How many people will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.

They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.

If you believe the hype, the promise of these companies isn’t in the money they take in as bookkeepers. They argue that the bets they collect offer a more accurate forecast of the future than traditional institutions. (In fact, they’ll tell you that you’re not betting at all but trading on futures contracts — a distinction that feels so tenuous it’s hard to justify with a full-throated explanation.)

This pitch has been especially enticing in the wake of the 2016 election, when polling missed the rise of Donald Trump, and its allure hasn’t faded as collective distrust of traditional institutions grows. But if the initial wave of social platforms — the Facebooks and Twitters of the world — fractured our sense of a shared reality, the predictive platforms are here to monetize the ruins.

Polymarket acknowledges the gravity of some of its more shocking propositions. It tells those who click on its more unsavory wagers: “The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today.” The app goes on say that “After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.”

It might seem odd, then, that these very platforms have lately been signing deals to entrench themselves into mainstream news coverage. Earlier this month, Kalshi signed on as an exclusive partner to offer its betting wagers on CNN and CNBC. Polymarket signed a similar deal with Yahoo Finance last month. Time Magazine signed with a lesser known platform Galactic.

For publishers, prediction markets offer a salve for deteriorating trust in journalism. For betting markets, these partnerships could help legitimize an industry that was mostly illegal until a few months ago. The marriage of these two industries is perhaps best encapsulated by Time Magazine’s recent press release announcing its partnership with Galactic. Stuart Stott, CEO of Galactic, called the deal “a new normal for readers” that promises them “the opportunity to participate in where the future is going.” Time Magazine COO Mark Howard described the partnership as motivated by the company’s “ambition to continue to push the boundaries of traditional media to ensure our content and audience experience is compelling, accurate, and evolving.”

Set aside the extreme cynicism in the conceit that audiences need to bet on genocide in order to read about it — if accuracy and trust are a concern, these partnerships may end up doing the media more harm than good.

To understand why the prediction markets apps believe they’re a better forecaster of the future, one needs to understand their governing philosophy, the “wisdom of the crowd.” The theory goes: In a well-functioning market with a diverse group of participants, traders acting on different information and insights collectively arrive at the most accurate price — or, in this case, probability of an event happening. The market, in other words, will self-correct to the most accurate outcome.

Betting apps have at times delivered better accuracy than polling results. For example, while pollsters clocked last year’s presidential race as deadlocked in the days before the election, Polymarket gave Trump an edge at 58 percent.

But whether they are consistently better is a whole other story. Some initial analysis suggests that they might not be as accurate as these companies suggest. One study found that Kalshi’s political prediction markets beat chance 78 percent of the time during the final five weeks of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, compared with 67 percent accuracy on Polymarket. PredicIt — one of the older betting markets run by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, that has more limits on how much money users can bet — came out on top at 93 percent. But even PredicIt got the 2016 election as wrong as the polls, and in the days preceding the last election suggested a slight edge for Kamala Harris that obviously didn’t materialize.

That same study found that when tracking the market for the same event, prediction markets often reacted in very different ways to the same information during the same time frame — something that wouldn’t happen if the markets were as efficient forecasters as its pushers suggest. “Markets are composed of humans, not omniscient rational forecasters,” the paper’s authors write.

One reason why Kalshi or Polymarket may struggle with accuracy hinges on who makes up the crowd. On November 6, 2024, in a rush of people collecting their post-election winnings, Kalshi saw a peak of around 400,000 users, and Polymarket counted about 100,000 less, according to a Fortune review; by June, their daily active user numbers had fallen over 90 percent to 27,000–32,000 and 5,000–10,000, respectively. While they don’t publish much information about their demographics, by some accounts their userbases tend to skew in the direction of crypto bros.

That can make these platforms just as inaccurate in edge cases, when they lack the requisite diversity to glean much wisdom about the real world. Consider the 2022 midterm elections: Up until election night, the major prediction markets “failed spectacularly” and “projected outcomes for key races that turned out to be completely wrong,” according to one expert analysis.

While polls are far from perfect, prediction markets are also more prone to manipulation than they’d have you believe. And this can give deep-pocketed political actors another vessel for information warfare.

Kalshi was even embroiled in a legal battle with federal regulators as recently as this summer for this very reason. In its brief, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission pointed toward a “spectacular manipulation” on Polymarket involving “a group of traders betting heavily on Vice President Harris.” “Unwitting participants may believe Kalshi’s contracts are less susceptible to manipulation or misinformation because they are on a regulated exchange, but this should heighten concern for the public interest, not allay it,” the CFTC continued.

One study found that trades intended to manipulate the market could have an impact as much as 60 days from the original trade. It also suggested the best way to game a prediction market was by making repeated bets of “varying sizes” on a single market to skew odds.

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According to the CFTC, when the agency brought up the possibility of this type of election interference, Kalshi argued the regulator could just use its enforcement authority against bad actors. But as the agency noted: “The CFTC cannot remediate damage to election integrity after the fact.” Despite these grave concerns, since Trump took office and has hired crypto insiders to oversee the CFTC, the agency has largely dropped lawsuits and investigations against Polymarket and Kalshi.

The major betting platforms have also aligned themselves with Trump’s inner orbit.

Both Polymarket and Kalshi count Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser. His venture capital firm has invested in Polymarket, whose founder Shayne Coplan has framed investigations against his company as politically motivated attacks by the outgoing Biden administration.

One doesn’t have to look far to see how the company’s positionality in the Trumpverse translated into what very well could be election interference. Shortly before election day in New York last month, Polymarket ran a questionable advertisement featuring an AI-generated Zohran Mamdani looking tearful with the headline: “BREAKING: Mamdani’s odds collapse in NYC Mayoral Election.” As this ad ran, however, Polymarket’s platform didn’t show Mamdani’s odds collapsing. Whether Polymarket intended to bait users into betting more, or to dissuade Mamdani voters ahead of Election Day, is unclear. What is clear is that for a platform partnering with a news organization, a commitment to veracity does not appear to be its first priority.

The first priority appears to be growing the number of customers. That’s likely why these betting apps are now trying to team up with major broadcasters and publications: Reporting shows that both Kalshi and Polymarket are losing bettors, which stands to hurt their bottom lines and make their predictions worse.

Whether deals between betting apps and news outlets will help either industry is an open question. But these partnerships may just end up worsening our crisis of trust in an already-fraught information environment.

The post These Apps Let You Bet on Deportations and Famine. Mainstream Media Is Eating It Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

From the very beginning of the genocide, I barely left my room. Three waves of displacement defined my movements: the first, on October 17, 2023, took me to my sister Doaa’s house in Khan Younis for nearly a month and a half. The second led me to my other sister Tasneem’s home in Al-Zawayda for about a week. The third displacement brought me to Rafah, where I stayed from December 31, 2023, until May 6, 2024.

Returning after Israeli forces occupied Rafah felt miraculous — our house had somehow survived. Still, I remained confined to my room until the so-called end of the genocide on January 19. The brief second ceasefire allowed me to step out for the first time with my father on March 17.

We drove across Gaza in our beloved car, visiting every corner of our city and stopping to see all our relatives on my father’s side — my aunts, uncles, and cousins — before returning home at midnight, only for the genocide to resume two hours later. After that, the outside world became almost inaccessible once again; my only venture outside was to make a brief, necessary visit to the dentist on August 23.

During that relentless isolation, I turned inward, to writing, to studying, to memory, and to personal growth. Each became a quiet act of resistance, a way to resist suffocation, to exist when existence itself was under siege. I immersed myself completely, separating my world from the chaos beyond my walls. Reclaiming life became an internal struggle, a fight to preserve traces of normalcy in a reality determined to erase every trace of it.

On Friday, OCtober 17, my sisters arrived at our home: Doaa with her 1-year-old son, Hossam; and Tasneem with her children, Nour, 3 years old, and Ezz Aldin, a year and a half old. They stayed with us for a full week, which became one of the most beautiful and meaningful times I had had in years. I didn’t know at the time that these moments of peace and happiness wouldn’t last.

I especially cherished taking care of little Hossam, whom I had missed more than anyone. He is very attached to me and shows so much affection, and being with him reminded me of the warmth we had been deprived of for so long.

That gathering was only the second time our family had been together since the genocide separated us two years ago. That same week, my aunt arrived with her son and daughter and stayed overnight. We also invited my cousins Ahmed and Alaa — the only remaining members of their family, as the rest were martyred — and they spent the day with us.

But on October 19, as we were talking and catching up, the Israeli occupation launched airstrikes across the entire Gaza Strip, including in my neighborhood. Our neighbors’ house was bombed, and we were pushed apart again, despite apparently being under a “ceasefire.”

I tried to calm myself by holding on to one truth: My father, my mother, my brothers, and my sisters were safe. Nothing matters more than their safety — if they are well, everything else is too.

During a respite from Israel’s airstrikes, we spent the day at my maternal grandfather’s house. As soon as I stepped inside, I was overwhelmed by a flood of childhood memories. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly a year, but we were all longing for this reunion and the house was filled with laughter and hugs.

The day featured five carefully planned surprises organized by my Aunt Manar. She had moved to Egypt a year after the beginning of the genocide and hadn’t been able to return. My sisters and I were responsible for executing her plan. My aunt stayed in constant contact with us to make sure every detail was perfect.

Four of the surprises were for my cousins, the students: Mohammed (Tawjihi 2006), Malek (Tawjihi 2006), Yaman (Tawjihi 2007), and my sister Aya (Tawjihi 2007). The Tawjihi, or high school graduation, exams marked the culmination of 12 years of study. The 2006 and 2007 classes — students born in those years — had been delayed by the genocide, but despite the extraordinary circumstances, the Ministry of Education conducted online exams. Results for the 2006 generation were released, and after some time, the results for the 2007 generation were announced. The fifth surprise was for my sister Sojood, who was celebrating her graduation from the Islamic University with a degree in medicine.

Each gift package contained a variety of treats, carefully arranged on the table at my grandfather’s house. My grandfather’s wife also prepared popcorn, biscuits, tea, and other goodies.

We agreed we would all arrive together after the Asr prayer. The surprise went off perfectly, with each of our guests completely caught off guard by their packages of delicious food and treats. We captured their joy with photos and videos. We played graduation songs and my Aunt Manar joined us live via WhatsApp to witness the celebration.

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I realized that here in Gaza, we never stop striving to live, to move forward, to overcome the genocide imposed upon us by the Israeli occupation. We’ve survived in the face of the world’s silence and indifference. We truly are a people who deserve to live.

The next day, I finally met my close friend Lana, who had ranked first in the nation in the 2023 Tawjihi exams. Before the genocide, we had planned to celebrate together, but the attacks changed our plans. After two long years, we finally made our plan happen.

We’d spent countless hours talking online, but nothing can compare with face-to-face conversation. We agreed to meet in front of her house in Al-Zawayda, and from there we would find a ride to a newly opened restaurant called O2.

To our surprise, there were no cars available for hire. We were hesitant to use improvised local transport: donkey carts, horse-drawn wagons, and other options people had devised out of necessity. After a long wait, we finally found a car and rode together to the restaurant.

Once there, we ordered chicken calzones, vegetable pizza, Nutella crepes, Nutella luqaimat, and Pepsi, the only beverage available at the time due to the occupation’s tight control over imports. We were so absorbed in conversation that we barely touched the food. The waiter packaged it for us to take home.

After long playful arguments about who should pay, Lana surprised me — she’d already made arrangements for her cousin, who lives nearby, to cover the entire bill. I made her promise that next time she would let me pay.

Before leaving, we took photos together in the restaurant’s small photo corner, capturing the rare, happy reunion we’d been waiting for for two years.

By Maghrib, the evening prayer, it was time to return home. There was life in the streets, but I felt a nagging fear that it would all be ripped away again. With some difficulty, we found a small bus and made it back safely.

I realized how desperately I had needed this outing to start living my life again. After I posted an Instagram story about Lana and me, featuring moments from our day together, my friends — even those abroad — were envious that we’d had our first outing together, and they wanted to make their own plans with me.

I was interviewed about my experience as an exemplary student at the Islamic University of Gaza in October. I spoke in depth about my experience learning online in the midst of the genocide. I’m only 19, but I completed three years of academic work in just two years amid forced displacement, limited electricity and internet service, and the emotional toll wreaked by pain, grief, and loss. I also presented my creative output: 50 published articles, 30 poems, contributions to over 20 international platforms, and publishing a zine that collected together some of my works. My published work had reached readers all over the globe and major cities across them. It was my message to the Israeli occupation and the world that no matter what they do, they cannot kill our hope.

In late October, I spent the day with my childhood friend Aya Nasser. Our families had been close friends since long before we were born, and we grew up together. We also hadn’t seen each other in two years.

I traveled to her apartment after the Dhuhr prayer on difficult, unsafe streets without proper transportation. I eventually found a tuk-tuk for the rest of the journey and recorded a short video to calm my nerves.

Aya’s building contained many damaged apartments that were partially open to the air, which made me fear for my safety as I walked inside. Aya and her family greeted me warmly with hugs and kisses. She led me to her room, and we sat on her bed. We spent hours talking and sharing our experiences of the past two years. Our conversation felt healing in a way that sending messages back and forth could never replicate.

We drank cappuccinos, took photos, and discussed our shared love for documenting life’s precious moments. Later, Aya got dressed, and we went to a newly opened restaurant in Al-Nuseirat called Al-Asima, about 15 minutes from her home. The restaurant was elegant but sparsely occupied, probably because of its high prices. We sat on a couch and ordered chicken pizza, pineapple-melon juice, corn appetizers with mayonnaise, garlic sauce, ketchup, potatoes, peppers, and pickles.

Eating there felt like taking back life itself. For the past two years, this type of meal had been rare — either unavailable, prohibitively expensive, or too risky to reach. Our motto now was to enjoy life regardless of the cost. We laughed, spoke from the heart, and took photos and videos to preserve the moment.

As usual, we had playful debates over who should pay. We agreed to split the bill, but I seized the opportunity and paid for it myself. Afterward, we shopped at a nearby market before returning home.

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Only an hour later, the Israeli occupation broke the ceasefire, taking more than 100 lives. To this day, that was the last time I went out. After enduring two years of relentless genocide, I had allowed myself to hope — to live again, to laugh with friends, to savor fleeting moments of joy— only for death and destruction to strike once again. This is the reality of life in Gaza: Any effort you make to live an ordinary life might be cut off without warning, the smallest spark of happiness extinguished in a moment.

Even now, I refuse to give in to despair. I hold tightly to the moments that have reminded me of my life as it should be lived: laughing with my sisters, embracing my family, reconnecting with friends over a meal. These experiences are my refuge, proof that nothing in this world can outweigh family, friendship, and human connection.

As long as my loved ones remain safe, life moves forward and our spirit endures, no matter how fiercely the occupation seeks to erase us. They can try to steal our joy, but they can never take away our happy memories — or our will to live and be free.

The post Reuniting With Family in Gaza During the Break Between Bombings appeared first on The Intercept.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the three-term Georgia representative, is leaving office in January, a decision that comes after a year of mounting tensions between her and President Donald Trump. The right-wing superstar has watched Trump’s popularity wane and has distanced herself from him and his administration. It appears she’s angling for something bigger than Congress — but what that is remains to be seen.

For some commentators eager for a return to the horse-race politics of a general election, Greene is positioning to run for president in 2028. Those rumors have been fueled by members of the right-wing firebrand’s camp, who have told reporters that the representative may well be considering a run. (There has also been reporting that Greene has told people she wants to run in 2028.)

Greene’s maneuvering could also be read as an effort to make herself the spiritual successor to her own brand of MAGA after Trump leaves office. The past six months have shown a different side of the representative in what looks like a calculated attempt to distance herself from the current leadership of a political ideology that’s not delivering for Americans — and alienating the general public.

The Georgia Republican is also embracing the non-interventionist side of the right while tailoring her language to a broader audience. In June, after Israel attacked Iran, and Trump eagerly joined in on attacking Iranian nuclear sites, Greene criticized the U.S. bombings as counter to the “America First” ideology that’s been central to MAGA for a decade. Greene railed against the trillions in U.S. debt and warned that pursuing war would only raise that number at the American people’s expense.

