More than 25,000 people have had their lives upended and been forced into unfamiliar cultures, governments, and legal systems when the Department of Homeland Security deported them to so-called “third countries,” places where immigrants previously living in the United States have no connections and few rights — and where a deportation business booming under the second Trump administration finds its murky endpoints.

“The point is to scare people,” said one Trump administration official, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report. “With countries like Palau or Eswatini, the point is that the Administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere.”

As is the case for many tools of its cruelty, the Trump administration did not invent third-country removals — it refashioned them to serve its own excesses. In the past, the U.S. used the obscure administrative compromise for people who could prove they would face persecution or harm if returned to their home country yet did not meet other requirements for asylum. The U.S. had to meet humanitarian and legal obligations, such as ensuring third countries would not turn around and deport migrants right back to their home countries. It was a last-resort tool that still left people displaced from their homes and communities in service of the country’s arcane immigration laws. But the current Trump administration’s policy, premised on agreements with at least 35 countries, has been anything but humane.

Nor has it been particularly legal. After the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the third-country deportation scheme, DHS scheduled a flight to deport migrants involved in a class-action lawsuit challenging the policy to Burundi, Rwanda, and the Central African Republic. Despite a successful emergency motion their lawyers filed last week, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement jet flew to two African countries that hold third-country removal agreements, according to the American Prospect. It is not yet clear who was on the plane or whether ICE carried out third-country removals in violation of a federal court order, and the Trump administration is now aiming to take the legal fight to the Supreme Court.

The saga illustrates the Trump administration’s proclivity for obfuscation, secret contracts, nondisclosure, and dealmaking of the backroom variety. Whether digitally disappearing people from ICE’s online detainee locator tool last week, or inking multimillion-dollar sole-source contracts with inexperienced companies of questionable provenance, the Trump administration has pursued its immigration goals under the cover of darkness, often justifying the secrecy with invocations of national security, all while attempting to shield itself from public scrutiny and accountability in the process.

“Deportation, Inc.: The Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy,” an ongoing investigative video series from Lawfare and SITU Research, in partnership with The Intercept, examines how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry shaped by private profit and political power — where contracts, capital flows, and institutional incentives increasingly govern detention, deportation, and surveillance. The project joins other efforts to shed light on the often invisible economy of immigration enforcement, including the Berkeley Human Rights Center, Human Rights First, Third Country Deportation Watch, and others.

The first installment, released last December, focuses on the business of migrant detention and profit motive underpinning the brutality of privately run ICE detention facilities. The second chapter, out today, looks at the network of flights shuffling migrants between those facilities, as well as the shady deals brokered with the governments of deportation destinations.

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Many details of these bilateral third-country removal agreements are not public, but the logic is transactional: Countries accept asylum-seekers and other immigrants from the United States in exchange for aid or other forms of financial compensation. Many of the countries involved in what The Intercept’s Nick Turse has called Trump’s “global gulag” are so dangerous that the State Department includes them on its “Level 4 Do Not Travel” list, “the highest advisory level due to life-threatening risks. And the very fact that these people are sent to a third country, rather than repatriated, means they have at least a viable asylum case.

Some but not all of the underlying texts of these agreements have come to light, often popping up in far-flung corners of the internet. This is not only a bad practice in government transparency, but a potentially illegal one as well. Lawfare, where I serve as managing editor, has argued as much in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., where the publication has sued the State Department over its failure to disclose international agreements into which the Trump administration has entered — in violation of the Case-Zablocki Act.

Though accelerated by the Trump administration, the secrecy that has enabled the growth of the vast, invisible economy of immigration enforcement traces back to at least 2001 with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Following the September 11 attacks, the new Cabinet-level department, along with other federal reforms, for the first time linked immigration with national security, which resulted in massive budget increases, new abilities to shield immigration information from the public, and general judicial deference to the executive branch that accompanies matters of foreign policy and national security.

Even the current Trump administration’s third-country deportation apparatus is beginning to build up its own record of cruel precedent. In the same class-action case last year, the Department of Homeland Security attempted to deport class members to Libya and South Sudan, in apparent violation of a temporary restraining order granted by a federal judge only weeks prior. During a hastily arranged hearing, a federal judge asked a Justice Department lawyer about the plane’s whereabouts, to which the government attorney responded, “I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified.” Asked under what authority the government had classified the location, the Justice Department lawyer did not have an answer.

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From the start, the Trump administration conceived of its third-country removal policy as another tool to inflict wanton abuse on irredeemable “illegal aliens.” As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained last year during a Cabinet meeting, “We are working with other countries to say ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries.’” What he failed to mention is that the people he’s demonizing have human rights, and that the countries he negotiated deals with have extensive records of violating them.

