Somewhere in a sweltering desert, cockroaches scurry around the cell of Carlitos Ricardo Parias. He holds up a plastic bottle, gazing at the worm-like creatures swimming in his drinking water. His other arm is turning purple from a gunshot wound for which he says he hasn’t received proper medical care.

His gulag isn’t in a distant Soviet or banana republic. It’s about an hour and a half from Disneyland, in a small California town called Adelanto.

After Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers shot and detained Parias last October, the Los Angeles-based journalist will cross 300 days in ICE detention on Monday. His horrifying conditions aren’t unique among immigrant detainees, but Parias’s case is extraordinary. Perhaps no journalist has endured such a sustained sequence of violence, prosecution, and imprisonment at the hands of the U.S. government.

Several American journalists have spent months in jail to protect their sources: New York Times reporter Judith Miller (85 days in 2005), writer Vanessa Leggett (168 days ending 2002), and freelancer Josh Wolf (226 days ending in 2007). Last year, Emmy-winning journalist Mario Guevara spent more than 100 days in immigration detention before being deported, prompting national outrage.

Parias long ago surpassed Wolf’s record for the longest known time a journalist had spent in U.S. custody.

He was already prolific on social media when the immigration enforcement surge began last summer. He worked independently as Richard Noticias LA, with over 100,000 followers on TikTok. He built that audience by chasing crime stories across California neighborhoods often overlooked by larger outlets. This time last year, the Los Angeles City Council presented him with a proclamation honoring his efforts.

Federal authorities say Parias is an undocumented immigrant who had previously evaded arrest. But their account does not explain a growing mountain of evidence.

On June 13, 2025, Parias arrived at an immigration raid in South LA ready to film as usual. According to witnesses, a federal agent ran into him with a vehicle. Parias was then handcuffed and left on a sidewalk while the agents continued their work. Videos show him crying out in pain and grasping at his injured leg. Agents never provided medical attention. Eventually, a Good Samaritan pulled up in a private vehicle and took Parias to the hospital. An agent briefly stopped them but let Parias leave — handcuffs still on.

Four months later, Parias was driving along a quiet block near downtown LA. Multiple unmarked vehicles pulled up around him, carrying masked men who turned out to be federal agents. Immediately and without warning, they smashed his window, as bodycam footage later showed. Panicked, Parias stepped on the accelerator — a meaningless move in a small car physically pinned by multiple large SUVs. Tires spun, the vehicles didn’t budge, and Parias quickly took his foot off the gas.

One agent struggled to open the passenger door. He fumbled with his gun, as his own bodycam showed, juggling it back and forth between his hands before shooting Parias in the elbow. A U.S. marshal was also hit and was expected to recover.

As federal immigration agents’ violence once again sent Parias to the hospital, the agents scurried into the security office of a nearby strip mall to check for surveillance footage. They downloaded it onto a thumb drive and deleted it from the mall’s system.

Prosecutors charged Parias with assault on a federal officer, offering a version of events that omitted critical context. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli fired off a social media post suggesting Parias had been trying to avoid deportation agents for months:

“This morning, Parias rammed his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in and ordered him to submit to arrest. Parias, who had previously avoided capture by immigration authorities, refused to comply with agents’ orders and escalated what could have been a simple arrest into a life-threatening situation.”

Essayli’s post included a single screenshot from their lone copy of the mall’s footage. The full video would have painted a very different picture. He didn’t release it.

Evidence wasn’t the only thing withheld from Parias, who was discharged from the hospital days later while still on morphine. Taken directly into a federal criminal detention center in downtown Los Angeles, he was supposed to receive high doses of ibuprofen. Once in court for his initial criminal hearing, the judge learned he wasn’t being given the prescribed treatment for his gunshot wound. The pain caused Parias to twist in his chair. Flummoxed, the judge implored a U.S. marshal to expedite his return to a facility where he could be given medication. The marshal refused.

Moments later, Parias’s lawyer asked the judge if his client’s teenage son — who had not been allowed to communicate with his father since the shooting — could give him a hug. Citing security protocol, the marshal also vetoed this small act of humanity. As Parias was whisked away, his son shouted across the courtroom in Spanish, “te amo” (“I love you”).

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Parias was eventually granted bond in his criminal case. But accepting it would have meant marshals turning him over to immigration authorities, who could immediately transfer him to their own distant facility with potentially worse care. He didn’t take the offer.

The government transferred him anyway. Adelanto is difficult to visit, hours from his lawyers and family in Los Angeles, not to mention the court itself. Prosecutors still hadn’t turned over the mall footage. But bystander videos began to undermine the government’s account. The judge ultimately threw out all criminal charges with prejudice, finding that the government had violated Parias’s constitutional rights.

The proceedings to deport Parias continue. For now, he’s stuck in Adelanto.

Even in detention, Parias remains a journalist. The government gave him a new beat. He began reporting on the horrid conditions that he and other detainees endure. Through video recorded by his visitors and accounts relayed to other reporters, Parias exposed the worm-like creatures in drinking water and cockroaches in cells.

His gunshot wound was being treated with vitamin D and Bengay. “What I saw looked like an arm that was on the verge of being amputated,” said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., who visited Parias at Adelanto in May. His situation inspired her to propose legislation addressing medical neglect in immigration facilities.

The government recently said it plans to ship him even farther away, to a facility in San Diego where he can receive medical care. The move will make it even harder for his family and lawyers to visit — and end his reporting on Adelanto’s rancid conditions.

Parias — and his reporting behind bars — is getting more media attention, but that coverage doesn’t always recognize how this all started because he was doing his job as a journalist.

America has imprisoned journalists before. It has even killed them. But what has happened to Parias is something different: A journalist was injured while documenting government power, shot during an attempt to arrest him, prosecuted, repeatedly denied medical care — and then left in immigration detention, where he has continued documenting the conditions around him.

The government’s powers to enforce immigration laws and prosecute crimes do not erase the First Amendment. Journalists don’t surrender their rights because they lack immigration status. And the government can’t make a journalist disappear simply by locking him in a cell.

At some point, the question stops being what else will happen to Parias. It becomes what America is willing to let happen to a journalist.

The post ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He’s Approaching 300 Days Behind Bars With a Festering Wound. appeared first on The Intercept.

In July 2020, Aluf Benn, the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, interviewed a 92-year-old retired Hebrew University professor named Yehezkel Dror. Benn described him as the “doyen of public policy experts in Israel.” For his part, Dror fashioned himself after Herman Kahn, the American defense intellectual who made his name by “thinking the unthinkable” — how to fight a thermonuclear war. In 2005, Dror’s work on policy planning and strategic thinking won him the coveted Israel Prize.

Dror responded to Benn’s questions as a futurologist with knowledge of what is to come, gained by thinking rationally and ruthlessly about a world too complex for all but an elite class of geniuses. Complimenting Israeli leaders for expelling as many Palestinians from the country as they did in 1948, Dror insisted on the correctness of his plan for an Israeli attack on Iran and praised President Donald Trump’s 2020 Israeli-Palestinian peace plan — the so-called Deal of the Century. He also called for a world government run by modern philosopher kings, and in his 2020 book, “Steering Human Evolution,” he advocated settling a thousand fertile couples on Mars to ensure the human race would not become extinct.

Dror explained the tension in his thinking between rationalist universalism and a tribalist commitment to his own group, the Jews. Citing Zionism as the “core meaning of his life,” Dror emphasized the contribution he had made to “a total revolution in the history of the Jewish people, on the path from Holocaust to resurgence.” The primacy of this latter commitment is clearly apparent in his book “Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem,” published in 1971.

The topic of “craziness” as a descriptor of states was a familiar one in the 1960s when discussing nuclear deterrence. Academics Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn both explored how a state with a reputation for craziness could increase the credibility of otherwise unconvincing threats.

The thrust of Dror’s book was different. Dror imagined how states with powerful modern weapons might act in ways radically contrary to accepted norms or expected calculations. Normal states would need to act differently toward adversaries deemed “crazy” by shifting strategies from deterrence and self-defense to destruction and preemptive attack. The not-so-hidden subtext of the argument was to brand all of Israel’s adversaries as “crazy,” thereby establishing justification for using any and all means, including subversion, preventive war, and even annihilation, against them.

Dror went on to lay out the criterion for labeling states — Israel’s enemies — as “crazy.” Fifty years later, however, Dror’s account of craziness and the warning signs he suggested looking for apply more readily to Israel than to its Arab enemies.

“Crazy” Characteristics

Dror never defined precisely what he meant by “crazy,” preferring to list behaviors, practices, and beliefs associated with his image of craziness. His prototypical case, used repeatedly for illustration of his argument, was Nazi Germany. Dror began his book by offering the Third Reich to skeptical readers “as a striking and radical demonstration of the possibility of crazy states and their implications for the international order and the security of various countries.” The case study also made the point that nonstate movements or organizations, such as Hitler’s National Socialist Party, could be treated as crazy as well as states. This justified Dror’s inclusion of various Palestinian movements and groups affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization as “crazy” even though they weren’t states.

At the end of 1973, an Israeli military publishing house issued a Hebrew edition of Dror’s book with a new chapter, “The Question of ‘Crazy’ States and the State of Israel.” Written against the backdrop of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War, Dror described virtually all Arab states and movements, whether Muslim or Palestinian, as either crazy, partially crazy, or liable to become crazy. According to Dror, the purpose of this chapter — which never appeared in English — was to shape Israeli military doctrine and strategies to deal with the craziness and potential for “extreme craziness” of Israel’s adversaries.

Dror emphasized that the kind of craziness he had in mind — so dangerous to the world community that no measures to disrupt or destroy it should be ruled out — requires an ability to think clearly, plan systematically, and act effectively. In doing so, he was carefully distinguishing irrationality from craziness. To be classified as crazy, a state or movement must not only have the means to project its power with devastating effect; it must also demonstrate a capacity for calculated action so that it can learn from mistakes and devise better and more successful techniques for achieving its (crazy) purposes.

A useful list of the features Dror set forth to identify a crazy state appeared in a positive review of his book: aggressive pursuit of far-reaching goals harmful to others; radical and intense commitments to achieve those goals; and adoption of a morally superior posture even while grossly contradicting international norms, both ethical and legal.

Using these measures — goals, means, and public posture — we can ask whether Israel itself is crazy. If it is, then for Israel’s Lobby to be successful, U.S. policies toward Israel and the Middle East must themselves be crazy and therefore dangerous to American interests and to the world.

