On Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he would be ending his run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision came after a weekslong battle following Biden’s disastrous showing at a debate against Republican nominee Donald Trump, a press conference that only slightly assuaged anxieties about his faculties, and a bout of Covid. 

For a major political party to change tack this late in the game reeks of a crisis. By its nature, the move is a gambit, a major risk. The shift sets up a candidate who was never overwhelmingly popular — Harris — as a political savior. As a savvy politician whose candidacy has already spurred Democratic enthusiasm, Harris has a real shot at pulling it all off, but the fact of the matter is the situation she has been handed is ripe with the potential for failure.

It’s a familiar story: a quick fix job, a woman of color tasked to clean up the mess made by a bunch of white men. Welcome to the “glass cliff.”

A now 20-year-old term, the notion of the glass cliff is a nod to the “glass ceiling” — that unseen but impenetrable barrier to the upward advancement of women. The “cliff” refers to the phenomenon of women being promoted or hired when an organization is on the brink of failure.

Coining the term in a 2005 research paper, British organizational psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam studied businesses in the London Stock Exchange and found that “companies who appointed women to their boards were more likely to have experienced consistently bad performance in the preceding five months than those who appointed men.”

The pressures of that moment are often insurmountable. A woman in this position is tasked with saving the organization: doing the cleanup job, cutting budgets, laying people off, and reorganizing. She’s heralded as a first of her kind, a historic moment, an opportunity to change directions, the dawn of a new day — but she’s also often paid less than the failed (male) leader who came before her. The “cliff” is the invisible ledge; one misstep, and you go barreling down the side.

It’s not difficult to see how this all applies to Harris.

Harris is an exceedingly qualified candidate who has the skills to do the job of being president. Why wasn’t she called in earlier? The party had months, if not years, to change course as the evidence of Biden’s decline became clear. Instead, Democrats waited until their hand was forced. Now Harris is being called upon to save the day. 

Whether Harris can, in fact, save the day is another question. Her history as a prosecutor haunted her last presidential run, dampening enthusiasm among the party’s progressive base. Or will the country be haunted by the question of whether voters are ready to accept a mixed race Black and South Asian woman? (Many observers said the country simply wasn’t ready for a white one after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, though a number of factors were clearly at work.) Harris’s perceived weaknesses — particularly alleged missteps on immigration — make her exactly the sort of foil the Trump campaign is looking to exploit.

At the same time, as Prem Thakker wrote, she doesn’t carry the same baggage as Biden when it comes to Israel’s war on Gaza and holds the potential to change direction. She was also one of the most solid liberals in the Senate, setting her up to unite the party around issues like abortion rights, something 85 percent of Democratic voters support. There is also early evidence that she is waking up the political machine, motivating both funders and door-knockers to get involved. 

Whatever one personally thinks of Harris, given the current slate of candidates and the growing threat of another Trump term, Democrats appear to have made the most solid choice they could have at this moment to help win the election. Because of her past run, Harris has already been vetted. The governors and senators named as other likely candidates would have left sometimes vulnerable empty seats in gubernatorial mansions and Congress. And an open convention could descend into chaos, resulting in Democratic disarray as the clock winds down on the race.

The potential for failure, however, remains. The polls have been daunting, and a total reverse is unlikely. It will require a feat of organizing to harness excitement about the change of candidate into a formidable ground operation. And Republicans will keep trying to tie Harris to Biden, attempting to weigh her down with his flagging popularity.

The bigger challenges she will face have less to do with her qualifications or ability to do the job and more to do with vast disinformation, a party plagued with infighting and — should she win — a host of intractable problems ranging from the climate crisis to a revanchist Supreme Court.

Harris isn’t solely responsible for her circumstances or the larger mess Democrats find themselves in, but she is now being tasked to lean in and fix it in the final hours.

Harris has also recently been attacked as a “DEI” candidate — a token of Democrats’ diversity. (Lydia Polgreen has argued that, if we label Harris as a diversity candidate, we should do the same for Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio.) The suggestion itself is racist: This diminishes Harris’s qualifications and longtime record as a Democratic power player.

There is, however, a lens through which the idea of Harris as a “DEI” candidate is not totally off. After all, when women and people of color are promoted amid a failing state of affairs, they are often heralded as wins for diversity. And though neoliberals may disingenuously tout the accomplishment of a victory for diversity, these sorts of wins can be genuinely positive developments for our politics — positive, that is, except for when things collapse.

That’s when the cynics come in. Instead of assessing how the system set Harris up to fail, the national conversation is overrun by handwringing over how she probably shouldn’t have gotten the nomination in the first place.

It’s a potential pitfall so great, so hard to see coming, that you might even call it a glass cliff.

The post Kamala Harris and the Dangers of the “Glass Cliff” appeared first on The Intercept.

From the beginning, something has been off about President Joe Biden’s approach to the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s genocidal invasion of Gaza.

Even by the low standards of America’s steadfast support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Biden’s own long-standing Zionism, he’s been careless: endorsing baseless Israeli propaganda, bear-hugging the notoriously unreliable Benjamin Netanyahu, and slandering his own supporters as antisemites.

The disastrous presidential debate, and Biden’s decision to bow out of the race, has given us a new way to understand what’s been happening. Maybe Biden’s approach has been thoughtless because the president is having trouble thinking.

In retrospect, Biden’s incapacity has been on display since the first days following the October 7 raid. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” the president said, repeating a gruesome but uncorroborated rumor.

The press raced to clarify: Had Biden seen evidence that the Israelis were keeping secret? White House staff explained that the president was merely referring to Israeli media reports. We could chalk it up to a gaffe at a highly charged moment, except that Biden kept repeating the charge, leading Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler to accuse the president of exaggerating under the headline “Biden yet again says Hamas beheaded babies. Has new evidence emerged?” The answer was “No.”

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Joe Biden Keeps Repeating His False Claim That He Saw Pictures of Beheaded Babies

The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill called Biden’s constant invocation of the fantastical beheaded babies story “inexplicable,” but now we know better. As two Harvard researchers wrote in a 2020 peer-reviewed study titled “Aging in an Era of Fake News,” those in late adulthood tend to have “difficulty detecting lies,” and they place “less emphasis on accuracy when communicating.” Obviously this does not apply to all older adults — Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, has remained notably sharp into his 80s — but after what we saw on the debate stage and in subsequent interviews, I find it hard to argue that it doesn’t fit Biden. At very least, it’s an explanation that fits the facts.

If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then how to describe Biden’s plan to break Yemen’s hold on Red Sea shipping lanes? When asked if U.S. airstrikes were working, Biden told the press, “When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” It’d be easier to call this another gaffe if that weren’t exactly what happened. Operation Prosperity Guardian airstrikes have killed dozens of Yemenis, and two Navy SEALs were lost at sea, but there has never been any hint of success for the Western alliance.

Over six months after the beginning of Prosperity Guardian, U.S. forces remain locked in what personnel have called “the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II.” America has been losing that battle every step of the way, something the troops aren’t used to. “I’ll be honest,” one recently returned Navy pilot told the AP about the novelty of getting shot at off Yemen, “it was a little traumatizing for the group.”

This drawn-out defeat is more or less what Biden said was going to happen; it’s not the statement that was the mistake, it was the mission itself. Starting a deadly international fight you can’t even plan to win is professional incompetence, but not being able to stop yourself from saying so out loud to the press suggests a different, more personal kind of incompetence.

Though Biden is unlikely to jump to the alternate explanations — corruption or racism — in his own defense, there’s evidence for both.

As a senator, Biden topped the Open Secrets list of recipients for pro-Israel money, receiving more than twice as much since 1990 as second-place Bob Menendez of New Jersey. (Menendez is corrupt: He was recently convicted at trial of acting as an overseas agent for Egypt.)

Whatever combination of earnest and bought, Biden’s support for Israel has never been tempered by concern for Palestinians. When the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner suggested to former State Department official Aaron David Miller that American policymakers don’t value Israeli and Palestinian lives equally, he didn’t get much pushback. “Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis?” said Miller. “No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.” I have similarly little doubt that Biden’s bigotry has made it easier for him to support the genocide in Gaza, but it’s not sufficient to explain his conduct.

But incompetence explains Biden’s actions in a way that unconditional support for the Israeli project can’t. It would have been easy enough to try and muddy the waters and obscure Israel Defense Forces responsibility for the massacre at Gaza’s largest hospital, for example, but there was no strategic reason for Biden to claim, as he did in November, that it was a “fact” that Hamas was hiding its military headquarters under al-Shifa.

When pressed by reporters to present some, or any, evidence that this was the case, Biden said with a strange, crooked smile, “No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.” He doesn’t even allow a reporter to get through the follow-up: “Do you feel absolutely confident based on what you know, that—?” “Yes,” he says, holding his bizarre expression. Hamas did not, in fact, have its military headquarters in tunnels under al-Shifa Hospital, and the president has never revealed any basis for his false but absolute confidence.

George W. Bush is not famous for having been one of America’s brighter presidents, but even he knew that you’re not supposed to get fooled twice. Biden, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to realize Netanyahu and his administration are running up the score on him: expanding the scope of the war to Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran; demanding the defunding of UNRWA under false pretenses, assassinating Western aid workers, and blocking aid trucks; and sabotaging peace negotiations. Israeli media has even reported that Netanyahu’s right-wing allies are opposing a hostage deal because it would be a victory for Biden and a “slap in the face” to their ally Donald Trump. None of this has upset Biden’s “bear hug” approach to the Israeli leadership, by which he preemptively ceded any leverage America might have over the country’s actions. Just look to Rafah, Biden’s “red line,” where the IDF has called his bluff and turned Gaza’s final “safe zone” into a killing field with impunity.

And yet, Biden seems to earnestly believe he is doing a good, fair job. “I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody,” he told Speedy Morman of Complex. “I mean, I’ve been very supportive of the Palestinians.” When asked why an Arab or Muslim voter would support him, Biden says his leadership represents the best path to peace and a two-state solution.

Meanwhile, under Biden’s watch, Israel has not only been seizing land in the West Bank at an unprecedented clip, but the Knesset also overwhelmingly voted against the idea of a two-state solution, right before Biden is set to reward Netanyahu with another bear hug during his visit to address Congress in D.C. this week.

Let’s not even get started with the disastrous temporary pier except to say that managing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without helping any of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people in direct proximity to the project surely represents an ironic achievement in American international aid. If still-President Biden thinks he has brought Palestinians anything but the kind of unfathomable tragedy and grief that resonates for centuries, it is the single strongest piece of evidence that he lacks the mental capacity to govern.

Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in November’s presidential election, thankfully. He is not withdrawing because he’s being held responsible for enabling war crimes against the Palestinian people (though a recent poll does have nearly 40 percent of Americans saying they’re less likely to vote for him thanks to his handling of the war). Yet it’s impossible to extricate the collapse in public faith in the Biden campaign from the “uncommitted” movement for Gaza. They were the first people to refuse him their votes, and defections from within the president’s base hollowed out his support well in advance of the debate.

Ditching Biden won’t automatically change anything, and the president is not solely responsible for Gaza, even within the White House. Anyone who is held personally responsible for a broad social crime such as genocide is, to some degree, a scapegoat — but that is not a reason to hold no one responsible. And Biden’s public incapacity opens a door to a better way forward for American policy. It’s time to take the keys; millions of Palestinians can’t wait for next January.

The Democrats and their presumptive nominee Kamala Harris are faced with a choice: On the one hand, they can continue Biden’s monstrous support for Netanyahu, the brutal IDF, and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That would help allow the party to cover for Biden and put a positive spin on a smooth handoff, even though we all know this would mainly benefit the embittered president himself and his small coterie of loyalists. Such a choice would confirm that the institutional rot that allowed the current situation to develop still characterizes the party.

The alternative is to force a change in policy. Harris must assure voters that, as the party’s leader, she won’t assume Biden’s biggest mistake, effective immediately. That starts with staying out of town during Netanyahu’s visit, and it has to grow from there, with public pressure from her office on the Israelis to sign a permanent ceasefire. This would in effect concede that the president’s incompetence has not been harmless at all: that on the contrary, it paved the road to hundreds of thousands of awful deaths.

Biden may well go down in history as Genocide Joe, a disgrace even to the job of president of the United States, roped to Israel’s atrocities in the same way Lyndon Johnson is tied to the Vietnam War. The upside for the rest of us is the possibility of an end to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

If the Democrats and Kamala Harris can’t decide between protecting Biden’s legacy and thousands of Palestinian lives, they’re no more competent to lead than he is.

The post Biden’s Failing Mind Might Explain His Incoherent Gaza Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

A bipartisan sampling of the world’s greatest perpetrators and enablers of political violence has rushed to condemn political violence following the shooting attempt on former President Donald Trump on Saturday.

Politicians swiftly coalesced around the language of “political violence,” rather than terrorism, to describe the assassination attempt, carried out by Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead at the Western Pennsylvania rally. Taken together, the outpourings of condemnations betray a clear agreement on what constitutes political violence, and in whose hands the monopoly on violence should remain.

“The idea that there’s political violence … in America like this, is just unheard of, it’s just not appropriate,” said President Joe Biden, the backer of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine, with a death toll that researchers believe could reach 186,000 Palestinians. Biden’s narrower point was correct, though: Deadly attacks on the American ruling class are vanishingly rare these days. Political violence that is not “like this” — the political violence of organized abandonment, poverty, militarized borders, police brutality, incarceration, and deportation — is commonplace.

“Everybody must condemn it,” Biden said of the assassination attempt.

