The Israeli government approved a proposal for 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank in a blatant violation of international humanitarian law.   The country’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on X that this increases the total number of new settlements to 69 in the past three years—a new record. “On the ground, we are blocking the establishment of a Palestinian terror state,” he said in his announcement on Sunday. According to the Associated Press, citing Peace Now, an Israeli watchdog group that works to prevent settlement expansion, there are now 210 settlements in the West Bank.  Ramiz Alakbarov, deputy special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process in the United Nations, said on Tuesday that Israeli settlement expansion “fuels tensions, impedes Palestinian land access, and threatens the viability of a contiguous and sovereign Palestinian State.”  A Saturday report from the New York Times that tracked Israel’s assault on the West Bank described a general pattern that settlers have employed to take over the land: an outpost unauthorized by Israeli law is established in the form of a tent or trailer, military orders call for Palestinian communities to evacuate, and the outpost grows and eventually the Israeli government authorizes the settlement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right administration has accelerated this settlement expansion. According to Peace Now, in the past two years, Israelis have built around 130 new outposts—more than the number established in the previous two decades. This settler campaign has led to attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank. According to the United Nations, in the first half of 2025, there were 757 settler attacks that caused casualties or property damage.  Between October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas-led attack that sparked the war in Gaza, and this October, Israeli attacks in the occupied West Bank have killed around 1,001 Palestinians—with one in five being children, according to the UN.  Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN’s office for human rights in Palestine, said that Israel “has a legal obligation to end the occupation and reverse the annexation” and demanded that member states “halt and reverse these policies and ensure accountability for decades of violations.”

Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson welcomed prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes onto the former Fox News host’s video podcast.  As my colleague Kiera Butler described their conversation: Fuentes “made the case for the importance of Americans ‘to be pro-white,’ sang the praises of brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and bemoaned the problem of ‘organized Jewry in America.'” Much of their friendly chat involved lambasting Republicans who support Christian Zionism—the belief among some evangelicals that Christians should support the state of Israel. Carlson said that Republican Christian Zionists like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee were “seized by this brain virus.” “I dislike them more than anybody,” Carlson added. Butler has written extensively about Christian Zionism, and how, at its core, the movement does not embrace adherence to Judaism: > Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that Jews will > convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert > will perish. But this was not the reason Carlson and Fuentes disavowed Christian Zionism. Rather, Fuentes has routinely espoused antisemitic views, even expressing disbelief in the Holocaust.  “Six million cookies? I’m not buying it,” he said in 2019, for example, comparing baked goods to the six million Jews killed by Nazis. In 2022, Fuentes said that all he wanted was “revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory.” But perhaps just as striking as Fuentes’ beliefs, or that Carlson gave him a massive platform from which to share them, was that Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts posted his own video later in the week on X, unapologetically supporting Carlson’s decision to have Fuentes on the show in the first place.  As conservatives split over Fuentes’ appearance, Roberts described the critics as a “venomous coalition” whose “attempt to cancel [Carlson] will fail.” “Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington,” said Roberts, whose organization published Project 2025, a blueprint of sorts for Trump’s second term in the White House. (To this, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell replied: “Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.”) Carlson “always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” Roberts concluded his full-throated defense. Roberts’ response only deepened the right’s rift over the Fuentes-Carlson interview. “Siding with Hitler and Stalin over Churchill is not conservative or consistent, no matter what Tucker claims,” conservative author Bethany Mandel wrote on X. “In deciding to side with him, Kevin Roberts has shifted the foundations on which the Heritage Foundation was built.” The onslaught of negative feedback prompted Roberts to clarify his views about Fuentes with an X post Friday afternoon: “[T]he Heritage Foundation and I denounce and stand against his vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history,” Roberts said, before making a point to say antisemitism has “blossomed on the Left,” too. But it’s not so easy to put the genie back in the bottle. As of Saturday morning, Roberts’ video supporting the objectionable Carlson-Fuentes interview has far more views (15.9 million) than the original interview itself (4.7 million).

