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A growing number of establishment Democrats are facing backlash from progressives for their escalating attacks on leftist streamer Hasan Piker, with critics accusing the party’s corporatist wing of obsessing over an online influencer while ignoring the economic and foreign policy grievances driving millions of voters away on the eve of the critical midterm elections.

The latest controversy erupted after Piker argued during an online broadcast that Jewish Americans’ public support for Israel could contribute to antisemitism. Piker’s comments drew swift condemnation from prominent Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), who, without naming Piker, called them “dangerous and antisemitic.”

Other Democrats piled on, prompting rebuke from progressives, who accused the centrists of caring more about an online personality than winning back control of Congress in November.

Former progressive Michigan congressional candidate Kyle Blomquist called it an “absolute mass psychosis event.”

Wild to see establishment Dems fighting a Twitch streamer harder than they're fighting Trump. Putting out statements attacking @hasanthehun while meeting with Jared Kushner. It's so obviously playing into the right's midterm strategy of distracting people from rising costs. pic.twitter.com/vhxHN9pTpB

— Aaron Regunberg (@AaronRegunberg) August 25, 2026

“Too many demotivated Democrats stayed home in 2016 and 2024. We can’t repeat past mistakes,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said on social media.

Khanna implored Democrats to stop calling Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who is Jewish—an antisemite and “stop wasting time attacking Hasan Piker instead of [President Donald] Trump’s robber-baron corruption.”

“Don’t put Israel hawks out of touch with our voters in charge of our Middle East policy,” he added. “It is time for a reckoning: Are we a party that represents corporate interests and super PACs, or will we represent the American people?”

According to Track AIPAC, pro-Israel Democrats have taken tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel lobby groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s United Democracy Project.

Khanna’s comments came a day after Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the leading Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced the appointment of Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) as ranking member of the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee. Moskowitz, who said earlier this year that he is “to the right” of Vice President JD Vance in his support of Trump’s illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran, is one of the strongest supporters of Israel in Congress.

This, at a time when three-quarters of Democratic voters oppose US aid to Israel—up from just 45% three years ago—and after the issue was a factor in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

A majority of Democratic voters also believe that Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza is a genocide, a position also held by United Nations experts, around 20 countries that joined South Africa’s ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, human rights groups, and scholars around the world—including in Israel.

Jasper Nathaniel, a US journalist known for his coverage of Israel’s illegal occupation, settler colonization, and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, posted on X: “The entire bipartisan political establishment has coalesced around a willful misreading of what Hasan Piker said in order to silence criticism of Israel. They’re doing the same thing to Mark Ruffalo in Hollywood. It’s all fucking gaslighting. Don’t give an inch.”

“What Hasan said is completely intuitive. Everyone knows that Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—and the Jewish institutions’ blanket support for it—has created more hostility towards Jews,” he added. “There is no good-faith argument against this.”

Below is a fuller transcript of Piker's remarks. No doubt much that some would disagree with, but there's no call for or justification of violence – the opposite, actually. pic.twitter.com/AZiksRy4VR

— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) August 25, 2026

Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic asserted Wednesday that “centrists despise Hasan Piker more than they want to win.”

“It’s an extreme stretch to describe Piker’s remarks as an incitement of or justification for violence and bigotry against Jews,” he continued. “The basic point he’s making—that the tendency by pro-Israel voices to conflate Jewishness with lockstep support for Israel makes Jews less safe—has been made by a number of Jewish voices, including Ezra Klein at The New York Times, David Klion at The Nation, Norman Solomon at The Guardian, union organizer Molly Kraft, and Hannah Arendt nearly 80 years ago.”

The dispute has now ensnared Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who campaigned alongside Piker during his successful Democratic primary bid. El-Sayed has somewhat distanced himself from Piker’s comments, emphasizing that the campaign represents his own views and condemning antisemitism. It hasn’t placated establishment Democrats.

Some Democrats have implored their party to keep its eyes on the proverbial prize—winning back Congress—instead of engaging in senseless internecine battles.

“Billionaires are draining our resources to develop a technology they want to replace us, millions will lose Medicaid in the new year to pay for tax cuts for the rich, and we’re spending billions on genocidal wars the voters oppose,” said Melat Kiros, the progressive Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. “But sure, let’s keep talking about Hasan Piker.”

It’s not just Democratic Socialists of America-type progressives who get it. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) admonished reporters during a Wednesday campaign rally for El-Sayed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

.@RepDebDingell (D-MI) says Hasan Piker is "not what November is about," and that Republicans are trying to divide Democrats over it: "I'm still trying to figure out is it the reason he exercises and looks buff why he has so many followers?" pic.twitter.com/zZLTCHHbTy

— CSPAN (@cspan) August 26, 2026

“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,” she said angrily. “It’s not what November is about.”

“Republicans are… trying to divide us,” she continued. “And we’ve got to stop letting them try to divide us.”

Weighing in on corporate Democrats’ attacks on Piker from across the Atlantic, British writer and activist Owen Jones said Wednesday that “the Democratic establishment know they’ve lost their base. These smears are driven by panic.”

“The bottom line about what’s happening here is this: The American people have turned against Israel in revulsion at the genocide and want to stop facilitating its crimes. That opposition is overwhelming among the Democratic rank-and-file,” he continued.

“But the Democratic Party establishment remains invested in the alliance with Israel—and they fear being swept aside by pro-Palestinian left-wing candidates in upcoming primaries,” Jones asserted, adding that centrists “would prefer to lose to the Republicans than win with the left. They would prefer to keep facilitating Israel’s genocide and heinous crimes rather than win.”

“That’s what we are dealing with here,” he added. “And if it means destroying US democracy to defend Israel—that’s a price they’re willing to pay.”

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sanders, expressed a similar sentiment on social media.

“You’ve never seen corporate Democrats fighting as hard and as on message against Trump as they are against Hasan right now,” he said. “It’s insane.”

Scientists and climate action campaigners on Thursday pointed to the collapse of a glacier as a likely cause of disastrous flash flooding in Tibet and Nepal’s Rasuwa district, where emergency workers are searching for more than 1,300 missing people after water and mud poured into the Trishuli River valley, crashing through villages where thousands of people live and sweeping away bridges, homes, and miles of roads.

An initial assessment by geologists and glaciologists found that in satellite imagery taken before the flooding, a glacier was seen about 4,000 feet above the valley where at least 353 people were later killed Wednesday by the rushing waters and mudslide.

The glacier appeared about 2 million square feet smaller after the flooding, while the valley was “strewn with ice and mud” and the nearby river was “swollen beyond its banks, submerging the surrounding vegetation beneath murky brown floodwaters.

The scientists said an “ice avalanche”—a massive chunk of ice that fell off a glacier in the mountainous region and into the valley below, was likely at least partially to blame for the flash flooding, but noted that it was too early to rule out other or additional causes.

The satellite imagery appeared to show that “a glacier in the area basically snapped off in a clean break, allowing it to fall just over a vertical kilometer to the valley bottom,” Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, told The New York Times. “The bottom looks like a bomb exploded—it’s just deposits from the broken-up glacier.”

The chunk of ice was likely about 2,000 feet wide, Shugar told the Times, and fell nearly 4,000 feet—a fall that would have “pulverized” the ice into water.

Aakriti Dotel, national network coordinator for the climate action group Nepalese Youth for Climate Action said the floods were “another painful reminder of the growing climate crisis facing Nepal and the Himalayas.”

“As our glaciers melt and extreme weather events become increasingly unpredictable, communities living downstream are bearing the devastating consequences,” said Dotel. “We mourn the lives lost and the livelihoods affected and call for urgent global climate action. There must be stronger support for vulnerable mountain communities, and accountability from those most responsible for the climate crisis.”

The disaster stunned officials in the area, where there had been no rainfall before the floodwaters and mudslide overtook the region.

Intense videos circulating on social media Wednesday showed people attempting to run away as water and mud crashed into villages in the region.

🇳🇵🌊 Nepal flash flood kills at least 95, hundreds missing

➤ A massive flash flood swept away villages in Nepal’s mountainous Rasuwa district near the Tibet border Wednesday, killing at least 95 people and leaving hundreds missing, including 384 tourists and eight South Korean…

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) August 26, 2026

Tom Fletcher, the United Nations humanitarian chief, said he had mobilized $2 million from the UN Global Emergency Fund “to save lives with emergency medical care, shelter, water.”

The secretary-general of the Nepal Red Cross told CNN that about 20,000 houses have been “swept away” in the region.

“These people do not have anything,” said Rishi Khanal. “To feed them for some time, some days is a very serious thing to us… The shelter problem is there. The drinking water problem is there.”

A truly desperate assessment out of Nepal from the Secretary General of @NepalRedCross: pic.twitter.com/QrJ4vZhmSz

— Becky Anderson (@BeckyCNN) August 26, 2026

A police officer in the village of Syabrubesi told the Times that waves of water crashed into his police station Wednesday morning, right after he got off the phone with a friend who had warned him a flood was headed toward the town.

“One of my senior officers and I were together when the wave struck. I was thrown out, but he was unlucky and was buried or swept away,” he told the newspaper. “I cannot explain how big the waves were. They engulfed several-meters-high buildings in a fraction of seconds… It wasn’t just water. It was a combination of boulders, sand, and thick sludge.”

Seven people were working at the station when the flood hit, and the officer is one of three who have been found alive. He said he was concerned that the other four are among the missing.

Homes, schools, government buildings, and the office of a hydropower project are among the infrastructure destroyed in Syabrubesi.

More than 160 glaciers in Nepal have entirely melted in recent decades, as scientists have warned that continued fossil fuel extraction is heating the planet and causing dangerous extreme weather. The area of the country’s glaciers also shrank by about one-quarter between 1970-2010.

At The Conversation, Levan Tielidze, a research fellow in glacial geomorphology at Monash University, wrote that “it’s too early to say this was the exact cause. But we know that the great ice stores of the Himalayas—known as the world’s ‘third pole’ because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic—are no longer safe.”

Tielidze continued:

What happened in Nepal is likely due to an enormous ice-and-rock landslide sweeping down a mountain pass and gathering up ice, water, rock, trees and dirt.
The landslide was so large it was originally thought to be an earthquake, as the seismic energy registered as a 4.4 magnitude quake on seismographs.
By the time it reached Gyirong Port—a China-Nepal border crossing—the wall of debris resembled a tsunami of dirt. Early estimates suggest the wave may have been 30 meters high.

Rising global temperatures have been linked to previous collapses of glaciers, including in Switzerland last year when the Birch Glacier wiped out nearly an entire town of 300 residents, who had evacuated before the disaster. Eleven mountain climbers were also killed by a glacier collapse in Italy in 2022.

“Every destabilized glacier in a warming Himalaya is a ticking time bomb that can go off unannounced, and when it does, those least responsible for the climate crisis pay with their lives,” said Savio Carvalho, head of campaigns and networks for 350.org. “This moment of grief has a clear message for world leaders: Delay is deadly. Rich countries must finally deliver the finance and protection they owe frontline communities. Without a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, the planet will continue to heat up and lives can be lost in a flash.”

Democratic leaders and a “pro-voter” coalition on Tuesday announced separate actions to combat President Donald Trump’s attack on voting by mail after the US Supreme Court’s right-wing majority delivered a “painful setback” for critics who argue the Republican’s executive order is unconstitutional.

The president’s March order directed the US Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of citizens eligible to vote, states to provide voter information to the federal government, and the United States Postal Service to craft new regulations for absentee ballots—for which the USPS published a final rule last Friday, less than three months away from the midterm elections.

The nation’s top court said in a 6-3 decision on Monday that Democrat-led states had not demonstrated sufficient standing to challenge the president’s order and paused a lower court injunction blocking its implementation. The attorneys general in that case, Trump v. California, vowed to keep fighting back, and as of Tuesday evening, others already are.

The chairs of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Governors Association, US Senate and House minority leaders, and heads of the party’s campaign committee for each chamber of Congress on Tuesday announced the filing of a new motion for a preliminary injunction.

“Today, we are taking strong, joint legal action to stop Trump’s unlawful attempt to restrict mail-in voting through the Postal Service,” said DNC Chair Ken Martin, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY), Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), and Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.) in a joint statement.

“Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling did not say that Trump’s executive order attacking voting rights is constitutional,” they stressed. Rather than ruling on the merits of the challenge, the majority of justices simply said that the states had sued prematurely, as federal efforts to respond to Trump’s order were still underway.

