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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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.

Aron D’Souza, the brainchild behind the lawsuit to kill Gawker Media, says he wants to fix journalism. To that end, in the spring he launched a platform that he described as a “private AI tribunal” to adjudicate the veracity of media claims.

“Today, anyone can publish allegations. Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media,” the platform’s homepage read until late May. Then, the site was unceremoniously taken down, not long after The Intercept’s interview with D’Souza. 

“Due to feedback we’re rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future,” Objection’s site, which features an uncanny AI-animated image of a painterly woman’s shifting eyes, now reads. “Stay tuned for updates.”

The platform itself was something of a mishmash between Snopes.com for right-wing culture war issues and a private defamation arbitration service marketed to the everyman. Among the claims it was adjudicating was whether Joe Rogan promoted the use of “horse dewormer” ivermectin as a Covid-19 cure and claims by Sen. Bernie Sanders that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

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It’s deeply unclear how many everyday people need easy access to defamation remedies; the lawsuit that eventually killed Gawker was brought on behalf of the professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is also one of the backers of Objection. But when I caught up with D’Souza, an Oxford-educated lawyer, to discuss the project which has been criticized for its possible impacts on press freedom, he was awash in populist rhetoric. 

“I don’t think anyone is actually happy with the state of journalism,” he told me. “My view is that someone needs to structurally fix journalism.”

When I asked why he shuttered the site, D’Souza pointed to sky-high demand.

“After launch, we received many customer requests for more complex investigations (with much higher willingness to pay),” he said. “As such, we decided to focus the team on retooling the website.”

When I first spoke with D’Souza shortly after launch, he was fresh off ringing the opening bell for the IPO of his other venture, which includes the Enhanced Games, a kind of Olympics where all manner of performance-enhancing drugs were allowed. We spoke about his views on the press and how he hopes his controversial Objection AI platform will reform the media.

There isn’t much that D’Souza points out that isn’t already obvious to most casual observers of the state of news media. Journalists are underpaid. “It’s kind of unimaginable why you would go to Columbia Journalism School and get half a million dollars in debt and then get paid $50,000 to write at The Huffington Post,” he said. The business model for most publishers “has completely fallen apart.” And “the people who are being written about,” he said, “aren’t very happy because they feel like they’re being represented incorrectly.”

On top of all of that, the editorial boards of the largest mainstream media outlets, owned by a handful of elite families, reflect their own biases — whether it’s the Sulzberger family, who owns the New York Times, or the Murdochs, the News Corp scions who own Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

“You walk into that building on 6th Avenue in New York and you feel the presence of Rupert Murdoch, as you’re aware. You walk into the Daily Mail building on Kensington High Street in London, you feel the presence of the Rothermere family. In a more subtle way, you walk into the New York Times building, and you feel the presence of the Sulzbergers,” D’Souza said.

According to him, that concentrated, elite media ownership class has contributed to a compounding, historic crisis that threatens the credibility of journalism as a whole. Just 28 percent of Americans trust the media, according to a 2025 Gallup survey, the lowest it’s ever been. Republicans, who are traditionally the partisan group with the lowest trust in media, have remained that way (6–17 percent) but curiously, now only a slim majority of Democrats — 51 percent — say they trust traditional media. For all intents and purposes, D’Souza’s got much of the diagnosis right. It’s his solution that’s the problem. 

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The centerpiece of Objection is what the company calls its “Honor Index,” a rating system that purports to tell how credible a journalist is. Here’s how it works: For a fee of $2,500 to $5,000 (depending where on the website you looked), anyone can file an Objection. After that, your case is investigated by what the platform describes as “the most qualified researchers,” which it says include award-winning investigative journalists, former CIA and FBI agents, and military intelligence officers.

The resulting investigation purportedly identifies the factual claims that require investigating, and adjudicates evidence by its “proximity to the underlying event.” Primary sources, documents, court filings, emails, and transaction records are valued at the highest premium. Anonymous sources “lacking a traceable origin” rank lowest. Once the investigators have gathered their “evidence” and offered the journalist in question an opportunity to reply, a proprietary AI system makes a judgment on the quality of the claim. The goal, ostensibly, is greater transparency into the business of newsgathering.  

“The actual article you publish,” he told me, referring to this Intercept story, “will only include a very small percentage of the actual data that has been transmitted to you. We live in this world of infinite cloud storage, infinite AI comprehension capability. So why isn’t that underlying data available?”

On first blush, D’Souza’s critiques mostly track, but for the fact that much of what he is asking for is already standard practice in many newsrooms. Pick through the archives of the once formidable, now-defunct BuzzFeed News data investigations team and you’ll find the underlying code for the publication’s award-winning investigation into surveillance aircrafts used by the military and law enforcement agencies, among other stories. Most newsrooms that practice data journalism host GitHub pages where people can audit their code and datasets.

Anonymous sources, however, are D’Souza’s biggest gripe. They are, he said, “One of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.” By his reasoning, science doesn’t use anonymous sources and is subject to peer review, so why isn’t journalism held to the same standard of external oversight?

It doesn’t take much to realize that the power differential exists in much the opposite direction. Who’s more of a threat: a whistleblower speaking out about the dangers of some of the biggest companies in the world, or the powerful company with the $300 billion market cap sitting on some of the most sophisticated surveillance architecture in the world?

