Citizens for Sanity , a shadowy nonprofit run by three former Trump administration officials, has purchased $33 million worth of air time this month to flood airwaves with violent, misleading ads that claim that Democrats are exclusively to blame for a series of lurid crimes caught on surveillance cameras in recent years.

Reporting on the tax-exempt nonprofit’s first wave of ads — which filled the screens of baseball fans with unwelcome images of violence between innings of playoff games — revealed that the Republican operatives responsible for the attacks all work closely with Stephen Miller, the former president’s speechwriter, who has played a key role in promoting the anti-Democrat ad campaign on social media.

The group’s latest ad, posted online Saturday, seeks to rewrite history by blaming President Joe Biden for the sickening rise in racist attacks on Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic, which first spiked in March 2020 when then-President Donald Trump started calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and “the Kung flu.”

The ad, which is provocatively titled, “Why Don’t Asian Lives Matter to Joe Biden and His Left-Wing Allies?” seeks to exploit justifiable outrage over the violence by confronting viewers with distressing images of 17 attacks on Asian Americans since 2020, as a narrator insists that the blame lies with Biden and “left-wing prosecutors who won’t prosecute — liberals freeing predators.”

WATCH: Why Don't Asian Lives Matter to Joe Biden and his liberal allies? pic.twitter.com/C0Nu9LyfeK

— Citizens for Sanity (@citizens_sanity) October 22, 2022

That language, including the reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, seems to be carefully calibrated to stoke racial resentment between Black and Asian communities by implying that Democrats have enacted criminal justice policies that, according to narration scripted by the former Trump aides, “have allowed deranged criminals to roam free, putting Asians in grave danger.”

But what is missing from the ad is perhaps more revealing than what is in it.

None of the clips of violence are dated, which prevents viewers from knowing that almost all of the crimes were committed either during or shortly after Trump’s presidency. Using the video clips as clues, I was able to find news reports on 16 of the 17 incidents. One of the most shocking assaults, on an 84-year-old Chinese man who was kicked to the pavement from his seated walker in San Francisco, took place when Trump was president, on February 20, 2020 . Six other attacks took place less than a month into Biden’s term. At least 12 of the victims shown in the ad were attacked before May 20, 2021, when Biden signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act , federal legislation aimed at combatting the racist attacks, which was introduced by two Asian American Democratic lawmakers, Rep. Grace Meng of New York, and Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii.

In at least one case, an assault on a 91-year-old man who was shoved to the ground in Oakland’s Chinatown on January 31, 2021, the ad makers appear to have zoomed in on the original surveillance camera video so that the part of the date stamp that clearly showed the month is cropped out.

All of the news reports on the violence featured in the ad have also been edited to remove mentions of bigotry triggered by the pandemic and Trump’s rhetoric.

Perhaps most importantly, the ad’s central claim, that criminals who attack Asian Americans are not punished for their crimes, is completely contradicted by news reports on the incidents, which make it clear that in case after case the suspected attackers were in fact arrested and charged , including with hate crimes .

At one point in the ad, as the narrator says “Joe Biden’s soft on crime,” viewers see video that was shared on Twitter by the actress Olivia Munn, who tweeted surveillance camera footage of a friend’s mother, Lee-Lee Chin-Yeung, being assaulted in Queens, New York, on February 16, 2021.

But the suspected attacker, Patrick Mateo, was arrested within three days and was later charged with a hate crime . The victim’s daughter, Maggie Cheng, was a virtual guest for Biden’s 2022 State of the Union address. “My mother was attacked because she is Asian and thanks to the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act that Rep. Meng wrote, the perpetrator will be held accountable for his crime,” Cheng told a local news site . “I am grateful to both President Biden and Congresswoman Meng for their continued support in protecting Asian Americans across the country and combating anti-Asian hate.”

Of the three attacks featured in the ad that took place in 2022, the most brutal was the beating of a 67-year-old woman of Asian descent in Yonkers, New York, in March. Last month, her attacker pleaded guilty to assault in the first degree as a hate crime. The Wall Street Journal reported that he “will be sentenced in November to 17.5 years in state prison and five years of supervised release as part of his plea agreement.”

Despite those arrests and prosecutions, the wave of racist harassment and attacks has yet to recede.

“Sadly the hate continues,” Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, told ABC News in March. “The hate’s been normalized, with President Trump’s rhetoric. He sort of opened Pandora’s box, that it’s OK to mock and then to attack Asians.”

Jeung launched the website Stop AAPI Hate on March 19, 2020 to track the alarming rise in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as the pandemic reached the United States. Three days earlier, Trump had referred to the harm caused to Americans by “the Chinese virus” for the first time on Twitter . Writing in the American Journal of Public Health this year, researchers reported evidence that Trump’s tweet had triggered an immediate spike in anti-Asian hate speech online.

On March 18, 2020, as reports of hatred directed at Chinese Americans circulated, Trump dismissed concerns about a White House official who made a racist joke to a Chinese American reporter, by referring to Covid-19 as “the Kung flu.” The next day, a Washington Post photographer captured an image of an alteration to Trump’s prepared remarks on the pandemic, written in Sharpie in what appeared to be Trump’s handwriting, showing that a reference to “the Corona Virus” had been altered to read “the CHINESE Virus.”

When Trump returned to the campaign trail in June 2020, he added the racist joke that Covid-19 was “the Kung flu” to his stump speech, which so pleased his fans that it quickly became an applause they cried out for .

“We had, about two years ago, leaders of our country using terms like, ‘China virus,’ ‘Kung flu,’ literally blaming people who look like me for bringing the virus to this country, and that’s not going to change overnight,” Meng told ABC News this March. “We have a lot of pain and damage to undo.”

According to a right-wing website’s report on the Citizens for Sanity ad, it is scheduled to air before the midterm elections in states where the votes of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders could decide close races — including Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

The post Bizarre Republican Ad Blames Biden for Anti-Asian Violence Incited by Trump appeared first on The Intercept .

A touching moment at a recent campaign event for Mehmet Oz, better known as Dr. Oz, in Philadelphia — in which a Black woman broke down in tears as she described the fatal shootings of her brother and nephew, and was comforted by the Republican Senate candidate — made for riveting television, and brought to mind the former daytime TV host’s old namesake show.

Three weeks later, after the encounter was featured in local and national news reports, journalists who covered the event discovered that they had been duped by the Oz campaign into reporting as news a scene that had more in common with reality TV.

The woman, Sheila Armstrong, sat next to Oz at a September 19 event his campaign described as a “community discussion” in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. Armstrong held a handmade sign which said that her lost relatives were “gone but not forgotten,” and her anguished tears were broadcast to the city that day by the local NBC News affiliate , and described in reports on the event by the Philadelphia Inquirer and KYW Newsradio .

Sheila Armstrong tells Oz about her nephew and brother who were shot and killed in Philly. She says she’s “fed up with the system that’s playing politics with the lives of people in this community.” That’s Democratic state Rep. Chris Rabb seated next to her. pic.twitter.com/WWFf4nGfXj

— Julia Terruso (@JuliaTerruso) September 19, 2022

The emotional encounter between the candidate and a victim of gun violence who had suffered so deeply was brought to national attention this week by The Associated Press, in a feature story on the competition over Black voters in the Pennsylvania Senate race between Oz and his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor. When the AP story was first published on Tuesday, it began this way:

As Sheila Armstrong grew emotional in recounting how her brother and nephew were killed in Philadelphia, Dr. Mehmet Oz — sitting next to her inside a Black church, their chairs arranged a bit like his former daytime TV show set — placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

Later, he gave her a hug, and said, “How do you cope?”

