With roughly 95 percent of precincts reporting election results, Bush trailed by less than 6,000 of the 112,000 cast. The Associated Press called the race two hours after polls closed.

After spending more than $17 million to topple Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., in July, AIPAC shifted its focus toward ousting Bush. The group poured more than $8 million into the race to unseat Bush in less than two months.

Outside groups dumped $18.2 million into the race. Bell’s backers outspent groups supporting Bush roughly four to one. AIPAC’s super PAC spent $8.5 million backing Bell’s campaign. Democratic Majority for Israel PAC spent half a million and Major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman’s Mainstream Democrats PAC spent $1.5 million in support of Bell.

Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party spent just under $3 million in support of Bush

The infusion of cash made the race the fourth most expensive primary in House history, according to the Working Families Party. 

AIPAC’s money was spent on voter engagement efforts and phone banking in addition to digital and mail ads. One of the mailers, first reported by The Intercept, included images that distorted Bush’s features. AIPAC also helped bundle at least two-thirds of Bell’s campaign haul, Sludge reported.

Bush’s loss marks another victory for a pro-Israel movement seeking to silence critics of Israel’s human rights abuses and its ongoing war on Gaza. 

Bush was one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only Palestinian American member of Congress. Tlaib won her uncontested primary Tuesday after AIPAC’s efforts to recruit a challenger failed. 

Bush was first elected in 2020 when she beat former Rep. William Lacy Clay in the Democratic primary by less than three points. The win marked a seismic shift in St. Louis politics and the end of the Clay dynasty, which represented the area for a half-century. 

Bowman and Bush’s wins that year grew the incipient Squad from four to six, and, with the victories, progressives’ hopes for building a base in Congress that could work toward policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and criminal justice reforms. 

Bell built his career as a reformer, elected as the first Black lead prosecutor in St. Louis County on a platform of police accountability and restorative justice reforms. He beat a three-decade incumbent who failed to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown in 2014. Some prosecutors working in the office were so enraged by Bell’s win that they joined the police union. 

In a phone call last summer, Bell promised Bush he would not run against her. At the time, he was running for the U.S. Senate in Missouri. As AIPAC beefed up its campaign last fall to oust Squad members over ceasefire calls, Bell abandoned the Senate run and entered the House race. 

As the congressional race heated up, Bell’s critics in Missouri said he had failed to follow through on promises he made while campaigning for prosecutor. Civil rights groups published a report last month criticizing Bell’s office for failing to implement reforms and overseeing a steady rise in the jail population during his time in office. Others noted that while he campaigned on not seeking the death penalty, he let death penalty cases proceed without a challenge. 

Bell’s critics have also complained about comments he made shortly after Brown’s killing in 2014 that downplayed the racial divide in Ferguson. 

The post AIPAC Millions Take Down Second Squad Member Cori Bush appeared first on The Intercept.

While the pick appears to be a bid to unite the Democratic Party heading into a crucial week of campaigning in key states, Harris’s selection of Walz could also signal a shift from President Joe Biden’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza. 

Walz offers Harris a strong counterpoint to the Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance. Like Vance, Walz is a small-town Midwesterner, but he has built a political career in the progressive wing of Minnesota’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. Walz’s matter-of-fact tone in his criticism of conservatives in TV appearances launched the former schoolteacher and football coach to a new level of popularity in recent weeks.

But it’s also worth focusing on what Walz is not, said James Zogby, especially around the war on Gaza and pro-Palestinian protests in the U.S. Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, contrasted Walz with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was widely reported to be the other frontrunner for Harris’s running mate, and believes that rejecting Shapiro in favor of Walz bodes well for Harris’s approach to the world.

“What we have is somebody who will do no harm, who is not going to step on the fact that the vice president is trying to turn a corner,” Zogby told The Intercept. “This is not going to be the policy of Joe Biden — she’s made that clear in a number of ways, even though she can’t break from her boss. But we have every indication that she is going to turn a corner, and [Walz] does not impede that corner turn — Shapiro on the other hand would have become an issue.”

Shapiro has received criticism from the progressive wing in the party for his aggressive responses to campus protesters who were advocating for schools to divest from Israel. In some cases, he aligned with Republicans in Congress who were calling for a crackdown on student protesters. Shapiro has also said he would sign a state bill that would withhold state funding to any institution that boycotts or divests from Israel. The Philadelphia and Pittsburgh chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote a pointed letter to Shapiro for failure “to recognize the structural root causes of the conflict” and to “intentionally ignore the civilian loss of life in Gaza” soon after the war began.

Walz, who has the support of prominent progressive members from his state, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Attorney General Keith Ellison, showed a softer approach to protesters critical of Israel’s war that aligns more with Harris, Zogby noted.

“With regard to demonstrators on college campuses, [Walz] said that he respected the empathy they’ve demonstrated for the suffering of people in Gaza, which is pretty much what Harris has said as well,” Zogby said. “He didn’t call them ‘KKK,’ right? He didn’t call the National Guard to start arresting people. And he’s been in very close contact with the ‘Uncommitted’ people in the state,” referring to the anti-war movement that protested Biden’s handling of the Gaza war through voting in Democratic primaries.

Several weeks after October 7, Zogby spoke with Harris and urged her to “say some things that would give Palestinians hope.” Days later, during a Hispanic Heritage Month event in the White House Rose Garden, Harris seemingly headed Zogby’s concerns and mentioned the war in Gaza, recognizing Palestinian suffering, as well as their right to self-determination, something even mainstream Democrats, including Biden, had been hesitant to say at the time.

“I didn’t expect her to do it that night,” Zogby recalled. “And she got an ovation from this Hispanic Heritage Month crowd, and it sunk in that this is an issue that resonates with people.”

A March poll from the Pew Research Center showed nearly half of adults under 30 opposed providing military aid to Israel. And half of all Americans were in favor of sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians. 

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders, said the issue of Palestine and Israel continues to divide Democrats, which he said is mirrored by the debate between pro-worker and pro-business constituencies in the party. He also said Harris’s choice of Walz speaks to where she stands on these dividing issues.

“It’s impossible to know exactly what calculations were made and what issues mattered the most,” Duss said, referring to the Walz selection. “But I think it’s clear that there is a growing constituency in the Democratic Party that takes the issue of Palestinian rights much more seriously than in previous years, and it has to be engaged with and its views have to be taken into account.”

By deciding against Shapiro, Duss said, Harris is showing that she is to some degree listening to this movement within the party. Duss also noted Harris’s speech in March in which she pressed the Israeli government for not doing enough to ending the loss of civilian lives and delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, along with her remarks after her July meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as evidence that she is paying closer attention to Palestinians. 

“That gives some evidence that she is someone who has put more value on Palestinian lives, which is unfortunately something that is missing from Biden’s approach — that reflects her own views,” Duss said. Even so, Duss said he still would like to see more from Harris and Walz in the coming months to further clarify their stance on Gaza and Palestine.

Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, a progressive Jewish publication, was more hesitant when linking the pressure from the pro-Palestinian movement and the Walz pick.

“We just don’t know how much the pressure from pro-Palestinian folks inside the Democratic Party may have played a role in her decision of Walz over Shapiro,” Beinart said. “But it also may not have, right? It could have been that she just liked Walz better personally, and she feels like he’s got all this momentum, and he’s got this great kind of attack on Trump and Vance.”

While noting that Walz falls in line with the typical Democratic stance on Israel and Palestine, Beinart said he will pay close attention to whether he and Harris would advocate for the conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel, something Biden vehemently opposed in his 2020 campaign. The U.S. pumps billions in military aid to Israel each year, and that support has continued even amid the civilian casualties and charges of war crimes in Gaza. The Working Families Party also called on Harris and Walz on Tuesday to commit to the arms embargo in its support of her pick.

“If they open the door to that, that would be significant, because that’s only recently become a kind of even modestly mainstream policy,” he said. “If that’s the case, then yeah, I think that would contribute to the sense that the politics in the party has somewhat changed.”

Beinart did recognize that even the perception of influence of the pro-Palestine movement in Democratic Party is unprecedented. But he also pointed to opposition against New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who was ousted in June after intense pushback from the pro-Israel lobby over his views on the war, and the ongoing opposition to Missouri Rep. Cori Bush in her own reelection bid.

“I mean we still have a situation where where if you’re a member of Congress running for reelection, you would much, much rather be pro-Israel than pro-Palestine from a political point of view,” he said.

Walz has drawn applause for his progressive record as governor for his pro-labor views and for leading an impressive slate of laws passed through Minnesota’s legislature, including expanding child care, a $2.2-billion boost in K-12 education, increased financial aid for low-income families, as well as an executive order to protect gender-affirming care. Duss said the Walz pick and his progressive record also signals to voters Harris’s willingness to continue the party’s post-neoliberal swing, which started in earnest in 2016 with Sanders’s candidacy and continuing into Biden’s presidency with pro-infrastructure, pro-labor bills. 

Some observers also noted Walz’s antiwar record while a member of Congress, pointing to his opposition to a war in Syria in 2013 and his support of repealing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which has given the White House broad powers to bypass Congress to conduct attacks and military operations in other countries. 

“On 16th anni. of 2001 [Authorization for Use of Military Force] passage, we’re reminded it’s Congress’ duty to #VoteOnWar,” Walz tweeted in 2017. “#EndlessWar is not sustainable. Time to debate & vote.”

Update: August 6, 2024, 5:01 p.m. ET
The story has been updated to include a quotation from Peter Beinart.

The post What Tim Walz Could Mean For Kamala Harris’s Stance on Gaza and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Harris, the woman went on, believes in pushing homosexuality, transgenderism, and “people acting like cats and dogs.” At her grandniece’s public school in Kentucky, students identify as animals and come to school on leashes. This, she insisted, is the future Democrats want: lawless, godless, and out of control.

It was late Saturday morning, two weeks since the near-assassination of Donald Trump. The woman from Kentucky, a nurse and preacher’s wife, had driven to Nashville earlier that day with her sisters. Outside the Music City Center, the sprawling convention center where Trump was scheduled to speak, the former president’s face appeared on a digital screen against a bright orange backdrop reading “Bitcoin 2024.”

The sisters knew little about bitcoin and, to be fair, neither did I. As for the conference, all they knew was that they couldn’t afford it. Tickets ranged from the basic festival pass for $699 to a VIP “Whale Pass” for $21,000. But it didn’t matter. They just wanted a glimpse of Trump. And if they didn’t get one, that was OK too: “We’re here for moral support.”