Hard-Right Turn

Israeli politics revolve around its party system. That system has undergone two fundamental transformations: from one-party dominance to an even rivalry between two parties and then a return to dominance by the former opposition party. For almost three decades, the social democratic Labor Party dominated Israeli elections, with the right-wing parties in opposition. While never securing a majority of seats, in the 1960s and 1970s, Labor’s parliamentary dominance was enough to relegate Menachem Begin’s right-wing Herut (Freedom) Party to the political wilderness.

As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first and until Netanyahu longest-serving prime minister, frequently declared, Labor would accept any party as a coalition partner except those occupying the extremes of the political spectrum: the communists and Herut. Begin, he once wrote, was “a Hitlerist type: a racist, willing to destroy all the Arabs for the sake of Greater Israel.”

After the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, known as the Six Day War, the Labor Party favored withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories in return for peace, though it avoided specifying what territories could be relinquished or under what circumstances. The party that Begin led in 1967 was Gahal, a combination of Herut and the Liberal Party. In 1973, it became the cornerstone of the Likud. Like Herut, Gahal and then Likud opposed territorial withdrawal from any part of the West Bank and Gaza. The right wingers rejected the principle of trading land for peace, favored settlement of Jews throughout the territories, and looked forward to their permanent absorption into the State of Israel.

The “earthquake,” Likud’s victory in the 1977 elections, temporarily ended single-party dominance in Israel. Subsequently, two rival blocs — one led by the Likud and the other by one or another version of the Labor Party — battled each other in seesaw fashion. But since the 2013 elections, the right-wing bloc, with the Likud forming the core of governing coalitions, has dominated Israeli politics.

The sharpness of Israel’s shift to the right is evident in the changing ideological complexion of members of its 120-seat parliament, the Knesset. Israeli parties have always differed on a variety of social and economic questions. But by far the two most important markers of a party’s location on the spectrum of Israeli politics are its position on Israel’s borders and the intensity of its commitment to an exclusivist Jewish mission for the state.

Border Wars

Before the 1967 war, the issue of the country’s borders was not particularly salient in Israeli politics. Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip reopened the question of expanding the state’s boundaries, polarizing the political system, and triggering a sharp rise in both hawkish and dovish positions on these questions. After the Six-Day War, average left-wing representation in the Knesset increased by approximately two-thirds compared to what it was before 1967. Right-wing representation in the Knesset, however, tripled.

In the 2000s, the right-wing bloc’s representation has grown rapidly, while the left-wing bloc has shrunk drastically. Since the 2003 election, the first following the second Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, average representation of right-wing views has been twice that associated with the left. In the most recent elections, actual majorities of Knesset members have been affiliated with political programs advanced before 1967 only by a small and extreme minority. Meanwhile, the number of Knesset members espousing concessions capable of attracting even minimal Palestinian interest has dwindled.

Following the 2022 election, 63 members of the Knesset identified with what were originally seen as extreme far-right views on the nation’s borders, while only 14 supported a two-state solution. Of the latter, 10 were Arabs and only four were Jews.

Israeli public opinion has also shifted strongly toward the extreme right. Intensive polling done between 2022 and 2024 showed that four to five times as many Jewish Israelis identified themselves as “right-wing” than as “left-wing.” The rightward shift is more extreme than it seems from this data because what it means to be yemini, or right wing, has itself changed. Much more than in the past, it is associated with commitments to overt discrimination against Palestinian citizens, annexation measures that would exclude Palestinians from citizenship, use of extrajudicial punishment against Arabs, and preference for military action over negotiation for advancing Israeli interests in the region.

Along with the rightward extremization of the Jewish public has been an escalating propensity for Israeli leaders to aggressively pursue expansive goals. This hawkishness manifested as military actions, assassinations, and spectacular acts of sabotage — from the West Bank and Gaza to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran — that have stunned the world.

Rise of a Madman

In the 1990s, Benjamin Netanyahu began his rise to power, not as a right-wing firebrand but as a silver-tongued defender of Israel against international criticism. He coupled strong right-wing views with opportunism and an aversion to making risky decisions. Having climbed the greasy pole to take control of the Likud Party in 1996, Netanyahu went on to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

Following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, however, Netanyahu’s modus operandi changed. Two of his most crucial judgments — that the Gaza Strip could be kept indefinitely in a state of economic immiseration and that Hamas would not mount a large-scale attack — pushed Israelis into one of the most severe shocks they ever experienced.

Fearing investigation of his failure to protect the country, Netanyahu transformed himself into the epitome of Israeli craziness.

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The levels of violence he authorized against Palestinians in Gaza shocked the world. Netanyahu’s endorsement of transferring the entire population of Gaza out of Palestine; the bloody attacks he unleashed against Hezbollah and civilian neighborhoods in Lebanon; the wars he launched against Iran; and his attempt to assassinate Hamas negotiators in Qatar all reflect much more far-reaching goals for Israel than those of recognition, peace, and security, as one nation among others in a stable Middle East.

In this way, Netanyahu is not just following in the footsteps of predecessors, who were prepared to take risks for ambitious gains; instead, he has made the craziness that has occasionally marked Israeli policies into a dominant trait.

A 21st Century Sparta

Efraim Inbar is among Israel’s most influential national security analysts. The founder and director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, Inbar has reliably indexed the policy preferences of Likud governments, in general, and those led by Netanyahu in particular.

From year to year, problem to problem, threat to threat, Inbar’s recommendation has almost always been the same: reject available compromises, accept international isolation, and use preemptive war to inflict more pain and damage on adversaries than they are willing to tolerate.

“Fortunately,” he wrote in response to questions about Israel’s long-term goals, “Jewish history presents the Zionist movement another alternative: the Davidic option of building a Jewish commonwealth in the midst of an idolatrous world. The House of David ruled the Land of Israel for over four hundred years, playing a balance of power politics in our region.”

As if channeling Inbar’s thinking, Netanyahu gave a speech in September 2025 calling for Israel to expect and accept international isolation, adapt its economy toward autarchy, and see itself as a 21st century Sparta.

Israelis are familiar with the Jerusalem syndrome, a tendency for susceptible people visiting the country to experience delusional psychoses with religious or apocalyptic themes. It is also true that spectacular visions — of an unfolding, divinely guided, and Israel-centric redemption process; of the settlement in the West Bank as a crucial step in the bringing of the Messiah; and of Jewish rule over virtually the entire Fertile Crescent — have long animated the private thinking of the architects behind the vast settlement project in the occupied territories.

The Israeli Mainstream

What is striking is that such thinking has moved from the private worlds of dedicated activists, from the margins of respectable political discourse toward the center of Israeli politics. Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich both advocate for the rebuilding of the ancient Jewish Temple in the Old City of Jerusalem. Daniella Weiss, Ben-Gvir, and many others have called for the entire Gaza Strip to be emptied of Palestinians and resettled by Jews. What were, in the 1960s and 1970s, the outlandish ambitions of some marginal intellectuals, extreme rabbis, and retired generals are now the goals pursued by leading government ministers, senior security service officials, and settlement leaders.

Such grandiose ideas provide no guidelines for practical strategic thinking about Israel’s future or rationales for creative diplomacy. The result is that Israeli leaders focus on imminent security threats and diplomatic challenges, but neither entertain nor pursue longterm goals. That is to say: Those who govern Israel imagine no stable future that is both satisfying and possible enough to shape policy decisions and actions. The goal of Israel’s foreign and security policies therefore becomes simple if outlandish: to establish itself as the regional hegemon, possessing the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, equipped with sufficient conventional military power to operate throughout the region at minimal risk, and poised to crush any combination of opponents.

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This region-shaping ambition was evident in Israel’s June 2025 attack on Iran. An Israeli military poster, in Farsi, of what Israel dubbed “Operation Rising Lion” featured a majestic lion on his hind legs next to a brightly shining sun, symbols of ancient Persia.

The idea of transforming the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Muslim-majority country of 93 million, into an ally and returning it to a non-Islamic imperial past was advanced in an Instagram post two weeks into the war by Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s influential wife. It depicted two lions leaning against each other and gazing into the future, one wrapped in the flag of Israel, the other in the flag of the Pahlavis, the last shahs of Iran.

Amid Israel’s bombardment of Iran in July 2025, before the U.S. joined the war, the grand scale of such ambitions — consistent with the unattainability of the goals crazy states set for themselves — became apparent during remarks Netanyahu made to an Israeli interviewer. “We are changing — and I said this on the second day of the [Gaza] war — I said that we’re changing the face of the Middle East,” Netanyahu said calmly. “And now I say to you and also to our viewers: We’re changing the face of the world. I have determined that we will achieve all our goals.”

Adapted from “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power” by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick. Copyright 2026 by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick. Reprinted by permission of One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

The post Israel Justified Its Wars by Calling Enemies “Crazy.” Now, the Warning Signs All Apply to Israel. appeared first on The Intercept.

Democrats have a lot to be embarrassed about when it comes to their actions during 2020. Like when Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and then-Sen. Kamala Harris, clad in kente cloth stoles, took a knee on Capitol Hill after introducing the 2020 Justice in Policing Act.

That bill, which contained pretty fangless policing reforms, stalled in the Senate along party lines and never became law. The legislative story was predictable. Law-and-order Democrats genuflecting in kente stoles was laughable and lambasted at the time. Or, remember when Pelosi thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing” his life “for justice”? Shameful. 

You could fairly call such gestures “crazy” if we are relitigating Democrats’ political priorities around that time. These were the scrambling acts of Democratic leaders failing to robustly respond to the largest protests in U.S. history — powerful uprisings against a system of policing and prisons that treats Black people’s lives as disposable. 

But when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., quipped on Sunday, in an apparent nod to New York City Council Member Chi Ossé, that “woke 1 was crazy,” she wasn’t mocking the empty gestures of her colleagues. She wasn’t criticizing the recuperative tendencies of a liberal establishment that treats racism and sexism as a problem of individual performances and representation. 

She was responding to a question about whether Democrats, herself included, who have in the past called to defund the police, still stood by those positions, or whether they went “too far.” She giggled, dismissed the idea of defunding police as a part of  “crazy” “woke 1,” but noted, at least, that “during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton Window” on policy considerations, and that “the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.” She also said they changed how we talk about crime.

Ocasio-Cortez did not even mention the George Floyd uprisings. 

There can be little doubt that certain “woke” tendencies hurt the project of building a powerful multiracial, working-class left. Movement collectives and organizations became mired in in-fighting. Too often, anti-racist performances by institutions took precedence over building strategies to fight the structures of racial capitalism. 

Centuries of accumulated material advantages and disadvantages, forged along colonialism’s racial lines, were not undone by social-media shamings, diversity trainings, or pro forma land acknowledgments. 

