The Intercept

Hegseth Dodges Impeachment, for Now. And Tom Morello on Fighting for the World You Want

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Secretary of defense Pete Hegseth narrowly avoided impeachment on Tuesday, but his future is anything but secure as an enraged Democratic caucus prepares to take control of both the House and Senate in January.

“Tick, tock! Get ready, asshole, because we’re coming,” Congress member-elect Richard Ojeda, D-N.C., warned Hegseth at a press conference on Wednesday. Ojeda told The Intercept that he planned not only to impeach Hegseth but also to bring criminal charges against him.

On Tuesday, the House declined to move forward with impeachment proceedings introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., which accused Hegseth of multiple “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Massie accused Hegseth of illegally waging war against both Iran and Yemen and of overseeing extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, co-host Jessica Washington speaks with Nick Turse, Intercept senior national security reporter and editor of Tom Dispatch, about Hegseth’s legacy as “secretary of war.”

“Hegseth can spin it any way he likes,” says Turse. “He can use the troops as a shield, claiming that indictments of him are indictments of them. But in the end, he’s got a lot to answer for on his own, and none of it’s because he’s doing a good job.” Turse adds: “It’s because he’s committing high crimes.”

Co-host Jordan Uhl also sits down with musician and guitarist Tom Morello to talk about his new album “Everyone Gets Everything They Want” and his decades-long fight against forever wars and his resistance to fascism.

“My career has basically been rebellion as self-care,” says Morello. “But in this day and age, every act of art is an act of resistance. Every truth spoken is a light in the gathering darkness. And every song sung has the potential to be a trumpet of a bulwark against the rising tide of authoritarianism to help sound the bell for current and future generations to continue to fight for a more just and peaceful and decent planet.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter for The Intercept.

CNN: Republicans banded together and they killed this effort to impeach Pete Hegseth and largely stayed united. And the final vote here was 211 to 204.

NBC: Republicans uniting to block them from moving forward following Hegseth’s fiery rebuke of the outgoing congressman who introduced them, Thomas Massie.

ABC: The Republicans sticking together have essentially tabled or moved this resolution to the House Judiciary Committee, where it’s expected under Republican control these articles of impeachment will die. Pete Hegseth, for the moment, will not be impeached by the House of Representatives under this effort by Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie. Not a single Republican colleague joined him. All the Democrats stuck together, but there were not enough.

JW: On Tuesday night U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth narrowly avoided impeachment as House Republicans blocked a bill introduced by Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

Rep. Thomas Massie: We’re not indicting him for being bad at his job. In fact, he was very effective at killing school children in Iran. He was very effective at extrajudicial killings. There’s no argument in these impeachment articles that he’s ineffective. The argument here is that he’s broken laws and he’s violated the Constitution.

JW: That’s Congressman Massie speaking at a press conference about the articles of Impeachment he introduced against the embattled Cabinet Secretary. This is how Hegseth responded:

Pete Hegseth: As for the articles themselves, Iran, the cartels, Maduro, Yemen, every one was a lawful operation ordered by the commander-in-chief, then ordered by myself, notified to congress and executed by American warriors who did their jobs. We destroyed terror regime’s capabilities. We sank the boats carrying poison into our communities. We put a narco dictator into handcuffs. These are not high crimes. This is the job. And it is a job well done.

Joining me now to break it all down is Nick Turse, senior national security and foreign policy reporter for the Intercept and editor of Tom Dispatch.

Nick, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing.

Nick Turse: Thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here.

JW: Before we dive in, I also want to let listeners know we have a special interview with Tom Morello, the musician and original member of Rage Against the Machine.

Tom Morello: My job from day one is to try to make one guitar sound like a riot and to have my music be a contributing factor to social justice movements at home and abroad.

JW: So stay tuned for that conversation

All right, Nick, to start. What’s your reaction to Secretary Hegseth dismissing Massie’s impeachment articles, claiming:

Pete Hegseth: What one disgruntled and defeated congressman is attempting is not oversight, and it’s not accountability. It’s a political spectacle, a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment.

JW: and that Massie is punishing him for a, “job well done”? What is your response?

NT: To start, it’s laughable. For half an hour at a press conference on the morning of the impeachment vote, Secretary Hegseth wove a web of lies designed to refute or obfuscate Massie’s eight impeachment charges. He repeatedly claimed that the effort to impeach him was just a stunt by one disgruntled congressman.

But, as we came to see, more than 200 members of Congress voted with Massie. So no, this wasn’t one man’s vendetta. When the new Congress is sworn in I think we’re going to find that the number in favor of impeaching him is only going to grow. And consequently, I think the list of high crimes and misdemeanors against him is also going to grow.

There’s almost a limitless list of high crimes that Hegseth can be charged with, and there are crimes within crimes. Waging unlawful wars in Iran and Yemen and Venezuela and specific war crimes within them that Hegseth may also be culpable for.

“Waging unlawful wars in Iran and Yemen and Venezuela and specific war crimes within them that Hegseth may also be culpable for. “

The boat strikes in and of themselves are criminal, and then there is, for example, the double tap strike on the first attack on a so-called drug boat, which is a crime in its own right.

Hegseth can spin it any way he likes. He can use the troops as a shield, claiming that indictments of him are indictments of them. But in the end, he’s got a lot to answer for on his own, and none of it’s because he’s doing a good job. It’s because he’s committing high crimes.

JW: High crimes and misdemeanors to a layperson, even to me, is not exactly indicative of what these actual crimes are. So what were the actual charges that Massie leveled against Hegseth?

NT: There were three charges for illegally waging war against Iran in violation of the War Powers Resolution. There was a charge related to Operation Rough Rider, which is the 2025 war in Yemen, which caused a tremendous number of civilian casualties. It’s become a forgotten conflict at this point.

The boat strike campaign which experts say are extrajudicial killings. There’s also a charge related to Hegseth’s efforts to undermine efforts at minimizing the possibility of civilian casualties. So these are some of the high crimes and misdemeanors of eight charges that Massie put forth.

JW: You just mentioned the drone strikes on so-called “narco terrorist” boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which to your estimate have killed more than 240 civilians. Those strikes, from my perspective, have gotten far less media attention than the Iran war, and obviously part of that is that much of what the U.S. is doing and who they’re targeting in open waters is shrouded in secrecy. But, how unprecedented are these strikes, and are these actions considered war crimes?

NT: The boat strikes, as you said, have largely been overtaken by the Iran war. But during his Pentagon press conference, Hegseth made a full-throated defense of his actions that actually drew attention to the unprecedented nature of the boat strike campaign.

Hegseth said that the charges that the American military targets civilians are a lie, and that the only people that target civilians are the terrorists that the U.S. hunts down. That itself is an outright lie. The U.S. boat strike campaign has only targeted civilians. Only. Not some, not inadvertently, not maybe. These are all civilians, period, full stop.

These summary executions of more than 240 people are a significant departure from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies detained suspected drug smugglers and then brought them to trial on criminal charges.

Experts in the laws of war, Pentagon officials that I’ve spoken with, and members of Congress from both parties say that Hegseth’s boat strikes are illegal, that they’re extrajudicial killings. The military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians, even suspected criminals.

Interdiction in these cases is possible. It’s preferable. It’s legal. We don’t execute suspected criminals in this country, or when the police do, it’s supposed to be a crime. If there was a declared war, these boat strikes might be war crimes, but no war exists, and there is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. And outside of armed conflict, the legal term for premeditated killing is murder. That’s what’s happening. That’s what Hegseth is responsible for, outright murder.

“Outside of armed conflict, the legal term for premeditated killing is murder. “

JW: Massie has not called Hegseth a war criminal or used the term murder like you have, but he did have this to say about Hegseth when discussing the articles of impeachment.

Thomas Massie: You won’t find a reference to war crimes. What I do say, though, is because he’s violated the international norms of war and violated our own conventions of war, he’s put our own soldiers and sailors at risk. When you go back for a second kill on people who are clinging to wreckage, you’re encouraging our adversaries to do the same. That’s why those laws — those international laws — are on the books.

JW: Nick, what did you make of Massie’s response just now?

NT: We were the first outlet to report that double tap strike in September 2025. It caused a firestorm in Congress for the very reason that Massie’s talking about.

He’s right. Double tap strikes on helpless shipwrecked people, they’re in contravention of the U.S. military’s own law of war manual, and they undermine respect for the laws of war and encourage enemies to give Americans no quarter, which is a war crime, and a war crime that Secretary Hegseth has openly called for and advocated.

I’m going to out myself as a lapsed historian here, but to emphasize that this is a longstanding norm in armed conflict I’d mention that a great rallying cry of the Revolutionary War — the American Revolution —was “Remember Paoli.” It’s a town in Pennsylvania where British Redcoats reportedly offered no quarter and massacred American forces.

Back in 1777, this was considered a major breach of the laws of combat. This is what Secretary Hegseth has advocated [that] we are doing in these types of double tap strikes, executing those who are injured those who are surrendering. That’s outright barbarism.

JW: We were just discussing civilian casualties in the boat strike —intentional civilian casualties. I also wanted to talk about what happened in February when the United States conducted an airstrike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran. That strike killed at least 150 people, most of them children.

Now, U.S. officials said the strike was caused by a “targeting error” where the military mistook the elementary school for an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base. What did this horrific incident tell us about how the military has been operating under Hegseth when it comes to civilian casualties?

“Hegseth made it inevitable that something like this mass killing of children would happen.”

NT: This horrendous attack — a massacre of children — was the predictable result of Pentagon policies that The Intercept has been spotlighting since the spring of 2025, just after Pete Hegseth came to office. Hegseth made it inevitable that something like this mass killing of children would happen.

We reported that immediately upon taking office, he began dismantling what is known within the military as CHMR, the shorthand for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, basically undermining everything he could that restrains the military in favor of his favorite dictum, which is lethality.

A group of Democratic lawmakers told Hegseth in July in a letter directly to him that this gutting of CHMR had left the Pentagon unable to comply with the law and also its congressionally mandated responsibilities to protect civilians. This is precisely what military officials told us would happen months earlier, and it all came to fruition.

These criticisms were echoed in another report that we revealed in July that found that Hegseth had gutted the premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones, the Pentagon’s own Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Its workforce was slashed from 40 personnel in January of 2025 to just nine at the end of last year.

Last week we published an exposé that quoted six current and former defense officials who served under Hegseth, and one of them was the former senior advisor to this Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. This former official Wes Bryant, served eight combat deployments calling in airstrikes on ISIS and other post-9/11 entities.

Then he served under Hegseth until he was pushed out for blowing the whistle on policies that would undermine protections for civilians. Bryant told me that Hegseth is conducting what he called, “state terrorism.” He said Hegseth is “100 percent a war criminal,” and that he needs to be prosecuted.

JW: To that last point, and I really don’t like to play devil’s advocate, but from my understanding, you choose to refer to Hegseth by his self-styled title, Secretary of War, and if I understand you correctly, your argument is that there’s no need to sugarcoat what the U.S. military is doing. The Army is not in the business of defense. It’s in the business of war.

Is there an argument to be made that Hegseth is simply stripping back the facade of the U.S. military as anything other than a war machine, or is he really changing how the U.S. operates in the theater of war and in the world?

NT: I take a lot of heat from from readers on social media and in my email inbox about this, and readers plead with me not to bend to Hegseth’s will and call him the Secretary of War, which is, as you said his preferred title.

But I’ve really jumped at the chance for the reasons that you mentioned. When Hegseth unilaterally renamed the department, it gave me license to do what I’d wanted to do for years to call it as it’s seen, as it’s experienced in the world. For years out in the field, I found it grating whether I was in Vietnam or Cambodia or Libya and Somalia, to talk to victims of U.S. military violence about the so-called Department of Defense. The DoD says this. The DoD spokesman says that. I don’t think these people cared about it, but I absolutely did.

The Defense Department made war on the world, killing, wounding, and displacing millions of people not in the defense of anything. It was an aggressive war-making organization, plain and simple.

I hate using milquetoast euphemisms, but journalistic conventions handcuffed me. I couldn’t go off on my own and start calling it “Department of War.” But when they freed me up to give readers a more accurate assessment of what they do now under Hegseth and what has been done since they changed the name going back to the 1940s, I took the opportunity that I was afforded.

Attacking an elementary school in Iran is an act of war and maybe a war crime. It’s not a defense of the United States or in defense of the United States. That’s the reason why I use that title.

JW: Do you think that Hegseth has changed what the department is? Did it becoming the Department of War change something fundamental about it, or is that what it’s always been? And then is Hegseth changing anything about the actual way it operates?

NT: Hegseth has pulled the veil off of what the department does. I think in a very real sense, he’s undermined protections on civilians that were only just starting to perhaps take hold. The Center of Excellence that I mentioned earlier only just came into existence and was needed because the Pentagon has a long history of attacking civilians whether purposefully or inadvertently as “collateral damage.”

So the Defense Department always did what the Department of War does now, but there were some measures that were perhaps just starting to take hold, and Hegseth has undermined them completely.

JW: I think to your point, yes, Hegseth has lifted the veil off of what this department does. It is a department that makes war on the world. But he’s also made that worse and deadlier for civilians around the world.

And, obviously on Tuesday, Republicans killed the possibility of Hegseth being impeached by the current Congress. But come January, there’s going to be a new Congress dominated by Democrats. Now, before the vote on Massie’s articles of impeachment, Massie had this really interesting argument actually for why Republicans should join him in impeaching Hegseth. Let’s hear that clip.

Thomas Massie: I’m being polite here. What is an impeachment? An impeachment is just firing somebody, really. You don’t go to prison. You don’t go to jail. You don’t pay a fine. OK, when the Democrats get in charge, they are going to be very vicious.

JW: He went on to say.

Thomas Massie: The Democrats are going to bring people in here who have served under him and with him, give them protection. They’ll be able to say what he’s actually done, the things that he has ignored, the things that he did that caused civilian casualties, the way he’s ignored the laws, and then there’ll be a full, robust trial over in the Senate.

JW: Nick, what do you make of Massie’s remarks, the failure of this vote now, and what do you think might be coming in the next Democratic-led House and Senate?

NT: So Hegseth was very fixated on Massie having a grudge against Trump, which he had transferred over to the war secretary. But Massie, as we heard there, throughout the process, was very vocal that he was doing Hegseth a huge favor. Massie suggested that his impeachment resolution was the legislative equivalent of a mercy killing, calling it a much gentler version of what the Democrats would do when they take control of Congress in January.

The Democrats can rain down relentless hellfire on Hegseth. Congressional committees have broad investigative powers including the authority to subpoena administration officials to testify under oath and compel them to turn over documents. They can paper the Pentagon with subpoenas.

Representative Yasmin Ansari, who filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth in the spring, told me that Hegseth surviving Massie’s impeachment only opened him up to a plethora of ways for Democrats to hold him accountable in the next session. Specifically compelling to testify under oath before Congress and before the American people.

She emphasized that he’s “not only one of the most incompetent members of the administration,” her words, “but also one of the most unpopular” on a bipartisan basis. What she believes is going to happen is that Hegseth is going to be hauled up before Congress, and he’s just going to be battered incessantly.

This is probably going to grow so great that he’s going to become toxic to the administration. Representative-elect Richard Ojeda of North Carolina told our colleague Matt Sledge just after the impeachment vote the new Democrats are spoiling for a fight with Hegseth. He said “I want Pete Hegseth not just impeached, I want him prosecuted.”

I personally think that Hegseth might relish this rhetorical combat on Capitol Hill as a prelude to a potential presidential run. But, I think at some point it’s going to become untenable for him to actually preside over the Pentagon.

JW: I was at a press conference where Richard Ojeda was as well, and he had even more colorful language for Hegseth.

Rep.-elect Richard Ojeda: Make no mistake about it, the 120th Congress, he will not be so lucky. Tick, tock! Get ready, asshole, because we’re coming.

JW: They certainly seem to have plans to really target Hegseth and Massie might have been right that he was trying to offer a mercy kill. But we’re going to have to leave it there.

Nick Turse, thank you so much for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

NT:: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: After the break, my co-host Jordan Uhl speaks to musician and guitarist Tom Morello about his new album “Everyone Gets Everything They Want” and using his platform to fight fascism.

[Break]

Jordan Uhl: “Every act of art is an act of resistance,” says the legendary musician Tom Morello. Fighting for social justice and against fascism has been a staple of his art and career, from his work with The Nightwatchman to Rage Against the Machine to Audioslave.

And he’s at it again with his new album “Everyone Gets Everything They Want.” The track “Adjourn it” denounces the rising tide of racism and anti immigrant bigotry.

[Adjourn It plays]

The song features Serj Tankian of System of a Down and Morello’s 15 year old son, Roman.

Tom Morello joins me now.

Tom, thanks so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

JU: Tom Morello, it is an honor. Thank you so much for joining us on the Intercept Briefing

Tom Morello: It’s my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me

JU: Tom, you have a long history of activism, infusing that into your music and your art, and creating space for activism-oriented concerts and events like Power to the People. Your new album follows that tradition. It’s called “Everyone Gets Everything They Want.” Can you tell us about this new album, the themes that you explore on it, and if there are plans for future Power to the People festivals as we head into the presidential cycle?

“Every act of art is an act of resistance.”

TM: My career has basically been rebellion as self-care — rock and roll, especially in these troubled times. But in this day and age, every act of art is an act of resistance. Every truth spoken is a light in the gathering darkness. And every song sung has the potential to be a trumpet of a bulwark against the rising tide of authoritarianism to help sound the bell for current and future generations to continue to fight for a more just and peaceful and decent planet.

“Everyone Gets Everything They Want” is the 22nd album of my career. All 22 of those records have been built around a single purpose: that history is not something that happens, history is something that we make. Standing up in your place, in your time, in your place of work, whether it’s in a recording studio, whether it’s at the carpenter’s union, whether you’re a student, whether you’re an unhoused person, whether you’re a politician, is doing what you can with what you’ve got to try to be an advocate and an agent for a more just and peaceful planet.

JU: We are coming off of a massive rout in this election. Voters made it clear how they feel about this growing fascist movement in this country. But coming out of it, while some people are relieved, some people are happy, there are already intra-party debates over the policy priorities and leadership.

Unsurprisingly, we are seeing the pundit class rush to quell people’s enthusiasm, insisting the left does not have a mandate and that the moderate policy is the answer. What is your response to that?

TM: I was the scheduling secretary for United States Senator Alan Cranston for two years, so I got to see how the sausage is made from inside the sausage factory, and it is worse than you could possibly imagine. While it is encouraging that here and in Hungary and in Serbia and in Brazil that the people have resoundingly said no to fascism but the idea is not to have a kinder, gentler oligarchy. The idea is the liberation of humanity. The idea is securing a planet — a healthy planet — for our children and grandchildren, generations to come.

“People have resoundingly said no to fascism but the idea is not to have a kinder, gentler oligarchy. The idea is the liberation of humanity. “

One thing that is encouraging in those other countries and in our most recent election is in addition to the terrible corporate Democrats who are also represented, there’s a new breed of politician. We have a socialist mayor in New York City. We have a socialist mayor in Los Angeles, the two biggest cities in our country.

The young people are once again the hope of the future. Rather than having me, a musician of a certain age saying, “This is what you should do,” I think that the main thing I can do is listen to what they have to say and encourage them in their efforts to build that more just and more peaceful planet.

JU: Do you have any thoughts on who should lead in the House and the Senate? We’re seeing calls for Schumer to step aside. Maybe if it’s new blood, maybe it’s Chris Van Hollen. Do you have any thoughts on who should lead Democrats in the Senate?

TM: My thoughts of people who should lead in the Senate are not elected in politics. And likely your show would be thrown off the air if I were to name them. [Laughter.]

Obviously the Chuck Schumers and Hakeem Jeffries are just awful continuations of the awful policies that got us in this to begin with. You can trace it back to Clinton with the crime bill and with NAFTA, and the abandonment of the working class that got us in this mess to begin with.

“Aim for the world you really want without compromise.”

But again, I also think that it’s important to aim for the world you really want without compromise, without apology, and to not just go, “OK, well this is going to be better than the slippery slope to obvious this 50 percent clown show, 50 percent fascism that is the Trump administration.”

But what is the world you really want, and how do you build that? Not just what is a glazed-over version of what we’ve had, a reheated version of the terrible policies of both parties that got us in this situation of nearly environmental collapse and right-wing white Christian nationalism.

One thing I will say is that, there has been some reckoning that needs to be pushed even further of dealing with America’s original sin. The paradox of this country, which is demanding liberty while embracing white supremacy. That is the story of our country from day one in that some people’s lives just matter a lot more than other people’s lives, both at home and abroad. And a full rejection of that we’ve seen in some other countries, we’ve seen in part of the electorate here, and in some of the elected officials.

In my view, Election Day is harm reduction. I always vote. I vote my conscience, unless it is a contested election, and then I vote for the absolute most harm reduction.

“What’s the world you really want, and how do we fight for it?” That doesn’t just happen on Election Day. That happens the day after Election Day, and the day after that. ”

To go beyond that and be like, “What’s the world you really want, and how do we fight for it?” That doesn’t just happen on Election Day. That happens the day after Election Day, and the day after that.

Since I was 17 years old, I have been in the trenches of grassroots organizing via rock and roll to try to do what I can in my small way with a Marshall half stack to liberate humanity. And that work has only just begun.

JU: I want to touch on that. I live in Los Angeles, and we just watched California voters reject a billionaire tax. This was a fight you were directly involved in. You performed at a rally here in Los Angeles in the spring. How do you make sense of that? You’re talking about these socialist gains, and we’re seeing this—

TM: It’s easy to make sense of it. It’s money in politics. I’m a fan of sports. Every World Series game, every football game had 72 ads paid for by tech billionaires and featuring the heroes of the California Democratic Party saying, “Please don’t tax the billionaires, whatever you do.”

This is a firsthand account. I was the scheduling secretary for a U.S. senator. Let me tell you what I scheduled. I scheduled phone calls for him to ask rich dudes for money. That’s what the schedule was.

We would go to a hotel, and there were like 10 payphones in a row. I would commandeer them, and I would call up the first guy and say, “Can you hold for the senator?” He’d get on the phone and ask that rich dude for money. Nine more calls in a row, Republicans, Democrats, corporate people, whatever.

Then they would start again, and we would spend the whole day doing that. Those guys are bought, sold, and totally beholden to the oligarchs that have their hands on the lever of power. So the reason why that tax failed was because how much money did they spend? If they had put as much money into healthcare for Californians as they did in trying to reject the billionaire tax, we’d be a lot better off.

JU: Over $300 million by a handful of billionaires. It’s absolutely staggering.

I want to look ahead. You and through your music, you’ve always been ahead of the curve waiting for folks to catch up. So what are the emerging fights that you see now that people need to get plugged in on? Is there something that stands out?

TM: I would say one thing is to not sink into a complacency when there’s a euphoria in the aftermath of a in my view somewhat surprising rejection of to the level that we’ve seen of Trumpism. But that’s just the beginning. We’ve already seen, as you mentioned, the right-wing of the Democratic Party asserting their hold on, like, “Hold on now. Hold on now.”

What people need to realize is the world isn’t going to change itself. That is up to you. That is up to me. While that may sound like a daunting sentence and a daunting task, the good news is whenever the world has changed in progressive, radical, or even revolutionary ways, it has been changed by people who didn’t have any more money, courage, power, intelligence, influence than anyone listening or watching this right now. The world is changed by average, everyday, ordinary people standing up in their time, not just at the ballot box, but in all that intervening time. Change comes from below. When change is real, it comes from below. It comes from you and me. That’s what I’ve been singing about and screaming about in my songs for an entire career. But I think that just that realization that we are agents of history, not just on election day, but beyond.

JU: The song “Unconquered” on your album features Kneecap, the Irish rap trio who have been very vocal at their shows for the liberation of Palestine, and they faced backlash, losing gigs, revocation of visas. Macklemore, same thing, speaking out about Palestine. We are in a moment right now where artists are using their platform for a critical human rights issue, a moral issue, and they are being punished.

What do you make of this backlash from the industry, from venue owners, from the billionaire class?

TM: First of all, welcome to my life. There’s nothing new about that. From Rage Against the Machine to my own political organizing, the pushback is real when you threaten centers of power and established orthodoxy in that regard.

The one thing that artists should remember is that you don’t put down your First Amendment rights when you pick up a microphone or a guitar. A lot of people are like, “Just shut up and dribble in sports,” or, “Just shut up and play music.” I would encourage all artists, don’t leave behind who you are and what you do.

But not just artists. As journalists, whatever your job is, don’t leave behind your convictions in your vocation. Those artists, Kneecap and Macklemore, have done it, and they’ve paid a price. Well, thank God. If you are making music that everyone can like hold hands to and skip around, you’re probably making pretty shitty music.

But those artists have stood up at a critical juncture. They are the Rage Against the Machine of now, fearlessly standing up for an oppressed people in a time where the world pushes back, and they don’t give a fuck. That should not just be Irish rappers and Pacific Northwestern rappers, but everybody should be emboldened by that and realize that they’re on the right side of history.

JU: Tom, before we let you go, we know you’re pressed for time. Any final thoughts?

TM: Thank you for your service, and The Intercept’s service in doing what you do. I think that you guys are upholding a long tradition of confrontational journalism, which the world needs now more than ever.

“My job from day one is to try to make one guitar sound like a riot and to have my music be a contributing factor to social justice movements at home and abroad.”

And also I’ve just started. I had hoped maybe around this time in my career we’d be living in the anarcho-syndicalist utopia that perhaps we imagined in the pre-choruses of some Rage Against the Machine songs long ago. That not being the case, though, I’m in it to win it. And I’ve only just started. My job from day one is to try to make one guitar sound like a riot and to have my music be a contributing factor to social justice movements at home and abroad.

JU: Tom, thank you so much for joining me on the Intercept Briefing

TM: Thank you very much.

JW: That’s Intercept Briefing co-host and contributor Jordan Uhl and musician and guitarist Tom Morello.

And that does it for this episode.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, Jessica Washington.

The post Hegseth Dodges Impeachment, for Now. And Tom Morello on Fighting for the World You Want appeared first on The Intercept.

How Democrats Changed Everything

The Intercept Briefing — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 02:00:00 +0000

The size of the Democrats’ victory Tuesday night shattered records and even the most optimistic expectations, handing the party a governing mandate with a clear demand for change.

But what do voters want that change to look like? This week on The Intercept Briefing, politics reporter Jessica Washington and managing editor Maia Hibbett break down Tuesday night’s election and hear from voters in Maine, Michigan, and Texas about what drove them to the polls in the midterms that saw a so-called “blue tsunami.”

“The rich get richer, the poor get poorer,” said one voter in Maine. In Michigan, a voter told The Intercept that politics “feels like a game that the rich play sometimes.” A Texas voter expressed anger that President Donald Trump was “spending taxpayer money to renovate the White House and turn it into this gold sanctuary.”

Frustration with wealth inequality and money in politics came up again and again in The Intercept’s conversations with voters. So did a desire for more social welfare spending, Medicare for All, freedom for Palestinians — and responses to transphobic and Islamophobic fearmongering on the campaign trail.

“When Democrats win so far across the board, you can make an argument that any faction of the Democratic Party has the mandate,” said Hibbett, “because Democrats of all stripes won Tuesday night.”

In any case, the results indicated a clear disapproval of the way the Trump administration is governing and the use of fearmongering as a tactic of distraction.

“One lesson maybe for Democrats is there’s no point in attempting to placate people when it comes to bigotry,” said Washington. “The thing that’ll motivate voters is if you can convince them that you’re going to make their lives better, not if you can convince them that you’re playing the middle on an issue of civil rights.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Bruce Bryan: We’re just hoping that people step up and tell Washington to go fuck itself.

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor here.

JW: Over the past few days, Intercept reporters hit the ground in key states to speak to voters about the issues driving them to the polls. We went to Texas.

Jermiah Robinson: The food prices, for one, and the gas prices.

Darryl Moore: Gotta work two jobs just to make it.

Tiffany Williams: I never really understood, like, how important it is for the minority to vote.

Lenna Tasby: This election is important because this election is going to make or break whether we have a vote or not. There’s a reason why they’re shutting down these polling places.

Intercept reporter Akela Lacy: What are the issues that motivated you this cycle?

Charles Senter: Well, I love Trump.

Helen Dexter: Red ticket all the way. The stop of the Muslim influx.

Lenna Tasby: If you’re spending taxpayer money to renovate the White House and turn it into this gold sanctuary, that’s money that can be used for our military veterans. That’s money that can be used to help with this homeless population. The government needs to be held accountable.

MH: We heard from voters in Michigan.

Erin Horne: The election this year is very critical because Trump’s got two more years.

Zouheir Alawieh: Our democracy is in danger.

Noora Iskander: I believe in Medicare for All. People have a right to self-determination, especially in Palestine.

Wendy: There’s a lot of concern about, of course, the economy, but the data centers, our children’s education.

JW: And we spoke to voters in Maine.

Intercept reporter Noah Hurowitz: What mattered to you as a voter this election?

Tyler Echard: Cost for the most part. Everything keeps going up.

Bryan Golay: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. At least 30 years ago, there was like a veneer of caring, and now there’s just blatant corruption and greed.

JW: So Maia, what a night.

MH: Yeah, it’s honestly embarrassing if you’re a Democrat and you did not win. They swept the House and the Senate by just about the biggest margins that the pollsters could have predicted. So luckily, the audience I’m concerned about, the pollsters, can rest easy. As of 11:00 a.m. [ET] on Wednesday morning, they had 228 seats in the House, Democrats did. They only needed 218 for a majority, so obviously that is more, and they’re expected to pick up some more seats as some more races get called. They had 54 seats in the Senate, which means that they have a big enough margin that they can’t be stopped from legislating by one lone senator, if one senator wanted to gum things up.

JW: And not at all surprising. The White House tried to spin Republican losses on Trump not being on the ballot and the quality of candidates, despite the fact that Trump repeatedly said at rallies across the country, “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Donald Trump: We’re going to ask you to pretend I’m on the ballot, because when I’m on the ballot, this has nothing to do with ego, I just get 49.2 percent more vote. And if we get even a good percentage of that, we’ll have the biggest victory that you’ve ever seen.

MH: He’s saying, “We’ll have the biggest victory ever” — and it was a very historic night. I think people will hear the word “historic” a lot in the coverage in the coming days because of this huge blue wave, not the kind of history Trump wanted, but also because there are some really surprising major firsts.

One of them was that last night, very early, like at 2:30 a.m. [ET], Abdul El-Sayed became the winner of the Senate race in Michigan, which means he will be the first ever Muslim U.S. senator.

Abdul El-Sayed (acceptance speech): To all the kids who watched this last month, to all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked someone for their name or how they pray, let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost.

JW: That race was filled with Islamophobia, both in the primary and in the general election. His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, just peddled in a million different Islamophobic tropes. Voters told our colleague, Matt Sledge, who was out in Michigan speaking with them, that they really didn’t like hearing all of this hate speech.

Zouheir Alawieh: They don’t have any programs for our economy, for our health, for our future. So that’s why they are attacking us as Muslims and as human beings.

Tea Edwards: Just, like, all of the Islamophobic hate campaigns that have been going around will probably sway a few people. The people who are actually researching what will be good for communities I think will see right through it.

MH: This was a campaign that was defined by so much panic about El-Sayed being Muslim. The race ended 25 years after 9/11, and there were all of these really kind of vitriolic Islamophobic tropes. It reminded me a lot of the campaign against [Mayor] Zohran Mamdani here in New York last year. There’s all this fear of the left and this fearmongering suggesting that there’s no way a Muslim candidate could represent American interests.

And of course, one of the big differences between El-Sayed and Mamdani is that El-Sayed is not a socialist.

JW: Say that again for the people in the back, because they are not going to believe you. El-Sayed has described himself as a capitalist who understands how capitalism works, so definitely not a socialist.

I’ve heard him described as much more of a [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren than someone in the Bernie Sanders mold.

MH: But he still faced millions of dollars in outside spending in this race, mostly because of his stance on the United States relationship to one other country.

We’ve heard in some of these deep-blue districts in the House races where socialists were elevated in the primaries, there was a lot of rhetoric on opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and fighting U.S. weapons flows to Israel. But it’s pretty rare to hear that from a U.S. Senate candidate, and now from a senator-elect.

JW: It also caused some really ugly drama with his former primary opponent, Haley Stevens.

MH: Do you want to try to recap that as fast as we can, or should I?

JW: I’ll get started and see if you can add in anything that I miss.

So essentially, on the Friday right before [Election Day], Haley Stevens released a statement condemning an ad that was not even created by the El-Sayed campaign, calling on him to condemn the ad, which he did disavow. She also asked him to take back his statements on Israel.

Now, things seemed fine for a second. Haley Stevens had all of these Democratic surrogates going on air saying that she promised to support him. While Haley Stevens’s staffers were at an event for El-Sayed, Haley Stevens popped up at an event supporting the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, giving him her endorsement.

Maia, is there anything that I missed in that?

MH: Jessie, I think the only thing you missed was just how baffling and strange this episode was. So you mentioned this ad that kicked it off. It was produced by this outside group Rebellion PAC, which is the group headed by Cenk Uygur, who some listeners might know from The Young Turks. He is also famously Hasan Piker’s uncle.

Haley Stevens, as she was struggling to explain why she switched from El-Sayed to the Rogers camp, kept citing Hasan Piker and the “uncle.” It was this kind of almost incomprehensible move where Anderson Cooper, the CNN host, was pressing her at one point, saying, well, you cite his affiliation with Hasan Piker and this part of the Democratic Party you don’t like, but you knew about this before — so what changed?

It really seemed strange. So we sent Matt Sledge out in Michigan to ask some voters what they thought of it, and if they thought that this was a politically savvy move that would have any resonance. And here’s what they said.

Kathleen Britton: I’m so disappointed in Haley Stevens. I gave her serious consideration during the primary.

Jesse Craft: She fought against Mike Rogers, then said somehow he earned her vote. I don’t really understand it. I kinda think it’s career-ending for her.

Wendy: How embarrassing to use an African American church. How embarrassing for you to use our votes and then disregard them because of your own personal issues.

Intercept reporter Matt Sledge: So you don’t think it’s gonna help Mike Rogers?

Kathleen Britton: I do not.

Erin Horne: No, I think she actually helped Abdul.

[Break]

JW: Maia, before the break, you started talking about money and politics, and I want to get into how that shaped the midterms. Last week, we talked about how this election cycle became the most expensive on record. Midterms ad spending is expected to reach north of $11.6 billion. Mega-donors overwhelmingly gave to Republican candidates, including Elon Musk, who spent nearly $450 million, with large sums of that directed at boosting Ken Paxton in Texas, who, by the way, lost to James Talarico. Now, for context, the next highest donors under Musk are a Republican couple [Richard and
Elizabeth Uihlein] who spent $150 million, mostly in Wisconsin and Illinois.

Jesse Craft: We all see where money is coming from. It’s coming from very, very wealthy billionaires. I don’t think we should be able to buy elections.

Tea Edwards: Politics, it just feels like a game that the rich play sometimes. Kind of feels hopeless when you’re just looking at all of these people and corporations giving money to each other.

MH: You hate to see Elon Musk throw away almost half a billion dollars. It only leaves him so many billions to go.

JW: Heartbreaking.

MH: But, I mean, in Texas, as you mentioned, that money really did not pan out. It didn’t seem to sway voters. It seemed like if anything from the voters who talked to our reporters in Texas, in Michigan, and in Maine, which we’ll get to later, people were really mad about outside election spending and don’t like the idea that billionaires or corporations can buy their elections.

And in Texas, a lot of that money went to propping up this anti-trans panic campaign that Paxton was running. But all that money was not enough to save Paxton from James Talarico. Paxton was a pretty bad candidate: He was mired in too many scandals to keep track of, including a 2015 grand jury indictment on felony securities fraud charges.

In 2020, eight of his top deputies reported to the FBI that he was potentially abusing his office to do favors for a donor and friend. And just earlier this year, he offered a plea deal in a child sex abuse case that seemed to anger Texans and voters.

Remember, this is the era of the Epstein files and people being very concerned about child sex abuse. It did not seem like the wisest calculation for Paxton to offer this while running for Senate.

JW: As it turns out, there is not enough money in the world to buy Ken Paxton out of being Ken Paxton and voters recognizing that. But Republicans tried this cycle to spend big on transphobia and to blanket the airwaves with these anti-trans advertisements.

Elon Musk’s Texas PAC spent $78 million on anti-transgender ads in Texas, which actually accounted for nearly half of all ad spending in support of Paxton. Republicans’ big play in Texas was transphobia — and that play failed.

While clearly it didn’t sway the election, some of those messages did appear to trickle down to voters. Our colleague, Akela Lacy, talked to voters in Dallas and the surrounding areas, and she did come across some voters who said they wanted to support Talarico or even some voters who did support Talarico but were concerned about his stance on trans rights, an issue that Republicans really fearmongered on this cycle yet again after doing it in 2024.

Akela Lacy: When you said you saw some stuff about James Talarico that made you unsure about voting for him, can you say more about that? What did you see, and what’s your impression of him?

Jermiah Robinson: I think I seen something about the LGBTQ+ community? I mean, I don’t really care about it, but I don’t know. People were saying a lot of bad stuff. I think they said something about him —

Canvasser: Encouraging sex change.

Jermiah Robinson: Yeah, on the children. I don’t really stand for that.

Maia Hibbett: The watchdog group Media Matters also put together a montage that showed just how much Republicans really leaned into this transphobic rhetoric.

Danielle Buck: He wants to trans our kids. He believes that there are six genders.

Andrew Kolvet: They wanna indoctrinate your kids. They wanna trans your kids.

Adam Sosnick: They’re gonna trans your kids. They’re gonna Talarico your kids.

Donald Trump Jr.: Trans kids back in school, trans agendas back in school, in your classrooms, with your children.

JW: Clearly, some of that rhetoric did trickle down to voters based on Akela’s conversations, and some people even believed the misinformation being spread in those ads.

But fearmongering was just clearly not persuasive enough to distract people from their lived reality, and that lived reality is that gas prices are up, rent is unaffordable, and grocery prices are up.

I think one lesson maybe for Democrats is, there’s no point in attempting to placate people when it comes to bigotry. The right can and will distort your messages, and so you can stand in your values or not, but the thing that’ll motivate voters is if you can convince them that you’re going to make their lives better, not if you can convince them that you’re playing the middle on an issue of civil rights.

MH: We saw a parallel to this in some ways in Michigan as well, where a lot of the Republican argument was based on this perception of Islamophobia and fearmongering. Ultimately, that was not enough to elevate Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed. In Texas, there’s also, of course, the strong anti-immigrant sentiment that Republicans frequently run on, and I think the statewide results showed us that that narrative really fell apart this cycle.

JW: To your point, clearly, attacks on trans people, attacks on immigrants didn’t work in Texas. Democrats had an amazing night. Gina Hinojosa toppled three-term incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott. The state has not had a Democratic governor since 1990.

“Attacks on trans people, attacks on immigrants didn’t work in Texas.”

MH: And speaking of toppling long-term incumbents that have been hard to get out of office, our colleague Noah Hurowitz was in Maine, where Troy Jackson defeated Susan Collins last night after many Democratic attempts to get her out of office.

This issue of disillusionment with money and politics came up quite a bit when he was talking to Maine voters.

Sharon McDonnell: It’s immoral. It is immoral to have people worried about their fuel and have that much money coming into this. It’s just wrong.

“The amount of money is more than I will probably make in my lifetime, spent in this election.”

Tyler Echard: The amount they spent on just mailers, not handed at the door but in the mail, is especially, it seems, on the Republican side of things, has been absolutely insane. The amount of money is more than I will probably make in my lifetime, spent in this election.

Charlie Dingman: It’s been extraordinary in Maine, the amount of spending in this race, particularly in the Senate race. I think there’s a lot of fatigue. I think people are tired of it. I have had some conversations with voters at the doors that lead me to think that the extremely negative and extremely untruthful ads may be backfiring.

JW: It seems like those ads backfired. The last voice you heard was Charlie Dingman, Maine Democratic Party chair.

Collins campaigned on her record of securing federal investments for state infrastructure, such as rural hospitals, and she really prided herself on being a moderate Republican who apparently breaks rank with President Donald Trump. But the reality of the situation is quite different.

The Congressional Quarterly Roll Call found that her votes aligned with Trump 90 percent of the time in both of the president’s first and second terms, and voters really noticed that. They understood the difference between what she said she was, a political moderate, and her voting record, which aligned with the really far-right Donald Trump. And that’s something that Noah heard from voters as well.

Sharon McDonnell: She has had this persona of moderate cross-party stuff that’s just really eroded. If you read every article about her, it’s like, “Moderate Susan Collins.” Like, wait a minute, she’s voted with Trump. She hasn’t used her power.

Susan Collins “has had this persona of moderate cross-party stuff that’s just really eroded.”

MH: Collins really used that line about her being a moderate and being an independent voice in Washington as a go-to for her campaign.

In past cycles, it has worked. As we alluded to a little bit earlier, the Democrats have mounted challenges against her before. In 2020, they ran a candidate named Sara Gideon, who looked somewhat likely to oust Collins. And I think this cycle, there were a lot of reasons for Democrats to be nervous about this race.

Troy Jackson, the nominee, is a former state senator, and he ran on lowering costs, really centering working-class interests. But he had jumped into the race kind of hastily. If you remember Graham Platner, Jessie, he was the former nominee for Senate in Maine for the Democratic Party, and he was really considered a rising star, but had to drop out because of a series of scandals, and Jackson had to jump in last minute and fill his place.

But ultimately, Jackson pulled it off.

Troy Jackson (acceptance speech): We did it. Working people did it.

JW: Clearly, Jackson had a disadvantage going into this race. There were people who complained and said that he wasn’t as charming as Platner, he wasn’t as polished. But in this election, the ideas and running on affordability seems to have won the day in Maine and really throughout the country.

Collins had a reputation of delivering for the state, but clearly that wasn’t enough to overcome this blue wave across the country and some frustrations with Collins as well.

But Maia, taking a step back to look at the full scope of Democratic wins, what do you make of their gains on Tuesday? Are there other races that stood out to you? What stood out to you overall?

MH: Well, there’s the spin about the spin, which is that everybody is going to be framing this election and these results in their own interests. When Democrats win so far across the board, you can make an argument that any faction of the Democratic Party has the mandate, because Democrats of all stripes won Tuesday night.

But to my view, it’s hard to see how this is a world where there isn’t a clear demand for some kind of transformational change. So I’m wondering what Democrats do with their mandate now, especially as we think ahead to 2028.

If you recall 2020 and the last time the U.S. elected a Democratic president, you might remember that the Biden campaign was the sort of centrist, moderate return to normalcy choice, but they got there after a lot of left momentum in the primary and a really serious showing of support for Bernie Sanders, who remains one of the most popular politicians in the country.

Once Biden got into office, he arguably tried to give some of that kind of left, dare we say, populist economic message some service. There was the Build Back Better plan that had a lot of social safety net spending and Covid relief. There were climate infrastructure projects. There was the elevation of Lina Khan [to Federal Trade Commission chair].

For a little while, Biden was getting called the most progressive president since FDR, and then he threw it all away supporting the genocide in Gaza and really lost the support of the left, and then lost the support of the country when he was kind of visibly melting on the debate stage and refusing to drop out of the race.

So I’m curious what Democrats have learned from the Biden years and how that will convert into the next congressional term and the next presidential election.

JW: It really feels like I’ve lived a million lives in between now and that debate that really tanked Joe Biden’s entire political career at the end there.

I will say to your point, we’re already seeing Hakeem Jeffries, who’s likely to be the House Speaker, calling for unity and saying that people don’t want to fight. But you don’t really get a blue wave like this or a political wave like this when people don’t want to fight.

Clearly, there’s anger at Republicans. There’s anger at the cost of living. There’s anger at the war. If Democrats don’t deliver, they’re likely to see a red wave come the next cycle.

But I did want to take just a little bit of a step back and talk about Black voters and what’s happened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court voting rights decision. Black voters in this election really delivered historic victories in southern states for Democrats, but Black representation in Congress thus far appears to have been slightly reduced in this election. Now, for those who remember our discussion earlier this year about the Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, there were a lot of deep concerns that the decision would crater Black political representation, and so far that hasn’t come to bear, but it’s worth paying attention to in cycles that are less blue, where we’ve seen really massive redistricting.

I will shout out, there was one historic victory for Black Americans: Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, won her race for governor, becoming the first Black female governor in the country.

MH: We’ve talked a lot about these historic wins, but we would be remiss to not mention a close call in Florida, where Angie Nixon narrowly lost.

Nixon is a Black woman who’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and had a really shocking primary upset when she defeated the establishment favorite to get the Democratic nomination. The Democrats didn’t invest very much in her Senate race in Florida. The conventional wisdom says Florida’s not flippable, but conventional wisdom also says that South Carolina’s not flippable — and they did that.

“The conventional wisdom says Florida’s not flippable, but conventional wisdom also says that South Carolina’s not flippable — and they did that.”

Nixon ended up coming within about 2 [percentage] points to Ashley Moody, the Republican incumbent, who just won a full term after being appointed to hold the seat that used to belong to [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio. A lot of people on the left side of the Democratic Party are wondering what would have happened if Democrats had invested in a DSA candidate running statewide in Florida, which is kind of a crazy statement to make if you think of just two years ago.

JW: I mean, I listened to her [concession] speech, she is an incredible speaker, but obviously, that’s not enough to win elections. You need money, clearly, and investment from the party.

We’re going to leave it there, but there is so much more election coverage you can follow at theintercept.com.

That does it for this episode.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Thank you to all of our reporters who worked late on election night: Matt Sledge, Akela Lacy, Noah Hurowitz, Jonah Valdez, and Austin Campbell, and the rest of our team.

Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review; it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

MH: And I’m Maia Hibbett.

The post How Democrats Changed Everything appeared first on The Intercept.

How AIPAC and AI Spent Their Money This Midterm Election

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

It’s a superlative achieved again and again: The current election cycle is the most expensive on record, according to AdImpact, likely to be surpassed only by the next one. North of $16 billion have been raised ahead of Tuesday’s looming elections, with ad spending in House and Senate races topping $4 billion. Mega-donors this election season have overwhelmingly backed Republicans with contributions largely flowing from AI, crypto, and online gambling interests.

The Intercept tracked how super PAC spending is flowing into the midterms and how growing public skepticism of special-interest money in politics is affecting campaign strategies. Hundreds of candidates are still taking donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, despite public sentiment turning against the pro-Israel lobby.

“The data overall reveals that [AIPAC is] still spending a ton of money on a lot of races, and more often than not, their candidates are still winning,” Intercept managing editor Maia Hibbett told The Intercept Briefing. “It is still quite meaningful money.”

Artificial intelligence super PACs have also poured tens of millions of dollars into this election cycle, most of it on just a few races in the primaries. The two leading AI super PAC networks, affiliated with OpenAI or Anthropic, dropped a whopping $50.7 million on the primaries, but are noticeably spending much less in the lead-up to the general election, $8.5 million — likely responding to public backlash in the same way that AIPAC has.

“The polls are just so startling on the public’s transformation on AI and data centers over the last year. … The entire life cycle of these AI super PACs, which started about a year ago, has followed that evolution of the public’s opinion,” said Intercept politics reporter Matt Sledge. “One of the things that’s been really interesting in the general election races is … candidates [trying] to paint themselves as the more pro-AI safety, pro-AI regulation candidate.”

This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Hibbett and Sledge about the spending trends in the most expensive election cycle to date and unpack the intended impact.

“No matter which party gets control of either or both houses of Congress, there will be a lot of people elected next week who got there on the backs of Big Tech and special interests,” said Hibbett.

“They’re backing a lot of people in safe seats who don’t really have a tight election,” Sledge added. “The goal may just be to buy themselves a few friends in Congress, because sometimes in Congress, it’s just as good to have a few people who can stop regulation as it is to have people who can shape and actually pass laws.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

On Tuesday, voters will head to the polls to cast their ballots in the most expensive election cycle ever in terms of campaign ad spending, even outpacing past presidential elections. That’s according to AdImpact.

North of $16 billion has been raised this cycle, with ad spending in House and Senate races topping $4 billion. Billionaire Elon Musk has dumped hundreds of millions into races across the country, using his enormous personal wealth to sway the election in favor of Republicans. Musk, who has a home and multiple businesses in Texas, has taken a particular interest in the state’s Senate race between Republican candidate Ken Paxton and Democratic candidate James Talarico.

Most of the money from Musk and other donors has flowed not to candidates, but to powerful super PACs representing a variety of different special interests.

That super PAC spending is the subject of my colleagues, Intercept politics reporter Matt Sledge and senior politics reporter Akela Lacy’s new project, tracking how money is flowing into the midterms.

Maia Hibbett, managing editor for The Intercept, and Matt Sledge join me now to talk about the project and how big money is shaping the midterms.

Matt, Maia, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing

Maia Hibbett: Thanks for having us.

Matt Sledge: Thank you for having us, Jessie.

JW: Maia, I want to start with you. As a part of the super PAC project, The Intercept tracked how millions of dollars flow through the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

What did the reporting reveal about how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and affiliated groups like the United Democracy Project mask their influence in U.S. elections in a political landscape where AIPAC’s contributions and endorsements have become largely politically toxic?

MH: The reporting showed that AIPAC and its affiliated super PAC UDP are a little bit weakened, but they’re still pretty dominant.

The narrative out of this midterm cycle, especially during the primaries, was largely focused on a few high-profile races that an AIPAC-backed candidate lost — and that was a huge shock. These big upsets were AIPAC or UDP or a related group that, we can talk about a little bit later, had poured money into, and then the candidate didn’t succeed.

But if you look at it in the aggregate, what the data overall reveals is that they’re still spending a ton of money on a lot of races, and more often than not, their candidates are still winning. It is still quite meaningful money. And even though AIPAC has been discussed as going underground, they are still directly invested in a lot of races.

JW: I want to get into AIPAC’s shifting strategy and their latest announcement on that. But first, Matt, I wanted to talk about your reporting. AI super PACs have poured tens of millions of dollars into this election cycle.

What do we know about the people and companies behind these super PACs? This may seem obvious, but what are they hoping to gain with this level of spending? Are there specific examples of friendly legislation these varied interest groups are hoping their candidates will see through if they win?

MS: To answer your second question, I think it’s really more about setting the tone for future regulation at the federal level. You have two big super PAC networks. One is affiliated with OpenAI, and they broadly favor a laxer regulatory scheme for AI. Then there’s another network that’s affiliated with Anthropic that paints itself as supporting a stricter regulatory scheme.

“It’s really more about setting the tone for future [AI] regulation at the federal level.”

Skeptics will point out that these networks are both backed by big AI companies. So at the end of the day, they’re probably going to favor regulation that is favorable to the AI companies. I get into this a little bit in my story, but, just in the last few months, there’s also been this constellation of other smaller groups that are sometimes backed by individual employees at these firms or just by people concerned about AI that are pushing for stricter regulatory regimes and aren’t as directly connected to one of the big companies.

JW: Matt, I’m curious about the impact on voters here. CNBC analysis from early October found that mega-donors this election season were overwhelmingly backing Republicans with contributions largely flowing from AI, crypto, and online gambling interests: “Fourteen of the 20 largest donors and donor groups this election cycle have exclusively or nearly exclusively backed GOP candidates or aligned groups.”

Matt, are we seeing voters become more receptive to Republicans as a result of all this ad spending? Is it working on the voter base?

MS: It’s always hard to tease out the impact of an individual super PAC or industry, because you have to keep in mind that a lot of the time, if you’re a crypto super PAC, or an AI super PAC — or more recently, a prediction market super PAC — they are not running pro-crypto or pro-AI ads.

They are running ads that look very similar to everybody else’s. Often, they’re doing negative campaigning that campaigns don’t want to do themselves, and they have such vague names that they’re not associated with crypto or AI. So I do think ads have an impact on the races, but overall what we’re seeing in polls is that it’s not a great environment for Republicans.

So it may have served, just writ large, to potentially soften the blow to Republicans this time around. It does help them to have this many corporate allies, but it may still be overwhelmed by a blue tide.

JW: That makes a lot of sense in terms of just, this is a bad environment for Republicans. They have a president who is unpopular. We have an economy that is not amazing right now. It makes a lot of sense that despite all this ad spending, the baseline of the election is not in favor of Republicans.

Maia, I wanted to get back to something that you had said a little bit earlier about AIPAC and their shifting strategy. AIPAC recently announced that they would no longer officially endorse candidates or give money directly to campaigns.

Were we seeing an early signal of shifting strategies from AIPAC during the 2026 midterm elections? And what does this change actually mean for AIPAC’s influence on our elections?

MH: I’m so glad you asked, because we actually noted early in the 2026 cycle that AIPAC was starting to retreat and change its strategy. Our colleague Akela Lacy wrote a story in December 2025, and the headline was, “AIPAC is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.” I encourage anyone to go back and read that story because it was really prescient about what we would see in the cycle to come, which is that AIPAC used to do all of its spending behind closed doors.

In 2022, it made a big splash when it started doing direct spending in that year’s midterms. The group had helped fund some anti-Bernie Sanders ads during the 2020 presidential campaign, but it was 2022 when it went all in, rather than routing its donations through other groups or through dark-money pathways, it just started giving contributions to candidates.

After it spent so much money in that midterm cycle and in last cycle‘s 2024 races, and as public sentiment started to turn against the pro-Israel lobby’s interests and people became very critical of the U.S. support for genocide in Gaza, AIPAC started to essentially return to its roots.

I think this is really interesting because in the press it has been talked about as a very new strategy. But really, it’s more that AIPAC is returning to the way it used to do business.

JW: Is that as effective as a strategy — the old model that they had? Should we expect that it’ll have just as much influence on elections as they did previously?

MH: It’s a good question. I don’t know how effective it will be as a strategy. There’s a lot more scrutiny on AIPAC now than there was a few years ago, and so it’s much more difficult for them to hide what they’re doing because there are journalists like us who are going to try to follow the money and say, maybe you gave to something that’s called Elect Chicago Women, but it’s actually from UDP, which is the super PAC for AIPAC.

I think in some cases, they can’t get away from the public perception that now exists. But on the other hand, there are many voters who might not really pay attention to the name of the PAC that sponsored the ad that they saw, and then go look it up and see where the money came from. So it remains to be seen how effective it will be.

“It’s much more difficult for them to hide what they’re doing because there are journalists like us who are going to try to follow the money.”

JW: Not everyone is reading The Intercept before voting, as they should, but it’s fine.

Matt, I wanted to get back to you because there’s a lot happening with these big AI super PACs. You noticed in your reporting that, after spending a lot in the primaries in New York in particular, but in other places as well, the big AI super PACs have gone pretty much quiet in the general election.

Are AI super PACs responding to public backlash in the same way that AIPAC is? What have you observed in terms of why they’ve gone a little bit quieter?

MS: In response to your question about backlash, I think the answer is yes.

“It’s just a dramatic decline in spending from the primaries to the generals — even though they still have money they can tap.”

They’re on this kind of accelerated timeline going through what AIPAC went through over the course of five years but essentially in five or six months. The polls are just so startling on the public’s transformation on AI and data centers over the last year. It’s just such a rapid change in public opinion, and the entire life cycle of these AI super PACs, which started about a year ago, has followed that evolution of the public’s opinion.

It’s just a dramatic decline in spending from the primaries to the generals — even though they still have money they can tap. Leading the Future, which is the OpenAI-aligned network, they started first, and then the Anthropic-aligned network, Public First, they started a few months later as a response to the Leading the Future network.

So it seems like, from what we’ve been able to tell, Leading the Future scaled back on spending as the general election came about, and Public First responded in turn and also scaled back its operations. That doesn’t mean they’re not spending anything, and we have seen a slight uptick in the final few days of this election when ads are probably just less effective than they would have been a couple weeks ago.

“If Darline Graham narrowly gets away with winning her race in South Carolina of all places … then you can still say that Leading the Future and the AI industry played a pretty important role in the general race.”

One really notable race is now South Carolina, where Leading the Future is helping prop up Sen. Darline Graham, who hasn’t been a great fundraiser on her own. So there’s actually still a world where AI plays a decisive role in this election in terms of control of the Senate.

If Darline Graham narrowly gets away with winning her race in South Carolina of all places, and that narrowly hands control of the Senate back to the Republicans, then you can still say that Leading the Future and the AI industry played a pretty important role in the general race.

JW: Just to be clear, you’re referring to Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, correct?

MS: That’s correct.

JW: Maia, speaking of Big Tech, you also edited a story from Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez looking at how tech leaders, including John Hering, are dumping millions into the LA city attorney race to block Marissa Roy, a DSA-backed candidate, from winning. What is going on here — why such an interest in a race most people are likely not paying any attention to?

MH: City attorneys are one of those jobs that, as you said, a lot of voters don’t pay attention to them. I think a lot of people in cities all over the country maybe couldn’t tell you who the top lawyer of whatever city they live in even is. But this is a job that is largely tasked with enforcing regulations and laws and making companies that might be based in that city or might operate in that city comply with them.

Marissa Roy, this DSA-backed candidate, is currently a deputy attorney general for the state of California, and she’s one of the people who helped the state prosecute this historic Meta settlement where Meta ended up having to pay $17 billion for harms to children using its technology.

We don’t know exactly why John Hering and other tech leaders, like the founders of Ring and Tinder and investors in Anthropic and SpaceX, are spending so heavily in this race, but you might be able to conclude that they’re interested in preventing a person who just helped carry out this huge settlement against Meta from becoming the city attorney of LA.

Some of them are funding a group that’s called Neighbors for John McKinney, which is backing the opponent in the race. John McKinney is the other candidate, and he is much less likely to win, but is propped up now by a lot of spending. They frame him as a tough-on-crime candidate; they say he’s going to restore order to LA, help clean it up is the idea.

Like Matt was saying, often these tech investments in races don’t actually foreground the interests of Big Tech, and they don’t say explicitly, “We want to stop this person from coming into office because we’re worried they’re going to regulate our industry.” Instead, they find a different issue and spend money on that.

It’s also worth noting that John Hering, his group, frames John McKinney as a lifelong Democrat and very anti-MAGA, is the language they use. But John Hering himself is a big ally of Elon Musk. He has been an eager investor in his companies. He said Musk was an “American hero” this year, and he has spent pretty heavily also to support Musk’s America PAC and the Trump campaign after previously spending on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Like many Silicon Valley types, he’s had an evolution. And although he lives in San Francisco, he also spent in favor of Spencer Pratt for LA mayor.

JW: Wow. Yeah, Big Tech has really come a long way from the ’08 years in terms of their relationship with Democrats and Republicans, and propping up Spencer Pratt.

Matt, I want to bring you in and get your perspective and kind of big picture. What has made this election cycle so popular for Big Tech?

MS: When it comes to AI and crypto and the prediction markets, it’s knowing that the next few years are really going to be critical for them in terms of regulation. These are all fairly young industries, and the rules haven’t been set yet. The Trump administration is doing its best to set them, but Congress has not had a final word on any of those industries.

They see a chance to shape the rules in a way that favors them, and they’re just using the old Washington playbook of spending a bunch of money on campaigns and a bunch of money on lobbyists to try to shape the rules in their favor.

JW: Is this just also a matter of them having more money to play with than they’ve had before? Is this something tech probably would have done years ago if they’d had this access to capital? Or is this really, like you said, just they’re aware that there is existential risks to their industry if they don’t?

MS: Tech for the last few decades has had a lot of money. It’s just been a huge part of the U.S. economy. But I think this move into more regulated spaces is maybe what’s newer.

When Microsoft is creating an internet browser or a word processor, that creates potential antitrust issues, and they have to spend political money in that sense. But they’re not playing in the same kind of highly regulated financial spaces, and nobody ever thought that Clippy posed an existential risk to humanity. So we are moving into new territory when it comes to techs.

JW: I miss Clippy. That is my one comment on that.

I want to get both of you back in here. We’ve been talking about some of the biggest donors in American politics today, and a few special interest groups in particular who’ve obviously been experiencing public backlash — AIPAC, AI, and data centers.

What do you make of this new record-level spending in a midterm election in particular? We’ll obviously have more answers on this next week, but from what you’ve observed so far, is it having the intended impact on voters? Maia, let’s start with you.

MH: I think to use the cop-out that we keep coming back to, we won’t really know if it worked with voters until after the results next week. But it’s clear in this midterm cycle and maybe this is a reminder of kind of a perpetual truth in, when it comes to money in politics, that these big spenders are always going to fund candidates on both sides of the aisle. Often election narratives and questions about special interests will really look to one party or the other and try to map this kind of spending onto partisan issues.

While some of that certainly happens, I think no matter which party gets control of either or both houses of Congress, there will be a lot of people elected next week who got there on the backs of Big Tech and special interests.

That is something that voters are more and more aware of and more and more frustrated by, and we did see a lot of rejection of that kind of big-money spending in the primaries. But ultimately, I don’t know how much that narrative has changed.

JW: Matt, I know you’ve seen some specific examples of this impacting elections. Can you talk about that a little bit?

MS: One of the things that’s been really interesting in the general election races is this race from candidates to paint themselves as the more pro-AI safety, pro-AI regulation candidate.

I’ve done some reporting in Michigan’s 7th [Congressional] District, where a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement is trying to unseat an incumbent Republican, and he has from the start really run on being an anti-data center candidate, campaigning with local activists in small towns of a few thousand people.

His Republican opponent is now also trying to paint himself as a data center skeptic — using different language, more language about local control than about big, bad companies.

But there’s been such a backlash that we’ve seen some changing tactics from the big AI super PACs in the runoff. One has donated money to a nonprofit that’s more focused on building support for data centers. Good luck with that, I guess.

And then another, the Anthropic-aligned network, has essentially handed off money to a pro-Scott Wiener super PAC in California that already existed and already has funding from other tech leaders in the San Francisco area. But that donation has generated this whole fight between Scott Wiener and his opponent, Connie Chan, over who is the more pro-AI regulation candidate now. So it’s a lot of candidates fighting to be the more pro-regulation candidate.

Just thinking back to your question about the effect on voters, I think for the super PACs and for their funders, the impact on candidates may ultimately be more important, on elected officials. They’re backing a lot of people in safe seats who don’t really have a tight election. The goal may just be to buy themselves a few friends in Congress, because sometimes in Congress, it’s just as good to have a few people who can stop regulation as it is to have people who can shape and actually pass laws.

JW: That’s a good point. Speaking of the election, which we know is just days away, what are you two going to be following closely next week? Maia, I want to start with you.

MH: There’s obviously a lot to follow next week, and more races than we can keep track of. One I think that will be very interesting that I was thinking about in terms of AIPAC spending — when Matt just mentioned this thing about AI groups backing candidates who are not in close races — is, of course, the Senate race in Maine.

One of the interesting takeaways we found in this AIPAC project is that in the primaries when AIPAC was spending, as it does in, in various races, one of the top recipients of its money was Susan Collins — who at the time did not have a primary challenger, but it spent heavily to support her primary campaign.

So we’ll obviously watch the Collins–Jackson race in Maine. We have a reporter going there. Matt’s going to go to Michigan. We also have a reporter going to Texas to track some of the big Senate races. Depending on how the results look, I think we’ll pretty quickly be pivoting to accountability for, coverage for the people who are elected, who, maybe entered office vowing not to take corporate PAC money or not to take special-interest money, and to keep an eye on those now Congress members and see if they vote like it or if they continue to have that policy once they’ve been elected.

JW: And Matt, what are you following?

MS: As Maia mentioned, I will be in Michigan. Super interested in that 7th District race that I mentioned between Will Lawrence and Tom Barrett. But then the race everybody’s going to be spinning and talking about for weeks probably: the Mike Rogers/Abdul El-Sayed race. It just is going to carry so much narrative heft going forward about what the voters were trying to say.

Where are you going to be, Jessie? What are you going to be up to?

JW: I will be in D.C., and I’ll be looking at what it means to have yet another election with the National Guard in town and essentially in an occupied city.

I’ll also be looking into what it would mean for the district to have a socialist mayor, Janeese Lewis George, who is almost certain to win on Tuesday, particularly when it comes to ICE and the Metropolitan Police Department’s collaboration with ICE. That’s going to be something I’m really keeping an eye on, not just on Election Day, but going forward to see if she can implement some of these really bold ideas that she’s proposing in a city that’s very constricted in what it can actually do because of federal law.

But that’s enough previewing from me. We’re going to leave it there. Maia, Matt, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

MH: Thanks again.

MS: Thanks for having us.

JW: And thank you for listening. Next week we’ll be back in your feed early with a special midterm election episode, so stay tuned.

That does it for this episode. We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post How AIPAC and AI Spent Their Money This Midterm Election appeared first on The Intercept.

The Intercept Live in Conversation With Robert Reich

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:34:26 +0000

Democrats may be ahead in the polls. But can they withstand billions in campaign spending by Elon Musk and other MAGA oligarchs? Will the election be safe from intimidation and interference? And even if they do prevail, what would a Democratic Congress actually do to obstruct Trump’s attacks on democracy?

For decades, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been sounding the alarm about rising inequality and the concentration of power in America. Having served in three presidential administrations, he’s become one of the loudest and clearest voices challenging Democrats for their failures in the Trump era.

Reich joins Intercept Briefing host Akela Lacy for a live conversation about the most pressing issues this midterm season. He is the author of numerous books, including his memoir “Coming Up Short,” out in paperback now. His media company, Inequality Media, has also made a timely new documentary, called “The Work in Progress,” exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept, and today we’re bringing you a special live episode to discuss who is trying to buy this election and who is succeeding. My guest, Robert Reich, has been a critical voice on how the forces of capitalism and inequality have shaped our electoral system and eroded our democracy.

Reich was a Secretary of Labor under former President Bill Clinton, and a longtime professor at UC Berkeley. He’s the author of numerous books, including “Coming Up Short,” out in paperback now, and which we spoke to him about on this podcast in November. And his media company, Inequality Media, has a new documentary exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times. It’s called “The Work in Progress.” Bob, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Robert Reich: Thank you, Akela. It’s nice to see you again.

AL: Likewise.

RR: And Ben, thank you for that introduction. In fact, thank you. I wanted to thank The Intercept. You’re doing great work, and many of us very much appreciate it.

AL: Thank you. We appreciate that from you. Rob, you’ve been making one core argument for a very long time, that economic—

RR: About 100 years, actually, Akela. [Laughter.]

AL: That economic inequality is the defining issue in America. It seems like we know this very well, and yet there’s very little being done about it. The cost of living has spiraled.

Oh, my dog is very excited that Bob is joining us, so sorry about that.

RR: No, I’m excited your dog is excited,

AL: We know this very well, but there’s very little being done about it. As I said, the cost of living has spiraled out of control while corporate oligarchs continue to rake in profits. How do you see economic inequality playing out in this election cycle?

RR: We are getting very close to the final kind of conflict between an oligarchic system and a democratic — small d — system. This has been growing and escalating for the past 40 years. I remember talking about this in the early ’90s, saying and predicting, sadly, that a two-tiered society would eventually lead to a demagogue who would try to wreck our democracy.

And here we are, 10 days away from a critical election, and I know we say it’s a critical election every time Akela, but this one really is.

AL: We do.

RR: This is because we can’t do very much if we have Donald Trump president and Republican sycophants and lap dogs in charge of Congress. He basically gets a free pass to do whatever he wants to do, and that’s got to end.

AL: Upcoming Democratic candidates who have been messaging on economic inequality and affordability ran and won in the primaries. But many of them, like Abdul El-Sayed or Darializa Avila Chevalier, for example, are making this inequality argument by tying it to these underlying criticisms of the way the Democratic Party has always done politics.

They’re using the affordability crisis to hit the Democratic establishment for supporting the expansion of the federal police force we’ve seen unleashed on the nation, for bolstering Immigration and Customs Enforcement, funding foreign wars, and, as you know well, letting corporations off the hook for being part of the bipartisan machine that made what we’re seeing today possible.

Those insurgent candidates have won in many ways because of how they’ve positioned themselves in opposition to the Democratic Party. They’re hoping to then enter Congress and work inside. So I wonder, how, if at all, does that fundamental tension resolve itself? Or is there a limit to how much these candidates can really change things from the inside?

RR: It’s important for us to keep our expectations within reasonable kind of shape because even if the progressive part of the Democratic Party— Remember Bernie Sanders used to say “I represent the Democratic side of the Democratic Party.” That Democratic side of the Democratic Party or the New Deal side of the Democratic Party or the progressive side of the Democratic Party or the social democratic side of the Democratic Party, however you want to style it, is more powerful today than it has been at any time in my lifetime.

But it is not powerful enough yet to take over the Democratic Party. Now, we’re heading in that direction, and I think that we’ve got to — all of us on the outside — push the Democrats. When they get into power, hopefully they will take the House and maybe even, fingers crossed, take the Senate. When they get into power, all of us have to push them to be courageous and strong and take on the corporate Democrats, who are still very significant and quite powerful in the party. Otherwise, nothing is going to change.

AL: It’s not surprising that there has been very little political change on economic inequality considering how much wealthy elites have poured into elections to maintain the status quo. We’ve seen record levels of ad spending, more than $10 billion so far this cycle, driven in large part by super PACs and billionaires. Who, in your view, is the biggest villain of this election cycle?

RR: Let me think. Let me count the ways I can say Elon Musk. Look. Look, Elon Musk is exhibit A, B, C, and D in terms of why billionaires really do need to be taxed in terms of a wealth tax, why we’ve got to get big money out of elections, and we do, and there are ways to do it despite the Supreme Court’s decisions.

Third, why it is so vitally important to use antitrust to bust up big combinations of power. SpaceX has a monopoly on satellite communications, and we have witnessed over the past week exactly what that means in terms of foreign policy. Why should one person, the richest person in the world, make American foreign policy with regard to Ukraine and decide that Putin is going to essentially win the next round — hopefully not the final round — of his war with Ukraine?

It is absurd that Elon Musk is essentially the secretary of defense. There are many things that can be done, should be done, and I hope Democrats, if they are in the position to do them, will do them.

AL: You’re giving me a great segue into our next question, which is about exactly this. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, also by far the single biggest known political donor this cycle.

He spent just under $300 million so far to help President Donald Trump and the Republican Party keep at least one chamber of Congress. Musk is mostly spending to help Republicans maintain control of the Senate. While Democrats don’t have nearly the same Musk firepower on their side, earlier this week, billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — who governed as mayor as a Republican, I will note — made a last-minute $80 million infusion to help Democrats keep the House.

In our previous question, you were talking about what the progressive wing of Democratic Party needs to do to combat the corporate Democratic wing, and I think this is a good sort of test case for this. There’s something to be said for wanting to try to level the playing field in terms of how much spending is going into these elections, particularly from Musk and the Republican side.

