US Rep. Ilhan Omar on Monday forcefully condemned the Department of Homeland Security’s raid on her Washington, DC home as part of a broader effort to weaponize federal law enforcement against progressives who oppose President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“This is part of the fascist playbook to rile up Trump’s die-hard supporters and give them a big distraction in advance of the midterms,” Omar (D-Minn.) wrote in an email distributed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hours after the raid. “With this obviously political investigation, Trump is telling his voters: ‘Ignore the price of gas, ignore the war in Iran, ignore that you’re losing your healthcare—we want you to get angry about this instead.’”

The email followed a statement issued by Omar’s office saying that the congresswoman “has done nothing wrong” and condemning the raid as “an outrageous abuse of power.”

“For a decade, Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back,” the statement read. “Now, those attacks have escalated to a pointless federal raid.”

The Trump Justice Department said the raid, executed by the investigative arm of DHS, was “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” Trump administration officials are reportedly probing whether Omar, who entered the US as a child refugee from Somalia and became a citizen in 2000, is in the country illegally. CBS News reported that the investigation centers on paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that he has “nothing to do with” the Omar investigation while attacking her as a “terrible person.” Omar and the Somali American community in Minnesota have been frequent targets of the president’s bigoted attacks, and Trump has called for the Democratic lawmaker to be jailed or deported.

“For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced,” Omar wrote in a social media post on Monday.

In the campaign email, Omar called the federal investigation a “sham” and “further proof” that Trump is “willing to use the power of the federal government to try to intimidate and silence anyone who stands up to him.”

“It’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t work,” Omar added.

The raid on Omar’s home drew widespread condemnation, including from top Democrats in Congress. The leadership of the House Democratic caucus issued a statement calling the raid a “deeply disturbing” act that “raises serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump’s adversaries.”

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) denounced the raid as “fascism in the extreme.”

“Trump is weaponizing the federal government to escalate his racist attacks against Rep. Omar, undermine her ahead of the midterms, and distract from his failures as president,” Kamlager-Dove added.

No doubt you’ve seen it yourself, or read about it: Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, manipulating engagement on certain accounts or banning pages and posts outright to limit the reach of specific political groups.

Here’s something that happened to me. I recently set up a second Instagram account. I never interacted with, followed or liked any far right content. I only followed progressive accounts: Brasil 247’s page, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, Lula and a few others. So what showed up first in my feed? A reel from Lucas Pavanato. Yes, the same far right extremist who won more than 3 million votes for federal deputy on the strength of his viral social media clips. Let’s be honest about how he got those millions of views. It wasn’t charisma, and it certainly wasn’t political substance.

Jeferson Miola, a columnist and political analyst at Brasil 247, shared an account of his own: “Instagram took down the page of SAJU, the legal aid service run by the law school at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul,” he said. “SAJU was founded in 1950, and it provides free legal help to low income people. Instagram removed the page after it posted support for Lula’s reelection. That’s a university institution being shut down for political and ideological reasons. It’s a clear restriction of freedom of expression.”

When media personality Fábio Porchat, who has 7.5 million followers on Instagram alone, posted a video video calling out abuses at senatorial candidate Michelle Bolsonaro’s prosperity gospel church, Lagoinha, Instagram pulled it offline with no explanation. It only went back online after a wave of public pressure.

I could list case after case all day. But one account stood out to me in particular: someone who actually works at Meta Brazil. I’m protecting her identity, as journalism allows, so I’ll call her Lira. Here’s what she told me:

“At Meta, there’s a whole team of human moderators who review content. They decide what gets approved and what gets flagged, whether it’s political violence, sexual content, or anything else that crosses their line. These are people with judgment and critical thinking, making real decisions, even while working within the platform’s guidelines. Right in the middle of Brazil’s election season, a large number of them were laid off and replaced almost immediately by AI systems. That means decisions are now coming from a single automated command, possibly issued from the US, designed to boost certain content while burying the rest.”

It’s no secret that Meta has been cutting jobs worldwide. What’s not public is which jobs these were, what those employees actually did, or why the company chose this specific moment in Brazil’s political calendar to make the switch.

There’s a bigger issue here too. AI doesn’t just follow orders, it scales them, instantly and at massive reach, whether the intent behind them is good or bad. All it takes is one command. Maybe from one billionaire.

Zuckerberg’s Unapologetic Support for Trump

Lira’s story connects a lot of dots. Pavanato showing up in my feed, Porchat’s video disappearing, a university page getting banned: all of it could trace back to a single AI instruction, one that executes instantly with no human review at all.

In 2025, Meta’s CEO doubled down on his alignment with the Trump administration, the same administration that openly admits to meddling in Brazil’s politics. “The government can either be actively against you, adding friction and getting in your way, or it can actively help you break down barriers,” Zuckerberg said. Asked about backing Trump specifically, he called it “the right thing to do.”

This partnership isn’t subtle. The support runs both ways, and there’s a real appetite here to control entire countries, Brazil especially. Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court and federal government still try to regulate social media and hold Big Tech accountable to the Constitution, as we saw recently with Discord. For Meta, getting Flávio Bolsonaro into the presidency would mean restoring the lawless digital free for all his father presided over. That’s not just a preference. It’s a profitable mission for Meta, and one that’s more alive than ever. After all, how do you think those viral, extremist friendly clips that get far right candidates elected actually come about, if not with some help from Big Tech?

Laís Gouveia has been a reporter at Brasil 247 since 2018. Before that, she was educational policy director at the National Student Union (União Nacional dos Estudantes/UNE) and an editor at Portal Vermelho.

This article originally ran at Brasil 247, was translated, with consent, by Panamerican Dispatch, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission.

Virtually everyone who is not a billionaire, or owned by one, agrees that we have to limit the ability of the rich to buy elections. While the Republican Party has taken “policy for sale” politics to a new level, there are plenty of Democrats who have been happy to support obviously awful policy in exchange for contributions from the AI industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the crypto industry, and Wall Street more generally. It costs a lot of money to run a competitive campaign and it’s hard to raise that from small contributions, so there will always be a temptation to bend policy positions to get some serious money.

While most people favor limits on campaign contributions, the current Supreme Court has made this very difficult. They have ruled that campaign contributions are speech and therefore any effort to limit campaign contributions is an unconstitutional restriction on speech.

There are some promising alternative paths that focus on making small donors matter. Seattle has a system of “democracy vouchers” that give every voter in local elections a modest sum that they can contribute to a candidate(s) of their choice. To qualify to get the vouchers, candidates must agree to limits on spending and large contributions.

Super-matches are a comparable system. Under this system, small dollar contributions can be matched up to 8 to 1, which means that even a $50 contribution can make a difference to a campaign. New York City, along with several other cities, have gone this route.

While these paths for amplifying the voice of ordinary people are promising, it will take much more to match the power of the billionaires. It is important to realize they exercise their political power in ways other than campaign contributions, primarily through their ownership of the media.

The importance of billionaire ownership goes far beyond the constant stream of lies and right-wing propaganda from Fox News. Last year, the very Trumpy Ellison family took control of CBS and immediately began to shift its news to the right. They are now taking control of CNN through the merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers. They also got control over TikTok, after Trump wrestled it away from a Chinese company for them.

Trumper Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook and Instagram and is not shy about banning political material he doesn’t like. And Elon Musk bought Twitter, explicitly to advance his right-wing agenda. The rest of the media landscape doesn’t look much better. The rich and very rich own the countries’ newspapers and broadcast outlets, and most of these people lean right, even if they have not yet joined the Trump Reich.  

And let’s just be clear. The idea that the campaign ads bought by the rich can influence votes, but not the material that people see between the ads, is beyond absurd. Even if we banned all political contributions from rich people and corporations, the rich could still control elections by showing us nothing but their propaganda on television, in newspapers, and on social media.

This is why the Community News Act that Governor Gavin Newsom just signed is so important. The measure provides $20,000 each for up to five journalists per news outlet covering local news. This subsidy can keep newspapers and news sites across the state in business and help to support new ones that might start up. It is similar to other programs that have been started in Illinois, New York, and New Mexico.

This might seem like small change in a world with multi-billion dollar media empires, but it is not realistic to imagine matching the super-rich dollar for dollar; the goal is to sustain reality-based reporting that people can rely upon. (Repealing Section 230 protection for the mega-platforms like Facebook and X would be a big step towards leveling the playing field.) And support for local news reporting is likely to also lead to better national and international reporting, both by training more reporters and also increasing the comfort level with public funding, perhaps opening the door for a national system.

To be clear, there are no political conditions attached to this funding. Conservative news outlets are as eligible for this subsidy as more liberal ones. The point is to support local journalism, not to favor a particular political perspective.

To my view, this system is not ideal. I prefer support coming through an individual refundable tax credit to support local news. This would allow people to have a more direct attachment to the news outlets being supported with public money. Ideally, this would give them a sense of ownership that many feel towards other community organizations.

But whether or not this is the best approach, there is no doubt that the California bill, along with the ones already passed in other states, are big steps forward. It will help to reverse the collapse of local news reporting, which is giving corruption free rein in many areas. We need to build on the positive and make it better, rather than reject a plan because it may not be ideal. Progressive opponents of California’s wealth tax initiative may want to give that point some thought.

The CIA is allegedly working behind the scenes in Brazil’s election, planting stories to favor Flávio Bolsonaro and build a positive narrative about the senator.

The claims come from John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who has become something of a celebrity in recent years. Earlier this week, he took to social media to flag what he called “credible” evidence of the spy agency’s involvement in Brazil’s election.

On Tuesday, Kiriakou gave more details on his podcast.

“I heard a rumor from a former CIA colleague of mine this past weekend that the agency is actively working behind the scenes to support Bolsonaro,” he said.

“And the way they’re doing it is by planting pro-Bolsonaro stories in both the Brazilian press and the international press,” he claimed.

He offered no evidence and was careful to say he doesn’t know whether this account is true. But he argued that it fits the agency’s pattern of behavior over the years.

“There’s a long history of CIA involvement in elections abroad, controlling the media narrative,” he said.

He noted that much of the Brazilian press has swung behind Bolsonaro.

“This is despite the fact that Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency was one mistake after another,” he said.

The former agent pointed to the former president’s 27 year prison sentence, calling his conduct “incredibly corrupt.”

Kiriakou said the runoff projections don’t favor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and suggested the right has already secured one of its biggest wins in Brazilian history.

“Lula is likely to lose the election, and I think the younger Bolsonaro will end up pardoning his father,” he predicted.

He also noted that Donald Trump has already endorsed Flávio Bolsonaro’s candidacy, acknowledging that doing so could be a “violation of international rules.”

Earlier in the week, Kiriakou wrote on social media that he met with Lula three years ago. On Tuesday, he explained that a Lula aide had reached out so the two could discuss government transparency.

According to the former agent, one topic in that conversation was police violence under Jair Bolsonaro’s government. He said he suggested that Lula confront that issue directly, and that doing so had led police to turn against Lula.

Who Is This Former Agent?

In 2013, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to revealing the identity of an undercover agent, the first case of its kind in 27 years. He had worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004 and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison as part of a plea deal.

He admitted to disclosing to a reporter the identity of an undercover officer who had taken part in harsh interrogations of alleged Al Qaeda members held at secret CIA detention sites.

Kiriakou first drew national attention in 2007, during the George W. Bush administration, when he told ABC News in an interview that waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, had been used on a Guantánamo detainee named Abu Zubaydah.

Then CIA Director David Petraeus issued a statement praising the plea deal with Kiriakou, even though four other charges against him were dropped. The case “represents an important victory for our agency, for our intelligence community and for our country,” Petraeus said.

It was the first time in 27 years that someone had been found guilty of revealing the identity of an undercover agent.

This article first ran in ICL Notícias, was translated by Panamerican Dispatch, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

“Keep our city out of your reckless war talk,” said San Diego’s mayor, Todd Gloria, Monday night after President Donald Trump’s rambling speech at a rally in Nebraska included a particularly violent mention of the California city.

Gloria was among several Democratic political leaders who were incensed after Trump—moments after predicted the Republican Party would see a “tremendous victory” in the November 3 midterm elections—suggested that he would not object to an Iranian military or nuclear attack on San Diego and Los Angeles.

The president said that soaring prices for gas, groceries, and other essentials are a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe—keeping our country safe.”

Trump on Iran: Let 'em take out Los Angeles and San Diego, it's a small price to pay pic.twitter.com/Fc4BcjVDKj

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) October 6, 2026

He warned that Iran could “take out a city,” before adding that he would “let them” attack the two deep-blue cities—home to a collective 5.2 million people, with more than 20 million residents in the surrounding areas

“Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego,” Trump said at the rally in Grand Island. “This is a very small price to pay… It’s gonna be over very soon.”