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But there was nothing “crazy” about more than 20 million people taking to the streets in righteous, militant protests against a racist, necropolitical order. And it was not crazy that politicians on the left saw good sense in the reasonable demand that the armed forces maintaining this racist order be abolished, or at least that tax dollars go instead to housing, healthcare, and education. 

If Ocasio-Cortez is running for president, or even just the Senate, treating the serious and significant intervention and event that was the 2020 uprisings as “crazy,” like it was an overreaching social-media furor, would be an appalling campaign orientation and an unacceptable erasure of historic Black struggle. 

The number of people killed by police in the U.S. every year has risen most years since 2020, and a disproportionate number of those killed are still Black. The facts about U.S. policing and prisons have not changed since the heady years of so-called “woke 1.” It remains the case that police do not stop or prevent crime. The mythic alignment of policing with public safety is nonetheless still treated as unquestionable common sense, despite ample evidence to the contrary. 

The George Floyd uprisings represented a brief rupture in that flawed common sense. One 2020 poll, for example, found a majority of Americans, 54 percent, believed that burning down a Minneapolis police precinct building following George Floyd’s murder was justified. 

The massive uprisings, in the words of writer Tobi Haslett, “came hurtling into view and exploded against the surface of daily life in the U.S.” They were, however, met with extraordinary repression from police forces nationwide, in both blue and red states and cities. 

Republicans under President Donald Trump’s first term prosecuted a successful campaign of law-and-order fearmongering. This white supremacist backlash was aided by liberal cowardice, which softened and then erased the abolitionist calls at the heart of the rebellions. The fractured left also bears its own responsibilities for failing on multiple fronts to take up and continue the uprisings’ militant challenge to racial capitalism. 

Under Trump’s second term, certain Democrats might be willing to call for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) but are silent when it comes to challenging the system of racist policing of which ICE is an extension. This is not because “woke 1 was crazy”; it is because the far-right backlash was successful, and centrist Democrats were all too happy to shrink away or fall fecklessly in line with law-and-order talking points. 

“The least we can do is remember ,” wrote Haslett, reflecting on the rebellions one year later. “[T]o try, after the riots, after the speeches, after the backlash and elections, and after this latest (livestreamed) liturgy of American ‘criminal justice,’ to recall what really happened, extracting and reconstructing the whole flabbergasting sequence.” AOC is failing at this basic requirement of faithful remembrance.

This may seem minor, but it performs something akin to what W.E.B. Du Bois called the post-Reconstruction “propaganda of history” — the erasure of the historical record of Black struggle and power to establish white supremacist rule as some transhistorical, unchallenged norm. 

Ocasio-Cortez is well aware of the discursive reality she must navigate should she run for higher office. Republicans will indeed dismiss any gesture toward progressive criminal legal system reform — let alone moving funding from police coffers to public goods — as radical, “crazy” acts. They will fearmonger and scapegoat. And, as has been the case with border policies and trans rights, Democrats bending rightwards only offers legitimacy, and often votes, to the right.

I do not expect AOC to run on an abolitionist line; I have no such delusions about the office of president, or, for that matter, Ocasio-Cortez, a politician who is yet to apologize for her intolerable defense of the Biden administration’s role in the Gaza genocide. Nor do I expect any left-wing Democratic candidate to overturn the myths about policing and safety, deeply inculcated in all too much of American society, in any single campaign. “Defund” could very well be a losing electoral position at this juncture. 

A talented and principled politician should, however, be able to present a democratic socialist platform that insists on marshaling funds where they in fact belong: housing, healthcare, education, and other social welfare programs. A politician on the left, who lived through the powerful and vast George Floyd uprisings, should not be able to dismiss and erase them so easily. 

The post No, AOC: “Woke” Wasn’t “Crazy” the Way You Say It Was appeared first on The Intercept.

Francesca Hong, who looks set to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the governor of Wisconsin, is not going to abolish Thanksgiving. This really should not require clarification, as no one seriously believes otherwise, but the fact that it does tells us what a beleaguered state the Democratic establishment finds itself in as it seeks to defeat Hong.

A 37-year-old democratic socialist, state lawmaker, and former chef, Hong has emerged as the frontrunner despite increasingly frantic efforts from her moderate opponents in the primary, who have belatedly rallied around Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Even with the backing of outgoing Gov. Tony Evers, Crowley looks unlikely to derail Hong’s momentum, which may explain why the last days of the campaign — the primary is today — have reeked of desperation. It’s also why the vast majority of media coverage surrounding the race is now oriented not around Hong’s policy platform but her supposedly nefarious designs against the holidays.

“Cancel Thanksgiving,” Hong wrote in a now-deleted tweet from 2020. “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women so be it.”

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In the midst of Covid-19, the suggestion that getting everyone around the dinner table might be inadvisable should not, in any sane world, have been remotely controversial; neither should the suggestion that the truth behind Thanksgiving — that a bunch of settler-colonialist religious fanatics managed to survive their first winter in the New World, and having done so, promptly set about the work of genocide and land theft — is not a national origin story worth celebrating. Evidently, others felt much differently: Hong had impugned the sacred day of families coming together and burning down the backyard while failing to deep-fry a turkey. Obviously, this was more worthy of discussion than anything so prosaic as issues of actual relevance to Wisconsinites, such as the need for free childcare, a moratorium on data centers, or restoring the state’s Limburger industry to its former glory.

“A Democratic Socialist Disparaged Thanksgiving,” a New York Times headline ominously intoned on Wednesday. “Can Voters Forgive Her?” (The Times’ on-the-ground reporting managed to dig up precisely one Wisconsinite who would not.) In the New York Post, opinion columnist Kirsten Fleming darkly imagined Hong presiding over a dystopian socialist future with “no football and no precious family gatherings.” After the candidate’s antagonists unearthed a 2021 interview in which she said she wrestles with her “proximity to whiteness” (Hong has a biracial son), Center for American Progress President and CEO Neera Tanden challenged Hong on X: “In the kitchens you’re in, do people hate Thanksgiving? Because that all feels pretty faculty lounge to me.”

In light of the manufactured furor, an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking Hong posed some existential danger to Thanksgiving, or that her opinion of the holiday is a matter of great salience to Wisconsin’s voters. In the United States, however, governors are not empowered to dissolve national holidays, and if elected, Hong’s ability to imperil Turkey Day would be roughly equivalent to her chances of blowing up the moon. Regrettably, Hong does not represent a credible threat to Americans’ inalienable right to combine yams with marshmallows.

But the amount of media attention Thanksgiving-gate has accrued is unsurprising, as it allows the centrist commentariat yet another opportunity to pursue their favorite hobby of telling the Left it must disavow any hint of radical thought and prostrate themselves to placate “normal” people (or whatever version of them exist in pundits’ fevered imaginations). This is critically important for their grift to persist. For all their jubilant schadenfreude over the supposed “vibe shift” since Trump’s re-election, the specter of Woke can never be declared truly destroyed, as this would severely inconvenience all those commentators who have fashioned careers railing against it. In one representative example, Slate’s Luke Winkie — after admitting that he lacked the “hoity-toity intellectual hardware” to know if colonialism and the genocide of the Native Americans are good or not — advised Hong, “If they ask if you still believe in the tiresome, unpopular, and ultimately peripheral positions you took in the white heat of 2020, you can just say no.”

Hong has pretty much said exactly that, now claiming that Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday that she in no way wants to cancel (a concession that is not likely to satisfy her critics, but who knows — being forced to pretend you like Thanksgiving may actually make Hong more relatable to voters who have an uncle they hate). The notion that the historically literate might have a problem with Thanksgiving was around long before Peak Woke — it was, in fact, a plot point in a 27-year-old episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Native Americans, if you cared to ask, have been rather vocal on the subject of why many of them aren’t exactly enthused about a holiday that serves to either obscure or celebrate centuries of atrocity. Even allowing for the fact that the attacks on Hong follow a well-established right-wing tradition—let us never forget those who laid down their lives in the War on Christmas—why has such a ridiculous controversy come to dominate efforts to quash her campaign?

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The answer is simple: Nothing else has worked, and that failure indicates a worrying pattern for the Democratic establishment terrified of an insurgent Left. As the numerous recent victories for DSA-backed or progressive Democratic candidates have demonstrated, attacking the Left on policy is not the winning strategy it once was. Many voters no longer recoil at the mere mention of universal healthcare, rent controls, or the dreaded “socialism.” Even centrist stalwart Jonathan Chait had to grudgingly acknowledge, after Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win in Michigan, that AIPAC spending and unconditional support for aid to Israel are now albatrosses around the necks of any Democratic candidate. Among Democrats who despair over the DSA’s rise, there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for detail-oriented debates over why cheap groceries are a bad thing, whether there is any circumstance under which they would not throw trans people under the bus, and why abolishing the murderous, paramilitary apparatus of ICE is unthinkable.

In lieu of anything substantive or policy-based to sink their teeth into, Hong’s enemies have turned to increasingly bizarre tactics, none of which have produced their desired results. Attacks on her previous mental health challenges were widely read as the grubby, ham-fisted ratfucking that they were, and the fruitless, never-ending search continues for a plurality of Democratic primary voters who share the party establishment’s inveighing against Hasan Piker as a kind of demonic imp who must be exorcised. “Cancel Thanksgiving” was the only bullet left in the gun, which does not render it any less pathetic.

There is perhaps some deeper meaning to read into this confected controversy. Historically, painting those on the Left as un-American has been of entirely too much political utility for centrists and conservatives to abandon it now, despite its diminishing returns. If you can force a candidate to refrain from questioning America’s foundational myths, from recognizing the historical truths of colonialism and genocide rather than a fairy tale about pilgrims fleeing persecution, you place limits on how far they can go in criticizing the United States that exists today as a result of that history.

Instead, you demand devotion not to the American people—many of whom have views on the day-to-day realities of America that are less than rosy—but to a nebulous idea of America defined less by what it is than what it is not. This America is not the result of colonialism and genocide; it is not predicated upon systemic racism and economic inequality; it is not, and never will be, socialist. All must swear fealty to this fantasy, or else people might cease to believe in it. That’s a possibility that petrifies Hong’s enemies far more than the thought of losing their day to eat dry turkey.

The post Francesca Hong’s “Thanksgiving-Gate” Shows Her Detractors Are Totally Out of Ideas appeared first on The Intercept.

In the ever-shifting theater of America’s culture wars, conservative media has found its newest gladiatorial conscript: Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham.

It’s an unlikely promotion—and from backers who, until recently, probably couldn’t have named five WNBA players.

The reason for her esteem probably has little to do with her faultless three point precision. In an interview with ESPN, Cunningham declared she opposed transgender women—whom she referred to as “biological men”—competing in women’s sports, arguing the issue was about “protecting young girls.” Later, she cheekily doubled down on the statement, posting an outfit photo on Instagram with the caption: “I said what I said” with a saluting emoji.