But how can Democrats accept that kind of support and then say that their top priority is fixing the affordability crisis or addressing economic inequality?

RR: It’s very difficult, Akela. One of the problems Democrats have had since the 1980s is if you drink at the same trough of campaign finance as Republicans, how do you ever bite the hands that feed you?

To change the metaphor slightly. That is, Democrats do have to figure out how to break away from the corporate sources of funding. Otherwise, there is no way that progressive Democrats, social Democrats, however we want to style ourselves, really can take over the party, and that is absolutely critical. It is necessary.

We need a working person’s party. We need a party that really does center itself on poor people and working-class people and Black people and women and people who have been knocked out of politics by Trump. But also white male workers who are non-college educated, who have been so angry and frustrated at their loss of any economic position in this country over the last 40 years that they were vulnerable to this tyrant who comes along and says he’s going to represent them and be their tribune, named Donald Trump.

Let’s be clear, Trump and Musk are in league. They are basically the same people. They are both con men. They are both billionaires. They are both fronts for the billionaire class, and they are both doing a lot of work that looks like they are working with Putin and with Netanyahu and with other autocrats around the world.

AL: Talking about Democrats trying to break away from this corporate system, what would you want to see them do? I’ve heard, sources talk about, they don’t want to fight with one hand tied between, behind their back, right? And so they’re going to take money where they can, particularly when the other side has the resources that it does.

But what does that look like when we’re still within this system — post-Citizens United — before there is a broader institutional change? What does that look like while still winning the seats that you need to govern?

RR: There are three important steps that progressive Democrats need to take to fight oligarchy when progressive Democrats have power. Even if they don’t have full power, they’ve got to do these three things. One is to develop a system of campaign finance that does not depend on big money. By that I mean probably public financing. Look at New York City, for example, or Seattle, or any places where you have progressives who have made great strides become mayors of these cities because they have public financing systems. That is, there is public dollars on a five-to-one or eight-to-one ratio for every small dollar donation. This is critically important to break the vice of big money in politics.

Secondly, Democrats need to be in the vanguard of antitrust, busting up monopolies, because the monopolies that we see, so much of the country and so much of the economy is now monopolized. These monopolies feed the billionaires. That’s where the money for the billionaires comes from.

Finally, we’ve got to have a wealth tax. We’ve got to tax big wealth. In California there is now on the ballot Proposition 40. We’re all working very hard for it, but the billionaires in California, guess what? They are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into trying to make it so that people don’t want to, trying to persuade people not to vote for this proposition. They are illustrating why it is so important to have a tax on billionaires, because otherwise billionaires are going to use their money like Elon Musk is doing like Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, is doing in California with regard to Proposition 40. They’re going to use their money to try to basically alter politics.

AL: Speaking of just that, the issue of corruption has also been at the fore this cycle. New polling shows that more and more Americans, 66 percent, believe that Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself. That’s up 10 points from this time last year, I’ll note. But that perception never appears to actually hurt Trump. Why is that? If affordability and inequality are the defining issues of our time, why isn’t the fact that the public believes the president is openly corrupt doing more to hurt his brand?

RR: First of all, his approval rating right now is lower than any president’s approval rating has been going into a midterm since I think since Harry Truman in 1946. This is historically extraordinary how many Americans, including Republicans, self-styled Republicans and most independents, have turned against Trump, and it is a combination of the affordability crisis. People see that his war in Iran and his tariffs have driven prices up, but they also see or are beginning to see the connection between those price increases and his corruption.

The war is in part supported and was maybe initiated by some of the billionaire class in terms of these high-tech billionaires who are making a lot of money off the war. A lot of AI money is in the war in terms of Palantir and other companies that are making huge amounts of money.

Elon Musk is making huge amounts of money off of his satellite communication system. In other words, there is a fairly obvious process by which wealthy people are buying pay-for-play benefits from this administration which hurt average people. Look at the tax increases that Trump has engineered on everybody else in order to get tax cuts for the super wealthy. By tax increases, eroding Medicaid and cutting food stamps. Those are tax increases. Even making Medicare less available, cutting the Affordable Care Act. All these things people are aware they are personally being hurt by this administration.

When it gets to the level of personal, when it gets to this level where people say, “I can’t afford it. I’m living paycheck to paycheck. I’m barely getting by. And these guys — the billionaires and Trump — are making hay off of my suffering.” That’s what America is beginning to see.

One of the silver linings on this dark period is that Trump has been so shameless and so the billionaire class around him have been utterly shameless. All this has actually emerged. It’s now revealed. It’s exposed. People can see it, and that’s changing American politics.

AL: Democrats have been trying to tap into the frustration with the affordability crisis, the frustration with Trump’s corruption, and the connections that you’re saying that voters are making now. They’ve said that this is what they’ll focus on if they win control of the House, probing Trump’s corruption. But it feels like we’ve been down that road before. Is that the most effective use of their time, especially if what’s supposed to be a political weakness is, it’s becoming more so for Trump, but it hasn’t necessarily sunk him yet?

Obviously, he’s not on the ballot, though he’s telling people to pretend like he’s on the ballot, so we’ll see how that goes.

RR: I wish he would keep on. I wish people really would take that to heart and think, “OK, he really is on the ballot.” Because I think, and most people, according to the polls, think he’s a disaster, a cataclysm, a catastrophe. So he should be on the ballot.

But I think you’re asking what should Democrats do when and if they get power back in the Senate and the House? I think that to some extent, there have got to be hearings, oversight hearings. I would bring in not so much Trump’s cabinet because they’re going to all say, “No, executive privilege. We don’t have to testify.” And we go go through endless rounds of litigation. No, I think they ought to bring in the oligarchs, bring in the billionaires, bring in Musk, bring in Jeff Bezos, bring in the Ellisons — Larry and David. What are they doing? Find out what the deals are in detail in terms of making America, the rest of America’s lives worse.

Secondly, antitrust, as I said before. I think that has to be a big part of the Democratic platform and movement of the Democrats.

Thirdly, Medicare for all. What I’ve seen, and I’m surprised and delighted because many of us have been working on this issue for 40 years. That is a single-payer system, is so much more logical. It is more efficient. Right now you’ve got anywhere from 8 to 12 million Americans who have lost their health coverage because of this administration. It’s absurd that we have a private for-profit healthcare system. Medicare for all has become, the timing is right for the Democrats to really push on Medicare for all. There are other things that I would like Democrats to do, but I think those are the highest priorities.

[Break]

AL: You mentioned AI, and I want to go back to this a little bit because this is a big force that’s shaping, midterms so far. And it’s also been one of the biggest issues animating voters. The frustration around data centers and the AI explosion. I’m not just talking about the conversation around AI and a looming far-off doomsday, but the anger with how AI is fueling hell on Earth today, conducting wars around the world, and as you mentioned, and enriching these companies that we’ve talked about, and also conducting surveillance at home. There’s been a massive public outcry against this industry.

RR: And the and the data centers. Yes. Don’t forget the data centers.

AL: Yes.

RR: They’re guzzling energy. They are taking huge amounts of water in drought-stricken areas where the water is needed. They are loud, noisy. A lot of people who are Republicans in the rural areas of America, they’re saying, “We don’t want data centers. That AI stuff, no.” And Democrats are really doing well because of that.

AL: We’ve seen this become a centerpiece of many of the successful primary campaigns and going well into the midterms as well. But to counter that public outcry, that public pressure, pro-AI super PACs are funneling record amounts of money, more than $100 million so far into our elections. I want to plug that my colleague Matt Sludge and I are conducting an analysis of this spending and spending by the pro-Israel lobby that we’ll publish in the coming weeks.

But Bob, what is at stake here? What can regular people do, as I know many of the people listening want to know to actually fight the influence of an industry that seemingly has endless resources to outspend its opponents?

RR: Let’s all vote 10 days from

AL: Now they’re specifically asking what can we do beyond voting?

RR: No, I understand. But Akela, first things first.

AL: Oh, I know.

RR: Let’s vote and make sure everybody we know particularly those who share our values, also votes. Because there’s no way we can actually control the oligarchy and AI, and really the oligarchs and the AI are very closely intertwined.

No way we can do that unless we have power, and the power comes through voting in 10 days. But then I think it is vitally important that Democrats, progressives look at AI and say, “Look here are the real problems with AI.” Number one, jobs. AI is on the verge of taking away huge numbers, not just hundreds of thousands, but millions of jobs.

What are we going to do about that? Are we going to prevent AI from doing that? Are we going to set up a re-employment system? Are we going to provide universal basic income? What’s the strategy, or what are the multiple strategies? Number two, AI poses an existential threat to humanity. How are we going to deal with that when you’ve got the right-wing saying, “Oh, we can’t let China do better than us and exceed us at AI?” What we have got to do is decide, here are the minimal regulations necessary for making sure that AI does not get out of control. We are going to demand this, and we’re going to work with China because China doesn’t want AI to get out of control either.

Thirdly, we have got to do something about the AI war machine and make sure that the whole bizarre notion of autonomous weapons that are not in human control remain in human control, that we don’t want to move in that direction. That is as frightening as anything else I can imagine.

I could go on and on. There is an AI agenda that progressives need to embrace, and it’s all related to power. I want to emphasize, if I may, that as we move toward this final showdown in America and in the world really, between democracy and oligarchy, one of the key areas where we are going to be battling is not just Elon Musk and Musk’s craziness and Donald Trump and Trump’s craziness, but it is AI and some of the issues connected to AI.

I’m sorry, I have to say one more thing, and I apologize for going on and on.

AL: No please.

RR: But we can’t forget the climate and climate change. AI and climate change are very closely related. One of the things that AI is endangering even more than it is already endangered is our climate.

I could get into more details, but I don’t want to at this point. The point is that we’ve got to maintain and keep our eye on what is really important in terms of maintaining social justice and humanity, and that’s really what’s at stake here.

AL: I’m glad you mentioned the climate change issue because this came up a little bit in the primaries, the discussion around the fact that, back in 2020, the 2018 cycle, climate change, Green New Deal was a much bigger part of particularly progressive campaign platforms. Not that they weren’t campaigning on it, but it does really seem like this has transitioned into the conversation around AI, the climate conversation. As you said, they’re one and the same.

But another group that has responded to public criticism of its efforts to buy elections by doubling down or trying to conceal its involvement is AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Facing massive outrage from the public amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and after spending $100 million to oust two outspoken critics of Israel from Congress last cycle, AIPAC shielded much of its spending in primaries this year through a network of shadowy pop-up PACs. While that was a shift in AIPAC’s most recent strategy, efforts to conceal the real source of money in elections is not new.

I will also note that earlier this week, AIPAC announced that it would stop endorsing and giving directly to candidates, though it will continue spending on elections through its super PAC, United Democracy Project. But what do you make of this phenomenon where groups like AIPAC or pro-AI PACs look at the mounting fight against them and they say, “OK, we’re just going to make it harder for people to figure out what we’re doing”?

Like, where do we go from there?

RR: What we have to do is require that these groups reveal themselves for who they are. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s AIPAC, it’s crypto, it’s AI, it’s Trump’s MAGA Inc, and it’s obviously Elon Musk. When they try to disguise themselves behind these innocent-sounding names, “Pro-America,” “America Plus,” whatever it is and also disguise their identities by not even endorsing and pushing particular policies that they believe in, but the candidates who are going to carry their water that’s a matter of public disclosure.

It’s important that all of us — you guys and I and everybody I work with and everybody — that we expose what these people are doing, what these organizations are really doing. I think the candidates need to expose them because most people don’t want to vote for candidates who are really being financed by AI and by crypto and by AIPAC and by organizations that are anathema to their values. A lot of it is about disclosure.

AL: You recently wrote criticizing the New York Times for reporting on the midterm elections with,, “false equivalencies.” I wanted to bring this up because this is something that’s in the ethos of how we approach reporting at The Intercept, but I think it’s interesting to talk about for a broader audience. What did you mean by those false equivalencies? How is the Times making a mistake in your view, and how can journalists avoid making the same mistake?

RR: The New York Times I pick on only because it is the newspaper of record. It is the paper of record. It is the big kahuna, and we all respect it.

We’ve all been reading it for years. Thank God for The New York Times. But I think that because of its special role and its extraordinary importance, it has even more responsibility to avoid some of the deceptive practices, and I use the word deceptive advisedly that we see in the press generally, this false equivalency between the left and the right drives me crazy because there’s not a center, a respectable center between fascism and democracy.

We’re not dealing with equivalent issues here. Neo-fascism, or whatever you want to call it, is really a profound danger to all of us. It’s as profound an existential danger as is AI and climate change. If we don’t recognize it as such, and if the papers of record, if New York Times just is simply reporting on, for example, El-Sayed— The thing that really ticked me off was when it reports on El-Sayed and his his challenger or his opponent in Michigan, Rogers — I think his name is Mike Rogers — and tries to create the impression that the two of them are somehow equal in terms of their positions or the people supporting them or the social media supporting them. They’re not equal. They’re completely different.

Rogers is on the side of authoritarianism. He’s a Trump supporter. I don’t want to get into the details, but just believe me, he is different. El-Sayed is really a progressive, and he believes in many of the things that we believe in, but also the New York Times has some responsibility to make that distinction. El-Sayed is a progressive who believes X, Y, and Z, and his opponent is a conservative reactionary, however you want to describe him, who believes in A, B, and C. We’ve got to see what they believe in and what they’re actually supporting, not just this false equivalence.

AL: And the idea that it’s not just two sides of the same coin. Our team has done a lot of reporting on Islamophobia and all sorts of things that go into sort of this lack of a distinction in many mainstream outlets particularly between those two candidates. But we’re going to pause on that train and pivot now to some wonderful questions that we received from our audience.

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. I will start with a kind of a fun— This isn’t fun necessarily, but it’s historical. If you like history, it’s fun. We now have the largest wealth disparity since the French Revolution. What can we as regular people do short of revolution to address this?

RR: I would not recommend a French Revolution type solution.

AL: Just to be clear.

RR: Just to be very clear. I’m not opposed to revolution. I think the American Revolution accomplished quite a lot and I liked Bernie Sanders’ political revolution. But I think that there is no substitute for political organization.

My granddaughter, for example, went door to door with her friends for Zohran Mamdani. New York is a different place now than it was because of that extraordinary political effort by so many people. We have the power because we have the people and the oligarchs don’t have the people. They have the money.

And I think what all of us need to do is sharpen the understanding that we all have, that this is really a contest between the money and the people, the big money and average working people, the oligarchs and democracy. This is what this is all about. Let’s not forget it.

AL: What federal government policies are most responsible for the obscene accumulation of wealth, and how can these policies be corrected?

RR: Oh I would say three policies. One, monopolization. That is, antitrust, which was supposed to be there to break up big concentrations of wealth, has become a back burner issue, not just under Trump, but believe me, I’ve been watching this for 40 years. It has never had the degree of enforcement that it needs. Lina Khan did a good job at the Federal Trade Commission, and I commend her for it, and her colleagues but it needs Presidential backing. We need a Teddy Roosevelt going after the big combinations.

Secondly, labor policy. We have got to make it easier for people to join unions. For years Democrats and Democratic presidents have promised that they’re going to make it easy just an up or down vote. If you want a union at your workplace, 51 percent yes, OK, you get a union. We have not had that labor law reform. We need labor law reform.

The third area is taxation. We’ve got to raise taxes on the super wealthy. We’ve got to raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ve got to raise taxes on corporations, on big corporations. Instead, for years, not just under Trump, but for years, since Ronald Reagan, we’ve had tax cuts on the wealthy. We’ve subscribed to this nonsense called trickle-down economics that if you give big tax cuts to people at the top, somehow it’ll trickle down and everybody will be better off. That is baloney. That is utter rubbish.

AL: This one is very timely given, as you mentioned, 10 days until the election, which really stressed me out, but it’s good to know. Do you feel comfortable that election offices across the country will be able to maintain a fair election considering Musk’s and Trump’s abilities and personal issues?

RR: I’m not comfortable. I don’t think any of us should be comfortable. Look what he’s doing now — that is Trump — getting the Justice Department to sue in Alaska to not certify those votes if it turns out that the Democrat wins the Senate race in Alaska just because there are two people with the name Dan Sullivan who are running. They’re laying the groundwork.

Here’s what I worry about. I don’t want to be paranoid about this. But Trump and the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security are laying the groundwork for challenging election results and maybe doing even worse in terms of putting ICE agents at polling places, maybe even invoking the Insurrection Act. I hope not. But I’m trying to soothe myself. I’m trying to say, “It’ll be fine.

AL: I get it.

RR: “Don’t worry. It’s a very decentralized system. If they were going to try to do something like that, we’d see it already.” I’m trying to stay very stable and hopeful, but I am worried.

AL: I appreciate the honesty. This is what we need to be discussing and talking about. We can’t just turn a blind eye to it.

One more question before we let you go, and I think this is a nice coda to this conversation. But will the midterms really make a difference since Trumpism seems to be a symptom rather than the disease itself?

RR: It’s a very important question. The midterms, if the Democrats take back the House, let’s say at a minimum, it will at least give progressive Democrats the beginning of a voice to lay the groundwork for 2028, when we really do have to take back America and the American government. What gives me some degree of optimism is that the trend line is in the right direction.

People, whether they call themselves Republicans or Democrats or independents, are getting angrier and angrier about all of the issues we’ve been talking about: the concentration of income, the concentration of wealth, the concentration of industry in terms of monopolization what this all means in terms of prices the foreign policy that is becoming more and more wacky, out of whack and also contrary to our principles, contrary to democracy.

What are we doing as Americans? How can we cozy up to Putin? Putin, if he’s not the worst authoritarian brutality, a brute out there, I don’t know who is. But we shouldn’t be doing this. We shouldn’t be sending any weapons at all to Israel. After the genocide and they’re continuing to commit genocide in Gaza.

No, we’ve got to stand for humanity and human rights and decency and democracy, and if we don’t stand for these, where is our moral authority in the world? We’ve got to be very tough on these issues because if we’re not tough internationally on these issues, how can we profess to believe in the things that are in our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the key documents of the United States?

We’ve got to get rid of ICE. We shouldn’t, cannot treat people who are immigrants to this country, whether they are documented or undocumented, we cannot treat them the way we are treating these people. This is analogous — it’s not the same — but it’s analogous to the way the Nazis began treating the Jews in the 1930s.

Once you open the door to that kind of bigotry and that kind of behavior, it’s very hard to close that door again. So we’ve got to stand up strongly, powerfully to the forces of bigotry.

AL: We have much more that we could discuss that I would love to get into, but we’re going to have to leave it there.

Bob, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Reich’s work on his Substack.

RR: Akela, my pleasure. Thank you.

Jessica Washington: That does it for this special livestream of The Intercept Briefing, which you can watch on The Intercept’s YouTube page.

Robert Reich’s latest book, “Coming up Short,” is out in paperback now. And his media company, Inequality Media, has a new documentary exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times. It’s called “The Work in Progress.” You can find it at https://theworkinprogressfilm.com/.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Thanks to Lauren Schilli for help managing the livestream. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Thanks for listening.

The post The Intercept Live in Conversation With Robert Reich appeared first on The Intercept.

The Stakes of Brazil’s Presidential Election

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Brazilians will head to the polls on Sunday in one of the most consequential presidential elections of the last decade. The run-off election will determine the future of the largest democracy in Latin America and the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

Incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is facing off against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The elder Bolsonaro is currently on house arrest for his role in a failed 2023 military coup that intended to assassinate Lula, his vice president, and a Supreme Court justice. Despite his father’s attempted coup, Flavio Bolsonaro is currently the frontrunner, after coming out slightly ahead in the first round of voting.

“If they don’t win this election, then not only is Jair going to stay in jail, most likely, but Eduardo, Flávio’s brother and Jair’s son, who is in self-exile in the U.S., he has a multiyear prison sentence for his actions in the U.S. lobbying against Brazil’s foreign interests. He’s not going to be able to go home if they lose this election,” says Andrew Fishman, a Rio de Janeiro-based investigative journalist. “So they’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Sound familiar? This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Fishman, president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil, about what’s at stake for Brazil and the planet in Sunday’s election.

“It’s a global election. The voters in Brazil will be deciding the future of humanity,” Fishman tells The Intercept. Jair Bolsonaro oversaw significant deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, leaving the ecological and climate linchpin in danger of becoming a “savanna.” Now, he argues, his son can finish the job. “You’re going to have an international migration crisis,” says Fishman. “It’s really self-defeating because the cattle ranchers are his base. They are the ones that are wanting to do the things that will end their future profitability — the future existence of their business.”

President Donald Trump has taken a particular interest in the race, as he seeks to expand U.S. influence and control across the Western Hemisphere. “Brazil — as the biggest economy, the biggest country, the most powerful entity in the hemisphere besides the United States — if Brazil falls, then the rest falls in line,” says Fishman. “But if Brazil remains as this big island of resistance in the middle of the continent, it really messes up [the Trump administration’s] plans, doesn’t it?”

Big Tech is also looming large over the race. “There’s all these pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Meta is interfering in this election, and they have every incentive to do so. They will have a much better regulatory environment if Flávio wins because of Flávio’s submissiveness to U.S. interests and his willingness to play ball with whatever Trump tells him to,” adds Fishman.

In a request for comment, Meta said, “Meta applies the same rules to every candidate, every party and every political viewpoint in Brazil, as we do in elections around the world. We do not suppress content to disadvantage one side, and we do not give preferential treatment to any side. Each of the incidents cited by Lula’s campaign has a straightforward, documented explanation. … Brazilian voters deserve facts, not a political narrative built by combining unrelated technical issues. Meta will continue to enforce its rules, comply with Brazilian electoral law, fix mistakes when they occur and provide a level playing field for everyone who uses our services.”

As U.S. leaders attempt to mold Brazil into a satellite state, Fishman argues the United States is slowly becoming more and more like its southern neighbor.

“It’s not that Brazil is becoming more like the United States, it’s that the United States is becoming more like Brazil,” says Fishman. “You have just shrinking spheres of democracy while oligarchs have increasing power and control and are able to do what they want and insist on decisions for the country that are bad for all of the society and the people, but good for their individual interests.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. Jessie, what do our listeners need to know about this week?

JW: I’ve been following a pretty disturbing story that’s actually centered on a campaign ad. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released what I would argue is the ugliest campaign ad of a dark season. That is, of course, a season of campaign ads filled with Islamophobic, transphobic, sexist rhetoric, and racist rhetoric as well. But in the ad, the mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton accuses her daughter of being a liar, claiming “she’s lied her whole life.”

Now, what makes this really dark is that Acton was removed from her mother’s care at 12 years old, after she alleges she was raped by her mother’s then-40-year-old husband.

AL: That’s horrible. Has Acton responded?

JW: Acton responded to the attack ad saying, “My brother Phil and I endured abuse, hunger, and neglect. We were often kept in a dark basement, were frequent-fliers with child protective services, and lived in fear of our birth mother’s violent and erratic temper. I’ve always known that she was deeply sick and unwell, and it’s sad to see Vivek Ramaswamy exploit her all for his own political gain.”

This is one, as I’ve said, of the darkest campaign ads in a really horrifying season of campaign ads.

Akela, I know you’ve been tracking another big election story this week on a beat you’ve covered for a really long time, and that’s [American Israel Public Affairs Committee].

AL: So we have been covering extensively the way that AIPAC’s strategy has changed over the last few election cycles since they started spending directly on campaigns.

If you’ve been following our reporting, you know that we’ve written a lot about both their super PAC, United Democracy Project, and this shell PAC strategy where there were a number of different groups that popped up throughout the midterm season, took money from AIPAC, spent against candidates that AIPAC didn’t like, and then — per filings that came out this week — shut down and gave all their money back to AIPAC.

So the idea being that, they had been trying to shield what was an increasingly toxic reputation amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza from creating backlash against their activity in these races.

Jewish Insider scooped on Wednesday that AIPAC announced that it will no longer endorse candidates or give PAC contributions through its AIPAC PAC. Now, this doesn’t mean that they will stop spending on elections. Their super PAC, United Democracy Project, will continue to spend, as it has been pouring record amounts of money into various races. But this is getting a lot of attention, both from the left and I would say from the center.

The left, Justice Democrats in particular, and candidates who are no longer in Congress, but I saw Jamaal Bowman talking about this, saying that this is the culmination of the fight that the left has been putting up against AIPAC in elections. I don’t know that I would categorize this as a win necessarily, considering that the super PAC seems like it’s going to continue to spend a lot of money. But that was the big news in my campaign finance world this week.

JW: You’ve done a lot of really interesting coverage of how AIPAC is moving their money around through these different PACs and trying to get around the fact that people really dislike AIPAC, and that it has really tarnished the reputation of candidates who take this money. Obviously, this is a maneuver to get rid of the reputational harm of AIPAC money while still giving people AIPAC money.

I’ve actually been tracking a story completely off our election cycle, and that’s what’s going on in France. I know we touched on that a couple weeks ago but, really, these protests have taken on another life.

For those who don’t know, in France, there were these protests that were initially launched by students primarily in the suburbs concerned about educational inequality. This meant staffing shortages and poor facilities. But it has exploded into a nationwide uprising about the cost of living and broader economic inequality.

Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, and not to bring it too quickly back to the U.S., but President Donald Trump has used this as an opportunity to rail against immigrants. So despite the fact that there is zero indication any of the violence has been spurred on by immigrants. At a campaign rally on Monday, he told the crowd, “If Europe doesn’t close its borders and bring the criminals out, like the people that are protesting, Europe is finished.”

So yeah, that’s just one other example of how Donald Trump has inserted himself into international politics.

AL: Trump has also inserted himself into politics in a different region in the world. We have the Brazilian elections for president heading to a runoff this week. I know you spoke, Jessie, to Andrew Fishman, an investigative reporter and president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil, about those elections.

JW: It’s a really interesting election with a ton of parallels to the political situation in the United States, as well as, as you’ve pointed out, a ton of influence from the United States. On Sunday, Brazil will have a run-off presidential election that will determine the future of not only Latin America’s largest democracy, but also — and this is really important — the fate of the Amazon rainforest, and one could argue, the planet.

This is the first presidential election since former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was imprisoned on house arrest in an attempted military coup, a sentence that his son, the current frontrunner, Flávio Bolsonaro has promised to overturn.

I talked to Andrew about the media landscape, the history of military leadership, and the outside influences that have made this a tight race, despite the fact that the perceived frontrunner is running on freeing the man who attempted a coup years prior.

President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva is running for reelection. He’s accused both President Donald Trump and Meta of attempting to sway the election in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro.

The Intercept reached out to Meta for comment, and Meta denied interfering in the election process, saying they do not suppress content to disadvantage one side or give preferential treatment to the other.

But this is a really interesting conversation with Andrew, and I’m excited for people to get to hear it.

AL: As am I. Let’s hear it.

JW: Andrew, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrew Fishman: Hi, thanks for having me.

JW: On Sunday, Brazilians will head to the polls in a runoff presidential election between right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and incumbent left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to determine the leadership of Latin America’s largest democracy and biggest economy.

Now, this is the first presidential election since former President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the Capitol in 2023 and attempted to overturn the election results. Now, Flávio Bolsonaro, his son and ally, is widely considered to be the frontrunner after coming out slightly ahead in the first round of voting.

But as of Tuesday, his lead in the polls has been narrowing. Andrew, big picture, what are the major issues at play in this election on Sunday?

AF: If you want to be really direct about it, it’s the future of humanity.

You have one candidate who’s been responsible for record reductions of deforestation in the Amazon; and you have another one who’s saying, let’s chop it all down, and farmers should be able to do whatever they want on their land.

And under his father’s leadership, deforestation in the Amazon soared, as in the other regions in the area. Scientists think that there’s a major tipping point that we could be on the cusp of, that if we were to reach that, the Amazon will turn into a savanna. There would be no going back from that.

If that were to happen, all of the rain in South America comes from the Amazon, basically. [That would affect] the cattle ranching that’s doing the deforestation, no more of the soy that’s doing the deforestation — people would have trouble feeding themselves. São Paulo would probably run out of water, which it has done in the past.

It’s very precarious. So you would be having mass refugee influxes, migrations. I really do think that this election is on that scale; it’s a global election. The voters in Brazil will be deciding the future of humanity, very possibly.

JW: To your point, his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration oversaw significant deforestation of the rainforest, which houses 10 percent of all [known] species on Earth, and his son appears to be moving in that same direction.

Flávio told reporters in August that he did not believe in climate change and that “the best way to address environmental issues is what we did during the Bolsonaro administration,” referring, of course, to the senior Bolsonaro’s administration.

What is at stake for climate change when we’re talking about this massive deforestation that could potentially be happening if Flávio wins?

AF: Every ecosystem in South America is interconnected and in the world. If the Amazon collapses and turns into savanna and the rainfall stops, and you have this massive drying out of the continent — which is one of the major exporters of food in the world — you’re going to have all of those issues locally, and that’s going to impact local markets and everything. You’re going to have an international migration crisis.

But on top of that, we have no idea what the ecological knock-on effects of that could be. With that, we could be having a more rapid increase in polar ice cap melting. With the temperatures increasing, it could be exacerbating the death of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which is the thing that would put Europe back into an ice age. It’s very possible that’s already happening right now.

We’re at this really tenuous moment for the climate, for the Earth, for humanity. And you have a candidate that says very proudly [he] doesn’t believe in any of that and wants to slash all mechanisms that are used to have more responsible management of land and prevent this massive catastrophe in just this proudly Luddite sort of way.

It’s really self-defeating because the cattle ranchers are his base. They are the ones that are wanting to do the things that will end their future profitability — the future existence of their business. It’s really self-defeating in this way for the Brazilians, and these very short-term benefits for massive long-term costs.

There’s estimates that the impact that the Amazon has for the global economy is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and that benefit is far larger than the profits that they get out of these extractive industries that they do with farming and mining. It’s really hard to overstate the potential impacts that this could have.

JW: Is that urgency resonating with voters?

AF: Absolutely not. That is not what people are voting about, unfortunately. It’s what the people living in the heavy agricultural regions — where their local economy depends on that — they’re voting for Flávio for that reason. But the people who are voting against him, yes, there’s many people that care about the Amazon and want to preserve it, but it’s not the issue that’s being discussed day to day on TV, in the news, on the streets.

People are talking more about more human issues of corruption and who has better communication, security, economics. They’re not talking about the Amazon, unfortunately.

JW: That’s hardly surprising in the U.S. context, which I’m a little bit more acquainted with. Certainly climate, the environment, have never been top issues for voters, even if they’ve resonated more so with young people.

I did want to talk about another issue in the election, and that is the fate of Jair Bolsonaro. His son, Flávio Bolsonaro, has promised to free him. Jair Bolsonaro has been imprisoned on house arrest since 2025 for plotting a military coup. How is that particular campaign promise landing with the electorate in Brazil, and are you at all surprised by the public’s response?

AF: It’s very clear that for the Bolsonaros, this is an all-or-nothing for them. If they don’t win this election, then not only is Jair going to stay in jail, most likely, but Eduardo, Flávio’s brother and Jair’s son, who is in self-exile in the U.S., he has a multiyear prison sentence for his actions in the U.S. lobbying against Brazil’s foreign interests. He’s not going to be able to go home if they lose this election.

For them, it’s been very clear, and they’ve even said it in moments, that’s what this is about for them: their ability to get their father out of prison and to get themselves off the hook. Also, if you’re elected president, the investigations on things you did before you got elected, they go away.

“They’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win, because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card.”

So then Flávio’s off the hook, and he’s so wrapped up in so many different schemes and accusations and active investigations, some of which that we have revealed, including U.S. and abroad and offshore bank accounts and money laundering and potential connections to organized crime and militias. So they’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card. To do that, they’re going to completely change the structure of the Supreme Court, and they’ll be able to put in a majority even without impeachment. They already have the Senate and the lower house of Congress.

They would control all of the executive branch. They have the majority of governorships that are in their coalition, and they run the local police. And the executive has control over the federal police and all the investigative and regulatory agencies. So they would have just absolute lockstep control over every branch of government federally and most of local government as well.

It would be a democratically elected coup.

JW: And voters, do they care about that? Do they care about the preservation of democracy? Is this ranking as a top election issue?

AF: It’s always double speak, right? Both sides say that they’re preserving democracy. The Bolsonaristas say that Lula and the Supreme Court are running a judicial dictatorship right now because they were getting censored and put in jail for actively plotting a coup, which included active planning to assassinate Lula after he was elected, his vice president after he was elected, and a member of the Supreme Court. So that’s what they’re [Jair Bolsonaro and military officials] in jail for. That’s why they were getting pushback, and they’re saying that having the pushback against that is a dictatorship.

In the meantime, you have the Lulistas who are saying that what the Bolsonaros want to do is a coup because they actively have said year after year, over and over again, “We want a coup. We love the military dictatorship. The military dictatorship was great! When we were torturing everybody, that was good.” Jair said, “When I’m elected, we’re going to take a machine gun and shoot down all of the leftists, the petistas, the Workers’ Party [Partido dos Trabalhadores] supporters.”

Remember that the military government was going alive and strong into the ’80s. It happened in ’64, and it went through the ’80s. So it’s very recent.

The people that are in his orbit, they were actually part of the military coup government until very recently. And I think that Lula supporters are very, very concerned about this. They really do care.

The Bolsonarista supporters, which are about 30 percent lockstep — same as it is in the U.S. with Trump — they’re just in their own information ecosystem, and they want Bolsonaro to win. It doesn’t matter, and anything that he does is good because it’s him.

“They’re just in their own information ecosystem, and they want Bolsonaro to win.”

It’s not, there are people that support the Workers’ Party, and there are people that support Bolsonaro. The Bolsonaro movement is essentially anti Workers’ Party, anti-petismo. The Bolsonaros have been seen as the greatest vehicle for getting rid of the Workers’ Party, which has been so hard to do because they’ve been so popular because of all the policies they’ve put into place over the years.

But you’ve had the media saying for 30 years now, just drilling it in, that the PT [Partido dos Trabalhadores] equals corruption, the PT invented corruption. The PT is everything that is bad in Brazil, and anything that is not the PT is everything that is good in Brazil. You’ve had a generation of this narrative being repeated over and over in all these different instances that it’s really hard to shake.

JW: Could you talk more about that legacy of military leadership in Brazil, and for Brazilians, how they feel about it on the day to day? I recognize that it’s a very large country, as we’ve mentioned multiple times. I assume not everyone feels the same way, but I am curious about that legacy and how people respond to it.

AF: Brazil has been a country of negotiated solutions. So when they were the last in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888, it was not some sort of civil war or uprising. It was a negotiation: “OK, I think it’s time that we do this, but let’s just make sure that everyone that did own slaves is in the best possible situation, and let’s make sure that we have some sort of semi-slavery going on afterwards.”

It was really the same thing with the dictatorship. It was a moment where the economy was going into the can. It was very unpopular. It wasn’t having the economic glory years of before, and so they said, “All right, we’ll step back. We’ll let you run some elections, but we’re going to make sure that we’re never held accountable, that we’re able to continue exercising power in the way we want.”

As part of that, they were able to help control the narrative. So during the military dictatorship, there was an impression — and it continues today — that there wasn’t corruption. The reason why they had that impression, it was actually very corrupt, very corrupt. But the impression exists because there was censorship of the media, so the corruption that existed just wasn’t exposed.

When the Lula government came into power the first time in the early 2000s, they started making the federal police stronger. They made the judiciary stronger and more independent. They increased the ability of the federal government to investigate and uphold the rule of law. As a result of that, many corruption schemes started coming out of the woodwork that were legacy of the military leadership.

“It was the business elite together with the military that did the coup and ran everything.”

It was called a civil military dictatorship, technically, in Brazil, because it was the business elite together with the military that did the coup and ran everything.

So that business elite didn’t change. It’s still the same families. They were running the same corruption schemes back then. They were running it through re-democratization. Whether it’s a right-wing government or a left-wing government in power, they’re making sure that their interests are being served. That corruption is just this constant throughline. People don’t really see that because that’s not how it’s presented in the media and in the day-to-day in communications.

I know for a fact that there’s lots of people that really want us to go back to the dictatorship. There are people that really want us to go back to the monarchy because they see it as a better, simpler time when things were the way that they should be. Everyone was in the right place and things were safer and everything was just better, this idealized past, “Make Brazil Great Again” sort of thing. How far back do you want to go?

Then there are the people that, like Dilma Rousseff, who was the successor to Lula after a second term — who fought against the dictatorship — that are currently active in politics, that are still around, and they were tortured. Their friends were murdered. They know exactly what a dictatorship means and what it means for people like them, anyone that stands against those entrenched powers of the old elites that go back for centuries.

That’s why you have a lot of older voters tend to vote PT [Workers’ Party] because they came up with the workers’ struggle with re-democratization. They understand what that means. It’s this interesting dynamic now where you have more younger people that are starting to tip more to the right because they don’t have this memory.

They don’t remember what it was like in the ’80s in the northeast when there was water shortages and food shortages, and the standard of living was so much lower. You have this new narrative being rewritten in real time online.

“You have more younger people that are starting to tip more to the right because they don’t have this memory.”

JW: The parallels to the United States and Brazil are just incredibly striking in what you’re saying. This kind of the “Make America Great Again” movement and the Make Brazil Great Again, even if they’re not using those exact same phrases. There are just so many points of similarity, especially with what we’ve seen with youth even in the United States, some of whom have taken a rightward tilt.

I want to get into the relationship between Brazil and the U.S. because that’s obviously been such a big issue in this election. In a Lula ad earlier this month, his campaign called Flávio Bolsonaro Trump’s candidate, arguing that, “What Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our riches, steal our future, and leave us in the dust.”

Now, this comes after President Lula confirmed that Brazil denied visas to two U.S. officials over election interference concerns. The State Department has denied any claims of election meddling, telling reporters, “Any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie.”

Andrew, is there any evidence that the Trump administration is attempting to sway this election? Does it veer into election interference as we generally understand it?

AF: The answer is oh God, yes. So much so it’s overwhelming. Overwhelming evidence, and it’s the same thing they’ve been doing across the region, which is why there’s been this rightward swing in elections across Latin America.

That’s why they’re so interested in Brazil right now because Brazil — as the biggest economy, the biggest country, the most powerful entity in the hemisphere besides the United States — if Brazil falls, then the rest falls in line.

But if Brazil remains as this big island of resistance in the middle of the continent, it really messes up their plans, doesn’t it? The interference has been done on many levels. The reality is that we don’t know the full extent of it, and we won’t know the full extent of it for years. We’re still learning about things that happened in 1964 with the U.S. role in the coup.

There’s dirty tricks happening that’s being run through intelligence agencies. That’s absolutely positive. There’s very, very strong signs that they’re using U.S. companies, Big Techs like Meta, who’s been getting a lot of attention — a lot of flak — lately because of clear signs that its algorithm is favoring Bolsonaro and suppressing Lula.

Multiple instances that they even admit happens, “Oh, but no, but it was just a mistake. It was just a mistake.” Meta and the Big Techs in the U.S., they’re really concerned about what a Lula government could do for their profits. Maybe Lula wants to have more sovereignty and control over what they’re doing.

The Brazilian government doesn’t even know how much money they make in Brazil, the Big Techs. They just know how much money they send out through the tax bills that they pay and the money they send out of the country. The Big Techs in the U.S. are really concerned about getting their access on rare earths and on lithium reserves, which Brazil has the largest deposits of rare earths after China. This whole trade war with China, Brazil becomes much more important. It’s a huge market.

So you have one candidate that is just completely submissive — like painfully, embarrassingly submissive — to U.S. interests. So much so that one of his former closest allies, a general, Santos Cruz, who’s a very famous well-known general, he came out recently and said, “I’m a conservative. I’m right-wing. This is not conservatism. This is not right wing. This is just ‘voluntary submissiveness.’”

“You have one candidate that is just completely submissive — like painfully, embarrassingly submissive — to U.S. interests.”

They’re just absolutely scamming Brazilians with this level of supplicancy that we’ve never seen before, that the military dictatorship even didn’t do, which was hand in glove with the U.S. interests. This is completely next level, and it’s something that obviously the left is very concerned about.

But people like Santos Cruz, Brazilians that actually believe in Brazilian sovereignty, and that it’s important for Brazil to be able to pursue its own interests rather than the interests of foreign powers — they’re very concerned about that, which is, some segments of the elite.

Whenever you have a submissive local government in an imperialist relationship, there are people that benefit. There are local people that will get special contracts, that will get special treatment. They’ll be able to crush their enemies through these relationships. And that’s what they’re doing in Bolivia and in Peru and in Ecuador right now.

“Whenever you have a submissive local government in an imperialist relationship, there are people that benefit.”

What they did in Venezuela, where they just came in and took all of the oil and said, “All right. We’re going to take 90 percent of the oil profits, and we’ll give you a couple billion a year.” People are seeing this in Brazil. They see what Trump has done. And they’re still saying, “Well, we like Bolsonaro, so we’re going with Bolsonaro. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

It’s a massive issue, and I really, I don’t think we know how bad it will be and how submissive they’ll be this time around. Because it always is the case that, with right-wing authoritarian governments, it’s the second term where they really take off whatever mask was left and decide, “We have a mandate and we can do whatever we want.”

You saw it in the U.S. with Trump. They saw it in Turkey with Erdoğan. They saw it in Hungary with Orbán. They saw it in India with Modi. This is what always happens. It’s the second term where they say, “OK. We showed them who we are, and everyone said it’s fine.” They’re able to smoke out all of their rivals in the first term. They map them out, and so when the second time comes around, it’s just bang, bang, bang. Let’s get rid of them. Let’s maximize our power and do whatever we want.

“With right-wing authoritarian governments, it’s the second term where they really take off whatever mask was left. … It’s the second term where they say, ‘OK. We showed them who we are, and everyone said it’s fine.’”

The result’s not going to be positive for Brazil. That’s the thing: If I were a Brazilian billionaire — which I am not — it would be in my personal interest for Brazil to follow the economic path that the Lula government is following, much more than what Bolsonaro is proposing.

Lula’s not some left-wing radical. He’s center-right. He was left, then he became center-left, and he’s moving ever more to the right. This last election, his vice presidential candidate was his former presidential rival, the center-right guy. They’re very much doing what the big banks want. They’re helping the big agro get what they want. They give tons of subsidies to major industries. But the thing that they do, they take a little bit of that money, and they spread it around to the poorest people with public services with access to education, with some cash transfers. We’re talking about 60 bucks or 80 bucks a month to families, and that is what is making the economy grow. Because if you don’t have consumers in your economy, and you have domestic industries you’re trying to build, then no one’s going to buy the things. Your employees can’t buy the things.

That’s intolerable to some people in Brazil, and they can’t see that it benefits their own economic interests.

You’re in this kind of crazy situation where it doesn’t really make sense what they’re doing. And they saw it happen with Bolsonaro, with Jair! They all supported him, and then he crashed the economy. Then they all went back to Lula begrudgingly and said, “OK, we’re going to support you in ’22 because things aren’t going very well.”

Then Lula turned it around immediately, and now they’re forgetting again and going back to Bolsonaro. Logically, it doesn’t make sense. It’s more psychological. Freud has to explain what’s going on.

“Lula’s not some left-wing radical. He’s center-right. He was left, then he became center-left, and he’s moving ever more to the right.”

JW: Again, the parallels between the United States and Brazil are very apparent in terms of some of those economic choices. You’ve already gone over what the U.S. wants to gain from involvement in this election. But there’s another foreign power that’s also interested in the election. Flávio Bolsonaro has been cozying up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously in stark contrast to President Lula, who’s been an ardent supporter of the Palestinians. What would a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency look like for Brazil’s stance towards Israel?

AF: You can’t say that Lula has been the heroic savior, but he has made statements saying, “This is a genocide. This is very bad. This shouldn’t happen.”

At the same time, he’s allowed Petrobras to ship petroleum products to the Israeli government that are being used in the genocide. He’s allowed one of the major steel manufacturers to ship steel and ore to the Israeli weapons companies that are using it to build rifles and bombs to use in Gaza.

It’s not like you’re dealing with the leader of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] versus Netanyahu’s best friend. It’s a run-of-the-mill European-style center-left social democrat leader that’s kinda disappointing on this issue, versus someone that just wants to be absolutely submissive to everything that Israel wants and does and just completely supports it.

Again, you said, there’s so many parallels to the U.S. The parallels in Brazil, why does this make sense? Why would they care about supporting Israel? Why would this be something that they would want to put their name on, like these horrible scenes that people have been seeing for years online?

Everyone’s seeing it. Why would they want to support it? They kind of want to do the same thing in Brazil. One of the things that Jair always complains about is that he’s jealous of the U.S. because their cavalry was more effective at exterminating the Indigenous population than the Brazilian cavalry was. They’re upset that they have these relatively small numbers of Indigenous people that have claims to these massive swaths of land, much of which in the Amazon, that they want to get their hands on so they can cut down the trees and throw cows in and do mining. So a colonial–settler project that involves extermination of the Indigenous population to benefit their economy.

“They’re upset that they have these relatively small numbers of Indigenous people that have claims to these massive swaths of land, much of which in the Amazon, that they want to get their hands on.”

That’s what Israel’s doing, and that’s what they want to do in Brazil: “Why don’t you give me all the fun, fancy tools of espionage and surveillance and war and suppression that you guys have developed and honed in Israel for the last decades, and let me get my hands on them too so I can do the same thing back here.”

I think that’s one of the main reasons ideologically. Plus the whole political, evangelical right-wing movement, which was a concerted project by the CIA to implant in Latin America, bringing in prosperity gospel to get rid of the Catholic Church and all their support of left and workers movements.

This is all very well documented, that they brought it in because it’s more individualist ideology, and that individualist ideology also includes the idea that all the Jews need to go to Israel for the reckoning.

There are a ton of parallels between Brazil and the U.S., and that’s because almost all of the worst ideas in the United States have been intentionally exported to Brazil as a way to make Brazil a worse country that’s more in line with U.S. interests.

That includes healthcare companies. The U.S. model of healthcare. They have free, independent public healthcare in Brazil called SUS [Sistema Único de Saúde]. It’s an incredible system that’s very popular. They want to privatize it. They want to get rid of it to create more profit. Prosperity gospel with all this right-wing ideological movements, they love it.

“Almost all of the worst ideas in the United States have been intentionally exported to Brazil as a way to make Brazil a worse country that’s more in line with U.S. interests.”

The NRA sent lobbyists down in 2002 to Brazil to work with the right-wing movements to say, “This is the game plan for how you create a gun movement in Brazil.” And what happened? It manifests itself in the Jair Bolsonaro administration, where they just opened up the floodgates for access to guns, increasing the number of guns you have, the type of guns that you could have, the number of bullets you could have, and getting rid of anything that could help prevent organized crime from getting massive amounts of assault rifles and unmarked bullets they can use in crimes. Under Bolsonaro, that’s one of the things that spread more than ever.

There’s all these little levers that they’re really just doing copy and paste, and we’ve seen these alliances with JD Vance and the Rockbridge [Network], which is a group that he created before he was vice president with a bunch of Peter Thiel and other billionaires in the U.S. They’ve created a subsidiary in Korea and now one in Brazil that they were using to do the same sort of alignment with the local elites that they did before, in the lead-up to the ’64 coup. I can go on for hours about all the different connections and ties.

JW: To your point, you’ve talked about how this is much bigger than just Brazil.

To me, the “Donroe Doctrine” is hanging over all of this. Last November, President Donald Trump released what he described as a corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the “Donroe Doctrine,” which effectively calls for the U.S. to take an aggressive interventionist stance in Latin America under the guise of protecting the United States’ national security and economic interests in the region.

Andrew, from your perspective, what more should we understand about what the United States is doing in Brazil and kind of the wider context of the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America over the last two years?

AF: It’s pretty simple. They are fighting the Cold War against China in Latin America, just like they used to do against the Soviets. As part of that war, they are aligning with far-right upstart leaders that are seen as anti-establishment, even though they’re usually tied to billionaires or even billionaires themselves, like in Ecuador.

There’s this weird coincidence with all of them that they almost all have connections to organized drug trafficking. They’re almost all known drug smugglers or connected to them or have some sort of financial relations. While they’re doing that, they’re arguing that “We are working together with these local governments in South and Latin America to fight drug trafficking,” which is obviously a farce.

That’s what they did in Ecuador. The president of Ecuador, Noboa, he’s the son of a banana dynasty that does a lot of exporting bananas, and in those crates of bananas, they’ve also been known to export a lot of kilos of cocaine. Their allies in Colombia have always been this way, and the things that they’re doing in Bolivia, it’s the exact same thing. The [Bolivian] attorney general who was trying to push back against the corruption of this right-wing government that has allied with Trump, well Trump and Rubio came in and said listen, you need to go after this attorney general and get rid of him. So he was arrested because he was going after their allies.

They don’t care about drug trafficking, obviously. The U.S. government never cared about drugs. It’s always been a weapon or a tool for them. So they’re aligning with these people to create this lockstep union that they’re calling the “Shield of the Americas.” It’s this new alliance that they’re using instead of the existing, the U.N. or other mechanisms. They’re creating all their own, just like they did with the “Board of Peace.” They’re working to make sure that those economies just stay in their sphere of influence just a little bit longer.

They know that China’s winning. China is the main trade partner with all of these countries now. They’re Brazil’s biggest trade partner. The United States cannot absorb all of the exports that Brazil produces that goes to China. They’re not going to get Brazil to stop trading with China or stop having relations with China. They compete on corn and ethanol and soy exports. They can’t absorb what China’s buying.

“They’re really just trying to buy a little bit more time as their empire is slowly waning, but at the cost of what?”

They’re really just trying to buy a little bit more time as their empire is slowly waning, but at the cost of what? At the cost of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of lives? It’s not clear what the indirect results of this will be. At the cost of destroying the democratic institutions in these countries that are already, many of them struggling and teetering, and potentially at the cost of massive ecological devastation, as would be the case in the collapse of the Amazon under a Bolsonaro government?

It’s uplifting, right?

JW: Very uplifting. That is my first word that comes to mind. You’ve pointed out everything that Donald Trump is doing, but we also know that tech oligarchs are involved as well. Tech tycoons like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have taken a massive interest in Latin American politics.

What impact do you think that is having on the rightward shift we’re seeing throughout the Americas?

AF: Oh, big time. Big time. I think the biggest tycoon that’s most in the news lately is Mark Zuckerberg. He’s the guy who runs Meta. Something like 99 percent of people in Brazil use WhatsApp as their primary form of communication.

The idea of sending a text message in Brazil is like, “What are you, some sort of barbarian? What decade is this?” People only use WhatsApp. And for a lot of people, you get a cheap phone, and you get a prepaid phone plan because they didn’t have net neutrality like it was passed in the U.S. It’ll come with free credits for WhatsApp and Facebook, and it’ll come preinstalled on the phone even, and it’s part of the plan.

So for a lot of people, Facebook for many years and WhatsApp were the internet. Now Instagram as well. Instagram is really the main tool of political communication at this point. As we know, [it is] highly censored. You guys saw recently at the No Kings protests what Meta can do if it just decides to suddenly have a technical error that they fail to fix for eight hours.

That’s what they’ve been doing in Brazil for months now. So you have a young right-wing member of Congress named Nikolas Ferreira. He comes from a right-wing evangelical church, and he’s very charismatic, and he’s really good on social media, and he’s got something like 22 million followers or something. Brazil has 214 million people.

When Lula was having this dispute a year or two ago with foreign tech interests, including Meta’s interests, Nikolas Ferreira planted this fake news that Lula was trying to tax the main financial instrument that people use called Pix. It’s this free instant cash transfers that you can do that’s created by the central bank, and everyone loves it. Trump hates it because it competes against Mastercard and Visa.

So [Ferreira] created this fake news that what Lula was trying to do was tax all transactions and so therefore you were just going to get taxed even more, and you, the poor working man, was going to get screwed. In reality, there was no tax involved, and it was an anti-money laundering initiative that any transactions over 1,000 reais [Editor’s note: 5,000 Brazilian reais] would be immediately reported so they can trace questions of money laundering, which is a huge problem in Brazil.

That video was seen, the last time I checked, over 300 million times in a country that has 214 million people, and not all of them are on Instagram. That’s just Instagram — not including the other social networks. And in the last few weeks of the election, Nikolas Ferreira’s account has had greater engagement and views than every global celebrity you can name. I don’t know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but three times more than Beyoncé. Just think of the most famous person that you can think of in the world and their account, and Nikolas Ferreira — who you hadn’t heard of until I said his name just now — is crushing them.

“Just think of the most famous person that you can think of in the world and their account, and Nikolas Ferreira — who you hadn’t heard of until I said his name just now — is crushing them.”

That’s being seen as probable algorithmic manipulation by Meta in favor of the right-wing movement. OK, that’s one example, we don’t have access to the algorithm, we can’t be sure about that. Well. if you go onto the Meta’s AI in WhatsApp, and you say, “Create me a political poster for Flávio, vote Flávio,” it’ll do vote Flávio, and they’ll use his election number, 22.

And you say, “Vote for a capybara, vote for a flamingo,” They’ll say, “Vote 22.” They’ll use Flávio’s number. And then if you say, “Do another poster, but say vote Lula,” it’ll say, “We can’t do that. That’s an election interference, and we’re not allowed to do that.” And say you just did it for Flávio,” and then the AI will be like, “Oh, you’re right. That’s a mistake.” But then it keeps happening, and it’s been happening for weeks now. People have been pointing it out for weeks.

They blocked Lula’s Meta account from being able to run paid ads like 10 days before the first round of the elections. They said, oh, that was a mistake. It was my bad. Lots of left-wing accounts have seen these weird number shifts.

So they’ll have, let’s say, 20,000 comments, but it’ll say zero shares, or the views will go down to zero, or people have been talking about, “My engagement just has been completely in the tank since this election has started.” Not everybody, but some people.

There’s all these pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Meta is interfering in this election, and they have every incentive to do so. They will have a much better regulatory environment if Flávio wins because of Flávio’s submissiveness to U.S. interests and his willingness to play ball with whatever Trump tells him to.

So that’s just one case. That’s just Mark Zuckerberg.

JW: Cutting in here, from the future. After our conversation with Andrew. We requested comment from Meta who sent a lengthy response, but in summary, they said, “Each of the incidents cited by Lula’s campaign has a straightforward, documented explanation. … None reflects political targeting. None reflects manipulated distribution. None reflects an effort to influence the election.”

Meta said Lula’s campaign ad account was disabled for one hour by mistake, not for political reasons. The company also claimed that issues with ad creation and video view count were global errors, and not politically motivated.

On Monday, a Brazilian court gave Meta 24 hours to prove that it was not favoring Flávio Bolsonaro over President Lula in its feeds, or it would face an escalating fine. This comes after that same judge ruled that while he could not find evidence of deliberate interference, the company had 24 hours to prove that the issues affecting the Lula campaign were solved and would not reoccur.

OK, now back to Andrew.

AF: Elon’s coming down here. Peter Thiel was just down in Argentina to hang out with Javier Milei, who’s the president who’s been destroying the economy and businesses are shuttering, unemployment’s up, costs of living have gone through the roof, but he’s this anarcho-capitalist, hyper-libertarian that’s just been cutting everything with a literal chainsaw. He came on stage with a chainsaw saying, just like Elon Musk did, I’m going to cut through all the regulations and the red tape.

That’s what they want, and Flávio Bolsonaro said, I’m going to do that. I want to follow the Milei model. In the last debate that they had, the first debate, which was just the other night, Lula asked Flávio about this: Are you going to be Milei?

He was just sort of refusing to answer the question. Eventually OK, what model are you going to follow? [Lula] said, I’m going to follow the Lula model, the one that I’ve been doing that’s been working. What are you going to do? Answer the question. But, outside of that debate, [Flávio] had been saying that he loves Milei.

Milei gave him an official endorsement, just like Benjamin Netanyahu did an official endorsement for Flávio, which is something that doesn’t happen in international relations. Foreign leaders just as a matter of course don’t endorse a candidate in a foreign election. So they’re being very overt in this, and they’re all working together with their billionaire buddies who have controls over huge levers of power in Brazil because of how Big Techs work in the world.

That’s one of the main issues for leftist voters in Brazil right now. They want sovereignty for their country. They want Brazil to be able to govern Brazil under Brazilian law and have control over Brazil to serve Brazilian interests.

Flávio Bolsonaro does not care about that. Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg do not want that because it would be a limitation on their ability to exert power in Brazil and in the world. They don’t want it to be a model for the rest of the world.

“That’s one of the main issues for leftist voters in Brazil right now. They want sovereignty for their country.”

JW: Listening to everything you’re saying, obviously, we’re not going to fix the issue of tech oligarchs meddling in foreign elections by Sunday. But are there any final thoughts that you have just about this election?

AF: I would say that this election is so important and relevant for the United States and for the world. For many years, there’s been this concept called the Brazilification of the United States.

Brazil wants to become, or, people that vote for Flávio at least, they want Brazil to become the United States. They see the U.S. as the country where everything works, where everything is perfect and goes well, and they don’t see all the bad stuff that listeners and readers of The Intercept know all about far too well.

But in reality, it’s not that Brazil is becoming more like the United States, it’s that the United States is becoming more like Brazil.

The middle class is getting squeezed and disappearing. In Brazil, 90 percent of the country makes $1,200 or less a month. The middle class would be considered extremely poor by U.S. standards, and what it does exist of a U.S.-style middle class is just teeny-tiny. You have just shrinking spheres of democracy, while oligarchs have increasing power and control and are able to do what they want and insist on decisions for the country that are bad for the society, bad for all of the society and the people, but good for their individual interests.

It’s just this more polarized, divided, K-shape economies, what you guys call it in the U.S. That’s where things are going. So you should really pay attention to this Brazilian election because the things that are happening here and the things that are going to happen in the next few days are very likely to be happening in the United States in the near future, if they’re not already happening.

JW: The Brazilification of the United States is a really good way to put it. I think so often people in the U.S., and, I can include myself, we think about the impact that the United States has on other countries, but we rarely think about the mutual shared relationships and larger shared ideas that people have between countries, between continents. So I think that’s a really good point.

We’re going to have to leave it there, but Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Andrew Fishman’s reporting at The Intercept Brasil.

AF: Thank you. Keep up the good work.

JW: That does it for this episode.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor.

Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Stakes of Brazil’s Presidential Election appeared first on The Intercept.

DHS Was Designed as a Weapon

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

A fresh wave of outrage over the Trump administration’s use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has surged after two high-profile events involving ICE in the span of a week: the shooting of a young father in New York City last Thursday, and the Monday morning Homeland Security Investigations raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home.

Reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests that the raid was a part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to strip the Minnesota Democrat of her U.S. citizenship. Omar arrived in the United States as a child refugee from Somalia and became a naturalized citizen in 2000, long before the start of her political career. The outspoken progressive congresswoman has since become a foe of President Donald Trump; in a statement, her spokesperson condemned the raid on her home as “an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.”

Omar’s House colleague, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., argues this sort of weaponization is an inherent feature of the Department of Homeland Security, which was established in 2003 as part of the George W. Bush administration’s mounting war on terror. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Ramirez about a new bill she introduced on Tuesday to abolish DHS and what the raid on Omar’s home reveals about the department.

“The Department of Homeland Security cannot be reformed. It should be dismantled,” said Ramirez. “What they did — just three weeks from an election — was to attempt to create such paralysis on everyday people. … If they can do this to one of my colleagues, they can do that to anyone. And it should concern everyone.”

Washington also speaks with Rozina Ali — a journalist covering the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, South Asia, and literature — and Will Sommer, a senior reporter covering right-wing media and conspiracy theories at The Bulwark.

Ali and Sommer unpack the role of conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim propaganda in the attacks on Omar, and how DHS has been historically weaponized against Muslims in the United States.

“Over the last 30 years, we have been conditioned to believe that Muslims, and now more broadly immigrants, are not just a threat to national security, but a threat to the American way of life,” said Ali.

“The right has been really eager to denaturalize Ilhan Omar for really going back a decade almost to the first Trump administration,” said Sommer. He called the investigation into Omar “one of the most striking examples we’ve seen of how the Trump administration is willing to use law enforcement to achieve its political aims and to sort of threaten its enemies.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. On Monday, Homeland Security Investigation agents searched the home of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Reporting from the Washington Post suggests that the probe centers on allegations that Omar’s late father lied on immigration paperwork decades ago when Omar was a teenager.

According to a source familiar with the case who spoke to the paper, the Department of Homeland Security had previously declined to move ahead with an investigation years prior based on similar allegations. There still weren’t many details out as of Wednesday. The Department of Justice has vaguely described a “federal criminal investigation,” but Omar has long been a political foe of President Donald Trump.

In a statement to The Intercept, Omar called the raid “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” The raid on Omar’s home comes days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck in New York City, with his 5-year-old son in the back seat.

The incidents have reignited concerns about the violent weaponization of the Department of Homeland Security by President Donald Trump against immigrants and the administration’s perceived political enemies.

The group Democracy Defenders Fund filed a complaint over the raid on Tuesday, arguing it violates the Hatch Act, a federal law that restricts political activity by members of the government’s executive branch. With early voting in Minnesota scheduled to start Friday, the group says the raid “appears to be timed to influence voters in the upcoming midterm election.”

Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced a new bill this week to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and abolish immigrant detention in the United States. I’m speaking to her on Wednesday, October 14. Congresswoman Ramirez, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing.

Rep. Delia Ramirez: Oh, happy to be on.

JW: First, I wanna get your reaction to the Homeland Security Investigation search of Representative Ilhan Omar’s home on Monday. Were you surprised by the news? And what do you think it tells us about how the Department of Homeland Security is operating under President Donald Trump?

DR: I’m gonna tell you that, unfortunately, I’m not surprised by what happened — but it is still bone-chilling.

You’re talking about a department that was created to have full authority to violate civil rights every single day, now weaponized against a sitting member of Congress — sending, I don’t know, 20 HSI agents into her home at 4:30 in the morning.

Cruelty, complete control, and authoritarianism, and demonstrating their ability to get away with whatever they think they can, was the point of what they just did.

And it is clearly the embodiment of abuse of power. But it also shows us exactly why the Department of Homeland Security cannot be reformed. It should be dismantled. And that what they did — just three weeks from an election — was to attempt to create such paralysis on everyday people to believe that if they can do this to one of my colleagues, that they can do that to anyone. And it should concern everyone.

“Demonstrating their ability to get away with whatever they think they can, was the point of what they just did.”

Anyone that cares deeply about our democracy, about our ability to exercise our freedom of speech, or to be protected from being harmed by the federal government should see what is happening to my colleague Ilhan Omar as a clear indicator that this could also happen to them, if we don’t stop them.

And that justice is not just that she gets her phone back, or they leave her alone. Justice is holding accountable the leadership that made that terrorizing experience for Ilhan happen.

JW: Speaking of stopping them, I want to get into the bill that you introduced on Tuesday, the Reimagining Safety Act, which would abolish the Department of Homeland Security, eliminate all immigrant detention, and repeal “duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws.”

Now, there has been some forward momentum on the movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at least from progressives — but this bill would get rid of all of DHS. Can you talk about how that would work and why, in your opinion, it’s not enough to just abolish ICE?

DR: I just mentioned to you what’s happening to Congresswoman Omar, and to me, it’s a clear indicator of the greatest threat to our security: It’s not immigrants; it’s the Department of Homeland Security.

And I know that a lot of people say, DHS is “rogue,” we need to address this “rogue” organization. But it’s not rogue. I wanna be clear with people. DHS did not exist my entire lifetime. As a matter of fact, it’s been operating less than 23 years. And it was built exactly to do what it’s doing right now: to violate our rights under pretense of securing our safety, and it’s been, in fact, empowered to act with impunity, which is why people keep saying like, “How can they possibly get away with what they’re doing, and why can’t Congress stop them?”

Because frankly, since its inception, DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute people that they consider the public enemy. And we know that fascism always requires a public enemy. Muslim Americans, Latinos, Haitians, protesters. DHS has never kept us safe. And 24 years ago, Americans, Republicans, and Democrats alike, let’s be clear, raised a flag about how DHS would constitute unprecedented consolidation of power, and yet this agency was still formed under the United States Congress.

“The greatest threat to our security is not immigrants; it’s the Department of Homeland Security.”

DHS has been a problem of the administration for its entirety. And administration after administration has demonstrated to us that this agency needs to be completely dismantled piece by piece. And when you have people like Donald Trump with very authoritarian tendencies, you have clearly seen what they’re capable of doing. And frankly, I don’t think we’ve seen the full extent of what they could do.

So this is a moment for us to ask ourselves: What kind of world do we wanna live in? And do we want to continue to live with the fear that this agency can be weaponized against you, to persecute you, to arrest you, to detain you, to denaturalize you, to attempt to question your own citizenship, to kill you?

And at the same time, ask ourselves: If FEMA and TSA and cybersecurity and the Coast Guard and other critical programs are important for us, how can we allow them to be politicized by this agency that constantly keeps taking away the resources that these critical programs need? And so for me, this is the moment that we don’t just abolish ICE or abolish CBP — we take on the institution that was created to allow ICE and CBP to operate in the way that it does.

“Do we want to continue to live with the fear that this agency can be weaponized against you, to persecute you, to arrest you, to detain you, to denaturalize you, to attempt to question your own citizenship, to kill you?”

JW: To your point, there are all of these other functions of the Department of Homeland Security, from federal disaster relief to TSA screenings to customs enforcement. What happens to all those other functions if DHS is dismantled?

DR: I’m glad you asked me that question ’cause people keep saying, “Do you not care about FEMA?” Actually, because I care about FEMA, I want to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.

H.R. 10803, the Reimagining Safety Act, it’s a first of its kind bill, and for the very first time, it’s a bill that community stakeholders spent months designing a Cabinet-level department. Because the Reimagining Safety Act would actually establish another department, the Department of Community Safety, that in fact is about protecting our communities.

It would dismantle DHS by preserving the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — we call it CISA, that was created under the Department of Homeland Security; protecting and expanding the Federal Emergency Management Agency; protecting and redirecting the Transportation Security Agency and custom functions into the Department of Transportation; while abolishing ICE and CBP and reinvesting funds in community.

And, certainly, I think the other piece of that is the surveillance: limiting government surveillance and reining in the unlawful abuses of data and curb the militarized enforcement that you’re seeing under DHS while beginning the process of taking what we call USCIS, that’s also under the Department of Homeland Security, and establishing it as its own separate civil immigration system that no longer operates under this agency that could call Renee Good, Alex Pretti, or Silverio Villegas terrorists.

JW: Thinking about your bill — obviously, Republicans currently control every lever of power, and only a handful of Democrats support abolishing ICE, and fewer still have called to abolish the Department of Homeland Security. Why introduce this bill now, knowing that it likely can’t pass this current Congress, much less get signed by President Donald Trump?

DR: Every single issue, whether it’s talking about universal healthcare, Medicare for All, whether it’s talking about raising wages — and now I introduced Living Wage for All — or blocking bombs and ending endless wars, oftentimes the assumption has been it is too early, or Republicans control, or Democrats have not arrived.

The people have arrived to where we are. They believe that this agency is the biggest threat to their well-being. And for me, this is an opportunity to provide a roadmap on how we actually in fact address the problem and then create a solution that centers people’s safety — and not just rhetoric of protecting the homeland under the guise of protecting us from terrorism, so that they can terrorize us.

Jessica, I am clear that this bill is not gonna pass overnight, but I am also clear that our community expects for us to propose something that is tangible, something that is comprehensive, and something that gets to the root of the problem by creating a permanent solution, so that we’re never here again.

“Our community expects for us to propose something that is tangible … that gets to the root of the problem.”

That means that over the next few months, and perhaps over the next year, we are building the support and changing the conversation in such way where in the same way only nine or 10 of my colleagues were willing to, out loud, say “Abolish ICE” two months ago, now we have actually more like 45, 50 of them, that we are in the same place when we’re talking about reimagining safety in this country.

Furthermore, every single poll that you look at ICE, CBP, [ousted former CBP head Greg] Bovino, [ousted former DHS head Kristi] Noem, immigration enforcement, and the fear of surveillance and losing our civil rights is top concern for the American people.

I am providing a bill that begins to respond to what our communities are demanding. I’m hoping that Congress doesn’t continue to be behind the ball of what the people are asking of them. And now I’m giving them something that they could actually in fact use.

I wanna tell you too that, look, in 2002, people expressed concerns about DHS. And 25 years later, those warnings have been validated as we watch what they’re doing. It’s a weapon pointed at anyone that the state considers a public enemy, whether it’s Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, whether it’s Congresswoman Omar, or the millions of people in this precise moment that are living in fear because of the way that this agency was created.

I think this is also an opportunity, Jessica, for us to actually educate the world around the fact that DHS was not created as a Cabinet department from our Founding Fathers — that we were OK before 2003 without DHS, and we can live in a life without it as well.

“We were OK before 2003 without DHS, and we can live in a life without it as well.”

JW: On the subject of looking to the future, if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterms, I’m curious what else you’re thinking about in terms of reining in DHS, and if you have any other priorities for the next session.

DR: Let me just come back to this bill, ’cause I think it’s really important — my own bottom line on it. The Reimagining Safety Act takes apart DHS and creates a new agency, a new agency that responds to what people are asking for — for we the people that they’ve elected to represent them, to keep them safe, to protect the mission of community safety, and to protect the public.

And it means that dismantling DHS is doing the work Congress should have done actually 24 years ago, to actually look at these agencies, all agencies under this department, but also how DOJ has been weaponized against us. How we created a Department of War. Just think about that: We’ve created a department where we want to spend more money on war than we want to actually spend on housing, on healthcare, on wages, and on infrastructure.

So for me, this is a moment for us to actually demonstrate that we’re going to fight like hell for accountability, to take on corruption, to end the terror, while also creating tangible ways to address the issues.

And one of those, and I’m going to be introducing a resolution [Thursday] around what should our positioning be when it comes to immigration. Because this agency is about what is wrong and what needs to stop so that we can actually have safety, but then we also need to talk about how we restore our systems of asylum, how we actually in fact establish legal pathways, and how do we bring 11 million people who are in fear, in the shadows, crying daily, to finally come out of the shadows into a justice status.

I am gonna be working really hard to make that front and center with our leadership, and I’m disappointed that our leadership isn’t centering that as one of the very first things that they wanna work on in the first 100 days. Because unfortunately, that is telling the people that have been under siege by this administration: Being an immigrant or being brown or being a protester isn’t the top priority of people that need to be protected.

When our leadership is talking about first 100 days of many important things, but not a word around immigration, and not a word around real accountability to what has happened under ICE and CBP.