This was not how I typically spent my Saturdays. On weekends, the strip near the convention center known as Lower Broadway is clogged with tourists and bachelorette parties. Scores of mostly white women in cowboy boots fill honky tonks that have become dominated by bro country celebrity venues, from Kid Rock’s Big-Ass Honky Tonk Rock n’ Roll Steakhouse to a new bar by Morgan Wallen, the country star ostensibly “canceled” after dropping the N-word on video.

Nevertheless, I’d come downtown with a certain sense of civic duty. Trump had arrived as Nashville was increasingly attracting right-wing extremists, who seemed to feel too comfortable in the city I call home. Since I moved to Nashville in 2015, the Republican Party had been taken over by the MAGA movement and Tennessee’s politics have taken a hard-right turn.

Nashville has become a magnet for far-right media figures like Ben Shapiro, who moved his media company, the Daily Wire, to the city in 2020, bringing a wave of anti-trans activism that has made Tennessee increasingly cruel toward LGBTQ+ people. Meanwhile, Nashville, which is often described as a blue dot in a red sea, has seen aggressive assaults on its political power. A new congressional map recently carved the city in three, obliterating a Democratic district and distributing the pieces to a trio of Republicans. The East Nashville neighborhood where I live is now represented by a Trump loyalist from Cookeville, some 80 miles away.

In recent weeks, things in Nashville seemed to be taking an even darker turn. All throughout July, white nationalist groups had descended upon the city. The neo-fascist Patriot Front marched downtown over Independence Day weekend; a week later, neo-Nazis disrupted a Nashville City Council meeting. The weekend before the bitcoin conference, neo-Nazi provocateurs filmed themselves harassing a group of Black boys who’d been downtown playing bucket drums. The men hurled racial slurs, laughing and jeering when one child erupted in anger. As police officers escorted the kids away, one of the white supremacists gleefully faced the camera, calling them “little fucking monkeys.”

The ladies from Kentucky were unaware of Nashville’s Nazi problem. They had no idea why such people would share Trump supporters’ slogans, like “Let’s Go Brandon” or “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” They questioned whether the neo-Nazis were even real. They had probably been paid by George Soros, the nurse concluded. “I think that anything that’s going against America is paid by George Soros.”

The neo-Nazis were real, of course — certainly more real than students identifying as cats. Seven years after white nationalists marched through Charlottesville and Trump signaled his support for the “very fine people, on both sides,” his supporters were as eager as ever to either embrace or explain away his racism and authoritarianism. Now those supporters included crypto billionaires and bitcoin bros. Like the nurse from Kentucky, they were committed to an alternate version of the world. Why worry about Nazis when you’re forging your own reality? 

Orange-Pilled

The Bitcoin conference is a project of Nashville-based BTC Media, and, I heard again and again, not usually political. Cryptocurrency’s adherents have traditionally envisioned a utopia of free exchange unshackled by the bonds of the state. Yet the conference seemed to have gone full MAGA. On the steps outside the Music City Center, a tax lawyer in khakis handed out white bandages stamped with a red QR code while wearing one over his ear. This year marked a turning point, he said. Many within the crypto community were skeptical of politicians but “anything that pushes the price of bitcoin up, everyone here will be happy about.”

Until recently, that skepticism had gone both ways. Trump used to dismiss cryptocurrency as a “scam,” calling it fake money “based on thin air.” But he’d changed his tune after election donors opened their checkbooks. Fundraising events had been arranged around the conference; a VIP reception with Trump cost between $60,000 and $844,600 a head, while a rooftop meet-and-greet featuring Donald Trump Jr. and former Daily Wire pundit Candace Owens was more modest: $3,000 to $20,000. (Following complaints about her antisemitism, Owens was replaced at the event by Tucker Carlson.)

This year’s event boasted a who’s who of politicians — including four U.S. senators — as well as right-wing celebrities, from former GOP primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to British comedian and accused rapist Russell Brand. Famed whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke remotely, warning the audience, apparently in vain, “Cast your vote but don’t join a cult.”

Outside the convention center, a garishly decorated Cybertruck advertising something called THORChain parked behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tour bus while I spoke to a campaign volunteer who bragged that he refused to vaccinate his children. He said he was drawn to RFK Jr. because of his anti-authoritarianism. When I mentioned the neo-Nazis who had been coming to Nashville, he scoffed. “That’s got Feds written all over it.”

Inside, the line for Trump’s speech stretched from the Nakamoto stage — the main event space, named after bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto — down the hallway and into a yawning exhibit hall, where it snaked through a maze of vendors and crypto displays. There was “mining” equipment, bitcoin-inspired art — a startling amount of which featured Pepe the Frog — and meme-inflected merch, whose tongue-in-cheek references were largely indecipherable to me. One vendor was hawking sports and entertainment memorabilia, along with a framed poster of Trump with his raised fist after the assassination attempt, stamped with the word “FIGHT!” At $500, it was his most popular item.

I found the end of the line across from a booth advertising Moonshot Mining. (Men vastly outnumbered women at the conference, both in the audience and onstage.) Behind me a group of guys discussed Harris. Picking her as their candidate was the worst decision the Democrats could have made, a white man laughed. A younger Black guy said he’d seen on TikTok that she might choose Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly as her running mate. Now that would be smart, the white guy replied. “Mark Kelly’s like an American hero, dude. He’s a fucking astronaut, bro.” In a more somber tone, he warned that if Harris wins, “one of two things is true. Either the electorate are really, really, uninformed or there’s something suspicious about the process.”

The Black man was 25 and a Nashville resident. He wore an orange and black Bitcoin-themed baseball jersey. A finance and economics student in college, he’d been “orange-pilled” years ago, he told me, but he had plenty of other interests. “A lot of bitcoin people are like, ‘If it’s not helping bitcoin, it’s not helping anything,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Uh, the world is much more complex than that.’” Still, he understood why some people felt so passionate about the issue. People see inflation and the doubling of grocery prices and become anxious about their future. “They can’t control what the banks do. So they think, ‘This is the only way I can escape what’s happening.’” Leaders embracing bitcoin made an alternative future feel within reach. Still, he didn’t like the energy Trump brought out in people.

Internalized Victimhood

By 1:45 p.m., the room was at capacity. What remained of the line dissolved as people scattered to the overflow areas in the exhibit hall. I found a spot in front of a stage sponsored by Gemini, the crypto company founded by billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. They had recently thrown their support behind Trump while declaring war on Harris, who had declined an invitation to the conference.

A white man in his 50s took a seat next to me holding a rolled-up sign reading “SCAMALA.” The enthusiasm for Trump seemed to strike him as both deeply stupid and very funny. “He’s here to raise money and get votes. It’s that simple,” he said. “Do I really want him to be our president? Not really.” But he was amused at how polarized the country became over Trump’s first term. “To me it was entertaining. And so when he lost the last election, I was bummed, and people are like, why? And I’m like, ‘The television’s gonna suck, it’s not gonna be fun anymore.’ … It’s exactly like the ’30s in Germany. The guy’s a complete narcissist. He says the craziest shit.”

Trump’s speech was detached from reality in the usual ways, veering across unscripted terrain full of exaggerations, insults, and lies. He praised the brilliance of the crowd as well as his own and commiserated over their shared sense of victimhood. “They slander you as criminals but that happened to me too because I said the election was rigged.” He took credit for Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential campaign — “We defeated the worst president in U.S. history” — and said that while he’d recently “won” his classified documents case, Biden, who was “guilty as hell” had been declared “incompetent.” (Biden has not been charged with stealing classified documents, nor has he been deemed legally incompetent for anything.) In short, Trump spun his own reality. And the audience willingly went along.

“This room is amazing, the people in this room — high IQ individuals. I’m running against a low IQ individual,” Trump said. The guy next to me cracked up: “He’s such an asshole.”

By the end, Trump had made some promises that resonated with the crowd. He vowed to commute the life sentence imposed on Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whose crackdown on crypto has made him enemy number one. He promised new ways to fuel bitcoin mining, which currently consumes an alarming amount of energy. “You’ll be begging me, ‘No more electricity, sir, we have enough.’” And he painted a doomsday scenario if he loses in November. “If they win this election, every one of you will be gone. They will be vicious, they will be ruthless, they will do things that you wouldn’t believe. But right now, because of me, they’re leaving you alone. So please say, ‘Thank you President Trump, thank you very much.’”

“Is This 2024?”

Leaving the conference, the vibe was mild disappointment mixed with a shrug. Trump clearly did not understand bitcoin. And he’d ended the speech on a patronizing note: “Have fun with your bitcoin and your crypto and everything else you’re playing with.”

“He’s like, ‘Go play with your bitcoins,’ like they’re little toys or something,” one man said indignantly. When I asked him and his companions whether they would vote for Trump, they looked at me like I was stupid. Of course they would.

I’d met a handful of protesters outside the venue that day — a solo priest holding up a sign calling Trump “an antichrist”; a trio of young men disgusted by Trump’s misogyny and racism. But I soon realized I’d missed the main demonstration: a Black-led solidarity march in support of the children harassed by the neo-Nazis. Scheduled to coincide with the speech, the group had briefly clashed with Trump supporters. A video clip showed one man angrily shouting at police. “Make it make sense! You’re protecting them, but you won’t protect our kids?”

Outside, I found passersby yelling at another lone protester, a woman holding a handwritten “KAMALA” sign and another reading, “TRUMP = FELON.” Two men from the march were confronting the people harassing her. A white guy in his 20s yelled that Trump had done more for Black people than any other U.S. president. “What are your pronouns?” he screamed in mock fury, slamming his skateboard against the wall. “I’m a skateboard!”

One of the marchers was disgusted to see people reacting so furiously to the woman’s signs. He had not seen the same rage toward the neo-Nazis. Anybody has the right to protest, he told me. But white nationalists had freely intimidated kids from his community with barely a word from the police. “We go form up anything for Black Lives Matter and it’s a damn problem,” he said.

This wasn’t just about Trump. “We understand the dynamics of downtown,” he said. The bars and music venues weren’t designed for people like him. What did it say that white supremacists from out of town could come to threaten Black people who have been here all their lives? It felt like things were moving backward, he said. “This is the South. … Like hold on, is this 2024 or what?”

The post Bitcoin Bros and the MAGA Faithful Converge in Nashville — and Embrace an Alternate Reality appeared first on The Intercept.

The far right and its fellow gender fascists typically focus their attacks on trans people. When it comes to women’s and girls’ sports — a terrain cherished by anti-trans crusaders — the exclusion of trans women has been a Republican legislative priority, leading even to proposals for abusive genital testing requirements on girls whose assigned sex at birth is questioned. The fact that the latest high-profile case of gender policing is aimed at athletes who were indeed assigned female at birth should, however, come as no surprise.

