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 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.

The post Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Can Now Control What TikTok Users See 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 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.

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.

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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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.

It’s hard to imagine a worse moment for Donald Trump to be caught in the Epstein dragnet than at the tail end of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, with food benefits rattled, “affordability” on everyone’s minds, and his own voters starting to wonder if the guy in the red tie is actually on their side.

On the same day Trump finally signed a bill to reopen the government after 43 days of chaos, a coalition of House Democrats and Republicans dropped a tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails that punches holes straight through the president’s carefully curated story about a distant, long-ago acquaintance, with Epstein alleging Trump “knew about the girls” and “spent hours at my house” with one of the victims.

While the messages don’t show criminal conduct by Trump, they landed at a moment when Americans are already furious with his handling of Epstein’s files, the shutdown, and the basic question of whether their government works for the powerful or for everyone else. Together, they form a pincer around a president who keeps promising transparency and law and order, then flinching the second those promises threaten him personally.

“The Dog That Hasn’t Barked”

The new emails came from the Epstein Estate in response to a subpoena and were released by the House Oversight Committee.

In one April 2011 exchange, Epstein tells Ghislaine Maxwell, his associate who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, that “the dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” adding that a trafficking victim “spent hours at my house with him” yet “he has never once been mentioned.” Maxwell replies that she has “been thinking about that.”

In another email, from January 2019, Epstein writes to author Michael Wolff about Mar-a-Lago: “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

A third exchange from December 2015 shows Wolff and Epstein gaming out how Trump should respond to questions from CNN about their relationship, with Wolff advising Epstein to “let him hang himself” if Trump “says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house” because that would give Epstein “PR and political currency” over him.

The more than 23,000 documents do not contain the storied “client list” the internet — and Trump’s own supporters — have been clamoring for, and none of the publicly released civil case records accuse Trump. But the emails do something almost as politically toxic: They cut against Trump’s own narrative that he barely knew Epstein, and that he had no meaningful insight into what Epstein had done.

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The White House is already calling the messages a “fake narrative” stitched together by partisan Democrats and pointing out that key accuser Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year, repeatedly said she never saw Trump engage in wrongdoing. (Trump himself has also repeatedly denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein’s crimes.) Republicans on the Oversight Committee accused Democrats of selectively redacting her name to make the emails look worse. But the specific denials aren’t the point anymore; the point is that the president now looks like he has something to hide about his role in a story where many Americans are already inclined to believe there was a cover-up.

America Wants the Files

Public opinion on this issue is not subtle. Polling in early October found that about three-quarters of Americans want all Epstein-related files released, with only 9 percent saying no documents should be made public.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey in July went even further: 69 percent of respondents said they believe Trump’s administration is hiding details about Epstein’s clients; just 6 percent said it isn’t. Only 17 percent approved of Trump’s handling of the case, his worst score on any issue in that poll. Even among Republicans the president was underwater.

This isn’t a niche, left-wing obsession. A July Economist/YouGov poll found that views on the need for transparency in the Epstein investigation cut across partisan lines, even as Trump’s overall job approval slid to a net negative of 15 points. PBS’s own write-up notes that support for releasing the files includes majorities of Republicans and independents.

The long algebra cut short, Americans might be OK with all manner of Trump impropriety, but you lose them when a disgraced billionaire pedophile enters the fray.

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For years, Republicans have built their identity around a moral panic of their own design — branding political opponents as “groomers,” painting LGBTQ+ people as threats to children, and accusing anyone outside their tribe of abetting pedophilia. They’ve cast themselves as the last line of defense against child trafficking, stoking a base that’s become genuinely animated by fantasies of a global cabal preying on kids. That’s why the Epstein revelations land like an airburst: not because the conspiracy is real in the way they imagine it, but because it punctures the mythology they’ve wrapped themselves in, exposing the rot inside the movement that claims to be protecting America’s children.

The Epstein emails hit, and suddenly the MAGA universe isn’t marching in lockstep; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene went online and tore into Trump for “how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out,” a line you only write when something in the foundation has shifted. She followed it by saying her loyalty is to God and her voters first — a subtle mutiny, but a mutiny all the same.

That’s the backdrop for the House push to force the issue. Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and dozens of bipartisan co-sponsors have been pushing legislation that would compel the Justice Department to publish its Epstein records, building on earlier efforts from Florida Democrats who chased these documents during the Biden years. On Wednesday night, the House forced Speaker Mike Johnson’s hand with an arcane rules maneuver that finally made him schedule a vote on releasing the records for next week, over objections from House Republicans and the White House. That measure is likely to pass the House but would face a much tougher road through the Senate. However, should it pass the Senate, it would force a showdown in which Trump could either sign that bill and live with whatever comes out — or veto it and tell an already suspicious public that he personally stopped the truth from seeing daylight.

A Credibility Crisis

If that were the only fire burning, the White House might be able to ride it out. It isn’t.