THE GOVERNMENT AND MEDIA ARE PRETENDING TO SUPPORT THE JEWISH COMMUNITY—BY OBEYING THE FAR RIGHT ~ Tabitha Troughton ~ Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have just been rioting in Tel Aviv itself, with the match banned as a result. For the previous 72 hours, the British public were once again instructed, by the media and politicians, not to believe their lying eyes. Forget videos of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters running riot in Amsterdam in November, or of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters beating someone in Athens unconscious in March last year: banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a game at Aston Villa is, according to the UK’s prime minister, antisemitic. It did not need confirmation from the Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs that the British government is now entirely obeying the diktats of the State of Israel. “A line must be drawn” Gideon Sa’ar reports having told foreign secretary Yvette Cooper yesterday (19 October), listing the measures necessary further to spread fear among, and alienate, British Jewish people. This included the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. Sa’ar: “expressed our clear and unequivocal expectation that this disgraceful decision be revoked and that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans be allowed to attend the game”. The resulting campaign is just the most recent in a redoubled wave of attacks on fact and community, clearly at the Israeli state’s behest. It is worth examining the run up to it. At the start of October, thirteen UK citizens were among those kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli military. Millions of people worldwide had been watching live-streamed footage from the Global Sumud Flotilla; around 50 small, civilian boats on a humanitarian mission to break Israel’s 17 year-long blockade of Gaza. By 2 am on Thursday 2nd, around 13 of the boats had been boarded and seized by Israel, with the rest still under pursuit. In total, 462 peaceful flotilla activists, from around 45 countries, were eventually taken hostage. Many would later report being tortured. By Thursday evening, emergency protests in support of the flotilla crew had erupted across the world, through the whole of Europe through to Dhaka, Rio and beyond. The UK public’s response, while comparatively muted, was no different. Earlier that day, the British Transport Police had issued a warning. Protests were expected “in response to Israel detaining activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla in the early hours of this morning”. Emergency gatherings indeed sprang up that evening around the country, from Edinburgh to London Piccadilly. Later that morning, in Manchester, two Jewish people had tragically been killed, and others injured, after a terrorist attacked a synagogue. The feelings of shock, dismay and horror across the population were heartfelt: condemnations of the act, and support for the victims and the wider Jewish community poured in from across all spectrums – religious, political and communal. And then one of the largest of disinformation campaigns slammed into action. It was spread by a variety of actors with a variety of motives, but the strategy was the same. To start with: tell people that the UK flotilla protests were not protests in support of the flotilla. Tell them they were protests in celebration of the Manchester terrorist attack. The flotilla protests were “a shameful response to the Manchester attack” according to The Spectator. “Vicious Jew-hatred was indulged, yet again” agreed the Scotsman. “They weren’t demonstrating. They were, actually celebrating. I can’t even imagine whoever’s seen such vile scenes on our streets” Farage told his followers. “I could not take it that after such a horrendous terrorist attack, I could see marches of celebrations in London and other cities that celebrated this murderous attack”, Israeli deputy foreign minister Sharren Haskel said, on Good Morning Britain. The next immediate target was larger; hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people: those who had marched peacefully through London, month after month,  against their government’s complicity in genocide. Suddenly, once again, the marches were “hate marches”, specifically a mass of “Jew hate”, and directly linked to the Manchester terror attack. “Everyone on pro-Palestine marches this weekend is complicit” threatened the Express. Social media was bombarded by posts from right wing accounts: “Anti Semitic mobs have been allowed to march through our streets, waving their terrorist flags and shouting Death to Jews” was one exemplar. “People like killing Jews” the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges clarified. Until now, coverage of the silent, seated, placard-holding Palestine Action protests had been sympathetic. It would, you would think, from the footage of priests, pensioners, Quakers and disabled people being arrested under the Terrorism Act, and carried off by reluctant police, be difficult to sell this as an antisemitic hate event. But not this time. “We’ve had Swastikas, pro-Hamas posters, pro-terror posters and calls for Intifada”, Dan Hodges asserted, of the most recent Palestine Action protest in Trafalgar Square on 4 October, which he does not appear to have attended. The supposed evidence for this came from three photos of people on the fringes of the protest: a grey-haired man with a t-shirt which compared the Israeli government to Nazis, and one person with a placard saying they supported Hamas’ right to resistance. A banner from Cage, the campaigning civil rights organisation demanding that the government “Abolish terror laws” was presumably “pro terror”. The Times’ Matthew Syed, wandering around the sombre square on Saturday, was asking people, there to protest their government’s support of an ongoing genocide, whether “Hamas were partly responsible”. Told to piss off with his stupid questions by women there to witness the protest, Syed extrapolates this into a “hatred of Jews”. Many participants in the protest were Jewish and the protest itself was supported by Jewish organisations, including Jewish Voice for Labour and Na’amod. There were placards affirming the general grief for Manchester, but Syed comes away with “the pervasive view that the Manchester atrocity was not a heinous attack but righteous comeuppance for an evil people”. The protestors, from priest to Quaker, were “almost gloating over the Yom Kippur attack” the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews later told his Jewish audience. Coasting on the back of this, like a surfer upon sewage, was the British government. Naturally they wanted to end the protests; the public accusations of their engagement in the mass slaughter of defenceless people. And yet, interviewed by Owen Jones and Rivkah Brown at the Labour Party conference last month, it was clear that they were not about to do this by stopping their diplomatic and military support for the current Israeli government. Indeed, the government can do nothing to go against the Trump/Netanyahu axis, or so it has persuaded itself. Consider the haunted grey face of Yvette Cooper, questioned by Jones over Gaza. Or Jess Phillips, pursued by an incredulous Rivkah Brown with questions about the proscription of Palestine Action. “We’re just doing what we’re told” shrugged Phillips’ body language. “Are you daft, or something?” “I just do as I’m told, you know”, Labour’s Peter Prinsley confirmed to Declassified UK outside the conference. So this ideologically authoritarian, blindly in thrall government doubles down. The Prime Minister told the country that there are “people on our streets calling for the murder of Jewish people”. He did not mean the threat, to all people, of insane extremist violence; he meant what Gideon Sa’ar has instructed him to mean: the schoolgirls, students, pensioners, white and brown, singing “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. According to Sa’ar, and the right wing press, and their supporters, this calls for “the elimination of the State of Israel” – and is therefore antisemitic. Legislation, said Sa’ar, was needed. And thus the UK’s right wing, and its convenient dupes, flog the fallacy that the majority of the country who demanded arms sales to Israel be suspended, or who think banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans is a good idea, simply hate Jewish people. Meanwhile, the Israeli state not only invites in, but parades, a man known as one of the UK’s most unwanted Nazi-adjacent mortgage fiddlers. The shock among the British Jewish community when Tommy Robinson’s trip was announced was palpable, including from the British Board of Deputies of British Jews, which described him as a “thug” who represented “the very worst of Britain”. Robinson was urging supporters to rally at the Maccabi Tel Aviv/Villa game, where the Prime Minister and his accomplices are simultaneously attempting to expedite, as directed by Sa’ar, an influx of notoriously violent foreign race-haters, screaming “antisemitism” if challenged. If there were a better way to spread fear, division and hatred among our Muslim and Jewish communities, it is difficult to think of one. “If Tommy Robinson wants to show he’s a friend of Jews I urge him not to go after Jewish journalists just because they happen to disagree with him” pleaded one Jewish journalist. It is a terrible and damning game that this government and its allies are attempting: pretending to support the Jewish community by obeying the far right. Meanwhile, excluding figures from London, religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims rose by 19% in the year before March, including direct attacks on mosques and Muslims themselves. Communities are standing up to this, as they have, and they can, and they will.  The government, clearly, will not. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos: Israel Police / Sports5. Maccabi Tel Aviv banners read “We’re back from reserve duty” and “Harbu Derby“ The post Red card for reality appeared first on Freedom News.