When Objection launched in April, and up until after our conversation, D’Souza said the company had seeded a list of active cases it was working on adjudicating. One case under active “investigation” before the site went dark was “The Public v. Hannah Broughton,” over the statement made in the U.K.-based outlet The Mirror that “Amazon workers were forced to work around a dead colleague and told ‘don’t look.’” However, Broughton wasn’t the originator of that claim; it was originally made by the investigative journalism outlet The Western Edge. The Mirror had merely aggregated the publication’s reporting and sourced it to the original reporter.

When I asked D’Souza about the claim and why, while it was under investigation, the company decided to reach out to the aggregator, he responded, “Repetition is not a defense to defamation in law.” Publications are generally liable for republishing defamatory content. But scrutinize that investigation further, and among the evidence listed is other stories, including by People magazine, that also aggregated The Western Edge — but not the actual Western Edge story.

But the real irony is that the person investigating that claim for Objection is listed as an “anonymous investigator.” When asked about fighting anonymity with more anonymity, D’Souza again gestured to the “power imbalance to be reckoned with.” While the case is being investigated, he said, Objection doesn’t want to “disclose the name of the investigator because a rich and powerful individual might say, oh, ‘I’m going to go bribe that investigator.’” The investigator’s name, he said, would be published when the investigation concludes. 

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It would take an awfully credulous person to believe that the businessman behind the shuttering of Gawker has an authentic stake in “fixing” journalism — especially considering that D’Souza described in an editor’s letter once live on the site that he views Objection as a “natural extension” of his and Thiel’s invasion of privacy lawsuit. Even so, one might wonder how the infamous sex tape story that was Gawker’s undoing would fare through Objection’s proprietary AI adjudication process. After all, Hulk Hogan did have sex with Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife, and Gawker did have the receipts, namely the video, to prove it.

Objection’s AI arbitration system, in which both the aggrieved figure and the journalist would need to agree to, also seems to have a fatal flaw. In promoting the use of AI judges, D’Souza cites a paper by two University of Chicago legal scholars that suggests AI adjudicators apply the law more consistently than human judges. In one test case, AI cited judicial precedent 99 percent of the time in its decision-making versus 61 percent for human judges. But that paper also critiques that level of accuracy. The paper’s authors write, “Another possibility is that GPT is actually a better judge than humans are. While many readers have argued that this is the proper reading of our results, we believe that this theory is decisively contradicted by the fact that GPT made decisions like law students.”

Real judges, the authors say, don’t make decisions in a legal vacuum but also through the broader human context of their decisions. Asked about that conclusion, D’Souza questioned whether “the goals of the law” should be more “interpretive” or more by “the letter of the law.”

“If you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man,” he said. “I firmly believe that we should be reducing human bias.”

But that area of human judgment is also arguably how the legal profession moves the law forward and how unjust laws are overturned. The seeds of this country’s freedom of the press law were laid when a jury defied the British crown’s judges and refused to convict the publisher of a small New York printing press of libel for publishing material that offended the then-governor of the state. Jurors would nullify the convictions of those who helped fugitive slaves flee violating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the 1970s, when the Camden 28 were tried for breaking into their local draft board offices and destroying their draft cards, the jury again acquitted the group based on their moral conviction. It’s hard to imagine that AI, trained on the letter of the law as it’s written, could easily navigate the murky moral waters that those laws may produce.

“Human judges are able to depart from rules when following them would produce bad outcomes from a moral, social, or policy standpoint,” the paper’s authors write. 

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A more basic mark against the AI arbiter the paper’s authors point out is fundamental to how these systems work — or don’t: “No one understands how they make decisions, and some people speculate that their decisions are literally unintelligible for humans.”

D’Souza is asking a question as old as the oldest democracy: Who watches the watchmen? 

One doesn’t have to look farther than the appalling double standard the mainstream press has applied to its coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to see the relevance of that question. But in a world where American press freedom is already backsliding in favor of the wealthiest, it’s hard to see how a black-box AI “fact-checker” backed by the billionaire owner of one of the world’s biggest military tech company is a better solution than a well-funded public media ecosystem buttressed by press freedom laws that are designed to hold the most powerful among us accountable.

The post The Peter Thiel Ally Who Helped Kill Gawker Wanted to Save Journalism. Then His Site Went Dark. appeared first on The Intercept.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.

At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity. 

That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly. 

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That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.” 

Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources.  

Trump’s administration has made no secret of the fact that it wants to destroy journalism that holds it to account, including by unmasking sources and punishing them. This week, for instance, news broke that the Department of Justice had unsuccessfully subpoenaed reporters from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, likely as part of a leak investigation.

But what if it could skip the journalists and simply demand that tech companies identify sources who may have spoken to reporters using their platforms?

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The risk isn’t hypothetical. The first Trump administration abused its authority to spy on journalists to figure out who they’re talking to, including online. The second Trump administration has already repeatedly attempted to unmask its critics online and raided a journalist’s home and seized the devices she used to communicate with her sources. 

In the face of these risks, using secure communication methods, like Signal or SecureDrop, can help. But some sources may still reach out to reporters through social media. As a result, age verification laws will create a new pool of data that the government can demand when it’s hunting for information about the people who may have spoken to the press.

The most common methods of age verification rely on the collection of government IDs to verify a user’s date of birth with certainty. The KIDS Act says it won’t require platforms to collect government IDs, but at least some platforms will likely choose this route to comply with the law or offer it as a fallback approach when other methods inevitably fail. 