Her language could have come from Ron Paul, another hard-right anti-interventionist with similarly questionable views on race and social issues. “American troops have been killed and forever torn apart physically and mentally for regime change, foreign wars, and for military industrial base profits,” Greene said. “I’m sick of it.”

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In a neat turn of phrase, Greene framed war with Iran as not only a waste of money and resources but also as the administration taking its eye off the real threat: fentanyl and other drugs coming from Latin America. Where were the bombing campaigns on cartel targets, she asked, adding, “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs.”

By October, Greene had broken from the administration on an even more important issue: Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In an appearance that month on CNN — itself a sign of her moderating tone as she began to expand her appeal beyond hardcore MAGA supporter — Greene made the very basic point that the majority of the victims of Israel’s relentless bombing and starvation campaign were not “Hamas” but “literally women and children.”

“You can’t unsee the amount of pictures and videos of children that have been blown to pieces and they’re finding them dead in the rubble,” Greene said. “That isn’t — those aren’t actors, that isn’t fake war propaganda. It’s very real.”

This pivot has garnered her cachet and credibility with elements of the left, including with the co-founder of the activist group Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, who somewhat perplexingly called her a “strong anti war voice” in Congress and said she would “miss her.”

But her sympathy for the victims of U.S. weapons only went so far. After the administration instructed the military to target boats off the coast of Venezuela in a series of attacks that left dozens dead under questionable, at best, circumstances, Greene expressed her “full support” for the action.

The president’s irritation boiled over in a November post on his Truth Social site. The final straw seemed to be Greene’s calls to release the Epstein files, a clear challenge to the president’s attempts to downplay a story in which he’s a player. Trump called Greene “Wacky,” said she’s “gone Far Left,” and withdrew his support and endorsement of her, saying her anger was based on his refusal to back her for governor or the Senate in Georgia.

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Trump also accused Greene of complaining he doesn’t return her calls, saying, “with 219 Congressmen/women, 53 U.S. Senators, 24 Cabinet Members, almost 200 Countries, and an otherwise normal life to lead, I can’t take a ranting Lunatic’s call every day.”

On X, Greene retorted: “It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level.”

Not long after, she announced she’d be leaving Congress on January 6, 2026; by December, Greene rejected the predictable consequence of the boat strikes she had previously supported, calling for no war in Venezuela. She also reprimanded the president for his comments about the death of Hollywood director and Democratic activist Rob Reiner, saying it’s “incredibly difficult” for families with children experiencing mental health and addiction and they “should be met with empathy especially when it ends in murder.”

“This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies,” Greene added.

Softening her profile is working. Greene is seen in some centrist circles as a conservative who’s seen the light. This crossover appeal can pay off, and it’s one tactic for conservatives, jaded by Trump, looking for a way to appeal to the broader public. Greene appeared on “The View,” the A+ daytime women’s talk show, where she called for decency in discourse, got the liberal crowd to applaud her, and prompted co-host Sunny Hostin to marvel at horseshoe theory: “I’m sitting here just stumped, because you are a very different person than I thought. You’ve gone so right, it’s like you’re on the left now.”

Despite laundering her reputation on certain issues for liberals, Greene has stayed true to her core principles of demonizing immigrants and maintaining a virulent anti-trans position, just last week introducing legislation to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. The moderate pivot to addressing a general audience isn’t a wholesale reversal of her previous positions. She’s still America First but feels Trump has lost his way; she’s still a Christian nationalist, but believes Trump is not serving that purpose anymore.

Whether she runs for president in 2028, simply tries to take over the MAGA movement and control its direction, or does a secret third thing, Greene isn’t going to hand over control of the far right to Trump, whose decline is beginning to mirror his predecessor’s, or to his bench, which isn’t capable of challenging him or establishing themselves as their own candidates and political figures, without a fight. She’s in a unique position. The question remains: What’s she going to do with it?

The post Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Rebranding for the Post-MAGA Era. Centrists Are Falling for It. appeared first on The Intercept.

The media world is disgusted and indignant at CBS News’s new editor-in-chef Bari Weiss’s decision not to air a “60 Minutes” segment critical of the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. (In a now-deleted promo clip for the segment, the reporter said the migrants endured “four months of hell,” with one man saying, when asked if he thought he was going to die, “We thought we were already the living dead.”) According to a statement from CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, the report had been internally reviewed and cleared by broadcaster’s legal and standards departments. It had also been heavily promoted on “60 Minutes”’ social media. But three hours before it was set to air, Weiss pulled the segment, citing the need for “additional reporting” and on-camera interviews with White House officials –– who had reportedly refused to comment for weeks.

This was, of course, an excuse that didn’t pass the most basic smell test. By all accounts, the piece had been thoroughly reported, and the idea that reporters need to secure on-camera interviews with government officials before reporting on government misdeeds effectively gives the administration veto power over CBS’s news reporting, as Alfonsi pointed out.

The outrage in the U.S. media has been swift and more than justified. But in the back and forth, some key context is being overlooked — context that might help clarify that as bleak as Weiss’s move is for the future of journalism, it is a perfect example of why Paramount’s new owner, David Ellison, hired her in the first place. Her job is to suck up to Trump, yes, but largely as a means –– not an end in and of itself. If Trump favors CBS and Paramount, it could undermine the pending Netflix–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, help Ellison take over WBD himself, and cement the Ellison family’s media concentration to further advance their business interests and their right-wing ideology. This is not just a matter of routine MAGA brain rot; there are material interests at work.

Unlike in traditional corporate media arrangements, Weiss reports directly to Ellison. Her role, from the onset, has been to police the CBS newsroom, an open acknowledgment that CBS News must reflect the ideological preferences of the Ellison family — namely, their fidelity to Israel and surveillance capitalism.

Despite efforts to paint Weiss as a “reporter” and her publication the Free Press as a “news outlet,” neither characterization is true. Weiss rose through the ranks as an opinion writer, going from Tablet to the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to her own Silicon Valley-seeded and funded media property, the Free Press. Along the way, she never did anything, at least not with any degree of consistency, that could be seen as reporting.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing opinion writing and analysis (indeed, it’s what I do), but it in no way qualifies someone to run an ostensibly straight news organization, especially one the size of CBS News. Installing a leader like Weiss is what a company does when it’s attempting an ideological overhaul and gutting of a newsroom, not when they’re attempting to appeal to middle America or modestly counter an alleged liberal bias, as some claimed at the time.

Weiss built her brand going after the targets popular with her wealthy backers: supposedly “woke” college kids, trans people, and pro-Palestine voices, positioning her outlet as “Honest. Independent. Fearless” while carrying water for reactionary elites. Through that lens, Ellison’s decision to buy the Free Press earlier this year can best be seen not as a straight-forward business decision, but a commitment to a political project that would dovetail with the family’s broader ideological and business interests in surveillance and military technology.

A cursory look at the Free Press’s YouTube channel (Weiss’s closest analogue to running a TV news network) at the time of the purchase reveals a product of middling popularity. The site’s videos rarely rack up more than 200,000 views, and the channel does not crack the top 1,000 on YouTube. It’s true that the outlet’s Substack supposedly had 155,000 paid subscribers, but by no objective metric did this justify its eventual $150 million purchase price. The payment was for something much less direct, and much less unseemly: Weiss integrating her political project with CBS News to slowly turn the once-storied brand into a tabloid news channel for cheerleading Israel, U.S. military interests, and right-wing social causes. By associating a valued name in journalism with Ellison and Weiss’s agenda, their politics take on a sheen of credibility — a bargain that far exceeds any purchase price.

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Central to this agenda is steadfast support for Israel. Ellison and Weiss’s shared commitment to Israel is hard to overstate: Weiss began her career at Columbia attempting to get Palestinian academics fired, and throughout her career has prioritized the topic with consistency, vitriol, and vindictiveness. When Ellison’s bid to buy Paramount was announced in the summer of 2024, his company Skydance published a press release in The Jerusalem Post stating David Ellison “loves Israel,” has “Zionist values,” and “quietly donates quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF.” Larry Ellison, David’s father and the co-founder of Oracle, made what was the largest single private donation to the nonprofit Friends of the Israel Defense Forces in 2017.

One thing gumming up the works is that Paramount, by Ellison’s own admission, is simply the appetizer for their grand designs of concentrated media ownership, and the Ellisons will need the Trump Department of Justice to help expand their reach any further. While the straightforward narrative of “pro-Trump media defends Trump” is, strictly speaking, true, it misses the bigger picture. Indeed, to say that Weiss and Ellison are ideologically MAGA wouldn’t be entirely correct –– or at least be very incomplete. Weiss and the Free Press’s journalistic output has frequently been critical of Trump. Despite his father Larry being a long-time Republican megadonor, David Ellison has donated large sums to Democrats.

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In the relatively tight window of Trump’s second term –– which has been marked by outright venality, old-school personality politics, and a total abandonment of anti-trust law –– the Ellisons have an opportunity to consolidate unprecedented control of media into the hands of one company. First, they snatched up CBS News’s parent company, Paramount, earlier this year for the relatively bargain basement price of $8 billion, and now they’re setting their sights on the big prize of Warner Bros. Discovery. That company has made a deal with Netflix, currently valued at nearly $83 billion, but it could still very much fall apart if Trump decides it should during the anti-trust review process, and Larry Ellison isn’t letting go without a fight.

Trump has made his demand that “60 Minutes” be nice to him abundantly clear by criticizing the Ellisons, CBS News, and “60 Minutes” just days before Weiss pulled the Venezuelan migrant segment. It’s important to situate the latest capitulation to the ever-petulant Trump as part of a much broader media consolidation effort. Ellison senior just took control over TikTok, and Ellison the younger controlling CBS News and potentially CNN, HBO, and other influential Warner Bros. Discovery media properties gives them power to not just profit off of media concentration, but also to use this unprecedented megaphone to shape the news in a way that benefits Oracle’s interests, Israel, and beyond.

Their goal isn’t just to promote Trumpism –– this is a temporary necessity with a lot of obvious ideological overlap –– it’s to promote the Ellisons’ own agenda. To do this, and do this swiftly, David Ellison’s foot soldiers within these organizations, with Weiss leading the way, are going to have to move fast, break journalism norms, and potentially wreck the old models and brands of trust and credibility –– ideally before Trump leaves office or other media competitors manage to win his favor first. Weiss and Ellison’s interference into “60 Minutes” creates a de facto state media, but their burgeoning empire is about consolidating top-down oligarchical control over legacy media brands that will endure long after Trump fades into irrelevance.

The post Bari Weiss Is Doing Exactly What She Was Installed at CBS to Do appeared first on The Intercept.

The TikTok deal announced on Thursday poses a fundamental threat to free and honest discourse about Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Under the reported deal, the Chinese company that owns the short-video social media app, ByteDance, will transfer control of TikTok’s algorithm and other U.S. operations to a new consortium of investors led by the U.S. technology company Oracle. The long-gestating deal will give Oracle’s billionaire pro-Trump board members Larry Ellison and Safra Catz the power to impose their anti-Palestinian agenda over the content that TikTok users see.

Most mainstream U.S. media coverage of the TikTok deal has completely ignored the explicitly anti-Palestinian agenda of its biggest Western investors. TikTok has played a critical role in helping hundreds of millions of users see the ugly reality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. But the Trump-favored billionaires who will take over TikTok’s U.S. operations have a documented agenda of both suppressing voices critical of Israel and supporting the very Israeli military that has killed so many Palestinian civilians. Without safeguards in place, TikTok’s U.S. operations could soon become an exercise in blocking users from seeing and reacting to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by a major U.S. ally.

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Ellison and Catz have a documented record of supporting Israel and its military. Ellison is a major donor to the Israeli military — in 2017, he donated $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, what was at the time the nonprofit’s largest single donation ever — as well as a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Catz, who stepped down as Oracle’s CEO in September, has also been quite blunt about the company’s ideological agenda. The Israeli American billionaire said while unveiling a new Oracle data center in Jerusalem in 2021, “I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.” The Ellison family has also brought his pro-Israel agenda to CBS News, where Larry’s son, David Ellison, recently installed anti-Palestinian ideologue Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.

TikTok played an important role in the sea change of U.S. opinion about Israel, particularly among young people. It’s why the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the organization I work for, condemned the sale as a “desperate” attempt to silence young Americans.

What’s at stake is no less than whether or not U.S. voters will continue to be able to see what Israel’s military is doing to Palestinians. While many mainstream media outlets pushed coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza that was deferential to Israeli government talking points, TikTok users watched unfiltered videos of Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinian civilians.

The effects are undeniable: A March Pew Research poll found Israel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans aged 18 to 49 had risen from 35 to 50 percent (among the same age group of Democrats, the country’s unfavorability also climbed almost 10 percentage points to 71 percent). A September New York Times/Siena University survey found 54 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 13 percent expressed greater empathy for Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that he understands the consequences of access to unfiltered social media. He recently described the sale of TikTok as “the most important purchase happening. … I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.” Netanyahu, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza, sees control of TikTok as a part of Israel’s military strategy. “You have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield, and one of the most important ones is social media,” he continued.

President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2024 mandating that ByteDance sell its U.S. operations. That law forced the sale of TikTok under threat of an outright ban, which briefly took effect in January 2025. The new “agreement,” which is reportedly set to close on January 22, will establish a new and separate TikTok joint venture that will control U.S. operations, U.S. user data, and the TikTok algorithm. Just over 80 percent of the new company, dubbed “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC,” will reportedly be owned by investors that include Oracle, private equity group Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. ByteDance will retain a 19.9 percent share.

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The TikTok Ban Is Also About Hiding Pro-Palestinian Content. Republicans Said So Themselves.

The official arguments for forcing the sale focused on preventing Chinese government surveillance of TikTok users, but some elected U.S. officials were more honest. At a McCain Institute forum in May 2024, then-Sen. Mitt Romney said, “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

That’s why advocates for human rights and a free press must work to challenge and reverse this government-sanctioned censorship effort. That means calling on both current and future members of Congress, as well as future White House administrations, to undo this dangerous media consolidation. The Ellison family’s control of TikTok, Paramount, and potentially other massive media properties in the future is a threat to free and open public discourse about U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. military support for Israel.

The work of chilling dissent has already been underway. Even before the 2024 law was passed, TikTok had begun taking steps to silence users who have criticized Israel. In July 2025, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, a former Israeli soldier with a documented record of anti-Palestinian politics, to police user speech on the platform. Given the Israeli military’s long record of propaganda, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, especially toward Palestinians, no former Israeli soldier should have been given the power to police TikTok users’ speech.

Even so, savvy social media users have long demonstrated an ability to organize and evade social media censorship, jumping from platform to platform regardless of what Western billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have tried to do. These challenges will continue in new forms, as demonstrated by the recently launched #TakeBackTikTok campaign. The campaign is pushing for a “user rebellion” in which American TikTok users challenge the Oracle takeover by flooding the platform with content in support of Palestinian liberation. Organizers began making their case last weekend with a massive projection onto Oracle’s U.K. offices.

This is a critical moment. The transfer of TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance to Oracle would mean that TikTok’s content would move from being controlled by a company under the influence of a Chinese government committing genocide against Uyghurs to being controlled by U.S. investors who want to silence TikTok users’ opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Once billionaire anti-Palestinian investors and ideologues take control, TikTok users who are critical of Israel will need to fight even harder and more creatively to evade the suppression of free speech. Millions of U.S. citizens now support an end to unquestioned diplomatic and military support for Israel. Anti-Palestinian billionaires like Ellison and Catz know this full well, and it’s up to us to stand in the way of their efforts to subvert the will of the many.

Correction: December 21, 2025, 6:10 p.m. ET
This story previously stated that, under the deal, Oracle could now moderate the content that 2 billion users see, which is the number of TikTok users globally, rather than in the U.S. As the deal is not yet final, it remains to be seen how many users could be affected.

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Following the announcement that Netflix would buy the film and streaming businesses of Warner Bros for $72 billion, it has been difficult to find anyone who views this development as positive, with even Netflix investors displaying concern. Yet rampant speculation over what this might mean for consumers or even the art of cinema itself has risked overshadowing ominous portents for the workers who stand to lose the most — and what they might do in response. The entertainment industry may be brutal toward those it depends on, but it is particularly vulnerable to their power when they act together.

