In the immediate wake of the incident, city council members introduced a motion to give $1 million to several Jewish security organizations that would expand their work around Jewish schools, religious institutions, and neighborhoods. 

Magen Am, a nonprofit that runs armed patrol services and firearm training programs for the Jewish community, was named as the recipient of $350,000 in the motion. The group is largely made up of former Israeli soldiers, along with U.S. military veterans, according to the group’s website and social media posts, and was founded by a former MMA fighter with ties to the National Rifle Association. The majority of the former Israel Defense Forces soldiers in the group are “lone soldiers,” according to several reports, the term for individuals with no direct ties to the state of Israel who immigrated there to serve in the nation’s military.

The city council has since introduced a new motion, which would give $2 million to various faith groups that want to hire additional security and does not mention Magen Am or any recipients by name. But LA activists are still concerned that city funds will go to an armed group with hard-line political stances.

“The fact that Magen Am was even named in that original motion as a recipient of money, that exposes the intention,” said Miguel Camnitzer, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace. The group is alarmed that city leaders are choosing to fund individuals who served a military that commits ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. 

“It’s the same military that’s enacting this genocide, and we’re going to have them patrolling our streets with guns seems wild to me,” Camnitzer said. The group also notes that the new motion does not include any provisions for keeping the recipients of city money accountable to the public interest. “We’re talking about essentially a private militia that can use force and detain people, and has no accountability.”

Magen Am’s director for its veterans program, Leibel Mangel, who served in the IDF’s counterterrorism unit during the 2014 Gaza War, flew to Israel in the days following October 7 to join the conflict, according to a post on Instagram. He shared in a podcast interview that he was stationed with other reservists along Israel’s southern border with Gaza, and later, in the West Bank, “protecting communities there, trying to put a dent in Hamas infrastructure.” One post showed him carrying an assault rifle and looking out into a desert with the caption, “Their spilled blood will be avenged.”

Magen Am lists former U.S. Navy SEAL Jason Pike as a firearms trainer on its website. Advocates with Jewish Voice for Peace were troubled by Pike’s online presence, which was filled with violent, homophobic, transphobic, and extremist military content. 

In one post on his public Instagram account, which has nearly 15,000 followers, Pike shared a video showing him waterboarding his son, a torture practice widely utilized by the U.S. government on its detainees during interrogations. Using the torture method to train U.S. military soldiers was banned in 2007 by the Justice Department because it “provided no instructional or training benefit to the student.” Pike captioned the video, which drew nearly 800 likes, with the hashtags “mindgames” and “trainyourbrain.” 

In December, Pike posted a video purporting to show an Israeli soldier repeatedly slapping a blindfolded Palestinian man. Pike captioned the post by dismissing “Rules of Engagement” in war and wrote, “the crap we do is far worse … I know from first hand experience.” The former Navy SEAL added, “The truth would utterly put many of us under the prison.”

A separate post shared last month seemed to condone comments made by a U.S. veteran who threatened to shoot at anti-Trump protesters at a Veterans Day Parade and “wipe them all out.” Pike wrote he felt the nation was headed to where “we will be forced to do a reset,” referring to the veteran’s violent threats, and that the only thing that holds him back from doing so “is God Himself.”

Also on his Instagram account, Pike shared a transphobic meme that misrepresented a “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” song, a common reference by anti-trans groups. And in his podcast, Pike labeled homosexuality “a sin” that would keep people from heaven.

Mangel and Pike did not respond to requests for comment.

“An organization that thinks it’s appropriate to have that be one of their instructors who is going to then teach other people how to patrol our streets is really scary,” said Camnitzer, who is gay and whose father escaped Nazi Germany with his family in 1939. “The fact that then our city would think it’s appropriate to hire an organization that has those people among their staff is really concerning.” 

Magen Am leadership did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The city council offices that introduced the motions did not respond to requests for comment. LA’s city council is currently on summer recess but is expected to vote on the motion when their session resumes later this month.

The push to fund security firms for Jewish communities emerged in late June, when a group of protesters made up of a coalition of Jewish and Palestinian advocates, including members of Jewish Voice For Peace, lined the outside of the Adas Torah synagogue in LA. They were there to oppose a real estate event taking place inside the house of worship, in which companies marketed the sale of properties in both Israel and in West Bank settlements considered illegal under international law.

The demonstrators were met with opposition from pro-Israel counterprotesters, whose agitation led to several fights, multiple injuries, and a couple of arrests, authorities said at the time.

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavksy, whose district includes the Pico-Robertson neighborhood where the protest took place, almost immediately started calling for armed guards to prevent future incidents. 

Later that week, Yaroslavsky and Councilmember Bob Blumenfield introduced the first motion, which would set aside $400,000 for the Jewish Federation, $250,000 for Jewish Community Foundation, and $350,000 for Magen Am. Nationally, Jewish leaders used the LA synagogue incident as a rallying cry to call for more funding for increased security. Religious organizations are able to apply for federal funding through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which got a $40 million boost in California in April.

“The threats are real and the fear of a proxy war for what is happening in the Middle East spilling onto our streets here in LA is real,” said Yaroslavsky at a July 2 council meeting. Her comments were met with a wave of “boos” from Jewish and Palestinian advocates who packed the council chambers to oppose the motion.

At the meeting, a Palestinian teenager who was at the synagogue protest told the council that she was attacked and harassed by pro-Israel agitators who followed her to her car and, after she got inside, went on to bang on her windows, blocking her from leaving.  

Magen Am’s armed units were present at the real estate event. The group admitted in a statement they were unable to control the crowd during the protest and misrepresented the demonstration, referring to it as “pro-Hamas protest.” The group was also present at the pro-Palestine student encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, where a group of dozens of counterprotesters who support Israel attacked students, leading to at least 15 injuries, according to campus officials. 

Jewish Voice for Peace feared that funding a pro-Israel group would only embolden violent agitators who align with the same pro-Israel leanings.    

“I’m just looking at the types of people that work at this organization, and I’m thinking, not only are they not going to keep me safe, but these are the types of people that generally put me in extreme danger,” Camnitzer said. “So who is the city trying to keep safe?” 

The post LA City Council Considers Funding Former IDF Soldiers to Patrol Its Streets appeared first on The Intercept.

“Everybody’s making a hard turn for ‘Fuck off Jew.’ It’s a hard right turn,” Fuentes says, laughing. The line is a reference to “Heck Off, Commie,” a far-right YouTube show run by one of Fuentes’s competitors. The crowd eats it up, chanting back “Fuck off Jew, fuck off Jew.” Fuentes shakes his head, grinning. “No, but that’s only a joke!”

He then gets serious, turning to former President Donald Trump’s support of Israel. The issue has always been a point of contention for Fuentes and has only intensified since October 7. Trump used to be their voice, Fuentes says, but now he seems more concerned with Israel. “I don’t know about you guys, but when he goes up there and says, ‘We’re gonna throw out all the anti-Israel protesters,’ that’s not my voice,” Fuentes says, referring to Trump’s promise to deport any foreign students participating in pro-Palestine protests on college campuses.

“You know that I am your voice,” Fuentes reassures them. “So in the spirit of me being your voice, I want you to raise your right hand, and repeat after me: ‘I solemnly swear that I will put America First and I will put Israel last every single time, because Christ is our king.’”

As he pauses for the audience response, people hold their right hands up as though they are taking a pledge. One man extends his arm into a Sieg Heil, giving Fuentes the Nazi-era salute as he repeats the words. Some people drop their hands early, perhaps noticing the salute, or maybe just tired of the position. But others slowly stretch their arms out too. By the end of the pledge, several people have made Sieg Heils.

“Because Christ is our king.”

Welcome to the fourth America First Political Action Conference.

Mainstreaming Extremism

Detroit is probably not the place you would expect to find a Republican convention, but that’s exactly where Turning Point USA chose to hold the People’s Convention in June. Founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012, Turning Point USA is an ostensibly mainstream youth-oriented conservative organization that has shifted into solidly MAGA territory. While TPUSA started as a network of conservative clubs on college campuses, it now includes high school chapters, a faith group, and a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit. The latter entity, Turning Point Action, is the arm responsible for the annual conference — and it is also boosting Trump 2024’s campaign. TPA is planning to spend $108 million on get-out-the-vote efforts in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Turning Point Action also has a sizable footprint at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week, taking over an entire restaurant within the secured perimeter for what it dubbed the Turning Point RNC Headquarters.

Fuentes has piggybacked off of the Republican conference circuit for years, holding his increasingly explicitly white nationalist America First Political Action Conference near the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and Turning Point USA. He has been banned from events hosted by both organizations, and for good reason. Fuentes has openly praised Hitler, suggested he would like to marry a 16-year-old girl, and clearly stated that he does not want Jewish people in government. But having his own conference in such close proximity to mainstream events allows for a built-in audience — and the chance to recruit new, sympathetic followers.

For a time, association with Fuentes was enough to tank a career in politics. TPUSA used to make an effort to maintain a distance from him, even severing ties with an influencer after she appeared in a photo with Fuentes. On the first day of the TPUSA conference, Fuentes showed up knowing he would be kicked out. Wearing a red hoodie, sunglasses, and ill-fitting jeans, he led a small group of young men into the convention center. Once inside, attendees broke out in applause and chants of “groyper, groyper,” the name Fuentes fans have given themselves. Security quickly showed up and escorted Fuentes out.

The process is tradition at this point. The man who escorted Fuentes out had done so in the past at TPUSA events in other cities. Something different, though, was Fuentes’s posse’s lack of effort to conceal their identities or their status as TPUSA attendees. Some of the men who followed Fuentes into the convention were known figures. MMA fighter turned right-wing poster Jake Shields was in the mix, as were streamers from Fuentes’s livestreaming platform. But one lower-profile man hung close to Fuentes, only obscuring his face with sunglasses: Alec Beaton, the youth chair for the St. Clair County, Michigan, GOP. Like many of the men in the group, Beaton had a Turning Point badge around his neck. While TPUSA still does not directly associate with Fuentes, its conference attendees openly hanging out with him suggests that its hard line has changed. (Shields later told me that he had come out “because I had a pass for Nick,” and that he returned to the conference the next day. TPUSA did not respond to my request for comment, nor did Beaton.)

It’s possible the groypers’ confidence was brought on by the political connections Fuentes has managed to make within the GOP. In November 2022, he accompanied hip-hop artist Kanye West to dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. In October of last year, Fuentes met with former Texas state Rep. Jonathan Stickland for nearly seven hours. Stickland was the head of both a well-connected consulting firm and a political action committee that distributed money largely from Tim Dunn, one of the biggest conservative donors in Texas. The Republican Party of Texas was briefly thrown into disarray; some wanted to outright ban party-affiliated groups from associating with Fuentes. The movement ultimately failed, and the PAC and consulting firm emerged from the kerfuffle largely free of any consequences. A new spinoff PAC, Texans United for a Conservative Majority, brought in $3.75 million from Dunn in a three-month period earlier this year. While Stickland is unaffiliated with that PAC, he has launched a new firm with help from a senior Texas GOP official.

“I don’t think Fuentes is the kiss of death that people think he is,” said Shane Burley, co-author of the book “Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide To Fighting Antisemitism.” “The world of these online influencers who say outlandish things has moved mainstream. You’re more likely to be around extreme voices and not have to take responsibility for it.”

A Hostile Reception

Fuentes planned to hold his fourth rendition of AFPAC alongside the People’s Convention in Detroit at the Russell Industrial Center. The day before his conference, the Russell Industrial Center told Fuentes it would not host the event. The venue told the Detroit Free Press that it was tricked by AFPAC, stating it would never have agreed to host the group, which had reserved the space through a third party. When Fuentes didn’t leave, the staff called the police, who sided with the venue. Fuentes said he planned to sue.

Fuentes did not tell would-be attendees that the venue was in jeopardy, leaving them in the dark. He would later claim, in tweets and during a livestream, that he was busy looking for a new place to hold the conference. Regardless of the reason, his silence meant that on the day of AFPAC, groups of men wearing suits and blue America First hats were stuck wandering around downtown Detroit, asking one another if they had any idea where or when AFPAC would be.

After some friends and I called around to different venues, I eventually figured out where at least some AFPAC attendees would be going. An employee of Detroit’s Siren Hotel confirmed on the phone that the hotel’s Ash Bar restaurant was hosting AFPAC’s smaller VIP dinner. Fuentes, meanwhile, was preparing to come clean to his supporters: AFPAC IV was canceled. Shortly after, Ash Bar canceled the VIP dinner too. The Siren Hotel later denied that the dinner was planned for its venue and did not respond to my follow-up questions about the event.

Compared to the other cities that have held AFPAC, it seemed Detroit was particularly hostile to Fuentes’s ideas. The groups of would-be attendees, some of whom had made clear on social media they weren’t thrilled about coming to Detroit to begin with, were now without any plans at all. They managed to all find each other and march around the city a bit, before reconvening for an impromptu rally in front of a hotel across from the convention center.

Even though Trump was still inside TPUSA giving his speech and Fuentes himself was nowhere to be found, a sizable crowd had gathered by the time I showed up. I was a little worried that I would face a hostile reception. Some of the men who were taking charge of the rally knew me from my year undercover in the far right, or from my reporting that followed. Others might have known me because Fuentes has ranted about me on his show in the past.

Right away, I spotted Paul Ingrassia, an attorney who sits on the board for the New York Young Republican Club. Ingrassia works for the National Constitutional Law Union, an organization that aims to be a right-wing version of the ACLU. Both groups have ties to Trump, who recorded a video testimonial for the NCLU’s fundraiser a few months ago and was the keynote speaker at NYYRC’s annual gala in 2023, where he thanked Ingrassia for his support. Ingrassia refers to himself as Trump’s favorite Substacker, spends time in Mar-a-Lago, and pals around with Roger Stone. This week, he was in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.

Ingrassia and I both stood near the raised platform in the concrete courtyard of the hotel that was being used as a makeshift stage. A few of Fuentes’s friends and streamers were speaking, presumably hoping to ramp up enough energy to draw Fuentes in. Unfortunately for them, the wind was working against them, making it difficult to hear. After 15 minutes of straining to hear, someone announced that Fuentes was on the way. Chants of “We want Nick” and “groyper, groyper” broke out.

When I reached out to Ingrassia to ask about his decision to attend the rally, he accused me of stalking him, made a barely veiled threat to sue me, and declared, “As a matter of best practices, to the extent you publish anything using my name, you have a duty to reprint my statement in full.” (I don’t, and I won’t.) Ingrassia said “it looked like a prayer vigil or some type of protest” and claimed he “walked past there for maybe 5 minutes out of curiosity … there was a lot of confusion, it was impossible to avoid if you were heading on foot in that direction.”

I replied with photos and video showing that not only had he stood directly in front of me for nearly 20 minutes listening to inflammatory speeches about making America a Christian nation; how unfair it was that Turning Point had banned Fuentes; and that “the Jews” controlled what Charlie Kirk does; but also that he had moved through the crowd and to the very front when Fuentes arrived. I pointed out that Fuentes and Ingrassia follow each other on X, so he must have known who Fuentes was. Instead of responding to this factual record of the rally, Ingrassia blocked me on X, ending our conversation. 

When Fuentes showed up, he commandeered the rooftop of the hotel, with his posse guarding the steps up. The group was steadily growing as TPUSA attendees exited Trump’s speech.

“Henry Ford was a genius,” Fuentes shouted into his megaphone, before bemoaning Ford’s “cancellation” for his intense antisemitism. “But Henry Ford is a great patriot, and his activism in exposing the influence of the Zionist movement and the Jewish mafia in the United States was an act of patriotism that we are all grateful for.”

“I freaking love Hitler!” one of Fuentes’s friends on the rooftop shouted.

A sea of maskless groypers stood staring up at Fuentes. Some of the men near me had Turning Point USA badges around their necks. Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable for credentialed TPUSA attendees to be in the middle of this crowd. Now, it hardly seemed to matter.

“Astonishingly Self-Assured”

The crowd thinned out shortly after Fuentes’s speech. After facing two cancellations, it seemed like the night was over for the groypers. It didn’t take long for them to start posting that the left could not keep them down, though. They had found another venue: Exodos Rooftop.

Fortunately for me, the bar next to Exodos Rooftop had couches out front, giving a direct view at anyone who entered or exited the club. I bought a drink and had a seat, waiting to see who would try to walk by. I figured I would be sitting there a while before they left, but within minutes groypers started to file out.

Inside the venue, there had been several increasingly bigoted speeches, according to videos that were posted online and my interview with a reporter who was in attendance. Jared Taylor, who organizes the white nationalist American Renaissance conference, talked about making America a white country. (He did not respond to my email about the event.) By the time Fuentes spoke, the antisemitic chants were too much. The staff, unaware who they had given the space to, turned the music up over their voices, drowning out the speeches. (The club did not respond to requests for comment.)

The crowd grew angry, and a groyper threw a drink at security. Conservative social media influencer Joey Mannarino got in the face of a bouncer and screamed “Fuck you!”, video from that night shows. (Mannarino later told me that he “arrived late” and “didn’t really get to see any of the speeches.” Mannarino, who is mutuals with Fuentes on X, also said, “I don’t know much about his ‘reputation’ because he’s so hard to watch due to social media banning him I haven’t ever had the chance to really see much of what he has to say.”)