But online anonymity isn’t assured even if platforms use other ways to verify users’ ages. Even so-called “privacy-preserving” approaches risk exposing users’ identities and undermine anonymity. All of the methods ultimately require platforms to collect, process, and retain more data on all users, raising the risks for anonymous sources who use online platforms to contact reporters.

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Age verification laws will also make it difficult or impossible for journalists to use anonymous social media accounts to gather information, like sock puppet accounts used to infiltrate and report on online extremist groups, or to avoid surveillance by the very Big Tech companies they’re reporting on. Reporters outside the U.S. who publish anonymously on platforms like X or Facebook to avoid the wrath of autocratic regimes will also find those entry points vanish.

Pools of incredibly sensitive identity data also creates an enticing “honey pot” of information that malicious actors could use to target, intimidate, and chill journalists from pursuing certain stories or sources from speaking to them. Already, many age verification providers have been breached, leaking users’ sensitive data and allowing others to link online activity to users’ offline identity. Age verification companies may also grant access or sell the data they collect to others, like payment processors, creating another avenue for data breaches.

Many Democratic lawmakers recognize that journalism is under threat from the Trump administration. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., the ranking member of the House committee that reached the deal on the KIDS Act, has rightfully blasted the Federal Communications Commission for abusing its power to destroy press freedom and free speech, for instance. So why would he and other Democrats now support legislation that serves the same anti-press agenda? 

Proponents of the KIDS ACT, and similar bills in the Senate, say these laws are necessary to protect children. But the truth is that age verification requirements are bad for everyone, including children. Why should we trust platforms with even more personal information, including from kids, when so many companies already use that data to target ads or share materials with law enforcement agencies that users believed was private?

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That’s not to say that platforms shouldn’t be required to do more to actually protect children online — they should. But comprehensive privacy legislation that protects everyone and requires platforms to collect less data, not more, is a better approach.

Mandating age verification, in contrast, effectively hands Big Tech and the government a skeleton key to the identities of every whistleblower, dissident, and investigative reporter who uses online platforms, not to mention everyone else, including children. This kind of surveillance on steroids that surrenders our right to speak, report, and read the news anonymously won’t make anyone safer.  

The post Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or would that be a crime?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The White House has been desperate to find a way out of the quagmire of its own making in Iran, leading to the remote signing on June 15 of a memorandum of understanding that promises extraordinary concessions to the Islamic Republic. Stipulations once deemed a “nightmare for Israel” by American politicians and dismissed by President Donald Trump as “not acceptable” — such as total sanctions relief and the unfreezing of billions of dollars of funds held abroad — are now reality. Despite attempts by the Trump administration to spin this as an achievement of all of America’s goals and an “unconditional surrender” by Iran, the deal has been met with skepticism, derision, anger, and mockery by Democrats and even some Republicans, pushing close Trump allies such as Fox News host Mark Levin and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to admonish the president for doing the “unthinkable” by capitulating to Iran.

In Israel, the deal has been seen far more uniformly across the political spectrum as an immense and almost incomprehensible betrayal by the United States, an unforeseen cruelty by Trump, and an incalculable failure by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Only 11 percent of Israelis say that their country won the war against Iran, and a whopping 71 percent do not expect Trump to look out for Israeli interests in future negotiations. One Likud member of the Knesset expressed his frustration by filming himself taking off his “Make America Great Again” hat and instead putting on a “Total Victory” hat, a phrase invoked by Netanyahu to justify the wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip.

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In Iran, the atmosphere is still not entirely jubilant. Much of Iran’s media and many officials have indeed taken a triumphant attitude: The front page of Javan, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-aligned newspaper, depicted a crowd of Iranians breaking through a wall of threats made by the Trump administration, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, claimed that “everything we wanted to achieve through military action, we achieved many times over through negotiation.” But past betrayals are, after all, far too recent to forget.

It was only in April, for instance, when Israel unilaterally insisted it wasn’t party to the ceasefire in Lebanon and continued its war there. Previous negotiations with America only served as a cover for war preparations in June 2025 and February 2026. This has resulted in a national mood that is much more cautious than the elation that many felt after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated under Barack Obama and agreed to by the Rouhani administration, was adopted in 2015.

While an overwhelming majority of the country has backed the diplomatic track, criticism of the efforts of the team lead by Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has burned subtly in the background since early April. Supporters of the coalition known as the Front of Islamic Revolution Stability, representing the largest faction of the conservatives in the Iranian Parliament, have begun making their objections known, countering previous attempts by those in power to present a united front and to dispense with hardliner-versus-reformist politicking amid the war.

Criticism of current diplomatic efforts on the Iranian state television program “Soraya” in late May led to the suspension of the program days later. In response, its host, Mohsen Maqsoodi, held live conversations in Tehran’s Valiasr Square, where political commentator Ali Abdi criticized the state for not striking Israel as its army continues to bulldoze Lebanon, which led to that series’ cancellation as well. Rumors swirled online that the cancellation was owed to an intervention by an adviser to Ghalibaf.

After Araghchi gave an interview on state TV on June 12 saying that Iran would have to make concessions in its dealings, angry demonstrators who were attending nightly state-sponsored rallies demanded the diplomatic corps remember the “blood of the Leader [Khamenei],” with one speaker in Tehran’s Enghelab Square leading marchers in chants of “Death to the compromiser,” against those who think “America has something to offer [Iran].”