JW: Thank you, Congresswoman. We’re gonna leave it there, but people can read more about your bill, the Reimagining Safety Act, at theintercept.com, where we have a story out about it. And thank you so much for joining The Intercept Briefing.

DR: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jessica Washington: Next, I speak with Rozina Ali, a journalist covering the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, South Asia, and literature; and Will Sommer, a senior reporter covering right-wing media and conspiracy theories at The Bulwark. Will, welcome to the Intercept Briefing, and Rozina, welcome back.

Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.

Rozina Ali: Thank you so much for having us.

JW: Rozina, I want to start with you. In your new book, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America,” you discuss the history of how immigration enforcement has been weaponized against Muslims in the United States. And while I want to preface by saying that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the raid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s home, we do know that Omar is outspoken, Muslim, Black, and an immigrant. She’s also been a consistent target of Trump and his allies.

How might this relate to the broader history of how the Department of Homeland Security has been weaponized against Muslims in the United States?

RA: Well, I really appreciate this question. There’s a very long history when it comes to using immigration enforcement to target Muslims and the Muslim community in the United States, and I just wanna go back a little bit before 9/11 to the late 1990s.

One thing that was happening was the use of secret evidence against Muslim immigrants, a lot of Arabs and South Asians, and a lot of Muslim immigrants, to, essentially, detain them and deport them. And what that meant was actually using classified evidence that the government brought forward that the defendant could not see.

And it actually kind of reminds me of what’s happening with Ilhan Omar now, is that we don’t actually know what the allegations are. We don’t know what the case is hinged on.

What the DHS did after 9/11 was actually broaden out its use of immigration enforcement to target Muslim communities. One of the things it did was actually institute a registry called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. That essentially allowed the U.S. government to detain thousands of Muslim immigrants and eventually deport them — even though they had no criminal charges.

One of the things that protects Ilhan Omar is that she is a U.S. citizen, but one of the things that does chill me is there is this longer, broader history of the government using immigration enforcement in order to deport people and detain people, even if they have not been guilty of any criminal charges.

JW: That makes a lot of sense, the concern, because we know there’s history of this power being used in secretive ways, kind of similar to what’s potentially happening now. And I do, again, want to caution that we do not have all the details on this case at the moment. But Will, I wanted to bring you in to kind of get into the origins at least where some of these conspiracy theories that have been swirling around Congresswoman Omar.

You wrote about this in September, kind of where you found that many in MAGA world were frustrated that after nearly a decade of conspiracy theories — some of which were pushed by Trump about alleged immigration fraud from Omar — she remains not only in the United States, but in Congress.

Will, can you explain some of the conspiracy theories that are fueling this push to deport Omar? Is there any evidence for them? And do we know if they had anything to do with the raid on her home?

WS: The right has been really eager to denaturalize Ilhan Omar for really going back a decade, almost to the first Trump administration. A lot of it was fueled by this idea that she had married her brother as some kind of immigration scheme, or essentially that this man she was married to was secretly her brother.

Now, I looked into the origins of this at the time. I thought, “Well, is this true? Could it be?” No, it’s not. In fact, it all started on some random kinda Somali Minnesotan message board where someone said, “Yeah, she’s married to her brother.” And then from there, once she became more prominent as a Democratic figure, people on the right kinda dug through that and sort of built this whole conspiracy theory based off of this one post.

Essentially, now that Trump is back in power, there’s this demand on the right because, as with other conspiracy theories, they’ve come to believe this. So they’re saying, you know, “Oh man, when are we finally gonna deport Ilhan Omar?” So Markwayne Mullin, the head of DHS, has been under this pressure, and he gave this interview at the Republican convention to [right-wing YouTuber] Benny Johnson, and he said, “Oh yeah, she married her brother.”

And Benny Johnson said, “Well, OK. Are you gonna deport her?” Now, you kinda can’t deport her anyway, even if she had married her brother. But there’s all this demand. And so what we’re seeing with this latest investigation is it’s not even related to the brother thing, reportedly. It’s — according to the Washington Post and some other outlets — related to this idea that Ilhan Omar’s father, who is dead now, misstated her age on a citizenship application.

Essentially, she was 17, according to the official record. But had she been a year older, 18, it would’ve kind of complicate it because she would’ve been an adult. It would’ve made it harder for her to get citizenship. This is this idea that’s been pushed by her Republican opponents in elections in the past. It’s really thin, and we can kinda get into it in a second. But this is some thin gruel, essentially, that they’re trying to manufacture this whole effort to pull her citizenship.

JW: I really wanna get more into the conspiracy theory of it and what’s being pushed here. And I think it’s interesting that it’s almost like they’re kind of grasping at any little thing they can get their hands on.

At first, it’s the brother-marriage of it all, which, as you pointed out, has very thin evidence, essentially no evidence. And then it’s pulling at these other threads about her dad, which have all been swirling in the ecosystem for a while.

I want to get a little bit deeper into what conspiracy theories, what role they have here, and I want to talk about what Donald Trump said on Monday night after the raid. He spoke at an Ohio rally pushing more conspiracy theories about Rep. Ilhan Omar and the Somali community in Minnesota in general. Let’s hear that clip now.

Trump: Just look at what’s happening in the once great state of Minnesota. What a mess they have done. Somalia, wonderful, wonderful. And that Ilhan, somebody was asking me, I don’t know what they’re doing with her, but I can tell you this: She’s a disaster. She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military, without — all they do is shoot each other. And she comes into our country, and she says, “I have a constitutional right.” She’s got a constitutional right. She’s telling us about the Constitution, and she comes from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet. Last week, savage Somali gang members shot two people in the high school parking lot in the middle of a football game. Just days later, a few miles away, the FBI arrested a radicalized Somalian who was planning to carry out an ISIS-style terrorist attack at the Mall of America, aiming to kill as many as possible, in his words. This is not what we want in this country.

Crowd: Deport! Deport! Deport! Deport!

Trump: What they have done to Minnesota.

JW: Rozina, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the administration spread conspiracy theories about Muslims. Ahead of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, for example, we heard similar rhetoric about the Somali community. What role have conspiracy theories played in the targeting of Muslims in the United States?

RA: Oh, where to start?

JW: Yeah, there’s a lot.

RA: There is a lot. I think one of the most enduring theories of Muslim communities is that there are radical elements that are living among Muslim neighborhoods, among Muslim communities. And that is a conspiracy theory born out of, obviously, the war on terror framework.

But one of the things that we saw in the aughts, especially under the Obama administration and especially as Trump rose in power, was this notion that Muslims, not just foreign elements, but Muslims living inside the United States are secretly hiding their agenda.

And this is something that we hear with regards to Abdul El-Sayed, that basically any Muslim that you meet is hiding a secret agenda, and what they wanna do is enact Sharia law in the United States. No one has yet to explain what Sharia law means and what that would mean to enact it, but this is one of the things that keeps coming up over and over again.

What is so interesting about this speech that Trump made recently is that he is actually throwing every theory against the wall that he can. That he mentions ISIS — something we haven’t heard for a long time. He mentions radicalization. He mentions fraud. And so all of these things that have been talking points that have been used against Muslim communities, particularly against the Somali community in Minnesota, he is using all at once in this one speech.

“What is so interesting about this speech that Trump made recently is that he is actually throwing every theory against the wall that he can.”

I will say, this is also the talking points — well, fraud is a new one — but when it comes to radicalization and when it comes to the notion of radical elements threatening the security and Western way of life of the United States, these are talking points he was peddling back in 2015 when he eventually called for a Muslim ban.

As we may remember, one of his first executive orders when he became president in January 2017 was to sign an executive order banning immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.

This is actually something that we see Donald Trump doing a lot, which is, he peddles conspiracy theories. He puts them on the main stage. His allies reinforce them and regurgitate them, and he gives them legitimacy, right? He legitimizes them by using a government framework to offer some veneer of truth to them. And unfortunately, as we know, one iteration of the Muslim ban was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court.

JW: As Rozina said, fraud is kind of a newer iteration of these kind of Muslim conspiracy theories. Where did it originate from, and why has it become such a powerful talking point on the right when targeting particularly the Somali community in Minnesota?

WS: I should say: Minnesota has a very — despite being a Democratic state — it has a very intense Republican activist and kind of like quasi-journalist scene going on. And so a lot of that has been built around, again, building, talking about Ilhan Omar. And now we’ve seen it kinda going after the Somali community in various ways.

But really, this hit a new level in January with this young man named Nick Shirley, who’s like a YouTuber. He went around, he was led around by one of these Minnesota conservative journalist types to various daycares, and they said,”Look at the fraud here.”

Now look, there are some criminal fraud cases that are being prosecuted in Minnesota. But there was this broader sense created by this video of, like the Somali community are parasitic, that they’re up to no good, they’re stealing all this money, what have you.

And then in fact, that helped justify then — at least in the view of the Trump administration — the ICE surge into Minneapolis. And so this has created this idea of constant Somali American fraud, not just in Minnesota, but all over the place. And so obviously it dovetails with the Ilhan Omar idea as well, that she forged her citizenship, she somehow faked that.

JW: That makes a lot of sense. It is really interesting to see the way the administration targeted Minnesota, both because of the Somali community, which was particularly vulnerable, because as we’ve mentioned this is both a Black, immigrant, and Muslim community, so this trifecta of areas that the Trump administration is targeting. And then also you had Ilhan Omar, who was this image that the administration could attack and go after, and it was really popular to their base to do so.

Rozina, when we’re talking about the stories that kind of stick when it comes to conspiracy theories, what sort of stuff has really stuck and why? I’m curious to understand why in the imagination of so many people in the U.S. these conspiracy theories have really stuck.

RA: I think one of the most enduring theories that keeps coming up over and over again and that really has stuck is this notion that, as I mentioned, that Muslims have nefarious secret agendas, but also that they have ties to foreign organizations and foreign elements.

And one of the things that we hear with regards to Ilhan Omar, too, is that — and I think I’ve heard this from some right-wing talking points in the previous days — is that there might be allegations that she has some financial ties or connections to foreign groups. This is something we have heard about Zohran Mandani. This is something we have heard about Abdul El-Sayed. This is actually something that has been a part of the American narrative about Muslims for decades.

One of the crucial things that was happening in the ’90s was that the U.S. government was looking for financial ties to foreign organizations among the Muslim community. And one of the things that happened immediately after 9/11 was that the United States government shut down the biggest Muslim charity in the United States, called the Holy Land Foundation, because of alleged nefarious ties to militant groups abroad.

Because there has been a government framework for this, I think it is really easy for a lot of conspiracy theorists and for a lot of Islamophobes, frankly, to keep regurgitating this notion that “just look at the financial ties of Muslims.” And one of the lasting shifts that we have seen in the last 25 years is that that scrutiny is not just against Muslim immigrants or visa holders, but also against Muslim Americans and citizens of the United States. And I don’t think we’re actually going to be able to break out of those conspiracy theories so easily if we don’t actually start discussing and reckoning with how we think about what terrorism is.

So for example, with the Holy Land Foundation case, that is a case that keeps coming up over and over again. A lot of those ties, financial ties, it’s a really complicated case, but a lot of those financial ties were related to Hamas, but it’s also relevant to remember that Hamas at the time was a governing body in Gaza that was supplying aid to people.

And essentially, the way we talk about terrorism, the way we talk about countries abroad, has a real impact for how we think about the Muslim community at home. So I just wanna go back to Abdul El-Sayed for just really quickly, is that one of the biggest talking points peddled against him these days is that his mother is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, there’s very little understanding of what it had meant to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, right? Because we just see that through the lens of terrorism, it’s completely dismissing all the political dynamics on the ground in those countries abroad. And I think what a lot of conspiracy theorists and Islamophobes have done so effectively is forever tie Muslim communities in the U.S. to what Americans largely think of as nefarious elements in other countries.

JW: I think that’s all really important, recognizing, to your point, that none of these conspiracy theories — I mean, again, they had taken new iterations — but that conspiracy theories against Muslims in the United States is not a new phenomenon. I guess I am curious if we’re moving into a new phase though, of danger, essentially, from the administration.

Will, coming back to your September piece, in it you compare the calls to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar to the Department of Justice’s attempts at convicting the president’s political enemies. And those have, for the most part failed, in terms of getting these convictions, “locking up” his enemies, as he’s said he wants to do.

Does this raid of a sitting congresswoman’s home signal a new, more dangerous era from the White House when it comes to threats against the administration’s perceived political enemies? Are we entering a new, more dangerous phase?

WS: I think the raid represents sort of the confluence of two alarming trends. One is what we’ve been talking about, which is the growing, second tide of Islamophobia that we’re seeing from this administration, that I think was sort of on the back burner as there was so much promotion on the right about fears about immigration from Latin America. Now, we see in Texas there’s so much anger at Muslim communities in that area in particular.

We’re also seeing though, as you said, the politicization of the Justice Department. I mean, this raid falls within the 60 days. Typically, the DOJ doesn’t raid politicians this close to an election, particularly something that’s about a 30-years-old child immigration case. Clearly, it’s political. It’s an attempt to make Ilhan Omar the face of the Democratic Party, suggest all this fraud.

Look, a lot of those attacks, those political lawfare, what have you, is related to Israel and Palestine, people like Fergie Chambers, Max Blumenthal, have either faced indictments or had their devices seized, in Max Blumenthal’s case. Certainly a lot of it aimed at campus activists as well.

I think the Ilhan Omar thing is really one of the most striking examples we’ve seen of how the Trump administration is willing to use law enforcement to achieve its political aims and to threaten its enemies.

“The Ilhan Omar [raid] is one of the most striking examples we’ve seen of how the Trump administration is willing to use law enforcement to achieve its political aims and threaten its enemies.”

JW: You mentioned that post-Watergate 60-day rule, which is an unwritten policy designating a blackout period effectively before elections during which the Department of Justice is not supposed to conduct activity which could influence voters. There’s also the Hatch Act, which states that government employees cannot use their authority or influence to interfere with or affect an election. There was actually a Hatch Act complaint filed yesterday by a watchdog group over the raid on Ilhan Omar’s house.

At this point, Will, with an administration that has already done so much over the years without consequence, does the Hatch Act and do these other kind of long-standing norms serve any purpose or any protection?

WS: No. At this point, unfortunately, I think the Hatch Act is a dead letter in terms of, no one’s gonna enforce it, at least until Democrats retake some kind of power. Look, the administration is using government money to buy political ads, outright political ads. And so certainly, I think they’re going to unfortunately be able to get away with things like raiding a congresswoman’s house.

I think really it’s just become, the idea that they would use Justice Department or DHS to achieve political aims is just understood now that that’s something Trump is gonna do.

JW: And Rozina, from your perspective, does this raid to you signal a kind of new, more dangerous era, for not just the president’s political enemies, but also disfavored groups?

RA: Yeah, I want to just go back specifically to the Somali community living in the United States. It is telling that President Trump disparaged the country of Somalia as he also bombs this country with hundreds of airstrikes in the past year alone, displacing more people and causing more people to search for refuge abroad.

We mentioned the ICE Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota last December. Trump was talking about the Somali community in Minnesota, and ostensibly fraud was the reason, one of the reasons, for which he sent ICE agents into the city.

One of the things that the government learned very quickly was that a lot of Somalis living in Minnesota are actually citizens. They are naturalized or that they were born here, and they could not be easily picked up and detained or deported, even though there were some who were. Yet what happened in the months after Operation Metro Surge was that it really chilled the Somali community living in the city. Even though there were so many people who did go out and protest and help each other, there were a lot who basically stayed at home. And I actually spoke with several people who would not leave their house for months.

Now, one of the things that really frightens me about what the DOJ and DHS did with regards to Ilhan Omar is that it is actually expanding the war against Somalis. It’s now seeing ways in which to not just frighten asylum-seekers and refugees and visa holders, but also naturalized citizens.

“What this administration has done so effectively is actually telling everyone that there are some communities who are no longer protected the way they used to be.”

And I think what this administration has done so effectively is actually telling everyone that there are some communities who are no longer protected the way they used to be. And we saw that also in the context of, for example, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and pro-Palestine protesters. We are seeing a level in which government is used to target people who before would have protections from the government, and now they are being told that they are actually vulnerable.

And Ilhan Omar, it’s possible that nothing comes of this raid, and things will just go back to normal. But what worries me is the larger chilling effect on the community, including now naturalized citizens.

JW: Trump aside, the Trump administration aside, Rozina, is this just the logical endpoint of effectively decades of crafting a federal domestic surveillance and police state that is laser-focused on immigrants and Muslim Americans?

RA: Yes, it is, right? One of the things that has happened over the 20, or last 25 years has been one immense power that has been concentrated in the executive branch. This notion that when it comes to national security, the government has a lot of leeway to violate people’s civil rights But the other thing — one of the other enduring legacies of the last 30 years — is precisely what the American public is willing to accept.

“We have been conditioned to believe that Muslims … are not just a threat to national security, but a threat to American way of life.”

And over the last 30 years, we have been conditioned to believe that Muslims, and now more broadly immigrants, are not just a threat to national security, but a threat to American way of life.

And again, Trump is able to throw everything — when it comes to Ilhan Omar and the Somali community — throw everything at them. They’re a threat to national security. They are threatening how we live in this country. They are threatening what it means to be American. They are taking away our money and our dollars, and he is using all of these talking points to help build up public support for this agenda against the Somali community. I don’t think such a blatant targeting and explicit targeting would have been met with such support even in, for example, October or November 2001.

JW: I think those are all very good points. I hate when people say this is the only form of acceptable bigotry, because I can frankly say that there are many forms of acceptable bigotry. But the extent to which Islamophobia is a part of American culture is accepted, I think is not just troubling, it’s decades of conditioning, as you’ve pointed out. It is decades of feeding these conspiracy theories, of repeating them until they feel almost natural to so many of us.

But I want to give you both an opportunity to just share any final thoughts. Will, I want to start with you. Is there anything else that you’d wanna add?

WS: As this case goes forward, it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like. But the idea that Ilhan Omar lied about her birthday or whatever is all based on, there was this one congressional website that said she was born in 1981 instead of 1982. And so Republicans have seized on this. Look, it’s one website, right? I looked in the court records, all this stuff. Before she became famous, she was listing her birthday as 1982, all this stuff. And so if that’s gonna be the crux of it, that one website had a typo, I don’t think the administration’s gonna have a lot to run on here.

JW: There’s very thin evidence for some of these conspiracy theories, although people will take very thin evidence and run with them. Rozina, any final thoughts from you?

“What does this mean for denaturalization efforts across the board?”

RA: I agree with Will, I don’t think that the government has that much to go on. It seems to be very thin evidence. But again, it is government resources that are being used to basically go on a, what appears to be for right now, a witch hunt. But again, what worries me is the more lasting effects of this, which is, what does this mean for denaturalization efforts across the board? And there seems to be not just support for it, but also a deliberate desire to run with such an agenda.

JW: And we’re gonna leave it there. But Will, Rozina, thank you both so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

WS: Thank you.

RA: Thank you.

JW: That does it for this episode. We wanna hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-PODCAST. That’s 530-763-2278. This episode was produced by Andrew Stelzer. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer.

Ben Muessig is our editor in chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slipstream provided our theme music. This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.

Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or review. It helps other listeners find our reporting. Until next time.

The post DHS Was Designed as a Weapon appeared first on The Intercept.

Prediction Markets Have a Lock on the Midterms

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

As so-called prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket embed themselves in every aspect of our daily lives, from elections to sports and entertainment, concerns have grown about what the explosion of these poorly understood, loosely regulated platforms could mean for regular people and democracy writ large.

Celebrities from LeBron James to Sydney Sweeney have inked lucrative deals with prediction platforms. Legacy news outlets have even begun including prediction market data in their coverage. And the Trump family is deeply embedded in these platforms’ success; Donald Trump Jr.’s VC firm just became a lead investor in Polymarket, and he is a paid adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

But what actually is a prediction market, and what separates it from online sports betting platforms like DraftKings or FanDuel?

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Kate Knibbs — a senior writer at Wired who covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet — breaks down the battles to define prediction markets; what they’re getting away with in the meantime, while existing in this “weird” regulatory gray zone; and their potential to be a “disruptive force” in next month’s midterm elections.

States have been looking to regulate these platforms like they do sports gambling. But the companies are pushing back: The founders of Kalshi donated $200,000 to a new Texas-focused political action committee, a week after state lawmakers held hearings to investigate whether prediction markets constitute sports betting, which is illegal in Texas.

“Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight,” says Knibbs. “Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they’re currently not beholden to. … I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars.”

In addition to spending heavily on lobbying, their survival strategy includes inking deals with mainstream media companies like CNN, CNBC, and even Substack to establish credibility.

“I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it’s flown under the radar a little bit, while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what’s potentially happening in the world,” says Knibbs. “They are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they’ve managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: And I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: So Akela, we completely missed a major milestone for the Intercept Briefing.

AL: That’s right, we published 100 episodes — and technically this is our 102nd.

JW: I actually can’t believe how fast the time has flown. Thank you all so much for sticking with us every week. We genuinely and literally could not do this without you. Akela, what are you watching this week?

AL: The story that was all over my feed on Thursday morning was this bombshell report from the New York Times about how a senior adviser to U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, suppressed and distorted internal reports that were critical of Israel, including a report describing the dozens of Palestinians who were killed near food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation last summer. This reporting comes after the anniversary this week of the October 7 attacks in 2023.

There was also a lot of news in New York City where protesters met Mayor Zohran Mamdani at an October 7 vigil and were shouting him down, basically criticizing him over his administration’s inaction on different policies that are within his purview in terms of sticking to some of his campaign promises on Israel policy, including the sale of occupied land in the West Bank that occurs across New York City.

JW: Online, what I had really seen was a lot of misconstruing of what the protesters were actually doing there. A lot of people saying they were just upset about Mamdani’s October 7 post, where he both spoke about the loss of life in Israel and the people who were killed on October 7, but then also talked about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and about the long history that led to the point of October 7. So there were some who were saying that the protesters felt that he wasn’t deferential enough to Gaza protesters in that post. But obviously the reality, as you’ve pointed out, is that while there are, I’m sure, a myriad of reasons that people showed up that day, a lot of it had to do with actual policy disagreements.

Speaking of protest movements, in France, hundreds of thousands of protesters — including students, teachers, and union leaders — have taken to the streets to protest widespread education inequality. The protests began in the suburbs outside of Paris, which are plagued by deep racial and socioeconomic inequality.

Students say they’ve suffered significant neglect, from teacher shortages to crumbling infrastructure. As the protests continued, they’ve really been bolstered by union leaders and left-leaning politicians. Now, there have been accounts of violence from the police towards protesters, and thousands have been arrested. Another mass demonstration was held on Thursday as well.

It really made me think back to that Nikole Hannah-Jones essay in The New York Times from a few weeks ago, where she wrote about her own experience navigating our unequal education system in the U.S. as a parent. It’s been really interesting to read about the parallels in France to our domestic system, where we’re also currently seeing massive cuts to the education system, particularly for vulnerable communities in programs like Head Start, but also in college programs throughout the country that are seeing cuts in high schools.

So it’s interesting to see both those parallels and the anger we’re witnessing in France toward not just cuts, but the long-standing inequality that’s been present.

AL: That’s one of many issues that will be top of mind for voters as we get closer and closer to the midterm elections next month.

JW: We’re less than a month away from the midterms, and among this long, long, and growing list of concerns around election integrity, prediction markets have somehow made their way into the conversation. So while these markets are best known for users betting on sports, Kalshi and Polymarket users — and by the way, these are prediction market platforms — are also betting on election outcomes.

So a number of controversies have come up in the primaries related to these platforms. Both of these platforms have had to ask their paid influencers to remove misleading information on social media. I get into all of that and much, much more with Kate Knibbs, senior writer at WIRED. She covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet.

Kate, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Kate Knibbs: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: Kate, we wanted to speak to you today because prediction and betting markets appear to be everywhere these days. You can’t walk down a busy street without seeing an ad for one, or on TV, watching your favorite sport’s team. Celebrities are cashing in. NBA player, LeBron James has a major deal with Polymarket, the prediction platform. Actress Sydney Sweeney made waves with her ad promoting Novig, a sports prediction site. Prediction markets have become ubiquitous.

So to start, how are prediction markets being defined? How do they differ or not from sports betting and gambling, and how are they similar?

KK: OK, you’re starting off with a very hard question because—

JW: It’s a big question. [Laughter.]

KK: There’s this huge, ongoing, multifaceted legal battle happening in the United States right now to define prediction markets. So what the federal government and the prediction markets think is these are regulated financial instruments that are traded on regulated financial exchanges. This view of prediction markets perceives them as a cousin to traditional commodities exchanges — except instead of trading corn futures, you’re trading futures on who’s going to win the Super Bowl, who’s going to win the presidential election, whether Iran is going to nuke anyone.

“They want to commodify absolutely everything in the world.”

It’s just this idea that these are financial markets for anything. Kalshi actually means, I believe, “everything” in Arabic. And the idea behind the platform is that they want to commodify absolutely everything in the world.

Now, a lot of states have seen this and gone, “OK, wait, but you’re also allowing people to trade futures on the outcome of sports events. That’s just sports gambling, and we want the tax money. And we don’t think that the federal government should be able to just give you carte blanche to operate in our states without our permission, without you having to abide by state gambling laws.”

There’s honestly dozens and dozens of lawsuits to the point where I don’t have the exact figure. It’s upwards of 50. So at the moment, the status quo is that they’re “financial exchanges.” Whether that will change and they’ll be reclassified as gambling platforms remains to be seen and will likely go to the Supreme Court.

To make matters even more confusing — there are two main prediction markets right now, Kalshi and Polymarket. Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange in the United States. Polymarket has Polymarket U.S., which is a federally regulated exchange with the United States.

But Polymarket’s flagship product, like what you’re probably thinking of — the website polymarket.com — that people go on and trade about the Iran war? That is an offshore, unregulated exchange that Americans are actually banned from using, even though it’s headquartered in America and heavily promoted in America.

So it’s actually in its own weird regulatory gray zone right now, and I think there are intentions to bring the entire exchange back into the U.S., but right now, the main Polymarket is not supposed to be accessed by people in the U.S. It doesn’t have the “Know Your Customer” regulations that something like Kalshi does, so people can trade anonymously, and it’s just sort of a different beast. So there’s that layer that makes things even more confusing.

JW: From your perspective, what is the difference between placing a bet on who wins the Super Bowl on something like DraftKings, and making a prediction on something like the Super Bowl? Understanding that, yeah, this is complicated, but what is the difference between those two things?

KK: It’s complicated on a technical level in that when you’re placing a bet on something like DraftKings — DraftKings has a house, so you are giving money to the platform.

And with prediction markets, you’re supposed to be trading with another person. It’s supposed to be peer to peer, and that’s why it’s allegedly more like a financial exchange.

In practice, though, if I’m betting that the Bears win, and they win, I make money either way. Functionally, for most regular people who are using these platforms, there’s not much of a difference at all.

JW: I want to get into some of the impacts and some of the potential harm, but first, you alluded to some of these state fights, and so I wanted to get into one of them in Texas and how these prediction markets are responding.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the founders of Kalshi, the prediction market platform, dropped $200,000 into a new Texas-focused PAC.

The state has some of the strictest gambling laws in the country, where it’s pretty much illegal outside of the state lottery and some animal races. Kalshi’s founders’ contributions come one week after Texas lawmakers held a hearing to investigate whether prediction platforms like Kalshi are actually just gambling sites.

What is known about how these companies are trying to influence lawmakers and shape policies that are going to affect their bottom line?

KK: Kalshi in particular is making an extremely concentrated push into political lobbying. It has a murderers’ row of lawyers — many of whom come from the Biden administration — fighting to ensure that it stays a federally regulated financial exchange and doesn’t get reclassified as gambling. It is basically continually hiring different comms people and lobbyists who come from D.C. and know how to get things done.

There are a few different organizations that it’s associated with, in addition to the PACs that it’s giving money to. One is called the Coalition for Prediction Markets, and that does a lot of advocacy work on behalf of regulated exchanges, really trying to ensure there’s a bipartisan coalition that approves of these markets being regulated like financial exchanges.

It’s also worth mentioning, right now, the company has pretty deep pockets. Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight. They are willing to put everything on the line and as much money as necessary on the line to ensure that they have the right people in Washington advocating on their behalf.

JW: I want to get into who they have in Washington a little bit more and what’s going on with the federal government in this regard. But I also want to talk about their potential impact on the midterms.

You reported in August that “election officials are preparing for prediction markets to sow chaos in the midterms.” You spoke to election officials across the country for that story. What did you hear from them? What are their major concerns?

KK: There’s a lot of concern about this. One of the main concerns is actually not directly tied to how the markets are resolved. So it wouldn’t be tied to how, for example, Kalshi or Polymarket called an election — but it’s tied to how these platforms currently use social media.

Both of the prediction markets have very popular X accounts and social media accounts, and they really use them like they are more traditional media companies. There’s a lot of breaking, scoop. There’s all of these news summaries blasted out to millions of followers. There have already been some cases where the way that these prediction markets have been updating their followers has been confusing or misleading for voters. They’ve made social media posts that implied that a race was over when it wasn’t.

“A lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever.”

There’s concern that their social media presences will be a disruptive force. Right now, when we’re in a moment where a lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever. If a candidate that someone has put money on them winning ends up losing, but then one of these prediction markets sent out a tweet two hours before the polls closed, implied that it was a sure thing — that that could anger the electorate to the point where poll workers would be in jeopardy, or there would just be even more rancor and discord and distrust of the election process. That’s one of their concerns.

Another major concern is that there could be market manipulation in some of the markets that are directly tied to elections. We’ve already seen — Kalshi has caught politicians trading on their races. None of them were really successful in moving the odds for a long period of time or anything. But there’s still a risk, especially on Polymarket offshore where people can trade semi-anonymously, that there could be bad actors coming in deliberately trying to manipulate the markets in a way that, again, would make the wagering electorate very angry when they ended up losing money on races that they thought they would win, in part because the markets were manipulated to make them think they would win.

There are a few different reasons why people are really concerned. Then there’s the overarching concern that encouraging people to gamble on the elections is going to change their relationship with the electoral process in a very detrimental way to society. It’s not tied to any one specific race, but more of a general, “This is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way.” I honestly think that that’s the one that I’m the most on board with as a real threat.

“There’s the overarching concern that … ‘This is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way.’”

JW: These platforms are partnering with traditional media as well. Your reporting has shown, and other reporting as well, that we’re seeing these partnerships between Polymarket and Dow Jones and Substack; Kalshi has deals with CNN, CNBC, and Fox.

What is known about how these partnerships and how the data from Polymarket and Kalshi are being integrated into news coverage? Does this give them an air of legitimacy that maybe is unearned?

KK: I think that striking these deals was such a huge coup for these companies, and it really did a lot to establish credibility that they might otherwise not have at all with the general population.

“Striking these [media] deals was such a huge coup for these companies, and it really did a lot to establish credibility.”

If you flip around, I’ve been waking up super early with my baby and turning on [CNBC’s] “Squawk Box” — because I hate myself, I guess [laughs]. And I’m always amazed: They are constantly bringing up Kalshi. The Kalshi odds are another part of the program in the same way that like the stock market ticker is. It’s really just considered another signal to tell people about what’s going on with the world, what’s going on with different markets — and they’re not being treated as experimental things at all at this point by very mainstream organizations like CNBC, CNN, Dow Jones.

I’m sure there’s going to be more partnerships inked by the time the year is up, too. I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it’s flown under the radar a little bit while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what’s potentially happening in the world.

They’re not inaccurate; they’re not more inaccurate than polling in many cases. I think there are many reasonable arguments to be made that these can be sources of information that have use cases. That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in writing about them, to be honest, is because I do think that they’re fascinating signals about public sentiment.

That said, they are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they’ve managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have.

“They’re not being treated as experimental things at all at this point by very mainstream organizations like CNBC, CNN.”

JW: In that vein, I wanted to talk about a really interesting story you published on Monday, about a new prediction market — Verifact Markets — which allows users to essentially place predictions on facts, like where the Covid-19 virus originated from, and whether the moon landing was staged.

You spoke to tech investor, Peter Wokwicz, whose family office Positron Capital Management, is funding and incubating the start-up, writing that Wokwicz, “envisions the startup as a way to settle debates over hot-button issues like the amount of energy consumed by AI data centers.”

How does predicting on a fact even work, and should prediction markets be in the business of adjudicating reality?

KK: Such an interesting question, and it’s just such a bonkers startup. I get a lot of pitches from startups in the prediction market space in my inbox at this point, and most of them I just ignore for my own sanity. This one was so off-the-wall that I had to speak to them, and I had to know more about how this would actually play out, because it’s such a zany concept.

I still have a lot of questions because, as I laid out in the piece, they’re pretty unwilling to give potential users or the media any specifics about how they’ll ultimately resolve the markets.

My first question was, “OK, well, if somebody wanted to prove a point, they could just put a bunch of money on whatever their desired outcome would be, and then point to that and say, ‘See, I was right.’”

And the Verifacts team was quick to assure me that they weren’t actually going to resolve the markets based on the outcome of the markets alone. It was going to be how people were trading on them and the odds. Then they were going to use some sort of proprietary, AI-flavored system to adjudicate the truth.

JW: Of course.

KK: There was a lot of hand-waving going on. The market just opened, so we’ll see, first of all, if anyone’s going to use it, and second of all, whether they’re actually going to be able to clear up any of the long-standing mysteries or debates about conspiracy theories that are ongoing, because it seems like an extremely tall order.

A friend of mine texted me after I published that article and was like, “I think we just had our Pets.com moment for the prediction market space.” This specific startup is really indicative of how frothy the bubble is right now. You’re just rolling out a prediction market for the past, and people are seemingly OK with it.

We’ll see if they actually manage to do that. I definitely don’t think that a world in which Verifact markets will be able to adjudicate contentious specifics about reality would be good, but I also am very skeptical that that will actually happen.

JW: That’s a fair point. Reading the article, which is really well-written and interesting by the way, I thought it was a very good catch when you pointed out that it would be a very big deal if they could figure out what actually caused the Covid-19 virus, if they could give a definitive answer, and you’re like, “Well, major news outlets are really interested in some of these questions.”

I did want to get into some of the possible harms here though. Prediction markets obviously want to distinguish themselves from sports betting, but people suffering from gambling addictions and the clinicians who treat them have said both produce the same results. That’s according to reporting from The Associated Press earlier this year.

“There may be real differences in how these products are defined or regulated, but in the therapy room, we are often seeing the same cycle of anticipation, action and reaction play out again and again.” That’s what Dr. Cynthia Grant told the AP. She’s the vice president of clinical for Birches Health, which operates a national network of providers for treating gambling addiction.

Kate, what have you found in your reporting? Do they really differ in terms of promoting addictive tendencies?

KK: No, I don’t think so. I’ve talked to some people who are working in the addiction space to try to get some clarification about whether there’s a big difference, for example, in demographics of people who are coming in with problematic behaviors in prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.

I haven’t actually written anything about it yet because I’ve been still gathering thread, but what I’ve found so far is that there’s a ton of overlap. One therapist I spoke to noted that they anecdotally have seen more women who have been coming in with problematic behaviors tied to prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.

It’s still really something that predominantly affects young men. The prediction markets, even while they’re having these battles and insisting that they’re financial instruments, have at least nodded towards the reality that the way that people use their products has a lot in common with gambling and wagering.

They’ve come up with different guardrails. Both sportsbooks and prediction markets now offer people an opportunity to self-exclude. So if you basically want to ban yourself from something like DraftKings, you can, and now from something like Kalshi, you can. Which obviously is a good start, but it doesn’t resolve the baseline fact that what they’re offering is something that is speculative, and you’re putting money on the line.

For many people, it can be fun and entertaining in the same way that people wagering small sums of money on football games in traditional sportsbooks can be fun and entertaining. But there’s inevitably always going to be a portion of the population that struggles with addictive behaviors, and the way that these platforms incentivize risky financial choices.

As they grow even more and more mainstream, inevitably that’s going to mean that there’s going to be more and more people who struggle with that kind of behavior. I don’t know if there’s any version of these products that’s going to exist that can do away with that kind of harm altogether.

I really perceive these platforms, both sportsbooks and prediction markets, they’re vice platforms at heart — in the same way that alcohol can be fun for a lot of people, but then drinking is deeply addictive behavior for others, and there’s no inventing a healthy alcohol. There’s no inventing a type of prediction market or sportsbook or stock exchange that doesn’t have some portion of the people using it displaying really problematic behaviors.

“Alcohol can be fun for a lot of people, but then drinking is deeply addictive behavior for others, and there’s no inventing a healthy alcohol.”

JW: It sounds like what you’re saying is that these are almost like the flavored vapes of the online world, in some way, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s so safe,” and now all of the kids are smoking these vapes.

KK: Yes.

JW: There’s something similar about it. And there’s a ubiquitousness about it that feels really different, too. What you just said about women being more pulled in, potentially — obviously, we don’t know that research yet — that makes sense to me, only because I see the ads in a way that I never would get ads for sports betting.

Do you want to place a bet on “Dancing With the Stars”? Do you want to place a bet on whether or not Donald Trump’s tie is going to be this color that day? Things that are outside of the sports world that kind of appeal to a larger audience. That clearly seems to be the goal, like you said earlier.

KK: “Love Island” was a big one for a while, and “Survivor.” There are certain reality shows that have really robust markets, and I think that the people on them skew more female than they would versus a football market or basically anything happening on the sportsbook. So yeah, the ubiquity is crazy.

It’ll be interesting to see how long these platforms are able to cater to the 18-to-24[-year-old] crowd. There are some, Novig, for example, like the prediction market startup that Sydney Sweeney’s involved with, they are only 21+ and are positioning themselves as a more virtuous option because of that.

I could see regulators really pushing to raise the participation floor to 21. I don’t think that the other major players are going to do it voluntarily. But, yeah, just how rampant this seems on college campuses doesn’t seem great.

JW: It’s hard to argue that. And when we’re also talking about the harm of these platforms, I think it’s important to also talk about who is propping them up.

I know earlier we got a little bit into who was behind these real attempts to limit regulation. Of course, the elephant in the room here is that these industries have exploded in an environment where a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgate to legalized sports betting, and you also have a president and his family fully invested in the prediction market industry succeeding.

When it comes to the legal battles to regulate companies like Polymarket and Kalshi, the Trump administration is backing the prediction market operators, fighting the states who are at minimum trying to enforce some regulations or outright ban them where sports betting and gambling is illegal.

Can you talk more about this tension and the stakeholders who in particular have a lot to gain by limiting regulations on these industries?

“Any conversation about what’s going on with prediction markets in the U.S. right now needs to have a big disclaimer: Donald Trump Jr. is a huge investor in Polymarket.”

KK: I think that any conversation about what’s going on with prediction markets in the U.S. right now needs to have a big disclaimer: Donald Trump Jr. is a huge investor in Polymarket. His VC firm, 1789 Capital, just became the lead investor for Polymarket’s latest fundraising round. He’s, in addition to that, also a paid adviser to Kalshi.

In addition to that, Trump Media was planning on launching its own prediction market. It walked that back a little, and now it just has this weird partnership with crypto.com. But Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they’re currently not beholden to. It’s the fact that it’s coloring everything that’s going on here.

I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars, or people affiliated with the Biden administration, or Democratic politicians.

Will that be enough? I don’t know. But yeah, at the moment, the very explicit financial ties that the Trump family has to the leading players in this world seem to be directing how easily it’s been for them to explode in popularity.

JW: With all of that said, with the Trump family’s interest, with the fact that these companies know that they need to get in good with Democrats as things go forward, where is this going to go?

Where do these platforms go from here? Do you see them massively expanding? Do you really see any kind of effort at regulation? I frankly, five years ago, could not have predicted that I would be interviewing people about prediction markets and sports betting as this kind of major force. Where do we go from here?

KK: Right now, almost everyone I talk to who is a legal expert paying attention to the regulatory battles is expecting the Supreme Court to end up taking one of these cases — and most of the cases are specifically about whether the sports markets are gambling or not.

“Prediction markets are here to stay as part of the fabric of the speculative economy. They are the inheritors to the commodities trade.”

It’s really unclear how they will land on that, so there is a world in which the sports markets end up getting reclassified as gambling. I definitely don’t think that these markets are going away, by any means. Prediction markets are here to stay as part of the fabric of the speculative economy. They are the inheritors to the commodities trade.

Kalshi and Polymarket are often described as arch-rivals, and they are, but they’re also gunning for CME Group and more traditional financial institutions. So, we’ll see. I do think that we will probably get more guardrails at some point, I hope, but not until a new administration comes in.

If the Supreme Court ends up siding with state regulators and reclassifying the sports markets, that will have a pretty big impact on the bottom lines of these companies, because right now the war markets and some of the more controversial geopolitical markets get a lot of attention, but most retail traders are using these to bet on sports. So yeah, I think they’re not going away. They might be reined in, but not in the near term.

JW: Sounds like we have a lot to watch out for. We’re going to leave it there. Kate, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Kate Knibbs’s reporting at Wired.

KK: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: That does it for this episode.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Prediction Markets Have a Lock on the Midterms appeared first on The Intercept.

Mahmoud Khalil: “We Can’t Afford to Stay Silent”

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Three years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the U.S. government is still targeting pro-Palestine student activists.

Even before federal immigration agents descended on communities around the country, killing immigrants and protesters, unmarked agents were abducting students who had voiced criticisms of Israel.

Mahmoud Khalil was the first. After federal agents detained him at his alma mater, Columbia University, he spent more than 100 days in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana. It’s been over a year since he was released and returned to live with his family in New York City. The Trump administration is still trying to deport him.

“Part of why I’m doing this right now rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years is because what’s happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience,” Khalil tells The Intercept Briefing. “I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.”

This week on the podcast, Khalil speaks with host Akela Lacy about what he’s learned about how he became President Donald Trump’s top target, the role Columbia University played in that campaign, and his new book, “No Land to Stand On,” which chronicles Khalil’s experience in ICE detention, missing the birth of his first child, his ongoing saga to stay in the U.S. with his family, and more.

“It’s been so difficult just to have that conversation with my wife Noor about what would happen,” Khalil says. “What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just leave? But to me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country.”

“It’s about whether anyone — whether they are citizens or non-citizens — are able to speak out against government policies and against the support of Israel in this country. It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

It’s been almost three years since the October 7 attacks in Israel that preceded the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In that time, Israel has destroyed an entire region, killed more than 70,000 people and injured scores more, launched attacks on surrounding countries, and drawn the U.S. into a full-blown war with Iran.

Over the last three years, at home in the U.S., something else fundamentally shattered. If anything is different now, it’s the honesty of it all. Free speech, civil rights, and equal protection under the law — of course, with all the appropriate exceptions.

What started as a bipartisan commitment to suppressing criticism of Israel led to flagrant abductions of pro-Palestine students by unmarked immigration agents.

Since the crackdown on students escalated in the early months of Trump’s second term, ICE’s war has spread even further.

Since Trump reentered the White House, ICE has detained more than half a million people and says it’s deported almost twice that. More people are dying in ICE custody or at the hands of federal agents, who have killed at least eight people since January 2025, including two protesters in Minneapolis.

Our guest today lives at this nexus: how the siege on Gaza fueled a reckoning at home and fused America’s anti-immigrant push with its battle over speech on Palestine.

Mahmoud Khalil was the first person taken by ICE over student activism for Palestine last year. Khalil, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, fled the country at 18. He later moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leader during student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. After being released from ICE detention last year, Khalil returned to living in New York, where he continues to fight against the threat of deportation. He joins me now.

Mahmoud Khalil, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Mahmoud Khalil: Thank you so much for having me.

AL: To start, I want to ask about your family. You were being held at a remote ICE detention center in Louisiana when your son, Deen, was born last year. How is Deen now?

MK: He’s a wonderful, wild 17-month-old. So he’s walking all over now, and it just feels so rewarding really to have him in our life right now, especially in a very difficult moment in our family.

I get so much inspiration from him and that pushes me to continue to work because this is not only about my family. It’s a story of so many families who this administration separated and inflicted violence upon them. It’s also a story of so many Palestinian families in Palestine whose fathers are in Israeli prisons [who] can’t meet their families, or even the ones in Gaza who are disappeared right now.

AL: I’m sure you and Noor talk about this, how you will tell Deen your story, and when. What are those conversations like?

MK: I try to push it as much as possible because usually you tell a story that already happened, but my story is still happening. Every day there’s something new.

And that’s what made writing the book difficult for me, because usually you write a memoir about a memory about something that has already happened to you. While, to me, I am now living it. So how would I write about it? That was like so difficult for me.

The same way about telling Deen about it: Would it be a happy story or a sad story? Would it be a story that, in fact, the legal system stood up for the unlawful detention of his father and the attempts to deport him — or it did not? Is it that the people in this country advocated for his father and the rights of so many other people in this country — or not? That’s still to be told, so I don’t want to really jump to conclusions at all.

Part of why I’m doing this right now, rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years, is because what’s happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience. So is the Palestine exception: the fact that freedom of speech, rule of law, basic dignities are afforded to everyone except for Palestinians. I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.

“I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now.”

AL: You were released from ICE detention last summer. What have the last 16 months in your life been like?

MK: It’s been a saga with courts but also just as a family, with a new family now, like trying to really live our life. Try to build our future in a country that at least promised me some sort of stability and safety after living in Syria and then in Lebanon. So it’s been difficult to find that stability and that permanence in our lives. It is a fight to me, like it’s been since then.

It’s been so difficult, of course, just to have that conversation with Noor, my wife Noor, about what would happen. What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just, like, leave? But to me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country. It’s also about whether those speaking out for Palestine have the right to do so without being punished by the administration or by the government, whether it’s the Trump administration or another. So that’s why I feel like it’s a bigger fight than just about me or about our family.

But at the end of the day, we are people. I want to go to Bryant Park and just watch the movies there, but I can’t do that easily. There’s several precautions I have to do to be able to actually do this very normal activity that any couple would do on a normal day. But it is the cost, unfortunately, that was imposed upon me by ICE and the Trump administration.

“To me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country. It’s also about whether those speaking out for Palestine have the right to do so without being punished.”

AL: To your point, this is something that’s happening at multiple levels. And you write in the book that you were given the option to “self-deport” — to where, we don’t know. But you say that you felt like if you did that, you wouldn’t just be succumbing to this false smear campaign, but you would be giving the federal government the blueprint for how to silence dissent. You also talk about this being a story about the horrors of the broader immigration detention system in the United States.

As of early July, more than 65,000 people are currently being held in immigration detention. You write in your book about your experience in Louisiana at LaSalle and the relationships you built with other people being held there, trading noodles. What was that like for you? You talk a lot about the psychological effects of some of the things: constant bright lights so you can’t sleep, constant freezing cold air. Can you describe the conditions of the facility that you were in?

MK: As I’ve mentioned, what’s happening behind ICE detention walls is a stain on the U.S. conscience. The fact that you have over 65,000 people at any moment detained in what’s called civil detention. That’s what they call ICE detention. And there’s nothing civil about detention. Even if it was a five-star condition, it’s still detention. You’re still separated from your family.

But I met in ICE detention so many incredible fathers and workers who came here seeking safety only to be snatched off the street, only to be told that they are criminals and they do not belong here.

“They want to make these conditions so bad you don’t fight for your case.”

I remember, and I talk in my book about, Najib, a man who was snatched off his immigration hearing — leaving behind his wife battling cancer with four little kids. Or Alexander, who came here begging for safety, begging for a place to stay, only to be told, “No, you should be safe where you’re from.” And when he was deported, he got killed.

They want to make these conditions so bad you don’t fight for your case, because you can fight your case, but that could take six months to two years, three years.

AL: Even if you win.

MK: Even if you win. That’s the fact. That’s how they weaponize the immigration system against you. Even if you win, you lose. They can appeal multiple times — not once or twice. Because it’s a kangaroo court. The system is so favorable to the administration, and the administration can change at any time.

That’s why you rarely find now anyone who would win in the immigration system, because it’s fully controlled by this administration. To me, it doesn’t make sense that you call it courts, or an impartial system, or a neutral system. It’s a very partial system to the administration.

That’s why they keep the lights on all the time. That’s why the temperature is down; it’s always cold. The food is pretty bad. You only have a thin blanket. Because they don’t want you to feel comfortable or have the basics to fight your case.

“To me, it doesn’t make sense that you call it courts, or an impartial system, or a neutral system. It’s a very partial system to the administration.”

AL: You’re very much still in limbo. It’s been almost six months since the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final ruling in one of your cases ordering your removal. Last week, that same body denied a request to reopen your case.

I know your team is looking at bringing your case to the Supreme Court. What’s the latest there? And when will you know if you have to leave the country?

MK: So 18 months since my arrest, the Trump administration has never brought any piece of evidence that I committed any crime. They haven’t even charged me with any crime because they know they control the immigration system.

“What they’re trying to do now in immigration is the total opposite: You are guilty until you are proven innocent — but you might be deported before then.”

So now we’re appealing our case to the Supreme Court — an Article III court — to look into the matter. Because what the Trump administration’s trying until now is to prevent me from even looking into the merits of the case that they are bringing against me. What they are claiming is that this case is purely an immigration case, and only immigration judges should be able to look at it. Then if you want to go to a federal court, it should go to the 5th Circuit or the courts in Texas and Louisiana, who are pretty much favorable to the administration as well.

So they are trying to prevent a federal court from looking into this matter. We are now taking it to the Supreme Court because no government should have the power to detain someone without any independent judgment into it.

Usually, the basics in criminal law are that you are innocent until proven guilty. What they’re trying to do now in immigration is the total opposite: You are guilty until you are proven innocent — but you might be deported before then. So it is a long fight. But once again, this fight is not only about my ability to stay in this country. It’s more than this.

It’s about whether anyone — whether they are citizens or non-citizens — are able to speak out against government policies and against the support of Israel in this country.

It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.

“If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.”

AL: You and your team have expressed concerns that any ruling at the Supreme Court could backfire and further curtail the rights of pro-Palestine students. I wonder if you can you talk more about that?

MK: For now, what we’re taking to the Supreme Court is only whether a federal court has jurisdiction to look into constitutional claims. For me, my constitutional claim is that the Trump administration wanted to deport me because of my activism on Palestine.

That’s what we’re bringing right now to the Supreme Court. This wouldn’t necessarily directly impact or have a larger impact on the movement as a whole. But already the government is doing everything in its power to chill the speech of whether students or citizens who are speaking out for Palestine. So what we’re trying is actually to prevent that.

But the other part is, we seek accountability also from the public themselves. You don’t get accountability only through courts. You get accountability through the people who are now voting in progressive candidates into Congress who may be able to change the law.

That’s how I get accountability. I get accountability when I see that my book is out and people are reading what this administration tried to silence — that they want to make an example out of me, but they failed. That’s how we seek accountability. It’s not only from the court itself, because at the end of the day, people who create the law actually push for the law.

Because everything we got right now, the rights that American citizens or anyone on this land have, it was a product of a fight. Whether it’s a fight during the civil rights movement or the anti-slavery movement before then. It did not happen because a judge woke up and decided to do what’s right. It’s because, actually, people pushed for that to happen, and that’s my part of the fight right now.

AL: Mahmoud, you were not a random target. We know now that ICE took names from the pro-Israel doxing group Canary Mission to create a list of targets. Far-right pro-Israel groups like Canary Mission and the USA chapter of the militant, ultra-Zionist group Betar — considered by even the Anti-Defamation League as an anti-Muslim hate group — targeted you.

Betar later claimed credit for ICE’s abduction of you and other students and said it shared “thousands” of — we know now it was about 5,000 — names of pro-Palestine students with the Trump administration for further action. In the lead-up to your abduction, Betar targeted you by name, as did actors at your alma mater, Columbia University: another group, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia, and a professor, Shai Davidai, who called specifically for the Trump administration to deport and arrest you in the days leading up to that abduction and tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

You write in the book: “What I did not anticipate was the U.S. government would one day consider the recommendation of hostile Zionist groups to target me, and then act on it.”

You sued for communications between these groups and the Trump administration. What more have you found out about how much they coordinated to target and arrest you and other students?

MK: The targeting of me and other pro-Palestine protesters was written in a document called Project Esther that was produced by the Heritage Foundation. In there, what they said [was], for this plan to work, we need a friendly administration that would listen to us and work with us to implement it.

That’s what happened after, because Stephen Miller was part of the Heritage Foundation or consulting for them, and then he became part of this administration, and actually worked on implementing this plan from A to Z.

From the discovery that the case in Massachusetts — AAUP v. Rubio—

AL: This is the American Association of University Professors lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

MK: Secretary Rubio.

AL: Yes.

MK: A Reagan appointee found that the government officials conspired between themselves to deprive us from our freedom of speech.

“We’re hoping to really expose these networks that pushed anti-Palestinian bigotry to be institutionalized within the U.S. government itself.”

One of the ICE agents or one of the DHS agents testified that, “I’ve never seen something like this happen in our department, that such a request would come from really senior individuals in the administration.” So now what we are suing for is to see this communication between between these private actors, whether it is Canary Mission, the Heritage Foundation, Betar, and others as well, what we call Zionist hate groups, and these administrators, whether it’s Rubio, Stephen Miller, or DOJ, and the attorney general.

Because it was all in public. Betar went out and said, “We take credit for that. We actually communicated with the administration about that.” That’s what we know publicly. So now we’re asking for these communications. This case, we filed it in July, takes some time, but we’re hoping to really expose these networks that pushed anti-Palestinian bigotry to be institutionalized within the U.S. government itself.

I got used to smear campaigns and doxing before my arrest. To me, that was part of an intimidation campaign to terrorize me not to speak out about Palestine.

To me, back then, the thought process was, usually they target your employer, they target your university, your father’s employers. I’m like, “Why would I work for anyone who doesn’t agree with my views on Palestine or who sees them as extreme? I don’t want to work for them.”

You know, I never wore a mask [at Columbia] to hide my identity because the risk to me wasn’t that high. In Syria, I wore masks, because the risk back then was getting shot by [Bashar al] Assad forces or getting disappeared by mukhabarat, or intelligence officers.

I never imagined that what I fled from would happen to me in the U.S., the land of the free.

AL: After a quick break, more from Mahmoud Khalil, who has a new book, “No Land to Stand On.” We’ll be right back.

Welcome back. We’re speaking with Mahmoud Khalil, the first pro-Palestine student taken by ICE last year.

You’ve filed three other lawsuits against the federal government and Columbia, and you are waiting for a response from the most recent suit which alleges a historical pattern of discrimination and retaliation against Palestinian students and pro-Palestinian activists, as well as a failure to address “coordinated harassment” against pro-Palestine students at your alma mater, the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

You’ve said that Columbia didn’t only ignore your concerns or documented harassment, but that the university facilitated your targeting and arrest by the Trump administration.

Of the suit, you said: “Columbia laid the groundwork for my targeting by the Trump administration through its deliberate indifference and discrimination aimed at intimidating Palestinian students.”

For listeners who might not be familiar with how Columbia handled protests against the genocide in Gaza, or its history trying to crush and later celebrate other student protest movements, against the Vietnam War or to divest from apartheid South Africa, can you tell us a little bit more about the role the school played here?

MK: When I applied to come to Columbia, I applied to come to an institution that had a long history of student activism, of standing up, at least the students of that institution standing up for human rights, whether it was during the ’60s and the civil rights movement or in the anti-apartheid South Africa, but also most recently, against private prisons, against fossil fuels. So it goes beyond that.

That’s the institution I came to. But I was surprised — even before October 7 — the level of the anti-Palestinian racism on campus. For example, when we tried to bring Human Rights Watch to our school [in 2023], the school put so many hurdles in front of us to be able to host a 70-person event. I was shocked. Why would you prevent us from hosting such a reputable human rights organization to come and talk about apartheid in South Africa? The same happened when we tried to bring BDS — the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — virtually on campus.

So on October 7, Columbia had a choice of being an example for other institutions around the country, of being a place where difficult conversations would be held, where they would stand up for human rights, where they would actually listen to their own students.

Instead, Columbia employed surveillance systems against their own students, brutalized them. They called in the police about four times or more than four times in less than two years. Provided that, the last time Columbia called the police on campus was during the ’60s — like 60, 70 years ago.

They couldn’t contain the movement; they established a Gestapo-like office called the Office of the Institutional Equity that investigated every single Palestinian advocacy on campus, going after them with investigations. They brought private investigators; I remember being called by a private investigator that Columbia hired just to intimidate us.

AL: I spoke to students who got those calls, too, and they’re like, “What is this?”

MK: Exactly. Instead of just listening to their students, to their own students. These students were, most of them, 17 to 20 years old, watching a genocide happening in real time.

So that was the climate at Columbia. At the same time, they harbored these actors who were doxing us. As a Palestinian, I pleaded so many times to get protection from the university up until the day of my arrest.

AL: Right. The day before.

MK: The day before my arrest, March 7, I emailed the president. I knew she wouldn’t answer. But I wanted to keep the record because I emailed her before then in January when the first wave of doxing happened, and they did not do anything.

A year later, when another student was kidnapped by ICE from Columbia, non-Palestinian, non-related-Palestinian student was detained by ICE — Columbia immediately issued a statement, immediately called lawyers, immediately called elected officials because that student did not have to do anything with Palestine.

I’m so glad that Columbia did that, but that’s what they should have done to me, to Mohsen [Mahdawi] and to Yunseo [Chung], to the other students who were targeted by ICE.

But that’s again the Palestine exception in these institutions, where you have ideologues on the board of trustees of Columbia whose protection of Israel for them is much more important than protecting freedom of speech, than actually listening to their students, than the normal decency of just being board of trustees who have responsibility toward these institutions, but their loyalty was somewhere else.

AL: You’ve also mentioned future plans to sue other individuals at Columbia. In your suit against Trump, DHS, ICE and Rubio, your legal team cited reporting by me and my colleague Natasha Lennard on a network of faculty, alumni and other people at Columbia who were active in trying to target pro-Palestine students for deportation and arrest. You write in the book about coordination between Columbia students and faculty and some of these groups that smeared and doxed students. You write: “Those who fed our names to the machine continued to attend the school.”

What else have you learned about those people and those efforts?

MK: I will continue to seek accountability until everyone who actively participated in me missing the birth of my child and me losing 104 days of my life, until they are all held accountable.

I will not stop until I achieve that. I’m doing this up until now, with first suing the federal government, then the federal government and private actors. And the private actors also included some of the Columbia actors who were feeding our names to Canary Mission.

Because we have to think about this — Canary Mission and Betar, or the Heritage Foundation — they did not have people on the ground. The people on the ground were Columbia’s own students and faculty, who were not hiding that they were doxing us.

AL: They were sending billboard trucks all over New York.

MK: Exactly. So we got records about communication between some of the students at Columbia and Leo Terrell, the chief of the antisemitism task force in the DOJ, pushing them to target us, but also providing talking points that we later saw on Terrell’s own social media.

“It was a very coordinated effort to demonize our movement.”

So that network goes beyond just random actors. It was a very coordinated effort to demonize our movement, to vilify the student movement that was rooted in human rights and equality and dignity. That’s why so many students joined this movement, not only Palestinians.

Palestinians at Columbia were barely 20, 30 students. But the movement that was built, it was built by Black students, by Asian students, by Jewish students. The coalition that was created as well, it had groups ranging from dancing groups, cultural groups, to the Young Democrats.

More than 100 groups joined together to call for Palestinian freedom, to call for the end of Columbia’s complicity in supporting Israel.

“Palestinians at Columbia were barely 20, 30 students. But the movement that was built, it was built by Black students, by Asian students, by Jewish students.”

AL: Mahmoud, you mentioned this already, the logic of exception regarding Palestine. You write in the book about the logic of exception regarding Palestine, the idea that only certain categories of Palestinians are deserving of rights. You talk about how you’ve internalized that in some ways as well.

This comes up in what I’ve noticed as attempts, even by well-meaning people, to paint you as “one of the good ones” among university students that have been portrayed otherwise, as an unruly mass of student protesters on a rampage in protesting this genocide. There was a similar effort around your Columbia colleague Mohsen Mahdawi, who was also targeted and abducted by ICE for his pro-Palestine activism.

During the Columbia encampments, you were active in the protests, and you also worked as a negotiator between protesters and university administrators, one of whom told the New Yorker that you stood out from other protesters for your levelheadedness, which I found very interesting.

What is the effect of trying to separate you from the rest of the pack as the “right” kind of protester”? How do you overcome that?

MK: That really enraged me that you have to be a perfect victim to be worthy of people’s sympathy, to be worthy of the rule of law. Because what we protested is a genocide. That’s what we protested, and that’s the right thing to do. It shouldn’t be criminalized. Unfortunately, we internalized that.

“That really enraged me that you have to be a perfect victim to be worthy of people’s sympathy, to be worthy of the rule of law. Because what we protested is a genocide.”

I talk a little bit about how I myself would highlight the numbers of women and children just to appeal to more people that like, “Look, young women and children are being killed by Israel.” But what about the men? Because that’s the level of the dehumanization of Palestinians in this country, that it only took the Trump administration to mention my name as “Mahmoud Khalil” and Palestinian for people to paint a certain image of me.

But in reality, I’m a Palestinian who believes in a free Palestine, where everyone from the river to the sea deserves safety, dignity, and freedom.

Just like the fact that I had to be that perfect victim. Because I’m not perfect. No one is perfect. Palestinians are, you know —

AL: Human.

MK: Humans, the same as any other, any other nation. We have our aspirations. We have our culture. We have our deficiencies. We’re not out of this planet. But yet the media insists on treating Palestinians on a different standard, when they ask me about condemning or not condemning all of that, I’m like, you’re not interested in my views about Hamas.

If you’re interested about my views about Hamas, you would ask me what are my views about Hamas, or a different question. But they use that question as a litmus test: If you say yes, then maybe you are a human worthy of talking to. If not, then you are that villain that this administration is talking about. That’s why we refuse the premise of the question as a whole. It’s not about the question itself. The whole premise of the question we refuse.

I think it’s for Americans to reckon with why we are here, why we are treating Palestinian stories differently from any other story. Whether it’s the Zionist lobby that for tens of years has fed this hate, whether it’s the media itself or Hollywood or just the institutions themselves that fed that hate and fed the image of the Palestinian as violent, rather than just a human being.

Or recently just how, it’s not only the Trump administration. It’s before them, the Biden administration, before them, the Obama administration. It goes back to every administration this country had dehumanizing Palestinians. Because Trump wouldn’t have had the power to do what he did with me were it not for what Colombia portrayed or said about the movement, or the Biden administration as well.

“It’s for Americans to reckon with why we are here, why we are treating Palestinian stories differently from any other story.”

AL: And as we’ve written about a lot at The Intercept the beginning of this crackdown on campuses started under Biden.

MK: Absolutely.

AL: I want to deviate quickly just because you mentioned this question, and I had written a question that I wasn’t sure we would have time to get to about being asked about Hamas because this comes up in The New Yorker article, and I was curious what you thought of how — I don’t know if you read the latest one from last month.

MK: The profile?

AL: Yeah. Because I was curious about how it was framed, because he says that you push back on the framing of the question, right? He asked you about your views on Hamas and that you protested the premise of the question. And then it said what your explanation was. But I thought it was interesting to print your defense of why you reject the premise, but still print your answer to the question.

MK: To me, Hamas is a political faction that has a military wing that got most of its popularity because of the failures of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, in bringing peace after the Oslo Accords, where a lot of Palestinians were excited about the prospects of peace.

But when they saw that Israel is undermining any prospects of a Palestinian state, a lot of Palestinians turned to Hamas as that resistance movement that may bring something.

And as I explain in my book, Palestinians supported Hamas not because of ideological reasons as much as because they wanted a way forward. For me, I’m against all Palestinian political factions because not one of them — whether it’s Hamas, Fatah, or PFLP — rose up to the aspirations of the Palestinian people, unfortunately.

“I’m against all Palestinian political factions because not one of them — whether it’s Hamas, Fatah, or PFLP — rose up to the aspirations of the Palestinian people, unfortunately.”

That’s why I’m a strong believer in international law. I’m a strong believer in the fact that Palestinians have the right of self-determination, have the right to resist under international law, and have the right to really tell the world what they want. That’s what I want my answer about such a questions to be.

AL: That’s not what people want to hear.

MK: Yeah, exactly. They want just a yes or no, it’s a black and white.

I can’t tell people how to resist. That’s from being in the United States. For someone who’s going through bombardment, who’s going through checkpoints, whose house is being raided at night by the Israeli army, who the drones are above their heads all the time — I can’t, from here, tell them how to resist.

But for me, I’m a firm believer of international law, and that’s how I see the way forward. Again, I’m a Palestinian. I believe in a free Palestine, where everyone, from the river to the sea, have the right to live with dignity, with justice, with freedom, with equality. That’s what we’re asking for.

AL: This fight, when it comes down to it, is fundamentally over First Amendment rights for you and everyone in this country and the fight for freedom in Palestine.

A new report from Uncivil, a consortium of scholars and researchers, audited five years, going back to 2020, of publicly listed grants to 77 university centers, initiatives, and nonprofits doing “civility” work to promote pluralism and viewpoint diversity. The group found that almost all of the top funders, responsible for $82 million in grants, were groups and foundations deeply invested in conservative and/or “pro-Israel” networks.

Unsurprisingly, these funders donated more to groups that mirrored and promoted their viewpoints over progressive groups by a ratio of more than 6 to 1. Just to underscore this point, the top five grantees who have received funding for “civility discourse” work include: Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council — which does model bills for state legislatures — the Anti-Defamation League, and Project Veritas. This is essentially a list of the most right-wing groups in the country at the moment. The top groups.

While many of those groups present this civility discourse as politically neutral, Uncivil found that 70 percent of the campuses they looked at had been accused of suppressing pro-Palestine speech. This is now roughly a $200-million-a-year industry.

In the book, you talk about how this movement at Columbia backfired: in trying to suspend or shut down pro-Palestine groups, it ended up creating a 100 or more new pro-Palestine groups.

But given how strong this “civility discourse” push still is, where do you see the student Palestine solidarity movement going from here?

MK: The fact that the president of the United States felt the need to go after a random student means that this movement changed the mainstream, means that we are winning. Otherwise, they would leave it to, I would say, covert racism and discrimination because it was always happening at Columbia, as I’ve mentioned these attacks against Palestine. But it wasn’t very obvious. Because they did not need to.

I don’t think there’s an amount of money that would stop the Palestine movement for freedom, because we can see that people now feel betrayed by their institutions, feel betrayed by their representatives, feel betrayed by the establishment that hid from them the endless support to Israel.

“The fact that the president of the United States felt the need to go after a random student means that this movement changed the mainstream.”

Because now if you’re a politician who’s supporting Palestine, that means you’re also good on other things. Because a lot of people, Palestine may not be their single issue or their first. But if you’re good on Palestine, that means you are good on other things.

That means that you are not bought by corporations and by AIPAC and by the oligarchs. That’s how it came right now. That’s why in Zohran’s race —

AL: Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor.

MK: Tens of millions were spent against him, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate, the Democratic candidate, also over $60 million were spent against him, and still he won [the primary]. But that doesn’t mean to me that we should stop. That means that we should continue until that dome breaks. And it will break. Sooner or later, it will break.

We need change. We need to stop sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, or any arms to Israel, or anything to Israel, really. Israel should be isolated, should be the pariah state that it is. That’s why I keep pushing now. I keep working on advocating for Palestine. That this did not stop. The genocide’s still happening. Every day there is a Palestinian getting killed by Israel, whether in Gaza or in the West Bank.

But also we must acknowledge the violence that was inflicted upon students, upon this movement in this country. It’s not only universities that suspended and expelled these students, not only that the police also brutalized their students, but you have a big attack on this movement that’s happening across the country, whether from the federal government itself. But you can see across the country, whether it is in the South or even small counties also still trying to attack this movement.

My position as a Palestinian is, how can we really face this level of violence or this level of coordinated and well-funded attacks against the movement?

AL: Though the Trump administration has claimed repeatedly that your case is not about free speech or the First Amendment, they have not necessarily been arguing that your speech wasn’t constitutionally protected or that you are here illegally. Just to be clear, for anyone who’s confused, you are a green card holder, a lawful permanent resident.

We’ve been talking about this New Yorker piece, as Andrew Marantz wrote last month. The government is arguing that none of those things — the legality of your actions, or your presence here — outweigh Trump’s power to detain you on whatever grounds it sees fit. In this case, claiming that your presence is a threat to American foreign policy interests.

You’ve talked about this fundamental contradiction in the American story of democracy and liberty, that the only real rights we have are those the government sees fit to enforce. You talk about the suspension of principles, depending on the circumstance. And this is a long-standing criticism of the American government, particularly if you’re a minority, a woman, a trans person, or if you’re poor.

You’ve shared your unique perspective on this issue, having lived under a dictatorship in Syria under Bashar al-Assad. You have said at least in Syria, the government wasn’t telling you it was upholding your rights. [laughs] They were open about it. And since your abduction, we’re seeing the government be in many ways more open about its intentions here. But what happens after that?

MK: It’s fascism. It is authoritarianism. What we’re seeing within my case or other cases is authoritarian practices. The government is trying their luck. For the government now, the worst thing that could happen is a court telling them, “No, maybe you shouldn’t do this.”

“For the government now, the worst thing that could happen is a court telling them, ‘No, maybe you shouldn’t do this.’”

But for me, I lost 104 days of my life. For others, they lost their entire lives. I’m not an expert on authoritarianism or dictatorships, but I lived under dictatorship. As I said, in Syria, I hid my face because I knew the risks. It wasn’t Assad was going out and saying, “We have freedom of speech, and we have all of that.” It wasn’t like that. You knew the consequences.

Here, they would gaslight you into “No, you have rights. You have all of this.” But you have rights because it’s convenient for them. As long as you’re not damaging or impacting the structures of power, you have freedom of speech, you have rule of law, the Constitution applies to you. But the moment that your speech or your actions threaten that structure of power, you would see the opposite — which is authoritarianism at the end of the day.

Trump is not hiding it. When they arrested me, they said, “This is a blueprint to go after everyone who’s speaking out for Palestine.” It’s not like they hid their intentions at all.

Part of me, like years from now, America would look back on ICE detention, on Palestine, and say, why did we let this happen? And that’s part of my fight. That’s why I’m doing this right now, because we need to stop it now. We can’t afford to wait 20 years from now because people are being killed. People are being disappeared. 65,000 at any moment are in ICE detention separated from their families.

“You have rights because it’s convenient for them. As long as you’re not damaging or impacting the structures of power, you have freedom of speech.”

AL: Mahmoud, are there any final thoughts you would like to leave our listeners with?