Predictably, much attention has been consumed by the hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s assets, launched by Paramount Skydance after its own attempt to acquire WBD was beaten out. Despite Paramount chief executive David Ellison arguing that his company would be more likely to gain the approval of federal competition regulators (and Ellison reportedly promising the White House to clownify CNN à la CBS under the Bari Weiss regime), a formal response from the WBD board this week advised shareholders to reject the offer, though Paramount may still return with a higher bid.

Regardless, a victory for either Netflix or Paramount would produce an industry-warping megacorporation that makes the word “monopoly” unavoidable. Whoever wins, we lose.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., warned on NPR’s Morning Edition that a Paramount–Warner Bros. merger could result in “one person who basically decides what movies are going to be made, what you’re going to see on your streaming service, and how much you’re going to have to pay for it.” Even President Donald Trump — not exactly renowned for his zeal for corporate propriety — commented that the combined size of Netflix and WBD “could be a problem.”

The most vociferous condemnation of a Warner Bros. merger has come from those unions representing the industries that would be most affected by it. Responding to the Netflix deal, a joint statement from the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East was unequivocal: “The world’s largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent.

“The outcome would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers. … This merger must be stopped.”

In the fiscal year ending in December 2024, WBD had approximately 35,000 employees, while Netflix had 14,000 and Paramount 18,600 (though Paramount Skydance already began layoffs of 2,000 U.S. jobs in October). Many may share organized labor’s fears.

According to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, these fears are unfounded. “This deal is pro-consumer, pro-innovation, pro-worker, it’s pro-creator, it’s pro-growth,” Sarandos claimed in a call with Wall Street analysts last week, presumably before explaining why bridge purchases are a hot investment, and later fabulating at a UBS conference that the merger would be “a great way to create and protect jobs in the entertainment industry.”

Notably unconvinced — and with good reason — is Lindsay Dougherty, the Jimmy Hoffa-tattooed director of the Teamsters Motion Picture Division, who told The Hollywood Reporter that “in any merger or acquisition we’ve seen in our history, it hasn’t been good for workers.”

This is a plain statement of fact: Corporate mergers are rarely marked by employees getting a pay rise and reassured job security, as evidenced by the dramatic mass layoffs that followed Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox and AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, the latter of which led to roughly 45,000 job losses across AT&T’s media and telecom divisions. Both of these examples also demonstrate that, whatever regulatory scrutiny a Warner Bros. deal may face, it is far from assured that present antitrust enforcement is enough to prevent one.

One of the great lies of America is that monopolies are the one form of capitalism the republic will not tolerate. In truth, most victories against the practice throughout American history have quickly been revealed as hollow. Two decades after the Supreme Court famously ruled that Standard Oil be dissolved under the Sherman Antitrust Act and split into 34 companies, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey remained the largest oil producer in the world and a perennial nemesis of the anti-monopoly populist Huey Long, easily capable of avoiding serious regulation thanks to its bottomless resources.

Writing in The Verge this week, Charles Pulliam-Moore observed that “issues like layoffs and price hikes are an inevitable consequence of consolidation,” but it is important to remember that this is precisely the point of such consolidation. Monopolies are not naturally occurring; they are designed to maximize the outcomes desired by those who bring them into being.

With that in mind, the grim consequences of a Warner Bros. merger for entertainment workers should be understood as anything but accidental, particularly given the context of recent years. Instead, they should be seen as the latest manifestation of a sustained and regrettably successful push to immiserate and disempower the many thousands whose livelihoods depend upon those industries.

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One of the defining issues behind the strike by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America that paralyzed Hollywood for much of 2023 was the threat of AI, the dark allure of which was not difficult to discern. The fact that within the entertainment industry, this technology has thus far produced only laughable slop has not killed off the dream in some quarters that it might eventually do away with the need for human creativity, along with the awkward need to pay human beings. This is arguably why, despite their grudging acceptance of some safeguards and restrictions in order to bring the 2023 strikes to an end, Hollywood bosses refused to countenance prohibiting AI entirely. Along with the rest of the corporatocracy, the anti-worker potential they see in it is too great to resist.

Many of those concerned by what a Warner Bros. merger could do to the industry will be all too aware of its current unenviable state. There is a bleak irony in Netflix’s attempt to seize one of Hollywood’s oldest and most famous studios, as unemployment and precarity have exploded among entertainment workers thanks to a devastating labor contraction caused in large part by the streaming industry pulling back from Hollywood; August 2024 saw unemployment in film and TV reach 12.5 percent, triple the national unemployment rate. Meanwhile, those VFX workers lucky enough to be employed — and upon whom so many of the industry’s biggest shows and movies depend — regularly face impossible workloads and sweatshop-like conditions.

The goal of keeping workers hungry and desperate is as old as capitalism itself, and the goal of any monopoly is to create an entity so vast and powerful it can set the terms for the entire industry, leaving consumers with no other option, workers with no choice but to reckon with it, and unions helpless to defend them.

Contrary to what Sarandos and his peers would like you to believe, those in a position to play Monopoly with billions of actual dollars are not and have never been aligned with the interests of workers; the question of the hour is what can be done to protect them.

In the opinion of Variety’s senior media writer Gene Maddaus, unions and industry groups may not have the power to derail a Warner Bros. deal, but “the more noise you can kick up, the more opposition there is, the more political pressure is brought to bear.”

Yet as the history of Warner Bros. demonstrates, Hollywood is a union town, and organized labor will almost certainly be pondering what options it has beyond making noise. If the unions wish to stand strong for their members before layoffs or worse starts to bite, the strength and solidarity shown in 2023 may be needed once again.

The post The Netflix–Warner Bros. Merger Is a Broadside Attack on Workers appeared first on The Intercept.

Last night, Donald Trump took the stage and announced in a bizarre, rambling speech what he framed as a gift to America’s troops: a one-time, $1,776 “warrior dividend,” a $1,776 payment pitched as gratitude for service members and veterans. Wrapped in Revolutionary War imagery and just in time for the holidays, the promise was sold as proof that Trump takes care of our warriors. But beneath the applause and bunting, the announcement amounted to another empty, Trump-branded PR exercise.

In reality, what Trump sold as a Christmas “warrior dividend” wasn’t a new benefit at all. As Politico reported, the money came from a military housing stipend Congress had already approved months earlier to address lagging quality-of-life conditions for service members. Under Trump, that benefit was simply rebranded, repackaged, and redelivered — not as a right earned through service, but as a personal gift bestowed from above.

Among veterans, the reaction was sharper — and darker. Former service members joked the dividend felt like a “steak and lobster deployment dinner,” the old military omen: When leadership suddenly splurges, bad news usually follows. Combat veteran and military accountability activist Greg Stoker summed it up more bluntly on Instagram, calling the announcement “corny as hell,” a sentiment echoed across veteran circles who’ve learned to distrust flashy gestures that arrive just before cuts, purges, or new demands.

That context matters. Trump’s sudden burst of generosity comes after years of deliberate harm to veterans, military families, and the institutions meant to support them. Set against that record, the “warrior dividend” isn’t gratitude — it’s the latest insult. For $1,776, a number that barely covers a month’s rent in much of the country, Trump seems to believe he can purchase loyalty, silence dissent, and paper over structural harm.

“Suckers”

This indifference isn’t an abstraction. Last week on Capitol Hill, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem assured lawmakers that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has “not deported” military veterans. As she spoke, an Army veteran appeared on screen from exile. Sae Joon Park, a Purple Heart recipient wounded in combat, had been deported to South Korea after nearly 50 years in the United States, ordered to self-deport over decades-old drug charges tied to his post-traumatic stress disorder. As Noem offered perfunctory thanks for his service and claimed her hands were tied, Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., cut in: Park had taken two bullets for his country — would the administration help him come home? Noem promised only to “look at his case.” The lie had already been exposed.

Park’s case is not an anomaly. Under Trump, military service has offered little protection from detention or deportation. During his first term, immigration authorities placed at least 250 veterans into removal proceedings and deported 92 of them, many of whom have service-connected trauma from their time in combat. Among them was Miguel Perez Jr., an Army veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan before being deported to Mexico. Just last month, Jose Barco, a Purple Heart recipient wounded in Iraq, was deported from a detention center in Arizona at 4 a.m.

Treating war heroes as disposable reflects how Trump fundamentally understands the military. He does not treat the military as a civic institution bound by mutual obligation or constitutional restraint. He treats it as a coercive instrument — a disciplined force that can be displayed, redirected, or withdrawn depending on political need. Loyalty, in this framework, is not owed to the Constitution but to the ruler. Compliance is rewarded with praise; independence is punished with humiliation or exile. In Trump’s worldview, soldiers are not citizens who serve; they are assets to be deployed, threatened, or discarded. That calculus explains everything from the casual talk of executing generals, to the weaponization of National Guard deployments, to the ease with which veterans are deported or fired, to reportedly calling troops “suckers.”

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Beyond the rhetoric, Trump’s policies have inflicted concrete harm on veterans. His administration is gutting the Department of Veterans Affairs, planning to eliminate more than 70,000 jobs and roll staffing back to pre-2019 levels. Hundreds of VA clinicians warned Congress that the cuts threaten veterans’ health care nationwide. Internal data show the VA has already lost more than 600 doctors and nearly 2,000 nurses, while appointment wait times creep upward. One Democratic member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee summed it up as “a full-scale, no-holds-barred assault on veterans.” Trump’s answer has been privatization — diverting billions to for-profit providers and pushing veterans toward telehealth stopgaps or long drives to private clinics as the VA’s capacity erodes.

The ideology behind these cuts has been stated plainly. “DEI is dead,” said Trump’s handpicked “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth — as if staffing, access, and continuity of care were political indulgences rather than lifelines. In practice, that posture means fewer PTSD counselors, fewer clinicians in rural hospitals, and fewer staff processing disability claims and GI Bill benefits. The result is predictable: a growing population of veterans left to navigate trauma and bureaucracy alone, after the country that sent them to war decides it is finished paying its share.

That assault on the VA is part of Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce — a purge that disproportionately harms veterans. Roughly 1 in 4 federal civilian employees is a veteran, and nearly 900,000 veterans and military spouses work in federal jobs. In less than a year, 100,000 federal workers were pushed out through firings or “buyouts.” Now entire agencies face decimation under Trump’s so-called Schedule F plan, aiming to liquidate government “waste” — and with it, the livelihoods of those veteran employees. Each statistic is a human story: an Air Force veteran and sole breadwinner losing her second career just months in; a disabled Navy veteran in tears after being canned from the Department of Education. “He said he wanted to make the country great again… but this is not making it great, said Cynthia Williams, an Army vet in Michigan who lost her federal job. For veterans who once believed Trump’s promises, these actions feel like a stab in the back. As one discarded veteran bluntly put it: “I feel like I got a big F-you from the American people, and I feel betrayed.”

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For veterans who are Black, brown, women, or LGBTQ+, Trump’s proposition is not merely that their service is inconvenient or expendable. It is that it never counted in the first place. His project is not just exclusion but erasure — a form of historical revisionism designed to strip these service members of visibility, lineage, and moral claim. If their stories are removed from the record, then their sacrifices become debatable, their demands for care sound excessive, and their request for a share of the American promise can be dismissed as entitlement rather than earned right.

At Trump’s direction, the Pentagon has even undertaken an effort to purge tens of thousands of websites, images, and historical materials that document the contributions of Black, Brown, women, and LGBTQ service members, framing them as “DEI” content rather than military history. Displays honoring Black soldiers have been removed from U.S. military cemeteries overseas, including exhibits acknowledging the segregation-era troops who fought and died for freedoms they were denied at home. Even the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen — among the most celebrated units in American military history — was briefly scrubbed from Air Force training materials before public backlash forced a reversal. This is what Trump means when his administration declares “DEI is dead.” It is not about bureaucratic language. It is about narrowing who gets remembered as having served — and, by extension, who is allowed to ask this country for anything in return.

Toy Soldiers

Trump’s indifference does not begin once the uniform comes off. It begins with those still wearing it — active-duty service members and their families — who have been reduced to bargaining chips and props under Trump’s command.

When partisan warfare in Washington led to a budget standoff, Trump gleefully held American soldiers, sailors, and Marines hostage. During the government shutdown, military paychecks nearly ground to a halt, and the administration allowed some non-active personnel to go unpaid until the government reopened. The uncertainty sent military families into a panic. By October 2025, the shutdown was in its fourth week, and families on bases across America were lining up at food banks to feed their kids. The Armed Services YMCA reported surges in demand of 30 to 75 percent at its food pantries near installations. Imagine serving on active duty in the world’s largest and most expensive military, only to find yourself, in uniform, accepting donated groceries to stave off hunger. “When you see service members raising their hands saying, ‘I need food,’ it is surprising and shocking,” one nonprofit leader said.

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And when Washington’s games moved from budget brinkmanship to political theater, the military itself became part of the set. There is a difference between commanding an army and staging one. In 2025, National Guard units were mobilized not for disaster response or defense, but for optics — summoned to pad out a presidential military parade in Washington, a spectacle to coincide with the president’s 79th birthday. Additional troops were mustered away from their families and deployed into Democratic-led cities under vague claims of restoring “law and order,” in what was clearly a politically calculated show of force. What followed looked less like security than improvisation: Troops idled without clear objectives, reduced to crowd control, traffic duty, or cleanup work. In Washington, Guard members deployed under these domestic orders were exposed to street-level violence, which culminated in a November shooting that killed one service member and critically wounded another. The symbolism was Trump’s. The risk was theirs.

The Price of Betrayal

At its core, this is a breach of covenant. Military service rests on a simple, fragile exchange: Service members accept extraordinary risk on behalf of the state, and in return the state assumes an enduring obligation to care for them — in life, in injury, and in the aftermath. When that obligation is hollowed out or treated as optional, the consequences are not symbolic. They become structural. A nation that fails to keep faith with those who serve eventually finds itself without people willing to serve when it matters most.

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The cumulative effect on morale is corrosive. When service becomes conditional and disposable, the damage shows up in lives lost and ranks hollowed out. Rates of veteran suicide remain staggeringly high, with the VA reporting more than 6,300 veteran deaths by suicide in the most recent annual data, a rate significantly higher than the civilian population. Active-duty deaths have risen as well: The Pentagon recorded more than 520 suicides among service members in 2023, many of them involving troops who had never faced direct combat. Instead, they faced the psychological barrage of financial stress, legal and administrative woes, relationship strain. These deaths are not the byproduct of battlefield loss. They reflect something deeper — a system that repeatedly fails to care for people after it has extracted their labor, discipline, and risk.

That erosion of trust now shows up in force readiness. The U.S. military missed its recruitment targets by more than 41,000 recruits in fiscal year 2023, forcing reductions in force structure and long-term planning. While enlistment numbers ticked upward in 2024 and 2025, independent fact-checkers have shown that those gains began before Trump’s return and do not reverse the broader, decadeslong decline in enlistment or eligibility. Young Americans are watching how veterans are treated — deported, fired, denied care, pushed toward food banks — and drawing their own conclusions.

When you set aside Trump’s checks, this is how he really regards the military. Not just insult, but attrition. Not just cruelty, but vulnerability. An all-volunteer force depends on belief — that service will be rewarded with dignity, care, and reciprocity. When that belief collapses, the consequences are measured in empty billets and early graves. Trump doesn’t care if you served. And more young Americans, seeing the discarded generation before them, are quietly deciding they don’t want to be “suckers,” either.

The post The “Warrior Dividend” Is Trump’s Latest PR Stunt to Act Like He Cares About the Troops appeared first on The Intercept.

Olivia Nuzzi’s world is populated by beasts, and by monsters.

“American Canto” opens with cockroaches, and a call from The Politician. “The Politician” is the tiring epithet Nuzzi uses throughout her memoir to reference Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man with whom the whole world now knows she had some degree of affair. It ends with a red-tailed hawk and a drone, a juxtaposition that underscores the degree to which the journalist’s life is now mediated by public interest in what was once private. In the 300-page course of “Canto,” birds of all feathers appear: the ravens Kennedy takes an interest in befriending (or subjugating), turkeys, swallows, cardinals, owls. President Donald Trump, the “character” Nuzzi has spent one-third of her time on Earth serving as “witness” to as a vocation, is “sophisticated” but still an “animal.” (He is also, I’m sorry to say, described in the phrase “a Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler.”)