For the first time, “Deportation, Inc.” aims to render visible the dark web of agreements, transactions, and private contractors that make these grave abuses possible.

Correction: September 29, 2026, 12:50 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct the premiere date of the first installment of Deportation, Inc.

The post Inside the Business of Trump’s Third-Country Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article and video are being co-published with Responsible Statecraft.

For the first time, the Pentagon budget topped $1 trillion, and private contractors now receive more than half of all the tax dollars flowing to the Pentagon.

Few have profited from this privatization of the U.S. military more than the CEOs of Pentagon contractors.

While these companies often advertise their work as supporting the troops, the fact is that many service members live in appalling housing conditions, while military–industrial contractors’ profits soar and their CEOs live in luxury.

The lavish lifestyles of these CEOs is laid bare in the new mockumentary “Lords of War,” co-produced by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, that lampoons an industry held aloft by hundreds of billions of public funds every year.

“Lords of War” connects exorbitant Pentagon spending to the luxury enjoyed by the CEOs of its top contractors. As the film notes, Lockheed Martin is regularly the largest recipient of Pentagon contracts, raking in $75 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than 72 percent of which came from the U.S. government.

As “Lords of War”’s faux real estate aficionado explains, Lockheed’s CEOs have used their $20-million-plus compensation packages to buy luxury real estate from the D.C. suburbs to the shores of Miami.

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Despite its care-free tone, the film highlights very real problems within the military–industrial complex. As research by William Hartung and Stephen Semler for Brown University’s Costs of War Project showed, 54 percent of the Pentagon’s annual spending now goes to private contractors — up from 41 percent in the 1990s.

The top Pentagon contractors’ revenues and stock prices also skyrocketed as they’ve begun to devour an ever-larger share of the military budget.

They converted their revenue from the military into line items on their own budgets that do nothing to improve U.S. national security: armies of lobbyists that now outnumber all members of Congress by a nearly 2-to-1 margin; billions of dollars in stock buybacks; and, of course, CEO compensation packages on par with those of NFL quarterbacks.

The contrast of these CEOs’ rock-star lifestyles — “Lords of War” reveals that one chief executive bought Lenny Kravitz’s Miami mansion — with those of the military service members they purport to serve is striking.

As the film notes, former Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson received $33.7 million in compensation in 2015, which is more than 150 times as much as the average compensation package for an enlisted service member. While Hewson and other Pentagon contractor CEOs have been buying up mansions, the basic pay of service members has been relatively stagnant for the past 20 years when controlling for inflation.

Worse, the conditions service members have been living in are deteriorating. A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that two-thirds of service members think their housing is unaffordable. And service members often face “long commutes, leave families behind in other states, and work 2 jobs to afford housing,” according to the GAO report.

A July 2026 Senate investigation, meanwhile, revealed dangerous living conditions at military bases in Georgia, including “reports of lead exposure affecting newborn health, severe mold contamination leading to emergency room visits, flooding in living areas, and more.”

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Wartime environments have been no better, as evidenced by the deplorable conditions — including food shortages and inoperable plumbing — during the USS Abraham Lincoln’s extended deployment near Iran, which ultimately led multiple sailors to attempt to jump overboard.

Unfortunately, it’s your tax dollars that are paying for this gaping chasm between the lives of contractor CEOs and the troops.

“Lords of War” is one of the few films about military–industrial complex that you find hilarious, but its subject is no laughing matter. The private firms we’re entrusting with U.S. national security are doing more to defend their own share prices than they are to defend the nation. If we keep trusting this broken system to keep us safe, then, ultimately, the joke is on us.

The post Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous War Profiteers appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All told, it is a damning inventory.

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

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

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

Those are not the same thing.

Free speech was never free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I understand some of the suspicion.

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

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

There is nothing neutral about that mission.

And there never was. 

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

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

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

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

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

It has been an excellent 48 hours for Schadenfreude.

Unprincipled pop star Ed Sheeran dropped principled pop star Macklemore from his U.S. stadium tour, following pressure from rabidly pro-Israel billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft over Macklemore’s wholly anodyne on-stage calls to free Palestine.

Macklemore has been loudly calling for an end to the genocide for over two years; it was only when facing the loss of future revenue that Sheeran asked his longtime friend to leave the tour.

Now, Sheeran is in a well-deserved pickle.

Every single one of his other support acts, including his backing band Beoga, have quit the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Finneas, Danish group Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe, and Beoga explicitly condemned the silencing of Palestine solidarity.

“I have decided to withdraw from my upcoming tour dates with Ed Sheeran. I stand with Palestine and its people,” Finneas said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Sheeran has been widely lambasted for his spinelessness.