That was enough.

Almost overnight, Cunningham became more than a WNBA player. She became one of conservatism’s newest culture-war combatants: blonde, white, conventionally attractive, and playing in a league overwhelmingly composed of players of color, and with one of the largest openly LGBTQ+ player populations in professional sports.

Within days of Cunningham’s remarks, conservative media had found its new protagonist. 

Fox News host Riley Gaines, who herself rose to prominence as an anti-trans NCAA swimmer, called Cunningham “the first current high-level female athlete” willing to publicly oppose transgender participation in women’s sports, and praised her for speaking out from inside what Gaines called “the most woke league of all time.” The Daily Wire cast the now-famous finger-pointer—and on-court defender of Caitlyn Clark, another white player whose first season with the WNBA sparked racialized conversations that cast her Black opponents as too “aggressive”—as someone “now fighting for us.” Trump’s Department of Education joined in, posting a Grok AI-generated image of Cunningham wearing a crown with the caption: “Common sense prevails.”

Cunningham’s ascent into the right’s zeitgeist is by design. For generations, conservative movements have sought to anoint and weaponize cisgender white women as public-facing enforcers of social and racial hierarchy. 

While the specific rallying cry has changed throughout history, their use and ideological framing to the conservative movement has remained largely intact: They serve narratively as bulwarks against some grave impending demographic or social upset, which if allowed to come to fruition would be an assault on the current status quo of women at large. 

Ride of the Valkyries

American political history is thick with appeals to white womanhood as something endangered and therefore requiring protection, particularly against the encroaching civil rights gains of Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ communities. Since the Academy Award-winning Birth of a Nation, the idea that straight white women are in peril simply by living in proximity to minority groups has been repeatedly used to justify racial exclusion and stir up moral panic.

In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, southern governments launched what’s now known as the “Massive Resistance,” a series of laws to prevent integration. The campaign mobilized a movement of white women to organize through schools, newspapers and civic groups in an effort they sold as defending white children, neighborhoods, and public education. It was largely these communities that performed the on-the-ground enforcement of segregation, going so far as to pluck out children suspected of being mixed-race from white schools. This changed the packaging of the politics of segregation: Rather than snarling racism, the message could be framed more politely as a threat to the sanctity of motherhood and child welfare.

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By the 1970s, overt defenses of racial segregation had become politically untenable on the national stage. The conservative movement’s next great cultural fight shifted toward gender. As the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and the promise of the Equal Rights Amendment changed family structures and challenged traditional gender roles, conservatives increasingly looked to white women to make the case against the nation’s expanding vision of female equality.

In the impeccably dressed mother-of-six Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative movement found its most formidable duelist against progressive feminism. Through her “STOP ERA” campaign, Schlafly argued the Equal Rights Amendment wouldn’t liberate women—it would endanger them by exposing women to the military draft, undermining mothers’ custody rights, and destabilizing the American family. 

Her message was overwhelmingly effective; the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified. As prominent legal scholar and feminist theorist Joan Williams put it, “the ERA was defeated when Schlafly turned it into a war among women over gender roles.” 

For decades, conservative politics has repeatedly tapped into this vein, transforming cultural anxieties—over motherhood, children’s safety, crime, sexuality, and gender roles—into mass movements by placing cisgender white women front and center. 

At the turn of the late 70s, conservatives promoted Anita Bryant, a wholesome pop singer who warned that gay rights threatened America’s children. During the rise of evangelical moralism of the 1980s, the religious right elevated Patricia Pulling, the suburban Virginia mother whose campaign against Dungeons & Dragons helped ignite the Satanic Panic. From matronly children’s book authors to buxom blue jean models, the conservative avatar is exceedingly familiar: a woman whom white men are encouraged to protect and one whom other white women are encouraged to empathize with and emulate. 

The Girls We Don’t Protect 

In her research on anti-feminist women, sociologist Rebecca Klatch found “most…are white, middle-aged, housewives, married or widowed, new to politics, and oriented toward single issues.”

But by screaming to “remember straight white women,” the right aims to make us forget anyone who sits at the edges of that definition, those long underserved by America’s promise of a truly free and equitable land. It dehumanizes women of color even further in a league where all athletes still earn a fraction of the paychecks their male counterparts take home. It shuts down any future good-faith conversations on how to allow trans athletes to compete and the sheer danger to a trans community increasingly excluded from social participation. It also serves to drown out the voices of women who support trans athletes, and often becomes a political Rorschach test to attack civil rights far beyond who makes a starting line up. 

I don’t know if that’s what Cunningham signed up to represent, and quite frankly, I don’t know if she did either. She most recently told the press that she wants to “get back to basketball.” 

In a free-speaking democratic society, Cunningham, and every athlete, is entitled to be human: to hold opinions, and feelings, and have a political voice. She is not the first, nor will be the last, fair maiden to be cast as a sword-bearing champion for a conservative culture war. 

But if a movement’s cause is about truly protecting women, then perhaps the more revealing question to interrogate is which women it has deemed worthy of protection in the first place. Whose womanhood is treated as universal, whose safety becomes a national rallying cry, and whose voices—including those of Black women, queer women, and transgender women—are left at the margins. That hierarchy often tells us more about the movement behind it than the woman standing under the net.

The post Sophie Cunningham Is the Anti-Trans Right’s New White Woman Mascot appeared first on The Intercept.

Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Senate in Michigan after besting Rep. Haley Stevens by less than 1 percentage point. Not long after The Associated Press called the race on Wednesday morning, Stevens threw her “full support” behind El-Sayed. While the votes were still being counted on Tuesday night, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow — who had dropped out of the running in July — also endorsed her former opponent, acknowledging that despite a “brutal” primary race, what is most important now is to head into November as a “unified party.”

What remains to be seen is whether moderates and Democratic Party pundits will follow suit, get on board, and vote blue no matter who. 

But centrists seem more interested in saving face than a Senate majority. Complaining that primary voters picked the candidate more likely to lose on Election Day has become a face-saving tactic for moderates as they’ve watched their preferred picks lose against upstart insurgent campaigns like El-Sayed’s.

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Among them are The Atlantic’s Jon Chait, who’s never met a progressive candidate he won’t sneer at. In typical form, Chait concern-trolled last weekend over the potential that Democrats would lose Michigan’s Senate seat by picking the charismatic El-Sayed over Stevens.

“Is there a single el-Sayed supporter with enough self-awareness to admit they’re willing to accept a higher risk of defeat to elect a left-wing candidate?” Chait asked on X, citing polling showing Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers with a slight but consistent lead in the Senate race just outside the margin of error

A more honest commentator might have pointed out that El-Sayed beat back an establishment campaign with tens of millions of dollars behind it: a staggering $62 million poured into the state to boost Stevens, half of it from AIPAC, giving her and her allies a 9-to-1 spending advantage over El-Sayed. But honesty has seldom been important for Chait’s left-bashing. 

By Wednesday morning, Chait had once again reframed the race, this time as a key battle in an existential war for liberalism. He groused variously about the streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned for El-Sayed; democratic socialism; and James Carville.

“The left has played down every success by the establishment while forcing it to own every failure,” he wrote in The Atlantic. “This dynamic points to a broader asymmetry between the two factions. The mainstream liberals of the Democratic Party have focused their energies on defeating Republicans. The left-wing faction has focused on defeating them.”

Chait certainly understands that this is how power is accumulated in the Democratic Party but is upset that, for once, it’s not benefiting his wing.

He wasn’t alone. Matt Yglesias — the ubiquitous blogger whose self-styled branding as a sensible, middle-of-the road liberal belies his support for Israel and antipathy for trans people — had warned about El-Sayed’s ability to win in the general for months. 

In a post on X citing one outlier poll showing Rogers with a 10-point lead on El-Sayed — the rest of the polls show a very tight race — Yglesias whined he was “kinda dooming on this situation.”

By early this morning, the blogger was downplaying the Michigan results, saying the Democratic nominee “should be good enough” to beat the Republican this year, even though El-Sayed “seems like a distinctly bad candidate” who is likely to “underperform the fundamentals.”

This is the kind of frustration that sets in when you realize that lurching to the right is putting you out of step with the party as whole, but you still want to be sure to appeal to the people who pay the bills.

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Making sure donors and power brokers are confident their interests are still being represented fuels how some party hacks are waging war against the left flank. Center for American Progress president and CEO Neera Tanden’s war on El-Sayed, waged on X, her platform of choice, was prosecuted in shockingly bad faith, even considering the source. Tanden implied that El-Sayed is a toxic misogynist, said his campaign had a “serious sexism” problem, and went all-in on every single attack line that came out of the Stevens campaign and the special interests that funded it.

“If I was the El-Sayed campaign, I probably wouldn’t want to be associated with Platner advisors’ previous push for [Graham] Platner as a future President given that it sounds grotesque today,” Tanden said on July 9. She continued forebodingly: “But then again, his campaign has all the same advisors so maybe he will be next.”

El-Sayed’s detractors have powerful friends. The biggest money targeting El-Sayed comes from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has already spent over $100 million on midterm races around the country, including more than $30 million directly boosting Stevens against El-Sayed.

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That massive spending comes as no surprise for two reasons: First, El-Sayed has been a critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the country’s conduct in general. Second, he’s of Egyptian descent, which is almost certainly a motivator for AIPAC, which didn’t throw much of any cash against Graham Platner, a white man in Maine, during his Senate campaign — despite Platner taking equally strong stances against Israel. 

Instead, AIPAC bundled $538,000 in donations for incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, and groups linked to its powerful super PAC pushed at least $750,000 into a state PAC opposing Platner. It’s a far cry from $60 million, but perhaps in the general election, Troy Jackson, who took over from Platner, will face larger financial attacks. 

In the waning days of the campaign, Stevens leaned into her support from AIPAC, all but overtly accusing El-Sayed of being an antisemite. Many of her supporters, including Angie Smith, a school board secretary in suburban Detroit whose backing Stevens continued to celebrate, have engaged in the kind of blatant, ugly Islamophobia that’s been simmering for a decade but was at its height during the Bush and Obama presidencies. Smith went viral for saying in an interview: “Don’t come out speaking only Arabic. Don’t come out with your Arabic music on.”

Stevens herself spent the last week of the race emphasizing her Michigan roots, a clear comment on El-Sayed’s “otherness,” and hit her opponent with broadside dog-whistle attacks, tweeting at her opponent: “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.”

But while Israel and racism were undeniably motivating factors for some of El-Sayed’s Democratic naysayers, and will surely continue to be, the real issue is the ongoing struggle for control of the Democratic Party between the increasingly out-of-touch, more conservative establishment and the increasingly progressive, pissed-off base. 