Right-wing extremists — including Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk — alongside gender-binary zealots like J.K. Rowling are currently hurling vitriol at a cis woman boxer, Imane Khelif of Algeria, following the athlete’s swift defeat of her Italian opponent in an Olympic match in Paris on Thursday. Khelif is a female athlete who was deemed by the International Olympic Committee to be eligible to compete. She is only the latest woman of color in sports to be deemed insufficiently female by a right-wing commentariat obsessed with forging the strictest gender binaries, contrary to social, biological, and medical realities.

Attacks on Khelif — like previous discriminatory treatment of other female athletes like South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya — reveal the right’s gender ideology for what it is: intellectually untenable and racist. Pointing this out will not stop their vile gender policing; it should, however, give pause to anyone who might entertain Republican and trans-exclusionary positions on gender as worthy even of debate.

On the New York Post’s homepage yesterday, a story by Douglas Murray decried Khelif’s fair win as the “tragic result of letting biological men compete in women’s sports.” (The tabloid published at least five articles about the controversy Thursday, showing the eagerness with which far-right media latches onto anti-trans sentiment.) Across social media, thousands of posts echoed, calling Khelif a “male” or a “biological man” and thus unfairly advantaged. Bigots were swift to glom onto the fact that Khelif, along with another female Olympics competitor from Taiwan now facing attacks, had previously been found ineligible to compete by the International Boxing Association — an organization that has been broadly discredited and officially unrecognized by the IOC.

Khelif was assigned female at birth. The controversy stems from biochemical tests by the IBA that resulted in her removal from their competition, likely because either high testosterone levels or some chromosomal variation was found. We don’t know the details about the IBA’s testing, and Khelif is entirely eligible to compete in the Olympics per its rules. More to the point, high testosterone levels and the presence of XY or XXY chromosomes do not make a person male, or biologically a man. This is a right-wing fantasy, aided in these cases by the practice of so-called sex-testing in sports. I say “so called” because these tests in no way actually test for something so dependent on multiple characteristics and determinations as a person’s sex. 

This is worth clarifying only to emphasize the incoherence of the right’s allegedly biology-based sex-gender ideologies, laid bare in the attacks on athletes like Khelif. Firstly, for a political stance so insistent on the capacity to “define woman” in order to distinguish readily, in everyday life, who is and is not a woman, it should be troubling to these gender authoritarians that only the vagaries of sports testing revealed chromosomal or hormonal variations in these adults who had previously lived unchallenged in their assigned sex-gender categories. “​​In many cases, these athletes had no idea they had chromosomal variations until the Olympic gender-verification authorities gave them their results, right before their events, and found them ineligible to compete,” noted Slate’s Christina Cauterucci.

Were such “sex testing” more widespread, Republicans and their anti-trans fellow travelers would perhaps be disturbed to learn that biology is not on their side: People with chromosomal variations outside the XX, XY binary are not extremely rare — around 1 in 100 people, more common than identical twins.

As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive feature on “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such practices purport to draw: “Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw.”

Not that this has mattered to numerous regulating bodies and gender conformity zealots. Nor has it mattered that their application of this flawed methodology has a foul legacy of excluding athletes of color.

In what Human Rights Watch calls “practices that violate fundamental rights to privacy and dignity,” sports governing bodies have overwhelmingly selected successful Black athletes for invasive chromosomal, hormone, and genital testing, in order to potentially exclude them from competing. Human Rights Watch reported that the athletes targeted for sex testing are “overwhelmingly women of color from the Global South.” 

The fact that cis women are the victims of this discrimination gives no pause to those committed to trans elimination. In the same vein, women both cis and trans have been attacked in the street by extremists obsessed with identifying and eradicating anyone they feel should not count as women. Strict gender conformity requires expansive authoritarian enforcement far beyond the policing of trans and queer communities and individuals. That it is so often Black and other women of color — the women long excluded from the protections bestowed on white womanhood — who are consistently victims of violent gender policing is not merely a happy accident for the racist far right. Sex-gender exclusions cannot be disentangled from the historically colonialist, white supremacist project of strict sex categorization and gender enforcement. 

It would be foolish to suggest that the far right has ever been interested in either biological sciences or, of course, protecting women and women’s sports. If questions of fair competition were really at stake, the fact that Khelif has lost nine previous career fights against other women, including losing to Irish gold medalist Kellie Harrington in the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, would surely give lie to claims of her indefeasibly unfair advantage. The outcry exposes the illogic and intellectual failures of fascistic gender ideology. This does not mean, however, that such reactionary campaigns are best defeated with better arguments based in science and reason, in the form of political debate. The misogynistic, racist policing of bodies deserves only our contempt and fierce opposition. 

The post The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports appeared first on The Intercept.

The opposition had high hopes when ex-diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia stepped in at the last minute for María Corina Machado, who was barred from running, but the Venezuelan government’s election authority announced a Maduro victory, with a 51.21 percent to 44.2 percent margin. Claiming fraudulent results, the opposition declared its own victory, bringing Venezuela to the brink of a political crisis.

Washington immediately seized on the disputed election. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on the government to produce verification of the vote, then issued a statement Thursday declaring the opposition victorious and urging a “respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law and the wishes of the Venezuelan people.” Prominent members of Congress like Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., are already doing the media circuit praising the Biden administration’s actions in defense of democracy in Venezuela.

In light of Maduro’s declared victory and the chaotic aftermath of the contested election, however, the case that U.S. policy worked in Venezuela is on shaky ground. Instead, Washington has embraced a policy of intense sanctions — implemented under President Donald Trump and largely continued by President Joe Biden — as a way to pressure the general population to force Maduro out of office. That aim has so far not been achieved, though it has devastated the nation’s economy, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans and forcing millions more to flee — fueling the migration crisis at the U.S. border in the process. 

“How can we blame asylum-seekers fleeing desperation and poverty if we’re contributing to the very desperation and poverty that they’re trying to escape?” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas told The Intercept. “At the end of the day, what we have seen in practice is that we don’t usually get the freedom of press and free and fair elections and transparency that we ask for. What we wind up getting is hungrier everyday people.”

Casar added that the U.S. approach to sanctions means “we just doom ourselves to continuing to strangle other nations’ economies.” We hurt the people in those countries, he said, “it ends up hurting us too because we’re all interconnected.”

As the Washington Post recently reported, U.S. sectoral sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry contributed to one of the most severe peacetime economic contractions ever recorded, significantly more severe than the Great Depression. As a result, more than 7 million Venezuelans have been driven to flee the country, triggering the largest migration crisis in the Western Hemisphere. 

The Biden administration temporarily allowed some sanctions relief, easing restrictions to allow Venezuela to export more oil and gas, in exchange for a promise of “free and fair elections.” In April, Biden reimposed the broader sanctions, while still allowing for licenses to be granted on a case-by-case basis.

“If it had not been for sanctions, Venezuela would have experienced a large economic crisis in the last decade, but it would have been more like other large economic crises in Latin America and even in prior Venezuela history,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist and professor who previously served as the head of the economic and financial advisory of the Venezuelan National Assembly. “It wouldn’t have been like what we’ve seen.”

Related

The Venezuelan Perspective

The famously anti-migrant Trump approved the John Bolton-led sanctions on Venezuela in spite of an array of officials in both the U.S. government and other Latin American countries warning the White House that the region could not handle the ensuing migration wave. Now, Venezuelans compose one of the largest groups of migrants at the southern border and in transit through Central America (under additional sanctions imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden, on top of the longtime, infamous embargo, the number of migrants from Cuba has also grown). On Wednesday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on the Biden administration to end the “anti-human” measure, adding that the sanctions only bring more hunger and violence. 

Sanctions have become an increasingly popular tool for U.S. foreign policy because they are perceived to be less harmful than outright war or proxy war. United Nations experts have argued that these coercive measures amount to economic warfare, and civilians harmed by sanctions “deserve the same protections provided by the Geneva Conventions to people in war.”

Venezuela offers a prime example of how sanctions are key to U.S. regime change strategies. Conventional wisdom holds that citizens living under economic decline are more likely to blame their own leaders — whose failings they can see firsthand — than economic analyses showing the impact sanctions imposed by a foreign power have on GDP. This strategy was succinctly articulated in a 1960 State Department cable regarding the purpose of the embargo on Cuba:

If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

The only way of “alienating internal support” for Fidel Castro, the State Department argued, was through “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

This holds true for Maduro, who has campaigned against the U.S. sanctions directly but has seen the yearslong economic hardship erode overall levels of support for his government.

Venezuela’s opposition leaders, in contrast, are well aware that the economic sanctions benefit them electorally, as long as they don’t give any sound bites endorsing collective punishment of their own citizens by the U.S. In a June interview, González Urrutia falsely claimed that the U.S.-imposed sectoral sanctions on much of Venezuela’s economy “are not directed against the country” but merely are targeting government officials. Corina Machado, the conservative activist leading the opposition, has also falsely claimed that Maduro is exclusively to blame for the economic crisis.

As Venezuela erupted into protests in the aftermath of the vote, Rodríguez argued that the influence of U.S. sanctions may be hardening both Maduro’s stance and that of the opposition. “The government is also uncompromising, of course, but I think that it’s made finding agreement much more difficult, because the opposition sees itself as backed by the U.S,” Rodríguez said.

Policymakers may feel the urge to intensify sanctions on Venezuela in the coming weeks as Maduro digs in, hoping it will spur the change they seek. But when asked whether U.S.-led sanctions ultimately skew the democratic process in other countries, Casar acknowledged that “it ends up just getting really messy, and it’s hard to see what the mess gets us.”

The post U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela. How Does That Help Democracy? appeared first on The Intercept.

Bell, who was serving as a municipal court judge and community college professor at the time, said he hoped Brown’s killing would “wake some people up” to get Black residents more engaged in their community and that the real “tragedy” of the situation was that the prosecutors hadn’t shared Wilson’s side of the story with the public, which was fomenting distrust in the process.

In Bell’s opinion, not releasing evidence that spoke to “the officer’s side of the story” was a mistake on the part of the prosecution. “To me that’s the tragedy of it — is that months later, I can’t even tell you whether I believe the officer should be indicted or not, because I don’t have the evidence,” Bell said.

Bell is now running with more than $8 million in backing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee against Bush in the Democratic primary next week in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District. Bush rose to national prominence as a Black Lives Matter organizer in Ferguson. Bell was elected to Ferguson City Council in the first election following the surge of local protests, beating out a candidate supported by protester groups, and went on to unseat the St. Louis prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, whom he criticized in this interview for his handling of the Brown case.

Bell made the comments about Ferguson in November 2014 on the Nick Taliaferro Show, which went off the air in 2017. At the time, Bell was a municipal court judge in the small St. Louis suburb of Velda City, which was sued in 2015 in a federal civil rights case over running an unlawful bail system. 