MK: I wrote this book to raise the alarm that we can’t afford to stay silent. That in our backyards, there are ICE detention centers. In our backyards, there are weapon manufacturers who are shipping weapons to Israel to kill people. We must act now, and we can’t just afford to wait.

AL: Mahmoud Khalil, we’re gonna leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

MK: No, it’s my honor, Akela. Thank you so much.

AL: That does it for this episode.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Video editing by Sean Turner. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. And a special thank you to our recording engineer David Herman at Good Studio. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Mahmoud Khalil: “We Can’t Afford to Stay Silent” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Blueprint for Democrats to Win Back Voters

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

It’s the year of the democratic socialist. But the group that helped start the earthquake currently transforming the Democratic Party almost didn’t make it to 2026.

After suffering major losses last election cycle after a deluge of pro-Israel lobby spending, Justice Democrats, which supports progressive candidates getting elected to Congress, was on the verge of being written about in the past tense.

“Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what’s to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn’t endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC,” says communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC’s momentum and ability.”

But Justice Democrats resurrected itself, had its most successful primary season to date, and helped put democratic socialism on the map. So what changed?

The group says it won big this year, even being massively outspent, because it tapped into the brewing frustration among voters — frustration directed at Democratic Party leaders. “We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back, and what voters were looking for as we’ve seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want,” says Andrabi. “That fight doesn’t just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Andrabi speaks to host Akela Lacy about how the group that helped elect Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib has seen their candidates make impressive gains in the primaries, and how they’re planning to leverage their wins — and what they can learn from their losses — beyond November.

This primary season, Justice Democrats endorsed 15 candidates; seven won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won.

“This work doesn’t happen overnight. These losses don’t happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress,” says Andrabi. “These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.”

“Until they start taking lessons from the left on what to actually fight for, they will continue to be running on cycle-to-cycle losses and wins instead of really looking at, long-term, how can we take back power and ensure that we don’t consistently backside into this fascist and authoritarian regime that is overrun by the same corporate interests that the Democratic establishment is also funded by.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. So, Akela, how are you doing? What’s been top of mind for you this week?

AL: I am really stuck on this news that apparently hackers now have information on all FBI agents, which is crazy. Hackers claimed that they were able to breach a bunch of FBI services and steal a bunch of information about federal agents.

That’s on top of another insane story that I saw on Thursday morning about yet another rogue AI agent, but this time it hacked an Australia government healthcare portal — an OpenAI agent. I don’t know if you saw that, but that really stuck with me.

JW: All of these AI attacks, everything that’s come out, I keep thinking back to our interview with Karen Hao, who wrote “Empire of AI,” and how so much of the stuff that she’s warned about is now something that people are talking about in the discourse. It’s all really scary stuff, but it’s also stuff that’s kind of been reported on before, so it is interesting to see it all blow up now.

As someone who started in television, I have to say I cannot stop thinking about this Paramount deal. So for those who don’t know, on Monday, Paramount reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros., which would give Trump ally David Ellison control of a massive media empire, which includes both CNN and CBS News. Ellison is reportedly considering tapping Elon Musk for an investment, which would give the billionaire a stake in two of the largest news organizations in the world.

AL: This is all happening while the White House is waging a war on mainstream media outlets: CNN, Politico, and MS Now. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the White House efforts to strip those outlets of their White House press credentials. But we saw President Trump this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York ask CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins why she was there because she wasn’t supposed to be covering him — but she wasn’t at the White House.

So the state of our media ecosystem is healthy as ever.

JW: Things are going great in our democracy. In other news, ProPublica reported that in 2024, the FBI was seeking to launch an investigation into a potential pay-to-play scheme between Sen. Susan Collins and one of her top donors, a former defense contractor who reportedly told federal agents that he had received millions in federal contracts by donating to campaigns of politicians. The investigation was reportedly halted after President Donald Trump returned to office and gutted the entire bureau.

Akela, you had a really interesting campaign finance story come out this week as well, relating to Sen. John Fetterman. What happened there?

AL: I got a text on Monday from a source who had seen an email that the Fetterman campaign sent from a domain called, “gopsquad.com.” The story we basically did was about after finding several other conservative email domains that Fetterman was using to send this campaign fundraising email after he delivered a surprise video speech to the Republican midterm convention earlier this month, was that he’s either renting or buying Republican targeted email lists to raise money right now.

We’ve been covering Fetterman’s fall from grace over the past several years, but his fundraising numbers have really struggled as he has pursued this rightward turn on issues from immigration to Iran to Israel. Many of his small dollar donors, we reported in, in recent years, were asking for their money back.

We see his campaign now pretty openly just asking Republicans for money. Something funny — well, funny or depressing —that happened on Wednesday, Republican Sen. Mike Lee from Utah was sending out emails fundraising off of Fetterman’s fundraising. I’ll just read you this email.

The subject line: “I just got this email from John Fetterman.” “Friend, I just got an email from John. He’s basically a Republican now. I need your help to draft him. Sign here. Thanks, Sen. Mike Lee.” Which is pretty chef’s kiss, if you ask me.

JW: I have to say: gopsquad.com is probably my favorite part.

AL: Not subtle.

JW: Not at all subtle. Is there anything else that you’re following that you want to talk about?

AL: We’re still waiting to learn the name of the ICE officer who shot a 28-year-old Venezuelan delivery driver in Austin, Texas. I spoke with sources there who said that the local district attorney’s office and the Austin Police Department are cooperating to basically get whatever information they can from HSI — the Department of Homeland Security Investigations — which apparently has not declined to give them any information, but also hasn’t given them any information yet.

So we’re seeing a very similar playbook as to what we saw after the ICE shootings in Minneapolis, where local law enforcement and prosecutors are basically fighting with federal agencies to try to get any information — the bare minimum, this person’s name — out of this. The Travis County district attorney, which encompasses Austin, has apparently been in close touch with the Minneapolis prosecutor to learn how they navigated the situation.

I’ll remind our listeners, we interviewed Mary Moriarty, the Minneapolis prosecutor, who was working on prosecuting the ICE shootings in Minneapolis earlier in the year.

JW: To your point, it’s been so many months, and there’s still not any kind of justice in those cases, and it’s hard to imagine that there will be in this most recent shooting.

Thinking about ICE and the election, I’ve been reporting on groups that are trying to fight back against potential election interference. They’re planning for a ton of different scenarios, one of which includes ICE potentially coming to the polls and being there to intimidate voters of color and immigrant voters as well.

These groups are trying to prevent that harassment, and so they’re there to monitor, to report, and to keep people safe against a terrifying new threat. Obviously, voter intimidation isn’t new. I spoke to the NAACP, who had mentioned, we’ve been fighting on this issue “for the last 117 years.”

But ICE at the polls is new. What Trump has been discussing in terms of election sabotage scenarios are very new, and so these organizers are trying to use the tools they learned in the resistance to ICE movement that we saw pop up in January and February to try and keep our election safe as well.

On that topic, Akela, I know you also speak with Justice Democrats communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi about how progressives are preparing for the general after a really impressive sweep in the primaries. Let’s hear that conversation.

AL: I speak now with Usamah Andrabi, Communications Director and Spokesperson for Justice Democrats, the group that brought us AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and many more.

Usamah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Usamah Andrabi: Thanks for having me.

AL: I want to start by taking our listeners back to a different time.

It’s 2018. The “Squad” has just been elected to office, and a fresh new crop of democratic socialists and progressives are making themselves known on Capitol Hill.

Think: AOC joining a sit-in to protest for a Green New Deal outside of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. For listeners who aren’t familiar with the legacy of Justice Democrats, they have your group to thank in large part for that moment in time and for bringing us the Squad. But a lot has changed since then. How is Justice Democrats different today from in 2018, and what’s the same?

UA: What’s the same, first and foremost, is the commitment to the values that we had then are the same commitment we have to those values, and those are the values that we demand of the candidates we recruit, support, and endorse. Because those are the values that Democratic voters share — values that put the needs of working-class people above the needs of corporations and billionaires, and taking on lobbies like AIPAC, crypto, or AI.

I think that’s a little bit of what’s changed, is what we have seen since 2018, really, is the increased appearance of more and more moneyed interest organizing against the Squad, organizing against left-wing politicians, because they are bringing working-class people into the halls of power and bringing their needs to the top of the agenda for the Democratic Party. Billionaires hate that.

I don’t think we would have seen the sort of organized construction of a United Democracy Project or a Democratic Majority for Israel or Jobs and Democracy PAC or Fairshake or a lot of these. But particularly the Israel lobby seems to really organize in direct response to the success of our candidates in Congress.

We had the Squad get elected in 2018. Then two years later, folks like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush won very specifically against deeply pro-Israel politicians like Eliot Engel and [William] Lacy Clay, and they won without compromising on those values. That’s a really scary thing for the Israel lobby, who has really had a sharp control over how Democrats unconditionally support the Israeli government and military like Republicans have for decades.

What I think has happened is, we’ve had some wins, we’ve had some losses, and we’ve had to learn a lot from those losses and understand how to organize our donors better, organize funders, organize progressives, really, to coalesce more around independent candidates and broaden this network.

I talk a lot about how I feel like in 2024, Democrats across the board suffered a lot of losses. We suffered two of our best members of Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their seats. And obviously, the Democratic Party lost every single other thing they could have lost. It felt like the job was to go home, everyone was supposed to do their homework and come back stronger to fight back against this very clearly fascist agenda that was laid out for us.

The left went home. We did our homework. We organized coalitions, we built broader donor networks, and we really invested a lot in candidate recruitment at Justice Dems.

And it feels like the establishment came back even weaker. Despite having weeks and months and years to really prepare for what Donald Trump promised he was going to do, they came back flat-footed and continue to look as weak as possible. That’s why I think you’re seeing so many successes for the left this cycle, because we are a true balm to the ineptitude of the Democratic establishment.

“You’re seeing so many successes for the left this cycle because we are a true balm to the ineptitude of the Democratic establishment.”

AL: We’re going to run through some of those wins in a second; many of our listeners are already familiar with them because we’ve talked a lot about these candidates on the show.

But I want to go back to this money thing before we get into that because, as you mentioned, coming off of those major losses of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman to money from the pro-Israel lobby last cycle — I don’t think anyone expected you all to notch as many wins as you did in the primaries this year.

We read obituaries of Justice Democrats, right? And that outside spending, as you mentioned, still has not gone away; it’s only increased. But it still wasn’t enough to stop the candidates behind the rise of democratic socialism that everyone is talking about, who were, to your point, far outmatched in terms of spending.

I’ll just run through the numbers quickly. You endorsed 15 candidates; seven of them won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all are but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won. Three of your other candidates won or came in the top two slots in the California primaries, which are nonpartisan, and are headed to runoffs in November. And only five candidates lost.

So what made this cycle different?

UA: First and foremost, love to prove our haters wrong at all times. [Laughter]

A lot of spite drives that. But also, it’s exactly that. Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what’s to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn’t endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC.

The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC’s momentum and ability. Because on the other side of that, as we had been working for years to expose, was the toxic involvement of AIPAC in these primaries and the right-wing network of billionaires who are actually funding this.

It took many years for us to break down AIPAC, and it took a lot of losses to get to that point, but it was worth it. We did a lot of polling. We invested a lot of money in research to bring this message to voters.

Cori and Jamaal’s losses unfortunately were the final nails in the coffin for a lot of people to wake up to realize how the Israel lobby really functions in our politics — paired with the fact that obviously we watched a genocide get livestreamed on our screens for years at this point, and voters began to wake up to understand: Why is it that a majority of us oppose this genocide — we support an arms embargo, we support a ceasefire — yet only a minority of left-wing politicians in Congress are responding to our demands?

They understood that that was the role of the Israel lobby, spending infinite amounts of money and buying members of Congress to ensure that they would do their bidding. Even before the 2024 election, we were very clear that this cycle was going to have to be a cycle where we went back on the offense, made big bets, and fought back really hard.

We knew we were going to have to endorse a lot more candidates, spread the board out across the country, really, to make sure that AIPAC didn’t just have two members of Congress to target but had 15 different candidates, as well as meeting where Democratic voters were at.

We know no matter if Kamala won or if Donald Trump won, there was still a lot of work to do to rebuild this Democratic Party to actually represent the needs of the working class. We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back.

What voters were looking for, as we’ve seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want. That fight doesn’t just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.

“There’s no going behind, under, or any other prepositional phrase around AIPAC or these lobbies. The only way to defeat them is to go right through them and beat them head-on.”

For so long, even people who call themselves progressive have tried to figure out, how can we go around, under, or behind these lobbies and skirt this very particular line to avoid their wrath? We try to make it clear to everyone, even in the cycle where we lost the most we’ve ever lost, that there’s no going behind, under, or any other prepositional phrase around AIPAC or these lobbies. The only way to defeat them is to go right through them and beat them head-on.

We knew that this was an existential crisis for us. As you said, people are already reading our obituaries, and we wanted to make it clear that this work doesn’t happen overnight. These losses don’t happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress.

The excitement that you are seeing from the Democratic electorate across the country for our candidates, it’s taken years to build, and it’s taken years of the Democratic establishment failing to actually live up to their potential and what the demands of working-class people across the country have been.

AL: I want to talk about this process that you’re talking about, this iterative process of bench-building that gets lost in a lot of the horse-race analysis.

But first, I just want to mention, we had one of your candidates, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, on the show earlier this year to talk about Republican gerrymandering efforts as part of this last-ditch plan to fight off what is expected to be big losses for Republicans in November. Pearson is running in one of the districts at the forefront of that gerrymandering fight.

Even with the momentum we’ve seen against Republicans and against the Democratic establishment, as we’re talking about, what can Democrats do in the face of this massive gerrymandering push? How do you think that could potentially affect Pearson’s race?

I’ll just mention this again: Justin Pearson is running in a seat that was vacated by longtime Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who is the last Democratic representative in Tennessee, so this is an important race.

UA: First and foremost, it’s doing exactly what Justin is doing, which is really not surrendering to the Republican gerrymander.

It’s very easy for us far away in the Democratic establishment to see these sort of Republican gerrymanders and say, “All right. Well, it’s cooked. There’s no chance of us doing anything here. We can put forward our standard DCCC candidate and talk about it a little, but we’re not going to invest any resources in there.”

I think that would be a failure. This is the tip of the spear of our modern civil rights movement. We are seeing the Voting Rights Act gutted in front of our face, take away the last Black-majority district in the state of Tennessee at a time when Justin J. Pearson was ostensibly going to win his Democratic primary against Steve Cohen.

“When he talked about whether or not he wanted to do this, he understood no matter if he wins or loses, this is a fight worth having.”

When he talked about whether or not he wanted to do this, he understood no matter if he wins or loses, this is a fight worth having. It’s worth showing Democratic voters in the electorate, and the establishment more than anyone, that we can go into these Republican districts and these rural communities and not compromise on our most basic values.

Justin has not changed the policies and agenda he was running for when he was running against Steve Cohen to what he’s running for now. He has been the leader in that state on taking on AI data centers, and he is still the leader taking them on as his Republican opponent has unleashed them on Republican areas of this district.

He’s uncompromised on standing up against the genocide and endless wars abroad and U.S. taxpayers funding for that, and he’s demanding Medicare for all. These are extremely popular policies, not just in the bluest districts across the country, but across the board ideologically. He is showing an example of how we don’t have to run Amy McGraths everywhere we go in these red districts to win over “red voters.”

“He is showing an example of how we don’t have to run Amy McGraths everywhere we go in these red districts to win over ‘red voters.’”

These are working-class voters who are also been shivved and fucked by the same establishment that is run by Republicans and Democrats. These are people who are getting their hospitals and schools closed down in rural communities, who are getting their ACA subsidies cut and Medicaid subsidies cut.

This is a failure of the establishment of both parties. We can show that a different way is possible. Obviously, we need to fight to restore the Voting Rights Act, and we need to expand the Supreme Court and reform this court so we cannot continue just to see fights that people who are still living have fought for to be taken away in the same breath.

There’s a lot of work to do. It feels really difficult to know how we can claw back some of this institutional power when our institutions are so broken and corrupt. But I think that visionary agenda and ideals are what we need to see more from the Democratic Party, rather than simply being a party that is not Republicans.

That’s what these candidates have been so exciting for voters across the country about are that they, for the first time, are giving Democratic voters in a lot of these districts an affirmative positive agenda that centers their most urgent crises and actually has bold enough solutions to tackle those crises.

“That visionary agenda and ideals are what we need to see more from the Democratic Party, rather than simply being a party that is not Republicans.”

AL: This criticism came up a lot in this cycle, and this is the kind of thing I think that often says more about the person that is saying the criticism than the people they’re actually targeting. This is often lodged against candidates on the left or candidates backed by Justice Democrats that, “OK, all this is great, congratulations on your win, but once you get to Congress you’re not actually going to be able to do anything because there aren’t enough of you yet.” What do you say to that?

UA: You could have said that to us nine years ago, right? That would’ve been the case. Yet one of the most popular politicians in this country is AOC, and the most popular politician is Bernie Sanders, who has these same values. So clearly there’s an appetite from the American electorate for more voters like that.

People know who Ilhan Omar is, people know who Rashida Tlaib is, and it’s not simply because Fox News uses them as an attack every other week. It’s because they have been standing up and been the most courageous leaders in Congress, standing up for the values they need, not only on Palestine, but no one is louder about needing clean water in the state of Michigan than Rashida Tlaib. Ilhan Omar is the reason that the state of Minnesota has universal school lunches for children. These are leaders who have actually delivered on the promises that the Democratic Party has only hypothetically talked about.

Coming off a cycle where we lost two members, it’s very easy for people to say “Well, you have no power in Congress.” Yet we are sending seven new leftists to Congress this cycle, at least. It’ll be really telling how big the hypothetical Democratic majority is in Congress, because if it is seven-member majority, then you’re starting to ask a lot more different questions of, well, now you have a block of new members of Congress who can actually sway what policy and what agenda we are fighting for in this party.

So this shit doesn’t happen over fucking night. It takes years and years and cycles to build this block in Congress. You have to bring the people with it, and it takes time to organize and convince the masses of the working class to really buy into an electoral project that has screwed them time and time again, and to have that revolutionary optimism that there’s something to be done here.

There’s a lot of promise with this new class of members who are now joining an already existing class of members. We will nearly double our size in Congress, and that’s a big deal. You can look at far smaller groups of members of Congress that have wielded much more power than the amount that we’re sending to Congress.

These leaders were elected with the mandate to challenge the Democratic establishment, and so they will have to do that. More than anything, it’s up to the Democratic establishment on how they want to respond to the clear demands of their voters. These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.

“These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party.”

AL: I do have to ask here, Cori Bush is the anomaly in the success stories that we’re talking about, right? What happened in that race? Why do you think that this momentum did not extend to her challenge to take back her old seat from Wesley Bell in Missouri?

UA: She is not the only loss we’ve had this cycle. The first race of the cycle was Nida Allam, who had lost a really close race.

AL: In North Carolina.

US: In North Carolina. We saw two races, Kat Abughazaleh and Junaid Ahmed in Illinois, lost at the hands of big money from AIPAC, crypto, and AI. Saikat Chakrabarti in Nancy Pelosi’s seat also lost the primary as well to a lot of big spending from seemingly pro-Israel donors.

The truth is, we are always going to be up against this insurmountable amount of money. To the best of our ability, we have to organize our resources and organize our people to fight back against that. But it’s also the truth that we don’t take corporate PAC money. We don’t take money from billionaires, and so our resources are limited, and we’ve grown that. We’ve grown that pool. We’ve expanded our donor network to be able to run 15 candidates and win seven races.

“We are always going to be up against this insurmountable amount of money.”

But there’s not an infinite amount of resources, and so those losses are proof that the left still also has work to do. We do need to build more resources. We do need to build better connections to ensure that champions and fighters like Cori Bush, who to me really embody the fighter that Democratic voters are talking about, can be sent back to Congress.

Because in the absence of them, we have useless corporate shills like Wesley Bell, who have done absolutely nothing for their community since they got to St. Louis — and it shows.

A big part of that is a resource constraint, also, the truth is, Cori had to go up against nearly $15 million of attacks last cycle, and that’s really recent. It’s not just the money that was spent against her this cycle. You have to look at what happened last cycle, because it’s all the same attacks. They ran the same playbook all over again, and it’s effective.

When you have a 20 to 1 outspending situation, and the only thing you’re seeing on TV and mail is how much you should dislike Cori Bush, it works at a certain point. That’s why it worked last cycle. Cori is a deep proof point that the left still has some work to do to really ensure that all of our champions can get to Congress.

AL: I want to move now to some of the news of the week. This week, ICE shot yet another person in Austin, Texas: 28-year old food delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez from Venezuela. After he was released from the hospital he was taken to an immigration detention center with a bullet still in his back, according to him and his lawyer.

If Justice Democrats candidates make it to Congress in November, what power do they have to push Democrats to do more to stop ICE from killing and terrorizing people? What can they do, particularly in a House session where we expect Democrats, if they win power to be putting a laser focus on investigating Trump’s corruption, for example?

UA: We should first and foremost be bold and listen to where voters are at. A majority of voters do not believe that ICE needs to exist. That’s understandable because both you and I were alive at a time when ICE didn’t exist — and yet I’m still living.

AL: What a time.

UA: What a time that was. The proof is in the pudding that we don’t need an ICE to have a “safe” America, whatever that means. But clearly the fascist governments need ICE to execute immigrants in this country and shoot down our neighbors and kidnap our families.

“Both you and I were alive at a time when ICE didn’t exist — and yet I’m still living. … We don’t need an ICE to have a ‘safe’ America, whatever that means.”

First and foremost, we should start from pushing to abolish ICE and ending this agency for all. Delia Ramirez, one of our Justice Democrats in Congress, has been leading the charge on this, calling to abolish ICE and also to dissolve the Department of Homeland Security, [which] in many ways, is also a relic of our lifetime. It is a relic of the George W. Bush era.

I am baffled when there are Democratic leaders in this country who are so obsessed with defending an institution created by George W. fucking Bush. I remember when we didn’t like George W. Bush, and we didn’t agree with his policies. I’m not sure why the Democratic Party of 2026 should be the same as the Republican Party of 2004.

It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, and I think we are always, on immigration over the last 20 years, have always been allowing the right to dictate what the agenda and our playground should be on immigration policy, on border policy, on all of these policies. And as a result, have always tried to be a diet Republican Party on immigration policy, when the most popular policies we ever put forward on immigration were things like a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers and abolishing ICE, now.

We have to be bold and not only end this agency, but also, as many people are talking about, prosecuting the people who were in charge of ICE and these officers who were killing folks.

“I’m not sure why the Democratic Party of 2026 should be the same as the Republican Party of 2004.”

The ICE agent who was the shooter in Austin wasn’t even wearing a body cam. As if that’s enough anyway. Then there’s so many different accounts and these lies. We are living through another evolution of our criminal legal system being so extrajudicial and so outside of the bounds of what should be legally allowed that I think we have to massively reign in this agency. We cannot do it in a mealy-mouthed way that says we need to pay lip service to this right-wing propaganda, while continuing to allow our immigrant neighbors and families to be murdered and shot down in the streets while they’re trying to deliver food to your house.

AL: In the Austin shooting the district attorney in Travis County, which is where the shooting happened, which is where Austin is, they are still trying to figure out the name of this officer, and they are waiting on getting footage from other ICE officers in the vicinity who had body cameras on, and they’re also trying to get footage from local hospitals to figure out where this officer who was allegedly injured went, because they do not yet know his name.

UA: But they know the man who he shot’s name, so.

AL: Yes. Much of the news this week centered on President Donald Trump’s attacks on the news media and his trip to New York City, where he met with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and attended the United Nations General Assembly.

Outside the UNGA, Jewish leaders protested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday. Mamdani once said he would arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York, though he didn’t have the authority to do so, and the two battled publicly this week.

Many people praised Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Netanyahu, even though it had not really any teeth, but as an example of what we’re talking about, of just wanting Democrats to do something — the kind of sentiment that has animated many voters who’ve supported Justice Democrats candidates this cycle.

Democrats are heading into this lame-duck session for Trump where there is still little appetite among leadership to do something substantive on Israel — though last week we saw an unusual refusal from top Democrat Rep. Greg Meeks to approve Trump’s latest proposed $2.8 billion sale of more bombs to Israel.

What is the strategy for the progressive bench on this issue right now? It seems like every time one of these packages comes up, there’s this big dust-up over OK, what’s going to happen? And every time, a few more Democrats either vote against it or, as in this case, voice some sort of opposition. But where do you see this going in the next Congress?

UA: The writing is on the wall if even Chairman Greg Meeks is suspending some of these things. You can go to the FEC’s website to see why that is an interesting development.

AL: [Laughter] Just in terms of support that Meeks has gotten from the pro-Israel apparatus in the past is what you’re referring to, I’m assuming.

UA: Yes. He’s been a dear ally to the lobby historically. But I think, like we saw on the vote on the Massie amendment, for the first time a majority of Democrats are voting to say, “We’re not going to send money to Israel.” A lot of people can say, “Well, that’s just a performative vote,” all these things.

Look, I worked in Congress. Those performative votes don’t happen in that sort of way, unless the people are pressuring members of Congress to get to this point. That’s what we’re seeing, is that you are seeing Democratic voters across the country reject you if you have an endorsement from AIPAC or you take a single dollar from AIPAC, which is why AIPAC has to hide its money so much this cycle.

“You are seeing Democratic voters across the country reject you if you have an endorsement from AIPAC or you take a single dollar from AIPAC, which is why AIPAC has to hide its money so much this cycle.”

That’s what we’re going to see coming into this new Congress, is a real thrust of energy for the pro-Palestinian movement within Congress now that you are really doubling the amount of leaders in Congress who are unabashedly against the endless supply of military funding and resources to the Israeli government.

You have a renewed movement to really organize even more members. You can look at the co-sponsor for the Block the Bombs, Delia Ramirez’s arms embargo bill has a lot of members you would not have expected even a cycle ago to do so. But that’s the power of not only these elections, but also mass movements across the country demanding that their leaders actually stop the endless supply of weapons.

There will absolutely have to be a fight in Congress for this next Congress to say we need to stop funding the Israeli government and military, and the Democratic voters are behind us. That might be a fight that has to challenge leadership on that fight, because obviously leadership has historically been more aligned with funding the Israeli military and government.

But at a certain point they have to also see the writing on the wall. They are beginning to see that. There’s a lot of opportunities with a Democratic majority to show voters that we are hearing them, that we also don’t think your tax dollars should fund a fucking genocide for three to four to five years after also already funding decades of apartheid.

That’s where we have to move next is not only ending funding right now, but ensuring that we never fund this military and government, and actually push towards a solution where we can end the apartheid state that Israel is running over the Palestinian people, and actually have a place where everyone has equal rights and dignity, which currently does not exist, obviously.

AL: You mentioned that you used to work in Congress, and I’m taken back to the fond days when I first met you around circa 2018 when you were working for then Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Mark Pocan. And since that time, we have been having this same conversation about the fight over the future of the Democratic Party.

Where do you see Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and party leadership more broadly, either fitting into or obstructing your vision for the future? In that vein, I’m curious there’s been a lot of talk about where will Justice Democrats’ candidates land on, supporting a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries in 2027? What conversations are you having around that? Where do you see this conversation going?

UA: Look, the corporate establishment will always be a barrier to progressive change and delivering for the needs of the working class. That, they have proven. They have made it clear. They have said it on the record.

These are not my feelings. They’re theirs. These elections, these campaigns, have proven that they are on the wrong side of the Democratic Party electorate, and they are in the minority, as they always have been. But it’s really eye-opening for people in leadership to have races like people like Claire Valdez, and Zohran, and Darializa become these leaders in New York, in your backyard, speaking of both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who obviously represent New York in the Senate and the House.

It doesn’t stop there. As much as people want to say every city is not New York — well New York is not Philly, is not Denver, is not Dallas, is not California, is not Tennessee. Let’s be fucking for real. This is happening across the country. There is a bloc of leaders across the country who are actually responding to the needs of the working class.

Like I said, they got elected on a mandate to challenge the Democratic establishment. They will be pushing this Democratic Party to meet the needs of voters, be it pushing for Medicare for All, or an arms embargo on Israel, or a stop to AI data centers, or raising taxes on billionaires. All universally popular fucking policies that the Democratic Party could lead on.

So often this question has been framed as, what will the left do when they get to Congress? How will they deal with these sorts of institutions? We should be asking Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and everyone else that question far more, which is: What are you going to do about the fact that your electorate is making clear that you are not fighting for the policies they are looking for?

When you come out to say you oppose Medicare for All after being a co-sponsor for it for a few cycles, you are in the minority of Democratic voters. I promise in your district particularly I imagine maybe, what, 5 percent of voters agree with you. It’s incumbent upon Democratic leadership to wake up and decide where they want to be on these issues and how they want to lead this party, because do they want to be a one-term House majority?

They can win back the majority a lot because Republicans are failing and because the left is showing voters what an opposition party could actually look like and what a governing party could actually look like. The establishment is not doing that. Until they start taking lessons from the left on what to actually fight for, they will continue to be running on cycle-to-cycle losses and wins instead of really looking at, long-term, how can we take back power and ensure that we don’t consistently backside into this fascist and authoritarian regime that is overrun by the same corporate interests that the Democratic establishment is also funded by.

We absolutely are looking at this new crop of leaders joining this already existing group of progressives to really have a sizable influence in bringing the people’s power to the halls of Congress more than anything, and using their coordinated megaphones in many ways to bring light to the issues that people need them to.

Because even if we take back the House majority, Donald Trump is still president, even if we take the Senate back. He can veto any bill, and that’s a reality, but that should not stop us from showing people what we could do if we had power.

“What we could do if we had power should not simply look like turning back the clock to what it looked like before Donald Trump, which is what some of the agenda I’m seeing from Democratic leadership is.”

And what we could do if we had power should not simply look like turning back the clock to what it looked like before Donald Trump, which is what some of the agenda I’m seeing from Democratic leadership is, let’s roll back this. Let’s get this back. The status quo three, two, five, seven, eight, pick a fucking year, was not good enough for working-class people, so why would we go back to that?

Obviously, we need to roll back all these attacks. We need to claw back the destruction that the Trump administration has done, but that’s obviously also not enough. We need universal healthcare. We need housing for all. We need to make billionaires pay their fair share. We need to stop fucking AI data centers from destroying every community, and raising our utility bills and poisoning our water. There are a litany of crises that we are facing. Mealy-mouthed solutions are not what Democratic voters are looking for.

They are making that deeply clear, and no matter how much fear-mongering around socialism or the Red Scare you want to do, the truth is, voters support these policies because these policies support voters.

AL: If we’re picking years, I pick 2004. [Laughter] I think you’re onto something there. We’re going to leave it there, Usamah. Thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

UA: Thank you, Akela.

AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor.

Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post The Blueprint for Democrats to Win Back Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:30:00 +0000

The fight over the future is rapidly unfolding before our eyes. With debates roiling Washington over calls to rein in artificial intelligence before it’s too late as the U.S. continues to wage official and unofficial wars around the world, many of the world’s most powerful players are licking their chops.

Yes, there’s destruction all around. But these players have carefully concocted a plan: to hasten a familiar vision that combines biblical, militant, and futuristic images of the end times so they can save themselves.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy interviews award-winning authors and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” maps the players who want to speed up the end of the world.

“We didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this,” says Klein. It seemed to be “a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm, and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down in and taking breakdown for granted.”

“End times fascism is an alliance of three main components,” says Taylor. The religious fundamentalists who helped elect Donald Trump, wanting to hasten along a violent Armageddon so Jesus will return. The tech accelerationists “exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over.” The ethnonationalists who view immigration as an existential threat, so they fortress the border and hoard resources. “These different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage,” says Taylor.

It may sound bizarre. And it is. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it, Klein says. “This is a really dangerous pattern of thought: that out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that’s the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear,” says Klein. “When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower, he’s doing a version of that story. When Sam Altman says he’s summoning a digital god, and we’re going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it’s going to be utopia … he’s doing the story. So we have to be able to identify it — because we’re all living with the consequences of this terrible story and we need better stories.”

“In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, ‘Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it’s just humans in general.’ This is opening up a bigger fight beyond ‘I am a man’ to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there’s something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying,” says Taylor, noting that the collective uprising, across the political spectrum, against data centers shows people breaking free of one so-called inevitable future.

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. Today, we’re going to talk about the apocalypse.

NBC: You truly believe AI can kill us all in less than a decade?

Jacob Coxon: Yes, I do.

AL: If you’ve been disturbed by the increasingly dystopian flavor of today’s world, you’re not alone. It can be hard to keep track.

And if you listen to this show, you’re familiar with the imagery: Masked agents in the streets. Soldiers clad in camo patrolling U.S cities. Mounting numbers of U.S. strikes committing extrajudicial killings of civilians in international waters. And a populace faced with a literal war against machines — not just at home but around the world.

U.S. Central Command’s Adm. Brad Cooper: First our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools.

AL: Washington is in turmoil over calls coming from inside the house to regulate AI before it’s too late. President Donald Trump has called the whole dustup a “hoax,” even as MAGA architect Steve Bannon appeared alongside Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to promote human control over AI, as Congress balks at renewed public pressure to do something — anything — before they recess again until November.

Bernie Sanders: When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry.

Steve Bannon: All they’re trying to do is to use a crisis and turn it to their advantage, turn it to their advantage by creating a moat, a cartel, where not only can’t other aspiring companies get in, but more importantly, they’re going to have a liability shift to the American people.

AL: None of this would come as a surprise to our guests today, award-winning journalists and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose latest book documents the end-times ideology that unites the players trying to hasten just the final doomsday AI leaders are warning us about.

Today, we’re discussing the players responsible for bringing the most Orwellian features of our collective imagination to life. And we’ll break down just what their project entails: prophecy as policy, and speeding up the end of the world to save the chosen few.

Klein and Taylor’s new book is called “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.”

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker and also the bestselling author of “Doppelganger,” “No Logo,” and “The Shock Doctrine.” She is an associate professor of geography and a co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, and she writes a regular column for The Guardian.

Naomi Klein, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Naomi Klein: Thank you, it’s great to be with you.

AL: Astra Taylor, also an award-winning journalist and documentarian, is a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She is the author of “The People’s Platform,” which won the American Book Award; “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone”; and “The Age of Insecurity.” Taylor regularly writes for publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times.

Astra Taylor, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Astra Taylor: Really excited to be here.

AL: I want to start with how you conceptualized this idea. How did you come to develop the notion of “end times fascism”?

NK: It was born of the early weeks of the new, the second Trump administration — really trying to put our fingers on the continuities and the ruptures of what we were seeing. Both Astra and I had been doing a lot of public conversations, webinars, and we both remember the first Trump administration.

So we were familiar with certain things that we were seeing, but we didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this.

For me personally, I was finding that a lot of people were reading and talking about earlier books of mine, like “The Shock Doctrine,” as a way to understand it. I was feeling like it does not actually capture the full thing.

History does not just repeat on a loop. We often talk about how it accumulates, it compounds. So as people who are pretty keenly attuned to both political and ecological crises, we were noticing that the planet is a player in our politics, and that this seemed to be a kind of fascism that was different in that it didn’t have a future horizon. This was a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm — and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down and taking breakdown for granted.

Those are the origins of it. We’re not saying it’s wholly new; we’re saying that history moves and takes us to new places.

“This was a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. … It was much more about bunkering down and taking breakdown for granted.”

AL: Astra, for people who haven’t read the book, can you tell us briefly, like, a top-level view of what you’re arguing?

AT: We’re arguing that the far right has taken a new apocalyptic turn. To emphasize what Naomi just said, we’re interested in the continuities, but we’re also interested in what has changed.

People for a while have been wondering, is this the F word? Is this fascism? If so, what does that mean for us? This book attempts to answer that question by really taking seriously what has changed. And as a consequence, how has the right wing changed?

The fascism of the 20th century emerged out of certain catastrophic conditions, the sort of classic fascism, which also had antecedents in colonialism and Jim Crow. It also didn’t come from nowhere. But it was a phenomenon that emerged in the wreckage of the First World War and the Great Depression. It was a response to those crises.

Today, we’re living in an age of crises that were unimaginable a century ago. Climate change, an era of nuclear weapons — nuclear weapons were not known to Mussolini or Hitler — artificial intelligence, forms of wealth that are incredibly concentrated and incredibly global, social media, incredibly networked media technologies. This planetary scale has shifted the kind of fascism that we’re responding to.

Our argument is that, as a response to these crises, the fascism of today has abandoned the idea of Armageddon ever ending, of there being a future horizon for their in-group. And that end times fascism is actually an alliance. Fascism is always an alliance, an uncomfortable alliance of different groups.

“These different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage.”

But end times fascism is an alliance of three main components. The book analyzes them, in the ways that they overlap and the ways that they actually conflict.

The religious end-timers who are a major force in the U.S. government and the Israeli government, and more broadly, who have a messianic conviction that the end is nigh and that the Messiah will come, and they want to accelerate what they see as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

The tech end-timers — the tech-right — that is playing with a similar script in the sense that they’re imagining a future where they have created a digital super intelligence or maybe we’ve left the planet.

And then the ethno-nationalist end-timers who view immigration as an existential threat and believe the only response to the increasing disasters and insecurity is to fortress the border and bunker down and save their in-group.

So these different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage.

There’s old, classic features of fascism: a supremacist thinking, eugenics thinking; a willingness to indulge in violence; a sense of woundedness. Fascism is always a movement of the powerful injured, so their sense that they’re under siege from below. These dimensions, though, have been updated for our new risk-filled era. So the book looks at the coalition and their strengths, but also their weaknesses.

“A sense of woundedness — fascism is always a movement of the powerful injured.”

AL: The book is an exploration of how deeply so much of the far right and its grip on sectors from tech to the military has been driven by what you’re talking about, this apocalyptic worldview.

One question I wanted to put to both of you is, when you think about this, how do you understand a vision that is so destructive also being so unifying for these coalitions that you’re talking about?

NK: As Astra was saying, fascism always arises during moments of crisis. Actually, there’s always a kind of a pincer of real crisis.

When Mussolini and Hitler rose up, the real crises of the wreckage of the First World War, economic desperation, cities choked with orphans, maimed soldiers. These were really genuinely horrific times. In response to what many people understood as the savagery of capitalism revealing itself was a rising militant left.

This was also the years after the Russian Revolution, and it was the years when socialists were saying, “We want a revolution in every country.” It was a global movement, and it was a movement that was saying, “You can’t actually have socialism in one country.”

So elites in every country were quite terrified that the response to these real crises would come for them, come up, would come for the system itself.

And so fascism pivots. It recognizes the rage, and it says, “Your rage is real. We feel it. Hey, here’s who to blame. It’s the immigrants crossing the border. That’s the real invasion. They’re coming for your stuff. They’re coming for your jobs. They’re the reason your life is painful,” and offers up all of the other scapegoats. So that can be unifying. It’s an old trick. That’s the Trump playbook. It’s the [Javier] Milei playbook. It’s the [Jair] Bolsonaro playbook. It’s a global playbook.

This is the other thing that we’re trying to do in the book, is wrench the U.S. out of its parochialism a little bit and be like, actually, the laboratory for this in many ways is more Latin America and Europe. It’s coming at a delay in the United States. And though it has particular characteristics in the United States, and in every country there’s particular characteristics, this is very much a global phenomenon.

But I think we wrote the book because we actually think it’s not that unifying. That scapegoat move is always going to be an effective move, but the nature of this alliance is almost uniquely unsteady because, where it’s useful to look at what is the same and what is different with 20th-century fascism, and — here I should add, massive asterisk: We’re not nostalgic for 20th-century fascism. Ye olde fascism. Don’t want that.

But it is useful to look at the fact that Mussolini really did, and so did Franco, invest in major public works projects. Hitler did make the trains run on time, famously. Our fascists don’t care about trains, airports. They fly private. They can live with a level of chaos. They deliver less for their own base, for the people who elected them.

“Our fascists don’t care about trains, airports. They fly private. They can live with a level of chaos. They deliver less for their own base, for the people who elected them.”

We see these ruptures really clearly. In things like Steve Bannon going off on the tech oligarchs, which I never thought people should take all that seriously because he has his own tech oligarchs who’ve been funding him all along.

But we should take seriously these extraordinary uprisings against data centers, where people at the grassroots are finding they have more in common with the people they’ve been warring with over the culture wars they’ve been steadily fed, and going like, “Actually, we all really do agree that we don’t want to live under constant surveillance by Silicon Valley, and we don’t want this data center in our backyard, and we don’t want our kids taught by AI.” Hey, like this is a hell of a lot better than what we saw a few years ago at community meetings. It’s the instability that is really most interesting to us.

By taking them seriously and highlighting how nihilistic and how apocalyptic and how exclusive the vision is, we think we make them weaker, not stronger. We’re saying, “Don’t be afraid to look at this, because actually the more you look at it, the more we drag it into the light, the more vulnerable it is.”

AL: You mentioned this, Astra, laying out the major players in “End Times Fascism” as the religious right, Big Tech, and aspiring bunker-builders, as you describe them, namely those leading the anti-immigrant movement and trafficking in great replacement ideology that’s shaping U.S. policy.

I want to start with the religious right. This is something we’ve discussed at length on this show, but I want to ask you all, what is something you think the general public understands the least about the extent to which messianism and the end times fixation that comes with it undergirds this political moment and shapes the Trump administration in particular?

AT: People have a vague sense that Trump wouldn’t have been elected if he hadn’t had the support of white evangelicals. He famously got around 80 percent of the evangelical vote in both 2016 and in 2024. So I think people have a sense that the religious right is behind a guy who is incredibly immoral — it feels like a cognitive dissonance there, right? How is this sexual predator who’s been divorced multiple times the hero figure for this group?

Part of what explains that, though, is that they are really occupying a parallel universe. Portions of the evangelical right or Christian Zionists are committed to a version of theology where they think what’s in the Bible is literally going to happen, and that what they need to do is hasten along the sequence of events foretold — most violently and strangely in the Book of Revelation — that bad things will happen on Earth, and that means we’re moving closer to the day when there will be Armageddon and Jesus will return.

Even to a lot of Christians, this seems ridiculous. But there are people at the upper echelons of the U.S. government today who really believe it, and who see acts of violence — acts of terror — as felicitous signs.

We quote pastor John Hagee, who’s a very popular leader of a megachurch in Texas, and he’s just like: Everyone! All my thousands of followers! Call the White House and tell them that you’re so grateful for the war in Iran because that means that the end is nigh, and that means we’re that much closer to being hoovered up in a magic escalator to heaven.

They have this theological investment in war in the Middle East and this idea that Jesus won’t return until biblical Israel is restored, which is not just the West Bank and Gaza but large swaths of other countries. They’re making common cause with Messianic Jews in Israel who, again, aren’t the whole of the government but have managed to control very powerful portions of it.

What we’re trying to convey is that we actually need to pay attention to what these folks are doing. It doesn’t need to be the majoritarian strand to be an incredibly dangerous one.

“It doesn’t need to be the majoritarian strand to be an incredibly dangerous one.”

One of our recurring jokes — it’s not even a joke, really — as we wrote this book and also as we talk about it, is that to even quote these people makes us sound insane. Because they’re doing things like importing the perfect red heifers from Texas to bring them to the Middle East. Then literally the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is flying over to visit these cows and go: Oh my gosh, I don’t see any spots on them. This is so great. The Bible is coming true.

These people are running the government, and we need to take seriously the risk that that poses to all of us. Again, it’s based on this idea — we return to the narrative in the Book of Revelation because it’s sort of the fundamental mythological script that these three groups are playing with, it’s the root of this apocalyptic strain.

It essentially is a narrative that says, in the end times, there will be war, there will be pestilence, there will be floods and fires, but that just means we’re getting closer to the end when the chosen few will reach their utopia. It’s a very dangerous script.

For this part of the end times fascist alliance, it’s a literal interpretation of that script. But it’s one that has suffused our culture more broadly. This linear narrative of: Out of catastrophe, the promised land. That narrative is being followed in different sometimes secularized ways by the other parts of the right-wing alliance.

NK: If there’s one thing I learned from writing a book about people who lost their minds during Covid and then became the U.S. government, it’s that nothing is too stupid to actually manifest in reality. I’m not being glib.

In “Doppelganger,” I quote Philip Roth saying, “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” being a kind of a mantra for our time. But that was before RFK Jr. was put in charge of Health and Human Services. There can be this smug response from liberals of like, “That’s just too silly for me to even have to care about.”

One of the things we dug up in the book is this story that was new to me, which was that in 1969 a Christian fundamentalist named Denis Rohan actually did succeed in firebombing Al-Aqsa [Mosque]. That’s very important to this theological story because the idea is that you have to build the “Third Temple” where Al-Aqsa is in order to create the conditions for the Messiah’s arrival or return, depending on which version of the story you believe. That relates to why you need those spotless red heifers, et cetera. So they are trying to fulfill this.

But as Astra was saying, this is both a literal threat of, like, it’s literally possible that there could be — as these ideas have become more and more powerful and more mainstream within the Israeli and U.S. government, and as people who were once seen as fringe terrorists like Itamar Ben-Gvir enter the government — it’s becomes more and more possible and more likely that people will do the self-fulfilling version of this prophecy.

Because the prophecy is, first, you have to have Armageddon. And if you were to actually destroy Al-Aqsa and try to rebuild the “Third Temple,” that’s a surefire recipe for World War III with nukes.

So they are creating the story that they claim is inevitable. It’s not inevitable, but they are actually doing their best to fulfill it for all of us. We can’t afford to ignore them. But it’s also a pattern of thought — this is a really dangerous pattern of thought that, out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that’s the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear.

When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower — he’s doing a version of that story.

When Sam Altman says he’s summoning a digital god, and we’re going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it’s going to be utopia, and we’ll all just be lying around just being in awe of the wisdom that AI has unleashed for us — he’s doing the story.

So we have to be able to identify it — because we’re all living with the consequences of this terrible story, and we need better stories.

[Break]

AL: This is a good segue into talking about perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of this apocalyptic project, as you mentioned, Naomi: AI and data centers, which you all situate as part of the doom cycle. You get into this question, but I want to talk with you both about how this particular issue has brought so many of us together in unified hatred.

I love this portion of the book where you talk about this. Across the ideological spectrum, why do people hate data centers so much? What exactly is so universally repulsive about them and what they represent?

AT: This is the kind of thing that gives you hope in humanity. Why do we hate data centers? Listen to the guys running these tech companies. They’re like, “Hi, we’re going to suck up all of the energy. We’re going to raise your electricity bills. We’re going to build these big, ugly city-sized buildings that have basically no jobs, that screech and scream all night long, destroy your property values. And guess what you’re going to get in return? You’re going to get no jobs in the future for you or your kids. You’re going to live in a world that is hollowed out because everybody’s talking to their chatbot, maybe dating a chatbot. Then also guess what? It might destroy everything, because it might turn on you. So how does that sound?”

AL: Doesn’t that sound great?

AT: Of course, people are like, “Actually, that sounds terrible. We never asked for this.”

Now, what’s interesting is these guys also have all their little podcasts where they talk amongst themselves too, so they’re like, “Geez, did we market this wrong?” And you’re like, yeah, you did, because actually you told us what you really want — which is you foresee a future with no human workers, and full of human alienation and loneliness, where one or two companies control the entire economy and maybe destroy humanity.

The reasons people object to this are obvious. It’s also building on years and years of a mounting tech-lash on both the left and the right. For different reasons, people were critical of the tech sector, and so that is also part of the foundation.

It’s really important, when Naomi said that they’re utilizing the same template — this, out of catastrophe, some kind of renewal for the chosen few. When you hear these folks talk about it, one of the founders of Google said it was “species-ist” to care about the fate of humanity, as opposed to exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over. That somehow we’re just close-minded for wanting to actually make a better world for human beings.

They literally talk about AI as a god or as a demon. And so they’re playing with these religious tropes. Of course, somebody like Peter Thiel and other high-powered people in Silicon Valley are increasingly coming out as Christians. Most famously, in his lectures about the Antichrist, which — tellingly — he says is somebody who wants to bring about control of AI, or like Greta Thunberg, some climate rationality.

So they’re playing with these overt theological elements. But ultimately what’s underpinning it is a material drive to own as much of the economy as possible, even if it destroys the lives of billions of people.

“Ultimately what’s underpinning it is a material drive to own as much of the economy as possible, even if it destroys the lives of billions of people.”

NK: On that last point, it’s a very profitable dream. I think that that’s true, honestly, for the theologians as well, that this is always, as [Karl] Marx said, there are opiate qualities to the story that heaven awaits, and yes, you’re suffering in the here and now, but do these things and you’re going to be in paradise.

That’s always been a story that has been very helpful to elite interests. The fact that the richest men on the planet are now telling it to us about their tech that is rapidly making them into trillionaires. It doesn’t mean they don’t believe it, but they certainly have motivations for telling us these stories. For telling us that we’re being speciesist and that we have to go along in this way.

But just on your point, why are people rejecting it? There’s this little detail that we came across in the story of one of the data center fights that I think people are by now very familiar with or should be familiar with. I think Intercept readers are familiar with what Elon Musk has done in Memphis. It’s a story of unbelievable environmental racism. The siting of these massive data centers that are impacting a majority-Black part of Memphis, Boxtown, which has these long roots of resistance.

It’s called Boxtown because it was built with the discarded parts of railway cars that were then turned into homes. Because it was unincorporated — and this is true of many Black communities — it was also chosen to be a place with very high levels of industrial pollution. It has a very strong environmental justice community, and it has all of this historical resonance because this is where Martin Luther King Jr. went to stand with the sanitation workers, which the organizers that we interviewed in Memphis consciously see the struggle as being part of that lineage and see the sanitation strike in Memphis as being the beginning of the environmental justice movement in the United States because it was a fight against a toxic workplace and work conditions.

But the detail that I was referring to, in that fight that I think often gets overlooked, is that the reason that Musk chose Memphis to build what he calls Colossus — the largest supercomputer in world history, and then he built a couple more — was because he needed to do it quickly. So he decided that he needed to find a place that would give him all the giveaways, but also where there was an empty building. He didn’t want to have to build a building from scratch. He wanted to move into a preexisting building.

In Memphis, they found a factory that was empty and in very good condition, and it was an Electrolux factory. If you look into the history of the Electrolux factory in Memphis, it’s a story of de-industrialization and free trade and broken promises because this is a factory that actually was producing ovens and other appliances, and it was moved from Canada to Memphis — from Quebec to Memphis — under NAFTA rules chasing lower wages.

So 3,000 higher-paid jobs became less than 1,000 lower-paid jobs in Memphis with contractors and so on. You see this race to the bottom. All these things were promised. They didn’t create nearly as many jobs with the Electrolux factory as they said they would. The wages weren’t as good as they said they would be. They said that all these other factories would open up, too. They didn’t.

So the re-industrialization didn’t happen with Electrolux. But then there’s this empty building, and Musk moves in, and it’s barely any jobs. We call it a ghost factory. That image of the abandoned factory was the image of the de-industrialization of the NAFTA years. But now we have this new image, which is a reoccupied former factory that once had almost 1,000 workers and now is just a bunch of buzzing computers, and whose end goal is to eliminate everyone’s job.

So why would people accept the trade-offs of that, because Musk also rigged together all of these polluting gas turbines in order to get it online quickly?

This is what we mean by history compounds. It’s not a loop. It’s more like a spiral taking us somewhere.

AT: Martin Luther King, those were the famous protests, of course, with the “I am a man” sign, where the aspiration was like, “I’m a man, recognize me as equal and human.”

“In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way.”

In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, “Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it’s just humans in general.” This is opening up a bigger fight beyond “I am a man” to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there’s something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying.

AL: You both pointed this out, and you get into this in the book, as to why tech giants like Elon Musk were so quick to jump on this right-wing train with the explosion of AI and how they abandoned progressive promises on the environment to warfare.

For our listeners, I’m wondering if you can walk us through that. As you point out, many of those promises were largely performative in the first place. But what made it so easy for tech titans to switch political teams here? What, if any, responsibility do Democrats hold in this dynamic?

NK: Lots of responsibility. [Laughter.]

Huge amounts of responsibility because I think that it was the Democrats — and Clinton, Obama — who first under Clinton accepted the idea of the internet as a frontier zone that couldn’t possibly be regulated or taxed. And then this continued under Obama with this very tight relationship with Silicon Valley and a revolving door of lots of people from the administration going off and taking jobs at Uber and Google and Microsoft.

Buying into this idea that these companies were blue and green and a new era — leaving sort of the dirty industrialization behind — and I think really participated in a lot of rhetoric that many of us understood to be hollow at the time, that they could be trusted to do voluntary net-zero, and they were greening their businesses, and it was all solar power and rainbows.

Under Biden, there did begin to be some changes. Astra can maybe talk about this more in terms of the intersection of the tech-lash and the fact that the Biden administration did start — not doing enough — but started doing things like hiring Lina Khan and introducing some regulations.

AT: The actions that the Biden administration took I think also should be credited to grassroots pressure to the tech workers who were organizing in the major companies. There were Google workers who walked out, both demanding better policies around sexual harassment, but also into certain military contracts.

There was a general sense from progressives and liberals that the tech sector was actually not bringing about the democratic transformation that they had so loudly promised in the years before. The Biden administration was making some moves that I think to us seemed pretty modest. It’s not like there were baseline privacy protections. It’s not like they were breaking up the tech monopolies, but yes, they hired Lina Khan and started to put up some basic regulations on crypto. That said, they did bail out Silicon Valley Bank, which was a crypto scandal. Then the folks they bailed out immediately made huge campaign contributions to Donald Trump. So that to me is a sort of parable for everything that went awry.

Ultimately though, end times fascism is a response to material conditions. Part of the Democratic failure was that they didn’t rein in concentrated wealth while they could. They didn’t regulate Big Tech when it was smaller and easier to do so. They never put constraints on these companies, and then at a certain point, they’re so big, they’re so powerful, that they’re like, “We don’t have to listen to our customers or to the public or to elected officials anymore.”

The public is “not asking for a job-destroying technology. The tech sector knows that they’re going to have to shove this down people’s throats.”

This is part of what happens when they start the rollout of generative AI. ChatGPT comes on the scene in 2023, and, again, the public is not asking for this technology. They’re not asking for a job-destroying technology. The tech sector knows that they’re going to have to shove this down people’s throats. What they needed was a strongman to help them do that, and so the alliance with Donald Trump was a merger of convenience.

What they got was a government that was going to roll out the red carpet in the sense of, “Yes, here’s the frontier,” you know, “No rules. Go for it.” What the Trump administration got was a bubble to dramatically inflate the stock market, and also a partner for the fossil fuel industry because this has given a lifeline to the fossil fuel sector, along with the attacks on renewables. It was a win-win for both camps.

Silicon Valley has a long history of libertarianism, of anti-democratic thinking that was marginal. But its moment has come. Its moment has come because of these underlying material changes. At a certain point, you’re so rich you don’t have to pretend to be nice anymore.

“At a certain point, you’re so rich you don’t have to pretend to be nice anymore.”

AL: This is a good segue into the final thing I want to end on, which is, and we haven’t really talked as much about the bunkerism and the anti-immigration as much as I wanted to get into. But it’s part and parcel of the thing that was at least in the back of my mind as I was reading this, which is like, where is all of this fricking money coming from?

How is it possible to unleash endless amounts of capital to slash red tape, for not just AI infrastructure and data centers, but also the explosion of Trump’s nationalized police force going after immigrants. When on the flip side, all we hear about policies that actually the public is asking for — to your point, Astra — Medicare for All or substantial climate policy or like green infrastructure policy, all you hear is, “We can’t pay for it.”

So I wonder if you all could talk about that contradiction, and what is the path out of that in terms of flipping that argument on its head? We have the money to pay for anything. We’re just paying for the wrong things.

NK: This is often felt very acutely in the communities that are fighting back against the data centers. We quote KeShaun Pearson in Memphis who heads Memphis Community Against Pollution. He’s also Rep. Justin Pearson‘s brother. He talks about what kind of infrastructure they actually need. We’re getting this data center, but we’re not getting transit, we’re not getting books for our schools. There’s so much else, green energy, no shortage of ideas. The money clearly is there if we decided to spend it differently.

This is part of why we’re seeing a surge of support for democratic socialism, because people understand that they have been lied to, that there was way more that we could be asking of governments. Even if you look at Trump’s tariff regime and the abandon with which he breaks the trade deals that the U.S. has entered into, shows that these deals were not as binding as we were told, and that they also could’ve been changed, but they could’ve been changed in the interests of working people instead of in the interests of corporations. So a lot more is possible.

But that said, Akela, it’s very frightening. The decisions that are being made are clearly designed to both hollow out the state and create a time bomb in the stock market that is rigged to explode on working people, on pensioners — and for the people who created this crisis to rapture themselves out of it.

“The decisions that are being made are clearly designed to both hollow out the state and create a time bomb in the stock market that is rigged to explode on working people.”

If you look at the SpaceX IPO and the ways that it was written in such a way to force regular investors who just have parts of their pension invested in the stock market to have to invest in this very high-risk company — at the same time as Musk has completely protected himself. Or even if you look at something like the “Board of Peace,” which is an escape plan for the Trump administration. They’re hoping it will give them immunity indefinitely and control indefinitely. These are positions for life. They are thinking about the next stage.

Part of what Astra and I are talking about is, this is not old-school colonialism in the sense that the imperialism that “discovered the New World” was based on this idea of boundlessness. What we think we’re seeing with seizing Venezuela’s oil or seizing Canada’s water or seizing critical minerals in Greenland is much more like super-sized “prepping” and making sure that as this all goes down, they have access to the resources, that this elite group of people has access to the resources they need.

It’s not necessarily as thought out as I’m making it sound. Maybe it is, but it’s more of an impulse. The impulse is not one of expansion and domination and boundlessness; it’s bringing the resources into the bunker, and also extracting from the state everything that you possibly can for this kind of next phase.

“All those guys in Silicon Valley, they know climate change is real.”

AT: Just to add on what Naomi said. It’s a really good way to put it, which is the sense of boundlessness versus the awareness today that boundaries are being crossed. So yes, they might superficially be climate denialists. We see the Trump administration killing renewable projects and scrubbing the word “climate change” or mentions of greenhouse gas emissions from websites. But these people are not idiots.

All those guys in Silicon Valley, they know climate change is real. Many people in the Trump administration do as well. So it’s that sense that, yeah, real boundaries are being pushed past in terms of the chemistry of the planet, in terms of the concentration of wealth, in terms of what these incredibly dangerous technologies are capable of. And instead of pulling back, they’re pressing the gas on those fronts, knowing that it will be catastrophic for the majority of people.

“When you are playing with fire like that, you need an ideology to rationalize the damage. That’s where fascism is useful, because it tells you a story that you deserve everything you’ve got.”

And when you are playing with fire like that, you need an ideology to rationalize the damage. That’s where fascism is useful, because it tells you a story that you deserve everything you’ve got. You deserve to be a trillionaire. You deserve to have your luxury bunker, you deserve to have the first flight out of the disaster zone because you’re superior for whatever reason. Because of your race, because of your religion, because of your passport, because of your superior genes, because you’re a genius or whatever.

There’s a feedback loop where the sense of superiority justifies the destruction, and then the destruction fuels more fascist thought. We need to break that cycle by saying, “No,” like, “That’s totally unacceptable and won’t work out for the vast majority of us. Let’s pull the emergency brake before it’s too late.”

AL: I want to thank you both for taking the time and remind all our listeners you can read “End Times Fascism” now. You all have a very wonderful section talking about the politics of hereness and how we chart our way out of this, and we didn’t get to talk about that, but I wish we had more time. Naomi and Astra, thank you both so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

AT: Thanks for having us.

NK: It was such a pleasure.

AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Video production by Sean Turner. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance appeared first on The Intercept.

The AI Doomsday Future Is Not Inevitable

The Intercept Briefing — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Local police departments use Flock cameras to track license plates. ICE uses Palantir software to track and round up immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s war department uses Claude to bomb Iran. The U.S. government spends billions employing private corporations to obtain mountains of data — and the surveillance space is only getting more privatized in Donald Trump’s second term.

“It really has become a Wild West,” 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler tells host Akela Lacy on The Intercept Briefing, on the state of the U.S. surveillance apparatus today. While Palantir and Flock have become household names, Koebler says, “anything that can be surveilled is being surveilled, and a lot of this is happening from companies that very few people have heard of, and companies that are willing to push the envelope on what they’re willing to do, like how far they’re willing to go to surveil people.”

“A lot of the stuff that you used to associate with the NSA or CIA or another state spy agency, those kinds of capabilities you can now just buy,” Intercept senior technology reporter Sam Biddle notes of the ease and accessibility of the tools now available to the government. “You don’t need to be a top-secret government agency. You can just be a contractor in Virginia.”

“It’s a way to sidestep warrant requirements,” says Koebler. Surveillance contractors “are doing things that if the government were doing directly, they would need to get a warrant in order to do it.”

This week, for a special recording of the podcast, independent tech outlet 404 Media and The Intercept teamed up in front of a live audience in Los Angeles to discuss how the U.S. government weaponizes private data to surveil and kill abroad and at home, the resulting backlash and potential regulations on the table, what tangible actions the average person can take to “divest from the contemporary surveillance hellscape,” and refocusing AI-ending-humanity doomerism.

“When you ascribe motives and agency to AI, you’re letting Sam Altman off the hook,” says Biddle. “There are human beings building this technology. It’s not inevitable. This doomsday future is not inevitable,” adds Koebler. “We can’t bury our heads in the sand and say, ‘This is not changing society in some way.’ But it is being driven by very rich humans, and they can be regulated. They can be held to account.”

“What’s been really interesting about the Flock backlash, and heartening, is that it is completely apolitical, or it’s nonpartisan. It is completely — from the deepest red to the people in this room right now — the entire political spectrum hates these,” says Biddle. “There’s the real potential for the first time in a while to create a pro-privacy coalition that bridges a lot of the otherwise pretty giant political gaps.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Today we’re coming to you live from Los Angeles for a special episode in collaboration with 404 Media.

Our topic? Killer tech. We’re talking lethal autonomous weapons; AI-assisted strikes in Iran; mining your digital footprint and even your financial activity to track you down; and surveillance cameras coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

This conversation is timely. Just this week, warnings from Anthropic researchers that AI could kill humanity set off alarm bells on Capitol Hill and prompted a bipartisan group of lawmakers to call for immediate action to regulate the AI industry — from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz to Independent populist Bernie Sanders, who is organizing senators for a briefing next week on the “extraordinary dangers” of AI.

The world we’ve long been told to fear is here. But how much do we actually know about these tools and how the government is using them — not just against you and your neighbors, but around the world?

To take us down the rabbit hole, I’m joined by my colleague, Intercept reporter Sam Biddle, a senior technology reporter who focuses on issues of surveillance, privacy, and corporate power.

Also joining us is Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, where he writes about surveillance and AI.

Sam and Jason, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Sam Biddle: Really great to be here.

Jason Koebler: Thank you for having me. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to The Intercept for having us. We’re very excited.

Akela Lacy: To start, can you all just paint us a picture of what the broad surveillance tech apparatus looks like today?

Many of our listeners are familiar with some of the biggest players, like the data mining government contractor Palantir or Flock, the operator of surveillance hardware marketing itself as a friendly neighborhood public safety tool.

But let’s zoom out a little bit. Like, how did we go from the days of the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden, to this largely privatized and, in many ways, even more lawless world of mass surveillance?

Sam, I’ll start with you. What’s stayed the same since that NSA era, and what’s new now?

SB: The NSA is still here, to say the least. I don’t think you have this conversation, or certainly not in the form that we’re going to have it tonight, without 9/11. I think that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the private sector economy that you described, billions and billions of dollars, is all downstream of 9/11.

I looked it up: In 2006, the DHS budget was, like, $30-something billion. The presidential request for next year is $118 billion, and a lot of that is flowing to contractors like Palantir.

To answer your question, Snowden taught us correctly that we have a lot to fear from the government, but there was not as much emphasis on the companies that empower the government.

I think that has really been at the fore especially around something like ICE raids, which Jason and his colleagues have really done a good job documenting the companies that are behind that.

“Snowden taught us correctly that we have a lot to fear from the government, but there was not as much emphasis on the companies that empower the government.”

JK: The big thing is it really has become a Wild West. People have heard of Palantir, they’ve heard of Flock at this point, as you mentioned.

But we got a leaked document recently about some of the contractors that ICE works with. They are companies like Accurint, Chameleon, Locate X, Cobwebs, ISO ClaimSearch. These are all different companies in this supply chain that do different things, whether it’s cellphone location data, whether it’s browsing history, whether it is cellphone tower data, web backbone information.

“A lot of this is happening from companies that very few people have heard of, and companies that are willing to push the envelope on what they’re willing to do.”

It’s just anything that can be surveilled is being surveilled, and a lot of this is happening from companies that very few people have heard of, and companies that are willing to push the envelope on what they’re willing to do, like how far they’re willing to go to surveil people.

SB: A lot of the stuff that you used to associate with the NSA or CIA or another state spy agency — those kinds of capabilities you can now just buy, and I think that’s really changed since Snowden.

You don’t need to be a top-secret government agency. You can just be a contractor in Virginia called “Persistent Solutions Incorporated” and be selling these powers to whoever wants to buy them.

AL: Which is a great segue to talk about Flock. Jason, you and your colleagues at 404 have reported on some of the most egregious uses of Flock, police using it to stalk people, track down a woman who had an abortion, conduct surveillance on protesters, and help ICE hunt people down.

The surveillance space has become increasingly privatized, as we’re talking about, but why does that matter, and what do you think is coming next?

JK: It matters because it is a way to sidestep regulations. It’s a way to sidestep warrant requirements and things like this. We’ve done many, many, many stories about Flock, but also other surveillance contractors where, they are doing things that if the government were doing directly, they would need to get a warrant in order to do it.

Surveillance contractors “are doing things that if the government were doing directly, they would need to get a warrant in order to do it.”

But this data, sometimes harvested from cellphone apps, sometimes it’s harvested from private companies like Flock that are sticking cameras on poles all throughout America. For a long time, the government would run into these legal roadblocks, and now they’re just sidestepping it by buying that information.

We’re also seeing the localization of a lot of this stuff. Flock is a company that primarily works with local governments, small towns, big cities. And we’ve seen that kind of over and over again with drones, with ALPRs [automated license plate readers], increasingly with things like facial recognition tools as well, where these things are being piloted in small towns where they maybe have a police force that’s willing to be innovative.

I feel like I say this often, but police have not found a spy tool that they’re not willing to try. So this is how this works now is you sell it to a local government, and then that data filters up and eventually makes its way to the feds.

So I think it is important to follow these companies how their business model works, and also how they spread from local governments to state governments and up to the feds.

SB: The technology’s gotten cheaper, too. The kind of capabilities that Flock sells would have cost, 20 years ago, it would be much cruder but prohibitively expensive. This stuff gets mainstreamed because it gets more powerful and it gets more affordable.

But also, the police departments are awash in money, so they can afford, like Jason says, they’ll buy whatever they can just because they like toys.

“ This stuff gets mainstreamed because it gets more powerful and it gets more affordable.”

JK: Those cameras, for what it’s worth, run on, like, several-generations’-old Android technology. It’s not expensive, as you said.

AL: We’re going to touch on the expansion of this technology into local police departments a little bit later. But first, Sam, you’ve reported on the literal hunting of immigrants using bounty hunters and enriching private companies.

Why aren’t some of those corporations facing the same level of public scrutiny for their role in ICE’s mass deportation and arrest campaign that we’ve seen in other cases?

SB: I think that there is just such an incredible diversity of these companies providing these kinds of surveillance services.

JK: And you love to see that. [Laughter.]

SB: It’s one of the only parts of the economy that’s probably steadily growing. But yeah, I found 10 different contractors, none of which I had ever heard of before, all very obscure, with names like “Government [Support Services]” — very anodyne — that were contracted by ICE to find immigrants so that they could be deported.

The more that they found and the faster they found them they would be eligible for basic cash bounties from the government. So they were incentivized to just find as many people as possible using a combination of on-the-ground stalking and digital tools.

“Their obscurity is a big asset.”

As much scrutiny and attention on Palantir as it gets — for a reason, it’s all warranted. But I do also think that sometimes the household names soak up a lot of the anger and the blame, and it lets the minnows get by with relatively less scrutiny. Compared to Palantir, a company that sells janitorial services to Air Force bases and then gets this bounty hunting contract is tiny.

But I think that there’s just too many for people to keep track of — too many for people whose job it is to keep track of them to keep track of them. Their obscurity is a big asset.

AL: And something like Palantir is a known quantity.

SB: And they seek attention. Palantir is very attention-seeking, and they want publicity.

JK: We were talking about that a little bit before the show. Very often you’ll see a Palantir or a Flock take a lot of the heat — even like Meta take a lot of the heat. “Oh, is Facebook going to put facial recognition on their glasses,” things like this. Turns out now they have cover, and they probably will.

But Clearview AI — a company that does facial recognition; you can put a photo in and search the internet and find all these instances of where that person has been. It’s used by a lot of police departments — and that is a startup that is essentially one guy. It’s bigger now, but it was started by one guy who was willing to do something that a lot of other contractors weren’t willing to do because there was so much attention on some of these big players, and the big players saying, “Oh we’ll never do facial recognition.”

But then you have Clearview come in and raise their hand and say, “We’re willing to do it.” That’s something that we’ve seen over and over again over the last decade or so, is that the backlash to some of these companies is very important, but there’s also 10 other companies that are willing to pop up and say, “Yes, we will hunt undocumented immigrants for you. We did previously do janitorial services, but I did go to a police training one time.”

Literally, that’s what these companies are in many cases. AI has allowed companies to spin up very quickly. A lot of them are super janky, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not getting government contracts.

AL: Jason, I want to talk about what this federal surveillance actually looks like in practice. 404 reported recently that the Department of Homeland Security is using a secretive predictive policing unit to pull people over. What did you all find?

JK: So it’s called the PITT [Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams], not the TV show.

But basically it’s these Border Patrol teams that are using financial data, various federal databases of which we are not sure what they are. They are essentially finding patterns that they believe are suspicious, and they are passing information to local police and saying, “Hey, please pull over this person with this license plate.”

We wrote earlier this week about a guy, I believe in Wisconsin, who was pulled over for an obscured license plate. At least that’s what the local police told him. It comes out during his court case that this PITT team had seen some financial activity that they thought was suspicious, asked local police to pull him over, to find some pretext to pull him over, and then they charged him with basically weed offenses, which didn’t seem that was what they were actually looking for. The [Homeland Security] documents we saw were like, “Oh, this is a big narcotics trafficker.”

