Two days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, Rep. Roger Williams issued an ultimatum to the Trump administration’s critics in Minnesota and beyond. “People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil,” the Texas Republican told NewsNation. “And until we do that, I guess we’re going to have it this way. And the people that are staying in their homes or doing the right thing need to be protected.” > Rep. Roger Williams: "People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law > enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil." > pic.twitter.com/r5TFLgFHy1 > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 9, 2026 That’s a pretty clear encapsulation of MAGA-world’s views on dissent these days. You aren’t supposed to protest. You aren’t supposed to “yell at” or “challenge” the militarized federal agents occupying your city. And anyone who wants to be “protected” should probably just stay “in their homes.” Williams isn’t some fringe backbencher; he’s a seven-term congressman who chairs the House Small Business Committee. He is announcing de facto government policy. For nearly a year, President Donald Trump and his allies have been engaged in an escalating assault on the First Amendment. The administration has systematically targeted or threatened many of Trump’s most prominent critics: massive law firms, Jimmy Kimmel, even, at one point, Elon Musk. But it’s worth keeping in mind that some of the earliest victims of the president’s second-term war on speech were far less powerful. Early last year, ICE began arresting and attempting to deport people with legal immigration status—such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk—who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism or expressed pro-Palestinian views. The administration was explicit about the new policy. Troy Edgar, Trump’s deputy secretary of Homeland Security, made clear that the government was seeking to remove Khalil in large part because he’d chosen to “protest” against Israel. Asked about such cases, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that engaging in “anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protest will not be tolerated.” It should have been obvious at the time that Trump allies were laying the groundwork for an even broader crackdown. “When it comes to protesters, we gotta make sure we treat all of them the same: Send them to jail,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) in March, discussing Khalil’s arrest on Fox Business Network. “Free speech is great, but hateful, hate, free speech is not what we need in these universities.” That’s pretty close to Williams’ demand on Friday that “people need to quit demonstrating.” It also sounds a lot like Attorney General Pam Bondi’s widely derided threat in September that the DOJ “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Hate speech—regardless of what the Trump administration thinks that means—is protected by the First Amendment. Bondi can’t prosecute people for expressing views she dislikes. And ICE can’t deport US citizens like Good. But of course, federal law enforcement has more direct ways to exert control. “The bottom line is this,” said Rep. Wesley Hunt, a Texas Republican running for US Senate, in the wake of Good’s death. “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” > Rep. Wesley Hunt: "The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you > instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep you life" > pic.twitter.com/JhA09qoT8r > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 7, 2026 Moment’s later, Newsmax anchor Carl Higbie complained to Hunt that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) had “literally told Minnesotans to get out and protest and that it is, quote, ‘a patriotic duty.'” “People are going to go out there,” Higbie warned ominously. “And what do you think is going to happen when you get 3, 4, 5,000 people—some of which are paid agitators—thinking it’s their ‘patriotic duty’ to oppose ICE?”

On Tuesday, the Israeli government announced that it would suspend the aid work of several humanitarian organizations that provide lifesaving aid to Palestinians in Gaza living through what Amnesty International and other groups labeled as a genocide. Israel has claimed that the organizations failed to meet new vetting guidelines. However, as the Associated Press reported, some of the affected organizations have argued that Israel’s rules are arbitrary and could endanger people working for the non-governmental organizations. The suspensions affect 37 organizations, including Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, Humanity & Inclusion, the International Rescue Committee, and Action Aid. In addition to working to meet the healthcare and other needs of Palestinians, many of these organizations and those involved in them have been vocal about the horrible conditions Palestinians have endured, including in interviews with Mother Jones. A Humanity & Inclusion employee told Sophie Hurwitz and me in 2024 that “one of the saddest things we hear on a regular basis” is that some children who are now amputees “think that their legs may grow again.” Following the announcement, foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom released a joint statement condemning this decision. “Deregistration could result in the forced closure of [non-governmental organizations’] operations within 60 days in Gaza and the West Bank. This would have a severe impact on access to essential services, including healthcare,” they wrote. “Any attempt to stem their ability to operate is unacceptable. Without them, it will be impossible to meet all urgent needs at the scale required.” Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières said in a statement to Mother Jones that while they have not gotten any official decision about their ongoing registration applications, if they are prevented from providing services, the impact will be devastating for Palestinians. “In Gaza, MSF supports around 20 percent of all hospital beds and supports the delivery of one in three babies,” said a spokesperson. H&I told Mother Jones that its registration to operate in Palestine will be suspended, effectively tomorrow. “This decision comes amid an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, with massive and urgent needs among the civilian population, particularly in Gaza,” said an H&I spokesperson. “[H&I] is currently consulting with other affected humanitarian organizations to analyze the implications of this decision and determine the appropriate next steps. While a ceasefire started on paper at the beginning of October that involved Hamas returning the remaining live hostages and bodies of the deceased to Israel, Palestinians in Gaza have still faced grim conditions. As of December 9, Palestinian officials have reported that 360 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the ceasefire. This past October, the International Rescue Committee emphasized the importance of continuing aid into Gaza, with IRC CEO and President David Miliband saying that “with 55,000 Palestinian children suffering from acute malnutrition and 90 percent of the population displaced, what is needed now is a dramatic surge in the amount of aid going into Gaza.” To top it all off, there has been intense rain and flooding in Gaza, displacing Palestinians living in tents who were already displaced from their homes.