What feels undebatable, in what’s likely been a mad-dash Washington parlor game of decoding all the unnamed characters, is that Kennedy is one of the book’s monsters. He is also, variously, a bull and a lion. We learn Kennedy in his human form is often shirtless. He was the “hunter” (“Like all men but more so,” we read, mouths agape), and she was the prey. We know this because of an extended metaphor that begins with considering a baby bird pushed from a nest — Nuzzi recounts, briefly, her difficult relationship with an alcoholic and mentally ill mother — then “swallowed up by some kind of monster” where “in her first and final act, she had made the monster stronger.” Nuzzi means to tell us that she was the woman consumed, first by love, and then by a nation of gawkers who still can’t look away.

“I’m annoyed that I had to learn about any of this crap,” comedian Adam Friedland tells Nuzzi in an interview for his eponymous show released to his subscribers on Tuesday night. Friedland, who often serves as a conduit for his audience’s own reactions, does seem actually annoyed, as I often felt while reading this book.

“I’m sorry,” Nuzzi replies, looking genuinely apologetic and mildly uncomfortable.

There’s real insight to be gleaned about how the former New York magazine journalist allowed herself to be used by a political project working to turn back the clock on scientific progress by decades and result in more dead children, but that’s not why Nuzzi is apologizing, or even writing this book. The greatest failing of “American Canto” is its inability to look too far outside itself. The revelations we’re meant to believe that Nuzzi has been to hell and back to earn are gossamer-thin and so lightly worn, they float in on the Santa Ana winds and just as abruptly vanish, uninterrogated. She often punctuates sentences, offset by commas, with the phrases “I think” or “I suppose,” lest we get the idea that she’s holding onto anything too tightly.

Crucially, all this thinking about our messed-up country is only of interest because it has forcefully and publicly intersected with the author’s personal life. In this way, it is perhaps the purest version of a Washington memoir yet, one that pretends to be about America and about politics and our twisted state of play but is really an exercise in the writer gesturing at these things with no appreciation for the real stakes of every policy decision made by this administration for real people. It’s all just a “kaleidoscopic” — Nuzzi’s repeated word choice — backdrop for the media to use in a clever lede before getting back to who’s up and who’s down and who’s interesting.

To emphasize this weightlessness, the author goes to great pains to remind us that, for all its flaws, such as electing an authoritarian with fascist ambitions not once but twice, she loves this country. (In the author’s note that opens the book, Nuzzi proclaims the book is “about love … and about love of country.”) There is plentiful red, white, and blue. Mentions of the flag are so numerous that I had to switch pens while underlining them. There are bullets and guns, including the loaded one that Nuzzi comes to keep on her nightstand. There is much discussion of God (Nuzzi, like Kennedy, was raised Catholic). Just a couple pages in, there is JonBenét Ramsey — another beautiful blonde, Nuzzi seems to be saying, who became, against her will, an avatar for a greater spiritual rot at the core of American culture.

Like at least a few great writers before her, Nuzzi fled the East Coast for Los Angeles (specifically Malibu, where she is surrounded by both literal and metaphorical fires) after news of the affair broke. Once there, she compares herself to the Black Dahlia, drained of blood for an eager nation to see as she’s bafflingly, symbolically hoisted above the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

There is mercifully little Ryan Lizza, the journalist Nuzzi refers to as “the man I did not marry,” who has proven she dodged a bullet by recounting his side of the story on his Substack (where, cleverly if cravenly, the first installment was free to draw readers in and subsequent numbered chapters have been paywalled). In the Friedland interview, Nuzzi denies Lizza’s allegations that she covered up information about the Trump assassination attempt and that she caught and killed stories damaging to Kennedy. When the host presses her about why she won’t sue her ex for defamation, Nuzzi points out that he rarely appears in the book, saying, “Like, I forgot him,” which is actually a pretty good burn. Lizza, who was fired from The New Yorker for “improper sexual conduct” (which he denies), has been let off in this saga far too easily; for all his yammering now, he did precious little to intervene when it actually might have mattered — say, during Kennedy’s confirmation hearing.

When Nuzzi dares to engage with substantive politics, it’s in careful, distant terms. By my count, there was one mention of Gaza, in a headline — “Mayhem in Gaza” — which she recounts only to give us a sense of time and of place. (It’s worth noting that in the selected headline, “mayhem” reduces the genocide in Gaza to something like a natural disaster.) She witnesses a pickup truck (Real America!) covered in Make America Great Again stickers; she sees protesters holding signs that read “STOP ARMING ISRAEL.” Nuzzi flattens it all. “The discourse, right and left, is filled with people remarking,” she writes, affecting a detached tone that sounds like a discount Joan Didion. In another section, Nuzzi pictures herself being (metaphorically) hit in a drone strike, which feels, to put it mildly, a bit lacking in self-awareness in the year 2025.

It’s all sound and fury, and to the chronicler of it all, it signifies absolutely nothing.

Tellingly, one of Nuzzi’s monsters doesn’t come off all that badly. She quotes her own phone and in-person conversations with Trump at great length (one unbroken monologue lasts an entire page). After all, the now-two-time president was her beat, and with their fates intertwined, she has reaped the professional rewards. She calls him “tyrannical” with “authoritarian fantasies,” and concedes that she was “sometimes fooled” by the “skilled practitioners” of MAGA. But Trump comes off in “American Canto” as slightly, if not dramatically, more interior than we’ve come to expect. I was darkly surprised by the billionaire musing that “illegal immigrants saved my life,” because without them, he wouldn’t have been able to ride their suffering all the way to the White House.

Trump, like Nuzzi, was for a time kicked out of his position of power, and in those four years of Joe Biden was put through a criminal trial in New York. (There has been no indication that he spent his time in exile reading Dante or the King James Bible, as Nuzzi apparently did.) Outside the courthouse, early in the book, Nuzzi watches a man self-immolate and spends the rest of the day with the taste of his burning flesh in her mouth. She doesn’t name him until nearly 200 pages in, instead opting for terms like “the boy who missed his mother and could no longer bear to be here.” Nuzzi bemoans that the TV cameras, once they learn the self-immolation is unrelated to the president or his policies, turn away from the scene. The observation turns her into yet another bystander in her own story, rather than a powerful journalist who made coverage decisions and chose the words she used to describe our world every day. She could have helped shape a different history by reporting with moral conviction about the events happening before her eyes, but instead, she looked around for someone, anyone, and was left wanting.

The post Olivia Nuzzi Is Completely Oblivious appeared first on The Intercept.

The total number of people killed in the antisemitic Bondi Beach massacre was still not known when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to blame Australia’s mere recognition of a Palestinian state.

Two gunmen, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, carried out the shooting, which targeted a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, and left 15 victims dead. People of conscience from all faiths have spoken out to condemn the slaughter, to express solidarity with Jewish communities, and to forcefully denounce antisemitism.

Netanyahu and his cheerleaders, meanwhile, have once again chosen the despicable path of weaponizing antisemitism to ensure and legitimize Palestinian suffering.

Netanyahu’s comments come as no surprise. They are just his latest vile affront to Jewish lives, using threats to our safety to guarantee that Palestinians can have none.

Beyond the clear fact that the Bondi shooters targeted Jews on a Jewish holiday — the very definition of an antisemitic attack — we currently know almost nothing about these men. The idea that their actions justify the continued oppression of Palestinians should be rejected outright.

That didn’t stop Netanyahu’s most ardent American supporters from jumping to reiterate his message.

The first New York Times opinion piece to be published in the massacre’s wake came from Israel apologist Bret Stephens, with a column titled “Bondi Beach is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” Stephens wrote that the shooting constitutes the “real-world consequences” of “literalists” responding to chants like “globalize the intifada,” “resistance is justified,” and “by any means necessary.”

The point is obvious: to make sure that Palestinians remain eternally in stateless subjugation and to give Israel a free hand to violate their rights — including by committing a genocide like the one unfolding in Gaza today.

It’s all done in the name of fighting antisemitism by conflating the worst kinds of violent anti-Jewish bigotry, like what we saw in Bondi Beach, with any criticisms of Israel and its actions. To so much as say Palestinians ought to have basic human rights, in this view, becomes a deadly attack on Jewish safety.

There’s a profound irony here. Like many thousands of Jewish people around the world, I do feel less safe precisely because the Israeli government is carrying out a genocide in our names, associating Jewish identity with ethno-nationalist brutality. It is antisemitic to blame all Jews for Israel’s actions; it is therefore also antisemitic — and produces more antisemitism — for Israel to claim to act for all Jews.

As Netanyahu’s response to the Bondi massacre again makes clear, his interest is not in Jewish safety. Jewish fear, directed into anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim animus, is far more useful to his government’s project of ethnic cleansing.

In his Sunday statement, the Israeli prime minister said he had earlier this year told Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” Australia, alongside nations including the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, moved to recognize Palestinian statehood in September at the United Nations; 159 countries now recognize Palestine.

On Monday, Albanese rightly rejected Netanyahu’s effort to link this recognition to the antisemitic attack. “I do not accept this connection,” Albanese said, calling the suggestion “an unfounded and dangerous shortcut.”

Stephens, for his part, begins his New York Times column by praising the bravery of local shopkeeper Ahmed al-Ahmed, who risked his own life to single-handedly disarm one of the Bondi attackers.

“That act of bravery not only saved lives,” Stephens wrote, “it also served as an essential reminder that humanity can always transcend cultural and religious boundaries.”

The columnist then spends the rest of the short article blaming, without grounds, the Palestinian solidarity movement for “Jewish blood.”

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Leaving aside the fact that Stephens knows next to nothing about the shooters, the extreme perniciousness of his conclusion goes beyond an issue of ignorance.

His message is of a piece with Netanyahu’s. He is saying that you cannot call for Palestinian liberation, or the end to Israel’s apartheid regime, without de facto calling for the killing of Jews.

The only option, according to this line of thinking, is to be silent and let Palestinian oppression continue. It’s a disgusting zero sum logic — not to mention an insult to the victims of antisemitism.

The post NY Times’ Bret Stephens Blames Palestine Freedom Movement for Bondi Beach Shooting appeared first on The Intercept.

The welcome was so warm it could’ve been the first day of school for a new class of kindergarteners, and with the so-called reporters’ level of skepticism for the administration, they might as well have been.

“I would also like to take a moment today to welcome all of you here to the Pentagon briefing room as official new members of the Pentagon press corps. We’re glad to have you,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in her December 2 briefing. “This is the beginning of a new era.”

Wilson also said that “legacy media chose to self-deport from this building,” a cute way of noting that dozens of news organizations — among them the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major broadcast news outlets, and even Fox News and Newsmax — gave up their press passes rather than sign on to the administration’s blatantly anti-First Amendment set of rules for reporting on Pete Hegseth’s Department of War. Among those rules was a provision allowing journalists to be expelled for reporting on anything, whether classified or unclassified, not approved for official release.

To test-drive the absurdity of this new “press corps,” Wilson granted the second question of the “new era” to disgraced former congressman Matt Gaetz, once Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general and now a host on the feverishly pro-Trump One America News Network. Gaetz, who was wearing a rather dated performance fleece jacket embroidered with “Representative Matt Gaetz,” asked two questions about regime change in Venezuela, a policy the administration is actively fomenting as it carries out strikes on boats it claims are carrying “narcoterrorists” smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

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The substance of the questions mattered less than the opening they provided for Wilson to parrot the administration’s line on these strikes: “Every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that.” Somewhat puzzlingly, Wilson also said the Department of War is “a planning organization” with “a contingency plan for everything.”

There was no further follow-up from the member of the “press” whom the House Ethics Committee found engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl in 2017. (Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.)

Since the briefing took place just days after the killing of a member of the National Guard blocks from the White House, multiple members of the Pentagon’s new Fourth Estate asked weighty questions in the wake of the tragedy, including whether the service member would receive a medal for distinguished service or a military burial at Arlington National Cemetery. (Both are TBD.)

It wasn’t all softball questions, but every assembled member served their purpose by running interference for the administration in general and Hegseth in particular. One interlocutor, following up on a question about selling weapons to Qatar despite its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood from the indefatigable Laura Loomer, asked without a hint of irony whether the U.S. would be “reassessing our relationship with Israel” over Israeli media reports that the country’s government “funded Hamas.”

Without missing a beat, the War Department flak replied that that would be a “better question for the State Department” and moved right along.

Another member of the press corps asked whether any actual drugs have been recovered from these alleged drug-smuggling boats that the U.S. military has been drone striking — twice, in one case — a question well worth asking, and one that’s almost certainly being posed by the deposed mainstream journalists now reporting on the Pentagon from outside its walls. Wilson, standing in for the U.S. government, responded by essentially asking that we trust her, trust the intelligence, and trust that Hegseth’s War Department is telling the truth. The matter was, once again, closed.

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Along with Loomer, a noted Trump sycophant and conspiracy theorist, I spotted “Pizzagate” promoter Jack Posobiec, who asked about Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe in the assembled crowd. In a video of the briefing, an open laptop in one member of the “new” media’s lap was emblazoned with stickers that read “feminine, not feminist” and “homemaking is hot.” A statement from the department trumpeting news of the new corps features an interviewer in front of a backdrop emblazoned with logos for “LindellTV,” the media venture by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell — who is now running for governor of Minnesota. (LindellTV’s IMDB page describes the programming as: “Aging man with many internet connectivity issues, screaming into his cell phone, has discussions with a tired looking news anchor,” although it’s not clear whether that’s the official network tagline.)

The Pentagon press corps has always been a gilded cage — a perch for big-name reporters who want a plush-sounding posting without too much hassle. The most essential, critical reporting never comes from briefings, where reporters sit with their mouths open like baby birds looking up for a news morsel from their press secretary mother. But like with so many things under Trump, by giving up on any semblance of respecting norms, he’s revealed how neutered the institution was to begin with. Critical reporting on the War Department has, and will, continue, even without reporters in the physical building. It’s worth asking if they should ever go back.

The post The Brand-New Pentagon Press Corps Is Gaga for Hegseth appeared first on The Intercept.

Luigi Mangione’s legal defense fund has swelled to more than $1.3 million and is still growing daily. As the December 4 Legal Committee, we created that fund — but it would mean nothing without the donations, prayers, and support of people from around the world. As corporate social media platforms censored support for Luigi, the fundraiser page became a place for people to share stories of senseless death and suffering at the hands of the for-profit health insurance industry in this country.

There is a deep irony in the widespread support for Luigi. People celebrate an alleged murderer not because they hate reasonable debate or lust for political violence, but out of respect for themselves and love for others. Across the political spectrum, Americans experience the corporate bureaucracies of our health care system as cruel, exploitative, and maddening. They feel powerless in the face of the unnecessary dehumanization, death, and financial ruin of their neighbors and loved ones.

One year ago, the December 4 killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson temporarily suspended the usually intractable left vs. right polarization of America. Ben Shapiro’s audience revolted when he accused Luigi supporters of being “evil leftists.” Donors to Luigi’s fund come from across the political spectrum, and a common theme among them is their acute realization that the political differences of the culture war are largely manufactured to benefit the powerful. This was a crucial difference between Mangione’s alleged act and, for example, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. While the latter intensified existing political divides, the former seemed to strike upon the common ground of a different political landscape: from red vs. blue, or left vs. right, to down vs. up.

But a year on, it is clear that even bipartisan public support for killing a health care CEO on the street and the endless stories of suffering and death as a result of insurance claim denials are not enough to depose the for-profit health care system. Today, Medicare for All looks even more politically unrealistic than when Bernie Sanders made it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

This fact poses a challenge for Luigi’s supporters: Will his alleged act be remembered as nothing more than a salacious contribution to the true crime genre? Will we settle for him being installed as an edgy icon of celebrity culture, used to market fast-fashion brands and who knows what next?

We do not think his supporters, or anyone else who believes that health care is a human right, should accept that. But what would it take to make the events of last December 4 into a movement to build a more humane health care system in America?

For the last year, we have been asking this question of medical professionals, community organizers, scholars, and ourselves.

In our forthcoming book, “Depose: Luigi Mangione and the Right to Health,” we offer the beginnings of an answer: The history of the struggle for the right to health in America shows that it is indeed politically unrealistic to expect politicians to deliver it from above — but our own dignity and intelligence demands that this right be asserted by all of us from below. The widespread support for Luigi shows that the time has come for the long struggle for the right to health care to make a strategic shift from protest to political direct action.