“But the law is clear: States have the authority to run elections—not the president,” the Democrats said. “”We will not stand by while Trump and Republicans try to unnecessarily inject chaos and confusion into our elections, just weeks before voting begins. We are asking a district court to immediately stop the Trump administration from unlawfully disrupting mail-in voting in every state. Democrats will continue fighting every day until Trump’s illegal executive order, and all of his other attempts to undermine our free and fair elections, are completely thrown out.“

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Democracy Defenders Fund (DDF) also continued their battle against the order, filing a new complaint on behalf of the Arizona Students’ Association, League of United Latin American Citizens, Secure Families Initiative, Texas’ Travis County, and the city of Madison, Wisconsin.

BREAKING: we just filed to STOP the new USPS rule on mail ballots

The Court only held that the injunction came too early. Now we HAVE a final rule & we are litigating it@DDFund_ & @CampaignLegal are proud to represent LULAC, Madison WI & Travis County TX pic.twitter.com/e7MTj66U0W

— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) August 25, 2026

“Key provisions of the president’s second executive order on elections have already been declared unlawful in multiple federal cases,” said Anna Baldwin, CLC’s director of voting rights litigation. “But the US Supreme Court’s recent lawless order on the shadow docket has given USPS the green light to attempt to implement their new mail voting rules—mere weeks before mail ballots start to be sent out in some parts of the country.”

“But nothing in the Supreme Court’s procedural order suggests that the rules are lawful,” Baldwin emphasized. “We will not let the president’s dangerous anti-voter agenda go unchecked, so we’re filing a new complaint challenging USPS’ unconstitutional new rulemaking to ensure all voters can cast their ballot in November.”

Ripping Trump’s order as a “reckless power grab that would likely result in mass confusion, chaos, and disenfranchisement of eligible absentee voters,” DDF legal director Tianna Mays said that “this rule not only places ordinary Postal Service employees in the untenable position of determining whether eligible voters may receive and cast mail ballots, it wreaks havoc on state and local election officials and civic engagement groups.”

“If not stopped,” Mays warned, “our clients, voter advocacy groups, and local election officials in two states would be tasked with deciphering, implementing, and educating their staff and members about the rule’s requirements, just weeks before Election Day.”

Separately on Tuesday, Massachusetts-based US District Judge Indira Talwani found that the Trump administration violated her injunction by finalizing the rule published last week by the Postal Service, though she declined to take any action over it.

The group behind that case, the League of Women Voters Massachusetts, also pledged to keep fighting Trump’s efforts to restrict voting by mail—despite repeatedly voting that way himself—after the Supreme Court’s interim ruling on Monday.

Once again, anti-semitism is being cynically—and falsely—​​redefined in the press and broader Discourse as “pointing out uncomfortable facts about the nation state of Israel.”

This past weekend, the Israel Crybully Lobby, using a familiar script I’ve detailed before, led a smear campaign against actor Mark Ruffalo because he had the temerity and integrity to note that the family vying to control not only 60 Minutes and CBS News, but CNN and HBO, is a committed and open supporter of Israel and its genocidal military. 

Ruffalo is leading a broad coalition of antitrust activists, creatives, and filmgoers to oppose the pending Skydance Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger and, in doing so, violated an unwritten rule against noting that the father-son duo behind the merger, David and Larry Ellison, are well-documented and open zionist advocates that not only lobby for and support Israel, but “privately” donate to their military. A military that—it’s worth noting—Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, OxFam, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and dozens of other humanitarian and human rights organizations have determined is committing genocide in Gaza. Ruffalo also pointed out that the Ellisons’ $400 billion fortune was largely built on military and surveillance technology from Oracle that is used, in part, to surveil, imprison, and kill Palestinians, as well combat opposition to Israel stateside.  

Ruffalo simply noted the open and well-documented ideological commitments that the Ellisons themselves have long championed.

Predictably, the Israel Crybully Lobby and its one-note propaganda organs in the nonprofit and media world responded to these comments by accusing Ruffalo of “antisemitism” and engaging in “tropes”—many of which are not, of course, tropes in any traditional sense, but simply Things That Are Awkward To Mention. Paramount Skydance released a whiney and self-indulgent statement saying “We are, as always, troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked.… Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong—they’re a bridge too far.” This statement, and related scandalizing of Ruffalo’s otherwise true and banal comments, were echoed by Hollywood press outlets such as Variety magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Wrap, the latter of which is owned by Sharon Waxman, an open supporter of Israel and its genocide in her own right. Needless to say, the Wrap has been covering this like Watergate, with nonstop breathless headlines, even laughably citing NATO-funded think tanker Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib as a “Leading Palestinian Activist.”

This campaign failed at shutting up Ruffalo, who defended himself on Twitter/X, where he received an outpouring of support. But more zionist advocacy organizations—always posing as “antisemitism” monitors, such as the Anti-Defamation League, Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Creative Community for Peace, and L.A. Jewish Federation—joined the pile-on. All four groups are openly supportive of Israel and its genocidal military and largely exist to smear Israel critics as antisemites regardless of the tone or nature of the criticism. 

Despite the “antisemitism scandal” playbook being less and less effective, it’s not stopping the Israel Crybully Lobby from using it to discipline Ruffalo and other actors who dare support basic human rights, or in this case, actors who connect Oracle’s obscene wealth with their intimate involvement in the US and Israeli security state. The whole “antisemitism” and “trope” charge is even more absurd since, in context, in addition to Ruffalo simply citing Oracle’s Executive Vice-Chair Safra Catz’s own dystopian words about their “really profoundly scary technologies,” Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison is open in his support for not just Israel as some romantic abstraction, but the IDF itself. In 2024, upon announcing his purchase of Paramount, Ellison’s Skydance issued a dressed-up press release in the Jerusalem Post detailing how his buying of Paramount would be good for Israel:

“These two young men [Ellison being one of the men] love Israel, are connected to their Judaism, have Zionist values, and it’s very encouraging to see that in such successful families, the values are passed on to the younger generations. Both quietly donate quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF. It is positive news for the Jewish world that Korff and Ellison are the next generation of global Jewish leadership, connected to Israel and holding Zionist values.” 

The piece would go on to note that the “article was written in cooperation with SkyDance” which is another way of saying it’s a touched-up press release issued by Skydance. So here is Ellison using his own company to boast how great his purchase of Paramount would be for Israel (setting aside how funny it is to point out how you “quietly” support a cause in your own company’s press release), thus openly acknowledging that his media properties would reflect Israel’s line. A promise immediately confirmed by Ellison’s first major hire post-Paramount purchase: self-identified “zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss, who he immediately put in charge of all of CBS News. The family patriarch, Larry Ellison, has even deeper ties to Israel: In addition to being the single largest private donor to the IDF, leaked emails revealed last year that in 2015 the elder Ellison vetted then-candidate for President Marco Rubio on behalf of the Israel ambassador to the UN. 

Israel is a nation state, a political entity; zionism is an ideology, a worldview that violently privileges Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. Neither are protected religions, cultures, or identities. Adults have to be able to separate these two things—one being an ethno-religious identity and the other being an ideological choice—when discussing the dispossession, occupation, and mass killing of Palestinians, and how this right-wing worldview dovetails with media ownership, US imperialism, the military state, and free speech suppression in the United States. It is certainly possible to criticize Israel and its supporters while engaging in antisemitic tropes, but Ruffalo did not come remotely close to doing this, and it’s deeply cynical to claim he did without presenting any credible evidence. Instead we just get mindless working of the refs, increasingly hollow pro forma language about “tropes” and “antisemitism,” whining and chauvinist solipsism from deluded rich ideologues high on their own zionist media supply. Ruffalo simply noted the open and well-documented ideological commitments that the Ellisons themselves have long championed. Adults should be able to talk about very rich people’s connections to militaries without everyone reaching for the antisemitism smelling salts. This script—where powerful, wealthy and deeply ideological actors cry and whine and piss and moan about being the victims of racist abuse because someone dares highlight their backing of a nation state and its military—is as dangerous and sleazy as it is tedious and, one can only hope, diminishing in its returns.

Politicians from Canada’s two biggest political parties vowed on Monday to hit back hard against US President Donald Trump’s trade war against their country.

Trade negotiations between the two countries collapsed last week after Trump reportedly sought to restrict Canada from striking trade deals with other nations, while also pressuring the country to scrap requirements aimed at preserving the use of the French language.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that Trump’s aggression would come back to hurt US workers.

“It’s not a surprise that the US would take some form of reprisal to our response to their unjustified tariffs,” said Carney, a member of the center-left Liberal Party. “But what message does that send to the workers in Michigan and Ohio and Kentucky and Alabama who rely on Canadian demand? We’re their largest customer for automobiles, more than the European Union, Japan, Korea.”

Mark Carney: "It's not a surprise that the US would take some form of reprisal to our response to their unjustified tariffs, which was on top of other unjustified tariffs. But what message does that send to the workers in Michigan and Ohio and Kentucky and Alabama who rely on… pic.twitter.com/2o5rbEmQAo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 24, 2026

Carney also said there was an “attitude at the negotiating table” from US officials that “Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” which is “not something we’re going to accept.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a member of the rival center-right Progressive Conservative Party, delivered a more strident rebuke to Trump, vowing that Canada’s response would deliver a hit to the president’s voters.

“The red states, we’re going to hit hard,” said Ford.

The Ontario premier then outlined all the ways his country can make life more painful for US consumers so long as Trump keeps trying to undermine Canadian sovereignty.

“If it gets really, really bad, I say everything’s on the table,” Ford said. “We need everyone to be on Team Canada and throw everything and the kitchen sink at them, no matter if it’s electricity, if it’s fuel, again, if it’s potash, if it’s uranium. We need to have everything on the table… we can put massive pain on the US. President Trump underestimates us. And that’s the biggest mistake.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford: "We need to throw everything and the kitchen sink that them — electricity, fuel, potash, uranium … we can put massive pain on the US. President Trump underestimates us. And that's a mistake." pic.twitter.com/IRIidj0iYS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 24, 2026

Trump lashed out at both Carney and Ford in a Monday morning Truth Social post.

“The USA will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada,” Trump wrote. “Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive—it’s where they get all of their money and, because of their current bad leadership, primarily Governor Carney, and his Flunky, Ford, they will not be allowed to keep taking advantage of the United States—their key to survival.”

The US military has resumed its campaign of bombing alleged drug-trafficking vessels after a two-month pause in a campaign that many legal experts and human rights groups believe constitutes a murder spree.

In a Monday social media post, US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said it carried out a “lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes” in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday. Two people were killed as a result of the attack, SOUTHCOM claimed.

In announcing the strike, SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis Donovan said the attack was part of a campaign of “imposing total systemic friction on narco-terrorists—disrupting their operations, dismantling their leadership, and eliminating cartel terror across the region.”

Donovan’s boasts about the effectiveness of the boat strikes in combating the drug trade come less than a month after a leaked a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) analysis revealed that the boat-bombing campaign has not “reduced the amount of cocaine entering” the country, as drug cartels have found alternate methods for shipping their product into the US.

With the latest two casualties, the boat bombing campaign launched nearly a year ago by President Donald Trump’s administration has now claimed the lives of at least 223 people.

Adam Isaacson, director of the Defense Oversight program at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), criticized the administration for resuming its boat bombings despite “overwhelming evidence that they are murder; that many, likely most, of the dead are either super-low-level or uninvolved with drugs; and that cocaine supply is unaffected.”

Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, delivered a similarly scathing assessment, commenting that “the Trump administration’s lawless killing spree at sea resumes.”

Nicholas Grossman, professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, described the boat strike campaign as “murderous” and “illegal,” adding that its victims are “not terrorists” and “may not even be drug traffickers.”

Investigative journalist Camila Lourdes Galarza observed that “there’s still no proof any of the victims” of the boat strikes were involved in the drug trade.

Lourdes Galarza sarcastically added that if the victims had been drug traffickers, “the US would probably give them a deal” like the one given to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was pardoned by Trump last year despite being previously convicted on narcotics trafficking charges.

On Tuesday morning, a coalition of leaders and members from labor, community, and faith organizations in Minnesota denounced Operation Puppet Master, an alleged campaign by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to spy on Minnesotans during Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. In a press conference held outside of Target’s headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, the coalition urged Minnesotans to continue standing in solidarity with one another, and demanded companies headquartered in the state sign the business for democracy pledge.