Citizen Lab has uncovered a coordinated AI-enabled influence operation against the Iranian government, probably conducted by Israel. > Key Findings > > * A coordinated network of more than 50 inauthentic X profiles is conducting > an AI-enabled influence operation. The network, which we refer to as > “PRISONBREAK,” is spreading narratives inciting Iranian audiences to revolt > against the Islamic Republic of Iran. > * While the network was created in 2023, almost all of its activity was > conducted starting in January 2025, and continues to the present day. > * The profiles’ activity appears to have been synchronized, at least in part, > with the military campaign that the Israel Defense Forces conducted against > Iranian targets in June 2025. ...

Conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer continues to wield a jarring amount of power in the Trump administration. The latest example: She appears to have had a Democratic Senator’s classified visit to a military spy agency cancelled. On Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that his visit to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)’s Virginia headquarters had been cancelled after Loomer launched what Warner called “a campaign of baseless attacks” on social media against him and the NGA’s Director, Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, who is also known as “Trey.” The classified visit, planned for Friday, had not been publicized. It was intended to be an oversight visit to the agency, which works within the Department of Defense (DOD) to provide intelligence through maps and satellites. But in a series of X posts on Sunday, Loomer called Warner a “Russia Hoaxer” and alleged the NGA “is infested with Trump haters” because Whitworth was appointed under former President Joe Biden. “Why are the Pentagon and [intelligence community] allowing for the Director of an Intel agency to host a rabid ANTI-TRUMP DEMOCRAT SENATOR at NGA under the Trump administration?” Loomer asked. On X, Warner said that Loomer “is basically a Cabinet member at this point.” And in a YouTube video discussing the news, Warner said it appears that Loomer “actually has more power and sway than [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth or [National Intelligence Director] Tulsi Gabbard.” Then he ticked off several recent examples of Loomer’s apparent power in the defense and intelligence sectors. After an Oval Office meeting earlier this year in which Loomer alleged some members of the National Security Council were disloyal to Trump, the president fired six of them. In May, she claimed credit for Trump’s firing of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. Warner also said Loomer also appears to have had a role in Trump revoking the national security clearances of 37 current and former officials last month, and in the firing of the Defense Intelligence Agency Director Jeffrey Kruse. Spokespeople for the White House and Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Loomer told the New York Times that she learned of the classified meeting from someone inside the intelligence community, and claimed that Warner should “be removed from office and tried for treason.” On X, she said that Whitworth should be fired. In a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Warner said Loomer’s influence “is the kind of thing that happens in authoritarian regimes,” according to the New York Times. “You purge your independent intelligence community and make them loyal not to a constitution but something else.” Warner also told the Times he is concerned about what the cancellation of the visit means for congressional oversight. “Is congressional oversight dead?” he asked. “If we are not doing oversight, if the intelligence is potentially being cooked or being bent to meet the administration’s needs, and we end up in a conflict—the American people have the right to say, ‘How the hell did this happen?'” Several Democrat members of Congress have reported being denied oversight visits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in recent months. When you consider Loomer’s politics, her sway in the White House seems even more jarring. And as former Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland explained in a piece when Loomer lost her 2022 congressional primary in Florida, her politics pretty much boil down to one word: Racism. > She has a years-long history of raw, unfiltered Islamophobia that possibly > reached its zenith when she said, after 50 people were killed in a New Zealand > mosque, that: “Nobody cares about [the] Christchurch [shooting]. I especially > don’t. I care about my social media accounts and the fact that Americans are > being silenced.” (Loomer was bemoaning those kicked off websites like Twitter > for being racist.) > > > > She did not change her rhetoric to make herself more palatable for Congress > during the campaign. Loomer recently shared an article that lamented the > “accelerating” of the “erasing” of “America’s white history.”  She’s also kept > up a public dialogue with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, who endorsed her. > In March, Loomer went on white nationalist Jared Taylor’s podcast. Right Wing > Watch has documented her saying things like “I’m a really big supporter of the > Christian nationalist movement,” and “I’m going to fight for Christians, I’m > going to fight for white people, I’m going to fight for nationalist > movements.” Despite—or maybe because of—this, Loomer’s influence continues to grow. As I reported last month, Loomer managed to convince the State Department to halt visitor visas to people from Gaza, including humanitarian medical visas for injured children. This weekend, when she wasn’t trashing Warner or Whitworth on X, she celebrated a new development: The State Department went further, suspending almost all visitor visas for Palestinian passport holders, as she had called for. “Thank you, @SecRubio!” Loomer wrote.

