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.

Related

The Performative Ceasefire in Gaza

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].”

Related

How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel

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. 

Related

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

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.

Related

Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran

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. 

Related

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

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

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$300,000 for his defense, judges repeatedly rejected efforts to leverage that support into his release before his bail was revoked.

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

Related

The Right Wing Desperately Wants to Make Charlie Kirk Its MLK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Related

“Terrorist”: How ICE Weaponized 9/11’s Scarlet Letter

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.

Related

How Did the Feds Get Into Anti-ICE Activists’ Signal Messages?

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.

Related

Why We Have to Fight Back Against ICE Protesters’ Terror Convictions

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.

Related

They Got 60 Days in Jail for Protesting Israel’s Largest Arms Maker — and Say That’s a “Huge Victory”

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).

Related

Anti-ICE Protesters Convicted on Terrorism Charges for Wearing All Black

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. 

Related

False Testimony Sent Tony Carruthers to Death Row. Tennessee Wants to Kill Him Anyway.

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.

Related

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

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.

Related

Bari Weiss Is Doing Exactly What She Was Installed at CBS to Do

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.

Related

Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories

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.

Related

Kash Patel Is Using MAGA’s Favorite Tool to Muzzle the Free Press

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. 

Related

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

If there’s one thing we know about the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, it is this: The police failed to stop it. This was not for an absence of well-funded, trained officers on the scene. They were there.

Rather than placing themselves potentially in harm’s way, however, the cops waited outside for over an hour and aggressively confronted desperate parents who begged for them to enter, including handcuffing one mother.

Related

Uvalde Police Didn’t Move to Save Lives Because That’s Not What Police Do

This failure to save lives was not, as I wrote at the time, a failure of police work. It in fact exemplified what police critics and abolitionists have stressed for decades, with reams of evidence. Police do not save lives or prevent crime. Policing is not the “thin blue line” between social peace and chaotic violence. And the work of policing is a far cry from the heroic myth so stubbornly lodged in the American imagination.

This was not, of course, the lesson learned by Texas authorities after the shooting. Instead, the state’s response was as predictable as it was doomed to produce only more violence in Texas schools: They added more cops.

There were no well-researched, pragmatic policy changes around limiting assault rifles, regulating the hyper-destructive expanding bullets that ripped children’s bodies apart, and increasing mental health support — things that could actually stop shootings like in Uvalde, which was carried out by a troubled 18-year-old.

Texas school districts instead poured billions of dollars into stationing police at every public school campus in the state. The results, as a New York Times report published this week found, has been an horrific spate of violent police abuse against children in schools across the state.

There is no official use-of-force data on the over 11,000 cops stationed across Texas’s 400-plus school district police departments, the Times reported, and scant oversight. Despite the limited access to information, journalists were able to pinpoint “more than 2,600 use-of-force incidents” in a nearly four-year period using only the “small share of records” available.

There are horrific details. Kids are routinely slammed to the ground for minor misbehavior. Police punch children in the face. They shock students with Tasers for being in the wrong place. Or point guns at unarmed teens. Cops put handcuffs on a 6-year-old who later cried to his father, “The police wants me to die!” In some cases, low-level disciplinary infractions that should lead to no more than a trip to the principal’s office left children facing criminal charges; the well-documented school-to-prison pipeline in all its ignominy.

According to policing experts who spoke with the paper, Texas lawmakers “embraced school policing without establishing safeguards required for meaningful accountability.” A cop was mildly disciplined for having hogtied a 10-year-old boy with a behavioral disorder; apparently hogtying kids was a pattern for the officer. In response to the incident, the school district had to ban the practice of binding children by their hands and feet. The risks of bodily harm coming to kids across the state, however, remain tremendous: As in 16 other states, corporal punishment is legal in Texas schools.

And there is no mention in the Times investigation of the demographic profiles of the children abused by cops, but the videos in the report overwhelmingly show what appear to be nonwhite children enduring violent police abuse.

Filling school campuses with cops, meanwhile has not even worked to achieve the policy’s stated aim of stopping school shootings in Texas. In late March, a 15-year-old student in Bulverde, Texas, shot and injured a teacher and then took his own life.

Policing: A Twisted Civic Religion

After Uvalde, it was obvious to many of us that, despite widespread and high-profile criticisms of the police officers’ actions that day, we were unlikely to see a radical shift in mythic perceptions around the value of policing as a source of public safety.

The conflation of police presence and public safety maintains a powerful ideological hold, resistant to revision, regardless of recalcitrant evidence. Even the Supreme Court affirmed in 2005 that police departments are not in fact obligated to provide protection to the public.

In a gun-drenched, law-and-order conservative state like Texas, police lionization is a twisted civic religion. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law in 2016 to designate police officers a protected class, “making it a hate crime for anyone to commit a crime against a law enforcement officer out of bias against the police.”

Related

Envisioning an America Free From Police Violence and Control

As I wrote in 2022, just after the Uvalde shooting, it would be too generous to those in power to grant that they have simply been misled by pro-police propaganda. By insisting that we double down on policing, leaders like Abbott make clear that they too uphold what the institution of policing defends: property, power, and racial hierarchy.

When it comes to the teachers and students whose lives are infused with greater violence and risk because of increased police presence, support for ever-present cops is more surprising. Even with ample evidence of police escalating confrontations and instigating violence against kids of all ages, sources who spoke to the Times reaffirmed the necessity of cops in schools.

“In interviews, dozens of parents, teachers, principals and students said that they believed police officers were needed to keep schools safe,” the Times reported.

Writer Patrick Blanchfield noted in 2020 that the police “are in our minds as a solution rather than as a problem.” There is a powerful false consciousness at play, violently reinforced when every social problem is met solely with a carceral, policing-based solution.

“We don’t know what our nation without police would look like,” the abolitionist scholar Mariame Kaba wrote. “But we know that our society with police is violent, racist, precarious, unequal, and unfree.”

As the response to Uvalde makes clear, this is not a knowledge problem. It is well established what flooding schools with police does and does not do. It does not promote safety; it does increase life-altering incidents of violence against children.

Texas is not alone in choosing violence.

The post After Uvalde, Texas Stuffed Schools Full of Cops. They Brutalized Students. appeared first on The Intercept.

One of the most enduring points of contention between the Democratic Party’s left and right wings is “vote blue no matter who,” a demand almost exclusively made of progressives to shelve principle over party when it comes to elections. 

But as we head toward the midterms in a year where the base is angry and ready for a change, centrists are now hearing that familiar refrain aimed at them — much to their horror. 

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat, was confronted with this new reality earlier this week. He told CNN on Monday that he hoped Maine voters would reject Graham Platner, the state’s presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate, over his controversial tattoo, which Auchincloss called “personally disqualifying.” Critics quickly pointed out that the congressman was effectively offering a tacit endorsement of Sen. Susan Collins, the milquetoast moderate Republican incumbent who has for years infuriated Democrats.

By Tuesday afternoon, the congressman issued a mea culpa on X and disputed that his remarks were an endorsement.

“If it were me I’d vote for someone else in the Maine Democratic primary,” he said, without indicating who that “someone else” might be. “Regardless of what happens in Maine, Democrats need to take back the Senate and I’ll keep working hard to make it happen.”

Platner’s campaign exemplifies the kind of coalition-building that the left has engaged in over the past decade. He goes across the state, meeting voters where they are, and has built relationships with community groups and activists. It’s a marked difference from the campaign of Gov. Janet Mills, Sen. Chuck Schumer’s pick for the seat who dropped out of the race last month after failing to gain momentum, and the retail politics go a long way toward explaining Platner’s success.

Outside of Maine, Platner has been a lightning rod for centrists eager to seize on his Senate race as a battleground for litigating broader divisions in the party’s anti-Trump coalition. Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, said on social media on Tuesday that anyone who endorsed the Uncommitted movement, which aimed to hold President Joe Biden accountable for his role in supporting the Israeli genocide of Gaza, couldn’t object to centrists doing the same over Platner — a comparison so out of proportion it defies rational explanation. 

Score-settling seems more important than keeping the party together and taking the Senate. Melissa DeRosa, the Andrew Cuomo loyalist, told Fox News on Tuesday, “There are a lot of moderate Democrats like myself who will not cry tears should we lose Maine.” John Fetterman, who has broken with his party over his zealous support for Israel, bemoaned Platner’s presumptive nomination after Mills dropped out. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia centrist who served in the Senate for over two decades as a nominal Democrat, implicitly endorsed Collins in a glowing address in late April. 

Politicians who are actually popular with Democratic voters, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., are backing Platner. The former hosted two raucous get-out-the-vote events for Platner over the holiday weekend; the latter is coming to Maine on June 5 to show his support. 