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In Parliament, conservatives affiliated or allied with the Front have made their criticism vocal, with members calling for Araghchi to be barred from contacting Trump administration negotiator Steve Witkoff and demanding Parliament see the deal before it is signed. One representative called the agreement worse than “the JCPOA and [the Treaty of] Turkmenchay,” referring to the 1828 treaty that ceded swathes of Iranian territory to the Russian Empire. 

Tehran representative Mahmoud Nabavian has been arguably the most prominent member of Parliament criticizing the government’s diplomats, castigating Araghchi for leaving gaps in the memorandum of understanding that America could exploit, namely the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz erasing Iran’s economic leverage, and the lack of clarity in the document about timelines for the lifting of sanctions and the exit of American forces from the region.

The public criticism has less so outlined how exactly Iran could extract more concessions. But it appears such sentiment is now being expressed at the highest level of government: Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. In a statement announcing his approval of the deal, Mojtaba raised the eyebrows of some analysts by saying that he “had a different view” than what was agreed to by his negotiators, but nevertheless acceded to the wishes of President Masoud Pezeshkian on the condition that Iran rejects “excessive demands” made by the United States, remarking that the nation “await[s] the realization of the aforementioned conditions.”

This kind of public and immediate skepticism of a deal agreed to by the elected government was not the type of messaging made by Mojtaba’s father, Ali Khamenei, who reserved public criticism of the red lines crossed in JCPOA negotiations until the deal had been torn up years later by the Trump administration. Coverage in Axios from an Israeli analyst speculated that Mojtaba means to place any failure of the deal firmly on the shoulders of the Iranian president.

While the deal has yielded extraordinary concessions for Iran, there are already dark clouds looming. Concerns are emerging among other members of Parliament about the agreement requiring cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was suspended last year by the elected legislature. More importantly, the first clause of the agreement — which requires an immediate and permanent end to the war in Lebanon — is already being shattered. 

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Israel, as it did when the ceasefire was initially achieved in early April, has again argued that it must remain in southern Lebanon for as long as Israel’s national security demands it. A ceasefire apparently brokered between Hezbollah and Israel on Friday was broken within minutes as Israel continued to bombard the Lebanese south. An order has apparently come down on Saturday from Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz for the Israeli military to cease firing in Lebanon, but not withdraw from any of its positions and respond to any Hezbollah attack on its occupying forces. This leaves open the question of how Israeli military doctrine in southern Lebanon is actually supposed to change.

The United States has also taken active steps to secure more concessions from Iran outside of the explicit directives of the deal, with Vice President JD Vance saying that the $300 billion in reconstruction funds would not be released to Iran unless the nation stopped funding “terrorist organization[s]” like Hezbollah. The memorandum of understanding includes no mention of Iran’s support for allied organizations abroad, nor its ballistic missile program, both of which were primary targets of the Israeli–American war.

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Iran, for its part, closed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday in response to Israel’s refusal to stop the war. While it is still sending negotiators to Switzerland to speak with Vance, Iran is apparently not going there to negotiate a final deal just yet but instead demand U.S. compliance with the terms of the agreement. There is, as of now, still little indication at this time that the U.S. will agree to the demand for a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, despite surprising recent criticism from Trump and Vance of Israel’s scorched-earth tactics in the country. 

For the moment, Israeli officials continue to dig in their heels, demanding further and further action, and stirring tension on other fronts like the West Bank, in an attempt to divert attention and lessen the blow that the majority of Israeli society agrees the country has suffered. For National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, there is no possibility of acceptance of the diplomatic track, remarking on Friday: “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!”

The post The Surprising Reaction Inside Iran to Its War Victory appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice unsealed a federal indictment on Tuesday announcing hefty charges against 15 antifascist protesters for alleged actions taken in response to the brutal U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement surge in Minneapolis earlier this year.

The federal prosecutor in the case, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, warned that more arrests and charges could follow.

Once again, prosecutors are throwing extreme and overreaching charges at activists in a scrambling effort to criminalize organized, collective opposition to Trump’s most violent policies.

The Minneapolis indictment exemplifies the Trump regime’s escalating strategy: Criminalize whole political movements with claims of collective liability and “conspiracy,” and treat typical acts of protest, constitutionally protected speech, association, and political identification as criminal acts.

Call it the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach.

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The indictment, Rosen said, is a part of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, initiative to target and prosecute leftists and antifascists as terrorists.

Minneapolis is not an incidental target for Trump’s Department of Justice. The city unleashed an oftentimes-inspiring response to the ICE crackdown: mutual aid organizing, confrontational protest, blockades, and strikes in response to brutality set a national example for how to fight back when federal agents descend on a city to kidnap our immigrant neighbors.

 “Conspiracy” to What?

The “conspiracy” in Minneapolis according to the government, involves purported antifa activists acting with the aim of impeding ICE operations and injuring officers. The indictment names no federal officer injuries, and only minor incidents of property damage — like a protester leaving a dent in an ICE vehicle from kicking it.

Among other pieces of evidence cited for the alleged criminal conspiracy are the most basic protest strategies, including self defense, nonviolent tactics, and First Amendment-protected activity.

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The use of encrypted Signal chats to communicate protest plans is cited again and again in the indictment.

The government points out that organizers employed phrases like “become ungovernable” — a liberatory slogan so common it has spread to cute animal memes.