The crowd joined in, chanting “Fuck you!” Finally, Sneako, a misogynist, pro-Hitler streamer and ally of white nationalism, reached up and knocked the bouncer’s hat off, another video shows. (Sneako, who is Black, did not respond to my request for comment.) In an instant, the bouncer raised his fist and dove through the air, punching Sneako in the face and breaking one of his teeth in half. The party was finally over.

As they trickled out, I saw Mark Ivanyo, the executive director of Republicans for National Renewal. RNR is a populist organization that often tables at TPUSA and CPAC (in both the U.S. and Hungary). It is known for its parties that show off how well connected its members are. Ivanyo spoke at CPAC Hungary earlier this year and recently was elected to be an at-large delegate for Texas at the Republican National Convention. Ivanyo had been slated to be a featured VIP guest at AFPAC. The conference’s social media team had tweeted a flier advertising his appearance, before quickly taking it down.

“Mark! Mark Ivanyo!” I yelled out, trying to get his attention, but to no avail. Ivanyo seemed to be ignoring me. When I later contacted him to ask about his attendance at the rooftop gathering, and his briefly advertised appearance as a VIP guest, he told me he was no longer an RNC delegate due to a “scheduling conflict,” offering no corroboration for this claim. He asked for evidence of my allegations, though he did not reply after I sent him photos, videos, and a screenshot of the tweet promoting his appearance.

A few days later, I ran into Ivanyo in Milwaukee at the RNC, where he refused to look at me or acknowledge my questions in person. While the Republican Party of Texas did not respond to my email asking if Ivanyo had been replaced as a delegate, he has been in photos posted to social media showing him with the Texas delegation on the convention floor.

Back in Detroit, Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP’s 2020 candidate for Senate, also appeared in videos from the event. She has boosted the baseless QAnon conspiracy and believes that Jewish people should not be in positions of power in our government. There was also Juliana Lombard, a VIP guest of the People’s Convention, and NYYRC’s former socials chair. In video of Fuentes’s speech, Lombard can be seen watching the show from a balcony, while the crowd below her chants “Fuck off Jew.” Lombard is currently running for a municipal office as a Republican in Hudson County, New Jersey. (She didn’t respond to my messages asking about her attendance.)

At previous AFPACs, attendees have adhered to strict rules about taking photos or video, but this year, footage from even the “private” event was readily shared all over social media. “They seem astonishingly self-assured about making their connections explicit,” said David Neiwert, a researcher, author, and journalist who has tracked the far right for years. “They deeply believe Trump will win and they will be in charge, so it makes sense to them to just make it a known reality.”

The post I Watched Groypers Descend on Detroit — Where They Were No Longer Pariahs Among Mainstream Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

Miller’s group, America First Legal Foundation, was one of the first organizations to jump ship from the Project 2025 advisory board. Last week, America First Legal asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board webpage. The organization was part of Project 2025 since at least June 2022, when the Heritage Foundation first announced the advisory board’s formation.

America First Legal staff were deeply involved in writing and editing the Project 2025 playbook. Its vice president and general counsel, Gene Hamilton, drafted an entire chapter about the Justice Department, which proposes launching a “campaign” to criminalize mailing abortion pills. In a footnote, Hamilton thanked “the staff at America First Legal Foundation,” who he wrote deserved “special mention for their assistance while juggling other responsibilities.” 

Last summer, in a podcast with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, Hamilton said that one thing that makes Project 2025 special is the vast coalition of conservative groups that came together to craft it. 

“What is so great about this book, and this chapter, and this whole initiative that Heritage is leading,” Hamilton said, “is that we have a coalition of organizations and individuals coming together to say: ‘These are the things, these are the bare minimum things that we expect you to do in this next conservative administration.’”

The Project 2025 playbook list of contributors includes three other America First attorneys: senior vice president Reed Rubinstein, legislative counsel John Zadrozny, and legal counsel Michael Ding, who also co-taught a module in Project 2025’s training academy. 

America First Legal did not respond to questions about why it asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board despite its prior participation.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank, were among the more than 100 groups listed on the Project 2025 website as part of its advisory board. By Wednesday, Americans United for Life and the Mackinac Center had vanished. 

Both organizations were relatively recent additions to the Project 2025 coalition. The Heritage Foundation announced they had joined in February 2024, several months after the massive playbook was released.

Neither organization would elaborate as to why it had joined the Project 2025 board in the first place or why it was exiting it now.

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On Abortion, J.D. Vance Is the Bridge Between Trump and Project 2025

“Americans United for Life has always sought to maintain a non-partisan stance,” said John Mize, chief executive officer at Americans United for Life, in an emailed statement. The group’s current pinned tweet on X thanks J.D. Vance for his contributions “to the pro-life movement,” and the Project 2025 playbook’s anti-abortion proposals seem to align with its philosophy and goals. 

“Going forward into the heart of this election season, we believe we can be most effective in our mission if we maintain this posture,” Mize said. “Of course, we will continue to partner with the Heritage Foundation as opportunity allows, knowing they share our profound commitment to the Life issue.”

A spokesperson said the Mackinac Center had “offered a few recommendations on energy and labor issues” to Project 2025, but that “Project 2025 contains some ideas we do not endorse and others outside of our scope.”

“Because of that, we requested that our name be removed,” said Holly Wetzel, public relations director at the Mackinac Center. 

Wetzel did not respond to questions about which parts of Project 2025 the Mackinac Center did not endorse and whether the think tank read the playbook before joining the advisory board.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about these defections from Project 2025. 

The post Conservative Organizations Are Quietly Scurrying Away From Project 2025  appeared first on The Intercept.

In the lead-up to the Republican convention, many credulously lauded Trump for “softening” or “moderating” the GOP platform on the issue, despite the fact that the platform proposes fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights.

Trump said that Project 2025 went “way too far” on abortion in a Fox News interview filmed over the weekend in Mar-a-Lago, prior to the attempt on his life. But just hours after the interview aired on Monday morning, Trump announced his pick for running mate: Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a man with a recent history of strong opposition to abortion whose selection was celebrated by anti-abortion groups like Students for Life Action.

In the past 48 hours, Vance has tried to backpedal on his abortion stances, including by scrubbing an “END ABORTION” section on his Senate campaign website, which now redirects to a fundraising page for the Trump-Vance ticket. Until he got the nod, this site succinctly distilled Vance’s “100 percent pro-life” views:

Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family. The historic Dobbs decision puts this new era of society into motion, one that prioritizes family and the sanctity of all life.

Vance’s views on abortion thus track with one of Project 2025’s most basic proposals: that “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.” Between Trump’s platform, Vance’s track record, and Vance’s ties to those leading Project 2025, the Trump campaign’s attempts to distinguish their own platform from the Project 2025 anti-abortion agenda are growing increasingly implausible.

Fetuses and the 14th Amendment

In past presidential election cycles, the GOP platform devoted multiple pages to various anti-abortion proposals, including appointing Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and enacting a national ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which Trump advocated when the House passed such a ban in 2017.

The concept of fetal personhood — that fetuses and embryos should have the same constitutional rights as people — has long been at the heart of the GOP’s anti-abortion plank. But past platforms envisioned passing a “human life amendment” to the Constitution and related legislation.

When the Republican National Committee unveiled the draft platform last week, it had just four sentences on abortion. Since the national 20-week ban was dropped, many commentators interpreted the platform as softening the party’s stance on abortion.

Abortion opponents, however, celebrated one sentence, in particular, which was approved by a voice vote of GOP delegates on Monday: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”

Far from moderating on abortion, the GOP platform now suggests that fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights — without the need for any new laws or amendments. This aligns neatly with Project 2025’s roadmap and Vance’s views. 

Notably, the platform refers to the constitutional rights of the “person” under the 14th Amendment, rather than the rights of the “unborn,” as prior platforms phrased it.

“To people in the know, the reference to every person being entitled to due process will bring to mind the idea of fetal personhood and suggest that the GOP will pursue it,” Mary Ziegler, a legal historian, wrote on X after the draft platform came out.

Plenty of anti-abortion organizations certainly read it that way and thus endorsed the revised language. 

“It is important that the GOP reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, in a statement.

“The most significant contribution that the GOP platform makes for LIFE comes in celebrating the fact that the 14th Amendment ‘guarantees’ legal protection for the preborn,” said Students for Life Action’s Kristan Hawkins in a similarly triumphant statement.

“It is proper and good to recognize every life, including those in the womb, share the distinct protections gained by those that have given so much and found as a guarantee within the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,” Americans United for Life wrote in its analysis of the draft platform.

As Erika Bachiochi, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank argued in the wake of the Dobbs decision, getting courts to recognize fetuses as full “persons” under the law and Constitution is “the movement’s ultimate — if elusive — goal.”

“The Republican party has now decided that the Constitution already protects fetal personhood,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a University of Texas law professor who studies reproductive rights and religion. “They’re going to take the view that fetuses have full constitutional rights.”

“The RNC platform attempting to walk back its extremist positions on abortion is irrelevant,” said Sabrina Talukder, director of the Women’s Initiative at Center for American Progress Action, “because Project 2025 will ensure abortion is banned everywhere.”

Both Sepper and Talukder pointed to a ruling in February from the Alabama state Supreme Court as an example of the fetal personhood legal strategy in action. The Alabama court ruled frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization were “children” under a 19th-century wrongful death statute, and it cited the Dobbs decision for the idea that “unborn children” have “civil rights.”

Trump-Vance on Project 2025 and Abortion

In his Fox News interview, Trump said abortion “will never be a federal issue again.” But if, as the GOP platform suggests, fetuses and embryos already have constitutional rights, the federal government arguably has a mandate to protect those rights and restrict abortion. And Project 2025 lays out a road map to doing so using federal regulatory processes.

The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the entire Project 2025 manifesto, while the Biden campaign quickly labeled Trump and Vance “the Project 2025 ticket.” The playbook was drafted and edited by many in Trump’s camp, including numerous former Trump administration officials.

Before getting the nod from Trump, Vance told Newsmax that he had “reviewed a lot of” Project 2025 and found a mix of “good ideas” plus “some things I disagree with,” without further specifying which were good and bad. 

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In the foreword to the 900-page playbook, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urges the “next conservative administration” to “work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life.”

When Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, Roberts called him a “good friend” that he was “privately really rooting for.” Earlier this year, Roberts said Vance was “absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.”

Vance is also a member of the Teneo Network, an invite-only conservative social group which is on the Project 2025 advisory board. In a private speech to Teneo members in 2021, Vance praised recently enacted abortion restrictions in Texas — S.B. 8, the abortion “bounty hunter law” — despite “the legal technicalities about whether that law is ultimately going to survive legal challenges.”

The “existing federal powers” available to restrict abortion, according to Project 2025’s more detailed chapters, include the Comstock Act, a sweepingly broad anti-vice law passed in 1873 that bans mailing materials “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” The Biden Justice Department has interpreted the Comstock Act to prohibit mailing abortion-related materials only when the sender knows they will be used for an illegal abortion, but this interpretation is not binding on future administrations.

Last year, a coalition of Republican attorneys general letters sent letters to CVS and Walgreens warning that sending abortion pills by mail violates the Comstock Act. One of the architects of the conservative legal strategy against abortion, Jonathan Mitchell, told the New York Times that he hopes Trump and anti-abortion groups would “keep their mouths shut as much as possible” about the Comstock Act until the election.

Project 2025 invokes the Comstock Act in the same way, in two chapters drafted by former Trump administration officials. The Justice Department chapter proposes “a campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” in the Comstock Act “against providers and distributors of abortion pills.”

“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” writes Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of America First Legal, who drafted the Justice Department chapter and served in the Trump DOJ. “The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.”

“Project 2025 is an authoritarian playbook to push a radical extremist agenda and outlines ways to create a backdoor national abortion ban by misapplying the Comstock Act,” Talukder, of the Center for American Progress, told The Intercept, “bypassing having to pass a national abortion ban in Congress or through an executive order.”

The Trump campaign and Vance’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about their views on using the Comstock Act to restrict abortion pills.

The Project 2025 chapter about the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, also cites the Comstock Act. The FDA should stop “promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs,” according to Roger Severino, who wrote the chapter and served as the HHS head of civil rights enforcement under Trump.

Severino also argues that the FDA should “reverse its approval” of abortion medications like mifepristone, and that one morning-after emergency contraceptive, Ella, should be removed from mandatory insurance coverage because it is a “potential abortifacient.” In a post to X, Project 2025 claimed the manifesto “says nothing about banning or restricting contraception.”

The Trump campaign and Vance’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about mifepristone and Ella.

Earlier this month, Vance caught flak from anti-abortion groups for saying he supported the Supreme Court’s decision dismissing a court challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Once Trump chose Vance as his VP pick, however, other abortion opponents downplayed the remark as part of a “left-leaning gotcha interview” on “Meet The Press” and thus insufficient to draw “too broad a conclusion about Vance’s abortion advocacy.”

But in his Teneo speech in 2021, Vance made his “abortion advocacy” clear. Praising Texas S.B. 8 — which prohibits abortions as early as six weeks, when the embryo is the size of a pea — Vance called it “a law that protects the rights of the unborn.” Like Project 2025 and the GOP platform, Vance believes fetuses and embryos already have rights that need protecting.

The post On Abortion, J.D. Vance Is the Bridge Between Trump and Project 2025 appeared first on The Intercept.

Marvin Risen, my father’s brother, died long before I was born. He was an FBI agent in Nashville and was killed in a plane crash in 1943.

But decades later, when I was growing up, something about Marvin’s death still troubled my family.

My parents often talked about how they had never been given any answers about Marvin’s death, and that led them to speculate wildly, trying to connect the dots. They openly questioned whether he had been the victim of wartime sabotage. His plane crashed in the middle of World War II, and his Nashville FBI office was not far from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then home to a critical part of the Manhattan Project: America’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. They sometimes wondered whether spies had blown up Marvin’s plane because he had uncovered an atomic espionage ring.

It wasn’t until this year — more than 80 years after my uncle’s death — that the full story of Marvin Risen and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would finally be resolved. But even then, the FBI’s painful treatment of our family would leave an open, unhealed wound.

In hindsight, I see that my parents long, failed struggle to grasp the truth about Marvin’s death wasn’t their fault. It was the result of the FBI’s callous handling of Marvin’s case — and many others like it. When my uncle was killed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was at the height of his power, and he ran the FBI like a dictatorship. The bureau was a cult of personality built around Hoover; he served a total of 48 years in his post, first as director of the FBI’s predecessor, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigations, and then as director of the FBI from its renaming in 1935 until his death in 1972.

Hoover accumulated power in part through his legendary ability to manipulate the press to propagandize and glorify the FBI. He created a mythic origin story for the FBI built around its manhunts and gun battles with Depression-era gangsters like John Dillinger; FBI agents killed in shootouts with gangsters became Hoover’s martyrs. But that meant that FBI agents like Marvin, who died in accidents or from illnesses, were largely ignored by Hoover’s FBI — even if their deaths were work-related.

On October 15, 1943, American Airlines Flight 63 crashed in rural Tennessee, killing all 11 people on board, including Marvin. The aircraft crashed soon after taking off from Nashville for a short flight to Memphis. Records show that, not long after leaving Nashville, the pilot radioed to air traffic control asking for permission to climb to 8,000 feet, possibly in an effort to find a band of warmer air to get rid of ice clinging to the wings and propellers, according to a later federal investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which then regulated commercial aviation. But as the plane gained altitude, ice continued to build, making it impossible to control.

The plane rapidly lost altitude and crashed into a wooded hill near Centerville, about 60 miles from Nashville. The area was so remote that the crash site wasn’t discovered until the next morning by a farmer, who then drove 3 miles to the town of Wrigley, where he could get a phone to call officials in Nashville. In its 1945 final report on the crash, the Civil Aeronautics Board was critical of American Airlines for allowing the plane to fly without deicing equipment; American had removed the equipment in the summer and had not yet reinstalled the gear for the fall and winter. The crash was caused by the “inability of the aircraft to gain or maintain altitude due to carburetor ice or propeller ice or wing ice or some combination of those icing conditions while over terrain and in weather unsuitable for an emergency landing,” the report stated. The agency’s report said that if the weather conditions on the route were known by the airline, that “should have precluded the dispatch of the flight in an aircraft not equipped with wing or propeller deicing equipment.” 

The plane nosedived into the ground, leaving a crash scene so horrific that none of the bodies could be easily identified. It was so terrible that Ernest Gann, an American Airlines pilot and author, wrote about the crash in his acclaimed 1961 memoir on the dangerous early days of aviation, “Fate is the Hunter,” which was turned into a movie in 1964.

Marvin Risen could only be identified by his official FBI briefcase. He was just 27 when he died. He had been with the FBI since 1939.

After I grew up and became a reporter, my family’s questions about what had happened to my uncle remained unanswered. As a journalist covering intelligence and national security issues, I frequently reported on stories involving the FBI, and that experience taught me that it was not surprising that the bureau had failed my family. The FBI was insular and slow to change, and many aspects of the FBI’s culture still bore the imprint of J. Edgar Hoover long after his death. 