The crowd responded to Trump’s comments with laughter and cheers. The president has frequently made Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles, Chicago, and his own hometown of New York City the targets of rhetorical attacks. He has also targeted those cities with the deployment of armed federal agents as part of his mass deportation agenda.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat whose name has been floated as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, condemned Trump’s remarks as “deranged and dangerous.”

“After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego,” said Newsom, who later criticized Trump’s vice president and secretary of state for not speaking out against the comments.

“The SILENCE from JD Vance and Marco Rubio today is deafening,” said the governor.

Gloria added that San Diego, which is home to major military installations, “is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass accused Trump of compromising the safety of the nation’s second-largest city.

“The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives,” said Bass. “In the face of irresponsible threats, as Angelenos, we know how to stand together and protect our city.”

Jim Desmond, a Republican running for Congress in California’s 48th District, which lies in San Diego, was also quick to distance himself from the president’s comments.

Some observers claimed the president had simply been speaking in an “especially confusing style,” as journalist Daniel Dale suggested, and did not intend to suggest that the two cities could be acceptable collateral damage.

“Of course you can say it’s inappropriate regardless for the president to casually float the possibility of a city being wiped out,” he added.

Trump’s comments came days after it was reported that the Pentagon is prepared to send thousands more troops and a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East, as talks between the US and Iran remain stalled. Gas prices remain elevated, at $4.36 per gallon on average, and nearly two-thirds of respondents to an Associated Press poll in June said they disapproved of how Trump had handled the war, which he joined Israel in starting in February without congressional approval.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) had a succinct response to Trump’s remarks, referring to the constitutional amendment that allows members of a president’s Cabinet to remove him from office on the ground that they cannot fulfill the duties of the president.

“Twenty-fifth amendment NOW,” said Padilla.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spoke on Sunday, after the release of the results of the first round of the 2026 elections. He said his campaign for a second round of the presidential race begins this Monday, October 5.

Lula will face Senator Flávio Bolsonaro in the runoff, scheduled for October 25.

In his speech, Lula stated that he intends to present to voters the differences between the two candidates’ platforms.

“Starting tomorrow, we begin a new campaign,” he said. “We will be able to show the difference between the proposals that exist for Brazil. The Brazilian people will have no doubt about choosing who will win the election.”

Lula also launched direct attacks on Flávio Bolsonaro’s political track record and cited the candidate’s past.

“He has a dark history,” Lula said. “With dark connections, with extremely serious suspicions, with ties to militia members and organized crime. All of this will become clear.”

The president mentioned Banco Master. He claimed that Flávio had a hand in the institution’s creation.

“Banco Master resulted in the greatest corruption scandal in this country and the biggest free-for-all involving politicians,” he said.

The accusations raised by Lula are part of his runoff campaign rhetoric and are expected to be a key point of contention between the two candidates in the coming weeks.

The president also argued that the race should be framed as a choice over the country’s future. He stated that his candidacy represents an opportunity to drive change in the Brazilian economy.

“We will show what has been done and what society expects to be done,” he said. “No one is better positioned than us to offer a future to Brazilian society.”

Lula further stated that Brazil needs to take a “qualitative leap” to become internationally competitive.

“I’m very good at the knockout stage”

Commenting on the first-round results, Lula referred to the fact that he had won the second Rond vote in previous presidential elections.

“It didn’t work out [this time],” he said. “You know why? Because the people like seeing me compete in the runoff.”

In a lighthearted tone, he added, “I’m very good at the knockout stage.”

The runoff will be a head-to-head contest between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, after neither candidate secured more than 50% of the valid votes in the first round. The vote will take place on October 25.

“More than 20 million people didn’t turn out to vote,” he said. “We are going to make an appeal: at this historic moment for Brazil. Voting is essential to determine the country’s future.”

“Bolsonaro supporters had better get ready,” he said. “Because we are going to defeat them.”

You can watch Lula’s speech below.

This article was originally published by Revista Forum. You can read the original in Portuguese, here.

An analysis published Friday by Democracy Docket warned that “tens of thousands” of voters across the US face “risk of disenfranchisement” thanks to actions being taken by the United States Postal Service.

The analysis, written by veteran election reporter Jim Saksa, points to a new USPS policy known as Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) that “will eliminate evening mail pickups from post offices more than 50 miles away from a regional processing facility, most of which are located in major urban areas.”

For people who live in these areas, ballots sent on Election Day will be postmarked and delivered at least a day later than in previous election years, thus making it ineligible to be included in final election tallies.

“In every state, a day’s delay in delivery means that if mail voters wait until the last day or two before the election to mail their ballot,” Saksa explained, “they could be disenfranchised.”

Saksa reported that this policy is currently active in “about 42.5% of all ZIP codes” in the continental US, and is scheduled to eventually take effect in around 70% of all ZIP codes. No additional ZIP codes are expected to be added between now and election day.

Saksa also said that voters concerned about their ballots not being counted should deliver them in person to their local post office, where they can ask an employee to postmark it.

President Donald Trump has tried for the last several months to use USPS to meddle with states’ mail-in voting systems.

In March, the president signed an executive order that instructed the United States Postal Service to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to their voter lists.

The US Supreme Court last month rejected Trump’s efforts to interfere with mail-in voting, allowing states to continue sending ballots to voters as they’ve done in past elections.

Even with the Supreme Court loss, however, the president’s repeated attacks on voting by mail has had a major impact on the 2026 midterm elections.

An NBC News poll released in September showed that just 23% of Democratic voters said they planned to vote by mail this year, a double-digit drop from 2024 when 34% of Democrats said they were voting by mail.

In an interview with Politico published Thursday, Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective Political Action Committee, said Black voters have been expressing concerns about sending in their ballots for fear that Trump will order USPS to not deliver them.

“I think there’s confusion,” James said. “We know that the president has spent six months talking about changing the rules regarding mail-in voting, and a lot of folks are concerned about their ballot being secure.”

Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg also told Politico that her group is “absolutely hearing concern” about the mail voting process this year.

“But more importantly,” Greenberg added, “what we’re hearing is people trying to figure out what they can do and how they can organize locally in order to protect elections.”

Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.

Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.

“It’s just a wildly invasive thing to do to somebody with no individualized justifiable basis to do it,” Shehadeh told Truthout.

He suspects federal authorities targeted him for his activism. The lawyer is involved in a legal complaint against a federal judge in Florida over the judge’s anti-Palestinian statements.

Shehadeh is one of several Palestinian rights advocates who have been detained and had their personal devices searched by CBP while returning to the U.S. from international travel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.

Other similar cases include Amir Makled, a lawyer from the Detroit area who was representing University of Michigan students involved in pro-Palestine activism, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which filed a legal motion earlier this week demanding the return of Shehadeh’s phone, said CBP appears to be escalating phone searches against opponents of President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“Common sense tells us that they are targeting people who have pro-Palestine views,” Younes told Truthout.

She stressed that the searches are illegal. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Younes said the “border exception” that allows searches to ensure that no illegal items are brought into the country should not apply to phones.

Younes, a civil liberties attorney, said the authors of the Constitution would have certainly opposed giving the government blanket authority to search people’s phones without cause.

“Law enforcement can search shipping vessels coming into the Boston harbor to make sure that they don’t have contraband. That’s a totally different thing from searching the contents of people’s smartphones,” she said. “I don’t think the framers would have thought that you could read the papers of somebody coming into the country in their suitcase, and likewise, a smartphone, which has so much more personal information.”

The case of Shehadeh and other Palestinian rights supporters targeted for searches at the border has reignited the debate over the application of constitutional protections at ports of entry.

Shehadeh said that when he was stopped at Newark on September 17, CBP officers only conducted a “cursory” search on his bags because they did not appear to be interested in physical items.

“They are looking for our thoughts,” he said. “They’re looking to see what I’m thinking. They want to see who I’m messaging. They want to see what WhatsApp groups I am part of.”

The lawyer, who has Global Entry for expedited border crossing, said he was flagged by name for secondary inspection and led to a waiting room. He was asked general questions about his travels, work, and family before the agents asked to search his phone.

Shehadeh objected to allowing the officers to go through his device, citing the attorney-client privileged information on the phone. The agents kept him waiting and subjected him to another round of questioning as they took the case to a supervisor. As the clock ticked, the Florida-based lawyer missed his connecting flight to Miami.

Eventually, he was informed by an officer that CBP would take his phone and let him go. “I told them, ‘I just want to be very clear. I am not giving you permission, consent to search my phone, and I’m not giving any other arm of this agency or anybody else consent to search my phone,’” he said.

The cell phone still has not been returned.

Shehadeh told Truthout that if the goal of the episode were to deter his activism for Palestinian rights, it would not succeed.

“It will not move our advocacy work an inch. Literally, it will have no impact. If anything, it will fuel the importance of doing more of this work,” he told Truthout. “But when it comes to travel, I’m going to be much more careful about what my phone situation will be.”

The Trump administration has been cracking down on Palestinian rights activism, including through a deportation campaign targeting non-citizen students who participated in protests against the war on Gaza.

Shehadeh warned that the administration is creating a new norm of weakened constitutional rights that many people may take for granted.

“This search is a perfect example of that. Protection against search and seizure is one of those things that comes out of our Constitution that really empowers citizens to know you will not have government intrusion,” he said.

“What this administration is doing is chipping away at the rights of Americans — of all Americans. But sadly, Arabs, Muslims, and minorities tend to be the first victims of these abuses. But they’re certainly not going to be the last ones.”

Abu Irshaid of AMP said the government is turning border crossings into a “hunting ground for individuals it wishes to target” for political retaliation or to gather information about constitutional protected activity.

Abu Irshaid has sued the government, alleging that the repeated searches he has been subjected to at the airport, along with the seizure of his phone, amount to illegal discrimination.

A federal judge ruled in his favor in July, declaring that the government violated Abu Irshaid’s rights with the searches.

Some activists are pinning their hopes on a case before the Supreme Court, Anibowei v. Blanche, that could determine whether the Fourth Amendment applies to the electronic devices of U.S. citizens travelling internationally.

CBP argues that only a tiny fraction of travelers, less than one-half of one percent, are subjected to a device search. But official statistics show an uptick in such searches since Trump returned to the White House.

In 2024, federal officers inspected the devices of 47,047 travelers. The numbers increased to 55,318 last year. Of those inspections, 13,590 targeted U.S. citizens in 2025, compared to 10,541 a year earlier.

In January, CBP released a memorandum outlining its regulations and authorities around searching travelers’ personal devices. The document stressed that people at ports of entry have diminished privacy rights and that phone searches are essential “to identify and combat a wide range of illicit activities.”

A basic search, one where the officer goes through the phone manually, can be conducted “with or without suspicion.”

The bar is higher for carrying out an advanced search, which includes copying and analyzing the content of the phone through an external device. It requires “reasonable suspicion of activity in violation of the laws” enforced by CBP. But there appears to be a loophole. An advanced search can still be conducted “in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion when there is a national security concern.”

The directive does not provide details on what constitutes a “national security concern” to enable an advanced search.

Officers can only search the device itself and may not access information stored remotely. That’s why they must disable the external connectivity of the phone, according to the memorandum.

The directive gives officers the authority to seize a device and keep it even after the traveler leaves the airport, which is what happened to Shehadeh. According to the memorandum, CBP could effectively keep his phone indefinitely. The agency is allowed to hold on to the device for a period of five days, which can be extended by 15 days and subsequently by seven days in increments without specified limits.

As of Thursday, CBP has kept Shehadeh’s phone for 14 days, meaning the agency has applied at least one extension to its hold on the device.

In response to Truthout’s request for comment, a CBP spokesperson told Truthout that the likelihood of a search at a port of entry “remains exceedingly rare” but did not answer specific questions about Shehadeh’s case, including why the agency is still holding on to his phone.

“U.S. Customs and Border Protection has statutory authority to conduct border searches of electronic devices for all persons entering or departing the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud, and national security threats,” the CBP spokesperson said.

In the face of the U.S.’s ever-expanding definition of “national security threats,” which now seem to include lawyers, journalists, and activists who have advocated for the rights of Palestinians, are now living in fear that border stops are being used as a form of intimidation.

“What is most disturbing is that many of these aggressive government actions target activists whose only ‘offense’ is criticizing Israel’s violations against Palestinians,” Abu Irshaid told Truthout in a statement.

---

A Personal Connection

As a reporter, I try to stay out of the stories I am telling. But my personal experience with being stopped and searched after returning to the U.S. from international travel is too relevant for this article to withhold.

After returning to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. from a trip to Lebanon in February 2025, I was detained for nearly five hours and faced similar treatment as Shehadeh.

CBP officers asked me intrusive questions relating to my work as a journalist and political leanings in my family’s hometown in Lebanon, which had been targeted by Israeli bombardment in the war.