Demonstrators are accused of building and advocating for the use of shields at protests outside an ICE detention facility — the sort of protests in which, in Minneapolis and nationwide, federal agents have beaten people and fired rubber bullets and tear-gas canisters directly at heads and bodies.

The indictment even claims that people tracking ICE vehicles and alerting others to their presence, as agents prowled neighborhoods looking for immigrants to kidnap, is evidence of criminal conspiracy.

That certain protest activities may have indeed impeded ICE in its efforts to ruin lives and whiten the country do not make those activities illegal. Minor violations and property damage may involve unlawful acts, but do not constitute a mass criminal conspiracy.

Certainly, none of it calls for unleashing the vast resources of the federal government against protesters. The Trump administration, however, has made its own strategy clear: Make the stakes of association with political movements dangerously high.

And if the cases fall apart? Well then, movements have still been disrupted by lengthy, frightening, and expensive legal processes; antifascist political activity is chilled nonetheless.

Nationwide Assault on the Left

The Minneapolis charges do not stand alone. Recent weeks have seen an array of federal arrests, prosecutions and raids aimed at Trump’s favored targets: antifascists, Palestine solidarity activists, and voting rights advocates. 

Protesters who participated in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement were hit last week with new federal charges under the NSPM-7 initiative — despite the fact that state cases against the movement for the very same incidents have consistently collapsed.

This month, the FBI also raided the homes of numerous Palestine-solidarity activists connected to the University of Michigan, with eight activists indicted on federal charges for allegedly aiming to “intimidate” university officials in protests aimed at ending the school’s investment in Israel’s genocide. FBI agents also raided the offices of an Ohio voter-registration organization, seizing employees’ phones and computers.

These are unabashed authoritarian tactics to chill whole swathes of political activity, the likes of which have a long history in this country, from multiple Red Scares and the deadly COINTELPRO effort last century against Black-liberation struggle, to the mass repression in response to Black Lives Matter uprisings in the last decade.

Such repression is not the sole preserve of Trump’s regime or Republican administrations, but we are witnessing an escalation in authoritarian efforts to criminalize political resistance.

The assault on the left has been, perversely, carried out in tandem with brazen attempts to lavish Trump’s violent far-right supporters with impunity, government jobs, and even financial rewards.

When the Spaghetti Sticks

Sometimes the spaghetti does stick. In March, a Texas jury found eight defendants guilty of terrorism charges for simply being present and wearing black at a protest in which a shooting took place outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Northern Texas.

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The ruling was a major victory for the Justice Department — a case in a Trump-friendly jurisdiction, presided over by a Trump-appointee judge, the government’s flimsy effort won through.

In Spokane, Washington, three anti-ICE demonstrators were convicted in May on conspiracy charges for impeding federal officers in a case with similarities to the Minneapolis indictment. The original federal prosecutor in the Spokane case resigned instead of signing indictments against protesters; he did not believe they were warranted, he said. As is a pattern with Trump’s Department of Justice, however, the prosecutor’s successor moved forward with charges. Six people took plea deals, but three refused, wanting to defend their First Amendment rights in court. For typical protest activity, they were convicted of federal conspiracy charges. They face up to six years in prison.

Trump’s lawyers are not famed as skilled practitioners, but they know how to navigate an unjust system with brute force, willing to pour unending resources into crushing ideological enemies and symbols of resistance.

Just consider the extraordinary, ongoing efforts to deport Palestinian activists like Mohsen Madawi and Mahmoud Khalil, or a Salvadorian immigrant with legal status, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

With an ideologically aligned far-right Supreme Court, Trump has ample reason to relentlessly push politically motivated cases, even those thrown out in lower courts.

Antidote to Collective Guilt

Cases like Prairieland threaten to set frightening precedents, but the lesson they offer is not that federal prosecutors have somehow now cracked the mass-prosecution code after other collective liability efforts had failed. Rather, the lesson is an older one, about solidarity.

Prosecutors in the Prairieland case relied heavily on the testimony of cooperating defendants, who testified against co-defendants as a part of plea deals. Without that testimony, the case would likely not have played out the same way.

“If people hadn’t cooperated in Prairieland, the case would’ve been extraordinarily different,” said Xavier T. de Janon, an attorney with the People’s Law Collective, which is representing Stop Cop City protesters in state-level cases. “Their entire prosecution was made possible by cooperators, and their investigation was successful because people cooperated very quickly.”

De Janon nonetheless stressed that, while the federal government was successful in the Prairieland trial, the Justice Department has accrued “hundreds of failures.”

In Stop Cop City cases so far, as was the case in the mass federal prosecution against the so-called J20 protesters at Trump’s first inauguration, no defendants aided prosecutors as cooperating witnesses. Efforts to isolate and criminalize “bad protesters” failed, and collective prosecutions, based on the flimsiest of claims, collapsed.

The response to ICE in Minneapolis and St. Paul was powerful precisely because residents blended tactics of mutual aid, community support, mass mobilization, and militancy. The worst possible response to the Justice Department’s sweeping indictment would be for certain elements of the movement to follow the government’s lead and demonize antifa associations and confrontational protest.

The government is escalating a well-worn strategy to disarticulate and defang movements.

“This is a fascist society, not just the government, but the fabric of society,” said de Janon. “People thinking, ‘If I go to a rally, I might be charged with a federal felony and spend 25 years in prison’ — it is outrageous.”

There is no denying that the Department of Justice is attempting to make the stakes devastatingly high for even minimal association with today’s liberatory movements, from antifascist immigrant defense to Palestine solidarity.