So in the 1990s, I decided to take the initiative and find out what I could about Marvin Risen and the FBI. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for Marvin’s personnel file. After a three-year wait, a huge package from the FBI arrived at my home, filled with hundreds of pages of ancient letters and memos documenting my uncle’s life and death. The files taught me things I didn’t know about my family; they revealed that my father was interviewed by the FBI when the bureau was considering hiring his brother. The files also showed that before he was promoted to special agent, Marvin started out working in the FBI’s fingerprinting unit, and later served as a tour guide at FBI headquarters in Washington.

But the most significant discovery in the files came from internal FBI memos that described the way in which the FBI handled Marvin’s death. 

The files showed that immediately after the plane crash, Hoover took a personal interest in Marvin’s case. Phone calls, telegrams, and internal FBI communications flew back and forth between Hoover and the FBI agents in Nashville and on the scene of the crash; it was clear Hoover had some of the same suspicions about the cause of the crash that later bedeviled my parents. Hoover wanted to know whether the crash was an act of sabotage, designed to kill an FBI agent. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Blan Maxwell, the speaker of the Tennessee state Senate, was one of the other passengers who died. At the time, Maxwell was widely considered the leading candidate to become the next governor of Tennessee. Prentice Cooper, the governor at the time, was one of the first officials on the crash scene, mingling with the FBI agents who were scouring the site.  

But the FBI quickly determined that the crash was just an accident. Once the FBI concluded that the plane was not downed by sabotage, Hoover lost interest. There was no drama in Marvin Risen’s death that Hoover could use to glorify the FBI. The files show that the FBI’s interest quickly shifted to finding Marvin’s FBI badge and gun amid the wreckage. When his gun was found, it was badly damaged from the crash.  

The files also revealed that Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his right-hand man and possibly his lover, personally decided not to include Marvin Risen on the FBI Wall of Honor, which listed the FBI’s valiant dead, the agents killed in the line of duty.   

The files reveal that Tolson was named by Hoover to be the chair of the committee set up to decide who was — and who wasn’t — included on the Wall of Honor. Hoover and Tolson wanted to reserve the Wall of Honor for agents killed in gun battles with gangsters and spies. The files included memos and messages between Hoover and Tolson showing that the pair decided that an accidental plane crash didn’t qualify as dying in the line of duty. They rejected Marvin Risen from consideration for the Wall of Honor, even though he was traveling in the line of duty when he died. He had been on his way to Memphis to meet with federal prosecutors about a bank robbery case. He wasn’t hot on the trail of an atomic spy ring or some other glamorous case. Yet he was involved in the kind of criminal investigation that made up much of the FBI’s day-to-day work.

At the time of his death in October 1943, Marvin Risen had one son, Daniel, and his wife, Mary Emily, was pregnant with their second son. In April 1944, she gave birth to Marvin Patrick Risen, who became known as Pat. 

Marvin’s wife, suddenly a widow in her mid-20s with two small children, was left to pick up the pieces after the shattering death of her husband. Yet the most that Hoover did to help was to offer her a secretarial job at the FBI’s headquarters, which would have required her to move from Nashville to Washington. She rejected the offer.

Later, two of Marvin’s sisters went to FBI headquarters in Washington to try to talk to Hoover about Marvin’s case. Hoover refused to come out of his office to meet with them, leaving them waiting — and insulted.

Marvin’s wife later remarried another agent in the FBI’s Nashville office, but both her sons kept Risen as their last name.

Daniel died by suicide when he was a young man. Pat Risen lived until 2022 and had two sons, Clay Risen and Michael Risen. Clay and I both worked at the New York Times together for many years; he continues to write for the Times and is the author of several books. His brother Michael is the associate head of school at the Norwood School, a private school in the Washington area.  

Out of the blue this spring, the FBI contacted Michael Risen: The bureau wanted to talk about his grandfather.

Decades after Marvin Risen’s death, the FBI had finally changed the Hoover-era standards for determining who should be included on the Wall of Honor. A review of old files on agents who had died in the line of duty but had been rejected by Hoover and Tolson had turned up Marvin’s case.

More than 80 years after his death, Marvin Risen was finally going up on the FBI’s Wall of Honor. 

Thomas Cottone, a retired FBI agent, said in an interview that he discovered Marvin’s case while going through old issues of an internal FBI newsletter, which contained an article about the plane crash. Cottone was already pushing the bureau to include the names of several other agents who had died in accidents while on duty, and so he began to advocate for Marvin as well.

One reason the FBI may have finally changed the qualifications for the Wall of Honor is that a number of FBI employees have died in recent years from cancer and other health complications resulting from exposure to toxins while serving at Ground Zero in New York and at the Pentagon after 9/11. Several employees who died after working at Ground Zero and the Pentagon in what were clearly work-related deaths have now been added to the wall; they would almost certainly not have been included under the old Hoover-era standards. 

In May, the FBI held a ceremony at its headquarters — which is named for J. Edgar Hoover — honoring Marvin Risen and seven others whose names have just been added to the wall. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke at the event, and several members of my family attended. I was not one of them.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend the ceremony. I have my own personal history with the FBI, and that experience has been painful and complicated.

Related

My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror

During my time as a national security journalist, the FBI has over the years spied on me, sought to discredit me and my reporting, and even tried to help the Justice Department put me in prison as part of a long government campaign to silence me through the use of draconian leak investigations into my stories. At one time, there were FBI agents assigned to two separate federal grand jury investigations into my work. They pulled my life apart, sifting through my private data while subpoenaing and forcing testimony from many of my sources. They even spied on my children; they thought they had uncovered a big secret about me when they discovered that I had sent a wire transfer to Europe. It was actually money for my son, who was then on a study abroad program. 

Even as the FBI was investigating me, I had to continue to deal with the bureau as a reporter. I frequently went to FBI headquarters for interviews for new stories while I was still the subject of leak investigations related to earlier coverage. But I was always suspicious that the FBI was using the interviews at the Hoover building to try to get me to say something incriminating in connection with one of their leak investigations — or simply to intimidate me. 

For one story about the government’s counterterrorism operations, I went to FBI headquarters for an interview and was ushered into a windowless conference room where seven FBI agents were waiting for me. None of them would give me their names or talk to me at all. After I explained to them what I knew about the story I was working on, they all just sat and stared at me, not saying a word, refusing to comment or answer any questions. 

The FBI’s campaign of intimidation against me reached its peak when the bureau sent a team of agents to Europe to try to ambush a meeting I had scheduled with a source. The FBI found out about the meeting in advance from an informant who the FBI used to gather information about me. At the last minute, the ambush was averted when the FBI’s informant had a change of heart and tipped me off.

I haven’t forgotten.

I am prepared to go to FBI headquarters when it is required for my work as a journalist. But I didn’t want to go for a celebration, no matter how long overdue.

I believe that Marvin Risen would understand. 

The post My Family’s Long and Painful Relationship With the FBI appeared first on The Intercept.

News of the leadership vacuum comes as experts and officials call for investigations into the communications failures between local, state, and federal agents that allowed a shooter to hit Trump, kill one rally attendee and injure at least two others.

Former Butler Township Police Department Chief John Hays retired last month, both Hays and a department administrator told The Intercept. There is no acting chief, but Lieutenant Matthew Pearson is the current head of the department. The department, which employs around 20 people, did not immediately respond to a request for further information about the absence of a chief. 

Amid reports that Secret Service agents manning the event were asleep, negligent, or both, the lack of communication between various local, state, and federal agencies likely placed disproportionate responsibility on local police, said Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia University Law School who studies policing.

“Local cops were left to shoulder the burden of security without much help from any federal agency, whether Secret Service or the FBI or anyone else,” he said. “They should have yelled for help, and so should the county government leaders.” 

The shooting has raised new questions in the debate over police funding, gun control, and how well officers can be expected to handle active shooters, regardless of resources and training. 

Similar questions plagued officials in the wake of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, after police on the scene refused to enter the building, even after receiving training, first reported by The Intercept, to put themselves in harm’s way to stop active shooters,

A head of department would normally take ultimate responsibility for answering such questions. Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo was recently indicted for his actions on the day, including the failure to follow the training.

“There should have been a protocol in place for coordination between the acting head of the local police and the federal agencies,” said Fagan. “Or the County Executive and that person’s designee. But it’s nuts for the Secret Service to delegate any aspect of presidential or former presidential security to the local police regardless.”

Law enforcement agencies’ failures on Saturday undermines the notion of perfect security, said Alex Vitale, professor and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York. 

“There is no world where if we just assign enough police, we will eliminate all risk,” Vitale said. 

Why and how there was a profound breakdown in communication between local police and state and federal agents needs scrutiny, Vitale added. It appears that local police were made aware of the shooter, took some inadequate action to neutralize the shooter, but did not successfully communicate to the Secret Service, he said, and the Secret Service may not have communicated their plans clearly to local police. 

“A breakdown in communication could be because of inadequate command and control procedures at the local police level.”

“Did the local police fail to make certain kinds of procedures or equipment available to their officers to ensure this communication?” Vitale said. “Or was it just in the heat of the moment, local cops thought they could handle it without bothering the Secret Service, and clearly they couldn’t handle it? We’d want to know who’s in charge of the local police and what the plan of the day was.”

“A breakdown in communication could be because of inadequate command and control procedures at the local police level.”

Blame Game

The tiny Butler Township Police Department was one of several law enforcement agencies on the grounds at the rally on Saturday where 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks killed one attendee and injured at least two other people.

Secret Service agents were also on the scene and their failure to prevent the shooting has prompted calls for an investigation into the agency. 

With accusations flying, experts and responding agents have pointed the finger at each other. 

Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe described the response to the shooting as a security failure, but did not blame any single agency. He also defended a Butler Township police officer who encountered Crooks just before the shooting took place and retreated after he pointed his rifle at him. (The sheriff’s office and Butler Township Board of Commissioners President Jim Lokhaiser Jr. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Reached for comment, former Butler Township Police Chief John Hays said his last day at the department was June 14. “I really don’t have much information other than what I’m reading in the paper or hearing on the news,” he said. 

Local police, Vitale said, should not be the only ones bearing blame for the communication breakdown. Instead of trying to pinpoint responsibility, he said, the broader problem lies in the idea that policing is politically neutral and that it can produce perfect public safety. 

“The fear of risk is weaponized by those who want to both gain political advantage by promising a risk-free future that they know they can’t deliver on,” Vitale said. “Those folks will weaponize the security apparatus to serve their political interests rather than producing any true, broad-based security for people.” 

“Those security services,” he said, “their first overriding job will be the neutralization of their political enemies, whether it’s grassroots movements, or whatever.”

Pennsylvania lawmakers have long stymied legislation to strengthen gun laws in the state, even while decrying gun violence. Earlier this year, state lawmakers fought a ban on the gun used in the assassination attempt. 

In Congress, Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Penn., who represents the district, has voted against efforts to pass an assault weapons ban. (Kelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 

The Butler County Sheriff’s office is currently advertising a basic handgun safety class and services to apply for or renew licenses to carry concealed firearms. According to its website, the office was accepting applications to carry weapons on the day of the shooting.

The post The Local Police Department Responding to Trump Shooting Has No Chief appeared first on The Intercept.

Related

Signal’s New Usernames Help Keep the Cops Out of Your Data

Signal continues to introduce privacy-enhancing features such as usernames that can be used in lieu of phone numbers to chat with others — preventing others from finding you by searching for your phone number. But the app still requires users to provide a working phone number to be able to sign up in the first place.

For privacy-conscious individuals, this can be a problem.

In response to subpoena requests, Signal can reveal phone numbers. Relying on phone numbers has also led to security and account takeover incidents. Not to mention that the phone number requirement costs Signal more than $6 million annually to implement.

Signal insists on its site that phone numbers are a requirement for contact discovery and to stymie spam. (Signal did not respond to a request for comment). Other encrypted messaging platforms such as Session and Wire do not require phone numbers. 

There are some ways around Signal’s phone number policy that involve obtaining a secondary number, such as using temporary SIM cards, virtual eSIMs, or virtual numbers. But these approaches involve jumping through hoops to set up anonymous payment measures to procure the secondary numbers. And sometimes they don’t work at all (that was my experience when I tried using a Google Voice number to sign up for Signal).

I wanted a way to get a Signal account without leaving any sort of payment trail — a free and anonymous alternative. And thus began my long and tedious journey of registering Signal with a pay phone. 

Finding a Pay Phone

The first step was actually finding a pay phone, a task which is dismally daunting in 2024.

The Payphone Project lists around 750,000 pay phones, but after attempting to cross-check a sampling of the hundreds of alleged pay phones in my town with Google Street View and Google Earth satellite images, I came to the quick realization that the list was woefully outdated. Many of these phones no longer exist. 

A Google Maps search for pay phones in my area brought up of a half-dozen pins. Using Street View, I found that four locations seemed to have something resembling a pay phone box. Trekking out to them, however, revealed that one no longer had a pay phone, though discoloration of the store façade revealed the precise spot the pay phone used to be; another pay phone looked like it had been the victim of a half-hearted arson attack; the third and fourth lacked dial tones. 

Asking on a community subreddit resulted in suggestions that once again led me to places without any working pay phones, or posts berating me for needing a pay phone in 2024 and inquiring about the legality of the endeavors I wished to pursue which would necessitate pay phone usage.

Failing at finding a functional pay phone through a systemic approach, I resorted to brute opportunism — keeping my eyes peeled for pay phones as I went through the dull drudgery of a modern life made ever bleaker by the lack of public phone access. 

A Working Pay Phone, That Is

I didn’t just need to find a working pay phone — no small feat in 2024. I also needed to find one able to receive incoming calls, so I could get Signal’s activation message.

On a recent visit to Tampa, where I travel annually to discuss security matters and set things on fire, I spotted a pay phone while leaving Busch Gardens. Picking up the receiver, I was delighted to hear the telephonic equivalent of a pulse: a dial tone. 

Now that I had a phone with a dial tone, the next step was to test whether it could receive incoming calls. This is because Signal’s registration process requires a phone number that can either receive a text message or a verification call.

To test whether a pay phone can receive incoming calls, you need to know one thing: the pay phone’s own phone number. Some pay phones reveal their numbers on the phones themselves, but not always. 

If the number isn’t listed on the phone — it wasn’t in this case — there’s a workaround that doesn’t involve a paper trail leading back to your cellphone. Use the pay phone to call what’s known as an ANAC (automatic number announcement circuit), which provides an ANI (automatic number identification) service. In other words, it’s a phone number you can call which then reads out the phone number you are calling from. Lists of ANAC numbers have been bantered about for years, though like pay phone lists, almost all are now defunct. 

One stalwart ANAC number that has withstood the test of time for over 30 years, however, is 1-800-444-4444. Feel free to try it. Call the number, and it should read yours back to you.

Back at Busch Gardens, I rang up the ANAC and had a number read back to me. The next and final step was to test whether the number actually accepted incoming calls. Unfortunately, when I called the number the ANAC line had read back to me, I reached the Busch Gardens main line, asking me to enter my party’s extension. In other words, this wasn’t actually the pay phone’s number, it was just the general theme park number.

Days later, during a layover on my trip home from Tampa, I noticed a small bay of pay phones at a small regional airport. I repeated the above rigamarole, and lo and behold, when I called the pay phone’s number from the neighboring pay phone, I was able to answer and talk to myself. Finally, success.

I took out a burner phone on which I wanted to set up Signal, which had no SIM or eSIM of any kind, and proceeded to enter the pay phone’s phone number when setting up Signal. Signal first insists on attempting to send a verification code via an SMS text message, so you have to initially go through that fruitless route. But after a few minutes, you can then select the option to receive the verification code via a voice call.

Moments later, the pay phone rang, and I was finally able to set up a Signal account. 

The next and final step was to set up a PIN and enable a registration lock so that someone else wouldn’t be able to take over the account by going to the same pay phone and registering their own version of Signal with that same number. The registration lock expires after a week of inactivity, so you also have to keep using the Signal account. It took a while, owing to Signal’s onerous registration requirements coupled with the increasing lack of public phone access, but in the end I proved there is a way to use Signal with an untraceable phone number.

A Step-by-Step Guide

1. Obtain a phone. It doesn’t need to have an active phone number associated with it, and can be either an old phone you have around or a dedicated burner phone.
2. Locate a pay phone. 
3. Find the pay phone’s phone number (call 1-800-444-4444 if it’s not written on the phone).
4. Make sure the pay phone can receive incoming calls.
5. Enter the pay phone number into Signal, and use the ‘Call me’ option to receive a verification call (this option shows up only after the SMS timer runs out).
6. Input the confirmation code, set up a PIN and enable Registration Lock in the Signal app. 

The post How I Got a Truly Anonymous Signal Account appeared first on The Intercept.

To rule as she did, Cannon had to sidestep longstanding Supreme Court precedent about independent prosecutors, which she decided was not precedent at all but instead mere “dictum” that need not be followed. This was precisely the path outlined by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas earlier this month in a decision regarding Trump’s prosecution for his role in the January 6 insurrection, where the constitutionality of the special counsel’s appointment was not even at issue. 

None of the other Supreme Court justices signed onto Thomas’s concurring opinion, but Cannon cited it three times. 