After a brief search of my bags, a CBP officer asked me to hand my phone and unlock it. I initially refused. The federal agent handed me a piece of paper stating that CBP has the lawful ability to search electronic devices. When I highlighted that the flyer reflects CBP policy, not the Constitution, the officer threatened to seize both my phone and computer indefinitely if I didn’t hand the phone in.

CBP took the phone after pressuring me to write down its passcode and kept me waiting for around two hours before handing it back — with a disclaimer that they couldn’t “process” it because the system was down. They eventually let me go. Throughout the hours-long ordeal, the officers did not allow me to contact my family member who was waiting to pick me up at the airport.

I have traveled outside the country twice since then and have been flagged for secondary inspection on the way back each time, albeit without a device search. At the advice of press freedom experts, now I travel internationally with an alternative phone that does not contain sensitive personal or professional information.

The 18^th-century notion of the panopticon — a circular prison design with a guard station in the middle, allowing a single officer to enforce discipline by keeping watch over all the prisoners — has become real in the 21^st century through AI-driven surveillance against workers: It’s the Amazon warehouse.

It should be no surprise that the company that harnessed technology to create a vast, $2.7 trillion empire would employ the same sophistication to enforce workplace discipline and tamp down insurgent unionization efforts. A recent disclosure of Amazon’s internal “employee relations” documents reveals just how extreme Amazon’s methods of warehouse surveillance and control have become.

Amazon employs what it calls the “Atlas” model, inputting into a computerized model a staggering amount of information on workers, their thoughts and behaviors, the workplace environment, and myriad other factors — “hundreds of data points,” according to the company. Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing. It’s like the “precrime” police in the film Minority Report who use psychic powers to identify and apprehend would-be criminals before they act — except in this case, it’s an AI-driven tool used by the billionaire owners of one of the richest companies in history to head off rebellion among its low-wage workforce. And this is not Tom Cruise play-acting; it’s very real.

Workers anywhere who have endured anti-union campaigns can relate to stories of overbearing surveillance by management; the Atlas model, however, takes the spying to an entirely new level.

Details of the Atlas model came to light recently as a result of a legal dispute between Amazon and Unifor, the Canadian private sector union. Last year, British Columbia’s Labour Relations Board awarded union certification to Unifor at Amazon’s YVR2 warehouse outside Vancouver, finding that the company had broadly interfered in the union drive. It was the second union certification at Amazon in North America — the other being the 2022 union win at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York. But in contrast to the U.S., where Amazon has managed to stall bargaining for four and a half years because of weak labor laws, the B.C. Labour Relations Board ordered Amazon to recognize the union and negotiate. Contract bargaining commenced last December.

Not surprisingly, Amazon has dragged its feet in negotiations, prompting the union to file unfair labor practice charges with the Labour Board. Following a series of hearings earlier this year, the Labour Board found that Amazon violated provincial law. In August it ordered a remarkable step — first-contract arbitration at YVR2. That fight remains in play, but as a result of the legal proceedings, Amazon was required to turn over documents to the Labour Board and Unifor. Unifor has shared them with Truthout, and they can be viewed here.

Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing.

In addition to the Atlas model revelation (beginning on Page 19 of the document), the material includes more than 100 pages that reveal in great detail how Amazon trains its frontline managers in union-busting. My colleague at the Center for Work and Democracy, Ben Fong, has written about this other portion of the disclosed material.

“Amazon’s own documents pull back the curtain on what workers have been telling us for years,” said Justin Gniposky, Unifor’s organizing director. “Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”

Amazon did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment on the Atlas model.

The documents describe the Atlas model as “a labor risk framework to clarify how Amazon evaluates emerging workforce issues, labor union targets, and internal or external labor threats.” The Atlas model ingests hundreds of data points: employee trainings completed; health and safety incidents, from simple first-aid cases to serious injuries; feedback from workers on management; worker tenure and turnover; the proximity of a warehouse to another workplace experiencing union activity; local minimum wage rates and other area economic conditions; and even the temperatures inside and outside of the warehouse.

Amazon seems especially thorough about scraping data from worker communications channels to plug into the Atlas model — the company’s internal “Voice of the Associate” (VOA) electronic bulletin board, the answers to digital questions posed daily to workers, and externally, forums including Reddit — “to understand the tenor of the discussion at the site level,” according to the documents.

“Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”

Atlas uses AI to identify phrases and “common keywords” to allow managers to do a “deep dive into the worker population driving the discussion.” Atlas also looks at the upvotes or other responses — positive, negative, or neutral — that the comments elicit, and the volume of those worker reactions. All of these data points go into Atlas and let managers “look around corners to identify developing themes” so they can “tailor strategic responses for addressing emerging risk.”

Amazon also tracks and documents all organizing activities that managers detect, and records them under the category of “employee relations events.” Each activity is assigned a severity score. “High severity” events include employees signing union cards, delegations of workers approaching management with demands, protests, sickouts, and work stoppages.

Atlas uses mathematical modeling to create a point system for all these data points, assigning a “labor score” to each workplace. The scale is further broken down into tiers, with the Tier 5 designation applied to facilities with high scores, where there is “no immediate perceived risk,” and Tier 1 applied to facilities where “future activity is imminent.” Amazon’s union busters focus largely on Tier 1 and 2 facilities.

Atlas produces extensive spreadsheets ranking different facilities and looking not just at raw “labor scores” but also at monthly trends. In 2024, the year the documents date from, Amazon was most concerned about union activity at 16 warehouses it had ranked as Tier 1. For instance, at LDJ5, a Staten Island sortation center across the street from JFK8, Atlas noted that leading issues of worker concern were “bathroom breaks, equipment, rest breaks, leadership/management, temperature.” The spreadsheet noted that “internal activists” — workers — were organizing, and that by looking at month-over-month trends, LDJ5 was experiencing “Risk Increase,” with the phrase placed inside a bright red box. At four of these Tier 1 facilities, the spreadsheet noted, the threat of union activity was sufficiently high to justify deploying Amazon’s “rapid response” team: union busters who travel to hotspots of organizing throughout Amazon’s global network.

Union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.

But the main value of Atlas seems to be predictive. For the Tier 2 worksites (“future activity is highly probable”), the spreadsheet poses these questions: “Which sites are showing the most future risk that are not Tier 1 sites yet?” and “What is the risk in each business line and which has the most risk, is it increasing or decreasing? What is driving the risk?” Tier 2 spreadsheets in the document look at the number of investigations of workers that management has handled in the last month, whether that number is trending up or down, the number of worker appeals of those investigations, and — notably — the percentage of negative worker comments on internal bulletin boards.

Voice of the Associate and other internal bulletin boards are key focal points. Charts in the document track how often workers raise particular topics, like weather, time off, breakroom amenities, management treatment, and restroom cleanliness. They also analyze the “vector” of each issue: “What are the top drivers of negative Sentiment and change MoM [month over month]?” is one question posed in the document. “What Sites are spiking MoM in negative sentiment? What themes are driving the sentiment? What anecdotes can we pull?”

Atlas is not strictly a North American tool. One chart analyzes trends for warehouses globally, documenting “employee relations events” — worker organizing — and cataloguing the number of worker comments on Voice of the Associate and the percentage of those comments that were negative. Two warehouses in the English Midlands where workers have been organizing with the GMB union — both Tier 1 sites in Atlas’ taxonomy — showed high volumes of negative VOA posts. A warehouse in Melbourne, Australia, also showed mostly negative Voice of the Associate posts, while posts were mostly not negative in some of the warehouses in Poland, Germany, and Italy.

All this is surely a tiny sliver of Atlas’s output. The former head of Amazon’s HR platforms, Bud Cashatt, boasted on LinkedIn recently about how his department created “predictive site-risk ML touching every building in Amazon’s global network.” (“ML” stands for machine learning, where programmers train AI to learn patterns and build predictions based on analyzing vast quantities of data.)

Did Jeremy Bentham, the 18^th-century British philosopher who dreamed up the panopticon, anticipate Atlas? Nearly 250 years ago, he imagined his panopticon as a useful tool for prisons, “madhouses,” and also “to the business of manufactories,” the industrialized manufacturing plants then just emerging in England. Speaking of his watchman in the center of the operation — the human Atlas of his time — Bentham wrote, “The concealment of his person will be of use.”

The documents uncovered at the B.C. Labour Board shine a light on Amazon’s concealed watchman. Atlas illustrates just how far Amazon will go to try to rule the warehouse floor. And its scope also underscores just how terrified Amazon’s masters are of their own workforce rising up and claiming their due.

Bentham theorized that the panopticon would facilitate social control: He imagined that incarcerated people would behave, not knowing at any moment whether they were being watched by the guard. It was, he wrote, “A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”

But what happens when prisoners — or workers — resist such attempts at social control? There’s no level of AI sophistication that can erase the reality that Amazon’s workers move millions of packages every day, and without their labor, the Amazon supply chain collapses.

Peter B. Olney, the retired organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, calls Atlas “a promethean tool for union busting and the thwarting of any employee organizing.”

To fight back against this “existential threat” to basic worker rights and unions, Olney says, “we have to get real about deploying massive resources towards organizing the workforce and finding their serious vulnerabilities and choke points.”

Today we see emerging fights everywhere against a billionaire class intent on harnessing AI and technology to undermine basic democracy and impose authoritarianism, both in the workplace and throughout society: in revolts against the algorithmically driven content we are force-fed on the internet; protests against and sabotage of the Flock cameras on neighborhood lampposts; and resistance against the replacement of workers with bots and computers. The Atlas model places Amazon workers at the center of this global fight against the AI billionaires. And it highlights that union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.

The close relationship between the Bolsonaro family and key figures in the international far right like Steve Bannon and U.S. President Donald Trump has been public knowledge for over eight years. In this article, tech specialist Miguel Manso looks at the state of that relationship, right now, just days before Brazil’s first-round presidential elections. – ed.

Just days before the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, a confidential report from the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin) warns that the United States is influencing the country’s electoral process. Titled “Threats to the 2026 Electoral Process,” the report was sent in late August to the presidency, the Superior Electoral Court and the Justice Ministry, warning that U.S. interference has reached a “critical” level.

Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign has become the target of legal action over claims that it benefited from paid ads and mass messaging originating in the United States.

The coalitions backing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party and Renan Santos of the Missão party asked the Superior Electoral Court and the Supreme Federal Court to investigate the senator for economic and political abuse of power and foreign interference.

The court filings allege the following:

Foreign amplification: U.S.-based right-wing profiles and influencers, including American political figures, allegedly ran paid campaign content on X in support of Flávio Bolsonaro.

Paid partnerships: The posts, labeled “paid partnership,” cited figures from the foreign betting platform Polymarket to claim that Bolsonaro was the favorite, distorting the actual state of Brazilian polling.

Prohibited financing: The parties allege that this amounts to the use of funds from outside the official campaign structure and financed from a foreign source, both of which are strictly prohibited under Brazilian electoral law.

The lawsuits ask for the immediate removal of the posts, a Federal Police investigation, and, if the irregularities are confirmed, the loss of candidacy and ineligibility for those involved.

Trump’s Shield of the Americas and the Fernando Cerimedo Case

The attempted murder of Nadia Beller has drawn investigators toward Fernando Cerimedo and a web of other connections, including drug-trafficking flights and Bolivia’s top anti-narcotics police official, who allegedly identified the hitmen. Cerimodo is known for his work with far-right political leaders in Latin America.

On August 17, 2026, two gunmen on a motorcycle shot Nadia Beller, a Bolivian lawyer and Cerimedo’s girlfriend, outside a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. She survived but was wounded in the neck, chest and arm.

Bolivian police have identified Colombian national Aldúbar Henry Silva Peña as the lead shooter. He fled immediately after the attack, then released a video in September 2026 admitting his role in planning the crime, though he claimed the original plan was only to “scare” Beller. He led a group of five, including four other operatives — two Colombians and two Brazilians — whose identities have not been released by investigators. All four remain at large.

Police detained Víctor Hugo C.Z. and formally charged him as an accomplice who worked directly with the gunmen. They arrested Róger Aguilera on charges of supplying the .32 caliber weapon used in the attack, and arrested Paola Andrea Vargas on charges of hiding and storing it.

Bolivian authorities arrested Argentine political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, known for his work with Trump’s MAGA movement and Beller’s former partner, at Viru Viru International Airport. Bolivia’s public prosecutor’s office accuses him of masterminding the attempted femicide.

A forensic review of Cerimedo’s phone revealed real-time messages with Erik Correa González, the Bolivian government’s head of intelligence, confirming that the shooting took place at the exact moment the two were exchanging messages. Beller has said publicly that the attack was ordered to silence her before she could expose corruption, money laundering and illicit dealings involving Cerimedo and local government officials.