Over and over again in this primary cycle, progressive insurgents have defeated centrist picks — incumbent and otherwise — and even disasters like Platner haven’t stemmed the rising tide around the country.

Yet even in the context of a progressive insurgency, El-Sayed’s win is notable. He not only faced down AIPAC, but also nearly the entire weight of the entrenched Democratic establishment — and won. Stevens touted her backing by party leaders like South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, and a host of local, state, and national leaders. Meanwhile, El-Sayed had the support of progressive party leaders, with Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among many others, in his corner. 

Now that El-Sayed is the party’s nominee, Stevens’s supporters, both in Michigan and nationally, will have to decide if they want a progressive Muslim in the Senate for six years or to risk continued GOP control. If they’re really worried about the outcome and truly committed to Democratic success in November, they’ll set aside whatever issues they have with El-Sayed and go all-in on his candidacy. 

Any attempt to rationalize another way forward means that they’re more concerned with maintaining control over the levers of power of the party and disciplining their own voters. What they fail to realize is that you can’t enforce the iron law of institutions when there’s nothing to rule over. 

The post There’s No Time for Centrists to Be Doomers About El-Sayed’s Victory appeared first on The Intercept.

Bari Weiss’s latest hire for “60 Minutes,” whose major journalistic output includes smearing genocide victims and putting a target on the backs of reporters in Gaza, shows that the full-blown right-wing tabloidification of the television news program is charging ahead. 

If one held out hope that U.S. media would seek to reverse course after its support for genocide in Gaza over the past 34 months, those hopes were severely misplaced. The mainstream media’s lockstep support for genocide, which I document in my recent book on the subject, has not abated, and in key ways it’s only ramped up, become more explicit, and removed any remaining pretense of editorial independence.

The most obvious example of this is the Ellison family’s $8 billion purchase of Paramount and overtly right-wing revamp of CBS News, which kicked off in earnest last year. A former gold standard of centrist journalism, Weiss’s takeover of CBS News has seen numerous high-profile firings, scandals, and credible allegations of undermining journalistic independence, allegations of Trump toadyism, and a broader editorial push to the right.

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This campaign has been, in large part, aimed at sucking up to Trump to push through the much bigger prize of a $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. But there’s another element at play: The Ellison family’s documented support for Israel and its broader ideological aims. As I noted last December, Weiss was put in place by David Ellison precisely because of her years of strident, pro-Israel coverage and willingness to push the boundaries of racism and cynicism to pursue this cause. So far, Weiss’s attempt to turn the prestigious “60 Minutes” brand into another New York Post has been met with major internal resistance from high-profile reporters, producers, and news management. 

And despite Ellison’s buzzy op-ed for The New York Times today, where he pushes back on “speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions” and pledges “independence” for the newsroom, Weiss’s latest hire makes clear that her ideological coup of the once-vaulted “60 Minutes” brand is right on schedule. 

The hiring of Tanya Lukyanova, a video journalist for The Free Press, as an associate producer for “60 Minutes,” was announced Friday. Lukyanova has previously done video and research work for the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and Semafor. She rose the ranks of journalism doing critical — if boilerplate — reporting on Russia, but over the past year, under Weiss’s direction, she has veered into outright right-wing tabloidism. This climaxed with her contribution to two of the most shameful supposedly journalistic contributions since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began in late 2023: an article she produced herself in September 2025 helping justifying Israel’s unprecedented attacks on journalists in Gaza, and an article she co-bylined in August 2025 downplaying mass starvation in Gaza.  

The September 2025 article, “Gazan Journalists Say Al Jazeera Works Hand in Glove with Hamas,” relies almost entirely on alleged Gazan sources procured by the Center for Peace Communications. This is a pro-Israel front group that poses as a “peace organization” and has peddled similar dubious narratives elsewhere, almost aways designed to create the narrative that Gaza is little more than 2 million Palestinians being held captive by Hamas, who desperately want Israel to bomb their way to liberation. The group’s board of directors includes major pro-Israel funders, as well as Dennis Ross, a long-time pro-Israel pundit and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, itself a spin-off from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The CPC is run by Joseph Braude, who in 2004 pleaded guilty in federal court for illegally smuggling artifacts out of Iraq, namely 4,000-year-old marble and alabaster stone seals he knew to be stolen. 

At no point in the story was the shady past of the “Center for Peace Communications,” or its overt Zionist advocacy and funding, mentioned by Lukyanova, who presents them merely as a good-faith humanitarian organization. The shameful guilt-by-vague-association piece proceeds to imply, over and over again, that any connection to Hamas, no matter how remote, makes journalists a fair target for Israeli killing — without once reckoning with the numerous active and former members of the Israeli military who make up the ranks of Israeli and U.S. media.

It relies heavily on New York Post reporting because the New York Post is exactly what Weiss wants CBS News to look like in the near future: lurid incitement mixed with shoddy sourcing and anti-Palestinian racism. Lukyanova dutifully lends this shoddy racist incitement the veneer of respectability. 

Israel has killed more than 240 media workers in Gaza since October 2023, including several prominent Al Jazeera journalists such as Mohammed Samir Wishah, Hossam Shabat, Mahmoud Wadi, and Anas al-Sharif. In airstrikes in late 2023 and early 2024, Israel killed the wife, 7-year-old daughter, 15- and 27-year-old sons, and two nephews of longtime Al Jazeera reporter and Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, effectively wiping out his whole family while failing to kill al-Dahdouh himself after he was injured in a separate attack.

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The Costs of War project at Brown University deemed Israel’s war on Gaza the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded. Lukyanova’s anonymously sourced “exposé” accusing Al Jazeera reporters of being “affiliated with Hamas” came just two weeks after +972 Magazine revealed a secret Israeli military propaganda campaign to tie critical reporters to the designated “terrorist organization,” using what it calls a “Legitimization Cell.”

Lukyanova’s other major contribution, published along with Olivia Reingold, was “They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems.” The article led to widespread backlash and criticism for its callousness, bizarre logical leaps, and the implication that starving children was No Big Deal if those being killed by Israel’s deliberate campaign of hunger as a weapon of collective punishment happen to have preexisting conditions.

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As Natasha Lennard noted for The Intercept at the time, Anne Frank wasn’t directly killed by the Nazis but died of typhus as a result of the Nazis creating the condition for such a disease to spread in their concentration camps to claim its intended victims. Drop Site News followed up on the 12 “Gazans” whose brutal suffering Reingold and Lukyanova decided to well, actually and found “their underlying health conditions did not drive the deterioration of their health. Instead, it was the lack of access to food and medicine that drove their acute medical crises. Such is the hallmark of a famine. The first to fall victim are generally those who had underlying conditions to begin with.” 

This is consistent with much of Lukyanova’s non-Gaza output. While ​​plenty of her journalistic output is conventional in nature, she has published several articles promoting schlocky regime-change narratives aimed at various U.S. enemies, namely Iran and Venezuela. Lukyanova has shown a willingness — and apparent eagerness — to use her influential platform to promote war, starvation as a weapon of war, attacks on reporters, and related ideological orthodoxies of U.S. and Israel aggression.

And this shameless propagandist, who has repeatedly shown a willingness to be callous in the face of widespread famine and launder pro-Israel talking points about Israel-critical reporters being secret terrorists, will now be an associate producer at the most respected news program in all of the American media.

“60 Minutes” has always been a flawed institution, but hiring people willing to wade into the lowest gutter of incitement reporting — putting targets on the backs of disabled, starving kids and journalists documenting a genocide — is a major escalation in Weiss’s battle to turn “60 Minutes” into a billionaires’ ideological plaything. 

This is who gets ahead in U.S.-based journalism: not who is most humane, or accurate, or fair, or speaks truth to power, but those who serve the needs of power — whether it be the U.S. and Israeli governments or billionaire media owners.

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Just as The Atlantic’s now-editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was rewarded for his lies attempting to tie Saddam Hussien to 9/11 in the run-up to the Iraq War with becoming the head of the most influential liberal magazine in the country; just as Joe Scarborough was rewarded for cheering on the Iraq War with a three-hour morning block on the most influential liberal cable news show; just as Iraq War cheerleaders from Ezra Klein to Anne Applebaum to Bret Stephens to David Remnick have all enjoyed prestigious positions in today’s elite liberal media — those who lied about, covered up, or otherwise downplayed the genocide in Gaza will continue to rise to the top. This dynamic is only becoming more shameless and acute now that pro-Israel multibillionaires are buying up old legacy media and turning them into their personal tabloid outlets.  

The post Bari Weiss’s “60 Minutes” Hires Producer Who Downplayed Gaza Starvation, Justified Killing Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

Over 50,000 people last week risked their lives to cross the border between Morocco and Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa, in the hope of making it to mainland Europe.

The vast majority have already been returned to Morocco; fewer than 2,000 refugees remain on Ceuta and are, according to on-the-ground reports, in urgent need of food and shelter. Over 80 people reportedly died during the crossings, most from drowning.

The crisis for those seeking to enter Europe through Ceuta last week, including those who have been sent back, has already been framed according to a putrid, far-right political fulcrum. As a wide array of responses to the situation on Ceuta make clear, a commitment to harsh border regimes is not the sole preserve of the far right.

Once again, liberals and centrists who claim to decry the right’s anti-immigrant stances are themselves treating immigrants as a threat to be secured against.

For the international far right, images of thousands of desperate young African men entering European Union territory — little matter that Ceuta is, in fact, not on mainland Europe — has been fodder for predictable racist fearmongering and calls for extremist border rule. Far-right leaders blamed the crossings of the left-wing Spanish government’s extremely reasonable plans to regularize over 1 million undocumented immigrants who have already been living and working in Spain for at least five months.

“It’s terrible. Remember that picture. That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” President Donald Trump told Fox News, in a groundless attempt to use the suffering on Ceuta to his advantage. A spokesperson for the White House decried Spain’s new immigration regularization proposal as “far-left, globalist policies.”

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Meanwhile, conservative and right-wing leaders across Europe and the U.K. echoed similar sentiments, conjuring the old lie of an “invasion” confronting the West. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proposed Spain be suspended from the Schengen Area. A total of 22 EU leaders, including Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, wrote a joint letter to the European Commission expressing “serious concerns” about how Spain’s decision to grant legal status to immigrants served as a “pull factor.”

In response to these attacks and criticisms, several liberal and centrist politicians, institutions, and media organs have pushed back. Analyses in the New York Times and The Atlantic have stressed, for example, that not one of the people who crossed into Ceuta managed to make it to mainland Europe. These responses are framed as a counterpoint to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s right-wing critics.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also defended Sánchez against right-wing attacks, by praising the Spanish authorities’ “swift handling” in “successfully preventing illegal movement onwards to mainland Spain and Europe.”