Related

Graham Platner Handed Centrist Dems a Bruising Defeat in Maine

With a glide path to the nomination — state Democrats are expected to fall in line after the vote out of respect for Mills — Platner is consolidating his support. National Democrats like Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom are in party leadership in the chamber, have pledged their support (however begrudgingly). 

Platner’s consistent presence across Maine and his populist, left message are resonating with voters. On Memorial Day, Sanders went as far as to compare the energy around Platner to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “Maine now has the opportunity to show the world that we could do the same thing in one of the most rural states in this country,” Sanders said. 

In an off-year election where Democrats are expected to deliver a shellacking to the GOP — a prospect that doesn’t seem to bother President Donald Trump much at all — the appeal of progressive politics a Platner win would represent has the centrist wing of the Democratic Party in an existential crisis. 

After decades of scolding the party’s left flank and left-leaning independents over their hesitation to vote for corporate, hawkish Democrats, the shoe is finally on the other foot. Now, centrists are going to be expected to fall in line vote for the likes of Platner. It’s a daunting proposition for the party’s more conservative wing, who will have to either bite the bullet and pull the lever for their ideological opponents or risk another two years of unfettered Republican rule. 

Perhaps that’s preferred. A GOP win means redoing the election in two years with potentially better results, and in the meantime, blaming the left for losing.

There’s precedent for supposed liberals choosing Republicans over progressive Democrats. After Barack Obama won the party’s nomination for president in 2008, a number of Hillary Clinton supporters went over to John McCain. Dubbing themselves “PUMAs” — for “Party Unity My Ass” — these diehard Clinton-backers were thrilled at the opportunity to cast their ballots for McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin. “I’m voting Republican,” Amy Siskind (yes, that one) said at the time. 

But in 2026, the likelihood of conservative Democrats throwing the midterms to the GOP by switching sides or sitting out is low (although a rash of redistricting in the South has somewhat narrowed the gap). The base is fired up, angry at the establishment, and primed to turn out in droves to vote out Trump’s enablers.

For centrists, this is the worst possible outcome: Their vote-scolding tactic exposed as a lie and a failure to prove they still have the clout to swing an election. For progressives, it would be a welcome break. 

The post Graham Platner Is Forcing Centrist Dems to Reckon With “Vote Blue No Matter Who” appeared first on The Intercept.

The bombshell New York Times report that the U.S. and Israel hoped to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the leader of Iran puts the lie to so much of what hawks in the West have been trying to sell their publics about the Iran war.

Despite claims by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Iran war was never about freedom for the Iranian people.

That much is obvious thanks to Ahmadinejad’s role in recent Iranian history: In 2009, Iranians rose up against a stolen election in what was known as the Green Movement, which was violently crushed by Iran’s security forces to keep Ahmadinejad in power.

Though a populist, Ahmadinejad at the time dismissed the protests as nothing more than the result of “emotions after a soccer match” or, in another instance, “dirt and dust.” These are not the bona fides of a leader who will lead Iran into democracy.

Instead of a campaign for Iranian freedom, this war — like much of the U.S. and Israel’s last 20 years of going after Iran — has been about catastrophically weakening Iran. Here, reading between the lines of history, Ahmadinejad’s position as an Israeli–U.S.-backed coup leader starts to make sense.

Ahmadinejad had been largely quiet until he suddenly reemerged into headlines on Tuesday with the Times report. After killing Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hour of the war, according to the Times, Israel targeted a building on Ahmadinejad’s street, ostensibly to “free” him from what was effectively either house arrest or the strict monitoring of his movements. According to some reports, the guards keeping watch on Ahmadinejad were indeed killed, but Ahmadinejad himself was injured, too.

How, if the plot had been successful, was Ahmadinejad supposed to take over? Was the assumption that by assassinating the top leadership, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals, Ahmadinejad would be able to gain the support of the rest of the top echelon of the security forces? That would be a far-fetched notion.

Related

Trump Wanted to Replicate His Venezuela “Success” in Iran. What Has It Even Looked Like?

While he retained his populist credentials over the years, Ahmadinejad’s clashes with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and with the “nezam,” or regime, over social and political issues lost him whatever support he still had among the military wings and the Basij militia. Those forces — though they had helped crush the 2009 protests on Ahmadinejad’s behalf — remained fiercely loyal to Khamenei and the political system of “Guardianship of the Jurist.”

For now, Ahmadinejad is nowhere to be found, raising suspicions that he is in the custody of the IRGC or dead.

Good for Israel

It’s hard to imagine the Iranian president who declared in his first few months in office that “Israel must vanish from the pages of time” and subsequently questioned the Holocaust being a good choice for Israel. History shows, though, how Ahmadinejad’s eclectic positioning has previously coincided with Israeli interests.

Coming to power after President Mohammad Khatami’s reform movement and his call for “dialog among civilizations,” Ahmadinejad’s stances damaged Iran’s reputation almost beyond repair.

And this was, somewhat ironically, a boon to Israel, whose leaders could point to the malevolent nature of the Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad was the perfect figurehead for a bogeyman Iran that needed to be taken down a notch.

Israel and its allies in Washington made hay of Ahmadinejad’s every word — for instance, his sponsorship of a Holocaust denial cartoon contest — and succeeded in turning his remarks into the justifications for an unprecedented and devastating sanctions program. Ahmadinejad’s rule was, in so many ways, bad for Iran.

Related

These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations

Which is why, even at the time and certainly later, there were suspicions privately aired in Tehran that he could actually be a Mossad asset — with the caveat, of course, that no hard proof ever emerged. Still, at a time when gaining the trust of the west in nuclear negotiations was paramount, Ahmadinejad was building Israeli hard-liners’ case against talks for them.

Now, of course, the allegation that Ahmadinejad was primed as a coup leader — the first report from an even remotely reliable outlet of a real link to Israel — has only added to the rumors, as have his most recent trips abroad, to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and to Guatemala, both allies and supporters of Israel.

Trump himself admitted before this latest revelation that Israel bombed some of the people who were candidates to be an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez — the Venezuelan figure who seamlessly took control from kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and reportedly is cooperating with the U.S. The most solid hint Trump gave was that he had someone “inside” Iran in mind, dashing the hopes of Iranian royalists.

Don’t Listen to Israel

Whether or not it is true that Ahmadinejad was an Israeli asset — whenever he may have been recruited or even just unwittingly manipulated — he would have fit Trump’s bill. What he never would have been was a beacon of freedom for the Iranian people. Insofar as the broad contours of the Times report are accurate, we can now be assured that the well-being of the Iranian people has not really ever been at the top of either Trump or Netanyahu’s minds.

Related

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

The U.S. and Israel may have some commonality in what they’d like to see with Iran, but not entirely. Israel’s interests lie mostly in defanging Iran, even seeing it descend into a failed state that can neither threaten Israel nor challenge its hegemony in the region. The U.S., on the other hand, has consistently focused on Iran’s nuclear potential.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have indicated that if the nuclear issue was resolved to the satisfaction of the U.S., Iran could potentially be rehabilitated and rejoin the international community. That would have left Iran with the potential to grow into a regional powerhouse and global force — something Israel has long opposed, which is why it tried so hard to derail the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Whatever happens, Ahmadinejad will never be a factor in Iranian politics, even if in the unlikely event that he one day resurfaces alive and free. The Venezuela option for Iran now seems silly, a chimera that should have never been considered.

If the White House had listened to a handful of Iranians or those who know Iran well, rather than Netanyahu and war hawks in Congress, perhaps 175 school children and their teachers would be alive today. The Strait of Hormuz might be open and free. And a nuclear deal could have already been signed.

Instead, there has been war and destruction, wasted lives and wasted treasure, chaos in the region, and the global economy wobbling. Ahmadinejad has once again been bad for Iranians — and now everyone else, too.

The post Ahmadinejad Is Still Bad for Iranians — and Still Great for Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, Republican lawmakers across the South moved with remarkable speed to carve up Black constituencies and consolidate political power. Tennessee rushed to dismantle Memphis’s majority-Black district. Louisiana went further, postponing an ongoing election and moving to eliminate a majority-Black district that snakes for more than 200 miles, from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. South Carolina and Georgia began maneuvering toward special sessions to redraw districts to be even more favorable to Republicans.

Democrats have warned that up to one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus could disappear, and Republicans aim to pick up as many as 15 House seats. 

The immediate reaction shattered the comforting fiction that America has somehow transcended race in its democratic life. The court may describe these protections as outdated relics of another era, but the swift political response revealed something older and more durable beneath the surface: preserving racial hierarchy remains one of the most potent organizing instincts in American politics.

The Supreme Court’s continued dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is often framed as a tragedy that primarily affects Black Americans. It is that. But in a much larger sense, it also reveals how willing the country is to weaken its own democracy to keep these racialized systems of power intact.