Investigators found two key pieces of evidence: a text note written six days before the attack that used the phrase “La Nadia” alongside an intent to “eliminate” the victim, and a message sent at 8:54 p.m. on August 17 to a contact identified as “E.C.G.,” reading, “Brother, they just shot her.”

The investigation also dug into Cerimedo’s finances. On his phone, police found a note referring to a “virtual wallet” that had moved about $66,000 over the previous 11 months across more than 320 transfers, and a larger “pass-through wallet” that had moved $1,386,997. In searches, police seized about $400,000 in cash, along with 500,000 Bolivian bolivianos, weapons, vehicles and equipment for a “bot farm” — automated accounts used to manipulate social media and elections.

The Earthquake Caused by Survivor Nadia Beller

Beller’s allegations against her former partner are shaking the governments of Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia, Javier Milei in Argentina, José Antonio Kast in Chile, Nasry Asfura in Honduras and Colombia’s Abelardo De La Espriella, along with their ties to the Bolsonaro family. Her account has helped expose a techno-fascist network aimed at manipulating and interfering in elections in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Colombia — and even in Mexico’s upcoming election — through bot and troll farms that Cerimedo’s team ran from Argentina and Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia.

The goal, investigators say, was to install leaders who would serve U.S. and Israeli interests, backed by the Shield of the Americas alliance, promotion from the outlet La Derecha Diario, and financing from Trump and his allies channeled through Milei. Cerimedo has been described as a CIA and Mossad asset.

Fernando Cerimedo, known as the “king of bots” for the Latin American far right, is also under investigation for money laundering and alleged ties to drug trafficking. Prosecutors are trying to determine whether he was part of a network that facilitated irregular flights carrying up to 500 kilograms of cocaine per trip and returning with large amounts of cash.

Searching properties tied to Cerimedo in Bolivia, authorities seized large sums of cash and found evidence of a technical setup built to automatically create fake online accounts — commonly known as a “bot farm.”

Fernando Cerimedo’s Ties to Donald Trump, Marco Rúbio and the Bolsonaro Family

It was already known that a global network links Donald Trump’s MAGA movement with right-wing leaders across Latin America, funded through an international web of businesspeople and drug traffickers and operating through artificial intelligence manipulation and integrated data networks used for cyberattacks.

These groups organize at high-profile political events and forums, such as Mar-a-Lago and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where strategists and data operatives share methods for digital engagement and fundraising.

Cerimedo has said in interviews that no one formally introduced him to Eduardo Bolsonaro. The two say they met by chance at Harvard University in 2010. But when news outlets asked Harvard directly, the university said it had no record that either Eduardo Bolsonaro or Fernando Gabriel Cerimedo had ever been enrolled there. Confronted with this, Cerimedo later claimed he had only taken open, non-degree classes.

As part of the Federal Police investigation into the attempted coup in Brazil, investigators found that in 2022, military officers and aides brokered Cerimedo’s ties to the hardline core of the Bolsonaro movement, producing false reports attacking the integrity of Brazil’s voting machines.

Reports based on the plea-deal testimony of Mauro Cid identify Army Col. Ângelo Denicoli as the officer who contacted Cerimedo and coordinated the technical details needed to carry out broadcasts and attacks on Brazil’s electoral system.

The Federal Police obtained electronic records showing that Cerimedo’s phone number and contact information were passed directly to Denicoli. Forensic analysis of seized phones showed that Denicoli became the main point of contact with the Argentine consultant, coordinating the materials sent to him.

Cid formally confirmed in testimony that Denicoli was the direct link between the criminal organization and Cerimedo, saying Denicoli was part of the group tasked with gathering data to support claims that the electronic voting machines had failed.

Technical evidence linked Denicoli, Cerimedo and technology entrepreneur Eder Balbino. Balbino and Denicoli compiled reports containing false arguments and data based on outdated voting-machine models, then passed the files to Cerimedo, who used them as visual material for his broadcasts.

Digital cross-referencing by the Federal Police showed that the data Cerimedo presented in his broadcasts from Argentina contained the same mathematical inconsistencies and formatting as the documents manipulated by the Liberal Party’s technical committee in Brazil. Investigators concluded that Cerimedo had not discovered the material independently, but received it from the structure Denicoli managed.

Investigators also found that Denicoli was part of what they called the Disinformation and Electoral System Attack Unit. The Federal Police traced digital records linking Denicoli directly to fake ballot-audit files stored in a public Google Drive folder belonging to Cerimedo, with Denicoli listed as the folder’s original owner and editor.

Denicoli coordinated the technical compilation of false reports with Balbino. The material was passed to Cerimedo, who used it in the “fraud livestream” broadcast from Argentina in November 2022 and amplified in Brazil by Eduardo Bolsonaro.

In a trial concluded by the Supreme Court, Denicoli received the harshest sentence among the defendants in his group: 17 years in a closed prison regime, on charges of attempting a coup, seeking the violent overthrow of Brazil’s democratic order, and participating in an armed criminal organization.

Billion-dollar Technology Infrastructure Serving Lies and Fraud

The connection between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rúbio and Argentine digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo took shape starting in 2023, with lobbyist and political consultant Damián Merlo acting as the intermediary.

Merlo, who owns the Miami-based Latin America Advisory Group, serves as a link between conservative Latin American politicians and power centers within the U.S. MAGA movement. According to filings under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, Merlo used his relationship with Viviana Bovo, a senior adviser to Rúbio, to introduce Cerimedo and his data tools directly to the office of the then senator, who is now secretary of state.

Cerimedo founded the agency Numen and the outlet La Derecha Diario, specializing in “bot farms” and algorithm manipulation to shape social media trends. In Chile, he worked on the campaign that defeated the 2022 constitutional referendum. In Brazil, he helped the Bolsonaro family spread disinformation about voting machines after the 2022 election. And in Argentina, he led the digital strategy behind Javier Milei’s election in 2023.

Brad Parscale, the top digital strategist for Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential campaigns, became Cerimedo’s business partner at the political consulting firm Numen, based in Buenos Aires.

Through that partnership, Cerimedo took over managing the Latin American operations of tools such as Campaign Nucleus and Eyes Over — data-mining and artificial intelligence platforms created or linked to Parscale. The partnership combined Parscale’s expertise in U.S. data operations with the infrastructure Cerimedo had built across Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Bolivia.

Brad Parscale, Peter Thiel and the Data Ecosystem

Brad Parscale earned the trust of the Trump family and went on to design websites for their businesses, before being chosen to lead the digital strategy for Donald Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign.

In 2016, as the campaign’s digital media director, he led a data operation called Project Alamo, directing much of the budget toward highly targeted social media ads and producing as many as 60,000 different Facebook ad variations a day.

In February 2018, Trump named Parscale campaign manager for his 2020 reelection bid.

Parscale’s ties to Big Tech and to Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies span strategic data cooperation, political alignment and technology supply.

Thiel, a Palantir cofounder, was one of the major Silicon Valley billionaires who directly backed and funded Trump’s 2016 campaign. Palantir builds surveillance and analytical intelligence software for governments and defense agencies.

Parscale created Campaign Nucleus, a platform meant to build a communications structure and data ecosystem. The data-mining and AI model it uses mirrors the mass-processing and information-control concepts associated with Palantir.

The ecosystem functions as an integrated chain: Thiel’s Palantir develops surveillance and data-intelligence technology, which feeds into political software such as Parscale’s Campaign Nucleus, and Parscale in turn distributes that technology across Latin America through Cerimedo’s Numen.

The Link between U.S. and Israeli Companies

These companies’ ties to Israel and its government center on two main areas: artificial intelligence for military targeting, and cyberwarfare and digital influence operations.

In January 2024, Palantir signed a direct strategic agreement with Israel’s Defense Ministry to supply advanced AI technology supporting “war-related missions.”

In July 2026, international journalistic investigations revealed that Parscale was registered as a foreign agent of Israel in the United States. The Israeli government hired Parscale’s main firm, Clock Tower X, through a $46.5 million contract to carry out a digital influence operation.

According to the reporting, the company built a network of pro-Israel propaganda websites and blogs while also producing search-optimized content designed to shape the databases artificial intelligence systems draw on.

Cerimedo’s Numen is described as the Latin American link in that network, applying Campaign Nucleus data concepts and bot infrastructure through La Derecha Diario.

The relationship is described as symbiotic: Israel provides public contracts, Palantir supplies data technology, Clock Tower X uses that funding for digital influence operations, and Numen carries out the messaging and bot infrastructure in Latin America.

The Use of Artificial Intelligence and “AI Poisoning”

The tactics have evolved from spreading disinformation on social media to manipulating institutional digital ecosystems.

Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is described as a technique meant to flood the internet with doctrinal texts and fake academic research centers, so that the crawlers used by systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude absorb that propaganda as factual information. As a result, when people ask artificial intelligence systems about geopolitical topics or elections, those systems can end up repeating narratives that this network planted beforehand.

The dismantling of Cerimedo’s structures in Bolivia also revealed the use of tens of thousands of automated phones running AI software designed to simulate human behavior, making it harder for social media platforms to detect and block them.

Trump’s MAGA strategists, working with Eduardo and Flávio Bolsonaro, continue trying to interfere in Brazil’s election despite Cerimedo’s arrest — evidence of a powerful alliance working jointly to manipulate and defraud the political landscape and bring Latin America under U.S. control. The question is: for how long?

This article was originally published in Brasil 247. It has been translated to English by Panamerican Dispatch and can be read in its original Portuguese, here.

An NFL official reportedly threatened to remove Houston Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair from his game earlier this month unless he removed his memorial for an 8-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israel in Gaza.

During the Texans’s week two game against the Cincinnati Bengals on September 20, Al-Shaair wrote the name of Wafaa Akila on his eye black, which refers to the strip or paint streaks that many football players wear on their cheeks.

Wafaa was an 8-year-old girl who was killed, along with her father, in an Israeli airstrike on a vehicle in Gaza City on September 6. She and her father were on their way home from her first day of school, according to Al Jazeera.

Al-Shaair, who is rated as one of the top linebackers in the league, was reportedly told by an NFL official that he would have to remove his eye black or else be barred from playing in the game, an anonymous NFL source told The Athletic. Al-Shaair complied, the reports said. Fox News’s sports vertical also confirmed the league’s threat.

The linebacker’s latest tribute came just days after the NFL gave him an $11,941 fine for writing Hind Rajab’s name on his eye black during the Texans game against the Buffalo Bills on September 13. In a show of solidarity, Dallas Mavericks player Kyrie Irving said in a post on social media that he would “take care of his fine.”

“It’s bigger to me. What’s a life worth? Is a life worth $11,000? I think it’s priceless,” said Al-Shaair when asked about the penalty.

“You can’t get so lost in your own problems that you can’t have compassion for other people in the world,” he went on. “We don’t have to have all the answers to everything to know that an innocent man, an innocent woman, an innocent child losing her life is not right … whether they’re here in America or somewhere halfway across the world.”

Ahead of the Texans game against the Indianapolis Colts this past Sunday, Al-Shaair once again wore the names of children killed by Israel — Lana and Bana Ahmed, two sisters who Israel killed along with their family in an airstrike earlier this month. The sisters were 12 and 8 years old.

The NFL gave Al-Shaair a similar fine in January when he wrote “stop the genocide” on his eye black during the pregame, but took it off for the actual game. At the time, he said that he was similarly told that he would be banned from playing in the game if he kept the message on.

“At the end of the day, it’s bigger than me. When things that are going on makes people uncomfortable — imagine how those people feel. I think that’s the biggest thing. I have no affiliation, no connection to these people other than the fact that I’m a human being,” Al-Shaair told reporters after that fine. “Even when I’m walking off this field, that’s the type of stuff that goes through my head, that I have to check myself — when I’m sitting here crying about football, when there’s people dying every single day.”

He was told that he violated league rules about displaying non-approved personal messages — but he pointed out that other players have written messages on their eye black without a fine.

“They always fine you, but I was told if I wore that in the game, I would be pulled out of the game,” he said. “I understood it was a fine, but I ain’t never seen Stef get pulled out of the game for having eye tape with writing on it.” Al-Shaair was referring to New England Patriots receiver Stefon Diggs, who frequently writes messages honoring his Christian faith on his face tape.

The White House recycled material from President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for a new taxpayer-funded ad that aired nationwide this past weekend, just weeks before the high-stakes November midterms.

The 30-second black-and-white ad features Trump walking down a hallway to audio of him vowing to “demolish the deep state” and “expel the warmongers from our government,” even as the president wages an illegal and deeply unpopular war on Iran that has killed thousands and driven up prices at home and around the world. During the final 10 seconds of the ad, white text appears at the bottom of the screen stating, “Paid for by the US government.”