We’ve seen things like that kind of happen over and over again. I think with regard to ICE in particular, often Palantir brings in a lot of different federal databases, a lot of different commercial databases.

ICE has become obsessed with this tool called Mobile Fortify, which is a smartphone facial recognition app made by a company I don’t even know what they do or what they are. But they’re using basically a facial database from Customs and Border [Protection]. So any time that anyone’s interacted with the government, TSA, at the border, things like this — that’s what it’s pulling from. There’s already been a few cases of mistaken identities and things like this.

“ICE has become obsessed with … Mobile Fortify, which is a smartphone facial recognition app made by a company I don’t even know what they do or what they are.”

SB: Worth pointing out, you can opt out of doing the biometric boarding at the airport. I embarrass my wife every time we go anywhere, but you can opt out. Just say no. [Laughter]

JK: They’re always mad.

SB: You’ll still be in some database, but, you know, it feels good.

AL: When it comes to ICE tracking people down, you’ve touched on this a little bit, but I wonder if you can take a step back and really break it down and walk us through the steps and the actors involved in each phase, from locating to identifying to arresting people.

JK: So a lot of this is like patching things together from individual court cases that we’ve seen, where there’s like a deposition from an ICE agent explaining how they found a person.

A lot of it does come back to Palantir and the sort of different apps that they have. Companies like Thomson Reuters are involved, LexisNexis — these big, giant companies that collect a lot of information and feed it back into the government. We learned that ICE was doing what it was calling a “density report,” where they were trying to find densities of potential undocumented immigrants.

So a lot of the places that they were choosing to do enforcement actions were based on maybe old addresses or just like interactions with the government that they had. So they’re pulling things like IRS data, labor data, things like this, as well as anything you could possibly imagine. So like cellphone location data, browsing data, license plate information.

Customs and Border [Protection] has their own ALPR cameras, automated license plate reader cameras. But then we also reported that through the 287(g) program, which is a program that allows local police to do ICE enforcement, they were doing Flock searches on behalf of ICE, local police were.

So it’s a mix of this, where they would get a target, and then as Sam said, like a lot of this was being outsourced to random — was and is — being outsourced to fly-by-night bounty hunters and police contractors and things like this. It’s been a real mixed bag, but it does come back to surveillance and to trying to find these density of undocumented immigrants to choose for their enforcement actions.

SB: I think it’s also worth pointing out that this stuff is only possible because there’s no law prohibiting it. You can drive a truck through the holes in the Fourth Amendment. Like Jason said, in theory, you’re not supposed to be able to do a lot of this stuff without a judge giving you the OK, but there is nothing stopping the government from buying the location of your phone for the past year, and the next year, into the future.

Every single place you go from minute to minute that can just be purchased because you happen to download Candy Crush or something where that has ads in it. There’s no law against that. There’s no regulation. The sale of private data, and geolocational data in particular, market is completely unregulated. You can just do whatever.

“There is nothing stopping the government from buying the location of your phone for the past year, and the next year, into the future.”

AL: And some of these companies have come back and said “These agencies are violating their terms of service or their terms of use.” Like you guys reported on this with Shadow Dragon, Jason, right?

JK: Yeah, every once in a while, a company is like, “Oh, we didn’t know it was being used for immigration enforcement.” And they’ll either revoke access, or maybe they’ll sell a new license or something like this. It does happen every now and then that what ICE is doing goes too far even for some of these surveillance companies.

I think also worth mentioning very quickly that a lot of this security and surveillance apparatus was built under Obama and earlier than that. They had these extremely frail guardrails on separating information between agencies, things like that.

And then suddenly, it’s, oh, HSI is not going to do workplace enforcement anymore — Homeland Security Investigations, which used to do generally really complicated investigations into drug trafficking rings, things like that. Now it’s just doing standard deportations and pulling people over and things like that. And so all of the guardrails have been knocked down, which is [pause] exciting.

SB: And the more you farm it out to private companies, the less of a public record potentially accessible paper trail there is.

If the NSA breaks the law, in theory, you can have congressional hearings about it, and you could, again, in theory, send people to jail. That wouldn’t happen, but you could.

But if a company does something, A, it’s legal, but B, probably no one’s going to find out unless, you know, Jason finds it. There’s no oversight! And there’s every incentive to maximally sell this stuff.

AL: Let’s talk about how this technology is being used to wage war around the world. We all saw the headlines about Anthropic’s Claude reportedly assisting U.S. strikes in Iran. Anthropic’s CEO said he doesn’t know if or how Claude was actually used, including if it was used in the strike that hit an elementary school and killed 120 children.

At one point in time, many of these Silicon Valley firms had sworn that they would not let their tech be used in warfare or surveillance, particularly in unmanned or automated warfare. That is no longer the case, and maybe it was always an empty promise. But partnerships between the government and tech companies are fueling wars happening right now — not just in Iran, but in Gaza and even in Ukraine.

Sam, what do we actually know about how AI is being used in those arenas, if anything?

SB: We know a pretty good amount, actually the use of American technology in the genocide in Gaza is pretty well documented at this point. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all very prominent contractors with the IDF [Israel Defense Forces].

Amazon and Google sell cloud computing services to Israel’s state-owned weapons companies that build the bombs that are dropped on Gaza; that’s established. And no one really tried to hide it. A lot of that stuff wasn’t secret to begin with.

The use of American technology, of AI companies’ services, in Iran is murkier. You’re absolutely right that these companies, almost all of them — maybe not Microsoft — at one point claimed they would not ever do this. OpenAI and Anthropic were both founded with these very like highfalutin missions of benefiting all of humanity.

AL: That’s, like, why it’s called Anthropic.

SB: Right. [laughter] Great point. And then they decide, “Oh, wait, there’s a lot of money to be made if we become Pentagon contractors.” So a few years ago, OpenAI just deleted the part of its terms of service that said they wouldn’t do military work. Google deleted “Don’t be evil” as its motto, which was very on the nose.

It’s a mistake to ever think that these policy positions of companies mean anything because they could just change them when they want to. But it is striking that, like you said, these were all things they at one point had a principled stand.

AL: And were very publicly, “We’re leading the frontier. We’re not going to let our stuff be used to kill people or surveil people.” And to Jason’s point, as soon as one person says, “Actually, that sounds kinda good,” everyone else is like, “You know what? We were wrong.”

“If you’re Google, you can only make so much money selling extra Gmail storage and ads.”

SB: If you’re Google, you can only make so much money selling extra Gmail storage and ads. At a certain point, the government is this customer that’s always going to be there and always is going to have a lot of money to give you. So yeah, I think they all looked at each other and were like, “Wait, you guys are down for this too, right?”

But as far as Iran, Anthropic is confirmed as having been involved since in the first day of the joint U.S.–Israeli attack.

JK: I saw a few minutes ago that Anthropic said the Houthis attempted to use Claude to target missiles, like typing in the chat box.

SB: I saw that!

JK: And they stopped that; they said they stopped that. I was at like this defense contract when Anthropic was nodding at the idea that it wouldn’t be helping in Iran. There were Anthropic and OpenAI executives there talking about this all, and they made very clear, at least at that point, that it’s like, “Oh, it’s not that we oppose working with the military. It’s that we want better oversight. There will be, like, an Anthropic person sitting in the Pentagon with the DoD making sure that this is being used in an ethical way. There will be an OpenAI person doing the same.”

It’s very unclear whether that is actually happening to any degree, and also what these tools are specifically being used for. We know it’s being used for targeting, we know it’s being used for planning — by targeting, I mean figuring out who to target and that sort of thing.

AL: Selecting a target.

JK: Yeah, selecting targets. But we don’t really know the level of autonomy, or at least I don’t.

AL: And they apparently don’t either, right?

SB: Well, that’s the thing: Both possibilities are really dire. If these companies are hands-on, helping wage war, that’s terrifying for a lot of reasons. But the alternative — which Anthropic’s CEO, the position he took, Bloomberg News asked him if Claude had been used to blow up that school, and he said, I don’t know.

Google has a similar position with the IDF, where they said, once we sell them this stuff, we don’t know how they’re going to use it, we don’t have visibility into how they use it, which is completely plausible.

But that’s also a pretty frightening prospect because then, they can say, “Oh we won’t let our technology be used for X, Y, Z,” but they hand it off to the customer, and they can do whatever they want with it, and the company will never find out.

AL: Sam, you have obtained hundreds of government documents on how the Pentagon is using AI. I wonder if you can tell us just how deep that relationship goes.

SB: We, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit got a set of contracts that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI — Elon Musk’s outfit — signed with the Pentagon last summer to develop militarized LLMs [large language models] for the Pentagon’s use.

They were heavily redacted, but what really came through clearly from the unredacted portions was that these companies did not just sell the Pentagon a product, but they sold them a very, very intimate relationship, an ongoing collaborative relationship wherein they were advising the Pentagon essentially on how to use these products to wage war.

They were getting classified briefings. They were getting briefings on U.S. military operations. They were providing hands-on training. They were providing threat assessments. They were helping shape DOD high-level strategy. So going well beyond the typical remit of a company.

“These companies did not just sell the Pentagon a product, but they sold them a very, very intimate relationship.”

Lockheed can sell the Pentagon some missiles, and the Pentagon more or less decides how they’re going to use them. Now we have the engineers from these companies and policy figures from these companies helping the U.S. decide how it will fuck, target, and kill people. We’re supposed to have ostensibly civilian control of the military — accountable to the public. Again, all this stuff is very much in theory, but it’s supposed to work that way.

But the more these companies intertwine themselves with warfare, the more of it is completely unaccountable because Sam Altman doesn’t owe you anything.

AL: It takes all the air out of the pretense that that’s like how this works in theory, right?

SB: In terms of, like, oversight?

AL: Embedding these private people in the government. That’s not actually how it works.

SB: Yeah, these are supposed to be decisions of who to kill and how are supposed to be decisions the government makes, if anyone’s going to make them.

AL: With the idea being that there’s some sort of measured process that goes behind that.

SB: You would hope so. Obviously, also the people who sell the weapons, whether it’s a bomb or an LLM, are going to have an incentive for it to be used maximally. I can’t imagine a contractor is going to urge restraint with the use of their product. Anything’s possible, but it would be surprising.

[Break]

AL: The use of surveillance at home is also being powered, unfortunately, by AI, like the license plate readers we’ve been discussing used by Flock and other government agencies. One of the concerns with these tech apparatuses is just how seamlessly they allow law enforcement agencies and private companies to share and transmit data from the local to the federal and vice versa, even when a particular government agency isn’t technically contracting with that company.

We’ve talked on this show about the explosion in the number of state and local police departments — as of today, more than 2,460 — now deputized to do ICE’s work through the 287(g) program, as Jason mentioned, helping to build out this nationalized, politicized police force we’ve seen take shape in recent years that’s become a Frankenstein, this entity patched together with agents from departments across the federal government.

Jason, 404 has reported that local police have been using Flock’s license plate reader system to look people up in immigration searches. How is that different from the kinds of police support for ICE we’ve seen in other areas?

JK: It is something where, as you said, the information is flowing in ways that were perhaps not originally intended by the companies. For years, Flock would say, we don’t work with ICE; we don’t sell to DHS. DHS doesn’t have a contract with us; ICE doesn’t have a contract with us.

Last year, we reported that there were hundreds of searches for undocumented immigrants on Flock’s system. They were universally done by local police in South Carolina and Texas and Tennessee in a bunch of states.

They were not searching their 15 cameras in their town. They were searching 80,000 cameras across the entire country, including in states where it was illegal.

“The sort of casualness with which a lot of this is happening, I find to be very alarming.”

A lot of these searches happened in Illinois, where it is illegal. And so I called up a bunch of police departments in Illinois and said, “Did you know that your cameras are being used for immigration enforcement?” They were like, “We have no idea what you’re talking about. We have no clue that this happened.” A lot of them were like, “Oh, you are like fake news,” et cetera. I was like, “Here’s the data.” Eventually, the Illinois Secretary of State did an investigation and found that a lot of these searches were illegal.

But the sort of casualness with which a lot of this is happening, I find to be very alarming. Not only is it happening on these commercial products that don’t have a warrant requirement, that don’t respect people’s Fourth Amendment rights, but a lot of it’s happening over email. A lot of it’s happening over phone calls, like, “Hey, buddy, can you do this search for me?”

We reported on a cop who basically gave his Flock login to an ICE officer. Then they got caught, got it taken away, and then they were group texting about it after the fact.

We’re seeing a rise of these real-time crime centers which are a mix of automated license plate reader cameras, facial recognition cameras, other surveillance cameras, 911 calls, information, things like this. And they’re all being monitored through what’s called Flock OS, and there’s other companies that do this as well.

But basically, instead of having a cop go to a 7-Eleven after a robbery and request the surveillance footage, they’re watching this stuff happen in real time. Or worse, an artificial intelligence is watching it in real time, is detecting anomalous behavior, and is dispatching a drone or something to go accost people.

The sort of experimentation, I would say, the creativity of local police, I find to be quite concerning. Because they’re like, “Oh, I have this tool. I’m going to use it for whatever I want,” and there’s very little oversight.

SB: There’s no reason not to if you’re the police. It’s cheap to do. Or once you’ve purchased the thing, it’s free. You might as well. There’s basically no barrier to experimentation of the kind you’re talking about, so you can get pretty creative with this stuff. It’s pretty user-friendly, right, from what you’ve seen?

JK: A lot of this stuff also spreads through word of mouth, where, like, one police department will try it. They will then go to a police conference and do a presentation: “How I used Flock to track down my local protester.” Literally, this is how this stuff works.

We’ve covered it many times through FOIA documents and things like this. It’s like, “Oh, did you guys get a drone? I bought a drone. We got money for a drone pilot program for a drone. Skydio is giving away drones if you apply through this program.” That’s how this technology takes hold.

The private companies say, “Go try it.” The cops become essentially unpaid marketing for these companies, and then suddenly they’re in tens of thousands of cities without much oversight.

AL: Sam, picking up on the news we touched on at the top around recent warnings from insiders at Anthropic, what kinds of regulations are on the table right now, and how do you expect the industry might push back here?

SB: Bernie Sanders proposed a bill, I think is the most extreme, or the heaviest regulation I’ve seen proposed, which would basically put an immediate stop to advanced frontier AI development. On the other end of the spectrum, you have measures that would make these companies submit their AI to an independent audit.

There are some self-oversight ideas or the ideas of a slowdown of developing this technology. The full spectrum is on the table. What actually gets passed is a whole other question.

These companies are basically propping up the stock market, they’re basically propping up the U.S. economy at this point. If they were to be crushingly regulated, that could be a problem. Obviously, members of Congress take a lot of money from the tech industry. The U.S. has never exactly been a pro regulation regime when it comes to corporate power, tech or otherwise. So we haven’t seen much of an appetite to regulate large tech firms in the past.

This could be different. I’m curious what Jason thinks. Things do feel a little different now because it’s the employees saying very casually on Twitter, like, oh yeah, the place where I work has a 15 percent chance of ending humanity. Anyway, back to work tomorrow.

AL: And then the CEO’s like, yeah, he’s right. [Laughs]

SB: Or the CEO will be, like, actually, I think it’s 25 percent. It’s a little crazy to be like, “Why isn’t anyone —?” Whether or not you believe it’s true or realistic, if someone who worked at like Lockheed was like, “We’re building a weapon that I think has a 10 percent chance of ending humanity.” Whether or not you think it’s bullshit, like someone probably should check that out, maybe call someone to testify before Congress and ask them under oath, “Is this true? Can you elaborate on this?”

I think what they are promising about their technology, again, true or not, is scary enough that I think it’s going to be hard to turn a blind eye compared to something like, eating disorders or bullying or what have you.

I’m curious what you think, Jason.

JK: The thing that you said where this is propping up the entirety of our economy is not giving me so much hope that much is going to be done. We’re seeing at a local level people pushing back against data centers and that sort of thing. That movement, along with the anti-Flock movement, they’re sort of intertwined.

There is this backlash to AI among the people, and they’re looking for places to push back, and it happens to be at these local council meetings around the country.

As far as regulation goes, there’s also such a focus on beating China that it feels like regulating this in a meaningful way is almost dead on arrival because our politicians are so hell-bent on not losing.

Anyone who “proposes clamping down on these companies is going to be accused of treason.”

SB: That’s exactly right. First of all, the completely grassroots opposition to data centers is depicted across the political mainstream as a Chinese psy-op — which it’d be funny if it weren’t so real and sad.

I saw people saying about Bernie Sanders and his proposal, “Oh I guess the commie wants red China to win.” Or anyone who pushes back on this stuff or proposes clamping down on these companies is going to be accused of treason, in one form or another, or of selling out the country, or wanting they’re going to be speaking Chinese in Albuquerque. It’s all this sort of Cold War bullshit that is really back.

The propping up the economy thing is no small portion of this, but I really think that China is the single biggest and most powerful anti-regulatory tool that the tech industry broadly, but AI specifically, has.

AL: I am going to transition us into audience questions. We have some good ones.

What tangible actions can the average person take to “divest from the contemporary surveillance hellscape.” Specifically, how do you get out of biometrics at the airport?

SB: The biometrics at the airport, again, like I don’t want to, like, lead anyone on. If DHS wants your face, they’re going to find it somewhere. You’ve been photographed in public. You’ve probably been captured.

AL: Don’t go outside.

SB: Yeah, and at a certain point, the advice is, like, don’t live in modern society. That’s not helpful.

When you go through airport security, you say, “I want to opt out of biometric identification,” and every TSA —

JK: They always sigh, they’re always upset.

SB: Some of them will roll their eyes and be like, “OK, I gotta look at your ID the old-fashioned way,” but they have to do it. Legally, they have to let you.

As far as opting out of the whole deal, you can take iterative steps, like not using Google, or not using Gmail.

AL: No phones.

SB: Yeah. Or throwing your phone down a well. But even if you have a flip phone, your location can still be picked up on the towers. I think it’s a matter of how much you want to inconvenience yourself.

JK: I say you shouldn’t drop out of society because that might make yourself a little safer, but it’s not necessarily helping the overall problem.

SB: I agree with that.

JK: What you can do is inform yourself. You can show up at city council meetings and talk about these issues. Flock has been canceled in dozens of cities and towns at this point. That movement is starting to, as we were speaking of earlier, as these cities are canceling Flock, a lot of them are replacing [them] with Axon or other surveillance contractors.

It’s good to see this sort of energy, and I think that people want to deploy this energy against other types of surveillance. I think that the backlash to Flock is not really about Flock itself; it’s that there is actually an outlet for that.

“I think that the backlash to Flock is not really about Flock itself; it’s that there is actually an outlet for that.”

Never condone this, but it’s like people are shooting these things with shotguns because they don’t know where to put their frustration for Meta spying on them, Google spying on them, Amazon spying on them, the NSA spying on them.

And here, you have a local city council. You can go to the city council and yell at the mayor or yell at the city council member. You can make life annoying for people wearing Meta glasses. These things aren’t necessarily going to be accepted by society.

SB: Jason and I were talking about this too earlier, and I think what’s been really interesting about the Flock backlash, and heartening, is that it is completely apolitical, or it’s nonpartisan.

AL: It’s cross-ideological.

SB: It is completely — from the deepest red to the people in this room right now — the entire political spectrum hates these.

JK: Also the deepest red.

SB: They hate these things. As fractured as the country is politically, you can find common ground with people who you might otherwise have very little to agree on when it comes to civil liberties things, when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to the right to not be followed around by the police for zero underlying suspicion.

There’s the real potential for the first time in a while to create a pro-privacy coalition that bridges a lot of the otherwise pretty giant political gaps.

“There’s the real potential for the first time in a while to create a pro-privacy coalition that bridges a lot of the otherwise pretty giant political gaps.”

AL: I love how this question begins, so thank you, Manny. “The high average age of U.S. senators creates a dangerous tech literacy gap, which results in ineffective regulatory oversight for tech companies ensconced in the mass surveillance apparatus.” Yes.

“With that in mind, is there a viable route to see real legislative change that protects people’s privacy?” I’m sorry, I just have to say I’m reminded of Jim Clyburn saying he did not know what ChatGPT was. I’m wondering if that inspired this question. Take it away.

JK: This has been a problem for a very long time. The fact that tech moves faster than regulation is one of the first things that I learned as a tech journalist. A lot of the regulatory fixes are, well, heavily influenced by lobbyists and that sort of thing, and they come way too late.

I keep coming back to the local level because it is a place that can move a lot faster. It’s a place where a smaller group of people can have a big influence. It is also where if there’s enough of a pushback at a local and state level, these big companies have to make broader changes. I’ve written about the right to repair for a long time, which I won’t go so far into, but basically different state laws had forced companies like Apple and John Deere to make massive changes. That type of legislation where you have to provide repair parts and things like that — maybe it would get passed at a federal level, but it would take decades to get the coalition that you need there. Whereas at a state level, you can do it in 12 months or four years or a lot faster.

SB: I totally agree that local state advocacy and legislation is much more in the short term achievable. But I wouldn’t want people to think that a more systemic approach is impossible. There could be with enough political will, and maybe some younger people in office perhaps. a sort of Clean Air Act for this stuff.

There have been moments where the country has, on a national level, decided “No, we gotta stop. We have to turn things around. This has become intolerable in one way or another.” That kind of action is doable. Like I said, I think politicians are paying attention to both the Flock backlash and also the data center backlash, which is equally, I think bipartisan and pan-ideological.

We have seen very prominent national political figures completely reverse themselves on data centers because they’ve seen that their constituents don’t want those things in their communities. That kind of popular anger could be wielded to achieve sweeping societal changes around privacy rights, for example.

JK: Otherwise, maybe Europe will try.

SB: Yeah, that’s the other option, is move to Belgium. Probably a good idea, anyway.

AL: How do you think about protecting your sources in this era where location data is widely available for purchase?

SB: I don’t want to speak for Jason. It’s a constant worry.

JK: A constant worry. Signal is a very powerful tool. It’s a very useful tool. It’s not infallible. If you’re not careful, these sorts of things can be subpoenaed. You lose your phone, things like this.

But I think it’s just part of doing the job now. That there is some risk to yourself; there’s some risk to your sources. Try to explain that to sources, that we are doing our best. We’re willing to go to jail for you. But that there is inherently a risk in being a source, especially in these times.

SB: There are two levels. There’s the government coming after you. Then there’s your employer coming after you. And the latter is if you’re a source from within a company, especially a tech company, you’re subject to very intense workplace surveillance.

I tell everyone, and I say this publicly, “Never contact me from a device that your job gives you. Never contact me from work.” There’s like, common sense, basic things you can do. But like Jason says, it’s inherently risky to talk to a reporter, and it takes a ton of bravery.

As things have gotten scarier, I’ve been really touched by the bravery of people who are willing to take that chance, knowing the risk. Luckily, there are a lot of those people out there.

AL: I’m tempted to not end on a depressing question, but I think we might have to, so I’m sorry. Why would AI want to end humanity?

[Laughter.]

SB: This is a great question. I emphatically believe that AI does not want anything.

AL: Yes. Sorry. [laughs]

SB: AI is built by people, and I think it’s important to really think about that. AI is like in many ways like any other piece of software. It’s just extremely capable and extremely powerful, and potentially devastatingly powerful, but it’s still software that people made.

“When you ascribe motives and agency to AI, you’re letting Sam Altman off the hook.”

This has been pointed out by others, but I think that when you ascribe motives and agency to AI, you’re letting Sam Altman off the hook. Somewhere, there’s a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy whose boss is in charge of all this stuff and ultimately accountable.

The question should not be, why would AI want to end humanity, but why would Sam Altman want to IPO a company that could potentially end humanity, that sells a product that could end humanity? Because then we’re at least like focused on the people who are responsible here. Look, if I end up being wrong, and we’re all being ruled in the matrix or something, I will look like quite a fool.

JK: Yeah. And I don’t think any of us have been nice to AI, so probably not going to be good for us. [Laughter.]

I think that’s very well said. I don’t have so much more to add there other than, it’s like there are human beings behind this. There are human beings building this technology. It’s not inevitable. This doomsday future is not inevitable. I think that we’d be naive to say that AI hasn’t really changed society already. I walk down the street and I see 800,000 fucking AI menus, and I get very mad. But I think it’s affecting labor, it’s affecting resource use, the economy, things of this nature.

We can’t bury our heads in the sand and say, “This is not changing society in some way,” but it is being driven by very rich humans and they can be regulated. They can be held to account, they can be put in jail someday, something like that.

[Laughter]

I don’t know how AI’s going to kill us, to answer your question. But I think dumb people wielding AI can cause a lot of problems. We’ve seen it all the time with, “Oops, I accidentally deleted my company’s database because my AI agent told it to.”

SB: I think what’s more likely and what people should be more — I hate to end on a note of what you should be worried about —

AL: We’re headed there.

SB: What everyone in this room should be freaked out about is not a rogue AI deciding “I hate humans,” and acting on its own, but it’s like —

Audience member: The entity!

SB: But it’s the Pentagon using some form of ChatGPT to help manage a nuclear strike, potentially. That is, I think, orders of magnitude more likely. AI’s already being used to kill people in large numbers today and round up people in large numbers today, as Jason and his colleagues have really thoroughly documented with ICE.

They are already using this stuff, and I think we should not let the hypothetical existential threats distract from the deaths and harms that are happening already and will continue to happen. So on that note —

AL: We’re going to leave it there. Thank you all for being here and making this possible.

And thank you again to Sam and Jason for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

SB: Our pleasure.

[Applause]

AL: That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Jesse Banner is our live show engineer. Hannah Behrendt is our events coordinator.

A special thanks to 404 Media for collaborating with us on this live show and to our live show production team: Adam Gunther, Annie Chabel, Celine Piser, Michael Sherrard, Lauren Schilli, Alessandra Bosco, and Sean Turner. We also want to thank The Loved One’s crew: J.C. Gabel and Aubrie Wienholt. And many thanks again to you, our audience, for coming out and making tonight possible.

[Applause] Sorry, there’s more!

Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. And legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post The AI Doomsday Future Is Not Inevitable appeared first on The Intercept.

25 Years After 9/11, Muslims Are Still Politicians’ Favorite Scapegoat

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

A quarter century after the September 11 attacks emboldened then-President George W. Bush to launch the “war on terror,” many Americans might like to think they’re wiser than the politicians and pundits who unleashed a flood of anti-Muslim hatred and eroded civil liberties through warrantless wiretaps and racist deportation campaigns.

But some of the most notorious Bush-era advents — like the Department of Homeland Security and the prison colony at Guantánamo Bay — don’t appear to be going anywhere. Nor does the phenomenon of Islamophobia, which is playing a major role in the current political cycle. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed — who, if elected, would be the first Muslim U.S. senator — has been called a terrorist, a radical Islamist, and a threat to national security, as pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs spend millions on ads that paint him as a terrorist sympathizer. In New York City, meanwhile, local media has suggested that the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, should not attend the commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, as if to do so would be an insult to the victims and their families.

“Islamophobia actually becomes more rampant during election season — not necessarily after a terrorist attack, but actually during election season in the U.S.,” journalist Rozina Ali tells The Intercept Briefing. “What’s happened over the last three decades is that Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics. … When you can’t actually discuss the policies, when we’re not willing to engage in facts, it’s really easy to throw racist rhetoric at people.”

“The fight that we’re seeing now is whether we are willing to accept all forms of religion in this country. And as much as I want to say this is just more of what we’ve seen in the past, I think what does frighten me is how quickly we are moving to a place where some governor or some local official might try to outlaw Islam altogether. And mind you, this is even a policy shift from 10 years ago when Trump called for a Muslim ban,” says Ali. “What has been happening recently is that the rhetoric … has been shifting toward, ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s a political ideology.’ This is not a new talking point, but it is becoming institutionalized. There are efforts to make it into law, which is a frightening place to be.”

This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Ali about how anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies are on the rise and have endured, or even worsened, in the post-9/11 world, as well as her new book, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.” Ali shares the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen, Arab American attorney Abdeen Jabara, as well as the story of imam Yassin Aref, a victim of a controversial sting operation who served 15 years in federal prison due to the ambiguous “material support” for terrorism law first passed in the ’90s. It was the same charge used to convict anti-ICE protesters at Prairieland Detention Center to decades in prison this year.

“This was something lot of civil rights lawyers and activists were warning about even back then, because they recognized that this law and this war on terror can be used to attack dissidents and eventually will be used to attack a lot more people than the Muslim community. And that is what we’re seeing now,” says Ali.

“Because we’ve given so much power to the executive branch, because we’ve given so much power to the government over the last 25 years, the government gets to decide who they consider enemies, who they consider terrorists, and what they consider support for terrorism,” says Ali. “The Trump administration can say, ‘I now consider leftists terrorists,’ and unfortunately, there are laws in the books that allow him to do that.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

AL: Jessie, it’s Labor Day weekend. Unless you’re a summer-truther like me, this marks the end of summer for most people. And accordingly, things are taking a hard pivot toward November.

I’m going to run through a few things that caught my eye in the last few days: ICE is planning to pay $5 million to create a national voter database, per reporting from Wired. Nothing to see there, I’m sure.

The Trump administration is also deploying hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents to conduct a witch hunt for unspecified voter fraud, despite lacking evidence that that’s a real issue.

In Congress, Democrats are considering whether to punish two lawmakers who sided with Republicans this week to advance a key procedural vote. And they’re weighing new rules for the caucus that worry progressives and several other caucuses across the ideological spectrum. But progressives in particular are worried that these new rules, if passed, could ice out the new class of socialists who are on track to take office in January. Separately, but perhaps most importantly, the United Nations said we’ve basically lost any chance to stop the worst of global warming.

JW: OK, I’m really going to avoid making a heat joke. But I will say that August in Washington is officially over and that means not only is the weather getting a little bit cooler, although, I guess, we’ll see. It also means there is a lot more news to cover. Although, I would say it is hard to argue we’ve gotten much rest this last month.

In Massachusetts on Tuesday night, Democratic Sen. Ed Markey easily defeated his challenger, Democratic congressman Seth Moulton. Moulton had run on his relative youth, but was hamstrung by people’s perception that he was both inauthentic and far too conservative for the state. After the 2024 presidential election, Moulton had made this very public appeal to the right, arguing that protecting transgender children had harmed Democrats electorally and that it made them seem out of touch. But as it turned out, from Tuesday night, Moulton ended up being the one who seemed out of touch with his voters in Massachusetts.

In some more somber news, this week marks one year since the Trump administration began carrying out strikes on civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Intercept’s Nick Turse reported that the United States has killed 227 civilians in the more than 65 attacks that have been carried out in the name of defeating so-called narco terrorists. There’s this one passage from Nick’s piece on the anniversary that really sticks with me.

“It’s been a year of murders,” said a defense official who was horrified by the first strike and has remained so as the U.S. has targeted scores of so-called “drug boats” in the year since. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.” The official added: “It’s absolutely criminal.”

And then of course, next week marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, so there’s a lot to reflect on when it comes to the legacy of that attack and how it fundamentally reshaped our society.

AL: Yes, and while so much has changed in the last 25 years since 9/11, it also feels like a lot has stayed the same — or, in many cases, gotten worse.

One of the major effects of 9/11 we’re reminded frequently of is the sprawling surveillance apparatus spawned by those attacks as we see its power put to use on almost a daily basis against immigrants, political dissidents, U.S. citizens, and particularly Muslim and Arab communities. We probably know only a small percentage of the destruction the post-9/11 wave of Islamophobia wrought not just in wars around the world, but here at home.

Today, Islamophobia is seeing its own grotesque renaissance, particularly in this year’s midterms. We’re going to get into all of this with our guest today, journalist Rozina Ali. But first, I wonder if you could tell us the latest here, Jessie.

JW: We got a really great example of what you’re talking about this week from CBS News, perhaps unsurprisingly.

AL: The shade. [Laughter]

JW: On Monday, the outlet, now led by conservative commentator Bari Weiss, published a story on Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed saying “Deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

Now, the tweets were very innocuous; as many people pointed out, this is a non-story. In two of them, he asked Americans to take Covid-19 as seriously as the terror attacks. But it’s a familiar playbook from the right and their media apparatus: Weaponize 9/11 to stoke Islamophobic fear about a Muslim candidate, rinse, repeat.

You discuss the legacy of 9/11 and how Islamophobia has been weaponized with journalist Rozina Ali. Let’s hear that conversation now.

AL: Yes, joining me now is Rozina Ali, a journalist and contributing writer at New York Times Magazine, a fellow at Type Media Center and at New America, and previously a senior editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. Ali writes primarily about the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, and South Asia. She has a new book out called, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.”

Rozina, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Rozina Ali: Thank you so much for having me. It’s really nice to be here.

AL: Rozina, unfortunately, we are going to start with midterms. We’re approaching the 25-year anniversary of 9/11. You’ve covered the subsequent war on terror and the rise in Islamophobia. A quarter of a century later, Islamophobia is still not just alive and well, but playing a major role in our current political cycle. Why do you think that is?

RA: Over the last 25 years, Islamophobia actually becomes more rampant during election season — not necessarily after a terrorist attack, but actually during election season in the U.S.

What we’re seeing now isn’t unusual. Actually, what’s happened over the last three decades is that Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics.

That said, what we’re seeing now is so rampant, and the anti-Muslim vitriol is just so stark and prevalent, that it is shocking to people who’ve been following this for three decades, like myself.

AL: It feels, as you said, in some ways, like the Islamophobia of 2026 is even more explicit, in some cases, than it was in the post-9/11 world.

We’re seeing a rise in Islamophobic attacks in communities around the country. Three people were killed in an attack on a mosque in San Diego in May. And as you noted, all of this has taken a particularly ugly turn in midterms — specifically the Michigan Senate race, where Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been called a “terrorist,” a “radical” Islamist, and a threat to national security.

But we also saw a lot of similar rhetoric aimed at Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race last year. At The Intercept, this cycle, we reported on the record-breaking spending from pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs against El-Sayed amounting to about $60 million, much of which paid for ads that painted him as a terrorist sympathizer.

How are you seeing Islamophobia take shape this cycle, and how are people responding?

RA: What’s being thrown at Abdul El-Sayed is actually, again, not unusual. It’s the same playbook that we’ve been seeing. But what is interesting is the way in which the Islamophobic rhetoric somewhat differs between Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed.

What’s interesting with Zohran is that a lot of the vitriol against him was that he was not American. That he was not born in the U.S., and there was a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric thrown at him too. There were calls to denaturalize him, suggesting that he was too foreign in many ways to be mayor of New York City.

You can’t quite do that with Abdul El-Sayed. He was born in Michigan. He was raised there; he went to school there. You can’t actually call for his denaturalization. But what Islamophobes have been doing and what the right-wing has been doing has been suggesting that he has alliances with foreign groups.

Specifically, that his family members have alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood or affiliations with them. The problem is that this has been a strategy that has been used over the past 25 years — suggestions that there are sleeper cells in the U.S., or that there are people who have affiliations with scary groups abroad.

Oftentimes, what the media did was just blare those headlines without really delving deeper into what does it mean to have such an affiliation, if it is true.

I think it’s really interesting that you brought up the San Diego mosque shooting that happened earlier this year, because one of the things that happened soon after was the New York Post did — and I know the New York Post has its flaws, and we should not take it seriously! But their headline when covering this tragic incident was saying, actually, the mosque had affiliations with some of the 9/11 hijackers. They chose to focus on that — as if the anti-Muslim attack was justified in some ways.

Earlier when you asked why is Islamophobia so rampant now, one reason is because for 25 years, anti-Muslim sentiment and rhetoric has been justified over and over again, both by policymakers and media and the public in general.

The New York Post “ chose to focus on that — as if the anti-Muslim attack was justified in some ways.”

AL: Your book touches on this, how the era that we’re living in right now with the attacks — particularly on pro-Palestine students, or surveillance of pro-Palestine activity in response to the genocide in Gaza — echoes the rise of the post-1967 surveillance state targeting Arab communities in the U.S.

A lot of this is encapsulated in the current obsession with leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. We just can’t seem to get away from him being a prominent feature in the news cycle. But I’m going to ask you about this anyway, because I think it’s relevant to the discussion.

In response to a segment on CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash that spent six minutes on El-Sayed and Piker, Piker posted on X:

it sounds unbelievably stupid but i have become this media cycle’s “trans athletes” or “migrant caravan.” wild how much supposedly liberal outlets let fox news play the role of news desk editor.

odd how none of these outlets will have me on to interrogate my beliefs directly.

Over recent months, Piker, who has endorsed and campaigned with progressive candidates, has become a prime target of Democrats and Republicans and mainstream news.

Here, he’s pointing out this feature, as you’re describing it, Rozina — a feature, not a bug of our politics. Where rather than focusing on the issues actually impacting people’s lives, there’s this effort to distract attention and channel anger toward a minority group, stoke unfounded fears, and spread lies and disinformation.

This is basically what led to the ICE surge in Minneapolis that killed two protesters, the target in that campaign being the Somali community.

I want to talk more about how you think about this dynamic and particularly why something that is such an obvious distraction can be so effective?

RA: This is what American media does, right? I will say I am part of the American media. We both are.

AL: We all are, yeah.

RA: We all are. There are journalists who are doing incredible work and trying to cut through the noise and trying to actually report on what’s happening.

But what I do find is that a lot of media coverage that revolves around conversations or opinions or talking points becomes so much about one thing.

“ A lot of the reason [Hasan Piker is] getting such vitriol is because of what he says regarding Palestine and Israel.”

This obsession with Hasan Piker actually reflects something that has been a long-standing issue, which is a lot of the reason he’s getting such vitriol is because of what he says regarding Palestine and Israel. Again, not something new.

This has been a problem for decades that the space to have a nuanced conversation about U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine has contracted over many, many years. Certainly after the 1970s, definitely after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.

But we really saw that much more after 9/11 — that any space to criticize U.S. foreign policy abroad, whether it be in Israel–Palestine, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even critique the war on terror in general, that space was just contracted, and certainly for Muslims and certainly for Arabs. I think what we’re seeing now is basically a continuation of that.

I do wonder what would happen — if we would be obsessed with Hasan Piker and what he says — if there were more opportunities to actually discuss some of the things that he was bringing up, rather than shut it down.

“The space to have a nuanced conversation about U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine has contracted over many years.”

AL: The space for this conversation on Israel and Palestine is getting smaller at the same time that it should theoretically be getting wider, right?

Because American sentiment is historically on the side of Palestinians for the first time in recent history. The number of elected officials campaigning on this issue and who have entered Congress over the last six or seven years is at a record high. And yet you see the space not just contracting, but being astroturfed at levels that we’ve never seen when it comes to political spending.

And I think that conversation is often really lost because we are so apt to talk about the historic achievements of this movement in the zeitgeist or public opinion, if you want to call it [that]. But the forces that are working to undermine that movement are stronger than ever at this point.

RA: Absolutely. It is fascinating to me the ways in which the pro-Palestine movement has gained steam over the last decade. Obviously, what happened after October 7 has really changed the momentum and increased the momentum, but there were a lot of attempts to actually shift the conversation from even a decade ago or a decade and a half ago.

A lot of these groups were working on the ground for much longer. It’s just become such a huge part of the public conversation, one, because of what Israel has been doing in Gaza; two, because of the U.S.’s — both Biden and Trump administration’s — full-hearted support for that; and three, because there have been a lot more politicians speaking out about it. There’s actually challenges to this.

One thing to remember is that, yes, basically the pro-Israel lobby has had a lot of money for a long time, but they’ve been throwing money at local elections for the past decade while this movement has been ramping up.

What is interesting to me now compared to 10 years ago, or even, let’s say, after 9/11, is that there is such a discrepancy between what policymakers want or what these interest groups want versus public opinion on the ground, to your point.

“There is such a discrepancy between what policymakers want or what these interest groups want vs. public opinion on the ground.”

That discrepancy is actually something that we need to be paying more attention to. I wish that [the] media would be talking about that a lot more, because if we continue the same policies we have been that the U.S. population does not agree with, we are going to continue to basically worsen distrust in the government, which has been a problem for the last three decades.

There has been waning trust in the U.S. government by the American public, and we have seen how that can be catastrophic. We have seen what happens when people stop losing faith in institutions and in their government. Obviously, this is one policy matter among many, but I do think that gap is something worth paying attention to.

Speaking of the lack of nuanced discussion about Palestine and Israel among U.S. policymakers, a few years ago, I did a profile of Rashida Tlaib for the New York Times Magazine, and I was surprised to learn that the House has about over 300 different caucuses. There is not one that is dedicated to Palestine or Palestinian rights.

That just illustrates how little we are willing to actually talk about this as a policy matter. It’s not shocking to me that the vitriol thrown at Abdul El-Sayed, or even Zohran Mamdani last year, had a lot to do with Islamophobia.

When you can’t actually discuss the policies, when we’re not willing to engage in facts, it’s really easy to throw racist rhetoric at people.

[Break]

AL: I want to talk about what’s been happening in Texas, because I think this is a poignant example of how this has spiraled out of control and seeped into a new form, almost, in 2026. Last year, a promotional video about a Muslim-friendly planned community went viral and sparked a wave of Islamophobic vitriol.

Since then, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law, “Banning Sharia Compounds.” He and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is also the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, ordered investigations against the development and other Muslim institutions across the state. The Department of Justice even launched an investigation, but closed it without finding wrongdoing, according to reporting from PBS. Now, Republican candidates in the state have been campaigning on “The Islamification of Texas.”

What has been your reaction to all of that?

[Rozina Ali laughs]

AL: You can have a range of reactions. [laughs]

RA: I did! I did go through a range of reactions, which was, “Oh, this is Texas doing its thing again.” Or, “Oh, people hate CAIR. That’s not new.” I hate to say it, but there’s a humor about it, too, because this anti-sharia sentiment is so absurd. One of the first times I heard sharia being used — and I grew up in a Muslim household — the first time I heard the word sharia was through Islamophobes in like 2009. I truly did not know what it meant.

“I don’t think that Greg Abbott or any of the other Republicans who are so staunchly against visible Muslims in Texas can explain what sharia means.”

I don’t think that Greg Abbott or any of the other Republicans who are so staunchly against visible Muslims in Texas can explain what sharia means. They can say it’s Islamic law, which is against Western civilization.

But one, they have not been able to show what it means on a very practical level; and two, they haven’t been able to show how that differs from the ways in which other religious communities practice their own religion in the U.S., or how they seek moral guidance.

Ultimately, what it comes down to, what the fight that we’re seeing now is whether we are willing to accept all forms of religion in this country. And as much as I want to say this is just more of what we’ve seen in the past, I think what does frighten me is how quickly we are moving to a place where some governor or some local official might try to outlaw Islam altogether. And mind you, this is even a policy shift from 10 years ago when Trump called for a Muslim ban.

So within even 10 years, there’s a dramatic shift. We’re not even just saying ban Muslim immigrants from coming into the United States. We are now having conversations where officials want to ban Muslims or Islam altogether.

“We are now having conversations where officials want to ban Muslims or Islam altogether.”

Just a little background: There have long been suspicions about Islamic institutions in this country. Islamic institutions have been surveilled going back to the ’80s and ’90s, and I mean mass surveillance, informants showing up at meetings, talking to and interrogating leaders.

After 2001, there was even an investigation into Muslim chaplains who would visit prisons because some policymakers were worried that they were radicalizing the prison population. There wasn’t really any criminal wrongdoing found actually, but this sense of Muslim institutions are suspicious has been, again, a feature of America for a long time.

But what does worry me is what has been happening recently is that the rhetoric in Texas has been shifting toward, “Islam is not a religion, it’s a political ideology.” This is not a new talking point, but it is becoming institutionalized. There are efforts to make it into law, which is a frightening place to be.

Texas has a huge Muslim population, and I wonder, what does that mean? Does that mean you shut down all the mosques? Does that mean that no Muslim can practice in public?

I have conflicted feelings about the Muslim neighborhood that was being built, and I know it was open to non-Muslims. But I do think what it suggests and what we are seeing more and more in the U.S. is a desire to live in pockets and to live in silos because people feel more comfortable with their community.

That actually is a marked difference from what we decided in the U.S., that we wanted to be a society of pluralism and tolerance, and that’s not what we’re seeing in Texas. You can blame the Muslim community, but very much so I blame a lot of the Islamophobes who not only suggest but say outright that Muslims do not belong in this country.

AL: As you’re talking, I can’t help but think about the irony of trying to frame Islam as a political ideology, while the rise of the Christian far-right as an actual political ideology is completely undergirding the Trump administration and its policy priorities across disciplines — and redirecting attention away from what is a very real manifestation of religion as a political ideology toward this scapegoated community that is not just a distraction, but is causing actual harm.

I wonder, has that come up in your reporting? The parallel between the attacks on Islam and this attempt to paint it as this radical, growing tendril that’s seeping into the American political ideology — while the far-right is actually doing that.

RA: So one of the things I wanted to do in my book is really place this history of Islamophobia in the larger context of what’s happening in American politics and what’s happening in the country. And those two things don’t live in a vacuum.

What was happening to the Muslim community in the U.S. directly affected what was happening in the rest of the country and was affected by it. One of the things that was happening was that even as the media — for years after 9/11, for decades after 9/11 — even as the media covered cases of terrorism convictions or anyone who was charged with terrorism that was related to Muslims, covered the rise of ISIS, covered the rise of Islamic terrorism, it focused much less on the rise of right-wing extremism.

One study put it at over 300 percent more media covered Muslim terrorists than the far-right. What that did was really lull us into thinking that the biggest national security threat we are facing in this country comes from Islamic terrorists, rather than right-wing elements in this country.

It lulled “us into thinking that the biggest national security threat we are facing in this country comes from Islamic terrorists, rather than right-wing elements in this country.”

The other thing that’s happened is that a lot of rhetoric and policies over the past 25 years have actually tried to make Islam different. What’s ironic about what we’re seeing today versus 25 years ago is that after 9/11, the Bush administration tried in rhetoric — and I want to make that clear, in rhetoric, at least — tried to make this a not religious war. They really wanted to resist that this was a clash of civilizations. But the policies and the rhetoric that came out of those initial months after 9/11 actually suggested otherwise.

What happened was that the U.S. government and U.S. authorities and U.S. law enforcement and then eventually “experts” and anti-Muslim hate groups kept positioning Muslims as different or as a group to be suspicious of.

Ultimately, you are creating a religious war by stating the reality of the country in those terms. It’s a natural byproduct of that that Christian fundamentalism would rise as a response to what is considered “foreign elements,” like Islam.

AL: Your new book, “Seasons of Fury,” documents the rise of Islamophobia in the U.S. Can you tell us why you wanted to write this book, and how you started your work on it? Obviously, you’ve been covering this for a long time.

RA: So I was living in Egypt for a couple of years, and I was very much focused on wars abroad and how the war on terror has affected communities around the world. When I returned from Egypt, I was actually thinking a lot about terrorism convictions and how Muslims whose fathers or sons had been sent away to prison for decades, how they were faring.

I wasn’t actually trying to question these terrorism convictions, but while I was looking into these cases and speaking to families — this was around the time of the rise of Trump on the political stage, and I started noticing that there was a lot of anti-mosque activity around the country, not just in New York, but in New Jersey and Tennessee and Chicago, and it was shocking to me that it was happening in both blue and red states.

At the same time, after Trump was elected, people started calling his the most Islamophobic administration in U.S. history. I thought there was already a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment long before Trump came into power. I realized that all those threads that I was observing and starting to look into were actually connected.

One thing I wanted to do with this book is, one, reclaim the history that I think we too often forget about how the Muslim community in the U.S. was targeted and what it went through. But two, I really wanted to situate the Muslim story in the wider American story to explain how we’ve changed.

I really approached this book as an investigative journalist because one of the questions I was really trying to interrogate is: Why is Islamophobia worse now than it was even after 9/11? Why has our country changed so much that we have elected a president who is willing to say, “Let’s ban all the Muslims”? I wanted to really present a history that could explain why we are where we are today.

“Why has our country changed so much that we have elected a president who is willing to say, ‘Let’s ban all the Muslims’?”

AL: Through the stories of four families across eight decades in “Seasons of Fury,” you portray a range of Muslim experiences shaped by relentless suspicion and prejudice.

You write about Arab American attorney Abdeen Jabara, who “learned that the government had amassed an extensive file, covering his organizational affiliations, his travels through the country and abroad, transcripts of phone conversations, and notes from interviews with more than a hundred acquaintances, bank transactions, and summaries of speeches.”

It turned out that the U.S. government had been spying on him since 1967. Tell us more about Abdeen and how he became a target of the government.

RA: Abdeen’s history is so fascinating to me. One of the things that I wanted to do when I started this book was really actually situate Muslims as already part of America.

There’s such a predominant narrative that Islam and Muslims are foreign and they came into this country. I wanted to actually show the opposite, and it was very important to me to begin the book in the United States, rather than with someone’s arrival to the United States. Abdeen was born in 1940 in small-town America, in Michigan.

“There’s such a predominant narrative that Islam and Muslims are foreign and they came into this country. I wanted to actually show the opposite.”

His father, who came from Greater Syria, he was a staunch Republican. He joined the U.S. Army and fought during World War I. He was so patriotic that every Memorial Day he would march in a parade through town. Abdeen became really obsessed with his parents’ homeland; he became obsessed with the Middle East. But what really shook him was what was happening both in the United States and in Israel–Palestine.

So he really came of age during the 1950s and ’60s. He moved to Detroit, and what he saw was an uprising — the 1967 uprising — and he saw police brutality against Black Americans. That same year, there was a war in which Israel basically grabbed more land, more Palestinian land, and those two things really shook Abdeen, and he became very politically active.

He started going to socialist meetings to talk about Palestine. He started to speak at rallies and forums. He helped start a group in the United States that was focused on Palestinian rights. He even took many trips to the Middle East. He was part of the progressive network of National Lawyers Guild. He took a lot of members to the Middle East to meet with Palestinian activists and prisoners and really try to capture what was happening on the ground, bring those facts back to the U.S. to really help shape and influence public opinion and policymakers’ opinion about Palestine, because the U.S. government at that point had backed Israel.

So in 1972, the Munich massacre happens, in which a Palestinian militant group kidnaps and kills the Israeli Olympics team. It caused a huge sensation. It was tragic, and it was blared across national headlines in the U.S. Almost immediately after, Abdeen started to notice that his colleagues, his friends, people he knew in the community were being visited by the FBI.

What immediately came to light was that the U.S. government had started a surveillance program to monitor what it thought were radical elements within the Arab community. This is an operation they called Operation Boulder. Now, ostensibly, the U.S. government said that they were only tackling immigrants, visa holders. It became very clear that it was not just them; it was actually also U.S. citizens of Arab heritage that people were targeting.

He was a U.S. citizen, born, obviously, in the U.S. When Abdeen decided to sue the U.S. government to figure out exactly what they knew and how much they knew because he was suspicious that they had also surveilled him, what he eventually found was that they had been surveilling him since after 1967. So not even since after Munich, but long before then. And that they had shared his information not just with other federal agencies, but also with foreign governments.

AL: This is the first case where the NSA admitted to spying on someone, right?

RA: It was the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen, yes. And it was against an Arab.

“It was the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen.”

One thing that I find also interesting about Abdeen’s case and the entire surveillance program at that time is, Abedin grew up in a Muslim household. FBI and police notes noted that he was Muslim, that his family was Muslim.

They did not surveil him because he was Muslim. They surveilled him because he was Arab — which was the case for his other colleagues, too. They surveilled them because even if they happened to be Muslim, they were surveilled because they were Arab.

After 9/11, it was a similar sort of surveillance — except law enforcement surveilled Muslims because they were Muslims. And that really is a fascinating and damning shift that we see.

When I was doing this reporting and research, I was thinking to myself, I think this might be the first time in U.S. history that the government has targeted a religious group so widely and so systematically, which is, honestly, quite astonishing. And it is something that I wish we would talk about more and really reckon with.

AL: You said you started thinking about this book by thinking about convictions for terrorism charges, and we’ve seen the expansion of charges for “material support” for terrorism in a variety of protest spheres in recent years. I just want to zoom out a little bit because I think most of our listeners are familiar with the way that this apparatus exploded after 9/11.

We know that 9/11 gave way to George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror, the Department of Homeland Security, Guantánamo Bay, the erosion of civil liberties with the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretaps, and the acceleration of the unitary executive theory — resting more unilateral power in the hands of the president.

All of that — all of those institutions — now rest in the hands of Donald Trump and his administration, who, as we know, have proven willing to push the bounds of government surveillance, extrajudicial killings, unilateral wars, and detention of perceived enemies of the state even further. You wrote for The New York Times recently about the Prairieland activists that the government charged with “material support” of terrorism.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how we got there, and how what constitutes terrorism and support for terrorism has evolved over the years.

RA: A lot of the structures and the laws that the Bush administration used to target terrorism were already in place in the United States. They were really expanded and founded during the Clinton administration in the ’90s.

This one specific law that you mentioned, the material support for terrorism, was actually passed in 1994, and then was expanded in 1996, ironically after the Oklahoma City bombing.

What it did was allow the U.S. government to prosecute anyone charged with support for terrorism, either a foreign terrorist organization or support a terrorist activity. The problem was that even in 1996, what “support” meant was so broad and vague.

It was so broad that even some senior administration officials asked the State Department, “Does that mean $25 in dues can be considered material support for terrorism?” The State Department official said, “Yes, actually. I don’t think anyone would prosecute for that, but yes.” So basically, by 1996, we had a really vague and powerful law on the books.

After 2001, prosecutors recognized that they had this really useful law to go after terrorists. One thing to remember is that after 9/11, the guiding star for the U.S. government across the board was prevention. “We have to prevent another attack before it happens,” which means that law enforcement were looking for not just terrorists before they could do something, but potential terrorists, anyone who could become a terrorist. It was a broad mission.

That plus the material support for terrorism law, which was already vague, allowed the U.S. government to basically put a lot of people in jail who were not even connected to a terrorist group or who did not even commit an act of violence or who did not even have particularly detailed plans for violence.

One of the cases I mentioned in the New York Times piece was the case of Yassin Aref, who was an imam in Albany, Kurdish imam. He came as a refugee. This is what’s so fascinating to me about the U.S. war on terror, is that when Yassin Aref came as a refugee, the U.S. considered Kurds their allies. After 2003, they were suspicious of Kurdish militants.

It was during that era, the post-9/11 era, that the U.S. government targeted Yassin Aref using an undercover informant. It’s not that Yassin Aref said, “I want to blow up something,” or “I have a plan,” or “I have a desire to kill someone.”

What actually happened was that the informant loaned money to one of Yassin Aref’s friends. Yasin Aref witnessed that loan. The informant said, “This money came from a foreign terrorist organization.” Yassin Aref did not really understand what this man was talking about and just nodded along. That was one of the pieces of evidence — the strongest piece of evidence — that U.S. prosecutors used to charge him with material support for terrorism.

Yassin Aref ended up in prison for 15 years. This is a case that illustrates, one, that material support was so vague and so broad, it really could mean anything and continues to mean anything. But two, what we consider terrorism has just broadened dramatically. We really have no good definition of what terrorism is.

And this was something that a lot of civil rights lawyers and activists were warning about even back then, because they recognized that this law and this war on terror can be used to attack dissidents and eventually will be used to attack a lot more people than the Muslim community. And that is what we’re seeing now.

We are seeing that because we’ve given so much power to the executive branch, because we’ve given so much power to the government over the last 25 years, the government gets to decide who they consider enemies, who they consider terrorists, and what they consider support for terrorism. And unfortunately, we have the legal backing in the books to back that mission. The Trump administration can say, “I now consider leftists terrorists,” and unfortunately, there are laws in the books that allow him to do that.

AL: They basically said as much claiming that all the socialists are heralding communism, et cetera, et cetera.

RA: Yes, it is one of the more, again, funny if not scary bits about the vitriol thrown at Abdul El-Sayed, is calling him an “Islamic communist.”

It’s so interesting to me that now it’s — I think especially because of the rise of the DSA and socialists in office — basically the right wing is throwing everything at him. And Abdul El-Sayed is not a socialist; he’s said it himself.

AL: He’s not. [laughs] On this show, he’s said that, yes.

RA: Yes. And Zohran Mamdani is a socialist, but it’s the same vitriol thrown at both of them. I think it’s really interesting and actually quite chilling that the rhetoric is starting to join the word “Islamic terrorist” with leftists or with socialists or communists. That actually spells something a lot more nefarious and dangerous for wider American society than just the Muslim community.

“It’s really interesting and actually quite chilling that the rhetoric is starting to join the word ‘Islamic terrorist’ with leftists or with socialists or communists.”

AL: Rozina, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

RA: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

AL: I want to remind everyone that Rozina’s new book is out now. “Seasons of Fury” documents Islamophobia in the U.S..

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post 25 Years After 9/11, Muslims Are Still Politicians’ Favorite Scapegoat appeared first on The Intercept.

Right-Wing Trans Hate Comes for the WNBA

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The WNBA is having a moment. Viewership is up. Attendance for this year’s WNBA All-Star Game surpassed the NBA’s All-Star Game. Games and events can be viewed in a record number of places, from broadcast to cable and streaming. And just this week, Angel Reese of the Atlanta Dream set a single-game record.

But the stories about the WNBA capturing national attention in recent weeks are about none of that. Instead, the focus has been on two retired NBA players, including Enes Kanter Freedom, who showed up courtside at an August 23 Chicago Sky–Indiana Fever game wearing a T-shirt that said “Woman: noun. adult human female.”

“I don’t believe that he’s being genuine in any realm, in order to create this mass hysteria of sorts for an issue that’s actually simply a non-issue,” says Angela Perry, a WNBA content creator, tells The Intercept Briefing. “There are no trans women in the WNBA; there are none attempting to be in the WNBA.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Perry and journalist Katelyn Burns about how the premier women’s professional basketball league has found itself at the center of a right-wing manufactured panic.

“The right has made such hay out of trans women in women’s sports that they need to keep inventing controversies in order to keep this issue front of mind,” says Burns who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice and co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast.

“We have a midterm election coming up, and to be frank with you, the only thing that the right has done besides terrorizing immigrants is banning trans women from women’s sports. It’s at the center of almost all of their policies,” continues Burns. “They are inventing controversies about trans people in sports where there are no trans people involved.”

“This is about women in general. They’re already talking about not wanting women to have the right to vote,” says Perry. “This isn’t just about sports. There’s a political party trying to scale us back to what they perceive was a time where things were better. But really, it was when women were more controlled.”

“The bigger issue is that the people who think that they’re protected, it’s always going to get to the protected class eventually,” warns Perry. “Right now, the focus is trans, and people think they’re safe because ‘I’m not trans. I’m a cis woman and I’m protected.’ But it will impact you.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

AL: Jessie, in typical August fashion, it feels like things have kind of slowed down somewhat with Washington in recess amid the final days of summer. I’m personally looking forward to having a little space to catch our breaths, as we enter the final midterm stretch before everyone turns their attention toward November. But there’s still plenty to cover.

ICE announced a record high in July arrests and deportations, and the Department of Homeland Security is continuing to expand its attacks on legal immigration. Nobody fret: Democrats are still melting down over Hasan Piker, while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met recently with Jared Kushner. A majority-Black town in Indiana went without power — and very little news attention — for two weeks. Dolly Parton died. And as we close out the sixth month of the Iran war, the Trump administration made a big show of announcing an “economic D-Day” with new sweeping sanctions and claiming, yet again, that this would end the war.

What have you been hearing on those fronts this week?

JW: I have to say: The second Trump administration is the only time in history where this could be considered a slow news cycle. But yeah, there’s a lot to talk about.

So with ICE, we have really been seeing a huge surge in detention and deportations. What I’ve been hearing from advocates on the ground is that it’s also coincided with an increase in violence. We’re seeing ICE use tactics like car kettling, even putting pepper spray and pepper balls into vehicles on the road. There’s a lot of dangerous activity happening with ICE — and a lot less coverage than we saw in January and February.

In regards to Gary, Indiana, I think it’s been heartening and disheartening of a news cycle, in the sense that at first people really were not paying attention. So for those who don’t know: Thousands of residents in the predominantly Black community [were] without power for two weeks after a storm caused massive outages. There’s a lot of anger right now because people are simultaneously being squeezed by these exorbitant electricity bills, but then they also don’t have power to meet their basic survival needs — for their medical equipment, for their refrigeration of food.

It’s a story that we keep seeing repeat. In Jackson, Mississippi, for example, residents of the also predominantly Black community, have been plagued for years by both expensive water bills and years of water shut-offs and boil-water notices. We just keep seeing people squeezed at both ends. You somehow don’t have access to the resources you need to survive, and you’re practically paying a second mortgage for the pleasure.

AL: Jessie, you’ve also been reporting this week on the fallout over the fight regarding trans rights in sports. This is not my wheelhouse. Can you get us up to speed on what happened, and where does the fight stand now?

JW: I had a great conversation with Angela Perry, a content creator who covers the WNBA and women’s basketball, and Katelyn Burns, who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice — she also co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast — about how the WNBA, a league with no trans women in it, found itself at the center of a right-wing culture war on transgender rights.

The right-wing outrage machine started off focusing on perceived racial grievances, claiming WNBA star Caitlin Clark, who is white, had been unfairly targeted because of her race. Media Matters recently documented Fox News spending over 13 1/2 hours of its summer coverage on the WNBA, largely focusing in on race and, more recently, trans inclusion.

Then enters WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, who has become a darling of the right, earning the moniker “MAGA Barbie.” Cunningham first started getting attention for these high-profile moments of her defending her teammate Clark on the court. Both Cunningham and Clark are white and straight in a league that is predominantly Black and LGBTQ+ inclusive. And these moments quickly became fodder, as noted, for a racist, right-wing backlash fueled by Fox News and other outlets against Black players, who were called overly aggressive and were subject to racist harassment.

Then in a July interview, Cunningham told ESPN that she wanted to “protect young girls in a locker room” from “biological men.” Her comments brought yet another round of hate to the doorsteps of the WNBA, leading to protests at the games over transgender participation in sports.

In August, two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, announced that they were declaring for the 2027 WNBA draft, in a transphobic stunt to force the league to have a policy on transgender female athletes, even though there are no transgender women in the WNBA. Here’s White and then Kanter Freedom arguing on Fox programs that they should qualify.

Royce White: I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball. So I’ll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well.

Enes Kanter Freedom: Article 13 in Section 1 says if you identify as a woman, then you’re allowed to play.

Laura Ingraham: So you are identifying as a woman tonight?

Enes Kanter Freedom: Sure. I identify as a woman. Sure. Yes. So I can play.

JW: Kanter Freedom was later kicked out of a [August 23] Chicago Sky game for disrupting the game and for now has been banned from Wintrust Arena.

But the project is bigger than just one sports league.

We get into how the right is attempting to use transphobia and racism to roll back Title IX and women’s rights more broadly. This isn’t just a fight about sports — the Supreme Court, state attorneys general, and the Trump administration are actively coming for transgender rights as well as women’s rights and, frankly, all of our rights.

AL: It sounds like I have a lot to learn about this, so let’s hear that conversation.

JW: Joining me now is Angela Perry, a content creator who regularly delivers hot takes on the WNBA and women’s basketball, @arperry01. You can find her on TikTok, Instagram, and across all social platforms.

Angela, welcome to The Intercept Briefing

Angela Perry: Thank you, glad to be here.

JW: Also joining us is journalist Katelyn Burns, who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice and co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast. Katelyn, welcome to the show.

Katelyn Burns: Hi, thanks for having me.

JW: The WNBA is having a moment. Viewership is way up. Attendance for this year’s All-Star WNBA game surpassed the NBA’s All-Star game. Games and events can be viewed in a record number of places, from broadcast to cable and streaming. And just this week, Angel Reese of the Atlanta Dream team set a single-game record.

But the stories about the WNBA capturing national attention in recent weeks are about none of that. Instead, two retired NBA players have captured national headlines, including Enes Kanter Freedom. Freedom showed up courtside wearing a T-shirt that said, “Woman: noun. adult human female.” Angela, you shared a really incisive take on social media. I want to start with you. What is going on here?

AP: I think when we remove the WNBA, and we look at the political climate in America, there’s an attack on trans people. So I think that’s something worth noting because trans men and women have not been an issue in the WNBA or in the MNBA, ever. But because this has been something that a political side has used over the last few years, it has now infiltrated itself in the WNBA.

The person that you mentioned, I refuse to learn his name, has used this as a tool. I don’t believe that he’s being genuine in any realm, in order to create this mass hysteria of sorts for an issue that’s actually simply a non-issue. There are no trans women in the WNBA; there are none attempting to be in the WNBA.

What we find here are just cis men who are trying to capitalize off of the discourse and create what looks like hostility. It’s just disheartening because it’s taking the focus away from things like you just said, Angel Reese breaking records. There’s a lot of people breaking records: Olivia Miles, Caitlin Clark. There’s so much actually happening, and then what we end up talking about the next day is this person who’s trying to take the headlines into a dark place.

And the people who aren’t watching the WNBA — that’s all they’re going to hear, that’s all they’re going to see. They don’t know what’s going on. And then they will be in my comments section, saying, “Well, he looks like he’s standing up for women!” So they actually have it completely wrong, based on getting the snippets and the sound bites from that person. So it’s pretty disheartening.

JW: That’s something that I’ve been thinking about even in talking about this on the podcast is, are we giving this more attention? But it feels like we have to talk about this because they’re distorting this issue so much. Katelyn, I want to get your thoughts as well here.

KB: This is such a frustrating conversation. Specifically, this issue is about trans women. And the frustrating part for me as a trans person, as a journalist, is that trans women have essentially been driven out of sports at any level beyond high school in a handful of blue states. I hate to say it, but politically, it’s a settled issue. But the right has made such hay out of trans women in women’s sports that they need to keep inventing controversies in order to keep this issue front of mind.

We have a midterm election coming up, and to be frank with you, the only thing that the right has done besides terrorizing immigrants is banning trans women from women’s sports. It’s at the center of almost all of their policies. So what you’re seeing now is they are inventing controversies about trans people in sports where there are no trans people involved.

“The only thing that the right has done besides terrorizing immigrants is banning trans women from women’s sports.”

Angela made the point: There are no trans women in the WNBA. There’s never been an out trans woman in the WNBA before. There are no out trans women college players. More than half the states in the country ban trans women from playing high school basketball, so there’s no pathway to make it to the WNBA.

This is a conversation about something that is not going to happen anytime soon, that is being drummed up for completely political purposes, just because the league has vague wording in their collective bargaining agreement over who is eligible to play. What you are seeing is just the exploitation of that gray language in the CBA to drive negative attention on the league as a whole.

JW: I want to get into the league’s response and how they’re dealing with all of this. Katelyn, you had written about what the league should say, but I also want to just ask what they are saying. Can you talk a little bit about what you think their strategy should be going forward and what their strategy has been so far?

KB: The league’s not doing itself any favors with all of this. I think that they are too afraid to take a stance in tamping down these protests and the antics of these men who are trying to intrude upon the game.

It started with suspending a Seattle team co-owner who confronted some anti-trans protesters who were at a game. Then it escalated again with Enes Kanter Freedom at this latest game, getting into it with a player on the court. He was escorted out of the building, but now they’re saying they’re not going to ban him from all of the WNBA games. So he’s just free to show up and harass another player on the court.

How you protect women out of harassing women basketball players doesn’t add up to me, but I guess it makes sense in the bizarro world of the anti-trans movement. They have come out and ruled that neither of these players — by the way, Royce White was running for office when he pulled his stunt, and then he got his ass kicked in his election, so that was really funny.

But, they’ve come out and said that neither of them are eligible to play because, clearly neither of them identify as women, which is the current language of the rules in the league. My proposal was, just go back to how sports used to treat trans women in sports: establish a testosterone limit and regular testing and prove that you’ve suppressed it for an extended period of time, and then allow somebody to play.

“Enes Kanter Freedom is not going to go take estrogen just to continue this stunt.”

Studies have shown that there is no biological advantage from trans women, no broad-based biological advantage for trans women. None of these grifters can intrude upon the game that way. That was my proposal. Enes Kanter Freedom is not going to go take estrogen just to continue this stunt. It’s just not going to happen.

That was my idea. I think, in general, the league should take more of a stance of protecting their own players — because the more you allow this to fester, the more you’re going to start seeing, “Oh, this player on this team that beat us is more muscular than a woman should be. Maybe they are trans.”

We’ve seen this before with the Olympics, with Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who won a gold medal and was the subject to a worldwide witch hunt over her gender, despite the fact that she was born female, raised as a girl, and happened to get into boxing.

JW: It is this crazy world where you’re seeing the kind of trans-vestigating now of WNBA players. As you’ve both mentioned, there are no transgender women in the WNBA, and yet we’re seeing people now say, “Well, this person is trans, this person is trans.” And it is mostly coming along racial lines, from what we’re mostly seeing, this is mostly targeting of Black women.

[Break]

JW: Angela, I’m curious, how do you think the league could protect players right now?

AP: Just like Katelyn mentioned, the fact that he was only banned in one arena, I think that we have to send the message. In the MNBA, when there was an irate person in the crowd — that person was banned for life. And it sent the message that this was unacceptable. It also makes me think the people who are doing it are part of the reason that the punishments aren’t that harsh as well.

“This is about policing women, in general.”

Like Katelyn mentioned, this is not necessarily about trans people. This is about policing women, in general. Because there’s masculine women, and it’s a way for the powers that be to try to say, “I don’t know if that person deserved to win because they’re stronger, so now let’s investigate if they are actually a woman.”

What does that mean? What are we going to do? Start examining women, girls, even? That’s the thing — this side that talks about protecting girls, you want your 11 or 12-year-old girls to be examined by who because they want to play baseball or softball or whatever have you.

So the bigger issue is that the people who think that they’re protected, it’s always going to get to the protected class eventually. Right now, the focus is trans, and people think they’re safe because “I’m not trans. I’m a cis woman and I’m protected.” But it will impact you.

“The bigger issue is the men that are on the other side of this, they don’t care about women’s sports in general. So to them, if there was just no WNBA, they don’t really care.”

I think the bigger picture is Title IX. I think the bigger issue is the men that are on the other side of this, they don’t care about women’s sports in general. So to them, if there was just no WNBA, they don’t really care. So that’s the bigger picture, is protecting women means protecting masculine women that don’t subscribe to social standards of what they’re supposed to look like. To me, there shouldn’t be any standards, but of course, we live in a society where there just are.

And then just protecting the women that are, like you said, already in the league. Why are we protecting this man who showed up, and treating him with any type of dignity, when they are the employees — the WNBA players.