Sanchez himself took a similar line.

“In less than 48 hours, my government has succeeded in fully restoring control over the border,” he wrote on Saturday in a response to criticism from other European leaders.

The mainstream defense against far-right fearmongering, then, was merely a regurgitation of the right’s anti-immigrant premise. Stopping immigrants who have been forced to take irregular routes, according to this logic, is a good thing. What the far right got wrong, by the lights of these centrists and liberals, was not their virulent racism, but rather that the claims of an “invasion” of Europe are not factually accurate.

“Spain and Germany’s centrist responses have been to ‘assure’ the E.U. that borders are fortified,” wrote migrant justice organizer and scholar Harsha Walia on Instagram. “This rebuttal simply buttresses the premise of border securitization.”

The reasons for the surge in crossings are not yet fully known; speculation abounds about the role of Moroccan and other state forces. A few things are, however, clear: Misinformation had spread in the preceding days on social media suggesting, falsely, that a recent Supreme Court ruling in Spain would prevent the Spanish authorities returning immigrants.

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In a world of increasing and inevitable mass migration, it is a moral failure to treat the swift removal of immigrants as a victory. Such a framing is also a gift to the far right, who will continue to benefit within a political consensus that treats immigration as a bad thing.

Only a few voices on the European left have placed focus where it belongs: with supporting immigrants who remain on Ceuta.

“What is happening in Ceuta is not a natural disaster, but the result of political decisions,” said Clara Bünger, a member of Germany’s The Left Party. “Germany and the EU have a duty to help with providing for refugees and to take in those seeking protection.”

“People are fleeing war, poverty, and the climate crisis,” she noted. “Higher walls won’t stop them; they will only make the escape more deadly. The most important thing now is that no one else dies.”

The post Liberals Are Ceding Ground to the Far Right on Ceuta Border Crossings appeared first on The Intercept.

For the low, low price of $100,000 a month, the ever-oxymoronic Truth Social is now selling direct access to its most important posts — or, in the firm’s preferred parlance, “truths” — to Wall Street. That’s an expedited lane to access statements and data from the president of the United States and other government officials, which have significant potential to move financial markets, ahead of us suckers in the general public. 

This sort of product, called an Application Processing Interface, or API, is not a particularly unusual offering for a social media company in the abstract. But Truth API, which launched today, is uniquely positioned to fuel blatant presidential graft. 

The move has been rightly called “brazen corruption,” “the president’s most desperate grift yet,” and a “clear and unacceptable pathway for corruption.” In a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sens. Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren called the offering “an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders.” All of that is true, but Truth API doesn’t stop at creating a new pathway to funnel de facto bribes to Trump; it also seeks to functionally merge the provision of a public good with a for-profit company. 

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

It has become de facto administration policy for high-ranking government officials to make official announcements on Truth Social without going through traditional press offices. Trump has also set a new standard for blurring the lines between his communications as a public official and a private citizen.

For nearly half a century, communications from the president have been recognized as the property of the United States, not the president himself. Under the Presidential Records Act, any documents (with some carve-outs for national security and personal records like journals and diaries) that are “created or received by the President … in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President” are subject to the United States’ “complete ownership, possession, and control.”

In other words, selling expedited access to such statements is effectively privatizing a public asset. That might be part of the reason why, this spring, Trump’s Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that argues the heretofore uncontroversial Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional.

Trump owns a 41 percent stake in Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. In December 2024, all of his shares were transferred into Trump’s revocable trust, which is overseen by Donald Trump Jr. At the time, it was a 52 percent stake, worth about $4 billion against the company’s total valuation of $7.5 billion. Those TMTG shares (which are of course traded under the narcissistic ticker DJT) represent a major part of the president’s total wealth. While his stake in the company is now valued at (only!) $1.2 billion, it still represents 18 percent of Trump’s overall wealth, which Forbes estimated to be $6.5 billion.

And while Truth Social has become a pillar of the Trump business empire, it is also a pillar of sand. Truth Social hemorrhages money: In 2024, it only brought in $3.6 million and had a net loss of more than $400 million. Last year was even worse: Revenue ticked up slightly to $3.68 million, but its net loss soared to more than $700 million. The company’s value is now less than one-fourth of what it was in its spring 2024 heyday. That’s a lot of money on board a sinking ship.

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TMTG tried to find income streams from branching out into prediction markets, cryptocurrency issuing, bitcoin investment, and nuclear energy production (perhaps a nod to Trump’s physicist Uncle John). But none of these maneuvers have stopped the bleeding.

This latest plan to sell the API might finally be the path to profitability that TMTG so desperately needs. At its core, what an API does is provide a data feed directly into a particular software program, in this case financial trading terminals. So even though the company insisted to the Wall Street Journal that “Truth API is designed to deliver posts the instant they are made public to everyone, not before,” it still represents priority access to government officials’ statements because anyone not paying for the service will be unable to process the information at the same pace as subscribers, letting professional traders and hedge funds outpace the market and reap the benefits.

In modern financial markets, an advantage of even fractions of a second can be decisive — and can provide the opportunity to reap huge profits. This is the sitting president directly selling financial powerhouses a significant edge from the very heart of the federal government for a cool $100,000 a month (or a paltry $60,000 if you opt for a multi-year subscription!).

This entire sordid arrangement already reeks of corruption, but the stench grows stronger when juxtaposed with this administration’s propensity to mistakenly, illegally, and/or prematurely release information when they aren’t supposed to, and not infrequently on Truth Social. Trump’s presidency has always been defined by the degradation of our sense of shared reality and by rampant corruption. There’s no better metaphor than sticking a price tag on the “truths” coming out of the administration.

The post Trump’s Truth Social API Is a Blatantly Corrupt Favor to Wall Street appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Saturday night, a man drove a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride Festival, before getting out and stabbing several people, leaving one woman dead and dozens injured.

The suspect, identified as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, a German national and reported supporter of the Islamic State group, was shot dead by police on Sunday following a daylong manhunt.

“We do not want this deed to be used for political ends,” said the organizers of the festival, also known as Christopher Street Day, in a statement on Sunday before the attacker had even been located. “We don’t want any groups to be placed under suspicion for this. People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others. We will not allow this.”

Amid the shock and grief, the organizers saw the immediate need to stop malign political forces using the horrific attack and the queer community’s suffering to fuel Germany’s already fervent anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-immigrant sentiment.

They had reason for concern. The far-right Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD — which decries trans people as a “cult,” opposes marriage equality and gay adoption, defines a family as only “father, mother and children,” and condemns so-called “gender ideology” — had moved to weaponize the attack within hours.

“The AfD has been warning for years: Islamism is and remains the greatest security threat to our country,” said AfD member of parliament Martin Hess in a statement. He remarked that “we also urgently need a genuine shift in migration policy” — despite the fact that Saturday’s suspect was born and raised in Germany.

The AfD, which is currently the most popular German party according to recent polls, boasts numerous state-level branches classified as extremist organizations by Germany’s intelligence agencies.

Alliance for Bigotry

The party is using a familiar playbook. In 2016, the day after the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a total ban on immigration from Muslim countries. His two presidencies have since been dedicated to destroying both trans lives and Muslim lives with vigor.

Trump has sought to leverage attacks abroad, including in Germany, to galvanize his anti-Muslim base. The president was quick to condemn the 2016 massacre at a Berlin Christmas market to double down, once again, on his Muslim ban plan.

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So far, Trump hasn’t said anything about the Berlin Pride attack — perhaps his demonization of Muslims has been so thorough that he no longer needs to feign concern about queer lives to gin up Islamophobia — but the alliances that inform these bigotries nonetheless remain a powerful political force.

Trump and his allies have long boosted the very German politics that is cynically leveraging the Berlin attack for political gains.

Last year, anti-trans zealot Elon Musk threw his support and his social media platform behind the far-right party.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he wrote on X.

The Right’s Own Attacks

Day in and day out, meanwhile, it is the likes of the AfD and other conservative German parties, and the Republicans at home, who are assaulting the LGBTQ+ rights.

A spike in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in Germany in recent years has been directly linked to a rise in far-right extremism, including more than two dozen attacks at Pride events.

The attacks themselves, however, are only part of the story.

“Politicians are now shamelessly exploiting the suffering of the queer community for their own agenda, while cutting funding for queer organizations, aid projects, and cultural initiatives,” wrote Mohamed Amjahid, a columnist for German newspaper, Taz.

It’s true. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Party, in its role in the coalition leading Berlin’s municipal government, has cut funding for queer community programs in the city and banned drag story hour readings in public libraries.

Of the perpetrators of Saturday’s brutality, Merz said: “They want to take away the most important things we have: our openness, our freedom.”

This purported shared “openness” and “freedom” had not been on display when Merz opposed plans to fly a rainbow flag atop the Reichstag Building to honor Pride last year.

“The Bundestag is not a circus tent,” the conservative chancellor said.

Just hours before Ballout rammed a truck into Pride attendees, Berlin riot police had focused their energies on making arrests and aggressing attendees at the explicitly anti-colonial, anti-capitalist Internationalist Queer Pride march elsewhere in Berlin.

Part-Time Solidarity

As Berlin-based journalist James Jackson noted, Merz’s statement on the attack, along with statements by three other senior conservative politicians, wholly failed to explicitly mention gay or queer people.

The statements defended “tolerance” and “freedom,” but when queer and trans people are attacked and killed, it is not “freedom” that is threatened in the abstract, it is specific forms of life — the very ways of being in the world that have been under assault by far-right politics and centrist complicity, across Europe and the United States.

On Sunday, thousands gathered for a vigil in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which was lit up in rainbow colors by night.

“Last year they refused to let us fly the rainbow flag in front of the Bundestag, because it’s not a circus tent, after all,” said one vigil speaker who identified as Muslim and gay. “Today the flags are flying at half-mast. But solidarity shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction after a tragedy.”

It’s a lesson that self-identifying allies in the U.S., above all Democrats who continue to fail trans people, would do well to learn, too.

The post The Right Seeks to Capitalize on Berlin Pride Attack — Even as It Poses Its Own Existential Threat to Queer Lives appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presidential Run?

Antipathy to the left now defines much of his politics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Negotiate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a tangible heat to being Black in America this summer. 

Every morning starts the same. A jolt of coffee and nicotine as my thumbs scroll a daily intake of Black death and indignity. 

It mostly comes dosed in tears. Tears of Black moms and aunties, projected behind stone-faced fathers and grandpops trying to hold it together behind press podiums. 