“Imagine being a Palestinian kid and seeing he did a concert for Ukraine but when over 20,000 Palestinian children are killed he’s silent,” wrote beloved children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel on Instagram, referencing Sheeran’s 2022 performance raising funds for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.

The backlash facing Sheeran has been a pleasure to observe. Seeing unscrupulous claims to purported apolitical neutrality revealed as hypocrisy and cowardice is validating.

Something bigger, too, may be unfolding. The response to Sheeran could mark a long, long overdue sea change in popular culture around Palestinian solidarity.

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Under the current paradigm, speaking out against Israel’s genocide and occupation has been extremely costly for celebrities. The case of Macklemore and Sheeran should herald an era in which, instead, devaluing Palestinian lives is deemed a career liability.

“The reason most famous artists continue to stay silent on the genocide in Palestine is simple: they’re afraid speaking up will lose them money,” wrote comedian Sammy Obeid on X. “So the solution is simple: make their silence even more unprofitable.”

The logic of economic boycotts — from South Africa to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — is to extract material costs for participation in oppressive regimes.

Sheeran is not a BDS target. The movement is explicit about only targeting select corporations and institutions that “play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.” But l’affaire Macklemore, as it has unfolded so far, may nonetheless affirm the logic of BDS.

The point is that Sheeran’s actions once again treated anti-Palestinian censorship as an uncontroversial norm, and the path of least resistance. The reaction to Sheeran suggests that, at the very least, after three years of livestreamed genocide, this norm is finally losing its hold in the cultural mainstream.

So far, Sheeran has not canceled his tour. He will likely be able to find scab artists to step in and replace his opening acts and supporting band.

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Given the public furor over his dropping Macklemore, however, musicians will be weary of backlash for stepping in. Indeed, it’s likely only explicitly pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian artists who would; Sheeran can’t help himself to the lie of neutrality anymore.

And now none of his chosen musicians will perform with him, despite describing him as a friend. It is his position that they have deemed unacceptable.

The Real Stakes

The backlash arrives as such a relief only because the so-called Palestinian exception to free speech has been so thoroughly normalized.

Yet even if this does mark a watershed moment for mainstream culture, it can hardly be called a victory as the genocide in Gaza continues and West Bank pogroms escalate.

Donald Trump this week approved a $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs renowned for mass civilian annihilation. The stakes of Ed Sheeran’s tour pale in comparison.

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That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Israel’s impunity-drenched eliminationist project has always relied on international disregard for Palestinian lives and mainstream accordance with pernicious and false pro-Israel narratives about Jewish safety. Every effort, in every sphere, to end that status quo should be celebrated and escalated.

“I am not complicit,” Sheeran wrote in a statement, which only seemed to confirm his complicity. “I have my personal views on this devastating conflict” — employing the verbiage of those who refuse to name a genocide. “There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics — my audience includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds.”

Recall, again, that he played a concert to raise funds for Ukraine in 2022.

It bears emphasizing that Macklemore said nothing remotely antisemitic. He called for a “free Palestine”; he also called for a “free Congo” and “free Sudan.” He condemned Israeli war crimes and added, “To all my Jewish brothers and sisters, criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you.”

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The reaction of Kraft and Zionist groups like the Israeli–American Council is, meanwhile, profoundly antisemitic, and generative of antisemitic violence: They suggest that we Jews should feel aligned with the genocide of Palestinians, and thus hurt by calls to end it.

A Fox News host said, of Macklemore’s performance, that “Free Palestine” is the new “Sieg Heil” — itself a vile act of Holocaust erasure.

And, as a friend of mine rightly noted, “The new Sieg Heil is the regular Sieg Heil.” Neo-Nazis abound.

Kanye West, who has spewed explicit anti-Jewish slurs and released a song called “Heil Hitler,” performed at stadiums that sought to ban Macklemore. Because, once again, this is not about Jewish safety; it’s about upholding the conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and crushing Israel-critical speech.

None of that is new. What feels new is that it isn’t working: Artists and supporters are rallying to Macklemore’s support, and Sheeran looks like a gutless idiot.

Being a “nice guy” can no longer sit comfortably alongside refusing to condemn a genocide that our home countries have backed and funded. That is a step in the right direction.

The post Ed Sheeran’s Craven “Neutrality” Is a Watershed Moment for Mainstreaming Palestine Solidarity appeared first on The Intercept.

In the last week, a raft of top tech executives — including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — joined a chorus of doomsaying voices from Silicon Valley urging a slowdown in artificial intelligence development.

The executives feared, they said, that the tools would become too powerful too soon and pose an existential risk to humanity.

Why would three multibillionaire tech CEOs all come together to agree that the technologies their companies are developing might be too dangerous?

Do the overlords of Silicon Valley really think frontier AI models are likely to “kill all humans,” as one senior employee at Anthropic warned last week? Is this just another example of hype propagated to draw in more investment?