Jim Crow for All

It is no surprise that many of the former slaveholding states have once again moved to cheat the nation out of its democratic values. While most Confederate soldiers did not personally own slaves, the poison of white supremacy still convinced countless poor and working-class white men to fracture the country, slaughter their fellow Americans, and march themselves into mass death on the battlefield to preserve a racial order that benefited an elite planter class more than it ever benefited them.

Related

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

After the Civil War, the South could have become a multiracial democracy built around poor Black and white laborers with overlapping economic interests. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black Americans briefly helped build some of the South’s first systems of universal public education and expanded democratic participation across the region. But Southern elites responded by enacting Jim Crow laws — not merely to dominate Black Americans, but also to preempt any nascent democratic solidarity. As historian Heather Cox Richardson has written, wealthy Southern landowners understood that interracial democracy threatened the entire economic order that had sustained plantation rule. 

The system harmed Black Americans most brutally. White racists got what they wanted: segregation, lynchings, and Black exclusion from political life. But it also left millions of poor and working-class white Americans trapped inside oligarchic state structures, one-party political machines insulated from accountability and designed to serve landowners, industrialists, and political dynasties. As Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia University, found in his study of postbellum Southern disenfranchisement that poll taxes and literacy tests didn’t just suppress Black voters — they also hurt democratic participation across the South as a whole, reducing overall voter turnout by 8 to 22 percent.

As a result, public goods, such as schools and sanitation, weakened, labor organizing collapsed under racial division, and political options narrowed for Southern whites. These shadows still haunt the South, the region that accounts for the nation’s highest poverty rates and lowest per capita GDP compared to other regions.

Southern Comforts 

Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act into law, infamously observed that “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” Johnson was articulating a fundamental truth about American political history: Racial status has often been used as compensation for democratic and economic weakness.

It’s a system that has never disappeared. 

The erosion of democracy in our current era also cuts both ways. As the Voting Rights Act is chipped away, blue states are increasingly incentivized to answer Republican gerrymandering with politically motivated maps of their own. The country drifts further from representative democracy and deeper into a retaliatory system where both parties manipulate their electorates for survival.

Ordinary Americans become pawns in a larger struggle over racial hierarchy and entrenched political power. Millions of voters — many of them white Americans — are treated as acceptable political sacrifices in the effort to preserve white conservative hegemony across the South. Their votes become collateral damage in a campaign of anti-Blackness. 

It is an odd gamble to watch: these southern Republican yes-men rushing to exploit the hollowed-out voter protections at a period of time when their states have so much to lose. As other Republicans have voiced concerns about Trump’s unilateral war on Iran, it is actually the bodies of the South that stand to risk the most, as Southern states have long supplied a disproportionate amount of the nation’s combat troops.

Trump’s tariff wars have also hammered away at that historic pillar of Southern agriculture, particularly the soybean, cotton, poultry, and manufacturing sectors that rely heavily on exports to foreign markets. Farmers across states like Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas have been forced to depend on bailouts after retaliatory tariffs slashed export demand and destabilized prices.

The South’s democratic decline has carried material consequences far beyond voting booths. Today, many of the same states most aggressive in restricting voting rights also rank among the nation’s worst in healthcare access, maternal mortality, and rural hospital closures. And as I’ve written before, the South also leads the nation in rates of gun violence. 

Millions of poor and working-class white Southerners now live with the realities of political systems shaped by a stark lack of public investment and democratic accountability. In trying to keep Black Americans farther from opportunity and power, white Southerners ultimately moved those civic possibilities farther from themselves, too.

Related

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

What we stand to be left with is an electoral system based on voting blocs engineered by the elites, for the elites. Researchers found that when politics harden into insulated gerrymandered coalitions, democratic systems become less responsive, less representative, and more vulnerable to authoritarian behavior. Politically jaded Americans, who increasingly identify as independents or report feeling disenfranchised by both parties, have now catapulted themselves into an arena with even fewer choices and no real levers left to pull to exercise political power.

In response, the Democrats have largely offered a restrained, institutional response, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urging Americans to “summon the courage, character and conviction” of civil rights figures like Rosa Parks and John Lewis, which feels backwards as hell as the Supreme Court incinerates their legacies.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is populated with politicians and legal thinkers who have long resented the hard-fought civil rights victories in the 1960s. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest political advisers, has railed against the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the law which banned European preferences in immigration. Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and Trump’s current director of the Office of Management and Budget, has argued that the post-1960s civil rights bureaucracy should be remolded away from protecting diversity and toward defending the interests of white Americans.

The right-wing campaign to roll back civil rights protections has always rested on a myth, on a dismissal of the role Black Americans have served throughout American history. It assumes the long battle for equal protections, fair labor, and true democracy was only for the benefit of Black people. It’s a falsehood that serves only to deepen racial divisions to discourage any form of class-based solidarity. Instead, we have been here through time to hold America to its promised principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — a stress testing of its legitimacy for all. 

But for a court so convinced America has made “great strides” in ending racism, it is worth asking why its allure is still so powerful, and why so many white Americans are willing to trade away parts of their own freedom in its service. Perhaps it lies in the pervasiveness of understanding racism as only a “Black problem” — an unfortunate deviation from an otherwise “normal” white arrangement. As sociologist Robert Terry once put it, “To be white in America is not to have to think about it.” But that lack of self awareness carries a cost: generations of white Americans re-ushering in white hegemony so reflexively they often fail to see how it has shrunk their own democracy, political imagination, and livelihoods in the process.

The post The End of the Voting Rights Act Isn’t Just a “Black Problem” appeared first on The Intercept.

In yet another staggeringly corrupt and unprecedented move, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department on Monday announced a $1.776 billion slush fund, drawn from public coffers, to funnel payouts to Trump loyalists.

The fund is part of a deal decided by the Trump administration to drop its weak $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over a leak of the president’s tax returns. The entire lawsuit had itself become an egregious example of self-dealing: Trump’s Justice Department suing Trump’s IRS on behalf of Trump.

Over 90 House Democrats recently signed an amicus brief to the presiding judge asking that she dismiss the suit. A settlement, the Democrats wrote, would create a “specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.”

Before the judge could respond, however, Trump withdrew the lawsuit and moved to set up something even worse than that specter: a slush fund beholden entirely to Trump, with little in the way of judicial or congressional oversight.  

According to the Justice Department announcement, the so-called “anti-weaponization” fund — to remedy the purported weaponization of the U.S. government — will be paid out to Trump allies who claim they were targeted by President Joe Biden’s administration. The irony that the fund itself is just one of Trump’s countless weaponizations of the government should be lost on no one.

The fund amount — $1.776 billion — is, of course, an on-the-nose reference to American independence and tells us everything we need to know about this deal. For most of the country, there is little of substance in this too-cute-by-half dollar amount. Instead, the material benefit will go to the largely to the white ruling classes with some crumbs for Trumpian militia members convicted under Biden.

Trump’s reckless and brutal presidency is materially harming the American working classes — even the white working class. With his popularity at historic lows, Trump can only turn to payouts like this, pardons, and the spectacle of white supremacist violence; these are all he has to offer his allies and dwindling base.

Related

Pardoned Capitol Rioter Tried to Hush Child Sex Victim With Promise of Jan. 6 Reparation Money, Police Say

That’s what this slush fund does: nod to Trump’s allegiance to his supporters, the vast majority of whom will get little other than the mood elevation that comes with having their resentments recognized — what W.E.B. DuBois once called the “psychological wages” of whiteness, a benefit that is only felt by virtue of the greater oppression of others.

Trump’s authoritarian capitalism will not, after all, uplift the white working class; there aren’t enough U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement signing bonuses or slush-fund payouts to go around.

January 6 Loyalists

The slush fund money would come directly from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which is typically used to pay legally reached settlements and court judgments. But in this case, a commission picked by Trump’s attorney general will apparently hand out payments as it pleases.

Related

The Capitol Rioters Are Free — But Ed Martin’s Crusade Against Jan. 6 Prosecutors Is Just Getting Started

No specific recipients have been named yet, but beneficiaries could reportedly include Proud Boys and other January 6 Capitol rioters, many of whom have since pardoned by Trump.

The fact that any payouts will be funded by taxpayer dollars is not mentioned in the Justice Department’s fund announcements.

“This is a theft far worse than Watergate,” wrote civil rights attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnik on social media. “There is no other word for it. They are stealing $1.78 BILLION dollars to pay Trump’s allies, despite knowing that these people are not legally entitled to any money.”

The Trump regime hopes programs like this “anti-weaponization” fund can appease just enough of an active base to hold power under minority rule, while enriching all those in Trump’s inner circles who in turn stick by his side regardless of what happens in elections.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told the New Republic that he sees the fund as Trump and his lawyers “figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

Raskin added that, should the Democrats retake the House and Senate in the midterms, they would shut down the fund and demand transparency about any payments made. According to the Congress member, any payouts to January 6 participants would violate the Fourteenth Amendment by aiding in an insurrection against the U.S. It is, however, no easy task to claw back money once doled out.

“It is my personal opinion that this is a criminal act and people should respond accordingly,” noted Reichlin-Melnik.

The problem is that for Trump’s regime and its loyal Supreme Court, the distinction between presidential criminal corruption and permissible executive action has all but evaporated.

The challenge, then, is to show that Trump’s meager offerings are not worth accepting.

The post Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund Is a Handout to His Hardcore Supporters appeared first on The Intercept.

In an escalation of its efforts to criminalize and eradicate trans healthcare, Donald Trump’s administration has sent its first known criminal subpoenas to hospitals that have provided gender-affirming care for young trans people. 

New York University Langone received a criminal grand jury subpoena last week from the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas demanding information about teens who received care from the hospital’s now-shuttered trans youth health program, as well as information on the medical staff who provided that care. 

In accordance with a New York state shield law, the hospital posted a public notice to inform affected patients. The notice also said “several” other institutions had received similar subpoenas, which the hospital said demands “information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care” between 2020 and 2026.

Previous administrative subpoenas for confidential patient information have been reliably quashed in courts around the country as blatantly unconstitutional, illegal intrusions into patient privacy. So far, these have been related only to civil investigations. The Langone subpoena means that the federal government has now launched a criminal investigation into trans youth healthcare providers, and in Northern Texas, a judicial district prone to extreme, right-wing decisions. 

It appears that providers, not the trans patients or their guardians, are the target of the criminal investigation. Since federal grand juries are the black boxes of the criminal legal system, little information is available about the details of the case. It is not even publicly known what charges the prosecutors could be pursuing. The subpoena demands sweeping information including medical records relating to any patients under 18 who received gender-affirming treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or any other “clinical services.” What we do know for certain is that resisting every government demand here is the only acceptable path forward. 

When it comes to healthcare providers, New York’s Shield Law is specifically in place as a protection from out-of-state prosecution. But the law has not yet been robustly tested against a federal case. 

“The hospital may try to fight the subpoena, in whole or in part, in court — but because the federal government is strategically pursuing the case in one of the most conservative courts in the country, Langone faces an uphill battle,” S. Baum wrote in the trans news and advocacy site Erin in the Morning. “This round of litigation could also put the efficacy of Shield Laws to the test.”

The Justice Department’s aim, whether or not the grand jury leads to prosecutions, is to further intimidate and harass healthcare providers and hospital administrators nationwide into preemptively ending services for trans young people. Many institutions, including NYU Langone, have already complied and stopped providing such care. Convening the grand jury is yet another direct and immediate attack on trans kids and adults, and a threat to bodily autonomy and medical confidentiality more broadly.

Related

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

We also know by now that the Constitution or our country’s laws are no constraint on the Trump administration. Prosecutors and lawmakers will continue to throw everything they can against the wall until something sticks to establish a new political-legal reality — one usually achieved after a case winds its way up to a favorable federal judge, and eventually the far-right Supreme Court. 

Meanwhile, NYU Langone has shown itself to be an easy target. In response to threats from the federal government last year to withhold funding, the hospital ended its Transgender Youth Health Program. Despite the fact that a federal court in April ruled that the government cannot withhold funding over trans healthcare provision, more than 40 hospital systems have stopped providing necessary medical care to trans youth based on the Trump regime’s threats. 

The fact that Langone already bent to Trump’s demands by shuttering the program but is still facing a potential criminal probe only proves the folly of compliance. Should the hospital, or any other hospital system, supply federal prosecutors with patient’s or worker’s personal information, patients would be well within their rights to sue for HIPAA violations and potentially even civil rights violations given the discriminatory nature of the request. Patients and their families can also file a motion against the subpoena — a precedent that has been set when it comes to administrative subpoenas asking for trans patients’ information. 

Earlier this year, for example, the families of six trans teens who had received treatment at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles filed a motion to quash an administrative subpoena on behalf of themselves and more than 3,000 other transgender youth patients and families whose identities and private medical information the subpoena demanded. A settlement was reached, in which the government withdrew the subpoena requests seeking patient-identifying information and instructed Children’s Hospital to redact all such information from any documents produced.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas — from the same district where the criminal grand jury is empanelled — ruled earlier this month that Rhode Island Hospital in Providence must comply with a Justice Department administrative subpoena for trans youth patient information, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and medical records. In response, the Rhode Island Office of Child Advocate filed an emergency motion to quash the request. In a hearing over the motion in a Providence court, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy slammed the Justice Department for conducting a “fishing expedition” by seeking medical records and patient information in a scrambling effort to criminalize healthcare provision; she also said the case was quite clearly “shopped” to Texas. 

For institutions and individuals, the stakes for resisting a criminal grand jury subpoena are higher. Individuals can be jailed and fined for the length of the grand jury in order to compel them to testify, and institutions can be slapped with hefty fines. But the consequences of giving in are graver still: Hospitals that capitulate to these demands could be subject to costly patient class action over privacy and rights violations. Institutions that hand over information are also aiding the potential criminal prosecution of medical care providers — an attack on the entire medical profession.

“If NYU Langone and other providers turn the confidential data of their patients over to the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Northern Texas, everyone’s privacy, everyone’s healthcare, everyone’s civil rights are compromised,” Brad Lander, the former New York City comptroller and congressional candidate, wrote on Bluesky.

Related

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

In March, a federal court ruled that a case brought by Columbia University students could proceed against the university. The lawsuit argues the university became a “third-party collaborator” in unconstitutional actions when it supplied the names and disciplinary records of students involved in Palestine solidarity organizing. The court determined Columbia could be found liable as a “state actor” for acting under government coercion to suppress student speech. Students and civil rights advocates sued the school for handing over student information in response to a congressional subpoena. While a civil, rather than a criminal, case, the finding should make institutions reflect on their readiness to comply with discriminatory and unconstitutional requests from this administration. 

“If the calculus before was that it’s better to comply with the federal government because it is either face saving or economically saving for these private institutions, now there’s the counterbalance: If you capitulate, you’ve actually opened yourself up to liability for selling out your constituents,” civil rights attorney and CUNY law professor Zal Shroff, who is representing plaintiffs in the case against Columbia, told me. 

Given that a federal grand jury subpoena is itself explicitly coercive, it’s unclear whether exactly the same legal claim could be made against NYU should it comply with the government’s demands. Shroff noted, “It may be that they are seeking to use the criminal process to avoid what has been found in the civil process,” but that nonetheless, “legal consequences work in multiple ways” when it comes to people’s ability to challenge private entities for their compliance with the administration’s harms. Continued complicity with Trump’s regime, however, has a known result. 

“NYU caved and ended care and they’re still being hit with a grand jury subpoena. It’s incredibly clear that no amount of preemptive compliance will stop this attack,” Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky. “You either fight or you will be destroyed by this administration. Caving will not save you.” 

The post DOJ Escalates War on Trans Youth Healthcare With Criminal Subpoenas appeared first on The Intercept.

Armed federal agents recently arrested Dr. David Morens, a 78-year-old retired government scientist, strip-searched him, and charged him with crimes that could carry decades in prison — all for allegedly using his personal email to try and evade Freedom of Information Act requests.

According to prosecutors, Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, used personal email accounts to dodge FOIA, deleted records, and sought to circumvent federal records requirements. In one message about communications about Covid research, he allegedly wrote: “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I’m FOIA’d but before the search starts. … Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to my Gmail.”

Related

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

If true, his actions were egregious and wrong, and accountability should be both proportional and consistent with previous cases of records destruction and FOIA evasion. 

But the Justice Department has, for decades, largely taken a hands-off approach to enforcing FOIA. When it has enforced the law, it’s usually landed in civil rather than criminal court. The DOJ has almost never treated FOIA evasion behavior as a crime — at least until now.

Even in high-profile cases involving far more sensitive material, such as Hillary Clinton’s infamous use of a private email server or Bill Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger’s repeated removal of classified documents from the National Archives, penalties were limited. Berger, for example, received probation, a fine, and community service, and Hillary Clinton wasn’t charged.

Morens, by contrast, faces real prison time if convicted: up to five years for conspiracy, up to 20 years per count for destruction of records, and additional penalties for concealment.

It should be irrelevant that Morens allegedly tried to evade FOIAs from a mix of organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and U.S. Right to Know. But it raises a question the Justice Department has not answered: Would similar charges be brought if the requesters were environmental groups, press freedom organizations, or others less politically aligned with the current administration?

The answer is likely no, and that’s the real danger: making it so FOIA evasion is only a crime if the administration has a score to settle.