The call comes after the New York Times published a report on August 13 about the campaign by DHS. Details were made public in a motion for discovery filed by Kevin Riach, an attorney for healthcare worker Isaac Sant. According to the motion, federal agents “surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state. The agents gathered information about Minnesotans from law enforcement databases and internet searches, and created dossiers that are apparently now available agency-wide.” 

The documents describe surveillance and infiltration of union and community meetings during and before Operation Metro Surge. Eighteen organizations, including labor unions, were listed in a chart connecting them to Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN), a group of individuals who resisted what coalition members call a “terror campaign” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Operation Metro Surge. Sant is one of 15 individuals who were indicted and charged by the federal government for conspiracy in what organizers have called an act of political repression and retaliation. More than half of the 15 are rank-and-file union members, and now the federal government is claiming labor organizations to be part of the alleged conspiracy. The motion continues: “With no evidence, the government alleged to the grand jury that this conspiracy in this case extends far beyond the defendants to include the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Monarca, Veterans for Peace, and the Grease Pit bicycle repair shop, among others.”

In addition to the AFL-CIO, Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE) Local 59, and Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE), SEIU Local 26 is also named by DHS along with the Workers Solidarity Circle and Black Cat Workers Collective. The motion also states that Homeland Security Investigations subpoenaed financial records for several labor unions, including SEIU locals in Minnesota and the Communication Workers of America (CWA). 

Alec Stewart is a MAPE union member and one of the Minnesota 15. “The revelation of Operation Puppet Master exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering folks in the street, they were also attempting to disrupt and dismantle one of the facets of Minnesota that makes us so unique, and that is our strong and unified labor movement,” he said at the press conference.

Treasure Thoreson is a teacher, executive board member at MFE Local 59, and one of the Minnesota 15. Thoreson spoke at the press conference about the food drives, fundraisers, grocery deliveries, and support that educators gave to their community all while continuing to show up to schools to educate students. “The government feels so threatened by our ability to come together and use our protected First Amendment rights, our legal rights as unionists that they feel they must surveil and disrupt. However, that to me is a signal that what we are doing is effective, impactful, and powerful,” she said. According to Thoreson, a GoFundMe that she donated to was flagged by DHS as evidence that she is part of a conspiracy.

Gabriel Van de Water is a community organizer and artist who is one of the Minnesota 15. Van de Water referred to a report by Human Rights Watch detailing the human rights abuses that happened under Operation Metro Surge. “Human Rights Watch referred to the occupation as a manufactured crisis. This administration has chosen to follow up that crisis with a manufactured conspiracy,” said Van de Water. “The Minnesota 15 case and others like it must be understood as an attempt to criminalize dissent, to make an example out of some of us so that all of us hesitate to exercise our rights to protect one another. We will not allow this to happen.”

Kieran Knutson is president of CWA Local 7250, which was also named in the document. “We are more determined than ever to stand up to our repressive government. We are more determined than ever to stand in solidarity with working class people,” he said. “The Minnesota 15 are some of the finest people I know. These are our people, we have their backs. We know that this prosecution against them is a bogus attack on the entire movement.”

Emilia Gonzalez Avalos, the executive director of Unidos MN, a grassroots social justice organization, spoke about the surveillance and infiltration enacted by the federal government on community members and noted the silence of corporations like Target. “They sat in our libraries, in training rooms, and wrote down what we thought about the Constitution. They took down license plates outside a church in Roseville, and built files of the families inside, their addresses, children, and where they work. Federal agents walked into a Target store in Richfield and detained two citizens who were at work,” said Gonzalez Avalos. “To this day, Target has said nothing about it. We came here today because that silence still has answers available.”

Target has been the center of national boycott campaigns for rolling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments, and now this Minnesota coalition is demanding that the corporation meet with coalition members before early voting begins on September 15. Best Buy, 3M, and Cargill were also named by the coalition as corporations that are being urged to sign the pledge.

There is also a labor-endorsed call to boycott Target during the back-to-school season. President of MFE Local 59 Marcia Howard highlighted this call by the American Federation of Teachers that was supported by the national AFL-CIO, which passed a resolution supporting the boycott at its constitutional convention held in Minneapolis in June. 

“Educators spend eight billion dollars on back to school supplies,” said Howard. “Between AFT calling for a boycott and AFL-CIO extending that boycott, the only thing that this corporation needs to do is make good. Make good for Alex Pretti, for Renee Good. For all of us who have been in the streets, for our students, for each other.”

Target made $5.1 billion in profits in 2025, and its chair and former CEO Brian Cornell pulled in over $21 million. 

Bernie Burnham, the president of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, which represents 1000 local unions and hundreds of thousands of workers in the state, said at the press conference that “attacks on labor are not new. Those with power always push back when they face the kind of solidarity we saw in Minnesota last winter.” Burnham continued, “Instead of holding federal agents accountable for shooting and killing Renee Good and our [American Federation of Government Employees] union brother Alex Pretti, or addressing the dangerous and deadly conditions within immigration and detention facilities, the Trump administration continues to weaponize our federal government to intimidate our unions, our communities, and anyone who peacefully opposes their radically authoritarian agenda.”

Coalition members say they remain unintimidated. “Countless Minnesotans rose to the occasion and stood strong in the face of what the Trump administration tried to do to our communities and the whole nation owes those Minnesotans a debt of gratitude,” said Phillip Cryan, the executive vice president of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota & Iowa. “We keep us safe. If they come after any of us, 15 of us, or 1500 of us, the hundreds of thousands of us who did what we needed to do this winter to protect our communities, will be there to support them.”

President Donald Trump on Wednesday insisted that Americans should welcome artificial intelligence data centers in their communities, despite polls showing widespread opposition to their construction across the US, as well as mounting evidence of their negative impacts on the environment, public health, and Americans’ utility bills.

During a White House event with cryptocurrency and technology leaders, Trump was asked what he would say to working-class voters who backed him in the 2024 election but are skeptical about the benefits of AI.

Trump said he saw no reason why there should be opposition to building data centers, which have drawn criticism for producing pollution and forcing major spikes in utility bills thanks to their massive energy needs.

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant, or a data center, I would absolutely want it,” Trump explained. “The jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are enormous. And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”

The president then suggested that the only reason data centers aren’t popular is due to lack of effective propaganda from the tech industry.

“Maybe it could use a little public relations help,” he said.

Trump: "If I were the mayor of a town or the governor or a state, and I had a chance to get a big data center, I would absolutely want it" pic.twitter.com/9caqZ8L76b

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2026

An internal memo written by the National Republican Senatorial Committee that leaked to Axios on Wednesday warned Silicon Valley that data centers were massively unpopular throughout the country and were putting GOP candidates at risk.

In particular, the memo singled out the US Senate race in Ohio, where former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown has used incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted’s support for data centers as a cudgel.

“If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly,” the memo cautioned, “the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.”

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the backlash to data centers has gotten so strong that it has inspired recall campaigns against officials who approved their construction in states including Missouri, Oklahoma, and Michigan.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has proposed a nationwide moratorium on AI data center construction, told the Times that opposition to Big Tech should be a basic litmus test for any ambitious politician.

“People are standing up and saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,’” Sanders said. “If you can’t have the guts to stand up to some large corporation, you should not continue serving in office.”

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, first authorized through bipartisan legislation in 2009, has been credited with helping to dramatically reduce the number of American teenagers who have experienced unwanted pregnancies in the past decade and a half, dropping by more than 65% over 16 years, according to one congressional report.

Despite the best efforts of President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a federal judge’s ruling on Wednesday sent the message that the push to reduce teen pregnancy in the US will continue, with the administration’s limits on the program’s federal grants paused.

Judge Christopher Cooper of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Hennepin County, Minnesota v. US Department of Health and Human Services, in which officials joined King County in Washington state, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in challenging HHS’s changes to the program’s grant policy. The plaintiffs were represented by Public Citizen and Democracy Forward.

The changes, said Cooper, were “likely arbitrary and capricious.”

LAWSUIT WIN: The court blocked the Trump admin’s attempt to turn the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program into an abstinence-only program.

The court said the plan would seem to defy social reality, common sense, & scientific evidence alike.

A win for young Americans' wellbeing.

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 19, 2026

The new policy, announced in June, canceled 53 of 66 active grants that had gone to public universities, health departments, and nonprofits for programming related to sex education, including information that was given to teens on contraception and communication with sexual partners.

In Trump’s 2027 budget, the grants are described as promoting “radical leftist ideology,” and officials claim there is no evidence that teen pregnancy prevention programs that go beyond educating young people about abstinence have “contributed to the historic decline in teen pregnancy, which is now at an all-time low.”

Under new guidance issued in June, Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) program grantees are required to focus lessons on abstinence, deemphasize contraception, and teach teens about fertility and “body literacy.”

“HHS is perfectly entitled to formulate its own views about how to stem teen pregnancy—or even whether it is worth preventing at all—and to pursue policy initiatives consistent with its viewpoint. But it is not at liberty, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), to impose conditions on grant recipients that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained. The preliminary record suggests that HHS has done just that,” wrote Cooper in the ruling.

“Through the TPP, Congress sought to fund a range of evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention strategies, not just abstinence. According to unrebutted record evidence, programs that teach abstinence to the exclusion of all other approaches are ineffective in delaying sexual initiation and reducing adolescent pregnancy, at least as a general matter,” Cooper continued.

The judge took aim at the administration’s promotion of “body literacy,” which he called “a nebulous concept that appears to elevate fertility and marital procreation over well-tested forms of contraception and pregnancy prevention.”

Cooper also suggested that HHS had not bothered to find genuine evidence of its claims about “body literacy,” instead “remarkably” referencing “public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited—a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”

The judge stopped short of reinstating the dozens of grants, amounting to about $67 million, that have been terminated, saying it was unclear whether he had the authority to do so.

The plaintiffs and other advocates of comprehensive sex education have called for a permanent injunction; Cooper called on both parties in the case to propose a schedule for next steps by September 1.

Callie Simon, executive director of SIECUS, said the group was “encouraged that the court has halted implementation of the new harmful policy” but emphasized that “the impacts of terminating existing grants remain.”

“Today’s decision sends a clear message that the Trump-Vance administration cannot replace the proven, bipartisan Teen Pregnancy Prevention program with an ideologically driven alternative that harms young people,” said Simon. “Communities across the country are still without the evidence-based programs they relied on, and we will continue fighting to ensure young people have access to the sex education they deserve.”

Sandra J. Valenciano, director and health officer for public health in Seattle and King counties, said local communities were facing a measurable loss due to HHS’ stripping of TPP grants

“This federal action threatened our ability to complete a study on a new science-based, community-informed sex education curriculum specifically for young men and boys,” said Valenciano. “This ruling gives us hope that we may still be able to get to the finish line with this study and ultimately empower more young people to build healthy families if, when, and how they choose.”

Ruth Richardson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, said the ruling “reaffirms the value of trusted, evidence-based education programs that help youth make informed choices and plan for their futures.”

“Attacks on the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program not only put young people at risk, they also risk increasing costs for taxpayers,” said Richardson. “No one benefits from these politically motivated attacks. It’s time for them to end.”

If education is indeed the great vehicle of social and economic mobility, then higher education is no longer delivering the promise of the “American dream.” In fact, this “dream” has become a fiscal nightmare. Colleges and universities saw 9,000 job cuts and buyouts in 2025, and several college closures, mergers, and looming budget crises have already been announced in 2026. Portland State University is one of the most recent casualties, with a projected deficit of $35 million.

How did we get here?

Universities have been operating like corporations for quite some time now. Business terminologies — like return on investment (ROI), efficiency, strategic alignment, move the needle, transparency, buy-in, revenue generating, burnout, bottom line, deliverable, best practices, and others — have been normalized in strategic plans and administrative reports.

The boards of trustees and presidents running these academic corporations/factories have been boldly claiming that education is business. And just as businesses fail due to strategic missteps, poor financial decisions, and various forms of mismanagement, this “business” called higher ed is on the brink of a great collapse. This collapse has not happened overnight. It certainly did not start with the COVID-19 pandemic. It certainly did not start with blocking international students from attending U.S. universities. It certainly did not start with Donald Trump and the resurgence of McCarthyism, although the various draconian attacks on higher ed under his presidency have exacerbated the collapse.

Decades of mismanagement, fiduciary irresponsibility, a lack of shared governance and accountability, and divestment are responsible for a plethora of failures. Irrespective of these failures, university presidents and boards have been transparent about their singular mindset (at least in their visible actions). To them, growth is essential, but such growth can only take place by cutting various services and programs that are no longer deemed “essential.” Faculty and staff at many institutions have raised warning flags, insisting that universities cannot cut their way to growth. Such illusory growth will weaken programs and prevent students from truly being educated. Such short-term growth will ultimately threaten the long-term foundation of higher ed and lead to the collapse of one of the biggest arenas of 21^st-century thought: the university.