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.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Every day when Rajaa Musleh wakes up and checks her phone, she fears she will see news that another member of her family has been killed in Gaza.  Musleh, a nurse and humanitarian worker who evacuated from Gaza to Cairo last year, works at the charity organization Human Concern International delivering food, medicine and other essential aid. Her 75-year-old mother and other family members are still in Gaza, where they face constant dangers: bombing, disease, starvation, medication shortages, and environmental devastation.  “I feel that I am divided into two parts,” Musleh said. “My body is here in Cairo and my soul inside Gaza.” Israeli forces have killed more than 70,000 Palestinians over the past two years and two months, according to official estimates. The United Nations estimates that 90 percent of Gaza’s population is displaced and that 1.5 million people are in urgent need of shelter.  Over the past two years, the UN and global medical and human rights authorities have continuously sounded the alarm on famine and forced starvation in Gaza, widespread environmental destruction, near-constant bombardment and violations of international law, deeming Israel’s assault a genocide. Israel has destroyed Gaza’s water, sewage, and hospital infrastructure and, the UN said, continues to restrict the entrance of food, tents, warm clothes, and life-saving medical supplies, leaving millions without basic necessities.  Now, as multiple reports show Israel violating the latest ceasefire, winter rains are flooding thousands of tents in Gaza amid plummeting temperatures. Escalating environmental destruction, from the impact of chemical weapons to heavily polluted water, make the scale of humanitarian devastation even more apocalyptic.  > “When they announced the ceasefire, it’s just [a] lie. They attack every day, > bombing the people in their tents.” “This war, I call it a climate war,” Musleh said. “It has created catastrophe, an environmental health crisis…and I think this will affect Gaza for generations.” The unusually heavy rains, strong winds, and floods Storm Byron brought to Israel and Gaza this week are making conditions for displaced families even more dire. One baby in Gaza died overnight last week in a cold and flooded tent. “The storm is exacerbating the humanitarian crisis amid the destruction of infrastructure and a lack of resources,” Gaza City Mayor Yahya Al-Sarraj told Al Jazeera.  According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, nearly 850,000 people in Gaza are sheltering in 761 displacement sites particularly vulnerable to flooding expected from the storm. Israeli officials have said they expect to see unprecedented rainfall and warned residents to stay inside and watch for signs of hypothermia. Thousands of children in Gaza are experiencing acute malnutrition, while lacking shelter, sanitation, and warm clothing. Flooding rains and lack of access to safe water for drinking and even basic hygiene interventions like handwashing accelerate the rapid spread of disease. Cold weather also increases the body’s energy needs, putting malnourished children with insufficient reserves of fat and muscle at severe risk of hypothermia, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. Doctors Without Borders found that diseases linked to poor living conditions, including skin, eye, respiratory, and gastrointestinal diseases, make up 70 percent of outpatient consultations in the organization’s health care clinics in southern Gaza. As winter rains mix with sewage, winter exacerbates the spread of disease. “Without immediate improvements to water, sanitation, shelter and nutrition, more people will die from entirely preventable causes,” the organization wrote in a statement denouncing bloodshed after Israeli strikes on November 19.  In an emailed statement, the Israel Defense Forces said allegations of genocide are “not only unfounded but also ignore Hamas’ violations of international law.” The IDF denied claims it is limiting the number of humanitarian aid trucks entering Gaza.  “The IDF remains committed to conducting its operations in accordance with international law,” the statement read, contending that Hamas is not fulfilling its part of the ceasefire agreement, including by killing three Israeli soldiers and not returning all hostages by the deadline. “The IDF is acting in response to threats, violations, and terror infrastructure.” The BBC reported on November 11 that Israel has destroyed more than 1,500 buildings in Gaza since the ceasefire went into effect on Oct. 10, and Al Jazeera reported that Israeli forces have killed at least 360 Palestinians and injured more than 900 over the same period. The UN Children’s Fund said on November 21 that at least 67 children had been killed in Gaza since October 10, an average of almost two children slain per day. Hamas has reportedly returned all but one deceased hostage, whose body has not yet been found. Hamas officials have said they have had difficulty locating the bodies of hostages under rubble following Israeli strikes. The UN adopted a resolution this month calling on Israel to comply with international law by ending its “unlawful” occupation in Palestine. The US government continues to funnel billions of dollars to Israel. US and Israeli officials reportedly expect the second phase of the US-brokered Gaza peace plan to begin as soon as this month, while Hamas officials are calling for international pressure on Israel to first fully implement the terms of the plan’s initial phase, including ceasing attacks and ending the aid blockade.  Hala Sabbah, co-founder of The Sameer Project—a mutual-aid organization supplying emergency shelter, food and medical aid in Gaza—is based in London and coordinates donations to colleagues on the ground bringing tents and warm clothes to displaced Gazans. The Sameer Project’s doctors are treating displaced patients with severe injuries and chronic diseases, doing so without basic medical supplies and while also living in hazardous conditions themselves.  “Unless borders open really, really, really soon, we’re just basically seeing a slow genocide where people are dying because of the lack of infrastructure and the lack of aid coming in,” Sabbah said. “If this lasts even longer, that means more and more and more deaths.” The Sameer Project is named after Sabbah’s uncle, who she said was killed in an Israeli bombing in 2024. The group is led by Gazans and members of the Palestinian diaspora, like Sabbah. The organization has about 100 team members on the ground, she said, but the scale of need far exceeds their capacity. “What we’re doing, really, is a drop in the ocean,” Sabbah said. “It’s really, really frustrating.” Lena Dajani, who coordinates The Sameer Project’s medical aid work while based in California, described the impact of the rain on displaced families living in makeshift shelters. “They’re drowning in their tents,” Dajani said. “There’s no drainage…There are just rivers of dirty water now, raw sewage, chemicals flooding into tents and destroying the very little that anyone owns.” The flooding with contaminated water is exacerbating gastrointestinal diseases, infections, and chronic coughs, and elevating hypothermia risks, which were already deadly last year. “This winter is going to be catastrophic,” Dajani said.  > View this post on Instagram After the latest ceasefire went into effect on October 10, The Sameer Project saw a drop in donations, Sabbah said, but the dire circumstances on the ground have remained largely unchanged. In late October, a Sameer Project staffer was killed along with 17 relatives in an Israeli airstrike on a residential building they were staying in, Dajani said.  