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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the encounter revealed three warning signs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the second time in a decade, Washington has shut itself down in a budget standoff, and ordinary Americans are quite literally paying the price. As of this writing, the federal government is in its second month of a shutdown, and 42 million Americans who rely on food stamps got nothing on November 1 — the first time in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s 60-year history that benefits have been fully halted. Think about that: Millions of families woke up hungry because politicians in Washington couldn’t do their jobs. It’s nuts.

After public pleas of desperation and multiple court orders, the Trump administration was forced to turn the food back on, but it’s now appealing that ruling, whiplashing Americans facing acute scarcity and economic anxiety.  

We’ve started to accept these crises as routine, like a new season of some twisted reality show. With each episode, the fatigue and fury of being used as political pawns only deepens. But this shutdown is different in a way. For the first time in modern American history, its leader is intentionally starving his own people.

In the United States, federal shutdowns have become de facto political theater — a reckless game of chicken that recurs with grim regularity. Since 1976, Congress has triggered 20 funding gaps resulting in 10 full or partial shutdowns, with the longest stretching 35 days. What was once unthinkable has become almost seasonal. Autumn rolls around, and Americans brace for the familiar countdown to chaos: Will our representatives fund the government, or take it hostage?

The current saga began like so many before it: a clash of priorities and a collapse of governance. House Republicans pushed their budget cuts that would imperil health care; Senate Democrats insisted they would only vote to pass a budget that extended tax credits on health care and reversed Medicaid cuts. Republicans lack the needed majority to have their way and refuse to compromise with Democrats. Neither would blink, so on October 1, the lights went out. Offices shuttered. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers were sent home or ordered to work without pay. Lawmakers gave floor speeches and media soundbites, and went to politicking. But behind the grandstanding, real families immediately began to hurt.

To many on Capitol Hill, this is all just part of the show. A shutdown is treated as a leverage move, a stunt to score ideological points or appease extremist donors. In 2013, one senator read Dr. Seuss on the Senate floor during a shutdown, as if it were storytime instead of a national crisis. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump quipped that unpaid federal workers should encourage his shutdown tactics, while his commerce secretary mused that he didn’t understand why unpaid workers were visiting food banks at all.

These people behind mahogany desks don’t feel the flames they fan. They still draw their salaries — yes, members of Congress still get paid during a shutdown — while a janitor or a park ranger loses theirs. The disconnect would be darkly funny if it weren’t so brutal. From the comfort of cushy offices, political strategists are already gaming out the next confrontation, like it’s a chess match.

No group of Americans has been more cynically weaponized in this standoff than those who depend on SNAP. This isn’t some fringe handout; it’s the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, serving working-poor families, children, seniors, and people with disabilities. Shutting down the government has put these Americans directly in the crosshairs. When November arrived, nearly 42 million people who count on SNAP to eat were told there was no money for food assistance. Despite access to a $5 billion emergency fund that the Trump administration refused to disburse, the program for the first time ever simply stopped.

Food aid quickly became a bargaining chip to extract concessions. Trump (back in office and seemingly emboldened by chaos) outright threatened hungry Americans on social media, declaring that benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government … and not before!” In other words: We’ll let your children starve until we get our way. Trump is using food as a weapon, and he’s hardly hiding it.

Democratic leaders, for their part, tried a symbolic move to fund SNAP during the shutdown — only to be blocked by the Republican Senate majority, who accused them of political stunt-making. “Kids and families are not poker chips or hostages,” Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley said, decrying the “unbelievably cruel” reality that food aid was being held hostage by political games. Unbelievably cruel, indeed. To be absolutely clear, Republicans are holding Democrats to a dark arrangement: Give up extended health care tax credits and preserve Trump’s Medicaid cuts, or watch the poorest Americans go hungry. 

At food pantries across the country, the lines began swelling almost immediately. Food banks from New York to Texas saw surging demand as low-income households — and even furloughed federal workers — scrambled to fill the void. States like New York hustled to release emergency funds, and charities begged for donations to stave off mass hunger. The stopgaps will feed some, but they can’t possibly replace SNAP’s reach. A federal court ordered the Department of Agriculture to draw on contingency funds to ensure SNAP benefits are paid in November, but the ruling only provides a temporary remedy, not a long-term solution to the program’s broader funding crisis.

It’s pure absurdity: We live in one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, yet our leaders have engineered a method where millions can be cut off from food overnight as a negotiation tactic. That people in a country this rich require such support is an outrage in itself and the result of decades of bipartisan governing that has harmed the poor.

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Our government has spent years subsidizing corporations that pay poverty wages while providing just enough aid to keep workers afloat — and then they freeze that critical aid. Republicans and Democrats alike have failed to tackle the chronic issues of increased costs of rent, housing, food, and medical care, perpetually kicking the can down the road and placing ever-widening swaths of Americans at risk. Mega-employers like Walmart pay notoriously low wages that leave employees reliant on public assistance; in fact, Walmart’s low-paid workers cost taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion a year in food stamps, Medicaid, and other help. It’s a vicious cycle: Our policies prop up “working poverty” with programs like SNAP, effectively incentivizing companies to keep wages down. Both parties haven’t done enough to keep people off the brink, but one party right now is pushing people off it. 

We’ve set the stage so that millions of Americans are one missed check away from hunger, then we dangle that over their heads for political gain. As one grandmother in Tennessee put it when she heard her $563 in monthly food stamps might not come: “I don’t know what I’ll do.” There’s nothing abstract about a mother skipping meals so her kids can eat, or a disabled veteran quietly rationing canned soup because his country won’t keep its doors open. “Time is of the essence when it comes to hunger,” lawyers for food aid recipients reminded a federal judge, urging immediate intervention. 

The cruelty goes further. In this shutdown, even WIC — the program for women, infants, and children — teetered on the brink. Nearly 7 million mothers and young kids who rely on WIC for baby formula and basic nutrition were at risk of being cut off. Only a last-ditch shuffle of funds (raiding an Agriculture Department tariff revenue stash) kept WIC afloat for a few weeks.

But SNAP got no such rescue. The administration flatly refused to tap the same pool to cover food stamps, calling it “unacceptable” to shift $4 billion from other child nutrition programs. In other words, they argued feeding hungry families would steal from schoolchildren’s lunches — a false choice created entirely by their own refusal to govern.

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Meanwhile, the president’s allies in Congress insisted there was no reason to fund SNAP in isolation; if Democrats wanted to feed people, they should just surrender and reopen the government on Republican terms. Hunger, in their view, is leverage. In 2023, one GOP state senator even claimed that he had “yet to meet a person in [his state] who is hungry,” as he voted to block free school meals. Another Republican quipped that maybe a missed meal would motivate the unemployed to get a job.

Time after time, the GOP has made it public through policy and dialect its disdain for America’s working poor. Now the message is loud and clear: a little starvation is acceptable collateral damage in service of the agenda.

Step back and behold the full dystopia of this moment. We have a government that periodically sabotages itself. We have partisan warlords so entrenched in their battle that they’re willing to withhold food from their own citizens to win full control of the state machinery. The GOP’s long-term project isn’t just to shrink government — it’s to break it, to erode American’s faith that their government can or should serve the common good. 

We have surpluses and wealth in this country beyond imagination, yet 27.5 million tons of American soybeans sat unsold at one point as a result of trade war tariffs — food rotting in silos because of political machinations — while children in this same country go to bed hungry. How did basic governance get twisted into a hostage crisis? How did we, the people, become the hostages? Each shutdown, each manufactured crisis, chips away at whatever trust remains in our institutions. 

The karmic cost of this dysfunction is incalculable. For a growing number of Americans, the idea that the government can solve problems or serve the public good is dying out, replaced by nihilism and anger. And perhaps that’s the point for some of the perpetrators: Break faith in government, then point to the wreckage and say, “See, it doesn’t work.” It’s a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy.

As this nightmare of a shutdown drags on, one can’t help but feel that our democracy is at a precipice. A government that repeatedly holds its own people hostage will eventually lose those people’s hearts. We are tired, bone-tired, of the political arsonists and their endless theater. The real test of patriotism now isn’t in the Capitol’s rhetoric, it’s in the character of the nation’s people. And if there’s any hope to be found, it’s in those everyday patriots with grumbling stomachs and unwavering resolve. They remind us that America is not its lawmakers. America is its people. And if the people can somehow endure this abuse and still help each other through it, then maybe — just maybe — this house won’t burn down completely. 

The post The President Is Perfectly Fine If You Starve appeared first on The Intercept.

If those conditions are violated or serious suspicions arise that they are, the State Department is obligated to investigate and, in many cases, alert Congress.

In practice, however, a new Government Accountability Office report shows the system is ad hoc, with little guidance or follow through.

The State Department largely relies on overseas Defense Department officials for tips about potential end-use violations.

Since 2019, the Pentagon has flagged more than 150 incidents that could be violations. But the State Department has reported just three end-use violations to Capitol Hill.

The report added that the State Department hasn’t informed Congress what merits reporting and that it investigates violations inconsistently.

Experts in the arms trafficking and conflict monitoring are dismayed, calling the reported gaps an affront to both national and global security.

“It was really shocking to see how far the U.S had fallen behind,” said Kathi Lynn Austin, executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project, who added the number of potential incidents flagged was “extraordinary.”

“We are violating our law and not protecting our own security — at a time when there is so much volatility in the world,” Austin said. “We need to understand this is urgent, and Congress needs to push to maintain transparency and public trust in our arms dealings.”

The 39-page GAO report, published to little notice in September, lays out a simple mismatch: Defense personnel stationed abroad are often the first to see or hear about possible violations, but diplomats with the State Department haven’t told military officials clearly what to flag. (GAO, Pentagon, and State Department officials said the government shutdown left them unavailable to comment.)

In other instances of being tipped to potential violations, the GAO says, the State Department could not produce records showing whether anyone ever decided if the law’s reporting thresholds were met.

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The Arms Export Control Act requires notifying Congress when there’s information that a substantial violation may have occurred regarding purpose, transfer, or security; it also requires reporting when an unauthorized transfer actually happens. Those are low thresholds for alerting the legislature, by design. Yet the GAO found no formal procedures inside the State Department for making, recording, and sharing their decision-making process.

In the report, the State Department agreed with GAO’s six recommendations, including providing concrete guidance to the Pentagon, standardizing investigations with timelines, and creating procedures for deciding and documenting what gets reported to Congress.

The GAO cannot force a federal agency to bend to its report and relies on voluntary compliance.

If the changes aren’t actually implemented, however, Congress will continue flying blind when it comes to U.S. arms sales negatively impacting national — and international — security.

The Misuse Pipeline

The mechanics of “end-use” sound bureaucratic, but the stakes aren’t. Around the world, U.S.-made weapons moves from legal sale to illicit use on the battlefield, stolen from depots, through corrupt commanders, transfers to proxies, or simple loss.

The results are everywhere. In Afghanistan, for instance, vast quantities of U.S.-supplied small arms and vehicles seeded regional black markets. Conflict Armament Research, a U.K. group that tracks conventional weapons, traced the Islamic State group’s ammunition stocks to dozens of countries — including U.S.-linked supply lines — often thanks to the chaos of collapsing units and unsecured stockpiles.

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“The biggest concern for the average American citizen is the potential for these arms to be used against us,” said Brandon Philips, a public affairs professor at California State University, East Bay. “We are in a position right now where we aren’t everyone’s favorite country.”

When the government puts tracking systems in place, however, more of the leaks get plugged. In Ukraine — a challenging venue for containing arms flows because of the sheer quantity of material being introduced — early Pentagon watchdog reviews faulted shortfalls in tracking designated sensitive items amid an active war. Follow-ups found marked improvement as the U.S. expanded “enhanced end-use monitoring,” boosted staffing, and raised compliance rates.

Even with a partner government that has strong incentives to cooperate, effective control requires sustained, well-resourced checks. But the U.S doesn’t even have a system for how those checks should happen.

In its report, the GAO zeroed in on this vagueness. Overseas Defense Department staffers told the watchdog they’re using “professional judgment” to decide what should rise to the State Department’s attention because the State Department hasn’t defined the incident types, thresholds, or timelines.

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The ambiguity increases the odds that important cases fall into a bureaucratic void, never formally investigated or reported. The GAO even found examples where one incident drew a full document review and coordination, while a similar one drew no action at all.

“A number of us for years have talked about insufficiencies around end-of-use monitoring, and this report continues to show the problems of how this is done,” said Jeff Abramson, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank. “The American people are attuned that a lot of harm is caused in the world by our weapons.”

The infrastructure exists to track weapons — the State Department has systems to vet its direct buyers, and the Pentagon has a program for enhanced end-use monitoring. But the GAO found that the connective tissue of such programs doesn’t.

“The fact that this report is mostly about things that happened during the Biden administration, and the second part of Trump, shows it’s a systemic problem. It shows that we are going sell things and not bother,” said John Lindsay-Poland, coordinator of the nonprofit Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico. Poland noted that the report only covers a small portion of government-to-government sales, while the bulk of U.S. arms exports are commercial sales and small arms.

“If your priority is selling stuff,” he said, “taking into account whether the stuff you’re selling is massacring people, destroying communities, strengthening terrorists and drug trafficking, or driving immigration is secondary.”

Gaza and Double Standards

The GAO’s accounting of the oversight vacuum comes at an incendiary moment.

In 2024, the Biden administration put a policy in place that required assessments of whether partners receiving U.S. arms in active conflicts were using them consistent with international humanitarian law.

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In May 2024, the administration’s report to Congress concluded it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used U.S.-provided arms in ways “inconsistent” with international law in some instances, while adding that wartime conditions made case-by-case attribution hard. Human rights groups blasted the equivocation and urged suspensions; Israel rejected the accusations.

In February 2025, the new administration scrapped the policy.

The Gaza debate is precisely where a functioning end-use system should be strongest.

Independent investigators and journalists have documented repeated Israeli strikes that allegedly used U.S.-origin munitions against protected sites or in ways that were indiscriminate. The State Department’s own human rights reporting, before becoming hollowed out this year under President Donald Trump, catalogued grave harms.

Abramson, who has tracked global armament and misuse, said failure to monitor end-use violations and report them to Congress can put American foreign policy in a diplomatic chokehold. 

“Around the world,” he said, “we are trying to make friends, But when they have seen our weapons being misused it undermines that ability, and makes us seem hypocritical, dangerous.”

The post The State Department Isn’t Telling Congress When U.S. Weapons Fall Into the Wrong Hands appeared first on The Intercept.

For everyone horrified by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, it is easy to be seduced by the latest headlines regarding President Donald Trump’s so-called peace plan. After two years of mass destruction, the present moment offers the contradictory possibility of a near-term pause in Israel’s deadly assault combined with the continued long-term subjugation of the Palestinian people.