The email release landed in the final days of a 43-day shutdown that shuttered much of the federal government and froze Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments for roughly 42 million people — the first time in modern history SNAP funding was allowed to lapse during a shutdown. Federal judges twice ordered the administration to restore full benefits; the Supreme Court granted Trump’s emergency appeal and temporarily blocked one of those orders, leaving families in limbo while states scrambled to cover the gap.

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Policy analysts and state attorneys general pointed out that the Department of Agriculture has billions in contingency reserves and other emergency accounts precisely for situations like this, and that the administration could have used them to keep food assistance flowing. Instead, the White House chose a monthslong game of chicken over health care tax credits while airports backed up, disability beneficiaries rationed groceries, and parents fielded notices that their EBT cards would go dry. And while the GOP shutdown gambit paid off for the Republicans in the short term, many Americans blamed them as the source of their pain.

America’s affordability crises has arrived, and Trump is on the hook. A new AP/NORC poll released this week found only 36 percent of adults approve of Trump’s overall performance and just about a third approve of his handling of the economy, health care, or the federal government. Most dangerous for Trump, the erosion of his establishment is finally showing up, and the call is coming from inside the house. That same poll found his declining approval rating was mostly driven by Republicans, with their approval for his management of the federal government falling from 81 percent in March to 68 percent now.

Ask voters what actually matters to them, and they point first to the economy and affordability: Three-quarters say the economy is “very important” to their 2026 vote; majorities say the same about threats to democracy, immigration, and housing costs. Trump is underwater on almost all of it.

So when new emails emerge suggesting that he has not told the whole story about his relationship with a convicted child sex trafficker — just as his choices have people lining up at food banks — that story doesn’t land in a vacuum. It lands in a country that already suspects the president is looking out for himself first.

A Pincer of His Own Making

The looming House vote on Epstein transparency turns that suspicion into a structural problem. On one flank, Trump faces a broad electorate that overwhelmingly wants every unclassified Epstein record released and already believes his administration is hiding the worst of it. On the other, he faces a Congress that, for once, is being nudged toward genuine oversight by a coalition that runs from progressive Democrats to libertarian Republicans.

If the bill passes the Senate and Trump signs it, he loses control of the documents — and the narrative — entirely. The Justice Department has already admitted it is sitting on tens of thousands of pages of records beyond what civil suits and Maxwell’s trial exposed, and has so far produced only a fraction of what congressional subpoenas demand. Nobody in the White House can guarantee that there isn’t another “dog that hasn’t barked” email buried somewhere in that pile.

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Veto the bill, and the president becomes the single most visible obstacle to telling Epstein’s victims — and the public — the full story. He would be doing it after a shutdown that left poor and disabled Americans wondering how they were going to eat and after months of promising that his second term would finally bring accountability for elites who prey on children.

Either way, the myth Trump sold to his base — that he was the one man willing to expose the secrets of the powerful — is collapsing in real time. In poll after poll, people say they think he is protecting somebody. Increasingly, they have to ask whether that somebody is himself.

The Wrong Time to Blink

You can feel Republicans straining to square the circle. On Capitol Hill, they accuse Democrats of weaponizing the emails while insisting they, too, support “full transparency” — eventually, after careful redactions and more closed-door review. In conservative media, some MAGA dynamos have raged that the Epstein focus is a liberal “distraction” from real issues like inflation, even as their own viewers tell pollsters that grocery prices and rent are exactly why they’re so angry at the shutdown and at Trump’s economy.

With full awareness of that dissonance, the administration is now sprinting toward an economic message it hopes can drown out the rest. Trump has reportedly ramped up his travel schedule, darting through swing states in a rushed attempt to smother the Epstein fallout under the safer storyline of economic revival. The White House may frame it as a shoring up of constituency, but it looks more like damage control: factory visits, small-business roundtables, and grocery store photo ops meant to convince voters the economy is better than it feels.

But no amount of travel gloss can obscure the deeper habit Americans are starting to recognize. A president who promised to smash corrupt systems has instead opted its to starve his poorest citizens during a manufactured crisis and slow-walk the truth about one of the most notorious predators of our time. It’s the same reflex: Use state power to protect the powerful, then gaslight the public about who is really to blame.

The House and Senate may be about to force him to choose. Release the files and gamble that whatever is in there won’t destroy him, or veto transparency and finally make clear that the swamp he promised to drain was never meant to include the likes of Jeffrey Epstein — or that he’s a creature of the swamp himself.

The post Epstein Is the Only Thing That Could Turn Trump’s Base Against Him appeared first on The Intercept.

For Gaza’s 2 million survivors, the word “ceasefire” no longer sounds like peace; it sounds like a trick of language, another fragile pause between massacres. After two years of genocide that erased entire families, neighborhoods, and futures, many in Gaza met this fragile truce not with celebration but disbelief, exhaustion, and fear. One Palestinian described the current moment as a “pause between two pains”: the horror they lived through and the uncertainty that has followed.

I spoke with six people from Gaza — a filmmaker, a photojournalist, an architect, a former spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality, a civil worker, and a survivor — who offer a piercing look into what it means to first live through a genocide and then to try to live through its aftermath. Their words reveal a haunting truth: The war may have paused, but it doesn’t feel truly over.