There are also other reasons for this collapse. For decades, universities have overspent on real estate, building fancy residence halls, offering attractive dining services, and raising tuition for students. All of this “added value” has been accompanied by cuts to essential student services (particularly those serving the most marginalized students) and insufficient compensation for overworked faculty and staff. Recent reports by the American Association of University Professors have found that faculty salaries still have not recovered from the decreases they saw during the early COVID-19 pandemic.

While faculty salaries have declined, large investments in athletics, online courses with low completion rates, and other designer programs have drained operational costs and endowments. Decades of reduced investment in the well-being of faculty have led to widespread burnout, watered down the system of tenure and shared governance, and led to the rise of the most exploited class in higher ed: the gig hustlers called “adjuncts.” This system, which Adrianna Kezar calls The Gig Academy, has created serious inequity and contributed long-term damage to faculty morale.

The infrastructure of higher ed has been further damaged by administrative bloat, with institutions hiring consultants — like enrollment management companies — that demand hefty price tags, all while cutting essential staff and overworking the ones that remain. In 2023, Forbes reported on this “skyrocketing” bloat and warned that such exponential growth in non-instructional staff in higher ed will drive up the cost of tuition and push vulnerable institutions to the brink of financial crisis. Meanwhile, due to staff cuts, overworked and underpaid faculty and staff are being asked to meet the demands of students who are increasingly coming to them underprepared and with various issues of mental health, food insecurity, homelessness, and learning styles and disabilities requiring multiple accommodations.

But unlike corporations, there is no government backing to bail universities out of their millions of dollars in structural deficits. They are simply closing or merging, destroying the lives of faculty and staff at various ranks and causing serious educational derailments for their students. The age of “the great resignation” that we witnessed during the pandemic has been replaced by “the age of massive layoffs” in higher ed. In my own state of Oregon, sweeping academic restructuring is underway, with 36 faculty layoffs and the closure of the award-winning and nationally recognized University Studies, a general education interdisciplinary program.

Let’s face it: The greatest danger facing higher education is not the “demographic cliff” but the loss of its fundamental mission to educate students. This shift has been accompanied by the loss of public trust in higher ed to serve the public good. The greatest danger facing higher education is not in its ability or inability to provide students with “job-related skills and training,” but the increasing and crushing debt, akin to a mortgage, that students and their families will be struggling to pay for decades.

No university education should cost over $60,000 per year to deliver just an undergraduate degree, which only a handful can truly afford. And these days, some universities are charging over $90,000 per year. There is no justifiable ROI for this kind of exorbitant cost. Yet, most of us who have been in higher ed for a while now know well that the millions of dollars of structural deficits that almost every university is currently facing did not just accumulate overnight. They are a result of shifting priorities.

Universities are no longer mission-driven to create critical, thoughtful, responsible, and well-rounded citizenry to participate in democracy and serve the public good. Instead, higher ed has traded its long-term intellectual benefits for short-term market and profit-driven (sometimes predatory) programs, with the sole and narrow purpose of training a generation of students for the workforce. This focus on job training, under the umbrella of “professionalism,” may or may not even succeed given the volatility of job markets in the age of artificial intelligence. Yet the disciplines that will be necessary to combat AI, like the humanities, are routinely being devalued.

While university administrators are speculating like gamblers to gauge which revenue-generating “programs” will ultimately survive, they are reducing, cutting, or hamstringing the disciplines in the arts, humanities, and sciences that have a long and storied tradition of cultivating “critical thinking.” Yet this strategy conflicts with studies that show the liberal arts, particularly the humanities, are valuable in terms of long-term employment prospects. According to the Mellon Foundation report “Humanities Graduates Can Find a Great Job. It’s Time to Make This Fact Known”:

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that, at latest count, 96.3 percent of terminal humanities bachelor’s degree holders between the ages of 23 and 32 were fully employed, a share that is on par with that for degree holders in the same age range across all fields. Further, the earnings of terminal bachelor’s degree holders in the humanities are comparable to those of their counterparts in the behavioral/social sciences and the life sciences, while the job satisfaction levels among humanities graduates are in line with those of degree holders in all fields.

This and other reports emphasize that students need to learn and practice deep critical thinking, problem-solving, and ethical reasoning as basic skills to enter and succeed in the job market.

In response to the closure of Hampshire College, Ken Burns, one of the school’s most celebrated alumni, hit the nail on its head: “The greatest danger that faces higher education,” Burns said, “is this transactional tendency that everything is about an exchange that ultimately is economic.” What is lost in this game is the mission that education should be “transformational.”

As bell hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” These days, in the age of fascism and corporatization, any radical space is a threat, and every effort is being made to destroy those threats. Federal policies target disciplines that challenge the status quo or question power structures, like sociology, pushing for them to be eliminated from the curriculum altogether.

This transformation was underway long before the current right-wing attacks on higher education, as universities slowly eroded critical programs through the use of the terminology of “academic prioritization.” Recently, “academic prioritization” has been replaced by new terminologies of “long-term sustainability,” “strategic growth potential,” “indoctrination,” and “demand programs.”

Irrespective of these terms, the end goal is to reduce and eliminate programs, mostly in the humanities, that have created transformational spaces for generations of students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, those who are economically disadvantaged, and first-generation students. Colleges and universities around the country have eliminated humanities majors in art, music, theater, philosophy, history, religious studies, global languages, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnic studies, citing decreased enrollments.

In April, the University of Montana eliminated its master’s degree program in English, focused on Literature and Ecocriticism, raising serious concerns about the university’s identity. “English is such a fundamental core subject within the humanities, and it’s almost like the heart of the humanities is being cut out,” said English Department Chair Louise Economides.

The University of Montana is not the only university where the “heart of the humanities” is being cut out with little to no conversation. The attack has been relentless nationally. Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold have described this crisis as “a crisis of civil society writ large.” They write:

There is no condition in which the humanities are under attack in which the whole university is not under attack. There is no condition in which the university is under attack that the whole of educational infrastructure, public and private, from pre-K up, is not under attack. And there is no condition in which education is under attack in which civil society can remain unimperiled.

Yet none of this is a surprise. While the right-wing attacks on these disciplines and departments have been relentless in recent years, faculty have been witnessing this slow collapse of the arts, humanities, and sciences for quite some time now. The market-driven model that encourages packing students into classrooms like sardines to maximize profits is not conducive to the personal attention that students need in disciplines like the arts and humanities. Many of these departments, slated to be reduced or cut, have been deliberately hamstrung by their administrations (citing low enrollment numbers), resulting in their inability to offer a robust curriculum. The overemphasis on the number of majors these disciplines have is a deliberate strategy to discredit these disciplines. If these programs are retained, they are treated as second-class departments simply serving as the “general education requirements” for the more profitable “revenue-generating” programs.

Higher ed is on the verge of collapsing because it has lost its soul. Can this soul be restored? Perhaps. But this would require a nationwide movement to restore public trust and reclaim higher education, building an academy that is not solely transactional or profit-driven but is deeply invested in serving and collaborating with its broader communities and society writ large. If we cannot do this, then we are one step closer to witnessing the weakening of our civil society and the end of our democracy.

It’s a “Hot Socialist Summer,” proclaims the New York City Democratic Socialists of America Instagram. Indeed, it has been a summer of socialist victories, with more socialists winning electoral office in June than ever, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who are headed to Congress; and the socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is visible everywhere, from announcements about an impending municipally owned grocery store with cheap food staples to the Knicks victory parade to announcing huge gains in back pay for the city’s deliveristas, those who deliver food for DoorDash and Uber Eats.

All this good news feels somehow related to the celebratory atmosphere of summer, a time of cookouts in the park and block parties and dips in bodies of water. But our ability to enjoy summer is deeply tied to the success of the socialist project. That’s because capitalism is ruining summer, and dear reader, only socialism can save it.

Let’s start with the worst part: the weather, brought to you by fossil fuel capitalism. When we think of summer, most of us nostalgically recall childhoods playing on the block, going to the beach, running around barefoot, families grilling at the park — all made possible by the warm, sunny weather. People are still doing all those fun things, but there have been fewer days on which to do them as of late, because the climate crisis has brought some truly horrible weather.

This summer has been marred by deadly heat waves all over the world, including in places like Spain, which used to be a summer vacation destination but at times reached 109 degrees Fahrenheit this summer. Not to mention the awful air quality, which produced many days we couldn’t go outside, caused by wildfires from Canada — a regular feature of the ongoing climate crisis. And on days that were not too hot or polluted to enjoy the outdoors, we were often pelted with flooding rainstorms. All of these forms of extreme weather, and many others, are products of or wildly exacerbated by the climate crisis.

While Democrats, amply funded by fossil fuel capitalists, run away from climate as an issue, claiming it doesn’t poll well, a rising ecosocialist movement fighting for publicly funded renewable energy and against the vampiric, energy-sucking data centers, and electing politicians who will stand up to the fossil fuel and tech polluters, is our only hope.

Of course, summer 2026 has not been an uninterrupted apocalypse. On some days, the weather has been perfect. But for many, capitalist wealth hoarding means that the places they can go to enjoy these days are limited. Since most people don’t have their own private island, the mass enjoyment of summer requires public space. In New York City — mostly because we had social democratic government and powerful unions in the middle of the twentieth century — we do have great pools, beaches, baseball fields, and shady parks. Ninety years ago this summer, as Ted Hamm recently chronicled for the Indypendent, 50,000 New Yorkers attended the grand opening of a new pool in Sunset Park.

“This is the finest swimming pool in the country,” said then Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has cited as a role model, “and it’s all yours.”

That same summer, LaGuardia, who was never anti-capitalist but was closely allied with socialists and revered for his pro-worker policies, opened eleven new pools across the five boroughs, all of which are still open today.

New York has continued in this tradition, and the current socialist administration has done so with enthusiasm and intention. This summer, after seventeen years of disuse, Mayor Mamdani reopened the beautiful art-deco-style Orchard Beach Pavilion, built in 1936 with funding from the Works Progress Administration, now renovated with the historic architecture preserved, with upgraded concessions and communal spaces. Mamdani also expanded the lifeguard program to improve access to its wonderful pools and beaches; the lifeguard union pushed for better pay and bonuses, and the mayor widely publicized those improvements to the job, increasing the number by 150, expanding our access to safe swimming at the city’s fourteen miles of public beaches and seventy-nine outdoor pools. This administration has prioritized summer fun for all, allowing huge free street watch parties during the Knicks playoffs and the World Cup, as well as free outdoor film screenings.

American-style capitalism and its insane work culture also robs us of the time to enjoy summer’s pleasures.

But in much of the United States, people are not so lucky. Good public swimming pools have become harder to find, thanks to austerity and privatization (as well as, in some places, the legacy of segregation). Less than half of Americans live within three miles of a forest. And tragically, 70 percent of our shoreline in the United States is privately owned, with only 10 percent protected by robust public access laws. The rich don’t want to pay taxes to make beautiful public spaces, and they’ve been allowed to not only hoard that wealth but also our most stunning natural resources.

Wrecking the weather and robbing us of beautiful spaces aren’t the only ways that capitalists deprive us of the full fruits of summer. American-style capitalism and its insane work culture also robs us of the time to enjoy summer’s pleasures. As Claire Valdez, a trade unionist and socialist assemblywoman from Queens who was elected to Congress in June, pointed out on the popular Instagram show Subway Takes, New York City has the best beaches, but most people are so busy working that they don’t have enough leisure time to go. The United States is the only rich country that does not obligate bosses to give workers paid vacations; without a union to negotiate such benefits, or fair wages, and with so little else provided — health care, housing, college — many can’t afford to stop working even for a couple weeks.

Socialism is the antidote to the wage slavery and work addiction that the boss class prefers. In fact, socialists invented summer vacation. Ninety years ago, in response to trade union demands and a “holiday movement,” Léon Blum, socialist prime minister of France, mandated paid vacation for all the country’s workers. Blum’s Popular Front government was so committed to summer vacation that it not only required the bosses to allow it but also invested in making summer getaways possible for workers, negotiating with railways to offer vacation packages that workers could afford. Communist governments were also ahead of other countries on summer vacation, requiring employers to offer time off and investing in resorts, campgrounds, and spas where workers could not only relax and return ready to work but also have adventures and experiences outside of work, whether exploring unknown places, engaging in activities like biking, or indulging in the apparently socially sanctioned “resort affair.”