And condemn it, most everyone in the Democratic political establishment has: “Political violence is absolutely unacceptable,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on X. “There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” tweeted former President Barack Obama, who oversaw war efforts and military strikes against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan with massive civilian death tolls; Obama added that we should “use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics.” “There is no place for political violence, including the horrific incident we just witnessed in Pennsylvania,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

The chorus of condemnation was predictable and not in itself a problem: There’s nothing wrong with desiring a world without stochastic assassination attempts, even against political opponents. But when you have Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Israel Katz of the fascistic ruling Likud Party, tweeting, “Violence can never ever be part of politics,” the very concept of “political violence” is evacuated of meaning.

The problem is not so much one of hypocrisy or insincerity — vices so common in politics that they hardly merit mention. The issue, rather, is what picture of “political violence” this messaging serves: To say that “political violence” has “no place” in a society organized by political violence at home and abroad is to acquiesce to the normalization of that violence, so long as it is state and capitalist monopolized.

As author Ben Ehrenreich noted on X, “There is no place for political violence against rich, white men. It is antithetical to everything America stands for.”

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Trump and his Republican Party will no doubt remain committed to a political imaginary of apocalyptic race war and paranoid tribalism, which the assassination attempt will likely only feed. Democrats are welcome to perform civility toward the man who has consistently called for their violent overthrow, but they cannot help themselves to the pretense that their well wishes to Trump actually constitute calls for an end to political violence.

Democratic leaders will call for civility and continue to fill the coffers of police departments nationwide, while sending billions of condition-free dollars and bombs to Israel. Within the U.S., these condemnations of political violence now set the scene for even greater violent repression and policing of protest movements and dissent.

“We will not tolerate this attack from the left,” said Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who was present at the rally. Little is known about the suspected gunman’s ideology; he was reportedly a registered Republican who once donated to a Democratic PAC on Biden’s inauguration day.

Other Republicans meanwhile blamed Democrats for simply telling the truth about Trump’s far-right extremism. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

If centrist Democrats stating the obvious about Trump can be slammed by Republicans as irresponsible, it bodes ill for any actual leftists organizing against fascist forces going forward — especially at a time when left-wing and pro-Palestinian protest movements are readily criminalized by both Democratic and Republican leaders. This is what peace means in a world where the only event to invoke a bipartisan chorus decrying “violence” is an attack on a fascistic former (and potentially future) world leader.

The post The Only Kind of “Political Violence” All U.S. Politicians Oppose appeared first on The Intercept.

Immediately following the surprise victory of left party coalition New Popular Front in France’s parliamentary elections last week, Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the leftist leader of the bloc’s largest party, France Unbowed — vowed to see France “recognize the Palestinian state as soon as possible.”

France’s far-right National Rally party, alongside conservative centrists, had spent weeks painting the left’s support of Palestine as an electoral poisoned pill. In attacks all too familiar in the U.S., they conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, slamming Israel’s critics as antisemites. Israeli officials explicitly backed the far-right party. In this last election, at least, it didn’t work to prevent left-wing success.

In Britain, too, the centrist Labour Party’s landslide victory was tempered in five constituencies, where independent candidates with pro-Palestinian platforms defeated Labour candidates. Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, won his North Islington, London, seat with ease; Corbyn was famously ousted from Labour when the party’s conservative wing and British media weaponized charges of antisemitism against the party’s left flank.

If there’s a lesson to be learned in the U.S. from the success of pro-Palestinian candidates in France and Britain, we can be grimly sure that no Democrat in November’s presidential election will learn it. President Joe Biden’s unfettered support of Israel and its genocidal Gaza war is not only a gross moral failure but also an electoral risk, particularly in crucial swing-state Michigan and for young voters in general. But his campaign refuses to change course on the issue. Even if the senescent president is replaced as the Democratic nominee, there’s scant chance that any successor will embrace a platform of Palestinian solidarity or even robust ceasefire demands. This, despite the fact that 77 percent of Democratic voters and two-thirds of voters in the U.S. support a permanent ceasefire.

The French and British results should, or at least could, however, be a lesson for left-wing Democrats to continue to fight against the vicious efforts of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, to crush Palestine-supportive candidates. This is especially important following the defeat of progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., after pro-Israel groups poured an unprecedented $15 million into the primary race to unseat the pro-Palestine incumbent.

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The astroturfed campaign against Bowman should not be heeded as a warning by progressive Democrats to abandon support for Palestine, or to temper their opposition to Israel’s Gaza onslaught. Rather, it should be a jolt to redouble organizing efforts in a united front against AIPAC’s interventions. Top Democrats did little to defend Bowman against the well-funded attack. It is somewhat encouraging that members of the Democratic mainstream have put more support behind AIPAC’s next target, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, for her primary next month; this support should be stronger still.

The French example is instructive here: Only through a highly strategic coalition of center-to-left candidates have the far right been kept from parliamentary leadership. Centrists did not throw their coalition partners on the left under the bus for their support for Palestine. The bloc can hardly be compared to the Democratic Party with its conservative, pro-Israel mainstream. Yet Democrats face a similar challenge: Win the trust of vast numbers of Muslim and Arab voters and young people, or stand with AIPAC — a lobby that has no problem raising millions for the Republican extreme right. 

It would go too far to say the recent French and British election results speak to the unambiguous popularity of Palestinian solidarity — too many variables were at play in both instances to draw simple conclusions. In Britain, desire to unseat the ruinous Conservative Party drove support for new Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s uninspiring Labour. In France, strategic coordination between the center and left in the election’s second round was key. The New Popular Front is a fraught coalition, and internal disagreements over Israel, among other issues, will no doubt threaten its fragile cohesion. The bloc also did not win an absolute majority, despite winning the largest number of seats, and thus faces huge roadblocks to pushing through its political program. Remaining a united front is the only chance the left parties have — and that means support for Palestine cannot be pushed aside.

This is, of course, a vile state of affairs that requires an appeal to realpolitik to see candidates stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid. Since the need to stop Israel’s intolerable war remains as urgent as ever, however, the fact that support for Palestine can be shown as helpful, rather than harmful, to electoral success is worth stressing. At the very least, leftist candidates and leaders in France and Britain like Mélenchon and Corbyn have modeled powerful examples for U.S. progressives: In the face of bad-faith attacks, and even party expulsions, aimed a quashing support for Palestine, they remained steadfast on the right side of history.

The post Supporting Palestine Helped the Left Win in France and Britain. Will Democrats Learn From It? appeared first on The Intercept.

When people told aid worker Fayad Mulla that as soon as asylum-seekers land on Greek soil, they’re immediately chased by groups of “masked men” assigned to kidnap them, Mulla found it hard to lend the stories credence.

Reports and rumors about black ops by Greek authorities have floated around for years, but the idea of state-sanctioned thugs running around beating migrants, throwing them in the trunks of cars, and forcing them back onto boats was too much for Mulla to believe. “It’s a European Union country,” he told an interviewer from the BBC, explaining his skepticism. That changed when he caught it on tape.

Through a long lens, he recorded a video of Greek guards on the island of Lesbos marching migrant families onto a speedboat. In one shot, you can clearly see a uniformed man in a balaclava carrying a child onto the boat. It’s shocking, yet this is part of a logical progression of escalating violence against migrants as governments erode the linked rights to asylum and rescue.

The BBC interviewed Mulla as part of its new documentary, “Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?” which starts with the question and ends with the facts: The Hellenic Coast Guard has turned the internationally recognized right of refugees to apply for asylum into a sick game, chasing down every man, woman, and child who lands unbidden in the country’s archipelago as part of a coordinated effort to deny them asylum rights.

Rather than an exception, the Greek strategy has become a signature model in the global war on asylum-seekers. From Venezuela to Mexico to Libya to Hungary to Japan, we’re seeing a semi-coordinated effort among wealthy countries to abolish one of the few legal responsibilities the world’s rich and comfortable have toward the poor and afflicted.

The Greek strategy has become a signature model in the global war on asylum-seekers.

Mulla’s video, first published by the New York Times in 2023, is a smoking gun, but analysts have also compiled a ton of circumstantial evidence that details an inescapable pattern. Forensic Architecture tracked and mapped over 2,000 instances of what the research group calls “drift-backs” from Greek territorial waters between 2020 and 2023. Once captured by the masked men, migrants are put onto motorless rubber boats and literally shoved toward Turkish territorial waters. Instead of the authorities expelling people directly, according to Forensic Architecture, “natural processes and geographical features of the Aegean archipelago — currents, waves, winds and uninhabited rocks — carry out the expulsion, distancing the perpetrators from the impact of their lethal actions.” The group counts 55,445 people expelled via the technique over three years, including 24 deaths and 17 disappearances.

Not included in the Forensic Architecture count is the June 2023 sinking of the migrant ship Adriana in the Mediterranean, in which over 600 people lost their lives. As recounted by survivors in “Dead Calm,” the Hellenic Coast Guard was so slow to respond to the ship’s distress that presumed negligence becomes probable malice. Ultimately, it was a Mexican-owned luxury yacht that came to the rescue, such as it was. But the Greeks weren’t the only ones responsible for the Adriana disaster: As Mulla said, Greece is part of the EU, and the EU has Frontex, an international border management agency. At its Polish headquarters, Frontex was monitoring the situation, but that didn’t do the passengers on the Adriana much good. Pushed by the BBC to condemn the now well-documented practices of the Hellenic Coast Guard, Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer Jonas Grimheden walked off the set.

Though it appears that the EU is defending the Hellenic Coast Guard, the inverse is closer to the truth: As the southeastern corner of the EU, Greece is responsible for deflecting as many migrants as possible from Europe.

“This border is not only a Greek border, it is also a European border,” declared European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen in a 2020 joint press conference with the Greek prime minister. “I thank Greece for being our European aspida in these times,” she said, using the Greek word for “shield.” Greece is between Europe and many tens of thousands of people seeking refuge from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East, and it stands astride the border wearing a mask and strapped with a combat knife. In support of this border work, the EU has funneled billions of euros to its member-state. Frontex also deploys aerial surveillance assets, its own ships, and even on-the-ground personnel who have collaborated with Greek police in the drift-back scheme.

Europe doesn’t just fund the Greek side: The European Union has sent over $10 billion worth of assistance to Turkey, a non-member state, to help guard the border. Billions more have gone to Egypt, Tunisia, and Mauritania — all with the goal of reducing the number of asylum-seekers who make it to somewhere within the EU where they can exercise their inviolable rights.

In the Western hemisphere, Mexico serves as un escudo for the United States, shielding its richer neighbor to the north.

President Joe Biden ended the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, but his June order to halt asylum processing at the southern border has had a similar effect. And under heavy pressure from the United States, Mexico adopted the cost-effective practice of pushing migrants back to the country’s own south, relying on the difficult journey to dissuade people traveling to the U.S. from Central and South America. Last month, the Associated Press reported accusations from an asylum-seeker that she was beaten by Mexican soldiers in front of her children before they were all put on a bus south. Such scenes and their direct connection to U.S. policy are so well-documented that any deniability is implausible, but that seems to be good enough for Biden and the international bodies to which heads of state are supposedly accountable.

If Donald Trump wins in November, the American attack on asylum will only accelerate. Like other conservative demagogues, the ex-president has made “migrant crime” a focus of his campaign, using it as an all-purpose answer in last month’s debate. Along with “Remain in Mexico,” we can expect Trump to reinstate Turkey-style Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras at minimum. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 victory plan goes further, hinting at a frontal attack on the right to asylum itself. “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed,” the authors write, “They should be abandoned.”

The dastardly Project 2025 schemers are correct about one thing: It is not the prerogative of individual states to protect their borders by whatever means they choose. The right to seek asylum as a refugee is statutorily enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and is, in theory, one of international law’s few guarantees. Non-refoulement (the French word for “push back”) is supposed to be a human right.

Non-refoulement is supposed to be a human right.

But if the rich Western countries who enforce international law conspire to obviate the same rule, there’s not a lot anyone can do about it. For example, Hungary is currently subject to a $1 million euro fine per day by the EU’s highest court to penalize it for refouling migrants, but Prime Minister Viktor Orbán should be able to afford it: von der Leyen graciously unblocked over 10 billion euros in frozen EU funds for Hungary’s illiberal ruling clique in December. Taken as a whole, the EU’s position is clear — and clearly lawless. Investigative agencies will continue to write their reports, but there’s no way to appeal the decisions of armed men in masks.

As of yet, nations are not challenging the Refugee Convention directly, even as they move to scale back and even nullify its protections. In this environment, nations that sit between the world’s richest countries and its poorest and most war-torn can offer a valuable service as buffers and border guards. Every asylum-seeker that Greece pushes back is one that Germany never needs to worry about accommodating.

Though a climatically and politically unstable world does mean more refugees, the global attack on asylum is not a byproduct of overwhelming immigration. Japan, for example, tightened its policy in June by making it easier to deport asylum-seekers, although the restrictive country only awarded refugee status to 303 people in 2024, which was still a national record. A few hundred people in a population of over 100 million can’t pose any real burden on the country’s resources; the problem is with the principle that people are entitled to flee hardship and seek refuge. The goal is to whittle a right into a rare privilege.

To accomplish that, the West has to find ways to make seeking asylum even less appealing and more dangerous than the wars and disasters people are fleeing in the first place. Authorities must invent new cruelties to administer, cook up new nightmares to visit on the world’s most desperate. With their masks and knives and beatings, the Hellenic Coast Guard leads the way.

“There is a huge amount to learn from the Greek authorities and the Greek government in terms of the approach that they’ve taken towards illegal migration,” United Kingdom Home Secretary Suella Braverman told the press after a guided tour of coast guard operations on Samos, an island notorious for drift-backs. In April, the day after the U.K. passed a new policy that involves deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda, five people drowned in the English Channel on their way to Britain, including a child.