The ad is just the latest taxpayer-funded, explicitly pro-Trump spot that the White House has launched in recent days, prompting alarm from lawmakers and government watchdog organizations who say the administration is using public funds to flood airwaves with the president’s campaign ads shortly before an election.

Watch the newly aired ad:

The U.S. Government is up on TV with this spot —

It aired nationally on FOX yesterday during Illinois at #7 Ohio State and also during Fox News Sunday this morning pic.twitter.com/8PP9FPzUZk

— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) September 27, 2026

Richard Painter, who served as the White House’s chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said the taxpayer-funded campaign ads “could be an impeachable offense,” noting that “Congress has expressly prohibited government-sponsored political propaganda, which is dangerous for democracy.”

The federal government appears to have spent more than $1 million on pro-Trump ads in recent days, The New York Times reported on Sunday, citing an estimate from AdImpact.

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, the White House launched a taxpayer-funded ad in which Trump declares that “America will never be a communist country” and promotes tax cuts he signed into law, delivering a massive windfall to the rich and large corporations.

Norm Eisen, former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, told the Times on Sunday that “the president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it.”

“The prior ad was bad enough,” said Eisen, “but this one openly repurposes prior political conduct.”

US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on social media that Republicans shouldn’t be taken seriously when they claim to care about “waste, fraud, and abuse” as the president and leader of their party runs campaign ads with taxpayer money.

“What a cult this party has become,” Murphy added.

A massive backlog of voter registration applications in Texas could affect the outcome of local and state elections, including a contentious election involving a U.S. Senate seat.

Public officials in the Republican-controlled state have not yet acknowledged what the error actually is. It’s also possible that the error could have affected elections from before the primary elections in March 2026, officials have acknowledged.

“Texas county voter registrars across the state have received a flood of new voter registrations and updates to voter registration records submitted through the Texas Department of Public Safety,” said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials. “Some of these submissions date as far back as October 2025.”

It’s unclear how many voters could be affected by the error. McGinn acknowledged that “counties have received anywhere from several hundred to tens of thousands of records to process.” In Bexar County alone, around 45,000 registrations that have been submitted have not yet been processed.

All 254 counties in the state appear to be affected. The Texas Secretary of State’s office alerted all counties to the issue in an email last week, writing:

Counties have alerted us to the fact that some older [Department of Public Safety] registrations are now appearing on their dashboard. We are actively investigating this issue to determine the source of these historical records.

The situation is dire, as the registration deadline for Texan voters for the upcoming general election is October 5. County officials have until October 19 to process registrations, which is the same date that early voting begins.

James Talarico, a Democrat and state representative who is running in the Senate election against State Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), called the situation “unacceptable,” and encouraged all voters to check their registration status.

“Less than two weeks before the voter registration deadline, thousands of Texans are now in the dark about their voter registration status — even more aren’t aware of this error at all,” Talarico said in a statement. “This is what a broken, corrupt political system looks like: Texans follow the rules, register to vote before the deadline, and still risk losing their God-given right to the ballot box because their government failed to do its job.”

The Senate race between Talarico and Paxton is a close one, and even a small error that goes unaddressed before the November election could affect the outcome.

A longtime Republican stronghold, Talarico is currently ahead in the polls with a slim lead against Paxton. According to an average of surveys collected by the polling aggregate site FiftyPlusOne, Talarico secures around 47.9 percent of the vote, while Paxton receives around 44.6 percent.

On September 22, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gave the opening speech of the 2026 U.N. General Assembly in New York City. He discussed the concerning state of the world, demanded diplomacy to resolve conflicts and said, “this is the most critical moment of the United Nations.”

He also denounced attempts to influence upcoming Brazilian elections.

“Brazil does not fit into anyone’s backyard,” he said. “We need partners with a positive agenda that promotes development.”

Full Speech by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in English.

My compliments to the President of the General Assembly, Ambassador Khalilur Rahman from Bangladesh.

I greet each of the Heads of State and Government and the delegates present. I address in particular the Secretary-General of the United Nations. During his two terms, António Guterres was a direct witness to the growing mismanagement of the superpower.

Mr. President, this is the tenth occasion in which I open the General Debate of this Assembly. Since I stood at this podium for the first time in 2003, this is the most critical moment of the United Nations. The feeling that moves me today is that of indignation.

The United Nations is failing in one of its highest missions, to free humanity from the fray of war. Its credibility has never been so low. Its ability to protect the most vulnerable, those who have no army or arsenals, has never been so small.

We are all victims of the immobility of a Security Council that does not fulfill its role. In 1946, already in the first session of this assembly, Brazil warned of the high price that the international community would pay for the right to veto. This vice, which gave rise to the U.N. Charter, conferred the great powers the privilege of insensitivity.

This original sin is now added to a profound crisis of leadership. The year 2025 recorded the highest number of armed conflicts since World War II. Trillions of dollars financed a new arms race.

Geopolitical tensions threaten to turn regional disputes into a conflict of global proportions. Those who hold the reins of crucial decisions must act responsibly and in a sense of urgency. The leaders of the countries that make up the Security Council must come together.

I know the realities of power, but the concessions to the law of the strongest have already crossed the limits. This is not idealism, it is pure realism. War is not the continuation of politics by other means, it is the total failure of politics.

In an interdependent world, to lead is to reconcile the interests of the homeland with that of humanity. This is the statement of someone who represents a nation that loves peace and freedom. Someone who fought against a military dictatorship and defended his country against a coup d’état. It is the conviction of a factory worker, who was elected president three times and who won the fight against hunger in Brazil.

This assembly has recently corrected historical distortions. It has recognized the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the most serious crime against humanity. It has approved the most precise representation of the world map. Now we must debate about determining themes for the future of humanity. We are called to choose between multilateralism and unilateralism, democracy or extremism, sovereignty or subordination.

These choices demand courage, political will and clarity of objectives. This is what is expected of a statesman. Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin were statesmen.

They challenged the past to design a future of peace. They were defeated by hatred. Generations of Palestinians will carry the pain and trauma left by the genocide practiced by the Netanyahu government against women and children in Gaza.

Israeli civilians paid the price of radicalism and intolerance of the terrorist acts of Hamas. Pursuing the International Criminal Court and its members is an incentive for these crimes to be punished. The U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese cannot be silenced for telling the truth.

Illegal settlements in the West Bank are becoming less and less viable. The two-state solution is essential so that Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace. Threatening the extinction of a civilization will not bring stability to the Middle East.

The Strait of Hormuz became a trench of war when it should remain a vital passage for international trade. Families all over the world pay for the increase in the price of fuel, fertilizers and food.

The war between Russia and Ukraine has dragged on for five years in a humanitarian drama that continues to save lives.

We all know that there will be no winners on the battlefield. Diplomacy is the only option. Initiatives such as the Group of Friends of Peace, created by Brazil and China, reveal the strength of the international community willing to work for dialogue.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the geographical proximity to the world’s largest military power is inescapable, especially in the context of the worsening of hegemonic temptations. Brazil does not fit into anyone’s backyard. We need partners with a positive agenda that promotes development.

Ideological differences should not be an obstacle to greater integration between neighbors. Countries in the region have recognized the horrors of regimes of exception. We have come a long way to restore popular will.

Democracy is once again in check. We are once again witnessing foreign interference in electoral processes. The division of the world into areas of influence and neocolonial attacks for strategic resources constitute anachronistic gestures.

The Venezuelan people deserve to define their own destiny. Nicaragua will not solve its problems by preventing the opposition from running for office. The crisis in Haiti continues to test the limits of the indifference of the international community. In Cuba, the world is suffering. The collective punishment imposed on 10 million people by an illegal economic embargo and energy blockade.

Mr. President, Brazil does not underestimate the challenge posed by organized crime. We are prepared to face criminal organizations that terrorize our communities. Workers are robbed, mothers lose their children, police officers do not return home. People are tired of violence.

But we will not outsource the responsibility of defending our borders and guaranteeing the population the right to live without fear. We do not need aircraft carriers guarding our waters. We need cooperation to stop the flow of weapons and money that supplies organized crime.

This is the spirit of the proposal that I personally delivered to the president of the United States. We want to fight the money laundering carried out by Brazilian criminals abroad.

For a long time, Brazilian states have acted in their own way. Criminals took advantage of the lack of coordination. But this is changing. In Manaus we created the International Police Cooperation Center of the Amazon, bringing together the public security officials of the nine Amazon countries.

In 2025, we carried out the largest organized crime operation in the history of Brazil. We broke records in the seizure of drugs, goods and illicit resources. We are confronting all levels of organized crime, including crime magnates.

The Anti-Faction Law, which we have just passed, imposes more severe penalties on organized crime than those stipulated for terrorism. Organized crime and corruption go hand in hand. The fight against corruption will continue to be relentless, no matter who may be hurt. No one is above the law.

Ladies and gentlemen, the pillars of multilateralism are being corroded. The World Trade Organization is on life support. When governments capitulate in the face of those who use tariffs as a weapon of coercion and blackmail, the consequences are disastrous. In the age of disinformation, those who fight progress and knowledge resistthe evidence of science. We will never forget the millions of lives lost by negligence in the fight against COVID-19. Campaigns against vaccines are bringing back diseases that we considered eradicated. Weakening the World Health Organization makes everyone more vulnerable.

Until recently, the response to climate change was consolidated in the center of the international agenda. This year, the issue disappeared from the G7 debate and the G20 debate, forums that bring together the largest carbon emitters in the world. It is time to resume the offensive and impose a defeat to negationism. Nature reminds us every day that we have but one planet.

The Himalayan glaciers are melting. A super El Niño can cause torrential rains, droughts and forest fires in different parts of the globe. Its effects will impact, above all, the most vulnerable.

Brazil has been demonstrating that it is possible to combine economic growth with emission reduction. We have achieved our self-sufficiency in oil and we will continue to research the potential of new reserves such as the Equatorial Margin.

We will not renounce the environmental agenda. We will carry forward the roadmap for the decarbonization of the Brazilian economy. The Forever Tropical Forest Fund, launched at COP30 in Belém, shows that it is possible to change old paradigms. The forest is worth more standing than destroyed.

We will continue to reduce deforestation, which fell by half in the Amazon and reached the lowest level of deforestation in 11 years. We have the moral authority to reject protectionist measures disguised as embracing the environmental cause.

Brazil is a global leader in green energy. We have the critical minerals and rare earth minerals that the world needs to carry out the energy transition. Our natural wealth belongs to the Brazilian people and it is for their benefit that they will be exploited. Access to our minerals will be a mandatory counterpart to the generation of value in our territory, the transfer of technology and the supply of national strategic sectors.

Mr. President, we live in an unprecedented technological revolution, with great risks and opportunities. It would be an unforgivable historical omission not to face the challenge of regulating big tech and artificial intelligence. A handful of oligarchic technicians want to revive a version of digital neoliberalism without rules or transparency.

They are promoting a race without ethical restraints, beyond the backs of the U.N. and the Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. As Pope Leo XIV warns, decisions on technology should never be separated from conscience and responsibility. Companies that know the risks of their products transfer to families the impossible task of facing algorithms.

The millionaire industry of betting apps turns addiction into profit. Its dizzying dissemination is indebting and destroying millions of homes. Brazil will not tolerate this business model. We approved one of the most advanced laws in the world to protect children, teenagers and women in the digital environment. We will ensure the joint remuneration of artists, musicians and audiovisual content creators. We will not give in to the pressure of multinationals who want to privatize our Pix, a public and free payment infrastructure that has made financial inclusion a reality for millions of Brazilians.

Ladies and gentlemen, sustainable development goals are the target of attacks from reactionary forces that want to naturalize injustice. Inequality and underdevelopment result from political choices. It is possible to put the poor in the budget and make the rich pay their share.

It is necessary to roll back privileges and invest in free, quality education and healthcare.

There is a legitimate desire for change in the world. But changing is not going backwards. Changing is not taking away rights. It is not rehashing theories of racial supremacy or of female submission. It is not recolonizing the Global South.

Changing is advancing to a future of more participation and more achievements. It is creating and sharing effective public solutions for the challenges of development through a democratic, strong, efficient and capable state. It is betting on the spirit of solidarity and cooperation with Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Initiatives such as the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty and the International Panel on Inequality are born from this political will. Brazil is in a hurry to become a developed and socially just nation. We have adopted an economic model that focuses on income distribution, creating jobs and wage increases.

We are betting on improving productivity, on increasing credit and on building a robust social protection network. Brazil has grown again in a sustainable way. We are the third largest destination for foreign foreign direct investment.

Despite the U.S. tariffs against our economy, this year we will hit a new record of exports. There is still a lot to be done. The labor market is transforming.

Older people want to remain active. Young people want to start a business. Workers need time to rest, to improve their skills and be with their families.

In Brazil, achieving this goal means ending the so-called 6×1 scale to guarantee workers two days off a week. This change is essential to alleviate the domestic overload that still falls on women.

We are building a Brazil where women don’t have to ask for permission to occupy positions of power or enter the labor market.

A country free of femicide where no woman, in or outside the home, lives under the threat of violence. This is a cause that the world needs to embrace.

Mr. President, upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. King said, “I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up.”

The UN was born under the symbol of hope. Over eight decades, it has contributed to decolonization, promoted human rights and supported sustainable development. It protected immigrants and refugees. It condemned racism, anti-Semitism and religious intolerance.

These were the achievements of leaders who stood at this podium, moved by indignation in the face of the injustices of their time. Men and women who refused to accept war as their destiny, colonialism as their right, apartheid as their legitimate system. This ability to say “no” to the inequalities gave birth to some of the greatest transformations that we have lived.

Faced with the paralysis of the United Nations, we need to rediscover the political will so that it can, again, be a temple of peace.

I want to conclude with a message about my country to all who listen to us.

On October 4, millions of Brazilians go to the polls to decide their destiny. They will not just elect the President of the Republic, state governors and representatives of the legislative power. They will decide between democracy and negationism. If Brazil is going to move toward a future of more opportunities or return to a past of exclusion.

We will have a transparent and competitive election where candidates enjoy the broadest freedom of expression. We know that some abuses of this freedom seem to be associated with the interests of foreigners, contrary to those of our country.

We do not underestimate the challenge of the disinformation network that intends to disrupt the public debate during the campaign.

But we have a modern and robust electoral system. Under the watchful eye of a plural citizenry and a free press, we will not allow the enemies of democracy, both internal and external, to attack the popular will.

Brazilian democracy belongs to Brazilians.

Brazil will continue to be a sovereign country.

No one, no one will take us away from this path.

May God bless us all. Thank you.

This speech was translated into English by Michael Fox at Panamerican Dispatch. You can read the original in Portuguese, here. You can watch his speech, below.

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The Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN) has raised the risk of external influence and interference by the United States in Brazil’s 2026 elections to a “critical level.” The confidential report was sent to the Presidency, the Supreme Electoral Court, and the Ministry of Justice. In it, the agency points to escalating pressure from the administration of Donald Trump on Brazil. It ties Washington’s actions to a broader strategy to politically reorient Latin America.

The document is titled, “Threats to the 2026 electoral process.” It was forwarded to authorities in late August, and its contents were revealed this Saturday, Sept. 19, by journalist Mônica Bergamo’s column in the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.

According to the report, there is a “trend of escalating pressure on Brazil” and a “selective intensification and reconfiguration of the pressure exerted by the United States,” albeit within a historic pattern of U.S. influence over the region.

The report’s assessment does not mention ballot tampering or altering the election results. The intelligence agency’s warning addresses the possibility that political, economic and diplomatic pressures could interfere with the institutional environment and with public debate during the electoral process.

The agency places these actions within the strategy adopted by the second Trump administration to reaffirm U.S. hegemony in Latin America.

According to the analysis, strategic documents released by the U.S. government between November 2025 and May of this year point to its objectives as reducing the influence of powers considered rivals and preventing their access to the region’s “strategic assets, natural resources and infrastructure.”

ABIN identifies China as one of the primary targets of this policy. In the agency’s assessment, Washington seeks to expand its direct or indirect control over these resources, whether through the U.S. government or the country’s private investment.

Support for conservative governments

The report pays special attention to the actions of U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio. According to ABIN, his policy toward Latin America has an ideological bent and he seeks to “influence and reorient the foreign policy of countries in the region.”

According to the document, this strategy involves steering Latin American countries away from China and promoting a domestic political shift “by supporting the rise of conservative governments.”

The agency cites a U.S. Senate hearing held in June, during which Rubio linked the restoration of U.S. hegemony in Latin America to the presence of governments aligned with Washington.

At the time, Rubio stated that the region had come to rely on several governments “friendly” to the United States during Trump’s second term. He singled out Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela as exceptions.

The document also noted statements in which Rubio held Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva responsible for U.S. tariffs on Brazilian products, alleging that Brazil had not negotiated “in good faith.”

In ABIN’s view, this approach personalizes the pressure exerted on the country and has the potential to impact public debate in Brazil during the electoral period.

Brazil targeted for defending autonomy, says ABIN

The intelligence agency assessed that Brazil holds a unique position in U.S. strategy, because it has a government with “greater political will and the means to defend its strategic autonomy” in the face of Washington’s pressure for concessions and geopolitical realignment.

The report states that, despite periods of easing tensions between Lula and Trump, actions taken by the United States since May indicate a trend of increasing pressure.

Among the actions cited is the U.S. designation of Brazilian criminal organizations as terrorist groups and sanctions announced in July against two Brazilians and companies based in Brazil and Portugal. The U.S. government accused them of ties to money-laundering networks linked to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) drug gang. For ABIN, these sanctions represented a “transition” because they caused U.S. pressure to have concrete effects on Brazilian individuals and companies.

“As a result, U.S. external interference now directly impacts financial relationships, corporate reputation, access to the dollar, international operations, and the exposure of third parties to the risk of secondary sanctions,” states an excerpt from the report released by Folha de S. Paulo.

According to the analysis, the U.S. strategy is happening in a “gradual, combined and adaptive” manner, linking Brazilian organizations to threats against U.S. national security. This is then followed by measures capable of affecting the country’s companies, banks and other institutions.

The Brazilian Intelligence Agency warns that these types of sanctions could prompt Brazilian and foreign economic actors to alter their decisions out of fear of losing access to the U.S. financial system or being impacted by secondary sanctions.

U.S. Makes Demands Over Brazilian Election

The report has also emerged amid tensions between Brasília and Washington directly related to the 2026 elections.

During negotiations held in 2025, the Trump administration presented Brazil with a draft joint statement that outlined a Brazilian commitment to not “arbitrarily” detain, arrest or limit the participation of “political dissidents” in the electoral process. The proposal stated that Brazil should commit to holding “free and fair” elections and ensure the participation of such individuals in the vote.

On Thursday. Sept. 17, Lula stated in an interview with Rádio Itatiaia that the proposal had become a “dead issue” for the Brazilian government. The president also rejected the possibility of granting the United States preferential access to the country’s mineral resources.

The confidential agency report delves deeper into the concerns previously raised in public analyses by the Brazilian Intelligence Agency. In a document released this year regarding intelligence challenges for 2026, the agency identified foreign interference as a threat to sovereignty. It warned that a combination of technological dependence, disinformation, espionage, and coercion could enable foreign actors to influence public debate and decision-making processes in Brazil.

Edited by Geisa Marques. This article was originally published by Brasil de Fato. It can be read in its original form, in Portuguese, here.

A coalition of Democratic states and Paramount reached a settlement in a lawsuit against its proposed $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery on Monday, paving the way for one of the largest media mergers in history — and a massive consolidation of power over a huge swath of the entertainment and news industries under the conservative billionaire Ellison family.

The antitrust lawsuit was the last major obstacle for the deal, which has already been blessed by the Trump administration. Attorneys general from 12 states had sued to block the merger, which leading California Attorney General Rob Bonta had called “unlawful,” amid a flurry of antitrust concerns from prominent Hollywood figures and press freedom groups. The Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) lawsuit against the merger was also settled on Monday, with the union saying that its members could not afford to continue the legal battle on their own.

The merger will grant widespread power to a company that would effectively control CNN; CBS News; and, in all, roughly 30 percent of wide-release theatrical film distribution and basic cable channel licensing. It amounts to roughly 20 percent of Americans’ television watching time — all conglomerated under the leadership of Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison. David Ellison is a major ally to Trump and son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who has personally donated millions to Israel’s military; Paramount had once dubiously suggested that opposition to the merger was a result of antisemitism.

David Ellison, who thanked California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in his statement celebrating the deal, has said that the merger is expected to go through in two weeks. Pro-Israel David Zaslav, the president of Warner Brothers Discovery — an entity that’s a conglomerate on its own, formed as a result of several other contentious mergers — is slated to receive $660 million from the merger, which would likely make him a billionaire.

Under the settlement, the newly formed megacorporation will be obligated to comply with several provisions, including the theatrical release of 30 films a year (something Paramount already independently pledged to do last year); a requirement for separate negotiations for cable channel distribution; management of two historic production lots; and an apparent commitment to domestic filmmaking.

The deal also includes a supposed commitment to a “News Editorial Independence Board” for the management of CNN and CBS, which will comprise of former or current journalists who are hand-picked by the conglomerate’s board of directors. News analysts and advocates have already cast doubt on the idea that the board will be effective, however, as past efforts to form similar such structures have failed.

David Ellison has already demonstrated a willingness to steer the news toward the right wing in his appointment of right-wing media figure Bari Weiss as CBS’s editor-in-chief last year. Meanwhile, press freedom advocates on Monday also urged David Ellison to oppose Trump’s recent ban on CNN in the press pool, noting his silence on the issue despite his stated commitments to press freedom.

Some of the world’s most repressive regimes will have a say at the company, too. The settlement comes just days after the Federal Communications Commission approved Paramount Skydance’s plan to allow the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to have a 49.5 percent equity stake in the newly merged company.

The deal immediately faced a deluge of criticism after it was announced on Monday, with critics saying that it will have “devastating” results for the nation’s media landscape and press freedom at a time of massive repression under the Trump administration.

“Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top,” said Alvaro Bedoya, a senior advisor for the American Economic Liberties Project. “As a result, a billionaire media conglomerate closely allied with the president will soon own one of its closest rivals, including some of the nation’s most critical news outlets.”

Over 5,000 filmmakers, documentarians, and other movie and television professionals signed a letter in April stating their opposition, including prominent directors and actors, under the umbrella of a group called the Block the Merger coalition. The coalition said that their members “vehemently oppose” the agreement on Monday.

“This is a bad deal for the future of film, entertainment, independent journalism, and a strong democracy in this country,” the group said. “We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires.”

The settlement comes despite experts saying that the states had a chance at blocking the merger, having secured a pause by a judge earlier this year.

“The Paramount/Warner Brothers merger seems facially illegal,” said Lina Khan, former Federal Trade Commission chair and leading antitrust expert, in a statement on Sunday. Khan noted that the lawsuit against it was strong, meaning it had a chance of succeeding.

However, she said, “[i]t’s troubling to hear that the states may now settle for behavioral remedies, allowing the deal to go through subject to various promises from the firms. Behavioral remedies routinely fail, and the stakes here are particularly high given that a strong democracy requires open markets for sound journalism and creative expression.”

If you are in San Francisco trying to follow the goings-on in your neighborhood or within city hall, you may have come across The Dissent. The website brands itself as “an AI newsroom” with work “reported, edited, and produced by named agents.” Its founder and publisher Dakota Carrasco — a real person, and, incidentally, an analyst at the notorious investment firm BlackRock — published text on the site’s “about” page saying, “Local journalism has been quietly consolidated and hollowed out.” Carrasco’s statement did not note the role of Carrasco’s own industry in that decline, nor did it acknowledge the irony in choosing this name for a website based on a technology that steals and repackages the intellectual output of others.

The Dissent’s website, which currently appears to be down, even included a masthead with bios for its non-human “staff” (the AI agents whose names appear alongside articles). Neighborhood “reporter” Casey Wong (who is not a real person) has a bio that reads, “I notice the texture of a block — who’s been here 30 years, who’s just moved in.” Of course, there’s no mention of how an AI agent might glean that information, but (actual) news outlet Mission Local has noted that, to fill its pages, The Dissent relies heavily on summarizing the work published in other sites by real human journalists.

Once, The San Francisco Standard reported, The Dissent did appear to follow up on a tip in a Reddit thread to break a story about a business closing, but “the agent appears to have hallucinated the claim that it had reached out to the owner for comment.”

The development of an AI newsroom in San Francisco, which is home to many of the tech billionaires attempting to reshape society, is certainly concerning for those of us who care about journalism. But The Dissent is not the only news outlet to have tried using AI to crib the journalism of real human workers. These AI newsrooms get a decent share of attention, and their harms are critical to point out. But they are also part of a broader problem: the undermining of how we share and receive factual information.

Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that could further destabilize the already precarious journalism industry by using its infamous search feature to prioritize AI summaries from Google Gemini, rather than directing people toward external links to news outlets like ours.

You might not have noticed the deep scale of this change, but you probably have noticed what writer Cory Doctorow refers to as the “enshittification” of Google search — the preponderance of spam, the push toward sponsored results, and the overwhelming sense that the internet no longer works the way it once did.

On June 9, when we sounded the alarm about the increased AI implementation within Google’s search function and the suppression of journalism that would surely result, it was too early to know exactly how much these changes would impact Truthout. Google had announced the changes on May 19 and we were still collecting data.