“Justice Thomas’s ‘Cannon-currence’ worked,” law professor Leah Litman tweeted after Cannon’s ruling came out. “In the Trump immunity case, Justice Thomas wrote separately to suggest the special counsel was unlawfully appointed; the reasoning laid out the roadmap for this (wrong) result/decision.” 

In United States v. Nixon, a 1973 decision, the Supreme Court rejected former President Richard Nixon’s attempts to stonewall a grand jury investigation into the Watergate break-in. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Nixon had to comply with the subpoena of a special prosecutor, who had been appointed in compliance with the Constitution, federal law, and regulation. 

For decades, the Nixon ruling has been understood to affirm the constitutionality of independent prosecutors and special counsel who are appointed by the attorney general to handle certain politically sensitive cases. In 2019, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed this understanding when it shot down a challenge to Robert Mueller’s appointment to investigate Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

The D.C. Circuit specifically rejected arguments that a key section in the Nixon decision was “dictum.”

Earlier this month, however, Justice Thomas went out of his way to endorse that theory. 

The Supreme Court immunity case stemmed from the separate investigation into Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection. In that case, Trump argued he was completely immune from prosecution, but he did not challenge Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel. 

Still, at oral argument in April, Justice Thomas asked about the appointment issue. 

“Did you, in this litigation, challenge the appointment of special counsel?” he asked Trump’s attorneys, who confirmed that they had raised it in the classified documents case but not in the January 6 prosecution.

On July 1, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled Trump had presumptive immunity for any “official acts” he took in the lead up to the insurrection. Writing only for himself, Justice Thomas issued a concurring opinion “to highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure.” 

“If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people,” Thomas wrote in his concurrence. “The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the Special Counsel’s appointment before proceeding.”

Thomas laid out his concerns about the constitutionality of special counsel like Smith, and he took a swipe at the Nixon decision as giving only “passing reference” to relevant statutes while providing “no analysis of those provisions’ text.”

In her decision on Monday, Cannon followed Thomas’s analysis, which no other conservative Supreme Court justice joined, while dismissing the D.C. Circuit’s unanimous determination that Nixon remained binding precedent.

Thomas “laid the table and Judge Cannon took a seat,” law professor Melissa Murray tweeted on Monday.  

The post How Clarence Thomas Cleared Trump’s Path in Classified Docs Case appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The extent of any injuries sustained by Trump remain unclear; a campaign spokesperson issued a statement saying the former president “is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility.” It is unclear how the incident might affect his campaign, but given historical precedent, his popularity is likely to benefit.

Assassination attempts targeting populist leaders have had a track record in the past of boosting their public appeal.

In the months after he was shot in the leg at a political rally, former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan saw support for his party grow as the public came to view him as a solitary figure battling a corrupt establishment.

Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed at an event in 2018, before going on to win elections boosted by the support of voters who saw him as surviving an attempted murder by their ideological enemies.

President Ronald Reagan likewise benefited from public sympathy and support after an attempted assassination — support which helped him push through a raft of controversial economic policies that would define the country for decades to come. 

Scholars have warned of an apparent increase in political assassinations in recent years, after a number of foiled and successful attempts targeting officials in the U.S. and abroad. Following the killing of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022, the national security publication War on the Rocks blamed the possible increase in attacks on “accelerationists” seeking to drive social conflict through destabilizing political institutions.

In the aftermath of the apparent shooting at his campaign rally, an image of a blood-streaked Trump raising his fist to the crowd began spreading virally on social media, including among supporters who lauded his defiance. The world awaits more details on Trump’s condition and what exactly took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. It will also be watching what this moment means for Trump’s popularity and the 2024 election.

The post Will This Make Trump More Popular? appeared first on The Intercept.

The university recently deposed tenured law professor Katherine Franke as part of an investigation stemming from an interview she gave to “Democracy Now!” in January. During that interview, Franke was asked about allegations that two students who had previously served in the Israeli army had sprayed a chemical at their classmates at an on-campus rally for Gaza.

Franke, who has worked at the school for decades, responded by linking the incident to a documented pattern of on-campus harassment that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students have alleged for years.

“Columbia has a program with older students from other countries, including Israel,” Franke said, referring to the school’s General Studies program. “It’s something that many of us were concerned about because so many of those Israeli students who then come to the campus are coming right out of their military service. And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus, and it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past.”

The remarks set off a firestorm, with commentators suggesting that Franke was calling to ban all Israeli students from campus. Within a few days of the interview, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article titled “Columbia University Pushes Back Against Professor Who Vilified Israeli Students,” citing a statement from the university affirming its support for Israeli students. 

By February 13, Franke was notified of a complaint against her based on the interview, filed by two law school professors who alleged violations of university discrimination policy. Online, supporters of Israel continued to misconstrue Franke’s statements, while a Republican lawmaker asked University President Minouche Shafik about Franke during an April hearing about campus antisemitism. 

Columbia refused to answer The Intercept’s questions on the pending investigation, but referred to its equal opportunity and affirmative action policies and procedures. The document lists a range of possible disciplinary action, including probation, administrative leave or suspension, and dismissal or restriction from employment. 

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Franke is one of several Columbia staff to face investigation — many of whom have defended Palestinian rights — while the House Committee on Education and the Workforce continues to apply pressure on the school. Recently, three deans were placed on indefinite leave for exchanging text messages the university says “touched on ancient antisemitic tropes.” Professors elsewhere across the country have had their livelihoods imperiled upon speaking out in defense of Palestinians.

“What’s of greatest concern is not really my 20-year-plus career at Columbia, but what this says about peaceful protest on our campuses, around the lives and dignity of Palestinians,” Franke said in an interview with The Intercept.

“What’s happening to me is happening to our students, it’s happened to people on many other campuses. And it’s, to me, shocking at a place like Columbia — which prides itself on being a home for, if not only tolerating, maybe welcoming student engagement with public events or public affairs like the crisis in the Middle East,” she continued. “And yet they’re punishing me and others for standing up for our students who I think are engaging in appropriate protest.”

Franke’s career as a lawyer and legal scholar has focused on gender and sexuality law, and she has also done human rights work focused on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In 2018, Israel deported Franke upon her arrival in the country to take part in a human rights delegation. As Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has roiled the Columbia campus, Franke has defended students speaking out on behalf of Palestinians or criticizing the Israeli government. She has also been unabashed in her criticism of the university administration’s response to student protests.

In its statement to Haaretz on the heels of Franke’s “Democracy Now!” interview, a university spokesperson said, “We are disheartened to see some members of our community and beyond use this moment to spread antisemitism, Islamophobia, bigotry against Palestinians and Israelis. Especially at a time of pain and anger, we must avoid language that vilifies, threatens, or stereotypes entire groups of people. It is antithetical to Columbia’s values and can lead to acts of harassment or violence.”

As the controversy persisted ahead of the April congressional hearing, Franke reached out to Shafik through another senior administrator to relay her concerns. (Franke said she did so because she had been unable to get Shafik to meet with her or respond to her efforts to connect). In an email that she asked the administrator to forward to Shafik, she rebutted the misinformation that had circulated about her interview and reiterated that she wasn’t calling to ban Israeli students from campus. 

Rather, she wrote, she was voicing concern “about students coming onto our campus who have just completed their military service in Israel – the transition to civilian life – after having been taught that Palestinians are evil and want to kill Israelis/Jews – can be a rough one for some people.”

Franke said she never heard from Shafik about the email.

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She was right to be on guard. At the April 17 hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked Shafik what she was doing about Franke, who, Stefanik falsely claimed, said “all Israeli students who have served in the IDF are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus.”

“I agree with you that those comments are completely unacceptable and discriminatory,” Shafik said, accepting Stefanik’s framing. “I think she will be finding a way to clarify her position.” The president added that “a very senior person in the administration” spoke to Franke, who said the comments were not what she intended to say.

While Shafik’s comments indicated knowledge of Franke’s interaction with the senior administrator, the president misconstrued the core point of Franke’s outreach: She didn’t mean those “unacceptable” comments because she did not say them.

Shafik’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

As part of the school’s investigatory process, the university deposed Franke for a couple of hours on June 13. The deposition was handled by outside investigators at the insistence of Franke and her lawyer, who argued that she had been prejudged by the school’s president. 

“It seemed clear to me that they had made their mind up already, coming into the deposition, that I was generalizing in a way that would make people who served in the IDF or Israelis feel bad, and so there’s a very good chance that they will fire me,” Franke said. She said that the person who deposed her seemed to be trying to goad her into agreeing with the premise of the violations alleged, asking questions like, “You can understand that somebody might hear what you said and take it as discriminatory?”

Franke is expecting a decision any day now. She was told the university would make a decision in a matter of weeks. 

“Today, it’s Palestine. Tomorrow could be abortion. It could be, you know, criticizing the Trump administration. It could be climate change,” Franke said. “I feel like it’s Palestine today, but what’s at stake here is something much larger, of the imposition of a kind of orthodoxy around a very contested political concept or context.” 

The post Columbia Law Professor Smeared by Israel Supporters Could Lose Her Job appeared first on The Intercept.

“We’re here today because Russia … attacked a children’s hospital,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “Even uttering that phrase sends a chill down my spine.”

Thomas-Greenfield went on to list a string of Russian attacks on other Ukrainian hospitals throughout the war. She described Russia’s aggression as a “campaign of terror” and labeled its attacks on civilian infrastructure as violations of international law. Representatives of other countries, such as the United Kingdom and France, echoed Thomas-Greenfield’s denunciations. (Russia’s ambassador denied responsibility for the Monday bombing.)

The moral clarity of her comments was striking to observers and experts of international law, who contrasted it to U.S. rhetoric and actions concerning Israel. The U.S. has stood by Israel militarily and diplomatically as it has consistently attacked civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, in Gaza since October 7, in a brutal campaign that the International Court of Justice has deemed a plausible genocide. 

“I’m very glad the U.S. is coming out and so vocally condemning all of those actions,” said Jessica Peake, an international law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, referring to Thomas-Greenfield’s comments toward Russia. “But at the same time, we don’t get any language anywhere near as strong as that when we’re talking about Palestinian hospitals, or Palestinian schools, or Palestinian children.”

A Very Stark Difference

The U.N. Security Council’s near-unanimous criticism of Russia this week mirrored another moment from earlier this year, with one stark difference: the U.S. response. 

The council met on April 5, just days after Israel bombed a convoy of aid workers with World Central Kitchen, and following the end of Israel’s siege of Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, during which the Israeli military killed 400 Palestinians. Council members took turns condemning the attacks, urged Israel to do a better job at protecting aid workers and civilian infrastructure, and called the attacks “clear violations of international humanitarian law.” 

The U.S. joined the calls for protections of aid workers. But it also withheld any criticism of the Al-Shifa Hospital attack, and instead shifted the blame to Hamas. “We must not ignore how Hamas’s actions have put humanitarian personnel at risk,” said U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood. “Tunneling under and storing weapons in hospitals is a violation of the laws of war, and we condemn it.”

The differing and uneven responses from the U.S. toward the wars in Ukraine and Gaza has long been a point of criticism from those pushing for peace in both contexts.

Nate Evans, a spokesperson for Thomas-Greenfield, told The Intercept that the ambassador “has condemned loss of Palestinian civilian lives many, many times in the Security Council,” while adding that the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine are “two very different wars.” Evans noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked,” while Israel launched its assault in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

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State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Monday similarly contrasted the two wars, asserting that the Ukrainian military isn’t “headquartering itself in hospitals, under hospitals, in other civilian sites, in apartment buildings,” but accused Hamas of doing so. The U.S. has consistently repeated Israel’s refrain that Hamas is using hospitals for military operations, a claim for which neither party has provided credible evidence. Israel’s war has decimated Gaza’s medical sector and killed more than 200 medical and humanitarian workers, the most ever recorded for a conflict in a single year, according to the U.N.

There are indeed significant differences between the circumstances surrounding the wars, including, significantly, that Russia is a longtime U.S. adversary while Israel is one of its closest allies and a recipient of billions of dollars in military aid each year. 

But there are also clear parallels in human rights abuses and violations of international law in each respective war, said Peake, who called the U.S. government’s handling of the conflicts “hypocritical.” 

“What we see from the U.S. is a very stark difference in how they are choosing to handle its involvement in pushing for an end to those conflicts,” said Peake, who is also assistant director of UCLA’s Promise Institute for Human Rights.

“On the one hand, you have the U.S., in Russia and Ukraine, playing a very central role within international efforts for seeking an end to the conflict and also accountability,” she said. “And in the case of Gaza, it’s vetoing resolutions, it’s watering down statements that are put out by U.N. bodies. The U.S. is acting to have those statements be softer to make Israel appear a more reasonable party.”

Hiding Behind Diplomacy

Since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the U.S. has vetoed three separate U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have called for a humanitarian pause or immediate ceasefire. In contrast, the U.S. has backed similar peace resolutions for Ukraine, many of which were in turn vetoed by Russia.

In March, the Security Council managed to pass a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. But the U.S. abstained from the vote because “certain key edits were ignored,” such as a request to add condemnation of Hamas, Thomas-Greenfield said at the time. 

U.S. officials have said they opposed ceasefire resolutions because they failed to stand by Israel’s apparent right to defend itself and argued diplomatic approaches would be more effective than public censures. And the U.S. continues to point to its leading role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as proof that it is serious about ending the conflict in Gaza. 

But even as negotiations continue, Israel is ramping up its bombardment in Gaza, focusing most recently on Gaza City, where Israeli forces on Wednesday ordered the evacuation of Palestinian civilians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that the war must continue until Hamas is destroyed, an implausible condition. 

This week, Israeli strikes have killed dozens, including a school near Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where at least 27 people were killed, mostly women and children, according to reports citing Palestinian medics. And over the weekend, separate Israeli strikes at other schools in Gaza City and a U.N.-run school in Nuseirat, killed 20 others. Strikes also hit a home in Deir al-Balah, which was inside Israel’s “humanitarian safe zone” where Palestinians have been told to flee, the Associated Press reported. 

The U.S. has yet to condemn the recent spate of attacks. On Wednesday, however, the Biden administration agreed to send hundreds of 500-pound bombs to Israel, the AP reported. The U.S. previously withheld the munitions in May as Israel readied for an assault on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were sheltering.

“It’s really just not enough to say ‘We’re pursuing diplomacy’ when we’re talking about any level of civilian casualties, but particularly when we’re talking about almost 10 percent of the population of Gaza,” Peake said, referencing a recent report from The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, which issued a “conservative estimate” that the Gaza death toll is 186,000.

“If Biden picked up the phone to Netanyahu this afternoon and said, ‘We’re cutting off your weapon supply,’ that would bring it to a close,” Peake said. “If the U.S. said, ‘We’re cutting off funding to Israel until there’s a ceasefire,’ that would end this conflict.”

The post Russia Attacks Hospitals in Ukraine. Israel Does the Same in Gaza. The U.S. Response Couldn’t Be More Different. appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Closeted Furries will be presented to the world for the degenerate perverts they are,” Howell told one of SiegedSec’s leaders, who goes by the handle “vio.” “Your means are miniscule compared to mine. You now can either turn yourself in or you can cooperate.”

Howell, who confirmed the chat logs were accurate to the Daily Dot, is the executive director for the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and a former Trump administration official. SiegedSec also provided screenshots of the discussion to The Intercept.

Howell started the conversation with questions about why SiegedSec targeted the Heritage Foundation. “What is that you are seeking or threatening?” he asked vio.

“We want to make a message and shine light on who exactly supports the Heritage Foundation,” vio responded. “We dont [sic] want anything more than that, not money and not fame. We’re strongly against Project 2025 and everything the Heritage Foundation stands for.”

When it posted a small cache of Heritage Foundation files on Tuesday, SiegedSec said it was part of a campaign against organizations that oppose trans rights. On Wednesday, a Heritage spokesperson told The Intercept that the foundation’s own systems were not breached, and that SiegedSec “stumbled upon a two-year-old archive of the Daily Signal website that was available on a public-facing website owned by a contractor.”

“The story of a ‘hack’ is a false narrative and exaggeration by a group of criminal trolls trying to get attention,” said Noah​​​​ Weinrich, the Heritage Foundation’s public relations director. 

Hack or not, Howell told vio that the Heritage Foundation was working with the FBI to identify the members of SiegedSec, including through a “2702 order,” likely a reference to a type of administrative subpoena. Howell included a screenshot of vio’s public bitcoin wallet. 

“Are you aware that you won’t be able to wear a furry tiger costume when you’re getting pounded in the ass in the federal prison I put you in next year?” Howell wrote.

When vio threatened to dox Howell and share such “unprofessional language from an executive director,” Howell pushed it further. “Please share widely,” Howell wrote. “I hope the word spreads as fast as the STDs do in your degenerate furry community.”

An hour after posting the chat logs on its Telegram channel, SiegedSec announced it was disbanding “for our own mental health, the stress of mass publicity, and to avoid the eye of the FBI.”

The Heritage Foundation declined to comment about the exchange between SiegedSec and Howell.

The post “Gay Furry Hackers” Feud With Heritage Foundation Exec appeared first on The Intercept.

At least four members of the Squad have expressed support for Biden since the first presidential debate. Two have enthusiastically backed him, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., reiterated that Biden was the nominee and said questions to the contrary were “losing the plot.” Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., said she and Biden were facing the same fight against extremist Republicans. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., have also affirmed their support.