Brown’s killing wasn’t unique to Ferguson, Bell said during the radio segment. “These are issues that have been plaguing our country since the beginning of our country. So when I hear, ‘Well it’s just Ferguson, it’s just Ferguson,’ even in this area, it’s not just Ferguson. These issues have been happening all over our region, it’s just this particular one happened in Ferguson and that’s what’s been playing in the media.” 

In the wake of Brown’s killing, there was a sense that the racial divide in Ferguson was comparable to that of Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, Taliaferro said. “That’s just not the case,” Bell said. “In the United States, there is a racial divide. I think we agree with that. I’m saying, relatively speaking, Ferguson is not as bad.” 

Ferguson’s racial divide was “less than normal,” Bell said, notwithstanding issues that still needed work, including diversity in the police force and government. But the need for accountability was “on both sides,” Bell said. “African Americans need to get more involved.” When he ran for a council seat, Black people weren’t involved in the political process, he said. “I’m hoping this wakes some people up.” 

“That quote is pretty astonishing coming from not only a Black man in St. Louis but a Black man who lived in Ferguson and was a municipal court judge,” said Thomas Harvey, a civil rights lawyer who ran the nonprofit law firm in St. Louis that sued Velda City under Bell’s judgeship; Harvey is currently based in Los Angeles. “It’s also an indication of the deep racism in St. Louis that you could look at Ferguson and say, ‘It’s not that bad,’” Harvey said. 

The Bell campaign commented on the 2014 interview in a statement. “Cori Bush and her allies are intentionally mischaracterizing Wesley’s comments,” wrote Anjan Mukherjee, a spokesperson for the Bell campaign. “In the interview, he was criticizing then-Prosecuting Attorney McCulloch for being secretive and not releasing the evidence on Wilson, a criticism he felt so strongly about, that he ultimately ran against McCulloch and beat him.”

Compared to other cities in Missouri at the time, it’s accurate to say that Ferguson was in the middle of the spectrum of unconstitutional practices and racist policing, according to Harvey. “It’s just that they were all so racist, it’s weird to hear someone say Ferguson wasn’t that bad. I think it’s actually indicative of how bad racism is in St. Louis overall and the whole region. What you’re doing is comparing it to the worst, most explicit forms of racism, and saying, that isn’t exactly happening in Ferguson.”

Arrest rates, police violence, stops, tickets, fines, and jailing were overwhelmingly disproportionately targeted against Black people living in Ferguson or passing through, Harvey said. “That is well known,” he added, and at the time, it was common knowledge.

Clients who lived in and near Ferguson would tell him that they wouldn’t travel to see friends and family around holidays because they didn’t want to get arrested and spend Thanksgiving or Christmas in jail, he said. Harvey said he used to work with pregnant women in St. Louis, many of whom didn’t want to drive to get prenatal care for the same reason. They arranged taxis instead. 

“Wesley was a judge in a town where the exact same thing was happening,” Harvey said. The prevailing logic at the time was that it was better to have a Black judge who could empathize with the population even if the system was still operating in a racist way, Harvey said. “I think that just kind of reflects Wesley’s overall politics, which is, the system can still be racist, we can still be jailing people illegally, holding them for $50, exploiting them, destroying their lives, so long as there’s a sort of kinder, gentler person who is able to empathize with them when they come before the court.” 

“That was really surprising to hear, especially that then it was 2014, after Mike Brown was murdered,” Harvey said. “This was common knowledge well before Mike Brown was murdered, and it was especially common knowledge among any Black person I met who lived in or around North County,” he said. “It’s just shocking to hear him say that. He must mean Ferguson isn’t the worst city in that region, and I agree, there are worse,” he said. “It’s hard to understand.”

Bell was elected St. Louis County prosecuting attorney against a three-decade incumbent with close ties to the local police. Bell was lauded as the first Black head prosecutor in the jurisdiction, someone who would champion the progressive reforms St. Louis had been pushing for since before Brown’s killing. Staff attorneys in the St. Louis prosecutors’ office were so angered by his win that they left the prosecutors union to join the local police union, The Intercept reported. 

But Bell later disappointed supporters when he declined to charge Wilson in Brown’s killing after reviewing the case. 

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Can “Progressive” Prosecutors Bring Justice to Victims of Police Violence?

On the radio in 2014, Taliaferro asked Bell what he thought would happen if the grand jury decided not to indict Wilson. Bell said he didn’t think there was any chance Wilson would remain an officer in Ferguson, but that the “worst-case scenario” from a perspective of safety and unrest was if the grand jury decided not to indict. “There’s going to be some kind of violent response. It’s just a matter of how much. And obviously we’re all praying that it’s not a lot.” Bell said he believed in nonviolent protest “as opposed to violence.” 

Last month as the race against Bush heated up, civil rights groups issued a report claiming that his office had not delivered on the reforms he promised on the campaign trail, and that the jail population had steadily climbed under his leadership.

“Wesley Bell has exposed himself as a fraud,” said Working Families Party spokesperson Ravi Mangla. “He’s running on being a Ferguson reformer, when it’s clear he couldn’t see the deep-lying issues in his own community.” WFP is backing Bush in the race.

Harvey, who was co-counsel on the suit over the bail system while Bell was judge in Velda City, said they would have sued Bell personally if they could have. “If judges didn’t have judicial immunity, we would have sued the judges in those cities,” he said.

“They’re very clearly participants in this system and know what’s happening, and are frequently the reason people are incarcerated,” Harvey said. “It’s ridiculous to think they don’t know. It’s impossible for Wesley Bell or any municipal court judge to say they didn’t know what was happening.”

The post After Michael Brown’s Killing, Wesley Bell Called for “Accountability on Both Sides” in Ferguson Racism appeared first on The Intercept.

Some former Trump administration officials who contributed to Project 2025’s controversial 900-page manifesto seem to have gotten the signal. The Intercept found Project 2025 recently tweaked its list of individual contributors, removing two names entirely and modifying two more to eliminate their employment affiliations with prominent firms.

For weeks, former President Donald Trump has been trying to distance himself from Project 2025. In recent months, some conservative organizations have quietly exited the Project 2025 advisory board, including some that were extensively involved in drafting the playbook.

After the Tuesday ouster of the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, who previously served in the Trump administration, the Washington Post reported that “there had been requests from people to get their names taken off the work.” A campaign spokesperson reportedly threatened to blacklist other Project 2025 affiliates from posts in the Trump administration.

All four individuals identified by The Intercept had been listed as Project 2025 contributors since April 2023, when the Heritage Foundation first put out the playbook. All four changes were made quietly on different dates in July, including three after Trump issued a statement saying he had “no idea who is behind” the project. Heritage did not respond to questions about these changes, including whether other contributors had asked for their names or affiliations to be removed.

“The contributors listed below generously volunteered their time and effort to assist the authors in the development and writing of this volume’s 30 chapters,” reads a disclaimer on the Project 2025 contributors list, which currently includes more than 250 names. “The policy views and reform proposals herein are not an all-inclusive catalogue of conservative ideas for the next President, nor is there unanimity among the contributors or the organizations with which they are affiliated with regard to the recommendations.”

The most prominent name to disappear from Project 2025 is David Moore, dean of Brigham Young University Law School. As recently as July 16, Moore was listed among the contributors, along with his BYU affiliation, but his name was no longer there on July 17.

Before leading BYU Law, Moore served in the Trump administration as acting deputy administrator and general counsel of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Moore, who did not respond to questions, was named dean in June 2023, two months after the Project 2025 playbook’s release.

The second former Trump official whose name evaporated from the Project 2025 list is attorney Sohan Dasgupta, who served as special counsel to the Department of Education and deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security. Dasgupta’s name and affiliation with the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, where he is a partner, appeared as recently as July 27. By July 28, it was gone. Dasgupta also did not answer questions about his involvement in Project 2025.

Two other individuals remain listed as Project 2025 contributors, but their entries were recently modified to eliminate their employers.

Earl Comstock, an attorney who served as senior adviser in the Trump Department of Commerce, is now senior policy counsel at the law firm White & Case in Washington, D.C. As of July 27, Comstock’s name appeared along with his employer, but by July 28 the firm’s name was gone.

“White & Case is not affiliated with Project 2025,” said a firm spokesperson. “Earl Comstock contributed to the project as a private citizen. The change was made for accuracy.”

The final tweak on Project 2025’s contributor list was for Joel Frushone, who served during the Trump years as a spokesperson for the Peace Corps and U.S. Economic Development Administration. As of July 2, Frushone was credited as a Project 2025 contributor along with his current employer, the accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young. By July 3, only his name appeared. Frushone declined to speak with The Intercept, and Ernst & Young did not respond to questions.

The post Project 2025 Contributors Are Abandoning Ship as Trump Turns Against Them appeared first on The Intercept.

After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in 2020, voters elected a reform prosecutor, Mary Moriarty, who promised to prosecute police misconduct and take a restorative justice approach to prosecution. 

The letter to Walz sent Wednesday from the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept, asks the governor to remove Moriarty’s office from all past, present, and future police use of force cases. With a former prosecutor as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, this pressure on Walz brings to the fore the split within the Democratic Party over how to handle the demand for continued police and criminal justice reform, as conservatives and law enforcement push to undo the reforms that have been put in place.

The push against Moriarty isn’t unique to Minnesota. Critics of reform have moved to oust or restrict the authority of prosecutors in dozens of states as reformers started winning elections more frequently amid the growing push for criminal justice reform. Between 2017 and early 2023, more than 37 bills to remove or limit the power of reform prosecutors were introduced in 17 states. As of early 2023, that number grew to more than 53 measures in 26 states, including efforts to restrict the power of prosecutors who refused to charge people who sought abortions. 

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In the letter to Walz, MPPOA general counsel Imran Ali wrote that police were concerned about Moriarty’s handling of use-of-force cases and that the association had “deep concerns about the impartiality and bias” from Moriarty against law enforcement. He suggested that Attorney General Keith Ellison could handle the cases “with proper funding.” Ellison built his career on reform and was once an ally of Moriarty’s. Last year, he removed a case from Moriarty’s office in which she declined to charge two teenage brothers accused of murder as adults.

“There is no way County Attorney Moriarty can act without bias and be impartial,” Ali wrote. “A significant number of peace officers have reached out to me and are troubled and fearful of this county attorney handling any use of force matters.” 

Moriarty’s critics in Minneapolis have been pushing to remove her from certain cases and oust her from the office since shortly after her term began in January 2023.

Last week, MPPOA filed an ethics complaint against Moriarty’s office for her handling of murder charges against a state trooper who killed a 33-year-old Black man, Ricky Cobb II, during a traffic stop last year. Moriarty’s office dropped the charges in June after the trooper’s defense team claimed that he was in fear for his partner’s life during the stop. Moriarty said the trooper used lawful force, and that her office couldn’t disprove his defense, but that she was “not backing down.”

Earlier this year, two Minnesota police associations sent a letter to Walz asking him to remove Moriarty from that case. At the time, four Republican members of Congress from Minnesota called for an investigation into Moriarty over the case, and at least one called on her to resign. Walz, MPPOA, and Moriarty’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We expect nothing less from a thoroughly corrupt police union that will do anything to prevent accountability for law enforcement accused of misconduct,” said Michael Collins, senior director of government affairs at Color of Change, a racial justice group. “Governor Tim Walz opened the door to these requests when he sided with the union in the Ricky Cobb II case. His behavior was shameful, up to and including calling the trooper’s defense lawyer to ask if they wanted the case to be reassigned to another county attorney. It’s no wonder the police union thinks he’s their guy. He should denounce the request and stop trying to pander to the right on criminal justice by undermining police accountability.”

Moriarty responded to the MPPOA’s ethics complaint last week, criticizing the police association for lobbying against efforts to hold police accountable and opposing regulations that would ban law enforcement from being involved in white supremacists groups.

The police group objected to Moriarty’s critiques in their letter to Walz this week. “These divisive comments were meant to divide our communities and elucidate her bias and belief that all peace officers are tied to white supremacist organizations,” Ali wrote. “As a person of color, and the general counsel of MPPOA, I find her comments offensive, repulsive and intend to injure and harm law enforcement all over the state, including harming my personal reputation.” 

Walz is not the only vice presidential candidate with a fraught relationship with the criminal justice reform movement. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another pick on Harris’s list, has also backed efforts to strip Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner of his authority to prosecute certain crimes. When Shapiro was state attorney general in 2019, his office pushed the Philadelphia Inquirer to be more critical of Krasner, The Intercept reported. Shapiro also backed a controversial bill passed by Pennsylvania lawmakers to strip Krasner’s ability to prosecute certain gun crimes in the city and give concurrent jurisdiction to the AG’s office. Shapiro’s office later said he would not use the measure to “act unilaterally or go around DA Krasner.” Local activists later pressured Shapiro into saying he would support a repeal of the bill. 

Correction: August 1, 2024, 2:04 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association as a union. The references have been removed.

The post Amid Veepstakes, Minnesota Cops Push Gov. Tim Walz to Back Off Police Violence Cases appeared first on The Intercept.

AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has gone on to spend a total of $7 million so far to oust Bush. Its recent mailers, reviewed by The Intercept, show images of Bush with distorted features that make her forehead look bigger and elongate her features.

Bush condemned the ads as part of a trope of using racist caricatures to target candidates based on their ethnicity.

“It is shameful that, in 2024, our communities are still being targeted with such blatant racism.”

“It is shameful that, in 2024, our communities are still being targeted with such blatant racism from political campaigns, let alone in a Democratic primary,” Bush said in a statement to The Intercept. “The people of St. Louis deserve better than to see their first Black Congresswoman racistly distorted into a caricature — I shouldn’t have to ask my opponent to condemn his biggest funders for putting out an ad like this and to apologize to the people of this district.”

AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobbying group, has been one of the single largest outside spenders in an election cycle that’s broken records for the most expensive House primaries in history. According to Sludge, AIPAC helped raise two-thirds of the campaign funding for Bush’s Democratic opponent, St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. (Neither United Democracy Project nor Bell’s campaign responded to requests for comment.)

The photo of Bush used in the AIPAC mailers was taken from a Missouri Independent article. In the mailers, part of Bush’s forehead has been photoshopped and appears sloped. The photos are also color altered.

The Missouri Independent said AIPAC’s use of the photo violated its site rules.

“As a nonprofit news organization we do not allow campaigns or political groups to use our photography,” said Jason Hancock, the editor-in-chief of the Missouri Independent. “We would never give a PAC permission to use our photos, and doing so without our knowledge or permission violates our terms of use.”

Ads With Racist Tropes

The mailers are the latest in a long history of ads that have distorted candidates’ skin color and facial features in line with stereotypical racist tropes. Bush’s campaign said ads from her 2020 opponent, former Democratic Rep. Willian Lacy Clay, also darkened her skin. In 2022, a Democratic firm working for Bowman’s opponent ran ads that darkened Bowman’s skin.

Republican ads run during the 2020 Georgia Senate race darkened Raphael Warnock’s skin and enlarged Jon Ossoff’s nose.

With its attacks on Bush, the lobby group is looking to oust a second member of the progressive Squad. The group spent more than $17 million to unseat Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., last month.

Since toppling Bowman last month, AIPAC has shifted its focus toward the upcoming primary in St. Louis. It’s dropped $3 million on the race against Bush in less than a month.

AIPAC has long been known for its behind-the-scenes lobbying but expanded its electoral presence and started giving directly to candidates in 2021. The group launched two new political action committees that year, including a regular PAC and its super PAC, United Democracy Project. The new electoral investment has gone largely toward ousting progressive members of Congress.

AIPAC has grown to one of the single largest outside groups spending in primaries this cycle and flooded Democratic primaries with millions of dollars, drawn largely from Republicans, right-wing billionaires, and megadonors.

AIPAC’s infusion of cash into Bowman’s race made the election the most expensive House Democratic primary in history. And AIPAC isn’t just spending on ads — it’s paying for phone banking and get-out-the-vote calls as well.

Justice Democrats, a progressive group backing Bush, called on Bell’s campaign to denounce the ads.

“In Wesley Bell’s name, AIPAC is peddling racist caricatures to attack Missouri’s first Black Congresswoman in a disgusting new low even for them,” said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “Bell should immediately condemn these racist pieces of mail and apologize to the people of St. Louis for allowing his biggest financial backers to promote outright racism in this Democratic primary.”

The post AIPAC Used Distorted Photo of Cori Bush in $7 Million Negative Ad Blitz appeared first on The Intercept.

McDonald’s yesterday reported that its global sales declined for the first time since 2020, with its net profit declining 12 percent compared to the same period last year. Starbucks announced Tuesday that sales in North American stores dipped 2 percent, and sales in the rest of the world dipped 7 percent. It also reported that its total international profits dropped by 23 percent.

Although the companies point to currency fluctuation, slowdown within the Chinese market, and consumer reaction to rising menu prices to account for the change, the chief executives of both corporations cited the conflict in Gaza when discussing problems the businesses face.

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions — a Palestinian-led movement to oppose Israel’s occupation and apartheid in Palestine — celebrated the dip in McDonald’s earnings on their social media accounts, writing, “#BDS is working!” While McDonald’s is not a part of the group’s list of targeted economic or consumer boycotts, they have endorsed it as an organic, grassroots movement that started shortly after October 7, when the chain’s Israeli franchises supported the Israeli military in its incursion on Gaza.

“McDonald’s Israel provided free meals for Israel’s forces during #GazaGenocide against 2.3 million Palestinians, and the company with its dozens of branches has for decades fed apartheid Israel’s war chest,” the group said, using the hashtag #BoycottMcDonalds.

During a quarterly earnings call on Monday, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said “several markets … continue to be negatively impacted by the war in the Middle East.” The company had previously warned of low earnings in Middle Eastern countries and Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, which have Muslim majorities. On the earnings call, Kempczinski also noted that sales in France were down, and attributed that decline to the country’s large Muslim population.

Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan also invoked the conflict in the company’s quarterly call on Tuesday, indirectly pointing to boycott efforts in the same regions as McDonald’s international trouble spots.

“Headwinds persist in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, parts of Europe driven by widely discussed misperceptions of our brand,” said Narasimhan. Earlier this year, the company reported a “significant impact on traffic and sales” in the Middle East and the U.S. markets, which it also attributed to “misperceptions” about its brand.

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Starbucks Is Suing Its Union After “Solidarity With Palestine!” Tweet

Shortly after October 7, Starbucks Workers United, the union that represents more than 10,000 of the chain’s employees, expressed solidarity for Palestine on its X account in a since-deleted tweet. The union’s post read “Solidarity with Palestine!” and quote-tweeted an image of a bulldozer breaking through the fence encircling Gaza. Starbucks retaliated, suing the union for damaging its reputation and misleading consumers to think the company itself supports Palestine. News of the lawsuit went viral online, along with calls to stop buying from the chain.

Calls to boycott McDonald’s also began days after October 7, when the fast food giant’s Israeli franchisee announced on social media it had “donated and continues to donate tens of thousands of meals to IDF units, the police, hospitals, residents around the strip and all rescue forces,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces. 

Kempczinski defended his company amid the McDonald’s boycott in a January LinkedIn post, blaming hits to stores internationally on “the war and associated misinformation.” Seemingly drawing distance between Israel and its other markets, he noted that McDonald’s international stores are owned locally, “including in Muslim countries.”

Residents and rights groups, namely in Muslim-majority nations such as Pakistan and Kuwait, started to boycott the chain, prompting the Pakistani franchisee to distance itself from the issue. In April, McDonald’s was forced to buy back its 225 restaurants in Israel after the boycott tanked sales in the Middle East, according to reports.

The post Boycotts Against Israel Are Hurting Starbucks and McDonald’s Sales Worldwide appeared first on The Intercept.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’s book, titled “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” sparked a media frenzy last week because it features a foreword written by J.D. Vance. As interest in the book rose following Trump’s pick of Vance as his vice president, a digital version of the text vanished from a website where publishers share advance copies with book reviewers.

The Intercept has reviewed a proof of the book’s acknowledgments page. In it, Roberts thanks Heritage Foundation colleagues, including Roger Severino, who wrote a Project 2025 chapter urging further abortion restrictions, shouts out prominent conservative media personalities, and praises Vance by name.

“And to Sen. J.D. Vance, thanks for inspiring me and millions of Americans with your story, and now with your leadership,” Roberts writes. “I’m so grateful that you wrote the foreword.”

The acknowledgments page isn’t the only part of the book made public on Tuesday. The New Republic published Vance’s foreword, which quotes John Travolta’s “Pulp Fiction” character, compares American politics to weeding gardens, and praises the book for “articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.” Vance praises the Heritage Foundation for being “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

But the meat of what Vance endorsed in Roberts’s book — which one commentator called “the popular narrative version” of Project 2025 — remains under wraps.

It has been a rough few days for the conservative braintrust behind Project 2025, as organizations that helped draft the document have quietly backed away. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who served as Project 2025’s director, stepped down. The Trump campaign wasted no time in putting out a jubilantly sinister statement on X. 

“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you,” reads the statement. 

Roberts released a more upbeat statement praising Dans’s leadership and suggesting Project 2025 will “continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local.”

Roberts hasn’t commented on the status of his book, which vanished last week from NetGalley, a website publishers use to share advance copies with book reviewers. The Intercept requested a NetGalley copy on July 25; within hours, the request function for that title had been disabled on the website. The book no longer shows up in search results on that platform. 

Publishing giant HarperCollins and its Broadside Books imprint, which “specializes in conservative nonfiction,” did not respond to questions about the book’s status or why review copies were taken offline.

The book “identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save,” according to HarperCollins. Roberts’s list includes federal agencies like the FBI and Department of Education, both targets of Project 2025, plus an array of cultural institutions like the Ivy League and the Gates Foundation, “to name a few.” 

In recent weeks, the book’s title and cover were subdued to remove literal inflammatory language. The book jacket previously featured a matchstick and the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” according to archived pages on Amazon and the HarperCollins website. “Just as a controlled burn preserves the longevity of a forest, conservatives need to burn down these institutions if we’re to preserve the American Way of life,” read a sentence from the book description which has been nixed.

At the same time, HarperCollins leaned into the controversy surrounding Project 2025. At some point, the Amazon page was updated to note that Roberts is the “Project 2025 head” and allude to his controversial comments about a “Second American Revolution.” 

HarperCollins did not respond to questions about when these changes were made and why. 

In the uncorrected proof of the book’s acknowledgments section reviewed by The Intercept, Roberts thanks “friends” like Tucker Carlson and Newt Gingrich for “reviewing the draft and for writing some excellent blurbs,” which are also on the current Amazon page. 

Roberts praises one of Trump’s former national security advisors, K.T. McFarland, who also wrote a blurb on the book’s Amazon page.

The acknowledgments thank Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, for writing a blurb, but hers has not been published on the site.

On Tuesday, Hemingway blasted the Trump campaign’s dig at Project 2025. “Trumpworld bows down to left-wing media lies, and keeps signaling he doesn’t want his most loyal foot soldiers — who kept with him even when very few others did — or their conservative ideas in his next administration,” she wrote on X. “Interesting.”

Along with Vance, Roberts expresses gratitude to several other conservative politicians. “A few elected officials were vital to this book,” Roberts writes in the acknowledgments, singling out two more by name: his “friends Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. Mike Lee, with whom I’ve had long and esoteric discussions about conservatism.” 

Roberts and the Heritage Foundation did not immediately return requests for comment. 

The post Project 2025’s Mastermind Personally Thanked J.D. Vance in His New Book appeared first on The Intercept.

The plan — which comes after a string of terms in which the court’s conservative supermajority preached judicial restraint while gutting landmark precedents — is entirely unattainable in the short term. And it’s thin on details. Among the open questions is whether some of the proposed reforms could withstand efforts by the Supreme Court itself to strike them down.

“We can and must prevent the abuse of presidential power and restore faith in the Supreme Court,” Biden said in a speech Monday afternoon in Austin, where he rehashed his proposals without fleshing out the logistics.

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The Supreme Court’s Latest Power Grab: Regulatory Oversight

Yet the move signals a key shift in the political discourse: Once the stuff of progressive pipe dreams, now even staunch centrists like Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee who quickly co-signed the president’s proposals, want to address the court’s outsized power.

Though Biden stopped short of proposing to expand the court to even out its ideological imbalance, which a slight majority of Americans have endorsed in recent polling, the announcement marks a course change for the president. Biden, an institutionalist who defended the filibuster until the Dobbs decision in 2022, has finally started playing checks-and-balances chicken with a judiciary that continues to consolidate its own authority while pretending to be above the political fray.

As previewed in an op-ed for the Washington Post, Biden’s plan has three basic proposals. First is to override the court’s recent decision about far-reaching presidential immunity by amending the Constitution itself. Although fanciful given the difficulty of the constitutional amendment process, this is also Biden’s most concrete proposal. Unlike his other proposals, this one includes a specific mechanism of binding the court to 21st-century realities about presidential power, instead of cherrypicking from the musings of Alexander Hamilton and his fellow founders.

So far, Biden hasn’t proposed how he might accomplish his other two proposals: an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, and an enforceable ethics code. Both provisions implicate Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been on the country’s highest bench since 1991 and who refused to recuse from cases stemming from the January 6 insurrection this term despite his wife’s deep involvement in Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts to reverse his loss in the 2020 election.

There are serious debates about whether these two measures would require constitutional amendments or if Congress has the authority to enact them in some fashion through legislation. The cross-ideological commission Biden appointed in 2021 — before the Supreme Court tossed Roe v. Wade and other bedrock doctrines — produced almost 300 pages of collective, heavily footnoted shrugs on such questions.

Many Democrats are eager to at least try the legislation route, even if court reform bills will just wind up before the Supreme Court upon inevitable challenge.

“It’s time for Congress to take significant action on Supreme Court ethics and term limits reform,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., wrote on X following Biden’s proposal. “I’ve got legislation to get it done.”

Whitehouse’s bill, which would create a process to disqualify justices from particular cases and require the Supreme Court to draft its own ethics code, among other provisions, has dozens of co-sponsors and passed favorably out of the Judiciary Committee but is unlikely to pass the full Senate.

Setting aside, again, the moonshot logistics and the unresolved particulars, Biden’s announcement is significant for its frank, if belated, diagnosis: There aren’t meaningful checks on the Supreme Court.  

The post Now a Lame Duck, Biden Finally Floats Supreme Court Reforms appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly two weeks after the July 13 shooting, the public remains in the dark about some basic points along the timeline, including when rally attendees alerted law enforcement to the gunman climbing onto a nearby roof and how federal, state, and local officers coordinated once he opened fire. Recordings of calls to emergency services could help shed light on what happened.

Soon after the shooting, The Intercept submitted a request to Butler County for copies of recorded 911 calls under Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law. On Monday, the county denied that request, citing part of the statute that generally exempts 911 recordings from disclosure. 

“It is the policy of Butler County only to release 911 audio under court order or by subpoena,” a county public records clerk wrote in an email. “Therefore, the request is denied.” 

A crucial provision in state law, however, gives Butler County the ability to release these recordings. Pennsylvania agencies and courts can release 911 recordings if they determine that “the public interest in disclosure outweighs the interest in nondisclosure.” 

As The Intercept wrote to the county, if the attempted assassination of a former president and current presidential candidate does not qualify as an overwhelming public interest, it’s not clear what ever could. 

The county did not respond to The Intercept’s requests to release the 911 recordings under this carveout. On Friday, The Intercept filed an appeal to the state Office of Open Records.

Other press outlets trying to get 911 recordings from the Trump rally have also gotten the runaround, according to Melissa Bevan Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association. 

“The carveout is there for situations where the public interest in the recordings is high, a situation like this,” Melewsky told The Intercept.

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“Obviously there is huge public interest — legitimate, compelling public interest — in hearing these recordings,” said attorney Joy Ramsingh, who previously adjudicated Office of Open Records appeals. “Potential embarrassment to the agency is not supposed to be part of the test.”

Ramsingh said Butler County’s refusal to address the public’s interest in these recordings was “impermissible.”

“At a minimum, they need to be articulating to the public why they won’t release them,” Ramsingh said. “My gut tells me it has something to do with potential embarrassment to the agency.” 

The post Why Won’t Authorities Release 911 Recordings From Trump Rally Shooting? appeared first on The Intercept.

In one April 2018 air attack, American troops killed three, and possibly five, civilians with a pair of missiles. A woman and child were among the dead, according to a U.S. military investigation, but the same report concluded their identities might never be known.

Last year, my investigation for The Intercept exposed the details of this disastrous attack. The woman and child survived the initial strike but were killed by the second missile. They were 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse.

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For six years, the family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, but they have never received a response. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, told me last year. “No one has been held accountable.”

A new report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict, or CIVIC, shared exclusively with The Intercept, underlines what Mohamed told me: Civilian victims and survivors of U.S. drone strikes in Somalia say that attaining justice in the form of official acknowledgment, apologies, and financial compensation would help them move on from the trauma they experienced.

But after almost 20 years of drone strikes, even in cases in which the Pentagon has admitted to killing innocent people, the U.S. has failed to apologize to any Somali survivors, much less offer amends.

“The civilians we interviewed described not only devastating physical harm, like deaths and injuries, but also significant economic burdens and long-lasting psychological trauma,” Madison Hunke, CIVIC’s U.S. program officer, told The Intercept. “Most respondents agreed that justice comes down to a perpetrator of harm being held accountable for their actions and the victims being treated with the dignity they deserve.”

CIVIC interviewed 38 individuals who identified as civilian victims of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia, as well as eight civil society experts who work with or represent the injured and survivors. Twenty-seven of the 38 lost a family member in an attack. Many spoke of justice in terms of U.S. accountability, including acknowledgment of the deaths, apologies, and financial amends, specifically a Somali custom known as diya (blood money) which is traditionally used to resolve disputes.

“For me, justice would mean the U.S. talking and sitting with the families of the civilian victims harmed in its airstrikes,” one interviewee told CIVIC. “Then the U.S. should financially compensate those families. That kind of move would eventually heal the wounded hearts.”

After more than 17 years of drone strikes and ground attacks in Somalia, the U.S. has carried out 288 declared strikes. AFRICOM claims to have killed just five civilians in that period, including Luul and Mariam. (The military has never referred to the mother and daughter by name.) Airwars, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, says the real number may be more than 3,000 percent higher.

Following The Intercept investigation last year, two dozen human rights organizations — 14 Somali and 10 international groups — called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to compensate Luul and Mariam’s family. This year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Reps. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn; Barbara Lee, D-Calif.; and Jim McGovern, D-Mass., joined the effort.

“The Department of Defense is currently reviewing this matter, and we will not comment further at this time,” Pentagon spokesperson Lisa Lawrence said of the case.

The Defense Department’s response has compounded the trauma suffered by survivors, says Clare Brown, the deputy director of Victim Advocates International, an organization that supports victims of international crimes that is representing the families of Somali drone strike victims, including Luul’s.

“The silence of AFRICOM and the U.S. Department of Defense towards the families has been really hurtful,” Brown told The Intercept. “As their lawyers, we know that there are discussions and even possibly some movement happening behind the scenes — but no one has reached out or spoken to the families.” Brown and other lawyers are the families’ only source of information. “It’s upsetting for them to feel like passive observers in this process they are actually at the center of,” Brown said.

The forms of harm chronicled in the CIVIC report include the death of a relative, physical injury, property damage, and economic hardship experienced by victims and survivors of U.S. drone strikes. 

Fourteen interviewees reported that they or family members experienced ongoing psychological trauma because of the attacks. “A considerable amount of time has elapsed since the incident, but I still experience nightmares,” one man whose sister was killed in a strike told CIVIC. “The incident and the gruesome details of what happened to her deeply affect me.” 

CIVIC’s research found that a majority of civilian victims and survivors indicated a preference for individual amends like condolence payments or financial assistance over community-level compensation, such as improving local infrastructure. “The report is a good reminder that we can’t know what justice means to people unless we ask them,” said Brown. “The U.S. should also be proactively trying to have these conversations with communities affected by drone strikes — and hopefully this report will create the impetus for them to find ways to do that.”

CIVIC’s report includes 11 recommendations for the U.S. government, including adoption of a comprehensive approach to accountability and amends, prioritization of individual amends to victims and survivors of attacks, and the utilization of $3 million authorized annually by Congress for ex gratia payments to victims and survivors of civilian harm.

In April, one year past its congressionally-mandated deadline, the Pentagon released its 2022 annual report on civilian casualties. It concluded that U.S. military operations in 2022 killed no civilians, and also noted that the Defense Department did not make any ex gratia payments to civilians harmed in its operations in 2022 or the families of those killed in strikes from previous years. This follows a single ex gratia payment made in 2021 and none issued in 2020.

It’s impossible to know if any payments to survivors were made last year because the Defense Department missed its May 1 deadline for releasing its 2023 civilian casualty report. Lawrence told The Intercept that the Pentagon is still reviewing data and expected the overdue report to be released “in the near term.”

In the meantime, Somali survivors continue to wait, wondering if the Pentagon will ever apologize for killing their relatives.

“Since 2020, when Congress first authorized the $3 million annually for ex gratia, the Department has reported just one single payment of just a few thousand dollars has been made, and that’s despite the many credible cases of harm the DoD has already publicly acknowledged,” CIVIC’s Hunke told The Intercept. “The U.S. has the tools it needs to make these payments, so it’s a question of political will.”

“The lack of payments in Somalia, as well as in other places like Iraq and Syria, speaks volumes about the DoD’s commitment to meaningfully respond to harm caused by its operations,” Hunke said.

The post U.S. Has Never Apologized to Somali Drone Strike Victims — Even When It Admitted to Killing Civilians appeared first on The Intercept.

The prime minister went after campus protesters, drawing a false equivalence between students calling on their schools to divest from Israel and antisemitic attacks. He went on to insult protesters’ geographical and historical knowledge of the region, in reference to the protest slogan “From the river to the sea,” and belittled the slogan “Gays for Gaza,” saying it was the same as “Chickens for KFC.” 

More broadly, Netanyahu claimed that movements for Palestine liberation were choosing “to stand with evil … to stand with Hamas.”

The prime minister also claimed that the pro-Palestinian movement is funded by the Iranian government, labeling protesters “Iran’s useful idiots,” without offering any evidence to substantiate his claim.

The allegation of Iranian funding drew a standing ovation from many members of Congress who attended the speech but also a spattering of “boos.” The comment likely stemmed from a statement released earlier this month from the White House’s head of national intelligence, Avril Haines, who said they found “actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.” In the same statement, Haines clarified that Americans who protest are expressing their view on Gaza “in good faith” and that her office’s “intelligence does not indicate otherwise.”

A number of media reports in recent months have found that Netanyahu’s government has been operating a similar influence campaign on social media, largely targeting Black members of Congress, in order to shore up support for its war on Gaza. 

To Palestine solidarity advocates demanding a ceasefire and an end to Israel’s war, Netanyahu’s attacks spoke to the power of their movement.

The speech was an “attempt to delegitimize a social movement that has a lot of power, that has a lot of clarity,” said Benjamin Kersten, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, who participated in the rally outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, as well as the sit-in a day earlier in the Capitol rotunda. “It is also a distraction from what should be in focus, which is that over 39,000 people, over 14,000 children, have been killed by the Israeli government and military, making great use of United States’ weapons and funding.”

A central demand of protests around the Capitol during Netanyahu’s visit was an arms embargo on Israel. Since October 7, the U.S. has sent more than $12 billion in military aid to Israel, contributing to more than $141 billion in weapons to the Israeli government since the nation’s formation in 1948. 

During his speech, Netanyahu appealed to lawmakers to fast-track military aid and invoked former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s World War II appeal to the United States: “Give us the tools, and we’ll finish the job.” He also said that sending more weapons would “help keep American’s boots off the ground,” despite the fact that American soldiers in the region have been readied for deployment to Gaza, have died in attacks related to the ongoing war, and have been actively defending Israeli targets from attack.

Netanyahu’s appearance before Congress generated significant controversy among Democratic lawmakers, drawing detractors across the party’s political spectrum, from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who said the invitation was a mistake, to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said Israel “has trampled on international law, on American law, and on basic human values” in its war on Gaza.

More than 50 Democratic lawmakers boycotted the address in protest. 

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian in Congress and most vocal opponent of the event, was in attendance, wearing a keffiyeh draped around her neck, holding a sign that read “War criminal.” Her guest at the address was Hani Almadhoun, a Palestinian American and director of philanthropy at UNRWA USA, who Tlaib said had lost “over 150 members of his extended family in Netanyahu’s genocide.” 

But roaring applause met Netanyahu as he walked onto the House floor, with the ovation lasting for more than five minutes. More clapping came after he dismissed protesters outside the Capitol, and chants of “USA” broke out after Netanyahu praised members of a University of North Carolina fraternity who went viral for stopping an American flag from touching the ground during campus protests in May. The fraternity members were also honored last week at the Republican National Convention.

Throughout his speech, Netanyahu singled guests in attendance out for praise. Israel Defense Forces soldiers were repeatedly highlighted in his remarks, including one soldier who had immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia, and several others who continued fighting despite injuries and bragged about their record of killing “many terrorists.” Also present in the House chambers was Noa Argamani, who was among four Israeli hostages taken by Hamas and were freed during an IDF operation at the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza in early June. During the raid, more than 200 Palestinians were killed, including children as well as some of the hostages, Gazan officials said.

Some families of hostages have expressed distaste for Netanyahu’s speech, and were critical of his desire to prolong the incursion on Gaza, which they say risks the safety of the hostages. At least six people who were guests at the speech were detained by Capitol Police for holding signs during standing ovations that read “SEAL THE DEAL NOW,” referring to a ceasefire and deal to free the remaining hostages, according to Axios. 

Among those detained was Carmit Palty Katzir, an Israeli citizen whose father and brother were both hostages killed in Hamas captivity, according to a photo posted to social media that showed her wearing a “Seal the deal now” shirt. Other family members of hostages critical of Netanyahu gathered at a rally in downtown Washington, arguing that their relatives are paying the price for his war.

The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor requested arrest warrants in May for Netanyahu and his cabinet member and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on a series of war crimes, including starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the targeting of civilians in its military attacks. The ICC has yet to approve the warrants, which would restrict the politicians’ travel to dozens of countries that are party to the court’s Rome Statute, which governs the enforcement of war crimes.

In Congress, Netanyahu openly dismissed the ICC’s case against him, defending his government’s record of delivering aid to Gaza and avoiding civilian deaths.

“The ICC is trying to shackle Israel’s hands and prevent us from defending ourselves,” Netanyahu said, before drawing a connection to the U.S., which, like Israel, is not party to the Rome Statute. “If Israel’s hands are tied, America’s next.”

[/newsletter

Protest organizers hope to shift the focus from individual actors, such as Netanyahu, to the broader catastrophe of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and war on Gaza. Last Friday, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ top court, ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal, rife with war crime violations, and amounts to apartheid. A separate ICJ case is considering whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

“As American taxpayers, we understand that Netanyahu is not the cause — this is not Netanyahu’s war — but that he really is the symptom of the larger problem of Israeli occupation, and apartheid, and now genocide” being carried out with American weapons and the support of the American government, said Kersten, the JVP organizer.

Kersten believes that U.S. lawmakers are wrong to isolate blame to Netanyahu: “What that allows is criticism of Netanyahu and no change in policy, or change in behavior.”

The post Netanyahu Insulted and Smeared the Pro-Palestine Protest Movement. Congress Clapped. appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter, addressed to President Joe Biden, references reporting from the New York Times, The Guardian, and Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which, in separate investigations, uncovered an Israeli influence campaign that used fake accounts to pose as Americans in order to disparage pro-Palestinian groups with “deeply Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content,” target student groups and human rights organizations who were critical of Israel, and post pro-Israel content online. The campaign was designed to persuade lawmakers to continue providing military aid to Israel for its war on Gaza, and focused on Black Democratic members of Congress.

“What this letter asks for is very simple: that President Biden and his administration treat reports of inappropriate Israeli influence operations with the same seriousness that it has allegations of Russian and Iranian influence campaigns.” said Jamal Abdi, head of the National Iranian American Council, referring to separate efforts to interrupt American democracy by Iran and Russia ahead of the 2016 and 2020 elections and earlier this year. “Unfortunately, what has been reported thus far could just be the tip of the iceberg.”

The letter, also addressed to the departments of Justice, State and Homeland Security, arrived hours before Netanyahu is expected to address Congress in a joint session, which has drawn a wave of criticism. Signatories include the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the Sikh Coalition, and a number of American Quaker groups.

Raed Jarrar — advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a letter signee and human rights group founded by slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi — called on the Biden administration to protect democracy and to “end its policy of exceptionalism towards Israel and hold all nations to the same standards.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has said she will not preside over the address but will meet with Netanyahu at a later time during his visit to Washington, which began Monday. Hundreds of demonstrators with Jewish Voice for Peace filled the Capitol rotunda on Tuesday, in protest of Netanyahu’s visit, chanting “Let Gaza Live!” until Capitol police arrested the crowd.

A growing number of lawmakers are boycotting the far-right prime minster’s address, including senior Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Patty Murray, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen, along with progressive members of the House of Representatives. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, has been the most pointed in her attacks on the address, referring to Netanyahu as “a war criminal committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” in a statement Tuesday, in which she called for his arrest and deportation to the International Criminal Court. She also referred to the event as “a celebration of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” and criticized continued U.S. military aid to Israel.

Last week, a separate letter signed by 230 Senate and House staffers from 122 Democratic and Republican congressional offices called on lawmakers to boycott the address, referring to the ICC war crimes case against Netanyahu. “This is not an issue of politics, but an issue of morality,” the staffers’ letter read.  