New York City summer benefits enormously from our own socialist history and a current administration eager to govern in that tradition. But as Hamm pointed out in his Indypendent piece on the swimming pools, 1930s working-class New York had a freely flowing spigot of federal money to rely on through the New Deal. Mamdani is trying to do a lot with a very different federal government, one seeking to not to improve summer vacation for working-class people but actually worsen its conditions, even cutting staff and access to cherished public vacation spots like National Parks.

The vibes this summer are strong and the commitment to socialist summer fun meaningful. But it will take a much more fundamental rearrangement of our economy to address climate change, redistribute property and wealth for broadly shared public space, and rewrite labor relations to allow us the real time off that we deserve.

While humanitarian associations’ coverage of Gaza focuses on how to provide food, medicine, and shelter, another devastating consequence of wars is the loss of childhood itself.

According to various reports and estimates, tens of thousands of children have been killed or injured in Israel’s war on Gaza, and many more have been affected by the loss of one or both parents. Large numbers of people have been displaced amid widespread destruction and ongoing genocide since 2023.

It is an unbelievable set of statistics that illustrate the systematic killing of childhood in Gaza and the erasure of new generations from Palestinian society. However, according to Save the Children, an estimated 105,000 to 110,000 children have been born in the Gaza Strip during the war — a new generation born alongside the immense number of children killed.

A New Generation Born Amid War

These children are born with nothing but suffering. Many mothers give birth in makeshift tents, in winter or the heat of summer, under bombardment, and with severely limited medical care. Many children experience starvation, displacement, and the loss of family members and lives around them.

Israel is not only preventing normal life but also restricting the entry of toys into Gaza. A wide range of goods, including toys, have been subject to restrictions entering the Strip. Some in the newest generation of Palestinians in Gaza may not even know what toys or games are.

Regarding the war’s impact, Truthout interviewed Italian psychologist and psychotherapist Damiano Rizzi, president of Fondazione Soleterre, an Italian humanitarian organization founded in 2002 that works to protect the physical and psychological well-being of people across the world.

Rizzi works in the West Bank and supports psychosocial programs for children affected by war in both the West Bank and Gaza.

“Children have trauma that affects emotional regulation, communication, language, and trust in the world,” Rizzi says, describing how war impacts the mental state of children. He explained that when trauma is repeated without a root solution, it becomes more complex and appears more as post-traumatic stress disorder, aggressive behaviors, lack of self-awareness, and difficulties in dealing with relationships.

“Trauma becomes permanent because there is almost no experience of an ‘after’ in which children finally feel safe.”

The normal daily life of a 2- or 3-year-old child has lost much of its meaning and is instead filled with fear. The ability to play with toys is not a secondary aspect of childhood; it is a crucial part of a child’s ability to develop, learn, engage with life, and build essential skills. Instead of doing so, many children in Gaza now are growing up searching for water, standing in food lines, and falling asleep to the sound of explosions.

I have seen this play out in the experience of my 5-year-old brother Yamen, who has lived in Gaza throughout the war and continues to suffer there, since he was not able to come with me on my student visa to Italy. “I really want to have a toy,” Yamen said during a video call I had with my family, who remain in Gaza.

Yamen is one of those children who have lost the experience of childhood. He was only three years old when the war began, so he no longer remembers the toys he once had.

He used to have many toys, but he lost many of them amid the chaos of displacement and the destruction of our neighborhood. Later, during the intense starvation conditions that we faced in Gaza in 2025, when we ran out of fuel and firewood with which to cook, we were forced in desperation to burn Yamen’s remaining plastic toys to make a fire. Too young to understand what was happening, Yamen innocently helped us by bringing more of his little plastic cups and toy dishes to feed the flames so we could prepare a meal. Wanting to help us, he was unaware that we were destroying the last pieces of what had once been his childhood.

Yamen’s young mind cannot fully grasp that he once owned so many toys and that they were all lost. He longs to play, go to kindergarten, and make new friends. However, Israel’s restrictions have shaped even his simplest dreams, where something as small as a toy becomes a reminder of the childhood he might have had before the war.

Children in the Strip are also deprived of the right to education; over 90 percent of Gaza’s school buildings have either been destroyed or repurposed as shelters for families displaced by the war. Instead of attending classes, many children now live in school buildings, having lost both their homes and access to education.

Parents Cannot Provide Safety

When a child like my brother asks for a toy, he is not asking for a simple material possession. He is asking for something ordinary: the right to play, imagine, and experience a moment of normal childhood.

Children usually look to their parents for reassurance that the world around them is safe. In Gaza, however, many parents are themselves terrified, exhausted, and overwhelmed by the daily struggle to survive. They spend hours searching for food, clean water, or a safe place to shelter, leaving little emotional energy to comfort their children or help them feel secure. Instead of protecting their children from fear, many parents are forced to endure that fear alongside them. The psychological burden of war affects entire families, making it far more difficult for children to find the stability and reassurance they need during their earliest years of development.

For many children, there are no gardens to play in, no toys, no regular activities, and no functioning schools. Countless children have also lost relatives, neighbors, and friends. The ordinary experiences that define childhood have been stripped away, leaving many parents unable to give their children a sense of normalcy. Children used to calm themselves through the reassurance of trusted adults, but what if the adults are themselves traumatized?

Recovery Seems Far Off in Gaza

Healing is nearly impossible when children remain trapped in the same environment that caused the trauma. “Trauma becomes permanent because there is almost no experience of an ‘after’ in which children finally feel safe,” Rizzi said, explaining why many children in Gaza are unable to recover psychologically. As long as displacement, destruction, deprivation of basic rights, disease, and daily suffering continue, they are denied the safety and stability necessary for healing. Instead of leaving trauma behind, these children are forced to relive it day after day during the most formative years of their lives.

When a child like my brother asks for a toy, he is not asking for a simple material possession. He is asking for something ordinary: the right to play, imagine, and experience a moment of normal childhood. When even toys become difficult to access, it reveals the extent to which war has disrupted the most basic elements of children’s lives.

The loss of access to toys is not only about the absence of objects. It reflects the broader destruction of childhood itself — the memories, skills, imagination, and emotional development that shape a generation. The consequences of war extend beyond physical injuries; they also affect the minds and futures of children who are growing up surrounded by fear and loss.

Children in Gaza are growing up shaped by memories that no child should ever have to experience. They are learning the language of loss and fear before they have the chance to discover the possibilities of life. The damage in Gaza affects more than homes and buildings; it reaches a generation that is being shattered by this war even amid the so-called ceasefire.

The U.S. government is attempting to use conspiracy charges to imprison organizers, just as it did in its war against the Black Panther Party, New Left, and other 1960s and ‘70s radicals through its counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. Through this method, the Trump regime shares the goal of the Nixon administration of disrupting and attempting to destroy domestic opposition to its authoritarian agenda.

Two weeks after the September 2025 murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump issued the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The memorandum created a category of “domestic terrorist” that, while lacking legal authority, broadly includes anyone who believes in things deemed as constituting “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” NSPM-7 openly calls for “investigative” tactics designed to “disrupt” and “dismantle” political movements and organizations.

Following the recent use of conspiracy charges to successfully convict people in both the Prairieland case in Texas and the Spokane 3 case in Washington, 15 community members in the Twin Cities were indicted on June 16 for resisting the Trump administration’s December 2025 immigration crackdown dubbed “Operation Metro Surge.” According to the indictment, all defendants are identified as “members and associates of … Direct Action Minnesota (‘DAMN’),” which helped organize Minnesota’s resistance. That organization is now defunct in light of the arrests and revelations about government infiltration.

The primary charge against these 15 community members is that each of them “did knowingly conspire, with other persons known and unknown … to prevent by force, intimidation, and threats officers and employees of the United States Department of Homeland Security from discharging the duties of their officers.” Those accused of “conspiracy” are alleged to have done such routine organizing activities as moderating meetings, engaging in fundraising, posting on social media, and communicating on the secure texting app Signal. Some are also accused of participating in an anarchist speaking tour, called “Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota,” which followed the collapse of the government’s campaign against the people of Minnesota.

Though the mainstream media headlines touted an “Antifa conspiracy,” anarchists are mentioned more in the 94-page indictment, with references to anarchism on 17 pages. While there are many local anti-fascist groups, and exponentially more people who identify as anti-fascist, the way the government is using “Antifa” to signify a single organization is simply false. People with a wide variety of beliefs and political commitments consider themselves anti-fascist. Anarchists historically have fought fascists as far back as the 1936 Spanish Revolution, prior to World War II, as they believe in the possibility of a cooperative world that is diametrically opposite the one that fascists envision. In painting the defendants as members of antifa and as anarchists, the government is attempting to both scare the public and to marginalize and isolate the accused. The U.S. has a long history of targeting anarchists, going back to repression against immigrant anarchist labor organizers in 1880s Chicago, when four outspoken anarchists were hanged for organizing for the eight-hour workday.

Anarchists traditionally oppose all forms of hierarchy, exploitation, and domination, while both advocating and practicing democratic decision-making. Anarchists pose an intersectionally informed opposition to the contemporary cultural, political, and economic organization of society, while offering an alternative vision of a just, cooperative, and free society.

In the interview that follows, organizer Cameron Kennedy, one of the so-called “Minnesota 15” defendants, discusses his thoughts on anarchism, the role it played in organizing opposition to Operation Metro Surge, and how other communities can organize resistance.

The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity.

Paul Messersmith-Glavin: What does anarchism mean to you?

Cameron Kennedy: I think anarchism is deeply misunderstood by most. To me, it’s an egalitarian blueprint for resisting oppression and building a better world that democratizes every aspect of society. That democratizes our communities and workplaces and gives each of us agency and responsibility; where resources are distributed evenly and fairly and not hoarded by the billionaire class.

This wasn’t just a movement without leaders — this was a movement where everyone became a leader.

Maybe more importantly to me personally, it’s a code of conduct that guides my actions and my thinking: to always treat others with respect and grace, to always question and adapt to my surroundings, to educate and work to better myself, to engage with my neighborhood and community, to recognize oppression in all its forms and have the courage to confront it in any capacity I can, as we struggle for a just society.

What aspects of the Twin Cities’ response to Operation Metro Surge, starting late in 2025 until earlier this year, resonate most with anarchist practices and principles?

I think the resistance we saw here in the Twin Cities is deeply and directly influenced by anarchism. There is a strong anarchist and labor history in the Twin Cities that goes back more than 100 years. Anarchists have been deeply involved in movements here, especially since the 2008 Republican National Convention, and in the many uprisings against police brutality, like those around the police murders of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many others. I think this involvement played a role in introducing the wider population to anarchists’ organizing.

The resistance to Metro Surge was entirely decentralized, meaning there were no leaders and everything was organized on a hyperlocal scale by average working people, connected through apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving everyone the ability to coordinate in unison at a macro scale. Mutual aid, long associated with anarchism, became a practice that every neighborhood committed to — for instance, to get food and rent money to our immigrant neighbors who were too under threat to leave their houses.

The raids and indictments woke the Twin Cities up again.

The rapid-response loops and Whipple Watch were designed to observe and report all ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] activity through this decentralized network, in which nearly 100,000 people participated at the height. [Whipple Watch is a counter-surveillance project comprised of locals using their constitutional right to observe law enforcement, specifically at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where most ICE operations are based.] This gave us the ability to respond to ICE raids in as little as three to five minutes almost anywhere in the Twin Cities. This wasn’t just a movement without leaders — this was a movement where everyone became a leader, and that’s exactly what anarchism is. That self-agency, the air-tight community communication, confrontational nature, and adaptability are why our resistance was so successful against Operation Metro Surge.

How have the indictments of the 15 of you been received by the wider community, namely the 100,000+ people that turned out in subzero temperatures to resist ICE?

My co-defendant Cal said it best: “Homeland Security really kicked the hornets’ nest with this one.” The movement against ICE had burned out post-Metro Surge, after the state of Minnesota moved toward a strategy of local law enforcement cooperating with ICE to arrest immigrants on low-level offenses, turning folks over to ICE at county jails. This allowed ICE to quietly and more effectively carry out its work without the constant flashy confrontations of Metro Surge. The raids and indictments woke the Twin Cities up again. Hundreds have rallied at our court dates and the community is mobilizing for another wave of repression. Bluntly, the raids enraged the Twin Cities back into action.