Consider the sit-in movements to end Jim Crow laws and desegregate American cities. These were protests, insofar as participants drew attention to unjust laws — but they were also political direct actions. Organizers were collectively breaking those laws, and in doing so, were enacting desegregation. Activists organized themselves to support and protect each other in collectively nullifying laws that had no moral authority and, in the process, acted as if they were already free. This is what we mean by a shift from protest to direct action.

Less well known is the role of direct action in winning the eight-hour workday. For half a century, industrial workers had been struggling to shorten their hours so they could have some rest and joy in their lives. One decisive moment in this struggle came in 1884, when the American Federation of Labor resolved that two years later, on May 1, their workers would enact the eight-hour day. After eight hours, they would go on strike and walk off the job together. They called on other unions around the country to do the same and a number did — including in Chicago, where police deployed political violence to attack striking workers, killing two. While this action did not immediately win the struggle everywhere, it did succeed in beginning to normalize the 8-hour day and raised the bar for everywhere else to eventually do the same. The key is that this could only happen when workers stopped demanding something politically unrealistic and started changing political reality themselves.

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The struggle for the right to health care has been ongoing in the United States for at least a century. At every turn, it has been thwarted by industry lobbyists and the politicians they control. But what would it look like to strategically shift the struggle for the right to health care in the U.S.? How would health care providers go on strike or engage in direct action without harming patients?

We found the beginning of an answer from Dr. Michael Fine, who has called on his fellow physicians to organize for a different kind of strike: not halting all their labor, but stopping the aspects of their work that are unrelated to their responsibility as healers. Fine writes, “We need to refuse, together, to use the electronic medical records until they change the software so that those computers free us to look at and listen to patients instead of looking at and listening to computer screens.”

A strike by health care workers could mean not the cessation of care, but liberating this critical work from the restraints imposed by profit-seeking companies. Beginning from this idea, all of us could organize to free the labor of health care from the corporate bureaucracies that act as parasites on the relationship between caregiver and patient.

If we step outside of our usual political bubbles and into a direct action movement to assert the universal right to health care, we might find that the common ground that Luigi’s alleged actions exposed is the precise point from which the wider political landscape may be remade.

The post Luigi, a Year Later: How to Build a Movement Against Parasitic Health Insurance Giants appeared first on The Intercept.

On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian college town not known as a hotbed of leftist protest. They held signs reading “Nazis were just following orders too” and “Time to melt the ICE,” and chanted profane rebukes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rumored to be in the area. “They came here thinking they wouldn’t be bothered,” one Appalachian State University student told The Appalachian at the impromptu rally. “Boone is a small, southern, white, mountain town. We need to let them know they’ll be bothered anywhere they go.” In a region often stereotyped as silently conservative, this flash of defiance was a startling sign that the battle lines of American politics are shifting in unexpected ways.

For the past several weeks, the Trump administration has been rolling out a mass deportation campaign of unprecedented scope — one that is now reaching deep into Appalachia. Branded “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a deployment of hundreds of Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents descended on North Carolina in mid-November, making sweeping arrests in and around Charlotte and into the state’s rural mountain counties.

Officials billed the effort as targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal aliens, but the numbers tell a different story: More than 370 people were arrested, only 44 of whom had any prior criminal record, according to DHS. The vast majority were ordinary undocumented residents — people going to work or school, not “violent criminals” — which underscores that the crackdown is less about public safety than meeting political quotas.

Indeed, Trump campaigned on conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, vowing to round up 15 to 20 million people (which is more than the estimated 14 million undocumented people living in the U.S.) and pressuring ICE to triple its arrest rates to 3,000 per day. The federal dragnet has already driven ICE arrests to levels not seen in years; immigrants without criminal convictions now make up the largest share of detainees. But the administration is also facing widespread resistance to its policy of indiscriminate arrests and mass deportations, not as the exception, but as the rule — and among everyday, fed-up Americans across the country.

Kicking the Hornets’ Nest

What officials didn’t seem to anticipate was that this crackdown would face fierce pushback not only in liberal hubs with large immigrant communities like Los Angeles or Chicago, but in predominantly white, working-class communities.

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In Charlotte, a city on the edge of the Blue Ridge foothills, activists scrambled to implement a broad early-warning network to track federal agents. Thousands of local volunteers — many of them outside the city’s political establishment — mobilized to monitor convoys and alert vulnerable families in real time. They patrolled neighborhoods, followed unmarked vehicles, and honked their car horns to warn others when Customs and Border Protection or ICE agents were spotted: acts of quiet guerrilla resistance that Border Patrol’s local commander derided as “cult behavior.” The effort spanned from downtown Charlotte into the rural western counties, with observers checking hotels and Walmart parking lots in mountain towns for staging areas and relaying tips across the region.

By the time the sheriff announced the feds had pulled out — and video showed a convoy hightailing it down the highway — locals were already hailing it as a “hornet’s nest” victory, comparing the retreat to British Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s abrupt withdrawal from the area during the Revolutionary War after being met with unexpectedly fierce resistance.

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Charlotte’s mostly quiet, semi-official resistance — dubbed the “bless your heart” approach for its polite-but-pointed Southern style — was notable. But the open rebellion brewing in coal country may be even more significant. In Harlan County, Kentucky — a storied epicenter of the Appalachian labor wars — residents recently got an alarming preview of the deportation machine’s reach. Back in May, a convoy of black SUVs rolled into the town of Harlan, and armed agents in tactical gear stormed two Mexican restaurants. At first, the operation was framed as a drug bust; Kentucky State Police on the scene told bystanders it was part of an “ongoing drug investigation.” But despite being carried out by DEA agents, it was an immigration raid, and local reporter Jennifer McDaniels noted that of the people arrested and jailed, their cases were listed as “immigration,” without a single drug-related offense.

Once the shock wore off, residents were livid. “We took it personal here,” McDaniels, who witnessed the raid, told n+1 magazine. Watching their neighbors being whisked away in an unmarked van — with no real explanation from authorities — rattled this tight-knit community. “I don’t like what [these raids] are doing to our community,” McDaniels continued. “Our local leaders don’t like what it’s doing to our community. … We just really want to know what’s happening, and nobody’s telling us.” It turned out at least 13 people from Harlan were disappeared that day, quietly transferred to a detention center 70 miles away. In Harlan – immortalized in song and history as “Bloody Harlan” for its coal miner uprisings — the sight of government agents snatching low-wage workers off the job struck a deep nerve of betrayal and anger. This is a place that knows what class war looks like, and many residents see shades of it in the federal government’s high-handed raids.

Blood in the Hills

For decades, Appalachia has lived with the same lesson carved into the hills like coal seams: When Washington shows up, it’s rarely to help. When the mining ended and industry dried up and when opioids ripped through these communities, the federal response was always too little, too late. When hurricanes and floods drowned eastern North Carolina — Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 — thousands of homes sat unrepaired a decade later, with families still sleeping in FEMA trailers long after the rest of the country had moved on. After Helene floods smashed the western mountains in 2024, relief trickled in like rusted pipe water — with just $1.3 billion delivered to address an estimated $60 billion in damage. A year later, survivors were living in tents and sheds waiting for their government to step in.

But the federal government’s priority is a parade of bodies — arrest numbers, detention quotas, a spectacle of force — and so suddenly, these forgotten communities are lit up with floodlights and convoys. Operation Charlotte’s Web saw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed overnight. Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored. It only reinforces the oldest mountain wisdom: Never trust the government.

It’s a paradoxical arrangement that to many working Appalachians is simply untenable. “It’s a rural area with low crime,” one organizer in Boone pointed out, calling ICE’s authoritarian sweep “disgusting and inhumane.” The organizer also said, “That’s the number one conservative tactic: being tough on crime even when that crime doesn’t exist.” In other words, the narrative about dangerous criminals doesn’t match what people are actually seeing as their friends, classmates, and co-workers are being carted off.

To be sure, public opinion in Appalachia isn’t monolithic; plenty of folks still cheer any crackdown on “illegals” as a restoration of law and order. But the growing resistance in these communities suggests a profound shift: Class solidarity is beginning to trouble the traditional partisan lines. The old playbook of stoking rural white fears about immigrants begins to lose its potency when those same immigrants have become neighbors, co-workers, or fellow parishioners — and when federal agents descend like an occupying army, indiscriminately disrupting everyone’s lives.

“Abducting a so-called violent gang member at their place of employment is a contradiction,” a local Boone resident scoffed. It doesn’t take a Marxist to see the underlying reality: This isn’t about protecting rural communities, it’s about using them for political ends. For many who’ve been told they’re the “forgotten America,” the only time Washington remembers them is to enlist them as pawns — or body counts — in someone else’s culture war. And increasingly, they are saying no.

Appalachia has a long, if overlooked, tradition of rebellion from below. A century ago, West Virginia coal miners fought the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history at Blair Mountain, where thousands of impoverished workers (immigrants and native-born alike) took up arms together against corrupt coal barons. In the 1960s, poor white migrants from Appalachia’s hills living in Chicago formed the Young Patriots Organization: Confederate-flag-wearing “hillbillies” who shocked the establishment by allying with the Black Panthers and Young Lords in a multiracial fight against police brutality and poverty.

That spirit of solidarity across color lines, born of shared class struggle, is reappearing in today’s mountain towns. You can see it in the way Charlotte activists borrowed tactics from Chicago’s immigrant rights movement, setting up rapid-response networks and legal support. You can see it in how North Carolina organizers are sharing resistance blueprints with communities in Louisiana and Mississippi ahead of “Swamp Sweep,” the next phase of Trump’s crackdown, slated to deploy as many 250 agents to the Gulf South on December 1 with the goal of arresting 5,000 people. And you can certainly see it each time a rural Southern church offers protection to an undocumented family, or when local volunteers protest Border Patrol outside their hotels.

No Southern Comfort for Feds

This all puts the Trump administration — and any future administration tempted to wage war on Trump-labeled “sanctuary cities” — in an uncomfortable position. It was easy enough for politicians to paint resistance to immigration raids as the province of big-city liberals or communities of color. But what happens when predominantly white, working-class towns start throwing sand in the gears of the deportation machine? In North Carolina, activists note that their state is not Illinois — the partisan landscape is different, and authorities have been cautious — but ordinary people are still finding creative ways to fight back. They are finding common cause with those they were told to blame for their economic woes. In doing so, they threaten to upend the narrative that Appalachia — and perhaps the rest of working-class, grit-ridden, forgotten America — will forever serve as obedient foot soldiers for someone else’s crusade.

The resistance unfolding now in places like Boone and Harlan is not noise — it’s a signal. It suggests that America’s political fault lines are shifting beneath our feet. The coming deportation raids were supposed to be a mop-up operation executed in the heart of “real America,” far from the sanctuary cities that have defied Trump. Instead, they are turning into a slog, met with a thousand cuts of small-town rebellions. This is hardly the passive or supportive response that hard-liners in Washington might have expected from the red-state USA.

On the contrary, as the enforcement regime trickles out into broader white America, it is encountering the same unruly spirit that has long defined its deepest hills, valleys, and backwoods. The message to Washington is clear: If you thought Appalachia would applaud or simply acquiesce while you turn their hometowns into staging grounds for mass round-ups, bless your heart.

The post “Real” America Is Turning Against Trump’s Mass Deportation Regime appeared first on The Intercept.

On World AIDS Day 2025, humanity should be celebrating that there is a new shot available which offers six months of protection against the transmission of HIV, the virus which has already infected approximately 40 million living people and taken the lives of 44 million more.

Instead, public health workers are reeling from how President Donald Trump has helped HIV to circulate in more humans this year than last. The lethal ways the current U.S. health policy is harming the health and wealth of LGBTQ+ people worldwide will be felt for years, if not decades.

That’s because on the first day of his second term, Trump issued a stop-work order for all foreign aid and several orders that jeopardized the health outcomes of minority groups within the U.S.

The cuts were far-reaching yet highly specific. They reduced resources for short- and long-term health research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, universities, and community groups in the U.S. and around the world. Through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, the administration curtailed or ended funding for programs like the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, also known as PEPFAR.

These cuts disparately harmed several distinct but often overlapping populations: LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, sex workers, and people living with HIV/AIDS. They were swift, halting scientific trials and critical services within days (or even mere hours) of their posting on January 20, 2025. And they were significant, contributing to acute medical crises, hunger, homelessness, or even death.

In the U.S., cuts to federal spending resulted in the cancellation of over $125 million in National Institutes of Health grants for LGBTQ-focused health research.

Across the globe, cuts to USAID are disrupting life-saving services and forced community organizations to close across the globe. In South Africa, transgender people immediately lost access to gender-affirming care, leading to forced detransitioning, body dysmorphia, depression, and even suicide. In Lebanon, USAID cuts are causing job losses among humanitarian aid workers, impacting medical care and disrupting development programs. In Uganda, people living with HIV have lost access to condoms, lubricants, medication, and even to the food that USAID once provided to people living with the virus (as those who are starving simply cannot take antiretroviral medication).

While there are lethal exceptions, often, the effects of these cuts are unfolding gradually over time. HIV is a slow-acting virus, and the deadliness of halting its prevention and treatment now will take years or even more than a decade to manifest.

But it’s possible to take a toll of the damage nearly 11 months later today on World AIDS Day, to better understand the damage done and the suffering and death still to come. By early 2025, Politico reported that the administration canceled 86 percent of all USAID awards. One analysis found that 71 percent of HIV-related activities globally were terminated, including several HIV treatment awards and most HIV prevention programs. Overall, there has been a huge drop in the number of people starting antiretroviral medication and a decrease in viral load testing, which is crucial for monitoring the virus and preventing transmission. Without the infrastructure of monitoring, documentation, and care, HIV is transmitting unchecked in the dark.

And it’s also possible to get a pattern of HIV’s rise by talking to people doing the work on the ground (or who recently returned from it), people living with HIV, and people who are both. In the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Trump’s cuts are not merely harming these populations by reducing or eliminating services they receive; it is also harming them by taking away their jobs.

For instance, at one large university hospital we visited in the Midwestern United States, every single trans Black outreach worker — who had been integral in addressing high rates of HIV among Black LGBTQ+ Americans — had lost their job by May. In Europe, we found HIV nongovernmental organizations struggling not just with cuts from USAID, but cuts also dictated from Brussels and their own governments, as EU countries shifted money away from immigrants and foreign aid and toward NATO and Frontex, the ICE of the European Union.

In Lebanon, the executive director of an organization that helps some 600 people per month access HIV services and other care — including financial aid or case management for queer people experiencing violence — said they can no longer plan beyond eight months.

At a clinic in Uganda for “key populations” (the euphemism for LGBTQ+ people in a country where “aggravated homosexuality” is a capital offense), a medical assistant said the staff was cut from 15 to just four. When told that staff at a similar organization in South Africa had also been reduced to just four people — but from an original staff of 86 — one of the workers in Uganda could only laugh: “Wow, I thought we had it bad.”

The immediate consequences of the cuts are more economic than medical. For many, the cuts created an acute crisis of employment.

Research has long shown that people who identify as LGBTQ+ and/or living with HIV are prone to living in poverty. Often, the only work in the formal economy accessible to LGBTQ people — and trans women in particular — is to work in HIV prevention. Workers typically began as clients, then became volunteers, then stick with it for their career. These people often lack university or even secondary-school educations, and their jobs in HIV prevention are key to their economic and physical well-being, with salaries serving as lifelines for their families and economic engines in their communities.

And when the stop-work order came, they fell off an economic cliff that brought financial danger much faster than HIV ever could. This was true in every country where we reported.

In the United States, the cuts created a crisis of LGBTQ+ employment with a stark racial divide. In the same way DOGE’s cuts to the federal workforce overall disproportionately impacted Black women’s employment, the domestic health cuts particularly affected LGBTQ+ workers of color. Whereas the stop-work order led to job losses for Black and Latinx queer and trans Americans who worked directly with the public, the same has not always true for their supervisors who, in our findings and in scientific research about primary investigators and recipients of government health grants, were overwhelmingly white. Many of this latter group relied on data collected by Black and brown colleagues — in the U.S. and around the world — to do their work. But when those Black and brown colleagues lose their jobs, the white researchers were often able to take the data and pivot to other research projects or jobs.