And that’s not just with this trans conversation. It’s also with racism. The WNBA came out with the “No space for hate” almost as a joke —because I have not seen anything implemented from that the entire season. I haven’t seen Cathy [Engelbert] since the All-Star Game; she’s supposed to be the leader of this league. It’s almost like she’s afraid to speak up because she’s afraid to lose the fan base of racist and transphobic people, which is honestly insane.

But in America, in a capitalist society, a dollar is a dollar — and they don’t care if that dollar is coming from a racist or a true fan. In my opinion, if they would invest in the true fans, you would get more true fans, and you wouldn’t have to take money from racist people or transphobic people or homophobic people. The list goes on and on.

To me, that’s not a safe space in the WNBA for the fans or the players.

“ In America, in a capitalist society, a dollar is a dollar — and they don’t care if that dollar is coming from a racist or a true fan.”

JW: To your point, Angela, Media Matters recently reported that Fox News spent “13 and a 1/2 hours waging a WNBA culture war this summer,” gravitating between perceived racial grievances and trans inclusion.

I should note that the WNBA did issue a statement saying, “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA, and we strongly denounce the bad faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”

But because you brought up Title IX, and I think that’s really the crux of what this is about, let’s get straight into that. So shortly after the Supreme Court ruled to uphold state laws banning transgender girls from participating in school sports, the Heritage Foundation published a paper calling Title IX — which bans sex-based discrimination in schools, including in school sports — a “failed experiment.”

The sports and culture site Defector pointed out that the author of the paper is Boise State professor Scott Yenor, who once called career-oriented women, “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He argues Title IX has led to “male-normed women’s sports” that are failing at “celebrating distinctly feminine virtues of service, grace, and character.”

Katelyn, can you tell us what is the end game here?

KB: Oh, God. It’s not great. This attitude was parodied in “A League of Their Own,” a movie from like 1992, I think. Don’t quote me on that, please. There was a whole storyline and arc and a couple of scenes like mocking people who thought that women playing professional baseball would make them unfeminine.

“They’re trying to build a world where women are literally barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.”

So they’re trying to build a world where women are literally barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I wrote about this Heritage Foundation memo that went out — or policy paper, I’m not quite exactly sure what they labeled it, off the top of my head — but it’s terrifying.

I have thought a lot about the intersection of gender and sports. I was a three-sport athlete growing up, and I was deeply in the closet, so I played boys’ sports. I grew up in a time where teenagers didn’t have the option to come out and transition. We didn’t even know what being trans was sometimes back in the ’80s and ’90s when I was growing up. I can’t imagine if I had found out that there was a way for me to transition but I had to give up the sports that I loved.

I am really sad that’s the position that we’re putting trans people in now, and I’m really upset that people have not thought all of this through. First of all, they don’t educate themselves about what hormones do. Everybody has hormones in their bodies — and no offense to the cis people who are listening, but you don’t even know what your own hormones do. You should because it’s an important part of your body. So they are using these bigoted stereotypes of trans women to scare you into rolling back gender politics 80 years.

“A League of Their Own,” it was made in 1992, but it was about the ’40s when World War II was happening. Angela mentioned, what are we going to do — inspect girls’ genitals maybe? Yes, that’s exactly what the Republicans and the right and the anti-trans movement are proposing.

I have to say, as somebody who writes about trans issues, who reads a lot about history, there’s a great podcast called “Tested,” which is about the struggle for intersex equality in athletics, and I highly recommend, if you’re interested in this topic, to go listen to that.

“The idea of sex testing originated with the 1936 Olympics that was hosted in Nazi Germany.”

But also, the idea of sex testing originated with the 1936 [Berlin] Olympics that was hosted in Nazi Germany. And that shocks people when I say that. These are legacies of literal Nazis that we’re, like, trying to reestablish here in the 2020s.

So what kind of world are they building? Not one that I want to live in.

JW: If they can define what is a woman, and they can say that transgender women are not women, then they can tell you, “This is how you have to be a woman. You cannot sue your boss for sex-based discrimination. You cannot have equal funding for your sports teams because you’re a girl.” And that’s the final play, and it’s sad that to get there, they’re going to bully a bunch of little girls, essentially. That’s the start, and then the end is to take away everyone’s rights.

Angela, I want to get your thoughts about this as well. Is this also just about sports, or is the goal to really target the entire anti-discrimination framework?

AP: Oh, no, this is about women in general. They’re already talking about not wanting women to have the right to vote. That is being said out loud, on — I wouldn’t say legitimate news stations, but they have channels — who are people currently in positions of power.

So this isn’t just about sports. There’s a political party trying to scale us back to what they perceive was a time where things were better. But really, it was when women were more controlled. And unfortunately, there’s men in this country that don’t like for women to have a voice because they realize that they’re losing in that, I would say, game of life.

Men are losing without the inherent control that they had for centuries. We’re in the first, I would say, 20 to 30 years where women have not been forced, essentially, by society into marriage. Yes, we’ve had a choice, but as far as having our own credit cards, being able to purchase our own homes — things like that have been critical in order for women to live their own lives, not choose marriage, children, so forth and so on, which means that there are men who have not learned essentially life skills without a woman doing it for them.

“This is much bigger than basketball.”

They’ve not been shown that because their father had it, their grandfather had it, and they don’t know what to do. So what they’ve decided is to go and try to change the landscape of America through laws and restricting what women are able to do. So yeah, I think this is much bigger than basketball.

Of course, I’m a women’s basketball content creator, so I talk about basketball and the intersections of it, but I’m well aware that this is scary times. I just went and voted in my local election two weeks ago, and I’m like, “Is this going to be allowed in five years?”

“I just went and voted in my local election two weeks ago, and I’m like, ‘Is this going to be allowed in five years?’”

KB: I think that there are people who assume that if they are not trans, then they don’t need to care about non-discrimination protections for trans people.

But I have to say that when there are legal protections for trans people, it also protects everybody else from discrimination based on the assumption that you’re trans. What you’re seeing is that the conservative side of the political aisle is trying to build an apparatus where they can just simply accuse somebody of being trans, and then they can do whatever they want.

They can sex discriminate to their heart’s content as long as it’s against a trans person or somebody that is assumed to be trans. The only way out of it is a very invasive process of you have to verify the sex that you were born with. I don’t think that’s a society that most people are prepared to accept, but it’s one that is quickly forming.

So I wanted to say to those people who are like, “Oh, this is a complicated issue that I don’t really know how I feel about,” you should have feelings about it, because anybody, any day, could come along and say, “Hey, I think you’re trans. You shouldn’t be doing that.” Then you’re in a big mess that you have to get out of somehow. The only way to do it is by revealing deeply personal information about yourself.

JW: Talking Points Memo reporter Kate Riga writes, “It’s been clear for weeks that right-wing media, eager to distract from its leaders’ woeful unpopularity and resulting fears about November’s midterms, struck gold with its anti-trans, anti-WNBA crusade.”

She goes on to say, “[Sophie] Cunningham, white and willing, has been the protagonist the right needed to unfurl its narrative. But the anti-trans campaign, the grousing about professional basketball players being fouled, it’s all in service of a grander mission. In the white Christian nationalist nation the Trump administration is openly trying to foist on the American public, a sports league where Black, gay players are celebrated and (recently, to a degree) paid well is a distinct danger.”

Angela, I want to start with you. What are your thoughts? Do you think that this white Christian nationalist grift is working, or do you think people are getting sick of seeing this stoking of hate and this fear? Or is it having the impact that they want it to have?

AP: I think people are getting sick of it. I don’t think the Christian nationalism of it all is actually going to win. So I think it’s a dying side that they still try to reignite over and over. It’s going to get clickbait because we are people of habit. It’s the internet. Even, I sometimes click on things just to see, what are they talking about now? But I don’t think they’re going to win overall.

It really does look like there is a tide turning. It doesn’t look to be beneficial to those particular people. And so it looks as though as a whole more fans are for cohesive playing, more diversity. Especially in general, the WNBA fan is just a more open-minded fan, in my opinion as a person who’s been watching the league for 30 years.

You go to a game, and it’s just every type of person. You get on the elevator, you’ll have someone who’s 60 all the way down to the 5-year-old, from white male to young Hispanics. It’s just too much of a melting pot for them to try to get everyone out of it, and so I don’t think it’s going to win. That’s my thoughts.

But if it does, you have Unrivaled, you have some of these other leagues that have not so far allowed the same type of hate and rhetoric to infiltrate it, that the W could lose out on a really huge fan base. I think at the end of the day, they may do the right thing only because of money, not because they’re trying to do the right thing. It’s going to come down to money.

“They may do the right thing only because of money, not because they’re trying to do the right thing.”

JW: Yeah, no, I could see that. To me, white Christian nationalism is just the soup that we all swim in. My theory of everything is white Christian nationalism, when you get to the end of it. But I think they start to lose when you start to show your hand in really obvious ways.

I think it’s hard to say, “Huh, you’re protecting women by throwing sex toys at female athletes while they’re doing their job.” I think that’s when people start to say, “Wait a minute. Maybe this is not a movement of people that really care about women.”

But Katelyn, I want to know what you think. Is this working, or have they hit their kind of limit of ridiculousness where the public says, “Wait a minute, you’re trying to say that people who protect trans people are ridiculous, and now we can clearly see that you’re being ridiculous” — or is it working?

KB: I think it’s working in that it keeps getting attention.

We’re here doing this podcast, so in a lot of ways, that is something that they want to have happen. I do think that the two men who tried to jump on this train are widely known as being losers in a way, and so they’re getting the loser stank on everything, which is kind of funny. I think that that has a bigger impact than we think.

Riley Gaines is a swimmer who is known for tying for fifth place with trans woman Lia Thomas in a college race, and she has turned that into a very lucrative career. But she’s also going to be known as a loser. I think that ultimately is where everything is headed.

If you look at what voters actually care about, they really don’t care about trans issues. There’s 10 people who base their vote on what a candidate thinks about trans issues, and they’re all going to vote for Republicans pretty much, at least on the anti-trans side. We’ve seen exit polling over and over again showing that trans issues are the lowest salience issue in the minds of voters.

People care about the economy. People care about gas prices, grocery prices. They care about housing prices. They care about another foreign war. Nobody’s going into the midterms thinking, “Oh, I have to vote for the anti-trans candidate.” I shouldn’t say nobody. There are people who will do that, but they’ve already made up their minds.

So I don’t think that you can convert even more people over to that type of thinking, nor do I think that you can win people back from that line of thinking. So I think that a lot of the time and effort spent trying to persuade people on this is really a sunk cost for those who are doing it.

And I have pretty high hopes that in the end, justice will prevail, fairness will prevail, and the liberal order will not fall to Christian nationalism.

JW: I’m pretty happy to leave it there. Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are losers, and we will not fall to white Christian nationalism.

Thank you both so much for joining. Really appreciate having you on The Intercept Briefing.

AP: Thank you so much for inviting me.

KB: Thank you, thank you.

JW: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Right-Wing Trans Hate Comes for the WNBA appeared first on The Intercept.

What American Doctors Saw in Gaza

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000

It’s been nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest “ceasefire” began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, United Nations experts reported earlier this month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more recently rejected President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace agreement with Hamas for Israeli troops to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

“The burden has really continued to devastate the healthcare system in general. So you’re hearing from colleagues every day. They don’t have the materials that they need to serve their patients,” Dr. Thaer Ahmad tells The Intercept Briefing. “They don’t have even the basic sort of guarantee that there is a cloak of security allowing them to operate in the traditional ways that they would like to.”

This week on the podcast, Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez speaks to Ahmad, an emergency medicine physician and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in conflict zones including Gaza, and director Poh Si Teng about their new documentary “American Doctor.” It follows three U.S. physicians from three different states who volunteer to enter Gaza to provide emergency medical care as best they can, with the insufficient supplies they have, to save lives — under the threat, as healthcare workers and hospitals have repeatedly been the target of strikes, of losing theirs.

The American doctors were not just targeted by the Israeli military, however. Upon returning home and trying to share the atrocities they had witnessed in Gaza, they were “pummeled,” says Teng, in interviews with mainstream media outlets and ignored by lawmakers in Congress.

“There’s this refusal to acknowledge what most American people are interested in — and that is money out of the Middle East in terms of military and wars, and into our communities here, into healthcare, and into some of the services that we are deprived of, that, for example, Israeli society is able to provide for their citizens: free education, free healthcare,” says Ahmad. “We don’t even have that here, and yet we’re still providing a significant amount of aid.”

Teng says, “For everybody who’s trying to do something in this moment, it’s not like as individuals we have no agency. We do. But it’s also important to remind people of the systems in place that make it very hard for us to do the right thing. If there was any path forward or a glimmer of inspiration, I felt, follow these doctors.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jonah Valdez: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jonah Valdez, a reporter at The Intercept who covers politics and foreign policy.

BBC: Breaking news. A senior Hamas official tells the BBC it has agreed to disarm in Gaza.

FOX 10: President Trump says he’s doing something long considered impossible: disarming Hamas, forging a stable peace, and beginning a withdrawal of Israeli forces.

JV: Let’s go back to July. President Donald Trump announces that his so-called Board of Peace has reached a deal with Hamas to disarm, a primary goal of the ceasefire agreement.

Donald Trump: Most people said that would be a deal that would be undoable.

JV: By August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the plan and the demand to withdraw troops from parts of Gaza.

It’s worth reminding Israel controls nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s territory.

PBS: President Trump’s Board of Peace says it’s in ongoing discussions with Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Mr. Trump’s new Gaza peace plan in yet another public break with the White House.

BBC: Saying it won’t withdraw from the territory until Hamas gives up all its weapons.

Benjamin Netanyahu, translated VO: Israel rejects the 15-point plan. The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed.

JV: It’s been nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest ceasefire began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, according to U.N. experts.

In all, since the start of the war in October 2023, at least 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza and 171,000 wounded. That doesn’t count the untold numbers buried under rubble. Still, the Israeli government has tight restrictions on who and what aid enters Gaza.

A new documentary called “American Doctor” follows three American physicians who travel to Gaza to provide medical care and save lives where healthcare workers and hospitals have been targeted.

When the three American doctors — Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian — enter Gaza, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth.

[Clip from “American Doctor” plays]

Dr. Thaer Ahmad: I want to take you through what Gaza looks like when a hospital is totally overwhelmed.

Dr. Mark Perlmutter: As a Jewish physician, I knew nothing about Gaza. I thought everybody out here were nothing but terrorists.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad: We’re just asking that hospitals not be targeted.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: This is a political problem. We need a political solution. We do not have to accept that as Americans.

Dr. Mark Perlmutter: This is what my tax dollars did, what your tax dollars did. They have the right to know the truth.

[Clip from film ends]

JV: I’m joined now by the folks behind “American Doctor.” Director Poh Si Teng is the producer of the Oscar-nominated “St. Louis Superman” and Emmy award-winning executive producer of “Patrice: The Movie.” “American Doctor” marks her debut as a feature documentary director. Poh, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Poh Si Teng: Thank you for having me, Jonah.

JV: Also joining us is Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in conflict zones including Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Kenya. He’s conducted five medical missions to Gaza, most recently in early 2024, and has since been denied entry four times by Israeli authorities due to his Palestinian heritage.

Thaer, welcome to the show.

Thaer Ahmad: Thank you, appreciate it.

JV: So in the opening scene of “American Doctor,” we see an ambulance and two severely injured children, bloody and in shock. They are carried into a hospital, and next we’re introduced to Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon sitting in front of his computer and speaking to the person filming him.

There’s this back and forth that happens between Dr. Perlmutter and you, Poh, of this debate of, should we blur the images? The image that they’re looking at and talking about is of six dead babies. Dr. Perlmutter goes on to say that Israel took away their dignity, and you’re not dignifying them unless you let their memory, their bodies tell the story of this trauma, of this genocide.

Poh, I’m wondering if you could talk about that scene, that conversation with you and Mark, and why you started the film there.

PT: Firstly, thank you, Jonah, for asking that question. I think as journalists, we often grapple with, what do we show? What do we write about? What do we capture?

You show too much, and it’s gratuitous — and people turn away. If we want to be effective, we want people to watch. But at the same time, if we show too little, then it’s not real. Then we’re not actually telling people what was happening.

So this scene that you’re talking about, Jonah, which, actually we recorded it — it was my second day with Mark. And I remember him being really, really furious with me because I was trying to see, like, how much should we show?

Part of the conversation was like, “Maybe we should film this creatively. Maybe we should pixelate it.” And he was very mad at me — and understandably so. He’s like, “What is the point? Why are you here?” And so it made me think “Why am I here?” If the reason for me wanting to make this film is to be effective, then I need to do right by those who have passed on, and maybe it is to show. And so that pretty much, Jonah, set the tone for what the film was going to be.

“What is the point? Why are you here?”

JV: On that note, that early scene really signaled to me, and I’m assuming the audience, that this film is very aware of and cares deeply about who gets to tell these stories, who gets to shape the narrative from the Israeli and U.S. military, powerful media institutions involved. To me, aside from showing the actual events and atrocities, that layer of the film really drove it forward.

[Thaer], the film follows you and two other American doctors, Dr. Mark Perlmutter and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon, as you three decide to return to serve in Gaza during the short-lived 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Remind us what the situation in Gaza was like at the time, and it’s worth mentioning that in March 2025, the death toll had already surpassed 50,000 people in Gaza, which at that point had been a little over a year into Israel’s genocidal campaign.

TA: It’s important for folks to remember that around this time, the Trump administration had brokered this sort of ceasefire deal, announced on the heels of the inauguration.

As we were slowly getting towards the end of that first phase of the ceasefire deal, which was March 2025, it had become abundantly clear that the Israeli military was getting ready to create another offensive. In fact, by the time I think the resumption of bombing had taken place, the Israeli military had already implemented a suffocating siege on the Gaza Strip.

The rise of malnutrition was so widespread that the Famine Early Warning System program that exists had already been sounding the alarm — that this is very concerning, that starvation was being used as a weapon of war, and this is all happening as the fighter jets were being fueled up and getting ready to carry out this offensive.

Many people who were involved in the emergency medical teams that were entering into the Gaza Strip at the time, they had really no inclination in terms of, would this be a resumption of the war on Gaza and the people of Palestine, or would we somehow get this miraculous 11th hour extension of the ceasefire deal?

Many of us — me, Feroze, and Mark — at the time, were planning on going back in March. We were traveling to Jordan, where every single doctor who is an international or nurse, that’s where they go. And they wait in Jordan to get approval by the Israeli military, and then they will cross in from Jericho and make their way towards Gaza.

We’re sitting there in Jordan, and we’re there with the film crew. Mark and Feroze get approval, and they’re able to enter. Then ultimately, I receive a denial. And that’s something that’s happening in the backdrop, not just of this film, but that’s happening consistently when it comes to access into the Gaza Strip.

You are talking about everything from food, water, doctors, nurses, diesel fuel. All of these things are arbitrarily being denied and restricted, even people like myself who had been to Gaza many times since 2008. That was kind of the circumstances that we were facing: There was a “ceasefire,” and there was trucks maybe entering — but what was needed in the Gaza Strip was not being supplied. It was not happening on a scale that needed to happen. Once they started cutting that off and the Israelis implemented this siege, we started to see people really struggling.

JV: Poh, I know as we said at the top, this film marks your debut as a feature documentary director. Just wondering, were you able to travel with doctors to document their work in Gaza? If so, could you talk a bit about that experience?

PT: I knew very early on that it would be impossible for me to get into Gaza. Even though the Jewish doctor, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, he’s ever the eternal optimist. When we met early on, he’s like, “I’m going to train you as a scrub nurse and take you into Gaza.”

Now, we know who controls the borders into Palestine. And anybody doing a cursory search on my name, what are they going to find? Journalist for the New York Times, former commissioner for Al Jazeera English, and I’ve worked for The Associated Press. I was an executive for ABC Disney. It was never going to happen for me.

So fortunately, I have this incredible producer: Reem Haddad. Reem and I used to work at Al Jazeera English. She looked after MENA [Middle East and North Africa], that region. She was working at that time, this was I would say end of 2023, with this incredible Gazan team: our co-producer Mohammed Sawwaf, and our director of photography, Ibrahim Al-Otla. They had made this short doc at the end of 2023. And I was like, “Reem, can we work with this team? We are trying to film in Gaza.” That sort of marked how we got to film inside Nasser Medical Complex.

Honestly, this film is really to honor what they saw and what they are living through, not just what they are trying to document. So that’s how we were able to make this film.

I should also add: At the end of the day, too, this entire production, it spans teams, from our team, from eight different countries. Not one person, not one country could have made this happen. It took everybody coming together from different parts of the world who wanted to do something in regards to what was happening in Gaza.

JV: To your point, Israel has continued to block international journalists from entering Gaza up to this point. Palestinian journalists have been the eyes and ears documenting the war, as have doctors, like yourself Thaer, and medical workers and the both of you and those who were let in.

I don’t know if you recall, but Thaer, you and I connected over text and voice notes in March of this year when I was writing about the Israeli government delaying doctors from leaving Gaza, which interrupts the entire process of care. And as you were explaining, that wasn’t the first time you were blocked from there. That was after the most recent ceasefire that was brokered in October of 2025.

From what you’re hearing from colleagues, how have things changed since when you were there during the first ceasefire? How are things the same?

TA: The burden has really continued to devastate the healthcare system in general. So you’re hearing from colleagues every day. They don’t have the materials that they need to serve their patients. They don’t have the space that they need. They don’t have even the basic sort of guarantee that there is a cloak of security allowing them to operate in the traditional ways that they would like to.

I would say that probably the biggest sign that the healthcare system has been attacked in such a devastating way would be the list of people who need to be evacuated out of Gaza to get medical treatment. That list is anywhere from 15 to 18,000 people, depending on what list you’re using. These are people who urgently need to leave Gaza because the medical care that they need is not able to be provided because of the siege and the blockade that continues to exist by the Israeli military.

We’re talking about kids with cancers that are completely treatable that will die from their cancer because they’re not allowed to go to an East Jerusalem hospital like Al-Makassed or Augusta Victoria, where that corridor had existed prior to October 7, but the Israelis are intentionally shutting down that corridor.

You’re talking about physicians who would want to perform basic procedures for their patients with heart disease or diabetes or whatever it is. They’re not able to do so because that material is actively being blocked by the Israeli military. They’re on the back of a truck somewhere, either in Egypt or Jordan, and not being allowed to enter.

These conditions continue to proliferate, and this is all happening, I should say, while the public services that should exist in any society, like water, sewage, electricity, even shelter, all of those things are not — to say “adequate” is not the right word, but I would say it’s absolutely horrifying in Gaza.

We are talking about things like chickenpox breaking out in these camps. We’re talking about kids who continue to be malnourished. We’re talking about all of these different communicable diseases that run through these overcrowded shelters and tent cities. These continue to be the conditions that people are living in, despite the fake ceasefire that was announced that saw more than 1,200 Palestinians killed since October 9, 2025, when it was first announced.

I’m even worried about what happens next because, as you probably have seen, Netanyahu announced that he’s rejecting that sort of ceasefire or the agreement to move on to the next phase that was brokered by this Board of Peace. And so I anticipate that conditions will worsen.

When we think about so many of the people that we worked with, that will appear in the film, that are in the background of the film, or even actually the cinematographers that Poh mentioned — I just don’t feel that they have the things that they need to sustain life in their homes, in their tents. Things continue to deteriorate, and it’s fallen out of the news cycle.

JV: Thaer, there’s scenes in the film of you and your colleagues packing basic medical supplies like scrubs and rubber bands, and Mark even hides antibiotics in his luggage. The film does a really good job at just laying out that reality and this targeting of hospitals. It’s pretty wild to think that even the mere fact of targeting of hospitals was a point of contention among much of Western media at a certain point.

The film features quite a bit of footage from sit-down interviews between doctors featured in the film and broadcast media. There’s these subtle framing biases that I think, Poh, you highlighted really well.

There’s that clip in the beginning where a CNN anchor caveats Dr. Perlmutter’s accounts of Israel targeting civilians as “extreme allegations” that CNN cannot independently verify. Later in the film, also on CNN, Dana Bash tees up a question to Thaer about getting aid into Gaza by saying, “Will Hamas allow the critical aid to get to the civilian population?” — completely ignoring the Israeli blockade on Gaza. There’s that sit-down where Mark grills the CNN anchor live on air about not doing enough coverage.

Poh, I want to start with you. Could you speak to this bias, this molding of the narrative that often benefits the Israeli government, and why that was important to show in the film?

PT: I’m so glad you asked this question. And I should say that long before I became a documentary filmmaker, I was a journalist. I’ve worked for so many of the established media organizations, and I’ve learned so much from my time there. But also, when the genocide started and there was pin-drop silence about the murder and execution of journalists, Gazan journalists, I’ll be honest with you: It hurt.

What happened? Why is it when journalists are kidnapped, taken in Russia, or killed in Ukraine or different parts of the world, all of a sudden, our peers, we come together. Why was it so that Gazan journalists or journalists in the West Bank or even Lebanon, for that matter — people weren’t rallying together. What was happening?

The whole film, I should say is a vérité in-scene film, so you’re in the world of Dr. Thaer, Dr. Mark, and Dr. Feroze. But in these clips, when we were filming them as they were being interviewed by media, I really wanted to show what they were up against.

As a former documentary commissioner for Al Jazeera, seeing my colleagues get targeted and executed was very, very, very hard. Now, as we were making the film, seeing the doctors trying to save lives and speak up for life, and then seeing them get pummeled like that, like basically the weight and structure of media crushing them — I was upset.

“Seeing the doctors trying to save lives and speak up for life, and then seeing them get pummeled like that, like basically the weight and structure of media crushing them — I was upset.”

Of course, I’m filming, I’m just observing. But it was very important to have that in the film because there are individuals, regular people — Thaer, Feroze, Mark — just trying to do all they can. And then there’s the weight of structure.

For everybody who’s trying to do something in this moment, it’s not like as individuals we have no agency. We do.

But it’s also important to remind people of the systems in place that make it very hard for us to do the right thing. If there was any path forward or a glimmer of inspiration, I felt, follow these doctors.

[Break]

JV: Thaer, there’s another scene where you acknowledge that you, “Always get nervous when Mark talks during interviews,” because he really, you called it, gets into the weeds of things like Zionism, and you’re worried about essentially bad-faith critics making you, what you say is, guilty by association.

Could you say more about that, and how in this media framing, how a pro-peace, anti-genocide message can get twisted, and also how those critics may complicate that message even further because of your identity as Palestinian American?

TA: Yeah, I think that’s something that we all have grown up with in terms of the Palestinian community. It’s understanding there’s a degree of dehumanization that is pervasive in not just the media, but in art and literature.

I remember being in medical school and having assigned reading before we started medical school, and then it was about a Hmong child who was dealing with a seizure disorder. And nestled in the middle of that book was a comment, a very brief passing comment, about a Palestinian who was a terrorist and was doing something extremely violent. Most med students in the country were assigned this reading. This is the backdrop of understanding this is how the world views you. Yes, of course, we reject it, but Palestinians know very well how they’re being portrayed and also what you’re stacked up against.

For me, I think something that I appreciate about Mark is that he understands there’s a privilege that he has, especially just how he looks, and that he can say things that I think can go farther than anything I could ever say. It can resonate with more Americans than anything I can ever do.

What I worry about, too, is the fact that you’ve got this conversation that the media and so many people try to make complicated. They want to say, “It’s complicated. There’s two sides.” Really what we’re trying to talk about is, “Hey, there’s an objective fact that something horrifying is unfolding here, and that really horrendous things are happening to this group of people by this institution. It’s a straight line. There’s not really, actually, so much dark and gray area here.”

The one thing I really wanted to make sure that we were communicating effectively — because again, so many people are working on this project, trying to get this film out there — I wanted to make sure that that message was as clear.

I would always worry knowing that Mark is somebody who shoots from the hip; he’s somebody that says what’s on his mind. Just in the back of my mind, just thinking about, every time we’re landing in Chicago O’Hare, every time you’re getting questioned by border control. All of these things were always at the top of mind for me. So it’s something I admire about Mark, but it’s also something that I know I just can’t do it myself. That’s not the world that we live in.

PT: To add to that, and one of the things I have so much respect for Thaer, because it takes a leader, to be really honest with you, to know whose word can go far because of the context and of our time and how things are.

As a woman, as a person of color, as somebody who’s barely 5 feet — I am acutely aware of when I step into the room as a journalist, as a filmmaker, perception. But I can only imagine what it’s like for a Palestinian; I will never be able to understand.

So those are one of the things where I thought about a lot in the making of the film. It was something that I was learning from as well, especially from Thaer, who, I don’t mean to embarrass you, Thaer, but, I really look up to you in many ways in how you are able to navigate this, because I feel like I’ve tried it in my entire — I’m 42 this year — and I’ve been challenged in navigating it.

“ It takes a leader, to be really honest with you, to know whose word can go far because of the context and of our time and how things are.”

Seeing you being able to do that and work with Feroze and Mark, even though you’re so different — and they’re very different doctors, very different personalities — it gives me a lot of inspiration on how to work with others who are also different, and also to know when does one take a step back and let others go forward.

JV: Thaer, did you have anything to add?

TA: Something that I’ve noticed for Palestinians, one of the things that really helps us get going, especially motivates us, is seeing other people step up and use their platforms and really put their money where their mouth is.

So despite me having real concerns that this project would be stifled, and it would never be able to see the light of day because of all of the things working against it, when you see Poh and Reem and you see all of the people that worked on this just continue to push and continue to say, “No, we’re going to be here from the beginning to the end. We’re not going to abandon you” — I think for my community here in the States that felt like we’ve been silenced for so long, and, even when anybody wants to talk about this subject, that you don’t even want to bring a Palestinian or invite a Palestinian because it could be [viewed as] biased, which is absurd.

You talk about who shapes the narrative — we are prevented from having control over our own narrative because of this disturbing narrative and structure that was built. When you see that and other people who are willing to put their money or their life on the line like Poh or Mark or Feroze — for me, it really gives you that energy when you just feel like everything is stacked up against you, and there’s a genocide unfolding. That’s a really heavy thing.

JV: I’m curious, Poh, how you initially contacted the subjects of the film there and others. How did that process unfold?

PT: So I’ll tell you how it began. I chanced upon Mark. I saw him being interviewed, and a reporter had asked him, this was fall of 2025, this was last year, and a reporter had asked him, “So Dr. Perlmutter, you have just returned from Gaza. Why do you think there’s no ceasefire?” Mark, who doesn’t mince words, straight up, he says, “There’s no ceasefire because politicians are (expletive) to lobby groups.” And I was like, “Oh my, who is this person? Who is this doctor?”

He was actually speaking in New York a few days later, and I went to meet him. Then very soon after he introduced me to Thaer and Feroze, and I just wanted to see how these three people, who couldn’t be more different in many ways, were able to work together.

JV: Thaer, you and your colleagues go to Washington to try and sway congressional members to act, and you all are met with indifference and platitudes, “dead ears,” as one person puts it.

But what do you make of the current political landscape in which we’re seeing U.S. support for Israel decline sharply even on the right, and where political candidates who have campaigned on and been proudly pro-Palestine are winning primaries?

TA: It’s just been incredible to see how the shift has emerged over the last two and a half years. You’re talking about early on, I remember November 2023, I had a Zoom call with eight senators. It was with the members, eight of them, all Democrats, and I remember saying that we need a ceasefire.

This was when Shifa Hospital had first been surrounded, and there were 38 babies in the neonatal intensive care unit in the newborn nursery, and several of them were in incubators. I remember being desperate at that time and saying, “We really need a ceasefire.” One of the senators, who was a member of the Armed Services Committee, cut me off and said, “Ceasefire is a military term. We’re not prepared to call for a ceasefire at this point. We’re more interested in maybe helping secure humanitarian aid.”

It went from that to when the images emerged for when the famine was in full-blown effect, where you had several members of Congress and the Senate sort of speak very publicly. They were outraged by what they saw, despite us telling them this information very early on, this is where we were heading, this is what was happening unless they did something. So to see the rhetoric even change has been remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like this before.

Then to see progressive candidates who really explicitly say that our policy in Palestine has been an utter failure and has contributed to the development of a genocide, that’s been amazing to see how much traction that’s getting, how much money they’re able to raise, how these races have really flipped the establishment on its head.

But I will say there are a couple of things that concern me, which I think the timing of this film could not be more perfect. And that is, you’re still seeing the very core of whatever, I don’t even know what they’re moderate in, but like, these “moderates” on the Democratic side or on the Republican side, you still see them try to stick to the status quo and go back to the old ways.

There’s this refusal to acknowledge what most American people are interested in — and that is money out of the Middle East in terms of military and wars and into our communities here, into healthcare, and into some of the services that we are deprived of, that, for example, Israeli society is able to provide for their citizens: free education, free healthcare. We don’t even have that here, and yet we’re still providing a significant amount of aid.

You’re still seeing some people try to resist that, try to resist this natural popular movement that’s at play here. Again, which is why I hope that this film could be that vehicle for people to be able to continue to push and understand we need to be activated and we need to advocate.

So we’re continuing the fight, and we’re still trying to push this forward. But there’s still, even though the rhetoric has changed, the policy is still well ingrained and institutionalized in a really significant way that’s going to take a long time to reverse. So that’s something I would encourage people to think about.

Abdul won the primary. Awesome. He’s going to be up for a huge fight in Michigan for that Senate race. There’s going to be a lot of money poured in against him. Mayor Mamdani was elected, and you can see how he is put under such a microscope for every single position or statement or even whatever his wife does. All of that is under a microscope.

There’s going to be this huge battle because it has been so ingrained in this country to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine as well as the Israeli military, but also to continue to fester and make the entire Middle East a very, I would say, a violent playground, for lack of a better term. That’s just how this country has faced things. That’s why the power of film, I hope, is something that can translate into action, and people can feel activated.

JV: There’s this thing that Dr. Feroze says at the end of the film where he is at that conference for Jewish Voice for Peace, and he expresses doubt that any of his mainstream media hits have really done anything. Then this audience member from the conference says it’s done a lot, and he refuted that and encourages him to keep going. I don’t need you to talk for Feroze, but I’m wondering where you stand on that and that idea of awareness or maybe its limits of media and that we need to keep doing what we can. Do you wrestle with that still? Is that a battle for you?

PT: I’ll say this. In embarking on this endeavor, I stopped thinking a long time ago about, what’s the outcome? Obviously, I hope that something good will come out of it. In the making of it, especially when we started, when it was really bleak, I told myself, “You know what? I’m just going to focus on doing.” I cannot fight against the structures, systemic structures, so many things, and I cannot be sorry for how I was or we cannot be sorry for our past actions or whatever it is, and we cannot predict the future. We have the power of now, and that is everything, and so just focus on the moment. Of course, think short-term, medium-term, long-term, but now is all we have, and so be true to oneself.

“I finally feel like I have found my voice, free of the constraints of everything. I can finally be.”

I feel like this film, in the making of this film, I finally feel like I have found my voice, free of the constraints of everything. I can finally be. I hope that this film, for those who are going to watch — and it’s going to be across theaters across the United States and Canada, which is massive, thanks to Watermelon Pictures — I hope that when people watch, they realize that too. Just focus on the now and keep going, because you don’t know how far you can go until you try.

JV: We’re going to wrap it up there. Thank you both for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

TA: Thank you, appreciate you.

PT: Thank you, Jonah.

JV: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor.

Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Jonah Valdez.

The post What American Doctors Saw in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Has the Left Really Met Its Limit?

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The stunning momentum of the insurgent left hit a roadblock this week when democratic socialist Francesca Hong narrowly lost her primary race for Wisconsin governor to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a moderate who garnered significant support from establishment Democrats.

“The collective power of that Democratic establishment in a state, where there is a Democratic governor and there is a real Democratic Party establishment machine, all of that power was required to eke out a 0.4 percent victory in the party’s own primary against a previously unknown candidate running as a Democratic socialist,” The Lever’s David Sirota tells The Intercept Briefing.

This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks with Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, about the primaries and how the left is building power within the Democratic Party.

There were bright spots for progressives on Tuesday night. In Minnesota, progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan defeated AIPAC-backed Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., in the Senate primary race. Craig had previously voted for the Laken Riley Act, which requires the federal government to detain people for certain crimes, including shoplifting and burglary. Flanagan, by contrast, told supporters on election night: “We need to rip ICE apart and stop them from terrorizing our communities.”

“What you’re seeing now is, and I don’t want to call it a Democratic Tea Party, but it is certainly organizing and pressuring to take back power in an adversarial way from a set of forces to the left of the Democratic establishment,” says Sirota. “That is what’s new, and that is what’s driving the political dynamic now.”

Washington and Sirota also discuss the intensifying democracy crisis unfolding in the United States. According to Sirota, it “stands on two pillars: concentrated executive power and the supremacy of money.”

Sirota explores this theme and more, in the new season of his show, Master Plan: The Kingmakers. The podcast is all about how a once-fringe legal theory moved into the mainstream and transformed the power of the American presidency.

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

On Tuesday night, democratic socialist Francesca Hong narrowly lost her primary race for Wisconsin Governor to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.

Hong lost by less than a percentage point. But her defeat was a blow to the anti-data center movement, which she had championed throughout her campaign, even as her detractors tried to make the race about her opinions on Thanksgiving and other major holidays.

But the night was not a total loss for progressives. In Minnesota, Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan defeated AIPAC-backed Congresswoman Angie Craig for Senate.

Peggy Flanagan: And now let’s talk about Donald Trump’s out of control ICE force [crowd boos]. We need to rip ICE apart and stop them from terrorizing our communities.

JW: Last year, Craig voted in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which requires the federal government to detain people for a host of crimes, including nonviolent ones like shoplifting, and it allows states to sue over immigration enforcement, giving power to state attorneys general to shape immigration enforcement policy regardless of which party holds the White House. That vote appears to have cost her in a state that largely rose up in defiance of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown, after federal immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens.

For more of our reporting on the primaries and the anti-data center movement, visit TheIntercept.com.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, I speak to David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, about the primaries and how the left is building power within the Democratic Party.

David also talks about the parallels between how the left and the right have consolidated power, and we get into the second season of his amazing series Master Plan, resuming this week.

This new season is called The Kingmakers and is all about how a once-fringe legal theory moved into the mainstream and transformed the power of the American presidency.

It traces the people and institutions behind that campaign — from Richard Nixon’s downfall and Dick Cheney’s post-9/11 power grab to pivotal Supreme Court decisions and Project 2025.

David, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing.

David Sirota: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

JW: So Tuesday night, Francesca Hong narrowly lost her primary race for Wisconsin governor to the more moderate candidate, David Crowley. But it wasn’t a total loss for the left. In Minnesota, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan defeated AIPAC-backed Angie Craig. Hong’s race was plagued by, honestly, the dumbest issues, like whether she supports Thanksgiving or how she views her “proximity to whiteness.”

David, what did you make of Tuesday night’s results? Does this, as The New York Times called it, show the “limits of the left,” or is something else at play here?

DS: I think this is a good test of the power dynamic in American politics right now, specifically inside the Democratic Party. I’m going to state a few empirical facts about what happened. People can use these facts to try to confirm their priors. But here are the facts that we know. Fact one is that the entire establishment of the Democratic Party came together towards the end of this race, really consolidated to try to shut down Francesca Hong’s campaign and defeat her.

“All of the power of the old Democratic machine was required to eke out the narrowest of victories against the longest of long-shot candidates.”

The collective power of that Democratic establishment in a state, where there is a Democratic governor and there is a real Democratic Party establishment machine, all of that power was required to eke out a 0.4 percent victory in the party’s own primary against a previously unknown candidate running as a Democratic socialist who was wildly under-resourced, did not air any television advertisements through her own campaign. So the point being that all of the power of the old Democratic machine was required to eke out the narrowest of victories against the longest of long-shot candidates.

A candidate who, by the way, had been effectively abandoned by other national left-of-center icons and politicians, democratic socialists. Bernie Sanders did not endorse Francesca Hong. AOC did not endorse Francesca Hong. The candidates who have been winning as democratic socialists did not come to Wisconsin to campaign with Francesca Hong. We can discuss why that is and the mistakes or stumbles that Hong made as a candidate. But the point is that the machine with all of the power and advantages it had against a candidate with no advantages at all, that ran to say the least, an imperfect campaign, still needed all of its power to barely win a race in Wisconsin.

So to me, what that says is that the Democratic establishment that has gotten very used to being able to easily control primary outcomes is now having to marshal all of its collective power and have everything break right for it in order to eke out these primary wins. That, I think, is a fundamental difference of the political topography of the Democratic Party.

JW: I’m thinking about the fact that we didn’t see Bernie Sanders supporting her. Obviously, AOC had come out and said that it was because she wanted to focus on Congress. So we can have that conversation.

But we also didn’t see that support for Cori Bush either. And she lost.

Do you think that progressives are making a smart play here by trying to decide who’s more electable in a general election? Or, is that just more of the same silly stuff we’ve seen from the Democratic Party in terms of electability and making those decisions before voters do?

DS: Yeah, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. My take on so-called electability is that nobody really knows who is electable or not electable. I’m old enough to remember when the same media machine and Democratic Party apparatus insisted with certainty that Barack Obama could never possibly win a general election. I remember when that same machine laughed at the idea that Donald Trump could be elected president.

I tend to believe that this whole discussion about electability is silly, but also a Jedi mind trick that the establishment of the Democratic Party uses to try to manipulate voters into not voting for candidates and not seeing elections as forums for voting for good policies.

They’re trying to turn primaries into — and they’ve been successful at it in the past — trying to turn primaries into this idea that, “Don’t vote for the candidate who may be offering you policies that you actually support. Vote for our view of who is actually ‘electable’ in a general election. Forget the fact that we told you that Barack Obama wasn’t electable or Donald Trump wasn’t electable. Forget all that.” So my basic take is that the whole electability discussion is this moving target and a real sort of engine of manipulation.

I think that in every race, candidates are looked at for their viability, for how well they are running, and their basic competence as a candidate. It’s not wrong for folks and political organizations and activists on the left or really any political faction to try to evaluate the competence of candidates that they are going to spend resources on or organize for or endorse. That’s part of the political process in America, and that’s not a perfect process. But sometimes you can make mistakes. That happens all the time.

Did Francesca Hong not get endorsements because she was evaluated to be a less competent candidate? Same thing for Cori Bush. Were those candidates seen as not competent? Competent meaning as candidates, not as people, as candidates running a campaign. Were they seen as not competent versus was Abdul El-Sayed seen as a highly competent candidate?

My guess is that those calculations were at play here. I’ve worked on a lot of campaigns in my life at this point. A candidate’s competency is this intangible that’s really important.

So my guess is though all of those questions were on the table in the way that these decisions were made to endorse certain candidates and not go all in for other candidates.

JW: That makes a lot of sense. We’re also talking about having to run these candidates against the right, against the massive money machine that the right has.

So I want to talk a little bit more about Republicans and their power. Recently on your podcast, Lever Time, you spoke to Reed Galen, co-founder of the anti-Trump political action committee, The Lincoln Project. Galen talked about leaving the Republican Party and his warning that Democrats are making the same mistakes Republicans made, mapping the transition of the GOP to the Tea Party movement takeover.

Can you talk about that conversation and what Galen sees as the kind of dangerous mistakes the Democratic Party is making, and what’s your view?

DS: Yeah, I agree with his story of history, which is that to understand the current Republican Party, you have to really rewind history and look at what created it. You can go all the way back to Barry Goldwater and tell the story from there.

But in modern times, what you can see is that in 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency. A lot of the center-left foment gets driven into the Democratic Party and into Obama as a personality, and a lot of the center-right and hard-right unhappiness with our political system was driven first into the Tea Party, which ultimately became MAGA, which ultimately became the Trump presidency.

The Tea Party was operating outside of the Republican Party, although in conjunction with it, to transform that party. Ultimately, Donald Trump’s presidency, first the MAGA movement and then Trump’s presidency, becomes the culmination of all of that foment outside of the party.

Obviously the party has been transformed. It is a much different party than it was even 10, 15 years ago. I think a similar dynamic is happening right now vis-a-vis the Democratic Party and the American left. Obviously on totally different issues. They don’t share ideologies, they don’t share policy agendas.

But politically speaking, just the raw politics of it, I think this is delayed, I think it’s been belated. Whereas in 2008, there was a moment in the middle of the financial crisis where center-left discontent could have been channeled into something like a center-left Tea Party. I reported on this for a long time.

There was Occupy Wall Street and the like. But certainly it wasn’t as big a movement as the Tea Party on the right because a lot of that energy was, again, channeled into Obama and the Obama presidency. We’re now here 18 years later, many of the grievances of that moment back in 2008 in the middle of the financial crisis, really the supercharging of oligarchy, they’re still here.

But the difference is here — in the here and now — if you look at polls of people on the left, center-left, before in 2008 they were fairly confident in Democratic leaders to channel their grievances. Today, they have lost faith in the Democratic leadership. They are angry at the Democratic Party for what they perceive to be capitulations and unnecessary compromises with corporate power and with Trump and MAGA.

“What you’re seeing now is … certainly organizing and pressuring to take back power in an adversarial way from a set of forces to the left of the Democratic establishment.”

What you’re seeing now is, and I don’t want to call it a Democratic Tea Party, but it is certainly organizing and pressuring to take back power in an adversarial way from a set of forces to the left of the Democratic establishment. That is something I think we have not really experienced in our lifetimes. That is what’s new, and that is what’s driving the political dynamic now.

Whether it’s in any of these races happening across the country or in Congress itself, which I expect the next session of Congress, if Democrats take it back, to be a lot of push and pull inside the Democratic caucus, which of course will overlay the 2028 presidential campaign.

I very much expect candidates in the Democratic primary to be competing for that positioning. You might want to call it the Bernie Sanders lane, but it’s really the lane to say, “I am the outsider that is going to take back the White House for a particular faction,” or representing a particular faction of the Democratic Party. A faction that is most certainly not the corporate old-school establishment that has been running the party into the ground for the last 30 years.

I see the whole push and pull right now as something very healthy. I don’t think it is healthy for democracy, for an establishment of one of the major parties in this country to have clung onto power for so long, offering so little change through so many electoral defeats and through the rise of Donald Trump and authoritarianism.

For that establishment to still be able to hold on to power without much change at all really is the democracy crisis in practice. So the effort to change that party through democratic means, is entirely long overdue, is entirely necessary. People listening to this may agree or disagree with specific different parts of the policy platform being pushed by those outside the establishment, but the process itself is the democracy working.

“The democracy crisis is a set of elite power brokers being able to cling on to a political party’s power regardless of what is happening in the world and in a way that sells out voters.”

A lot of liberals think about the democracy crisis. The democracy crisis is a set of elite power brokers being able to cling on to a political party’s power regardless of what is happening in the world and in a way that sells out voters. That’s what’s been going on in the Democratic Party for a long time, and the effort to significantly change it and revitalize the party through democratic means is a healthy expression of democracy.

[Break]

JW: We have multiple crises of democracy happening. We obviously have Trump, but we also have the establishment [Democrats] and the fact that they’ve allowed Republicans to gain control of the government from the House to the Senate to presidency, and I would argue, also the Supreme Court.

Last week, the president’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, was confirmed as attorney general with, to me, what seems like a clear mandate to target the president’s enemies. Then on Tuesday, it was reported that the DOJ issued a sweeping memo giving broad authority to the president to conceal his communications with so-called private advisers in what seems like just a clear effort to undercut Democrats’ ability to investigate the president if they retake Congress. That doesn’t even touch on the fact that we’re over 100 days into war with Iran without congressional approval.

I want to talk about how we got here, and you explore that in the new season of your show, Master Plan: Kingmakers, which is out this week, by the way. It tracks how a once fringe legal theory has transformed the American presidency into a pseudo-monarchy with term limits.

I listened to the first episode and loved it, by the way. It also feels incredibly relevant right now. David, how did we get here?

“We’ve turned elections into auctions. We’ve equated money with free speech, we’ve equated corporations with people, giving them human rights.”

DS: To my mind, it is the second part of a two-part story to understand the real democracy crisis. The democracy crisis I think, stands on two pillars: concentrated executive power and the supremacy of money.

They’re obviously interrelated. Season one of Master Plan traces the secret 50-year plot to effectively legalize corruption, deregulate the campaign finance system and make bribery essentially a permissible act in the United States. We all understand, implicitly, that we’re now living in that reality when we’ve turned elections into auctions. We’ve equated money with free speech, we’ve equated corporations with people, giving them human rights.

So we are living through that project of the American right to effectively legalize corruption, to turn the democracy from a “one person, one vote” democracy into a “one dollar, one vote” oligarchy. I think we all see the evidence of that. That came about through, among other things, the infamous Powell Memo.

That’s the sort of origin story where a lot of it started, which was a call to arms for corporations in the early 1970s when corporations and oligarchs felt under attack from the New Deal policies of the mid-20th century. The Powell Memo was a call to essentially make monetary investments in buying democracy.

The democracy was functioning too well. It was becoming too responsive to what people actually wanted, and the idea was we have to legalize corruption to be able to rig the system so that we can buy outcomes, we the oligarchy. So that was season one of Master Plan.

The other pillar of the democracy crisis is then to concentrate as much power in the executive branch in the hands of really one person so that the small-D democratic institutions of government have much less power, so that power is less diffuse. It’s all in the hands of one person, because if that’s your guy — you the oligarchy — then you’ve essentially ended democracy. This story starts in Watergate. Watergate was the moment that was seen as a so-called imperial presidency, a presidency that had gotten out of control and stepped over the boundaries and thresholds that had been established for the executive branch.

Congress passes a series of laws that are designed to take power away from the executive branch. So the story really starts there at a kind of small-D democratic moment of triumph, but it also hatches a backlash, and that’s what the new season of Master Plan is about, The Kingmakers.

It hatches a backlash among conservatives starting in the Ford administration with Dick Cheney, who was chief of staff to make legal arguments and start creating legal doctrines that are designed to grab back the power that was taken in the post-Watergate era, put it back in the White House, and then significantly expand it.

“The original Project 2025 was The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, a policy bible whose through line was how to use executive authority.”

That’s what happens soon after Ronald Reagan gets elected president. We all have heard of Project 2025. Back in the late 1970s into 1980, the original Project 2025 was The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, a policy bible whose through line was how to use executive authority to do what the conservative movement wanted regardless of what Congress or any other institution wanted, and how to grab as much of that power as possible under a new legal rubric called the unitary executive theory.

I’m guessing some people have heard that. This is cooked up inside of the Reagan Justice Department in its battles with a Democratic Congress. A legal doctrine that is then tested in the courts in strategic ways to try to get it enshrined into the law.

From the Reagan era into obviously the Bush era, the Bush’s war on terror, Dick Cheney, the guy who had been spearheading parts of this when he was in the Ford administration and when he was in Congress, the Bush administration sees a huge consolidation of power under the veneer of the so-called war on terror.

“All of these powers, from the unitary executive theories that were forged in the Reagan administration to the drone war national security powers that were fortified by Obama after the Bush era, all of this is now resting in the Trump White House.”

Then in probably our most controversial episode of this season, we go into how the Obama administration ended up consolidating power in truly unprecedented ways. The Obama administration didn’t champion the unitary executive theory, but it did make a set of precedential legal arguments about the executive branch’s alleged power to execute and target for assassination American citizens without charging them even with a crime.

I’m talking about the drone war here. Some may say that the drone war was necessary, others may say it wasn’t, but the legal architecture and the outlining of the powers asserted by the executive branch were unprecedented and were effectively validated during the Obama presidency. Powers that are now, fast-forward to today, all of these powers, from the unitary executive theories that were forged in the Reagan administration to the drone war national security powers that were fortified by Obama after the Bush era, all of this is now resting in the Trump White House.

So the point of this is that what we’re living through today didn’t just happen because Donald Trump showed up to the White House. Donald Trump, when he got to the White House, had a series of levers, if you will, an entire control panel of executive powers, unprecedented executive powers, that were created for him.

So when we see him use those powers, it’s not to say we shouldn’t be terrified by it or outraged by it, but it is to say, let’s understand where those powers came from, because they didn’t just happen. They weren’t just seized randomly, and they weren’t just created by Donald Trump himself.

JW: As you just mentioned, efforts to bring the unitary executive theory to reality have been decades in the making. We saw President George W. Bush’s administration push in that direction, and now it’s reached just a whole other level under Trump. First, just to make it clear, can you briefly explain just how powerful is the American presidency under Trump, and what is the unitary executive theory?

DS: The unitary executive theory is this idea that the president singularly is the controller, the master, the decider of every single thing that the executive branch does. The executive branch, that’s one term for it. Another term for the executive branch is the federal government, right?

At one level they are one and the same, but I bring that up so that people can understand how radical the unitary executive theory actually is. When I use the federal government, maybe you’re thinking of the military. Maybe you’re thinking of the Agriculture Department, the scientists working on food safety in the Agriculture Department.

We’re talking about everything, the sort of basic functions, the on-the-ground functions of the government. Technically all of those agencies are operating in what we understand in terms of separation of powers. We understand them to be the executive branch. There’s Congress that makes the laws. There’s the president that executes the laws. There’s the courts that adjudicate battles between Congress and the president, adjudicate what the law is actually saying, et cetera, et cetera.

The unitary executive theory is saying that the president as the head of the executive branch has complete and total power to effectively do whatever the president wants inside of the executive branch.

So the unitary executive theory undergirds something like DOGE, the rampage that we all experienced right when Donald Trump came into his second term. He said, for instance, I’m shutting off all previously approved congressional grants across the entire United States. I’m asserting my executive authority to do that.

Now, Congress had passed laws saying that the money must be spent, but Trump and his administration were essentially arguing the president makes the decision on whether to execute those laws. So I give that example as a way for people to understand how radical an idea this is.

By the way, this came up recently with independent federal agencies. There are a set of agencies that Congress had set up and that presidents had signed laws, signed them into law in the past, saying that, the FTC or the Securities and Exchange Commission that these agencies are quasi-independent because the commissioners have set terms.

It’s much harder to fire them. Donald Trump went into court saying, I’m the unitary executive. These independent agencies structurally are unconstitutional. I should be allowed to hire and fire whoever I want at any time for any reason. And the Supreme Court largely agreed with him.

So this is about an unprecedented consolidation of power in the hands of one person to say that at any level of the federal government, any granular level, there’s some EPA scientist who is issuing a report about climate change that the president doesn’t like, the theory would hold that the president has a right, regardless of what Congress has passed, regardless of what the courts have adjudicated, the president has the right to reach into the EPA, target that one person, and fire them himself.

So you can see the dangers of this, because here’s the thing: Part of the way modern civilization has modernized from the old era of medieval royal courts, is that we have professionalized a lot of the functions of government. Like line scientists doing food safety reviews or environmental reviews or making all sorts of technical technical determinations, et cetera, et cetera. We had previously said this is going to be insulated at some level from the political whims of just one all-powerful king, whichever party it is. There’s a civil service, there’s a sort of a professionalized bureaucracy, if you will, and the unitary executive theory is trying to dismantle all of that.

Now, I want to add one thing very quickly here. I do think there’s an argument that, when a bureaucracy, a professionalized government bureaucracy, is so insulated from what voters are voting for, there can be an undemocratic disconnect there. If voters are voting for certain kinds of change and a kind of permanent bureaucratic government, because of job protections and the like over many years, is not responding to what people want, I do think there is a nugget of an argument there that there has to be ways that elections happen and policy changes then flow from those election changes.

But I think the unitary executive theory is a radical overcorrection for that kind of alleged problem. The solution to that theoretical problem is not to turn the president into an all-powerful king who can wake up at any day or any moment, ignore all of the laws on the books, and do whatever he wants.

JW: It sounds like there’s a lot that’s going to be happening in your podcast, and I’m, for one, really looking forward to listening to the rest of the new season of Master Plan: The Kingmakers. David, where can people listen to it?

DS: They can find it on our website at levernews.com. You can also go on your podcast app and just type in Master Plan. And you can go to our YouTube page. We have video versions of the episodes. That’s youtube.com/@levernews. The URL, the easiest way to find it, masterplanpodcast.com.

JW: David, thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

DS: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

JW: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor.

Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Has the Left Really Met Its Limit? appeared first on The Intercept.

The Most Expensive Democratic Senate Primary Has a Winner

The Intercept Briefing — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:00:00 +0000

Over the course of Donald Trump’s second term, Democratic voters have expressed dissatisfaction with their party over what many view as an inability to stand up to the president and his broader movement. That dissatisfaction with the establishment has manifested in primaries in coastal cities across the country, where the progressive movement appears to be ascendant. On Tuesday, that test played out in Midwestern states, Michigan and Missouri.

Within roughly two hours of polls closing, The Associated Press called the closely watched rematch between Cori Bush and Rep. Wesley Bell for the incumbent. In 2024, AIPAC and other outside groups spent more than $18 million to oust Bush from her Missouri district, and her defeat, along with New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s, has served as a warning sign for Democrats not to be too progressive or too pro-Palestine.

But by Wednesday morning, Abdul El-Sayed, who ran on Medicare for All and ending military aid to Israel for its continued genocide in Gaza, narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens by less than 20,000 votes. According to AdImpact, the Michigan Democratic Senate primary saw $98 million in ad spending and reservations. At least $60 million was spent boosting Stevens or attacking El-Sayed, with more than $30 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC, United Democracy Project — its largest spend in a single race ever, nearly double the then-record-breaking amount spent on Bowman’s 2024 primary race.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Akela Lacy and Jonah Valdez discuss what results from Tuesday’s primaries signal for progressives and the broader left in the Democratic Party, especially in swing states and outside of coastal cities.

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: And I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter.

Jonah Valdez: And I’m Jonah Valdez. I cover politics and U.S. foreign policy.

JW: We’re in your feed a bit early this week to talk about two major primaries we’ve been reporting on at The Intercept.

Over the nearly two years on this podcast, we’ve been covering voters’ dissatisfaction with Democrats over what many view as an inability to stand up to President Donald Trump and his broader movement. That dissatisfaction has manifested in primaries in cities across the country, from New York to Colorado and California, where the progressive movement appears to be ascendant.

That test came to the Midwest on Tuesday in Michigan and Missouri. In Missouri, former squad member Cori Bush lost her rematch against Rep. Wesley Bell, who received the bulk of outside spending, primarily from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In 2024, AIPAC and other groups poured a collective $18 million into the race to defeat her.

In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in a win for progressives after AIPAC-aligned super PACs and others poured close to $100 million into the race, according to AdImpact. This week on The Intercept Briefing, you’ll hear what the results from Tuesday’s primaries signal for progressives and the broader left in the Democratic Party, especially in swing states and outside of coastal cities.

Jonah, Akela, I really want to get your reactions to El-Sayed winning the Democratic Michigan Senate primary.

JV: Well, it was a long night, and AP called it pretty early — at least here where I am on the West Coast. And I think my initial reaction is, a win’s a win. I think results were a lot closer than what the polls had showed leading up to it.

I think it’s worth noting that Abdul El-Sayed was massively outspent in this race. Overall, nearly $100 million in the Senate primary. It’s the most expensive Democratic primary ever, but the majority of which was spent in outside spending to either attack El-Sayed or boost the campaign of Stevens.

Yet El-Sayed pulls off this very close win with a vote total, I think it’s worth noting, that’s greater than the more moderate Elissa Slotkin got in her primary in 2024. More similar to closer margins we saw in the presidential primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

JW: For our listeners at home, Elissa Slotkin is the senator who beat Mike Rogers in 2024. Mike Rogers is the presumptive Republican nominee who El-Sayed will be facing in the November election.

JV: And you’re already seeing online, all this talk from moderates as far as where El-Sayed may have failed, as if to show progressive policies still don’t do well, or, all this talk of how can El-Sayed moderate more in the general.

But I think if Dems are serious about getting a Senate majority, I think it’s more so on moderates to appeal to what the majority of voters in Michigan decided today. And that’s that it’s the politics of the El-Sayed campaign.

“If Dems are serious about getting a Senate majority, I think it’s more so on moderates to appeal to what the majority of voters in Michigan decided today.”

AL: My reaction, obviously NBC projected overnight that El-Sayed would win, and so his campaign claimed victory overnight, and everyone was waiting well into the morning for the final results.

But in that interim period, you basically saw the shift in conversation go from everyone having that election-night anticipation to everyone churning out takes about why the polling that showed El-Sayed up by double digits in the final weeks of the race had been so far off. Making conjectures about counties where Stevens outperformed him and extrapolating that to the November general election, making claims that El-Sayed is going to have to make up a lot of ground with Black or working-class voters in counties that Stevens performed better in.

But I think that immediate pivot is really telling in a lot of ways because this was the most expensive [Democratic] Senate primary in history, and we saw the most spending ever from not just the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, but all of these other corporate PACs to boost Haley Stevens.

She came into this race in the first spot with backing from the Democratic Party and lost. And I think to ignore the massive failure on the part of the party in that vein and to instead put those failures on El-Sayed is a really backwards reading of what happened last night.

“To ignore the massive failure on the part of the party in that vein and to instead put those failures on El-Sayed is a really backwards reading of what happened last night.”

JW: Akela, to your point about the money, and Jonah, I want to bring you into this, did the money make a difference? It was the most expensive Democratic [Senate] primary in history, and did the spending here change the outcome? Obviously, El-Sayed won anyway, but, did this have an impact?

AL: I think it would be folly to argue that it didn’t have an impact. It’s still very early. We don’t have all of the information, but there’s anecdotal reports of voters saying that they thought that Obama endorsed Haley Stevens. I actually haven’t seen anyone talking about individual responses to the AIPAC attacks, but that narrative out there that Abdul El-Sayed is the biggest threat to the U.S.–Israel relationship or to American Jews or Jewish voters in Michigan, that’s been out there this entire race.

And so I think that certainly had an effect. But I’ve also seen some people saying, “Oh, you can’t just make the argument that voters who voted for Haley Stevens or who were swayed by these ads are stupid.” I don’t think anyone’s saying they’re stupid. But it’s unrealistic to try to make an argument that this money had no effect in this race.

JV: Yeah, it absolutely made a difference. Speaking with people in Michigan throughout the summer and really starting, early July, just like a flood of attack ads against El-Sayed. They were pretty much omnipresent if you were watching TV. Mind you, this was around the World Cup, so people were seeing this on primetime television immediately after a game ended.

Someone I spoke to said the second ad right after is an attack ad calling Abdul El-Sayed, I think, hateful toward women, and other ones painted him as a terrorist sympathizer trying to tie him to Hasan Piker and comments he made. Painting this whole vision that he is too radical for Michigan. It is the outside spending propping that up, but on top of that, like trying to make this ideological argument.

JW: And just for anyone who doesn’t know Hasan Piker is the popular Twitch streamer who’s been campaigning with progressives and who Republicans and Democrats have been weaponizing against progressives implying with, I would argue, pretty Islamophobic attacks that these candidates are anti-American and that they believe everything that Piker believes.

JV: I think it’s worth remembering that there was a point in this race when it was essentially a three-way tie between El-Sayed, Stevens, and Mallory McMorrow, who would eventually drop out. The conventional thinking at the time was that the more that voters see of Stevens, the more it would consolidate around McMorrow and El-Sayed, that Stevens would back off and would drop off in the polls because of AIPAC being such a big issue in the race.

Around the same time as polls were reflecting that, that’s when AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, dropped in tens and tens of millions of dollars. This is the correlated result that you get.

Stevens also has this history with AIPAC as far as the why they spent for her. AIPAC and corporate groups saw Stevens as a candidate that aligns with their policy positions. Stevens of course in 2019 took that freshman trip sponsored by AIPAC to Israel. And worth mentioning in 2022 she received millions in support in her race against former congressman Andy Levin, who was attacked over his support for a Palestinian state.

On the other side of that coin, of course, is AIPAC saw a candidate in El-Sayed who opposes their positions on Israel.

JW: Akela, I want to turn to you for a second. I know that the United Democracy Project, a super PAC backed by AIPAC, as you both have mentioned, spent a ton of money in this race. I know that came up in your conversation with El-Sayed last week. Now that you’ve had some time to reflect on that conversation, were there any takeaways for you about how he was thinking about money and politics, and specifically the massive amount of money that was spent on his election?

AL: The core of El-Sayed’s argument this entire race was that he was the antithesis to big money in politics. Not just spending on a race, but talking about money in politics being the reason that we don’t have policies like Medicare for All, that we can’t change sort of the status quo on U.S. military support for Israel, that being a driving factor for why many voters ended up supporting somebody like Donald Trump.

Looking back on the way that El-Sayed messaged on these things, he was right. The question was, like, how much do voters actually care about that thing? And I think the breakdown came between voters who support a candidate like Stevens and don’t necessarily care about the money coming in to support her.

People talk a lot about the enthusiasm gap — that supporters of El-Sayed were much more enthusiastically supportive of him in a positive way than supporters of Stevens who might have been supporting her because they were familiar with her, they felt like she was more of a predictable candidate, or because they didn’t want to vote for somebody like El-Sayed.

“That enthusiasm gap is why you see that kind of money coming into the race.”

That enthusiasm gap is why you see that kind of money coming into the race. He made the point over and over again: “If your candidate is so electable, why do you have to spend $60 million to put them in office?” Part of that is his campaign strategy, but I think it’s a pretty unimpeachable argument, right? If they didn’t need that kind of boost to put their candidate in office — and obviously it didn’t work — why would you make that kind of investment?

Coming out of this, there’s all kinds of people trying to spin this to say, “Oh, the money advantage has changed this cycle.” We’ve seen other candidates who had the money advantage lose, but I think that sort of discounts exactly how much money went into this race. I think there was almost $100 million spent in total on the Michigan Senate race. Which is crazy! Just on its face. If you’re on the opposite side of that spending, the obvious question is, “OK, if your candidate is so good, then why do you have to do all of this to help them win?”

The takeaway that a lot of people have from this, whether they’re supportive of El-Sayed or whether they’re upset about Haley Stevens, is that, I don’t think the era of big money in politics is over, but obviously the ground is shifting.

JW: Jonah, I want to come back to the Islamophobia in the race that you reported on. Obviously, we saw these attacks both from Democrats and Republicans, and as we head into November, we can only imagine that these attacks are going to intensify and I would argue become more Islamophobic as Republicans pick up some of these attacks that Democrats had dropped in the primary.

What do you think is going to happen in the general election, and how are you anticipating Islamophobia to show up in this race?

JV: We’re already seeing it this morning. The Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, they released their first ads this morning, and of course, they refer to Abdul El-Sayed by his full name, they are tying him again to Hasan Piker, using phrasing that El-Sayed is too radical. These are all out of the playbook from the primary that the Michigan GOP had rolled out that Mike Rogers had rolled out.

And on top of that, I’m glad you noted that it’s not just the Republicans who have been weaponizing Islamophobia, it’s also the Democratic establishment and AIPAC through its, again, super PAC, [United Democracy Project], just pouring and pouring all these ads that are again painting Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim and Arab, as a sympathizer to terrorism. That, on top of these unfounded claims of his hatred toward women. Speaking to several leading experts in Islamophobia, they were identifying these as pretty troubling anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tropes that have been around in American politics for years now.

One person mentioned that it reminded them of the early attacks on Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008, and that leaked photo that Hillary Clinton’s campaign at the time put out showing him in traditional Somalian elder attire. And so, I think we could expect these kinds of attacks to only accelerate, especially at a time when Islamophobia is pretty common in GOP rhetoric right now.

We saw it leading up to the campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York for his mayoral seat. We see it very regularly from representatives in the House like Randy Fine, who folks like him in his part of the world essentially believe that no Muslims should serve in Congress at all.

“Republicans are still betting that these old tactics can still work before a broader electorate.”

They’re drawing these hard, very bigoted lines. They’re successful politically in a lot of spaces. Republicans are still betting that these old tactics can still work before a broader electorate. Today’s victory, though, in spite of all of the attack ads in the primary, kind of shows that those older tactics may not be as effective as they were, say, a decade ago or 20 years ago.

What we’re seeing this morning with these new ads, is a preview of what’s to come. It’s only going to get worse as the GOP plays to its MAGA base. But El-Sayed has shown that he has the capacity to overcome this, and I think that boils down to just how far the electorate has evolved on this and just aren’t as susceptible to such blatant racism.

JW: One thing I’ve been wondering is whether or not, as we head into November, establishment Democrats are going to protect El-Sayed and actually stand up against these Islamophobic attacks.

We’ve seen Democrats dance around these attacks on Ilhan Omar, sometimes defending against them, but often adding fuel to the fire. So I think come November or before November even, it’ll be interesting to see if Democrats actually intervene and do something about these kinds of racist, Islamophobic attacks.

AL: It’s a good question, Jessie, and already this morning we’ve seen Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who run the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee endorse El-Sayed. We saw the Senate Majority PAC come in and endorse him. Even Haley Stevens endorsed him. But lest we forget, four days ago, Haley Stevens was saying that El-Sayed blamed all of his problems on Jewish voters with the backing of many of these people in the party.

So yeah, I think the question of whether they will specifically address the Islamophobic attacks is a totally different question from whether they are going to consolidate around him, which they are, because they obviously need the seat.

[Break]

JW: Obviously, this was a really interesting race, and we’ve all been watching it, but I want to talk about some other races that happened last night as well.

So Akela, I know you’ve been watching House District 7 in Michigan, where William Lawrence, founder of the Sunrise Movement, won the Democratic primary. Akela, can you tell us a little bit about him and the dynamics of that race?

AL: Will Lawrence — many people may remember him because of the late-breaking oppo story about him saying that the left had been defanged by Black members of Congress. But prior to that, Will Lawrence had run a pretty textbook progressive campaign from the left, but he really was one of the first candidates this cycle who we saw center their campaign around the issue of data centers.

And I think in some of the analysis that we’ve seen coming out of his win, which was one of the early calls last night is that that is a winning argument particularly for progressive campaigns, but also in states where communities are fighting data centers.

We’ve seen this, I don’t want to say people are treating the data-center issue as like a panacea, but we have seen that come up in a lot of campaigns and a lot of analysis, suggesting that’s potentially a through line where progressives can overcome some of the obstacles that they might have faced around other “controversial policies,” and that data centers is, like, this reasonable policy that progressives are adopting that’s helping to boost their campaigns.

I think that’s a narrative that’s really coming out of Will Lawrence’s race. I will also mention that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee backed Lawrence shortly after he won, which is a pretty big deal.

JV: And just to add with Lawrence, he is in the 7th Michigan district, which is considered a purple district, and it’s currently held by a Republican incumbent. So I think moving ahead to the general, I think similar to El-Sayed’s race against Mike Rogers, is that, a lot of people will be looking at this as a test of how these anti-corporate, anti-data center, and unabashedly pro-Palestinian politics play in a general election in a district that is very much considered a swing district.

“A lot of people will be looking at this as a test of how these anti-corporate, anti-data center, and unabashedly pro-Palestinian politics play in a general election in a district that is very much considered a swing district.”