The beneficiaries of the AI gold rush and the beneficiaries of investment in AI safety are, after all, likely to be the very same people, even if AI stocks have fallen in recent days amid the latest doom cycle.

We could waste a lot of time speculating about the apocalyptic or cynical worldviews of tech billionaires. Regardless of what these CEOs and their employees actually believe, however, one thing is clear: Talk of existential risk is a highly convenient way to not address the already known harms produced by AI technologies overseen by fascist billionaires like Musk and Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

It’s a suspicious time for Silicon Valley leaders to again offer up millenarian narratives about existential risks beyond our comprehension. The CEOs’ warnings, after all, came at the very moment a cross-political consensus is growing against the proliferation of actually existing harms of AI and its infrastructure. Consider, for example, mass opposition to data centers and classroom AI bans.

Silicon Valley talk about existential risk is hardly new. In 2023, hundreds of tech researchers, CEOs of the major AI companies, investors, and academics signed an open letter on AI risk just one sentence long: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Pitiful international commitments to preventing future pandemics and nuclear wars are hardly a reassuring baseline, but the sentiment of the open letter played into a now typical AI story, thick with theological overtones: A threshold is supposedly approaching, which could lead to the total destruction of life on Earth — or our salvation.

That threshold, according to the figureheads of technocapital, is the birth of AGI: “artificial general intelligence,” or systems of equal or superior intelligence to humans. From that point, these stories go, mighty super intelligent machines would emerge through recursive cycles of AI self-improvement.

Deliverance or Destruction

The destruction wrought by these AI systems could be total, so we are told, if they are not “aligned” with human interests. According to one particularly deranged thought experiment, our future robot overlords could turn everything on Earth into paperclips.

Alternatively, the utopian storyline goes, the magic of AI — and it is described with no more concreteness than gestures to magic — will solve every worldly problem and more, from climate devastation, to poverty, to illness, to mortality itself.

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Consider how tech multibillionaires Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt have brushed off the issue of AI processing’s already ruinous, gargantuan consumption of energy and water use. The New York Times reported that Schmidt believes AI has “too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.”

Advanced AI will bring such growth, such prosperity, such environment-saving technology, such holy deliverance, they say, that only a small-minded technophobe could want to hold back the learning machines in their dizzying progress.

How will super AI do this? I can’t tell you. Crucially, neither can the billionaires and technologists bringing this alleged magic — or terror — to the world. Nor can those directing unprecedented, economy-redefining amounts of capital and energy toward data centers and AI research articulate artificial intelligence’s path to redemption.

The whole point is that those of us at the bottom of the food chain — the consumers, or maybe all of humanity — cannot possibly understand the forces at work here.

We should be skeptical of these propagandistic narratives. This is not to say that the AI industries are not world-changing. AI can already do extraordinary things, many far beyond human capacities; these technologies have already had profound effects on the world of work, on global infrastructure, on the applications of state violence, on the vast flows of capital and energy.

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AI isn’t, after all, one thing: It’s collection of methods based in what’s known as machine learning, which is basically algorithms using statistics to find patterns in massive amounts of data, including in extraordinarily complex ways.

AI products and services abound, from text and image generative content to recommendation engines, like those used by Spotify and Netflix; fraud detection systems; and navigation systems such as Google Maps.

Yes, we’re swimming in AI slop, enshittified search engines, stolen content, deepfakes, embarrassing mistakes, and hallucinations. But there are also scientists using machine learning to revolutionize the detection and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

Meanwhile, AI systems are used to generate — and justify — kill lists in a genocide, or generate revenge porn, or populate predictive-policing databases along racist lines.

AI Fairytales

The problem with AI fairytales, which take the development of “artificial general intelligence” as a teleological endpoint, is that the array of machine learning’s current and potential applications are collapsed together as part of a singular unstoppable force.

Instead of a serious reckoning with existing harms and possibilities of technological development, technocapital’s mouthpieces prefer a story of an inevitable Judgment Day: The great thinking machines are coming and will destroy or deliver us.

Pesky questions about the actual capacities and potentials of machine learning are cast away. So, too, are difficult discussions about the dark history of “intelligence” as a calculable quality and a messy, contested concept.

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Genuine uncertainties and unknowns about how best or not to develop and deploy advanced machine learning technologies are obviated — considerations being reserved for the Great Men of Silicon Valley.

As the cognitive scientist Hagen Blix and machine learning researcher Ingeborg Glimmer wrote in their 2025 book “Why We Fear AI”: “If the stakes are as high as the very survival of humanity, then concerns about the effects that really existing artificial intelligence technology has right now—from excessive energy usage, to undermining the livelihood of artists and dock workers, to introducing cybersecurity vulnerabilities, to perpetuating and worsening discrimination, to disinformation and deep fakes, to supercharging mass surveillance, etc., are easily brushed aside.”