That text account — in a piece looking at the Oz’s campaign’s effort to connect with Black voters as an allied Republican group worked to cast Fetterman as an anti-Black racist — was posted on the AP’s website, and distributed to the hundreds of news organizations that reprint AP reporting, accompanied by a photograph of Armstrong drying her tears as Oz leaned in to hug her.

As the text and photo accounts of the exchange between Oz and Armstrong were reproduced by news organizations across the country that subscribe to the AP’s wire service, Fetterman’s campaign manager, Brendan McPhillips, complained on Twitter that the AP had failed to share a pertinent fact with readers: that Armstrong is not an ordinary voter but a paid member of the Oz campaign staff.

As evidence, McPhillips posted a screenshot of a business card Armstrong had shared on her public Instagram account in June, identifying her as the Oz campaign’s “Philadelphia County Coordinator,” above a “doctorozforsenate.com” email address.

Armstrong’s Instagram feed also includes posts from June and July promoting other campaign events in Philadelphia, illustrated by a photo of her smiling with the candidate, and one from September , in which she invited anyone who wanted to attend the “Safer Streets Community Discussion” with Oz on September 19 to RSVP, by emailing her at her campaign account. The flyer for the event Armstrong posted on Instagram made it clear that the location of the event would not be made public to anyone who did not email her.

Records filed with the Federal Election Commission in June show that two payments to Armstrong that month from the Doctor Oz for Senate campaign were described as “payroll.”

None of the local news reports on the event that were published last month informed the public that Armstrong worked for the Oz campaign.

While Armstrong has clearly suffered greatly from the unchecked epidemic of gun violence in America, it appears that the Oz campaign misled reporters who attended the invitation-only discussion where she was a featured speaker by failing to disclose her affiliation with the campaign. None of the local news reports on the event that were published last month informed the public that Armstrong worked for the Oz campaign.

Although the AP updated the text of its report to add a reference to Armstrong’s employment, after the Fetterman campaign raised the issue, it seems clear that the news organization only became aware of her status after publication. “As soon as AP learned of Armstrong’s campaign affiliation and confirmed it, we updated our story,” a spokesperson for the news organization told me in an email.

In a phone interview on Thursday, Ryan Collerd, the freelance photojournalist who took the photograph of Oz comforting Armstrong on assignment for the AP, told me that he had no idea that she was affiliated with the campaign until I called him. “She was not presented, in my recollection, as anything other than a grieving family member,” Collerd said.

Armstrong and the Oz campaign’s communications director, Brittany Yanick, did not respond to questions about whether the campaign deliberately withheld her role with the campaign from journalists.

Chris Rabb — a Democratic state representative who said he forced his way into the event in his community without an invitation “in protest,” and took a seat next to Armstrong — shared a photograph on Twitter that seemed to show that reporters in the room nearly outnumbered the dozen invited guests who took part in the discussion.

Literally half of the dozen folks at this fake town hall were featured on #DocHollywood ’s campaign pamphlet that I tore up in front of the cameras before I left.

Let’s see what news outlets will release that footage.

I was neither invited, nor welcomed to this #traumaporn . pic.twitter.com/2OEgHzhvi9

— Re-Elect RepRabb! (@Rabb4ThePeople) September 19, 2022

Rabb also claimed that some of the participants in the photo-op had previously been photographed by the Oz campaign for a flyer promoting his candidacy that was handed out at the event. While that flyer does not appear to be available online, a campaign commercial for Oz that was filmed that day and released two weeks later did feature video of him speaking to at least two of the participants in the Philadelphia event, including Armstrong, who was shown touring the neighborhood with him, arm in arm.

Cory Clark, a photojournalist and writer who covered the event for The Local, a Northwest Philadelphia newspaper, told me in an email that Armstrong’s affiliation with the campaign was not revealed to reporters who attended what he pointedly called “a closed-door community discussion.”

Clark’s report on the event also included video of a confrontation between Armstrong and pro-choice Fetterman supporters outside the storefront church where the event she organized for Oz took place.

“I invited Dr. Oz to come have this conversation with me and my community,” Armstrong told the Fetterman supporters. “So a conversation about safer streets? Every candidate should be having a conversation with us. But guess what? Oz, he took my invitation, so that’s why we’re doing it — and I invited Fetterman, Fetterman did not come.”

A Fetterman campaign official described Armstrong’s claim as false, telling me in an email, “we were never invited to this event.”

There is nothing new about a political campaign carefully stage-managing a public event to get good publicity or using the news media to broadcast a favorable message to the public. But by inviting reporters to cover a community discussion with Oz and not revealing that a featured speaker, Armstrong, was a paid staffer, the former TV host’s aides seem to have successfully tricked reporters into presenting a staged, reality TV scene as if it were news.

What’s more, despite Armstrong’s suggestion that the whole point of the event was to discuss gun violence, the four-part plan to “fight for Black communities” Oz unveiled during his visit to Philadelphia that day made no mention of any measures to take guns off the city’s streets.

In fact, the candidate’s campaign website boasts that Oz is “a proud gun-owner” and “a firm believer in the Second Amendment and our constitutional right to bear arms for protection.”

The text under a video that shows Oz firing a variety of weapons, and loading a rifle, states his position clearly: “He opposes anti-gun measures like red flag laws and liberal gun grabs.”

But when Lauren Mayk, a reporter for the local NBC News affiliate in Philadelphia, asked Oz if he would oppose any new restrictions on guns as a senator, the candidate — who had been photographed after his event giving Armstrong another warm hug — dodged the question and quickly changed the subject.

The post Mehmet Oz Campaign Misled Reporters About His Emotional Encounter With a Black Voter appeared first on The Intercept .

On Tuesday, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told a right-wing journalist that “regime media” in the United States had “wanted to see Tampa” devastated by Hurricane Ian “because they thought that would be worse for Florida.” A clip of the conspiratorial comments quickly went viral — largely because many of DeSantis’s critics on the left had no idea what he was talking about. The detractors were shocked at the offhand comparison of American news organizations outside the conservative media ecosystem to state-run propaganda outlets .

DeSantis had been asked by Brendon Leslie, the founder of a conservative news site — and a Republican activist who told local news on January 6, 2021, that he was following President Donald Trump’s orders when he stormed the U.S. Capitol — if the media was at fault for storm forecasts that had stressed the danger to the city of Tampa instead of other areas that were badly hit.

I asked Governor DeSantis about media accountability and he absolutely demolished them

“They don’t care about the people of this state… they want to use destruction from storms as a way to advance their agenda” pic.twitter.com/IErBHfwkuJ

— Brendon Leslie (@BrendonLeslie) October 4, 2022

Instead of blaming the weather forecasters, the governor pivoted to his claim that national news organizations had been rooting for maximum destruction from the storm because they hoped to “use it to pursue their political agenda.” DeSantis left unsaid which news organizations he was talking about, and what they hoped to gain politically by seeing Tampa devastated — but the governor’s words seemed to make perfect sense to Leslie, who nodded along.