The ICC’s prosecutor requested arrest warrants in May for Netanyahu and his cabinet member and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant on a series of war crimes, including starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the targeting of civilians in its military attacks. The ICC has yet to approve the warrants. Last Friday, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ top court, ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal, rife with war crime violations, and amounts to apartheid. A separate ICJ case is considering whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Since the start of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the Biden administration has been criticized for its handling of the conflict and its deference toward Israel, which many critics and international law observers see as a double standard in foreign policy. Despite Biden’s public denunciations of civilian deaths, Israel has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children. Bombardments have intensified in recent weeks with civilian death tolls mounting, even as Israel is engaged in ceasefire talks. The U.S. has continued to send billions in military aid throughout the conflict, with a few temporary exceptions, and has repeatedly upheld Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas.

Letter signers pointed to recent sanctions by the Treasury Department earlier this year against Russian hackers over a similar campaign influence scheme, and asked Biden for Israel’s program to be treated the same. 

Israel’s influence campaign received $2 million in government funding and was commissioned by its Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which fosters relationships between Jews across the globe with Israel, according to the New York Times. Both their report and Haaretz’s reporting linked the campaign to Stoic, a Tel-Aviv-based political marketing firm. Stoic created and ran various social media accounts that spread Islamophobic material. One posted that Muslim immigrants posed a threat to Canada and were calling for a Sharia state. Another account highlighted the history of Arab slave traders in Africa, in an effort to sway Black American lawmakers, Haaretz reported.

“As an Administration that has defined itself as defenders of American democracy against threats from both domestic and foreign state actors, the news of the Israeli government’s attacks on our democracy must be addressed,” the letter urged.

Wednesday’s letter also outlined previous communications between signatories and State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. Miller declined to comment on the facts around Israel’s social media scheme highlighted in media reports, and instead stated that “we have very clear laws on the books in the United States about foreign influence campaigns. We enforce those laws vigorously and we expect everyone to comply with them.” He did not give any indication that the State Department would investigate the allegations further. 

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Rights Groups Demand Biden Give Answers on Israel’s Secret Influence Campaign on Congress appeared first on The Intercept.

The elected officials who will not attend Netanyahu’s speech span the ideological spectrum, from Vice President Kamala Harris to members of the Squad. Most of the members of the House and Senate who have said they will skip the address — including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Democrat in the upper chamber — focused on Netanyahu himself as a war criminal or international law violator, rather than on the Israeli state’s systemic abuses against the Palestinian people. 

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian in Congress, has been the most frank in explaining her protest. 

“Netanyahu is a war criminal committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” Tlaib said in a statement on Tuesday. “It is utterly disgraceful that leaders from both parties have invited him to address Congress. He should be arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court.”

Some, like Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have echoed Tlaib’s straightforward opposition. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said she won’t be attending the speech and that she gave her tickets to the family member of an Israeli hostage. Several prominent members of Congress, including Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., will reportedly hold counter-programming with the families of Israeli hostages at the time of Netanyahu’s address. Even former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said the prime minister should not have been invited to speak. 

“Benjamin Netanyahu is the worst leader in Jewish history since the Maccabean king who invited the Romans into Jerusalem over 2100 years ago,” Nadler said. “The Prime Minister is putting the security of Israel, the lives of the hostages, the stability of the region, and longstanding Israeli democratic norms in perilous jeopardy, simply to maintain the stability of his far-right coalition and absolve him of his own legal troubles.”

While Nadler insisted he had “not given up on the dream of an Israel that can live in peace with its neighbors, including with Palestinians, through a negotiated two-state solution,” his statement, along with those of scores of others, made no mention of Israeli state violence against Palestinians. 

The last time Netanyahu visited Congress, in 2015, nearly 60 Democrats boycotted his speech, viewing the address as an attack on President Barack Obama’s efforts to finalize negotiations regarding the Iran nuclear deal. Today, the Israeli premier is likely facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court and oversees a government that was ordered by the ICJ months ago to stop any act of genocide in Gaza.

Time and time again, reputable bodies ranging from international courts to human rights organizations to the United Nations have found the Israeli government to be committing human rights violations. Even the Biden administration — while providing financial and political cover for Israel’s war on Gaza — has admitted that Israel has killed civilians and likely violated international law with U.S. weapons. As Tlaib pointed out in her statement on Tuesday, “Since 1948, the US has provided more than $141 billion in weapons to the Israeli government to fund the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including $17.9 billion since October.”

While that reality may not be front and center for other members of Congress, protesters from across the country descended on Washington this week to make their opposition known. In interviews with The Intercept, activists described Netanyahu as a “symptom” of Israeli politics, not the problem himself.

On Tuesday, the U.S. veterans group Common Dreams joined Israeli veterans from Breaking the Silence to urge members of Congress to support a ceasefire, and to condition any future military aid to Israel upon its respect for international law and the human rights of Palestinians. The groups also urged Congress to restore U.S. funding for UNRWA: a United Nations agency that aids Palestinians and that has faced attacks from Israeli and U.S. officials.

“We’re the soldiers that stood at checkpoints, raided homes, arrested kids, destroyed Palestinian villages and fought in Gaza,” Nadav Weiman, incoming executive director of BTS, said in a statement. “We know more than anyone else why we need to end the Israeli occupation for the sake of Israeli society and the Palestinian society as well. We cannot really be a democracy in the middle-east if we continue our continuous 57 years of military occupation over the Palestinian people.”

The former soldiers were not alone at the Capitol. Hundreds of Jewish people — including over two dozen rabbis and rabbinical students — from across the country took to the rotunda to demand a ceasefire and arms embargo to Israel.

When asked about the protest, Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., suggested the demonstrators — holding signs and wearing shirts that said things like “Jews for Ceasefire” or “Not in our name” — were “pro-Hamas.” 

The Intercept pointed out that the crowd included rabbis and asked Lawler if he believed they were also pro-Hamas.

“Those that are coming here on a continuing basis as they have since October 7, to protest the State of Israel and continually support the propaganda put forth by Hamas — yes, they’re pro-Hamas,” Lawler said.

Lawler, who is Catholic, questioned whether the protesters were even Jewish, and seemed to suggest that believing the demonstrators who self-identified as Jewish was akin to believing the death toll recorded by the Gaza Ministry of Health. (Gaza’s health authority has long faced bad-faith attacks by actors who point out that it is an arm of the Hamas government. Lawler also falsely said that the United Nations reduced the ministry’s death count by 50 percent; after The Intercept pointed out that was not true, he simply said, “OK.”)

Several protesters told The Intercept that their Jewish background is exactly why they were protesting in the first place.

Tal Frieden, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors who endured the Nazi work camps, said they were at the protest because of the horrors on display in Gaza and what they had been warned about growing up. “My entire childhood, I was told ‘never again’ means ‘never again for anyone.’”

Jay Saper, whose family members were killed at Auschwitz, said they honor their ancestors’ memories by pressing Congress and the president “to stop arming Israel while it carries out a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.”

“I love my Jewish tradition because it inspires me. It allows me to take action for justice.”

Correction: July 24, 2024
A previous version of this article misspelled Tal Frieden’s last name.

The post Dozens of Lawmakers Are Protesting Netanyahu — but Have Little to Say About Israel’s Systemic Abuses of Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

In a poll conducted before Biden’s decision not to seek reelection, Dan Osborn, a Nebraska labor leader running as an independent, tied with two-term incumbent Republican Sen. Deb Fischer.

The poll — commissioned by the Osborn campaign, conducted by Impact Research, and advised by Republican firm Red Wave Strategy Group — shows the Senate candidates tied at 42-42. When respondents were asked how they would vote in the Senate race given an independent versus a Republican, 57 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Trump voters said they were open to voting for an independent.

Statewide, survey respondents said they preferred former President Donald Trump to Biden, 59 to 36. And in parts of the state where the presidential race was tighter, voters showed even more enthusiasm for Osborn. In Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes Omaha, Trump led Biden 49-47 in a head-to-head matchup, while Osborn bested Fischer 44-40.

Three of the four independents currently in the Senate caucus with the Democrats, while the fourth, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, is aligned with Democrats for committee purposes. Osborn, for his part, has declined to accept the endorsement of either major party, though many of his policy priorities align with positions traditionally adopted by Democrats. Democratic officials in Nebraska had considered supporting Osborn’s candidacy and did not field a Democratic candidate against him in the primaries. Just one day after the state primaries, Osborn said he would not accept the party’s endorsement, prompting state officials to publish a statement saying Osborn “betrayed” their trust. While the party later said it intended to field a write-in candidate against Osborn and Fischer for the general election, that has not yet happened.

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Unlike the 73-year-old Fischer, who has served in politics for more than two decades, Osborn would be a first-time politician. The 48-year-old military veteran is best known as a labor leader. He was the president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union Local 50G. Two years ago, Osborn helped lead workers in a strike against food giant Kellogg’s that lasted more than two months and also included factories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Last month, he won the endorsement of the United Auto Workers union.

His platform includes raising pay for service members, confronting agricultural consolidation, and legalizing medical marijuana. He also calls to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and oppose “extreme national measures to ban abortion.” He also urges rail safety reform, including measures like requiring two-person crews and increasing fines for violating rail safety laws — reforms floated after the disastrous Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last year.

Osborn, who launched his campaign in October, raised $1,035,249 from roughly 31,000 donors in the second quarter of 2024, between April 1 and July 30 — making the average contribution $33. Fischer’s campaign, meanwhile, raised $678,985 over the same period, according to campaign finance reports.

While the state has been a Republican stronghold for years, respondents to the recent poll were not as enthused about Fischer herself did not have as strong a foothold in the recent poll. Her favorability rating was a net negative two, and roughly as many voters said they preferred “someone else” (40 percent) to reelecting Fischer (41 percent). Moreover, 68 percent of respondents said they are open to supporting an independent candidate for Senate, while just 21 percent said they would only support a Republican.

Osborn also led in the poll among those registered with neither party, earning the support of 65 percent of independents, while Fischer got only 16 percent.

Three earlier polls for the race showed mixed results, with a recent survey giving Fischer a significant edge while previous ones showed a much tighter contest.

A poll commissioned by the Fischer campaign earlier this month showed the incumbent beating Osborn by 26 percentage points. More than 75 percent of respondents, however, said they had no opinion of Osborn, didn’t know who he was, or declined to share an opinion of him. Conversely, only 14 percent of respondents did not know who Fischer was. The poll otherwise followed trends, showing Trump beating Biden by 19 points.

A November survey had Osborn leading Fischer by a slim 2 points, with respondents responding more favorably to Osborn’s background than Fischer’s. Another poll conducted in late April showed Osborn trailing Fischer by 4 points, with 30 percent of voters undecided. 

Now as Republicans’ nationwide strategy has been upended by Biden’s exit from the presidential race, the latest poll suggests that the Fischer campaign may have cause for concern as well.

The post As Republicans’ 2024 Strategy Is Upended, Poll Shows Nebraska Senate Seat May Be Up for Grabs appeared first on The Intercept.

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.