Before the change, our traffic from Google was 27 percent of our overall traffic: Exactly 2,604,280 people visited Truthout via Google in 2025. Given our experience with Facebook traffic abruptly declining by 90 percent in 2018, following sudden changes in the social media platform’s algorithm (including for example, Facebook’s decision to no longer regularly show Truthout’s posts to the more than 800,000 people who had followed Truthout’s page out of a desire to see them), it seemed reasonable to worry about losing as much as half our Google traffic. In our June op-ed, we wrote, “If even half of that 27 percent disappears, it will have a devastating impact on our journalism.”

At the time, we were hopeful that it wouldn’t be that bad. After all, wasn’t Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil”?

We later learned, however, that Google has quietly stepped back from its infamous motto, even removing it from the opening lines of its Code of Conduct while its parent company, Alphabet, Inc., ignores it entirely.

We now have three full months of data since Google’s change, and the numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.

We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.

At Truthout, we anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.

We know Truthout is not the only news organization taking a massive hit amid Google’s abrupt decision to prioritize showing internet users AI summaries instead of relevant news articles. Our peers in independent media and beyond — including among grassroots base-building organizations that depend on traffic — are struggling to stay above water.

As we wrote when Google’s AI changes were first announced, nobody wants this. People have overwhelmingly said they’d rather not get their news through an AI chatbot, and they recognize that there’s a pretty good chance the information they get from chatbots is not accurate. In fact, U.S. voters dislike AI as a whole, poll after poll has found. But Big Tech is increasingly treating its users as potential sites of profit and subjects to be managed, rather than people looking for the information they need to function as informed members of society. And they’re able to get away with it because, for so long, the importance of factual information and the people who ensure we have access to it have both been devalued by our political and economic systems.

A dystopian infringement on our access to information isn’t just some looming threat — we’re actively living through it.

The repercussions of this devaluation become more relevant by the day. As people try to find and share truthful, accurate information about the many crises that have been unleashed on us — foodborne disease outbreaks, vaccine science, disasters induced by the climate crisis, and immigration policing raids in their communities, for starters — they may be greeted with a torrent of loose facts or outright disinformation. Corporate news outlets and those owned by billionaires have repeatedly shown their willingness to capitulate to Donald Trump. Paywalls and subscriptions, which some outlets need in order to survive, mean that critical reporting is put behind a fence. A dystopian infringement on our access to information isn’t just some looming threat — we’re actively living through it.

Journalism has always been a crucial node of democratic practice; after all, how can we make decisions about what our society should look like if we don’t actually know the facts of what’s happening around us?

The AI-ification of news is making that increasingly clear. When AI “news outlets” and AI summaries are not busy plagiarizing real journalists, they are often instead regurgitating information from company press releases.

Is this the future of news that we imagine? Can we trust a website created by a BlackRock analyst to accurately report on the company that employs him? Can we trust Google’s AI search to accurately tell us about privacy controversies concerning Gmail, or about safety ratings for Google-owned Waymo self-driving cars? Limiting our avenues for finding accurate, factual information is a real threat to democracy.

Yet we are rapidly tunneling toward that future. Searches on Google for the term “Google Zero” have increased by 190 percent. The term, coined by tech journalist Nilay Patel in 2024, imagines a time when Google acts solely as a direct answer machine instead of an index of the web. Using Google’s own tools to analyze Truthout’s traffic, we can see that traffic from Google is currently at “Google 46,” meaning that we’re now seeing only 46 percent of our pre-AI Google traffic numbers.

We’ve seen the way tech companies’ devaluation of journalism has impacted our ecosystem in the past. Eight years ago, Facebook made up over 40 percent of Truthout’s traffic. Over the last decade we’ve seen that number decline to under 3 percent — not because the urgency or professionalism of our journalism decreased in any way, but because Facebook decided to stop showing our articles to the people who had expressly signed up to read them. We know from our experience with Facebook that once democracy and journalism are in the crosshairs of corporate greed, circumstances only get worse. We fully expect to be staring down Google Zero in the next couple of years.

Given these mounting, overlapping AI crises, how can we take action? We’re the first to admit that sometimes, this issue can seem so overwhelming and all-encompassing that one’s first reaction is an assumption of inevitability. That line of thought goes: AI (even in its most damaging forms) is here to stay, so we must simply get used to it. However, this mindset is exactly what tech companies are counting on to fuel the AI takeover. Rejecting it is the first step to pushing back.

When it comes to Google Search and Google’s default reliance on AI summaries for news and information, a full recognition of the inadequacy and danger of the problem is urgently necessary. An AI summary drawn from a few mainstream sources — plus Reddit, Wikipedia, and corporate press releases — will inevitably leave out crucial truths and perspectives, particularly those of marginalized and oppressed groups, resistance movements, independent and firsthand sources, and those critical of the tech companies responsible for AI’s harms. Similarly, relying on Meta-promoted posts for the latest on what’s going on in the world places a crucial lever of democracy — our ability to read, process, and discern current events — firmly in the hands of the algorithm (and, thus, mega-powerful corporations).

What might a broad and honest recognition of these realities lead to? We imagine it might lead to a different way of reading the news: one that won’t look entirely unfamiliar. What if, instead of relying on notifications and scrolling, we returned to bookmarking our favorite news sites and reading their homepages each morning?

What if we discerningly subscribed to trusted news sources, whether over email or in print, and read their publications as a first-line route to information? What if we took care to read whole articles (not just headlines or quick videos) and then shared them with friends, accompanied by our own thoughts?

If the journalistic sources for influencers’ facts disappear, thanks to lost traffic and revenue, what are we left with?

It wasn’t long ago that these were standard practices for many of us in left and progressive circles. A mass return to longer, slower, more reflective reading is possible, and we can each consider our capacity to take it on, individually and among our circles of friends and colleagues.

This might also require us to take a critical look at our engagement with, and reliance on, influencers — including on the left. According to the American Press Institute, “More than half of all American teenagers and adults (57 percent) now report getting news and information from influencers at least sometimes, and fully 81 percent of those ages 13-17 report getting news and information from influencers.”

We don’t need to renounce our dependence on the thoughts and analysis of leftist social media icons we trust, but we do need to recognize that their information comes from somewhere: They draw from journalism — which generally comes from independent publications and news organizations that are staffed and resourced — in order to provide their commentaries. If the journalistic sources for influencers’ facts disappear, thanks to lost traffic and revenue, what are we left with?

For individual readers, foundations, and concerned policy makers, the mandate in this department is clear: Supporting independent journalism is key to maintaining both day-to-day knowledge of the world and factual sources for research, both of which are essential to democracy.

There’s no magical shortcut, no silver-bullet strategy that will solve the dire threats to our society’s informational infrastructure. Material support for journalism outlets is necessary now, particularly as online readership tumbles off an AI-shaped cliff.

Of course, individual readers play a crucial role here. For institutional funders and potential major donors, we believe it’s worth assessing how journalism fits into your portfolios, and why liberal and progressive funding for this indispensable democratic puzzle piece has been consistently slashed, even as the right wing unabashedly bankrolls its own media.

If we all recognize that we have a stake in the looming threats to independent journalism’s very existence, it shouldn’t only affect our individual reading choices; it should also drive us toward collective action. Fortunately, the possibilities for mass movements abound, as people around the country rise up against Big Tech companies through diverse and creative channels.

Environmental justice activists, Indigenous rights organizers, rural communities, and even disgruntled former Trump supporters are banding together to oppose data centers, and in many places, they’re winning.

Child advocacy groups and impacted teens and caregivers drove the push that resulted in last month’s massive win against Meta, in which the company is instructed to make sweeping changes to its addiction-driving practices.

Rank-and-file workers are challenging AI from a labor vantage, and pushing their unions to act.

The more we can plug into these resistance efforts, the less inevitable an AI-dominated future becomes.

As a backlash against generative AI has spread across social media, even the most dominant platforms have acquiesced to a few changes. Corporate accountability activists are sounding the alarm on Big Tech’s runaway political spending, and are calling for renewed efforts to overturn Citizens United and implement state-level reforms. The more we can plug into these resistance efforts, the less inevitable an AI-dominated future becomes.

Finally, let’s allow ourselves to access our outrage at the injustice wrought by tech companies’ attacks on our rights, humanity, and any vestiges of remaining democracy. A recent study by Social Change Lab found that when it comes to AI, “the emotion most strongly associated with action was not fear or anxiety, but anger.”

Every week brings a new encroachment of AI into our lives. This is terrifying, but it should also be motivating: We all have a stake in this struggle. Don’t let AI take over our search results or our lives without a fight.

During the national anthem of the first three 2016 NFL preseason games, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat down on his team’s bench between two Gatorade coolers. Few noticed, and nobody made mention of the gesture until a Black reporter for NFL Network named Steve Wyche asked him about it following the third exhibition tilt, a home game against the Green Bay Packers. Wyche’s interview with Kaepernick put the quiet protest on newsfeeds across the country. Then, shortly after police shot and killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile within a 48-hour period — Kaepernick and a teammate, safety Eric Reid, went a step further before the final preseason game on Sept. 1. Instead of sitting on the bench during the anthem, they took a knee. The rest is civil rights and sports history.

The story of Kaepernick’s life before and after that fateful stand is the subject of his new memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” co-written with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Nick Chiles. Kaepernick’s journey from a shy adoptee of color to white parents uninterested in exploring his Black experience, to a boldfaced protest icon is a singular American story, whose hinge moment came at the cusp of the Trump era. The book, which comes out tomorrow, will be available at most places where books are sold — but not Target. Kaepernick is boycotting the retailer over the company’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. I spoke with the author in late August. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Truthdig: Beginning where the book begins, have you thought about what it means to be a public face for adopted children? 

Colin Kaepernick: It’s interesting, I didn’t actually hear much about adoption prior to the 2016 protest, which is when I got a surprising amount of letters and feedback from adoptees. It wasn’t immediately on my radar because being adopted is just life for me; like a regular Tuesday, right? But as more and more people reached out over the years, I’ve become mindful and intentional about showing the positive elements of it, but also the realities, and what it requires to work through all of it. Looking back, it’s natural this position came into my realm. I try to represent our community appropriately. 

How were you able to grow as a person at the University of Nevada-Reno?

I was fortunate to find the right relationships early on. Some I stumbled into, like the one with my roommate-teammate Virgil Green. He invited me to attend Second Baptist Church, which became a second home for me because Reno wasn’t overly welcoming to its small Black population either. The town’s historical nickname is “The Mississippi of the West.” Later on in college, another teammate, future Super Bowl champion Brandon Marshall, introduced me to the Kappas, an esteemed Divine Nine Black fraternity, which I didn’t even know we had because the campus population was so small. 

One of the funniest moments in the book is your dad getting all worked up and questioning you because he thinks it’s an “Animal House” situation.

Yeah, Dad. Not the same thing at all. The Kappas gave me a great sense of community, and I’ll add one more to the mix. The Center is a multicultural campus spot where if you weren’t white, you could go hang out and relax. I made a lot of friends there as well. I had these three safe spaces where I could have conversations I never had [growing up] back in Turlock [California]. I explored ideas and concepts I hadn’t been exposed to previously, so even with the demands of football, college allowed me to grow and develop in important ways. 

I revisited your NFL highlight reels and will confess to forgetting how ahead of your time you were. Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen were certainly watching. Do you hope to reclaim yourself as a quarterback, because in many ways it’s been overshadowed and even memory-holed?

I became the 49ers’ starter in 2012, which is when you start to see a broader shift in the style of quarterback play towards what we see today. Mobile with a lot of movement, beat defenses with your arm and your legs. I’m proud of what I accomplished, but the league’s response to the protest itself is the reason my career isn’t remembered in the way it should be. The NFL did significant work to delegitimize the on-field performances to justify blackballing me.

Delegitimizing is an evenhanded way of describing it.

Yes, it’s a very kind word. There was a lot of work done on that front by the NFL, but what gets missed in all of it is that if I wasn’t the caliber of quarterback that I was, nobody would’ve cared. I know how good I was because a backup QB would’ve just been shuffled off the sidelines and it would’ve been the end of it. My success as a quarterback is precisely why the protest drove the NFL crazy. 

To me, the biggest surprise in “The Perilous Fight” is that your first protest in Houston was impromptu. What was it that hit you when the national anthem played? 

“We’re consistently seeing Black men killed by multiple cameras.”

At that point in time, there’d been a wave of police killings, year after year on a regular basis. By then, we’re also in a different era with social media. Historically, you look at the L.A. riots, which erupted only because someone happened to shoot video of Rodney King being beaten by LAPD. One person with a VHS camera. Today, we’re consistently seeing Black men killed by multiple cameras everyone carries around. These killings coincided with the reading and research I’d been doing to understand the historical context of police brutality. Walking onto the field for that 2016 game, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” hadn’t crossed my mind. When I heard it I asked myself, what does this actually mean to you? 