For myself, I’ve received nothing but support here. My neighbors have offered to help my partner and I any way they can, donating money and food. People recognize me on the street and thank me for the work I’m alleged to have done. It’s very clear that the government’s claim that we are “a danger to our own community” is a load of horseshit and just about anyone in the Twin Cities will tell you as much.

Do you have any advice for how organizers can best use the Signal app for secure communication? What are the best protocols for using that app to organize securely and effectively?

The number one rule is: “Always assume there is a fed in the chat and don’t say anything you don’t want read back to you in court.” I firmly believe mass-oriented organizing is crucial, but in that type of approach, it is impossible to avoid infiltration from the state. I don’t think there is any point in vetting large rapid-response groups, but I don’t think we should then throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon mass organizing just because of that. Smaller groups doing mutual aid in the Twin Cities, who were being directly targeted by ICE for supporting their neighbors with grocery runs and rent money, restricted their chats to small groups on a need-to-know basis with trusted individuals. There is no bulletproof way to do this work though. Right now, the State Department is using rapid-response chats that nearly 100,000 people were in as evidence of “conspiracy.” Under an authoritarian state, resisting means taking necessary risks to protect our community and even very legal methods will be targeted if they are effective.

Also in rapid-response chats, it’s really important to use the SALUTE method of reporting ICE activity. SALUTE stands for size, activity, location, uniform, time, equipment. So, for example, that might look like utilizing your constitutionally protected right to observe ICE in your neighborhood and reporting to your local rapid-response group something like: “It’s 8:17 am. There are six ICE officers armed with assault rifles, less-lethal weapons, and riot gear. At 38th and Chicago, that are currently detaining one person. No one else on scene.” By giving accurate and precise information, we avoid the rumor mill and unneeded panic that further confuses and spreads fear in the community.

What lessons have you learned from the successful resistance to the ICE surge that you can pass on to other communities that may be targeted in the future?

I think this decentralized hyperlocal organizing is key, as is being confrontational and taking risks (if you can). Protests still serve a purpose, but it’s clear our politicians aren’t listening and they aren’t protecting us; in fact, they are using local police to attack our community and protect ICE despite what they may say in speeches. This is why it’s up to us to take personal responsibility to protect our communities and not show fear when we confront the state that is murdering our neighbors in the streets.

The government’s claim that we are “a danger to our own community” is a load of horseshit and just about anyone in the Twin Cities will tell you as much.

Activating every element of society — from neighborhoods, workplaces, places of worship and even hobby groups — and then combining them in an informal alliance working together to resist ICE is also essential. Combining unions, activist groups, and rapid-response networks is what lead to the first successful general strike in the U.S. in generations. Those connections built a foundation for society to resist effectively together.

Final note: I want people to study what we did in Minneapolis with a critical lens, then apply and adapt it to where you are. The Twin Cites won the battle of Metro Surge while losing more than 1,700 people to deportations and two people to state-sanctioned street executions. The larger war ICE is waging against communities across the country is still raging and intensifying, and in the last few weeks, we have seen record amounts of families being ripped apart.

I firmly believe that solidarity with each other, including groups you might normally never work with, is key: organizing at a micro level with agency, like anarchists, instead of under the control of a large organization, taking orders from leadership like our dysfunctional political system has indoctrinated us to do. And having the courage to confront the brutality of ICE in a way that effectively protects our immigrant neighbors and isn’t merely performative.

Take responsibility, take risks, take care of each other, and never rely on the very state that is ripping our communities apart and murdering our people to solve the problem that both political parties created. Together, we will march arm-in-arm through the ruins that capitalism has brought on itself into a far better world of our own making.

As progressive, DSA, and DSA-adjacent candidates win primaries throughout the US, corporate media is rushing to prop up their favorite “centrist” and “moderate” critics—who, ostensibly, are just looking out for the wellbeing of the Democratic Party—to explain why these candidates people are voting for are actually dangerous and “unelectable.” What the media is refusing to do, on an institutional level, is disclose the glaring conflicts of interests these groups—backed by billionaires, health insurance giants, pro-Israel lobbying firms, and massive corporations —would have in attacking candidates who undermine their sponsors’ bottom lines and ideological agendas. 

As progressive, DSA, and DSA-adjacent candidates win primaries throughout the US, corporate media is rushing to prop up their favorite “centrist” and “moderate” critics—who, ostensibly, are just looking out for the wellbeing of the Democratic Party—to explain why these candidates people are voting for are actually dangerous and “unelectable.”

As I noted in TRNN in June, certain personalities and parties with blatant conflicts of interest are being boosted by US media—presented as mere neutral observers who are Deeply Concerned About Electability—to dump on insurgent candidates such as Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila-Chevalier, Melat Kiro and, most recently, Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed’s primary victory in Michigan signaled serious upward momentum for the latest progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party—and triggered a PR crisis for the Democratic establishment. That momentum was stemmed this week, if only for now, as DSA-endorsed candidate for Wisconsin Governor Francesca Hong was narrowly defeated—a defeat that was reportedly due, in part, to voter concerns over “electability.” 

But who shapes “electability” perceptions in our media? 

Let’s examine a recent article in The New York Times, which broke the news on August 6, in the wake of El-Sayed’s primary victory, about a $15-million effort by “moderate” group Third Way to attack the DSA specifically and socialism more broadly (despite El-Sayed explicitly being neither a socialist nor a DSA member, but he still champions Medicare for All and cutting US support for  Israel, so the distinction to these groups is purely academic). In response to socialist and progressive primary wins, Third Way President Jonathan Cowan told the Times he is “preparing for war” against candidates he views as insufficiently “moderate.” Central to Third Way’s argument are supposed concerns over the “electability” of Democratic candidates facing MAGA Republicans in the November midterms—a motive taken at face value by The New York Times. 

Third Way does not publish their donors and refuses to answer media inquiries about who keeps their operation financially afloat.

Not once did Times reporter Shane Goldmacher inquire about or address—much less investigate and unearth—who is funding this operation. The money is simply said to come from Third Way. But Third Way does not generate revenue. They are backed by specific interests. “Who are these interests?” seems like a fairly obvious question that a reporter should ask. Alas, it’s not one Shane Goldmacher seems the least bit interested in. 

So who is backing Third Way? 

Third Way does not publish their donors and refuses to answer media inquiries about who keeps their operation financially afloat. But reporting in The Nation in 2013 revealed the group was being backed then by the US Chamber of Commerce, Deutsche Bank, Intel, the Business Roundtable, and the Pharma lobbying giant PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America). More recent digging by The Sludge revealed major donors now include the Republican-run insurance industry front group Better Solutions for Healthcare, PhRMA, CVS Health, pharma giant Johnson & Johnson, and the Business Roundtable. Other major corporate backers include Entergy, Yum! Brands, Amazon, and Meta––all corporations with much to lose in the event Congress passes measures to impose higher taxes on corporations and the rich, or to provide single-payer healthcare for all. 

Additionally, Goldmacher quotes two other “centrist” groups in his Times article—the Center for New Liberalism and Welcome PAC—without noting the patronage they receive from billionaire and corporate interests. The Center for New Liberalism, as I documented in 2023, is a front group for Third Way Foundation (which also goes by the name Progressive Policy Institute) and is funded by ExxonMobil, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Walmart, and Amazon. (The Third Way Foundation used to be related to the aforementioned Third Way, but is now its own independent corporate front group.) 

WelcomePAC, for its part, is funded directly by mega-billionaires: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman; six different relatives and heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton (the richest family in America); Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein; Rupert Murdoch’s son James Murdoch; and Mark Heising, the founder of private equity firm Medley Partners, among others.

Shouldn’t these obvious conflicts of interest at least be mentioned? Noted in passing, maybe? Especially in an article specifically about one of these groups spending $15 million to attack “the left,” shouldn’t a reporter be asking where exactly the $15 million came from?

Shouldn’t these obvious conflicts of interest at least be mentioned? Noted in passing, maybe? Especially in an article specifically about one of these groups spending $15 million to attack “the left,” shouldn’t a reporter be asking where exactly the $15 million came from? Or where the money behind these other Deeply Worried Centrist Groups comes from? Isn’t it relevant to note Third Way’s long history of being funded by Wall Street and the health insurance lobby? For a high school reporter, this would obviously be the first line of questions to ask. Presumably, Third Way didn’t just manifest the money out of thin air… So who is footing the bill? And shouldn’t potential voters know who is paying for this campaign, and others like it, to bombard them with falsely “objective” arguments about who is and isn’t “electable” in America? 

The Times isn’t alone. Recent softball coverage of, op-eds by, or interviews with Third Way and other “moderate groups” in mainstream media also did not disclose who is bankrolling Third Way, which has quickly emerged as a Sensible Voice opposed to the “radical left.” 

Shouldn’t potential voters know who is paying for this campaign, and others like it, to bombard them with falsely “objective” arguments about who is and isn’t “electable” in America? 

Last week, CBS News did a five-and-a-half-minute puff interview with Third Day’s Jon Cowan, in which Cowan was given free rein to bash the DSA and El-Sayed without mentioning that Cowan’s salary is paid by private health insurance companies and other corporate America behemoths that would all stand to lose a lot of money and power in the event Medicare For All became a mainstream Democratic position. The Washington Post, likewise, published an op-ed by Cowan and Third Way Executive Vice President Matt Bennett the next day, in which they lambast El-Sayed and other progressives’ supposed lack of “electability” without disclosing who backs their astroturf “think tank.” Earlier that same week, CNN ran an otherwise balanced segment on “The Left Insurgency” that nevertheless featured an interview with Cowan and introduced Third Way as a “Democratic centrist group” without mentioning the corporate funders paying him to go on CNN and lament about “electability concerns.”

Why is discussion of “electability” almost entirely being shaped by astroturfed corporate front groups with obvious conflicts of interest? 

It’s not that US media should never report on potential “electability” dynamics—with both the center and left––but why not turn to parties with fewer obvious conflicts of interest? Why not consult independent pollsters or academics? Why not ask Left-aligned experts as well as those on the dole of the Health Insurance lobby? Why is discussion of “electability” almost entirely being shaped by astroturfed corporate front groups with obvious conflicts of interest? 

Journalism is supposed to, at least in theory, be about questioning the motives of the powerful, following the money, and connecting the dots. It’s not supposed to be the practice of credulously reprinting the opinions of powerful people presenting themselves as having only the noblest of motivations. 

But here’s the rub: these billionaire- and corporate-backed groups, and their media mouthpieces, can’t talk about the forces propping them up, because to do so would give the game away. They can’t openly discuss or defend their attendant ideologies of capitalism, deregulation, imperialism, and Zionism because these are increasingly unpopular among the Democratic voters whose interests they allegedly care about. So what’s left? If they can’t speak openly about their elite patrons and make arguments from first principles, all that’s left is feigned concern over the “electability” of the “other guy.” That’s why it’s all they talk about. They can’t make arguments for “centrism” or against Medicare for All, so all they have is a nonstop posture of Deep Concern Over Electability, which, over time, gets repeated into becoming conventional wisdom despite no empirical basis for the narrative that “moderate” “centrists” are more electable. It apparently doesn’t matter how many times the centrist wing of the party loses Congress or blows it to Trump, they still claim, through sheer assertion and dogma and endless media spots, that they are uniquely positioned to “defeat republicans.” And this is a posture our media pundits echo without an ounce of skepticism. 

It apparently doesn’t matter how many times the centrist wing of the party loses Congress or blows it to Trump, they still claim, through sheer assertion and dogma and endless media spots, that they are uniquely positioned to “defeat republicans.”

“Moderate” groups like Third Way are fronts for corporate America and billionaire interests; they’re not just aw-shucks groups of concerned citizens with organic worries about Democrats losing in November. Those claiming to be journalists should ask deeper questions, follow the money, and provide readers essential context that the person being held up as a neutral—if vaguely ideological—expert on winning elections is sponsored by the very health insurance industry that stands to lose a great deal should the progressives they’re bashing ever ascend to positions of power.  

As Mainers continue to target Sen. Susan Collins’ office with protests following a recent killing by an immigration agent, new reporting shows how some of the $70 billion she and her GOP colleagues gave to President Donald Trump’s immigration agencies is being spent.

According to the Associated Press on Tuesday:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals.

ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and agents by March, according to a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security.

The devices are known as the GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. They have been used in recent years by some jails and police departments.