JW: Yeah. No, I can definitely see that.

I want to turn to another state, Missouri. Within roughly two hours of polls closing, The Associated Press called the closely watched — for me at least, probably a little bit less for the rest of the news ecosystem — but the closely watched rematch between Cori Bush and Rep. Wesley Bell in Bell’s favor.

So in 2024, AIPAC and other groups had spent more than $18 million to oust her from her Missouri district. Akela, we’ve both spoken to members of Congress who have seen her defeat as a warning sign to not be so progressive, to not be so pro-Palestine. We’ve been chatting in the newsroom in our politics meetings about whether or not this race says anything about progressives and the progressive movement right now, or does it just say something about Bush and her campaign?

AL: I don’t think that this race says anything about the viability of pro-Palestine candidates. To make that argument, you would have to close your eyes to all of the last three months, basically. I think this was a race about Cori Bush and Wesley Bell. And for all the criticisms of Wesley Bell, people like him in this district.

Turnout in the city of St. Louis, Cori Bush’s base, was pretty high. It was 30 percent. That was around the levels that we saw when she won reelection in 2022, and that was not enough to counteract the support that Wesley Bell got from St. Louis County, where more older Black voters who support him tend to live.

What I heard from supporters of Bush was that some people thought she was going to lose, but they didn’t think it would be by this much. A lot of people thought she was going to win; they were obviously wrong. I don’t think you can make the argument that the AIPAC money in this race is the only reason that she lost.

“I don’t think you can make the argument that the AIPAC money in this race is the only reason that she lost.”

There was a pretty effective campaign to saddle her with baggage from these stories about what happened to the tornado relief money that she raised, and her husband being probed over a pandemic loan fraud, and all of these things we talked about and she chalked up to political attacks.

But I think people in the district were not necessarily swayed by those issue, but it left a bad taste in their mouth. And it’s the kind of thing where I’m not sure that Wesley Bell would’ve won if a different candidate was was challenging him, just given the frustration both with incumbents and with AIPAC money.

Bush’s campaign also suffered because she didn’t have the marquee progressive support that we’ve seen boost candidates in other races, like rallies with Bernie Sanders and AOC. Bernie Sanders endorsed her, but nobody came to campaign with her. Justice Democrats endorsed her, but they didn’t spend money on the race.

The money that was spent in favor of Bush was just around $200,000 — that means that progressive groups didn’t take this race seriously. And for one reason or another, it’s kind of a chicken or the egg thing. Had they taken it seriously, could she have won, or did they not take it seriously because they didn’t think she was going to win?

At the end of the day, this was more of a race about Cori Bush and Wesley Bell than it was a bigger test of all these other issues. And Wesley Bell is the kind of person who has, aside from taking AIPAC money, you can’t really say a lot else about him because he doesn’t really do a lot — and I think that works in his favor, for better or for worse.

JW: And Jonah, I wanted to get your thoughts as well. If you’ve spoken to Cori Bush, she is unlike any other politician. She very much speaks and feels like an organizer. Just watching her navigate the political system and struggle to navigate the political system has been really interesting. But Jonah, I wanted to see if you had any thoughts about this race as well?

JV: I think it’s worth noting that she was very much ahead of the curve on a lot of the politics that we’re seeing succeed in this midterm primary elections. And, I think to Akela’s point, seeing the success, like the massive success across the U.S. on, the same platform that she’s running on, and something that she’s ran on since she was first elected, and was among the early politicians to call the genocide in Gaza a genocide.

“She was very much ahead of the curve on a lot of the politics that we’re seeing succeed in this midterm primary elections.”

As yours and Akela’s reporting had noted in 2024, was very early with the ceasefire resolution, as we know there’s still no ceasefire in Gaza. These are things that she was very much ahead in the curve on and is still very much a leader in that space. Her losing in this election doesn’t necessarily mean that those values don’t do well before the electorate.

JW: Akela, to your point, I’ve seen some analysis suggesting that a lot of progressive attention was spent on Michigan. Do you think that played a role in why there wasn’t as much spending or attention or any on-the-ground mobilization from progressive groups? Was all of their focus on Michigan?

AL: I wouldn’t say there was no on-the-ground mobilization. [Democratic Socialists of America], the St. Louis DSA endorsed her, and the St. Louis chapter was canvassing for her, and they had a pretty well-run canvassing operation to what I understand. But that’s not enough. I think they potentially miscalculated because of the boost that DSA gave to other candidates in New York and Colorado, I think they assumed that would be enough to put her over the edge.

But yeah, in conversations with progressive strategists who work on these races, the reason that they didn’t put as many resources into this race is absolutely because they put all of them into Michigan. The caveat here is that even while groups like Justice Democrats or the new pro-Palestine PAC, American Priorities, are spending more than they ever have on these races — in part because of how much money corporate PACs and the pro-Israel lobby have spent against their candidates in previous cycles — is that there’s still only a handful of these groups.

They simply do not have the capacity to triage every race in a cycle or even every race in a week. People were like, “I wish another group bucked up and came in and put more money in this race for her.” But it wasn’t going to be [Justice Democrats] because they had Donavan McKinney. It wasn’t going to be American Priorities, probably because they didn’t want to sully their positive track record so far by making a massive investment in a race where the candidate already had a lot of problems.

All of these calculations went into the fact that the focus on Michigan probably affected this race, but again, I don’t think you can say, one way or the other, if all these groups came in and spent a bunch of money for her that it would’ve changed the outcome. We just don’t have enough information right now to say that.

JW: I want to talk about democratic socialist Francesca Hong, who is currently having clips about her takes on Thanksgiving and raising a biracial child taken, I would argue, a little bit out of context.

But I do want to talk about that race because she’s a democratic socialist who is currently leading in the polls for governor in Wisconsin against the more moderate candidate, David Crowley, and that race is coming up next week. Akela, can you just briefly talk about the dynamics at play here?

AL: Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist state lawmaker in Wisconsin who has been leading the polls in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. This is a situation where, I mean, why is CNN asking this woman about a tweet about canceling Thanksgiving? That’s my question. I don’t care what she thinks about Thanksgiving. That’s not a policy that the governor of Wisconsin has power over.

The fact that this is what this race has come down to at this point is a reflection of how much these outlets and mainstream forces are working to tear down and poke holes in what is clearly a substantive movement against the Democratic establishment. I’m not saying Francesca Hong is perfect, but I think these interviews and these clips of her making these comments are less about her than they are about how much fear she strikes in the heart of the establishment apparatus.

These clips “are less about her than they are about how much fear she strikes in the heart of the establishment apparatus.”

I’ve talked to a lot of people in Wisconsin, people who are supporting Hong’s campaign and see this race as a real opportunity again to put this question of can progressive politics win in the Midwest? This is what Perry Bacon Jr. wrote about the New Republic earlier this week. I thought this was a really great piece, and we’ve talked about this, Jessie. Pointing to people like Tammy Duckworth and Barack Obama and Sherrod Brown who were progressives prior to their races in the Midwest, and then won those races, whether or not they fashioned themselves as a progressive or not.

The polling that has shown her ahead — a lot of people have questions about that now, given how blown out of proportion the polling was for El-Sayed. But I think, pairing that question with the criticisms of “Oh, she’s talking about her proximity to whiteness and marrying a white guy and having a biracial child and talking about canceling Thanksgiving.” There’s a reason they’re not talking about her actual policy platform.

“ There’s a reason they’re not talking about her actual policy platform.”

It’s frustrating because like what happens when you have real “working-class” candidates or candidates who are running on policies to help the working class elevated to this level of national attention, you don’t get the polished Abdul El-Sayed soundbite answers that we were seeing in the Michigan race. People take that and run with it in a way that is pretty hollow in a lot of cases, and that’s what we’re seeing with Francesca Hong.

JW: I’d have to agree. What I think about — and I am a former debate kid, so this is no shade to debate people — but there is an extent to which our politics just feels like how good are you at giving a speech and essentially being a good debate kid, and has nothing to do with your policies.

I also don’t understand why we’re focusing on her attitudes about her child and how she’s planning on raising them, or how she thinks about Thanksgiving and whether or not it should exist. It’s not like she said anything completely out of left field.

But as we begin to pivot from primaries to midterm elections, what do you make of progressive’s chances in places outside of the coast in November? I know that we already talked about Perry Bacon’s piece, which, by the way, people should read. It’s called “Can Progressive Candidates Win in Swing States? They Already Have.” But what are you thinking about progressives’ chances? Jonah, I want to actually take this question to you and see what you’re thinking.

JV: Yeah, as Michigan has shown us and as possibly looking ahead to Wisconsin next week, the margins are still very close and these races are very embattled and bitter.

But I think the success that we’re seeing with Abdul El-Sayed, with Will Lawrence, who we talked about, and as well as Donavan McKinney, who we haven’t talked about yet. These are folks who are running on very progressive, unabashedly pro-Palestine campaigns. And I think it’s worth mentioning Donavan McKinney was also endorsed by the Detroit Metro DSA chapter as well and mobilizing for him.

DSA also mobilized very heavily for El-Sayed, even though he himself is not a member of DSA and has called himself a capitalist and someone who wants to regulate capitalism and not necessarily stands for socialist policies. But I think that’s proving the theory right that it’s not just confined to the coasts, and this is less of an ideological battle when it comes to voters.

A lot of experts and analysts will say that people don’t vote based on ideological lines. They vote on their pocketbooks. The adage of, it’s the economy. And these progressive platforms are playing directly to that on top of people’s dissatisfaction with the establishment.

I think to Akela’s point, right-wing media, corporate liberal media like CNN, can play up all of these culture war questions constantly of Thanksgiving, holidays. For the case of El-Sayed, it was a question of why he felt the need to have sympathy for some of his Muslim constituents in Dearborn or would-be constituents in Dearborn. It’s questions like this that have nothing to do with actual legitimate policy questions. In that case, it’s like there was zero questioning, we’re talking about Iran and the killing of Iran’s leader. There were zero questions about should we be in this war with Iran? Should we have killed how many civilians we’ve killed in that war? Or backing Israel’s war in Lebanon and continued war in Gaza. These are the kind of policy questions that a lot of Americans are fed up with. Polling also shows total dissatisfaction with military spending, as opposed to spending it on healthcare and education.

Progressives, regardless of the coasts or in the Midwest, are continuing to hammer that in, of, your taxpayer dollars can be spent and should be spent in way more effective ways that meet your needs and not the needs of the greater American empire, if you will.

JW: Yeah, and just for everyone listening you referred to state Rep Donavan McKinney, who defeated U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar, the incumbent candidate in Michigan’s 13th District on Tuesday night.

And that’s honestly all of the time that we have here. But thank you all so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing, staying up late, waking up early, putting in the real work.

AL: Thank you, Jessie.

JV: Thank you.

JW: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcast@theintercept.com or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slipstream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts.

Do leave us a rating or a review. It helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Most Expensive Democratic Senate Primary Has a Winner appeared first on The Intercept.

Abdul El-Sayed on The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday, Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., will face off in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The race is the next biggest test of whether progressives can win statewide, particularly in purple territory.

The Michigan race is one of the most expensive primaries of the cycle. Outside groups have spent upward of $50 million in support of Stevens or against El-Sayed. Most of that money is coming from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated groups — close to $30 million, which their largest investment ever in a single race, according to The AP.

“It’s just anti-democratic on its own terms,” El-Sayed, the former public health official, tells The Intercept Briefing. “I always ask people, “OK, you’re covering this as a very close race, but would it be close if they didn’t have $60 million to spend? Would it even be a close race at all?’”

This week on The Intercept Briefing podcast, host Akela Lacy asks, can progressives win outside of blue cities? El-Sayed argues, if you focus on the issues people care about and act on them, you can: “Look, you have an option that’s not bought off by all the same corporations. And that option is desperately clear about wanting you to have healthcare, and also wanting your kid to have a good school, and also making sure that there’s not a data center that gets planted in your backyard to automate your job away.”

Lacy explores that question further with Ryan Clancy, a Wisconsin state representative and founding member of the state legislature’s current Socialist Caucus, and Thom Hartmann, a progressive political commentator.

Clancy says voters he speaks to in Milwaukee “want a fighter. People want people in office who are going to fight for the middle class, fight for actual transformative change.” He adds, “The idea that in order to win in a purple district that is roughly split between Democrats and Republicans, that you need when you’re a Democrat, to look as much like a Republican as possible is just not helpful.”

Polling suggests that El-Sayed has a commanding lead over Stevens in the Democratic primary. But polls for the November general election narrow sharply when El-Sayed is up against Trump-backed Republican candidate Mike Rogers; one shows Rogers beating him by 10 percentage points, which the Stevens’s campaign has leaned into.

“We’ve been in this change moment. We’re sick and tired of neoliberalism. We’re sick and tired of Reaganism. We’re sick and tired of the status quo. We’re sick and tired of a dying middle class. We have been living in this moment, in my opinion, since 2000, and I think in a big way since 2008. Obama promised hope and change, and really just brought us a bunch of health insurance companies,” says Hartmann. “I’m not sure if we’re there yet to the point where a good message like El-Sayed’s message can overcome millions of dollars from Israel and from big corporations. That’s going to be the big challenge.”

The Intercept invited Stevens on the program for an interview but as of publishing have not heard back yet.

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

What do Democratic voters really want? It’s the question that’s animated primaries so far this cycle in the ongoing battle over the future of the Democratic Party.

Progressives and democratic socialists say their recent wins from New York to Maine to Colorado, including a slew of races where insurgent candidates beat incumbents or others backed by the Democratic Party, have pushed their skeptics to move the goalposts.

The main criticism facing the left is no longer that its candidates can’t win — it’s that they can’t win in “normal” places outside of city enclaves full of young, educated, left-leaning voters.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.: In those swing states, it’s the moderate candidate that is more successful statewide.

AL: That argument has reared its head again ahead of key primaries in the Midwest set to test the power of progressives to win in statewide races pitting them against the Democratic establishment in states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, we’re talking about the question we just can’t seem to get away from: Can the left win in the Midwest?

We put that question to one of the candidates at the center of that debate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday. We also asked his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, to discuss the issues, but she has not gotten back to us.

But first, I’m joined by Ryan Clancy, a Wisconsin state Rep. and founding member of the state legislature’s current Socialist Caucus and the first democratic socialist lawmaker elected in Milwaukee in more than half a century.

Ryan Clancy, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Ryan Clancy: Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to this.

AL: We’re also joined by Thom Hartmann of the “Thom Hartmann Program” on radio stations across the country, and the author of “Who Killed the American Dream?”, about an 1886 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations constitutional rights. Thom, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Thom Hartmann: Thanks, Akela.

AL: So we’re talking about the question of whether the left can win in the Midwest, but I want to start with the premise of that question. Why is there this idea that the left can’t win in the Midwest? Where does that come from? Ryan, let’s start with you, and then Thom.

RC: I think it’s coming from two different places. One is just fear. In Wisconsin here, we’ve lived now for 16 years under Republican control. We haven’t had the abilities to even get bills hearings, much less pass things into law and do what Wisconsin needs us to. So I think there is some valid concern that people just don’t want another Republican.

But there really is no basis for not wanting somebody from the left unless you’re a Democrat who’s just a conservative or moderate and one of the folks who is, I think, on the way out both in Wisconsin and across the country.

AL: Thom, what’s your take?

TH: I think it’s astonishing that we’re calling this “the left.” I’m assuming that Ryan is not calling for all of the big companies in America to be owned by the government.

RC: Not until next week. [Laughter]

TH: Exactly. Right now where progressive Democrats are at is where Dwight Eisenhower was at. He ran for reelection in 1956 on the fact that he had almost doubled the number of people on Social Security. He’d expanded the benefits. He’d almost tripled the number of people eligible for union jobs and increased union membership by almost 100 percent.

My mom, in the 1950s, went to college, and she paid her way through Michigan State University and graduated — with a summer job as a lifeguard in Charlevoix, Michigan. That was the world.

Today, if anybody proposed that you should be able to go to college and work a part-time job for three months to pay for an entire year of a major Big Ten school!

Healthcare was inexpensive in Michigan where I grew up. Blue Cross Blue Shield was required by law to be a nonprofit. In fact, all of the insurance here, all of the hospitals in the state were required by law to be nonprofits. If anybody were to propose this stuff now, they’d be screaming “communism!” This is just common sense.

To the extent that America has been radicalized, I would say it’s the radical middle, not the left. The real left largely doesn’t exist in America.

RC: Yeah, you’re totally right. I think the reason for the resurgence of the left, really, is the economic conditions. It’s people having really been let down by capitalism, by so many years of moderate and Republican control.

We’ve seen the average age for somebody buying their first home go from the 20s years ago: It’s 41 now. The idea of the American Dream really is out of grasp for many people, even people who are working really hard to get there.

TH: Again, in the 1950s, my dad bought the house that I grew up in 1957. He was able to do that because he finally got a union job at a tool and die shop. With that one union paycheck, he was able to buy a house. He bought a new car every three years. He took a vacation every year. He retired and traveled the world. He put four boys through college — on a single paycheck!

If you use that as the definition of the middle class, 65 percent of Americans were there because a third of us had union jobs when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981. Today, it’s 41 percent of us who can make that claim, who can satisfy all those tick marks for the middle class — and it requires two paychecks to do that.

This is 45 years of Reaganomics that’s just essentially ripped America apart, torn apart the middle class. So you’ve got people reacting and saying, no, we want to either go back or go forward — however you want to define it or frame it — to a world where work is honored, regardless of educational attainment. If somebody works a 40-hour week, they should be able to have housing and transportation and food and a decent life.

The reactionaries, the Reaganites, the crazies on the right start screaming “leftism” and “communism.” I’ll call myself the left, but the Overton window has just been — it hasn’t moved, it’s been blown off the side of the map.

“If somebody works a 40-hour week, they should be able to have housing and transportation and food and a decent life.”

RC: Absolutely.

AL: We were talking about this today in a meeting with some of my colleagues about criticism when reporters use the word “centrist Democrat” or “moderate Democrat.”

I think that’s the perfect counterpoint to the point that you both are making, which is that not only have policies that were considered common sense or mainstream half a century ago [are now] portrayed more and more as radical. But policies that are overtly conservative among the Democratic Party are portrayed as the common sense or the centrist position, when in reality, they are increasingly reflective of a right wing — a strong right wing — within the Democratic Party. How has that happened?

That subtext feels like it’s missing from all of the conversations that we’re having around this midterm cycle. Part of this is the messaging battle, right? That Republicans are very good at fearmongering — and Democrats are good at fearmongering around the left. But what has made that shift possible and that sort of flipping of these definitions?

RC: I think it’s a lack of political bravery. In Wisconsin 16 years ago, we had a trifecta, and Democrats totally missed the moment. We didn’t codify abortion rights. We didn’t raise the minimum wage from $7.25, where it has languished for many years now. The sub-minimum wage in Wisconsin is $2.33 for service industry workers that are customarily tipped.

When Democrats have the ability to make real substantial change, and they don’t, we’re in trouble. I think we see that window moving, slipping slowly to the right and have for the last 15 years.

TH: I think it’s important to put this in a historical context. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in ’33, only about 20 percent of America was in the middle class. He set out to create, and succeeded in creating, the world’s first middle class that was more than half of the nation’s population. And the principal thing that drove that was unionization.

He legalized unions in 1935 with the Wagner Act. So from the mid-’30s all the way up until really 1992, what you saw was that the Democratic Party was largely funded by unions, and the Republican Party was largely funded by corporations and fat cats. But in 1981, Reagan went after the unions. A third of us were in unions at that time when he was elected, and he starts with PATCO [the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization], and he just deconstructed the unions.

He puts an anti-union lawyer in charge of the Labor Department, et cetera. So by ’92, right when Clinton wants to run for president, the unions are down to like 10 percent of the American workforce, maybe 9 percent of the American workforce. They got no money.

So Clinton’s looking around going, “I can’t get enough money to run for president. What do I do?” And the solution that these guys came up with — and it was a reasonable one at the time in 1992 — was to say, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to take corporate money, but let’s take it from the good corporations. Let’s take it from health insurance companies and banks and pharmaceutical companies, not those awful oil companies or the chemical companies or the mining operations.”

So we got all this speechification from Clinton about the new jobs and everything else. But the bottom line was that was the point at which the Democratic Party essentially sold out to neoliberalism and this “moderate position.” In fact, Clinton called it the Third Way, The Third Way Democrats, and the new Democrats. The same thing was going on in the U.K. It wasn’t really until the Obama campaign in 2008 that we discovered that the internet was capable of raising money for a presidential campaign, enough to get somebody into the White House. But the Democrats had not, or at least about half of the Democrats right now, have still not sworn off that money that Clinton lurched at.

So you’ve got about half the Democratic Party that is beholden to their donors. That’s why you’re not seeing them take advantage of these opportunities like Ryan was talking about. Then you got another half of the Democratic Party, the Progressive Caucus in the House, about 100 members, who are not taking corporate money and are explicitly saying, “No, let’s work toward what people want.”

That schism — that split — in the Democratic Party, it’s way behind the American people. The Democratic base is 80, 90 percent with the progressives. The American public is 60, 70 percent with the progressives. But the institutional Democratic Party and the old line, or these on-the-take Democrats, I call them the Jared Goldens and Josh Gottheimers of the world — they’re going to fight like hell to hang on to that money and all those perks that go with it. That’s the real tragedy of this moment because it just cripples our ability to challenge the genuine fascists who are running our government right now and trying to take our country apart.

AL: Ryan, we’re two weeks out from a very big primary in Wisconsin. What are you hearing from your constituents on the issues that resonate with them from a democratic socialist perspective? Do voters in Midwestern states actually prefer more conservative Democrats?

RC: They absolutely do not want conservative Democrats. The playbook that I think a lot of Democrats are working from is old. I don’t think that it was really the case even 10 or 20 years ago. But the idea that in order to win in a purple district that is roughly split between Democrats and Republicans, that you need, when you’re a Democrat, to look as much like a Republican as possible is just not helpful.

It’s not what people want on the doors. People want a fighter. People want people in office who are going to fight for the middle class, fight for actual, transformative change. That’s the reason that we saw some voters move from a Bernie Sanders to a Donald Trump. It wasn’t necessarily the specific policies; it was the idea that they wanted somebody who would mess with the system.

“People want a fighter.”

I knock on Republican and Independent and socialist, libertarian doors all over the place. And there’s a critical mass of folks right now who still want that change, but they realize that it’s not going to come. The sort of change they want is not going to come in the form of a Donald Trump or in a Tom Tiffany, who is the likely Republican nominee for governor.

But they do want Democrats who are going to fight for them in ways that we’ve really missed the moment on in over the last decade and a half.

AL: The next biggest test on these questions, particularly whether progressive wins that we saw earlier this cycle will carry over into statewide races, is the upcoming Michigan Democratic Senate primary.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens are facing off on Tuesday. El-Sayed, a former public health official, has the backing of some of the most well-known progressives in Congress, from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Stevens, on the other hand, is backed by members of the Democratic establishment, like Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Sen. Chuck Schumer said she had the best shot of winning, though he didn’t officially endorse her.

This is one of the most expensive primaries of the cycle. Outside groups have spent upwards of $50 million in support of Stevens or against El-Sayed — most of that money coming from one single group, the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent a record amount, more than $25 million, on the race.

Stevens and El-Sayed debated on Monday. Let’s hear from both their opening statements.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed: My friend is going to frame this race about me and her. It’s not about that. It’s about you. It’s about what you deserve. It’s about you deserving a politics that’s not bought off by the same corporations picking your pocket at every single turn.

I’m looking forward to the conversation about how we get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, and pass Medicare for All.

Rep. Haley Stevens: Look, Michigan deserves a senator who can win and who can deliver. I’m the only one on this stage who has flipped a Republican seat, and I was named Michigan’s most effective Democratic lawmaker in Congress because my only focus is you. Abdul is running for celebrity. Republicans are propping up his campaign.

RC: You could not have candidates that are more starkly contrasted with each other.

You have somebody who’s backed by AIPAC. In that same interview, actually, she was asked point-blank if she took money from their power company [two major Michigan utility companies]. And she said no, that she had not, and absolutely did.

AL: She was asked about saying no, and then she said that she thought they were talking about this cycle and not previous cycles. And she admitted that she had taken it in previous cycles.

RC: She is backed by all of the institutions that average people across that state, and across the U.S., absolutely revile. AIPAC is wildly unpopular now — so are power companies, for that matter.

You have a candidate who is very clearly beholden to his community, somebody who came up as a doctor in public health; and then you have somebody who claims to be successful. Her version of success is collaborating with Republicans to pass bad policy. That is not the definition of “effective” that most voters in the United States right now want. They want people who will be fighting for something better, not rolling over and collaborating with the people that have made it worse.

“Her version of success is collaborating with Republicans to pass bad policy. That is not the definition of ‘effective’ that most voters in the United States right now want.”

AL: Thom, what are the biggest takeaways from this race so far, and who do you think is going to win?

TH: It’s a classic example of the kind of Hillary–Bernie divide brought into this era. In that 2016 election, I was living on a boat in Washington, D.C., in the marina there. We were doing our show from D.C.

Maybe a third of the people who lived in that marina were either active-duty or retired Coast Guard or Navy, living in boats. Men mostly, and almost all every single one of them that I can recall called himself Republican. During that primary, most of them were actually planning on voting for Bernie, these Republicans, because they thought that he was going to bring genuine change.

But when the day finally came, and afterwards, I talked to many of them, a lot of them ended up voting for Trump because they thought that he would actually bring change.

“Obama promised hope and change, and really just brought us a bunch of health insurance companies.”

We’ve been in this change moment. We’re sick and tired of neoliberalism. We’re sick and tired of Reaganism. We’re sick and tired of the status quo. We’re sick and tired of a dying middle class. We have been living in this moment, in my opinion, since 2000, and I think in a big way since 2008. Obama promised hope and change, and really just brought us a bunch of health insurance companies.

I’m not sure if we’re there yet to the point where a good message like El-Sayed’s message can overcome millions of dollars from Israel and from big corporations. That’s going to be the big challenge. We’re seeing this now. In the 2024 election, 20 percent of all the spending in that election came from a handful of billionaire families, all for Republicans.

So it’s going to be really interesting, and it’s going to be really instructive, I think, next Tuesday to see how this shakes out. But it’s really a challenge of big money.

“It’s really a challenge of big money.”

AL: The irony being that Haley Stevens, in the last couple of debates in the final weeks of the race, has tried to make that argument against Abdul El-Sayed, saying he’s got all this personal wealth: “I’m the only non-millionaire in this race.” Meanwhile, she has the vast majority of outside spending on her side; it’s not even a comparison.

El-Sayed has been leading Stevens in primary polls, but her campaign has been touting other polling that shows her leading Republican Trump-backed candidate Mike Rogers in November, and El-Sayed losing to him.

This is another classic case of voters potentially having a different preference for the direction of the Democratic Party and the party pushing back against that with the electability argument. But if the less popular Democrat actually wins — either in the primary or in the general — where does that leave the party in the long term? Does that not aggravate voter frustration even more and set up a situation where the GOP gets the upper hand anyway?

TH: It does, and it always does. I would argue that when you look at these match-ups, with the general population voting and El-Sayed starts dropping — what you’re seeing there is racism and anti-Muslim bigotry probably more than anything else. And apparently it’s a bigger force, at least in this election, than misogyny. In addition to all the money that’s been spent.

AL: I will say my colleague Jonah Valdez did a great piece on Islamophobia in this race that I encourage all of you to read at The Intercept. This is for our listeners.

Ryan, did you want to add anything on that?

RC: I do think that the polls, both in Michigan and in here and other places, they are not measuring the enthusiasm gap as they should. I think they are underrepresenting these dynamic leftist candidates. Because when somebody is asked, they can only say yes so forcefully, right? A yes is a yes. But voters and people who are really engaged with these campaigns, when you knock on their doorstep and you ask them about somebody and they light up — these are the folks who are going to drag their friends to the polls, both for primaries and again in November, in a way that somebody grudgingly backing a centrist candidate just isn’t.

So I think he’s going to do fine.

AL: The counterpoint to the argument that progressives or a leftist archetype doesn’t work outside of blue cities is that there is an archetype that works. And it’s dictated largely by the Democratic Party and its campaign committees. But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other groups aligned with the conservative wing of the Democratic Party have had a very rough cycle.

They’ve lost races in Arizona, California, and Colorado, while other incumbents lost in New York and Texas. The DCCC recently added a candidate that they endorsed against in Arizona to their coveted Red to Blue list, which typically helps boost candidates with fundraising. That addition to the list comes along with another candidate, Sam Forstag, who’s running for a competitive congressional seat in Montana against Republican Aaron Flint.

Forstag is a firefighter and a union organizer who won the endorsement of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last month, and she spoke at a rally for him in Montana in May. This is a rare case of overlap between the DSA and the establishment wing. Is that surprising to you? Is this a model that we could potentially see in other races?

RC: It has to be, otherwise it is the death of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party as a brand is not polling well at all. If I was the Democratic machine, if my goal was to make sure that the Democratic Party was strong and vibrant and thriving, I would be encouraging these awesome candidates on the left into my party.

But increasingly we are hearing Democrats talk about a big tent, but they only mean big to the right. For some reason, the tent flap is just not big enough to cover those on the left in a lot of cases. But ultimately that unity and saying, “Oh, the candidates on the left within our own party are not a threat to us, they are the future, they are how we get through this,” really is inevitable. And they have to do this or fall out of power even more than they have.

TH: Yeah, they’re 20 years behind the electorate right now.

AL: I want to turn now to the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary on August 11. Francesca Hong, democratic socialist candidate, has been leading in recent polling, while other Democratic candidates in the race like Mandela Barnes and David Crowley, who dropped out of the race and quickly reentered after the establishment pick Sara Rodriguez dropped out over a campaign finance scandal, have been polling below Hong.

What do you think it would take for a more progressive candidate to win in Wisconsin or throughout the Midwest? We’ll start with Ryan, and then I’ll come to you, Thom.

RC: Folks on doors are really concerned about everyday things. They’re concerned about affordability. They’re concerned that they cannot afford healthcare. They’re concerned that they can’t afford rent and that they’ll never be able to afford a home because everything’s getting more expensive.

“I’ve never seen people more concerned for themselves and their families.”

But they also have these existential concerns. I’ve never seen people more concerned for themselves and their families. I talked to a woman on doors a couple weeks ago who broke down crying at the door because rather than me showing up and saying, “Here’s who I am and, will you vote for me?” My question was, “How are you? What are you concerned about?” And she started crying and talked about how she was concerned about a family member being abducted by ICE and the ever-present threat of that. So we need people who are going to meet the moment, who are going to address those very real concerns from affordability to concern for community in a way that we haven’t yet but that we need to.

TH: I think that it’s really important that people who are concerned about this political future and where things are going and whatnot get inside the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, it’s a billion-dollar corporation. It’s just sitting there, saying, anybody can come in and volunteer and participate.

I’ve had a bunch of people call into my program over the years since I’ve been ranting about this for a decade, who have gotten inside their local Democratic parties. And once you become a precinct committee person, you’re the person or the people who write the platform for the party. You’re the ones who determine who the primary candidates are going to be. You’re the first ones that when your congressperson or your senator comes into your state to talk to the people, you’re the first one they talk to. You have incredible power and influence. A lot of people are just sitting around complaining rather than doing something like this.

Progressives, social democrats, right across the board, I think that we need to be taking over the Democratic Party. We need to learn from the way that the GOP got flipped by the right a decade and a half ago.

AL: Ryan and Thom, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

I will just mention for our listeners: Thom’s new book gets at one of the root causes of many of the issues that we’re talking about, giving corporations the same rights as people. Thank you both again for the time. This was a great conversation.

TH: Thank you.

RC: Thank you so much for having us.

[Break]

AL: The race on everyone’s minds is happening on Tuesday in Michigan, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is running against Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.

El-Sayed joins me now. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Abdul El-Sayed: Akela, it’s a privilege to be with you. You gotta call me Abdul.

AL: I will. Thank you. We also reached out to Stevens’s campaign to join us on the podcast and did not hear back.

Abdul, let’s just jump in. I’ve been listening to a lot of your interviews, and one thing that has stood out to me is that you’re walking this delicate line between providing what you say is an alternative for voters who’ve been disenchanted with both parties, while also trying to demonstrate your capacity to beat a Republican in November.

How do you square those two objectives between attracting support in a state that Trump won — including potentially from people who might have supported him — and also making this case that you can and will beat Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate Trump endorsed in the race and was campaigning with earlier this week.

AES: I don’t think about it as much as walking a line as I do about building something that is magnetic for everyone. I think walking a line implies a frame of this, like, left–right divide. “You don’t want to go too far left, otherwise you might lose the people who are on your right!” And I just don’t think that’s the reality for most people.

Most people don’t walk around asking, “Where do I sit on the left–right spectrum?” Most people are walking around asking, “What the hell’s going to happen if I get sick? What’s going to happen if I lose my home or I lose my job? Or AI, literally, they automate out the possibility of my being able to earn the money I need to provide for my family? Also, why does my kids’ school look like it did 50 years ago?”

I think those are the things that unite most Michiganders. You can go anywhere in the state, and you hear the same concerns. I’m looking to build a movement that pushes back on the bipartisan consensus that we ought to build a politics that is paid for by corporations, Big Tech, Big Pharma, DTE [Energy], Blue Cross — and that gives you milquetoast answers to most problems.

I’m looking to build a politics that takes the questions that we’re asking head on and answer them by telling folks that we really can get past the corporate-bought version of politics that’s too often forced into our eyeballs in tens of millions of dollars of spending on ads, and to a question of, let’s solve these things because we’re not bought off by the people who caused the problem in the first place.

AL: Touching on, this flipping the left–right divide framing on its head: Have you spoken with voters who’ve supported Trump? Are you courting those voters?

AES: They come to my events. That’s the thing is, that people think you gotta kinda go to different places to court different voters.

The nature of this world — you and I are talking by virtue of a set of microphones and cameras. This is going to go out into the ether, and it’s probably going to be clipped, and then people are going to hear these clips. What that means is that it’s a lot easier for folks to hear something, and then if that sounds kinda right, they’ll come and find you. And then they’ll come to your events.

I can’t tell you how many people have come to events of mine saying, “I voted for Donald Trump three times, and I’m voting for you.” I give them a kinda quizzical look. I’m like, “Me? Me?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” I ask why, and it’s because, “Hey, I really think you want me to have healthcare.” I’m like, “I really want you to have healthcare.” They’re like “I think you really are America first, like you want to keep my tax dollars here.” I was like, “I really want to keep your tax dollars here.” And they’ll say, “Look, I voted for Donald Trump not because I agree with him on everything, but he didn’t look like politics as usual.” And they’re right. He didn’t look like politics as usual. He was like the most heinous version of the worst things about politics as usual.

I’m out here trying to say, “Look, you have an option that’s not bought off by all the same corporations. And that option is desperately clear about wanting you to have healthcare, and also wanting your kid to have a good school, and also making sure that there’s not a data center that gets planted in your backyard to automate your job away.”

Imagine what that could look like. So what happens if, instead of Donald Trump, the person pushing back on politics as usual on both sides of the aisle is a doctor who rebuilt health departments to eliminate medical debt, provide Narcan, and put glasses on kids?

“I don’t do this because I care about the future of the Democratic Party. I care about the future of Michiganders.”

AL: You’ve said Trump is a symptom of the bigger problems in our political system, not the problem itself. A core part of your campaign is highlighting what you’ve described as the corruption of politics on both sides of the aisle by corporate and special interest money, as you’ve mentioned already, as we’re talking. Democrats just launched a new campaign hitting Trump’s corruption ahead of November, tying it to rising costs for Americans. And they’re preparing to make this the centerpiece of their agenda should they take control in Congress after the midterms.

Is that an effective strategy? What do you make of that effort? Is that an approach you share, or would you do anything differently?

AES: Yeah, I think we should take on his corruption. His corruption’s insane. It’s like he’s made $2 billion off of the White House. He just took out the East Wing because he wanted to, and is now fixated on drapes despite the fact that he took us into a war he doesn’t seem to know how to take us out of.

I think the issue here is corruption, but I also think that in order to talk about corruption, it really helps to be somebody who’s not played that game at all and will never play that game. We need more Democrats who make sure that we are not playing on that side so that the contrast is clear.

Look, I don’t do this because I care about the future of the Democratic Party. I care about the future of Michiganders. But if an election is an exercise in contrasts, and your argument is that they’re corrupt, it helps to make sure that you have not taken a dime of that corruption money.

AL: Democrats can’t make that argument in your race, right? One of the most expensive primaries in this cycle due almost wholly to the spending of one super PAC, United Democracy Project, AIPAC super PAC. But why does —

AES: Akela, if I can push back on that. Actually, UDP has only spent half the amount of money: $61 million, they’ve spent $31 million of it. So the other money is, it’s buried in these shell 501(c)(4)s.

Part of it is probably DMFI money, part of it’s also probably other AIPAC money, but a lot of it is also just your usual standard issue, Big Pharma, Big Tech, big everyone else. DTE, our local utility who’s one of the worst corporate actors in Michigan. So it’s all bundled in one and the same. Obviously, UDP is just insane amounts of money. They set a record against me in terms of the amount of money that they’ve spent.

But it is everyone, and part of it is also the point that it’s just anti-democratic on its own terms. I always ask people, “OK, you’re covering this as a very close race, but would it be close if they didn’t have $60 million to spend? Would it even be a close race at all?”

Then if it’s their corruption money against a campaign of grassroots organizers knocking nearly 10,000 doors a day, what kind of politics do we actually want? One where corporations and people who want to send your money abroad get to dump $60 million into a race? Or one where young organizers are coming together to build a movement, to knock doors, to have conversations about who we are and who we want to be?

It’s anti-democratic on its own terms. And Democrats, they’re all so worried about what this all means. I’m like, “It means that we still have an opportunity to inspire people, y’all. That’s what it means, and we can win if we do it.”

AL: One of the questions that we’ve been talking about a lot on this podcast is, why are Democrats so afraid of the message that you’re sending in terms of getting big money out of politics? Could the Democratic Party exist in its current form if they didn’t rely on these kinds of outside groups spending to prop up their preferred candidates, particularly in primaries?

“Democrats, they’re all so worried about what this all means. I’m like, “It means that we still have an opportunity to inspire people, y’all.’”

AES: Look, if you’re somebody like Chuck Schumer and your experience of politics is to be able to dictate where a whole bunch of money from big corporations and their lobbyists goes, so that you can handpick your senatorial colleagues who will do exactly what you want them to do, and then you get invited to their fancy cocktail parties and have a nice life — if that’s your vision of politics, then, yeah, you’re probably scared of somebody like me. Because, A, I’m not coming to your cocktail party. B, I’m not somebody who’s going to do what you tell me. And C, I don’t need you or your money. So I think that’s why they’re all so afraid. Now, of course, they hide behind the idea of, “Well, can somebody with his politics win in Michigan?”

If you were out there solving actual problems for people — if groceries weren’t inflating like a balloon, if people could afford their gas because you actually were an opposition party that could stand up to this absurd war, if people had healthcare and didn’t have to worry about it because you weren’t so bought off by Big Pharma and health insurance corporations, I think we would have so much better an opportunity to both win races and actually govern.

The problem, though, is that there’s a cynicism to this kind of politics. You retain a certain level of power, but the other side of it is you can’t actually solve the problems because, of course, that means opposing the very corporations who create the problems in the first place.

AL: Digging a little bit more into specific policy issues. You’ve said AI has taken over climate change as the biggest risk, though the two are inextricable. How has AI and the issue of data centers come up in your conversations with voters?

AES: Yeah, I don’t want to say biggest risk, just most urgent — because it’s imminent, right? And climate change feels imminent now that we’re all worried about trying to dodge air coming from wildfires in Canada. It looks like Europe is burning. So yes, I don’t want to undercut —

AL: They’re linked. They’re two sides of the same issue.

AES: They’re linked. It’s just this one is exceedingly urgent. I want all of us to step back and just remember that moment where ChatGPT came out. It was the end of 2022. It is now the middle of 2026, and I want you to think about just how much money is being flowed into the economy to enable research that’s foundationally unregulated, that could cause danger in so many different ways.

The first is, it can disrupt the social contract as we know it to the ability to sell your human capital on a market for money, when intelligence is now automated — that part.

Then there’s the existential, actual risk. Just last week you had an OpenAI model that jumped its “sandbox” to go commit a cyberattack on a website.

Then there’s the question of data centers. This comes up all the time, and it comes up usually from communities where data centers are trying to be placed. Or it comes up from young people who are actually the most avid users of AI and also have this pit in their stomach about the existential risk of not having a job in the future.

I gotta be honest with you, the worry that I have is that you’ve got probably three nine-figure super PACs that are out there in the world right now. Two of them are AI PACs; the third one is AIPAC. They are trying to throw their body weight around in a way that could render AI ungovernable.

The reason I say this, and I started with this question of do you remember where you were, less than four years ago, is that it’s only been three and a half years. So what happens in the next three and a half? If our Congress is not capable of setting the regulatory framework now, we might reach escape velocity. I don’t love that future when a few billionaires get to decide what happens with the most powerful technology that’s ever existed.

“If our Congress is not capable of setting the regulatory [AI] framework now, we might reach escape velocity.”

AL: Abdul, you’ve criticized what you say has been a conversation about climate change that’s been held in esoteric terms. This is a criticism that Democrats have faced on other issues beyond climate too — criminal justice reform, racial inequality, et cetera, talking about issues in a way that can feel inaccessible or stuck in the ivory tower. Are there other policy issues where you see Democrats making that same mistake?

AES: I think a lot of them. I think AI is one of them. I think we need to be talking about the closest risk that people perceive, rather than the long-range risk that people don’t. It’s particularly hard when the causes of the problem feel less connected to the outcome of the problem.

Then when we don’t take seriously a lot of the pushback in the short run when it comes to the climate crisis, we all know that the pathway to solving it needs to be to get to 100 percent renewable energy. But so often we’ve situated it in the well-being of polar bears or the melting of ice caps, and I don’t know, I’ve never seen an ice cap. In fact, if I ever see an ice cap, I live in Michigan, I’m trying to get it off of something. I’ve never met a polar bear, and if I did, I would run like hell.

It’s a lot easier to just talk about the smokestacks that are pushing putrid chemicals into the lungs of our kids. It’s a lot easier to talk about how we could create an insane number of really high-quality jobs and reduce the price of your electricity in the process by investing in a renewable energy future.

But because we’re so busy talking about these other things, we’ve allowed those who want to continue to run interference for the worst actors — Chevrons and Exxons of the world — to win the argument about jobs and the price of electricity. They’ve used that to drive us backwards, even though our argument is the better one.

It’s because we’re out here having this academic conversation about 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius, rather than have a conversation about, “Hey, we can create a whole lot of jobs that they want to end. We can bring down the price of your electricity, which they want to jack up, and we can do it without burning stuff into the lungs of your kids, which they seem dead-set on doing.”

We win that argument every single day, but, like, enough with polar bears.

AL: Talking about this messaging question, talk about Democrats messaging on criminal justice reform. You’ve been criticized over talking about defunding the police in 2020. You’ve addressed this, and this issue has been litigated over and over in many races, not just yours.

But distinguishing the fact that calls to defund police meant in practice funding social services and addressing the root causes of crime. You’ve deleted some of those posts and said you didn’t want them taken out of context. I’m not asking you about this to relitigate it because I think it misses the broader point and can be an exercise in beating a dead horse or confirming priors rather than clarifying something about your policy position.

But I do want to ask you about this line of attack from a strategy standpoint because you’ve talked about Democrats always being on the defensive. I think we really saw that in the aftermath of calls to defund the police in 2020. Democrats didn’t just shy away from that slogan — they shied away from doing anything meaningful to address concerns around policing.

We’ve seen this narrative coming out of midterms that this cycle, candidates who backed away from campaigning on addressing police abuse are winning. What happened there?

AES: I’ve spent the last several years leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services. Among the roles that I performed in that job was overseeing health in the jail, and that meant overseeing a privatized contract — which taught me that you shouldn’t be privatizing anything having to do with incarceration. Because at the end of the day, who wins? It’s some private contractor. Who loses? It’s the whole system. Everybody whose job is to be taken care of, everybody who works in the system — all of those folks lose.

I also got to work alongside law enforcement. At the end of the day, all of us want to get home safely. That’s the goal here. And often, our answer to that has been a person with a gun for every problem. Turns out that there’s a lot of ways to make sure everybody gets to get home safely that is not that.

So the question of what we want is about investing in the kinds of intervention programs that can prevent a beef from turning into a full-on gun crime. The kinds of things we want are behavioral health responders who can answer a call when somebody’s in a mental health crisis. We want the mental health infrastructure that we have not funded and need to have in local communities.

And we want law enforcement, in the circumstances where the answer to a call needs to be a person with a gun, we want that person with a gun to come from the local community. So that instead of thinking of themselves as policing against that community, they’re policing with the community because those folks are their neighbors.

That means you gotta invest in recruitment, retention, retirement, so people can see themselves having a good, long-range career. If you’re underfunding the folks that you ask to show up with a gun — ask yourself whether or not you’re getting the best-equipped, most empathic folks that have the gun.

“No slogan really captures the complexity and the nuance of what we really want.”

It’s about what we want. And I think the hard part with sloganeering — which is the way we did all things in the early 2020s — is that no slogan really captures the complexity and the nuance of what we really want. But all of us are on the same idea: Everybody should get home safely. Whether you’re somebody who’s being policed against or you’re law enforcement doing the policing, everybody should get home safely.

If we keep that in our minds, I think you can architect a set of solutions that get us past the lack of nuance of a slogan and into the kind of future where people are protected, their bodily autonomy is protected, and that you are answering the call with the right kind of resource to actually make sure that you get to that goal where everybody gets home safely in the end.

AL: There’s been an effort to paint you as a socialist, right? Particularly among Republicans, but also among some centrist Democrats, though you’re not a democratic socialist. You’re not affiliated with DSA. And you’ve said you’re a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.

But why do you think it’s important to tell people that you’re not a socialist, despite having endorsements from the two biggest Democratic socialists in the country? If your policies are similar, why is that a meaningful distinction?

AES: Honestly, I’m just not out there really talking about it. I get asked about it all the time. But it’s not something I’m out there talking about. I’m trained as a scientist, and anybody who knows me knows that I demand data all the time. Make a claim, and then show me why your claim is correct.

Right now, I don’t really ascribe to any one ideology. I want solutions to problems. I know what our goal is. We want a America where everybody can get the healthcare they need, when they need it, without going into bankruptcy or worrying about their financial future.

We want to be able to breathe clean air, drink clean water. We all want to get home safely. We want an economy where everybody is dignified, they have the wages they need to be able to live their life, and nobody is oppressed upon by a few people who can extract from them. Those are all goals that we have.

“I’m trying to solve problems in the actual world.”

So I’m just trying to identify solutions around those problems, which is how I come to my policy positions. I just don’t come at it from an ideological bent, which apparently is what folks want me to do, but I just don’t. It’s just not how I operate in the world.

You get arguments from every side: “Why won’t you say this? Why won’t you—?” I’m like, because, I read a lot, unfortunately. For better or worse, I try to read about the things I talk about. The reality of it is that you might agree about a solution set to a particular problem, but when you ascribe to an ideology, what you’re also ascribing to is the extrema of both ideologies, right?

So I’m not a corporatist. I don’t want corporate capitalism; I want regulated capitalism. I’m also not a socialist because I don’t agree on the extreme on that part, either. I’m trying to solve problems in the actual world. That’s what I’m actually trying to do.

When I think about that, I want everybody to bring data — and maybe it’s just because of my training as a scientist, maybe it’s because of my training as a doctor. But at the end of the day, we’re like, all right, what actually works here? Show me what works, and we’ll do the thing that works. If we can do the thing that works, and we can get all the problems out of the way of the thing that works, then more people have the things that they need, and I’ve done my job.

AL: Turning back to money in this race, this is a big topic of discussion. As we’ve already mentioned, this is one of the most expensive primaries of this cycle. AIPAC has made its biggest investment ever spending against you.

But your opponent has been focused on your tax returns and claimed that the $2.1 million in wealth that you disclosed, including a home in Dubai and earnings from consulting and capital gains and other incomes, undermines your working-class message.

This came up in your debate with Stevens on Monday.

Rep. Haley Stevens: And you have not released your full tax returns. $300,000 in other income, while you sat in the podcast chair and you hawked junk healthcare cures that RFK Jr. would thumbs up. You talk about getting money out of politics and putting money in people’s pockets, but still no one knows who’s putting the money in your pocket.

AL: But you released your tax returns after requesting an extension that would have released them after the primary. Why did you request that extension originally?

AES: You know that property that you mentioned? It’s not mine. It is in the name of my wife, shared with all of her siblings and her parents. They inherited property, and then they sold it, and they purchased a different property. And if you’ve ever transacted with the real estate system or any system in India, it’s not the fastest system. And I would have loved to put everything out immediately. The hard part is that all of the powers that be to get us the forms to do all of those things just did not comply.

In the end, I love my wife, and I’m so grateful for her contribution in this race, and she happens to have property in different places, and that transaction happens to have happened this year, and it takes time to get those numbers.

AL: I know you’ve said you’re focused on Michigan, but you’ve also articulated, at least in private, a vision beyond this cycle for progressives in the left more broadly, talking about how progressives can win other races, primary someone like Sen. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and even put forth a presidential candidate ahead of 2028.

That approach has struck fear in the heart of the Democratic Party apparatus, which has been part of the efforts we discussed to drive fear around this idea that you’re another piece of this insurgent wave that’s threatening their existence, which in many ways you are.

But it sounds like you’re saying that in some ways, your campaign is part of this insurgent wave, but in other ways, it’s not. Is that right?

AES: My job is to serve Michiganders. Everything I’m doing is about trying to make sure that they can afford their groceries, that they know that they have stable housing, that they can get healthcare when they need it, and that their money is kept here.

Now, I’m going to the U.S. Senate because I want the U.S. Senate to vote for legislation to do those things. So part of my job is to make sure that we’ve got a U.S. Senate that can actually do that work. And my hope is that the conversations I can share with the 99 other senators, the persuasion that we can all do for the world that we want to build is enough. But also, let’s be clear, I want to serve Michiganders, and part of doing that is making sure that the U.S. Senate serves their interests.

I think that a lot of people are paying attention to this race because Michigan’s a microcosm of this country. It’s the most important state in the entire country — I’ve always known that — but I think people are starting to figure out why. And that’s because the things that Michiganders need and deserve, frankly, are the things that people across this country need and deserve.

AL: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, thank you so much. We’re going to leave it there.

AES: Thank you.

AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278.

That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor.

Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Abdul El-Sayed on The Intercept Briefing appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s National Killer Police Force

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Within the span of a week, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people in Maine and Texas, and another was hit by a truck and killed in Florida after trying to avoid ICE agents. A fourth person recently died in ICE custody after reportedly being denied medication.

Their deaths prompted yet another round of questioning as to how federal immigration agents have amassed so much power and so little accountability. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Naureen Shah, of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Nayna Gupta, of the American Immigration Council, on the consequences of allowing the government to build a national policing force that’s bringing Trump’s war on immigrants into communities across the country.

“The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies — which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies — make them far larger than anything that we’ve seen at the federal law enforcement level,” says Shah. “Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually most militaries around the world.”

“It’s not really just about who they’re hiring and even the training that they’re getting — it’s the message that they get all the way from the top,” says Shah. “And of course, the message after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good was, you have immunity in the conduct that you’re engaged in. It’s basically a message of, you’re going to get away with it. Don’t worry about it.”

“The signal from the very top of the administration is unmistakable: Arrest as many people as possible without regard for the actual impact on public safety, without regard for the killings that may result, the harm that results.”

Congressional funding for those agencies has outpaced any action on comprehensive immigration reform. And with Republicans pushing to strip voting rights from millions of Americans while campaigning against immigrants, says Gupta, the solution is to neutralize their argument by creating a path to citizenship — a proposal with broad bipartisan support.

“There’s no question that the immigration enforcement agenda that this administration is pursuing ties to voting rights. Now, the question is, given that, how do we still make sure we’re offering solutions and reforms that can be viable and build a broad enough coalition of support to overwhelm that far-right base and the way they’ve weaponized this issue?” Gupta says.

“I think those kinds of conversations are a more effective antidote to the far right’s effort to weaponize the immigration system, not only to hurt immigrants, but to hurt core democratic rights like the right to vote.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

AL: Jessie, the big news this week has been the ongoing fallout from the most recent killings by federal immigration agents in Texas and Maine, along with two other deaths in relation to immigration enforcement within the last month. What did we learn this week about those deaths? And is Congress responding?

JW: We’ve continued to learn more about the ICE officer, David Brouillette, who shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero at a traffic stop in Maine two weeks ago. His ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, said that he called to ask her to vouch for his character, which she refused to do. Instead she’s been speaking publicly about the violence she said she endured during their marriage and his apparent racism, which she believes may have been a motive in the shooting.

Ashley Brouillette: He’s like, well, I need you to lie about my character because this is what it comes down to, like my character. I don’t want you talking about any of the abuse in our relationship, like, this is literally about me actually. I told him that I was not going to lie for him, that I’ve waited years to speak my truth. I’ve been silenced long enough and now I need to come out with everything because a man lost his life.

JW: I think for many, this story is highlighting the kinds of people, and the caliber of people who are being hired at ICE as the agency rapidly staffs up.

There was some additional news The Intercept broke recently. Last Thursday, Intercept contributor Karl Loftus reported that the ICE officers who were on the scene at the Maine shooting were actually wearing body cameras but they just weren’t turned on.

We also learned more about the man who was killed fleeing from ICE agents in Florida. According to Mexican officials, the man who was struck by a truck after fleeing into traffic to avoid ICE, Juan Coronilla Durán, was in the United States legally on a tourist visa and was visiting family.

I want to preface this by saying there are still more details to come about why ICE targeted that vehicle and about the people inside. But so far, the incident does bolster claims that ICE is targeting people based on their race and ethnicity, not a sophisticated calculation about their immigration status, or as Juan Proaño, the CEO of LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the United States, put it when describing the other recent ICE shooting on Democracy Now!:

Juan Proaño: ICE was casing Magnolia Park, which is a 97 percent Hispanic community. They were hunting for Latinos.

JW: As for Congress, there really isn’t much to report. Last week, Democrats sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding new restrictions on ICE after the fatal shootings in Maine and Texas. Democrats also attempted to add enforcement guardrails to a new sweeping immigration bill in the House but were shut down.

There is some noise, but the closer we get to the possibility of Democrats regaining control of Congress in November, the clearer it becomes that there isn’t an appetite from leadership, or frankly much of the caucus, to come up with a Democratic solution to do anything but tinker around the edges of a broken, violent system.

AL: While those shootings were all over national news the last two weeks, the Trump administration has been busy all over the map. Officials froze more than $1 billion in Medicaid funds to California and Minnesota as the president and his allies attack blue states with claims of fraud. The president has also been laying the groundwork to contest the outcome of the 2026 midterms — continuing to push Republicans in Congress to pass an unpopular and unprecedented voter ID law. And on Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the monitoring of polling sites in Arizona.

Meanwhile, the House approved $1.1 trillion in military funding on Wednesday and another $95 billion budget blueprint with $70 billion in funding for the Iran war. The House also passed another war powers resolution directing the president to withdraw the U.S. military from Iran on Thursday. The Pentagon had requested $67 billion to make up for spending on the Iran war, which has already cost $37.5 billion, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told senators in a hearing on Tuesday.

Sen. Dick Durbin: Do you have a new estimate about what the war has cost us so far in this, the fifth month of the first year of this war in Iran?

Pete Hegseth: Senator, the estimate we have as of today is $37.5 billion.

AL: Trump has continued to escalate the war on Iran and promised to strike an Iranian bridge or power plant for every U.S. service member killed as that number continues to climb. Our colleague Nick Turse also reported this week on the unraveling of the administration’s efforts to cover up the number of U.S. military casualties.

We’re talking about cutting all this money from social services while simultaneously pumping tens of billions of dollars into federal law enforcement and the military. These are some of the hallmarks of a country shifting to an authoritarian form of neoliberalism. Is that what’s happening?

JW: Short answer: yes. Longer answer: It does feel pretty clear that the Trump administration is employing classic authoritarian tactics. Step one, focus the country’s attention on a marginalized group with little political power who are already being scapegoated. In this case, immigrants. Step two, use that group to deflect from the fact that you are pillaging all of the resources, privatizing everything and concentrating enhanced military and police power in your control. Step three, which I think we’re all familiar with, crush all dissent.

The administration is really using alleged and unfounded, by the way, fraud by immigrants, whether that be claims of voter fraud, or Medicare and Medicaid fraud to enact policy goals that either enrich or empower them, or enrich and empower their allies.

We don’t need to go back to the Nazis to see authoritarianism in action. For example, In the 1970s and ’80s, former President Ronald Reagan deployed the myth of the “welfare queen.” So this was a woman, typically Black, who defrauds and abuses the welfare system. And he did this in order to push draconian rollbacks in the social safety net. And you can’t divorce that from the Cold War politics and militarism, and rapid wealth and income disparity growth, that was also a key feature of that administration.

So, yes, this is a march to authoritarianism, but it’s a march we’ve been on before.

AL: This is something that came up in my conversation this week with Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council. And she says, “We have over the many months of this administration seen them use the immigration system as the tip of the spear in their attack on democracy and core democratic institutions.”

JW: To her point, we are really seeing the administration use immigrants as a way to come after democracy writ large. I’m really interested in hearing that conversation between the two of you.

AL: I get into all that and more with Nayna Gupta, who also leads the Council’s legislative, administrative, and policy portfolio, and Naureen Shah, the director of government affairs, equality division at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she leads the ACLU’s immigration policy and advocacy work.

Naureen Shah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Naureen Shah: Thanks for having me.

AL: Nayna Gupta, welcome to the show.

Nayna Gupta: Thanks so much for having me.

AL: Within the span of six days, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people — 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and 25-year-old Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Maine. That brings the total number of people fatally shot by immigration agents in Trump’s second term to at least 11. Two more people died in connection with ICE within the last month. A third man — identified this week as a Mexican man on vacation in the U.S. — was struck by a truck after fleeing an encounter in Florida. A fourth man died in [ICE] custody in Georgia after his family says he was denied medicine, reported by our former colleague José Olivares at The Guardian.

Their deaths are not isolated incidents. A new analysis from the ACLU that documented 1,200 ICE incidents last year across eight states finds a pattern of federal immigration enforcement that consistently flouts civil liberties.

Naureen, one of the report’s findings that struck me the most was the emphasis on these most recent killings and deaths not being an aberration but part of a broader systematic pattern. And that the way the U.S. government is conducting immigration enforcement is moving us further away from a liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism. Can you tell us more about that finding and others from the ACLU report?

NS: Again and again, ICE and immigration agents that work for ICE are resorting to violence. They are using the threat of violence and actual physical violence in their interactions with people — not because they are facing a specific threat, but just as a default tool, as a way to compel immediate obedience, as though that is the main tactic they have in understanding how they engage with the public. What we saw was that they weren’t doing so in a professional way. It wasn’t calibrated. It wasn’t specific, as though they were following a carefully designed protocol.

Let me give you an example. There was a situation not far from where I live in Maryland — in Hyattsville, Maryland — where a man was pulled from his car. He is in the traffic intersection being held down. He’s being pinned down by the neck by an ICE agent, and that agent fumbles his gun. His gun falls while he’s doing this. He grabs the gun, picks it back up, and points it at the crowd that has gathered to watch this. A second agent then moves in on the crowd with his weapon raised as well. So you’re seeing them act as careless as they are reckless.

That is really dangerous. Because the other thing we found in the report was that ICE is now on our streets, at our grocery stores, at our parking lots, even at school playgrounds. That presence there in masks, in street clothes, with that kind of aggression is changing the nature of daily life in this country.

When you have to be afraid that when your 15-year-old is waiting for the bus and they are brown, that they may be accosted by a masked agent, that they may be questioned about their citizenship. I’ve heard about people wearing their identification around their necks because they’re so afraid.

That is a change in our country; it’s a change for the worse.

“They are using the threat of violence and actual physical violence in their interactions with people — not because they are facing a specific threat, but just as a default tool, as a way to compel immediate obedience.”

AL: I want to back up a little here and just remind people of the arc of this mass deportation project from the beginning of Trump’s second term, although it was a feature of his previous administration. This attack has reached an unprecedented scale since 2025 when Trump entered office for the second time.

We saw, as you mentioned, Naureen, masked and unidentified ICE agents descend on our cities attacking pro-Palestine students. We saw, as the report notes, the president send the military to cities run by his political opponents, first deploying the National Guard to California to suppress anti-ICE protests, where we also saw a surge of masked federal agents targeting Latinos and grabbing people off the streets at gas stations, grocery stores, churches, and so on.

We started the year with immigration agents flooding Minneapolis and killing two protesters and shooting another who survived. Although the killings of those protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, really drew national attention to this issue in a new way, you all documented just how widespread this kind of action from immigration agents has been over the past year.

While we’ve covered a lot of that at The Intercept, namely the targeting of pro-Palestine students by ICE, ICE has been doing this kind of thing in ordinary neighborhoods across the country. Fifty-two people have also died in ICE custody since Trump reentered the White House, putting the mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody at its highest level in over a decade, more than doubling that rate since he started his second term. That’s according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch.

Nayna, can you talk a little bit about why you think January was a turning point in terms of people paying attention to this?

NG: I’ll just start by saying, the Trump administration right now may have moved away from the more theatrical displays of force that characterized those earlier operations in places like Minneapolis and Chicago.

“Sheer volume is their goal.”

But just as you say, the basic objective has not changed — and that is a fixation on increasing detention and deportation simply for the sake of numbers. This is an administration that has made clear that sheer volume is their goal. What we saw in January was a lot of Americans waking up to the fact that this is the first time in U.S. history that we are seeing the immigration system taken to its extreme and sometimes beyond its legal limits within American communities against long-standing immigrant neighbors and those that stand up for those neighbors.

In other words, while in the past we have had harsh, or punitive or restrictive immigration policies at our border, this is the immigration enforcement system used to the extreme within the interior of the United States in our communities. Folks seeing that in their streets — this indiscriminate enforcement driven by sheer quotas and numbers — is a wake-up call. That includes for folks who voted in support of this president and mass deportation. We’ve heard stories reported early on of communities in places like Missouri that voted in large numbers for the president who are suddenly out on the streets calling for the return of their favorite local business owner and soccer mom who was swept away by arrest and detention.

In other words, a lot of the protests and pushback we’ve seen is both because of the extreme nature of this agenda, but also who it’s targeting — and those are long-standing members of our communities who pose absolutely no public safety threat. We’re seeing a lot more Americans than ever before say, “Wait a minute, why do the laws subject these people to this kind of extreme response? That doesn’t make sense.”

“This is the immigration enforcement system used to the extreme within the interior of the United States in our communities.”

AL: This is for both of you. I want to talk about the people who have been dying in ICE custody, which often does not get as much attention as the shootings. What is happening to people when they enter these facilities?

NG: Look, the immigration detention facility had a record of endemic abuse long before the Trump administration. And now what we’re seeing is the administration sweeping in, again, people who largely pose no public safety threat, who have no prior criminal convictions, who are being put into a system that no longer records where they are in the system so that family members and lawyers are unable to locate or find their loved ones.

We’re talking about a system where now under the Trump administration, the vast majority of people locked up in these inhumane facilities don’t even have a right to a court hearing in the immigration system to make a case for their release. The administration is rapidly expanding the use of mandatory detention so that people who would have a good case for release don’t get to make that. That means that then folks are stuck inside, and sometimes when U.S. citizens or folks with lawful status get swept into these detention facilities, it can take weeks before they’re able to show that they shouldn’t even be there — because they don’t have access to that basic kind of due process.

“We’re seeing an average of one death every eight days out of the immigration detention facilities across the country.”

Then finally, again, the endemic, abusive conditions of this system predate the Trump administration, but this administration has taken that to an all-new extreme.

At this point, we’re seeing an average of one death every eight days out of the immigration detention facilities across the country, and the kinds of conditions we’re hearing about include starvation; not just medical neglect but intentional medical abuse; people not being able to receive life-saving medical treatments; pregnant women not being given the support they need.

This is extreme inhumanity, and that is what folks are facing when they go inside. And it’s a lot harder to shine a light on those abuses because we don’t have viral video footage like we do when we see some of these shootings and killings in our streets.

NS: If you’ve ever been to one of these detention facilities, you get a sense of the geography that’s at play. The geography of a detention facility is that sometimes you’re driving hours from the nearest city. These are in the woods. They are in areas that no one is supposed to be able to reach.

The Trump administration has a design. They have a plan. They want to put people in detention sites that are remote, where lawyers have a harder time getting access, where journalists are not going to visit, and they don’t want people to be knocking on the doors and finding out what’s going on inside.

They don’t want congressional staff and members of Congress to be there either because what’s happening inside is truly frightening. It is straight out of the most dystopian novel, which is that you go inside these detention facilities, and you have no ability to reach back out into the world and get that lawyer to help you navigate the system — or even talk to an ICE officer and say, “I have no idea what’s going to happen to me.”

“Once you go in, you are stuck there in the most nightmarish kind of way.”

The most tragic cases are the ones where people need something as basic as their heart medication, and without it they will die, and they can’t get answers. They can’t get seen by a doctor. There is just no way to reach out to people to say, “This is happening to me.” That is why we’re seeing the record number of deaths in ICE detention because once you go in, you are stuck there in the most nightmarish kind of way.

We hear from people, not as much as we would if people actually had working phones in all these detention facilities. The ACLU just published a report with Human Rights Watch about Camp [East] Montana, the largest detention facility that’s on a military base. The conditions there are appalling. It really just strikes at your conscience to think that people are living in this kind of nightmarish condition where they don’t think they’re ever going to make it back out of these facilities — and that, again, is what the Trump administration wants to do.

There was an ICE official who last year said we’re going to create the “Amazon Prime” of deportations. They want to treat people like they are not human beings, and that is partly why they put them in these detention sites; it’s to be able to get them out of public view quickly and deported quickly.

That is just anathema to our Constitution, our entire system. Under our laws, detention is not supposed to be used as widely as it is being used; it’s meant to effectuate a final order of removal. That doesn’t mean that it’s meant to be used as punishment or to deter people from coming here or to terrorize people into self-deporting, but we know that’s the Trump administration’s aim.

“Under our laws, detention is not supposed to be used as widely as it is being used; it’s meant to effectuate a final order of removal.”

AL: I just want to mention while we’re on this note, the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a pro-Palestine student targeted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose arrest by ICE I reported last year. In his case, on Tuesday, a panel for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a ruling that had released him from ICE custody. He told me that, though, that he was “in good spirit, unshaken, and determined and hopeful.”

[Break]

Turning back to the most recent shootings in Maine and Texas — neither of those men were the people ICE was “supposed to be targeting.” The shootings also renewed criticism of ICE having slashed its training standards for new recruits, including cutting the amount of time that they had to go through training. They actually instituted new training in June in response to backlash, though they said it was to protect ICE agents from “coordinated campaigns of violence against them.”

The AP reported that David Brouillette was the officer who shot Guerrero in Maine. Brouillette was an Army veteran with a history of mental health issues and domestic violence, according to relatives.

Naureen, what do we know about how ICE is screening officers, and does that really matter when even vetted agents are also carrying out these policies or involved in misconduct?

NS: A number of members of Congress have been asking questions about ICE’s vetting and hiring standards, as well as their training standards. What they have heard from the new DHS secretary, Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin, was meant to assuage them, meant to assure them that things are going back to the way they were before and that standards are going to be increased, that the training is going to go back up to its full level. But as you say, it’s not really just about who they’re hiring and even the training that they’re getting — it’s the message that they get all the way from the top.

“The message after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good was, you have immunity in the conduct that you’re engaged in.”

And of course, the message after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good was, you have immunity in the conduct that you’re engaged in. It’s basically a message of, “You’re going to get away with it. Don’t worry about it.” Even now, after these latest shootings, when Secretary Mullin said OK, we’re going to pull back on vehicle arrests, the very next day, the president was out there saying yes to vehicle arrests.

The signal from the very top of the administration is unmistakable: Arrest as many people as possible without regard for the actual impact on public safety, without regard for the killings that may result, the harm that results. And we’ve still got an ICE arrest quota, and we still have ICE officers out there who are being told to just get it done.

As Nayna was saying, it doesn’t matter for them how many U.S. citizens, how many green card holders, or how many kids. One of the things our report documents is how many kids have been caught up by ICE and other immigration agents. We identify more than 200 kids, including 32 U.S. citizen kids, who were subjected to misconduct and targeted by ICE.

They just keep going and you don’t see any accountability for the missteps — the clear missteps — that they have made, let alone, real investigations into these killings that result in people being held accountable.

AL: Yeah, talking about not taking accountability — I remember listening to Tom Homan when he went to Minneapolis in January, effectively blaming the shootings of Good and Pretti on “hateful rhetoric” toward ICE.

NG: It is important to talk about some of these political players at the top. Again, this is an enforcement agenda, as Naureen is alluding to, that rewards volume and scale.

Just before these most recent shootings, there was reporting on how the White House was doubling down again on a quota. We have heard reports from law enforcement leaders who engage directly with people inside the administration that Stephen Miller himself was on the phone with ICE field offices around the country asking them why arrest numbers weren’t higher.

When you combine that kind of pressure from the White House with a workforce that has grown exponentially very quickly with relaxed training, vetting, and hiring standards, and a slush fund from Congress that has no meaningful accountability and oversight — these killings are no surprise. They are not isolated incidents. They are inevitable results of the combination of all of these factors that are at play. So even with more training and vetting, so long as Stephen Miller is on the phone, and Homan is backing him up, pushing for higher arrest numbers, I don’t think we can expect to see much difference on the ground.

That being said, in the immediate term, it is incumbent on members of Congress to push for training, vetting, and hiring. This is an administration that marketed this agenda as being focused on the “worst of the worst,” that has used public safety as a pretext to advance mass deportation — when they themselves are hiring people with questionable criminal records that underscore an inability to manage tense situations like the kind of enforcement that they are being thrown into, and like what we’ve seen out of Maine from the officer there.

This administration “marketed this agenda as being focused on the ‘worst of the worst’ that has used public safety as a pretext to advance mass deportation — when they themselves are hiring people with questionable criminal records.”