This prosecution also comes at a moment when the federal government’s commitment to FOIA has never been lower. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hollowed out most of his department’s FOIA offices, and the FOIA office for the bureau where Morens used to work is drowning, with over 1,100 backlogged requests right now as a result. The agency is also more than two months late posting its annual FOIA report, which would give us a better idea of how well (or not) it is responding to public records requests for the first year of this Trump administration.

Related

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

At the same time, public health, environmental, and scientific information has been removed from federal websites at an unprecedented pace, FOIA officials are being fired for lawfully releasing information that the administration doesn’t like, and the Justice Department is actively helping the White House evade record-keeping laws.

Against that backdrop, targeting a single retired official while systemic transparency failures go largely unaddressed is absurd.

There are legitimate arguments for stronger consequences when officials deliberately evade transparency laws. But selective criminal enforcement carries its own risks. It invites politicized prosecutions and risks reshaping FOIA itself into a system where compliance is influenced, consciously or not, by who is making the request. That would undermine the core purpose of FOIA: equal access to government records.

If the goal is better compliance, structural incentives may matter more than individual prosecutions. Agencies routinely under-invest in their FOIA operations, leaving small offices to manage massive backlogs with limited resources and political support. One way to change that would be to tie agency leadership’s discretionary budgets to FOIA performance, thus rewarding timely, lawful disclosure and penalizing chronic failure.

That approach would address not just willful evasion but also the broader system that allows noncompliance to persist.

Morens’s alleged actions warrant scrutiny and accountability. But this case is about more than one official. It is about whether the government is establishing a new standard for enforcing transparency, and whether that standard will be applied fairly.

If evading FOIA is now a crime, it must be enforced evenly. Otherwise, the transparency law risks becoming what it was meant to prevent: a tool that, when applied selectively, only serves the powerful.

The post Dodging FOIA Could Now Mean Arrest and Strip Search, Depending on Who’s Asking appeared first on The Intercept.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is preparing for the legal fight of its life with the U.S. government — but its most immediate threat is coming from the financial system, rather than the courts.

Fidelity Charitable, Charles Schwab affiliate DAFgiving360, and Vanguard Charitable have begun blocking donor-advised fund, or DAF, donations to the SPLC — effectively cutting off one of the organization’s most important funding pipelines at a critical moment. The decision arrives alongside a politicized and bogus indictment announced late last month by the Trump Department of Justice, which is attempting to paint one of the country’s most prominent watchdogs against hate and racial violence as a promoter of it.

A letter from Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon notes the House Judiciary Committee has received whistleblower reports that the DOJ “ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama to rush through the indictment of the SPLC despite serious concerns about the strength of the case.” As Alabama Reflector editor Brian Lyman wrote, “DOJ has no evidence of SPLC committing a crime. The organization’s real offense, in the eyes of Trump’s toadies, is its lack of obedience.”

But before any courts can assess the merits of the case, the SPLC is already suffering severe financial consequences.

Donor-advised funds have become a key part of American philanthropy. Managed by firms like Fidelity and Vanguard, DAFs allow donors to receive immediate tax benefits while recommending grants to IRS-recognized nonprofits over time. They are one of the primary channels many nonprofits use to connect with donors.

What’s happening to the SPLC fits a broader pattern of using financial exclusion to punish speakers who challenge those in power. In 2010, after WikiLeaks published State Department cables that embarrassed the U.S. government, major financial institutions — including Visa, Mastercard, and Bank of America — cut off its ability to receive online donations. The punishment happened without WikiLeaks ever having a chance to defend itself in a court of law. The consequences were devastating for the organization, which lost more than 95 percent of its revenue the following year.

That episode is often treated as a one-off, but my research has shown that’s far from the case. I’ve spoken to dozens of law-abiding U.S. citizens who’ve lost financial services due to speech or political viewpoints — groups like VoteAmerica, which had a bank account closed by Chase Bank and was denied an account by First Republic Bank, and the National Committee for Religious Freedom, which also had its bank account shuttered by Chase. I detail these and many other cases in my newly published book, “Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech.” 

As with the SPLC, financial censorship sometimes happens to those who have been merely accused of a crime. I’m reminded of the case of a Stop Cop City activist who faced charges for participating in an anti-police protest in Atlanta. The Daily Mail wrote a disparaging news article about her, calling her “an Antifa terrorist who is part of the Atlanta cell.” Shortly after that article was published, Chase closed the bank account she’d held for years, citing “negative media.” 

The implications of this type of censorship go beyond the individual accounts impacted; it has a chilling effect on anyone who wants to attend protests or engage in advocacy. Like WikiLeaks before and the SPLC today, organizations and individuals who challenge the status quo must fear drawing the ire of the corporations that wield immense power over our financial lives.

Related

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

We’ve also seen financial corporations try to police the news, as with a 2022 policy rolled out by PayPal that promised a $2,500 fine to any accounts spreading “misinformation” — a term left conspicuously undefined. PayPal was widely criticized and swiftly retracted the policy. Given the Trump administration’s open hostility to journalism and its novel legal tactics to attack the press, it’s entirely possible that the next target of financial censorship could be a news outlet after the WikiLeaks blockade set the precedent.

Courts have recognized the danger when the government plays a direct role in shuttering financial accounts. In Backpage.com v. Dart, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals compared a government official pressuring credit card companies to end services to a website as similar to suffocation, saying it was like “killing a person by cutting off his oxygen supply rather than by shooting him.” The Supreme Court has also seen the dangers of financial companies policing speakers at the behest of the government, noting in National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo that intermediaries like financial companies won’t stand up for free expression because they “will often be less invested in the speaker’s message and thus less likely to risk the regulator’s ire.” But in both of these cases, the government pressure was overt and coercive, triggering the First Amendment protections for the speakers involved.

Related

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

The case of SPLC is more ambiguous but no less troubling. As of now, there is no public evidence that the government contacted Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity directly. Instead, these financial giants are justifying their decisions by pointing to their own terms of service, which they can write and amend as they see fit and which don’t trigger the same First Amendment concerns.

But the ethical and societal concerns are just as important. Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity are punishing a lawful nonprofit organization that hasn’t been convicted of any wrongdoing. These companies are under no obligation to shut off SPLC donations at this time. The San Francisco Foundation, which also oversees donor-advised funds, has promised to continue sending DAFs to SPLC, noting, “we are guided by our values and by our donors, not shifting political winds.” 

The result of Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity’s decisions could be devastating for the SPLC, which will have fewer resources available to fight this politicized prosecution. Regardless of how one feels about the SPLC, we should all object to weaponizing the financial system this way.

This is a problem across the ideological spectrum. The SPLC has itself championed the idea that DAFs should stop the flow of donations to conservative nonprofit organizations it alleges promote hate and racial violence. Pressuring financial intermediaries to advance a political agenda when no court has weighed the merits of a case is no more appropriate in those cases than it is in this one.

Related

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

What is particularly ironic about this moment is that President Donald Trump himself has spoken out against financial exclusion used as a political weapon, going so far as to sign an executive order against debanking last year that attempted to stop “politicized or unlawful debanking.” But under his administration, one of the country’s most prominent civil rights organizations now faces a sudden constriction of its funding channels. 

A financial system that shutters or blocks the accounts of advocacy organizations that have not been convicted of any wrongdoing is not neutral. It is a system that can be used to sideline communities and activists — without ever stepping into a courtroom.

The post Big Finance Might Be Dooming the SPLC — Even Before Its Day in Court appeared first on The Intercept.

The ink had barely dried on the Supreme Court’s ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act when Republican lawmakers raced to deliver on the barely veiled promises of the court’s decision: the decimation of Black political power and a revival of Jim Crow-era racist voter suppression.

In Tennessee on Thursday, Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a half-century-old law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and then the overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed new redistricting maps that eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district. The 9th Congressional District, also Tennessee’s only reliable Democratic seat, will be carved into three — purposefully redrawn for each piece to have a white-majority and Republican-leaning electorate. The votes of Memphis’s 63 percent Black population will be diluted to near irrelevance; the entire state will be handed to Republicans.

No one can act surprised. This was the predicted outcome of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which decimated Section 2 of the embattled Voting Rights Act, a provision that had protected minority voters from redistricting. With the right-wing justices’ blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering and reestablish the pre-civil-rights-era status quo ante.

It stands to reason that Republicans are not representing the interests of Black Tennesseans, some 17 percent of the population, overwhelmingly Democrats. These residents only have one representative in Washington, Rep. Steve Cohen — the lone Democrat among the state’s nine congressional seats. That is the seat being eliminated by the new maps passed by Tennessee’s largely white legislature.

The situation is already one in which Black working-class interests are hardly represented — and nor would greater Black representation in the state necessarily ensure the delivery of racial justice and the economic justice it requires.

The point is that Black disenfranchisement both reflects and produces conditions of white supremacist rule, wherein greater anti-Black oppression is assured.