The price for failing to stand together against this fascist overreach is, however, far higher still.

The post Trump’s Spaghetti-Against-the-Wall Indictment Against ICE Protesters — and How to Fight It appeared first on The Intercept.

Four UK-based Palestine solidarity activists were sentenced as terrorists on Friday for damaging military drones and other equipment at an Elbit Systems U.K. factory in 2024. Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has provided the vast majority of drones used in the Israeli military’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, among other horrors.

The terrorism sentences, handed down by Justice Jeremy Johnson, set a frightening precedent. This is the first time in Britain that anyone has faced terrorism enhancements at sentencing without actually being convicted of terrorist offenses. It is also the first time that “criminal damage” convictions have been classified as terrorism. It is not, of course, the first time that the so-called Palestine exception has entailed the setting of vile legal precedents.

As a point of comparison: The convicted activists, who are affiliated with the Palestine Action network, will spend significantly more time in prison than the majority of people arrested and convicted for participating in brutal white supremacist riots across the U.K. in 2024, 2025, and again in recent weeks in Belfast, Northern Ireland — riots in which migrant shelters have been set on fire and Black and brown people have been beaten in the streets.

The four Elbit protesters, part of the so-called Filton 25 arrested in relation to the Elbit factory incident, have already been in detention for over two years. They now face five more years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection.” One defendant was sentenced to a further three years for striking a police officer during the incident. By contrast, a 30-year-old man who kicked and punched Black man in the face amid an anti-immigrant race riot in Manchester in 2024 was sentenced to three years in jail; while labeled a “violent racist” by the presiding judge, he was not labeled a terrorist, nor were any of his fellow pogromists.

The Palestine Action activists were all previously cleared of heftier charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. Now labeled terrorists, however, they will be subject to at least 15 years of terrorist notification requirements, including informing the police of personal and financial details and travel plans.

The defendants were not convicted of terrorist offenses — the jury convicted them on charges of criminal damage. It was explicitly hidden from the jurors that, in finding the protesters guilty of specific criminal acts, they also opened them to hefty terror enhancements by the judge at sentencing. Justice Johnson had also set strict restrictions on the trial: The defendants were not permitted to tell the jury that their actions were motivated by a desire to save Palestinian lives and prevent greater crimes of mass slaughter; they could not mention the genocide in Gaza or Elbit’s role in it.

“Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest,” Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International U.K.’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“A terrorism sentence carries restrictions that stay with a person for the rest of their life. We should all be worried about what this means for other individuals taking direct action in protest at a genocide or any other issue,” Moscogiuri said. She called the sentencing a “new new low in the ongoing crackdown against protest across the UK.”

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media.

Palestine Action, a loose-knit network of Palestine-solidarity direct-action advocates and activists, has faced extraordinary authoritarian crackdowns in the U.K., including a government proscription under the Terrorism Act that renders any support for the group a criminal offense.

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For simply holding signs at rallies and sit-ins that bear slogans like “I support Palestine Action,” nearly 3,000 people have been arrested. A British High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the group unlawful in February, but the ban remains in place as the government appeals the decision. Over 100 people, many of them elderly retirees, were arrested on Friday outside the sentencing hearing while holding signs in support of Palestine Action.

“Convicting activists for one charge, then sentencing them as terrorists, is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action. Everyone needs to mobilize against it,” said Ammori.

As ever, the “terror” label here tells us more about the ideological priorities of the authorities that apply it than it does about the nature or moral standing of any acts deemed “terrorism.”

The treatment of violent anti-immigrant racists in the U.K. provides a telling point of comparison. After all, the very same Justice Johnson who sentenced the Palestine Action defendants as terrorists and foreclosed their potential for a fair trial moved last year to release the U.K.’s leading far-right provocateur, Tommy Robinson, early from prison. Robinson had been convicted for contempt of court after continuously violating injunctions on spreading false allegations against a Syrian refugee. A High Court had rejected his appeal for early release, which Johnson nonetheless granted. Robinson has gone on to aggressively and continuously stoke more anti-immigrant, racist violence like the recent pogroms in Belfast.

“If sentenced with a ‘terrorist connection’, the Filton 4 will not be afforded the same opportunity as Robinson, a repeat criminal, for early release,” noted jury conscience advocacy group Defend Our Juries.

To explain his “terrorism connection” sentencing of the pro-Palestine activists, the judge said, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to intimidate the U.K. government and a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause.”

There’s a certain irony here, in that the actions taken to disable Elbit equipment were specifically not acts of political persuasion. They were not petitions, or rallies, or economic pressure campaigns. The very point of direct action is that it aims to interfere with a given site of production and circulation of materials; a broken quadcopter drone can’t rain fire down on the bodies of Palestinian civilians, can’t flay the flesh of Palestinian toddlers (as quadcopter fire has been shown to do).

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It’s a grim irony indeed that activists feel called to take direct action precisely when efforts to pressure our governments to end support for genocide fail and are themselves treated as potentially criminal acts.

If “terrorism,” per Johnson, refers to criminal acts with the aim of ideological, political persuasion, we might consider this: Following escalations in Britain’s white riots against immigrants, the government has moved to further harden its border regime and shutter many asylum hotels that had become focal points for racist protests. By the lights of the British government, this does not constitute yielding to white supremacist terror, though. The label “terrorism” is reserved for other targets.