The post Tech CEOs’ Doomsaying Is a Distraction from Real, Existing Harms of AI appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie Kirk will live forever — at least online. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey comfortably defeated Rep. Seth Moulton in his Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, in what the media — and Moulton himself — had described as a “generational” challenge.

The framing is understandable: In a country suffering under gerontocratic rule, Markey is 80 and Moulton is 47.

Age, however, was the least of what was at stake in Moulton’s run from the decaying center of the Democratic Party. Moulton ran on a conservative line, recycling right-wing talking points and echoing Donald Trump to suggest, erroneously, that Democrats have been failing because they have not been conservative enough.

Markey may be 80 years old, but his campaign did precisely what Democrats must if they want to appeal to progressives and bring in a broad working-class voter base: He ran on issues of economic inequality, taxing billionaires, green energy, and universal health care — all while refusing to jettison support for vulnerable minorities, especially trans people.

Meanwhile Moulton, claiming to represent a break in the status quo, repeated precisely the tired centrist playbook that has both failed America’s multiracial working class and failed to win elections. He punched left and, as Markey himself highlighted, threw trans kids “under the bus.”

In a risible misreading of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential election loss, Moulton suggested that his party had shown too much care for trans rights. (It had not.)

“I have two little girls,” Moulton told the New York Times just after the November 2024 election. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

It was only last month that Moulton offered a tempered apology for the anti-trans remarks — and only because Markey had lambasted him during a debate.

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“He just took the whole playbook of MAGA and Trump, and he blamed those kids for the loss,” said Markey, who has been consistent in his advocacy for trans rights. “We should have been loving those kids. There’s only 12 trans athletes in the whole of the NCAA. We should have been embracing them.”

Indeed, we should question the validity of this so-called “debate” entirely: Why did the moderator of a Senate primary debate even feel the need to ask a question about trans girls in sports at all?

This is not, after all, a political problem in need of addressing in Massachusetts, or anywhere else. It is a ghoulish far-right panic that has been baselessly elevated into a hot-button issue, with the help of Democratic cowardice.

Fox News, of all places, noted that Markey is “one of the few Democrats running this midterm cycle who is continuing to push for transgender rights, particularly in sports” — as if that were a bad thing.

“There is good evidence that transgender issues were a major part of Markey’s victory, too,” wrote reporter and trans advocate Erin Reed. “In the final days of the campaign, a UMass/Amherst poll asked primary voters how a candidate who embraces anti-trans positions or policies would impact their vote. In that poll, a whopping 67% stated it would make their vote less likely for that candidate.”

Markey, the longtime incumbent, was already at an advantage. And no doubt proselytizers for Democratic Party conservatism will stress that Markey’s victory in deep-blue Massachusetts cannot offer lessons for Democrats running in less progressive territory. This again would be to selectively learn the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris’s spectacular 2024 failure.

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It should not need repeating that Democrats in 2024 campaigned on Republican talking points, with Harris donning khaki for photo ops at the Arizona border. If Donald Trump’s campaign attacking trans people gained purchase, it is because Democrats roundly failed to answer it by demystifying right-wing anti-trans fearmongering. They also failed to offer a robust, class-focused platform to vote for.

Being nearly half someone’s age does not constitute a generational challenge; contesting the staid ways of a generational establishment does. Moulton did nothing of the sort.

Markey said it best on Tuesday: “Generational change isn’t about compromising.”

The post Seth Moulton Sold Out Trans Kids — and Lost His Senate Race appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Abdul El-Sayed on The Intercept Briefing

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

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

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

Of the more than $170 billion that President Donald Trump secured for his border regime in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” nearly $50 billion is allocated to border wall construction. Even with these enormous resources, however, the administration continues to face challenges constructing its monument to violent exclusion along the southern border through tribal, private, and state lands.

For nearly a month, the key force standing in the way of Trump’s border wall project in southeast Arizona has been a person sitting in a 200-year-old tree.

More precisely, at every moment since late July, one person — although not always the same person — has been on a platform in the branches of a giant cottonwood tree in Lochiel, Arizona, with an expanding encampment of primarily local activists 50 feet below.

The protesters’ aim is to stop the ongoing construction of two parallel, 30-foot-high border walls ripping through the remote San Rafael Valley.

Miles of the double wall structure have already been built in the area. This part of the valley is sparsely populated and hardly ever used as a border-crossing site by humans, but is renowned as a unique wildlife migration corridor. According to the Sierra Club’s borderlands coordinator, Erick Meza, the region is “a biodiversity hotspot and the most important jaguar corridor that we have left in the U.S.”