“These maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump,” said Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson at the Tennessee statehouse on Thursday. Pearson, a progressive activist and one of the state’s few Black representatives, is running for a seat in Congress and was neck and neck in polling for his August primary against Cohen, the 76-year-old incumbent. The redrawn maps would likely foreclose his chance to represent South Memphis in Washington.

Pearson called the gerrymandered maps a “political lynching” that “set our state back over 150 years.”

Trump’s Larger Project

Trump, who is historically unpopular, has every reason to push his GOP to use newly unconstrained gerrymandering capacities in advance of the midterms. Right-wing redistricting efforts go beyond a scramble for November, though, and sit within a larger project of white supremacist backlash.

Like in Tennessee, Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina all called special legislative sessions — as explicitly ordered by Trump — to push new redistricting maps that will decimate majority-Black districts and deliver congressional seats to Republicans.

Related

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

According to the cynical rationale of the Supreme Court conservatives, such maps would not violate what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, because the GOP is not openly describing their gerrymander as targeting Black voters.

“The more racist you are as a party, the more insulated you are from Voting Rights Act liability under this decision,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told Bolts Magazine about the Callais ruling. “If there were a party called the Klan party, right now, it would trigger an awful lot of nonwhite opposition based on the party’s platform. But this opinion says, you have to set the party’s platform entirely aside to figure out if there’s been any damage based on race. So the more you can tie the two together, the more insulated you are.”

In short, as Levitt put it, “the most racist partisan gerrymandering is going to be the most immune from a VRA challenge.”

Tennessee Republicans proved precisely this point on Thursday. Striding into the statehouse to disenfranchise Black voters, Republican state Rep. Todd Warner wore a giant Trump 2024 flag as a cape.

As other states follow Tennessee’s example, the consequences of Callais could see the largest-ever drop in the number of Black lawmakers in Congress. The previous record was set, NPR reported, in the post-Reconstruction backlash, by the Congress that began in 1877 with four fewer House districts represented by Black lawmakers than the previous session.

In response to racist Republican gerrymandering, Democrats can play their own game of redistricting — but there’s a reason the Callais decision is understood as a gift to Republicans.

“The states controlled by Republicans where there are majority-minority districts have no internal constraint on how much they can screw over Black voters, because Black voters are not voting for that party,” Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, told Slate.

Democrats could expand a small number of safe seats in New York and California, for example, by eliminating minority voter districts. As Karlan noted, however, this would be politically unpalatable because “the politics of the state are not going to look favorably on that, and the Democrats in those states depend on Black and Latino voters in statewide races.”

According to Karlan, in this race to the bottom, Republican-led election fixing will not be addressed without a different Congress, a different president, and a powerful political movement to hold politicians accountable.

“Voters have to first build a political movement around this that makes elected officials afraid to do this,” she said.

Meanwhile, Democratic redistricting efforts in Virginia were dealt a blow on Friday, when they were struck down by the state’s Supreme Court. Voters had approved in a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional map, but the court’s ruling hands Republicans a fierce electoral advantage.

After Thursday’s vote, Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Justin Jones burned a paper Confederate flag in the statehouse rotunda, surrounded by protesters who had gathered to decry the racist gerrymandering.

“We saw a time like this, in this building before,” Jones told his fellow lawmakers earlier this week during the unprecedented redistricting special session. “If you study Reconstruction. We had Black lawmakers after the Civil War, then from the end of the 1800s to the 1960s, we had no Black folks here” — meaning the statehouse.

On Thursday afternoon, the NAACP’s Tennessee chapter filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the new congressional map, which is likely to be the first of several legal efforts against the rushed, conniving, and unrepentantly racist gerrymander.

The post Tennessee GOP Moves to Decimate Black Voting Power After Supreme Court’s Blessing of Jim Crow appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter to Twitch and Amazon, New York Democratic Rep. Richie Torres once slammed Hasan Piker, the popular political streamer, for his “depravity” and called him “the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism.” While mainstream Democrats and their allies have for months weighed the “problem” of Piker for the party, his star has only continued to rise. Insurgent candidates on the left are now making him their go-to surrogate, with Piker as a new kind of kingmaker, one they hope can shepherd his mass of online supporters behind them.

Piker recently touched down in Missouri to lend his star power to Cori Bush, who is looking to reclaim her position in the House after serving as the first Black woman to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District from 2021 to 2025. During her first term in office, Bush authored a bill calling for an “immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” In what was widely read as retribution, Bush was primaried by a Democratic opponent, Wesley Bell, who ended his own Senate campaign against Republican Josh Hawley for the run; Bell defeated Bush with the help of an unprecedented nearly $9 million in spending from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Now Bush is back, and like Piker, is unbowed: During the rally, she wore a T-shirt with her campaign slogan “FIGHT BACK” in big, bold letters. 

“I love seeing you all,” Bush told the May Day crowd. “I just don’t love why I keep seeing you all.”

Bush, who rose to prominence as an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, quickly gained a reputation in office for bucking establishment Democrats — even outpacing other members of “the Squad” — and being outspoken in her criticism of party leadership.

On his wildly popular Twitch stream, Piker has argued that “80 percent of the Democratic Party now agrees with the principles that Cori Bush was defending at a time when it was inopportune for her to do so.” Piker’s visit to St. Louis coincided with weeks of national media scrutiny condemning the popular streamer’s views as antisemitic, culminating in Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., pushing a bipartisan bill to explicitly denounce Piker.

Related

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

But for the left, the criticism rings more like an endorsement, and Piker has hit the campaign trail for a number of progressive Democrats including Abdul El-Sayed, who’s running for the Senate in Michigan; Dr. Adam Hamawy, who’s running for a New Jersey House seat; and Rep. Ilhan Omar, who’s up for reelection in Minnesota. 

On stage with Bush, Piker described Bell as an “AIPAC stooge,” and urged St. Louisans to rally around the Bush campaign. “Republicans are monsters who traffic in hatred,” said Piker. “But we’re no longer going to vote for do-nothing Democrats, either.” He told the crowd about a St. Louis woman at the airport who was shocked to see him, visiting the city. “There’s this attitude in places like Missouri where city slickers like myself, the bicoastal elite, don’t come to places like St. Louis. Like, she genuinely was shocked,” Piker said on a stream re-cap.

At the rally, Piker described St. Louis as part of a growing coalition of the discontented. “I’ve seen a lot of places like St. Louis. Places that have been left behind by wealthy corporations that pollute your waters and steal your productive output … but today we say, ‘No more!’”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Bell pointed to common criticisms from mainstream figures over Piker’s past online comments. “If Cori Bush spent as much time meeting with her constituents as she does associating with people who condone sexual assault and blame America for September 11th, she may have fared better in her last election,” said Bell campaign spokesperson Jordan Blase.

Before Piker and Bush, historian Ángel Flores Fontánez took the stage as an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, anchoring the day in proud St. Louis labor history. One of the first American general strikes took place in the city in July 1877, when railroad workers across the United States objected to immiseration imposed by Gilded Age robber barons.

In 1877, railroad workers across the United States shut down rail line capital from New York to Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania to Ohio, all the way out west to Missouri. In St. Louis, the strike escalated, evolving into a general action which drew river levee roustabouts, coopers, newsboys, foundry workers, and refinery laborers into a weeklong action. 

The strike was a multiracial coalition, and the strike’s executive committee briefly ran St. Louis as one of the first commune governments before it was violently suppressed.

Fontánez recalled the city’s legacy of socialists, which dates back to the abolitionist German ’48ers, and the Funsten Nut Strike of May 1933. As University of Missouri history professor Keona Ervin notes in “Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis,” the Funsten strike was one of the first successful strike actions of the era, with the Communist Party USA using the strike as a moment to “mark the urban Midwest as a new hotbed for radical labor politics spearheaded by black working women.”

In the aftermath of the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement, which began in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, many hoped to see St. Louis once again become a beacon of progressivism. But Missouri poses a cadre of challenges: The 1st District is a gerrymandered product of a red state that used to be purple. Missouri was a bellwether for a century, but as polarization intensified in the early 2000s, Missouri Republicans successfully drew maps that neutralized the state’s urban progressive centers.

Most Missourians live in the blue islands of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield, which also make up 80 percent of the state’s annual GDP. Previously, the state elected Democratic governors, senators, and controlled a handful of congressional seats. But now the 1st District is one of the few remaining positions not controlled by Republicans.

Decades of state and federal Republican rule have been disastrous for the Greater St. Louis area, plunging the city into a pattern of capital flight and population loss. The city is still reeling from the May 2025 tornado which ripped through the city and hit historically Black neighborhoods in North St. Louis the hardest.

From the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the St. Louis mayor’s office, many residents feel the recovery has been botched and worry that the North Side will not be rebuilt. Last month, protesters confronted Mayor Cara Spencer over the sluggish cleanup effort, where houses have been left half-destroyed and their residents sleeping in tents. 