Musleh, with Human Concern International, evacuated Gaza last year after spending 50 days trapped in Al-Shifa Hospital, where she worked as a nurse. Musleh is traumatized by the scenes of carnage she saw at Al-Shifa. When she evacuated in March 2024 she only planned to stay in Cairo for a month before returning to continue her work in Gaza, but she has not been able to get back in. She now coordinates aid to Gaza, including food, warm clothes and hygiene and medical supplies.  But aid is severely restricted. International human rights organizations and aid workers have criticized Israel for keeping healthy food, medical supplies and other essentials out of Gaza. This fall, Musleh said that Israeli authorities removed dates—high in nutrition desperately needed by malnourished children and adults—from Human Concern International’s food aid packages before letting them through. > “There is no electricity, no fans, no ACs, no cold water, no safe places.” Musleh’s mother, who is still in Gaza, suffers from kidney disease, but Musleh’s attempts to send her basic medication have been blocked, she said. She pays $2,000 each month to secure her mother a place in a two-bedroom apartment where 20 people are currently living, just to keep her out of the rain and floods. But there’s nowhere safe from violence, she said. “When they announced the ceasefire, it’s just [a] lie,” Musleh said. “They attack every day, bombing the people in their tents.” Even before October 2023, 97 percent of Gaza’s groundwater was already considered unfit for human consumption, due to a depleted coastal aquifer, over-extraction, nitrate pollution from sewage disposal, saltwater intrusion and the flushing of agricultural fertilizer, according to the UN Environment Programme. Palestinians have long lacked sufficient water access, and in 2012, the UN warned that the Gaza Strip could be unlivable by 2020 if no action was taken to secure clean drinking water as well as energy and sanitation access. Gaza has been under Israeli blockade for nearly two decades, with Israeli authorities significantly restricting residents’ freedom of movement, employment, and ability to access imported goods including food, medical supplies, and fuel. Israel has also restricted and undermined water access in Gaza for decades, including by restricting fuel used to operate desalination plants, overexploiting the coastal aquifer, and deliberately targeting and destroying water and sewage infrastructure, according to water and human rights organizations. Today, none of Gaza’s wastewater treatment plants are operational, according to the UN, and just a fraction of the aid needed to sustain its population is allowed through the blockade.  Climate change is making the crisis even more acute, aid workers said. The rain came late and heavy this year, Musleh said, following scorching summer heat. Palestine is in a region particularly vulnerable to climate change, and climate models predict increased temperature highs and lows, as well as exacerbated droughts and floods. Palestine is already seeing significant sea-level rise, which scientists have projected will cause coastal flooding and erosion and continued saltwater intrusion in groundwater aquifers.  In August, Gazan journalist Bisan Owda described the impact of brutal heat over 104 degrees. “There is no electricity, no fans, no ACs, no cold water, no safe places…because of climate issues and because of the intense bombings,” Owda said.  Groups like The Sameer Project are delivering truckloads of water, but once again, the need is far greater than their capacity. “Families have gotten used to drinking brackish water,” Dajani said. “We’re seeing a lot of problems with kidneys because they can’t identify the taste anymore of the salt water.”  Dajani added that her colleagues are seeing kidney inflammation, hepatitis, jaundice, and Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare and potentially life-threatening condition that can result in paralysis and breathing problems and most commonly follows a viral infection.  In a briefing published on November 27, Amnesty International detailed the extent of the ongoing human rights crisis. “The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal,” said Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, in a statement. “The world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.” > “Gaza’s aquifer is contaminated, farmland has been decimated, and sewage seeps > into the soil.” Amidst staggering immediate needs, aid workers are seeing widespread trauma and medical complications that will impact Gaza’s population for generations to come.  Dajani described a child named Ahmed Al Homs, who was hit with tear gas last year, and suffered asphyxiation and brain damage. Now, he is paralyzed, Dajani said. The Sameer Project has been providing care and medications for Al Homs, who lives in the Refaat Alareer Camp, an emergency medical aid site the organization operates in central Gaza.  Doctors are also seeing severe birth complications likely tied to continuous exposure to highly toxic air and water, Dajani and Musleh both said. In a report from September, the UN Environment Programme found that 78 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed, generating about 67 million tons of debris, including rubble that could contain high-risk contaminants like asbestos, industrial waste and heavy metals that Gazans living among the rubble are exposed to. “That’s going to be a whole generation…that are not the proper size for their age, they’re not meeting cognitive milestones,” Dajani said. “An entire generation is going to be affected by this.” In September, the Israel-based Arava Institute for Environmental Studies released a report on the scope of environmental damage in Gaza, detailing the destruction of croplands, desalination plants and wastewater treatment infrastructure, increased air pollution from the burning of solid waste and building materials—including through bombing—and a buildup of hazardous medical waste. More than 80 percent of croplands have been damaged or destroyed, leaving more than 90 percent of Gaza’s population suffering crisis-level food insecurity, the report found.  Fuel shortages and a collapsed power grid further exacerbate water insecurity—experienced by at least 93 percent of households—and prohibit basic activities such as cooking and communication. “What we are witnessing is not just a humanitarian catastrophe but an ecological collapse that threatens the very possibility of recovery,” said David Lehrer, director of the institute’s Center for Applied Environmental Diplomacy, in a statement at the report’s release. “Gaza’s aquifer is contaminated, farmland has been decimated, and sewage seeps into the soil, polluting shared groundwater and setting the stage for outbreaks of waterborne disease that could spread beyond Gaza’s borders.” Masum Mahbub, CEO of Human Concern USA—the US affiliate of Human Concern International—emphasized that the depth of environmental devastation in Gaza will impact the humanitarian crisis for years to come. Mahbub described a cycle of harm: emissions from the war exacerbate the climate crisis, which impacts Gaza’s future livability, while the bombardment itself destroys its capacity for resilience. Any effort to rebuild Gaza’s infrastructure will have to prioritize the environment, he said. “The world cannot rebuild Gaza without restoring its land, which takes a long time,” Mahbub said. “The recovery must prioritize environmental remediations, renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture…It’s about restoring the ecological foundation of life and dignity.”