Residents from Lochiel and the surrounding area, including from Sonora, Mexico, had been coming together regularly for over a year for binational gatherings to organize against wall construction. They shared music, art, food, and ceremonies across the border, which is demarcated there by only a rancher’s wire fence.

The planned double wall structure, with a 60-foot no man’s land in between, would not only devastate the land and its ecosystems — it would also sever the binational life worlds of the area.

The “happenings,” as organizers called the gatherings, escalated into a continuous protest and tree sit when construction workers with government contractors Fisher Sand & Gravel crushed three giant cottonwood trees, known locally as “grandmother” trees, in one day on July 27.

Local activists moved in swiftly to save the last cottonwood standing on the U.S. side of the border, and the tree sit began.

“Momentum had been growing locally in the region to try to make more of an intervention,” said an Arizona-based participant in the tree sit, who asked for anonymity out of concern for government repression. “People got together that night and decided to go down and set up a tree sit in that final tree on the U.S. side, which was planned to be cleared.”

Ever since, a tree sitter has been in the cottonwood at all times, numerous participants told The Intercept.

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“U.S. Customs and Border Protection identified four cottonwood trees on federal land in Lochiel, Arizona, that needed removal for planned border wall construction,” said a spokesperson from CBP. “Preconstruction surveys found no active migratory bird nests, and environmental monitors were present at the start of clearing activities to ensure work was limited to the identified trees. Three trees have been removed, and the remaining tree is scheduled for removal.”

Meza, of the Sierra Club, told The Intercept that the government’s environmental survey was out of date and that the day before the cottonwoods were felled, he had taken video of an active nest in one of the trees.

“The next day, they had sent the contractors to take down the trees,” he said. “Their environmental monitor was not present.” Meza added that “when people saw what happened, the community in general got outraged.”

For participants in the Lochiel encampment, protecting the remaining “grandmother” is an anchoring point for the protest, but stopping the border wall and all it represents is the organizing principle.

“Some people are tree sitting and supporting the tree sit. Some people are more focused on getting into the roads, and intervening in construction work that’s happening,” the tree-sit participant said. “Now there’s a whole zone of a few miles where they’re having trouble building. And as camp grows, the ability to affect construction also grows.”

The remaining cottonwood itself is on federal land, but the encampment, just feet away, is technically on private land. It’s a unique setup, organizers told The Intercept, in which local ranchers and authorities oppose the border wall construction, and construction workers cannot risk forging forward in the path of the tree as a person remains perched in its branches. The small standoff is becoming a growing site of border resistance, and the construction of Trump’s wall in the area has been disrupted for a month.

“Living Things on the Land”

At a time when jack-booted agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are terrorizing communities nationwide and over 73,000 people are held in ICE detention, the defense of a remote stretch of borderlands may seem a minor struggle.

The binational protest around the cottonwood, however, exemplifies what it looks like to take strategic action to disrupt the infrastructure of the border regime.

“Something happens along these borderlands,” said another participant in the tree sit and encampment, Uni Yuchi Trejo, a first-generation Mexican American. “You still feel the way the land moves here, how the living things on the land migrate and move with it.”

Trejo highlighted other sites of resistance along the Arizona border, like fights waged by the Tohono O’odham Nation to block the wall on its sovereign and sacred lands — fights that are heating up just this week.

Compared to other struggles against border enforcement, the Lochiel encampment has seen remarkably little law enforcement repression, despite creating disruptions to a major border infrastructure project.

One protester was arrested in late July by local sheriffs for blocking construction workers on a roadway but was released the same day without charge; the sheriff himself is on the record as opposing the border wall construction. And with the encampment on private property, it remains relatively protected from federal law enforcement sweeps.

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According to activists on the ground, a second tree sit on the Mexico side of the border was initiated last week but ended after a few days, following reported interventions from Mexican law enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

The relative peace the Arizona-based activists have enjoyed stands in stark contrast to the brutal persecution others opposing border regime enforcement have faced in places like Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas; Spokane, Washington; and Minneapolis. The Arizona demonstration also sits in the legacy of site-based struggles not tied directly to the border, like Stop Copy City in Atlanta, or the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock — movements that have also faced ruthless repression.

This might speak to the place of the border wall in the Trump administration’s current priorities. Even for an anti-immigrant fascist like Stephen Miller, swift border wall construction in the San Rafael Valley is not an urgent matter, owing to the minuscule number of border-crossing attempts there. Those that do attempt to cross are already facing long odds against a system designed to push them into death’s grips.

Though the environmental destruction of border wall construction is well established, a spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection absurdly pointed to people who might attempt to cross as the real environmental threat.