This racialized LGBTQ+ employment crisis for front-line Black and brown workers is global. For instance, in Uganda, some health care workers who avoided layoffs had their salaries reduced by more than 50 percent, while other laid-off workers still go to their jobs just in exchange for food. In South Africa, one person at the Johannesburg HIV-prevention organization where staff was cut from 86 to just four people said, “If you go on Grindr,” a gay hookup app, “you will see many of my former colleagues offering services.” These HIV prevention workers had turned to for sex work — as there were no other jobs available to them.

Gutting the funding of HIV prevention globally harms workers in the short term, and humanity in the long run, by undermining a novel chance to curb or even end AIDS. In early 2025, trials were completed in some countries for lenacapavir, an injectable drug that can prevent HIV transmission for six months. Often hailed as a “breakthrough” medication, the potential benefits of lenacapavir were profound: If given to enough people for a period of time, it could diminish or potentially eradicate HIV. At the 13th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in July, the World Health Organization recommended widespread use of lenacapavir as soon as possible.

Tragically, right as it was ready to begin rolling out, the Trump administration “decimated the infrastructure of global HIV prevention programs by its destruction of USAID,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. Despite the administration backing some small rollouts of the drug (about 500 doses of lenacapavir were delivered each to Zambia and Eswatini, which have a combined population of about 24 million people), Gonsalves described Trump’s “support for Lenacapivir” as “a hollow promise to millions who are at risk of HIV infection around the globe,” and “a drop in the bucket for a drug that can be manufactured by generic companies for $40 a year. We need the programs and services that Trump cut put back in place” — and for workers to be hired back to distribute this new drug to their peers.

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Over the last year, there has been an enormous decrease in those peer educators in Europe, Africa, and North America. USAID cuts took away money from their outreach in sex work “hotspots,” gay saunas, immigration processing centers, prisons, cruising grounds, food banks, and the many places where HIV lodges itself by people society has largely abandoned.

In Uganda, we witnessed an illustration of what USAID could be doing, what it’s no longer funding, and how people fighting HIV could be fighting it more effectively (without expending more human resources).

On November 21, the group Universal Love Alliance created a free STI clinic at a sex work motel in Kampala, where it gave condoms and lubricants to 200 sex workers, and tested 86 people for HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and urinary tract infections. People with urinary tract infections and syphilis were given antibiotics on the spot. There were three positive HIV cases detected (who were all enrolled into treatment immediately), six inconclusive cases (who were scheduled for follow-ups), and 77 negative cases.

Of those 77, about 60 began daily PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, and left with a 30-day supply of daily HIV prevention medication.

But the encounter revealed three warning signs.

First, most of the 15 people working were volunteers and were filling in for people who used to be paid to do this work.

Second, some of the boxes of supplies were marked “USAID: From the American People.” These were the last of their kind from a vanishing supply which will not be replaced. Universal Love Alliance is able to get antiretroviral drugs from a hospital for free, but it is buying all of its other supplies (including PrEP) with private donations, which limits how often it can offer such free clinics (at a time when such clinics funded by USAID and the CDC has ended).

And finally, while giving dozens of sex workers 30 pills PrEp is a good thing, if the team had been able to provide lenacapivr instead, “the six-month injectable PrEP, you could have potentially improved patient outcomes, increased adherence, and reduced the burden of HIV prevention,” Ahabwe Lenard, one of the lab technicians pointed out. With lenacapivr, Lenard and his colleagues would only have to try to find the people they’d treated again in 180 days instead of 30 — just two times a year, instead of 12 — which would free up everyone’s time and money (in a very poor country) while further reducing HIV.

But the benefits of this new drug will not be felt if it’s not available and if there aren’t trusted community health outreach workers to explain and administer it.

On World AIDS Day, it’s clear whose lives, employment, and health have been most affected by Trump’s budget cuts.

But make no mistake: Viruses travel, and Trump’s stop-work order has put the entire human race at higher risk for HIV and AIDS.

This essay is part of the series Global Stop Work Order, which will feature reporting about how the Trump administration’s cuts are affecting LGBTQ+ health and HIV/AIDS in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. The series is supported by a Pulitzer Center Global Reporting Grant and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Trump Gutted AIDS Health Care at the Worst Possible Time appeared first on The Intercept.

I was never that into cocaine — preferring the euphoria promised by MDMA or the relaxation offered by cannabis — but back in 2015, a cocaine-serving lounge bar, Route 36, in La Paz, Bolivia, was the talk of the backpacking circuit, and the scarcely-believable novelty of the place was alluring.

At Route 36, bags of cocaine are served on silver platters, and a friend and I got incredibly high that night. Too high, perhaps, though it was all undeniably good fun. But as soon as my first-person dispatch for Vice from the lively dusk-till-dawn session went viral, I feared that I perhaps shouldn’t have glorified the use of a moreish drug that typically leaves a trail of violent destruction in its wake.

As the years passed, however — with cocaine becoming both unprecedentedly popular and increasingly affordable despite the billions spent on the war on drugs to avoid these exact outcomes — I’ve come to realize that accepting that adults take cocaine, and legally regulating the drug, is the only sensible path forward. Establishments like Route 36, the world’s first cocaine bar, might just represent a more enlightened, peaceful future for us all.

After all, U.S.-led authorities around the world have tried everything else, and to great human cost. Coca fields across the Andes, where cocaine’s main ingredient grows, have been sprayed with harmful herbicides like glyphosate, harming the local Indigenous people for whom coca holds unique spiritual and nutritional value, and killing anything that tries to grow in the contaminated soil. Consumers and traffickers of cocaine have been imprisoned en masse, helping to create a prison–industrial complex which serves as a university of crime for its incarcerated and a fertile recruitment ground for armed drug gangs.

The war on drugs is not just a political metaphor — in many places, it’s a full-blown, militarized conflict with vast numbers of casualties. It has fueled unparalleled bloodbaths in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed across the world, notably in Colombia, Mexico, and most recently Brazil, where a police raid on a cartel-controlled favela in Rio led to more than 130 deaths in one night in late October. “This was a slaughter, not an operation,” one bereaved mother told The Guardian. “They came here to kill.”

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In the international waters around the U.S., the “legally indefensible” and “barbarian” campaign the Trump administration is waging against boats suspected of trafficking drugs from Latin America has killed at least 83 people in 21 extrajudicial airstrikes.

Such boats, if some of them are indeed carrying drugs, would mostly be ferrying a popular white powder which many people appear to have an insatiable appetite for. As President Donald Trump acknowledged in 1990 before becoming a politician, legalizing drugs is the only way to end the war on drugs. After all, people want to sniff cocaine. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war,” Trump said in 1990.

Cocaine was first extracted from the coca leaf in 1855 by a young German chemist, Friedrich Gaedcke. A few decades later, it was identified as a highly effective local anesthetic. Cocaine was then vaunted as a “nerve food” wonder drug by pharmaceutical companies and psychologist Sigmund Freud, who initially claimed it was a panacea for depression. Then, it was widely used as both a medicine and as a recreational drug.

Pope Leo XIII was such a fan of one cocaine-infused tonic wine as a mental fortifier, “when prayer was insufficient,” that he awarded its creator a Vatican gold medal. President Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, and Queen Victoria were also partial.

In 1886, Coca-Cola launched as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage” flavored by the cocaine-containing coca leaves.

But as the invigorating drug’s addictive nature became impossible to ignore, there was a backlash. Coca-Cola removed the cocaine from its recipe in 1903, though it still derives its distinctive taste from the bitter leaves (thanks to its ongoing effective monopoly over coca imports to the U.S.).

Next, in 1914, the U.S. passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which heavily regulated cocaine and stymied its use outside of medicine — where it had become long essential for ear, throat, and, perhaps ironically, nose surgery.

The U.S. then set about creating a sprawling drug control regime to assert its geopolitical control in Latin America, protect pharmaceutical interests, and promote a heathen culture in which alcohol and cigarettes are OK, but every other drug is bad. In 1961, the United Nations placed cocaine and coca under strict international control — along with heroin and cannabis — and required governments to criminalize non-medical use.

Prohibition coincided with increased interest in cocaine. After decades of negligible use, it was rediscovered by countercultural elites in the late 1960s, just as Colombian traffickers were perfecting their methods. Cocaine hit Miami in the early-1970s, and the rest is history.

“When cocaine came to town, it was so ridiculously profitable,” Roben Farzad, author of “Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami,” told PBS. “It made people do such crazy things in the name of money and power and blood lust that you had something approximating a failed state by 1981 in Miami.”

Today, cocaine is one of the world’s most reliable commodities. It’s a multibillion-dollar market serving around 50 million global consumers. Production in the Andes is at a record high. Purity is the highest it’s ever been. Cocaine is cheaper, stronger, and more accessible than at any point in history. From bankers to bricklayers, everyone is at it — and the interests of cartels all over the world are enmeshed with the legal economies.

This state of affairs represents a totemic, catastrophic policy failure. It’s high time for a grown-up conversation which acknowledges that the drug laws — by funneling untold riches to violent criminals — are more harmful than the drugs themselves, as research increasingly shows.

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“We’re losing badly the war on drugs,” Trump said more than three decades ago. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.” Instead, taxes on legal profits on the sales of drugs like cocaine could be spent to educate the public on the dangers of drug misuse, the future president recommended. “What I’d like to do maybe by bringing it up is cause enough controversy that you get into a dialogue on the issue of drugs so people will start to realize that this is the only answer; there is no other answer,” he added.

Fast forward 35 years, and Trump is waging his illegal, extrajudicial campaign on boats carrying suspected drug traffickers. If history tells us anything, the cartels will simply switch to other methods — over air or land — to get the lucrative cocaine into the U.S., after the Coast Guard seized a record 510,000 pounds over the last fiscal year.

That means that 2 million pounds of cocaine likely made it into the country by sea hidden in shipments of bananas and corn, or in stealthy narco-subs, since it has been estimated that interdiction efforts only capture a fraction of illegal drugs imported. Port staff, border guards, and law enforcement officers are no doubt being corrupted to an extent we will never be able to comprehend. The tentacles of the illegal drug trade will always penetrate the legal economy because there’s just so much money at stake — more than any other illegal commodity industry.

That’s why the cocaine business continues to infect even quaint corners of the world, as cartels continually shift their operations away from enforcement hotspots to evade detection. Spare a thought for Saõ Miguel in the Azores, a tropical paradise that suffered an explosion in problematic cocaine use when half a ton washed up on its shores in 2001; or the degeneration of Cape Verde into a narco-state thanks to gangs seeking new smuggling routes.

In the Amazon, land defenders who object to the razing of their land for secret coca plantations are killed. Ecuador, once one of South America’s safest countries, is the latest state to be rocked by an explosion of prison massacres, political assassinations, and street bombings; the homicide rate has increased sixfold in just five years. Even Scandinavian gangs are killing over the cocaine trade, in the once peaceful countries of northern Europe.

So what would happen if cocaine was legalized? Organized crime groups would be deprived of a uniquely profitable income stream. The purity of the drug would also not be at the whims of these criminal groups, as batches contaminated with fentanyl regularly kill people who use cocaine. Others may celebrate that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which has 93 offices across 69 countries, would lose much of their raison d’être. And, depending on whether there would be an amnesty and reconciliation process for the criminal groups who control the cocaine trade, there would be a new class of legal cocaine merchants.

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Undoubtedly, there will be concerns that cocaine legalization could increase use. But it is already available for delivery faster than a pizza in many major cities across the world, and regulation — as even Trump noted — would help bring people who are addicted into closer contact with essential health services. This policy overhaul could also potentially reduce the thousands of deaths from cocaine misuse each year. There would be controls over public usage, as outlined in nonprofit Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s book “How to Regulate Stimulants,” as well as plain packaging, and a huge remit for drug education and harm reduction services.

At Route 36 — which under any regulated system would not be permitted to serve cocktails, since cocaine enables one to drink extraordinary amounts of alcohol — I was already asking myself about the morality of taking cocaine. I resolved in 2018 never to take it again, at least until I could ensure it was from an ethical source, but the reality is that the growing market is not going to magically disappear. Legalization is the only way to change the story of cocaine, from field to nose, being written in other people’s blood. The real immorality would be the continuation of the failed status quo.

The post Legalizing Cocaine Is the Only Way to End the Drug War appeared first on The Intercept.

At first glance, the photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his entourage outside New York’s City Hall suggest nothing other than a joyous public celebration. Taken on December 17, 1964, just one week after the civil rights leader had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. is seen formally receiving King as though he were a visiting head of state. Later that day, Wagner awarded the city’s Medallion of Honor to King, praising him as “a great American who has returned home after a great triumph abroad.”

But a few details about the photographs — published here for the first time — make clear that the person behind the camera harbored a far less flattering impression of King. That’s because the prints are held in the New York City Municipal Archives files of the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, the New York Police Department’s former political intelligence unit, where I found them while researching for my new book, “Police Against the Movement.”

On their face, the images are mundane. King emerges from a car, greeted by two men in suits. In another, King stands with family and confidants, including his wife, the activist Coretta Scott King; his mother, Alberta Williams King; and his friend and adviser Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington. In a third shot, Coretta shakes hands with Wagner.

One thing unites the images: None of the 14 individuals who appear at close range betray the slightest hint of recognition that their picture is being taken; no one looks directly at the camera. Their lack of acknowledgment suggests that they may not have realized they were being photographed — certainly not by police. But their placement in the Bureau of Special Services “Red Squad” files make the NYPD’s sentiments clear. (These files were first discovered by city archivists in a Queens warehouse in 2016, more than three decades after the landmark Handschu federal court settlement mandated they be made available to the activist subjects of NYPD surveillance, and two years after a lawsuit by historian Johanna Fernandez called for their release. Today, the NYPD “Red Squad” files represent the most significant collection of publicly accessible police intelligence records in the United States.)

For the NYPD, Wagner’s public flattery of King mattered much less than the unfavorable comments made just one month earlier by the nation’s premier law enforcement official, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Speaking to a group of reporters in November 1964, Hoover condemned Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country,” skewering the civil rights leader for his suggestion that the Bureau only reluctantly investigated segregationist attacks on civil rights activists. Hoover’s comments may seem quaint in our current era — in which politicians launch profanity-laced fusillades at their opponents and the president of the United States posts AI-generated videos depicting him as a fighter pilot bombarding No Kings protesters with raw sewage — but that insult succeeded in further delegitimizing King and the civil rights movement in the eyes of law enforcement officials. Wagner might have overtly praised King, but police in New York covertly surveilled him. They could care less what their mayor thought, because they worshipped the FBI director as the nation’s top cop.

Just as Donald Trump demonizes leftist organizers today as domestic terrorists, both federal officials and local police in the South and North condemned civil rights activists as rioters and insurrectionists. Just as Trump falsely disparaged Zohran Mamdani as a communist in recent months (before opting not to repeat the charges in a surprisingly friendly meeting with the mayor-elect in the Oval Office), Southern officials slandered King as a communist. And just as Trump’s Justice Department is indicting his political enemies on legally specious mortgage fraud charges, state officials in Alabama unsuccessfully indicted King on felony criminal charges for income tax perjury in 1960.

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But the NYPD — nor any other local police department — did not need to wait for encouragement from the feds to spy on King and his allies. A common misperception is that local police were content with physically assaulting protesters while leaving the sophisticated work of surveillance and slander to Hoover’s FBI. But police were far more experienced in spying on and sabotaging activists than we have acknowledged — so much so that the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program against “Black extremists,” launched in August 1967, should be recognized for federalizing efforts that local police departments had already undertaken to disrupt the civil rights movement.

Long before Hoover denounced King as a liar, the NYPD issued a surveillance report on the civil rights leader’s visit to Harlem in 1958, with other memos to follow in the early 1960s. Rank-and-file organizers supporting King received unwanted attention as well. As they prepared for the March on Washington — now widely celebrated across the political spectrum as a shining moment for democracy thanks to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — attendees were monitored by the NYPD, as they were by the police departments of Birmingham, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

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Police agencies did not limit themselves to surveilling civil rights activists. They also deployed the weaponry of deception and disruption in hopes of crippling the movement. When Herb Callender, a Congress of Racial Equality chapter leader, confronted police violence with street protests in New York in 1964, BOSS dispatched the undercover spy Ray Wood to infiltrate the Bronx organizer’s inner circle. Wood ultimately coaxed his newfound activist friends into a ludicrous scheme to perform a citizens’ arrest on Wagner, the mayor, at City Hall — which got Callendar arrested and landed him in the Bellevue psych ward.