WHILE ISRAEL BRANDS IT AS ‘TERRORISM’, GENOA DOCKWORKERS THREATEN MASS ACTION SHOULD THE FLOTILLA BE INTERCEPTED ~ Santiago Navarro F, Avispa Midia ~ As the Sumud Flotilla sails through the Mediterranean, Israel’s stance has been swift, threatening to label its crew, from more than 44 countries, as terrorists and to arrest and imprison them. Following these threats, Italian dockworkers in the port of Genoa have warned that if they lose contact with the flotilla for even 20 minutes, they will block the departure of 14,000 containers of merchandise to Israel. The flotilla of over 50 boats set sail on Sunday (30 August) from Barcelona, carrying trade unionists, doctors, parliamentarians, and activists such as American actress Susan Sarandon and Portuguese actress Sofía Aparicio, as well as Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was detained and deported last June while attempting to break the Gaza blockade with the then-called Freedom Flotilla. Their objective is threefold: to deliver aid directly, to break the media and political isolation of Gaza, and to denounce to the world what they describe as a “genocidal war” and an “illegal siege”. Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians and injured more than 157,000. Meanwhile, it continues to systematically obstruct the entry of food and humanitarian aid into the enclave. “It’s unfortunate that we have to do it ourselves; that we have to load ships with humanitarian aid to try to break the blockade and stop the genocide”, said Saif Abukeshek, a spokesperson for the flotilla, who was detained by Egypt last June during the Global March for Gaza. “We’re not just announcing the mission itself, but the building of a global solidarity movement that works with all oppressed peoples”, he explained. Abukeshek speaking in Barcelona. Photos: Albert Hernández Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir warned that activists travelling aboard the flotilla will be subjected to prolonged detention and will be denied privileges. “We will not allow people who support terrorism to live in comfort. They will face the full consequences of their actions”, Ben-Gvir said. Responding from Genoa, Riccardo Rudino, representative of the Autonomous Committee of Stevedores (CALP), issued an ultimatum in a video warning that if contact with the fleet is lost for even 20 minutes, “we will block Europe”. He also emphatically stated that “not a single nail will come out. We will go on an international strike, block roads, and block schools”. In Genoa alone, more than 300 tons of humanitarian aid were collected prior to the flotilla’s departure. This cargo was sent to the port of Catania and distributed to Italian ships that will join the humanitarian voyage. The voyage is planned to last seven to eight days. Strict security and discretion measures have been implemented, mindful of previous experiences with Israeli repression. This year has already seen two bitter precedents: the Madleen, with Thunberg on board, and the Handala, which were intercepted in June and July respectively by drone attacks and boarded by Israeli commandos in international waters. Their passengers were beaten, kidnapped, deported, and had their phones confiscated. Despite the drone overflights of the vessels near the coasts of Mallorca and Menorca, which the Flotilla has reported, they continue on their way to Gaza. The vessels advance each day toward their destination, with actions in different countries taking place at all times, ranging from words of encouragement to the addition of more vessels and people. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edited machine translation The post Sumud flotilla heads to Gaza “to break the blockade and stop the genocide” appeared first on Freedom News.

Leading genocide scholars have ruled that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide. In a resolution issued Sunday by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the scholars argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide under the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That document, which has been ratified by more than 150 member states, characterizes genocide as crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The IAGS resolution cites several figures and examples from Israel’s war in Gaza to make its cases: More than 59,000 reported fatalities and 143,000 reported injuries, according to the UN; deliberate attacks on journalists, aid workers, and medical professionals; the aid blockade; and the destructions of Palestinian schools and cultural sites. The resolution calls on the Israeli government “to immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza” and asks both the Israeli government and the UN “to support a process of repair and transitional justice that will afford democracy, freedom, dignity, and security for all people of Gaza.” It also calls upon members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to “surrender any individual subject to an arrest warrant,” seemingly referring to the arrest warrants the ICC issued last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The resolution comes as international condemnation of Israel’s actions are ramping up: Several countries recently announced plans to recognize Palestinian statehood, with Belgian becoming the latest as of Tuesday morning. Amnesty International also concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza in a 300-page report issued in December, as my colleague Noah Lenard reported at the time, and the Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel both determined the same in July. South Africa is also pursuing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. And last month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a coalition of 21 organizations—including Save the Children, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization—confirmed that an “entirely man-made” famine is taking place in Gaza City and that other nearby cities are also at risk. The US, though, has consistently remained an outlier as other countries have moved to speak out against Israel and call for peace. President Donald Trump, for example, has not publicly addressed the IPC’s designation of famine in Gaza, though he has previously acknowledged starvation in Gaza. Spokespeople for the White House and the State Department did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Mother Jones on Tuesday about the IAGS resolution. The US has funded Israel’s war to the tune of nearly $18 billion since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages, including a dozen Americans. (The IAGS resolution also says the Oct. 7 attack “constitutes international crimes.”) On Sunday, the same day the IAGS resolution was issued, the Washington Post reported that a postwar plan for Gaza circulating throughout the Trump administration would put it under US control for a decade and would include the so-called “voluntary” displacement of Palestinians—a plan that experts have called ethnic cleansing. Israeli officials have repeatedly denied allegations of genocide against Palestinians. On Monday, the Israel Foreign Ministry slammed the IAGS resolution in a statement on X, calling it “an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard” and alleging that the claims within it were unverified and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies.” Tim Williams, the vice president of IAGS and professor of insecurity and social order at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, told the UK’s Channel 4 News that the organization’s were not surprised by the Israeli reaction, but hoped their determination would provide “a certain amount of academic credentials to anyone now claiming that it is genocide.” As my colleague Noah Lanard has written, the definition of what constitutes a genocide has been both contested and narrowed since its original formulation: > The word “genocide” was coined in 1941 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from > a Polish family, who combined the Greek word for a people (genos) and the > Latin translation for killing (cide). At its most basic, genocide meant > systematically destroying another group. Lemkin laid it out as a two-phase, > often colonial process in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: First, > the oppressor erases the “national pattern” of the victim. Then, it imposes > its own. Genocide stretched from antiquity (Carthage) to modern times > (Ireland). > > […] > > Since the Genocide Convention’s adoption, international courts have arrived at > a narrow reading of the already narrow interpretation of Lemkin’s concept, > says Leila Sadat, the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at > the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. The emphasis of the law > is determining whether a country or individual has killed massive numbers of a > group of people, and whether they did so with a provable intent to destroy > that group. This poses a problem for prosecutors since most perpetrators of > genocide are not as transparent as Adolf Hitler.   Williams gestured towards these difficulties in his appearance on Channel 4 News: > Genocide is not just mass killing. It’s also other crimes, like I was saying, > for instance, also the deliberate destruction of foundations of life. But also > there is a high bar set by the intent to destroy. The perpetrators of genocide > have to want to eradicate the target group in whole or in part, I think that’s > where there’s been most debate. But we have seen many [Israeli] government > leaders, cabinet ministers and senior army officials making explicit > statements over the last now almost two years. And through that, I think > eventually our members see that the bar has been fulfilled.