The post They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.

A few days before my best friend’s execution date in 2006, prison administrators granted me one last chance to see him in a legal visit. We discussed his concerns about the humaneness of the lethal injection that would kill him. I will never forget his terrified look.

The day of his execution, I paced my cell hoping for the best. Without access to a telephone, my only method to monitor if or how my friend had died was through radio reports from members of the media who were allowed to witness his final breath.

News reports have historically allowed us as a society to monitor our government when it exercises its greatest power: ending a person’s life. But the state of Indiana has decided to inhibit that public access by banning members of the media from attending executions — unless the condemned person chooses to give a reporter a spot that could instead have gone to their relatives or friends. An appellate court upheld the ban this week. 

Prison officials in Indiana claim the media ban is mainly about respecting the dignity of the condemned person. But the idea that there could ever be dignity in state-sanctioned killing of a perfectly healthy human is ludicrous within itself. That would be the case even if executioners eschewed cruel and unusual methods. But they don’t, even when the media is watching. 

Angel Nieves Diaz continued moving for half an hour after receiving an injection of a drug that was supposed to paralyze him during a Florida execution. It took Arizona officials two hours to kill Joseph R. Wood. He had to be injected with 14 doses beyond the dose that was supposed to cause his death. 

Byron Black yelled, “It’s hurting so bad,” five minutes into a botched execution in Tennessee. John Marion Grant began convulsing and vomiting during his execution in Oklahoma. Prison officials had to enter the death chamber multiple times to wipe away and remove the vomit. The entire time, Grant was still breathing. Just last month, Tony Carruthers lay on a Tennessee gurney for more than hour moaning and bleeding as executioners struggled to find a vein. The execution was eventually called off by government officials.

These are only a few of the botched executions that lack “dignity.” This week, a federal appellate court upheld a decision blocking Alabama from using nitrogen gas to kill Jeffery Lee. Suffocating and asphyxiating on one’s own vomit seemed like a bridge too far. 

As a result of the barbarity of these events, it’s not far-fetched to wonder if Indiana officials have an ulterior motive. Perhaps the media ban has nothing to do with preserving the dignity of the condemned and is instead about obstructing government accountability and public oversight. 

Executions in this country were once highly public affairs. Often held in town squares, any member of the public could attend. In the 1830s, government officials began to enact laws that made executions private events. 

This was not because 19th century executioners were moved to protect the dignity of the condemned (who were disproportionately Black). It was an effort to halt a growing capital punishment abolitionist movement. A significant number of Americans found the public spectacle disgusting.

The same is occurring today. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, support for capital punishment in America has decreased from 80 percent in 1994 to 52 percent in 2026. This division necessitates transparency — otherwise, the only nongovernment actors able to tell the public the truth are dead.

The “dignity” playbook is a well-worn one that I know well as an incarcerated journalist. As a result of restrictions placed on media access to prisons, prisons have become unjustifiably cruel, less humane and more difficult to monitor. Restricting press freedom erodes human rights and constitutional safeguards and blinds the public to the kinds of cruelty and abuse depicted in HBO’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Alabama Solution.” 

The film was made possible not because officials granted access to outside journalists, but because incarcerated people risked (and endured) severe punishment to document their reality with contraband phones. 

It’s not the first time surreptitious reporting methods revealed the real motives behind media restrictions. In 1906, a reporter in Minnesota ignored a ban on media executions and sneaked in to watch a condemned man spend 14 minutes gasping for air before he strangled to death because the rope used to hang him was too long – he hit the floor when dropped and needed to be raised back up. 

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As appellate judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi wrote in a dissenting opinion in the Indiana case, “A government exercises its greatest power when it ends a person’s life. As I see it, such severe and irreversible punishment on behalf of ‘the people’ must be observable to comply with the Constitution.”

Lifting the media ban is the only dignified thing Indiana can do, not only for the condemned but also for the people being asked to fund irreversible punishments.

The post Indiana Banned Press From Executions for “Dignity.” It Actually Serves Repression. appeared first on The Intercept.

The battle over “60 Minutes” can teach us a lot about how someone like CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss can wreak havoc on our media ecosystem. What has gotten a lot less attention, however, is the way the fight shows us how ill-equipped our media institutions already were when it comes to covering the Trump administration and MAGA-era politics.

The strife at the famous magazine television news program reached a fever pitch last week, when, during a staff meeting, longtime correspondent Scott Pelley unloaded on Nick Bilton, Weiss’s pick to run the show. Pelley was fired and took to the media to defend himself.

In a long interview with the New York Times over the weekend, Pelley talked about how Weiss had injected herself into the show’s editorial process.

The most revealing part of the discussion centered on Pelley’s own “60 Minutes” coverage of President Donald Trump’s surge of immigration enforcement officers into Minneapolis, the uprising against the invasion, and the subsequent crackdown that led to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.

Weiss’s role in the story was clearly toxic, but Pelley’s description of his own editorial process before Weiss got involved should also raise eyebrows.

“I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively,” Pelley said. “I thought we’d done a really good job with this.”

Pelley said they found evidence of protesters chest-bumping officers and hitting them with snowballs. The Minnesotans screamed at federal agents, Pelley said, and Pretti himself could be seen in one picture kicking out a police car taillight.