Having a better understanding of the historical systems of oppression, as opposed to ‘one-off’ incidents, gave me a realization in that moment. What the United States purports to represent doesn’t represent me or a significant portion of the population. Why am I supposed to show pride in this? Steve Wyche caught me sitting in a third game, inquired, and I told him why. By the next day, the story had blown up well beyond sports media.

I joked at the time that you should offer to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” in exchange for playing the never-mentioned third verse.

Right, dig a little deeper and the question becomes: What is the actual intention of the national anthem? Why would I ever stand up for that? Absurd. To your point though, sure, if we’re going to ring it out in stadiums, play the full thing. Get it all out there. 

There’s a major public misconception about when you changed tactics in the final preseason game and decided to take a knee. The oft-told tale is that former Green Beret and NFL preseason player Nate Boyer convinced you and teammate Eric Reid to do so, but that isn’t what happened at all. How did Boyer become part of the narrative?

The story came out that way because Nate Boyer positioned it that way. It obviously wasn’t the case, it was Eric and I. As I note in the book, I was a Black guy in a national firestorm and, supposedly, I reached out to a white guy I didn’t know to come and advise me on what to do during the national anthem? Laughable. It was Reid’s idea. The really telling part is that nobody in the media questioned Boyer’s version of events. Why? Well, if it’s Boyer’s idea, it’s a more palpable narrative to make a lot of football fans nominally comfortable. 

“He was supposed to take a knee with us and then at the last minute decided not to.”

Eric and I had spoken to Nate beforehand, and he was supposed to take a knee with us and then at the last minute decided not to, which is its own situation altogether. It became a big decision for Eric and I. Should we combat this bogus story in real time, or do we stay with the protest message we’re trying to send? If the thing with Boyer becomes the focal point, then we’ve lost the impact we’re trying to achieve. We didn’t love seeing that narrative run rampant, but Eric and I decided it wasn’t the battle worth fighting. 

It’s a no-win situation, but Boyer’s story did steer the conversation in public circles to one of free speech, rather than police brutality, which are two very different topics.

Very different, indeed. How the protest is talked about through those two lenses was revealing then and remains so today. People who recognize what Eric and I were doing, see it as a protest against police killing Black people, the serious need to address that and systemic oppression more broadly. The free speech piece of it was always a deflection from the core issues at hand. 

Do you feel there’s a connective tissue from taking a knee to the mass public protests over the last decade, both the righteous ones following George Floyd’s murder, and opposite ones like Jan. 6? 

I’ve never thought about it that way. I mainly look at the anthem protest in terms of the wins we’ve had and the progress we’ve made, but also how much more work there is to do, especially given all the resistance to creating a fair and equitable society. How loud and vocal the other side of it has gotten over the last 10 years is both surprising and not at the same time. We’ve taken major steps back, but I’d rather have it all out in the open so we know what we’re up against. It’s valuable to know where it lies. 

Have you found the last decade disheartening?

At times for sure, but my hope is that the awful politics are part of a last-ditch effort. As far as where we’re at as a society, there’s a strong growing undercurrent of people saying “enough’s enough.” We’re heading in the right direction, but you have to weather the hard times. Keep playing offense in the storm. 

One savvy author’s move on your part is mentioning President Donald Trump as little as possible. I thought there would be more pronounced score-settling and was sincerely hoping you’d “motherfuck” the big man once or twice. Did you go back and forth at all about your impressive restraint?

Look, that man had a direct impact, working with NFL owners to blackball me. That exists, that’s real, so there is plenty I could say about him personally—

Wouldn’t it feel good just saying it out loud?  

Maybe, but I know in many ways that’s what they want. They want to be the center of the story and have relevance and influence in that way. Him in particular. There’s obviously a level of power and influence that comes with his position, but I don’t have to lean into that or accept it. I’m trying to stay focused on what’s most important. He doesn’t fit the bill. 

Given the nightmare CTE report that came out this week combined with distance from your playing days, does your brain thank you for missing out on a decade of head shots, even if your heart says otherwise?

It’s a both/and answer. There’s my love of playing football, nothing else like it, with its competitive nature, the camaraderie of a group of guys coming together to win. You put yourself through so much it makes success incredibly rewarding in ways you can’t find anywhere else. And yet, there are serious consequences. I haven’t even read this week’s report yet, but I remember the one where they had more than a hundred players and every single one of them had CTE except for one, a kicker I think. If you want to play, be a kicker. 

“In football, CTE is not an if, it’s a when.”

The physical consequences of football are real. My wife, Nessa Diab, and I have asked the question so many families are asking. If we have a son, will we let him play football? As a parent who knows the undeniable impact, I would like him to play other sports. In football, CTE is not an if, it’s a when. You don’t want to put your child in that situation. 

On a personal level, I played football for 20-plus years, so time will tell the damage done, but am I glad I saved myself some hits? Yes. Would I love to get back out on the field? Absolutely. 

You write about Jay-Z, who supported you on “Saturday Night Live,” then ignored you, later tried to co-opt you after Roc Nation partnered with the NFL, and then last summer, after the book was finished, called you out at Yankee Stadium. Do you think these will be the tabloid headlines to emerge out of “The Perilous Fight?”

I’m not sure, because there are so many different topical pieces in the book. Like the Nate Boyer story isn’t known, hasn’t been talked or written about, so I think there will be a good amount there. On the Jay-Z side, this is repetitive behavior that there’s been conversations about for quite a while. There may be some surprise around specific details, but Jay-Z’s overall actions won’t be shocking to anyone who has paid attention. 

As noted in “The Perilous Fight,” you do not watch the NFL at all, but I’m curious if you’ve seen clips of Eminem taking a knee during the halftime show of Super Bowl LVI?

I had friends text me about it, but I’ve never seen it because I don’t engage. I hope solidarity is the case. And if so, while I don’t love anyone who is now doing the Super Bowl show because of the Jay-Z deal, I appreciate the sentiment. 

Finally, looking back, can you believe how the last 10 years have played out? How you became a monumental public figure — and all of the fallout that came along with it — for a generally mild act of protest against an ongoing life-and-death problem for communities of color? It’s mind-blowing, no?  

It really speaks to the fragility of a certain portion of society. In basic form, I’m protesting police killing Black people. The flip side of resistance to this simple human concept is — what? Police should be killing Black people? Yes, I’ve been in the center spotlight, but I’m also part of a larger movement of people publicly screaming, “Hey, you shouldn’t be killing us!”

It’s the lowest of bars to get over.

The US Supreme Court on Monday night rejected a bid by the Trump administration to keep onerous US Postal Service rules for mail-in ballots in place, which voting-rights defenders said risked depriving millions of people of the franchise in this year’s midterm elections.

After a back-and-forth legal battle over the USPS rules that dragged on for months, the nation’s highest court issued the 7-2 ruling without elaborating on its legal reasoning, though right-wing Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas issued dissents in favor of President Donald Trump’s side.

The ruling in USPS v. California was in response to a legal challenge brought by the League of Women’s Voters, the attorneys general of numerous states, and others who argued that newly-announced rules by the Postal Service regarding mail-in ballots, changes prompted by an executive order issued by Trump, would prevent people from having their ballots counted and cause chaos for those trying to administer this year’s elections.

A victory for democracy, a defeat for election deniers. https://t.co/MKjfKmgyTv

— David Crowley (@DavidCCrowley) September 15, 2026

In response to the ruling, the plaintiffs’ legal team said the decision was “a critical step to ensuring free and fair elections this November by maintaining access to mail voting for millions of eligible voters across the United States and lifting the dire threat that the Postal Service would disenfranchise them.”

“Mail voting is safe, secure, and reliable—and the Trump administration has presented no evidence to the contrary, as the courts have repeatedly recognized,” the statement continued. “We will remain vigilant in countering threats to free and fair elections and ensuring that every eligible voter is able to cast a ballot and have it count.”

“Today’s decision is a victory for our democracy and a powerful affirmation of the rule of law,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement. “The stakes in this litigation could not have been higher.”

Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, was among the other pro-democracy advocates who welcomed the decision.

“Today’s decision is a major win for the millions of everyday Americans who count on vote-by-mail—our seniors, service members, busy parents, rural voters, and voters with disabilities,” said Solomón in a statement. “Vote-by-mail is safe, proven, and vital; even the president uses it. This executive order was a blatant power grab designed to silence voters and undermine our elections, but it failed because the people and the law were on our side. Our Constitution is clear: states run our elections, and voters choose their leaders—not the other way around. No administration can strip the people of their power.”

Michael McNulty, senior policy director for Issue One, a nonpartisan group that works to defend free and fair elections, also welcomed the ruling, but said vigilance would still be necessary going forward.

“The fight to preserve states’ authority to administer elections is far from over,” warned McNulty.

“President Trump continuously and falsely claims fraud in mail-in voting without evidence,” he added. “Despite voting multiple times with this method, he remains obsessed with centralizing control over elections to tilt the playing field. However, for now, one piece of that centralization effort is blocked, and it ensures that mail-in voting for the midterms won’t be disrupted.”

In what environmental advocates describe as “another gift to the fossil fuel industry,” the Trump administration plans to end rules limiting the release of planet-heating emissions from power plants that burn coal and gas.

Power plants are considered the largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US and account for about a quarter of the nation’s climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In 2024, the EPA under the Biden administration used the Clean Air Act to require that many new gas plants and existing coal plants reduce their carbon emissions by 90%, including by installing carbon capture technology, by 2032.

The EPA estimated that the rule would reduce the amount of CO2 emissions by about 1.38 billion metric tons over the next two decades, the equivalent of about a year of emissions from the entire US electric power sector.

Another gift to the fossil fuel industry!
The US will allow power plant polluters to dump unlimited planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas.@maxinejoselow https://t.co/ZeiSaFkEpC

— Safe Climate Campaign now @safe-climate.bsky.soc (@safe_climate) September 14, 2026

On Monday, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator under President Donald Trump, announced an end to this policy at a meeting of energy ministers at the Group of 20 conference in Houston.

Not only will this prevent the enactment of a policy that the EPA has estimated would prevent around 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma cases by 2035. But the administration is also rolling out a proposal seeking to prevent future administrations from regulating carbon emissions as a health risk.

It is an effort that runs parallel to the administration’s rescission of the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allowed the EPA to regulate vehicle emissions under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act on the grounds that they are harmful to human health. That move is also being challenged in court.

Power plants are regulated under a different section of the Clean Air Act, Section 111, which allows the EPA to regulate facilities that “cause, or contribute significantly to” dangerous air pollution.

But whereas the courts have previously interpreted this statute to regulate the outputs of entire facilities, the Trump administration is asking courts to adopt a novel reading of the statute which says each individual chemical under scrutiny must “contribute significantly” to climate change.

As Meredith Hankins, legal director for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained in a policy memo last week, it likely won’t be easy for the administration to prove that the CO2 emissions from US power plants aren’t a significant driver of climate change.

“Power sector emissions account for a quarter of total US emissions, so if they cannot be counted as significant, it’s hard to conceive of any emissions that would,” Hankins wrote. “In fact, if the US power sector were a nation, it would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter after China, the United States, India, and Russia. That’s a pretty ‘significant contribution’ to the problem.”

The effort to gut power plant regulations comes after the hottest meteorological summer recorded in US history and amid a year with one of the largest numbers of climate disasters on record, including widespread drought, destructive wildfires, and repeated flooding and tornado outbreaks.

As the planet has warmed over the last half-century, the US has seen a sharp, near-sevenfold increase in weather disasters costing over $1 billion, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” said Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, following news of the EPA’s rollback of power plant rules. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”

She added that “the Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country.”

If successful, the reversal of the power plant rules would be one of the most significant steps in Zeldin’s push to eviscerate the EPA’s authority to combat climate change on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. Earlier this summer, during a meeting of the National Coal Council, he bragged that “many of the items” on the industry’s “wish list are now done.”

He has put the wheels in motion to roll back virtually every Biden-era regulation on the coal industry, including rules limiting pollution from mercury and toxic metals, controls on toxic wastewater from coal plants, and limits on coal ash.

And while seeking to undermine the legal basis to regulate greenhouse gases, Zeldin’s EPA has also taken a sledgehammer to its practical ability to do so, dismantling offices that collect climate data, erasing information about human-caused climate change from the agency’s websites, and filling research panels with scientists employed by the fossil fuel industry.

Former State Department energy official Alan Eyre noted that on the world stage, the US “has always been obstructionist” when it comes to climate policy. Under Trump, he said, “we’re actively malevolent.”