The boost from progressives comes even as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Wednesday that Biden was running out of time to decide whether to stay in the race. 

It has left media outlets asking why the Squad among all Democrats is backing Biden “so forcefully”?

But not all progressives are lining up behind Biden. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., one of the most vocal members criticizing U.S. military support for the war on Gaza, has said she will not endorse the president for reelection. And last week, Rep. Summer Lee, D-Penn., said that if Biden decided to step down, she would support Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee.

Progressives in Washington insisted that members of the Squad and their staffs were not frustrated with each other over how each member approached questions about Biden. They explained the division as merely a difference in messaging between political allies. 

Two sources who work closely with Squad offices said progressive efforts to boost Biden had less to do with him as the presidential candidate and more to do with protecting their own political futures.

No progressive members have explicitly called on Biden to drop out of the race.

Shortly after the debate, observers criticized Squad members for not immediately joining calls from at least 10 Democrats in nine states, including a slew of moderates, for Biden to step down. Progressives waited to see how the fallout would play out after the debate and over the July 4 holiday weekend. 

There wasn’t a specific plan for how the Squad would respond, and there was no coordination with offices that wanted to stay silent, sources said. Some strategists questioned whether progressives calling on Biden to step down would have had the opposite effect and if it was more effective to have moderate Democrats make the case instead. But as members faced mounting questions from the media, different members took more deliberate stances in support of the president.

One progressive strategist who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely said there were pragmatic reasons for each member’s decision to speak out or keep quiet on Biden. “There is a divide between the most progressive members who feel like they need to show fealty for self-preservation or for future ambition and those who are willing to just hang back and not offer support because they don’t need anything,” said the strategist, who is in regular communication with Squad members’ staff. 

Several Squad members have so far managed to stay silent on the Biden question.

There wasn’t a specific plan for how the Squad would respond, and there was no coordination with offices that wanted to stay silent, sources said.

Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, has not weighed in on whether Biden should stay in the race. He is reportedly eyeing a run for chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus next year, which makes it less likely that he would take a vocal stance against Biden. Casar’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Delia Ramirez, who says she has been focused on making sure that former President Donald Trump doesn’t win reelection, is not taking a position on Biden’s campaign. “At the moment, Congresswoman Ramirez is not commenting on the issue,” communications director Jowen Ortiz Cintrón said in a statement to The Intercept. 

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who lost his reelection last month, has not spoken out about Biden’s campaign. His office did not respond to a request for comment. 

The offices of Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, Bush, and Jayapal did not respond to a request for comment. Tlaib’s office declined to comment. Lee’s office directed questions about her position to her full interview with WESA. 

Squad members had previously led a solid block of opposition to Biden’s funding for Israel’s war on Gaza. Those efforts have slowly given way to support for his campaign among some members as the presidential election looms nearer, leaving Tlaib as one of the lone voices withholding her endorsement over Biden’s support for Israel. Even before the debate, Omar reiterated her support for Biden despite his handling of Gaza. 

Sanders backed Biden in an interview over the weekend. On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Pressley joined him. Ocasio-Cortez told reporters at the Capitol that she had spoken with Biden, that he was not leaving the race, and that she would continue to support him as the nominee. The same day, Omar reiterated her support for Biden and called him “the best president of my lifetime.” Pressley said Biden was the nominee, “and I think we’re losing the plot here.” 

On Tuesday, Bush compared her reelection fight to Biden’s and said the party should unite to defeat extremist Republicans. Bush’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Jayapal also expressed support for Biden but said she was “listening carefully” to members in a statement on Monday. Jayapal said she would continue working to ensure that Democrats defeated Trump in November. 

Jayapal’s statement avoided taking a definitive stance on Biden’s campaign and invited criticism that progressives have diluted what was once a strong opposition to Biden’s policy toward Israel. After Jayapal faced intense blowback for calling Israel a “racist state,” she has since affirmed her support of funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, along with Ocasio-Cortez, who has also been campaigning for Biden. 

The post Even Centrists Are Questioning Biden. But the Squad Is Divided. appeared first on The Intercept.

On July 2, the court unanimously declined to review the case of Charles McCrory, who was convicted in Alabama in 1985 for the murder of his wife, based almost exclusively on bogus bite-mark testimony. Bite-mark analysis has been roundly discredited by scientists and, to date, is behind at least 39 wrongful convictions or indictments.

Bite-mark evidence is among a host of problematic, scientifically questionable forensic practices widely used in the criminal legal system. While a number of forensic practitioners have acknowledged the problem and sought to get their disciplines on firmer scientific footing, the law has not caught up. Ostensibly, courts are supposed to vet forensic evidence before trial, though because judges are not scientists — and most lack any science training — this is rarely effective, and they often allow even the most questionable science into evidence.

For people like McCrory subsequently convicted based on junk science, there is often no straightforward way for the courts to revisit or correct old cases based on outdated and debunked forensic practices. The law favors finality, so once someone is sent to prison, it becomes difficult to challenge a conviction based on junk science, and judges often deny appeals based on procedural matters without ever engaging with those flaws.

While the Supreme Court has occasionally acknowledged this problem, among her colleagues, Sotomayor was alone in calling out the crisis it has created. In a statement alongside the denial of McCrory’s appeal, Sotomayor described his case as a symptom of a broader problem.

“This petition raises difficult questions about the adequacy of current postconviction remedies to correct a conviction secured by what we now know was faulty science,” Sotomayor wrote. “Hundreds if not thousands of innocent people may currently be incarcerated despite a modern consensus that the central piece of evidence at their trials lacked any scientific basis.”

To date, a handful of states have created a direct avenue of appeal for defendants convicted based on junk or debunked science. Texas was first, and Sotomayor notes that the statute has been used to exonerate a man named Steven Mark Chaney, who was convicted on bogus bite-mark evidence. California has a similar statute, which was used to exonerate Bill Richards, also convicted on discredited bite-mark analysis. 

“These statutes,” Sotomayor wrote, “create an efficient avenue for innocent people convicted based on forensic science that the scientific community has now largely repudiated.”

A Flimsy Piece of Evidence

Throughout the nearly four decades since his wife’s murder, McCrory has maintained his innocence. In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s case against him. The case has since attracted additional attention and media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. 

Related

A Bogus Bite Mark Sent Him to Prison for Murder. Alabama Wants to Keep Him There.

Julie McCrory’s body was found inside her home in Andalusia, Alabama, on the morning of May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple’s young son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his crib. Police quickly zeroed in on McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives searched McCrory’s home and car and found nothing to connect him to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two bedroom windows that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime.  

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite-mark made by McCrory’s allegedly distinctive dentition.

To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn’t definitively link the two marks on Julie’s arm to McCrory, at trial he was unequivocal that they did indeed match. 

More than three decades later, Souviron recanted his testimony. He provided an affidavit to McCrory’s lawyers, Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project and Mark Loudon-Brown of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.” 

Fabricant and Loudon-Brown also presented testimony from two leading forensic dentists who were once bite-mark true believers but now admitted that the discipline lacked any scientific underpinning and was not valid evidence. They agreed to testify for free, they told the court, because they felt they had a duty to correct the record. Dr. Cynthia Brzozowski, a veteran forensic dentist from New York, told the court that she felt an “ethical and civic responsibility” to testify in cases like McCrory’s.

In response, prosecutors presented no evidence and instead insisted that McCrory was guilty based on the same case presented at trial, including the bite mark — which they now termed “teeth marks” — implying that this was a separate and valid discipline. It is not. Regardless, prosecutor Grace Jeter argued that, even if Souviron had not testified for the state, jurors could have looked at the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that the wounds were caused by McCrory’s teeth. In other words, the jury would have been free to engage in its own expert-free junk science. 

In the end, Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short agreed with the state, denying McCrory’s request for a new trial. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his decision. When McCrory’s lawyers asked the court to reconsider — in part because one of the justices had previously defended McCrory’s conviction while working as a prosecutor — the court simply reissued its opinion, complete with a typo that appeared in the original, along with a note saying that the judge had now recused herself.

McCrory’s team then appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week denied review.

Legislatures Need Not Wait

In their petition to the high court, McCrory’s lawyers asked the justices to consider two questions: whether the right to due process precludes a judge from deliberating on the appeal of a case they’d previously worked on, and whether there is a “due process right not to be convicted based on forensic evidence later shown to be fundamentally unreliable.”

Sotomayor joined her colleagues in declining to review the case, writing separately to explain. “I vote to deny this petition because due process claims like McCrory’s have yet to percolate sufficiently through the federal courts,” she wrote. “Legislatures concerned with wrongful convictions based on faulty science, however, need not wait for this Court to address a constitutional remedy.”

She notes that the “wholesale reevaluation” of forensics began with a congressionally mandated review by the National Academy of Sciences, which in 2009 issued a landmark report calling out nearly all forensic practices as scientifically unsound. The report included harsh criticism of bite-mark evidence. In 2016, those concerns were reiterated in a bombshell report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body that provides nonbinding recommendations to the U.S. president. The advisory council noted that bite-mark analysis would never likely pass scientific muster. Since then, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued its own exhaustive report finding the same. 

For all intents and purposes, bite-mark evidence is dead — except in many courts, including in Alabama, which refuse to consider its status when evaluating appeals such as McCrory’s. In part, the problem is that statutes outlining post-conviction procedures were written prior to scientific advancements and do not contemplate the evisceration of an entire field of practice, leaving countless defendants convicted on junk science without any meaningful avenue to challenge their convictions. 

Alabama’s prosecutors argue, first, that courts approved the use of bite-mark evidence in the 1980s, and so, in theory, it remains legitimate. Second, they argue that McCrory should have raised this issue years ago — back in 2002, in fact, when his lawyers first found a Newsweek article that questioned bite-mark evidence. In other words, their argument isn’t necessarily that bite-mark evidence is good or even valid, but rather, that Alabama law still recognizes the discipline, and there’s nothing new in McCrory’s appeals that changes that. Souviron’s affidavit recanting his testimony is too little, too late. 

But just because some people were questioning bite-mark evidence in the early 2000s doesn’t mean that the scientific consensus had changed by then. It had not. And as The Intercept has reported, the battle over bite-mark evidence and other forms of junk science, continues to this day.

This makes it difficult for people like McCrory who seek to challenge their convictions based on new evidence. “Because science evolves slowly rather than in conclusive bursts,” Sotomayor wrote, it is hard to pinpoint when the science has truly changed and thus, when the issue should be raised on appeal. “Unlike a murder weapon left in an abandoned warehouse, forensic science does not lie around waiting for sudden discovery.”

And when scientific evidence is debunked, it’s a unique and ground-shaking event that needs addressing. “Evidence that an entire mode of forensic analysis has no scientific basis, however, is of a different category from evidence that might call into question a witness’s credibility or motive to testify.”

Sotomayor’s statement is a big deal, said Fabricant, who also wrote a book on junk forensic science. “Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence is the first time any Supreme Court Justice has recognized the appalling legacy of wrongful convictions attributable to the use of junk science in criminal cases, and the failure of lower courts to take remedial action to address these all too common miscarriages of justice.”

Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, McCrory’s other lawyer, have filed an appeal in federal district court raising the same concerns they brought to the Supreme Court. While Alabama is arguing that the appeal should be tossed out, Sotomayor seems to be nodding to the district court to give McCrory’s case a thorough vetting. 

“We appreciate Justice Sotomayor recognizing that Charles McCrory was convicted based on bitemark evidence that science has condemned and that the expert who testified against him has recanted,” McCrory’s lawyers wrote in an email to The Intercept. “But today an innocent man remains in prison, where he has been for almost 40 years. We will continue to fight for Mr. McCrory in the federal courts and call upon the State of Alabama to rectify this injustice.”

The post There’s a Junk Science Crisis in Criminal Convictions. Sonia Sotomayor Calls It Out in Alabama Bite-Mark Case. appeared first on The Intercept.

Dmitri Mehlhorn is among the most powerful Democratic funders and operatives working inside what can roughly be called the party’s establishment. He’s also been one of the most ardent defenders of Joe Biden as the best Democratic nominee to beat Donald Trump in November. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim speaks to Mehlhorn about why he’s committed to Biden at a moment when more are calling for him to abandon his candidacy.

Transcript

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome back to Deconstructed.

First, some rather important programming announcements. I am no longer at The Intercept. Jeremy Scahill and I, along with our former editor Nausicaa Renner, have launched Drop Site, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. We’re publishing over at dropsitenews.com, and we’re also sending our stories out by email. You can sign up to get them at, again, dropsitenews.com. Our journalism will always remain free but, if you can help out, please do that at donate.dropsitenews.com.

Contributions to DropSite are tax deductible. If you need any information on that, you can email majorgiving@dropsitenews.com.

I’m also going to continue hosting this podcast, and Jeremy will continue hosting Intercepted. You’ll be able to listen to them the same way you have been. The transcripts will continue to be posted at The Intercept.

Now, last year, one of our most popular episodes was with Democratic megadonor Dmitri Mehlhorn, who often sees the world quite differently than I do, but he doesn’t mind mixing it up with people he disagrees with. Well, he now finds himself disagreeing with far more people than just me, and he’s become one of the few Democratic power brokers making an ardent case behind the scenes on behalf of Joe Biden’s viability in the presidential election. We spoke for an hour over the weekend, when the entire world was pretty convinced Biden was done for, but Dmitri was sticking by him. Biden no longer looks like he’s certain to drop out, though the situation remains quite fluid.

Agree with him or not, Dmitri is often as provocative as he is powerful. Here’s our conversation.

All right. I am pleased to be joined today by Dimitri Mehlhorn, who goes by the one name of “Dmitri” in Democratic circles. If you talk to the DC funder or operative class, there’s just one Dmitri. Dmitri says this, Dmitri thinks this.

Dmitri, you were in the news recently. I think it was Fox News or somebody was reporting that you were saying privately — correct me if I’m getting the paraphrase wrong here — Biden’s corpse would be more popular than Kamala, nationally. Fox News is not always the most reliable source of information, but just give me a general kind of overview of your take on where we are right now, post-George Stephanopoulos Biden interview.

Dmitri Mehlhorn: Alright. I’m happy to answer that question, but you asked a couple, so let me answer the little one and the big one.

The little one is about what I said about the president and vice president, and I just wanted to let you know that quote was taken out of context. I did say that, but it was in a donor call that had been scheduled to last an hour, where this conversation was happening. And I was trying to make the point that Biden has a particular brand superpower that happens to be kryptonite to Trump. And that may be more important than age concerns in an environment where the other party is trying to smear our people.

So, I was trying to make the point through example, and then one of the donors on this very large call shared it with someone at Semaphore. And so, of course, that’s the quote.

And so, the reason I was on Fox and Friends is because they saw that quote, and I think they sensed that they had another Mark Penn type on their hands, who would come on the show and sort of privately acknowledge how terrible both the president and vice president are. And when I wasn’t doing that, that interview got cut short pretty quick.

RG: You went on and called Trump out directly on Fox, and it seemed like they were not here for that.

DM: They were not. But the funny thing, Ryan, is right before I came on, they had been having a conversation about the way in which the mainstream left-of-center press had handled Biden’s age, and they were so angry. And the arguments they were making sounded very much like the arguments that journalists might make, about how important it is to tell the truth to your audience.

RG: Yeah.

DM: So I was like, hey, you know? And so, the Fox host was like, do you really think he can do it? And I’m like, yeah. And he’s like, I’m not talking about age, I’m talking about mental acuity. And my answer is, yeah. One of those candidates has lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, and it’s not my guy. And so, that was the end of that interview.

RG: So, the bigger question: where are you now on Biden and his path forward?

DM: Broadly, that debate and everything since then has hurt. But it has hurt in a lot of emotional ways and a lot of other ways. The disagreement that Reid and I have with everyone else is how much it hurt, relative to all the other bad things that are happening.

So, as far as we can tell, our best guess is that that debate moved the polls away from Biden by about three points which, in an election this close, is devastating. And Trump’s odds of being reelected are now as high as they’ve been since mid-2020. You know, up in the mid-60s, in terms of likelihood of getting reelected; like two-to-one odds. And Ryan, you know me well enough to know what I would give to move those odds that much in the other direction. That’s a lot.

Also, two to three points and ten to fifteen points of likelihood are the range that this race has been in for the past two years. And, when you start to unpack it, you realize that that is the nature of these two men. Each of them is going to be revealing new things about themselves that the public wasn’t really clued in on, and each time that happens, it is likely to move things away from them.

And the difference that Reid and I have with everybody else is that we still think that the fundamental choice facing the American public — and this is both in terms of serving as president and in terms of running — the choice is between Yoda and Jabba the Hutt. And America will choose even any version of Yoda over the best version of Jabba the Hutt, because if there’s a 3 a.m. call and Joe Biden is disoriented, he will gather his team and they will make a good decision. Whereas, if there’s a 3 a.m. call that wakes up Trump in 2027, it’s possible he will invade a country, so.

RG: That assumes a race in November in which you’ve got Trump on the ticket for Republicans, Biden on the ticket for Democrats. And I think you’re right, most people listening to this show would say, yeah, in that scenario, yes. All right, Biden it is. A lot that we’re wondering about, but we don’t like Trump. We don’t think Biden’s even necessarily going to survive the next four terms, but it’s better that he beat Trump.

DM: Four years. It’s Trump [where] it’s the four terms.

RG: Right. But, at the same time, we’re not necessarily wedded to those two options. So, that’s why I wanted to hear your analysis of why you think Biden has this super ability to connect with voters, such that he serves as this kryptonite to Trump in such a way that it’s worth the points that are getting knocked off on him on a regular basis. It’s worth, even like you said, not necessarily having somebody who’s able to orient himself at 3 a.m. and make a call, because he has these particular virtues that are so impressive that there’s nobody that could come in and step in for him.

Because that seems to be your fear — correct me if I’m wrong — that you’re a pragmatic person who wants to beat Trump. Like, if you thought that there was somebody who could take Biden’s place and beat Trump, I would assume you’d be for that. This is not some, like, diehard sympathy for Biden himself.

So, what is it about Biden from your perspective that makes him such a unique figure worth rallying around, despite everything we’re seeing?

DM: Yeah. And all of your assumptions about my point of view are correct, except one; I’m not conceding he would be disoriented, I’m saying, even if you think that.

So, there’s a variety of reasons why I think, actually, he’ll continue to be a great president, as he currently is, as he’s been for the past four years. But that’s not your question right now.

For your question right now, let me ask you something. Have you sorted out in your head the efforts that have been made, the quantum of efforts that have been made to paint Joe Biden as corrupt and criminal?

RG: Yeah. I co-host this show Counterpoints with a conservative host. And so, I’m constantly seeing all of the different right-wing activity.

DM: So, you see all that.

RG: Yeah. I’ve been seeing it since the original campaign.

DM: A hundred percent.

RG: Hunter Biden, China Joe. Like —

DM: It’s been since before the original campaign.

RG: All of the buzzwords that would be odd to people in Democratic circles, I know. You say “China Joe,” I know what you’re talking about. I know Romania, I know —

DM: A hundred percent. And you said “since the first campaign,” so you already clearly have a list, right?

RG: Mm-hmm.

DM: But it started before the first campaign. I mean, Donald Trump’s first impeachment, Donald Trump used the power of the United States federal government and its foreign services to make sure, even before Biden declared, that Biden was seen as corrupt.

RG: Yeah.

DM: It’s a lot.

RG: Right. And, for people who don’t remember, it was a guy named Vladimir Zelensky — who nobody had heard of at that point — who Trump called and said, basically, I need you to go on CNN and say that Joe Biden is corrupt. And, if you do that, I’ll send these weapons.

DM: 100 percent.

RG: Biden was the guy that Trump was trying to do that to.

DM: Correct, before Biden had declared.

So, the other side, if you think about the amount of time and effort that Donald Trump personally — and the United States federal government — and Vladimir Putin, personally, and the Russian government, and all of Fox News, and all of the related — Steve Bannon. And that’s a lot, right? They have spent more money and effort trying to paint Joe Biden as corrupt than they’ve spent on anything else, by far. It’s not close. Right?

RG: Mm-hmm.

DM: So, one thing to ask yourself is, why is that? Is it that they are not seeing how weak Biden is, and they are just making a catastrophic error in investment? Because that’s possible, but it seems pretty unlikely. We are talking about the equivalent of literally billions of dollars designed to degrade Joe Biden’s brand as honest, decent, and patriotic.

Now, I believe I know why they think that’s so important. This is a hypothesis, but my belief is that Donald Trump is what Madeleine Albright would call a fascist, meaning it doesn’t really matter if you’re left, right, theocratic, whatever. You’re an authoritarian. Every fascist movement that I have studied — from the left, or the right, or otherwise, or religious — they start from a base of cleansing fire. All of the things that we are about to do are necessary to cleanse our society of its rot, right? It’s always that kind of a frame. And, every time a fascist succeeds, they’re running against someone that they can smear as equally corrupt. Or, at least, it’s close.

And so, Trump’s campaign from day one — In fact, from the 1980s onwards, when he first was effectively running against Reagan. He’s been running for president for decades. And it has always been that the system is rigged and corrupt, and he’s at least honest about it, and he will do it on your behalf, right? That is his essential pitch.

And that, by the way, that basic pitch dispatched a long list of people who were great. DeSantis, and Rubio, and Hillary Clinton. These are impressive people. It worked.

RG: The center-right and the center-left are very vulnerable — especially as we’ve seen in Europe — to that charge.

DM: A hundred percent.

So, then particularly against the Democrats, in general, globally, it is always a campaign against the cities; the diversity of the cities, the elites, the cosmopolitan values, it is always that kind of campaign. And so, in addition to painting his adversaries as corrupt, Trump, in the general election, taps into the deep white nationalist Christian rural theocracy that is, I don’t know, a fifth of the electorate?

And it matters, right? For example, white evangelical Christians: 85 percent for Trump in 2016, 80 percent for Trump in 2020. That’s a huge difference, right? And so, it matters if those groups are super-fired up, and Trump is super firing them up by warning them about the threat of the urbane, antireligious, etc.

So then, along comes this candidate — and, again, Trump saw this early, 2017 is when he started using his powers to make sure that he damaged Biden in this way — along comes a candidate who has this brand, and is also branded as a kind of centrist, kind of middle, Christian white man. Trump chokes on it.

And so, if you look at the perceptions of the genuine marginal voters, the people who are really at the fringe and they perceive Biden, you can ask them a lot of things about Joe, and they will say things that are not great. But that entire Trump brand campaign — and Putin and everybody, the billion-dollar smear campaign — failed, and everybody else it’s been run against, it succeeded.

So, the point that I make about Kamala and everything else and all the others is that — Now, could someone else do that? Could a Michelle Obama or a Dwayne Johnson maybe have that? Sure. But those are not the options that are available. The options that are available are other politicians who, in a three-, four-year period of time, I am so fired up about the bench. The 50-year-old Democrats who are leading around the country, very good. But, in 120 days, with the influence that the right-wing disinformation ecosystem has? If you did not like what happened to John Kerry in 2004, do not watch as your preferred candidate gets introduced to the American public. So, I’m just saying —

RG: Let’s actually even stipulate all that, and I think a lot of that is true. I’ve watched the right have this apoplectic frustration with their inability to code Biden as left wing, and a socialist as —

DM: Or corrupt.

RG: Or necessarily even corrupt.

DM: I actually think corrupt is first and left is second. But, yes. They’re frustrated that they can’t.

RG: Throughout, especially, Build Back Better, and all the deficit spending, and even the inflation, even with Biden saying a lot of the things that Bernie Sanders has said. Even with Biden being probably the most populist domestic policy president since FDR, it just has not stuck, because he just seems like Joe Biden, the centrist guy. And that has really frustrated Republicans, and I think that that’s all great.

But then Thursday happened, and it seems like Biden can’t complete a thought, that he loses his train of thought very quickly. He can’t separate out his words so that you can understand what he’s saying. He confuses things. We don’t even have to get into all of the different medical diagnoses, and the requests for neurological testing, to get to a place where we say, all right, the American public by 70-plus percent thinks he’s not fit for office anymore.

And every day that he fights against that, the media is going to zero in on whatever his latest gaff was, and that’s going to kick off another couple of days. And it’s also going to overshadow everything else.

Like, you may have seen the North Carolina gubernatorial candidate.

DM: Some folks need killing.

RG: He said some people need killing, yeah. And that just gets washed aside, because every Democratic member of Congress who now comes out and says Joe Biden needs to step aside is going to make news. Mark Warner gathering senators together, that’s going to make news. And Biden is going to try this loop where he says, OK, well, I’m going to do a press conference next Thursday, and that will buy another week. And then, that press conference, maybe it goes as poorly as the Stephanopoulos interview, but he doesn’t wander off stage. And so, he says, well, in three weeks, I’m going to do this thing. And then, eventually he says, well, it’s August, and now he’s pulling at the high 20s, low 30s.

And, while everything you said might have been true, age is a thing, and it landed on Biden, and this is the situation we’re in. And so, are you just so pessimistic about being able to bring in any alternatives, that you’re like, we’re just going to roll the dice here? Because it seems like the thing that Biden has is this brand of honesty, which is the thing that you’re saying you need to combat fascism, and fascism’s ability to kind of equate all corruption and say, well, I alone can fix it.

It’s hard for Biden to maintain that aura of honesty if people think he’s lying about his ability to function.

DM: Yeah. So, you have summarized, effectively, the case, and it’s a very real question. I’m trying to think of — There are so many embedded assumptions in there that we questioned, that I want to try to see what’s the most useful.

Let me say a few things. One question is, can Joe Biden be a good / great president as he is now, as he will be in four years. And we believe, contra-everyone, that, actually, he certainly can. And the reason we believe that is because of the nature of the job of president.

RG: Staff, etc.

DM: It’s not just staff. To be in that role, you have got to have great leverage. And great leverage means an amazing network of relationships, and people, and deputies, and foreign leaders, who you can work with, because they understand your values. And all of those things get better with age. I mean, in some cases. Not in every case; the Warren Buffett example, etc.

So, the question is, is Biden also suffering from age enough that that makes him worse? And that’s the presidential question, and we can have a whole separate podcast on that. But the more important question is how these five million marginal voters in the swing states that I’m talking about will perceive it.

Almost everything that you said is an argument that makes sense to people who are not in that category. Remember, the convention will be over in about 50 days. About 30 days after that, we’ll be in mid-September, and the actual five million will start paying attention. And then, 40 days after that, we will have a result. And Those five million voters are going to consume an enormous amount of information and disinformation about whomever.

Let’s assume that Biden were to choose to step down; it would be about Kamala. Like I said, I think she can prosecute that case, and we will support her hard. But it’s not guaranteed, because that campaign has worked against everybody else prior to Joe.

And so, they will consume bits and pieces about Joe’s age, they will also consume new information about Trump. And probably the biggest disagreement that Reid and I tend to have — and our team tends to have — with folks that are making your argument, is the extent to which Biden’s downsides are baked versus Trump’s. We think, actually, that Biden’s downsides, if you think about the five million marginal voters, Ryan, they overwhelmingly anchor their news in either TikTok — which is, like, four-to-one pro-Trump — or the Fox/Steve Bannon social media ecosystem, which is even worse.

So, my belief is, those five million people already think Biden is like you are suggesting he is now proven to be.

RG: Sure, I think you’re right about that.

DM: And then, on the Trump side, people tend to say everything is baked in. And I think that is an understandable instinct. But, really, what we’re saying is that we’ve seen this for so long, and all of our friends have seen it for so long, what more can be said? And, it turns out, more can be said.

The last time those five million voters seriously paid attention, yes, Joe Biden was younger. And, also, Donald Trump had not launched a violent assault on the Capitol that broke his brain and destroyed his ability to distinguish truth from fiction. Also, last time they were looking, Donald Trump had never been convicted of anything, and now there’s four unanimous juries and counting.

And so, my point is that we are going to get more and more information about how Donald Trump has lost it and how criminal he is, and that’s new news. At the same time, we’re contextualizing a bunch of other information about Biden and his team. At the same time, who knows what else is happening? That’s a long time.

RG: And so, I think the error that you guys might be making — and let me frame it this way — might be rooted in both the success that you guys have had, and also your roots in Silicon Valley.

And so, you and Reid both have been able to identify what you guys perceive as the real reality, which you believe a lot of people are missing. And you’ve also been able to, effectively, over the years, move hundreds of millions of dollars in different directions to kind of push people to see that reality with some success, some failures.

And so, I think that, at this moment, you guys might be overestimating your control over reality, your ability to get people to see what you see, and that, in fact, it’s over. That the world has decided and, whatever the world is, that this guy just isn’t up for the job, and it’s just going to get worse and worse and worse, day after day after day. And that looking back and seeing your guy’s ability to kind of shape reality in the past has convinced you that maybe you can shape it again this time in a smarter direction. When, in fact, the smarter thing might be to say, you know what? Actually, we might be right here, but nobody is ever going to agree with us. And we are going to lose credibility making this argument, and we need to do something different.

Now, I think that — and I’ve argued this — I think the different thing you should do is not anoint Kamala, because I think that’s a disaster. I think she has to fight for it, in what Jim Clyburn called a mini-primary. And there are donors lining up — you’ve probably heard from them — willing to back this idea of a mini-primary.

But, before we get to that, what do you think of my psychologizing of what I think is the error that you guys are making at this moment of overestimating your ability to influence this?

DM: I am so glad you asked that question. I’m surprised by it, but delighted to have the opportunity to talk about it, because that is actually the thing I think about all of you. I think we’re being modest.

That’s the thing; if Reid and I do not believe that we can move the odds as much as that debate did, we believe we have a little bit of influence. And, because the stakes are so high, we’re using all of it. And you are correct that it is very damaging to our credibility to take positions that all of our allies disagree with, right? And yet, you all think you can change people’s minds. You have so much confidence that you can get Kyrsten Sinema to change, you can get Joe Manchin to change. Just pressure them and they’ll change. And we can get Biden to change, we can get Kamala to not take it.

And I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, I know who Biden is. I know he’s grateful for our support. But I don’t know that we’re in the top 100 most influential people. Probably in the top 1,000 but, like, even that’s questionable.

And so, we are just trying to play the cards we’re dealt. That’s what we’re trying to do. And we don’t think we can make a huge difference, but we are trying to, like — Guys, if this is the situation we’re in, this is kind of a conversation — A little bit, this is a conversation we had about S1. Like, I agreed with S1 in March of 2021, and the fight was always over. OK, are we accepting reality or overestimating our own influence? And I was on the other side. I was like, guys, it’s done, move on.

And I think that the cost of ignoring that reality — you know how I felt about those seven months of failure — and also, I know you’re not sad to see Kyrsten Sinema leaving the party, but she and Manchin are shitting on it on the way out, and that does not help right now. And that is all a consequence of overestimating your ability to have influence.

So, you kind of have this perception that we think we’re masters of the universe and can change everything and, on the contrary, we happen to be in a position where we are approaching this landscape of politics with a new set of lenses that gives us access to different insights that might be more relevant. And when we work through the game theory implied by that, we think the only thing we can do is increase the odds of Biden beating Trump. And one of the things that all of these conversations are doing is not talking about Donald Trump.

RG: Right.

DM: And you don’t want to talk about Donald Trump because you feel like you’ve already said it a million times, and I get that. The problem is, now is exactly the time I need you talking about Donald Trump, if I’m right.

So, I know that I’m expending my credibility, [and] Reid does, too. If we were solving for our credibility in politics, we would be doing the exact opposite of what we’re doing.

RG: I started by saying you were overestimating your capacity; now I think you’re underestimating it.

I think if you and Reid Hoffman came out — and you have a network of people as well that you can be influential around — if you came out and said, look, Jim Clyburn’s right, we need a mini-primary. We have six weeks between now and August 19th. We can have two debates, we can captivate national attention. We have 3,900 delegates who are there because they love Joe Biden. These are rank-and-file, everyday party figures. These are not the kind of elites — there are superdelegates and there are some elites mixed in there — but, overall, I think people would be shocked to find who these delegates actually are. These are just regular people who are really active in Democratic Party politics.

And it’s obviously too late to do voting, but there would be relentless polling, and Democrats just want to beat Trump. And if by August 19 you head into the convention and say, J.B. Pritzker is three points ahead of Trump, and Whitmer is two points behind Trump, I think the delegates are probably going to say, you know what? Big JB is our guy, and maybe he’s got some of that kryptonite, too, that works against Trump, and there just isn’t time over the next 50, 60 days to nuke him with the amount of oppo that Republicans are going to come after [him with]. They’re going to try, but you can only do so much; there’s only so much TikTok you can consume in a 24-hour period, people have tested it.

DM: Have you tested it? Have you tried it?

RG: I have deliberately stayed away from it because I can tell how addictive it is. Right now, I’ve heard a lot of Democrats say, look, the chance of Biden actually winning the election at this point is close to zero. And so, we have nothing to lose. Anything above zero is worth trying. So, let’s try. And we get closer to zero every day that this goes on, whether we like it or not.

So, what’s wrong with that analysis of it? And don’t you think if you guys came out and endorsed that, it would substantially move the needle internally? And I say this after I just said you overrate your ability to have influence, so I understand that’s incoherent.

DM: No, no, no, no, no. No, it’s not incoherent. It just sounds like we just learned, we moved forward together.

So, you’ve blended a couple of different strands in your question, as you know, because you get into the substance of why it would be good as part of gaming out what would actually happen. But I want to just go a little bit deeper into the decision-making process of Joe Biden, right?

Joe Biden is haunted by the fact that, in 2016, he listened to these arguments, and he’s right. We were all wrong. If he’d run in 2016, we would not be here. A lot of people — not us as much this time, but a lot of people — made those same arguments to him in 2020. He stubbornly, stubbornly resisted all of them, and he saved us.

I mean, it is very plausible, given how close that was, that anybody else, if our theory of Biden’s brand is correct, that was it. So, all of these arguments came at him in ’16. He listened. The world suffered grievously. All of these arguments came at him in 2020, he refused to listen. The world benefited tremendously. America now has the strongest economy in the world. We are powering the world economy, we are leading the free world against Russian aggression, because he refused to listen to these arguments.

So, right now, who is he going to listen to? I believe that, fundamentally, he is going to listen to voters, and he’s going to listen to the Democratic voters in particular. And the Democratic Party’s voters, since mid-2020, there has never been any single person who has been anywhere close to as popular as Biden with Democrats. It’s been the inverse on the other side.

And the choices in this country, in this political system, the way democracy works in this country is that the two parties put forward their candidates, those are the only chances to win, and they are put forward by the parties, and the parties are not most people. Certainly not the swing, and the swing is left with the choices, and there’s always a complaint.

And so, the question is, is there an argument for Joe Biden to step down? And the answer is, well, if he were to plummet in the polls — which would be the result if all these arguments are correct about how he’s being perceived — that might change his mind. And, at that point, we will be there to help with the transition.

He hasn’t plummeted. He’s dropped in the averages by less than three points, which is the amount by which they moved in the other direction — or slightly less than, actually — when Donald Trump was convicted of felonies. So, we are going to get more and more evidence of Trump’s criminality. At the same time, we’re getting more and more evidence of Biden’s physical aging. And you all assume that that is going to net out in a way that is going to be so obvious that you will persuade Joe Biden that, this time, you’re all right, and he’s wrong, when the last couple of times it was catastrophically the reverse.

RG: One thing that worries me is he told George Stephanopoulos that all the polls have him tied. And it made me wonder who’s feeding him, who’s briefing him on the polling? Will he actually see the numbers if they do collapse?

But, that aside —

DM: No, that’s actually important. Can we talk about that, or do you want to go to another one?

RG: Yeah.

DM: Because that one’s important. Because, look, there were many, many, many times when I watch politicians that I’m backing say things that I hate. From the time I watched Mike Dukakis answer that question about Kitty Dukakis, right? It happens. And so, there was a lot that Biden said that I did not like.

But his answer about polling, I’m like, yeah, actually. Everybody’s wrong and Joe is right. The polls are tied. They are still within the margin of error. That’s what matters at this stage.

RG: Not all of them, for sure.

DM: The aggregate, for sure.

RG: I see.

DM: Like, New York Times over? But the weighted average — And, look, you can disagree with a bunch of stuff about 538, and think that Nate Silver’s new thing is better, or whatever. But the one thing that I believe that 538 has cornered is the ability to evaluate pollsters. They go so hard at that, no one else is close. And they use that to weight the polls, and the average, it was Trump up about two, then there was a felony conviction — 34 actually — and, as the public digested that, it went to Biden, up about a little less than half a point. And now, it’s Trump by two-and-a-half. And all of that remains within the margin of error of these polls.

These two men have been tied in the 270 electoral vote battlegrounds. They have been within the margin of error since inception. And so, when people are saying Joe’s losing, and they’ve been saying that forever, I’ve been saying, it’s tied. And the reason it’s tied is because Joe Biden has this brand advantage. That is why, if you compare him to incumbents all over the world, he’s actually less unpopular.

So, I’ve always said it was tied, and it’s still roughly a jump ball. So, that is one of the cases where, look, there were a lot of things Biden said that I did not like, but that was one of the ones where I actually think he’s right, and you’re all wrong.

RG: So what would a plummet be? A drop versus a plummet?

DM: It would be outside the range. It would be outside the margin of error. It’d be, like, five points, and it would last a week or two. Five or more.

But, by the way, Ryan, the other side of it, just to set the presumption properly, if you guys are right, how much should the polls drop? I mean, shouldn’t they drop a lot? Shouldn’t they drop more than two-and-a-half points? Shouldn’t Trump’s odds of winning be higher than two-to-one, if you’re so right?

RG: I think you would need a more plugged in population to have swings bigger than we see, maybe.

DM: More plugged in? I don’t know, man. It wasn’t that long ago when George H.W. Bush had 90 percent approval ratings, and even George W. Bush was pretty high after September 11, right? So, it is not ancient history when Americans swung a lot. The reason they don’t now — in my view — is negative partisanship, and that goes both ways.

Remember this: even as the donor class — not me and Reid, obviously, but a lot of donors are freaking out — more small-dollar fundraising to Joe Biden came in since that debate than ever before. Those two hours were their best two hours. Those 24 hours were their best 24 hours. These are indications that the other side is also true.

And so, my whole point is, on all of this, it seems to me, especially given the psychological history of Biden being right and us being wrong — twice previously, catastrophically — and the way the polls are moving, the odds of him stepping down are very low. If things move a lot, I think he’ll reconsider. That will be his decision.

So, if it’s 90 percent likely that it’s Biden, and 10 percent likely that it’s someone else — or even 80/20, even if it’s just more likely than not — all of us need to be focused on attacking Trump, because Biden is going to make that decision in that way based on those factors that we don’t control. And he may be right. So, what are we doing?

RG: At what point does the reality start to intervene and we say, you know what? Horse race aside, numbers aside, all of the game theory aside, a president who said he needs to work less and shouldn’t do stuff after 8 p.m., and that we’re not confident is up to it, it’s just not something that, as a country, we want.

Like, people who would say, “OK, we want him to beat Trump, but do we want him to be president? Like, do we actually have confidence in his ability to be president?”

DM: See, this is great, I’m glad you’re raising this, because we talked at the outset that this was going to come up. And once you work through all the gaming and so forth that you and I have just discussed, you get to the fundamental of, like, “Wait, can he be a good president, right?”

And so, Ryan, my question to you: what do you think the job of the president is? Because clearly you seem to think it includes working super long hours. And I don’t think the president is necessarily an investment banking associate.

RG: I divide it into two things: one is making hard decisions, because the reason a decision gets to a president is because it’s a difficult one, and his massive apparatus that’s underneath him could not answer that question. That, maybe you can do between 10 and 4.

DM: No, no, no. Biden is not saying he won’t take calls.

RG: But, there’s that. And then there’s also, this is the second part of being president: communicating to the American people and persuading them of your vision.

DM: I agree with both of those. So, let’s go into those. OK. So—

RG: And, actually, the international public, I should put the international public in there, too.

DM: Yeah, a hundred percent. Absolutely. OK.

The president has to be able to make tough decisions, and communicate them in a way that is consistent so that everybody understands, right?

RG: Yeah.

DM: My contention is that Joe Biden is as good or better on those two things than anybody else, and it’s not getting worse as he’s getting older.

The way in which he makes decisions is with his close team. He is the leader of a council. He is the leader of the council of elders at the center of a network of decision-making, and he has been working too hard. He’s been working too hard if he was 50. And, when you’re older, you need to ease up a little bit, and he’s got the leverage to do it. He’s just working too hard. That doesn’t mean he’s not available, at all. If you need him, you can call him, but he’s working too hard. But his process of making decisions is one that seems pretty good.

And the second thing about communicating, if you are clear in your values, and you’ve recruited a network of people who embody those values, when you do make those decisions, they pulse out effectively.

Now, I’ve just made two contentions that you don’t agree with, and I understand that. My two contentions are that Joe Biden’s decision-making process is really good, and that his ability to implement and communicate and effectuate those decisions is really good. And you disagree.

So, the next question, Ryan, is, how do we look at the world and determine from the evidence without our bubbles, outside of our bubbles, how do we look at the evidence and determine outside of our bubbles what’s really true? And I think the best possible evidence is, how good of a job is Biden doing at president-ing today?

So, let’s look at the international leaders. International leaders call Biden personally when they need help. That is why he travels to war zones; they want him, personally. Look at domestic negotiations in the Senate. When they have a logjam, they call him, personally. And if you think that the left has been hiding Biden’s inability to do that well, Kevin McCarthy was caught saying, against interest, that actually that’s not the case. That when Joe Biden is embedded within his team and intervenes in those places, he is the closer, and everybody knows it. The international community calls him, the leaders call him.

And America is doing really well. We have the strongest economy in the world by far. And America is once again the leader of the free world. We almost lost [that] in just four years under Trump. We are back, and all of that is true right now.

So, that seems to me a pretty good evidence base that maybe my point of view might be right, and yours might be wrong.

RG: It seems that the candidates who are running for office around the country — a lot of them, at least — seem to think you’re wrong, and seem to think that, at least, from their perspective, as kind of cynical electoral operators, that Biden is now a drag on their electability. Angie Craig, in a swing district, a representative from Houston, became one of the most recent to come out and say he should step aside.

Can you really go forward with so many elected Democrats telling the public that their candidates should drop out?

DM: I am not saying that electeds are always cynical, or that people running for office are all always cynical, right? There’s a continuum between just being brutally cynical and just maybe having some motivated reasoning, you know, etc., etc. And then there’s also specific brass tacks, right?

If frontline swing district candidates are talking about issues, I think it is very important that we take them seriously with how they want to frame things, for sure. Because they’re the ones who know what the swing voters are thinking. However, a presidential nominee runs nationally, and it is almost always the case that there is some upside to locals distancing themselves from the nominee. That would certainly be true for any alternative to Biden as well. And it always happens.

So, I don’t mind that, it doesn’t bother me. But it’s also not evidence that is relevant to any of the questions we’ve discussed, which are, can he be a great president? Is he already a great president? Can he be a winning nominee? Is he our best bet? None of that is influenced even by what electeds say about distancing themselves from Biden. That is just a different thing.

RG: Let’s talk about Cori Bush for a second. Last time we spoke, you were pretty excited about the possibility of being able to take her out, that she was kind of one of the proxies you saw for Democrats who make it harder for swing district Democrats to win, because of her support for defunding the police, and —

DM: It was defund the police in particular. Bob Menendez and Cori Bush were my two biggest targets. So, one down, one to go.

RG: How is the Cori Bush race looking?

DM: I think it’s even.

RG: How invested are you? What are you going to spend?

DM: We’re not going to spend anything new. So, look, you know we support the mainstream Democrats, and we’ve supported some of the sort of centrist Black organizations that are dissatisfied with Cori Bush. We put resources into those. Wesley Bell, I really like him, I think he’s very good. And I think that, from the polls I’ve seen, it’s about even now.

She has a lot of loyalty and a lot of name recognition, but so does he. He actually has a pretty good brand. And I think the race is pulling into a tie, and I think there’s a very good shot that Wesley Bell wins, which would be great.

And he’s like— You wouldn’t hate him.

RG: We covered his initial race when he won as a progressive prosecutor.

DM: Yeah, you would not hate him. He’s just different from Bush on that thing that I think is important.

RG: Yeah. And he also was running for Senate.

DM: Against Josh Hawley.

RG: Yeah, and saw an opportunity to take her out after October 7.

DM: Thank god.

Yeah, look, Cori Bush took out Lacy Clay Jr. So, Cori Bush decided out of the woodworks to take him out, because she believed that he was not the right fit. And Wesley Bell made the same decision rather than taking on Josh Hawley. And thank god it works both ways.

RG: And did you say you’re not putting more?

DM: We’ve already put in a lot. I’ve maxed out personally, and Reid has, and we’ve supported some of the groups that are active. But that is not our priority right now.

RG: Do you have any guess what AIPAC’s super PAC is going to spend there? Did you coordinate with them at all?

DM: No, I don’t. The mainstream Democrats that we work with have ties with AIPAC. We do not. We have real issues with AIPAC: The stance they took vis-à-vis Netanyahu and Obama. Horrible. Horrible. So, we don’t work with them.

However, clearly, every now and then, someone you don’t like is fighting the same enemy you are. What are you going to do?

RG: So, the headline here, right now, you still think Biden is the best possible candidate to take on Trump, and that will remain the case in your view until or unless the polls plummet, and he moves outside the margin of error. Is that about right?

DM: Well, so, it’s a good headline, but just to be a little bit more precise: number one, yes, I believe Biden is still the best bet. Number two, I believe that Biden will choose to step down only if the polls move significantly for a couple of weeks; significantly meaning, like, five more points, stays there, etc. And, even then, the only way he will make that decision is with his close advisors, and that we will not have influence because of the history we’ve discussed.

The third thing that we believe is — and, again, this is just a positive statement, not a normative statement — we believe that, if it is not Biden, the confidence level that we have it’s going to be Biden, whatever it is, call it 90 percent, 80 percent, whatever. That is the level of confidence we have. And if it’s not Biden, it’s Harris. And I do believe that Harris can prosecute the case.

Remember, in 2020, even as I was pushing Biden over Bernie, I was making a bunch of arguments about how, if it is Bernie, here’s the play, and he could win. If it’s Kamala, she could win. She’s a prosecutor and he’s a criminal. And if she picks the right running mate, like, that’s cool, too. We’ll go for that. But those are the choices.

RG: You don’t think a mini-primary is a realistic possibility.

DM: Yeah. So, just to be clear, you said, “as Jim Clyburn advocated.” Remember, Clyburn advocated “it’s Biden’s decision.” But, no, I don’t actually think that’s realistic.

Actually, sorry, it’s not that it’s not realistic, I think it might actually happen. I just think that the odds that someone other than Kamala is winning that are close to zero.

RG: A lot of them are so cowardly they won’t even run against Kamala, even in an open mini-primary.

DM: Maybe it’s cowardly, maybe it’s not. But the cowardly thing is, Ryan, this is a little bit about picking your battles, and this is the same thing as the S1 debacle or disagreement. If you’ve lost, move on to the next fight, right?

So, there’s 2,000 delegates who’ve been pledged to Joe Biden. And even Black women who dislike the vice president go nuclear when people talk of passing them over do not see how our coalition passes up a number two, with her resume, background, and emerges better for it, at the same time that the disinformation ecosystem is attacking us. I just don’t see it. So, if that’s all true, then it’s going to be Kamala. And if you game it out, then don’t fight that fight.

So, I think that Kamala will win for all of those reasons if it’s not Joe. And so, it’s Kamala or Joe. And, either way, our job is to pay attention to the other guy who is worse.

RG: One side point on that that, to me, undermines the credibility of a lot of the people who are warning that Trump is going to usher in fascism and it’ll be the last election, is that you have so many of these top-tier Democratic candidates who presumably are very good political prognosticators — like a Newsom, and a Whitmer, and a Pritzker, and all these others — who are clearly taking a dive for 2028, they’re like, you know what? This is not my year. If they truly believe there would be no 2028 election, and that 2024 is the last shot at an election, I suppose you could say that it’s purely selfless, and they understand that their running would make it less likely that Democrats win in the end in 2024.

But all of the jockeying that I hear in the background from all of these camps who are very openly positioning themselves for 2028 undermines the idea that there won’t be a 2028 election. You know what I mean?

DM: I do. And I think that that is not a contradiction, I think it is a nuance that makes sense. So, maybe there’s a specific comment that I’m not thinking of, but people have varying degrees of confidence as to whether Trump will be able to end America’s constitutional democracy. Will be able to/will, right? So, I have very high confidence. I think if you had that much power, that kind of a criminal, in that kind of a setting, you don’t get it back, and there’s a ton of history on that.

But a lot of people say otherwise, and America is super complicated. So, some people say, well, the odds of America’s constitutional order collapsing rise from 1 percent to 3 percent. I’ve heard these Democratic politicians articulating a risk associated with Trump. But, if it’s just a risk, if the odds of America’s constitutional order ending rise from 2 percent to 4 percent, or from 5 percent to 10 percent, you still play the 90. If you believe, as Liz Cheney does, and as I do, that the odds are way worse, then you don’t.

So, I understand that it creates some brand conflict but, fundamentally, Ryan, I think that most people have less conviction than I do about how serious the risks are by a great deal. I am no longer seen as quite as insane as when I first started warning about this in 2016. I have more company, but people still think I’m exaggerating the threat.

So, mostly, people are going to act as though it’s not as big of a threat as I think it is, even if they’re going to say, any threat at all of that nature is unacceptable.

RG: As always, Dmitri Mehlhorn, thanks again. I really appreciate it.

DM: Thanks, Ryan.

RG: That was Dimitri Mehlhorn, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of Drop Site. This episode was brought to you in part by a grant from The Intercept. The episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. The episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. And I’m Ryan Grim, cofounder of Drop Site. Check us out at dropsitenews.com.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Deconstructed wherever you listen to podcasts. And please leave us a rating and a review, it helps people find the show. Also, check out our other podcast Intercepted.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you soon.

The post Why Biden’s Still In: Insights From Democratic Insider Dmitri Mehlhorn appeared first on The Intercept.

The basic inanity underscores the malign interest driving one of two major American political parties: $300 million of donations to lawmakers from energy and natural resource interest groups (namely, fossil fuel companies) since 1990 — more than double the amount directed to Democrats during that same period.

On Monday, the Republican National Convention announced its platform, which affirmed that the party is wholly Donald Trump’s. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” the 16-page document’s headline read. 

The document paid no mind to environmental protection, never mind the 130 million Americans currently trudging through oppressive heat. But it did call to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY,” a reference to Israel’s U.S.-funded defense system, and to “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

That the Trump-led, Republican agenda doesn’t mention “climate” is not surprising. In his first term, the former president overturned some 100 environmental regulations, pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and weakened the Environmental Protection Agency. In April, Trump reportedly promised oil tycoons that he would reverse some of Joe Biden’s climate policies in exchange for a $1 billion campaign contribution. Meanwhile, three of his Supreme Court justices just helped corporate America get even further off the hook from having to respect environmental regulation by overturning the Chevron doctrine, a decades-old legal precedent that directed courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretation of unambiguous statues. 