Earlier this fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. Their goal: Break through Israel’s blockade of the territory and end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world’s attention.  At first, it was easy to dismiss the Global Sumud Flotilla—until it wasn’t. Before reaching Gaza, the flotilla was attacked by drones, and activists were arrested by the Israeli navy.  “We were at gunpoint; like, you could see the laser on our chest,” says flotilla participant Louna Sbou.   Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. They were then sent to a high-security prison in the middle of the Negev desert. “You have no control, you have no information, and you have no rights,” says Carsie Blanton, another participant. “They could do whatever they want to you.” This week on Reveal, we go aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla for a firsthand look at what activists faced on their journey and whether their efforts made any difference.

Jason Stanley isn’t afraid to use the F-word when talking about President Donald Trump. The author of How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future is clear: He believes the United States is currently under an authoritarian regime led by a fascist leader. At a time when the Trump administration is putting increasing pressure on private and public universities to conform or lose funding, Stanley recently left his position at Yale University and moved his family to Canada, where he’s now the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The move, he says, has allowed him to talk about the US in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if he remained in the country.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale,” he says. “I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different.” On this week’s More To The Story, Stanley traces the recent rise of fascist regimes around the globe, and explains why he describes what’s happening in the US today as a “coup” and why he thinks the speed and scope of the Trump administration’s hardline policies could ultimately lead to significant pushback from those opposed to the president. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So your new book, Erasing History, focuses on what you call the rise of global fascism and specifically on the role of education in authoritarian regimes. Tell me about that. Jason Stanley: It’s really a prequel to my 2018 book, How Fascism Works. So I’m a philosopher first and foremost, so what I’ve been doing, really, I envisage a kind of trilogy eventually with the third book being what to ho, how to stop this, but How Fascism Works is about fascist politics, how a certain kind of politics works to catapult people into power when they use it as a practice, whether they might be ideologically fascist or not. I think everybody accepts that whatever the Trump machine believes behind the scenes, they’re employing techniques familiar from the Nazis. It’s the same set of scapegoats except not the Jews, but immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, opposition politicians, et cetera. So for fascist politics to be maximally effective, you need a certain kind of education system that tells people that their country is like the greatest ever. And as I show in the book, Hitler is extremely clear about this in Mein Kampf, he speaks in very clear terms about education and the necessity of having an education system where you promote the founders of the nation, the great Aryan men who founded the German nation as great exemplars and models, and you base the education around that. And hey, in the United States we already had an education like system like that. So if that is your background education system, then you can set up great replacement theory. You can say America’s greatness is because it had these great white Christian men. And so if you try to replace those men, if you try to replace white Christian men in positions of power by non-whites or women, or non-white women most concerningly from this perspective, then that’s an existential challenge to American greatness. Just for basis of this conversation, can you give me your definition of fascism? Many countries have fascist, social, and political movements, and have them in their history. The United States certainly does: eugenics, the immigration laws that Hitler so admired. And in the United States, in the black intellectual tradition you consider Jim Crow a fascist social and political movement. And Jim Crow, the second Ku Klux Klan was, ideologically very similar to German fascism particularly. But whereas in Europe you had–and this is what we think of when we think of fascism–you had a cult of the leader. So I would go with something like a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ citizens, feminists, and leftists. Jim Crow South did not have a cult of the leader, wasn’t organized around a Trump figure, but what we now have in the United States is something that looks a lot closer to German fascism. You consider President Trump a fascist? Oh, yeah. And even more… I mean, if you think of fascism as a set of tactics and practices, yes. What President Trump has in his heart, I don’t know. Do you feel like America is living in an authoritarian state? Of course. I think right now, the Trump regime has decided it has enough of the levers of power that they don’t need to have public support anymore. And it is not clear to me whether or not they’re correct on that. They might be wrong. They might have just misstated the moment, and in fact, there will be civil resistance. The institutions will see that they have to unify. That might happen. Civil society is not, I think, buying the propaganda line of the regime. So I’m not saying by any means that things are lost. And in fact, the rapidity by which this has happened might actually work against this coup that is now happening. But the problem is the Supreme Court is nothing but a far-right Trump loyalists, nothing but, so everything they’re going to do, they rule almost entirely in favor of Trump. They’re not minds on that court for the most part, the conservative majority, they’re only there for the purposes of keeping Trump in power and whatever far-right machine replaces him. And things are moving quickly, they’re seizing the levers of power. But I do not think they have popular support, and I think they will have even less popular support as this proceeds. You just used the word coup. Do you think that a coup is happening in the United States? Yes, a coup is happening in the United States. Walk me through that. Why do you think it’s a coup, in the sense of, I mean, these guys were elected? I’m just curious why you use that word, that’s all. Right, let’s look at what’s happening with the boats that they’re blowing up and now in the Pacific, first in the Caribbean, now in the Pacific, they’re just simply assassinating people for no reason whatsoever. It’s completely illegal. In fact, what it now means is that Trump could just kill anyone anywhere just by saying they’re a terrorist. The way it’s going to work is they’re going to say, “Okay, these narco traffickers are terrorists. Oh, the immigrants are terrorists. Anyone protesting ICE now is a terrorist. If you’re against us blowing up boats without any legal justification or evidence, or if you are against ICE brutalizing little kids, you are a terrorist. The Democratic Party are terrorists.” So they’re trying to illegalize the opposition. What they’re doing is so far beyond what’s legal, so there’s no legality anymore. Everybody who supports Trump gets pardoned. Trump tells people, tells the military the real enemy is within, namely the opposition. The Democratic states and Democratic cities will have the military, the National Guard, the red states are essentially invading the blue states. All of this is an overthrow of the Democratic order, and it’s already happened. So you’ve been studying this for a long time. You’re watching America change or maybe kind of realize the destiny