This summer, it was Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old who disappeared during a trip to Mississippi’s Horn Island over the Fourth of July. Wells, who traveled to the island with a predominately white group of friends, was found dead in the water two days later. Authorities have not announced a final determination of what happened, but Wells’s family has challenged the official timeline and sought an independent autopsy. The investigation remains ongoing, which is to say that another Black family is waiting for answers in the indeterminate dark. In a state synonymous with deep-seated anti-Black racism, and the highest number of recorded lynchings, speculators and community members have begun to fear the worst.

It’s an expectation that has set the tone for living while Black in this new era. Where at any moment you, as Black person, can be erased for the most negligible of offenses, and if you’re not careful, be discarded into the void.

Before Nolan Wells, we watched in June as another Mississippi family laid their Black boy to rest. Kohen Wiley, who was just a year old, was shot and killed by Senatobia police officers, who fired into the vehicle where Wiley was sitting on his mother’s lap. After a friend of Wiley’s mother was accused of shoplifting a box of diapers at a Walmart, police opened fire on their car under the pretense that the vehicle was “oncoming” toward the officers. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has said the officers were not in the car’s path, citing a photo from the scene. A month later, investigators have yet to release body camera footage of the incident or provide any new answers. No charges have been filed.

Black Americans had already borne witness to those familiar echoes. Earlier that month, a jury in South Carolina acquitted 61-year-old Rick Chow of a murder charge after he shot and killed Cyrus Carmack-Belton, 14, for the alleged offense of stealing bottled water. Video evidence of the 2023 incident shows the store owner chasing Carmack-Belton out of the shop after falsely accusing him of theft. Chow, who had twice before shot patrons he suspected of shoplifting, would go on to shoot the teenager in the back as he fled. 

Whether over a box of Pampers or a gulp of water, it is a startling reminder that for too many non-Black Americans, protecting even the most trivial property can take precedence over the sanctity of a Black life.

It’s an existential dread that has now turned into expectation, an anxiety meant for the mind to blunt the inevitable oncoming pattern of pain, disappointment, and injustice — in this case, being Black in America.

These deaths do not exist in isolation. They arrive amid a broader retreat from the institutions that, however imperfectly, once acknowledged Black Americans as a constituency deserving of protection and investment.

And the casualties of Black existence transcend more than just bodies. The Trump administration has waged full spectrum warfare on Black identity in every sense. 

Since Trump returned to office, Black workers have experienced rising unemployment, with Black men seeing some of the steepest job losses in recent memory, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

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

This coincides with broader efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle federal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, directing agencies to terminate DEI programs and contracts while encouraging similar rollbacks throughout the private sector. The administration has also sought to reshape how race is discussed across the federal government, from education and museums to civil rights enforcement. 

At the same time, the administration has continued to chip away at the legal architecture of voting rights, with years of court decisions making it more difficult to challenge racial gerrymandering and voting restrictions. The Supreme Court’s recent decision dismantling key Voting Rights Act protections has opened the door for states to erase Black-majority districts, which threatens to strip Black communities of congressional representation across the South. 

If there was anything novel to the current pulse of American white supremacy, it is that it doesn’t seek domination but to erase Blackness altogether.

Trump’s supporters have come out in droves to support this mission, from swarms of masked white supremacists descending on the U.S. Capitol in honor of our nation’s 250th birthday to the endless viral videos of white men brandishing guns at Black people doing anything from swimming at the pool to handing out flyers. 

It is no surprise that, under the constant reminder that the market value of Black life has plummeted, many Black Americans are succumbing to despair. Suicide rates among Black Americans — especially young Black men — have risen sharply over the past decade. Researchers point to a convergence of untreated depression, limited access to mental health care, economic instability, exposure to violence, and the cumulative weight of racialized stress.

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None of those policies alone determine whether a police officer fires a gun, whether a jury reaches a particular verdict, or what pushes a broken down mind over the brink. But together they communicate something many Black Americans increasingly recognize: that America has further turned tail and ran away from its promise of an egalitarian society, or even the aspiration that it should be one. 

That departure has consequences well beyond Washington. It shapes who receives the public’s attention, which communities are viewed as worthy of investment, and whose fears are treated as matters of national concern. 

For Black Americans watching another summer marked by funerals, investigations, and courtroom disappointments, the sentiment is not simply that violence persists. It is that the country is becoming less interested in confronting why it persists at all. 

That is the understanding of it. But the feeling is something entirely different.

And that feeling is scary as hell.

The post It’s Scary As Hell Being Black in America Right Now appeared first on The Intercept.

For the second time in a week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have shot a man dead. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old father from Colombia, was driving slowly in Biddeford, Maine, when an agent shot into his vehicle.

As is now par for the course, ICE representatives are already lying about the incident. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reportedly at first told Maine Sen. Angus King that the driver had attempted to use his car as a weapon — the same lie used to justify shooting 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dead just one week ago in Houston and Renee Good months before that. ICE has made the same bogus claim in a number of recorded incidents involving agents shooting into moving cars.

In a contradictory but equally baseless statement, the Department of Homeland Security claimed on X that the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.” An eyewitness told reporters that before the victim died, his face covered in blood, he could be heard saying, “I tried to stop.”

Like Salgado Araujo in Texas last week, Durán Guerrero had not been the target of ICE operations. This is not to say that either death would be any more justified had ICE been seeking the men for arrest; no immigration violation should carry a death sentence. But both shootings highlight the agency’s pattern of violent racial profiling and reckless indifference to human life.

Thousands protested in Houston following Salgado Araujo’s killing. Immediately after news spread of the Maine shooting, protesters took to the streets and rushed to Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s Biddeford office. Collins cast a deciding vote in the Senate last month to deliver a staggering $70 billion in funding over three years to ICE and Border Patrol. “Vote her out,” the demonstrators chanted.

Every elected official who is complicit in this border regime should be ousted. It should be a minimum requirement for Democrats running for Congress that they commit to abolishing ICE. Wherever there is legislative, municipal, city, or local power to do so, political leaders must combat ICE with more than words or face organized pressure campaigns and removal.

Following the high-profile ICE killings of Good and Alex Pretti, two Minnesotans, in January, people took to the streets nationwide. Minneapolis residents responded with work stoppages, blockades, and powerful community resistance. The need to escalate organized resistance to ICE nationwide is again all too clear. Community mutual aid networks, neighborhood defenses, mass strikes, and major disruptive protests are as necessary as ever. But all such actions face the challenge of sustainability when opposing President Donald Trump’s endlessly resourced deportation machine.

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Durán Guerrero’s killing in Maine is the eighth fatal ICE shooting in Trump’s second term, according to The Trace. At least fifty-two people have died in ICE custody over that same period, which Human Rights Watch called a “soaring mortality rate.” Meanwhile, ICE is further scaling up its quotidian activities to serve Trump’s project of ethnic cleansing: In just five days at the end of June, ICE agents quietly made a reported 10,000 arrests.

The vile spectacle of city-based ICE surges, which were the agency’s calling card under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have given way to dispersed but constant round-ups. The terror for immigrant communities is no less acute; the difficulty when it comes to fighting back has only sharpened. It is high time that anti-ICE action receives more robust political and institutional support.

It is not sufficient, for example, for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to assert that the New York Police Department does not coordinate with ICE for deportation operations if the NYPD is dispatched to clear streets for ICE vehicles to travel through disruption-free. It is not enough to have a court order in place barring ICE from making arrests at New York City immigration courts if that order isn’t enforced. “Sanctuary city” has to be a label with meaning beyond Trump using it as a slur against blue cities. It’s a promise, one that must also entail taking action against the racist municipal policing under which immigrants suffer and antifascist organizing is targeted.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire vowed last week to “pursue an independent and transparent” local investigation into the ICE shooting in his city. He also said that the federal government has taken control of the evidence, making such an investigation extremely difficult. The idea that the federal government will hold its jackbooted thugs accountable is, of course, utterly laughable.

But so, too, is the idea that an investigation by Houston or Texas law enforcement will deliver justice to Salgado Araujo’s loved ones, let alone the millions of people whose lives are being destroyed by the American deportation machine. An independent investigation into ICE killings is not even the floor, it’s the basement.

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As the federal government expands extremist efforts to criminalize and imprison antifascist activists and ICE watchers as terrorists, political leaders — especially those who claim to represent so-called sanctuary cities — must step up to support and protect targeted organizers. It is a disgrace, albeit not a surprise, that Democratic leaders have not spoken out against the unprecedented, draconian sentences — ranging from 30 to 100 years in federal prison — handed down to eight people in Texas over an ICE detention center protest.

The struggle against Trump’s border regime will continue to be led by immigrant communities and their neighbors. The front-line work on the neighborhood level remains the most crucial — from street to street, workplace to workplace, building to building — and in collective efforts against detention centers and in the direct surveillance of and confrontation with ICE agents on the ground. No work of legislation or policy can supplant that. But as the stakes for taking part in anti-ICE work heighten, as immigrant round-ups grow and the death counts climb, it’s high time that Democrats join the work of abolishing ICE with everything at their disposal — or be replaced.

Update: July 16, 2026
The article and photo caption have been updated to reflect that Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s age was 25; several initial news stories listed him as 26 after the Colombian Embassy reported an erroneous age.

The post How ICE Arrests Went Quiet — and Got Even More Deadly appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

The months after the October 7, 2023, attacks saw a wave of questionable mainstream news stories about alleged sexual assault in Hamas’s attacks that day on Israel.

It would be years before the American press began to deal with sex crimes against Palestinians imprisoned by Israel as part of its brutal occupation.

It’s a reckoning that is long overdue.

Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both a systematic and a decades-old practice — a well understood dynamic that is being put in the spotlight this week in a new report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers.

The extensive 188-page report, parts of which were shared with The Intercept in advance of publication, situates recent, high-profile news stories detailing the rape and sexual assault of Palestinians in Israeli detention as part of “a wider system of sexualized and gendered violence spanning detention, warfare, surveillance, reproductive destruction, family separation, domicide, and the desecration of Palestinian bodies” over decades.

The report, “A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians,” brings together witness and survivor testimonies; news coverage; academic research; United Nations reports; and findings from human rights groups, like the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and Israel-based B’Tselem; along with declassified Israeli archival material.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces denied allegations of mistreatment of Palestinians in detention and said the military could not comment on specific cases without more information about the detainees.

“The IDF rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees, including allegations of stripping detainees of their clothes and sexually assaulting detainees during interrogations in detention facilities under its responsibility,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “Allegations of misconduct by IDF soldiers are examined and handled accordingly. In appropriate cases, criminal investigations are opened by the Military Police.”