Striving for “Balance”

It’s a striking passage because it shows a revered journalist searching for a balanced narrative where there simply wasn’t one. If, after scouring hours and hours video to find evidence of “aggressive” protesters, all you can find is a chest bump and a thrown snowball, perhaps that’s a sign that your narrative that both sides were aggressive isn’t all that accurate.

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The truth is that the Minneapolis protesters were remarkably restrained in the face of egregious state violence and brutality. Yes, they were angry, loud, persistent, and rude. Demonstrators yelled insults at officers, blew whistles, and recorded with their cellphones. Yet that is all First Amendment-protected activity, no matter how many times Stephen Miller or Kristi Noem try to call it “terrorism.”

There’s a reason why the criminal charges against protesters have rarely held up in court: There was never any merit to them. Over and over, when it came time to present actual evidence, the government backed down, was reprimanded by a judge, or was rejected by a grand jury.

Likewise, Pretti’s confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement days before he was killed has nothing to do with whether immigration officers were justified in killing him. Videos of the killing show that Pretti did nothing to justify being confronted, beaten, and shot 10 times.

Pelley’s remarks, by themselves, offer a lesson in the pitfalls of striving for “balance” under an administration that lies by default, lies when it doesn’t need to, and lies as a demonstration of its power.

Enter Weiss

Weiss, her billionaire Paramount bosses David and Larry Ellison, and the other tech billionaires who fund her publication the Free Press are all of the belief that the legacy media is overwhelmingly left of center.

They’re correct in a very broad sense. Generally, journalists who work for legacy outlets have personal politics that skew liberal, but it’s more complicated than that. Legacy media journalists also tend to be institutionalists and deferential to authority. That can make them defensive of power and often skeptical of those who challenge it.

As Pelley’s Minneapolis story shows, these journalists also want to be seen as fair, which can drive them to seek balance even when there is no credible “other side.” Contrary to Weiss and the MAGA world’s claims that legacy media is hopelessly blinkered, the more urgent problem right now is that even the most revered journalistic institutions aren’t equipped to sort through the firehose of lies and propaganda pouring out of Trump’s far-right movement.

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Weiss’s role at both the Free Press and now at CBS News has been to make that task even more even more difficult. Her editorial feedback for Pelley, for instance, only served to muddy the waters.

“About four hours after our deadline,” Pelley told the New York Times, “Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include — can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing: Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

Weiss’s editorial advice to Pelley wasn’t about clearer or fairer or more contextual journalism. She was asking for propaganda.

If Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, reasonably feared for his life, he was legally justified in killing Good. And if Good was driving toward him, that bolsters his claim to have reasonably feared for his life.

The problem is that there’s no evidence that she was. In fact, CBS News did its own analysis of the video footage, which clearly demonstrated that Good’s wheels were pointed away from Ross — as did several other outlets. As television producer Tim Carvell pointed out, however, CBS’s analysis never aired on the network; it was relegated to YouTube.

Weiss’s alleged directive also glosses over how Ross and his fellow agents also created the very volatility they claimed justified his use of lethal force. And it ignores how the agents violated multiple Department of Homeland Security policies during the encounter — for example, by putting themselves in front of Good’s car, and by rushing toward her door.

At the time of Good’s death, the administration and its supporters had also been pushing a much more destructive and conspiratorial narrative: that a cabal of far-left donors had been training protesters and ICE watchers to weaponize their cars against immigration officers. Not only was there zero evidence for this, it provided cover for what the agents themselves were doing. Video and witness accounts repeatedly showed agents ramming and boxing people in with their vehicles, then falsely claiming they were the victims who had been rammed. Slandering Good just reinforced the narrative.

If Weiss had really wanted to provide relevant context for Good’s death, there were plenty of places to look. Perhaps Good feared for her safety because immigration officers surging into liberal cities were pulling people out of their cars and beating them. Or maybe it was relevant that Border Patrol officers have a long history of improperly placing themselves in front of moving vehicles, then using that as justification to fire at those vehicles.

Weiss didn’t demand any of that. For her, balance and nuance meant telling Pelley to make his story more palatable to MAGA.

Crisis of Disinformation

We now live in an era in which one of the two major parties has given itself over to wild conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and the whims and biases of a disturbed billionaire.

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The mere fact that Trump leads that party means the airwaves are already polluted with nonsense like whether windmills cause cancer, whether immigrants are eating neighborhood pets, and whether developing countries are “emptying their insane asylums” into the U.S.

The fact that half the Congress, about 40 percent of the public, and the entire executive branch now subscribe to anti-vaccine bullshit, election denialism, and “great replacement theory” doesn’t make any of those claims legitimate. So long as a good portion of the country is in the throes of MAGA, however, there will be ongoing pressure to platform even the looniest claims out of a sense of fairness and representation. Weiss isn’t the cause of all of this, but she is an accelerant.

Pelley told the New York Times that he refused to make Weiss’s changes, and that his piece aired without them. That may be encouraging, except that not everyone has the institutional stature of Scott Pelley to insulate themselves from reprisals — not even Scott Pelley, it turns out.

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The request itself, however, testifies to a disinformation crisis that’s only going to get worse, particularly as Weiss starts replacing departed staff with her own people and Trump keeps leaning on media outlets.

Another way it could get worse is if media honchos like those who own CBS keep gaining clout. Weiss’s own bosses, for example, have now set their sights on CNN — with Weiss reportedly expected to lead editorial at both news operations.

The post Scott Pelley Shows How Legacy Media Got It Wrong — Before Bari Weiss Made It Worse appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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