that’s kind of always been under the surface because I would argue that what we’re seeing now was set up long time ago. And it just took a little while for it to come to the surface. In seeing all that, was that a part of why you decided to leave the United States? I knew when I made the decision in March that people were going to be harshly critical. Somebody yelled at me the other day, they were like, “You are safe, you’re a Yale professor.” I just didn’t want to deal with the whole structure. I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale. I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different, and talk about polarization, which is just fascism. All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers. They’re almost worse than the fascists because they’re just like, “Hey, how do I keep getting money in power?” I’ll say the fascists are normal. And so I was just like, “Okay, I have this great opportunity.” And I thought that without that pressure, because I do love Yale, and so I love my time there. I love my colleagues, I love my students, I love the institution as a home to do my work, and I just felt I would be torn. I couldn’t hit hard in the way that I’m hitting hard now with you and I’m hitting hard when I go on TV and I’m hitting hard when I write my op-eds, I can say whatever I want in Toronto about the United States and about global fascism, and I’m building an institute here to create fellowships for journalists from all around the world to figure out what’s going on and how to respond to what’s going on. And I don’t think I could have done that in a university in the United States. So the Trump administration is targeting funds for private universities in hopes of pushing them into a more conservative agenda. And as of this recording, it’s closing in on a deal with the University of Virginia. You’ve called this a war. So how would you advise other universities, given where we are in the world, but also the desire within those universities to protect the institution? Everyone has to say fuck you. I mean, it’s the only way to… I mean, you could say Yale predates American democracy, which is true, but a university in a democracy is a core democratic institution. That’s why they attack universities first and the media. They’ve taken the court. Obviously, the Supreme Court is taken. So unfortunately, what you have to do, every single democratic institution has to band together and defend each other. And we’ve already had that total breakdown because starting in 2015, we had this Coke-funded movement creating a moral panic about universities, and the New York Times piled on this moral panic. You couldn’t open the New York Times for years without reading another op-ed about hysterical moral panic about leftists on campus. All the while it was a total fiction that the whole time the right-wing press from Turning Points USA’s Professor Watchlist, originally Breitbart, Campus Reform, there was this massive attack on progressives and universities where progressive professors were terrified of being targeted by the conservative students and universities completely. So the media viciously attacked universities and set the groundwork for Trumpism. So that has to stop, and the both-siderism has to stop. The whole stuff about polarization, that’s just enabling fascism. Yeah, explain that to me because you don’t like when people talk and say polarization, because the polarization, the idea that things are more toxic than they’ve ever been, and people are choosing sides, and all of that. Specifically, why don’t you like that? Because one side is led by fascists. I mean, it’s like saying the Civil War, the problem with the Civil War was polarization. It’s literally like that. History will look back at this time at figures who talk about polarization exactly like history looks back on people who called John Brown a crazy person or who said, “Oh, it’s too early for abolition. It’s, oh, terrible, polarized time.” One group thinks that slavery is good, and the other group thinks it’s bad, terribly polarized. Or Nazi Germany. One group thinks Jews should be killed, the other one thinks they’re okay, it’s Polarized. It’s nonsensical. It’s just fascism enabling. Let me ask you this: do you think Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist? Oh, well, of course, more so than Trump even. You’ve said in the past that Jews in particular need to speak out about what’s happening and how history will look back at this time period. Why do you think it’s so important for Jewish people to speak up at this time? Well, first of all, because the genocide is being perpetrated in our name, there’s a long tradition of European Jews from which I come who do not accept, from my father’s side. My mother’s Polish Jewish and has very different views about Israel than I do, and I’m not questioning, I don’t know what it means to question the existence of a state as Israel’s there, nobody should be killed in Israel, nobody should be moved away from Israel, it’s there, but Israel should stop the practice of apartheid. Obviously, they should not commit a genocide, and it’s the first televised genocide in human history. Jan Karski spent… of the Polish Home Army spent… deeply risked his life visiting the Warsaw Ghetto, infiltrating the death camp system to spread word of what was happening in Poland with the death camp, with the Nazi death camps, and no one… Roosevelt didn’t believe him. Now we’ve got it all on social media. So Jews have to speak out about that. We have to say this is not in our name, and we have to do that in a way that makes it clear that we’re not calling for the end of… for anyone to be thrust out of Israel. Palestinians and Jews should have equal rights, and apartheid has to end. And then Jewish people have suffered fascism. I mean, Russians have suffered fascism too, but they’re still awfully fascist, so that’s what we learned from Israel as well. But my Judaism, my version of Judaism is the tradition of liberalism. And we Jews did represent liberalism, the idea that a nation cannot be based on an ethnicity or a religion, the idea that if you are in a place, that is your home, and it doesn’t matter what your religion or ethnicity is, that’s why we were killed and why we were targeted. What is it about this moment in time that we are seeing fascist movements all over the planet happening and gaining power? What is it at this moment that we’re seeing all this? Well, one thing I think is essential to see is the global nature of this. You cannot investigate Trumpism just by looking at the United States. Now we’re seeing Trump offer $20 billion to Argentina to support their far-right leader. I mean, that’s a crazy amount of money. And they’re saying, “Well, you better keep them in power.” So these are connected movements. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for months, but now it’s getting more attention now that Homeland Security has tweeted it, but remigration. It’s very clear there are powerful links between Germany’s fascist party, Alternative für Deutschland, and the Trump regime since the Munich Security Conference at least. Vance went over and met with the head of AfD and not with the Chancellor of Germany who’s a conservative. And then there was all this stuff about Germany threatening to ban AfD. That became central to the Trump regime. So when Homeland Security tweets remigration, which is not a word in the English language. It’s a word created by Martin Zellner who intended it to mean taking citizenship away from non-white, from Muslims. Right. When we look back on moments like Nazi Germany and wonder why people didn’t do something about these atrocities faster, do you think that people just at some point become complacent? Yeah. I mean, people just don’t get that under fascism or virtually any kind of authoritarianism, you can still go to the club, there are still raves, there are restaurants, there are bars. They’re like, “How could it be fascism because I can go to the restaurant and complain