Two days after experts officially declared that a famine is unfolding in Gaza, President Donald Trump has yet to acknowledge the devastating new findings about the consequences of the US-backed war. On Friday, an analysis released by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—a coalition of 21 organizations, including Save the Children, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization—confirmed that an “entirely man-made” famine is, indeed, taking place in Gaza City, and that the nearby cities of Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis are also at risk of famine. “The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading,” the IPC report says. “There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed. Any further delay—even by days—will result in a totally unacceptable escalation of Famine-related mortality.” More than a half million people in Gaza are facing “starvation, destitution and death,” and more than 600,000 are expected to face catastrophic conditions between now and the end of September, according to the IPC. In addition, at least 132,000 kids under five years old are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition between now and June 2026. The IPC defines famine as occurring when three conditions are met: When at least a fifth of households in a given area are facing an extreme lack of food; at least 30 percent of children are suffering from acute malnutrition, and two out of every 10,000 people are dying daily due to starvation or the combination of malnutrition and disease. The assessment—just the fifth time the IPC has ever declared a famine—follows prior warnings from the IPC that increasing numbers of Palestinians were at risk of starvation in Gaza. That trend continued following the launch of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-backed Israeli aid distribution system that aid groups have decried as inefficient and dangerous. Israeli officials have defended that organization by claiming the system is required to prevent Hamas from interfering with food distribution, though officials have not provided evidence that this was ever happening at a large scale. In the wake of the latest IPC findings, top aid officials called for immediate action. UN Relief Chief Tom Fletcher said the report offers “irrefutable testimony” that famine is happening in Gaza. In a direct appeal to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Fletcher said: “For humanity’s sake, let us in.” “All of Gaza is being systematically starved by design, and children are paying the highest price,” Inger Ashing, CEO of Save the Children, said in a statement. “Palestinian children are their society’s future—and that future, and theirs, has been irrevocably undermined.” Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, said in a statement: “To even begin reversing the devastating consequences of Israel’s inhumane policies and actions, the world must take action now,” adding that Israel should lift its aid blockade and allow the UN to distribute unrestricted aid and that all parties must agree to a ceasefire. Israel, for its part, dismissed the findings, alleging that the IPC’s methodology was flawed and that it overstated its findings. In an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday, Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF, called this claim “obscene,” adding, “We know children are dying.” Trump has remained silent about the new report in recent days, instead posting on Truth Social about golfing with former baseball player Roger Clemens and potentially sending federal troops to Maryland. His silence is all the more notable given that he has seemingly recognized the seriousness of the situation in Gaza in the past. In May, Trump acknowledged that “a lot of people are starving” in Gaza; last month, he described the conditions there as “real starvation stuff.” But the fact that he has not commented on the latest findings, or publicly pressured Israel to change course and allow in unrestricted food and aid, suggests that his prior comments may not have signaled a sustained commitment to preventing starvation. Spokespeople for the White House and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday.

When President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on Saturday that the United States had bombed three sites in Iran, he spoke to a MAGA-verse divided. Many of his most ardent supporters—former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, and far-right political activist Laura Loomer—applauded his decision. But others—including media personality Tucker Carlson, hard-right commentator Candace Owens, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon—were against the bombing from the beginning. “A bombing campaign against Iran will set off a war, and it will be America’s war,” Carlson warned his 16.4 million followers on X in March. “Don’t let the propagandists lie to you.” The political fight seemed to boil down to a battle between those who believed that the United States had a responsibility to its foreign allies and others who saw Trump’s decision as a betrayal of his “America First” campaign promise. But there is another dynamic propelling the deepening rift within the MAGA faithful. Underlying the divide over intervention in the Middle East is not geopolitics but a substantial theological schism within the community of Christian nationalists, and their belief about the “end times,” or the imminent end of the world. Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions— many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS) in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.” During his first term, Taylor noted, Trump made strong connections with influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic Christian movement that teaches followers to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including government. Over the last decade or so, Christian Zionism has become an important part of NAR theology—so much so that during worship, some adherents now wear Jewish prayer shawls and blow shofars, the ram’s horn instruments that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle and still features in some Jewish holidays. This is an example of what Taylor refers to as philosemitism—the idea of loving Jewish customs and cultures. But within end-times theology lurks a dark side to Christian Zionists’ fixation on Judaism. Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that the Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert will perish. “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism,”  Taylor says, “they really are two sides of the same coin.” > “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism, they really are > two sides of the same coin.” Even before the bombs were dropped that Saturday, Christian Zionists were hailing a possible strike as divinely ordained. One of their most prominent and politically powerful adherents is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who currently serves as the US ambassador to Israel. On a podcast last year, Huckabee described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist,” adding, “there really isn’t such a thing” as Palestine. He refers to the West Bank exclusively by its biblical name, “Judea and Samaria.” In the Jerusalem Post’s list of the most influential Christian Zionists, Huckabee comes in second. He follows former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently helped launch an Israel institute at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia. On June 18, three days before the United States bombed Iran, Huckabee