As far as rich countries are concerned, these drownings are not a problem — they are a model policy solution. So if you want an image of the future, imagine a masked man kidnapping a child, putting her on a raft, and shoving it into the open sea, over and over and over again.

The post The World War on Asylum appeared first on The Intercept.

Monday’s Supreme Court ruling granting far-reaching presidential immunity gives the lie to decades of right-wing propaganda about the real purpose of the long conservative campaign to take over the court.

Generations of conservative pseudointellectuals have argued that the mission of the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal group that has seeded the Supreme Court with its zombie-like members, was to bring the court back to its original mandate under the Constitution. The right-wing pundits who promoted the Federalist Society were always a little vague on what their version of “originalism” really entailed, which led to widespread suspicions that it just meant whatever was politically beneficial to conservatives.

The ruling on presidential immunity is just the latest piece of evidence that shows that originalism was just a confidence game by the right to gain power. The court’s conservative majority has revealed itself to be a corrupt political machine with both short- and long-term goals. Today, the court is determined to protect Donald Trump and the Republican Party; longer-term, its mandate is to protect and defend the powers of those who will enable white minority rule in America for years to come.

The court’s immunity ruling is nearly a blank check for Donald Trump.

The court’s immunity ruling is nearly a blank check for Trump, a brazen attempt to protect him from his ongoing criminal cases and to grant him virtually unlimited power if he gets back into the White House. With its ruling, the Supreme Court’s right-wing block has made it clear: They are tired of democracy. The justices want a dictator.

But they only want a right-wing dictator. It is not hard to imagine how differently the justices would have ruled if the question of presidential immunity had come before them in a case involving a Democratic president. 

The right-wing court is engaged in a radical revolution, and its objective is to rewrite modern American history. Through their rulings, the conservative justices are revealing what the American right has until recently tried to keep quiet, which is that the right doesn’t accept any of the major changes that have happened in American society since World War II. They have in their minds a fantasy version of 1940s America, even though almost none of them were alive at the time. What they yearn for is a nation before integration and civil rights, before women’s rights and reproductive rights, before gay rights, before the modern expansions of free speech and press freedom. Above all, they want a return to a less diverse America, a nation in which white male power was unquestioned. They want it so badly that they are willing to abandon democracy to get it. 

The radicalized court, with the Federalist Society’s approval, are in the process of demolishing the landmark Supreme Court rulings of the post-World War II era.

In order to get confirmed, Trump’s appointees to the court lied to the Senate by claiming that they saw Roe v. Wade as settled law; they ripped it up as soon as they consolidated their power on the court. In quick succession, they have gone after voting rights, affirmative action, gun control, environmental regulations, while sending out the word that now is a good time for conservative lawyers to bring their most extreme lawsuits to the court in order to create more right-wing precedents. This court could ban access to contraceptives next; another target could be a reversal on the legalization of gay marriage. The court is now so radical that it would not be surprising to see it go after Brown versus Board of Education, the historic Supreme Court ruling that declared that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional and which helped formed the basis for integration.

This court will be remembered like the justices behind the Dredd Scott decision, the worst ruling by the Supreme Court in American history. Their robes don’t hide their naked grab for political power.      

The post The Supreme Court Wants a Dictator appeared first on The Intercept.

When Julian Assange abruptly found himself back in Australia and freedom this week after reaching a plea deal with the U.S. government, I found myself thinking back to my own marathon legal fight with the U.S. government and how it finally and suddenly ended. 

I waged a seven-year legal battle against the George W. Bush administration and later the Obama administration, both of which demanded I reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for story I wrote about a botched CIA operation. I wrote about the CIA operation for the New York Times, but the paper’s editors suppressed the story at the government’s request, so I published it in my 2006 book, “State of War.” The government then launched a leak investigation, subpoenaing me in 2008 to try to force me to testify and reveal my sources. The government threatened that if I didn’t comply, I could be thrown in prison for contempt of court. I refused and fought them all the way to the Supreme Court. 

In 2015, as negative publicity mounted on the Obama administration for its campaign to put a reporter in prison, I was called to attend a court hearing. When the prosecutor asked me whether I would go to prison rather than reveal my sources, I said yes. This time the government backed down, abandoning its efforts to force me to testify. At the end of that hearing, I drove home and had a glass of champagne with my wife to celebrate. I felt free for the first time in seven years.  

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that began in the post-9/11 era and has continued ever since. The Assange case was part of that same anti-press campaign, one that the government has continued to conduct under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

My personal experience has made me sympathize with Assange, even as so many other Americans have turned on him. My legal fight left me exhausted, both mentally and physically, especially during the long periods when my case was being ignored by the press and the outside world. I learned firsthand that the Justice Department’s primary legal strategy in such cases is to try to bankrupt people and wear them down so that they cut deals rather than go to trial. 

My personal experience has made me sympathize with Assange, even as so many other Americans have turned on him.

I emerged victorious when my case finally ended; I never revealed my sources. But the result of facing down the government for so long made me far more I suspicious of power and much less willing to accept authority.  

I am sure that as Assange returns to Australia to try to put his life back together, he will recognize that he has changed in surprising ways as well.     

To be sure, there are stark differences between Assange’s experience and my own. Assange was a polarizing figure long before he faced prosecution, with enemies on both sides of the American political divide. Republicans hated him for what he did in 2010, when he published classified documents from the Pentagon and the State Department on his WikiLeaks website, while also sharing those documents with mainstream news organizations like The Guardian and the New York Times. Those documents led to a wide range of disclosures about the dark and abusive actions of the United States in the post-9/11 era, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond in the global war on terror. 

Democrats, meanwhile, learned to hate Assange for what he did in 2016. Knowingly or not, he served as a go-between for Russian intelligence. Moscow hacked the emails of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and then turned them over to Assange, who published the emails and related Democratic Party documents on WikiLeaks, while also doling them out to reporters for mainstream news organizations during the 2016 presidential campaign, damaging the Clinton campaign and helping Donald Trump. 

As if all of that wasn’t enough, many others grew to hate him for evading sexual assault charges in Sweden. 

When Assange was first charged in 2019 by the Justice Department under the Espionage Act for his involvement in the 2010 leak of classified documents from the State Department and the U.S. military, very few people, liberal or conservative, came to his defense. Democrats went along with his indictment by the Trump administration, even though he was not charged in connection with the hacking of Democratic Party emails and Russian election interference in 2016. And when Joe Biden became president, his Justice Department continued the Assange prosecution without extending the charges to cover his involvement in the 2016 election.  

Now, after years in prison in Britain while fighting extradition to the United States, Assange has finally cut a deal with the Justice Department. He pleaded guilty this week to violating the Espionage Act and in return was released from prison for the time he has served in Britain. He was able to enter his plea agreement at a federal court in Saipan, a U.S. territory, and then fly directly to Australia. 

Many of his supporters have declared this a victory for Assange. But by obtaining a guilty plea, the Justice Department can also claim victory and ominously may use the same tactics to go after other reporters.  

Assange’s unpopularity means that few have viewed him as a martyr in the cause of press freedom. But he is a victim of an abusive prosecution by a government seeking to silence whistleblowers, and his case has set a dangerous precedent that could severely damage press freedom in the United States.

Few have viewed Assange as a martyr in the cause of press freedom. But he is a victim of an abusive prosecution by a government seeking to silence whistleblowers.

Though his legal saga has come to an end, the role he has played in journalism has never been fully resolved or even accurately defined. 

Assange was a strange hybrid figure in journalism. WikiLeaks, the online organization he co-founded, obtained documents from sources inside governments and other organizations and then made them public, either by publishing them on its own website or by sharing them with major news organizations. Journalists learned to cultivate relationships with Assange in order to get their hands on the secret documents that WikiLeaks had obtained from whistleblowers.

Did that make Assange a go-between, a source, a journalist, or all three rolled into one?  

The Justice Department arbitrarily sought to decide itself how to define Assange’s role by declaring that Assange did not act as a legitimate journalist when he interacted with Chelsea Manning, the former Army analyst and whistleblower who leaked the classified State Department and U.S. military documents to Assange.  

The notion that the U.S. government gets to decide how to define journalism might prove to be the least understood, but most dangerous, precedent set by the long and messy case against Assange. 

The post Like Julian Assange, I Know How It Feels to Be Prosecuted for Acts of Journalism appeared first on The Intercept.

The legal system cracked down on a New York fraudster last Thursday. Guilty of engaging in a complex scheme to move and hide money for his personal benefit, a former top executive must now face sentencing and the possibility of spending time in prison.

But last Thursday’s court hearing for Shukhratjon Mirsaidov, during which he pleaded guilty to money laundering, was overshadowed by a different white-collar criminal case in another New York courthouse on the same day. Just as Mirsaidov, a former business executive, was pleading guilty in federal court in Manhattan to a complex, fraudulent scheme to launder money, Donald Trump, a former president, was also convicted in a complex fraudulent scheme to falsify business records — in his case hiding a hush-money payment to a porn star that risked derailing his presidential campaign. 

The Trump and Mirsaidov cases aren’t exactly alike, and the stakes involved are obviously very different. But the similarities between them prove that the case brought against Trump was not out of line with the routine white-collar prosecutions that make up the daily work of the justice system. Vengeful attacks by Trump and his supporters claiming that ex-president is the victim of a political persecution don’t stand up to scrutiny when it becomes clear that the Trump case was not so different from the run-of-the-mill case that ensnared Mirsaidov on the same day.

Federal prosecutors accused Mirsaidov of laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars he obtained through health care fraud through a bank account at the company where he worked. Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the office that prosecuted Mirsaidov, said the case was more significant because Mirsaidov took advantage of his senior position to gain access to company accounts to launder funds. “While all forms of money laundering are pernicious, such conduct is particularly severe when it involves executives at major businesses abusing their positions,” Williams said. “This case demonstrates that money launderers — no matter what their station — will be held accountable.” 

Williams could just as easily have been talking about Trump. The difference was that Mirsaidov was simply trying to enrich himself, while Trump was trying to win an election through a fraudulent cover-up. 

Trump was treated like other white-collar criminals in New York, but the guilty verdict in that case stands in stark contrast to the kid-glove treatment he has received in the three other pending cases in which he has been criminally charged. The New York case was the only one that couldn’t be delayed or quashed by Republican-appointed judges or right-wing legal and political systems, and so is the only one that has yet gone to trial. All three other cases remain in legal limbo because Trump is receiving privileged treatment, giving the lie to the notion that everyone is equal before the law in the United States. 

In each jurisdiction in which he has been charged besides New York’s state courts, the legal system has provided a champagne room for Trump — and a back alley for everyone else. 

Trump has been indicted in federal court for trying to overturn the 2020 election, engaging in what amounted to a coup d’état to illegally remain in power and stop Joe Biden from becoming president. He also faces separate federal charges in a scheme in which he illicitly kept classified documents after he left office and hid them from federal investigators when they came looking for them. In a third case, Trump faces state charges in Georgia for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, which Biden won. 

The federal case involving his efforts to overturn the 2020 election is currently on hold because the Republican-dominated Supreme Court has taken up Trump’s ridiculous claim, dismissed by lower courts, that he is immune from prosecution because he was still president at the time he was trying to illegally overturn the election. 

In the classified documents case, a Trump-appointed federal judge has been doing his bidding by agreeing to endless delays. The judge seems to be hoping to delay the case until after the November election, hoping that Trump will win, quash the case, and then reward her with a position on a higher court or a top position in his administration.

The Georgia case has been delayed by a sideshow concerning the personal relationship between the district attorney who brought the case and an outside prosecutor she hired to handle the prosecution. Their sexual relationship became the subject of bitter hearings; a judge ruled that the district attorney could remain on the case despite the relationship, but that ruling is now on appeal, delaying the trial. 

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on whether Trump is immune in the federal election interference case before the end of its current term in July. If the court rules that Trump is not immune, that case could go to trial before the election. 

But the fact that ethically challenged Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito get to vote on whether to hold Trump accountable doesn’t bode well for the rule of law. 

So for now, the New York case, which the pundit class initially dismissed as the weakest of the four cases against Trump, is the only one to hold him accountable for what he is: a white-collar criminal, not so different from Shukhratjon Mirsaidov.

The post To Understand the Trump Verdict, Look at the Case Against Shukhratjon Mirsaidov appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump is running for president to stay out of prison. But what happens if he has to run for president to try to stay out of prison — while he is already in prison?

What if he is running from Rikers? 

On Thursday, that possibility became very real, very fast, after Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts in a case in New York state court. The jury only deliberated for a day before issuing a sweeping verdict convicting him of charges related to paying hush money to a porn actress. 

Trump is now a convicted felon in a very complicated legal situation, brought on by his utter disregard for the rule of law.

Over the past year, he has been facing criminal charges in four separate cases, but his defense has had very little to do with proving his innocence in any of them. The facts in all of the cases go against him, and he and his lawyers know it. Instead, his legal strategy has been to delay the cases until he can win the presidential election, and then quickly abuse his presidential powers in order to kill the two federal cases against him. 

The state cases, however, pose a greater threat to him, as he wouldn’t have any ability to pardon himself, should he win.

In state court in Georgia, where Trump is accused of election interference, he is relying on a friendly, Republican-dominated state legal and political system, where efforts are already underway to discredit the local prosecutor. If that doesn’t work, Georgia’s Republican-dominated pardon board (its members are appointed by the Republican governor) will probably find some legal loophole to help Trump wriggle out of any punishment, especially if he is elected president. 

Then there is New York. 

Trump was unable to bully the state’s legal system into delaying his case there, and the judge showed little patience for the antics Trump has employed with impunity in other legal venues. All of that helped guarantee that the New York trial would take place before the election, even as his other cases were delayed and faded from political view.

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When the state charges were first brought against Trump in New York, pundits with little understanding of the legal system immediately branded the case to be weak, overdrawn, and too complicated. But the basic facts of the case are actually straightforward, revealing a criminal conspiracy that was designed to help Trump win the White House in 2016. 

It wasn’t too weak, too overdrawn, or too complicated for the jury. 

Think back to Friday, October 7, 2016. In the closing weeks of the presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton, a Washington Post story was posted online that night reporting on a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump talked openly about how he frequently groped women, adding that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” 

Almost immediately, shocked Republican leaders began to call on Trump to drop out of the presidential race. It was the biggest crisis of the Trump campaign. 

Trump’s campaign barely survived. But what would have happened to Trump if other scandals had come out immediately after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public? What if the “Access Hollywood” tape was quickly followed by the revelation that Trump had sex with a porn actress while he was married? 

In his closing arguments in the New York trial, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass emphasized the connection between the political firestorm surrounding the “Access Hollywood” tape that was engulfing the Trump campaign in October 2016 and the scheme to silence Stormy Daniels, the adult film star. Steinglass pointed out that the deal to pay off Daniels was made just after the “Access Hollywood” tape came out.

“It’s critical to appreciate this,” Steinglass told the jurors. “Stormy Daniels … would have totally undermined his strategy of spinning away the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape.”

So to avoid another big scandal on top of the “Access Hollywood” scandal, a combination punch that could have knocked him out of the presidential campaign, Trump engaged in a plot to secretly pay off Daniels and bury the story. As part of the cover-up, he fraudulently falsified records about the transactions involved in his scheme. 

Charges related to that cover-up were at the heart of the New York state case, including the falsifying of business records in order to hide the fact that he paid back his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for his payment to Daniels.

To bolster the argument that Trump engaged in a wide-ranging fraud to hide damaging news in the middle of the presidential campaign, the New York case also featured the role of the sensationalist tabloid National Enquirer in the practice of the “catch and kill” of stories potentially harmful to Trump. David Pecker, the former chief executive of the company that owned the Enquirer, testified during the trial in New York that he was involved in three payments to silence people with negative information about Trump: a Trump Tower doorman who said Trump had an illegitimate child, a former Playboy model who had an affair with Trump, and Daniels. 

Sentencing in the case will be July 11 — less than a week before the Republican National Convention. 

Update: May 30, 2024, 8:12 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a quote from prosecutor Joshua Steinglass.

The post These Convictions Thwart Trump’s Plan to Pardon Himself appeared first on The Intercept.

Why does Joe Biden insist on pursuing a foreign policy of blind support of Israel’s war on Gaza? In addition to the moral calamity — on full display as Israel bombed Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza — it has also exacted a political cost, damaging his relationship with his base and swing state voters. Critics have attributed Biden’s disastrous handling of the war to incompetence or his lifelong Zionism.

What is really at the center of the administration’s policy, however, is an insidious geopolitical play that will make the world a more dangerous place, advancing U.S. imperial interests under the guise of a diplomatic deal.

Biden wants to tie the U.S. to one of the most abhorrent regimes in the world for decades to come, striking a far-reaching security deal with Saudi Arabia — an agreement that would put American lives on the line to protect the Saudi dictatorship and lock us into a new cold war.

And Biden’s big plan for peace in the Middle East is straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook.

Biden’s big plan for peace in the Middle East is straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook.

After going all-in on Israel’s genocidal campaign, the Biden administration is doing everything it can to ram through the Saudi deal, hoping that solving the Gaza crisis can score a win heading into the election.

As part of the deal, the U.S. would commit to militarily defending Saudi Arabia, a repressive dictatorship that has been a destructive force in the region for years.

Biden’s team has long considered a deal with Saudi Arabia to be a cornerstone of Washington’s broader Middle East strategy. The pact would build directly on the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords — a set of Israeli normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — but offer something those deals didn’t: the security guarantee.

Last year, U.S. officials were on the verge of finalizing an agreement when the surprise October 7 attack by Hamas, and Israel’s response, changed everything. Since then, the U.S. has remained committed to supporting Israel’s regime change war, providing generous military assistance and unconditional political and diplomatic support.

This month, reports said talks were on the cusp of a breakthrough. If an agreement isn’t stopped, it will cement a hostile approach to Iran and further embolden dictators like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And it’s no secret that Biden’s push for a Saudi deal is largely about escalating its proxy war against Iran and “great power competition” with China.

With the election closing in, few influential Democrats are willing to intervene when Biden is so desperate for a win in the region. Fewer still will say what everyone knows about the Saudi pact: It’s just a bad deal.

The Deal With the Deal

The push to place American military might between Saudi Arabia and its enemies is a stark reversal. When he ran for president, Biden vowed to make the country a “pariah” for its rights violations and halt weapons sales.

Instead, the defense pact with Saudi Arabia would mean sacrificing American blood and treasure to protect a government best known in recent years for its assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and its brutal war in Yemen.

The exact details of the agreement haven’t been made public, but Daniel Mouton, formerly a senior adviser to Biden’s top Middle East aide Brett McGurk, outlined the broad strokes of the plan just a month after the October 7 attacks:

“Long-term security in the Middle East will start with the ability to maintain an enduring regional deterrent order against Iran and its proxies,” he wrote, laying out a sweeping vision of coordinated maneuvering against Iran, China, and Russia, as well as a push for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“This progress will in turn allow for Israel to normalize its relationship with Saudi Arabia and more comprehensively integrate itself into the region,” Mouton wrote, alluding to the ability to “fully unlock US arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”

The specifics reportedly on the table for a Saudi deal would harden the adversarial relationships with Washington and rivals like Iran and China, while softening Israel’s isolation even as it loses international legitimacy with the Gaza war.

In addition to the security guarantee, the U.S. is reportedly considering supporting a Saudi civil nuclear program and offering access to advanced U.S. weapons that were previously off-limits.

For its part, Saudi Arabia would vow to restrict Chinese investment and move away from Chinese technology, the efficacy of which has been questioned by analysts who fear that the kingdom could turn around and use an inked deal to extract more from the U.S.

Then there is the coup de grâce: normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It might, however, be the most elusive part of the deal — and not because of Saudi Arabia.

An Israeli Partner for Peace?

Saudi Arabia has indicated that it’s preparing to normalize relations with Israel in return for the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state, with the crown prince ramping up arrests of those criticizing Israel online.

Israel, though, is widely considered the remaining obstacle to the trilateral agreement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flat-out opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and, what’s worse, is escalating tensions in the region with his all-out offensive against Gaza.

In response, top Democrats recently began to publicly criticize Netanyahu, in hopes that if Netanyahu can be pushed out, a more moderate Israeli leader would simply take the deal. When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took to the Senate floor to attack Netanyahu, mainstream media outlets declared the speech a “turning point” in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

The Biden administration, though, is making lemonade, seeing an opportunity for Israeli-Saudi diplomacy even in the ruins of the Gaza war. According to HuffPost, McGurk, the top Biden aide, is reportedly seeking to have Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf countries build on the rubble of Gaza to ease the pain of normalization.

So far, with Israeli intransigence, the American body politic has not had to fully confront a deal. However, Democrats, Republicans, and mainstream media outlets are already hyping the potential agreement as a diplomatic triumph that could achieve peace in the region.

They should be up in arms.

Even MAGA Republicans have reason to oppose a Saudi deal: It goes even further than their president’s deals in sacrificing U.S. interests. Trump’s Abraham Accords between UAE, Bahrain, and Israel may have shored up those monarchies’ dictatorship, but they did not so overtly subsume U.S. security to a foreign country’s interests.

Under Biden, the Saudi regime would be getting a security commitment along with a bunch of other rewards, and Israel would gain legitimacy with its neighbors, while the American people would see no clear benefit in return.

The post Joe Biden’s Terrible Israel Policy Is Really About Getting in Bed With Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Intercept.

If the right wanted to bring more babies into the world by banning abortion, the plan is backfiring.

In fact, abortions have increased since June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Every state without a ban — especially those adjacent to red states — saw a rise in abortions from 2020 through 2023.

But even women facing severe restrictions have managed to end their pregnancies. In 2023, abortion in the U.S. reached its highest level in over a decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute — and that’s counting only terminations recorded by the formal health care system.

While surgical abortions are harder to get, the word is out about self-managed abortions using pills. Online services like PlanC, Aid Access, and Abuzz disseminate the information; shield laws protect blue-state providers from red-state prosecution if they prescribe pills via telehealth and mail them to patients living under the bans. Abortion funds are in overdrive helping abortion-seekers with travel, child care, and medical costs.

The right is actively seeking to ban every one of these tools: telehealth prescription, self-management, out-of-state travel, and funds that “aid and abet” abortion-seekers. At the same time, a U.S. feminist underground with links to overseas suppliers is outrunning the posse, sending out pills without professional intervention and at low cost, even gratis.

Ironically, now that abortion is gone or all but gone in 21 states, feminists have realized the dream of over half-century of activism: free abortion on demand without apology. 

But abortion isn’t the only thing impeding births in the U.S. Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling that nullified Roe, a growing number of people still young enough to have children are getting sterilized. Tubal ligations and vasectomies among adults ages 18 to 30 were creeping up before the ruling. But following it, “we observed an abrupt increase,” report the authors of a research letter published last month in JAMA Health Forum.

The researchers couldn’t break the data out by state or race. But unsurprisingly, the trend is gendered. As with birth control, unwanted pregnancy, and parenthood, the greater burden of “permanent contraception” is falling on women: “The increase in procedures for female patients was double that for male patients,” write the authors, three Pennsylvania public health policy experts.

The U.S. could see more people choosing voluntary sterilization in the future. Birth control is still legal and constitutionally protected — and 9 in 10 American women have used it. But the religious right is chipping away at that too.

In 2014, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., a split Supreme Court ruled that certain private companies can cite religious objections to get out of covering the cost of contraception for their employees under the Affordable Care Act. A few days later, the same slim majority decided that Wheaton College, a Christian school already exempt from using its insurance policy to pay for birth control, was unduly burdened by having to fill out a form so that a third party could cover the cost.

A 2020 lawsuit by a Christian father challenging his daughter’s right to get birth control without parental consent is a piece of the anti-contraception long game, modeled on the strategy that slowly killed abortion rights. Just three years after Roe, in 1976, a Missouri requirement that minors get written parental consent for abortion was the first restriction upheld by the Supreme Court. And Donald Trump, who likes to take credit for delivering Dobbs to the right, hinted that he’d be OK with state crackdowns on contraception. (Then he walked it back. As usual with Trump, who knows what’s true.)

Emotionally, early sterilization is not simple. The right has long claimed that women who terminate pregnancies suffer “post-abortion syndrome,” a lifelong residue of depression and regret. PAS does not exist. In fact, the most common post-abortion emotion is relief. But post-sterilization regret is real, and a 2005 study found that the younger a woman is when she has her tubes tied, the more likely she is to wish she hadn’t, request a reversal, or seek in vitro fertilization to have a baby.

The authors of the post-Dobbs sterilization study surmise that some of these procedures were contemplated before Roe was overturned, but felt suddenly urgent when the bans came down. If oral contraceptives, IUDs, or morning-after pills (all of which the antis have incorrectly called abortifacients) become unavailable, permanent contraception will be the last reliable option.

If sterilization with regrets can be sad, some other effects of the bans are tragic. 

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Almost immediately after the June 2022 ruling, stories started emerging of pregnant people forced to drive hours out of state while miscarrying, carrying dead fetuses, feverish and in pain; of women going into sepsis or losing their fertility — all because doctors feared breaking the law by practicing good medicine. While emergency rooms around the country turn away pregnant patients in distress — one Oregon OB-GYN called the situation “absolutely shocking,” “appalling,” and “inconceivable” —providers and advocates are holding their breaths for the first preventable death due to compulsory medical malpractice.

But, new research shows, the deaths are already happening — caused not inadvertently by doctors but intentionally by pregnant people’s partners or pregnant people themselves.

For women in abusive relationships, to get pregnant is to risk your life. The narrative is well documented: A violent intimate partner, sensing the impending loss of control over his wife’s or girlfriend’s body and the arrival of a competitor for her time and attention — even if he wanted the baby at first — grows increasingly possessive, volatile, and assaultive. His menacing behavior erodes not just her freedom but also her will to take care of herself. She grows depressed, skips prenatal clinic visits, eats poorly and smokes, drinks, and uses drugs more, all to the detriment of her own and her fetus’s health.

Sometimes the partner’s violence turns murderous. “Women who are pregnant or recently gave birth are significantly more likely to be killed by an intimate partner” than women of the same age who are neither pregnant nor postpartum, write the authors of a new study from Tulane University.

The harder it is to end a pregnancy, the more danger women are in. Looking at states with multiple abortion restrictions alongside their rates of intimate partner homicide committed against women and girls ages 10 to 44, the researchers found a 3.4 percent rise in the state homicide rate with each restriction enforced between 2014 and 2020. The authors acknowledge the limits of their methodology but extrapolate that nearly a quarter of those murders were associated with the statutes.

Some abusive men prefer to exert control by keeping their partners pregnant, and Republican legislators are helping them with legal threats and reprisals. In at least 15 states, the father of an aborted fetus can sue for the “wrongful death” of his child.

Ask the staff at any abortion clinic or hotline: These laws are causing terror and desperation among abortion-seekers in ban states, and that desperation boils hotter with each passing day. Ohio providers have issued a report showing how required 24-hour waiting periods between an initial visit and an abortion stretch to an average of over a week, complicating the procedure and in some cases pushing it past the legal limit.

The more desperate the pregnant person’s situation — no money, abusive partner, insecure housing, addiction or other psychological ills — the more desperate is the “solution,” until the solution may become final. An analysis by researchers at several Philadelphia medical institutions and published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2022 compared suicide data from 1974, just after Roe, through 2016, by which time restrictions in some states had created what were, for some, insurmountable obstacles to ending a pregnancy. During the period, suicide rates increased among reproductive-age women but not women of post-reproductive age. Each new statute “was associated with a 5.81 percent higher annual rate of suicide than in pre-enforcement years,” the authors wrote.

Since Dobbs, the antis have been flummoxed by the surge — and then the endurance — of support for legal abortion across party lines, religion, geography, race, and age.

In response, they’ve flogged old, conservative arguments (“Mothers need husbands, not abortion”) or, rarely, progressive ones. The anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, for instance, supports a strong federal social safety net. Some far-right Christian evangelicals are calling for eugenic programs of white hyper-reproduction — which Andrew Torba, the Christian nationalist CEO of Gab, calls “babymaxxing” — to combat the abortion “holocaust.” Where honey doesn’t work, they pour on the boiling oil, enacting more intrusive surveillance and harsher penalties. 

But try as they might, the anti-abortion movement is unable to force people to want babies they don’t want. The World Health Organization has repeatedly shown that prohibition does not reduce rates of abortion. Where it is illegal, pregnant patients turn to untrained and criminal providers, and as many as 13 percent of them don’t survive.

A person will do everything in their power to end an unwanted or untenable pregnancy. They will grasp at social equality and bodily freedom — even if they have to die trying.

The post Sterilization, Murders, Suicides: Bans Haven’t Slowed Abortions, and They’re Costing Lives appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy in the United States. If he is elected president, he will try to become a dictator.

That warning must be repeated, over and over again, so Americans don’t forget it in November.

But that’s not the daily news that you will read or hear in the American press today. Instead, it’s mostly coverage of polls favorable to Trump and cute scene-setting stories about the carnival-like atmosphere at his crazed rallies, where his massive cult following is on display.

That daily coverage ignores the five-alarm fire burning up the 2024 election. The mainstream political press is effectively ignoring the coming national apocalypse. How can that be? How can they once again screw up covering Trump?

After all, Trump isn’t hiding his lust for dictatorial power. He admits it publicly. In December, when his Fox News lackey, Sean Hannity, gave him an opportunity to dispel fears that he wanted dictatorial power, Trump instead offered a rare truth. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked. “Except for day one,” Trump replied.

Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.

In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.

Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”

Trump is a fascist. But the mainstream political press doesn’t want to say it. They want to act like 2024 is just another election year.

With their obsession with horse-race coverage, political reporters tend to judge what Trump says or does by whether his words and actions will help him politically. By doing so, the press is saying that Trump’s racism, corruption, criminality, and insane abuses of power matter only so far as his electability.

There are exceptions: major news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have done some important stories about Trump’s dictatorial plans for a second term. But those investigative stories are drowned out by the chorus of horse-race stories — sometimes published on the same days and by the same news organizations behind more substantial coverage.

The media is sleepwalking.

I’ve often wondered how the press, both in Germany and around the world, failed to see Hitler for the monster that he was before he gained power. After Trump, I think I understand.

Hitler took advantage of the incremental nature of daily journalism. For years, his rise in Germany was not taken seriously in the United States, and that period of American inattention and isolationism enabled Hitler to become a much greater global threat. The American press played a significant and ugly role in downplaying the threat Hitler posed to the Western world.

American journalists initially viewed Hitler as little more than a German version of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who they saw as a blustering demagogue, yet also a leader who had helped save Italy from the economic chaos of the post-World War I era.

The New York Times credited Mussolini “with returning turbulent Italy to what it called normalcy,” according to a study of the press coverage of Hitler and Mussolini in Smithsonian Magazine in 2016.

When Hitler first burst into German political life, the American press sought to downplay his importance by treating him as a joke; the Smithsonian notes how Newsweek called him a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” and that his appearance suggested “Charlie Chaplin.”

Over time, American journalists’ views of Hitler began to shift, but mostly just to show greater respect for his skills as a charismatic public speaker and a successful demagogue. Ultimately, through more than a decade in German politics before he came to power, Hitler was normalized by American reporters. The press became numb to the outrageous things he said and wrote and did. He kept saying the same things for years; he laid out many of his plans and intentions in “Mein Kampf” in 1925, eight years before he came to power. By the time of the crucial 1932 German elections and Hitler’s subsequent rise to power in 1933, his rabid antisemitism and his lust for power were treated as old news.

The American press is making the same mistake today.

Ever since Trump announced he was running for president in 2015, reporters have alternated between depicting him as a goof who couldn’t be taken seriously and showing respect for his skills as a demagogue.

Two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and one insurrection later, Trump is normal now, at least as far as the political press corps is concerned. The January 6 insurrection, in which Trump tried to illegally hold on to power, is old news. Just like Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was old news by the 1932 German elections.

After Trump’s chaotic four years in office, too many journalists think that everything about Trump’s insane record has already been reported and written. This leads to more coverage of his poll numbers than his criminality or the threat he poses to the United States.

Mainstream journalists are increasingly open about their refusal to cover the campaign in crisis terms. In a recent interview, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn bristled at the notion that the Times needs to recognize the threat that Trump poses to the republic. He claimed that would just be doing the bidding of the Biden campaign and would turn the Times into a state propaganda organ like “Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”

Kahn’s defensive crouch is symptomatic of the press today. After years of losing to social media companies in the fight for advertising and attention and fending off a constant barrage of attacks from right-wing critics who seek to discredit their journalism, major news organizations have become increasingly insular. A sudden surge in readership and viewership during the Trump administration has waned, while a drive to make newsrooms more diverse by hiring a wave of young progressive journalists has left older white editors embittered that the new generation has dared to challenge the status quo.

News organizations have always been hostile to outside scrutiny, but their hypocrisy about transparency and openness have reached new heights. Earlier this year the Times launched an ill-conceived leak investigation of its own staff to find out who talked to The Intercept for a story, while more recently the Washington Post has sought to downplay evidence that its new publisher, Will Lewis, was involved in a scheme to conceal evidence about phone hacking of British royals and celebrities while he was an executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in London. Semafor reported this week that an editor at the Post ordered the staff not to promote on its newsletters one of the Post’s own stories that included new allegations about Lewis from a lawsuit filed by Prince Harry in London.

Expect little accountability for these actions; the Post got rid of its ombudsman in 2013, and the Times got rid of its last public editor in 2017. Both the Times and the Washington Post have media reporters, but they rarely write about their own newsrooms and instead spend most of their time punching down on smaller news organizations.

Last year, CNN went through an internal crisis as well, after its new owners sought to force the newsroom to bend more toward Trump. That controversy ultimately led to the firing of CNN’s chief, but it is not clear whether the new ownership group still plans to push for more Trump-friendly coverage.

These efforts to build protective bubbles around their organizations at a time of unprecedented volatility in the news business seem to be at the heart of the refusal by the mainstream press to get out in front of the voters and take a stand on Trump.

In fact, many in the news business would secretly be thrilled by Trump’s return to the White House, particularly old, white pundits and commentators who claim to be liberal but quietly believe that “cancel culture” is a bigger threat than Trump. Many corporate executives in the news business would likewise be happy to see a return to Trump-era revenues.

But the basic reason the press isn’t sounding the alarm about the threat Trump poses to American democracy is much more banal. It’s about the structure of journalism. 

Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection happened years ago. True, he has been indicted four times and now faces up to four criminal trials, but that’s already been reported. What’s new today?

For political reporters covering the campaign, that means usually treating Trump’s authoritarian promises as “B-matter.” That’s an old newspaper phrase that refers to the background information that reporters gather about a story’s subject. B-matter is usually exiled to the bottom of an article — if not cut entirely to save space or time.

But the horrifying truth is that when Trump’s dictatorial ambitions are left on the cutting room floor as B-matter, America is in trouble.

The post The Media Still Doesn’t Grasp the Danger of Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

It doesn’t take much to be accused of supporting terrorism these days. And that doesn’t just go for student activists. In recent months, dozens of lawmakers and public officials have, without evidence, insinuated that U.S. news outlets provide material support for Hamas. Some even issued thinly veiled threats to prosecute news organizations over those bogus allegations.

Their letters were political stunts. Prosecutors would never have been able to carry their burden of proof under anti-terrorism laws, and all the pandering politicians who signed the letters knew that. But next time might be different, especially if nonprofit news outlets, such as The Intercept, manage to offend the government. 

That’s because a bill that passed the House with broad bipartisan support in April — after which a companion bill was immediately introduced in the Senate — would empower the secretary of the Treasury to revoke the nonprofit status of any organization deemed “terrorist supporting.” This week, the bill’s Senate sponsor, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced it as an amendment to must-pass legislation to renew the Federal Aviation Administration’s authorities. While it didn’t make the cut (the Senate didn’t vote on any of the dozens of proposed amendments), it’s likely to make its way to the Senate floor in another form soon.

Funding terrorism is already illegal, but the new bill would let the government avoid the red tape required for criminal prosecutions or official terrorist designations.

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You might think actionable support of terrorism is limited to intentional, direct contributions to terror groups. You’d be mistaken. Existing laws on material support for terrorism have long been criticized for their overbreadth and potential for abuse, not only against free speech but also against humanitarian aid providers. A recent letter from 135 rights organizations opposing the bill highlighted efforts to revoke the tax-exempt status of, or otherwise retaliate against, pro-Palestine student groups.

There’s no reason to believe the press is exempt from overreach. In their recent letters, elected officials called for terrorism investigations of the New York Times, Reuters, CNN, and the Associated Press, relying on allegations that those outlets bought photographs from Palestinian freelancers who covered Hamas’s October 7 attacks.

The feigned outrage originated with a spurious accusation, from an organization ironically calling itself HonestReporting, that those pictures evidenced that the photographers who took them had advance knowledge of the massacre. Otherwise how (other than, say, TV or the internet) would they have known where to go?

HonestReporting then reasoned that the news outlets that bought the pictures may have been in on it as well — because, of course, when an international news giant buys a picture from someone on its vast roster of freelancers, it’s reasonable to impute the freelancer’s alleged sins all the way up the chain.

HonestReporting eventually walked back that convoluted theory, admitting it had no evidence and was merely asking questions. After forcing the news outlets to publicly deny having ties to Hamas, HonestReporting said it believed them.

But that didn’t stop U.S. officials from surmising that the fact some Palestinian freelancers in Gaza had contacts with Hamas officials — which should not be surprising, given that Hamas is the governing authority in the besieged enclave — made anyone who hired them terrorism financiers.

And it gets even worse. One of the letters — signed by over a dozen state attorneys general — floated the theory that the outlets’ reporting could itself evidence support for Hamas. As the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker (another nonprofit news site, operated by Freedom of the Press Foundation, where I work) put it:

The letter also highlighted that “material support” for terrorist groups — both a federal and state crime — can include “writing and distributing publications supporting the organization.” It did not elaborate on what would be considered support, potentially chilling any reporting that does not unequivocally condemn Hamas or unilaterally support Israel.

The attorneys general then warned the outlets that they would “continue to follow your reporting to ensure that your organizations do not violate any federal or State laws by giving material support to terrorists abroad.” The writers continued: “Now your organizations are on notice. Follow the law.”

Many of those same attorneys general recently argued that “First Amendment speech and associational freedoms do not protect persons who provide material support” to terrorism. They failed to mention the Supreme Court’s skepticism that “applications of the material-support statute to speech or advocacy will survive First Amendment scrutiny … even if the Government were to show that such speech benefits foreign terrorist organizations.”

Members of Congress have set their eyes on news outlets as well. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., parroted HonestReporting’s disinformation in multiple letters, while 15 congressional representatives demanded that the news outlets provide information — potentially including source identities and communications — regarding the freelancers, threatening to issue subpoenas.

If there is any doubt about the nonprofit bill’s backers’ intentions, consider that five of its House sponsors also signed onto a letter to the Internal Revenue Service asking how it defines antisemitism and insinuating that the IRS should deny tax-exempt status to nonprofits that “promote conduct that is counter to public policy,” even if they’re not accused of supporting terrorism at all. 

Nonprofit news outlets are already struggling even without government harassment, but revocation of their tax-exempt status would be a death knell for outlets doing the kind of in-depth investigative journalism that is hardly ever profitable these days. The mere prospect would chill reporting, not only on Israel but also on U.S. foreign policy generally. And that’s not to mention the threat to nonprofit press freedom organizations that journalists depend on to protect their rights (including to not get killed in Gaza).

Unfortunately, this is just the latest piece of reckless, unnecessary “national security” legislation that puts the press at risk. Last month, President Joe Biden ignored civil liberties advocates and signed into law a bill that would allow intelligence agencies to enlist any “service provider” to help the U.S. spy on foreigners.

As Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., explained, the law could “forc[e] an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.” And that office could easily be a newsroom, where journalists often talk to foreigners whose communications might interest U.S. intelligence agencies.

Is the government going to immediately start conscripting reporters to surveil their sources, or shutting down nonprofit news outlets that stray from the Israeli military’s narrative? Probably not. But history teaches that once officials are given the power to retaliate against journalists they don’t like, they inevitably will. The prospect of the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act being weaponized against journalism was also once merely hypothetical — until it wasn’t.