“While concerns exist about impacts to sensitive areas, it is important to note that illegal immigration itself poses significant environmental challenges,” the spokesperson said. “High volumes of unauthorized crossings often result in substantial amounts of trash, pollution, and damage to natural resources, including sensitive habitats and agriculture.”

Suffice it to say, the people crossing borders do not tear down ancient trees, plow over tribal burial grounds, or cut off wildlife corridors. Not to mention that no “high volumes” of crossings occur in the San Rafael Valley.

As Arizona-based reporter and author of “How to Close a Camp,” John Washington, told Democracy Now!, “People, I think, are right to point out that this very much smells of a boondoggle — that no one is crossing here, and yet they are spending maybe a half a billion dollars on just this about 27-mile segment of wall to devastate the local ecosystem.”

“The Border Is Everywhere”

“We’re taking the proactive stance of: ‘No, we don’t want the wall and we’re going to make sure you’re not doing it through Lochiel,’” said Kate Scott, a local resident and co-founder of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center, who was among the original organizers against border construction in the region. “And we will hopefully have inspired people all across the world, wherever their horrible border walls are, and to question them in a way that’s most defiant.”

Activists on the ground are aware that reaching remote Lochiel is no easy task, so organizers are encouraging action wherever people can undertake it.

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One target of activists’ campaigns is Fisher Sand & Gravel, the contractor working on the wall, which has received around $1.5 billion in government contracts in Arizona alone. (Fisher Sand & Gravel and its parent company, Fisher Industries, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Subcontractors working on the project are falling under scrutiny, too.

“The border is everywhere,” said Trejo, the Mexican-American land defender, “which means that there are subcontractors and there are power players maybe in your backyard, maybe in your city, maybe an hour drive from where you’re living.”

“Right now we’re at a really crucial point, where those of us that have been holding space and ground are seizing more of it each day. And so imagine if the 30, 40 holding that space becomes a 1,000 or becomes 5,000. What kind of opening will that then create?”

Correction: August 27, 2026, 2:30 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct an errant spelling of Kate Scott’s name.

The post A New Tree-Sit Movement to Block Trump’s Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier this month, Roman Gofman, the new director of the Mossad, Israel’s shadowy national intelligence agency, dismissed the heads of its intelligence directorate and Iran division, known only by their heavily anonymized names “K” and “Y,” respectively. The Mossad prides itself on secrecy, and while terminations following the appointment of a new Mossad director aren’t unprecedented, such public oustings, which were reported by Israel’s mainstream news organizations, are almost unheard of.

The last known dismissals for incompetence came in 1997, when a botched attempt to assassinate Khaled Mashal, then chair of Hamas’s political bureau, resulted in the detention of several Mossad agents inside Jordan and a public relations disaster. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government found itself forced to supply the antidote for the poison its Mossad agents had administered, bringing down both the agency’s director and the director of operations. 

Israel is now dealing with the aftermath of the largest mistake in its history, one of its own doing: its failed war on Iran. Sold to the United States as an easy war that would quickly bring down the Islamic Republic and its alleged nuclear weapons program, almost nothing Israel desired came to pass.

The promise of assassinating Ali Khamenei was that it would bring about governmental chaos and spur a spontaneous national uprising. Instead, it only led to the selection of his younger son as the new supreme leader, a leadership that may prove to be even more antagonistic to the United States and Israel than the previous one.

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Israel also promised that any potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz would be militarily ineffective. Now, Iran’s ability to hold the world economy hostage — despite relentless claims by the U.S. that the waterway is “open” — is its most valuable weapon. 

The Mossad’s particular role in this war involved weakening the Islamic Republic’s security structure in hopes of then funneling guns to Kurdish armed groups who would invade the country from Iraq, and then fuel mass demonstrations to topple the state. All of these lofty ambitions completely detonated on impact with reality, with Iran’s security structure remaining intact despite assassinations and airstrikes, Kurdish factions instead suffering constant Iranian military attacks, and no major protests occurring in any Iranian city, despite the massive anti-government protests in January that swept through the country.

For those who witnessed the Mossad’s public campaigns to encourage protests and defections — which it deployed in the open through Farsi-language social media accounts on X and Telegram bearing their name and seal — signs of the inevitable failure of this campaign were becoming evident. While images from June 2025’s Twelve-Day War of Mossad agents operating inside Iran and sabotaging Iranian military operations shocked many inside the country — that sabotage hampering Iran’s initial military response — its ability to change fundamental facts on the ground, and to move an entire country’s population against the sitting government, sputtered.

The Mossad chose to shift its image as that war began, capitalizing on its perception as an all-powerful and omniscient force to offer its supposedly unlimited power to help the Iranian populace. This shift manifested through cryptic social media posts, sarcastic quote-tweets of Iranian officials, and offering gifts to those who answered questions by direct message. The Mossad offered remote medical services through WhatsApp, and former radio host Menashe Amir, who notably hosted an Israeli radio show in Farsi aimed at anti-Islamic Republic Iranians, made videos on the Mossad’s behalf encouraging Iranians to listen to what the intelligence agency had to say.