texted President Trump, comparing him to “Truman in 1945,” who was faced with the existential decision of whether to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “God spared you in Butler, Pennsylvania, to be the most consequential president in a century, maybe ever,” Huckabee wrote. “I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.” Hours before news of the bombing broke, Lance Wallnau, an influential Texas NAR leader, with robust ties to the Trump administration—last year he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance— warned his 129,000 followers on X, “Satan would love to crush Israel, humiliate the United States, destroy President Trump’s hope of recovery for America, and plunge the world into war.” But then he reassured them, “That’s not going to happen. Why? I was reminded again just a few moments ago what the Lord told me about Donald Trump in 2015.” He explained that he had received a message from God that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” an Old Testament Persian king whom God used to free the Jews, his chosen people. On his YouTube channel two days after the bombing, Wallnau concluded that the prophecy was coming true. “Jesus is coming back, and I believe this is all part of him setting the stage for his return,” he said. In Trump’s speech shortly after the bombing, he appeared to give a presidential nod to the Christian Zionist crowd, saying, “I want to thank—in particular—God. I want to just say, ‘We love you, God!’” In those words, some evangelicals thought they heard an affirmation of a common Christian Zionist refrain: “God will bless those who bless Israel.” Eric Metaxas, an evangelical radio host who has collaborated with Wallnau and was present at the rally leading up to the January 6th attack on the Capital, tweeted to his 240,000 followers, “Trump was obviously choked up & meant it,” he wrote. “No president has ever said anything like that. An extraordinary & historic public declaration of faith. God WILL bless this nation. Hallelujah.” Taylor noted that another NAR leader, the Colorado evangelist Dutch Sheets, had a similar message for his 359,000 YouTube followers on Monday. “We are entering this time,” he said. “Millions of [Iranians] will come to Christ. Be assured: God is involved in this war.” A key figure in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election and the leadup to the January 6th attack on the Capital, Sheets has long held that Trump is a divinely appointed leader. The Heritage Foundation, the powerful right-wing think tank that was the driving force behind the Project 2025 roadmap for Trump’s second term, also celebrated the Iran strikes. A particularly vocal Heritage staffer on this issue is Victoria Coates, vice president of the group’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy. Coates, a Christian, leads Project Esther, Heritage’s roadmap for quashing the pro-Palestine movement in the United States; the name is a reference to Queen Esther, a biblical heroine who saved the Jews in Persia from slaughter. Coates is also the author of the 2023 book The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel―And America―Can Win. In a statement the Heritage Foundation released the day after the attack, Coates made the case that by bombing Iran, the United States actually progressed toward ending the age-old conflicts in the Middle East. “Now that Iran’s self-defeating dreams of nuclear military power have been decimated,” she said, “we are closer to peace.” Unlike the Christian Zionists, some Christian members of the crowd that criticizes Trump’s decision to bomb Iran believe modern-day Israel has little to do with the Holy Land of the Bible. In fact, some of them hold that the Christian church now plays the role that Israel itself once did in ancient times, explains Taylor, the religion scholar. He explains the dynamic as more of the absorption of Jewish and Gentile Christians into a single church unit, which then becomes “a kind of replacement theology” in which Christianity supersedes Judaism and “replaces it.” One group that strongly rejects the idea that Israel and the Jewish people are key to the second coming is the TheoBros, mostly millennial, extremely online men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Great fans of Trump, in the wake of the US bombing, some of the TheoBros’ comments have veered into the terrain of antisemitism. The day after Trump announced the bombing, Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, tweeted to his 31,000 followers, “2% of the population demand 100% of the wars,” presumably an oblique reference to the roughly 2 percent of the American population who identifies as Jewish. (Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.) The same day, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, another Christian nationalist TheoBro, weighed in, tweeting to his 39,000 followers, “Gentile Christians are not second class citizens of heaven, and Jews aren’t special.” On a Monday airing of his podcast, he clarified that his disdain for Israel did not amount to tacit support for Muslims, using slurs as he referred to adherents of that faith. “I’m not a fan of sand demons and the sand people who worship them, and I’m also not a fan of the synagogue of Satan.” Later in the same episode, he said, “My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”   > “My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with > its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, > spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”   One of the loudest critics of the Iran strikes is right-wing media personality and erstwhile Trump fan Tucker Carlson—and on this issue, he has clashed dramatically with the Christian Zionist crowd that sees Israel and Judaism as one and the same. A few days before the bombing, Carlson interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Christian Zionist who strongly supports American military action in Iran. The exchange was a microcosm of the broader MAGA divide. Cruz accused Carlson of having an “obsession with Israel,” to which Carlson responded, “Oh, I’m an antisemite now?” and added, “Shame on you for conflating Jews and Israel.” Cruz was apoplectic. “Give me another reason, if you’re not an antisemite, why the obsession with Israel?” Carlson mainly sees the Middle East conflict as a geopolitical quagmire, not a spiritual battle for a holy land. This stance is likely influenced by the “America First” anti-interventionist crowd he’s long been aligned with. But he too has strong ties to the TheoBro world. Earlier this year, he hosted Andrew Isker, a podcaster and pastor who is part of a movement to build a Christian nationalist community in Appalachia, and regularly tweets about his desire for Jews to convert to Christianity. He also strongly endorses the idea that Jews no longer have any particular claim to Israel. “You talk a lot about the Old Covenant and this idea of Jews and Gentiles. Is that all done now, are they one?” Tucker asked Isker. “Absolutely,” replied Isker. “In the New Testament, Paul makes it clear—there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free’; in Christ we are one true Israel. The old dividing lines are abolished.” Carlson chuckled. “To come to the opposite conclusion does sort of make you wonder—have you actually read the Bible?” A curious figure in the religious MAGA infighting over Iran is US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. While Hegseth currently attends a TheoBro-adjacent church, in the past he was a devoted Christian Zionist. In 2018, when he was still a Fox News anchor, he gave a speech in