And let’s not forget that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee publicly fantasizes about jailing and otherwise retaliating against journalists.

Those who claim a second Donald Trump term would mark the end of democracy need to stop passing overbroad and unnecessary new laws handing him, and future authoritarians, brand new ways to harass and silence journalists who don’t toe the line.

The post Criticizing Israel? Nonprofit Media Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status Without Due Process appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel’s attack on Iran late Thursday night was met with a dangerously premature sigh of relief from both the news media and U.S. government, that somehow full-scale “war” was avoided.

Outlets like the New York Times were quick to characterize the attack as “subdued” and “limited” in scope, pointing to Iranian statements that the attack was launched from within Iranian borders and used small drones rather than fighter jets. Then it was further revealed that the Israeli attack included a stealth cruise missile launched from long range so as to not upset Israel’s new Arab partners.

But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.

The misconception has even infected the U.S. government.

“The downplaying of direct attacks on its soil may indicate the Islamic Republic lacks the desire, or capability, to match its bluster with professed military might,” a State Department communiqué produced after the attack and obtained by The Intercept says. “Over weeks of unprecedented military exchanges between Iran and Israel … Iranian officials appear keen to avoid further escalation.”

On Thursday, prior to the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian vowed that if Israel strikes back, “the next response from us will be immediate and at a maximum level.” Now, Tehran has to adjust to the reality that a massive Israeli counterattack didn’t come and might never.

As the media and the world awaits full-scale war between Iran and Israel and even frets about nuclear escalation, a huge reality of modern warfare is being overlooked: We are already fighting World War III. No, it is not empires marching armies through countries, conquering continents. And no, it isn’t millions of young men (and now women) pressed in uniform on scales of nearly 100 years ago. And no, in most societies where war is a constant, the public doesn’t even have to feel the pain of war, except in that the military dominates everything and robs everything else of resources: programs to fight poverty, food, housing, health care, transportation, climate change.

World War III instead is all around, a planet that is aflame with armed conflict and awash in arms sales, an overlapping Venn diagram of killing that engulfs the globe, and a constant bonanza for national security “experts” and the military–industrial complex.

Let’s take a tour of the battlefield.

In the Middle East, the U.S., Turkey, Iraq, and even Iran all have footholds in Syria as their internal civil war continues unabated. And all of it goes unremarked most of the time as people look elsewhere for World War II-like battles. Iranian; Iranian-funded or backed or inspired; or independent militias in Syria and Iraq target U.S. troops in Syria, Iraq, and now Jordan. The United States bombs, but so does Israel, and Turkey, and other silent partners of Washington in the war against Iran, and Syria, and ISIS, and Hezbollah. The fight against ISIS, Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. says, involves 80-plus “partners” fighting not just in Syria and Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and Libya. A coalition of 80-plus countries — but the U.S. is loath to name them all, especially the allied “special” operators who are clandestinely working on the ground.

What we do know is that 10 countries have been involved in airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, including the U.S., United Kingdom, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Korea. Like so many other conflicts, it’s not altogether clear who bombed who or from where, nor other members of the supporting cast. The U.S. bombs from aircraft carriers and from the Gulf states, and from Kuwait and Jordan, and possibly even from Saudi Arabia and Oman. But World War III is about keeping things secret, so who knows.

In the Red Sea, these same countries — plus France, Italy, Norway, Seychelles, Spain, Greece, Finland, Australia, and Sri Lanka — have joined to fend off Houthi attacks at sea. Even more countries are allegedly participating in the coalition in secret, given the sensitivities surrounding support for Israel during its war with Hamas. But then there’s also the war against pirates, and the war against nuclear proliferation, and the war against arms smuggling, and the Middle East war even against drugs, all carried out by a vast international maritime fleet involving dozens of countries.

While Israel’s war in Gaza, and its back and forth with Iran, is atop the Billboard charts for now, in Ukraine, a trench war and a standoff has now dragged on for more than two years. Here as well, all eyes have been on some kind of decisive victory or defeat, but World War III is more characterized by Ukraine or its proxies regularly attacking targets inside Mother Russia, attacks that Moscow downplays. Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side are now making regular incursions into Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions. Meanwhile, the real World War III is NATO already at war with Russia, increasing its activities adjacent to the enemy, expanding its ranks, building up its military, and supplying arms to Ukraine. The United States, meanwhile, is deployed from Norway to Bulgaria, and has in the past two years built up a major new base in Poland. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea have played their part in shuttling drones, missiles, and artillery shells into the Russian war effort.

Though the blatant Russian invasion seems to embody the old-fashioned concept of occupying armies and World War II, the reality is that Ukraine never turned into “the largest tank battle” ever, as some predicted, nor did it “escalate” to nuclear war, nor has it even been decisive. 

The war in Ukraine is certainly the world-altering event of the past five years, but even here, without more borders crossed, without escalation, and without Russia and NATO shooting at each other directly, some mighty lessons can be learned. Armies clashing is an illusion. World War III is thus not some conquering army sweeping its way across the continent. At no time have more than 300,000 soldiers been on the battlefield in Ukraine at any one time; in World War II, it was nearly 10 million facing each other on a daily basis (and some 125 million mobilized overall). Because of the greater lethality of weapons, military casualties in Ukraine have been enormous. But most of the ground engagements have taken place at the company or even platoon level; massing too many troops in one place is just too dangerous in today’s world. And this has all unfolded while neither Russia nor Ukraine have been able to harness airpower in the same way the United States has. Other than Vladimir Putin’s heartless offensive that used young Russian men as cannon fodder, few nations want to fight this way, preferring long-range air and missile (and now drone) attacks.

South of Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia continue to simmer. Last year, Azerbaijan attacked the breakaway republic of Artsakh. With the backing of Turkey and Israeli weapons, Azerbaijan attempted to permanently squash the ethnic Armenian enclave, successfully driving tens of thousands of civilians into neighboring countries. 

Past the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea is also brimming with maritime conflict. Constant Chinese naval passes around the borders of Taiwan are supplemented with close calls with South Korea, Japan and the Philippines (and the United States). Meanwhile, Myanmar’s civil war continues unabated.

On the Korean Peninsula, North Korea continues nuclear testing and the unannounced firing of ballistic missiles into the ocean, and tensions are a constant background noise of war games, military incursions, and cross-border incidents. Thousands of artillery batteries stare each other down across the Demilitarized Zone, as South Korea points the finger at North Korean technology used in Iranian missiles launched toward Israel. And, of course, the United States and other “partners” are active on the ground.

In a world of supposed “international order,” India and Pakistan continue to fight over their common border, as they have been doing for decades. And India and China face off, another flashpoint that could spell World War III to some but one that is already here in reality.

In Africa, military forces, terrorists, militants, mercenaries, militias, bandits, pirates, and separatists are active, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, in Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Sudan. China and Russia scramble for bases and influence (China already has a base in Djibouti). Russia’s Wagner Group is active in Africa and involved in combat, and in the past two months, Rwandan military forces have attacked targets in the DRC, and Morocco has conducted drone strikes on Polisario fighters near the Western Sahara border.

On the African continent, the U.S., France, and the U.K. have been engaged in expansive yet clandestine fighting, supposedly against Islamic terrorists, while all around the continent smolders and neither can claim any long-term wins on the dual fronts of counterterrorism and peacekeeping. American troops operating in Niger are stuck as the country’s U.S. government-trained junta claims America’s footprint is illegal. The United States has also been bombing targets in Somalia for years now, and the African Union mission in Somalia has been actively involved in combating al-Shabab.

U.S. forces continue to fan out across Latin America and the Caribbean, using missile cruisers to intercept drug smuggling submarines, sending marine anti-terrorism teams into a fully destabilized Haiti, and fast-tracking exports of helicopters, aircraft, and naval drones to Guyana as its neighbor Venezuela hungrily eyes its oil reserves. Senior Biden administration officials have floated sending U.S. troops into the treacherous swatch of jungle connecting South and Central America known as the Darién Gap to stem the flow of migrants and drugs across the U.S. southern border. 

And what even happened to neutrality in the past few years? Switzerland and Austria have provided arms to Ukraine. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO. Only little Costa Rica, Iceland, Mauritius, Panama, and Vanuatu have no formal armed forces, but even there, Iceland is a very active member of NATO and Panama is a close military ally of the U.S. Speaking of small countries taking on big fights, Fiji and Luxembourg both count themselves as members of the global coalition to defeat ISIS. 

Ubiquitous warfare, our World War III, paints a worldwide picture that is overwhelming, leaving little room to imagine that something can be done about it. And it’s hard not to conclude that the superpowers and the national security “community” aren’t somehow satisfied with the status quo. But as with addiction, the first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem — or in this case, a global war.

The post Israel Attack on Iran Is What World War III Looks Like appeared first on The Intercept.

As far as I know, there are no laws against eating broken glass. You’re free to doomscroll through your cabinets, smash your favorite water cup, then scarf down the shards.

A ban on eating broken glass would be overwhelmingly irrelevant, since most people just don’t do it, and for good reason. Unfortunately, you can’t say the same about another dangerous habit: TikTok.

As a security researcher, I can’t help but hate TikTok, just like I hate all social media, for creating unnecessary personal exposure.

As a security researcher working in journalism, one group of the video-sharing app’s many, many users give me heartburn. These users strike a particular fear into my heart. This group of users is — you guessed it — my beloved colleagues, the journalists.

TikTok, of course, isn’t the only app that poses risks for journalists, but it’s been bizarre to watch reporters with sources to protect express concern about a TikTok ban when they shouldn’t be using the platform in the first place. TikTok officials, after all, have explicitly targeted reporters in attempts to reveal their sources.

My colleagues seem to nonetheless be dressing up as bullseyes.

Ignoring TikTok’s Record

Impassioned pleas by reporters to not ban TikTok curiously omit TikTok’s most egregious attacks on reporters.

In his defense of TikTok, the Daily Beast’s Brad Polumbo offers a disclaimer in the first half of the headline — “TikTok Is Bad. Banning It Would Be Much Worse” — but never expands upon why. Instead, the bulk of the piece offers an apologia for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.

Meanwhile, Vox’s A.W. Ohlheiser expatiates on the “both/and” of TikTok, highlighting its many perceived benefits and ills. And yet, the one specific ill, which could have the most impact on Ohlheiser and other reporters, is absent from the laundry list of downsides.

The record is well established. In an attempt to identify reporters’ sources, ByteDance accessed IP addresses and other user data of several journalists, according to a Forbes investigation. The intention seems to have been to track the location of the reporters to see if they were in the same locations as TikTok employees who may have been sources for stories about TikTok’s links to China.

Not only did TikTok surveil reporters in attempts to identify their sources, but the company also proceeded to publicly deny having done so.

“TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from US users, meaning TikTok could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested,” the TikTok communication team’s account posted on X in response to Forbes’s initial reporting. “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.”

Forbes kept digging, and its subsequent investigation found that an internal email “acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way,” as reporter Emily Baker-White put it.

TikTok did various probes into the company’s accessing of U.S. user data; officials were fired and at least one resigned, according to Forbes. That doesn’t change the basic facts: Not only did TikTok surveil reporters in attempts to identify their sources, but the company also proceeded to publicly deny having done so.

And Now, Service Journalism for Journalists

For my journalism colleagues, there may well be times when you need to check TikTok, for instance when researching a story. If this is the case, you should follow the operational security best practice of compartmentalization: keeping various items separated from one another.

In other words, put TikTok on a separate “burner” device, which doesn’t have anything sensitive on it, like your sources saved in its contacts. There’s no evidence TikTok can see, for example, your chat histories, but it can, according to the security research firm Proofpoint, access your device’s location data, contacts list, as well as camera and microphone. And, as as a security researcher, I like to be as safe as possible.

And keep the burner device in a separate location from your regular phone. Don’t walk around with both phones turned on and connected to a cellular or Wi-Fi network and, for the love of everything holy, don’t take the burner to sensitive source meetings.

You can also limit the permissions that your device gives to TikTok — so that you’re not handing the app your aforementioned location data, contacts list, and camera access — and you should. Only allow the app to do things that are required for the app to run, and only run enough to do your research.

And don’t forget, this is all for your research. When you’re done looking up whatever in our hellscape tech dystopia has brought you to this tremendous time suck, the burner device should be wiped and restored to factory defaults.

The security and disinformation risks posed to journalists are, of course, not unique to TikTok. They permeate, one way or another, every single social media platform.

That doesn’t explain journalists’ inscrutable defense of a medium that is actively working against them. It’s as clear as your favorite water cup.

Editor’s note: You can follow The Intercept on TikTok here.

The post Forget a Ban — Why Are Journalists Using TikTok in the First Place? appeared first on The Intercept.

When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S.

The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos in an accident at a fertility clinic, heightened the conflict between ideology and electability, already about as high as it could get after June 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization freed the states to snub overwhelming public opinion, enact radical abortion bans — and then lose badly in the midterms. 

But now the ideologues have more than a political problem. They have a moral one too.

When most of Alabama’s fertility clinics suspended operations in fear that dropping a vial might be prosecuted as manslaughter and patients were left anguished in the middle of time-sensitive treatments, the GOP faced the present, palpable harms inflicted on real people by its abstract religious pieties. And these harmed parties were not baby killers. They were among the 1 in 7 women afflicted by infertility, and they were desperate to have babies.