Then, in December 1964, just three days before BOSS photographed King, Wood made contact with associates of the tiny Black Liberation Front collective. In short order, he encouraged three activists loosely connected with the group to join him in an outlandish plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty. Wood prodded the men for weeks and talked one of them into taking into his possession a box of dynamite purchased with department funds, which triggered the activists’ swift arrest. Glowing headlines detailing Wood’s efforts appeared on front pages across the country, and coverage included a photograph of Wood receiving a promotion for the work, his face carefully turned away to protect his identity. At that point, the FBI assumed control of the case, and federal prosecutors indicted the men on felony charges. All three were convicted on the basis of nothing more than Wood’s word and the box of dynamite, and each served time in federal prison.

The prosecution of these activists was a watershed moment where the feds and NYPD recast the broadly tolerated liberal civil rights movement that they secretly spied on into the dangerous radical extremist movement they publicly indicted on felony charges — all of which clearly anticipated not only COINTELPRO, but also today’s coordinated local–federal attacks on so-called antifa activists and domestic terrorists.

These surveillance tactics are of more than just historical significance. Local police continue to deploy weapons of political espionage against movements for justice to this day. In Trump’s first term, police in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago surveilled the same racial justice activists disparaged by the president.

There’s little reason to think that such investigations will cease. Protesters against ICE and Israel’s war on Gaza draw continued law enforcement monitoring — not least of all in New York, where the outgoing mayor has echoed the president’s criticisms of protests against ICE as attacks on law enforcement, and local organizers have increased their calls for the NYPD to disband its Strategic Response Group, a secretive unit that continues the work of BOSS by attending protests and conducting surveillance.

Words matter. Federal authorities who vocally attack protesters telegraph to law enforcement agents that they would be mistaken to not monitor and probe activists. Insults and slander give way to surveillance and invasions of privacy, which in turn lay the foundation for harassment by public officials, and in some cases result in criminal proceedings.

Time will tell which actions the federal government will take against the activists that they have recently branded as terrorists. But we can’t lose sight of the actions of the local law enforcement agencies that look to the feds for guidance — and we must recognize that the untruthful words of a president, no matter how far-fetched, have real-life consequences for the activists on the receiving end.

The post Newly Unveiled Photos of MLK Jr. Show Depth of NYPD’s Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.

If Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a site of tension in your family for the last two Thanksgiving holidays, this year should be no different. The so-called ceasefire might seem like a good excuse to bury the hatchet and enjoy a quieter turkey dinner, but when we look at the harrowing status quo for Palestinians in Gaza today, there is no peace to be thankful for — especially not on a day that marks the remembrance of this country’s own genocide against Indigenous Americans.

To be clear, if two years of livestreamed annihilation have failed to shift your loved ones’ support away from the Israeli ethnostate, I doubt there is anything a dinner table argument could do to persuade them. There can be no reasoning with a worldview that forecloses seeing Palestinians as fully human.

I navigate this with pro-Israel members of my own British Jewish family. It’s painful, and I don’t have any good advice. Whatever your approach with your family, there can be no pretense that the genocide in Gaza is over.

Families like mine, divided over Israel, are not the important ones here. For my part, I’ll be thinking instead of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza. He escaped in 2024 after Israel bombed his home, killing two of his immediate family members, including his mother. His surviving family are still there, living in tents. He hasn’t heard from them in over two weeks.

It is for families like my student’s that we cannot simply take it easy this Thanksgiving because of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza.

Unending Destruction

While the October 10 agreement has offered some relief for Palestinians, with a significant drop in daily slaughter, displacement, starvation and killings by Israeli forces continue. Instead of relentless, Israel’s bombings over the last 45 days have been simply ongoing and regular. Israel has killed 345 Palestinians in Gaza, including 120 children, while demolishing over 1,500 structures.

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At the same time, only a fraction of the aid trucks which were supposed to enter Gaza daily under the ceasefire agreement have been permitted entry by Israeli forces. Mass, enforced hunger continues in the Strip, where 50 million tons of rubble sits atop well over 10,000 unrecovered bodies.

In the face of such totalizing and unending destruction, it’s hard to find much solace in the fact that the support for the Palestinian cause has grown internationally; that nearly all major international human rights organizations have recognized Israel’s actions as genocidal; that a major wave of nation-states, including France, Canada, and Britain, moved this year to recognize the state of Palestine. The dead, displaced, and occupied can do little with declarations that carry no concrete consequences.

“What we need is a justice plan,” Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian writer and poet, told a U.N. meeting this week. “It is time to stop accepting the illusion of peace processes that only entrench injustices.”

With the state of the world as it stands, it feels unlikely that Israeli leaders will be held accountable for their war crimes any time soon. Justice for Palestine is hard to imagine, but we can continue to apply pressure in ways that have already seen paradigms shift. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election was a genuine victory against the perverse weaponization of antisemitism against Israel’s critics. Now New Yorkers must push our next mayor to uphold commitments to Palestinian solidarity and international law.

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And there is more those of us living in safety can do. We can send funds and share resources, as so many already do. And we can continue heading and supporting Palestinians’ call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli institutions complicit in occupation and apartheid.

Activist sometimes say, “Solidarity begins at home.” Yet not everyone can choose their home. If you have the great fortune of spending the holidays with loved ones who share your commitments to justice and liberation, I hope your time together is full of joy. Most of the time, though, solidarity actually begins anywhere but home. So if you choose to spend time with your family knowing that it will be fraught, I wish you luck. The weekend will pass, and there’s urgent work to be done.

The post Keep Talking About Gaza at Your Thanksgiving Table appeared first on The Intercept.

In late October, Elon Musk released a Wikipedia alternative, with pages written by his AI chatbot Grok. Unlike its nearly quarter-century-old namesake, Musk said Grokipedia would strip out the “woke” from Wikipedia, which he previously described as an “extension of legacy media propaganda.” But while Musk’s Grokipedia, in his eyes, is propaganda-free, it seems to have a proclivity toward right-wing hagiography.

Take Grokipedia’s entry on Adolf Hitler. Until earlier this month, the entry read, “Adolf Hitler was the Austrian-born Führer of Germany from 1933 to 1945.” That phrase has been edited to “Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and dictator,” but Grok still refers to Hitler by his honorific one clause later, writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945.” NBC News also pointed out that the page on Hitler goes on for some 13,000 words before the first mention of the Holocaust.

This isn’t the first time Grok has praised Hitler. Earlier this year, X users posted screenshots of the AI chatbot saying the Nazi leader could help combat “anti-white hate,” echoing his maker’s statements about debunked claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa. (When confronted about his chatbot’s “MechaHitler” turn earlier this year, he said users “manipulated” it into praising the Nazi leader).

Grokipedia isn’t exactly Stormfront, the neo-Nazi site known for spewing outright bigotry or Holocaust denial, but it does cite the white supremacist blog at least 42 times, according to recently published data by researcher Hal Triedman. Instead, the AI-generated Wikipedia alternative subtly advances far-right narratives by mimicking the authority of Wikipedia while reframing extremist positions, casting suspicion on democratic institutions, and elevating fringe or conspiratorial sources.

LK Seiling, an AI researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute, describes Grokipedia as “cloaking misinformation.”

“Everyone knows Wikipedia. They’re an epistemic authority, if you’d want to call them that. [Musk] wants to attach himself to exactly that epistemic authority to substantiate his political agenda,” they say.

It’s worth paying attention to how Grok frames a few key issues.

Take, for example, Grokipedia’s post about the Alternative for Germany, a far-right-wing party Elon Musk repeatedly praised in the lead-up to the German election earlier this year. Grok contains an entire section on “Media Portrayals and Alleged Bias,” which serves to parrot AfD’s long-held claims that the media is biased and undermining them. (The party routinely peddles anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, and its leaders have previously urged the country to stop apologizing for its Nazi past. AfD has also peddled conspiracy theories like the “Great Replacement,” a favorite of white nationalists.)

“Mainstream German media outlets, including public broadcasters such as ARD and ZDF, have consistently portrayed the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a far-right or extremist party,” Grok writes. “This framing often highlights AfD’s scrutiny by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), which classified the party’s youth wing as extremist in 2021 and the overall party under observation for right-wing extremism tendencies by 2025, while downplaying policy achievements like electoral gains in eastern states.”

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution was established after World War II to ensure that no German leader tries to overturn the country’s constitution again. But Grokipedia subtly casts doubt on the institution’s legitimacy arguing that it is “downplaying” the AfD’s achievements.

According to Seiling, who is German, Grokipedia is attempting to undermine the authority of German institutions created to prevent another Hitler. “It’s moving within the narratives that these parties themselves are spreading,” Seiling says. “If you look closely, their argument is also kind of shit. Just because [AfD is] polling at 15 percent doesn’t mean they have merit. ”

Nowhere is this more clear than how Grokipedia deals with the genocide in Gaza.

Much like the post on the AfD, the page has a long section dedicated to the “biases” of the United Nations and NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which Grok accuses of emphasizing “Israeli actions while minimizing Hamas’s violations.” Notably, Grokipedia repeats unsubstantiated claims by Israel that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was infiltrated by Hamas operatives, and the pages for the Israel–Hamas conflict rely strongly on hyperlinks from pro-Israel advocacy groups like UN Watch and NGO Watch.

“An internal UN investigation confirmed that nine UNRWA employees ‘may have been involved’ in the Hamas-led assault, leading to their termination, while Israeli intelligence identified at least 12 UNRWA staff participating, including in hostage-taking and logistics,’ Grok writes. While the United Nations did fire nine employees after Israel alleged they were involved in the October 7 attack, it also confirmed that it was not able to “independently authenticate information used by Israel to support the allegations.”

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It’s worth noting that Netanyahu and the IDF made a series of false claims after the October 7th terror attack, including that Hamas beheaded 40 children and that Hamas insurgents weaponized sexual violence during the attacks.

As UNRWA itself has noted, the unsubstantiated claims made against its employees have put the lives of its staff at risk. According to the U.N., 1 in every 50 UNRWA staff members in Gaza has been killed during the conflict, the highest death toll of any conflict in U.N. history.

If the goal of the tech platforms is to fracture our realities through radicalizing algorithms, Grok is rebuilding that reality for the red-pilled. That means not only questioning the integrity of traditional sources of authority, like Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or the United Nations, but also serving up an alternative set of authorities.

On Grok’s page covering conspiracy theories about the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it dedicates several paragraphs to what Grok describes as the “Initial Anomalies and Public Skepticism” about the official narrative. “Alternative media outlets played a pivotal role in disseminating initial doubts about the official account of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting,” Grok writes, referring to the Alex Jones-operated conspiracy theory site Infowars and other social media groups. (The families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre successfully sued Alex Jones for $1.5 billion for spreading false claims about the school shooting).

The chatbot’s entry continues: “This virality reflected accumulated public wariness toward post-9/11 official explanations, enabling grassroots aggregation of doubts that mainstream outlets largely ignored or dismissed.” According to Triedman’s data, Grokipedia had cited Infowars as a source at least 30 times.

Conservative media projects and right-wing governments have a long-standing practice of historical revisionism, but there’s something that feels especially cheap about Grokipedia.

“Encyclopedia-style media is extremely labor-intensive. Wikipedia requires huge human governance structures, all visible and auditable,” Seiling says. “Musk does not have armies of people writing pages. What he does have is a shit-ton of GPUs,” the technology that underpins AI processing.

Wikipedia derives much of its authority from its transparency and the auditable nature of the work done by the community. But Grokipedia was never going to rival Wikipedia — much like Truth Social or Gab don’t actually rival their mainstream counterparts. But that doesn’t make it any less dangerous. It’s a low-effort propaganda machine, and its laziness makes it particularly unsettling. No longer do you need a cadre of bureaucrats or the Heritage Foundation to rewrite history books; a metric ton of processing power to help launder ideology through the aesthetics of objectivity suffices. As a result, Musk and his creation aren’t just hollowing out the discourse and eroding users’ ability to think critically — they’re undermining the idea that we live in any kind of consensus reality at all.

Correction: November 30, 2025
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of LK Seiling’s name.

The post Elon Musk’s Anti-Woke Wikipedia Is Calling Hitler “The Führer” appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Sanchez was first indicted in October on charges of “corruptly concealing a document or record” as a standalone case, but the new indictment merges his charges with those against the other defendants, likely in hopes of burying the First Amendment problems with the case against him under prosecutors’ claims about the alleged shooting.

It’s an escalation of a familiar tactic. In 2023, Georgia prosecutors listed “zine” distribution as part of the conspiracy charges against 61 Stop Cop City protesters in a sprawling RICO indictment that didn’t bother to explain how each individual defendant was involved in any actual crime. I wrote back then about my concern that this wasn’t just sloppy overreach, but also a blueprint for censorship. Those fears have now been validated by Sanchez’s prosecution solely for possessing similar literature.

There have been other warnings that cops and prosecutors think they’ve found a constitutional loophole — if you can’t punish reporting it, punish transporting it. Los Angeles journalist Maya Lau is suing the LA County Sheriff’s Department for secretly investigating her for conspiracy, theft of government property, unlawful access of a computer, burglary, and receiving stolen property. According to her attorneys, her only offense was reporting on a list of deputies with histories of misconduct for the Los Angeles Times.

It’s also reminiscent of the Biden administration’s case against right-wing outlet Project Veritas for possessing and transporting Ashley Biden’s diary, which the organization bought from a Florida woman later convicted of stealing and selling it. The Constitution protects the right to publish materials stolen by others — a right that would be meaningless if they couldn’t possess the materials in the first place.

Despite the collapses of the Cop City prosecution and the Lau investigation — and its own dismissal of the Project Veritas case — the Trump administration has followed those dangerous examples, characterizing lawful activism and ideologies as terrorist conspiracies (a strategy Trump allies also floated during this first term) to seize the power to prosecute pamphlet possession anytime they use the magic word “Antifa.”

That’s a chilling combination for any journalist, activist, or individual who criticizes Trump. National security reporters have long dealt with the specter of prosecution under the archaic Espionage Act for merely obtaining government secrets from sources, particularly after the Biden administration extracted a guilty plea from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the rest of the press — and everyone else, for that matter — understood that merely possessing written materials, no matter what they said, is not a crime.

Guilt by Literature

At what point does a literary collection or newspaper subscription become prosecutorial evidence under the Trump administration’s logic? Essentially, whenever it’s convenient. The vagueness is a feature, not a bug. When people don’t know which political materials might later be deemed evidence of criminality, the safest course is to avoid engaging with controversial ideas altogether.

The slippery slope from anarchist zines to conventional journalism isn’t hypothetical, and we’re already sliding fast. Journalist Mario Guevara can tell you that from El Salvador, where he was deported in a clear case of retaliation for livestreaming a No Kings protest. So can Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, as she awaits deportation proceedings for co-writing an opinion piece critical of Israel’s wars that the administration considers evidence of support for terrorism.

At least two journalists lawfully in the U.S. — Ya’akub Ira Vijandre and Sami Hamdi — were nabbed by ICE just last month. The case against Vijandre is partially based on his criticism of prosecutorial overreach in the Holy Land Five case and his liking social media posts that quote Quranic verses, raising the question of how far away we are from someone being indicted for transporting a Quran or a news article critical of the war on terror.

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“Antifa” Protesters Charged With Terrorism for Constitutionally Protected Activity

Sanchez’s case is prosecutorial overreach stacked on more prosecutorial overreach. The National Lawyers Guild criticized prosecutors’ tenuous dot-connecting to justify holding 18 defendants responsible for one gunshot wound. Some defendants were also charged with supporting terrorism due to their alleged association with “Antifa.” Anarchist zines were cited as evidence against them, too.