Jerusalem at a conference hosted by the right-wing Israeli news site Israel National News. “If you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution,” he said. “There is one state.” In the same speech, he referred to the return of the prophesied Jewish diaspora to Israel, the event that Christian Zionists believe will herald the second coming of the Messiah. “There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” he said. “I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.” Despite his current church’s beliefs, Hegseth appears to be holding fast to his Christian Zionist roots—and his allegiance to Trump. At a Wednesday press conference, the defense secretary railed against the media for reporting on intelligence that found that Iran’s nuclear program had not been completely destroyed. Shortly after, he tweeted, “I will always defend @POTUS leadership, especially our skilled and amazing warfighters.” To Taylor, the divide between the Christian Zionists and their also-Christian detractors reveals a deeper truth about the theological clashes within the MAGA movement. “Everyone can kind of be pro-Trump and pro-Maga, but underneath that, there are real theological and ideological disagreements, and especially in around Jews and Judaism,” he says. “The ideological rift, even among the Christian Trump supporters, is very, very real.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since March, the Trump administration has dismantled a leading office at the Department of Homeland Security whose mission was averting terrorism and targeted violence. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, has been stripped of funding, and most of its 40-plus personnel have been fired, reassigned, or otherwise pushed out. Amid this process, the White House temporarily put in charge a 22-year-old Trump superfan who arched an eyebrow for his agency portrait and has zero leadership experience in government, let alone in national security. The demise of CP3 comes as the White House has diverted major law enforcement and security resources toward deporting undocumented immigrants. It also comes as high-profile acts of political violence have surged in the United States. The list of recent devastation includes an ISIS-inspired truck massacre in New Orleans, the bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, and a spate of antisemitic attacks—including the murder of a young couple working for Israel in Washington, DC; an arson attack against the governor of Pennsylvania; and a fiery assault on peaceful marchers in Boulder, Colorado. Last year, a healthcare CEO was gunned down point-blank in Manhattan, and President Trump barely avoided death from an assassin’s bullet on the campaign trail. Twelve days ago, a right-wing extremist in Minnesota targeted Democratic state lawmakers in a deadly gun rampage, killing former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her spouse, and gravely wounding two others. The nation is now also on heightened alert after Trump ordered the bombing of Iran, a major state sponsor of terrorism. Though political extremism has been rising, it is almost never the only factor in targeted violence, including with most, if not all, of the above cases. Most perpetrators are also driven by a mix of rage and despair over acute personal problems, such as financial or health crises—and many are suicidal. This complexity was a focus of CP3’s $18 million in annual grants to state and local partners. Drawing on long-established public health research, the office worked with law enforcement, educators, faith leaders, and others to use “upstream” interventions with troubled individuals who may be planning and moving toward violence. The work gained traction over the past couple of years, according to William Braniff, a military veteran and national security expert who was director of CP3 until March. He said that many states were working with the office to build this kind of strategy and that CP3 was flooded with $99 million in eligible grant applications—exceeding its funds by more than fivefold. He resigned when eight of his colleagues were fired without cause. “I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance,” Braniff told me. “A lot of the headquarters-based offices within DHS are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted.” As the wave of recent attacks shows, a variety of extremism is fueling the danger. Researchers have tracked growing acceptance and endorsement of political violence in America in recent years, particularly among people who identify as MAGA Republicans, a finding reaffirmed in a new national study from the Centers for Violence Prevention at University of California, Davis. > “We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our > democracy.” In response to my email asking for an explanation of the shutdown, DHS assistant secretary of public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said CP3 “plays an insignificant and ineffective role” in DHS counterterrorism efforts, and further claimed, without providing any evidence, that CP3 was “weaponized” under the Biden administration for partisan purposes. Braniff, who is now executive director of the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University, explained in our recent interview (lightly edited below for clarity) how CP3 built out its national model for violence prevention. He also spoke about what citizens and communities can do to counter the danger of political violence—and the disturbing normalization of it. First, can you talk a little bit about the CP3 strategy and how the programs worked? From school shootings and grievance-based workplace violence, to hate-fueled violence, to terrorism, we needed an approach out of the federal government that would address all of those. And so we looked to the public health community, and specifically the decades of work on violence prevention from places like the Centers for Disease Control—evidence-based programs for prevention of suicide, intimate-partner violence, violence against children, and community-based violence. And we said, well, what if we could apply those tested approaches to some of these more “exotic” forms of violence? For too long, and especially after 9/11, we exoticized terrorism as this foreign kind of violence, when in reality, underneath the manifestation, you have these very human things happening: individuals who have unaddressed risk factors in their lives. That might be an adverse childhood experience, trauma, or financial hardship. That might be social isolation. And these risk factors, when left unaddressed, might spur the individual to go seeking answers down dark rabbit holes that preach hate, that preach violence for the sake of it. And regardless of the way that violence might manifest later, there are these upstream preventative programs that we can put in place. So CP3 was the primary entity in the US government for creating these upstream programs, informed by public health. Social isolation is a massive risk factor for all kinds of negative health outcomes, including self harm and perpetration of violence. And so you look at these underlying risk factors and you say, well, we can actually mitigate against them. Very rarely in the national security realm do we get to talk about building positive programs that make us all happier and healthier and less susceptible to violence as a solution. Sometimes people still might gravitate towards violence. And in those instances, we invested in secondary prevention. These are multidisciplinary interventions, so that if someone makes an offhand comment about starting a racial holy war, accelerating