“When we’re going to our electeds, we’re saying fully fund the North Side,” Bush told the crowd. “If you can’t stand up to Donald Trump and his administration — at the city level, the state level, or the federal level — then you’re no representative for us. If you can’t stand up to Donald Trump and his allies, then how are you supposed to stand up for us?”

Related

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

St. Louisans are calling on their elected officials to fight for more disaster relief, and also against attacks by the state legislature. At the direct request of President Donald Trump, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe, a former car dealership owner turned Republican politician, is attempting to further gerrymander the voting map for Kansas City. 

Kehoe also wants to abolish Missouri’s income tax, which critics say will send the state into a budget tailspin not unlike Sam Brownback’s failed tax-cutting policy, the “Kansas Experiment.”

The governor also caused an uproar by legally invading St. Louis in 2025, taking over state control of the city’s police department. In doing so, Kehoe defied a 2012 statewide vote which granted local control of the police to the St. Louis mayor. Missouri is the only state in the U.S. where the governor controls the police of the major cities, including the police budget.

Many St. Louisans are vehemently opposed to the police takeover and disgruntled with the status quo, but Missouri’s 1st District includes several neighborhoods in St. Louis County that went heavily for Bell in 2024. G Gamache, a union organizer with Starbucks Workers United who attended May Day rally, told The Intercept that Bush is still the fighter St. Louis needs.

“When you see her in person, you see how much she hasn’t changed who she is. … She’s still 10 toes down on things like Medicare for All, affordable housing, and ending the genocide of Palestinians by Israel. A wide majority of Democratic voters, and even many Republican voters, even in Missouri, support all these things,” he said.

Related

Wesley Bell’s Swan Song: Felonies for Ferguson Protesters

Back in August 2025, Bush’s opponent, Wesley Bell, held his first and only in-person town hall, which was disrupted by protesters. Local activists challenged the congressman on his support of Israel, his refusal to call Gaza a genocide, and his trip to Tel Aviv, which was sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation.

During the town hall, a man providing security for Bell was caught on video attempting to forcefully physically remove the protesters. 

Between Missouri Republicans and Bell, the 2.8 million St. Louisans living in the greater metropolitan area are generally represented by pro-Israel politicians. According to the Pew Research Center, most U.S. voters have soured on Israel, which is now engaged in an invasion of Lebanon, continued violence in the West Bank, the further annihilation of Gaza, and now an ongoing conflict with Iran, which has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane. As of April 2026, 60 percent of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year, and the trend seems to be accelerating.

Bell has tried to square this circle by recognizing the Armenian genocide, voting against Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and denouncing Kehoe’s attempts to redraw Missouri’s congressional maps. Since the initial almost $9 million, AIPAC has continued supporting Bell, directing donors through its PAC’s portal to fund his campaign.

Blase, the Bell spokesperson, told The Intercept that “Congressman Bell remains focused on standing up to Trump and fighting for the people of Missouri’s first Congressional District.”

Related

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

While Bush called for a ceasefire early on, her criticisms of Israel don’t quite explain why AIPAC would spend so much on a Missouri congressional campaign.

A more complete answer may lie in Missouri as a node in the country’s military–industrial complex. St. Louis is home to several Boeing facilities, with the Seattle-headquartered aerospace company selling a range of weapons to the Israeli military, including F-35 and F-15IA fighter jets, missiles, and smart bombs.

In 2020, pro-Palestine student groups in St. Louis protested the St. Charles Boeing facility over a $2.2 billion contract to manufacture small-diameter bombs sold to foreign nations, including Israel, and in 2024, the Washington University Student Union Senate passed a resolution to divest from Boeing.

In one of its corporate PR products, a 2025 Boeing video highlighted St. Louis as “Fighterland U.S.A.,” nicknamed for its importance in military jet manufacturing across the Lambert International Airport and Scott Air Force Base complexes. In February 2026, the company announced the return of its Defense, Space & Security headquarters to St. Louis. Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, near Kansas City, made headlines in June 2025 as playing a key role in launching strikes against Iran.

St. Louis is also home to a number of companies on pro-Palestine boycott lists. The North American headquarters of Israeli Chemical Limited Group — which manufactures fertilizers, metals, and chemical products including white phosphorus — is in Creve Coeur, Missouri. As Human Rights Watch reported, Israel used white phosphorus in populated areas of Gaza and Lebanon in October and November 2023.

Bush told The Intercept that Missouri voters are agitated enough to show up and oust Bell, pointing to polling that shows the race to be neck and neck. But Bush is positioning herself as a fighter for people who have long felt left behind by the Democratic Party.

“If you hurt my people, I can’t sit back and do nothing. … If we wait on the feckless people in some of these seats to do it, it’ll never happen,” she promised.

The post Hasan Piker Is the Democrats’ New Man on the Trail, Whether They Like It or Not appeared first on The Intercept.

Braden Peters, better known online as Clavicular, did not become famous by offering young men discipline in any ordinary sense. He became famous by selling them “ascension”: the promise that a better face, leaner body, harsher jaw, and ruthless optimization could buy them power in a world they believe has already priced them out. In April, that sermon hit a grisly wall (or, more accurately, a floor) when Peters was hospitalized after a suspected overdose during a livestream in Miami. Bloody and bruised, he later described the hospitalization as “brutal.” 

In the aftermath, Clavicular’s online presence has unraveled. YouTube recently removed his channels for repeated policy violations, including linking to prohibited sites and attempting to evade a previous ban. Despite being pushed off major platforms, he doubled down, staging a stunt trip late last month with a group of young women to Little Saint James, the private island once owned by Jeffrey Epstein. 

Now, that same pattern of boundary-pushing has bled into the courts: Clavicular is facing a civil lawsuit in Florida from Aleksandra Mendoza, who alleges battery, fraud, and emotional distress, including claims that he injected her with a non-FDA-approved substance during a livestream and engaged in nonconsensual sex. Still, the streamer seems to make news almost daily, most recently for reportedly entering into a club venture in Miami with a man with ties to the Israeli mob.

None of this ongoing ordeal is some tragic footnote to the Clavicular brand. It has been him reaching his final form, stripped of filters: a young man preaching mastery through chemical self-invention, then collapsing live on camera, only to be slapped with subpoenas.

The New Prophet of Male Despair

Clavicular’s movement lives in the vocabulary of “looksmaxxing,” “hardmaxxing,” and “ascending,” a lexicon born in incel-adjacent internet forums and now being pushed into the mainstream by TikTok, Kick, and algorithmic outrage. Looksmaxxing culture didn’t emerge from nowhere; it grew out of the fringe online forums where users reduce attraction to “power, status, and looks,” obsessively rate faces, and turn self-improvement into an unyielding, almost clinical hierarchy of attractiveness.

His popularity stems from selling what he claims is the answer to a worldview born from the insular hodgepodge of pickup artists, anti-women forums, and involuntary celibacy groups — and he’s dragged it into the spotlight.

Related

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

He has promoted steroid use, “bone smashing,” injecting peptides, and even using methamphetamine as part of a savage self-improvement regimen aimed mostly at young men. He has also drifted openly around Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and the broader online right while insisting politics are for “jesters” (an insult in the looksmaxxing community). That juke is its own tell, because when a teenager builds an audience on hierarchy, humiliation, sexual scarcity, and racialized beauty standards, he is doing politics whether he says so or not.

It’s not unheard of for a young man to throw himself into the gym, practice self-discipline, embark on a rigid diet, and curate a public-facing persona. I’ve imbibed on bodybuilding culture in my own life. But Clavicular’s worldview is fueled by more than simple vanity. It is blackpill nihilism in gym clothes. The “blackpill” tells young men that the social order is fixed, intimacy is a commodified market, and the only thing left is to become more physically dominant than the next guy or accept your permanent irrelevance. In that mental framework, body maintenance becomes class warfare of the face. It is triage in a mating economy. Clavicular did not invent male despair, but he has certainly monetized it to his own great success.

Blackpilled

There is a reason this message is resonating. Clavicular’s runway to launch is an America where young men are more atomized and are worse off than their forefathers. Young American men are lonely, socially frayed, and increasingly detached from the kinds of institutions that once gave people identity outside romance and work. Gallup found that 25 percent of U.S. men ages 15 to 34 said they felt lonely “a lot” of the previous day, a higher number than young women and second in the world among our peer countries. The 2023 surgeon general’s advisory on social connection warned the country’s broader epidemic of isolation is not merely personal but structural.

Related

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

Gone too is the era where men could feel like they were contributing to the community and world around them. A farmer could see his food nourishing his neighbors, a cobbler’s work lived on the feet of his peers, and a doctor literally saved the lives of his local village. These are now nothing more than oral legends passed down from baby-boomer and Gen X parents of the way it used to be. 