Sanchez was charged following a search that ICE proclaimed on social media turned up “literal insurrectionist propaganda” he had allegedly transported from his home to an apartment, noting that “insurrectionary anarchism is regarded as the most serious form of domestic (non-jihadi) terrorist threat.” The tweet also said that Sanchez is a green card holder granted legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The indictment claims Sanchez was transporting those materials to conceal them because they incriminated his wife. But how can possession of literature incriminate anyone, let alone someone who isn’t even accused of anything but being present when someone else allegedly fired a gun? Zines aren’t contraband; it’s not illegal to be an anarchist or read about anarchism. I don’t know why Sanchez allegedly moved the box of documents, but if it was because he (apparently correctly) feared prosecutors would try to use them against his wife, that’s a commentary on prosecutors’ lawlessness, not Sanchez’s.

Violent rhetoric is subject to punishment only when it constitutes a “true threat” of imminent violence. Even then, the speaker is held responsible, not anyone merely in possession of their words.

Government prosecutors haven’t alleged the “Antifa materials” contained any “true threats,” or any other category of speech that falls outside the protection of the First Amendment. Nor did they allege that the materials were used to plan the alleged actions of protesters on July 4 (although they did allege that the materials were “anti-government” and “anti-Trump”).

Even the aforementioned “Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attack” zine, despite its hyperbolic title, reads like a think piece, not a how-to manual. It advocates for tactics like rent strikes and squatting, not shooting police officers. Critically, it has nothing to do with whether Sanchez’s wife committed crimes on July 4.

Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We don’t need a constitutional right to publish (or possess) only what the government likes, and the “anti-government” literature in Sanchez’s box of zines is exactly what the First Amendment protects. With history and leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán as a guide, we also know it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s censorship crusade will stop with a few radical pamphlets.

The Framers Loved Zines

There’s an irony in a supposedly conservative administration treating anti-government pamphlets as evidence of criminality. Many of the publications the Constitution’s framers had in mind when they authored the First Amendment’s press freedom clause bore far more resemblance to Sanchez’s box of zines than to the output of today’s mainstream news media.

Revolutionary-era America was awash in highly opinionated, politically radical literature. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was designed to inspire revolution against the established government. Newspapers like the Boston Gazette printed inflammatory writings by Samuel Adams and others urging the colonies to prepare for war after the Coercive Acts. The Declaration of Independence itself recognized the right of the people to rise up. It did not assume the revolution of the time would be the last one.

One might call it “literal insurrectionist propaganda” — and some of it was probably transported in boxes.

The framers enshrined press freedom not because they imagined today’s professionally trained journalists maintaining careful neutrality. They protected it because they understood firsthand the need for journalists and writers who believed their government had become tyrannical to espouse revolution.

For all their many faults, the framers were confident enough in their ideas that they were willing to let them be tested. If the government’s conduct didn’t call for radical opposition, then radical ideas wouldn’t catch on. It sure looks like the current administration doesn’t want to make that bet.

The post The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine appeared first on The Intercept.

The United States is amassing power off Venezuela’s coast. Warships, Marine detachments, and surveillance aircraft are flowing into the Caribbean under the banner of “counter-narcotics operations.” Military officials have presented Donald Trump with various game plans for potential operations. The U.S. president is openly tying Nicolás Maduro to narco-terror networks and cartel structures, while dangling both “talks” and threatening the use of military force in the same breath. It’s all pushing toward the culmination of crowning Maduro and his government America’s next top “terrorists” — the magic movie-script label that means the bombs can start heating up.

Then comes the media warm-up act: a New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens, published on Monday, assuring readers in “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro” that this is all modest, calibrated, even reasonable.

“The serious question is whether American intervention would make things even worse,” Stephens writes. “Intervention means war, and war means death. … The law of unintended consequences is unrepealable.”

The column’s argument is simple: Relax. This isn’t Iraq, a conflict Stephens helped cheerlead our way into and proudly declared in 2023 that two decades later, he doesn’t regret supporting the war.

“There are also important differences between Venezuela and Iraq or Libya,” he continues. “They include Trump’s clear reluctance to put U.S. boots on the ground for any extended period. And they include the fact that we can learn from our past mistakes.”

Venezuela, Stephens argues, provides grounds for intervention against criminals in a failing state. Maduro is corrupt, the threat is real, and Trump’s moves are not the opening shots of a war but the necessary application of restrained power. It’s an argument Americans have heard before. And it’s as familiar as the hardware now cruising toward Caracas.

Everything Old Is New Again

The echoes of Iraq are everywhere: the moral certainty, the insistence on a narrow mission, laws stretched to accommodate force, the journalist class nudging readers toward the idea of escalation. The Times leans on that posture — the intellectual confidence that if a dictator is cruel enough, if his country is chaotic enough, then U.S. firepower is not only justified but prudent and even moral.

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But step back. There’s nothing limited about an aircraft carrier strike group, including the world’s largest warship, moving into position near a country the United States has spent years sanctioning, isolating, and trying to politically dislodge. There’s nothing modest about weaving “narco-terrorism” into the policy narrative, a label that conveniently sidesteps congressional authorization. And there’s nothing reassuring about the president telling reporters he’s open to “talks,” while simultaneously telegraphing retaliatory force if Maduro doesn’t yield.

This is not law enforcement. It is coercive statecraft backed by military power. And when the press uncritically repeats the administration’s framing, the escalation becomes easier to swallow.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

Iraq should have been the end of innocence in American foreign-policy thinking. We toppled Saddam Hussein; what followed was not liberation but vacuum. Power didn’t flow to democratic institutions — it scattered, producing insurgency, sectarian collapse, and a national debt Americans will never pay off.

We’ve watched this choreography before too. In 2002, the Washington Post assured readers that toppling Saddam and invading Iraq would be — I kid you not — a “cakewalk.” But the New York Times once again led the way: A 2001 piece titled “The U.S. Must Strike at Saddam Hussein” framed Saddam as driven by “hatred intensified by a tribal culture of the blood feud”, and that preemptive war was America’s moral duty. By 2003, the Times was profiling “Liberals for War,” laundering the idea that even longtime doves were ready to get on board.

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And then there was the big one: In September 2002, the front-page report insisting Iraq’s access to “aluminum tubes” was “intensifying its quest for bomb parts,” a claim that became one of the Bush administration’s most potent talking points despite falling apart under scrutiny. Less than two years later, the Times quietly admitted what the country already knew: Its coverage “wasn’t as rigorous as it should have been” — an apology that did nothing for the dead, the displaced, or the war that never ended.

The argument that a conflict with Venezuela is any different hinges on the fantasy that U.S. firepower can topple a foreign regime without creating irreversible instability. But Venezuela is already in economic freefall. Its state infrastructure is brittle. A miscalculation — a strike, a naval confrontation, a retaliatory move from Maduro — could fracture what remains of the country’s governance.

Even in articles and political rhetoric selling the safe insistence this isn’t anything like Iraq, it’s hitting the familiar beats: Redefine the battlefield as a courtroom, call the targets “terrorists,” and pretend the spectators won’t notice. It’s the old Washington parlor trick — war recast as paperwork, missiles disguised as “measured responses.” But beneath the soothing language is the real hazard: This posture locks the United States into a glide path toward escalation. It casts Maduro as a stationary object America can strike without consequence, right up until he isn’t. Because the moment a U.S. service member dies in some hillside village most Americans couldn’t find on a map last week, or a destroyer gets hit by something unseen in the dark, the mission will shed every polite euphemism. It won’t be “limited.” It won’t be “precision interdictions.” It will become the only war frame Washington and the political media never hesitates to embrace: American vengeance, expansive and unbounded.

The Myth of “Limited” War

The press should be asking harder questions, not just about the Pentagon’s talking points, but about what kind of wars we’re willing to inherit. What do we expect these campaigns to become once they outlast the news cycle and the political administration that started them? What do they cost us in dollars, in decades, in the quiet bleed of national attention? Americans are already living through a squeezed economy; we can’t afford another open-ended conflict with the only measure of success being the upkeep of a strained momentum to throw bodies and dollars at finishing what we ultimately started.

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But that’s easy to forget from a corner suite in Washington or a standing desk in Manhattan. From that distance, war looks like a policy instrument, a rhetorical jousting match, an intellectualized game played on someone else’s terrain. But the last two decades of living through America’s post-Iraq unraveling should have taught us otherwise. A sharper press, the right questions, and a robust, skeptical stance toward American intervention abroad could have spared lives: service members lost to missions with no endpoint, civilians flattened as “collateral damage,” entire regions left to absorb the shockwaves long after Washington moved on.

That’s the distance the press should be interrogating — between the people who greenlight these missions and the people who have to live inside them. Because if we don’t ask these questions now, we’ll end up asking them years later, after the bills come due and the country pretends it never saw this coming.

The post War in Venezuela, Brought to You By the Same People Who Lied Us Into Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.

Larry Summers is the archetype of the technocratic Democratic insider. A prodigy whose abilities in the academy propelled him to powerful roles in government, he has for decades enjoyed close relationships with nearly every important figure in left-of-center politics, including advising former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and (in an informal role) Joe Biden. His CV gives the impression of the sort of shrewd politico who might broker an epic compromise to save the day in an episode of “The West Wing.”

Beyond the paragons of liberal society, Summers also has prodigious connections to more unsavory sorts, from financial bottom-feeders to goofy Silicon Valley founders like Jack Dorsey — and an outright criminal like human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

So it felt overdue when the Harvard Crimson first reported Monday night that Summers would “step back from all public commitments.” Summers was “deeply ashamed,” he told the paper in a statement, and he took “full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.” The Harvard economist would continue teaching, he said in the statement, and he did not specify which commitments he’d be stepping back from.

Summers, it bears remembering, had been publicly chastened and made a comeback before.

He’s survived numerous scandals, including previous reporting on his connections to Epstein while serving as president of Harvard University. But nothing has laid bare his cavalier attitude toward the appearance of impropriety like the close friendship revealed in the newly released trove of Epstein’s emails. They contain frequent correspondence between the late billionaire sex criminal and both Summers and his wife, Elisa New, a literature professor emerita at Harvard. The emails shed new light on what Summers had previously told the Wall Street Journal was a relationship that “primarily focused on global economic issues.”

Indeed, the emails reveal the two men had a close relationship and discussed deeply personal issues together long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction on the charge of solicitation of a minor — up until July 5, 2019, the day before the financier’s final arrest and subsequent death. In one message, the married Summers bemoans his pursuit of an unnamed woman, to which Epstein offers his read on the situation: “shes smart. making you pay for past errors. … you reacted well.” In further reporting published Monday by the Crimson, Summers and Epstein also discussed the economist’s pursuit of a woman he reportedly referred to as a mentee, and the late financier dubbed himself Summers’s “wing man.”

Summers is a towering figure in economic discourse. The son of two economists and nephew of two Nobel laureates in the subject (his father, Robert Summers, née Samuelson, was Paul Samuelson’s brother; his mother was Kenneth Arrow’s sister), he grew up steeped in the discipline. Not to be overshadowed by his relations, Summers earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he became a tenured professor before turning 30, one of the youngest in the school’s history. He went on to hold posts as chief economist at the World Bank, secretary of the Treasury Department, Harvard president, and director of the National Economic Council. That’s the side of his story fit for “The West Wing.”

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The undercurrent is far less flattering. While at the World Bank, Summers signed a memo that argued for dumping waste in African nations, although he later claimed it was meant to be sarcastic. As Treasury secretary, he pushed for deregulation and the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act’s banking oversight, and, crucially, helped block regulation of over-the-counter derivatives (financial instruments traded directly between counterparties, rather than on an exchange) — a decision that ultimately contributed to the disastrous 2008 financial crash. Incidentally, Summers would go on to make millions of dollars working for banks and hedge funds.

After serving in Clinton’s Treasury Department for both terms (he started as undersecretary, then deputy secretary, and ascended to secretary when his mentor, Robert Rubin, left in 1999), Summers ascended to the Harvard presidency. His tenure was eventful. He famously clashed with Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the Afro-American Studies Department; multiple prominent faculty members considered leaving just months into his administration. (On-campus affairs clearly remain top of mind for Summers, whose last public tweet before the Epstein emails dropped was hand-wringing about the Crimson’s support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.)

Summers caused an uproar as university president when he attempted to explain the gender imbalance in the economics profession by claiming it was the result of women being innately worse at mathematical thinking. While he has claimed this was taken out of context, one of his email exchanges with Epstein showed that Summers’s disdain toward women’s intelligence hadn’t dissipated in the decade since his ouster in 2006. In the email, he snarked: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.” Under Summers’s leadership, Harvard’s hiring of women to tenure track positions fell from 36 percent to a mere 13 percent. Since then, Summers has become a martyr of sorts for pundits, conservative and liberal alike, decrying cancel culture.

Following his supposed cancellation, Summers took a brief sojourn to Wall Street hedge fund D.E. Shaw, where he made $5.2 million in the two years of his employment at the firm, despite reportedly only working one day a week. Summers padded out his lifestyle by pulling in an additional $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street banks.

With future aspirations in academia apparently limited to merely an at-large professorship at Harvard, Summers turned his eye back to politics in 2008. After advising Obama’s campaign, Summers took an influential role as director of the National Economic Council, where he was instrumental in cutting down the size of the new administration’s stimulus package. After losing out on the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, Summers returned to Harvard, where he has remained since, while still exerting his influence in the world of politics. He was in the running for a return to the Treasury in the Biden administration, and publicly railed against Covid-19 stimulus checks.

Naturally, he also hasn’t been left wanting for lucrative opportunities in the private sector, often explicitly renting out his reputation to corporations. The illustrious deregulator has advised or sat on boards for dozens of companies, including predatory lenders, Wall Street behemoths, and cryptocurrency cons. He worked for Genie Energy while the firm was drilling in the Golan Heights, the illegal Israeli settlement in Syria. He’s also advised CitiBank and Marc Andreessen’s a16z.

On at least three separate occasions, Summers has left a company shortly before they faced investigation. In 2018, he left LendingClub less than a month before the Federal Trade Commission sued the fintech company, charging it with deceptive practices. (The FTC announced in July 2021 that LendingClub would pay $18 million to settle the charges.) He left Digital Currency Group at some point in 2022; the firm’s website listed him as an adviser until November 2022. However, while following up on calls for more transparent disclosure from Summers, Protos reported he had left earlier than that. In any event, the crypto company was hit with a joint SEC/Justice Department probe in January 2023, followed by a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James in October. (In January, the SEC announced the company would pay $38.5 million in civil penalties.) On February 9, 2024, he abruptly resigned from Block (formerly Square), just one week before they faced investigation from federal regulators. (In January 2025, Block was hit with $255 million in penalties from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and 48 states.)

Still, when Sam Altman faced mutiny from inside OpenAI and fired the entire board, it was Larry Summers to whom he turned for help consolidating his control and appeasing investors.

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On top of all of this advising and a full professorship, Summers has still found time to be a columnist at the Washington Post, a regular Bloomberg contributor, and an omnipresent source for the journalism elite. Despite this lack of work-life balance, Summers also amazingly managed to make headlines in 2023 by calling for unemployment to increase to combat inflation, set against the backdrop of a tropical locale.

Summers has spent decades enjoying the finer things of life inside the D.C. Beltway: power, fame, millions of dollars, multiple flights on Epstein’s private plane. Over that time frame, he has brought ruin to our financial system, destroyed American manufacturing, helped stop student debt relief, hampered the recovery from the Great Recession, and helped ensure that economic policy serves the interests of capital holders and not workers. In short, we live in a hell made possible in no small part by Summers’ influence.

The antifeminist writer Helen Andrews recently highlighted Summers’s case as an example of the failures of “cancel culture.” In a way she’s right: Cancel culture failed spectacularly to excise Summers from positions of influence. After years of maintaining a close relationship with a known sex trafficker (which has been public knowledge for years), he is still teaching undergraduates at Harvard. He was advising presidents and senators as recently as 2023. His “cancellation” was not even enough to preclude his consideration for a Cabinet post that would have put him fifth in line for the presidency (again).

As much as any single person can, Summers embodies the most odious qualities of the political elite and the scorn they show for basic human well-being. We don’t need to be getting our policy insights from a pedophile-adjacent, ethically conflicted nepo baby. His advice isn’t worth it. He was wrong about our recent bout of inflation. He was wrong about bank deregulation. He was wrong about free trade agreements. He was wrong about fiscal stimulus. He even lost Harvard nearly $2 billion as president.

We should demand much more from our economists, policymakers, and leaders. Indeed, making a more humane, responsive government will depend on it.

The post Don’t Let Larry Summers Back Into Polite Society appeared first on The Intercept.