about the government to my friends?” So it’s like what you’re saying, a large chunk of the population are still living their regular routine, going to work, coming home, taking care of their kids, all of that, but they’re oblivious to… or they’re tuning out what’s happening to people in the margins? Yeah. I mean, we’re creating large concentration camps for immigrants. Lawyers can’t get into these places. Congress people are being blocked from their oversight role. So we now have concentration camps in the United States. We have people in masks kidnapping people off the streets. I don’t even like to say, “Oh, now it’s going to go to protesters,” which it obviously will, but because it’s bad enough that little kids are watching their parents snatched away in immigration courts, that’s bad enough. And all the people who are enabling this, all the people who are normalizing this, I don’t myself believe in hell, but I think there’s a lot of people out there who are patting their wallets, getting that extra attention by normalizing this, by saying, “Oh, maybe we need to really… This cruelty is okay, it’s part of… It’s just you disagree with it. We’re polarized.” Yeah. Well, I think that we have, in many ways, been dehumanized by the media we consume. When you look back at the civil rights struggle, when those images came on TV, it made change… Exactly. … because we were in a different place. Now, the reaction is when young people rise up, when they see images on the screen or they see what’s happening to immigrants or they’re seeing what’s happening to democracy, heads are getting cracked or they’re threatening to crack heads. I mean, I think this is what I was saying before, I’m not sure they’re going to be successful on this because I think civil society is really pushing back, and they’ve threatened people if they showed up at the No Kings demonstrations, but people still showed up, so it kind of didn’t work. What do you see for the near future for the United States? Well, I’m actually heartened by certain things, I’m heartened by the… I see that the regime has… So the regime is going hog wild. They’re soaking themselves in cruelty and corruption and illegality, and their justifications for this are not playing with the American people. Most Americans are starting to get that we’re facing a dictator, an out of control dictator. I think that what you’re going to see as people see the American Republic being cracked apart and sold for parts to the tech fascists, to anyone really. Basically, Trump is saying, “Line up behind my corruption, line up behind my brutalization of immigrants, my targeting of domestic opponents, and you’ll profit, you’ll get that $50,000 signing bonus for ICE, you’ll profit, you’ll get the government contracts, the courts will rule in your favor.” But I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer to many Americans what’s going on. The problem is fascism and dictatorship, and the regime went over its skis. So that’s where I see the hope here, that I think they went too fast. So it’s a bad time, but I think that there is a lot of civil society reaction, and so we just don’t know what’s going to happen right now. Yeah. Jason Stanley, thank you so much for taking your time to talk to me, man. This was great. Yeah, great conversation in difficult times.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Over two years of nearly incessant bombardment, Israeli forces have killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, at least a third of whom are children. The human toll has been called genocide by human rights organizations around the world and by a UN commission, but a new report from an Israeli research center also points to environmental devastation: Gaza’s soil is polluted after the destruction of wastewater treatment plants, sewage contamination is widespread, and particulate matter left by exploded bombs is increasing rates of respiratory illness.  According to a new report by the Arava Institute, an environmental research institute based in Israel, Gaza is covered with an estimated 61 million tons of rubble, much of which contains asbestos, unexploded munitions, and unburied human remains. “The environmental situation in Gaza before October 7 was a disaster,” said Tareq Abuhamed, who leads the Arava Institute and is Palestinian. Rebuilding even to that prior state of disaster is likely to take decades.  A report from the UN, published in late September, estimated that nearly $70 billion in damage has been done to Gaza’s roads, buildings, and infrastructure over the past two years, while more than 80 percent of cropland has been destroyed. Less than 10 percent of all hazardous waste is being safely disposed of, and most, by necessity, is being burned or piled in open-air landfills. Untreated wastewater, meanwhile, is dumped directly on the land or into the sea.  “The garbage becomes mountains, and the mountains are a breeding site for mosquitos and rodents, which spread malaria,” said Yasser El-Nahhal, an environmental chemist and eco-toxicologist with the Islamic University of Gaza.  > “I don’t think there’s any doubt in anybody’s mind that [Israel’s actions in > Gaza have been] ecocidal.”  Long before Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, Israeli blockades prevented easy access to water, electricity, and food. Rolling blackouts have been common in Palestine for the last 20 years, and many residents relied on small-scale desalination units, plants that make seawater drinkable, and private water tankers to purchase potable water. Now, the aid organization Doctors Without Borders says that only 1 out of every 10 of their requests for water to be imported are approved by Israeli authorities.  “The environment [was] destroyed before the war,” said El-Nahhal. “But since the war, it has been destroyed several times above imagination.”  Palestinian researcher Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University’s Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability calls what is happening now ecocide: a term broadly defined as the severe, long-term, and widespread destruction of the environment. A growing coalition of countries hopes to legally define ecocide as a crime the International Criminal Court might prosecute. “Gaza, of course, was a functioning society, even though it was subjected to significant sanctions in the past 16 years that limited supplies,” Qumsiyeh said. “They had a functioning society. They had schools, universities, sewage treatment facilities, and a desalination plant. All of this was destroyed in this genocidal, ecocidal war.”  Earlier this month, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the world’s largest conservation congress, signed a resolution asserting that ecocide should be treated as a criminal offense. Jojo Mehta, founder of the legal advocacy group Stop Ecocide International, said that while the resolution defines ecocide quite broadly, it could certainly be applied to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “What’s been happening in terms of the environment in Gaza is horrific,” Mehta said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt in anybody’s mind that it’s ecocidal.”  Israeli officials did not return multiple requests for comment on this story.  The Arava report calls for unimpeded aid to Gaza, as well as potable water systems and personal hygiene kits to mitigate disease. The UN, in its September report, wrote that to make Gaza’s environment livable again “will require a cessation of hostilities. The first phase of recovery will focus on saving lives, through restoration of essential services and removal of debris.” Nonetheless, Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University said that Palestinians will continue to rebuild—even if, as he believes is likely, the current ceasefire falls apart. “I don’t claim we have a huge success rate,” he said, “But imagine your community being destroyed dozens of times, and you continue to rebuild. That shows an incredible amount of hopefulness.”