But it is also revisionist history. This is the part too many elders refuse to admit: A lot of men were raised to expect an unearned inheritance. It was an entitlement gained at the exclusion of everyone else. They were assured that stable work, baseline social respect, and starting a family would follow if they merely stayed on the tracks as a heterosexual, yet basic, white man. But the tracks have buckled. Economist Raj Chetty’s work on mobility found that 90 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents; for children born in the 1980s, that figure had fallen to around half. Meanwhile, wage growth for the top has badly outpaced the bottom 90 percent over the long arc of modern American inequality. That does not excuse reactionary politics, but it does explain why so many young men feel they were promised adulthood and handed precarity.

The modern far right, which has stepped in to fill the space the erosion of our institutions and social fabric have left behind, understands something even modern liberals tend to flatten: Misogyny is not a secondary issue. It is foundational to the entire right-wing project. Researchers have described misogyny as a gateway into far-right radicalization, and scholars who research white nationalism have shown how “Great Replacement” ideology is soaked in reproductive anxiety — the fantasy that white decline is caused not just by immigration but by women refusing their assigned breeding role. In these circles, women are not citizens. They are demographic assets and currency.

But as civil rights, reproductive rights, and immigration have expanded opportunities, life isn’t so easy for the static white-bread young men of America. They now have to bring more to the table.

Related

“Me Too” Comes Back to Congress

It is why in Clavicular’s talk of “ascension” doesn’t just coincide with a rise in personal male beauty, but in parallel with right-wing mansophere attacks on what has been the perceived robbery of white male entitlements. It’s no shock that much of Clavicular’s vocabulary aims to diminish women, whom he publicly humiliates on his stream and reduces into self-serving chasers of status, making claims of centuries-old patriarchal domination as a societal good.

It’s an ethos that punches back at the external reality of his impressionable fanbase. 

That is why Clavicular matters beyond his own cartoonish excess. He is not just some young misanthrope with a camera and a syringe. He is a clean vessel for a much older grievance: that sweeping social change has stripped certain men, especially but not exclusively cis white men, of an unearned ease their fathers and grandfathers treated as normal.

The Disappearing Man

The real theft here is spiritual. In a quixotic quest for authenticity, young men are instead being sold a playbook that they must collapse themselves into tiny, fixed archetypes: warrior, king, alpha, mogger, Chad.

In Clavicular’s lane, and under the auspices of social media attention, the commandment is simpler still: become beautiful or become nothing. Conspicuously absent from that script are virtues like wisdom, tenderness, stewardship, restraint, humor, and even morality. 

Missing, too, is heroism — not performative strength, but the harder labor of standing against cruelty, telling the truth under pressure, protecting the vulnerable, and trying to tilt the world a few degrees toward justice.

That is why the blackpill philosophy, and broader manosphere, is antithetical to perhaps the most important tenet of true growth: courage. 

It is surrender disguised as realism. It tells men to stop imagining themselves as builders of community tasked with fighting unjust systems, and instead obsess over their social ranking. It is a feudal vision of manhood with the body as castle, the whole world as an ever-present threat, and other men as rivals. 

That is the real cowardice of imagination at the center of Clavicular’s rise. Not that he tells young men to exercise, clean up, or care how they present themselves. Fine. Groom yourself. Build your body. Take some responsibility. But do not confuse optimization with grit. And do not mistake a man begging his followers to buy into his despair for a leader of men.

The post Clavicular and the Right-Wing Project to Radicalize Young Men appeared first on The Intercept.

Another writer once told me that she never, ever apologizes. How unenlightened and abrasive, I thought at the time. This was circa 2019, when the specter of cancellation loomed large, where old tweets were being dug up, and public apologies abounded.

I like to think we’ve come out on the other side a bit more canny. The era of overcorrection converted me to the idea that, with few exceptions, you should not publicly apologize, and you should not retreat.

I’ve been thinking about this again in the wake of former FBI Director James Comey’s second indictment stemming from a dumb joke he literally wrote in the sand. While on a beach vacation last year, Comey spelled out the words “86 47” and posted the photo online. For this limp act of resistance, he’s been charged with threatening to kill the president and transmitting the message via interstate commerce, i.e., Instagram.

For those who’ve never worked a service industry job and are not unruly, public drunks — which would make for an interesting Venn Diagram for members of this administration — “86” is slang for removing someone from an establishment. It’s ludicrous to imagine this being read as a threat on Donald Trump’s life, but that was hardly the point.  

What matters is that Comey made a critical misstep: He deleted the post and retreated, giving his detractors exactly what they so richly desired. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said at the time.

Now, some necessary caveats: There is great value in addressing specific wrongs to the specific people you’ve wronged. This is best done in private. If you find yourself apologizing to a large group of unspecified people for hard-to-pin-down or ever-evolving wrongs, it should give you pause, ditto if you start by opening up your Notes app. Consider who is asking you to apologize and their motivations for doing so. Are they trying to exert control over you? Do they want to gain leverage for future use?

Related

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

Comey’s de facto apology not only didn’t matter to its intended audience, but it also telegraphed the former FBI director as weak. Announcing himself as willing to capitulate only chummed the water further, the sharks circled, and he bent the knee to the worst actors rather than stand his ground. Deleting the post, in the modern era, ends up looking like an admission of guilt — or, at least, an admission that the bad guys got under your skin, which means they can do so again, at will, in the future.

Once you start apologizing to appease the nameless, faceless ombudsmen looking to catch you out, you might find it’s impossible to stop. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is experiencing this firsthand. Early in March, the right-wing website Jewish Insider thought they were onto the scoop of the century when they published a story blaring: “Zohran Mamdani’s wife liked social media posts celebrating Oct. 7 attacks.” That premise was hardly borne out by the posts that Rama Duwaji, an interdisciplinary artist, had “liked” — which included such incendiary phrases as “Systemic change for collective liberation” — but the damage was done. A Mamdani spokesperson responded to the report with a conciliatory statement: “Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7th was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally.”

It’s safe to say this apology was not accepted, and bad actors in the media doubled down on attacking Duwaji. One week later, a gotcha reporter manufactured outrage with a story for the conservative Washington Free Beacon about one of Duwaji’s illustrations running alongside a collection of essays edited by Susan Abulhawa about the indignities of living under Israeli occupation — in this case, a Gazan woman’s search for something as simple as a bathroom. The publication attempted to hold Duwaji accountable for everything the editor has ever said, none of which was contained in the piece itself, which was actually written by Diana Islayih.

Mamdani apologized for the editor, saying, “I think that that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible.” But the mayor’s critics were quick to seize on what was left unsaid, with an Anti-Defamation League leader crediting his apology with one hand while offering with the other: “However, we have not heard from [Duwaji]. Does she have a problem with the author and her statements? We just don’t know.” (Abulhawa, for her part, nailed it in a withering response to Mamdani’s apology: “You succumbed to forces that seek to pick away at you, at your talented, beautiful wife, and at your work, clawing harder with each apology or concession you make.”)

It wasn’t over, and we likely haven’t heard the end of it. The Free Beacon doubled down on its intrepid reporting by advanced-searching up some of Duwaji’s off-color tweets from when she was a teenager. This seemed to break the dam, and New York’s first lady publicly apologized earlier this month in an interview on the art site Hyperallergic.

“I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn’t excuse it,” she told the site. “I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry.” 

Related

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

This all comes after Mamdani was only a few months off his historic win in an election where the most votes were tallied since 1969 — one in which he overcame wave after wave of Islamophobic fearmongering and political opponents smearing him as “antisemtic” for refusing to roll over on supporting Palestinian liberation. He stood up for something people believe in and was rewarded for not backing down, which makes it all the more mystifying that he would start apologizing now.

But Mamdani and Duwaji are far from alone. Years back, Rep. Ilhan Omar was famously disciplined for her “all about the Benjamins” tweet, which suggested, apparently quite controversially, that money was involved in lobbying. (After being tarred as trafficking in antisemitic tropes, Omar tweeted, “I unequivocally apologize.”) The attacks on Omar — again, brought by bad actors — have not stopped since then.

Related

Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories

The door on all this apologizing only swings one way. You’ll never get an apology out of Donald Trump, AIPAC, or the vast majority of elected Republicans. This should force you to consider that, just maybe, your opponents weren’t actually offended in the first place; they were exercising power over you in a way you’ve already proven works. It’s akin to political blackmail: If you prove you’re willing to pay the bad guys off once, there’s nothing to stop them coming back again and again for another pound of flesh.

Being involved in public life — and politics in particular — means offending people. It means making enemies of the types of people who strenuously fight against everything you stand for. What the left should stake out is the courage to stand on principle and be willing to have the bad people dislike you. Because without a spine, an elected lefty is just another politician.

The post Never Apologize appeared first on The Intercept.