the downfall of the government, or being an infamous school shooter, these ideations of violence are not dismissed. We created these programs so that bystanders had a place to refer someone they cared about. And the purpose wasn’t criminal justice, it was to get them access to help. > “You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from > more mental health professionals and social workers. We were bringing these > folks together and blending their assets.” Out of the 1,172 interventions that we funded through our grant program, 93.5 percent of the individuals who were exhibiting threatening behavior got help. They got access to a clinician or a caring professional. In 6.5 percent of the incidents, the persons had already broken the law or were an imminent threat to public safety, and they were referred to law enforcement. And that wasn’t the point of the intervention, but there was that safety net there for when that person really was an imminent risk to their community. We could balance public health and public safety through these multidisciplinary, evidence-based programs. There’s a lot of research on their efficacy, including to make sure that persons of color are getting equitable treatment and programs are not succumbing to implicit bias in schools and workplaces. And so there’s all sorts of value to these programs socially as well as economically. They’re much cheaper than criminal justice or the cost of violence. Given that we’re in this heightened environment of political extremism and attacks, why shut down CP3? What is your view of that? I don’t think that CP3 was targeted by the Trump administration specifically. I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance. A lot of the headquarters-based offices within the Department of Homeland Security are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted. Ignorance is not an excuse for what’s happening. The primary mission of DHS, as enshrined in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, is to prevent terrorism. And CP3 was the latest manifestation of an office within DHS that was trying to find a way to get traction in this prevention space. And we got it in the last couple of years. Eight states worked with CP3 to publish a state strategy, and when I left in March, another eight states were drafting their strategy with CP3’s help. Twenty-seven states had agreed to work with CP3 and were in the queue. So we were normalizing this at the state and local level. Why? Because it’s pragmatic. It’s cost-effective. It works. You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from more mental health professionals and social workers, because law enforcement officers are not equipped to do this kind of upstream intervention. We had $99 million of eligible grant applications for our $18 million grant pool, which means we were wildly oversubscribed. We were bringing these folks together and blending their assets. A whole range of political ideology and extremism feeds into targeted violence, but we also know there’s been a steady rise in far-right domestic terrorism in recent years. I’m curious how you view the long-term impact of losing this type of work in the federal government, particularly as it relates to things like Trump’s clemency for January 6 insurrectionists, including a lot of violent offenders who attacked police. Some groups associated with that event are again instigating on social media for potentially violent behavior. What message is this all sending, and what does it do in terms of the political environment that we’re in? It’s such a good set of questions. We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our democracy. And that is a potential death blow to a free and open society. It’s not to say that these things can’t gravitate back towards a norm of nonviolence. But right now we are creating permission structures for individuals to dehumanize the transgender community, to dehumanize Jews or equate their individual actions with that of the Israeli government, half a world away. We’re at risk of normalizing school shootings among youth who don’t imagine a healthy future for themselves and are succumbing to this kind of nihilistic manipulation that we’re seeing in [online extremist] movements like “764.” And when these norms are accepted at a societal level and encouraged at a political level, they become entrenched and really difficult to reverse. And so what we were doing at CP3 and what we’re doing now at my current organization at American University is trying to normalize prevention, the idea that we can and should build thriving communities where individuals don’t need to buy the violent empowerment that either a politician or an online groomer is selling that leads to violence. The things you’ve listed are incredibly concerning, and frankly, we all have to decide that we care about this issue. If we don’t, if we decide we’re going to be apathetic about it, the violence is going to win the day because it’s going to capture the news headlines, and the algorithms, and the path of least resistance is to surrender to violence as a norm in our current information environment. And so it’s going to take intentional decision making by all of us as individuals to decide that’s not the country or the community that we want to live in. So there are some real problems in our political system right now with a permission structure, as you describe it, for violence. Isn’t rejecting that part of not normalizing it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the techniques that we study and work with at PERIL is called video-based inoculation. It’s the idea that you can give individuals a microdose of some sort of manipulative tactic that they might come across on social media or cable news. And you give them this microdose of this manipulation so that they develop “antibodies” to it. They realize that they’re being manipulated. That is really important, for us to sort of throw sand in the gears of what otherwise spreads like wildfire when we’re passive consumers of information. And so with the last antisemitism video that we tested, individuals were 24 percent more likely to openly challenge manipulative material online if they saw the inoculating video first. So we think there’s a lot of promise there to engage all of us as stewards of our information environment. Is it your hope or expectation that this kind of prevention work will come back more strongly in the federal government in the future? Yes, it has to. The threat is growing and manifesting in more and different ways. There’s been nearly a 2,000-percent increase in mass casualty attacks in the United States since the early 1990s. There are approximately three violent attacks per day that either are plotted or carried out in the United States. School shootings are up linearly since the Columbine attack of 1999. Political assassinations are being normalized. We have to marshal resources to push back on this. I do believe it’ll come back—I think Americans will demand it, but only if they know that violence is preventable, which it is. If, instead, they’re told by their government or anyone else that this is just inevitable and we should be resigned to it, they may believe that. Instead of recognizing that the overwhelming majority of school shooters tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, and that nearly 50 percent of mass-casualty attackers tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, we’ll ignore that reality and just accept the violence. And so it’s really important that we continue to push on this now, but ultimately demand it of our federal government.