As the company’s website explains, “the discomfort associated with the stimulation is usually effective in bringing individuals into compliance in less than three seconds and leaves no burns, marks, or scars.” It describes them as a “humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution for many situations facing our men and women in uniform.”

As if ICE wasn’t sadistic enough, the agency plans to spend up to $20 million to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shockshttps://t.co/y5yMRYecLr

— Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) August 12, 2026

John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, told the AP that the sensation is “immediate and sharp,” comparing it to a “bee sting.”

While he said it could be an effective tool to prevent “resistance,” he warned that it should not be used as a form of punishment against those merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence” or on high-risk populations such as children, pregnant women, or elderly or disabled people.

But given the recent record of rampant civil rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, excessive use of force, and efforts to lie about misconduct, civil rights advocates are warning that these gloves are being placed into, or onto, the exact wrong hands.

“ICE spent the last year showing this country that they are willing to disregard the law and are too quick to use force, with devastating and at times fatal consequences for citizens and noncitizens alike,” Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Common Dreams. “Now they might be equipped with a device that allows them to deliver an electric shock with their hands by pushing a small button, in a move that might be imperceptible to those watching.”

Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, concurred, telling Common Dreams that ICE is a “rogue agency with an $80 billion slush fund that allows them to concoct and fund new ways to visit cruelty upon our communities.”

“Arming poorly trained agents with electric shock gloves to inflict pain on our neighbors is disgusting and barbaric,” Matos added. “Congress must end the blank check to ICE, and ICE must get out of our communities.”

The shock gloves are just one way that immigration agencies are spending the $70 billion in additional funding they were given back in June, when Republicans in the Senate voted 52-47 to authorize the funding despite rampant lawlessness. Only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), voted against supercharging the funding.

In a July 16 letter to Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, Collins defended her vote for the increased ICE funding by pointing to “reforms” passed in April as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s broader appropriations bill, which included $20 million for body cameras and $2 million for “de-escalation” training.

Collins’ office did not immediately respond when asked by Common Dreams whether she believes electric shock gloves were a good form of “de-escalation.”

A five-term senator in the midst of a fierce reelection bid against Democrat Troy Jackson has taken fierce criticism for her vote to support ICE on the campaign trail, which has only grown in intensity since July’s fatal shooting of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford.

It was one of two fatal shootings of men without criminal records over the course of a week. ICE later acknowledged that the victims were not the target of their operations.

When asked after the shooting, Collins declined to say that she regretted her vote for increased ICE funding.

Protesters who gathered outside Collins’ Biddeford office on Tuesday said she should.

“$70 billion to fund the terror that left my family and community in fear,” Fernanda McLaughlin, a Maine resident and community organizer, said over the loudspeaker, according to NBC News Center Maine. “You know what that money can be really used for? To feed Mainers. To fund our schools. To fund our health system.”

“There were no guardrails included, and she still voted yes on it,” McLaughlin said. “Simple guardrails that exist in nearly every other law enforcement agency across our nation.”

A right-wing talk show host on Tuesday pushed President Donald Trump to declare a “national security emergency” that would let him meddle in the 2026 midterm elections—and the president did not rule it out.

In an appearance on Real America’s Voice, Trump listened as host Wayne Allyn Root rattled off actions he would like to see the president take ahead of the midterms.

“Let me put an idea in your head,” Root told Trump. “Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections.”

🚨🚨🚨

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: You have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. If you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail ballots

TRUMP: Let me just say stranger things have happened. I'll leave it at… pic.twitter.com/SvXYoYI0lQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 11, 2026

Root then told the president that “if you do this in the next month” it would allow for the implementation of photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements, as well as restrictions on mail-in ballots.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” Trump said in response. “I’ll leave it at that.”

The US Constitution does not give the president power to declare a “national emergency” that would allow him to unilaterally rewrite states’ election laws.

Regardless, ABC News reported in February that a group of pro-Trump attorneys were circulating a 17-page draft order that would use the purported threat of election interference from the Chinese government to declare a “national emergency” that would outright ban mail-in ballots and mandate that all ballots be hand-counted.

Trump has not yet signed such an order, but he has issued other election-related directives, including one that instructs the United States Postal Service (USPS) to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to their voter lists.

The USPS executive order and an order that required Americans to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote have been blocked by courts.

Regardless, some observers expressed concern that the president wasn’t yet finished in his efforts to meddle in the coming elections.

“There is zero reason,” wrote CNN host Jake Tapper, “to not take Trump at his word that he and his team are planning something alarming to disrupt the midterms and beyond.”

Criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield observed in response to the president’s appearance on Real America’s Voice that “Trump has no legal authority to do this,” but warned “that doesn’t mean he won’t try.”

Journalist Mike Rothschild questioned what the conversation between Trump and Root said about both men’s mental stability.

“Once again, Donald Trump is not a wizard,” wrote Rothschild. “He can’t just manifest things into existence by saying them or with a tweet. There is no ‘right’ to do this in US law, nor is there any mechanism that would enable any of this to happen. Both people in this conversation are deranged.”

After losing the 2020 presidential election to former President Joe Biden, Trump refused to concede the race, lied about the election being “stolen” by nefarious actors, pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overtake Biden in the Peach State, and pushed then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject certifying the election despite lacking constitutional authority to do so.

When these efforts to overturn the election failed, Trump encouraged his followers to march to the US Capitol, where they broke into the building, assaulted law enforcement officers, and sent members of Congress running for their lives.

Police in cities across the U.S. are rolling out a pro-drone PR blitz as hundreds of local police departments prepare to deploy autonomous, AI-driven surveillance drones. The drones are capable of following a single vehicle across an entire city, capturing footage through apartment windows, and generally recording daily life from the sky without being noticed.

As of February, more than 1,000 law enforcement and public safety agencies had received waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate autonomous surveillance drones as part of so-called “drone-as-first-responder” (DFR) programs, according to public records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and released in July. While the list of waiver recipients includes fire departments and other first responders, the vast majority are law enforcement agencies, including police in cities large and small.

The automated drone push comes as resistance to mass surveillance by license plate-reading cameras goes viral. Residents are packing city council meetings across the country to demand restrictions on the data gathered by high-tech drones and cameras — or an end to mass surveillance altogether.

Scandals over digital stalking by police and other abuses are erupting as new surveillance tech empowers the state to violate privacy in entirely fresh ways. In response, people are taking direct action, sabotaging automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that are capable of building complex profiles of individual vehicles.

Flock Safety, a top surveillance tech firm, is the company most associated with ALPRs and is itself often at the center of controversy. But Flock also has a number of competitors, including Axon and Motorola Solutions. And business across the surveillance tech economy is booming.

In many cities, local cops have extra funding for surveillance from wealthy private donors, police foundations, and federal grants; surveillance companies also often offer police free trials and help with applying for grants and waivers. Those surveillance firms have expanded from offering singular technologies such as ALPRs or body-worn cameras to become one-stop shops for police seeking the latest surveillance setup — including advanced drones.

Unlike most consumer drones, which are controlled by an operator looking up from the ground, autonomous surveillance drones used for DFR programs are operated remotely, allowing police to send drones much longer distances and stream live video footage back to headquarters. Cops in many cities have launched camera-carrying drones for years, but autonomous drones guided by AI are capable of flying “beyond the visual line of sight” of the operator (also known as BVLOS drones) and can be managed from a central launch pad, freeing up police time and capacity.

“The human increasingly is not flying the drone; the drone is driven by artificial intelligence and just deployed from one spot to another spot.”

“The human increasingly is not flying the drone; the drone is driven by artificial intelligence and just deployed from one spot to another spot,” said Beryl Lipton, the senior investigative researcher at EFF, in an interview. “They don’t have a pilot, but there is often a human person who is there to manage the feed.”

Instead of attending a street parade and launching a drone overhead, for example, police can fly multiple drones with AI-driven navigation from a desk, as EFF writes:

FAA rules for police drones also required a human operator to manually fly the device to a scene, but DFR technology has become a more common and more automated police technology. DFR programs increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to automate drone flights from launchpads placed around the city, often atop municipal buildings, and make it possible for one drone operator to “fly” multiple devices at once.

Flying a BVLOS drone requires an FAA waiver. The agency streamlined the waiver process in April 2025 and approved more waivers for BVLOS drones between then and February 2026 than it had in the previous seven years combined, EFF reports.

Lipton said most law enforcement applicants are already deploying automated drones or are strongly considering a “drone-as-first-responder” program. Once police begin a relationship with a company such as Flock Safety or Axon, Lipton said, taxpayers can expect a push for purchases of additional gadgets, upgrades, and storage for video.

It’s also not surprising that these programs now seem ubiquitous. “There is a lot of this kind of peer pressure in law enforcement, you can really see it with Flock,” Lipton said. “One police department gets a new tool or signs off on Flock cameras, and then you see neighboring cities are now signing up for Flock to keep up with the latest new thing.”

Flock Safety boasts that its automated “first responder” drones carry ALPR cameras that can read license plates from above up to 2,000 feet away, allowing police to connect surveillance footage of individual vehicles to data captured on the street. Lipton said companies such as Flock and Axon bundle services like gadgets and processing software to help police compile data from multiple streams into easily searchable databases, including footage from body-warn cameras, ALPRs, automated gunshot detectors, and drones flying overhead.

While a corporate partnership between Flock Safety and Axon fell apart in early 2025, some of the most prominent companies selling drones to police departments, including Skydio, integrate their products directly with the software and data analysis tools sold by leading manufacturers of ALPRs. “People don’t realize that video analytics has really developed as much as it has in the past few years, no matter whether coming from a police body-worn camera, drones or ALPR,” Lipton said. “All of these can easily be analyzed and made searchable, and that is a really integral part of what Axon and Flock are doing.”

Amid widespread backlash to ALPRs, police across the nation are going into PR mode, releasing footage of drones in action along with statements casting the technology as a “first responder” that can arrive on the scene before police to establish “situational awareness,” help with search-and-rescue, and track down suspects and stolen property.

“It seemed much more palatable for a drone to be framed as a ‘first responder’ … But in practice it is plain old surveillance.”

“It seemed much more palatable for a drone to be framed as a ‘first responder’ going to a specific crime rather than a tool for surveillance that has a very abstract crime-fighting purpose,” Lipton said. “But in practice it is plain old surveillance.”

Audits of drone flight logs — from piloted or autonomous drones — tell a more complicated story. In places police are required to log flights, officers often record only vague justifications for launching drones without a warrant, often for what appear to be routine dispatches and training flights, the ACLU has noted. Even on mundane missions, such drones equipped with powerful zoom lenses or infrared sensors can capture significant data that can later be analyzed with AI-powered data processing and facial recognition technology.

On July 13, Wired published an investigation into hours of drone footage from the San Franciso Police Department, providing an unfiltered look at automated drones in action. The footage was accidentally released on the open internet via the website for Skydio, the company providing the drones and software behind them. Discovered by security researchers Sam Curry and Maik Robert, the leaked footage itself raised serious privacy concerns.

“In the case of San Franscisco, they are doing a lot of locking onto license plates and, particularly, people, and the drone is able to navigate itself,” Lipton said.

The innocuous scenes captured by drones — police talking to a unhoused person, an arrest at a gas station by undercover officers, two men parking a car before joining a basketball game — also raised questions about the nature and breadth of the surveillance.

In one video, a response to an alleged “prowler” incident, the drone hovers over a young person wearing headphones and apparently having a private moment on the roof of a building. The drones have powerful zoom lenses, and footage captured of living rooms in the interior of apartments and people on private rooftops raise serious constitutional questions about the level of intrusion involved, according to Jay Stanley, a privacy analyst at the ACLU.

“It’s pretty clear that a police drone hovering, say, outside a 2nd story window in a suburban backyard would violate ‘reasonable expectations of privacy’ and thus the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, but it’s less clear what the courts would find to be a reasonable expectation of privacy in a city, where people are already susceptible to Rear Window-type observation,” Stanley wrote in a blog post on July 17.

In some cities, police launched drone-as-first-responder programs with automated BVLOS drones with little or no oversight. The city council in Nashville, Tennessee, is considering placing restrictions on automated drones after learning that police had quietly launched a trial program without a vote or hearing by the city council. After public outcry, the Metro Nashville Police Department announced on August 6 that it would end its trial drone program.