“Trump can’t mention it because every last one of his policies would make it worse. He’s essentially running on heating the planet even more,” Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of climate groups Third Act and 350.org, told The Intercept.

In an exchange with a young climate activist on the day the GOP’s platform was released, Republican Sen. Katie Britt — framed by the party as “America’s mom” before her memorable “State of the Union” response speech — embodied her party’s dismissive response to the burning of our planet.

“Oh you, look at how dishonest that was. You asked if you could take a selfie and now you’re asking questions,” Britt said to a voter who asked her about money she receives from the oil and gas lobby. Britt proceeded to ask what the voter’s issue was with “Big Oil.”

“I think that the climate crisis is here and getting worse, and you’re being funded by the people who are making that happen,” the activist said.

The senator from Alabama responded evasively, seeming to cheer on more toxic drilling. “Listen, we’ve got to be not only energy independent, but energy dominant. We do it better than anybody.”

Britt did not respond to questions about her plan to address climate change and environmental protection, or about the $197,037 she has received from the oil and gas industries since joining Congress in 2022.

It’s not as if modern Republicans have not engaged with climate. In 2021, Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, launched the Conservative Climate Caucus in 2021 to educate Republicans on climate policies and legislation. “Don’t be too tough on us, but watch us. I am totally ready to be judged a year from on how much impact we’ve had on the debate,” he said at the time of the group’s founding. 

As it turns out, the effort, which has received favorable media coverage since its inception, has not had much tangible impact. The group’s members have attacked environmental regulations, undermined or simply refused to vote for bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, and taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry.

The post GOP Platform Doesn’t Mention the Word “Climate” Once — Even After Hottest Year on Record appeared first on The Intercept.

Similar real estate fairs have popped up across North America this year, in places such as Montreal, Toronto, New Jersey, Baltimore, and Brooklyn, and several have faced protests as the war on Gaza has brought the issue of Israeli settlements and Palestinian sovereignty to the fore.

An outbreak of violence at the LA event thrust the incident into the national spotlight. Protesters at the Adas Torah synagogue, who decried the sale of what they called “stolen land,” were met by pro-Israel counterprotesters on the West LA streets. Fights broke out among demonstrators, LA police said, while protesters reported being beaten by police with batons. The fracas was cast in the national media as an incident of violence at a place of worship, rather than a political protest at a corporate event, prompting political leaders from both parties, including President Joe Biden, to characterize the demonstration as antisemitic. The Justice Department said it is investigating the incident.

But homebuyers interested in purchasing a property in the occupied West Bank have a more convenient option for making an offer: a simple scroll through online listings. 

On websites largely tailored for Jewish American buyers looking to move to Israel, prospective homeowners can browse properties that include listings for homes in settlement communities, which offer the typical trappings of suburban life. 

Around a dozen real estate firms have participated in real estate fairs organized by My Israel Home across North America this year. Six of these firms are actively marketing at least two dozen separate properties for sale located within eight different West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements, according to their online listings. Other real estate firms commonly list dozens of West Bank properties on their sites. The firms mentioned in this story did not respond to requests for comment.  

They listed homes for sale in Ma’ale Adumim, Efrat, Mitzpe Yericho, Ramat Givat Ze’ev, Har Adar, Hashmonaim, and Ariel — all West Bank settlements located within a one-hour drive of Jerusalem — as well as Givat Hamatos, which is in East Jerusalem.

West Bank settlements have long drawn criticism from the international community, which regards the settlements as illegal, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions. The Israeli government disputes their illegality, however, and recognizes 146 settlements as legal, according to Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that tracks and opposes settlement expansion. The Israeli government leases land exclusively to Israelis, the group said, as Palestinians are barred from using the new plots the state has usurped in the West Bank.

Criticism of settlements have only intensified in recent months amid a spike in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied territory, as Israel’s war in Gaza rages. And on Friday, Israel announced its plans to adopt five illegal outposts in the West Bank as settlements, which has also invited international condemnation. 

On its website, My Home in Israel, which helped organize the LA event and runs a team of U.S.-based real estate agents, posted photos from its other conventions in Teaneck, New Jersey, and Montreal, showing the interior of synagogues lined with booths manned by real estate firms, mortgage companies, and law firms, sitting and talking with prospective buyers. “Find your dream home in Israel,” reads one booth’s banner. “Live the American dream in the heart of Israel,” another reads atop a rendering of luxury apartments.

“A lot of people want to live out there — it’s beautiful, the mountains, it’s scenic,” said Baruki Cohen, a real estate agent, referring to West Bank settlements. His firm, Israel Home, did not participate at the LA event, but markets similar properties to Jewish Americans, selling property within Israel alongside houses in East Jerusalem. He plans to list properties in an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron in the future. A native of New Jersey who grew up visiting family in Israel, Cohen bought a second home in 2014 in Jerusalem. 

Cohen said real estate conventions, such as the LA event, have been going on for at least the past decade. Conventions are commonly hosted in hotel conference rooms and in people’s homes, in addition to synagogues. He estimates as many as 100 different real estate conventions take place across North America each year.

“I have no moral or legal qualms selling property [in the West Bank],” Cohen said. “I would live there myself if I felt it was safe. Anyone who wants to move there, we’re happy to facilitate it.”

“I have no moral or legal qualms selling property [in the West Bank].”

Since the early years after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the country has invited the immigration of Jews from across the globe. Immigration beyond the Green Line — the border between Israel and the West Bank that was drawn after the Israeli-Arab War of 1948, during which more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes as a part of an ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba — boomed in the 1980s, as settlements expanded from small illegal outposts into suburban cities with the help of the Israeli government’s funding and military support. Since then, the Israeli government has continued to evict Palestinians from their land and homes as settlements expand.

Most Jewish Americans who exercise their right to emigrate to Israel don’t move to the West Bank, experts say, but hundreds still make the choice to do so each year.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a visiting professor at the University of Haifa and an expert on Jewish American settlers, estimates that among the 3,000 Jewish Americans who move to Israel each year, about 15 percent of them are moving into settlements. There are about 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. About 60,000 are American, according to Hirschhorn. This excludes the more than 200,000 Israeli settlers who live in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1967. 

To the majority of American immigrants, Hirschhorn said, the border between the state of Israel and the occupied West Bank still matters. But the real estate firms profiting off the modest yet steady stream of American migration are less discerning.

Jerusalem-based Noam Homes, which was part of the LA real estate event, lists properties within Israel, in cities such as Tel Aviv, alongside homes beyond the Green Line, in major settlements like Efrat and Ma’ale Adumim, which boasts a population of more than 30,000 with little recognition of their status as settlements. Most listings for settlement communities show an address in Israel and at times refer to the region with the biblical name of Judea and Samaria, the Israeli government’s preferred term for the West Bank.

“These are not like tiny hilltop outposts; these are massive settlement blocks that are contiguous with and integrated into Israeli state proper,” said Rachel Feldman, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College who specializes in Judaism and Israel and Palestine. “I spoke to American Jewish settlers here who don’t even have a sense that they are living beyond the state’s borders.”

Parents often send their children there for a gap year or seminary school, she said, treating the settlements as part of Israel. She said that during the Trump era, even more American Jews were emboldened to ignore the Green Line. 

Their studies predate the October 7 attacks, so Hirschhorn and Feldman could not quantify the impact of the Gaza war on American interest in West Bank homeownership. 

But Cohen, the real estate agent, said that he’s seen demand for Israeli property increase since the war began. Before October 7, he would receive about four or five inquiries from homebuyers each week. While the immediate weeks after the attacks were quiet, interest has picked up over the last three months, parallel to a series of settlement expansions announced by the Israeli government. Cohen said he now gets 15 inquiries per week. 

Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest. 

“Although we are in the midst of the Iron Sword war,” said the Meny Group in promotional material on their website, using the Israeli government’s official name for the campaign, “the real estate market is booming.” Several other firms argued that investing in housing is a way for Jews to support Israel in times of conflict and instability. Firms also cited the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic as another crisis that the Israeli economy survived due to support from foreign and American buyers. 

Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest.

Most firms’ marketing materials appeal more broadly to Zionist ideals of supporting the homeland and its economy, pitching owning “a piece of the Promised Land for themselves and future generations.” One such firm, the Meny Group, which was also present at real estate conventions across North America, notes the rise in antisemitism across the globe, painting Israel as “a beacon of security for Jews.”  

The real estate companies also highlighted economic concerns for American buyers. The Meny Group’s website highlights public education options that teach the Torah, in an appeal to Orthodox families who struggle to meet religious education costs in the U.S. One real estate agent who made the move from the U.S. wrote that tuition for his four children cost roughly $17,500 per child. In Israel, his costs in a single year for his children was $3,000.  

Hirschhorn said even though housing is expensive in Israel and the West Bank — like in the U.S. — the overall lower cost of living made possible by a state-sponsored Jewish infrastructure allows for life to possibly be more affordable. Health care is also socialized in Israel, and new arrivals may also receive small stipends or tax incentives and deductions to buy a new car or appliances for a new home.

“Cost of Kosher food is a lot less, you don’t have to worry about sending your kids to Jewish day school, cost of college in Israel isn’t going to be too much,” she said. “Being a part of Jewish community just really isn’t as expensive or difficult.”

The properties in the settlements are hardly cheap, but they are less expensive than homes within Israeli cities. The price for a condo in the popular Gush Etzion group of settlements ranges from $500,000 to $1 million, for properties with around four to six bedrooms and more than 1,000 square feet. Cohen said a similarly sized home in central Jerusalem may run for as much as $3 million. 

One listing shows a 2,000 square-foot penthouse in a suburban enclave of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, east of Jerusalem, for $1.2 million. The space, listed as a “Stunning Penthouse” has five bedrooms and two “generously sized” balconies with panoramic views. There is also the assurance of plenty of storage space. However, the penthouse also includes one other amenity less common in American homes: “a dedicated safe room for your peace of mind.”    

“American Jews might want to maintain a certain kind of middle-class living standard if they’re imagining moving to Israel, and that actually might not be possible inside Israel proper,” Feldman said. “And so they start to look to the West Bank. What looks like a nice, spacious middle-class house with a yard starts to look nice compared to a tiny, unaffordable apartment in Tel Aviv.”

Settlements often have their own schools, parks, swimming pools, supermarkets, dry cleaners, sports facilities, hairdressers, and synagogues. 

On the website for Nefesh-B’nefesh, a nonprofit that encourages and facilitates Jewish immigration from the U.S. to Israel, users are able to read neighborhood profiles to compare settlements’ educational and religious options. The profiles also mention whether there are other English speakers in the area. The online portal is often the starting point for Jewish Americans who look to immigrate; the organization assists with paperwork and other bureaucratic steps. 

Like the real estate companies, the nonprofit does not honor the Green Line, listing unlawful settlements in its neighborhood profiles as a part of Israel. The site also links users to Yad2, similar to Zillow and Craigslist, which shows dozens of housing listings across Israel and on settlements.

During the research for her book on Jewish American settlers, Hirschhorn said a woman told her that the settlement community she lived in “was the place I could get a bagel on Sunday morning, but also know that I was going to be in the right place when the redemption of the Jewish people and the messiah came.” 

In late June, the Israeli government seized an additional 3,000 acres of West Bank land for other planned settlements, barring Palestinians from using it. The land seizure, made public last week, is the largest by Israel since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Peace Now said. The government has taken more than 5,000 acres of land in the West Bank this year, the group said, the most in any single year during the same 30-year span. In March, the Israeli government also approved the construction of 3,400 new homes in settlements, the majority of which will be built in Ma’ale Adumim. Most of the companies attached to the real estate events list properties in the settlement. 

The Jewish real estate market in the West Bank remains an important piece of the current Israeli government’s expansion into the occupied territory. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who oversees the office that handles new housing developments, celebrated the project and declared on X, “The enemies try to hurt and weaken, but we will continue to build and be built in this country.” He lives in the settlement of Kedumim, though his home, built outside of the settlement proper, appears to violate even Israeli law, according to reports.

Smotrich most recently made statements that reveal his long-term goals of annexing the entirety of the West Bank away from Palestinians, and expressed his support of legitimizing newer, illegal settlements. 

“We will establish sovereignty … first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements,” Smotrich said last week during a meeting, according to Haaretz. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The 2.8 million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank already face restrictions on day-to-day movement throughout the territory. And since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has resulted in the killings of more than 500 Palestinians, 133 of them children, by Israeli military forces or settlers, according to the United Nations’s top human rights official and an Intercept investigation. The 2023 death toll was the highest since 2005 when the U.N. started tracking casualties in the West Bank. 

“As the world’s eyes has been primarily focused on Gaza, the settler movement has continued unabated and pushed even harder to establish illegal settlements, to further develop settlements, to take more land,” said Hadar Susskind, president of Americans for Peace Now, which opposes West Bank settlements. “They’ve pushed whole Palestinian communities off of their land almost every day, certainly every week.”

His colleagues at their Israel-based counterpart, Peace Now, which tracks the settler movement, have reported incidents of violence from Jewish settlers, harassment, burning olive groves, and stealing sheep from Palestinian farmers. In 2023, settlers built 26 new illegal outposts, the most since the group starting keeping track in 2002, the group reported. So far this year, 14 additional settler outposts have been built.  

Americans, even outside the Jewish community, play a major role in supporting the expansion of settlements, Susskind said. He pointed to evangelical Christian groups that pump millions into pro-settler causes. In February, one American Christian pro-settler group, HaYovel, raised $3.5 million to buy hundreds of vests, helmets, binoculars, flashlights, and security drones for settlers in the West Bank. The group looks to raise an additional $25 million.

Americans for Peace Now has urged the U.S. government to do more to stop the flow of such funds. Susskind credited Biden’s executive order that allowed the State Department to sanction certain organizations and individuals for violence committed in the West Bank. So far the government has sanctioned Israeli Jewish settlers Zvi Bar Yosef, Moshe Sharvit, Neriya Ben Pazi, and Ben Zion Gopstein for repeated attacks and threats against Palestinians; the organizations Mount Hebron Fund and Shlom Asiraich, which raised funds for that fueled further settler violence; and Tzav 9, an extremist Israeli group that has attacked aid convoys in the West Bank on their way to Gaza. 

“Palestinians are going to continue to have all the day-to-day problems, and they certainly are not going to have justice and equality until the occupation ends,” Susskind said. “You have to deal with people’s immediate needs, but the big picture there is only one answer, which is an end to the occupation.”

Correction: Tuesday, July 9, 5:11 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Rachel Feldman as an anthropologist at Dartmouth University; she works at Dartmouth College. A quote from Feldman was incorrectly transcribed to state that West Bank property “starts to look nice compared to a tiny, affordable apartment in Tel Aviv.” Feldman’s comparison invoked a tiny, unaffordable apartment in Tel Aviv.

The post The Companies Making It Easy to Buy in a West Bank Settlement appeared first on The Intercept.

In a post to Telegram announcing the hack, SiegedSec called Project 2025 “an authoritarian Christian nationalist plan to reform the United States government.” The attack was part of the group’s #OpTransRights campaign, which recently targeted right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice, the Hillsong megachurch, and a Minnesota pastor.

In his foreword to the Project 2025 manifesto, the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, rails against “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” and “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.” The playbook’s other contributors call on “the next conservative administration” to roll back certain policies, including allowing trans people to serve in the military.

“We’re strongly against Project 2025 and everything the Heritage Foundation stands for,” one of SiegedSec’s leaders, who goes by the handle “vio,” told The Intercept.

In its Telegram post, SiegedSec said it obtained passwords and other user information for “every user” of a Heritage Foundation database, including Roberts and some U.S. government employees. Heritage Foundation said in statement Wednesday that SiegedSec only obtained incomplete password information.

The remainder of more than 200GB of files the hackers obtained were “mostly useless,” SiegedSec said.

The Intercept reviewed copies of files provided to the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. They included an archive of the Heritage Foundation’s blogs and a Heritage-aligned media site, The Daily Signal, as of November 2022.

This is at least the second hack against the Heritage Foundation this year. In April, Heritage shut down its network following a cyberattack tentatively attributed to nation-state hackers. SiegedSec targeted the Heritage Foundation in early June, according to vio, who denied involvement in the earlier attack.

A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation said Wednesday that the files were not obtained by hacking its systems, but that SiegedSec discovered them on a third party’s site.

“An organized group stumbled upon a two-year-old archive of The Daily Signal website that was available on a public-facing website owned by a contractor,” said Noah Weinrich, a Heritage spokesperson. “No Heritage systems were breached at any time, and all Heritage databases and websites remain secure, including Project 2025. The data at issue has been taken down, and additional security steps have since been taken as a precaution.”

SiegedSec’s other recent operations have targeted NATO and Israeli companies to oppose the war in Gaza. 

Update: Wednesday, July 10, 6:36 p.m. ET

This article was updated to include comment from the Heritage Foundation disputing that the files released by SiegedSec were the result of a hack of its systems and were hosted instead on a third party’s website.

The post “Gay Furry Hackers” Claim Credit for Hacking Heritage Foundation Files Over Project 2025 appeared first on The Intercept.