The effort produced little. Iranian officials openly mocked the campaign online from the start, and it became increasingly desperate as mass protests failed to materialize. AI-generated videos of Iranian prisons having their walls blown open, and of happy Iranians following their defections to Israel, did next to nothing. The Mossad has continued to post AI-generated videos using Grok to encourage collaboration following the ceasefire.

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While accusations were levied (and arrests made) of supposed Mossad agents inside the Iranian protests in January, their infiltration, alleged or otherwise, did not end up toppling or even shattering the Islamic Republic. Instead, more than 7,000 protesters were killed that month, in addition to hundreds of police officers.

After the plan to arm Kurdish groups, in collaboration with the CIA, apparently fell apart — either by Trump’s veto or, as Trump claimed, because the Kurds simply kept the weapons themselves — the Mossad apparently came up with a quick Plan B. The new bright idea: Overthrow the government via an airstrike campaign against Iranian police stations and checkpoints manned by the Basij, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ paramilitary militia component. Despite extensive strikes in broad daylight, with some Iranians tipping off locations to opposition media outlets to help facilitate this campaign, the mass uprising, once again, did not arrive.

The war did not continue long enough for a comprehensive Plan C to come to fruition on the ground, with the Israeli military beginning to strike railways and manufacturing infrastructure, and Trump taking the lead on calling for the destruction of Iran’s energy infrastructure and bridges. Both are unified in their hope to strangle the country economically in hopes of pushing Iranian society into oblivion, but this outcome is only truly possible through American military means.

But even the U.S. has seen itself overextended, unable to resupply its missile interceptors for its own bases in the Middle East, and potentially unable to protect Israel as effectively as it had in the past should open conflict break out over its skies again.

News of the dismissal of the Mossad officials was met with disbelief in the Israeli media and by veterans of the intelligence service, who accused Gofman of suppressing the agency’s ability to function. By firing two deputies, security analysts accused him of foisting the agency’s failure onto underlings to shield the decisions made at the top levels of government from scrutiny.

While overthrowing the Iranian government has remained a popular idea among Israeli officials and other elected politicians, Netanyahu chief among them, other politicians have acknowledged its difficulty. Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of the general staff, has spoken of the unlikelihood of being able to overthrow the entire Iranian system, instead stating that operations should have continued “in the shadows.”

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Reporting from Israel Hayom in May revealed that many in the Mossad were opposed to the idea of focusing resources on overthrowing the Iranian government, seeing it as a massive gamble. The Mossad’s former chief of influence operations, known as O., told the newspaper that he felt he had to sell the operation to many in the agency, despite the fact that “no one actually knows how to overthrow a regime or what the chances are that it will succeed.”

In March, just days before he would be killed in an Israeli assassination strike, Ali Larijani, then-secretary of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, told the Iranian news outlet ISNA that Netanyahu “seemed to believe that these attacks had set a movement in motion inside Iran and that, by portraying the system as being in disarray, he could incite the public.” But Larijani pointed out that in less than a day, the regime had appointed “replacements for the commanders who had been killed, addressed the public, changed the atmosphere, and, by issuing specific orders, authorized the launch of missiles.”

Netanyahu, having pushed for the military overthrow of the Iranian government across multiple American administrations, finally got the war he wanted. But neither raw force, nor covert operations executed on his orders, were enough to carry out his will.

While Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has remarked upon how the current situation is very much working for Israel — one in which southern Iran is constantly bombarded with no end, and America is doing all of the fighting and dying — Netanyahu has continued his rhetoric about the need to create the conditions for the fall of the Islamic Republic. But in a moment of rare humility, he admitted this may “not happen in a single day.”

Recent reporting from Ynet found Netanyahu’s government instructed both the Israeli military and the Mossad to prepare for a much larger campaign against the Iranian state, with eyes on a potential return to open war in autumn. As has been the case over and over again, in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, and now Iran, Israel hopes that what was not solved with bombs can still be won — this time with even more bombs.

The post The Mossad Suffers a Crushing Defeat Entirely of Its Own Making appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Crazy” Characteristics

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

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

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

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

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

Hard-Right Turn

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

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

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

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

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

Border Wars

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

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

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

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

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

Rise of a Madman

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

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

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

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

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

A 21st Century Sparta

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

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

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

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

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

The Israeli Mainstream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There’s a New Democratic Machine. It’s Unabashedly Socialist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was enough.

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

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

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

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

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

Ride of the Valkyries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Girls We Don’t Protect 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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