How we arrived at this moment is the result of multiple factors, but it’s hard to overstate the impact of public outrage. Trump has never been subtle about his narcissistic desire to be seen as a peacemaker worthy of the Nobel Prize. At the same time, anti-Israel sentiment is now negatively affecting Trump’s approval ratings, with only 35 percent of American voters approving of his handling of Gaza. The Republican Party base is increasingly skeptical of the U.S.–Israel alliance, and Jewish Americans are demonstrating rising revulsion over Israel’s crimes against humanity. And no one should be surprised if there has been private engagement by Israeli elites who are already fed up with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and are seeking an off-ramp that enables them to escape global isolation — while preserving their domination over Palestinians.

The simple reality is that public opinion matters. Even if political elites in the U.S. and Israel pretend otherwise, they are impacted in different ways by public opposition to their policy choices. Though Trump’s long-term plan for Gaza is an ugly vision of neocolonial control, it can be bent and blocked by more of the global pressure that has made even this moment possible.

That’s why this is not the time for supporters of Palestinian self-determination to be quiet. It’s the moment for us to demand more.

To understand just how much has shifted in recent days, it is worth recalling the surprising headlines of the last week. First, Trump humiliated Netanyahu by releasing a photo of the Israeli leader apologizing to Qatar’s ruler for bombing his country. Then Trump announced his 20-point Gaza plan, threatening Palestinians in Gaza with more violence if Hamas didn’t accept his terms. When Hamas offered its limited acceptance, Trump called on Israel to stop bombing the Palestinian territory. “I am asking everyone to MOVE FAST,” he declared as he dispatched Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, to Egypt to mediate negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

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Despite the headlines, there are some sobering realities to consider. Israel is still bombing Gaza, regardless of Trump’s claims to the contrary. And Trump’s plan for Gaza calls for Israeli military withdrawal based on “standards, milestones, and timeframes” that would be decided in the future, a day that may never come. Israel has a decadeslong history of violating agreements in order to continue stealing what is left of Palestinian land. And the U.S. has a long history of sending Israel billions of dollars in military funding, no matter what Israel does or doesn’t do.

While Trump’s plan offers the important possibility of a pause or end to Israel’s genocide, the worst of Trump’s plan for Gaza is embedded in its long-term vision. The plan amounts to a blueprint for external neocolonial domination over Gaza, under which Palestinians will have no formal ability to assert their rights or determine their future. Trump’s plan for Gaza denies Palestinians self-determination and says nothing of Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Under the plan, Trump would personally chair an Orwellian “Board of Peace” that would rule over Gaza, with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side. The Trump-run “board” would convene an unnamed “panel of experts” who would create a “Trump economic development plan” that would “rebuild and energize Gaza.” But dig a little deeper, and it is clear that Trump’s vision for Gaza is yet another page from the Trump family playbook for corruption and self-enrichment.

Back in February, after meeting with Netanyahu for hours, Trump called for Gaza to be developed into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” with “the United States owning that piece of land” and Palestinians being moved elsewhere. Though the plan no longer calls for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, it — like so many Trump proposals — appears to be a handout to his family businesses. (Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is already heavily invested in Israeli business interests that profit from Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, with at least $2 billion in financial support from Saudi Arabia’s ruling dictator, Mohammed bin Salman.)

But the Trump family is not alone in profiting heavily from this plan. In July, the Financial Times reported that the Tony Blair Institute, Boston Consulting Group, and Israeli businessmen Michael Eisenberg and Liran Tancman developed an investment plan for Gaza that included building an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.” The investment plan called for cutting development costs by removing Palestinians from the territory. No surprise that the Tony Blair Institute has received at least $345 million from pro-Israel billionaire and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

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Under Trump’s plan, Palestinians would be required to relinquish all forms of resistance to Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide. While Trump’s “Board of Peace” would cash in on Gaza, it would delegate daily governance in Gaza to “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” that would be “responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza.”

The plan proposes that the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, could eventually take over Gaza, but only if it meets the so-called “reform” conditions previously outlined in an earlier plan Trump put forward in 2020. That 2020 plan required that the Palestinian Authority give up all claims against Israel or the U.S. before the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, “and all other tribunals.” Of course, the Palestinian Authority is already considered by many to be an undemocratic and corrupt institution that rules over Palestinians and serves as a subcontractor to the Israeli occupation. These new requirements would block any last vestige of justice for Palestinians.

The plan also requires that Hamas demilitarize as part of making Gaza “a deradicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.” But no mention is made of the fact that Israel has bombed Qatar, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and, of course, the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Nor is there any mention of “deradicalizing” the violent Israeli settler movement or holding accountable the thousands of Israeli soldiers and their leaders who are still committing genocide in Gaza today.

Given these details, the long-term implications of Trump’s latest “peace plan” appear startlingly similar to the goals that America’s white settlers must have had for Native American populations: Confiscate their resources and drive them into smaller and smaller parcels of land, whether through murder, violent displacement, treaties that would later be ignored, or all of the above.

While Trump pushes for an immediate, headline-grabbing “win,” the broader political trends make it clear that time is not on Israel’s side. A June Quinnipiac poll revealed that sympathy for Israel dropped 14 percent among Republicans over the last year, from a May 2024 level of 78% down to 64%. An April Pew Research poll showed that Israel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans aged 18 to 49 had risen from 35 to 50 percent. Meanwhile, loud conservative voices like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens have all spoken critically of America’s alliance with Israel. And a September New York Times/Siena survey found more American voters “siding with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time since The Times began asking voters about their sympathies in 1998.”

These shifts in U.S. public opinion reveal the path ahead. Activists across the U.S., Europe, and worldwide must continue isolating Israel and begin explicitly pushing their own governments to reject the full arc of Trump’s plan. Yes, an immediate deal that ends Israel’s genocidal violence and mass starvation of Palestinians is critical. But Trump’s longer-term vision for Gaza must be defeated. 

Massive waves of opposition to Israel’s genocide have already flooded cities worldwide, from the hundreds of thousands who protested in Amsterdam and Mexico City, to the millions who took to the streets in Italy. Protesters should now consider taking direct aim at Trump’s plan itself. Global pressure is critical if we are to see a future in which Palestinians can live free from Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide.

The post Trump’s Plan to Deprive Palestinians Any Say in Their Future appeared first on The Intercept.

Before dawn, federal agents moved on Chicago’s South Shore in camouflage uniforms with rifles drawn, the thrum of chopper rotors breaking the sky. Officially, it was a “targeted immigration enforcement operation.” In reality, it looked like a military incursion into a historic Black neighborhood — home to working families, elders, and churches that have held the South Side together for generations. By the end of the night, an entire apartment building was under siege.

U.S citizens and children were zip-tied, families separated, and residents of a community that is 92 percent African American reported being met with guns and flash-bang grenades. When a Chicago alderperson went to check on hospitalized residents, she says she was handcuffed by agents.

For some, the Trump administration’s Chicago assault was a shock. But for Black Americans, none of it felt extraordinary. It felt remembered. Generational experience has taught us what happens when the state builds a weapon for someone else: Sooner or later, it finds a way back to us.

The raid wasn’t an aberration; it was a continuation, the latest verse in a long American refrain where safety is promised, and Black lives become the proving grounds. What the nation calls “targeted enforcement,” we recognize as the same searchlight sweeping back across the map.

We’ve seen this movie before, and Black communities have been telling America how it ends.

From Red Scares to Black Files

For more than a century, Black Americans have watched the United States build extraordinary enforcement tools for a supposedly narrow enemy — and then turn them inward. The Palmer Raids of the 1920s were justified as a way to root out communists but swept up Black labor leaders. COINTELPRO was sold as means to counter “subversives” but was used to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. and raid Black Panther homes. After 9/11, the war on terror built fusion centers, joint task forces, and counter-extremism programs that soon labeled Black activists as “Black Identity Extremists.” The Department of Homeland Security grants and surplus weapons meant to stop terrorism rolled into Ferguson and Baltimore in armored vehicles.

Now the same pattern is playing out with immigration enforcement. Databases, cross-deputized local cops, and DHS-led raids built to target migrants have expanded into Black neighborhoods. The Chicago raid didn’t just catch “gang-linked migrants” — it detained U.S. citizens in a majority-Black area under the same machinery.

After 9/11, Washington rewired the government around suspicion. The Department of Homeland Security absorbed 22 agencies and cast immigration as a national security threat. Programs like NSEERS singled out Muslim and Arab men for registration and interrogation before being scrapped years later. DHS-funded “fusion centers,” sold as vital to counterterrorism, were later blasted by a bipartisan Senate investigation for producing “a bunch of crap” intelligence while eroding civil liberties. Despite mounting criticism, that infrastructure didn’t disappear. It morphed and migrated into everyday policing and immigration enforcement.

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Built to hunt terrorists, those intelligence hubs eventually began circulating threat bulletins on Black activists and protest movements, labeling them “Black Identity Extremists,” and once again shifting the federal sword of authority to point toward domestic Blackness. In practice, the “BIE” label surfaced in instances like the firearms case against Dallas activist Rakem Balogun, also known as Christopher Daniels, in which the government cited his Facebook posts praising a Dallas gunman who shot police. A federal judge ultimately released him, and the case collapsed in May 2018. 

After public backlash, FBI officials told Congress in 2019 that the bureau had stopped using “BIE” and folded activities into “Racially Motivated Violent Extremism,” yet leaked records show an “Iron Fist” program directing undercover surveillance of Black activists under the rebranded category. 

Activists and civil liberties advocates are echoing the similarities to COINTELPRO all over again. The very machinery designed to guard the homeland ended up treating Black dissent as a domestic threat. Now amid waning political interest in the global war on terror, America has recast its gaze and fear to a new subject: the immigrant.

The current crackdown on immigrants shows how this bleed-over works. ICE’s 287(g) agreements deputize local police as immigration agents. The program has ballooned in scope and reach, with DHS touting more than 1,000 partnerships. Research finds these entanglements don’t reduce violent crime — what they do is make entire neighborhoods too scared to call the police. Meanwhile, the feds cast wider and wider nets. In 2008, the Secure Communities data pipeline was installed, funneling every American’s arrest fingerprints and biometric data to immigration databases, supercharging dragnet mistakes.

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One 2011 independent analysis found that the system had led to false hits and culminated in the arrest of 3,600 U.S. citizens by ICE. A 2018 Los Angeles Times investigation found ICE had to release more than 1,480 people from custody after they asserted U.S. citizenship. Other analyses estimate thousands of citizens have been wrongfully targeted by detainers. The point isn’t that every raid snags the wrong person — it’s that the system is designed to view these unconstitutional detentions as collateral damage.

And Black people, historically over-represented in the criminal legal system and targeted by law enforcement officials, knew we’d eat the collateral most.

Black organizers have been warning about this for years. The Movement for Black Lives explicitly called for ending deportations and the 1996 crime–immigration laws that knit policing to banishment. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration has documented how immigration detention is “anti-Black” in its outcomes. And long before the rest of the country learned to say “surveillance state,” Malkia Devich-Cyril wrote and organized about the way targeted spying on Black neighborhoods would metastasize into mass surveillance.

It’s About Flexing Power

Many Americans were sold a comforting bargain: If you’re innocent, government “vetting” will sort it out; body cameras will guarantee accountability; and an attorney will fix any mistake. The reality is rougher.

Immigration courts are civil, not criminal. That means there is no general right to a government-appointed lawyer, and most detained people go to court alone. As for body-worn cameras, the best meta-analyses find mixed or null effects on police use of force and accountability. And “vetting”? Ask the U.S. citizens who’ve been cuffed, jailed, or even deported by mistake how that worked out.

But most of all, on the street, the liquid dialect of “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” will always bend hardest toward the poor, the immigrant, and — most of all — us. Too often, those lessons are learned at the wrong end of a police door ram, or in the back of a van.

And it’s not effective.

Here’s the part national TV pundits won’t tell you: Chicago’s shootings and homicides have fallen dramatically this year. Through the first half of 2025, homicides are down roughly a third and shootings nearly 40 percent, with independent analysts calling it a historic decline. Federal claims that heavy-handed immigration raids are a necessary crime-fighting tool don’t square with the city’s own data. The crackdown isn’t about safety; it’s about flexing power.

Black voters aren’t a monolith in our beliefs, but we have long voted cohesively when the stakes are existential. Political science calls it “linked fate.” History calls it survival. Survey work and decades of elections show Black voters remain the most reliably aligned bloc against authoritarian drift — not because we love any party, but because we recognize the pattern when the state builds machines of exception and promises to deploy those tools only on “them.” We know “them” becomes “you” sooner than you think.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones once reminded readers that the real outlier in American electoral life is the Black vote — no other group, including Asians or Latinos, votes with such cohesion. Her point was simple: We have always recognized the stakes most clearly.

Decades of polling show that issues of criminal justice and policing have remained top concerns for Black voters, because our safety and freedom have always been the first to be tested when state power expands.

After Trump’s reelection, far fewer Black Americans took to the streets — or even to social media — to protest. Instead of marching, many watched quietly, feeling a sharp sting of betrayal: betrayed that our persistent warnings about white supremacist power went ignored, and betrayed by the system that insists on invalidating our lived experience until it becomes everyone’s problem. Some Black women publicly expressed a tactical withholding — “stepping back,” “rethinking our role,” “not showing up in the same way”— because the emotional weight of being the reliable backbone in a democracy that constantly disfranchises you is too heavy. Particularly without giving them rest, pause, or reflection to their words.

During Trump’s second inauguration and early policy blitzkrieg, Black organizers didn’t pivot to spectacle; they braced for bleed-over. They’d already watched terrorism authorities spill into protest monitoring; already watched immigration powers swallow due process; already watched fusion centers and data-sharing as routes to harass communities over unmerited suspicions. They also watched red-state leaders preside over higher gun deaths while labeling liberal big cities as lawless war zones — facts we reported here at The Intercept. That context makes what happened in South Shore feel less like an aberration and more like the next link in a chain.

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Listen to the voices who warned you: the freedom-movement veterans who endured COINTELPRO; the Muslim organizers targeted after 9/11; the Black immigration advocates who saw detention’s cruelty up close. The lesson isn’t merely solidarity, it’s self-interest. The tools built for “others” always come home.

Black America has always been the first to feel the temperature drop in the room of democracy. We have mapped this country’s overreaches with our bodies and our ballots. When we speak of raids, of suspicion, of the quiet erosion of rights, we’re not predicting — we’re recalling. Listen to Black people. The warning isn’t a sermon; it’s a survival manual.

The post Black People Knew This Would Happen appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s approval of the Ambler Road Project is a reversal for the federal government. Only last year, the Bureau of Land Management released its Record of Decision selecting “No Action” on Ambler Road, in cooperation with Alaska tribal councils, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and many others.

In the document, the impact on fish habitat, water and air quality, disruption of groundwater flow, hazardous materials from spills, and the negative impact on the Western Arctic caribou herd, which has been steadily declining since 2017, were all cited as reasons for denial. The Record of Decision also stated that the Ambler Road Project would forever alter the culture and traditional practices of Alaska Native communities, who have lived and thrived in the region for centuries.

Thanks to the BLM’s findings, the Biden administration denied the Ambler Road Project on June 28, 2024. The project resurfaced after the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority filed a direct appeal to Trump over his predecessor’s denial of transportation permits.

Trump’s decision to approve the Ambler Road Project comes months after his administration announced plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, opening 45 million acres of national forest land to logging and road construction. While the Ambler Road Project is not directly tied to the “roadless rule,” it’s one of a growing list of examples of the U.S. government prioritizing corporate interests over the natural world.

Ambler Road will begin at milepost 161 on the Dalton Highway, near the towns of Wiseman and Coldfoot, before crossing over 3,000 streams and multiple rivers. It will require up to 50 various bridge projects, as well as aid stations, airstrips, turnouts, and culverts, before ending at the proposed mining site near the town of Ambler.

On Monday, Trump sat in the Oval Office with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright and made it clear that he was approving the project to stay ahead in what he considers an AI race against China.

“Ambler Mining District, at the end of [the 211-mile road] has some of the richest mining deposits in all of America,” Burgum said, while gesturing at a map of Alaska behind the Resolute desk. “These are minerals that are absolutely essential to defense, to industry. … Just take copper alone. This is one of the richest copper locations in the country.”

The haul at the end of the 211-mile road is presumed to be a copper deposit worth more than $7 billion. Copper has many uses, among them being the primary component to efficiently help power and cool the massive data centers that run AI applications. As a result, and as AI advances, copper is in massively high demand. According to the 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook, copper supplies will fall 30 percent short of the required demand by 2035.

“China controls 85 to 100 percent of all the mining and refining of all the top 20 critical minerals,” Burgum said. “And in this mine area up here, we got copper, lead, zinc, gold, silver, gallium, germanium — rich in all of the minerals that we need to win the AI arms race against China.”

Burgum said that the U.S. has “gotten out of the energy and mining area,” and that when Trump said, “Drill, baby, drill,” he also meant “Mine, baby, mine.”

Trump emphasized that the copper was needed to power AI data centers — but also immediately contradicted himself on whether it’s needed to surpass China, or rather to maintain what he described as America’s undisputed lead in AI.

“We get a road done, and with that, we unleash billions and billions of dollars in wealth,” Trump said to the press on Monday. “It’s pretty amazing when you think of it. And it’s wealth that we need if we’re going to be the number one country. We’re number one now with AI, you’ve probably read. We’re beating everybody with AI at levels that nobody ever thought even possible.”

But Trump said the U.S. currently lacks the power to support its tech companies, so he has greenlit them to “build their own power.”

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Immediately after taking office, Trump announced a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence — led by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank — called the Stargate Project, aiming to create a nationwide network of AI data centers. The first opened in Abilene, Texas, in September, after which five more were immediately announced.

Also in September, Trump hosted a roundtable of AI giants to discuss AI innovation and investments into its future. Included in the guest list were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Each of whom, coincidentally, donated exactly $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

AI data centers significantly impact the environment due to their immense electricity consumption, high water usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and demand from local power grids.

But along with the AI craze, a modern copper rush has begun, and it’s moving quickly. What was originally proposed as a three to four-year timeline for the Ambler Road Project appears to have been significantly sped up. Burgum said that construction will begin next spring with “planning throughout the winter.”

“We’ll get it done in less than a year,” Trump added.

Following the announcement of the approval for the Ambler Road Project, Burgum stated that the Department of War and the U.S. government will take a 10 percent stake in Trilogy Metals, a Canadian mining company with claims in the area.

“America was a mining powerhouse for a long, long time, and our mining industry got squelched,” Burgum said. “Now we’re seeing it come back to life.”

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order to take immediate measures to increase American mineral production. The order states: “It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”

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Biden Moves Forward With Mining Project That Will Obliterate a Sacred Apache Religious Site

In April, the Trump administration fast-tracked a controversial transfer of ownership of Oak Flat, Arizona, from the U.S. Forest Service to Resolution Copper. The Apache Stronghold, who have sacred and ceremonial ties to the land, have been in lengthy legal battles to try to halt the transfer. Resolution Copper, a conglomerate owned by British and Australian mining companies, plans to blast a hole 2 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep, decimating the sacred Apache site to gain access to the deep copper reserve.

In August, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge put a temporary injunction on the land transfer, and Trump released a scathing post on Truth Social in which he called the 9th Circuit “radical left” and the Apache Stronghold “anti-American.”

On October 6, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Apache Stronghold case.

The proposed destruction of public land — held sacred by Native Americans at Oak Flat and the Northwestern Arctic of Alaska — and numerous other sites, every year across America, in the name of progress, is merely one more example of a continued and very pointed genocide of Native American culture.

In response to Trump’s approval of the Ambler Road Project, environmental advocacy groups blasted the decision, saying it’s another example of Trump protecting business interests over the planet.

“As with every other shortsighted, self-serving decision by this administration, this move is silencing the people who will be impacted the most,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “Trump is sidestepping the views of Native Alaskans and short circuiting the federal government’s obligation to hear from them.”

“We build a road that’s over 200 miles long through a very beautiful area of the world,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “It’s incredible when you look at it. But a rough area from the standpoint of building.”

The post Trump Sacrifices Alaska Wilderness to Help AI Companies appeared first on The Intercept.

The consolidation of the new police state has not been announced. There was no press conference declaring that local, state, and federal law enforcement — plus the military — are all marching to the same drum. No news conference featuring a bunch of police captains standing before a microphone to express their commitment to the new regime.

But it is here.

In the past six months, a quiet, mass reorganization of resources and rules and personnel has rippled across the country in order to enforce the Trump administration’s desires.

This realignment is happening swiftly, smoothly and without fanfare. That the police have been so quiet in a historically loud moment should be a dead giveaway that a shift is under way. The line between order and chaos is moving. And the police are adapting to meet the changing norms.

Politics was always in their job description — whether by origin (slave catchers) or by election or appointment. But under this new order, the police — arm in arm with immigration agents, the military, and the rest of the federal agencies — are starting to function more as political police force. That is, an instrument of a specific regime. City by city, state by state, the police have been reorganizing themselves to align with the priorities of the White House. This is what the free agents of fascism do: They make themselves useful. They figure out how to stay in the mix, how to serve the emergent status quo.

Since the summer, where there have been Trump administration escalations, police have been lurking on the margins — or lending a helping hand.

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Sometimes, the assistance matches the fiery timbre of repression put forth by the White House. When thousands showed up in downtown LA to protest federal immigration raids, in June, the Los Angeles Police Department seemed to cast aside decades of sanctuary city policy forbidding cooperation with immigration enforcement authorities by working alongside federal forces to violently repress protestors. LAPD officers on horseback trampled a man and beat him with batons while their colleagues alternated with members of the Department of Homeland Security and National Guard to shoot people — including an Australian journalist — with “less than lethal” bullets and pepper spray.

Other times, the help aids and abets. During a raid, the LAPD blocked in formation as Immigration and Customs Enforcement quarterbacked an operation that resulted in the violent arrest of Service Employees International Union California and SEIU-USWW President David Huerta. Then, at an ICE staging area at Dodger Stadium, the LAPD helped federal agents exit though a different gate after one was blocked by protesters and the press. One month later, during “Operation Excalibur” — a “show of presence” by the National Guard and Customs and Border Protection — police officers worked crowd control at MacArthur Park. (Then, when they were done, they swerved at a few Angelenos protesting the federal scare tactics.)

In the nation’s capital, D.C. Metropolitan police, under the president’s orders and backed up by Mayor Muriel Bowser through an executive order, are formally cooperating with ICE, helping with immigration checkpoints and, apparently, responding to calls for backup. This month, when a resident followed a group of National Guard troops on patrol, playing the storm troopers theme music from “Star Wars,” one soldier threatened to call the police.

This kind of collaboration is easy to overlook. If, during the regular course of a work week or at a major community event — like the recent West Indian Day festivities or the African American Day parade in New York City — the cops are around every corner, why wouldn’t they also make random cameos during ICE raids?

You might not think much of these because they feel so banal in the face of the spectacular terror and brutality being perpetrated daily. If you’re watching political violence take place — say, ICE agents gunning down a man in Chicago — the uniformed officers directing traffic fade into the background.

But they’re signs of the Thin Blue Line’s willingness to go with the federal flow.

Gone are the days of beefs between local cops and federal agents, the plot engine of blockbusters like “Bad Boys” and “Beverly Hills Cop,” and auteur productions like “Inside Man” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” Instead of drama over one department stepping on another’s toes, the police, federal agents, and military forces are now taking turns as leading role. During the Biden administration, the local police were the strong arm violently cracking down against the student protesters objecting against Israel’s genocide. Now, they’re playing second fiddle to ICE’s top billing as America’s violent first responders.

Sworn duties and responsibilities have become blurred between jurisdictions, and, in some cases, downright bizarre. The distinctions — agencies, budgets, and even uniform design — between different departments of law enforcement are becoming subsumed under one identifier: police. Agents of the state take to the field united by the word “POLICE” on their vests.

This is, in part, a function of Trump’s relentless push to replace the rule of law with the rule of Trump, a system built on confusion and dubious legality. His deportation program and his illegitimate constitutional subventions have perverted the relationship between the immigration and justice systems, with the administrative proceedings of immigration enforcement transformed into crackdowns on so-called criminals — or even “foreign terrorists” — who can be renditioned to gulags in far-off countries with no due process.

Trump’s insistence on the presence of crime — his claim of crime as not just a feature of immigration but as the principle prism through which immigration must be understood — justifies leveraging all means of enforcement to fix the system. And that system needs endless resources.

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Trump’s deployment of the National Guard has only further corrupted these distinctions and made the job duties stranger. Troops are spreading mulch and picking up trash on the Mall, and the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Secret Service; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are conducting traffic stops, asking for drivers’ immigration status. Meanwhile, military lawyers are being recruited to sit as immigration judges.

The perversion of job duties might seem like a natural progression. To encounter a police officer taking on tasks that might seem beyond the core job of a cop — “being asked to do too much,” in the words of New York mayoral favorite Zohran Mamdani — is unremarkable because that has been the norm for some time.

In New York, all sorts of services mysteriously and bafflingly fall under the stewardship of the police: school crossing guards, street vendor citations, traffic enforcement, staffing summer and after-school programs at what are, ostensibly, community centers administered by the Police Athletic League.

But the mission creep has accelerated.

As of October 1, 2025, ICE has signed 1,036 memorandums of agreement for state and local cooperation in 40 states, including New York, under its 287(g) program. Police surveillance is merging with federal surveillance more than ever before. And the technology is advancing faster than regulators, the media, and the general public can keep track of.

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In March, a Guardian investigation found that local police and ICE had “gained access to troves of data” in sanctuary cities such as Westchester from vast networks of license plate readers. In April, New York Focus revealed that the New York State Police are funneling information from the 20-year-old gang database it maintains into a federal database used by ICE to further its deportation efforts. In June, 404 Media reported that ICE has been field-testing Mobile Fortify, an app that uses facial recognition captured via a smartphone to access your biometric data in various government databases. 404 Media also reported that, in Oregon, local police “casually offered various surveillance services to federal law enforcement officials from the FBI and ICE, and to other state and local police departments, as part of an informal email and meetup group of crime analysts.”

According to Forbes, ICE has a $4.4 million contract — first procured during the Biden administration — with a manufacturer that produces Stingray, the fake cell tower that can be used to trace the whereabouts of anyone in range.

This month, The Guardian reported that ICE obtained access to begin the use of Israeli spyware to hack phones and encrypted apps. And a week later, 404 Media reported ICE spent $10 million on Clearview AI facial recognition software to support Homeland Security Investigations, supposedly allowing the agency track people it accuses of “assaulting” officers. This is all on top of HSI’s contract with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, which, according to a dossier of documents reviewed by The Guardian, built a platform called ImmigrationOS that “will service ICE branches beyond HSI” and includes a “searchable super-network” for agents to comb through government and private databases. One wonders if and when the NYPD’s elaborate operation of data collection, which includes everything from OMNY taps to CCTV feeds taken from “free” Wi-Fi networks at public housing developments, will be the next searchable feast for federal authorities to sink their teeth into.

The budgetary allocation to immigration enforcement contained in the Big Beautiful Bill will soon kick into overdrive, meaning there will be a huge leap in recruitment and the acquisition of more tools of technological surveillance and repression. (DHS claims any “lapse in funding” brought on by the government shutdown “will not slow ICE down.”) ICE recruitment is moving ahead swiftly and will surely accelerate. The agency is working full stop to crush counter-surveillance efforts by organizers and concerned citizens. At the same time, its propaganda machine is hard at work creating hero narratives and poisoning the discourse.

The police state of our nightmares is nearing its final form. Even the so-called opposition leaders have proven themselves useful stewards of the cause. In many of the blue cities and states Trump has attacked, Democratic elected officials have used Trump’s actions to serve as cover for their desired expansions of the police at the expense of taxpayers, while appropriating the president’s crime narrative to fit their own ambitions.

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Ahead of Trump’s invasion in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass signed off on increasing the LAPD’s $1.86 billion budget to $1.98 billion just before she found herself holding press conference after press conference decrying the president for sending in troops to do what her LAPD could handle on its own. And she has all but assured that liability claims against the city, exacerbated by the police-fed crowd control crackdown, will continue to mount, despite huge budget shortfalls made worse by lawsuits against the LAPD.

In D.C., Mayor Bowser has greenlighted her Metro police force, home to the now infamous “jump out boys,” to implement Trump’s desired broken-windows policies. “We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” she said, wishing out loud for more local police. (In her executive order, announcing her compliance with the White House, she even adopted Trump’s branding in establishing a “Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center.”) In other words, it’s jump-out season once again.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul boasted of her deployment of National Guard troops and cameras in the MTA to boost safety, then she asked the president by phone not to deploy troops to the city. When DHS cut $187 million in security funding for police, she worked with Trump to reinstate it.

Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a constant Trump critic, seized on the president’s conspiracies and deployed the California Highway Patrol to fight “crime.” He doubled-down on this deployment at the end of August, citing its overwhelming success.

There never was a red police state or a blue police state, only a United Police State of America.

The rounds of beta testing are behind us. We are through the looking glass already. The police state expansions long pre-date Trump’s deportation program. The level of coordination is just getting more sophisticated. Propaganda and technology and fascism are all working together in overdrive. The police are collaborating across that trinity. They’ve figured out how to adjust their tune to meet the dystopian new reality that’s emerging. Their quietude in this moment should be setting off all the alarms that the Gestapo are already hard at work. Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth are openly preparing to wage war on the “enemy within” — but the political police have been moving in the shadows for quite some time.

The post The United Police State of America Has Arrived appeared first on The Intercept.

After Charlie Kirk was murdered at Utah Valley University, graphic videos of the right-wing provocateur’s assassination went viral on every major social media platform. It’s not surprising that such violent footage quickly spread — especially around a killing as high-profile as Kirk’s. What’s unusual, however, is how long those videos have been allowed to stay up.