“No Triumph in Surviving”

Hala Asfour, a 24-year-old filmmaker and photographer, said her initial reaction to the ceasefire was pure disbelief. “I didn’t feel joy,” she says. “Just this heavy, oppressive feeling, like my heart couldn’t absorb what had happened. I feel a great void. Even a week later, I still see the war everywhere: in people’s faces, in the children, in the echo of planes and drones that will never leave my memory.” For Asfour, this ceasefire is a pause, not peace. She calls it a “pause between two pains,” the agony of the genocide they endured and the suffering that continues in its aftermath.

Fear is now part of her body, she says, and escaping it seems impossible. “Fear is something I breathe. It’s inside me. Every loud sound, every plane, every buzz — it takes me back to that first explosion of the war. Safety? I don’t feel it at all,” she says. She thinks this ceasefire is a pause that feels like the calm before the storm. She and the people of Gaza lived through many truces before, only to have new, more devastating attacks follow.

For Hala, the war stole much more than homes. It stole her life, herself, her friends, her colleagues, the familiar streets, and everything that looked like her. Hala also lost her fiancé, the Palestinian journalist Mohammad Salama, an Al Jazeera camera operator, in a “double-tap” Israeli strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on August 25, 2025, that also killed five other journalists.

“What I miss most is reassurance,” she says. “The simple feeling of waking up and knowing where your day will go. My wish now is to have one normal day.” This genocide shattered Hala into fragments: a girl who once dreamed and a woman who now struggles to survive.

In Gaza, living becomes the harder choice, more complicated than death itself. “There’s no triumph in surviving. It’s a different kind of pain,” Hala reflects. “You wake up every day carrying the guilt of still being alive when others—people you loved—are gone and didn’t make it till the end. We survived to tell their stories, to honor them, but survival isn’t a privilege.” Slowly, she is learning to breathe again. “Life feels fragmented, but with each child’s laugh, with every sunrise piercing the ruins, we inch toward the possibility of breathing—just a little. Not because we are OK, but because we have to try,” she says.

“I Take More Photos Now Than During the War Itself”

For Anas Zayed Fteiha, a 31-year-old photojournalist with Anadolu Agency, the ceasefire has meant returning to work to document the aftermath of destruction. (Fteiha is currently pursuing legal action against the global publishing company Axel Springer, which he has accused of violating his constitutional rights after one of its tabloids in Germany accused him of being a propagandist for Hamas.)

“The war has not really ended,” he says, noting the breaches in the truce and the ongoing human cost for those left behind. “For mothers who lost their children, for those who lost limbs, for families left homeless—the war never stopped.” But there is a paradoxical relief in the pause. “I feel relief, but fear persists,” Fteiha says. “There’s comfort in not hearing the explosions daily, but the trauma is not gone.”

The people who lost their homes and have nowhere to go are what still haunts Anas after the ceasefire. “This genocide stole many friends and colleagues — and my home, the house I grew up in. Our lives have shattered. Gaza is no longer a livable place,” he says. “Sometimes we envy the martyrs who were killed — they’ve survived the pain and suffering we now face.”

Even as the ceasefire seems to hold, his work is intensifying, and his camera keeps clicking, capturing shots of survival and grief. The rubble and the lives scattered among it demand documentation. “I take more photos now than during the war itself. There are so many stories that must be told,” he says.

The experience has reshaped his understanding of journalism. “I thought journalism was protected. I thought journalists were respected. In Gaza, I learned the hard truth: Our work is sacred, but we are not protected. We witness, and we are vulnerable,” Anas says.

“We’re Living in a City of Ghosts”

Nooh al-Shaghnobi, 24, a civil defense worker, witnessed the war from the front lines of rescue operations. “I didn’t believe the ceasefire at first,” he says. “Even now, there are breaches and attacks on the so-called ‘yellow zones’ the army designated, and we are still pulling bodies from the rubble. Thousands of bodies remain under the rubble — around 10,000 people. The war didn’t really stop; it just began a new phase.”

Al-shaghnobi stayed in Gaza City, on duty, and refused to leave with his family to the south as two years of genocide stretched on, and now, al-Shaghnobi describes the recovery work as grueling and deeply traumatic. With limited equipment, each recovery is a struggle. “We work with shovels, hammers, and basic tools. To remove one body can take a whole day. And the smell, the sight of decomposed remains, skeletons, skulls, bones — it is impossible to forget. We’re living in a city of ghosts,” he says.

Faith and resilience, he says, have been reshaped. “I saw miracles, and I survived each time the Civil Defense team was directly targeted while many of my colleagues were killed. That changed me. But our dreams, our lives, everything is fragile. Any moment, it can vanish,” he says.

Al-shaghnobi’s work makes him confront mortality every day. “Honestly, those who died are the ones who really survived. Yet for those of us who survived, it’s like living in a body without a soul. The war took our loved ones, our homes, and our hope. We’ve learned to live numb. We’ve witnessed so much death and destruction that it has become part of our daily life,” he says.

Even in moments of gratitude, there is also pain. Al-shaghnobi recalled the shock of losing his close friend, the journalist Saleh Aljafarawi, just days after the ceasefire was announced: “We celebrated surviving the massacre, only to see him killed. That’s the reality here — the ceasefire is never complete. The danger never ends.”

“Joy and Fear Mixed Together”

Sara Bsaiso, 32, a human resources manager, echoed this mixture of relief and lingering terror. “When I heard about the ceasefire, it felt like just another headline. We’ve heard about ceasefires before. They never lasted. We didn’t believe this one would either. Only when the bombing truly stops will we believe the war has ended,” she says.

After her family was forced to repeatedly flee south in March 2024 and returned north in February 2025, only to flee again before this most recent ceasefire, Bsaiso carries the exhaustion of displacement. Survival now means facing a new battle: “Sometimes I think those who were killed might be in a better place than us — because what lies ahead is another kind of war: rebuilding from nothing, living without homes, jobs, or normal life.”

She reflects on what the war stole. “It took our sense of time, safety, stability, normalcy, minds, lives, homes, jobs,” and, for a time, her brother. Hossam, 36, was imprisoned for over a year in Israeli prisons. She describes the moment when her family found out her brother would be released. “When we saw his name on the list of released prisoners, joy and fear mixed together. We were terrified it might change at the last minute. When we finally saw him before us, safe — it felt like a dream. That was our greatest wish throughout the war,” she says.

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“Now we cherish the smallest things: a meal, a bed, a roof over our heads. It’s changed how we think about life and what we prioritize,” she says. Her words capture the quiet appreciation for life in the shadow of destruction. Even as she rebuilds her life, fear lingers, an invisible shadow that no ceasefire can erase. “We survived,” she says, “but the next war could come at any moment.” Despite everything, Sara is trying to find a sense of normalcy. “We must try to breathe again, no matter how much pain we’ve endured. We were born for a reason, and we have to start over with determination and bring life back again,” Bsaiso says.

“All We Can Do Now Is Wait and Pray”

For Walaa Shublaq, a 29-year-old architect and visual artist, the announcement of a ceasefire brought a feeling she hadn’t known in years — a fragile, fleeting joy.

But in the days that followed, the silence was unbearable. The war replayed endlessly in her mind: scene after scene, sound after sound. While the world celebrated, she felt only anger and exhaustion. “I couldn’t even respond to messages of congratulations,” she says. “I was angry — at everyone who could have stopped this bloodshed but didn’t.” For Shublaq, survival has been a burden. It meant abandoning everything and everyone she loved just to stay alive, running from one death to another. “Sometimes we envied the martyrs,” she says. “They had completed their test. But for us who survived, the test continues.”

The genocide robbed her not just of her home, but also her sense of self. Her grandmother, her friends, her art, her dreams — all gone. “Now, I no longer mourn the material things I lost; I mourn their meaning,” she says. But amid all that loss, something shifted. “I found a kind of freedom — from illusion, from attachment. I learned that emptiness can only be filled with light,” she says. Among the ruins, she rediscovered fragments of her past, including the signed contract for her first book.

Shublaq still remembers images of the genocide: barefoot children chasing water carts, smoke from wood-fire ovens choking the air, overcrowded donkey carts, and the constant hum of Israeli drones. Now, she wants to forever forget the faces of soldiers, the tanks, and the nights she ran barefoot through the streets to escape death.

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As part of the ceasefire deal, more than 1,700 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli prisons in October; among them were two of Shublaq’s brothers, Anas and Abdullah. They had been imprisoned for one year and eight months, enduring brutal physical and psychological torture. Another of her brothers, Omar, remains captive. “When my phone rang that night and I heard, ‘Walaa? It’s Anas — your brother,’ I broke down in tears,’ she says. “On that day, we waited for my brothers for long hours from the day till we finally met at night at 9 p.m. in absolute darkness. The reunion was bittersweet — joy shadowed by the absence of our third brother.”

“They came back older, heavier with time, but still radiant with life,” she says. When asked about the future, she hesitates. “I’ve lost the ability and the desire to plan,” she says. “All we can do now is wait and pray for a vast and merciful relief.”

“Our Bodies Survived, but Our Souls Didn’t”

Asem Alnabih, 35, a former spokesperson for Gaza Municipality who’s now a correspondent for Al-Araby TV, approached the ceasefire with measured skepticism. “There is no safety,” he says. “The city is still in crisis: water shortages, blocked streets, broken sewage systems. Even after the ceasefire, people are living in a state of collapse, and they are struggling for basic services.” People in Gaza often say, ‘After the war comes another war.’ This is the reality now.

Like al-Shaghnobi, Alnabih stayed in Gaza City, never moving to the south. “I slept in a car, a park, a building basement, municipal facilities, friends’ homes, and even with strangers. Displacement became part of daily life,” he says. He describes what home means to him: a place where his family could sit together peacefully, coos, laugh, and feel safe.

For Alnabih, the war has meant the loss of relatives, friends, and normalcy. “It took my closeness to my wife and children — I’ve been separated from them since before the war; they were abroad. It took my nephew Ahmed, my niece Rasha, and my brother-in-law Motaz. It took my dear friend Dr. Refaat Alareer, one of the brightest souls I knew. It left me surrounded by loss, loneliness, and grief.”

He describes survival as a “delayed death.” “Maybe our bodies survived, but our souls didn’t,” he says. Like all the people of Gaza, Asem’s dreams have become so simple: a peaceful night’s sleep, a meal without fear, and a meeting not torn apart by a bombing. “But my deeper dream is that our sacrifices finally lead to something — that we live free, in our own land, with dignity,” he continued. “Peace is only possible when Palestinians receive their full rights.”

The ceasefire may have silenced the bombs, but it has not ended the war — not the one inside people, nor the one against their right to exist. In Gaza, peace is not the sound of quiet skies; it is the dream of justice that remains deferred.

Every survivor now carries the weight of survival, not as triumph, but as testimony. They live among ruins, haunted by what was taken and what could return at any moment. But even here, between grief and persistence, they reach for the smallest signs of life: a child’s laughter, a brother returned home, or the morning sun rising over broken walls.

The post Gazans Reflect on Surviving to See a Ceasefire: “Sometimes We Envy the Martyrs” appeared first on The Intercept.

In his first term, Donald Trump appeared to be gunning for the title of most corrupt president in U.S. history. But after taking advantage of four years on the sidelines to ruminate about how to do better, he’s blown all competition completely out of the water in the nine months since retaking the Oval Office.

Trump set off a media firestorm in 2017 by breaking from tradition and not placing his assets in a blind trust, instead choosing to entrust them to his children. The conflicts of interest invited by this farce were met with lawsuits, and #Resistance activists spoke about the emoluments clause of the Constitution as though they were constitutional law professors. Some reporting called this a “halfway blind” trust, which is sort of like a halfway-cooked chicken in that, for practical purposes, it’s a nonstarter. But after Trump left office in 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuits, and Merrick Garland, Biden’s spineless attorney general, slow-rolled any investigations into the former president.

Faced with few consequences for this first round of graft, Trump and company have flouted even the appearance of adhering to ethical guidelines since his reelection in November. The presidential transition process was delayed by the Trump campaign not filing internal ethics guidance for the transition team, and the inauguration fund’s coffers were filled with many millions of dollars from donors eager to get on the president’s good side. That panhandling set the tone for the administration. 

In October, a Trump benefactor gave $130 million to stave off what would have been a major political liability and cover the paychecks for service members during the government shutdown. The office space Eleanor Roosevelt once occupied has been unceremoniously bulldozed to make way for a gargantuan ballroom, also being funded by corporate “donations” from the likes of BlackRock, Booz Allen Hamilton, and tech giants like Apple and Amazon. The sticker price of the project has soared from $200 million to $350 million. To add insult to injury, the donors will likely write off their bribes to the latest Trump event venue as charitable contributions, as economist Dean Baker laid out. The president is working to intervene in negotiations around the sale of Warner Brothers–Discovery to ensure that his longtime supporters, the Ellisons, are able to add on to their growing media empire. And that’s just the past couple of weeks!

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It’s not for nothing that my colleagues at the Revolving Door Project have had more than enough material for a biweekly rundown in our Corruption Calendar. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington also recently published a timeline tracking national and state corruption since January 20.

While Trumpian corruption is striking in frequency, scale, and just how routine it is starting to feel, this administration was the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity. The second Trump administration is a striking monument to governmental misconduct, but the ground was broken long ago, with both parties laying the foundation. For the past half century, corporate and white-collar crime have gone largely unenforced. This was the result of both a widespread shift in views of governance (à la the Reagan Revolution) and a coordinated plan orchestrated to enable private wealth to hijack our democracy, as David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher documented in their new book “Master Plan,” building on a podcast of the same name.

Trump himself is a byproduct of the wealthy being empowered to violate the law. Seemingly his entire pre-government career was predicated on getting away with gaming bankruptcy law, committing widespread financial fraud, and racial discrimination. Now, in government, he is employing the “blitzscaling” model pioneered by firms like Uber to break the law faster than anyone can keep up with.

The relentlessness of the Trump administration’s criminality is the point; it becomes borderline impossible to tackle any single instance of corruption if two more spring up by the time you finish reading up on it. This “flood the zone” strategy has been the hallmark of Trump 2.0.

Calls for Democrats to find their way back from the wilderness by forcefully rebuking corporate influence and corruption, something we at the Revolving Door Project have been urging as the cornerstone of progressive politics for years, are multiplying. Politicians, notably Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, both Democrats, are emerging as anti-corruption champions. To mount a real anti-corruption agenda, though, Democrats must go farther than just condemning the sundry glad-handing of Trump world. There is no appetite for going back to the halcyon days when everyone knew the legal code was merely a suggestion for corporate titans and the ultra-rich, even as they masqueraded as law-abiding citizens.

The Great Recession was a turning point; the extent of corporate lawbreaking in the financial sector was laid bare. And, famously, hardly anyone ever went to jail. Obama-era regulators, in many ways the acme of our last half-century of the hands-off approach to ruling-class misconduct, earned rebuke and scorn as “the chickenshit club,” afraid to square up against the powerful, if not overtly committed to serve elite interests. Since 2008, it has only become more apparent that the wealthy play by an entirely different set of rules. 

Trump’s first election was, in part, built on the argument that he knew “how to play the game.” In this telling, his ability to break the rules was actually an asset because he would break them for you rather than just for the powerful. It was always a dubious pitch, but it’s understandable why — faced with the choice between someone trying to convince you the game that’s obviously been fixed is actually not rigged, and someone who tells you how they cheat and promise to help you get ahead a little bit — people would gravitate toward the latter. Part of the early MAGA mythos was built on resignation to the fact that our rule of law is fundamentally perverted to create two parallel tracks of justice: an unforgiving, punitive, carceral system for most people, and a cushy, consequence-free dinner party circuit for the ruling class.

Dethroning Trump will not be enough to restore real rule of law; the Biden administration is proof enough of that. Donald Trump was excised from the White House with historically bad public sentiment in the immediate aftermath of a failed coup. Under Biden, the Garland Justice Department tried to wind the clock back to 2016 and resume operating the way establishment politicians did in the 1990s and 2000s. It failed spectacularly, allowing bad actors like Elon Musk to grow ever more powerful while continuing to flout the law with impunity. The result was an embittered Trump who faced no real repercussions for his corruption — the worst-case scenario.

If and when Democrats control the executive branch again, they will have an even more daunting task after the second Trump term than they did the first, and their existing body of work does not inspire confidence. Business-as-usual enforcement did not fail to rein in corruption over the last four years because of strategic missteps. It failed because it is incapable of rooting out undue elite influence that’s baked into the very essence of the way we became accustomed to enforcing the law. Trump is an extreme example, but he is the logical extreme.

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As Trump pardons business associates, sets up meetings for his children’s business interests with foreign leaders, and grows his personal wealth, the consequences of failing to hold the powerful to account are more obvious than ever. The answer isn’t simply to go back to electing more reasonable politicians. As long as the two tracks of our justice system diverge, the game stays rigged and the Trumpian appeal to America’s id will stay firmly entrenched. 

To dislodge the hold that corruption has on our government and restore the rule of law, Democrats will need to decide who they really are — and who they’ll fight for.

The post Liberal Elites Kicked the Door Wide Open for Trump’s Flagrant Corruption appeared first on The Intercept.

Boy does it feel good in New York City. On Tuesday night, just over 30 minutes after polls closed, Zohran Mamdani won the election to become the city’s next mayor. To do so, he overcame substantial political headwinds: The man who will be our first Muslim mayor was constantly tarred as an antisemite and, as too often seems to follow, was subject to an undercurrent of Islamophobic attacks about “sharia law” and “global jihad” throughout the race. Mamdani also faced the city’s ruling class of millionaires and billionaires, who engaged in some heartwarming class solidarity by spending tens of millions against him and vowing to flee the headquarters of global capital if he won, which perhaps motivated ordinary New Yorkers to turn out to support the mayor-elect. In other words, the New York assembly member stared down the ruling class and still won.

In a stunning turn of events, many of those high-class naysayers have come right back around to offer a helping hand in governing the city, effectively bending the knee to the man they cast as an existential threat.

Chiefest among these converts is billionaire hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman, who famously contributed nearly $2 million of his own money to efforts to kill Mamdani’s candidacy and warned on social media that the city would “become much more dangerous and economically unviable” after Mamdani routed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June Democratic primary. In that same Twitter tome, Ackman promised there were “hundreds of million of dollars of capital available” if the right candidate would simply throw his hat in the race, and reduced the democratic will of the people to a plug-and-play scheme where this mythical person would be able to defeat Mamdani simply by running Michael Bloomberg’s “how-to-win-the-mayoralty IP.” (It’s well worth noting that New York saw the highest turnout in a mayoral election in more than 50 years.) As a result, it was with no small measure of glee that I read the Pershing Square Capital boss’s tweet on Tuesday night at-ing Mamdani: “congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.” A rival billionaire hedge fund guy responded by calling this olive branch “gimp-like.” If that’s what it takes, so be it!

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Elsewhere in the world of high finance, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who previously called Mamdani “more a Marxist than a socialist” and slammed him as pushing “ideological mush that means nothing in the real world,” is also offering his help. In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Dimon urged Mamdani to call up the outgoing mayor of Detroit for advice because “that’s the way you learn,” which is more than a little bit condescending. The billionaire also said he left a message for Mamdani the day after the election and selflessly offered to meet with him: “If I find it productive, I’ll continue to do it.” (The mayor-elect, for his part, responded that he’d take the CEO up on the offer, despite not agreeing across “every single issue.”) With all due respect, New York City is not Detroit, a city that was hollowed out by corporate flight, and Dimon, whose bank has invested $2 billion in that city’s recovery, seems to know this full well. Detroit “wasn’t like New York, which is kind of healthy,” he told CNN. That’s a real understatement, especially for the ultra-wealthy.

Elsewhere, the crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz urged his countrymen to reach out to Mamdani. “Once he’s the mayor, we’ve got to be sure he’s successful in keeping New York a thriving community,” he told Bloomberg News on Wednesday, a “community” for whom Novogratz did not say. “He’s tapping into a message that’s real: that we’ve got a tale of two cities in the Dickensian sense, to a degree we haven’t seen since we’ve been alive, and can you address the affordability issue in creative ways without driving business out.” The crypto industry might mourn the booster it had in the outgoing mayor, but something tells me “business” at large is going to be alright.

This isn’t to say everyone at the top has gracefully accepted the results. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, whose company was severely affected by new city rules limiting short-term rentals and who donated $2 million total to two anti-Mamdani super PACs, hasn’t publicly reacted to the news. Bloomberg, the former mayor who poured $5 million into fighting the red menace, has also stayed quiet. Crashouts abounded lower on the tax bracket as well.

It remains to be seen how Mamdani will govern and how big business will respond. Many onlookers have been eager to point out that the facts of governance and the world as it exists today will likely involve compromises and, as a result, disappointments. I’m sure many New Yorkers would love for Mamdani to leave these billionaires on read for all eternity, but New Yorkers are not known for their naiveté. It’s still a giddy feeling to see the masters of the universe sweat and prostrate themselves, if only for now. Our lame-duck, court-jester mayor got at least one thing right during his tenure: The haters truly do become your waiters at the table of success.

The post New York’s Billionaires Are Bending the Knee to Zohran Mamdani appeared first on The Intercept.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s death on Monday could be the perfect opportunity for media institutions in the U.S. to take a sober look at the George W. Bush era — but it’s more likely they’ll fire up the nostalgia machine than confront reality. 

Liberal network MSNBC’s flagship a.m. program “Morning Joe” somberly announced the news on Tuesday and quickly worked to portray Cheney as a strong leader who fought for the country at all costs. Host Joe Scarborough said the former vice president was defined by his determination not to see another 9/11. Later in the show, author and historian Jon Meacham called Cheney “a remarkable American figure.”

“We don’t make them like this anymore,” Meacham said, implying this is a bad thing. 

Scarborough celebrated Cheney as a “defender of democracy” for his opposition to Donald Trump, a common theme in his final act. The former vice president and Republican hard-liner was greeted warmly in recent years by powerful Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Adam Schiff for the pivot.

It’s a pattern we’re likely to see continued in the wake of his death — and a sign that Democrats have still not learned hard lessons about their role in sending the country into the abyss.

In fact, Cheney had more of a role in giving us Trump than his later opposition might suggest, pioneering a cruel brand of post-truth politics that Trump would perfect. 

Cheney said whatever he needed to in order to push his agenda. He cast aside clear legal constraints, wantonly starting illegal wars and ignoring nettlesome obstacles like the legal prohibition on torture. He ruthlessly attacked his perceived political enemies, decrying anyone who disagreed with him as “terrorist” sympathizers. Sound familiar?

Legacy of Bloodshed

The former vice president’s legacy is one that came with gallons of Iraqi blood and billions in profit for his friends and allies in the private sector — something that has been overlooked and papered over.

Cheney was part of three Republican presidential administrations: Gerald Ford’s, George H.W. Bush’s, and George W. Bush’s. In the latter two, Cheney helped prosecute wars on Iraq: first, the Gulf War in the early 1990s, which set the stage for the second disastrous Iraq War that defined the younger Bush’s presidency and wrought destruction across the Middle East.

A masterful manipulator of the national media, Cheney was a point man for selling the 2003 Iraq War. He appeared on “Meet the Press” multiple times during the 2000s, plying obsequious host Tim Russert with lies and misleading statements comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and implying that the Iraqi dictator was involved in the 9/11 attacks. 

After Iraq devolved into chaos due to the U.S. invasion, Cheney returned to Russert in 2006 to imply that critics of the war were aiding and abetting the enemy by raising doubts among allies about U.S. commitment to the mission.

“Those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States,” Cheney said. “Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”

Maintaining a presence in Iraq had its own consequences. The “surge” of U.S. troops to pacify the country led to the deaths of thousands more and continued to destabilize the region, and led to the rise of a number of fundamentalist groups, culminating in the ISIS militant takeover of Mosul and the resulting brutality visited upon the Iraqi people. 

You can’t even spin doubling down on the war as an international win for the U.S. The biggest benefactor of the conflict was geopolitical rival Iran, which saw its power and influence grow in the wake of the disaster.

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At home, the ramifications of the Iraq War damaged and discredited U.S. institutions. The media’s role in promoting the war was shameful and the source of much of the mistrust and discontent that the American people still have for the Fourth Estate. 

Rather than take on the lessons of that time and hold the architects of war policy accountable, corporate U.S. newsrooms have, by and large, worked overtime to launder the reputations of the leaders of the Bush administration in the intervening years. 

Trump Era Turncoat

Cheney lived to see his image fully rehabilitated, as have many of the neocon figures in and around the Bush administration, including Bush himself. Cheney was part of a cottage industry of wayward Republicans who raised their profiles, earned liberal plaudits, and made millions by rejecting Trump.

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Desperate to differentiate between the mythical “good Republican” and the vulgar, far-right MAGA movement, liberal media institutions spent much of the president’s first term from 2017 to 2021 rehabbing the images of Bush White House officials as a de facto “resistance” that broke with Trump as just a step too far.

The turncoats’ motives, however, may not have been so pure as “defending democracy.” Both Cheney and his daughter Liz, who followed in her father’s footsteps as a GOP representative from Wyoming, embraced the opportunity to reject Trump, not least by repudiating his America First foreign policy doctrine. Their problem? Not enough war-making; Trump eschewed the kind of wholesale invasions and occupations the Cheneys embraced.

It was the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that finally forced a clean break for the Cheneys, whose adherence to the unitary executive was total.

It’s possible that Cheney, a polarizing figure — he voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 — will prompt a more subdued response from liberals in the halls of power and among the media, despite his late-in-life conversion on democracy. 

His legacy of blood, destruction, and death, however, is one that must be accounted for, rather than made a footnote in the career of a so-called public servant.

The post Dick Cheney Doesn’t Deserve Your Heartfelt Eulogies appeared first on The Intercept.

In Gaza, we are used to waking up to the sounds of explosions, counting the days between meals, and cycling constantly between fear and hope. We thought our pain was unlike any other in the world until we saw Sudan burning under the same silence. There, as here, people die from hunger and under rubble, cameras and lenses absent, as if pain in the Global South is not meant to be heard in the North.

In Sudan and Gaza, children are snatched from their mothers’ arms before they even know what safety feels like. Last Tuesday alone, some 460 people were reportedly killed by paramilitary forces in the city of El-Fasher. Estimates put the rate of displacement in Gaza at 90%; in Sudan, more than 14 million people have been displaced. Homes are destroyed, access to clean water is severely limited, food remains deeply scarce, and the wounded lie scattered on the ground without medical care, just as we witnessed in our small city on the Mediterranean coast. 

Yet what hurts more than bombing or hunger is silence. The silence of the world, the silence of those who raise human rights slogans in closed halls while people die in the streets. Despite the distance between them, Gaza and Sudan share this silence that doubles our pain and makes us ask: Is humanity truly universal, or is it only reserved for those whose suffering is in front of the cameras?

In Gaza, I have seen how hunger can become a constant dagger in the stomach, how it makes us cling to each other more than anything else. In Sudan, I see familiar faces in the photos of naked children fleeing death, in women burying their loved ones under the ruins of their homes, as if history is doomed to keep mercilessly repeating itself.

The blood spilled in Darfur is no different from the blood spilled here. The destruction of schools and hospitals in Khartoum and El-Fasher mirrors exactly what we have seen in our neighborhoods after the latest bombing. The difference is that the world sometimes looks, and sometimes closes its eyes completely.

In Sudan, especially in Darfur and El-Fasher, civilians are suffering under a suffocating siege that has cut off food, water, and medicine, while essential services like hospitals and schools collapse. Thousands of children, women, and men live under the constant threat of famine and disease, including cholera, spread due to lack of sanitation and clean water. Civilians are being killed or forcibly displaced, and hundreds of thousands have fled inside the country or across borders, under an almost complete global silence. The ongoing conflict between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army has made civilians hostages of destruction, as they are kidnapped, targeted, and deprived of their most basic human rights—just as we experienced in Gaza.

Shared pain connects us more than any geography or language. Gaza and Sudan, separated by sea and desert, share the same suffering. Every time I read about the deaths in El-Fasher or Geneina, I feel that their pain is ours.

The unfolding tragedy in Sudan reminds us in Gaza that we are not alone, and that wars, hunger, and destruction are not isolated events—they are linked chapters of the same human suffering. And it is painful to realize that the world so often chooses to close the door on our cries, leaving the pain confined to those who live through it.

Talking about Gaza is not enough, and talking about Sudan alone is not enough. We must connect the pain, to see that human suffering knows no borders, and that those who live war, hunger, and death deserve to have their voices heard, no matter their nationality or land.

From Gaza, I raise my voice to the world: Speak about Sudan, share their cries, and do not let this pain go unanswered. Sudan knows the same destruction, the same hunger, the same fear binding us inextricably together. We who have lived bombing, death, and hunger know what betrayal feels like, and we know how the world can remain silent while innocents die.

I feel the importance, I feel the pain, and I know that every word written, every story told, can ease some of the suffering. Do not leave Sudan alone as Gaza was left alone. Speak, write, share, so that the world hears their cries and understands that humanity is not optional, but a duty we all must share.

The post From Gaza to Sudan: “Their Pain Is Ours” appeared first on The Intercept.