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Alabama Court Rules Frozen Embryos Made by IVF Are “Children”

The predicament landed hard. As the national press closed in on the Alabama Legislature, its panicked Republican supermajority hurried through a bill giving full legal and criminal immunity to IVF providers for the death or destruction of embryos. The bill passed the House by a vote of 94 to 6, including most of the chamber’s 27 Democrats, and unanimously in the Senate. Some Democrats objected that the blanket immunity exposed patients to malpractice without recourse, while Republican opponents still wanted protection for the embryos. The GOP’s state PAC defended supporters as casting “a pro-life vote.”

The more radical elements of Alabama’s “pro-life” community did not agree. The American Action Fund posted a petition on Facebook attacking Republican lawmakers who “voted to give immunity to any IVF provider who ‘intentionally causes the death of an unborn child,’” putting quotation marks around a phrase that is not in the statute and pressing for repeal. D.J. Parten, founder of a group that crafted legislation to prosecute self-managed abortion as murder, called the IVF legislation the “immunity for murder” bill. Eric Johnston, president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition and author of the state’s abortion ban, told AL.com that he’d contacted the Senate pro tempore to work out the next steps, which sounded like a reversal. “If [embryos] are destroyed,” Johnston said, “there needs to be some repercussions for that.” Then what for IVF? He didn’t say.

And while the Republicans were busy biting each other’s backs, Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands walked away with a special election for a vacant state House seat. Having focused her campaign on abortion rights, she added the threat to IVF. On March 26, she beat her opponent 2 to 1.

The battle moved north to Capitol Hill. Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth introduced a bill to protect “access to assisted reproductive technology, and all medical care surrounding such technology.” A Republican senator blocked the bill because it imperiled embryos, and it died on the floor.

House Republicans released a 2025 budget containing the Life at Conception Act, which would grant full legal rights “from the moment of fertilization.” It had 120 sponsors. The Senate version made an exception for IVF, but the senators couldn’t sway the lower chamber. The Republican National Committee urged candidates to come out strongly for fertility care.

Conflict churned, not just between religious morality and political reality, but also between Republicans crusading to deregulate everything public — from greenhouse gas emissions to payday lenders — and Republicans pouring their hearts and political capital into regulating everything personal, particularly what people do with their bodies.

At least one prominent player tried to split the difference. The fiercely anti-regulation Heritage Foundation released a position paper titled “Why the IVF Industry Must Be Regulated.”

“You cannot support IVF and support fetal personhood. … You are not fooling anyone.”

Unsurprisingly, it is a weird document. “The well-being of children, not profit margins, should be the top priority when it comes to IVF and embryonic cryopreservation,” proclaims the writer, senior research associate Emma Waters, sounding like a perfect socialist-feminist. She goes on to decry preimplantation testing for heritable conditions, which disability justice advocates also oppose, and preselection for sex or eye or skin color, which many feminists of color and critics of human genetic engineering condemn. Waters refers to these practices, provided by the majority of U.S. fertility clinics, as “eugenics,” which they are. 

The paper proposes regulations including “true informed consent,” based on full explication of the risks and success rates of the treatment, and the prohibition of embryonic genetic testing and sex selection “in pursuit of the ‘perfect’ child” — regulations common throughout the EU and the U.K.

But if Europe promulgates rules to protect patients and children born through reproductive technologies, the children whose well-being most concerns the Heritage Foundation are the unborn ones. The paper’s first recommendation not-so-obliquely endorses embryonic personhood: “Impose a standard of care in IVF clinics sufficient to prevent the wanton or careless destruction of embryonic human beings.” Waters praises the Alabama judge, whose ruling “reassures parents who rely on IVF that their children will receive the same legal protections as everyone else’s.”

Alas, even a pro-regulation encyclical from the mother church of deregulation did not resolve the GOP’s dilemma. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., put it succinctly: “You cannot support IVF and support fetal personhood laws. They are fundamentally incompatible!” she said. “You are not fooling anyone.”

Aside from the Heritage Foundation, there is another group of pro-lifers who believe they can have it both ways. That is, the practitioners of embryo adoption, a small but growing niche occupying the space where the fertility and adoption industries meet, inside a community populated almost entirely by evangelical Christians. The embryo adoption communities both condone IVF out of compassion for the infertile and are working to liberate, one by one, the treatments’ leftover embryos, which Catholic bioethicist Kent Lasnoski describes as the “frozen generation” and Baptist preacher John Piper calls the “orphaned unborn.”

These agencies match donors who’ve been through IVF and have unused fertilized embryos with would-be parents, most of whom have already tried and failed in multiple rounds of IVF, fostering, and/or traditional child adoption. The agents interview and screen both sides, suggest propitious pairings, and facilitate the delivery and implantation — called transfer — of the thawed frozen embryos. Some programs are all-inclusive, with their own clinics and home study experts; others offer services a la carte and recommend outside providers. Donors are not paid, yet the exchange promises them the satisfaction and security, and perhaps the relief from guilt, of giving their “children” a good home. Recipients get a bespoke baby, selected for genetic health, sex, race, and other characteristics, plus the experience of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and “early bonding.”

But the agents do not view themselves only as individual adoption brokers. They are missionaries: rescue teams searching out “snowflake babies” shivering in cryostorage and bringing them into the warmth and shelter of womb, family, and church. “Just as each snowflake is frozen, unique and a gift from heaven, so are each of our Snowflakes Babies,” explains the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, founded in 1997 by the Christian adoption nonprofit Nightline. “We hope to help each donated embryo grow, develop, and live a full life. In the intricate design of each flake of snow, we find the Creator reflecting the individual human heart.”

And if it doesn’t work, if an embryo dies while thawing or a pregnancy ends in miscarriage — even if a couple never ends up with a child — all is understood as God’s plan. “If God puts it on our heart to adopt a child, we know that one doesn’t always come home,” one would-be mother told the anthropologist Risa Cromer.

In “Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics,” Cromer calls this “embryo saviorism,” whose ultimate aim is to build the material and spiritual infrastructure “to leverage a niche family-making process for realizing the potential for a conservative Christian country.” And not just Christian. The website photo galleries feature healthy, unambiguously gendered children surrounding coupled, unambiguously heterosexual parents (at the National Embryo Donation Center, adopters must be “a genetic male and a genetic female married for at least three years”). And although women of color suffer far higher rates of infertility than their white counterparts, these families are almost all as white as Easter lilies.

Christian embryo adoption appears to be the embodiment of the anti-abortion slogan “Love them both,” mother and child. But the interests of parents and children, or parents and fetuses or embryos, are not always identical — they are sometimes in mortal battle. Nor can the born and the “unborn” have equal rights. “There is no way to add fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses to the Constitution without subtracting women,” says reproductive justice attorney and advocate Lynn Paltrow in the film “Personhood: Policing Pregnant Women in America.”

The IVF-embryonic personhood debate has taught Republicans that you sometimes have to choose a side.

Embryo adoption grew out of the anti-abortion movement. It found a fortuitous place where the adult’s needs and desires and the embryo’s survival are not at odds. But that does not mean it is neutral when it comes to adult needs and desires that clash with the embryo’s. In the 1990s, embryo adopters joined the National Right to Life Committee in lobbying against stem-cell research because it could result in the destruction of fertilized embryos. They continued to push throughout the 2000 elections and beyond, even as public opinion shifted toward valuing potential cures over potential life. In 2006, a group of “snowflake families” stood beside President George W. Bush when he vetoed a bipartisan bill to restore federal funding to the research. Prominent among the families were John and Marlene Strege and their child Hannah, the first “snowflake baby,” born on New Year’s Eve, 1998.

The Streges are still taking sides. In 2021, the family — identified as Hannah S., “a former IVF frozen embryo,” and John and Marlene S., “adoptive parents of the first ‘adopted’ frozen embryo in America” — filed an amicus brief in Dobbs supporting Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. Faster than anyone expected, the Supreme Court’s ruling set the U.S. moving toward a time when cells in petri dishes have more rights than the people whose bodies give them life. And when we get there, not even the hand of God will be able to unlock access to the medical procedures and products that allow millions to exercise their human right to have a baby — or not.

The post Pro-Lifers Are Up Against a Real-Life Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

In the nearly two years since the Supreme Court sent abortion rights back to the states in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, state courts have become a hotbed of battles to criminalize, legalize, or expand access to abortion care.

States like Michigan prevented decades-old draconian bans from taking effect, while Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, and others have challenges pending in state court to their criminal bans. Judges in Florida, Missouri, and Ohio have also become referees for when voters get to weigh in on abortion rights through ballot measures.

Beyond abortion, the Supreme Court’s supermajority conservative bloc has made the entire federal judiciary generally hostile to civil rights. State courts have therefore increasingly assumed center stage on a wide variety of issues: LGBTQ+ rights and gender-affirming care, criminal justice reform and police accountability, voting rights, and more. As state courts and the cases they handle continue to grow in importance, so have various efforts to rig who sits on those courts and who has power in the legal system. 

If in the past legislative gerrymandering — or redrawing legislative districts in artificial ways — was used to entrench corporate and partisan power, we now see another branch of government being manipulated to rig the system toward the same aims: judicial gerrymandering.

Like its legislative counterpart, judicial gerrymandering threatens our democracy.

Judicial gerrymandering is the process of manipulating the rules for selecting, retaining, or replacing judges, prosecutors, and other judicial actors to evade voter accountability. It can look like state legislatures redrawing judicial districts to favor certain voters; judges evading the prescribed retirement process to prevent elections for open seats; or state officials creating new “tools” to remove elected judges and prosecutors as an end run around voters’ choices.

Like its legislative counterpart, judicial gerrymandering threatens our democracy.

In states where gerrymandering has already created severely partisan legislatures, the rigging of judicial positions — which are typically voted on at the local level — threatens to cut entire swaths of the population out of the political process. 

Take Georgia, where conservatives have devised a scheme to prevent voters in more progressive parts of the state from exercising their power to elect their judges. As judges approach reelection, several have strategically retired before they would have to face voters, and the state has canceled elections for their seats, sending power to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to appoint their replacements and depriving voters of the opportunity to select new jurists according to state law.

The Georgia state legislature has also created a partisan oversight commission with the power to suspend and remove locally elected prosecutors, part of a national campaign of attacking the independence of district attorneys. The commission has been given broad authority to disqualify prosecutors for 10 years based on their charging decisions — often decisions aimed at reducing mass incarceration by not prosecuting low-level offenses like drug charges, or standing up for reproductive rights by taking public stances against criminal bans.

In Mississippi, state officials have executed a judicial takeover of majority-Black Jackson, depriving its mayor, also Black, and its residents of local control over police, prosecutors, and the courts. One attempt to dilute voting power over elected county judges failed, but the state has created a two-tiered system in which a Capitol district controlled by white conservatives has power to govern Jackson instead of the city’s own residents.

And in Florida, state officials considered judicial redistricting to attempt to kick out reform prosecutors, who are elected based on the district “circuit” lines for state courts. The Florida Supreme Court demurred last year, but that doesn’t stop the legislature from taking it up in 2024. These redistricting efforts come in tandem with moves by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to suspend prosecutors in both Orlando and Tampa, due to his disagreement with their approaches to prosecution.

These efforts come in various shapes and sizes, but they all add up to an end run around the democratic process, depriving voters of an opportunity to elect officials based on their priorities, and depriving officials of the ability to do the jobs they were elected to do.

The trend will continue to intensify in the coming years. The Supreme Court has made it clear it won’t get involved in issues of state and local power consolidation, no matter how egregious.

Across states, legislators and governors often follow one another, proposing “new ideas” to consolidate power along partisan lines. These attempts start not as bald-faced power grabs, but something more insidious. Early, small pushes set the precedent for actions that are bolder and more problematic — and often harder to reverse. It is up to all of us to stay vigilant and pay close attention to this new brand of subtle attempts to dilute community power.

There is also, however, a growing resistance. There’s a new playbook taking shape: a movement by elected officials, community organizations, nonprofit lawyers, and civil rights groups who are executing a range of legal and electoral strategies to fight back against judicial gerrymandering. In Georgia, for instance, we have worked with a bipartisan coalition of prosecutors to file litigation challenging their oversight commission.

The same system that can be rigged for political advantage can also be used for good, to protect civil rights.

This pushback also includes efforts to let voters weigh in on changes regarding judicial authority and redistricting. When people understand what’s at stake and are given a voice, they can make it harder for state officials to interfere with and take over local power.

Supporting government officials who push back is critical to resist those trying to rig the rules of democracy. The same system that can be rigged for political advantage can also be used for good, to protect civil rights. The effort for reform has won victories too, in even purple and red states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Mississippi. The future of our democracy may depend on more of these wins.

The post How the Right Is Taking Over State Courts With Judicial Gerrymandering appeared first on The Intercept.

I have organized airlifts of women legislators, judges, and journalists out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell; delivered ongoing aid to Ukrainian front-line villages during Russia’s invasion; worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwandan refugees after the genocide; and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army.

None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip.

It’s easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children. Yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I’ve come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel’s end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Biden administration isn’t just complicit by refusing to condemn Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid — an absurd situation leading the U.S. to incur significant costs and unnecessary risks for symbolic airdrops. He’s actively supporting Israel’s oft-stated but ill-defined war aim of eradicating Hamas, a military effort with little concern for Palestinian lives or the fate of Israel’s hostages held in Gaza.