New Orleans was among the cities that received the FAA waiver for an automated drone-as-first-responder program. Police plan to expand their existing drone program to launch drones in response to 911 calls from the historic French Quarter later this year. But residents were outraged after activists discovered that the city’s police department had changed internal rules to allow police drones to carry “weapons” with prior approval from the police superintendent, according to Edith Romero, an organizer with Eye on Surveillance. Police claimed the change was only a proposal added to a draft policy, but as Verite News pointed out, the file name for the “draft” document suggests the policy was meant to go into effect on June 21.

“Nobody knew; city council didn’t know, we had to announce it, and we mobilized people to start calling and start demanding that this be rescinded,” Romero told Truthout in an interview.

Police ditched the policy on drones carrying weapons after public outcry. On August 6, the New Orleans City Council voted to require police to publicly publish regular drone flight logs and reports on usage and reasons for deployment. While the new ordinance addresses transparency, it does not place enforceable restrictions on drone use. Romero echoed residents who submitted public comments arguing the ordinance does not go far enough.

“We need to do an investigation of the policy violations that happened last year, and the change in policy that weaponized the drones before we can move toward an expansion,” Romero said, adding that there must be penalties for police who deploy drones for unapproved uses.

The city has become a testing ground for surveillance tech, including ALPRs and cameras equipped with facial recognition. Wealthy private interests have funded an expansion of policing in the French Quarter, and the nonprofit Project NOLA secretly supplied police with data from a network of facial recognition cameras in violation of local law.

Officials said the use of facial recognition was paused after a Washington Post investigation exposed the program in May 2025, but the ACLU reported in April 2026 that abuses continue. The ongoing controversy has left residents anxious about surveillance in a city where drones are already a common sight during parades and street festivals.

“We already have people coming to us saying, ‘I saw drone outside my window, we don’t know what to do, how can we even confirm that it was a police drone?’” Romero said. “But we don’t know who was manning the drone, and for what purpose.”

According to Skydio flight logs for 2025 obtained by Eye on Surveillance and reviewed by Truthout, piloted drones were overwhelmingly dispatched to respond to calls about minor incidents, including a subject who was “involved in a disturbance with the hot dog guy then fled the scene.”

Drones were twice dispatched in response to a “Black female” causing a “disturbance” on or near Bourbon Street, famously one of the rowdiest bar crawls in the world. While many entries for “Type of Incident” in the flight logs are left blank, in multiple cases, drones responded to calls about unhoused people and people with mental illness.

“This is really why they want the [drones-as-first-responder] drones in the French Quarter,” Romero said. “These business owners don’t want to see people that are houseless, and they want to harass people they think are suspicious.”

Romero said building a surveillance state is clearly not the solution to homelessness or the budget crisis facing city leaders, who may be tempted by lucrative federal grants that require cities to build out surveillance infrastructure. Romero pointed to the Trump administration’s Model Cities Initiative, which offers $300 million to cities that invest in “proactive policing” and surveillance tech.

“If cities are building the surveillance infrastructure, the risks that our data will end up in the hands of the federal government or state government in our case are really high.”

“We have to take into consideration that the federal and the state governments are trying to use all the surveillance technologies out there. And so if cities are building the surveillance infrastructure, the risks that our data will end up in the hands of the federal government or state government in our case are really high,” Romero said.

Lipton said many questions remain about how police are actually using drones as “first responders,” and advocacy around restrictions and transparency is critical. Drones are not as immediately visible to the public as traffic cameras. But as anger continues rise over the automated license plate readers sold to police by Flock and Axon, Lipton expects a similar backlash to automated drones once more people learn about the technology.

“The adoption of these tools has outpaced the public’s awareness that they exist,” Lipton said. “License plate readers have been around for a very long time at this point, but we are seeing a moment where everybody — even people who are not tech-savvy — understand what it means that these systems are accessible in real time and interconnected.”

Can a lawsuit hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate-change and its impact? That’s the question a Washington State-based woman is hoping to answer. Misti Leon is suing several big oil companies — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and others — over the 2021 heat-related death of her mother Juliana, who died during a record-breaking heat dome over the Pacific Northwest.

For years, individuals and institutions have attempted to protect human lives from climate change using litigation. In 2015, a public interest law firm called Our Children’s Trust, representing nearly two dozen young people sued the federal government for failing to protect them against the impending impacts of fossil fuel emissions. Courts dragged their feet for more than a decade only for the case to reach a dead end at the United States Supreme Court in 2025.

Leon’s civil suit is significant, not just because a Washington judge unexpectedly cleared the case for discovery and trial, but because Leon can directly link her mother’s death to climate change. Scientists concluded that the 2021 heat dome was, in the words of one research paper, “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” It’s about a crime that already occurred instead of hypothetical harm.

“Ms. Leon’s case is unique in that it is the first of its kind to seek to hold big oil companies accountable for their role in an individual’s death in a climate-related disaster,” Mike Meno, communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports community efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for climate change, explained in an interview.

Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome. “She was found unresponsive in her car,” said Meno. “The medical examiner determined that her death was caused by hyperthermia,” a condition that is the opposite of the more well-known cold-related condition of hypothermia.

Hyperthermia-related deaths have sharply risen over the past decade, a predictable outcome of fossil fuel emissions. Oil companies such as Exxon have long been aware of the devastating impacts their product would have on the climate. “Major oil and gas companies decades ago knew, their own scientists told them internally, that if we kept burning fossil fuels, it would lead to, in the words of one internal Exxon document, potentially catastrophic events, just like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome,” said Meno.

Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome.

Big Oil’s failure to act on this information has drawn comparisons to Big Tobacco. Companies like Philip Morris knew about the impacts of cigarette smoking on human health and kept it secret for years. Since that information was made public, individuals suffering from their addictive products have sued repeatedly and won.

A major lawsuit brought by state attorneys general culminated in 1998 in what became known as the Master Settlement Agreement, where dozens of tobacco companies settled to the tune of billions of dollars for public health. Notably, the federal government also sued tobacco companies for violations of racketeering laws over their deception.

Yet while individuals and states are taking action in the case of oil companies, the federal government clearly has no interest in holding Big Oil accountable for climate change. Instead, President Donald Trump says he wants the Justice Department to investigate fossil fuel companies for raising oil prices in the wake of the Iran war. This appears to be a classic case of deflection, given that a majority of voters blame Trump for price increases at the pump. He isn’t interested in holding companies accountable for climate change; he’s upset they made it harder for people to consume oil. Moreover, his administration is suing states for trying to enforce environmental regulations aimed at oil companies.

In addition to keeping their own research secret, fossil fuel companies spent years sowing doubt over the cause-and-effect relationship between greenhouse gases and a warming climate. “What that decades-long deception campaign did is it stole a generation’s worth of time when action could’ve been taken, and we could’ve averted the worst of some of these climate disasters,” said Meno.

This year, more extreme weather records are expected to be broken as climate change intensifies. The first half of 2026 was the third-warmest half-year on record. An El Niño phenomenon developing this year is expected to be one of the strongest in modern history.

Whether or not the Trump administration admits that the climate is changing, Americans know it is. “Anyone of a certain age who can look back over enough time just knows, as a matter of common sense, that the climate we are all living in today is not what we had a few years ago,” said Meno.

The industry knows it too — and, according to Meno, oil companies “are in absolute panic mode, fighting tooth and nail to escape accountability.” Leon’s lawsuit is hardly the only one they fear. Numerous states, counties, cities, and tribal governments are suing Big Oil, and making headway.

Meno explained that companies have “been pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to take up one of these cases for years.” The Supreme Court finally agreed to review a case in Colorado where that state’s supreme court in May 2025 ruled the City of Boulder and Boulder County could move forward with discovery and trial in their suit against ExxonMobil and Suncor.

Not content with leaving it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Big Oil has been lobbying Congress to grant the industry immunity over its role in climate change — and conservative lawmakers have complied. In April, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026.”

If Congress were to pass the bill, according to Meno, it “would be a truly unprecedented legal shield that would strip the public of their right to hold these corporations accountable for the harm they’ve caused.” Meno’s Center for Climate Integrity is urging members of the public to demand their elected representatives vote against Hageman and Cruz’s bill.

Big Oil says it deserves immunity because it shouldn’t be penalized for giving the public what it wants. In a joint statement, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers said: “These efforts to retroactively penalize companies for lawfully meeting consumer demand are misguided and counterproductive.”

What they didn’t say is that they have worked for years to prevent fair competition from renewables. It’s why the state of Michigan launched an antitrust lawsuit against ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and others because they acted “as a cartel … to forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy in order to maintain their dominance.”

Fossil fuel companies have long known their products are deadly, kept it secret, unfairly ensured their dominance, then argued that they ought not to be sued for delivering a product the public wants. Now, as climate-related deaths stack up, the industry claims it isn’t responsible. Misti Leon, whose mother might be alive today if governments and courts had reined in Big Oil, told The New York Times: “I never would have in a million years guessed that a heat dome and climate change would be what killed my mother and what took her from me. There’s no way to comprehend that and to kind of even rationalize it.”

Following the largest nurses strike in New York City history, Marilyn Shuler and 11 of her co-workers returned to their jobs at Montefiore Hospitals in the Bronx in February, only to find that their work environment had changed in a major way. 

At the time, Shuler worked in utilization review, a department that ascertains the need for medical care and whether care is covered by insurance. The veteran nurse, who worked at Montefiore for almost 40 years, had to begin using Datavant, a tool used to abridge the process by which the hospital sends patient and care information to insurance companies. Datavant’s website refers to itself as an AI platform.

Shuler said she and other nurses thought the tool would just help process the backlog of cases created by the nurses strike. But when case volume returned to normal, the 12 nurses working in utilization review were told to continue using Datavant. 

In early July, after a few months of using the tool, Shuler was laid off from the position she held for six years. Her colleagues were all laid off too. They felt they had been replaced by artificial intelligence.

Shuler’s case and that of her colleagues, she said, is far from an outlier. Hospitals will continue to automate and eliminate the jobs of nurses and other workers through AI, Shuler added. 

Job automation keeps nurses up at night. It was a concern raised by nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) earlier in the year, when 15,000 walked off the job demanding a new contract. 

“Artificial intelligence should never replace real human caring from a nurse,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said in a press release issued when the 12 nurses at Montefiore lost their job.  

Montefiore representatives deny having replaced workers with Datavant. 

“As is often the case, the claims by NYSNA are inaccurate and misleading,” Joe Solmonese, Montefiore’s senior vice president for government relations and strategic communications, said in an email. “What is true is that we are always investing in new technology to ensure the best care and outcomes for our patients and will continue to do so for the betterment of the people we serve.”

A spokesperson for the hospital said that Datavant’s tools are a nonclinical program that helps facilitate the paperwork process, but did not address whether the program uses AI.

Shuler said the laid-off nurses did not receive proper notice from the hospital. A union representative told the nurses on May 6, National Nurses Day, that the hospital planned to eliminate the 12 utilization review positions. 

“We just can’t believe that a machine can replace all the decades of … clinical judgment and knowledge that we have,” Shuler told Prism. 

Job automation through AI is bound to impact nurses in other parts of the country too. Joe-Ann Fergus, the executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said her union, which is engaged in a fierce contract battle with the largest hospital network in the state, is pushing back against an AI future in which hospitals deprioritize workforce development. A future in which hospitals deskill their workers, she said, could be disastrous for patients and hospitals alike.

“We have already begun to see that in places where AI has been introduced around triaging,” Fergus said. “The younger, newer clinicians, the more exposure they have to AI, and the earlier exposure they have to AI, the higher the risk of them deskilling.”

Fergus said healthcare workers should have a background education, but that they should also supplement that with real experience in the field and trial and error. Reading X-ray scans, Fergus said, is an example of a practice that is enhanced by AI tools. But workers should still be able to know what they are looking at.

“We will lose the skill of doctors being able to read those tools as well, and when the inevitable happens that the system goes down, then nobody’s going to know how to read the images,” Fergus said. 

Using an AI system that does not account for the historical inequities of the healthcare industry, Fergus said, is also a deep concern. Fergus worries that hospitals might look to save money on the AI products they contract with and end up with a service that is not attuned to serving a diverse population.

“If there’s any issues of racism, or the system is not properly programmed for the population that it’s in, then that additional programming of the AI can amplify the disparities that already exist and can actually result in injuries,” Fergus said. 

Despite hospitals onboarding AI systems as an addition to workers’ current workflows, Fergus said it is only a matter of time before hospitals look to automate jobs. She said most hospitals will likely see this as short-term savings. 

But if they don’t create more staffing to maintain and continuously train the products, “then the systems become obsolete, and they become harmful to the patients,” Fergus said.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor