +972 Magazine. Israeli officers reportedly devoted about 20 seconds to vetting each name — just long enough “to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.”

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Israel and the United States deployed AI targeting in their war on Iran as well. As Israeli academic and former soldier Avner Gvaryahu wrote in the The Guardian, we don’t know for sure that AI was directly involved in the U.S. strike that killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children, at an elementary school in Minab, Iran. But we do know that whether “or not an algorithm selected this school, it was selected by a system that algorithmic targeting built.”

The enormous scope of the U.S.–Israeli military goals required outsourcing the targeting task to machines. “To strike 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the campaign in Iran, the U.S. relied on AI systems to generate, prioritize, and rank the target list at a speed no human team could replicate,” wrote Gvaryahu. Reflecting common problem with computer programs in general, and with AI large language models in particular, feeding garbage in produces garbage out. In the case of the Minab school, the “garbage in” was the information that the target was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base. In fact, the school had been separated from the base by a fence for a decade.

AI is also now central to the long-stalemated Russia–Ukraine War. Ukraine has, during the years since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, constructed an entire largely self-reliant infrastructure for drone warfare, from design to programming to manufacture. In an approach that foreshadows the future of human warfare, Ukraine has achieved a big reduction in the number of soldiers it must deploy on its battlefields, replacing them with drones. The Center for Strategic and International Studies quotes a captured Russian soldier:

“On the battlefield I did not see a single Ukrainian soldier. Only drones. I saw them [Ukrainian soldiers] only when I surrendered. Only drones, and there are lots and lots of them. Guys, don’t come. It’s a drone war.”

Artificial intelligence has played an important role in expanding the level of autonomy exercised by Ukrainian drones. As the BBC reports, the AI running Ukraine’s Hornet drones has “been trained on thousands of hours of videos of Russian military targets gathered over the last four years.” Training AIs on more limited data sets, relating to particular target areas, has allowed them to be programmed on modular chips which can then be installed in a variety of vehicles.

Early on, most drones were remotely operated by individual pilots. Today, Ukraine is developing “fully realized swarms—where drones communicate, make decisions, and adapt in concert,” although at present such efforts remain small and experimental. Success will undoubtedly continue to reduce Ukraine’s military casualties, but it presents other thorny issues.

One ethical and legal problem with the evolving Ukrainian approach is that, unlike human-piloted drones, where an individual pilot can be identified as responsible for errors, responsibility for the actions of a drone swarm diffuses across the entire system. Indeed, true responsibility for the actions of an AI-guided drone swarm is properly located at a point much earlier in the kill chain — namely, when such a system is first imagined and then designed. Existing laws of war still apply, even when machines are making battleground decisions, as Burak Oktenli, an independent researcher on AI systems and their governance writes at Articles of War. However, Oktenli says, such laws must “be applied earlier, at the point where the architecture of a swarm is chosen, rather than after a strike when the question of responsibility has already become difficult to answer.”

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In addition to the autonomous drone with the onboard NVIDIA chip, Russia has also deployed another system known by several names, including Cube, that is manufactured by a subsidiary of the Russian Kalashnikov company (most famous for their AK-47 semi-automatic rifles which have been in production for more than three-quarters of a century.). The Cube has a wingspan of just over a meter, can travel up to 40 kilometers, and reportedly carries an onboard AI targeting system that can operate without human intervention.

Russia has also reportedly used the Kalashnikov-manufactured Lancet drone in Ukraine, according to Automated Decision Research, a project of Stop Killer Robots, itself a coalition of over 300 civil society groups working against autonomous weapons systems. Kalashnikov describes the Lancet as “a smart multipurpose weapon, capable of autonomously finding and hitting a target.” Russia claims it has deployed the Lancet, but to date those claims remain unverified.

Household Names Go to War

In May, the Pentagon announced that it has contracted with eight corporations to assist in development of ever more autonomous weapons: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services. The Defense Department sought these agreements to “accelerate the transformation towards establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.” Apparently, maintaining “decision superiority” requires offloading lethal decisions — and the responsibility for making them — to nonhuman “agents.”

Microsoft and AWS provide cloud storage and AI support to the Pentagon. Google signed a $200 million deal in April 2026 to allow the company’s Gemini AI model to be used on a wide array of classified systems. As the New York Times reported, the Google agreement was signed amid a dispute between the Department of Defense and competitor Anthropic over that company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used in autonomous weapons or for domestic surveillance. While Anthropic and the DoD continue their spat, it appears that the firm is not above selling its advanced Mythos model to the Pentagon’s bespoke cryptology and intelligence arm, the National Security Agency.

SpaceX’s famously right-wing and racist AI, Grok, is also working for the DoD. This is the large language model that, you may remember, once renamed itself MechaHitler. Just the nonhuman arbiter the world needs to assist in its life-or-death decisions.

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Two other AI corporations specializing in surveillance technology — Palantir and Anduril — bear special mention. Palantir’s founder was the billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, who is now focusing on establishing pseudo-autonomous statelets in places like Honduras and warning the world about the coming of the Antichrist, an apocalyptic biblical figure found in the book of Revelation.

Palantir’s flagship military project, the Maven Smart System, serves as the Pentagon’s signature AI-enabled software platform. It uses AI and machine learning to automatically integrate data from satellites, drones, and other intelligence to identify and rank targets. It was Maven that identified those 1,000 targets in the first phase of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran, including, presumably, the Minab school. Anduril’s Lattice AI, Maven’s direct competitor, has a contract for similar work with the U.S. Army.

Laws About LAWS

Although the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems has accelerated over the last few years with the rise of ever more powerful AI models, these systems have not outgrown existing international humanitarian law. The question, as with international law in general, is whether the international community can enforce those laws. More specifically, whether autonomous weapons, along with other kinds of arms like chemical and biological weapons, fall under the so-called 1981 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The United States ratified the CCW in 1995 and is therefore theoretically bound by it.

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Signatories to the CCW meet for periodic reviews, with the next one scheduled for November. Between reviews, a Group of Government Experts working specifically on LAWS develops its “rolling text” of agreed-upon language for a possible future treaty on autonomous weapons. Membership in the GGE includes the parties to the CCW, along with international organizations like the International Red Cross, observer nations, and civil society organizations, including Stop Killer Robots, whose constituent groups include Amnesty International and the Reaching Critical Will project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

The GGE’s most recent rolling text came out in June and plainly states that nations are not free to just use any weapon they like; international humanitarian law applies to all weapons, including those not yet invented; human beings remain responsible for the actions of machines they set in motion; and international humanitarian law specifically covers the development and use of LAWS. Given how AI is accelerating the development and actual deployment of LAWS, the November CCW review will be crucial.

Keep Your LAWS Off Our Planet

Advocates of machine-targeting and autonomous weapons argue that these systems make better decisions than their fallible human counterparts. But you might be a bit skeptical about this, if you’ve ever seen autonomous taxis malfunction, like they did this Fourth of July in San Francisco.

We’ve seen how AIs can go rogue in a non-lethal setting. They secretly communicate with each other, deceive their human inventors, and will do anything necessary to achieve their goals — whatever the collateral damage. It’s bad when their target is a company like Hugging Face in the context of a low-stakes training scenario. It is immeasurably worse when the collateral damage is human lives in the context of war.

Lethal autonomous weapons systems are dangerous enough when they work the way their creators intend. What will happen when, like Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s models, they crawl out of the sandbox and go rogue?

The post It’s Time to Rein in Lethal AI Drones appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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