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell got an honest, if muddled, answer from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week. She asked him to explain the “incompatible policy” of being “the leading supplier of weapons to Israel” while, at the same time, “leading an international rescue effort” being impeded by Israeli government officials. Her question laid bare the ugly reality of Biden’s complicity in Israel’s campaign resulting in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Blinken looked into the camera and attempted to make the incompatible compatible. “These two objectives are not in conflict,” he insisted, defending the ongoing flow of no-strings-attached aid to Israel, Washington’s biggest foreign aid recipient. “The question is whether Israel, on the one hand, is and can effectively deal with its security needs in defending the country, while at the same time maximizing every possible effort to ensure that civilians are not harmed and that assistance gets to those who need it.”

Blinken has since ratcheted up that rhetoric, promising a United Nations resolution urging “an immediate ceasefire” — while at the same time sending endless arms to Israel.

Biden Sends Weapons, Not Aid

Israel’s war has already cost the lives of over 31,000 Palestinians and brought Biden closer to electoral peril, with 364,000 Michigan and Super Tuesday voters choosing “uncommitted” on their primary ballots, largely a result of grassroots efforts to generate a political cost for the White House’s support for the Israeli war.

Biden and his advisers’ refusal to change policy on aid to Israel or rethink the diplomatic cover it provides for Israel at the United Nations reveals a U.S. presidency with little regard for civilians in Gaza. There’s nothing beyond a steady trickle of statements of concern about Palestinian civilians and anonymous West Wing officials suggesting ongoing frustration with the execution of the war.

Israel’s devastating bombardment of Gaza wouldn’t be possible without tens of thousands of bombs and guided munitions sent by the U.S. since October 7. The Biden administration organized more than 100 arms transfers but only notified Congress of two, utilizing a variety of mechanisms to mask the scale and frequency of weapons transfers.

While he provided a steady flow of weapons to Israel, Biden withheld funding from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. The largest humanitarian aid body in Gaza, UNRWA was targeted by Israel with unfounded claims — that its employees participated in the October 7 attack in Israel.

Biden’s aid efforts implicitly accept Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings.

Israel has yet to provide any evidence to back up its allegations — Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., called the claims “flat-out lies” — and Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the European Commission have all resumed their funding. The Biden administration, however, continues to withhold financial support, even as UNRWA faces a $450 million budget shortfall. Instead, Biden chose to engage in humanitarian aid theater, endorsing costly, dangerous, and impractical methods for transporting aid into Gaza that won’t require forcing Israel to end its blockade of food and medicine. 

In the short term, Biden’s aid policies won’t deliver any meaningful relief for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The latest effort involves the U.S. military constructing a causeway off the coast of Gaza to deliver as many as 2 million meals per day. The process implicitly accepts Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings. The causeway is expected to take two months to implement, a timeline guaranteeing famine for Gaza’s most vulnerable populations.

Israel, to its credit, has been more honest about its goals in Gaza. Internally, the country has made its goals clear: A leaked October 13 concept paper from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry explored the possibility of mass population transfers from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

In public, the same agenda is stated more crudely. Statements by senior Israeli politicians in the wake of October 7 include calls for mass depopulation of Gaza and exhibited consistent disregard for any distinction between Hamas militants and innocent civilians. One government minister spoke openly of removing up to 90 percent of the Palestinians. Another said Israel was “fighting human animals.” A third said there were no civilians in Gaza and suggested using a nuclear weapon. A top parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party said Israel’s goal is “erasing the Gaza strip from the face of the earth.”

The statements were used in a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, where a preliminary ruling found enough merit to the allegations to let the case go forward.

By imposing food scarcity on Gaza, and bombing refugee camps, apartment buildings, hospitals, universities, and aid distribution centers, it’s clear that Israel is following through on the words of its political leadership.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s occasional expressions of concern with the civilian death toll in Gaza while enabling the war raises a disturbing question: Is the Biden administration knowingly complicit in maximizing civilian killing in one of the most deadly military campaigns in recent history — or stunningly naive and incompetent?

Either way, hundreds of thousands of Democratic Party voters already came to the same conclusion as Andrea Mitchell: It is incompatible to claim concern for Palestinian lives while actively participating in their extermination.

The post Organizing Aid to Gaza Led Me to a Harsh Truth: Biden Is on Board for Ethnic Cleansing appeared first on The Intercept.

Wadea al-Fayoume was an adorable 6-year-old Muslim boy — killed by his landlord in his suburban Chicago home on October 14, with 26 stab wounds. Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad are three college students — shot over Thanksgiving weekend in Vermont last year; Hisham is paralyzed from the chest down. Zacharia Doar, a 23-year-old Muslim father living in Texas, was stabbed in Austin on February 8 after a protest.

Politicians, especially prominent liberals, have responded to these and other violent attacks with somber statements condemning Islamophobia. To mark the start of Ramadan, President Joe Biden reminded Americans that “Islamophobia has absolutely no place in the United States.” A few weeks after al-Fayoume’s brutal killing, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris announced “the First-Ever National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia.” At the local level, New York City Public Schools Chancellor David Banks established an “Interfaith Advisory Council,” and several other public and private schools have established Muslim affinity groups.

On the surface, these appear to be substantive, positive moves taken by officials who appear genuinely concerned about a rise in anti-Muslim violence since October 7.

Yet Wadea al-Fayoume wasn’t killed just because he was Muslim. Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen weren’t shot because they’re Muslim. And Zacharia wasn’t stabbed just because he’s Muslim. They were all targeted for being Palestinian.

The responses to this wave of violence haven’t emphasized that fact. It’s politically safer to speak generically about “countering Islamophobia” than to confront the phenomenon that has gripped America even tighter since October 2023: anti-Palestinianism.

Obscuring the victims’ Palestinian identity allows liberal politicians to profess decency and nod to identity politics. Biden, for instance, dispatched his administration’s top-ranking Muslim, Dilawar Syed, to al-Fayoume’s memorial service. Dilawar is not of Palestinian heritage, or even Arab. And he is the deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration; the killing of the small child has no connection to the administration of small businesses.

The willingness to let anti-Palestinianism go unmentioned is on more stark display in situations that don’t generate as many headlines as a slain child. The same liberal officials who paid homage to al-Fayoume often choose silence when Palestinians or supporters of Palestinian freedom are targeted with harassment and retaliation for their activism.

The sleight of hand that would elevate the fight to eliminate anti-Muslim bias, but not anti-Palestinian animus, can be seen in some of the groups that stand up to Islamophobia. Even groups with a track record of opposition to pro-Palestinian activism are willing to jump on the anti-Islamophobia bandwagon. The Anti-Defamation League, for instance, is no friend of Palestinian freedom, yet it responded to al-Fayoume’s death much like Biden: by condemning Islamophobia while ignoring his identity as a Palestinian child.

By focusing instead on Islamophobia, liberal American politicians believe they can maintain the balancing act of supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza while appearing to care for their domestic constituencies. If these liberals were to confront anti-Palestinianism head on, it would put them on a collision course with America’s powerful anti-Palestinian faction, a long existing force in American life that was kicked into overdrive after October 7.

It is exactly the pressures brought to bear by these pro-Israel forces that would shunt the mere words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” to oblivion — let alone the notion of Palestinian people. A well-meaning liberal can attract controversy by, say, just mentioning “Gaza” or “the occupation” in an Oscar speech without so much as uttering the word “Palestine.”

That Palestinians shouldn’t, can’t, or don’t exist is a common refrain of pro-Israel figures. The Zionist motto of “a land without a people for a people without a land” has been around for more than a century and a half. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir declared in 1969, “There were no such thing as Palestinians.” The mantra gets repeated everywhere from the Israeli halls of power to contemporary American campus disputes. Ignoring anti-Palestinianism cannot be separated from this campaign of total erasure.

Avoiding anti-Palestinianism is not just incorrect; it also has damaging side effects. The lack of acknowledgment casts the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a battle between Jews and Muslims. It is ahistorical, reductive, and foolish to view the troubling recent instances of anti-Palestinian violence in the U.S. through this lens. And even the most well-intentioned liberals can fall prey to it. While not the fault of his guests, Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” episode on Israel–Palestine didn’t feature any Palestinians: only an American Muslim and an American Jew.

This dangerous sectarian narrative also negates Palestinian Christians. An influential minority roughly divided between orthodoxy and Catholicism, Palestinian Christians are just as passionate about their liberation as Palestinian Muslims. As are non-Palestinian Americans — including Arab Americans of other national origins, African Americans, Jewish Americans, Asian Americans, non-Muslim LGBTQ+ folks, and countless others — who have stood shoulder to shoulder with their Palestinian compatriots. (In an example of how the conflation of Palestinians and Islam gets tricky, the three college students shot in Vermont have not been identified by their religion in media reports.)

Many of these people have also suffered personal and professional consequences that would not attract the support of officials who are “confronting Islamophobia.” Viewing the consequences meted out to this diverse coalition shines a light on the unifying factor: not that they took Islamic positions, but rather pro-Palestine stances.

Islamophobia, of course, is very real. It existed before the attacks of September 11, 2001, and intensified afterward. It’s a global force so strong that, marking the fifth anniversary of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings, the U.N. General Assembly voted two years ago to recognize March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. In the U.S., anti-Muslim bigotry has consistently boiled beneath the surface, with incidents spiking periodically following incitement related to various, sometimes contrived, current events, from the campaign against the “Ground Zero Mosque” to Donald Trump’s ascension to power.

Israeli bombs don’t distinguish between Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

There is often overlap between anti-Palestinianism and Islamophobia. When former Obama administration official Stuart Seldowitz repeatedly harassed an Egyptian food cart vendor in New York, his bigotry cut across both.

Liberals should by all means combat Islamophobia and be commended for it when appropriate. (Today’s MAGA-era conservatism is at its core so anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian that an appeal to them would be foolish.) The liberal body politic, though, should recognize that Israeli bombs don’t distinguish between Palestinian Muslims and Christians. The occupation and its hateful vigilantes don’t care whether they are subjugating believers or nonbelievers. And here at home, the enforcers of pro-Israel norms rail against Palestinians and non-Palestinians, Jews and Christians, Muslims and atheists; so long as they fight for Palestinian rights, they are targets.

This is why liberals must recognize anti-Palestinianism for what it is. If they are legitimately concerned, they should combat it however they can. One place to start would be by opposing Israel’s war on Gaza.

The post Let’s Name It: Not Just Islamophobia, but Anti-Palestinianism appeared first on The Intercept.

When assessing State of the Union speeches, what isn’t said can be just as interesting as what is. 

During his speech last night, President Joe Biden did not mention how the war in Ukraine is ever going to end. He didn’t mention U.S. service member deaths since Hamas’s October 7 attack (including three U.S. troops killed by an attack drone in Jordan and two Navy SEALs who died during a mission to interdict a ship carrying weapons to Yemen). He didn’t talk about the 170 attacks on U.S. troops in Syria and Iraq since Israel’s war in Gaza began, the thousands of U.S. troops stationed in those same countries, plus Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Djibouti, and even in small numbers, in Lebanon and Egypt. He didn’t address the forces in central Asia and Pakistan still overseeing an over-the-horizon war in Afghanistan. He didn’t talk about U.S. military aid to Israel, or Benjamin Netanyahu, or how the United States plans to use its influence to bring about an end to the conflict.

Biden didn’t mention the creeping surveillance state, or his recent affirmation of the NSA’s spying powers by pushing for the reauthorization of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He didn’t speak of upcoming increases in the military, intelligence, and homeland security budgets or justify why more than $2 trillion is now needed. He didn’t talk about the administration’s laser focus on domestic terrorism and extremism or how to pursue threats of violence and illegality while preserving the public’s right to privacy and free speech. He didn’t speak to the alleged national security threat posed by TikTok or the White House’s support for legislation that will try to ban the powerhouse social media app. He didn’t mention the growing dangers of war in space (or the space race now underway). He didn’t talk about alarming developments like autonomous weapons, robots, and drone armies, all of which through AI already threaten to change the very nature of warfare. And of course, not a word was said about nuclear arms control or any programs seeking disarmament.

At a time when the U.S. is closer to war with Iran than it has been in decades, Biden made just one reference to the country: “Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran.”

Biden did not elaborate on what he means by containment: the large-scale U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s friends and proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The administration has gone to great lengths to play down the rising tensions with Iran.

“We are not at war in the Middle East,” Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said in January as U.S. bombs were dropping in the region. “We currently assess that the fight between Israel and Hamas remains contained in Gaza.”

But the Iran-aligned groups warring with the U.S. have directly cited the war in Gaza as a motivating factor, including the Iraqi militant group that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan this January, as The Intercept previously reported.

Biden did mention that he “ordered strikes to degrade Houthi capabilities and defend U.S. Forces in the region.” But he did not explain why, after all these years, U.S. forces remain in the region, or how long they will stay or what is the endgame — especially when the national security community claims that it is shifting its attention to Russia and China.

The presence of U.S. forces and bases throughout a region is an important fact because the Biden administration justifies its airstrikes, including those on Houthi targets in Yemen, as self-defense, circumventing the need for congressional war powers authorization. The move has rankled members of Congress and led to internal debate among Biden’s own national security lawyers. But there’s no sign Biden has ever pondered that the U.S. presence is itself an irritant that contributes to escalation.

When the Biden administration was asked during a Senate hearing on February 27 if there was any historical precedent for Operation Prosperity Guardian, the Pentagon’s name for the U.S.-led military coalition formed to respond to Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, a top administration official was stumped.

“Senator, I’d have to defer to colleagues to find the historical precedent for that,” Daniel Shapiro, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, told Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind.

Despite all the genuine threats that weren’t mentioned, the speech still had a healthy dose of fearmongering, with Biden saying our democracy is facing greater peril than any point since the Civil War.

“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.”

The post What Joe Biden’s State of the Union Speech Didn’t Mention appeared first on The Intercept.