Search Kirk’s name on Instagram right now, and for every three videos of him “owning” a college student in a debate, there’s at least one of him bleeding out. Search “Charlie Kirk shooting,” and your feed will be inundated with videos of the incident. This was not always the case. After a gunman livestreamed his attack at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, Meta said it took down 1.2 million versions of the video before users could upload them to the platform. The Southern Poverty Law Center also tracked uploads of videos after mass shootings in Christchurch; Halle, Germany; and Buffalo, New York, and found a dramatic decrease after the seventh day of each of those shootings. 

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Owners of social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube have traditionally responded much faster to the proliferation of such graphic violence on their platforms, at least in the West. (Internet users in places where these platforms dedicate less resources to moderation like Gaza or Tigray are all too familiar with the kind of deluge of gore American users were subject to these past few weeks.)

Lawmakers including Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have called on the platforms to delete the videos of Kirk’s gruesome assassination.

“He has a family, young children, and no one should be forced to relive this tragedy online. These are not the only graphic videos of horrifying murders circulating— at some point, social media begins to desensitize humanity. We must still value life,” Luna wrote on her X account. “Please take them down.”

But for several years, Republican legislators, in the name of free speech, have pushed tech companies to gut the very systems they now expect to protect them. It was part of pressure campaign intended to force social media companies to fire moderators, abandon fact-checking, and weaken their hate speech policies. As Luna and Boebert now demand the removal of videos of Kirk’s gruesome assassination, they’re experiencing the predictable consequence of the information ecosystem their party created — and are now horrified that the chaos has turned inward.

In 2023, after Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, succeeded Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., as chair of the House Judiciary Committee; he immediately used his platform to start subpoenaing Big Tech and research organizations that study online hate speech and misinformation, like the Stanford Internet Observatory. Jordan accused them of a “marriage of big government, big tech [and] big academia” that attacked “American citizens’ First Amendment liberties.” Notably, last year, congressional Republicans accused the FBI and tech platforms of collaborating to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election by suppressing posts related to Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

Meanwhile, conservative activists sued the Biden administration complaining that it pressured social media companies to censor conservative views on Covid-19 vaccines and election fraud. Though they lost the suit, Republicans have long held that platforms have overly censored their posts. Studies also show that Republicans are far more likely to spread misinformation. During the 2016 election, for example, 80 percent of the disinformation on Facebook came from Republican-leaning posts. Another 2023 study found that conservatives were eight times more likely to spread misleading content than those who lean liberal. In other words, Republicans were more likely to be censored by social media because their posts were more likely to violate their policies.

Of course, a lot has changed since then, and tech companies have gone much further in appeasing conservatives. Perhaps, the biggest coup d’état for conservatives in the battle against “liberal tech” was Elon Musk’s purchase and subsequent rebranding of Twitter. To appease Republican activists, Musk — who recently advocated for the imprisonment of those who belittle the death of Kirk — promised to turn Twitter into a “free speech” platform. His first move was laying off a majority of the company’s staff involved in devising and implementing its content moderation policies. One former Twitter staffer who used to work in this division estimated that almost 90 percent of the company’s content moderation staff was laid off. Twitter, now X, also said it would rely on its Community Notes feature and AI to moderate content.  

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Musk’s changes were not only in staffing, but also in how strongly the company enforces its policies. While Twitter’s hate speech policies still exist on paper, the platform has chosen not to enforce and has instead verified hundreds of accounts belonging to white supremacists, reinstated the accounts of notorious promoters of anti-trans content, and of course, brought back Trump who was excommunicated from the platform for his role in inciting the January 6 riots. Musk also joined Republicans’ attack on researchers who monitor disinformation by suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2023 — though that lawsuit was later dismissed. 

The inflection point for this yearslong campaign by conservative activists was Meta’s capitulation to their demands shortly after Trump’s election win. In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, dressed in a loose black T-shirt and a gold chain, told Facebook and Instagram users the company would drastically scale back its third-party fact-checking operation. He told users the company would also ease enforcement of its hate speech rules, especially around immigration and gender. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuck said. 

While Meta, YouTube, and others have said their content policies would apply to the Kirk assassination videos, to capitulate to Republican demands, they have not only reduced how strongly they review content but also gotten rid of much of the staff that does that work.

Like Twitter, Meta has since quietly laid off many of the people that work on its trust and safety teams while also announcing it would double-down on AI based moderation. Not even a month after Meta announced its content policy changes, users reported seeing more graphic content on the platform.

“Underinvesting in platform safety has serious consequences,” says Martha Dark, the co-executive director of Foxglove Legal, a tech accountability nonprofit that advocates for content moderators. “It’s striking that after years of demanding platforms ease up on enforcement, some politicians are now outraged at the very consequences of that pressure. You can’t have it both ways: Weakening moderation inevitably means violent and graphic content is left up for longer and spreads more quickly,” Dark adds.

As for the tech companies’ claims that AI can carry the burden of their content moderation load: Olivia Conti, a former Twitter product manager who focused on abuse detection algorithms, told me that these algorithms may as well be “pizza detectors” because they “flag anything with predominantly red tones.” Even the hashing technology that tech platforms have traditionally used to identify these videos can easily be evaded through small edits.

Ellery Biddle, the director of impact at Meedan, a technology nonprofit that studies harmful speech and gender-based violence online, says that while some content moderation can be assisted by AI, “you still need teams of smart people to tell the AI what to do.”

Republicans intended to take aim at the teams that moderate hate speech and harassment. But those very people are also responsible for the job of monitoring and removing gruesome videos, like that of Kirk’s death.

The post Videos of Charlie Kirk’s Murder Are Still on Social Media — and That’s No Accident appeared first on The Intercept.

“We worked hard to get him here. It was expensive to go through the process,” he told The Intercept. “I want to do something to educate and help the process go more smoothly for other people.” 

That’s what brought him to the Department of Homeland Security’s Career Expo in Provo, Utah, five days after the shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, where the Trump administration was seeking new recruits for its anti-immigrant campaign. 

Tim knows that federal agents are responsible for separating families under Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation push. But he thinks that’s a risk immigrants knowingly take living in the U.S. “You want to come here for a better life, but you gotta do it the hard way,” he said before submitting an application to join U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 

At the Utah Valley Convention Center, hundreds of people like Tim stood in the sun, many in suits with briefcases and resumes at the ready. The biggest line was for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement booth; a smaller queue led to the CBP stall next door. Recruiters strolled by the applicants, asking if anyone was a lawyer or had tentative offers, and plucking them out of line. If your resume was selected, you might hear back within the hour for interviews, fingerprints, and a drug test. 

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With the Trump administration’s push to hire 10,000 new ICE officers by the start of 2026, attendees drove overnight or flew in with hopes to get a leg up on other applicants with some in-person time with DHS recruiters last week. They heard about it from friends or family, from social media posts, or from the 1811 forum on Reddit — a hub for “active and aspiring” federal criminal investigators, or “special agents.” Due to the murder of Kirk at Utah Valley University less than five miles away, journalists were denied entry inside the fair to protect DHS personnel and candidate identities, an agency spokesperson told this reporter.

To understand the motivation of those seeking to join the Trump administration’s violent anti-immigrant campaign, The Intercept spoke to applicants near the parking lot outside. Prospects ran the gamut from college students seeking debt relief to those parroting white nationalist talking points. Many supported the administration’s hard-line approach to immigration, or were convinced that whatever ethical quibbles they might have with current immigration enforcement could be separated from the job itself. Most job-seekers agreed to speak on the condition that only their first name would be published.

Among those seeking DHS jobs, many had backgrounds in law enforcement or the military. Nick, a former Marines Corps reserve officer and current Florida state policeman, came to the fair on the recommendation of friends who work in ICE detention centers. 

“I want to say it’s in my blood,” he said, between sips of his protein shake. “It’s what I want to do. I want to help people, want to defend the country.” The child of a Peruvian immigrant, Nick said he learned early the importance of being frugal and avoiding debt. He voted for Trump because he is convinced the president runs good businesses. 

Taking an ICE job would result in a pay cut of more than $30,000, but he believes it would free him from the mundane desk duty of his police job.

“I’ve gotten to a point in my career where I’m not going to be doing anything new or going anywhere. I’m kind of stuck in an office,” Nick said. “I need something different.”

Nick was one of several applicants who feels that current criticism for ICE is hypocritical.

“It’s been this way since Obama and well before that. Why weren’t these protesters out there? He is the Deporter-in-Chief. He’s deported way more people than anybody else,” he said. “The media wants to push this agenda that this is a new thing. It’s not. We all live by rules and laws, so I just don’t understand what the whole attention is to this right now, other than because of who’s in office.”

During President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, the federal government deported more than 3 million people, focusing on “returns” for new arrivals at the border and those with criminal records. Deportations in President Joe Biden’s final year in office jumped to a 10-year high of 271,000 in 2024, rising after a lull during the pandemic when deportations were suspended briefly. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff of policy and a homeland security adviser, has set an arrest quota of more than 3,000 per day and a goal of 1 million deportations per year. 

Several applicants who spoke with The Intercept were children of immigrants or had close friends and family members in immigrant communities. They often spoke about the importance of adhering to the protocols of U.S. immigration policy.

Jaime Fernandez, 31, drove overnight from California to the expo fair to support a friend applying for a job with ICE. Sporting a neat beard, an MMA T-shirt, and a “Veteran for Trump” cap, he threw up two shaka hand signs while posing for a photo. 

He grew up in a mixed immigration status household: Decades before he was born, his grandmother crossed the border illegally with his father. His grandmother was at one point detained and deported.

“Did my dad come over illegally? Yeah, he did. He paid his fines, then we had to get his green card. He couldn’t do nothing at 2 years old, but he did the right steps to go the right way,” said the Army veteran, who currently works as a barber.

Fernandez wound up tossing in an application with CBP.

“You’re supposed to adapt and change and overcome, right?” he said.

In August, the Department of Homeland Security waived its age cap for those who previously served in law enforcement. This change reassured many of those waiting in line like David Thomas, 61, who owns a printing company in Fort Myers, Florida. He never worked in law enforcement but was hopeful that his physical fitness and life experience would be qualification enough.

“I’ve always had that urge that I wanted to serve. A lot of my friends, they went to Iraq back then, and I didn’t go. So if this is something I can do, I’m going to try it,” Thomas said, who showed up in a black suit and sunglasses. 

“I just feel like right now that there needs to be people like me,” said Thomas, who previously worked for a decade as a special education teacher serving mostly Latino students. “A little older and have seen a little bit more situations over the years.”

At a time when federal agents are regularly documented using violence against immigrants and even U.S. citizens, Thomas feels that he can make enforcement less confrontational. 

“There are a lot of great people out there that are working hard and don’t need this, but we got to get it the right way. We get them documented, get in the right way, and keep them here,” he said. 

Other applicants cared less about process and more about forging an America with fewer immigrants. 

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“Americans are getting pushed out of jobs because of all this stuff. The cities, they’re even flooding smaller towns trying to take jobs there,” said Peter Neugebauer, 34. As an independent contractor in Arkansas, however, he said he mostly works with “European Americans.” Joining ICE, he said, would enable him to truly serve American interests.

Neugebauer’s politics shifted dramatically five years ago while attending college in Humboldt County, California. He said his worldview switched when he saw people “acting crazy” in protests over the police killing of George Floyd. He changed his friend groups, connecting with them via Telegram. There were fewer arguments when they hung out, since their beliefs were aligned.

He also started connecting more to his Catholic faith. In an interview after exiting the job fair, he read aloud to this reporter Acts 17:26 in the Bible. “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands,” Neugebauer read as he pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You know, everybody’s supposed to be sort of in their nations and with their peoples,” he summarized. “You relate better.”

After the recruitment event, Neugebauer planned to visit Utah Valley University to pay respects to Kirk, a fellow Christian and family man. Compared to Kirk’s views, Neugebauer said his personal politics are “a little bit more far right.” 

DHS did not directly respond to a question about whether the application process screens individuals holding extremist views. Instead, the agency emailed this statement: “Americans are answering their country’s call to serve and help remove murderers, pedophiles, rapists, terrorists, and gang members from our country; since July, more than 151,000 Americans have applied to ICE nationwide.”

ICE’s recruitment spree — including a promised hiring bonus of $50,000 and $60,000 student loan repayment — is also an avenue for people who want to kickstart or pivot their careers. 

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“I’m a college student, so the bonus could help me [with student loans]. I’m at the point in my life now where I can apply,” said Devon M., a college senior majoring in criminal justice from New Jersey. He flew in for the weekend and hoped his previous athletic and internship experiences at a police department and a prosecutor’s office would help him win a tentative ICE offer. 

When asked about ICE’s pattern of violence and the Trump administration’s push to deport immigrants without due process, many applicants insisted that the government’s priority is to deport those with criminal records. Several applicants cited alleged crimes committed by immigrants — including car crashes they blame on undocumented immigrant drivers — as a catalyst for their interest in working with ICE. 

According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 70 percent of current immigration detainees have no criminal convictions. An analysis of ICE’s deportation data by the Marshall Project and Cato Institute both found the majority of ICE book-ins since January had no criminal convictions or only nonviolent offenses.

Devon M. and other interviewees also cautioned against taking social media videos at face value. 

“You only see whatever somebody’s recording so you don’t know what happened before for it to get violent,” he said. “Every day you see videos of some ICE agents being aggressive. I feel like as long as you’re doing your job, it’s OK.”

Not everyone at the job fair was looking to do field work. Salt Lake-based legal assistant Andrea Alexander, 59, felt her profile could be a fit for the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, ICE’s enforcement and litigation division.

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She said she absolutely loves Trump and feels he has been vilified in his efforts to save America. She doesn’t advertise her politics to her liberal friends but acknowledged taking a front-line job with ICE means being a “true believer,” since people will probably “catch a lot of flak right now” for enabling Trump’s politics. She described the American immigration system as exploitative due to the fact that large industries, like agriculture, rely on low-wage foreign workers. 

“I’m also passionate about those people. I don’t want them to be slave labor for the big corporations,” she said. 

Alexander was hoping to find a job for herself and her two children. “The jobs that have paychecks and benefits right now, the economy, are not great for our young kids getting out of college,” she said.

The odds, however, were good for job-hunters in Provo. Of the 1,500 people who registered for the expo, nearly 500 received tentative job offers, a DHS spokesperson said. More than 370 of those job offers were for roles with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit, which arrests, detains, and removes those unlawfully present in the U.S. 

Outside of the venue, a dozen or so protesters held signs saying “Don’t join ICE” and “Keep families together,” shouting phrases occasionally at applicants who walked in. Cars passing by honked in support. 

Amid the noise, Nick, the state police officer from Florida, noted that he is friends with an undocumented immigrant who came to the U.S. when he was 2 years old. When asked if he would be OK with detaining and deporting someone like his friend — who speaks only English and remembers only life in America — he had to think. 