On September 8, at least 800 peaceful protesters holding signs that read “I oppose genocide/I support Palestine Action,” were arrested in London’s Parliament Square, some on grounds of supporting an illegal organization under the United Kingdom’s Terrorism Act. The Labour Party administration of Prime Minister Keir Starmer had banned Palestine Action (PA), a group that engages in property destruction as part of its campaign against the “Israeli apartheid regime,” after it repeatedly sabotaged the factories of arms contractor Elbit Systems. A key supplier to the Israel Defense Forces, Elbit produces state-of-the-art rockets and bombs, attack drones, and guidance systems the companies says are battle-tested on the proving grounds of Gaza and elsewhere. The PA actionists hadn’t harmed any living beings, but since the group’s founding in 2020, they have cost Elbit hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. In 2022, Elbit lost out on a series of defense contracts with the UK government worth some $340 million, a loss which PA claimed was because their disruptions had become so widespread that Elbit was now an “unreliable supplier.” In September, Elbit suddenly shut down a facility that the group had targeted dozens of times. Members of PA charged with criminal damage to an Elbit subsidiary were acquitted in December by a jury sympathetic to their argument that they were impeding civilian deaths in an ongoing genocide. “It was about valuing the lives of Palestinians more than the property and tools used to massacre them,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told me.  Then came the declaration in July that Palestine Action was to be considered on the same footing as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and ISIS, along with other groups banned in the UK under the Terrorism Act, like Boko Haram, the Irish Republican Army, and the neo-Nazi Maniac Murder Cult. The decision roiled the Starmer administration. “It’s being widely condemned as a blatant misuse of anti-terror laws for political purposes to clamp down on protests which are affecting the profits of arms companies,” an anonymous source in the Home Office—roughly the UK’s Department of Homeland Security—told the Guardian. The British public seems to agree, gathering by the thousands in cities across the country to signal their support for PA, or at least their condemnation of government overreach. Starmer hit back with the mass arrests of August and September, which set records for the largest number of protesters rounded up during a single demonstration in London. The circle of arrestees now widened to include those whose only apparent crime was that they supported the right to assemble and be heard. A lay minister named Martin Clay held a placard that said: “I don’t support Palestine Action but I support the right to support them.” He was arrested for expressing support for a terrorist organization. In Glasgow, a 64-year-old man was arrested because he held a sign that said “Genocide in Palestine, time to take action.” His ostensible crime was that “Palestine” and “action” had been printed in larger font than the other words on his sign—here, in the nation that gave the world Magna Carta, habeas corpus, the modern parliamentary system, and the first bill of rights. “The mother of all democracies, people,” said a sign holder in Parliament Square as he was dragged to a paddy wagon.  Protesters sit in Parliament Square with placards stating ‘I Oppose Genocide, I Support Palestine Action’. Over a thousand people gathered to show support for the activist group—which has been banned under anti-terrorism laws—and for Palestine.Vuk Valcic/ZUMA The United States government doesn’t ban political organizations outright, but it does have a legal apparatus, put in place almost a quarter-century ago, for transmogrifying protesters into prosecutable terrorists. Following September 11, right-wing lawmakers saw an opportunity to broaden the definition of terrorists well beyond the likes of Al Qaeda members. A day after the attacks, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), took to the House floor to decry the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which he said constituted a threat “no less heinous than what we saw occur yesterday here in Washington and in New York.” Starting in the mid-1990s, Earth Liberation Front cells across the United States had firebombed animal testing labs, ski resorts, and auto dealerships; released captive animals from industrial farms; and, central to Walden’s concerns, sabotaged logging and roading equipment. According to the FBI, the roughly 600 criminal acts attributed to the group between 1996 and 2002 resulted in more than $40 million in damages—but not a single injury or death. Nonetheless, by 2005, ELF and associated saboteurs including the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) had been named by the FBI as “the No. 1 domestic terrorist threat.” The bureau’s Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a booklet regarding “terrorism imagery recognition” that depicted Osama Bin Laden, a Hamas suicide bomber, and a masked member of the ALF holding a primate. By 2012, Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) inveighed against the “reign of environmental terror” by “radical environmental groups” that opposed his state’s fracking industry. Michael Loadenthal, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Cincinnati who studies the criminalization of dissent, posits that the figure of the “eco-terrorist” was a useful bogeyman for a government hell-bent on expanding its powers of surveillance and policing public protest. “From the passage of the USA PATRIOT ACT, to the establishment of the federal DHS, increased electronic surveillance and the militarisation of domestic policing, the spectre of eco-terrorism has been touted at press conferences and in Congressional testimonies to shape budgets, craft policy and allow the State a freer hand in waging the ‘War on Terror,’” writes Loadenthal. At the same time, the eco-terrorist, by targeting industrial and commercial interests, was considered a genuine threat to the capitalist order. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, passed in 2006, marked the high point of the reactionary assault on environmental protest. Under AETA, crimes that had been prosecuted as misdemeanors punishable with fines or short stints in jail could be bumped up to felony “terrorism enhancements” that threatened punishments of decades in prison or even life sentences. Any person who engaged in any kind of disruption of a business that involved animals could be charged as a terrorist: throwing red paint on a meat processing plant; filming inside a slaughterhouse; picketing in front of the house of a researcher involved in animal testing—all prosecutable as acts of terror.  AETA only added to an already formidable arsenal for prosecuting terrorists, supplementing statutes passed by Congress in the 1990s that provided for increased prison sentences if any vaguely defined “material support” for terrorism could be proven. According to one recent study by a criminology student at the University of Alabama, the number of counts of material support in all terrorism cases post 9/11 increased by 3,130 percent. Fast-forward to 2016, when resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline involved thousands of people at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation who came under attack by militarized police and private security units for blockading construction. Catholic Worker activists Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya secretly sabotaged the pipeline for more than a year before they went public with their crimes. In October of 2016, five members of Climate Direct Action simultaneously turned emergency shut-off valves in four American states and then awaited arrest. State governments rushed to expand the criminal penalties for those who protested or sabotaged oil and gas facilities. In Florida, trespassing on property that houses pipelines became punishable by up to five years in prison, as opposed to 60 days if convicted of trespassing on any other property type. Ohio lawmakers mandated up to six years in prison for those brazen enough to graffiti a pipeline, and up to ten years for entering a pipeline facility with the mere intention of tampering with it. In Arkansas and Alabama, citizens who trespass in any area that contains “critical infrastructure” risk between one and six years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine. Louisiana prosecutors can now file RICO charges, which carry a possible 50-year sentence, against protesters who “damage” fossil fuel infrastructure. In Mississippi, a conviction for impeding access to a pipeline or a pipeline construction site carries a sentence of up to seven years. If you protest a pipeline in North Carolina and “impede or impair” its construction, you could face more than 15 years in prison and a mandatory $250,000 fine. Protesters are arrested by police officers in Parliament Square for holding placards in support of Palestine Action, which has been banned by the British government as a terrorist group.Ray Tang/London News Pictures/ZUMA The new pipeline trespass laws constituted the first wave of repressive legislation that targeted dissent in the era of Trumpian authoritarianism. The second wave arrived shortly after the George Floyd rebellion of 2020-21, when lawmakers introduced more than a hundred bills to restrict protests and ratchet up potential prison time. Thirty-five of those bills passed in 19 states, effectively criminalizing groups that protest in concert; at least 20 other anti-protest laws came into effect between 2017 and 2020. “Nearly half of all Americans now live in a state where it’s harder to protest than it was eight years ago,” said Elly Page, an attorney who runs the US Protest Law Tracker at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. Some of the bills mandated extreme punishments for those who slow-march in roadways and block motorists. If 25 or more people impede traffic in Florida, they can be charged with “rioting” and face 15 years. Tennessee mandates up to 12 years for people convicted of “knowingly” obstructing roadways. In Louisiana, if you help plan a protest that might impede traffic—even if the protest never comes to pass—you can be charged with conspiracy and get six months. In Iowa, a driver who rams into protesters is safe from prosecution if he can prove to authorities that “due care” was taken. Congress followed suit with its introduction in June of the Safe and Open Streets Act, which would make it a federal crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to “purposely obstruct, delay, or affect commerce…by blocking a public road or highway.”  Defenders of a protest encampment outside Atlanta, who organized to protect forest habitat that was to be paved over for the construction of a police training facility dubbed Cop City, have been charged as domestic terrorists. Proposed bills in New York, Arkansas, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Oregon, and Texas would make blockading of streets during protest assemblies an act of “domestic terrorism” or establish potential terrorism charges generally for non-violent protesters. We are now in the midst of the third legislative wave, in which lawmakers have struck back at pro-Palestine encampments and rallies—though so far in the US there’s been little of the kind of sabotage that Palestine Action has mounted, and almost no property destruction beyond the occasional graffiti. Arizona and Texas this year enacted blanket bans on all protest encampments on the campuses of state universities and colleges, while New York has proposed mandatory sanctions for campus protesters. Republicans in Congress have introduced four new bills that would block financial aid to students who commit an ill-defined “riot” offense, bar many student protesters from federal loans and loan forgiveness, and provide for visa revocation and deportation of noncitizens involved in a protest “riot.”  Naturally, the old bogeyman of the protester-as-terrorist has returned to center stage. “Many of our ‘elite’ academic institutions have become hotbeds for…pro-terror ideologies,” said Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), sponsor of a bill that would make federal funds in colleges and universities contingent on tamping down on campus protest. Trump’s attack on foreign students involved in pro-Palestine dissent on college campuses is tinged with the same protester-as-terrorist rhetoric. He declared Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, arrested in March and held without charge for three months, a “terrorist sympathizer.” “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote on social media. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” More arrests did come—not just of students, nor even domestic protesters. In July, an Ohio children’s hospital chaplain named Ayman Soliman was stripped of asylum and incarcerated based on his affiliation, well over a decade ago, with an Islamic charity once linked with the Muslim Brotherhood; Soliman now faces deportation to Egypt, a US ally that repeatedly tortured him as a dissident journalist. The question now is whether the Trump administration will continue to expand the use of terrorism material support statutes to go after protest of all kinds—whether for Palestine, for racial justice, or for climate and the environment.

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.

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.