That’s probably because Leslie, like DeSantis, is fluent in the language of the far-right media ecosystem. In fact, Leslie seems to draw no contradiction between reporting on Republican political candidates and also campaigning for them . In March, he organized a far-right rally featuring Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. In August, Leslie spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

On Tuesday, when Leslie interviewed the governor, he was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the Three Percenters , a far-right militia group. DeSantis, who does much of his campaigning on Fox News, had good reason to believe that he was speaking to someone with an audience steeped in the right-wing media trope that treats the Biden administration as akin to a dictatorship.

Fox News seems to have played a role in mainstreaming the language DeSantis used on Tuesday. On the cable channel, the Biden administration is regularly referred to as a repressive “regime.” In recent months one of the channel’s most prominent hosts, Laura Ingraham, has repeatedly cast reports that are unflattering to Republicans — from CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today, Vox, the Daily Beast, and Politico — as the work of “regime media.”

In fact, in her opening monologue on Monday night — hours before DeSantis was interviewed by Leslie — Ingraham had claimed that reporters from “regime media” outlets who asked questions about Florida’s response to the storm were “working overtime to cast aspersions and sow distrust” and “rooting now against Florida’s governor in a time of crisis.”

As Ingraham spoke, a graphic behind her displayed the logos of the nonpartisan news organizations, and the headline in the lower third of the screen read: “Media Desperate to Make This DeSantis’ Katrina.”

Close observers of Fox News, which is clearly partisan and operates as a de facto arm of the Republican Party, and was in lockstep with the White House during the Trump administration , might see some irony in one of its hosts claiming that news organizations which aim to be nonpartisan are the ones acting like state-controlled media in autocracies like Russia or Syria.

While it seems likely that DeSantis, who has appeared on Fox dozens of times this year , was channeling Ingraham when he railed against the supposed “regime media” plot to make him look bad, the governor has been referring to the Biden administration as a totalitarian regime supported by media lackeys for more than a year.

“When you stand up for the right things, they will attack you,” DeSantis told Republicans in Nebraska in September 2021. “The left will come after you. The regime-controlled media will smear you.”

The following month, the governor suggested that federal officials were trying to intimidate Florida parents who objected to masks mandates in schools during the coronavirus pandemic. “As we continue to see the use of fear and intimidation to suppress opposition to the regime, we’re going to find new ways to be able to empower parents’ rights to decide what is best for their children,” DeSantis said.

When he announced that he would be “a candidate for reelection as governor of the free state of Florida,” last November, DeSantis listed among his accomplishments that he had “stood up to the Biden regime.” The same week, he appeared on “Fox and Friends” to denounce “the Biden regime failures from Afghanistan to the southern border.”

This August, when Mar-a-Lago was searched by federal agents to seize classified documents illegally taken from the White House by Trump, DeSantis called it “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.”

While many Americans who do not spend their time immersed in the right-wing media echo chamber might be surprised that this term is so commonly used to describe a democratically elected federal government in Washington, the effort to discredit all non-conservative media outlets as filled with undercover left-wing operatives is of course not new.

In 2009, the Republican nominee for vice president the previous year, Sarah Palin, surprised tFox host Sean Hannity by referring to mainstream media critics of her memoir as “ that lamestream media .” “Did you say lamestream media?” Hannity asked. “Yeah, lamestream,” Palin answered.

Eight years later, Donald Trump went a step further by referring to any criticism of him or his administration as “ fake news ,” and calling reporters unwilling to accept his lies as truth “the enemy of the people.”

Over the past year, Republican politicians like DeSantis — who recently headlined campaign events for Republican candidates that effectively barred any journalists who were not willing to allow their reporting to be used in campaign commercials — have increasingly embraced the far more extreme claim that reporters who ask uncomfortable questions are “regime media.”

The post Ron DeSantis Claim That “Regime Media” Wanted Hurricane Ian to Hit Tampa Echoed Fox News Rant appeared first on The Intercept .

More than 1,000 antiwar protesters were arrested in Russia on Wednesday, following President Vladimir Putin’s decision to force up to 300,000 reservists back into military service as his war on Ukraine falters.

In a recorded address , Putin described the move as a “partial mobilization” of Russian citizens with some prior military training, but, as the Russian exile news site Meduza reported , a new law enacted this week appears to give the president the right to call for a wider, general mobilization. Most Russian men of military age are legally considered reservists following a mandatory year of military service in their youth.

Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian armed forces, observed that Putin’s order, which also indefinitely extends the contracts of soldiers who volunteered to fight in Ukraine, “might help Moscow stem the deteriorating quantity of the force, but not the deteriorating quality of the force [and] its morale.”

At least 1,386 protesters were arrested at demonstrations across the country, according to OVD-Info , a human rights group that monitors political persecution in Russia.

There were more than 500 arrests in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, where protesters chanted “No to war,” “Send Putin to the trenches,” and “Russia without Putin.”

Protests in Moscow and St Petersburg today have grown pretty large. People chanting “No to War!” Dozens of arrests reported pic.twitter.com/9F4E5VIy9E

— Matthew Luxmoore (@mjluxmoore) September 21, 2022

A crowd gathered this evening on Arbat, Moscow's main pedestrian street, shouts "Send Putin to the trenches!" pic.twitter.com/pkm8vynnxw

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) September 21, 2022

?????? ??? ?????? #???????? pic.twitter.com/C45wMLQQdn

— ?????? ?????? (@SobolLubov) September 21, 2022

Some protesters also used a play on words to refer to the mobilization — known in Russian as a “mobilizatsiya” — as a “mogilizatsiya,” an invented word that means something close to a “burialization.”

Although the arrests were not featured on tightly controlled state television news broadcasts, video of protesters being dragged away by the police quickly filled Russian social media channels.

In #Moscow , #Russia , the police are detaining protesters against the mobilisation at an unauthorised #protest rally taking place tonight. The protester who is being detained is chanting “No to War!”.

pic.twitter.com/rvqGhJuqMl

— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) September 21, 2022

Many of those images showed casual brutality inflicted on the demonstrators by the police, including a clip recorded by someone sitting inside a bakery on the Old Arbat , a pedestrian street in central Moscow, as officers repeatedly bashed a young man’s head into a window directly in front of them.

A quiet dinner in Moscow pic.twitter.com/AmN1pVetCR

— Alec Luhn (@ASLuhn) September 21, 2022

While many Russian dissidents in exile saluted the courage of the protesters, who risked lengthy prison terms to voice their dissent, some Ukrainians accused Russian protesters of being too passive, or failing to take to the streets until Putin’s mobilization order put them or their loved ones in imminent danger of being forced to join the assault on Ukraine that began in February.

No mass protests in ??Russia after Bucha. No mass protests after Izyum. After hundreds of ??Ukrainian children killed. Etc etc etc.

So forgive my remaining very much unimpressed by today's "No war" chantings after they got mobilization.

— Danylo Mokryk (@DMokryk) September 21, 2022

People are protesting in Moscow. (Other cities, too). They are traditionally grabbed one by one and showed into police vans.

Until Russians begin to fight for their own and resist instead of filming arrests and making selfies, they will be slaves. Their protest will be pointless pic.twitter.com/yibyfus1pZ

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) September 21, 2022

But, as OVD-Info reported last month, there were at least 16,437 arrests related to antiwar protests in Russia between February and August. Ahead of Wednesday’s protests, the prosecutor’s office in Moscow warned the public that anyone taking part in or encouraging protests could be punished with 15 years in prison.

In addition to risking arrest, many young Russian men who attended the protests also faced the prospect of being immediately pressed into military service by the authorities. Mediazona, a reader-supported news site focused on the Russian court system and prisons, reported that at least three of the men arrested for protesting in Moscow were handed summonses ordering them to report to enlistment offices.

There were also signs, however, that Russia’s criminal justice system was overwhelmed by the mass arrests. Video provided to OVD-Info by one detainee in St. Petersburg showed that dozens of protesters who were forced to wait all night at a police station passed the time by filming each other as one played the piano.

??????????? ????? ? ?????? ??????? ? 17 ?????-??????????. ???? ????????? ????? 50 ??????????? ?? ????? ?????? ???????????. ???? ?? ?????, ??????? ????? ?? ??? ?? ??? ???? ????????? ? ???????.

????? ??????? ??????????? pic.twitter.com/rrHFtoOaoK

— ???-???? (@OvdInfo) September 21, 2022

In the southern city of Krasnodar, near Ukraine, a police bus carrying at least 14 detainees broke down before reaching the station.

In the Russian city of Krasnodar a police van packed with anti-mobilisation protesters broke down this evening pic.twitter.com/EV2HX1aFuH

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) September 21, 2022

Francis Scarr, who monitors Russian television for the BBC, reported that among those arrested was a street musician in the city of Izhevsk who entertained protesters with a rendition of a sardonic Siberian punk song from the last days of the Soviet Union, “ Everything Is Going According to Plan .”

Police in the Russian city of Izhevsk have reportedly detained a busker whose repertoire contained anti-war songs

The one being sung in this video is the highly ironic (and very apt) "Everything is going to plan" by Yegor Letov pic.twitter.com/DynDWjLpdg

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) September 21, 2022

The post Russians Return to Streets to Protest Widening of Putin’s War on Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept .

The nationwide campaign to stifle discussions of race and gender in public schools through misinformation and bullying suffered a reversal in Idaho on Monday, when a high school senior vocally opposed to book bans and smears against LGBTQ+ youth took a seat on the Boise school board.

The student, Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week, defeating an incumbent board member who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries.

I also thoroughly appreciate all of the constituents who took time to write to the Board on the freedom to read. Book bans have no place in Boise! pic.twitter.com/n9qjVEokhs

— Shiva Rajbhandari (he/him) (@_Shiva_R) September 13, 2022

Rajbhandari, who turned 18 days before the election , was already well-known in the school district as a student organizer on climate , environmental , voting rights , and gun control issues. But in the closing days of the campaign, his opponent, Steve Schmidt, was endorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, which in response helped Rajbhandari win the endorsement of Boise’s leading newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.

Rajbhandari, a third-generation Idahoan whose father is from Nepal, was elected to a two-year term with 56 percent of the vote .

Thank you, Boise. Now the real work starts. pic.twitter.com/j7zzLnylGy

— Shiva Rajbhandari (he/him) (@_Shiva_R) September 7, 2022

In an interview, Rajbhandari told The Intercept that although he had hoped people would vote for him rather than against his opponent — “My campaign was not against Steve Schmidt,” he said — he was nonetheless shocked that Schmidt did not immediately reject the far-right group’s endorsement. “I think that’s what the majority of voters took issue with,” Rajbhandari said.

The Idaho Liberty Dogs, which attacked Rajbhandari on Facebook for being “Pro Masks/Vaccines” and leading protests “which created traffic jams and costed [sic] tax payers money,” spent the summer agitating to have books removed from public libraries in Nampa and Meridian, two cities in the Boise metro area.

I stand strongly against book bans. Free access to information is the cornerstone of a democratic civil society, and I refuse to back down to extremists. On the school board I will continue to advocate for student dignity and teacher freedom. https://t.co/K7mb1stEdU pic.twitter.com/SOrLRNMsJ0

— Shiva Rajbhandari (he/him) (@_Shiva_R) August 5, 2022

But, Rajbhandari said, “that’s the least of what they’ve done. Last year, there was a kid who brought a gun to Boise High, which is my school, and he got suspended and they organized an armed protest outside our school.”

Rajbhandari, who started leading Extinction Rebellion climate protests in Boise when he was 15 , is familiar with the group’s tactics. “We used to have climate strikes, like back in ninth grade, and they would come with AR-15s,” he said, bringing rifles to intimidate “a bunch of kids protesting for a livable future.”

So when the Idaho Liberty Dogs called on Boise voters to support Schmidt — and a slate of other candidates for the school board who, ultimately, all lost — Rajbhandari told me he texted his rival to say, “You need to immediately disavow this.”

“This is a hate group,” Rajbhandari says he told Schmidt. “They intimidate teachers, they are a stain on our schools, and their involvement in this election is a stain on your candidacy.” Schmidt, however, refused to clearly reject the group, even after the Idaho Liberty Dogs lashed out at a local rabbi who criticized the endorsement by comparing the rabbi to Hitler and claiming that he harbored “an unrelenting hatred for white Christians.”

While the school board election was a hyperlocal one, Rajbhandari is aware that the forces he is battling operate at the state and national level. “Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education,” Rajbhandari told me. “There’s a group, they’re called the Idaho Freedom Foundation , and they actually control a lot of the political discourse in our legislature. Their primary goal is to get rid of public education and disburse the money to charter schools or get rid of that funding entirely.”

“Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education.”

“And the way they’ve done that, is with this very well-thought-out attack on teachers,” he added, promoting “baseless claims of ‘indoctrination’” in schools as well as “attacks on LGBTQ youth, with claims of ‘grooming.’”

Last year, when he was 16, Rajbhandari publicly confronted Idaho’s far-right lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, telling her that the task force she had set up to “Examine Indoctrination in Idaho Education” was investigating an entirely imaginary threat.

During in-person testimony to the task force, the young activist told McGeachin, who was running for governor at the time, and her running mate, state Rep. Priscilla Giddings, that Idaho teachers were not “indoctrinating students to hate America, as this committee purports.” He went on to accuse the two Republican officials of endorsing baseless conspiracy theories as a political stunt in support of their candidacies.

“You won’t succeed,” he told them. “You won’t succeed in silencing student voices. You won’t succeed at bringing Idaho back to the 1800s. You won’t succeed at abolishing public schools as the Freedom Foundation aspires. And you won’t succeed in being elected to the executive branch of state government, which I feel is the true purpose of this.”

“And you won’t succeed because despite all your efforts, we Idahoans are smart, we’re educated, and we can’t be fooled into believing that something exists when the opposite is true,” Rajbhandari added. “All across the state, there are young people like me who will vote in the Republican primary for the first time in 2022.”

McGeachin — who was, as Rajbhandari had predicted, ultimately defeated in the Republican primary for governor — had launched the task force by appealing for “information regarding problematic teachings on social justice, critical race theory, socialism, communism, or Marxism” in public schools. But the response from Idahoans was so overwhelmingly opposed to her claims of widespread indoctrination that she refused to make the comments submitted to the task force public until a court ordered her to do so.

A review of the records by the Idaho Capital Sun showed that about 90 percent of the public comments on the subject either denied that Idaho teachers were indoctrinating students or criticized McGeachin for wasting taxpayer dollars “chasing an illusion.”

The initial impetus for Rajbhandari’s run for office was a feeling of frustration that the Boise school board was simply ignoring pleas from student climate activists to make a clean energy commitment. Two years ago, he said, a group of high school and junior high students tried everything they could think of to urge the board to make a commitment to renewable energy. “We sent emails; we did a postcard drive and wrote like 300 postcards; we met with our local power company; we had a petition, we delivered the largest petition ever to our school district,” Rajbhandari said, but the board never responded. “Last year, I wrote a letter to our school board president, just asking for a meeting … and I never got anything back. But I know that he read my letter because about a week later, I was called to the principal’s office.”

“That’s when I knew I was going to run” for a seat on the board, Rajbhandari recalled. “Because that is indicative of a problem. Students are the primary stakeholders in our education, right? And yet our board wasn’t seeing us as constituents, and they weren’t willing to meet with us, and they weren’t taking our ideas seriously,” he said.

“That’s not to say that my run for the board comes from a place of animosity,” he added, “but it comes from a place of need, which is that we don’t have student representation on the Boise Schools board, and our board members aren’t boots-on-the-ground in the classroom.”

One of the most urgent priorities for action from the board, Rajbhandari says, is finding resources to address a mental health crisis in a state that has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the country.

If all goes according to plan, Rajbhandari hopes to serve on the board for the whole school year, then hand over the seat to one of the high school juniors from the district who will shadow him for the year. The idea is to ensure student representation on the Boise school board going forward.

As for his own future, Rajbhandari told me that he is looking at colleges now but is not yet certain about what’s next. “I’m really passionate about climate justice, environmental issues — so maybe study law,” he said. “But I think that’s what school’s for, is figuring out who you want to be. And really, Boise Schools is what made me who I am, and so I can thank my teachers for that.”

The post Idaho’s Far Right Suffers Election Loss to 18-Year-Old Climate Activist appeared first on The Intercept .

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly accused President Joe Biden of hypocrisy during their meeting in Jeddah on Friday, by asking why the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Turkey in 2018 seemed to matter more to him than the fatal shooting of Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank May.

Biden, who had said during his campaign for the presidency in 2019 that Khashoggi was “murdered and dismembered… I believe on the order of the crown prince,” told reporters that he had confronted Prince Mohammed over the killing of the dissident Saudi journalist at the start of their meeting this week.

But, according to a Saudi official who spoke to the state broadcaster Al Arabiya , the prince contrasted Biden’s concern about the brutal murder of Khashoggi, a long-term resident of the United States, with his failure to hold Israel’s government accountable for the killing of Abu Akleh, an American citizen who was shot — according to witnesses and visual investigations — from an Israeli military convoy.

Saudi official gives MBS's response to Biden when he asked about Khashoggi. "You can't impose your values on us by force. Remember Abu Ghraib? What have you done about Shireen Abu Akleh?". Yes MBS literally said that to Biden. https://t.co/9DQDrWVM2L

— ?yad el-Baghdadi | ???? ???????? (@iyad_elbaghdadi) July 16, 2022

Ayman Mohyeldin of MSNBC also reported that a Saudi official told him that Prince Mohammed, known as M.B.S., denied that he had ordered the assassination, “the same way George Bush did not order the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.” The Crown Prince then asked, according to Mohyeldin’s source, why “with so many U.S. journalists killed, missing or detained,” including Shireen Abu Akleh, “the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was being politicized.”

Saudi state television was also careful to keep viewers inside the repressive kingdom from hearing Biden reiterate the C.I.A. conclusion that the Crown Prince had ordered the murder of Khashoggi.

When Biden was asked during a news conference in Jeddah on Friday night how Prince Mohammed had responded to his comments about Khashoggi, Al Arabiya’s sister station Al Hadath cut away from its live broadcast so abruptly that its studio anchor and control room seemed to be caught off guard. After viewers heard Biden begin, “He basically said that he was not personally resp—” the picture jumped back to a startled anchor who took four seconds to start speaking. Then, when she did, her mic was not on.

Here's how abruptly the Saudi state broadcaster ? @AlHadath ? cut away from Biden's live news conference on Friday when he was asked how Mohammed bin Salman had responded to his criticism of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – before their anchor or control room was ready: pic.twitter.com/3riRxDgI8B

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) July 17, 2022

A C-SPAN clip of the same moment from the news conference shows that what Saudi viewers nearly heard Biden say was: “He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it. I indicated that I thought he was.”

President Biden on #MBS and Jamal Khashoggi murder: "He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it. I indicated that I thought he was. He said he was not personally responsible for it and he took action against those who were responsible. pic.twitter.com/ABQSLQAEnV

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 15, 2022

Earlier on Friday, Biden was confronted with images of Shireen Abu Akleh at a news conference in Bethlehem, because her colleagues in the press corps had reserved a seat for a photograph of the renowned Palestinian American journalist, and several wore T-shirts with a drawing of her face above the words, “Justice for Shireen.”

#ShireenAbuAkleh ’s presence is strong, even when she’s absent. Colleagues at the Presidential HQ in Bethlehem demanding #JusticeForShireen during Biden visit. pic.twitter.com/FkQY904QY5

— Rania Zabaneh (@RZabaneh) July 15, 2022

In a letter to the White House last week, Abu Akleh’s family had asked Biden to meet with them during his trip to the region, and expressed their anguish that the U.S. seems unwilling to press Israel to open a credible criminal investigation into her killing. Instead, the family has been invited to Washington by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

At the news conference in Bethlehem, standing alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Biden called Abu Akleh’s death a loss for the United States as well, and promised to “insist on a full and transparent accounting of her death.” His sincerity, in the eyes of many critics, was however undermined by his inability to pronounce Abu Akleh’s last name correctly.

Not only has the Biden administration done precious little to ensure that those in the Israeli occupation forces who murdered Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, are held accountable, he also garbles her name.

A totally unedifying low point. #JusticeForShireen pic.twitter.com/pP6LsTP74Z

— Joseph Willits (@josephwillits) July 15, 2022

The post Saudi Prince Taunts Biden for Caring More About Khashoggi Than Shireen Abu Akleh appeared first on The Intercept .

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined protesters outside the Supreme Court the day that Roe v. Wade was overturned, the progressive representative from New York was quickly surrounded by members of a newly formed group, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, who wore green bandanas and waved signs with slogans and the group’s web address.

A founder of Rise Up, Sunsara Taylor, pushed past an Ocasio-Cortez aide and got the New York representative to join her in chanting through a megaphone that the decision was “illegitimate” and needed to be contested by going “into the streets!”

AOC joined us in the streets to call out this decision for what it is ILLEGITIMATE

This court is Illegitimate and this decision must not stand. Legal, Nationwide abortion on demand!

Get in the streets NOW. AND TOMORROW and the next day! Post Roe? HELL NO! pic.twitter.com/w6qVAsRyoC

— Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (@riseup4abortion) June 24, 2022

Taylor, a longtime leader of the tiny, Harlem-based Revolutionary Communist Party — a group better known as the Revcoms, which is dedicated to spreading the ideas of the former ’60s radical Bob Avakian — then offered Ocasio-Cortez the mic. As the Democratic congresswoman spoke, Taylor also handed her a green bandana , a symbol of abortion rights in Latin America available for purchase on the Rise Up website.

After Ocasio-Cortez told the protesters that the effort to restore the right to an abortion nationwide would be “a generational fight,” a reporter asked what Congress could do. As Ocasio-Cortez gathered her thoughts, Taylor interjected: “Fill the streets.” Ocasio-Cortez agreed. “We have to fill the streets,” she said. “Right now, elections are not enough.”

Speaking outside the Supreme Court, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told protesters that "right now, elections are not enough" to reclaim abortion rights in America "we have to fill the streets." pic.twitter.com/dgfKo8FQFR

— HuffPost (@HuffPost) June 24, 2022

Before she left, Ocasio-Cortez took a moment to comfort one of the young Rise Up protesters, Julianne D’Eredita, a 21-year-old from Texas, who was in tears behind her. As Ocasio-Cortez hugged D’Eredita, Taylor started a chant of the slogan that is also the group’s name: “Rise up for abortion rights!”

As #RoevWade is overturned, @AOC charges into the crowd outside the Supreme Court demanding people “take to the streets”, hugging pro-choice protesters pic.twitter.com/mv55EOA1f1

— Sarah Gough (@sarahgoughy) June 24, 2022

Anyone watching news coverage of the protests at the court that day, and in the weeks since, would be forgiven for thinking that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights must be one of the nation’s leading reproductive rights organizations, since its activists , chants , placards , and the green bandanas and stickers sold on its website have been prominently featured in report after report .

The day after Roe v. Wade was overturned, for instance, an MSNBC interview with D’Eredita and another young member of the group, Zoe Warren, 19, went viral, as their frustration at Democrats for failing to codify Roe and fundraising off the decision was seconded by progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Nina Turner .

She’s not wrong.?? pic.twitter.com/8mJDZIR2dZ

— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) June 25, 2022

But the flurry of attention in recent weeks is misleading, since Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has only existed since January, when Taylor and a handful of other Revcom activists launched it with a protest outside the Supreme Court on the 49th, and final, anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has only existed since January.

The role played by Revcom members in the recent wave of abortion rights demonstrations has alarmed grassroots organizers for reproductive justice and experts on left-wing movements who liken the devotion of self-described “followers of Bob Avakian” to a cult .

“That viral clip of the woman in the green shirt (Zoe Warren)?” Imani Gandy, senior editor of law and policy for Rewire News Group, tweeted . “She is associated with RiseUp4Abortion rights which is yet another one of Bob Avakian’s many social justice fronts. He occupies space in order to get more people to join his weird cult.”

Talia Jane, an independent reporter who covers extremism and activism, has compared the Revcoms and their new offshoot to a multilevel marketing, or MLM, scam.

“RevCom showed up even though they’re not welcome, so I told people about how they’re a scam cult taking advantage of new people who want to get involved,” Jane reported on Twitter after a protest in New York in May. “If you took any pictures or flyers of RiseUp4AbortionRights (the girls with the white pants with blood in the crotch),” she added, “please know they are a scam front run by a MLM cult that thinks their dear leader will return to tell them how to revolution if everyone joins their cause.”

Sam Goldman, a Rise Up leader who has promoted Avakian’s teachings in the past, sent me an official statement from the group rejecting the criticism. Goldman, who also hosts a podcast for another offshoot of the Revcoms called Refuse Fascism, said that it was incorrect “to untruthfully conflate” Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and the Revcoms. But recent Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights protests in New York and Los Angeles have been led by Revcom activists wearing Revcom T-shirts.

Rise Up has also been criticized by veteran abortion rights activists for focusing, from January through June, on the quixotic strategy of trying to stop the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority from overturning Roe by calling on millions of Americans to take to the streets.

To that end, in June, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights volunteers staged a series of small, theatrical protests which drew media attention but failed to either ignite a mass movement or keep five justices from signing Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which held that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

Grassroots reproductive rights organizers also claim that Rise Up’s own fundraising, which is boosted by media coverage, has only served to divert much-needed resources and attention away from organizations that do important work, like defending abortion clinics and providing funds to people who need to travel to obtain abortions.

In early June, for example, the Texas-based writer and reproductive justice activist Andrea Grimes criticized a protest in Houston at the televangelist Joel Osteen’s megachurch, in which D’Eredita and two other women stripped down to their underwear during a service and shouted, “It’s my body, my fucking choice!”

Disruption for Abortion Rights at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston TX. @riseup4abortion pic.twitter.com/5XFnHPDEn5

— TX4ABORTION (@tx4abortion) June 5, 2022

“I haven’t seen this gaining traction anywhere meaningful, but for reporters covering whatever these dipshits do next: these folks are part of a widely despised cult of personality not tied to any serious repro health, rights, or justice organization,” Grimes commented on Twitter . “They are not supported by folks here doing the work on the ground. Nobody knows them. Nobody likes them. They’re not a thing. They show up when the cameras come on.”

Grimes added that she, and other members of a group called Texans for Reproductive Justice, had previously denounced a prior Revcom abortion rights group led by Taylor, called Stop Patriarchy, when it staged a series of unwelcome marches there in 2014 in which activists wore chains and chanted, “Forced motherhood is female enslavement!” By equating restrictions on abortion to slavery, Grimes wrote at the time, Taylor and other followers of Avakian disrespected the suffering experienced by the ancestors of people of color.

When she led the protest outside the Supreme Court that Ocasio-Cortez joined last month, Taylor was wearing a Revcom T-shirt that read: “Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement.”

In late June, Rise Up was similarly criticized for staging a protest outside Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home, in which a 15-year-old girl and a half dozen others wore white pants with fake blood stains and carried dolls in their bound hands.

Watch: 15 yr old Ariana who organized a baby doll procession speaks powerfully in front Amy Coney Barrett’s house

“Children forced to give birth to children! Women will be inferior! ALL OF U WHO ARE PRO CHOICE. Come to DC & stay!” #RiseUp4AbortionRights pic.twitter.com/ARhwVoSyWL

— Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (@riseup4abortion) June 18, 2022

“Why do they have these kids out here doing this dumb shit?” Mary Drummer, an activist and digital strategist who has led advocacy campaigns for Planned Parenthood, Color of Change, and MoveOn, asked on Twitter . “What purpose does this serve? How is this strategic?”

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, Drummer argued , “is a front group of the Revolutionary Communist Party (also known as RCP or Revcom), which is basically a cult run by Bob Avakian and is known for co-opting social justice movements & protests.”

Drummer noted that Revcom activists had previously been accused of trying to amplify anger over racist policing to trigger the full-scale communist revolution mapped out in Avakian’s tracts. For instance, Revcom activists in T-shirts with Avakian quotes were greeted with suspicion when they appeared in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 , when the police shooting of Michael Brown gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.

“RevComs is notorious for ‘swooping’ — descending on protests organized by other groups, positioning their banners and signs prominently where they’ll be photographed, but then leaving the event at the first sign of police or counter protesters,” one left-wing organizer, who asked to remain anonymous to comment on the group’s tactics, told me in an interview. “All they do is lead pointless marches designed for photo-ops.”

In the days after the viral video of Zoe Warren’s comments brought Rise Up national attention, a coalition of pro-abortion activists from nearly two dozen organizations, led by NYC for Abortion Rights, released a statement denouncing the group as “a cult and pyramid scheme.”

“Similar to its parent group RevCom, RiseUp’s only goal appears to be gaining more followers in order to raise more and more money,” the activists argued. “Both essentially function as pyramid schemes that prey on social movements.”

They “essentially function as pyramid schemes that prey on social movements.”

“RevCom and its fronts — RiseUp and Refuse Fascism — are notorious for raising tens of thousands of dollars and using those funds to pay RevCom leadership, and to purchase marketing materials (to raise even more money),” the statement continued. “ The RiseUp website, for instance, features urgent prompts to donate with no information about where this money goes. What we do know is that this money never goes to abortion funds ( which they argue are not a strategy to defend abortion access ), providers, practical support groups, or anyone actually working to increase abortion access.”

The activists also criticized Rise Up for “theatrical tactics” like “the wearing of white pants painted with fake blood, die-ins, and coat-hanger imagery,” which “further the extremely harmful idea that abortion is a violent procedure and safe self-managed abortion is not possible.”

Rise Up and the Revcoms have heard and rejected the criticism, as evidenced by a Rise Up protest last week in Los Angeles — led by a Revcom activist in a “Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement” T-shirt — in which four women wearing white pants daubed with fake blood chained themselves to City Hall as the steps were drenched in red paint.

ACTIVISTS IN LOS ANGELES POUR “BLOOD” DOWN THE STEPS OF CITY HALL AFTER CHAINING THEMSELVES TO THE BUILDING IN PROTEST OF THE SUPREME COURTS OVERTURNING ROE V WADE. pic.twitter.com/yBwQ0Mi8P4

— Mike Ade (@bellikemike) July 6, 2022

“Some so-called ‘leaders’ in the so-called ‘movement’ have decided that the fall of Roe — shutting down of abortion in 8 states immediately w more to follow quickly — is the time to attack the ONE org that consistently fought to mobilize people to prevent the fall of Roe,” Sunsara Taylor tweeted in response to Rise Up’s critics. “There is an unthinking fanatical pile-on to using the scary word ‘cult’ to try to tar and keep people away from uniting with followers of Bob Avakian or… heaven forbid… looking into what he is about for themselves,” she added .

The Rise Up statement sent to me by Sam Goldman also attacked the veteran organizers as people who “have done absolutely nothing to mobilize people to fight this decision when it was impending over the past 6 months.”

The statement, which was signed by Taylor and two other founders of the group who are not Revcoms, also said that “Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has never used any funds it has raised for any purposes other than exactly what the funds were raised for.”

Last week, Rise Up added an update to the statement which said that the group’s lawyer had “sent a letter to those who have accused us of financial wrongdoing instructing them to cease and desist in spreading these blatantly untrue, baseless, extremely dangerous allegations.”

A separate statement on the Revcom website also rejected the criticism that the group is a cult, but does so in a curious way: by lavishing praise on Bob Avakian to such an extent that it seems to reinforce the charge.

“Bob Avakian’s leadership, and the new communism he has brought forward is absolutely essential for making revolution and emancipating humanity,” the Revcom statement reads. “Any chance at all for not just avoiding the nightmare we are heading toward but bringing forward instead an emancipating future requires all of you who read this to engage what Bob Avakian has written in a serious way.”

Despite the group’s best efforts to sell Avakian as a revolutionary leader, skepticism of the Revcoms is deeply rooted among left-wing activists and commentators. For instance, when Hasan Piker, a popular progressive Twitch streamer, discovered that the two young Rise Up activists who criticized Democrats in the viral MSNBC clip were linked to Revcoms, he collapsed in despair during a live broadcast.

The moment that @hasanthehun found out that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights is actually a cult ??? but seriously they are a Rev Com cult group! Don’t support them! pic.twitter.com/6aNIRNWY0b

— People’s City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) June 27, 2022

In a phone interview, however, Warren told me that she had no idea that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights was “associated with Revcoms” when she first volunteered for the group two months ago and does not share Sunsara Taylor’s belief in communism or devotion to Avakian’s leadership.

“I’m not a member of the Revcoms and I never have been and I don’t plan to be,” Warren said. “When I first got involved with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, I didn’t know that they were associated with Revcoms, and when I found that out, that was a little concerning for me,” she added.

Still, she said, the group’s efforts to pressure Democrats to pass a federal law legalizing abortion by protesting makes sense to her. “I believe that Rise Up is doing something that no other organization is really doing right now, and that is calling people into the streets to do something they might not have done before, which is demand more from their government than they are getting,” Warren said.

Because the excerpt from her MSNBC interview that was clipped and went viral online focused on her anger at Democrats, I asked her if she agreed with Taylor, who tweeted the day after Roe v. Wade was overturned that it was pointless to “Rely on voting and the fucking Democrats.” Warren told me that she did not think protesting instead of voting was a good idea.

“I believe that a combination of both is definitely necessary,” she said. “I think that to a certain point getting as many people in the streets as possible to demand that our current government make abortion legal nationwide now is an amazingly powerful thing to do. But, when November comes around, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote. We most definitely need to vote, and we most definitely need to vote for Democrats because we do live in a two-party system and they’re our only option.”

The post Abortion Rights Activists Call New Group Leading Protests a Front for a Far-Left Cult appeared first on The Intercept .

The family of slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh has asked to meet President Joe Biden during his upcoming visit to Jerusalem, accusing the White House of an “abject response” to the apparent killing of a U.S. citizen by Israeli forces.

“Dear Mr. President,” the family’s letter , sent to Biden on Friday morning, began, “We, the family of Shireen Abu Akleh, write to express our grief, outrage and sense of betrayal concerning your administration’s abject response to the extrajudicial killing of our sister and aunt by Israeli forces on May 11, 2022, while on assignment in the occupied Palestinian city of Jenin in the West Bank.”

The letter, which was provided to The Intercept by the family, reminded the American president that Abu Akleh was not just “a prominent, beloved Palestinian journalist” and “a role model and a mentor” to women in her community. “She was also a United States citizen.”

The family, including Abu Akleh’s brother Anton and his children, demanded that Biden make time during his visit to the Middle East next week to meet with them, “and hear directly from us about our concerns and demands for justice.”

The U.S. “has been skulking toward the erasure of any wrongdoing by Israeli forces.”

They also described their anger and disappointment at a lack of support from the Biden administration, and suggested that instead of using its leverage over Israel to demand a credible investigation of the fatal shot that witnesses said was fired from an Israeli military convoy, “the United States has been skulking toward the erasure of any wrongdoing by Israeli forces.”

“In the days and weeks since an Israeli soldier killed Shireen, not only have we not been adequately consulted, informed, and supported by U.S. government officials, but your administration’s actions exhibit an apparent intent to undermine our efforts toward justice and accountability for Shireen’s death,” the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent’s relatives wrote.

The family provided links to a half-dozen painstaking examinations of the video and audio evidence of the killing — conducted by the Washington Post , CNN , The Associated Press , the New York Times , Bellingcat , and the United Nations Human Rights Office — which all concluded that the fatal shot had likely been fired from the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, raiding party.

“All available evidence suggests that Shireen, a U.S. citizen, was the subject of an extrajudicial killing,” the Abu Akleh family told Biden, “yet your administration has thoroughly failed to meet the bare minimum expectation held by a grieving family — to ensure a prompt, thorough, credible, impartial, independent, effective and transparent investigation that leads to true justice and accountability for Shireen’s killing.”

The family urged Biden to direct the Department of Justice to use the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Bureau and the FBI to investigate the killing of Abu Akleh.

The letter was sent days after the State Department released an oddly vague statement , on the Fourth of July holiday, reporting that “an extremely detailed forensic analysis” of the bullet that killed the journalist, carried out in Israel by unnamed “independent, third-party examiners,” overseen by the regional U.S. security coordinator, Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, was unable to determine if the shot had been fired from an Israeli rifle.

According to the State Department, the American general’s review of other information gathered by Israeli and Palestinian officials led him to the conclusion “that gunfire from IDF positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.” Fenzel, however, “found no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances,” the statement added.

As the Abu Aklehs noted in their letter to Biden, the U.S. has offered no explanation of how the American general determined that no Israeli soldier intended to fire at the journalist, who was wearing a blue vest marked “PRESS,” but the statement seemed to exactly echo a claim the Israeli military has made repeatedly. “The IDF investigation conclusively determined that no IDF soldier deliberately fired at Ms. Abu Akleh,” Israel’s military said in a statement released the same day.

The U.S. has offered no explanation of how the American general determined that no Israeli soldier intended to fire at the journalist.

The journalist’s family also pointed out that just one day after State Department spokesperson Ned Price “announced that Shireen’s killing was likely unintentional,” he admitted, during questioning by reporters, that the U.S. security coordinator’s review of the evidence was “not a law enforcement investigation” and his conclusion about intent was simply “a judgment.”

“Nonetheless,” the family wrote to Biden, “your administration deemed it necessary to include and perpetuate the baseless and damaging conclusion that the killing was not intentional, seemingly choosing political expedience over actual accountability for a foreign government’s killing of a U.S. citizen.”

The Abu Aklehs went on to demand that the State Department retract the July 4 press statement and turn over to them any forensic report prepared by the ballistic experts, and reveal their identities. Price, the State Department spokesperson, told reporters that the forensic experts were not Americans but came from one of the seven other NATO countries that help train Palestinian Authority security forces.

While Price declined to say what country the experts came from, Israel’s military insisted in its own statement that “Israeli experts examined the bullet” in the presence of representatives of the U.S. security coordinator. The Israelis added that their ballistic examination was looking for evidence that the bullet had been fired from a specific weapon which was examined in the lab. That statement appears to indicate that Israel has identified the soldier from the Duvdevan commando unit who fired in Abu Akleh’s direction from the convoy during the raid.

The family also reminded Biden that 57 members of Congress and 24 senators had signed letters asking for the U.S. to be directly involved in investigating the killing of Abu Akleh, given that Palestinians and Israelis do not trust each other to conduct a credible and independent investigation.

“We reaffirm these demands on behalf of our beloved Shireen as your administration’s actions to date have not only fallen woefully short of ‘full accountability’ but they amount to express acceptance for Shireen’s killing,” the family wrote. “Your administration’s actions can only be seen as an attempt to erase the extrajudicial killing of Shireen and further entrench the systemic impunity enjoyed by Israeli forces and officials for unlawfully killing Palestinians.”

The post In Letter to Biden, Shireen Abu Akleh’s Family Demands a Meeting and an End to Israeli Impunity appeared first on The Intercept .

Alaa Abd El Fattah , a jailed writer and activist whose calls for democratic change in Egypt have frightened four successive authoritarian governments into prosecuting him for just attending protests or posting critical comments on Facebook, entered day 56 of a hunger strike on Friday. His deteriorating health has added urgency to calls for his immediate release from rights groups and lawmakers in the United States and Britain.

#FreeAlaa #FreeThemAll pic.twitter.com/JjMzKzRiIb

— Ahdaf Soueif (@asoueif) May 27, 2022

Abd El Fattah, known to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers as @alaa , rose to international prominence as one of the most compelling voices to emerge from Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Two Democratic lawmakers in Washington, Reps. Don Beyer of Virginia and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, demanded the immediate release of Abd El Fattah. The lawmakers also urged the Biden administration to make it clear to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former military leader who seized power in 2013, that “criminalizing peaceful dissent” from activists “jeopardizes the security partnership Egypt wants with its Western partners.”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged that he would indeed condition $1.3 billion in U.S. security aid to Egypt on respect for human rights from el-Sisi, who had been coddled by President Donald Trump. “Arresting, torturing, and exiling activists … or threatening their families is unacceptable,” Biden tweeted . “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator.’”

But in September, administration officials reportedly told Egypt that just $130 million of aid would be withheld until the country ended the prosecutions of one set of nongovernmental organizations and dropped charges against or released just 16 of the estimated 60,000 political prisoners in Egyptian jails. (A new report released this week showed that nearly 6,000 Egyptians were jailed for political activities during Biden’s first year in office.)

While there are scant hopes that the U.S. will use its leverage to free Abd El Fattah, the dissident’s family has focused their efforts on urging British lawmakers to have their government intervene to save his life. Abd El Fattah recently acquired British citizenship through his mother, the mathematician and activist Laila Soueif, who was born in London.

During an interview in London on Tuesday, Abd El Fattah’s sister Mona Seif, who founded the group No Military Trials for Civilians, told the BBC’s main morning news show that the British government could demand his release during meetings with the Egyptian government over plans for the COP 27 climate change conference, which is scheduled to be held in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, in November. With a single phone call, Seif said, “Alaa will be on board a plane. Tomorrow, if they want it, he’ll be free here with us.”

"I don't think things are moving fast enough"

Alaa Abdel Fattah is a British-Egyptian activist imprisoned in Egypt, who has been on hunger strike for 53 days.

His sister Mona Seif tells @MishalHusain the UK government is best placed to help him. https://t.co/HeZvNCNmxE pic.twitter.com/G51zNf62VG

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) May 24, 2022

“I don’t think things are moving fast enough,” she added, given that her brother had decided to continue his hunger strike despite being moved to what el-Sisi has proudly called a new “American-style” prison.

At a subsequent appearance at the Frontline Club in London, Seif stressed that the situation is urgent. “We think Alaa has decided he wants an end to all of this,” she said . “He wants the end to be guided by him rather than just imposed on his body. We feel he has decided to take this hunger strike until the end. Either it pushes us enough and triggers enough pressure to get him out of this endless loop of Sisi’s prisons or it will end his life.”

At the same event, another of Abd El Fattah’s sisters, Sanaa Seif, a political activist who has also been jailed for violating Egypt’s repressive ban on protesting, read a passage from a book of her brother’s collected writings, “ You Have Not Yet Been Defeated ,” which includes reflections, smuggled out of prison, on the prospects for popular uprisings in other nations.

Beautiful moment last night with @andrewmarr9 : Alaa’s words: « I am in prison because they want to make an example of https://t.co/oONKU2l65l let us be an example of our own choosing..Nothing will constrain the strong..nor define the space of beauty & possibility but the weak » pic.twitter.com/qjpyRiuxPf

— Free Alaa (@FreedomForAlaa) May 25, 2022

“I’m in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us,” Abd El Fattah wrote from the maximum-security Tora prison in 2017. “So let us be an example, but of our own choosing. The war on meaning is not yet over in the rest of the world. Let us be an example, not a warning. Let’s communicate with the world again, not send distress signals nor to cry over ruins or spilled milk, but to draw lessons, summarize experiences, and deepen observations, may it help those struggling in the post-truth era.”

“We were ,” he added, “then we were defeated, and meaning was defeated with us. But we have not perished yet, and meaning has not been killed. Perhaps our defeat was inevitable, but the current chaos that is sweeping the world will sooner or later give birth to a new world, a world that will — of course — be ruled and managed by the victors. But nothing will constrain the strong, nor shape the margins of freedom and justice, nor define spaces of beauty and possibilities for a common life except the weal, who clung to their defence of meaning, even after defeat.”

The post Egyptian Dissident Alaa Abd El Fattah’s Hunger Strike Reaches a Critical Phase. Will the U.S. and U.K. Let Him Die? appeared first on The Intercept .