“I don’t know what I would do in that situation,” Nick said. But “the job in itself I’m OK with.”

The post Who Wants to Join ICE? We Went to Utah to Find Out. appeared first on The Intercept.

The filing against a European news organization is a first-of-its-kind legal strategy for a journalist working in Palestine. “I want to prove the truth cannot be erased by false allegations,” Fteiha told The Intercept.

Fteiha’s legal claim, submitted in the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court, stems from a BILD article published on August 5 under the headline “This Gaza photographer stages Hamas propaganda.”

The BILD piece singled out Fteiha, alleging he fabricated images of starving Palestinians to push a Hamas narrative. To underscore this charge, BILD published a picture showing Fteiha kneeling to photograph people in Gaza holding empty pots in front of a metal barrier. BILD framed the scene as an attempt to exaggerate the levels of hunger in Gaza. Later in August, a United Nations-backed body declared a famine in Gaza.

The article claims Fteiha staged the photo and describes him as a “journalist” three times, always in quotation marks.

“In fact it was a genuine moment of human suffering,” Fteiha told The Intercept.

Fteiha was at the food distribution site as a freelancer for the Turkish news agency Anadolu and published a range of photographs online from that day. To Fteiha, BILD’s reporting is part of a campaign to discredit Palestinian journalists, he told The Intercept.

“Falsely accusing me of staging propaganda exposes me to threats and undermines the supposed protections afforded to journalists,” he said. “It means I could be targeted simply because false reports about me were published.”

Fteiha is seeking an injunction proceeding, an emergency procedure aimed at reaching a quicker resolution than a typical lawsuit. If granted by the court, the injunction would require Axel Springer to correct the statements in the article that he alleges are false and would oblige the publisher to cover the costs of the legal proceedings brought by Fteiha.

Axel Springer has not responded to questions from The Intercept. A BILD group communications spokesperson said that the company has not yet received Fteiha’s filing and therefore cannot comment on it.

Fteiha’s legal action could test whether German courts are willing to hold one of the country’s most powerful media outlets accountable for defamatory coverage that critics say has fueled the dehumanization of Palestinians. Just days after Fteiha was singled out in the August article, BILD ran the image of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif — who was killed by an Israeli strike hours earlier — with the headline: “Terrorist disguised as journalist killed in Gaza.” The phrasing was later revised to “Killed journalist allegedly was a terrorist.”

That article, too, is mentioned in the filing: “It seems that [Axel Springer] is promoting a narrative portraying journalists in Gaza as accomplices of Hamas.”

Fteiha’s claim, filed by German press lawyer Ingrid Yeboah with support from the European Legal Support Center, rejects BILD’s assertions that Fteiha staged or manipulated his images and that he masquerades as a journalist. It argues that the BILD reporting includes “gravely defamatory and life-threatening statements” that constitute a violation of Fteiha’s “general right of personality” under German constitutional law, which protects individuals against defamation.

BILD never sought Fteiha’s comment before publication, his filing alleges, despite claiming otherwise in the article. BILD’s communications director Christian Senft told The Intercept: “As a matter of principle, we do not comment on our sources or editorial processes.”

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The article, the filing says, insinuates that Fteiha deliberately withheld photos showing men at the food distribution site in order to distort reality and bolster a “constructed narrative” serving Hamas.

Yet before the BILD article was published, Fteiha had already posted several images from the day in question — depicting men as well as women and children waiting for food — as a report by Der Spiegel showed.

The filing argues that BILD deliberately withheld this fact in order to maintain its narrative that a Gaza-based journalist was spreading Hamas propaganda.

BILD further attempted to link Fteiha to Hamas, he alleges, by citing an Instagram image he co-published that reads “Free Palestine” — describing this as Fteiha’s “mission” — and by framing his freelance work for Anadolu as “subordinate to Turkish President and Israel-hater Recep Tayyip Erdogan.” Both examples, the filing argues, were wrongfully presented as evidence of political extremism intended to delegitimize Fteiha.

Before the BILD article came out, the liberal news outlet Süddeutsche Zeitung, or SZ, published a piece titled, “How real are the images from Gaza?” BILD referred to the article as it questioned the authenticity of photos taken by journalists in Gaza. The SZ article consulted experts and published the same image of Fteiha photographing civilians behind a metal barrier.

Although SZ did not mention Fteiha by name, the article — together with BILD’s — was quickly amplified on social media by Israel’s foreign ministry. Pointing to the German coverage as proof that Hamas manipulates global opinion, the ministry branded Fteiha an “Israel- and Jew-hater” serving Hamas.

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The U.S–Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation quickly joined in, followed by major Israeli outlets such as The Times of Israel, Ynet, and the Jerusalem Post. Israeli President Isaac Herzog echoed the fabrication narrative as well, holding up the photo of Fteiha at a conference in Estonia and citing German press reports. “It was all staged,” Herzog declared.

Christopher Resch, a spokesperson for Reporters Without Borders Germany, said that German media appeared eager to amplify Israel’s campaign to delegitimize a Palestinian journalist.

“Newsrooms should always — especially when it comes to war reporting — apply the highest professional and ethical standards and never report carelessly,” Resch said. “If media reports can be used to legitimise criminal decisions by the Israeli military, one can assume they will be used.”

Fteiha’s legal action followed an application for a cease-and-desist order that Yeboah filed on September 1 demanding that BILD retract the contested statements and cover Fteiha’s legal costs, while reserving the right to seek further damages.

Axel Springer’s lawyer Felix Seidel rejected that request in an official letter on September 4, arguing that “after reviewing the facts and legal situation, [we] inform you that we do not intend to comply with the demands of your client.”

According to the filing, the BILD article violated multiple standards of German press law. The filing alleges the story contained false claims, including that Fteiha had not distributed the images in question and was merely posing as a journalist. It further argues that under German law, suspicion reporting is only permissible if backed by careful research, a minimum factual basis, and a clear indication that the allegations are unproven. It notes that the subject must be given the chance to comment before publication — all requirements that, the filing says, BILD ignored.

Fteiha continues to work in Gaza despite the Israeli military’s heavy bombing and imminent ground invasion of in Gaza City. “I believe my role as a journalist is to bear witness to what is happening and to convey the truth to the world — no matter the cost,” he told The Intercept.

The post A Newspaper Called His Gaza Photos “Hamas Propaganda.” He’s Fighting Back. appeared first on The Intercept.

Reuters reported on and aired the footage of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping discussing organ transplantation as a means of life extension and perhaps immortality during a September 3 Victory Day Parade in China, a procession celebrating the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

But two days later, Reuters yanked the video off its website, retracted the footage from its wire service, and erased clips from its social media feeds.

The reason: a takedown letter from a China Central Television, China’s state-controlled television network, which had licensed footage of the event to Reuters.

Last Friday, CCTV lawyer HE Danning wrote to Reuters demanding the video be taken down. “The editorial treatment applied to this material has resulted in a clear misrepresentation of the facts and statements contained within the licensed feed.”

Reuters, whose parent company Thomson Reuters conducts a variety of business operations in China, complied.

“Reuters removed the video from its website and issued a ‘kill’ order to its clients on Friday,” the media company wrote in a statement published on its website, explaining its decision to withdraw the footage from a portal used by other news organizations that rely on Reuters as a wire service.

The initial Reuters article about the hot mic moment now contains a note that “story has been corrected to withdraw videos, with no changes to text.”

Reuters didn’t just remove the full four-minute event video from its systems, but also a 38-second annotated clip of the exchange that it had previously posted across its social media platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A Reuters World News podcast episode, which features a short audio clip of the exchange, is still online.

Footage of the event remains online elsewhere — but not all clips capture the conversation between Xi and Putin as clearly as the Reuters recording. A version of the event footage on CCTV’s official YouTube channel includes audio of an announcer speaking and music playing, obscuring the conversation about life extension between Xi and Putin.

In the version of the video Reuters posted to TikTok (and later deleted), Xi and Putin stroll around like old chums as they discuss, through translators, “immortality in a conversation caught on a hot mic,” as Reuters summarized in the opening title card. 

During the conversation, as seen in the Reuters clip, Xi says: “In the past people rarely lived longer than 70 years, but today they say that at 70 you are still a child.”

The Russian state-funded outlet RT later posted Bloomberg’s version of the video, which remains online and features a similar translation of Xi’s remarks over the same 38-second sequence, which Bloomberg credits to CCTV’s “live transmission” of the parade; RT’s thread also featured an English-dubbed video of Putin confirming the exchange at a press conference.

Putin responds, “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become and even achieve immortality.” Xi then says, “Some predict this century humans may live up to 150 years old.”

In a statement, Reuters expressed that they “stand by the accuracy of what we published” and that “we have carefully reviewed the published footage, and we have found no reason to believe Reuters longstanding commitment to accurate, unbiased journalism has been compromised.”

“Reuters withdrew these videos because it no longer held the legal permission to publish this copyrighted material, and as a global news agency, we are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others,” Reuters spokesperson Heather Carpenter told The Intercept.

Thomson Reuters, headquartered in Toronto, engages in an assortment of business ventures in China, such as an AI-based legal “co-counsel” bot, “global trade solutions,” and legal research on Chinese law through its Westlaw product. The company maintains several offices in China, including in Shanghai, Beijing, and a Reuters news bureau in Shenzhen. The news organization is currently hiring for a researcher position at its Beijing bureau.

Reuters did not respond specifically when asked if its business interests played any interest in complying with the removal request.

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This isn’t the first time Reuters has taken down content at the behest of international authorities. In 2023, Reuters published an exposé about the Indian cyber-espionage firm Appin. An Indian court deemed the article to be “indicative of defamation” and ordered that the article be removed. As the Freedom of the Press Foundation highlighted, even though Indian courts don’t have jurisdiction outside of India, Reuters removed the article not just in India but also worldwide. Once the injunction expired, Reuters reinstated the article.

The Chinese government has in the past blocked Reuters news websites on occasion for unspecified reasons.

Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, said Reuters’ decision to remove the video is a blow to press freedom at a critical juncture.

“International news outlets have a responsibility to uphold press rights internationally, especially in times like these where press freedom is backsliding almost everywhere. Otherwise, journalism’s independence sinks to the lowest common denominator whenever news of global importance breaks in a country governed by a repressive regime.”

He cautioned that compliance with takedown requests is a slippery slope.

“What makes [Reuters] think the next censorial regime that might not like what it prints isn’t taking notes?” he asked.

The post China Didn’t Want You to See This Video of Xi and Putin. So Reuters Deleted It. appeared first on The Intercept.

This is not a moment for dishonesty. Contrary to the hurried efforts of some Democratic leaders to eulogize Charlie Kirk, we don’t need to pretend the far-right activist engaged in earnest politics “across ideology, through spirited debate” as California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a post on X paying tribute to Kirk. 

Kirk, the founder of the far-right movement Turning Points USA, was committed to organizing America’s white young men, from college campus to college campus and beyond, into a politics of revanchist, resentment-fueled, patriarchal white nationalism. 

However harmful Kirk’s project has been to our collective flourishing, though, the response to his assassination could put this nation, and especially those on the left, in a position of greater peril than at any previous moment of Donald Trump’s authoritarian second term.

The call couldn’t be clearer: Open season on the left.

At the time of writing, the person responsible for shooting Kirk has not been apprehended or identified. That didn’t stop Trump from delivering an official address unequivocally blaming the “radical left” for Kirk’s death in the broadest terms possible.

The Trump administration is a weaponization machine; it will transform all manner of things into an ideological arsenal to use against its opposition. Anti-genocide activism is antisemitism; immigrant workers are “the worst” criminals; addressing white supremacy is discrimination; war crimes are peace — all of these fascistic transmutations have become grimly common in the last eight months. 

Trump’s erratic government is predictable only insofar as it can reliably and quickly metabolize events toward authoritarian ends. 

In his televised remarks, Trump made immediately clear how his administration plans to instrumentalize this assassination too, regardless of the specifics of the shooting. Trump called Kirk a “martyr” and blamed the “radical left” for comparing “wonderful Americans” like Kirk — who was an unabashed Christian nationalist — to Nazis.

“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today,” the president said. Without any public information about the shooter, Trump took the opportunity to assert that his administration would hunt down any person or organization associated with the — again, unknown — suspect. 

The call couldn’t be clearer: Open season on the left.

“Demonizing” Whom?

In his speech, the president described a scourge of left-wing political violence based on “demonizing those with whom you disagree.” 

When he was shot, Kirk was speaking on a Utah college campus, demonizing those with whom he disagreed. In response to an audience member asking, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” Kirk responded “too many,” promoting a baseless and vile conspiracy theory spread by Trump attempting to link trans people with violent crimes. 

Trump then sought to paint a picture of prolific left-wing violence by listing the assassination attempt he himself survived last year; “attacks on ICE agents,” which have been egregiously overblown; the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; and the shooting at a baseball game that injured Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise. 

The president notably did not mention the assassination attempts on multiple Democratic members of the Minnesota Legislature last June, in which state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed. Nor did Trump invoke the time a far-right conspiracy theorist broke into former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in an attempted kidnapping and bashed in her husband’s skull.

Needless to say, the president said nothing of the fact that the majority of politically motivated attacks are carried out by far-right extremists. The omissions were as glaring as they were unsurprising.

Calls for Repression

Meanwhile, Trump’s key propagandists and loyalists spoke in swift unison to weaponize the shooting for repressive purposes. 

Far-right activist and Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted that the government should “shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She added, “No mercy. Jail every single Leftist who makes a threat of political violence.”

“They are at war with us,” said Fox News host Jesse Watters. “What are we going to do about it?” 

“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” wrote the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo on X. Rufo, a major force in the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on higher education, added, “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.” 

With major Republican figures explicitly calling to revive McCarthyite and COINTELPRO-style repression of the political left — a category that, in the deranged worldview of the Trumpian right could include everyone from far-left mutual aid groups to Bill Gates — now is no time for lie-filled paeans to Kirk from political leaders. It is a moment that demands a commitment to protecting constituents from the sort of hateful ideologies Kirk supported — and the kinds of crackdowns Trump and his acolytes are demanding. 

Progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wrote social media posts to say that there is “no place” for political violence in this country.

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Political violence has always been at home in a nation built on Indigenous slaughter, slavery, dispossession, and exploitation, to say nothing of rates of incarceration and shootings seen nowhere else on the planet. The progressives’ statements are all the more misplaced at this time of authoritarian escalation at home and U.S.-backed genocide abroad. 

It is precisely because of the central place of political violence in this country that this moment feels both predictably and uniquely dangerous. On Wednesday night, Trump called it a “dark moment for America” — but for all the wrong reasons. 

This is no time for whitewashing the memory of a man who did more than perhaps anyone in his generation to recruit young people into the inherently violent cause of white nationalism. The urgent work at hand is to take care of each other, and to protect the most vulnerable among us, from a world that would be built in Charlie Kirk’s name.

The post Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Attack the Left appeared first on The Intercept.

On September 2, President Donald Trump posted a 29-second black-and-white video of a high-prow, four-engine speedboat. At the 20-second mark, there’s a bright flash and fire. Trump claimed the footage was shot that morning, and that it showed the U.S. military destroying the vessel, killing 11 Tren de Aragua members smuggling drugs bound for the United States.

In the week since, little more information about the strike has been made public. No one has disclosed the coordinates where it took place, or any evidence that, as the administration insists, the vessel was carrying drugs and those onboard were smugglers. The administration hasn’t even said what kind of drug was being smuggled. No bodies have been fished out of the sea. No debris.

On Friday, Trump officials canceled, without explanation, a scheduled briefing with the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss the attack. When challenged about the legality of the killing, Vice President JD Vance tweeted that he didn’t “give a shit.” “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” he said, and more such actions should be expected.

No doubt the assault is par for Trump’s general MO, an expression of his aggrieved nationalism: the idea that the country is besieged by a variety of threats, among them Latin American drug traffickers. According to Pete Hegseth, the secretary of what until recently was the Department of Defense, now the Department of War, the killing was a defensive act against enemies trying “to poison our country with illicit drugs.”

Yet there’s no proof that the 11 people were smugglers or migrants. The kind of go-fast boat shown in the video are called pangas. They can’t carry enough fuel to get to the United States. They are used for smuggling, but also for trading and fishing. It was likely headed to Trinidad, where might have transferred cargo to larger ships bound for the United States.

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Whether the vessel was carrying cocaine, migrants, or mackerel, our country’s highest officials are boasting about assassinating 11 human beings, civilians, traveling in a small ship in international waters who have not charged with, much less proven guilty of, a crime.

People should be outraged at what is in effect pure murder. But they should also be looking at why the U.S. military is suddenly shifting its focus to the Caribbean, amassing navy vessels and thousands of sailors off the shores and carrying out such a brazen strike. If they look close enough, they might see what the Trump administration is after — and the rift within Trump’s coalition that might scuttle his Latin American plans.

The Latin American Pivot

During this fraught geopolitical moment, as Washington hemorrhages global influence, the U.S. bipartisan strategic class is turning, as it often turns during crisis times, to Latin America.

A few years ago, Army Gen. Laura Richardson, as Biden’s head of SOUTHCOM — the branch of the Pentagon charged with policing South America and the Caribbean — gave a series of think-tank talks on the importance of the region’s resources to the United States: “You have heavy crude. You have light sweet crude. You have rare earth elements,” she told the Aspen Security Forum: “You have 31 percent of the world’s freshwater. … Sixty percent of the world’s lithium is in the lithium triangle: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile. … You have Venezuela’s resources as well, with oil, copper, gold.”

Latin America is “off-the-charts rich” when it comes to resources, the general said, and Washington’s “adversaries” — Russia and China — want a cut. Moscow and Beijing had consolidated their influence in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and were forging alliances with Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina.

Richardson said the best way to secure access to the region’s riches was through “engagement” — that is, refraining from using overt forms of dominance and working to shore up soft-power alliances, including commercial treaties.

There are those, a minority to be sure, within the Trump administration who think the same. First among them is Richard Grenell, who has long advocated for normalizing relations with Venezuela. A close friend of the president, Grenell holds the catch-all title of “special envoy for special missions,” allowing him to carry out under-the-table diplomacy. Grenell is an anti-NATO America Firster who believes that a non-conflictive approach to Latin America is the best way the U.S. can ensure access to essential resources in a fracturing world.

So even as the White House was ramping up its rhetoric against Caracas — in effect declaring the entire Venezuelan government a cartel and President Nicolás Maduro its “kingpin” — Grenell scored an important victory, obtaining licenses allowing Chevron to bypass Washington’s harsh sanctions (first imposed by George W. Bush and then strengthened by every president since) to start pumping Venezuelan crude.

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Chevron tankers began delivering Venezuelan oil to Port Arthur, Texas, just weeks before the assault on the speedboat. On September 3, a day after the bombing of the boat, Reuters reported that Venezuela’s oil exports to the U.S. had risen sharply, oil that otherwise would have been sent to China.

Harry Sargeant III is another within Trump’s circle who shares Grenell’s deal-making approach to Latin America. A Mar-a-Lago billionaire who made a fortune off Pentagon contracts delivering oil to U.S. troops during the Second Gulf War, Sargeant is a major Republican donor. He’s also a confidant of Maduro, and works, even during the Biden presidency, as a Caracas–Washington go-between. He runs, under special waiver, several lucrative operations in Venezuela, including exporting asphalt. And Trump’s current chief of staff, Susie Wiles, had earlier worked for Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm whose clients included both Trump and Venezuelan businesses tied to Maduro.

For his part, Venezuela’s Maduro, with few close allies of consequence in Latin America apart from those who defend Caracas on the principle of sovereignty, would be happy to make a deal with these profit-seeking elements of the Trump administration.

Marco Makes His Move

Trump says he gave the order to bomb the speedboat, the most lethal U.S. military operation in Latin America since its 1989 invasion of Panama. Yet the brinkmanship belongs to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. By raising the stakes and promising that such attacks will continue, Rubio is looking to gain hard-liners the upper hand against appeasers like Grenell — especially if the fallout from the executions forces Chevron to shut down its Venezuelan operations.

Rubio had tried to block Chevron’s license from going through, delaying it numerous times. He has opposed efforts by Sargeant and others in the business lobby to obtain similar exemptions for individual companies, instead pushing for a universal ban on U.S. business activity in Venezuela.

Rubio, in earlier electoral campaigns when he ran against Trump, held himself up as the defender of the liberal international order, a champion of NATO and advocate of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Now, he might as well hoist the Jolly Roger over the State Department, as he applauds the piratical murder of civilians traveling in defenseless open boats on the high seas. “It will happen again,” Rubio said menacingly, promising another strike against civilians.

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During Trump’s first term, Rubio, as Florida’s senator, worked in league with then-national security adviser John Bolton. The duo was largely responsible for the fiasco of pretending that the head of the national assembly, Juan Guaidó, was the real president of Venezuela in a bid to overthrow Maduro. The farce led to a botched mercenary invasion and, finally, to the Venezuelan opposition itself stripping Guaidó of his “presidential role.”

That escapade didn’t chastise Rubio, who, apart from whatever statesmanship he once aspired too, can’t escape Florida provincialism. Joan Didion, in her book “Miami,” describes anticommunist Cuban exiles as controlled by “a kind of collective spell, an occult enchantment,” a “febrile complex of resentments and revenges.” Mixed with Trumpism, that enchantment is a powerful propulsive, fueling a desire to vanquish not just left-wing authoritarians in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua but also squishy social democrats in Brazil and Chile, who criticize Israel and sell their soy beans and lithium to China.

Rubio, who like Kissinger years ago serves as both secretary of state and national security adviser, is part of a hard-line interagency war machine that includes Hegseth at the Department of Defense, er, War; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; Lt. Col. Michael Jensen, a veteran of special forces, at the National Security Council, and Terrance Cole at the Drug Enforcement Administration. Vance seems to function as this group’s cheerleader.

They are all maximalists, looking to fuse the war on drugs with the war on terror — with the goal not to nudge Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela toward more open societies but to bring the hammer down on the continent: sanctions, reaper drones, covert ops, concentration camps, election manipulation, an expansion of DEA operations, and, as promised, more bombs, more civilian deaths.

“It’s a war. It’s a war on killers. It’s a war on terror,” Rubio says. And the U.S. can use El Salvador and Ecuador, corrupt and repressive narco-states, as launching pads for Rubio’s war.

ExxonMobil has Rubio’s back. Unlike Chevron, Exxon, in 2007, refused to participate in “joint ventures” with Venezuela’s government, then led by the now-deceased Hugo Chávez. In response, Venezuela seized the company’s holdings, leading to more than a decade of litigation.

Today, Exxon and Chevron are antagonists, each vying for control of massive oil reserves off the coast of Guyana, which shares a contested border with Venezuela. The situation echoes the 1930s, when Royal Dutch Shell backed Paraguay and Standard Oil backed Bolivia, pushing the two countries into a brutal war over a vast stretch of scrubland believed to contain a vast underground oil lake. Then, there was no oil: the petroleum that was said to exist was a mirage. Today, though, the petroleum is real. Venezuela alone possesses the largest proven crude reserves in the world, approximately 303 billion barrels — more than Saudi Arabia. Added to that is an estimated 15 billion barrels, light and sweet and easy to pump, in Guyana’s offshore fields.

Considering that the age of oil is not ending any time soon, any reorganization of hemispheric relations would require getting Venezuela in order: but under want terms? Rubio’s call to war or Grenell’s crudepolitik?

Importing the Logic of Gaza

Rubio is playing a dangerous game importing the hideous logic of Gaza — unaccountable extrajudicial murder justified by an expansive definition of self-defense — into the Western hemisphere.

A day after the attack, Maduro dispatched two F-16s to fly low over Trump’s warships, which brought a rebuke from Washington.

A conventional war, though, is unlikely. Caracas’ main response has been to try to drive a wedge between Trump and Rubio. “Mr. President Donald Trump, you have to be careful because Marco Rubio wants your hands stained with blood, with South American blood, Caribbean blood, Venezuelan blood,” Maduro said after the attack, going on to note that he’s opened backchannel negotiations with Grenell to deescalate the conflict. “I respect Trump,” Maduro has said, probably not insincerely.

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Trumpism has a social base in Latin America, but there’s little appetite for a full-on ideological crusade. Both Colombia and Mexico suffered badly under previous efforts by the U.S. to use military force in response to narcotic production and trafficking. Politicians across the political spectrum, at least those not openly allied with Rubio such as El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, want to end not escalate Washington’s half-century war on drugs.

Rubio’s Venezuela play will probably backfire, as it did during Trump’s first term. Trump operates in that middle ground between Rubio and Grenell, talking tough but always signaling that a deal is in the works. And he’s denied that the U.S. wants “regime change” in Venezuela, no matter the fact his Department of Justice has just raised the bounty on Maduro’s head to $50 million.

But the rhetorical momentum is on the side of the maximalists. The Pentagon followed its attack on the speedboat by ordering the deployment of 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico, to be used to conduct further strikes against alleged cartel activity, on sea and on land, including in Venezuela.

As pressure builds on Trump at home, so will the urge to act abroad, to do something spectacular. The economy is stalling, inflation and unemployment climbing, and the world is de-dollarizing; Trump’s poll numbers are slipping, and Democrats might take the House during the midterms; the ongoing war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza exposes Washington’s diplomatic feebleness; troops patrolling city streets and masked ICE agents invading neighborhoods worsen the country’s polarization.

And so, the temptation to turn the hard-liners loose in Latin America will be difficult to resist. As a distraction. To renew a sense of purpose. To affirm, at least among the faithful, unity. And to get that sweet crude.

The post The Rift in Trump World Over Venezuela appeared first on The Intercept.

A stream key is like an account password for livestreaming content on social media. Before a stream goes live on a user’s social media account, they must input a stream key into their broadcast software of choice.

Google, which owns YouTube, describes stream keys as being akin to “your YouTube stream’s password and address.” Facebook tells streamers “Don’t share your stream key. Anyone who has access to it can stream video from your page.”

The Department of War, however, routinely posts stream keys on its Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) website, a portal hosting military videos and photos for media usage. The website is open to the public and doesn’t require an account to browse – or to come across stream keys.

An Intercept analysis found that the Department of War has publicly posted stream keys on this service for years. The stream keys are typically posted prior to upcoming scheduled streams. For example, Twitter stream keys were posted for the U.S. Cyber Command change of command ceremony live stream in 2018. X and YouTube keys were also posted for last year’s West Point commencement ceremony. More recently, the stream keys for the department’s X, YouTube, and Facebook accounts were posted in the hours leading up to a livestream of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth giving burgers to the the National Guard in Washington, D.C. in August.  

They aren’t hard to find. The stream key posted on the DVIDS site can be seen by browsing the portal’s sequentially-numbered webcast URLs, or querying search engines for terms such as “stream key” and “DVIDS.” At times the Department of War uses stream keys that expire after each stream, allowing the takeover of one specific upcoming event but preventing persistent unauthorized access. Sometimes, however, the Department of War leaves stream keys unchanged for years, allowing for the takeover of upcoming streams on various social media platforms even if the stream keys for a specific event aren’t posted for that event.

This vulnerability wouldn’t allow attackers to take over social media feeds at any time. A hacker would need to wait for an upcoming Department of War webcast and then use the keys to start broadcasting their own content. The Pentagon maintains a public schedule of upcoming webcasts on their DVIDS site.

Stream keys are not made public for all Department of War streams. For instance, the keys were not publicly disclosed on September 5 for the livestream of President Trump signing an executive order rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War.

The Department of War did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Intercept has found no evidence that stream keys have been exploited to take over a Department of War stream. But past security incidents show the danger of such vulnerabilities. Imposters, for instance, have used artificial intelligence tools to impersonate politicians, including mimicking Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s voice to contact various U.S. politicians and foreign ministers. If this kind of deceptive content appeared on official government channels, even briefly, the consequences could be significant, warned security technologist Bruce Schneier. “You can imagine this being used for some kind of confusion event,” he cautioned.

AI-based hoaxes can have wide-ranging implications. In 2023, for example, a fake image of smoke coming from a building near the Pentagon caused a dip in the stock market. The Department of War is no stranger to security lapses, including discussing a bombing campaign in Yemen on Signal with journalists earlier this year.

Exposing stream keys “doesn’t rise to the level of putting strangers on your Signal chat,” Schneier said, but he considers it a sloppy practice that should be fixed immediately.

Cooper Quintin, Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the “concern here is less that an adversary would spread disinformation — our own federal government is doing plenty of that already.”

The bigger risk, Quintin said, is that the vulnerability could be used to discredit real footage. “This could be used to lend plausible deniability to any legitimate videos that got posted to that account.”

In other words, the government could use this as justification to erase any official stream – say an embarrassing press conference or a hot mic moment – by claiming it was manipulated content posted by a hacker, not a video posted by the Department of War itself.

The post Department of War Doesn’t Defend its Web Streams From Hackers appeared first on The Intercept.

After decades of political inaction after mass shootings, the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting appears to finally have spurred conservatives into action. That’s because this horrific slaying was the grotesque gift the right had been waiting for: The shooter – whose diary entries show a troubled young person immersed in extremist, racist online culture – happened to also be trans.

The Department of Justice is now considering options to ban trans people from owning guns, with senior department officials reportedly dedicating numerous meetings to determining precisely how to strip constitutional rights from an entire category of Americans.

The effort is as cynical as it is transparent: in response to one incident of mass violence linked to a trans perpetrator, the government will further vilify trans people as an a priori public threat, while finding new ways to exclude trans people from the class of rights-bearing individuals.

Anti-trans zealots have for some time attempted to conjure a link between violent crime and trans people. These efforts, however, tend to fizzle because mass shootings in the U.S. are overwhelmingly a cis problem. Across 5,700 mass shootings in the U.S. since 2013, only five shooters have been trans. The vast majority shootings are carried out by cis men; the vast majority of politically motivated attacks are carried out by far-right extremists. Yet the Trump administration is scaling back law enforcement efforts focused on the very real problem of white supremacist extremism to pour resources into kidnapping immigrants – as well as apparently hollowing out of Constitutional protections for trans people.

One need not be a fan of the U.S.’s twisted devotion to guns to appreciate the danger of an anti-trans gun ban and its stakes for trans people’s standing in this country. Like Trump’s ban on trans people serving in the military, any efforts to ban trans people from gun ownership will rely on a dangerous logic with stakes for all trans and gender nonconforming people, gun owners or not.

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Pentagon Official: Hegseth’s Campaign to Scrub DEI History Is a “Dumb” Distraction

The military ban rests on the sick premise that there is something inherently untrustworthy or dishonest about being trans that “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” Meanwhile, discussions around a gun ownership ban, according to reports, frame trans identity as a mental illness. (It shouldn’t need repeating, but being trans is not a mental illness; suffering from gender dysphoria without access to gender affirming care, however, can be debilitating if not deadly.)

Justice Department officials told reporters that discussions were only in “early stages,” and any ban proposal would no doubt face legal pushback. The discussions alone serve a purpose, however, in signalling the administration’s commitment to demonizing trans people, and promoting the connection in the public imaginary between trans people and violence.

According to Alejandra Caraballo, a trans rights activist and clinical instructor at Harvard Law School, in order to skirt the Second Amendment, the government would have to declare that “anyone with gender dysphoria has a ‘mental illness’ that makes them a ‘danger to [themselves] or to others.’”

“Such a sweeping determination would not only have repercussions for gun ownership but also employment, benefits, access to bank accounts, professional licenses etc,” Caraballo noted on Bluesky. “Determinations of mental incompetence can lead to the loss of professional licenses such as law, teaching, and medical licenses.”

Caraballo added that such a designation “would be a means of effectively purging trans people from society writ large and starting the process of mass institutionalization.”

Indeed, if there is any group in the US for whom the right to armed self-defense should be protected, it is trans people — particularly trans women of color. Trans people make up around two percent of the US population but are at least four times more likely to face violent victimization than cis people; trans people are also far more likely to be harassed by law enforcement.

Heavily armed far-right militias have also for years made a habit of turning up to LBGTQ+ events, including family-friendly brunches and library readings, to harass gender nonconforming people. Under Trump’s eliminationist assault on trans lives, anti-trans vigilantism is de facto state-sanctioned. At times, it is only the presence of armed antifascist groups at these events that has kept armed fascists at bay.

Most every exception to the otherwise unassailable Second Amendment has been dedicated to further disempowering communities already made vulnerable to premature death by state and vigilante violence. While Ronald Reagan was governor, California passed the 1967 Mulford Act to prohibit the open carrying of loaded firearms in public as a direct response to the Black Panther Party’s patrols against police brutality.

“The American people in general and the Black people in particular,” BPP co-founder Bobby Seale said at the time, must “take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the Black people disarmed and powerless.”

Fighting for trans people’s Second Amendment rights today has a different valence, least of all because tactics around armed self-defense are not remotely widespread in the urgent struggle for trans rights. Beyond a small number of queer and leftist anti-fascist militant collectives and actions, like Bash Back! in the late 2000s and a number of leftist gun clubs, guns don’t play a significant role in the defensive arsenal. That’s for understandable reasons — many on the left want no part in the scourge that is America’s relationship to guns, and even those who do support armed self-defense in principle recognize that the left is radically out armed by far-right forces (including in the government and law enforcement).

The government’s logic here is the same as racist gun control efforts: an assertion of whom the country and its protections are for. The Trump administration wants trans people excluded from the right to gun ownership insofar as that right stands for membership in the American body politic. They want to control who gets to be a full self, worthy of self-defense, and who does not.

The post Trump’s DOJ Wants to Deprive Trans People of the Right to Self-Defense appeared first on The Intercept.

The Justice Department announced in January that violent crime in D.C. hit a 30-year low in 2024. So far this year, it’s down 26 percent from that. This, in other words, is a curious time for the president to declare that the nation’s capital is a violent cesspool that demands the sort of crime-fighting expertise that only a 79-year-old man who fetishizes dictators and whose entire worldview is perpetually stuck in the 1980s can provide.

The motivation for Donald Trump’s plan to “federalize” Washington, D.C., is same as his motivation for sending active-duty troops into Los Angeles, deporting people to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador, his politicization of the Department of Justice, and nearly every other authoritarian overreach of the last six months. He is testing the limits of his power — and, by extension, of our democracy. He’s feeling out what the Supreme Court, Congress, and the public will let him get away with. And so far, he’s been able to do what he pleases.

The incident that apparently precipitated Trump’s D.C. crackdown was entirely pretextual. It wasn’t the overall amount of violent crime, it was that the wrong person had fallen victim to it. Both Trump and Elon Musk declared D.C. to be a crime-infested wasteland after photos emerged of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, formerly of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, beaten and bloodied from an alleged carjacking. The attackers ran off when a Metro police officer arrived on the scene — which is far more protection than crime victims usually get from law enforcement.

In response, Trump raged on social media over the weekend. He immediately sent hundreds of agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security Investigations, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the city (who then responded to a fender bender as if someone had detonated a dirty bomb.)

Trump is now deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the city too. While state National Guards report to governors, the D.C. National Guard reports to the president. The federal government also has jurisdiction over Washington. Oversight power is supposed to lie with Congress, not the president. But this Congress has essentially dissolved itself into Trump’s agenda.

These legal distinctions mean that Trump’s “federalization” of D.C. isn’t quite as extraordinary a power grab as his deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June. But as he made clear at an unhinged press conference on Monday, Trump himself is either unaware of that distinction or doesn’t acknowledge it. He vowed to send troops into Oakland, Baltimore, and New York as well.

But as with Washington and Los Angeles, violent crime in Oakland and Baltimore has fallen dramatically this year. New York, meanwhile, remains one of the safest big cities in the country, despite what the trembling cowards on Fox News may tell you.

If there were truly a violent crime surge in D.C., Trump wouldn’t have cut security funding to the city by 44 percent. (I’m dubious of the link between such funding and crime rates, but the important thing here is that Trump thinks they’re linked.)

There was no emergency in Los Angeles, either. With the aid of the right-wing media bubble, the administration exploited a couple incidents of property destruction with a surge in peaceful protests against the administration’s immigration raids to depict the city as a dystopian hellscape.

The important thing Trump learned from Los Angeles is that the federal courts failed to intervene. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard over the objections of a state governor is reviewable by federal courts, the court also took at face value Trump’s claim that the protests presented a threat to immigration enforcement.

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The Pentagon Won’t Track Troops Deployed on U.S. Soil. So We Will.

There’s little evidence that this was true. But more importantly, that was never the real reason Trump cracked down on the city. As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump himself, and internal documents made clear, the real reason was to intimidate protesters, terrify immigrant communities and their advocates, and “liberate” blue cities and states from the “socialists” elected to office. It was a projection of power.

Trump has long disparaged cities with large Black populations and Black leadership. New York, D.C., Baltimore, Oakland, and Los Angeles are all cities with large Black populations who are run by Black Democrats. The front-runner to be the new mayor of New York is a Muslim Democratic socialist. Trump isn’t planning to “protect” the residents of these cities from crime. He’s planning to impose his will on them.

The crackdown in D.C. comes 10 days after the New Republic reported on a Pentagon memo authored by Phil Hegseth, the Defense Secretary’s brother, laying out the administration’s plans to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement “for years to come.”

That memo would end once and for all this country’s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement, it would eradicate one of the cornerstone principles that drove the American Revolution, and it could well end with U.S. soldiers firing their guns at U.S. citizens. (If you’re wondering what — other than being the brother of the least qualified person ever to lead a Cabinet-level agency — makes Phil Hegseth qualified to plan and implement a policy that would fundamentally alter the relationship between America and its military, the answer is apparently that he once started a podcasting company.)

Tough-on-crime politicians have long used Washington, D.C., and its residents as political pawns rather than real Americans with real constitutional rights. When Richard Nixon was pushing a crime bill that would make the D.C. the test city for his crime policies in 1970, his Justice Department suppressed statistics showing that crime in the city had been falling for five months. They needed people to fear the capital to get the bill through Congress. The bill passed, but D.C.’s progressive police chief at the time refused to implement policies like no-knock raids, preventative detention, and aggressive crackdowns on protest. Crime would continue to fall in D.C. even as it rose in the rest of the country.

In 1989, in his first televised speech as president, George H.W. Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine that he claimed had been seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in Lafayette Park, just a few blocks from the White House. It had not. It hadn’t even been “seized.” Undercover agents from the DEA had persuaded a small-time, 18-year-old drug dealer to sell them crack at the park so they could give it to the White House for Bush to use in his speech. In other words, the DEA arranged for an illegal drug sale near the White House that otherwise wouldn’t have happened solely so Bush could say an illegal drug sale had just taken place near the White House.

Demonizing Washington, D.C., then, is an old tactic from an old playbook. But the threat today is uniquely authoritarian and dangerous. The Nixon and Bush administrations were pushing policies that were wrongheaded, counterproductive, and in a few cases unconstitutional. But they weren’t attacks on democracy.

This most certainly is.

The memo reported by the New Republic seeks to replicate what Trump did in Los Angeles in other cities. It conflates peaceful, constitutionally protected protest with international crime syndicates and Al Qaeda or ISIS. And it puts heavy pressure on the Pentagon to scrap Founding-era principles about the role of a standing army in favor of a military increasingly directed inward, against U.S. residents and citizens, to do the president’s bidding.

This is what Trump has always wanted. He has always expressed his envy of and respect for authoritarians who could sic the military on protesters and critics.

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A Trumped Up Police State Is Coming

One of the healthier things about our democracy is that when politicians have advocated to get the Pentagon more active in domestic policing, the strongest resistance has tended to come from the Pentagon itself. It’s long been a core principle in U.S. military culture that soldiers should not be deployed against their fellow citizens. It’s a bright red line.

That line held in 2020, when Trump wanted to send the military in to shoot George Floyd protesters in D.C. Both his defense secretary and his Joint Chiefs chair refused to cross it and threatened to resign.

But Trump learned his lesson. This time around, he quickly purged the Defense Department’s senior leadership and JAG officers, replacing them with MAGA-devoted sycophants. Pete Hegseth wrote in his book that he wants to invoke the military in a holy war, and Trump has boasted that his current Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Dan Caine, once said he’d kill for Trump. So among the upper echelons of the Pentagon, the bright red line now appears to be gone.

That means the decision of whether to carry out illegal, unconstitutional orders to detain, harm, or even kill immigrants, protesters, or the president’s perceived enemies will fall much lower in the chain of command, at ranks where defying orders won’t mean dismissal from a political position, but a possible court-martial or prison time.

We should also be thinking about how this could ease a slide into authoritarianism should we face an actual crisis. National security experts worry that Trump’s dismantling of the CIA and FBI and politicization of the NSA could leave the country vulnerable to a September 11-style attack. Whatever you make of that fear, such an attack wouldn’t be a vulnerability for this administration so much as an opportunity. Nothing conditions the public to accept restrictions on civil liberties and vast expansions of government power like fear. It seems safe to say that this administration will exploit any genuine crisis as shamelessly as they’ve exploited the crises they’ve manufactured.

For 15 years now, I’ve given a speech about police militarization based on my first book. I’ve always ended the speech with a reality check on the term “police state.” I’ve tried to emphasize that despite the unsettling trends I just spoke about, we do not live in a police state. Instead, it’s important to speak out about these problems as they happen, because by the time you’re actually in a police state, speaking out is no longer an option.

We are now past the point of crisis. Trump has long dreamed of presiding over a police state. He has openly admired and been reluctant to criticize foreign leaders who helm one. He has now appointed people who have expressed their willingness to help him achieve one to the very positions with the power to make one happen. And both he and his highest-ranking advisers have both openly spoken about and written out their plans to implement one.

It’s time to believe them.

The post Trump’s Trial Run for a Police State appeared first on The Intercept.

From her room on the third floor of the Sonesta Chicago O’Hare Airport Rosemont hotel, Valentina Galvis could see flight crews and travelers coming and going. Families enjoyed summer dining on the outdoor patio. Friends snapped selfies commemorating their stays. Children fidgeted as they waited for shuttles to deliver them to the nearby airport.

But for Galvis and her seven-month-old son, the hotel was not a vacation — it was a jail. The phone had been removed from the room, and Galvis had no way to contact the outside world. Private guards contracted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stood watch at all times. She had no idea when she and her son Naythan, who is a U.S. citizen, would ever get to leave.

Galvis and her son were detained at the Sonesta for five days in early June after they were apprehended at the Chicago Immigration Court by federal agents.

“I was sad, confused, and often terrified,” Galvis said. “I wanted to call my husband, my attorney, or anyone at all to let them know where I was.”

In screenshots taken by family members and reviewed by Injustice Watch and The Intercept, Galvis appeared on the ICE locator to be held over 700 miles away in Washington, D.C.

Galvis’s detention at the airport hotel came as federal immigration authorities have rounded up more than 100,000 immigrants nationwide in an effort to meet arrest targets set out by the Trump administration. The spike in immigration arrests has overwhelmed detention centers around the country: Immigrants have been packed into overcrowded holding cells, forced to sleep on floors, and subjected to “unlivable” conditions at a hastily built detention camp in the Florida Everglades.

Though a hotel may seem preferable to these conditions, advocates said Galvis’s detention raises concerns about what types of facilities are being turned into de facto detention centers and how many people are quietly held in Illinois.

Xanat Sobrevilla, who works with Organized Communities Against Deportations, says it’s not the first time she’s heard of an Illinois mother of an infant baby appearing to be in Washington, D.C. — which has no detention center.

“We know we can’t trust the ICE detainee locator,” she said. “People get lost in this system.” 

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., called the false location listing “chilling” and likened the secretive hotel detention to a “kidnapping.”

Illinois and Chicago have some of the nation’s strongest laws aimed at protecting immigrants like Galvis by prohibiting state and local agencies from cooperating with ICE. But her and Naythan’s detention at the Sonesta shows the limits of the state’s efforts to block ICE detention. The federal government can still use commercial facilities like hotel rooms to hold individuals and families in its custody.

“Nothing that the states or local governments can do will stop ICE from carrying out its operations,” said Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel at Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has backed legislation that defends immigrants in the state, declined to comment.

Ramirez said private companies are violating the spirit of sanctuary legislation — and she called for a state investigation into what happened with Galvis.

“This requires the [Illinois] attorney general to conduct an investigation and to consider what legal action must be taken in the state of Illinois” against the security company that detained Galvis and Naythan as well as the hotel they were confined in, Ramirez said.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement to Injustice Watch, Sonesta, one of the world’s largest hotel chains, asserted it “has no knowledge of any illegal detentions at any hotels in the Sonesta portfolio.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment.

ICE Detention by Another Name

Galvis doesn’t remember the name of the company the civilian guards said they worked for. But she recognized a photo of JoAnna Granado, an employee for MVM Inc., a longtime ICE contractor with active contracts to transport children and families and a track record of confining unaccompanied migrant children in office buildings as well as in hotels. Granado confirmed to Injustice Watch and The Intercept that she transported Galvis and her son from the Sonesta O’Hare. MVM did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

Since fiscal year 2020, MVM has entered into contracts worth more than $1.3 billion from ICE — the vast majority of it for the transportation of immigrant children and families.

In 2020, when an attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project attempted to reach unaccompanied children being held in a McAllen hotel, he was physically turned away. ICE acknowledged MVM was at the hotel in question. The Texas Civil Rights Project and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Trump administration, and the government ultimately transferred the children out of the hotel.

More recently, attorneys filed suit against MVM last year for enforced disappearance, torture, and child abduction — among other claims — for its role during the first Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy that separated thousands of children from their parents near the border. The company’s effort to get the case dismissed failed.

Calls to the Sonesta O’Hare in June and July after Galvis’s release confirmed that MVM had rooms there.

ICE’s standards for temporary housing allow for the use of hotel suites to hold noncitizens “due to exigent circumstances including travel delays, lack of other bedspace, delay of receipt of travel documents, medical issues, or other unforeseen circumstances.” The standards require ICE or its contractors to explain to the detainee why they are at the hotel and how long they will be there, and to inform the detainee of the right to file a grievance, as well as “unlimited availability of unmonitored telephone calls to family, friends, and legal representatives” and various oversight agencies. Galvis said she wasn’t allowed to make any calls and was never told she was able to file a complaint. 

In its statement, Sonesta said that “all guest rooms at the property have a telephone and seating” at the O’Hare hotel. 

Two Sonesta O’Hare workers said they were familiar with MVM — one added that the company had a special rate there. (In a phone call with Injustice Watch, Sonesta O’Hare’s general manager, Sandra Wolf, said she was “unaware” of MVM or the confinement of detainees at her hotel.)

Calls to other airport Sonesta hotels suggest that MVM’s detention of immigrants may be more widespread.

When called in June, a front-desk worker at the Sonesta Atlanta Airport South in Georgia said that MVM usually has rooms at the hotel. On a call, an attendant at the Sonesta Select Los Angeles LAX El Segundo immediately recognized the company name and explained that MVM books rooms at a nearby property.

A front-desk agent at the nearby Sonesta Los Angeles Airport LAX acknowledged by phone that MVM regularly has rooms at the hotel. The hotel’s general manager Robert Routh later said he’d never heard of MVM and wasn’t familiar with the practice of holding ICE detainees in his hotel.

In a written statement, Sonesta wrote that it “does not condone illegal behavior of any kind at its hotels, and we endeavor to comply with the law and with law enforcement in the event of any suspected illegal behavior at any property within the Sonesta portfolio.” The company declined to answer questions about whether it has any contractual obligations to MVM or whether MVM received a special rate at its hotels.

Snatched From Immigration Court

Galvis knew before she went to Chicago’s immigration court on Thursday, June 5, from news and social media reports that ICE had been arresting people like her when they had shown up to court for their immigration cases.

But her husband, Camilo, a long-haul truck driver, had been granted asylum in the same court just two weeks earlier. The facts of their cases were almost identical. They had come to the U.S. together in 2022, fleeing far-right paramilitary violence in their native Colombia. Galvis had also survived a brutal assault from the paramilitary group.

So she came to the court at 55 E. Monroe Street with her infant son, Naythan, hoping to walk out without incident.

Instead, as with thousands of other immigrants in recent months, federal prosecutors asked the judge to dismiss her case, ending the asylum process. Plainclothes agents were waiting to detain her the moment she left the courtroom.

The agents shuttled Galvis and Naythan first to a nearby building, where she was fingerprinted and her phone and documents — including Naythan’s U.S. passport and birth certificate — were seized. Mother and son were then taken to an initial hotel where they spent several hours late into Thursday night. She was told that they would be flown to Texas before dawn on Friday — the sole detention center, ICE claimed, that could accommodate families. She was allowed one call to her husband; in a call that lasted a few seconds, she told him she was heading to Texas. 

The terror that Naythan might be torn away consumed her thoughts. She could endure detention and deportation alongside her son, Galvis said. Without him, she believed grief alone might kill her.

Around 2:30 a.m., two people dressed in civilian clothing arrived. They said their names were Alejandro and Lori and told Galvis in Spanish that they worked for a private company, though Galvis doesn’t remember which one. They encouraged her to ask any questions about her case to the ICE agents while she still had the chance, because the two of them wouldn’t be able to answer them.

Soon after, they brought Galvis and Naythan to the Sonesta, where they would spend the next five days cut off from the outside world.

They were held in a two-room suite and monitored at all times by one or two civilian guards, sometimes Alejandro and Lori and sometimes others. They were given fast food: Panera Bread, Subway, McDonald’s; Galvis picked out little pieces of vegetables to feed to her son, who was just beginning to eat solid foods.

On Friday, the day after she and Naythan were detained by ICE, Galvis’s attorney William G. McLean III filed a writ of habeas corpus, petitioning for her release. U.S. District Judge Franklin Valderrama soon ordered that the Trump administration “shall not remove Petitioners from the jurisdiction of the United States, nor shall they transfer petitioners to any judicial district outside the State of Illinois” before June 12. Judge Valderrama set an afternoon hearing for Tuesday, June 10, on the matter.

In emails reviewed by Injustice Watch and The Intercept, McLean pleaded with an ICE field officer for days to know his client’s whereabouts. “We do not know where they are located,” he wrote on Saturday. “I feel that it is very important to know that everything is OK,” he wrote the following Monday. ICE didn’t reveal his client’s location.

Galvis, meanwhile, had no idea about her lawyer’s efforts to release her. One day, she was told by one of the civilian guards that she would be deported with her son to Colombia. Other days, she said, she was told they’d be taken to Texas. She continued to fear that her son would be taken from her.

Finally, on the fifth day, Granado and another guard loaded Galvis and Naythan in a car but wouldn’t divulge where they were headed, Galvis said. While the airport was only minutes away, she noticed the navigation system indicated a 40-minute drive. Her heart sank, thinking they were taking her to a new location where her son could be taken from her.

Galvis kept quiet in the car, caressing Naythan and silently praying. As they approached their destination, Granado turned to her, Galvis said. 

“I think they’re going to let you go,” Galvis remembered her saying.

Galvis didn’t believe her. But moments later, she was at the Department of Homeland Security’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program office in Chicago. Agents gave her paperwork, including some of Naythan’s documents, and placed an electronic bracelet monitor on her wrist. Relief overcame her, mixed with uncertainty about what could happen next.

“I was obviously very scared of being deported, but my principal fear was being deported without my baby,” Galvis said. “I don’t think I could have survived that.” 

The dismissal in Galvis’s original immigration case is on appeal, and she now has a new asylum case with a new immigration judge in the same court. Galvis has regular online and in-person check-ins. Her next immigration court date is scheduled for January.

The post ICE Contractor Locked a Mother and Her Baby in a Hotel Room for Five Days appeared first on The Intercept.

Many of those watching the horrors unfold in Gaza have hung their highest hopes and deepest frustrations on the world’s apex courts: the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Nearly two years into the war, these judicial bodies have neither prevented atrocities from occurring nor punished perpetrators. Journalists and activists amassed ample evidence documenting war crimes committed by the Israeli military, and yet its soldiers continue to operate in Gaza with impunity. 

It’s a mistake to laser-focus on the ICJ, established by the United Nations Charter to settle disputes between states, and the ICC, which prosecutes individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression under the Rome Statute. Doing so misunderstands and overemphasizes their role. “The ICC takes up way too much oxygen in discussions of international criminal justice and accountability,” the International Crisis Group’s Brian Finucane told me. The myopia also misses important work happening in national courts. It’s here at the domestic level where Palestinians have the best chance to see justice, as nation-states attempt to fulfill their international obligations through homegrown investigations and prosecutions.

In many ways, the hopes and frustrations lavished on the ICC and ICJ are understandable. “When people think of international trials, they think of Nuremberg and the signal to the international community that these are the most serious crimes that are being perpetrated,” said Jake Romm, a human rights lawyer and U.S. representative for the Hind Rajab Foundation. Gaza is exactly the kind of grave situation for which these courts were founded, and they have not been completely dormant since October 7, 2023. In early 2024, after South Africa brought a case against Israel alleging that it violated the U.N. Genocide Convention, the ICJ issued several rounds of provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts, halt military action, and ensure the flow of humanitarian aid. In November that same year, the ICC put out arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (along with three top Hamas commanders) for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

But the wheels of justice in general turn slowly, and, for Palestinians, it can often feel like the wheels of international justice in particular seldom turn at all. The ICJ likely won’t rule on the genocide case until the end of 2027 at the earliest. And while the prospects of seeing Netanyahu or Gallant in the dock at The Hague were always dim, they look even dimmer after Hungary, a state party to the Rome Statute, allowed Israel’s wanted prime minister safe passage through Budapest, shirking its obligation to arrest him. The ICC also remains embroiled in crisis after its chief prosecutor took leave amid allegations of sexual misconduct, as perennial resource problems and political pressure continue to plague the court and the Trump administration targets the institution with sanctions and other threats. Even special international criminal tribunals, like the ad hoc structures created in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, are subject to a United Nations Security Council veto, an insurmountable hurdle for Palestinians.

These international courts have surely not met the moment, but they cannot fight for global justice alone, nor were they designed to. Without an independent enforcement mechanism, international law functions as a voluntary system, dependent on states — as both its subjects and principal agents — to carry it out. And, according to associate professor of criminal law at the University of Milan and senior legal adviser to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights Chantal Meloni, the Rome Statute set out “a very clear logic that not every international crime committed everywhere in the world can be under the jurisdiction of the ICC, and states have to take their share of the responsibility to prevent and punish these crimes.”

National courts, on the other hand, often don’t face the same resource constraints and can go after perpetrators up and down the chain of command. The pursuit of justice through domestic courts “involves potentially hundreds, even thousands of potential suspects as opposed to the ICC, which is only ever going to be dealing with a handful of cases,” said Mark Lattimer, executive director at the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights. While states also face their own political pressures, they do not have to perform the ICC’s difficult dance of appeasing its many patrons. Lattimer added that domestic efforts can also “act as a break on double standards” all too present in international courts, especially for countries with a strong, independent judiciary insulated from prevailing geopolitical power shifts and free to pursue the gravest breaches of international law irrespective of the perpetrator’s nationality.

Efforts to activate domestic jurisdiction for international crimes are not new. A growing body of case law has arisen out of extraterritorial prosecutions in the Syrian war, the Balkan wars, various African conflicts, and, of course, World War II. Countries such as Spain and Belgium already had universal jurisdiction laws, which empower national authorities of any country to investigate and prosecute serious international crimes even if they were committed in another country, in place even before the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998.

Lawyers and activists are building on this historical precedent by pushing for domestic jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute allegations of atrocities by Israel’s military in Gaza, the fruits of which have already led to tangible outcomes across several countries. Last month, Belgian authorities detained and questioned two Israeli soldiers on leave at a music festival in response to a legal complaint filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation and the Global Legal Action Network. The episode may have marked the first time national authorities detained Israeli soldiers on suspicion of crimes committed in Gaza, but these “traveling soldiers,” some of them dual nationals, have faced other consequences. In January, the Israeli foreign minister helped Yuval Vagdani, as a vacationing soldier, escape from Brazil after learning that a federal judge there had opened a war crimes investigation stemming from another Hind Rajab Foundation legal filing. (Vagdani has denied the allegations in the filing.)

In addition to filing a complaint with the ICC against more than 1,000 members of Israel’s military, the Hind Rajab Foundation has filed complaints and arrest requests with the national authorities of at least 23 countries. In response to these activities and others, the Israeli government issued advisories for soldiers traveling to certain jurisdictions with legal resources and other advice. “They’re spooked,” said Romm. “National legal systems are coming online to possibly arrest and incarcerate these Israeli soldiers for what they’re doing to the Palestinians for the first time in history.” Though no complaint has resulted in a prosecution yet, these cases will likely continue and may even pick up speed. In July, 30 countries convened by The Hague Group committed to supporting “universal jurisdiction mandates, as and where applicable in our legal constitutional frameworks and judiciaries, to ensure justice for all victims and the prevention of future crimes in the Occupied Palestine Territory.”

Of course, the current political environment in several countries make any investigations of Israeli soldiers impossible, regardless of questions of jurisdiction and prosecutorial capacity. In April, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed an urgent request with the Justice Department to prosecute the Israeli soldier Yuval Shatel under U.S. federal law after learning he was spotted in Texas days prior. According to a press release from the foundation, the filing included a dossier of evidence in support of allegations that Shatel committed “serious violations of international humanitarian law during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.” (Shatel and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment).

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At the same time, the Hind Rajab Foundation is not naive. The chance of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi directing the Justice Department to investigate its allegations against Shatel seems slim at best, especially since the U.S. War Crimes Act, passed in 1996, laid dormant until December 2023, when the Justice Department indicted four Russians for alleged violations of the federal war crimes statute — the first (and only) prosecution in the law’s 30-year history. The apparent unwillingness to apply the statute elsewhere drew criticism as Israel’s military campaign in Gaza intensified. On October 21, 2024, Justice Department attorneys wrote a letter to Bondi’s predecessor, Merrick Garland, “calling out the ‘glaring gap’ between the department’s approach to crimes committed by Russia and Hamas — versus the department’s silence on potential crimes committed by Israeli forces and civilians.”

The Hind Rajab Foundation’s request aims to close that gap. “There is a discrepancy between what the letter of the law says and how the U.S. is acting,” said Romm. “We filed this because we want them to prosecute, and because they can. They have jurisdiction, and the crimes are very clear.” The Shatel case is HRF’s first U.S. prosecution request, but Romm says it won’t be the last. “All I can say is there will be more,” he told me. “We’re going to try to get everyone we possibly can.”

There is no statute of limitations for the gravest transgressions of international law. For perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, the prosecutor’s sword of Damocles will hang over them for a lifetime. In December, German courts cleared the way for a 100-year-old former Nazi to stand trial nearly 80 years after the end of WWII. “Despite the fact that this carnage has gone on for almost two years now, it’s still, by the standards of justice, in the early days,” said Finucane. “When it comes to atrocity crime accountability, there are very long tails, and these things spool over the course of decades.”

For anyone demanding justice and accountability for Israel’s crimes in Gaza, the message is clear: Let a thousand prosecutions bloom.

The post An Unexpected Path to Hold War Criminals Accountable appeared first on The Intercept.