The United Nations added Israel in May to a blacklist of countries found to be committing sexual violence in war zones, citing 31 cases of sexual violence perpetrated in the last two years by Israeli forces against Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The new Palestinian Feminist Collective report underlines that the U.N.’s findings are merely the tip of the iceberg.

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The compilation of harrowing details from a multiplicity of sources offers a chilling rebuke to those who have sought to discredit Palestinian victims’ claims or dismiss cases of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by Israeli forces as rare aberrations.

Crushed testicles, genital beatings, rapes of detainees including children and the elderly — the report, like a number of the previous human rights reports it draws from, shows that such abuse is, according to the authors, “institutional practice rather than individual misconduct.”

Rape by Trained Dogs

A section of the report shared with The Intercept includes the detailed testimonies of multiple released Palestinian prisoners. A 42-year-old woman arrested in Gaza while going through an Israeli military checkpoint in November 2024, for example, described being stripped, blindfolded, and handcuffed to a metal table and raped vaginally and anally by Israeli soldiers.

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“I felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me,” the woman said, in testimony originally collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “I started screaming, and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded. I felt the man who was raping me ejaculate inside my anus.”

She then recounted subsequent vaginal rapes.

A 41-year-old Palestinian father arrested at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023 and held for 22 months in Israeli prison reported, “One of the soldiers raped me by violently inserting a wooden stick into my anus. After about a minute he removed it and then inserted it again more forcefully.”

Other accounts from boys and men detail anal rape by soldiers and prison guards using carrots, bottles, batons, and other sharp objects.

The report also includes multiple accounts claiming the use of trained dogs as sexual threats and tools of direct sexual violence.

When the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof last month reported on widespread and extreme sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention, including the use of trained dogs to rape detainees, the backlash from Israeli authorities and pro-Israel mouthpieces was as swift as it was predictable.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed the article as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” — a typical retort that deems any criticism of Israeli brutality to be antisemitic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sue the Times for defamation. No such lawsuit has materialized, bound as it would be to fail and risk a court process revealing further horrors perpetrated by Israeli forces.

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Meanwhile, for Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian liberation, Kristof’s report was perhaps only surprising for its presence in the New York Times. Reports of rape, sexual violence, and sexual humiliation in Israeli custody have been widespread well established for years.

Pro-Israel media outlets like Bari Weiss’s The Free Press attempted to discredit and debunk the testimonies in Kristof’s article, particularly those from formerly detained Palestinians who alleged that trained dogs were used to rape prisoners. Such abuse was impossible, the critics claimed — despite the fact that, according to survivors, Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, as well as Nazi prison commander Klaus Barbie, reportedly used dogs to rape and sexually torture prisoners.

The “Predatory State” report lists 10 specific incidents of rape or severe sexual assault involving trained dogs, as reported to human rights groups by victims themselves or firsthand witnesses.

“The shock came when they forced me to lie down, and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me,” one detainee testified, in a report first compiled by Euro-Med and cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. “At first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.”

“They unleashed police dogs on us again, allowing them to tear into our flesh,” a 48-year-old man arrested at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in further testimony cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. He reported that one dog attacked a fellow detainee and “started mauling his genitals (penis). He bled to death in my arms.”

“Violence Across Decades”

The report authors note that “sexual torture has often preceded the deaths of detainees and prisoners and therefore must be considered part and parcel of the crime of genocide waged against the Palestinian people.”

This statement covers more than just Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: The Palestinian Feminist Collective report is explicit in including accounts of sexual violence reportedly carried out by soldiers as well as settlers in the West Bank.

“They zip-tied my penis, tightened it and then dragged me all around the village,” a Palestinian man, Qusai Abu-al Kebash, told B’Tselem of a reported assault at the hands of settlers in his West Bank village earlier this year.

In response to credible claims of sexual assault, particularly in Israel’s Sde Teiman military prison, Israel’s defenders have attempted to downplay incidents as aberrations or outliers in the fog of war.

“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesperson, now fellow at the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told The Free Press.

He was responding to an incident caught on video of Israeli soldiers appearing to beat and brutally sodomize a Palestinian prisoner with a knife. Conricus blamed “reservists without the right training” who “were called up to be prison guards” — but rejected any claims of systematic abuse.

All charges were dropped against the soldiers accused of sexually assaulting the detainee. Numerous Israeli lawmakers, including far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, condemned the military for even attempting to charge the soldiers.

Reports like the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s further give the lie to excuses like Conricus’s.

“The Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven until Israeli perpetrators record themselves,” legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat told The Intercept. “Still the debate focuses on whether individual soldiers received direct orders, rather than how a state has sanctioned, protected, and repeated this violence across decades.”

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In a statement shared with The Intercept, Loubna Qutami, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, said, “This report names what Palestinians have long known and what the world has too often refused to hear: Israel’s sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians is systemic, historical, and constitutive of Israeli colonial rule.”

According to Igal Dotan, an Israeli attorney cited in the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report, “The situation before the war was very bad, but it is not comparable to what happened in Israeli prisons after October 7.”

Dotan’s clients include a “severely disabled” 14-year-old Palestinian boy, diagnosed with autism, who was, the report notes, “reportedly sexually, physically, and psychologically assaulted while in detention.”

Before October 7

The Palestinian Feminist Collective refuses to begin its history of sexual and gendered violence on October 7. The report includes testimonies of sexualized violence gathered from oral histories, declassified archives and historical documents, dating back to the Nakba in 1948, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what are today’s Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

The long history of systematic displacement and dehumanization of Palestinians is run through with sexualized violence — as is common in situations of oppressive, militarized violence and population control.

“‘A Predatory State’ documents how sexual torture is a technology of Israeli rule: a means of terrorizing Palestinians and advancing a project of destruction,” Erakat told The Intercept. “Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.”

With the genocide in Gaza ongoing and Israeli expansionist violence continuing in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, such accountability seems beyond our current horizons of expectation.

More evidence of the sort compiled by the Palestinian Feminist Collective is unlikely to change that; it is not for lack of evidence that Israeli forces continue to carry out war crimes with impunity.

The urgency is to act on the ample evidence we have.

“The report is a call upon all responsible citizens to stay united,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, in a statement on the Palestinian Feminist Collective report, “not just to end genocide, but to fight once and for all this testosteronic model of power that roots and grows through subjugation and repression.”

Update: July 2, 2026
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Israeli military received after publication.

The post How to Show That Israel’s Sexual Violence Against Palestinians Is Systemic — and Has Gone on for Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

The far-right Supreme Court majority marked the final day of Pride month with an anti-trans decision upholding state bans on trans girls from playing girls’ sports. That the ruling from the right-wing court had been long expected made it no less horrendous.

With a 6–3 judgment applying to two cases, one from Idaho and one from West Virginia, the court gave states nationwide carte blanche to discriminate against trans girls who want to play on teams consistent with their gender. The ruling does not constitute a nationwide ban on trans athletes, and trans girls can continue to compete in states without bans. Twenty-seven states currently have bans on the books against trans girl athletes. All those bans — and whatever new ones come into place — can stay in place.

One of the cases was just about a single girl seeking to participate in her school sports.

Pointing to the absurdity, the legal scholar and trans rights advocate Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky, “Just absolutely insane to me how many millions were spent and the massive political and legal effort exhausted just so a state can ban a single trans girl from playing sports with her friends in school.”

This was always the plan for the anti-trans zealots who saw girls’ sports as an easy entry point from which to decimate trans people’s civil rights protections. It’s no surprise then that the consequences of the rulings threaten to go far beyond school and college athletics.

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As multiple critics of anti-trans sports bans stress, efforts to exclude trans athletes also open the door to the abuse and harassment of any girls alleged to appear insufficiently feminine. Genital inspection and genetic testing requirements are the next logical steps — steps that have already been proposed by Republicans in several states.

The Supreme Court majority argued that the anti-trans bans do not violate either Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that proscribes sex-based discrimination, or constitutional guarantees of equal protection.

Even the dissenting liberal justices ceded vital ground in the moral struggle for trans rights. Though they sided with the trans students’ claims under the equal protection clause, they agreed with the conservatives that trans-exclusionary, sex-segregated school sports bans did not violate Title IX’s prohibitions in schools.

The liberal stance paints a telling picture of the decimated state of trans rights. The far right has been able to pursue its trans-eliminationist agenda to an extraordinary degree in part because liberals and even some leftists have been willing to throw trans people under the bus, if not fully align with fascistic anti-trans fearmongering.

The idea that trans girls pose a threat or danger to cisgender girls playing sports remains a myth without any evidence or grounding, conjured from whole cloth by anti-trans ideologues looking for a wedge issue to pass overreaching anti-trans laws.

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Today, the strategies dreamt up by well-funded think tanks and advocacy groups like the rabidly anti-trans Alliance Defending Freedom have again paid off: According to the highest court in the land, trans exclusion in sex-segregated sports does not violate civil rights.

Even more anti-trans bathroom bans and other policies of exclusion from public life will no doubt follow.

Anti-Trans Eliminationism

The West Virginia case was brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school student who has identified as a girl since she was 8 years old, takes puberty blockers, has a birth certificate recognizing her as female, and just wanted to compete on the athletics team with other girls.

Writing the majority opinion upholding the ban against her participation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh described trans girls and women and “biological males.”

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Earlier this week, anticipating the court’s ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chase Strangio wrote, “I hope that everyone who, like me, loves sports will pause to think about what it means to exile a group of young people from the social, cultural, and emotional experience of being part of a team.”

The legal arguments for permitting anti-trans discrimination are by now familiar: The bans are not discriminatory, anti-trans bigots say, because they apply equally to those they deem biologically male and those they deem biologically female.

The fact that anti-trans discrimination is unavoidably a matter of sex-based discrimination is neatly avoided in a way that erases the sex-based reality of trans people from existence. Little matter that no current state laws are on the books relating to boys’ sports.

It evidently matters even less to the Supreme Court justices that sex and gender do not exist in the sharp binary that sports bans and other anti-trans policies demand.

In an unnecessary and cruel concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas went out of his way to note, “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe they are.”

This tells us all we need to know about the right’s designs on trans existence, reflecting an anti-trans eliminationist ideology that flies in the face of medical consensus and empirical evidence.

As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive 2016 feature on the practice of so-called “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such tests purports to achieve.

“Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw,” Padawer wrote.

Not that this has mattered to the sports regulators and gender-conformity zealots, committed as they are to the brutal racist legacy of gender policing, and desperately pushing to exclude trans people from public life.

“No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” Kavanaugh had the audacity to say at the end of his opinion, upholding laws designed precisely to ostracize and vilify trans children.

The post Even the Liberal Supreme Court Justices Ceded Ground in the Fight for Trans Existence appeared first on The Intercept.