AL: I also just want to mention before we move on to the next question that The Intercept recently reported on ICE adopting a new dress code after the deaths of Araujo and Guerrero and a botched raid in Las Vegas. An ICE official who spoke to us anonymously, citing the Las Vegas incident where a man was tackled to the ground by two plainsclothed people, said, “What an embarrassment the Vegas video was. Those two fucking clowns should’ve been immediately fired. Half these fucking new DOs” — that’s deportation officers — “don’t even know the basics of immigration law or how to process an alien. They hired a bunch of fucking clowns and they look sloppy as shit.”

Naureen, we spoke last year for a story about ICE rapidly expanding its cooperation with state and local police departments, even with wildlife and gaming commissions, and I remember you describing this dystopian image of a nationalized police force dispatched to do Trump’s political bidding. Does that match up to what you’re seeing now? Is it not quite there, or is it worse?

NS: We are at a really dangerous point with this national deportation policing force, which is what we call the cannibalization of federal law enforcement and state and local law enforcement to serve the mass deportation agenda. What we see all around the country is that law enforcement agencies, sometimes the entire law enforcement agency, are deputized to work for ICE. There’s a huge financial incentive for them to do so. They can get performance bonuses. They can get people’s salaries paid for, new cars, new phones.

What it means is that you have signed up to work for ICE. And so we see, for instance, highway patrols in some states just posting up. Their weekend duty is to set up checkpoints and have ICE in cars nearby, and they stop people for the purpose of funneling people to ICE.

“What we have now is local police doing ICE’s bidding.”

You’ve got local police who are in Florida. They’re seeing people and saying, “Hey, you’re walking your dog in the wrong part of the beach. No dog walking here. And by the way, where were you born? You seem to be speaking with an accent. Oh, I’ve gotta call ICE.” So what we have now is local police doing ICE’s bidding. From a democracy perspective, what’s so dangerous about that is that ICE is not just a law enforcement agency, it is a political tool of the White House.

They’ve made no bones about it during the funding shutdown last year. The president threatened to deploy ICE to the airports and did so really in a blatant political stunt to try to put pressure on Congress and say, “Look, I’ve got ICE and I can send them after you if I don’t like what you’re doing. If you’re putting the squeeze on me, I’ll use ICE to put the squeeze on you.”

So if you look not very far into the future and you think about, well, there’s more than 50,000 law enforcement agents that are now working for ICE — with ICE directly from another federal law enforcement agency, as you’ve reported, from the FBI, from state and local police, they’ve got more than 50,000.

Every day there’s even more law enforcement agencies signing up to work for ICE, and now they can be deployed by the president, by Stephen Miller, to go after dissent. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s not a hypothetical because we’ve seen it in states all around the country.

“Every day, there’s even more law enforcement agencies signing up to work for ICE, and now they can be deployed by the president, by Stephen Miller, to go after dissent.”

In our report, which was just looking at 2025, we identified more than 780 people who were engaged in First Amendment-protected activity. They’re documenting ICE’s behavior, they’ve got their cellphones on recording. They’re not trained legal observers, they’re just people. But there’s also members of the clergy, elected officials, journalists — more than 780 of them who were targeted or subjected to misconduct by immigration agents.

I think that should scare all of us when ICE is tear-gassing people. We documented 132 times when immigration agents were directly targeting people with chemical irritants, like spraying them in the face. That is brazen. Again, thinking about that as a politicized force, concentrated power at the beck and call of the president, not just here in Washington, D.C., but in states all around the country, it is truly frightening from the perspective of our democracy.

AL: You mentioned the reporting that I did in May on the FBI redirecting a quarter of its staff — over 9,000 personnel — to target immigrants. And at the state and local level, cooperation between federal immigration agents and local police has exploded under Trump. In his first year alone, the number of local and state police departments partnering with ICE to do immigration enforcement increased by 600 percent. As of July, ICE has partnered with more than 2,100 such agencies. Naureen, you touched on this a little bit, but Nayna, I wonder if you can elaborate on how those specific partnerships are making this deportation machine possible.

NG: Let me start with the diversion of resources from other federal agencies. One thing here that’s important to talk about on both fronts is public safety. These are agencies — federal agencies — that have typically focused on core public safety priorities like political violence, domestic terrorism, human and drug trafficking. Instead, these are now officers that are focused on low-level immigration enforcement with very little understanding of the immigration system altogether. That is a way to supercharge this mass deportation agenda at the federal level, but also a way in which it undermines safety for all Americans, not only immigrant communities.

At the local level, this expansion of partnerships between local sheriffs and the federal government absolutely, as always, can serve as a force multiplier for ICE. That means police officers out on the street using routine traffic stops that can turn into detention, deportation, family separation, or even death. There was the young 3-year-old boy who died because his mother had been deported; and she had been picked up by a local police officer during a traffic stop. That is an example of how these partnerships have real human harms.

Now on the public safety front, what we know is that when local police are deputized to work as ICE agents, of course they lose the trust of community members because communities become afraid that reporting crime or contacting public government services will result in deportation and detention.

Earlier in the administration, we saw a public post from a sheriff in Tennessee who said that a baby died in the care of a non-citizen caretaker who was too scared to call 911 in Tennessee because of recent raids that had just happened at the hands of Tennessee State Police officers and federal agents.

So those public safety implications are real, and at the [American Immigration] Council, we have been talking to sheriffs around the country who do not want to enter into these partnerships because of how it erodes their credibility and how it works against public safety. These are sheriffs in places, including North Carolina, who say, “We can’t investigate homicides in immigrant communities if we’re in bed with the Trump administration and ICE.”

We’ve seen the most conservative sheriffs in Florida who cozied up to this agenda saying, “Wait a minute, why are we going after people who pose no safety threat for these kinds of arrests?” So this kind of collaboration, as Naureen said, it obviously has implications for our democracy. It’s growing our federal police force. But it also has terrible negative effects for actually protecting public safety and maintaining public trust of public institutions.

We can expect the kind of violence we’re seeing, not only at the hands of federal agents, but also local police officers if we continue to see the administration expand this kind of collaboration.

AL: I’m not really sure people grasp just how unprecedented the amount of federal money we’re giving to ICE and CBP is compared to when those agencies were created after 9/11. Congress just gave ICE and CBP another $70 billion on top of the money allocated in Trump’s economic bill last year, which allocated $170 billion over four years for federal immigration enforcement.

Naureen, can you put in perspective for our listeners that explosion in funding, and how is that money shaping what federal immigration agents are doing, what resources and the kinds of weapons that they have?

NS: The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies — which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies — make them far larger than anything that we’ve seen at the federal law enforcement level. Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually most militaries around the world. So most militaries around the world are funded less than ICE and Border Patrol at this moment in our nation’s history.

If you think about where ICE even comes from, like how it came into being, it came into being after the 9/11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a pretty young agency as they go, less than 25 years old. And even after 9/11, which spawned a lot of legitimate concern and also a lot of hysteria about terrorism and immigration. Even after that, we didn’t see this kind of funding. Nothing near this kind of funding.

We’ve actually got a bar chart that shows just how enormously, like a staggering amount of money this is in comparison to anything ICE and Border Patrol got before. Even if you compare it to the first Trump administration, even if you look at several years combined, it does not meet $240 billion. So what can they do with this money?

“100 million, which is about a third of the country, that’s how many people they want to get rid of.”

I mentioned that they want to create the “Amazon Prime” of deportations. It means that they can not only expand ICE’s footprint directly in terms of hiring, but they can do more of what we’ve been talking about, which is incentivizing state and local police to join their ranks through a program called 287(g).

They’re going to spend billions of dollars on that, billions of dollars on detention, and detention not to make it more safe. It will be deadly. It will be large facilities where people are just left to suffer all kinds of abuse and all kinds of medical neglect, and of course, just to deport as many people as they can.

It’s worth remembering that their ambition is to deport 100 million people. That’s what they’ve said on their social media platform. 100 million, which is about a third of the country, that’s how many people they want to get rid of. And they’ve got a lot of ideas about how to do it. So they will be spending that money unless Congress takes it back, and we will certainly be looking for members of Congress now to make that commitment that they will take that money back because it is just too large a sum.

AL: I want to end on how immigration is coming up in the midterms. There’s been an intractable debate on immigration reform in Congress for as long as I can remember. Congress could create a path to citizenship for people. We saw efforts to that effect under President Joe Biden, which were then used to attack him and the eventual nominee, Kamala Harris, in 2024 as a preview of what Trump would do in office.

Meanwhile, Republicans are campaigning in this midterm cycle on attacking immigrants and taking advantage of anti-immigrant sentiment among their base. We also have Trump basically trying to hold the GOP hostage until they pass his SAVE Act bill that has previously failed and is even unpopular among Republicans and would require people to prove their citizenship to vote with a birth certificate or a passport, documents that more than 21 million Americans already lack access to, according to the Brennan Center.

I wonder if you could talk about how the war on immigrants is tied to the war to strip people of their right to vote. Nayna, I’ll start with you.

How is the war on immigrants tied to the war to strip people of their right to vote?

NG: The challenge of advocating and pushing to reform and fix the immigration system has always been that so many of the people impacted are quite obviously the most politically disenfranchised. They’re non-citizens. They don’t have a right to vote. That means that pathways to permanent status and citizenship could wake up new constituencies that would be a threat to the far right, given the far right’s anti-immigrant sentiment. That is always a backdrop in the fight for advancing reform.

We have, over the many months of this administration, seen them use the immigration system as the tip of the spear in their attack on democracy and core democratic institutions. Once again, we’re seeing the administration use immigration and the authorities they’ve been given in the system to attack fundamental voting rights — whether that’s using immigration agents at polling locations, whether that’s pushing back against these efforts to provide folks pathways to permanent status and protect them from the arm of ICE.

So there’s no question that the immigration enforcement agenda that this administration is pursuing ties to voting rights. Now, the question is, given that, how do we still make sure we’re offering solutions and reforms that can be viable and build a broad enough coalition of support to overwhelm that far-right base and the way they’ve weaponized this issue?

At the Council, what we’ve observed is that while we’ve done a great job at talking about what we don’t want — we don’t want this many dollars, we don’t want an immigration detention system to enforce civil immigration rules — it’s been harder to explain to folks how do you get rid of those harmful parts of the system but still have a system of rules.

We still have to enforce immigration laws in the United States. And what we’ve been doing is talking to members of Congress, talking to the public about what that can look like, that you can have penalties for violations of civil immigration law. But deportation should not be this one-size-fits-all punishment, and that is the system that we have right now.

“Deportation should not be this one-size-fits-all punishment.”

When we talk in those terms, there are many Americans who are increasingly uncomfortable with what they’re seeing, given the killings of people like Renee and Alex, but who still believe in a system of rules and are worried about an America that welcomes anybody and everybody. And so what we’re really saying is, you can enforce rules and have a system, but no, it doesn’t have to mean that any person in violation of civil immigration law could be subject to arrest and mass incarceration. What does that look like? Those kinds of conversations are a more effective antidote to the far right’s effort to weaponize the immigration system, not only to hurt immigrants, but to hurt core democratic rights like the right to vote.

NS: Most Americans still support citizenship as a pathway. More than 80 percent of Americans support a path to citizenship for Dreamers, people who came here as kids. That includes 54 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup poll from July. [Editor’s note: 56 percent of Republicans support Dreamers’ citizenship in the Gallup poll.]

So even with years and years of anti-immigrant scapegoating, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, all support a path to citizenship. I think it gets to what Nayna is speaking to, which is a value of fairness, a value that cuts across a lot of different parts of our political spectrum — a sense that people ought to have a fair shot.

When we talk about the rules of the system, we are talking right now about if you were playing this, if you were explaining this as a board game to a child, there would be no way for most people to win that board game. They would just keep landing on go directly to jail, do not pass go, just go to jail.

That is how our immigration system is set up. It’s a game with rules, and the rules are rigged so that people will fail, and they will be punished, and they might even lose their lives, and they might even be torn from their small children. And of course, we’ve seen heartbreaking cases like that. So the ACLU is seeing this moment as a moment for policymakers to call for transformative change to an immigration system that has long been cruel, and has long not served anybody’s interest.

“It’s a game with rules, and the rules are rigged so that people will fail.”

Right now, that system is on overdrive. We are seeing that cruelty on display, and it means that we just need to transform this entire system. How do you turn a broken, upside-down system right-side up? The first thing is that people in this country, millions and millions of them, need a path. They need a path to being here with legal residency and ultimately with citizenship.

But if we continue to have a system where more than 10 million people — who are our neighbors, our loved ones, ourselves, people who are working, who keep this country going — if those people are stuck in this game that they just cannot win, we’ll never have a system that works. Enforcement will always be broken.

It will always mean people being put in detention because they just never had a chance at any kind of alternative where they could live freely and openly and with legal authorization. And, just say also, that’s really terrible for our democracy. I think about, I’ve got little kids, I think about the country they’re going to grow up in.

If Stephen Miller has his way, the undocumented people in this country and their U.S.-born children are not going to have the same right to education. They won’t have the same right to free speech. So two decades from now, if we were having this conversation and one of us was undocumented or one of us was the child of an undocumented person, Stephen Miller’s pipe dream is that some of us would have the right to speak our minds on this, in this conversation, and some of us would be afraid. That’s where we’re headed to unless we have transformative change to this broken immigration system.

AL: We’re going to leave it there. Naureen Shah and Nayna Gupta, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

NS: Thanks for having me.

NG: Thanks so much.

AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor.

Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Trump’s National Killer Police Force appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s Formula for Forever Wars

The Intercept Briefing — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0000

President Donald Trump blew up the temporary ceasefire after the U.S. launched a series of airstrikes against Iran over the weekend. The two nations have continued to exchange strikes throughout the week, with Iran targeting U.S. allies in the Middle East, as Congress debates further entangling the United States military with Israel — a proposal that would give Israel enormous leverage over U.S. defense policy.

“This is a formula for a forever war,” national security reporter Spencer Ackerman tells The Intercept Briefing. A major champion of such forever wars was Sen. Lindsey Graham, who passed away over the weekend. “Lindsey Graham never met a war he didn’t like, never met a war he didn’t want to send other people’s children to wage,” says Ackerman, who writes the Substack Forever Wars. “The white whale for Lindsey Graham and many others in the bridge between neoconservatism and MAGA was Iran — assaulting Iran not only at home, but rolling back its regional challenge to U.S. and Israeli power in the Middle East.”

“Whatever else MAGA says about wars,” says Ackerman, “what it wants is domination. It wants domination not only at home, but abroad. That’s where Graham recognized — that instead of being someone like John McCain, who sought to occasionally butt against, fight against Donald Trump — that Graham could help maneuver Trump into being a vehicle for their shared project. And he did that with really tremendous success.”

“You are seeing a more rent-seeking U.S. empire than ever before as a defining characteristic … of the Trump-era empire,” says Ackerman, on the administration’s thirst to turn countries in its orbit, like Venezuela, into “vassal that pay tribute.” “This is the sort of thing that an empire in decline does. Rather than figuring out new strategies to growth, it redistributes wealth from its own people to its driving oligarchic sectors.”

Politics reporter Akela Lacy also drops in to discuss how the turmoil at home and abroad is impacting the midterms. After Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner dropped out of the race, Lacy says, “Maine Democrats are in a situation where they’re all trying to become the nominee that the party picks to replace Platner on the ballot to go against Collins in November. Many of those candidates have now come out and called to abolish ICE outright after the shooting in Maine.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

AL: Jessie, we were anticipating having a slow July, but the news has not slowed down. Trump reignited the U.S. war with Iran, resuming airstrikes on the country, and said we’re taking over the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, Congress is trying to pass the National Defense Authorization Act after several weeks of gridlock, asking for a record $1.15 trillion in funding. On Tuesday, Senate Democrats blocked the bill in protest of the Iran war and over a provision that would more closely integrate the U.S. and Israeli military. On Wednesday, more than half of House Democrats voted to strip $3.3 billion in aid to Israel from the measure, though the effort failed in the broader House.

And within the last week, there have been four ICE-related deaths. Federal immigration agents shot and killed two fathers: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián [Durán] Guerrero in Maine. That brings the total number of people fatally shot by immigration agents in Trump’s second term to 11. On Tuesday, a third man was struck by a truck fleeing agents in Florida. And a Venezuelan man died in custody in Georgia after being denied medicine, reported by our former colleague Jose Olivares at The Guardian.

At least 52 people have died in ICE custody during Trump’s second term. It’s the highest level in a decade according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights [and Human Rights Watch].

Jessie, this week you covered how lawmakers are responding, or not, to Trump’s deadly immigration agenda. What did you find out?

JW: When I was looking into it, I was wondering where is this momentum that we saw in January and February around immigration, around at least saying, ICE is wrong, the actions that ICE is taking are immoral, are against the code of our nation. Those were the kinds of things you were hearing in January and February.

That was in response, obviously, to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota that elicited a huge response — not just from Congress, but also you saw a massive response in the streets, people coming out in droves to support their community to say this isn’t right, to say that you can’t just rob us of vital members of our community.

We’re really not seeing that same intensity either in policies that were put out, even policies that were going to go nowhere. Obviously, Democrats caved on DHS spending in April. We just really haven’t seen the same moment that we did in January and February.

I had a long conversation with Congresswoman Delia Ramirez, who introduced the “Melt ICE” Act in January. That bill would end the Department of Homeland Security’s funding to detain and monitor immigrants. She’s characterized it as a first step, but really when she’s had conversations with her colleagues in the wake of these two really horrific shootings, she’s found that there just isn’t that same intensity, there isn’t that same momentum for action.

There’s two things happening from her perspective, from what she told me. One of them is racism and the fact that the people who were killed most recently were not U.S. citizens. Alex Pretti and Renee Good were, and they were also white, and that obviously changes the tenor, at least for the media and the public.

Then there’s the fact that without the large national outpouring, without voters really pushing politicians, they aren’t motivated because their donor class is not motivated. They benefit from a broken immigration system where people are forced to take these low-wage jobs. So in an absence of kind of a massive public outcry of people pushing their politicians, you just aren’t going to see that action, and that’s really coming from my conversation with her.

But I think you can see that in the way that Democratic politicians have not risen in this moment — and I would argue they didn’t rise in January and February — but certainly we saw more energy.

The other big news of the week was as the world closely watched for updates on Sen. Mitch McConnell’s health, Sen. Lindsey Graham died from a heart condition. This of course happened in the backdrop of the looming midterms where Republicans currently hold a slim majority in the senate.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins who is running in a chaotic Senate race, is facing protests for voting to give DHS $70 billion for immigration enforcement after ICE agents fatally shot Guerrero in Maine. Akela, there is so much to unpack here. Can you talk about the political implications unfolding here and what you’re watching for in the midterms?

AL: This is really shaping what was already a tumultuous situation in the Maine Senate race, where obviously, Graham Platner dropped out last week over an allegation of rape. Now Maine Democrats are in a situation where they’re all trying to become the nominee that the party picks to replace Platner on the ballot to go against Collins in November.

Many of those candidates have now come out and called to abolish ICE outright after the shooting in Maine. That was something that Platner had campaigned on, obviously, prior to the shooting. Our colleague Noah Hurowitz is actually working on a story about this that you can read at The Intercept.

We see candidates adopting this sense of urgency around ICE that is shaping the campaigns of insurgent candidates and frustration among voters right now. Jessie, you’re talking about feeling like the momentum on the ground against ICE is not being matched in Congress, something that’s animating the midterms and emphasizing this sort of split-screen where people don’t feel like Democratic leadership or longtime incumbents are meeting the moment. We’re seeing that shape now not just this race in Maine, but we’ve seen that be a rallying call for many of the candidates who have won their races already this primary cycle.

One thing that I thought was interesting about how this is unfolding in Maine is that one of the candidates, Dr. Nirav Shah, who I spoke to actually before Platner dropped out of the race — he had stopped short of calling to abolish ICE outright. He said it can’t exist in its current form, whether we reform it or dismantle it or transfer its duties to another body, it has to go.

But earlier this week, he came out and said “Abolish ICE” outright, after the shooting. So we are seeing this have a real effect on how candidates are running their races. Even people who might have thought saying “Abolish ICE” a week ago — wasn’t the right strategy.

JW: That’s one thing in my conversation with Congresswoman Ramirez that came up, is that people are not feeling as if Congress is meeting this moment or meeting them where they’re at.

They’re saying, we’re in the streets. We’re risking our lives, our freedom, in some cases. Obviously, we’ve seen the prosecutions that came out of Prairieland, those protests. So people are saying, “We’re risking our lives, we’re risking our freedom, and you’re going to lunches and meetings on the Hill like everything is normal.”

I do think that’s going to be a motivating force in these midterms, and we’ll see if candidates meet that moment. Or if they end up on the side of most of Congress, which seems to be doing not much of anything on this really horrific issue.

AL: You mentioned that there’s been protests against Collins in Maine after the ICE shooting, pointing to the fact that she voted for ICE funding without any conditions. I’m interested to see if the most recent killings and deaths related to ICE have any effect on what appeared — even in the week where the last Platner scandal broke — she was still leading him in polling. I’m curious to see if this will affect that in the coming months.

JW: That’s definitely something to look out for. The way that it’s worked has been very regionally specific. I think we’ve seen Minnesota really come together and come out on this issue. Now we’re seeing it in Maine, and perhaps in Texas as well.

There’s obviously so much to get into. The Iran war, the proposed U.S.–Israel partnership, Lindsey Graham’s death and his foreign policy legacy. We’re going to talk about all of this with national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, who’s reported on the war on terror since 2002.

His most recent piece reflects on Graham’s legacy of warmongering and preserving Guantánamo Bay, or as Ackerman describes it, “an extrajudicial cage that is still swallowing people.”

Ackerman is the author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” which traces the political, legal, and cultural evolution of the last 25 years and how the boomerang has come back home.

Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many U.S. bases. He’s won a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award, and currently writes for Zeteo and Forever Wars, where you can sign up for his newsletter.

[Break]

JW: Spencer Ackerman, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing.

Spencer Ackerman: Thank you for having me back, Jessica.

JW: There’s a lot that we have to discuss with you, but first, we’re going to start with the broken temporary ceasefire deal between the United States and Iran. The United States launched a wave of airstrikes over the weekend against Iran; the two countries have exchanged strikes throughout the week.

On Monday, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. military would reinstate its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and implement a 20 percent cargo charge. The latter, he has since scrapped.

Spencer, what is known at this point about why we’re at war again with Iran, and why the U.S.–Iran memorandum of understanding to bring a permanent end to the war failed?

SA: The simple answer is the fifth paragraph in the memorandum of understanding, which despite what I think fairly counts as a clear concession by the United States that Iran henceforth will be able to control and hence impose some manner of cost on shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the United States rejects that interpretation and rejects that outcome.

Most importantly, that paragraph in the memorandum of understanding indicates just how deeply Iran has triumphed in this conflict that the United States and Israel brought to it. Before February 28, there were no costs, no fees on transits across one of the world’s most economically important waterways. That was the result of Iranian decision-making up to this point, a lot of which we don’t have a great deal of fidelity on, but basically represented a step that Iranians, even under the decades-long enmity with the United States and Israel, never felt that it had reason to impose.

It is a really historical shift. It is a pivot away from what has been an absolutely central aspect of not just U.S., but Western economic hegemony going back centuries. Which is to say what we in the West like to call free trade, freedom of navigation — that is a major thing for the United States to lose, and the Trump administration knows that. The shipping industry knows that.

The Trump administration, when it reached the memorandum of understanding, appears to have operated in such a way that it would agree, as negotiated by Trump’s envoys — his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his buddy Steve Witkoff — to do whatever necessary once the markets reacted with such shock to this war to get Iran to stop firing and to make it appear for those markets like there was going to be a resolution of the conflict.

The memorandum of understanding represents the pathway to that resolution, and so the Trump administration had been hailing it as a way back to normalcy and a way out of dire economic straits. So the U.S. needed that memorandum of understanding for the shooting to stop, but it would not accept the state that it had agreed to under the memorandum of understanding, which basically saw Iran agree to waive fees during the 60-day period authorized under the memorandum of understanding to achieve a lasting peace deal, some form of resolution over the nuclear file, and also explicitly authorized Iran and its neighbor Oman — which also has significant territorial waters in that strait — to come up with essentially a lasting mechanism to provide for continued access in transit, a new way of doing business for global shipping.

Once the United States started seeing Iran basically keep control over those shipping routes, it started attacking Iran. Iran replied not just by harassing shipping, but also by resuming its missiles and drone strikes at U.S. facilities in Gulf countries that host them — and that basically broke down the ceasefire.

I think the question going forward now is what new or expanded capacity the United States has not only to open the strait but keep it open. I think that we saw during the month of shooting that preceded the ceasefire that led to the memorandum of understanding, that the United States lacks that.

This is not either a military or an economic calculation that favors U.S. power, that the Iranians have leveraged this rather intelligently in order to hold something very, very desired by the United States and indeed the global economy at risk. That’s where this stands.

“Once the United States started seeing Iran basically keep control over those shipping routes, it started attacking Iran.”

JW: It’s hard to imagine under these circumstances an end to the war in a real sense. And even Trump, when asked by CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins if bombing Iran was the new normal, said, “We were in Vietnam for 19 years.”

Kaitlan Collins: Mr. President, you noted the United States is bombing Iran again. You’ve been bombing Iran for months now. Is this just the new normal for the American people?

Donald Trump: No. We were in Vietnam for 19 years. We’re here for four months. I think we’ve done a lot. We’ve knocked out their navy in a period of one month.

JW: At this point, where do you see this heading? Trump hasn’t ruled out sending ground troops to Iran, but he also hasn’t done it yet. Do you think there’s a possibility or are there signals that there could be an off-ramp? Or is this a forever war that’s about to happen?

SA: It’s absolutely a forever war. I think that the future looks a lot like the present here, where you have essentially an unresolved situation where the United States does not accept Iranian control over the strait, regardless of the fact that it conceded as much in the memorandum of understanding.

The Iranians will not relinquish this concession over the strait now that it achieved it in this memorandum of understanding, however much a dead letter it might formally be. That deadlock is going to persist. There’s also the dire math of the U.S. missile interceptor magazine, which is to say that a whole lot of very expensive missile interceptors that the United States possesses will have to, over now an extended period, be placed in the Middle East, in the Gulf countries that host the U.S. presence up against far, far, far cheaper Iranian missiles and drones.

You heard the president say that the Iranian navy has been knocked out. Well, if the Iranian navy can swarm around, as we’ve seen them able to do even during the so-called ceasefire, shipping in the Gulf, then that kind of raises a question of how, even with whatever higher-end capacities the U.S. military has knocked out, whether that represents an actual defeat of the Iranian navy or whether Iranian naval capabilities remain sufficient to keep this kind of harassment going.

When we hear the president compare this war to Vietnam, that’s a five-alarm fire. Yes, the Vietnam War lasted a very, very long time. That’s what now we’re looking at even in month four of this war, I guess more like month five at this point. This was a war that both Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth said was over.

Marco Rubio: Operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objectives of that operation.

Pete Hegseth: Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield.

SA: And clearly it’s not over. We are in just a shape change of this. There will be periods, I would imagine, of continued diplomacy. But until the United States is able to either, A, deliver some sort of finishing blow against the Iranians that they find intolerable, which I don’t really see much indication of them doing, or the Iranians decide through whatever coercive measures that they will give up control of the strait — this situation will persist.

All of the drivers of this conflict, and we haven’t even gotten to Israel here, which would prefer to both destroy the regime and collapse the Iranian state. This is a formula for a forever war. This is a formula for — if not necessarily every single day seeing exchanges of U.S., Iranian, and even potentially Israeli fire — a situation where, like the questioner said, this is a new normal. This is what the Middle East risks looking like. The coercive ability of the United States to break this logjam, the diplomatic will necessary, has simply not been in evidence.

JW: So Congress obviously has a role here. We’re speaking on Wednesday, July 15, and things may have changed by the time people are hearing this.

But as of Wednesday, the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes Pentagon spending, is stalling in the Senate. Democrats are refusing to take up the NDAA, arguing that it’s a “permission slip” for the Trump administration as they wage war on Iran.” Others balked at the fact that the proposal would increase authorized defense spending by $80 billion. And the NDAA includes the United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, which would facilitate between the two countries technology sharing from weapons development to artificial intelligence.

Here is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Fox trying to sell it.

Benjamin Netanyahu: I’m calling it from aid to partnership. So we take away the money that is given to Israel, which is one part. But the other part is we invest, co-invest in equal measures in the new technologies that are needed to give our military and your military the advantage. So we want — there are some unbelievable projects.

JW: Spencer, what’s at stake in this National Defense Authorization Act fight?

SA: The U.S. has co-production deals for military hardware and technological development with a number of countries that’s part of the AUKUS partnership with the U.K. and Australia that the Biden administration spearheaded. It also has co-production deals with Israel for things like the Iron Dome missile defense system.

“There’s just nothing like this that exists outside of this proposal.”

It is nevertheless completely unlike any other bi- or multilateral defense technological production agreement, ever. This will enmesh the U.S. and Israeli defense technological, both research and manufacturing capabilities like never before, like nothing that the United States has.

It puts Israeli firms that are nominally competing, in some cases with American firms across various aspects of the defense technological enterprises, into licensing agreements that give them intellectual property stakes over their American competitors and their nominal competitors. Perhaps most importantly, it puts Israeli firms, academic institutions, and so forth, into the supply chains of the U.S. military’s technological enterprise and production capabilities.

That gives Israel enormous leverage over U.S. defense policy, U.S. defense decision-making. And as well, unlike any other co-production deal that the U.S. military has with any of its partners, it creates an executive agent within the Pentagon who is empowered to override existing bureaucratic processes, procurement issues, and decision-making to basically be, essentially, an Israeli commissar in the Pentagon advocating for greater and greater production and technological integration.

There’s just nothing like this that exists outside of this proposal. There isn’t, as best I can tell, much of a precedent for it. And think of the implications of that. By the time this is out, I’ll have a piece on my newsletter, Forever Wars, about this. You’re already seeing real questions during the Iran war and Iran’s ability to hit U.S. infrastructure hosted in the Gulf about the viability of keeping the network of about 18 or so U.S. bases that span the Gulf from Kuwait to Bahrain.

You could see that bivouacking for reasons of both defensibility and certainly ease of integration into Israel. You’re already seeing a U.S. general placed in charge of the force that’s supposed to be essentially occupying Gaza under Trump’s imperial Board of Peace proposal.

The amount of missile strikes from Iran and drone strikes that Israel had to absorb during this war of aggression that it and the United States launched — if those Israeli firms, academic institutions, and so on are part of the U.S. military supply chain, and they’re vulnerable to Iranian missiles, then the United States has a direct interest in protecting those firms, installations, and so forth.

“This is an epochal, I would argue, tectonic shift in the U.S.–Israeli military relationship.”

So now U.S. defense of Israel will be a matter of U.S. defense necessity. So this is an epochal, I would argue, tectonic shift in the U.S.–Israeli military relationship. It needs to be said that right now Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, it’s committing an ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and it’s undergoing a process of territorial conquest in Lebanon and Syria.

This is what the United States would be far deeper yoked to than ever before, and all of this is occurring precisely as you heard the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say, to make U.S.–Israeli economic integration, particularly over defense, seamless, invisible, and far less susceptible to the rising political challenge that’s happening in the United States as the result of Israel’s genocide.

JW: The irony to what you’re saying, of course, is that on the campaign trail, Donald Trump effectively sold himself as a non-interventionist, promising no new forever wars, declaring himself a peace president. Many pundits, podcasters, journalists, others backed up that claim, despite the fact that during his first term, he assassinated an Iranian general, escalated conflicts in Iraq and Syria, and loosened the military’s rules of engagement.

One of his biggest cheerleaders on this foreign policy front was the now late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who passed away suddenly on Saturday as a result of a tear in his heart, while the world was actually awaiting news of his longtime friend Sen. Mitch McConnell’s health. Recently, you wrote, “It’s darkly poetic that Senator Lindsey Graham left this world the same weekend that the Iran ceasefire collapsed. Graham had wanted this war for a very long time. While it would be nice to think that its rapid emergence as a fiasco would have redounded to Graham’s political detriment, absolutely nothing in his political biography as one of Capitol Hill’s premier warmongers suggests that would have happened.” Talk about Graham’s foreign policy legacy.

SA: Lindsey Graham never met a war he didn’t like, never met a war he didn’t want to send other people’s children to wage. He treated war as a game, and a game that the United States and Israel, and also Ukraine — he was a very big proponent of Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion — that really animated Graham as much as criminalizing abortion and limiting the bodily autonomy of pregnant people animated his domestic vision.

The litany is great. An advocate of all aspects of the war on terror, from the Afghanistan War, to especially the Iraq War, to the global drone campaigns, to keeping Guantanamo Bay open, establishing, he didn’t succeed in this, but attempting to establish a globally applicable system of U.S. wartime detention that was non-judicial, that would basically be a major, major entrenchment and expansion of what we see at Guantanamo Bay.

The Libya war, attacking Bashar al-Assad in Syria, on and on it goes. But especially the white whale for Lindsey Graham and many others in the bridge between neoconservatism and MAGA was Iran — assaulting Iran not only at home, but rolling back its regional challenge to U.S. and Israeli power in the Middle East.

As you saw from the true media saturation ahead of the February 28 kickoff for the war, there was Lindsey Graham constantly advocating for it, talking with Trump, liaising behind the scenes between the White House and Benjamin Netanyahu, serving as one of the greatest advocates for launching this new forever war, and also attempting to conceal what an epochal both commitment of military power and, naturally following this would be.

“There was never any political consequence that he experienced.”

I wrote that to indicate that the main reason why Graham was able to operate this way is that there was never any political consequence that he experienced despite various changes in national mood, especially like elite political mood toward the war on terror, Graham never felt that personally. He never felt that as a real genuine challenge to his political career.

Then when there’s no consequences, there’s no accountability for that, there’s no reason for Graham to have changed, and he never did. In fairness, by all indications, he did this not just because of the campaign contributions, not just because of rise in popularity for such bellicose policies, but for the love of the game. This man was by all measures a committed militarist, someone who believed deeply in the American imperial project and was always a committed advocate of it, even when he saw that it inhibited the political careers even of his allies, John McCain, Joe Lieberman being important examples of that.

JW: Graham seems to have viewed Trump as a vehicle for his warmongering ambitions. What do you think Graham understood about Trump that the people who thought he would be a peacetime president missed?

SA: First, I think anyone who wrote that Trump would be a peacetime president or an anti-war president committed a great disservice to the public discourse.

You can read my book, “Reign of Terror,” about why this would never, ever be actually the case. It is not an accident that Trump escalated the wars that he inherited and launched new and epochal ones, especially, Venezuela we didn’t even mention, which the U.S. now has imperial control over.

“Graham understood that Donald Trump is a malleable, impressionable figure, that he is protean.”

Graham understood that Donald Trump is a malleable, impressionable figure, that he is protean, that there are certain things that Trump responds to as someone who formed his political self-understanding primarily in the Reagan era and before, and that’s a healthy receptivity, to put it mildly, to U.S. militarism, that whatever else MAGA says about wars, what it wants is domination. It wants domination not only at home, but abroad.

That’s where Graham recognized that instead of being someone like John McCain, who sought to occasionally butt against, fight against Donald Trump, that Graham could help maneuver Trump into being a vehicle for their shared project. And he did that with really tremendous success.

It occasionally cost Graham dignity, but Graham, throughout his career, has never been someone who placed a great deal of shall we say, emphasis on having political dignity as long as it meant having political success. So he saw that as an easy trade-off if it meant maneuvering Trump into a kind of position that Graham, had he been president, had he been secretary of state, had he been secretary of defense, would’ve wanted to pursue.

JW: One thing that I’ve been thinking about is, does someone else come in to fill his place as a champion for endless war in the Senate? Or, at this point, does there not even need to be a congressional champion for war to continue at this point?

SA: It’s a good question. Lindsey Graham’s probably a singular figure in Republican politics at the moment. But that’s not to say that someone similar, though not identical, could fill the same void — as material conditions, it’s fair to say, probably produced Graham, and so they’ll produce, as long as they persist, another figure like Graham to take political advantage.

I think probably the figure in Republican politics, certainly in the Senate, that best fits a Graham-type profile is Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas. Like Graham, also a lawyer. Like Graham, an Iraq veteran, although Graham was in the reserves in the Air Force, Cotton was in the Army.

Similarly bellicose, and bellicose in many of the same ways on the same footings. Both were fierce advocates of U.S. support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Similarly, never met aspects of the war on terror they disliked, and seek the aggression against Iran, fervent support for Israel. Characterologically similar in the sense that you could often see aggrieved-lawyer come out in them. So I would say probably Tom Cotton.

JW: On a holistic sense, we are now well into Trump’s second term. The U.S. is at war with Iran. The administration has conducted an undeclared war in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing scores of civilians by deploying drone strikes on boats they allege are carrying drugs. Marco Rubio is effectively running Venezuela from afar after the U.S. kidnapped the country’s president and his wife.

How would you characterize the Trump administration’s foreign policy at this point?

SA: Purely imperial. The dream of the Teddy Roosevelt administration is alive within the Trump one. I’ll never be able to forget the interview that Stephen Miller gave to Jake Tapper right after the Maduro kidnapping.

This is worth watching. Reading the transcript doesn’t really do it justice because you’ve really gotta see the way Miller performs in this interview. But it’s this expression of what the French used to call hyperpuissance: invincibility applied to an imperial level. A sense that the United States was capable militarily of imposing its will — militarily, economically — over the entire world in a way that the war on terror represented a drain of resources and capabilities from this was despite those material realities persisting, represented a declaration that Trump was going to make the American empire both more ambitious and recrafted in his image.

It is very explicitly rent-seeking. It seeks to make the countries in its orbit, whether traditional allies or new conquests like Venezuela, truly into vassals. Vassals that pay tribute. Tribute that provides the United States, which looks to be in pretty substantial economic decline, with new sources of revenue that stave off what will probably be politically unacceptable shocks economically to the system.

“It seeks to make the countries in its orbit, whether traditional allies or new conquests like Venezuela, truly into vassals. Vassals that pay tribute.”

Every empire throughout history has sought to bring in resources from the periphery into the metropole. That’s absolutely what’s happening here. That Miller interview with Jake Tapper from January was the same one where Miller sounds like he’s cutting a wrestling promo threatening Denmark over Greenland — which now during the NATO summit, Trump brings back up. You are seeing a more rent-seeking U.S. empire than ever before as a characteristic, a defining characteristic, I would say, of the Trump-era empire.

I will leave it to listeners, viewers, historians to figure out where we are historically on the long trajectory of American decline. But this is the sort of thing that an empire in decline does. Rather than figuring out new strategies to growth, it redistributes wealth from its own people to its driving oligarchic sectors.

This is [the] civilizing mission that you see in Silicon Valley now from companies like Palantir that talks about the need for, essentially, they don’t say it exactly like this, but the need for U.S. public subsidies to keep the AI booming, going in order to make sure that the West doesn’t, in some sense, fall behind, whatever that means, or doesn’t become vulnerable to Chinese power.

We haven’t even talked about Somalia, which is now essentially been subject to 200 drone strikes in the course of just 18 months, which makes a completely invisible war that the United States has conducted for 20 years in an East African nation.

So this is a very erratic moment in American imperial history, but it absolutely has to be understood as a moment of American imperial assertion.

“This is the sort of thing that an empire in decline does. Rather than figuring out new strategies to growth, it redistributes wealth from its own people, to its driving oligarchic sectors.”

JW: Yeah. No, I’m getting thoughts of the Romans when they stopped making their own food and just expanded their empire out too fast. It’s giving a lot of those history flashbacks.

SA: Those Egyptian grain imports, right?

JW: Yeah. [Laughs] And we have so much that we could get into, but we’re going to have to leave it there for time. Spencer, thank you so much for joining us again on The Intercept Briefing.

SA: Once again, I mentioned Eastern Roman history and killed a podcast. Thank you very much, Jessica. [Laughter]

JW: For more from Spencer Ackerman, visit Forever Wars, where you can subscribe to his newsletter. We’ll add a link in the show notes.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voicemail at 530-PODCAST. That’s 530-763-2278.

That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor.

Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept does not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Trump’s Formula for Forever Wars appeared first on The Intercept.

Rebecca Nagle on the Boomerang of Empire

The Intercept Briefing — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Last spring, President Donald Trump issued the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, taking aim at federal parks, monuments, museums, and sites that have cast the United States’s “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” On the Fourth of July this year, the White House published its 162-page “Saving America’s Story,” attacking the Smithsonian Institution directly for “anti-white activism,” “illegal alien activism,” “transgender activism,” and more broadly for adopting “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

“We’re in this moment where we are fighting over how America tells its past,” journalist Rebecca Nagle tells The Intercept Briefing. “It can be scary in a moment when it feels like the stakes are really high to really interrogate the myths that we all carry, that we all hold about who our country is and where it started because it’s really tempting to want to think, ‘OK, if we just wind the clock back 10 years, if we just go back a few election cycles, we’ll be back to a democracy that’s strong, that’s stable, that’s solid, and we’ll all be fine.’ It’s much more scary to say, ‘Oh, actually, if we want to talk about where authoritarianism comes from in the United States, it’s actually at the foundation.’”

As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday this year, the Trump administration has been ramping up its efforts to erase not just the dark parts of U.S. history but also the contributions of basically anyone who isn’t a white, Christian man. That project has included taking concrete steps to remove all traces of the history of people who don’t fit that description, Black people, immigrants, civil rights advocates, women and gay and trans people — including the first people to live on this land: Native Americans.

This week on the podcast, Nagle speaks to host Akela Lacy about her new podcast series “First America,” which examines how Native people have been largely written out of the American story, and how that story informs the current political crisis in the U.S.

“One of the big claims that the series makes is that the foundation is in itself is a myth. Because at the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire. The way that you govern an empire, the way that you govern other people by force, is not democratic,” says Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation. “This identity crisis we’re having around authoritarianism and democracy, and how could authoritarianism be sneaking into our democracy — what we argue is that it’s actually always been there.”

“A lot of what is happening now — it’s not new, it’s not un-American, it’s not unprecedented. Sometimes it’s not even unconstitutional! It’s actually just taking these parts of our government that for a long time most Americans didn’t know was there or didn’t really think about, and Trump is just pulling it into the center,” says Nagle.

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this year.

President Donald Trump kicked off festivities by hosting a UFC cage match on the White House lawn to also celebrate his 80th birthday.

[Horns playing]

CBS: President Trump and UFC President and CEO Dana White kicked off the historic event that started with the national anthem and a joint Air Force and Navy flyover.

VO: From the south lawn of the White House.

[Clip ends]

AL: Then there was Trump’s two-week-long Great American State Fair in D.C., which aside from the Fourth of July, ended up being a giant bust.

[Clips montage]

MS Now: Donald Trump’s long-awaited Freedom 250 Great American State Fair went off with a whimper this weekend with what looked like tens, dozens of people showing up for the event.

FT: Donald Trump has said that this event is packed with happy people loving it, but it is 6 p.m. in the middle of the week, and there is hardly anyone here.

MS Now: This was the scene on Tuesday when there were actually more people in the band on stage than there were in the crowd watching them.

AL: Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been ramping up its efforts to erase not just the dark parts of U.S. history, but also the contributions of basically anyone who isn’t a white, Christian man. That project has included taking concrete steps to remove all traces of the history of people who don’t fit that description: Black people, immigrants, civil rights advocates, women and gay and trans people — including the first people to live on this land: Native Americans.

After reviewing nearly 2,000 flagged materials from National Parks and Monuments, The Guardian found that one Trump executive order resulted in the targeted removal of signs about “Native American history, slavery, the climate crisis, and the civil rights movement.”

Native American history is already poorly understood or misunderstood in the U.S. A new podcast series called “First America” examines how Native people have been largely written out of the American story. Host and creator Rebecca Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation, argues our current political moment is 250 years in the making.

[Clip plays]

Actor: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Nick Estes: The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs about Enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

Actor: The merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages …

Nick Estes: If we don’t understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won’t understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

Rebecca Nagle: So, it’s been 250 years since 1776. How’s this democracy of ours going?

[Ambient sounds. Clip ends]

AL: Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning advocate and writer focused on advancing Native rights and ending violence against Native women. You might remember Nagle from her hit podcast “This Land,” which focused on treaty rights and tribal sovereignty in Oklahoma. She joins me now.

Rebecca Nagle, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Rebecca Nagle: Thank you so much for having me.

AL: Before we jump in, I want to let our listeners know that we’re also going to drop the first episode of “First America” into our feed so you can listen.

Rebecca, you have a new podcast series out, called “First America.” In the first episode, you open with this scene where you and history professor Nick Estes visit Fort Snelling in Minnesota. It’s January 2026. Set the scene for us? Why did you start the series there?

RN: Nick is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a historian. We were visiting Fort Snelling, which was a concentration camp in the 1860s during the Dakota Wars.

Dakota families were held there as actually part of a broader effort to force all Dakota people to leave the state of Minnesota, and that effort included death marches, it included open-air prisons, it included mass executions. It was extremely violent. We were there, actually, really to just see how the site talked about it.

The site doesn’t really know, it seemed like, how to integrate the history. There’s this giant replica for it that school kids visit that’s mostly celebrating the military history of the site. Then in this sort of tucked away corner, if you walk down a long, snowy path, there’s a memorial to the victims of this chapter of genocide.

The history of the fort is not really integrated in the way that Minnesotans tell the history at that site. While we’re there that day, Nick got a call from his wife that ICE had just shot and killed someone; it was the day that ICE killed Renee Good. The next day, I was actually back at Fort Snelling — this time not to visit the historic fort, but actually for a protest.

So where ICE is headquartered in Minneapolis is on the Fort Snelling campus. There’s the historic fort, but then there’s this broader Fort Snelling campus. ICE is there because it’s federal land, and it’s federal land because it was once a military reservation. So what you see is the federal government doing the same thing — rounding people up and detaining them — in the same place.

When I first started this project, I thought I was just making a history podcast. I thought I was talking about the founding and how Native people have been left out of that story and correcting the record. The project actually started as conversations between me and Nick about how Native people are left out of American history and the American story.

And then this thing kept happening where I would be somewhere learning about America’s past, and the same thing would happen in our present. What I realized is that this history — that as a country we don’t know how to talk about, that we haven’t reckoned with — the history that we keep in a memorial that’s tucked away in a corner, that history is why the present moment is happening.

“What you see is the federal government doing the same thing — rounding people up and detaining them — in the same place.”

AL: I also want to mention for our listeners, Nick Estes has written some really great reporting for The Intercept, which I encourage people to check out.

We’re talking about your series a few days after the Fourth of July weekend, and the United States is still celebrating its 250-year birthday which dates back to, obviously, the Fourth of July signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a document which you dive into in the podcast.

But I will quote for our listeners who might not have it on hand. The Declaration reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” while also describing Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”

It’s well known that this and many other contradictions exist in our founding document, but why was this important for you to underscore here? What does it tell us both about our history, but also about today?

Rebecca Nagle: One thing that is important is the meaning of the word “savages,” and what does it mean for our founders to call Native people savages?

We all know the part of the Declaration of Independence that we’re taught in school — that all men are created equal; life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. But alongside those Enlightenment ideals, the founders included really their deep hatred for Indigenous people. The word “savages” has a really specific meaning in the late 1700s, which is that there are societies and groups of people that are seen as civilized, as deserving of human rights, and then there are people that are something less than human, and those are savages.

It’s a term that at the time carries a lot of meaning, and the founders are saying, “We’re not going to extend these Enlightenment ideals to these Indigenous people, to these savages.” The other reason that it’s really important is because it was important to our founders, right?

This isn’t just a throwaway line in the Declaration of Independence. Many historians think that the Declaration of Independence has an order. A lot of people, we know the preamble, but we don’t actually know what the majority of the document is. So the majority of the document is just this long list of grievances, and it’s basically the founders’ reasons for why they’re rebelling against the Crown.

A simple way I like to explain it is that it’s almost like a breakup letter — at least like a bad breakup, where you tell the person everything that they did wrong. The founders are doing that to King George, where they’re just like, “And you were a jerk, and you left your laundry everywhere.” It’s kind of like that list.

A lot of historians think that that list has an order and that it starts with smaller things and then ends with the things that the founders were most upset about.

The last grievance — the 27th grievance — is this line about “merciless Indian savages,” and there’s a whole history to why that line is in the document.

“What we see in that last grievance and the history behind it is that actually one of the main motivating factors for the Revolution itself was hunger for more Indigenous land.”

That history tells us a different story than the one we’ve all grown up knowing: It was about taxation and representation, and this is why the Revolution happened. This is what the founders were fighting for. What we see in that last grievance and the history behind it is that actually one of the main motivating factors for the Revolution itself was hunger for more Indigenous land.

The colonists wanted to expand west. The king of England was telling them no. They were really angry about that. They did a lot of different things, but they also put that anger in the Declaration of Independence. To me, it just goes to how deeply Native people are erased from the American story. It’s not like you have to rifle through Thomas Jefferson’s personal papers to be like, “Oh, look here. He said here in this journal that he was mad about Indigenous people.” They put it right there in our country’s most famous document. But somehow as Americans, we don’t know this story.

AL: We’re talking about this in the U.S. particularly when it comes to the “founders.” As you mentioned, most people don’t know that the first president, George Washington, was a land speculator interested in seizing Indian land. Can you tell us a little bit more about that history?

RN: For people who don’t know, and it’s not just George Washington, a lot of the gentry men of this era —

AL: The good men.

RN: — are involved in this business called land speculation. Actually George Washington’s family did it. It was a pretty well-established practice. But basically what they would do is they would buy land that either England and then later the United States claimed in this racist, abstract way where they would sail somewhere and plant a flag and be like, “This is our land.” But it’s still governed and controlled on the ground by Indigenous people.

They would buy that land, and then like a modern-day real estate developer would flip it, they would flip it. Once Indigenous people were forced off that land, they would sell the land to settlers for a profit. Sometimes they would sell the land while Indigenous people were still living there.

What happened is in the 1760s, there was this Indigenous uprising where a group led by an Odawa chief named Pontiac sacked a bunch of British forts.

So Britain, in a very loose way, claims all this land in the Great Lakes region. The way they claim that land on the ground is by having these forts; they’re these military outposts. And Indigenous nations sack a bunch of them.

The Crown is looking at fighting a very expensive war in North America. It’s just been fighting this big global war, sometimes called the French and Indian War, sometimes called the Seven Years’ War, and it’s broke — the Crown is broke. It doesn’t want to fight another war with Indigenous nations. What the Crown does is it makes this line, this proclamation, issues a royal proclamation, and that royal proclamation draws a line basically down the Appalachian Mountains, and it tells settlers, colonists: “You can live to the east of this line, but everything to the west is reserved for Indigenous nations.”

And what we have is George Washington telling his kinda business guy, “Hey, ignore the proclamation and continue to buy land and speculate in land west of the King’s boundary. We’re not going to follow this law.” We know that the elite didn’t like the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and it also upset regular folks too who felt entitled to more Indigenous land out west.

AL: You’re talking about this project as a way to correct the record, as you said, when it comes to U.S. history and Native peoples. It brings to mind another effort by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones who published “The 1619 Project,” recasting the way we understand how slavery shaped the founding of the country.

There was a massive backlash to that project. I’m curious, have you gotten any pushback on this series in that vein?

RN: Not to the extent that “The 1619 Project” did, by a long shot.

AL: It would be hard to replicate that.

RN: Yeah, I also just think we don’t have the visibility of The New York Times. It’s a different cultural moment. There have been a few right-wing websites that have criticized the podcast and perhaps there’ll be more. We’ll see what happens.

What I will say, broadly speaking, is that we’re in this moment where we are fighting over how America tells its past. That fight is really important, which is also why projects like “The 1619 Project” are really important and are definitely an inspiration for the work we’re doing with First America.

But I think that the fight over who we are as a country, where we come from, how we started — that fight is so bitter because so much power flows from the stories that we tell ourselves. The stories that we tell ourselves as a country about who we are and where we come from, I believe, really shape public policy and public sentiment, and how we have these conversations around law, around equity, today.

What I will say as a Native person is what I often feel like I experience is both sides leaving us out. So we’re left out of the “America was great, 250, rah, rah, rah, the founders were perfect” version of the story, because obviously genocide doesn’t fit easily into that version. But we’re also left out of the more progressive side, too — things like the No Kings protest, or this idea of wanting to go back to this democratic foundation.

“At the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire.”

One of the big claims that the series makes is that the foundation is in itself is a myth. Because at the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire. The way that you govern an empire, the way that you govern other people by force, is not democratic. So this identity crisis we’re having around authoritarianism and democracy, and how could authoritarianism be sneaking into our democracy — what we argue is that it’s actually always been there. I don’t think people, on both sides of the aisle, I feel like most people aren’t having that conversation.

[Break]

AL: There are a lot of people — similar to the critics of “The 1619 Project” — there are a lot of people out there who might brush off efforts to look into the past, as you’ve mentioned, or say they’re not reflective of how much progress has been made since then on things like racial equality or civil rights.

As you’ve said, this is a history that is uncomfortable for people that they don’t want to talk about. But what’s your response to someone, including potentially people among our listeners, who might have that perspective?

RN: I’ll just give one example. So there’s been a lot of talk around presidential war powers and what power the president has to go to war, to bomb another country without congressional oversight.

There’s been a lot of moments of controversy in Trump’s second term: bombing boats in the Caribbean, abducting the leader of Venezuela, the war with Iran. A lot of people have said, “Oh, the president really shouldn’t be able to do this without congressional approval, without a formal declaration of war.”

The first undeclared war that the U.S. fought was fought under the George Washington administration in the late 1700s. It was a war with Indigenous nations. That war is not only precedent for why presidents can fight wars without congressional oversight, but is also why we have such a big military, is why we even have a central military. At first, we didn’t actually really have a big standing army, and the founders didn’t want one. It also is a big part of why the wars that the U.S. fight is plagued by human rights abuses.

So for people who want to say, in kind of a vague way of, “Oh, we shouldn’t be talking about history. We should be focused on the present” — I don’t think we can understand where we are as a country and how we got here without understanding where we came from. I actually think that so much of our current political crisis is from us not really knowing how our country started, and really what the full structure and character of our government is.

AL: On a similar note, you explore in the series how Native Americans have been erased and left out of the 250-year history of the United States. This has long been the case, as you lay out time and time again, absence in museums, cultural sites, National Parks, et cetera.

Now we’re living under a president who wants to further erase that history. Why does Donald Trump want to try to further erase Native history, and what does he get out of it? What does anyone get out of that?

RN: I am not an expert in authoritarianism and fascism. We talk about it in relationship to colonialism in the podcast, but what I will say is that an important part of those types of leadership is having a very specific kind of national narrative.

What you see happening right now, whether it’s banning books, changing curriculum, taking down signs at National Parks, is really this effort to have a very specific type of image of the United States and a very specific kind of national narrative that aligns with people’s political goals.

It can be scary in a moment when it feels like the stakes are really high to really interrogate the myths that we all carry, that we all hold about who our country is and where it started because it’s really tempting to want to think, “OK, if we just wind the clock back 10 years, if we just go back a few election cycles, we’ll be back to a democracy that’s strong, that’s stable, that’s solid, and we’ll all be fine.

It’s much more scary to say, “Oh, actually, if we want to talk about where authoritarianism comes from in the United States, it’s actually at the foundation.” That’s really scary to think about, but it’s really important because if we don’t understand how deep it goes, we actually won’t be able to root it out.

It’ll be like chopping the head off of a weed; it’ll just grow back stronger. And I actually think we already saw that between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. We did the thing where we all voted, Trump was out of office. It was really scary — didn’t look like maybe there would be a peaceful transition of power.

Then the second administration has actually been stronger than the first, and accomplished, I would say, more of their goals. It’s really important for us to get really specific if we want to defeat authoritarianism in America, for us to get really specific about where it comes from, and that process is going to be, for all of us, interrogating some of the myths that we hold about the United States and about U.S. democracy.

AL: Something that’s interesting about this is the question comes up, OK, what is so horrifying about conceding that the founders were calling Indian savages, viewing people as less than human, owning slaves, fighting to keep themselves in the same socioeconomic class at whatever cost? And part of it is potentially that if living in the U.S. today is a product of a document that was rooted in authoritarianism, then do we know what authoritarianism looks like?

Obviously, we didn’t stop it, right? Because we’re now in Trump 2.0, and I think that it’s like we can confront all of these other horrific things in the world day in and day out, like how is this still a conversation that we’re having?

RN: The story we’ve been told about American democracy, it has been ingrained in us so deeply. Then at the same time, the other thing that’s been ingrained in us so deeply is the erasure of the people that our government colonized. We erase what our government did to Native people. Where we do talk about it, it’s in passing mention.

“The other thing that’s been ingrained in us so deeply is the erasure of the people that our government colonized.”

We also erase what our government did to places like Guam and Puerto Rico and the Philippines. So we have this long history of our government ruling through force, like taking over other people’s land by usually through extreme violence and military control.

It’s not just that we did that and it went away — we built a government to do that. We built departments and secretaries and methods and technologies and got better at it as we did it more, really to pull it apart is to see that at the same time that our founders were building a Constitution for themselves, they called it an empire of liberty, but they were also building an empire and an arm of the American government that did not operate with elections, that did not operate through consent, that did not have due process or freedom of speech or freedom of religion.

At different times in U.S. history, the U.S. federal government has controlled where Native people can live, where Native people can even move their bodies, how we raise our children, if we can have children, what languages we can speak, what religion we can practice, what food we can eat — all against our will. That’s not democracy. Again, you can call it colonialism, you can call it empire, but it’s government by force, which is also another way to say authoritarianism.

What we have to pull apart in this moment is understanding how deep that goes. This is really from the scholarship of a legal scholar that we talk to pretty extensively in the podcast named Maggie Blackhawk, who is at NYU and is Ojibwe.

But what we’re seeing in the present moment is these practices of our government around how much power the president has, how much power the courts have to intervene, that have built up over time. Now we have someone like Trump in office, and oops, we gave the president a ton of power over war when we were fighting Indigenous nations. We gave the president a ton of power over things like the military and foreign affairs.

A lot of what is happening now — it’s not new, it’s not un-American, it’s not unprecedented. Sometimes it’s not even unconstitutional! It’s actually just taking these parts of our government that for a long time most Americans didn’t know was there or didn’t really think about, and Trump is just pulling it into the center.

“They were also building an empire and an arm of the American government that did not operate with elections, that did not operate through consent.”

AL: You’ve given a couple of examples of this, but I wonder if you can zoom out a little bit and connect the dots a bit more on how, as you’ve put it, the specific Native part of our history helps to explain the current political crisis.

RN: Again, this is from the scholarship of Maggie Blackhawk, who’s Ojibwe and her work is amazing.

I’ll tell a story. The same summer our founders were drafting the Constitution in Philadelphia; at the time New York is where Congress met, the Congress at the time. A bunch of people actually leave the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia so Congress can have a quorum in New York.

So you’ve got these two meetings happening at the same time. In New York, Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance to govern an area that’s like Ohio to Minnesota. It’s like the Great Lakes region. The founders actually call this area America’s first colony, and they’re going to govern it like a colony.

The person who oversees the colony is appointed, is not elected. There aren’t elections, even for the white people — it’s majority Native — but even for the white people who are living there, they don’t have elections. They don’t have a representative in Congress. It’s not democracy the way that we would think about it.

It’s top-down government. That’s how we’ve ruled every territory as we stretch from sea to shining sea, and then as we stretch from the Philippines and Guam and Puerto Rico, and as we governed big, huge swaths of area that way. This isn’t a small subset of the United States. Under Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, two-thirds of the land mass of the United States was governed by unelected appointed leaders.

The way that we governed those areas built up certain practices. It’s a big legal term, it’s called plenary power. But it basically built up a stronger president. These are areas where the president could get away with a lot and kinda do what the president wanted. It’s an area where also the courts have this tradition of saying, “Ah, like this isn’t really our business. We’re not going to intervene. We’re going to defer.” There are also areas where constitutional rights don’t apply as much. Native people were the first example of that. We’re the first example where we developed some of these areas of laws, but then it’s been applied to other groups of people. It’s been applied to places like Puerto Rico and Guam; it’s been applied to immigrants. What we’re seeing right now is it getting applied to everybody.

The other thing that’s happening is that the Trump administration is pushing on some of these weaknesses in our democracy. You can see that in the controversy over war powers. You can see that in the birthright citizenship case. Even in the fund for like January 6th defendants, part of the precedent for that fund comes from settlement funds with tribes that had been established under previous presidents.

The way I think about it is what our government did to Native people, it set up these fault lines in our democracy, and what we’re living through right now is the earthquake — those fault lines moving everything around to where it feels like it’s going to fall apart. There are these very concrete ways — whether it’s birthright citizenship, detaining migrant families, the war in Iran, threatening to annex places like Greenland or Canada or Panama — that actually come from this long colonial history in the United States that I think as Americans we’re not used to seeing.

We have this knee-jerk reaction as a public of “This is unconstitutional. This is unprecedented. This is un-American.” You heard that a lot around the ICE surge in Minneapolis of “This is unprecedented.” It’s not the first time a president has sent federal troops to the land that is now Minnesota to round people up and remove them. We’ve actually done that before as a government, and we never went back and said, “Oops. That’s bad. We don’t want to do that. That is against our values as a democracy. That’s dangerous.” It’s no surprise that a lot of that history is repeating itself.

“It’s not the first time a president has sent federal troops to the land that is now Minnesota to round people up and remove them.”

AL: You have alluded to your answer to this question several times already, but I’m going to ask you directly. Knowing that you are not an expert in authoritarianism, but you’ve raised the question in the podcast, are we really a democracy? Can you give us your answer?

RN: I think we’re both.

AL: Sorry, both meaning authoritarianism and democracy?

RN: Yeah! I think there’s parts of our government that are democratic, and I think there are parts of our government that are authoritarian. Like a lot of empires, we thought we could keep those things separate. That we could have colonialism over there, and democracy over here. That we could rule this group of people by force, and we could rule this group of people by consent. But history tells us that’s not how it works, and what we’re seeing right now is those things come together.

There’s this theory of where authoritarianism comes from that actually became popular at the end of World War II as a way to explain the rise of fascism in Europe. What theorists said is, why are you surprised about the violence and the horrors of World War II and Nazi Germany when Europe has been doing these things to colonized people across the globe? Germany committed genocide in Africa before it committed genocide in Europe.

“We oftentimes think about colonialism as just impacting the people who are colonized.”

This theory is called the boomerang of empire, and the idea, like in the way that you throw out a boomerang and it comes back to you, is that colonialism works the same way. We oftentimes think about colonialism as just impacting the people who are colonized. So we think of the terrible history of what our government did to Native people as just impacting Native people, that’s the bad thing that happened to Native Americans.

But it changed our government. It changed the structure of our government permanently, indelibly. What we’re seeing in this moment is those arms of our government that we thought could be authoritarian towards some people coming back home and coming back to impact everybody.

AL: Speaking of that, this is an apt transition.

I want to pivot to some current issues affecting Native communities. Donald Trump is pushing Republicans to pass the so-called SAVE Act, which even members of his party have said is dead on arrival. This is a bill to require people to prove their citizenship in order to vote, an extremely restrictive measure that’s being compared to the controversial Arizona “Show Me Your Papers” bill.

Speaker Mike Johnson announced on Sunday that the House would pass the SAVE Act “one more time” through budget reconciliation despite that process holding many potential pitfalls, even for his own caucus. If passed and enacted, even though it’s a long shot, how would this legislation impact Native voters?

RN: Not everybody has the kind of documentation that the bill would require. It requires people to have things like a birth certificate or a Social Security card. A lot of folks just don’t have those papers, and getting them isn’t always easy and is sometimes also very expensive.

AL: Apparently, there’s more than 21 million Americans who do not have either their birth certificate or passport. Apparently, there’s half of Americans who don’t have a passport.

RN: It’s important that Native people have access to the vote. It’s essential, and it’s something that Native people have been fighting for a very long time. There are also times that our ancestors were fighting not to be U.S. citizens, and there are times that citizenship was the carrot and the stick was assimilation. The promise of citizenship was used to take more land. So that’s how my great-grandfather became a U.S. citizen, through the privatization and then the eventual taking over of Native land — of Cherokee land — by white settlers.

“If your government is an invading army, you don’t want to vote in the invading army’s next election if they just burned your village to the ground, right?”

When we think about the weaknesses of our democracy, we think that voting and inclusion and equality are how we fix those weaknesses. That doesn’t actually fix colonialism. If your government is an invading army, you don’t want to vote in the invading army’s next election if they just burned your village to the ground, right? You want them to leave your land. That’s the demand that generations of Native people made, was not for citizenship, was not for voting, but was for us to have our own land, our own territory, our sovereignty intact.

In this moment, the crisis that we’re facing, because it has these roots in colonialism, we have to think bigger than just, how do we protect the vote. We have to ask some of these harder questions like why does the president have so much power to bomb another country without more oversight? What are we doing when we bomb school children in another country? How can we call ourselves a democracy and do that, right? How are we holding people — who the only thing that they did is live in the United States without papers — how are we holding them without due process? Those are questions that we also have to ask.

That whole voting election thing isn’t the only thing that’s breaking down right now. And if we only have that conversation, we’re not going to catch some of these other problems, if that makes sense.

“We have to think bigger than just, how do we protect the vote. We have to ask some of these harder questions, like why does the president have so much power to bomb another country without more oversight?”

AL: Are there any other major takeaways from the reporting that you’ve done that you want to mention that I haven’t asked you about yet?

RN: One of the things we talk about in the podcast is the Revolutionary War itself. In the United States, we have this very neat and tidy way we like to talk about the war, where it’s the colonists against England. We get to be David, England is Goliath. They’re bigger, they’re more powerful, but we’re brave, and we fight hard, and we beat them.

That’s not the full story of the Revolutionary War because it was also a sprawling conflict over who would control land in North America. Indigenous nations fought on both sides of that conflict. Also to stake out their claim, the U.S. was willing to commit some very extreme acts of violence.

My own ancestors experienced scorched-earth campaigns from colonial militias in Cherokee Nation, where about half of Cherokee villages were burned to the ground. During one of those campaigns, the militias purposely waited until it was too late in the growing season for the corn to be replanted to then invade and burn the fields of corn to the ground so that people would starve. They burned food storage. They took time to chop down fruit orchards and destroy fruit orchards so even when people returned, we wouldn’t have our fruit trees and that source of food. That was how much they wanted to destroy our way of life.

The Haudenosaunee was a powerful confederacy further to the north, in what is today New York state. Part of the confederacy sided with the British, and as punishment for that choice, George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee, which was later known as Sullivan’s campaign. That’s the name of the general who led it.

The general took about a third of the Continental Army — this wasn’t some small campaign. It was a huge effort. They burned about 40 Haudenosaunee villages to the ground, and historians estimate that between direct killing, but then also exposure and malnutrition that winter, that about half of the population died. And so when we talk about the Revolutionary War, we really have to change the way that we tell the story of that war because it was also a campaign of genocide.

“When we talk about the Revolutionary War, we really have to change the way that we tell the story of that war because it was also a campaign of genocide.”

In the podcast, I talk about the history of that war, and then I’m trying to ask if this is how American democracy began, what does that mean? If this is the war that started our country, what does that even mean for our democracy? And where I get to is the stuff that we’ve been talking about, where a part of our government has always functioned through force and not elections and consent and due process and all these things that we hold dear. Oftentimes, that force was extreme violence because people don’t let you control their lives just because you ask nicely. You take over other people’s lands and territories, often only through extreme violence, and that’s how the U.S. government began.

AL: That is a fitting place to wrap up our conversation. Rebecca Nagle, thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing. We are excited to listen to the forthcoming episodes of “First America.”

RN: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

AL: Is there an issue you’re concerned about and what to see more reporting on? Let us know. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

That does it for this episode.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Rebecca Nagle on the Boomerang of Empire appeared first on The Intercept.

The Intercept

Hegseth Dodges Impeachment, for Now. And Tom Morello on Fighting for the World You Want

Transcript

Related

Hegseth Survives Impeachment Attempt

Related

Debunking Pete Hegseth’s Bullshit Impeachment Defense

Related

Humanitarian Orgs Demand Answers on Yemen War After Hegseth Impeachment Fails

Related

The U.S. Has Now Killed More Than 240 People in Ongoing Spree of Boat Strikes

Related

Hegseth’s War Department Slashed Civilian Protection Staff, Brought in AI Assessments

Related

“Dead Man Walking”: Officials Say Hegseth Has to Go

Related

How Democrats Changed Everything

How Democrats Changed Everything

Transcript

Related

Abdul El-Sayed Wins Senate Seat With Pro-Palestine Campaign

Related

Radical Centrists Like Haley Stevens Are the Real Extremists in the Democratic Party

Related

Haley Stevens Destroyed Her Political Career for Absolutely Nothing

Related

Anti-Trans Panic Couldn’t Save Republicans in Deep-Red Texas

Related

Right-Wing Trans Hate Comes for the WNBA

Related

Lockheed Martin Showered Susan Collins With Cash as F-35 Program Hit Turbulence

Related

The Progressive Agenda: End Iran War, Rein in AI, Get Dems to Actually Do Something

Related

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It

How AIPAC and AI Spent Their Money This Midterm Election

Related

AIPAC Isn’t Retreating. Here’s How It’s Already Shaping the Next Congress.

Transcript

Related

AI Tried to Buy the Midterms — Then the Lobby Learned Everyone Hates AI

Related

AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.

Related

Prediction Markets Have a Lock on the Midterms

Related

AI Almost Started a U.S.–China War — and No One Seems to Care

The Intercept Live in Conversation With Robert Reich

The Stakes of Brazil’s Presidential Election

Transcript

Related

AIPAC, AI, Crypto, and Gambling Are Hiding Their Big Election Spends

Related

The Front Lines of the End of the World — and the Fight to Save the Amazon

Related

Latin America’s New Right Ushers in Pan-American Trumpism

Related

The Dawn of a New Cold War

Related

Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance

Related

Trump Frees Ex-President of Honduras, Right-Wing “Narco-Dictator” Convicted of Drug Trafficking

DHS Was Designed as a Weapon

Related

Don’t Stop at ICE, Says Progressive Dem: Abolish the Department of Homeland Security

Transcript

Related

Inside ICE, Officials Question String of Trump Admin “Midterm Panic Moves”

Related

“Terrorist”: How ICE Weaponized 9/11’s Scarlet Letter

Related

Federal Agents at Protests Renew Calls to Dismantle Homeland Security

Related

Trump Is Prosecuting a Congressional Democrat for Doing Her Job. The Media’s Response: No Big Deal.

Related

Obama Book Explains How Birtherism Made Trump’s Presidency

Related

Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories

Related

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