Progressive Politics

Yet the legal definition of genocide is much narrower than is generally understood. That’s why so few events have ever been labelled as genocide as a matter of law.

June 1st, we’ll attempt to, again, sail towards Gaza and to try to break the siege and open up a humanitarian corridor by delivering aid like food and medical supplies,” says Thunberg. A similar mission to sail to occupied Gaza in May was aborted after a flotilla dubbed the “Conscience” suffered two drone attacks while in international waters.

“Keep your eyes on deck, continue flooding the streets, organize, boycott, and do everything in your power to stand for Palestine,” Thunberg ends her message, readying to set sail for Gaza from Catania, Sicily, on Sunday with aid supplies and several high-profile activists alongside her.

For months, pundits have decried the absence of a “Joe Rogan of the left” — an online media figure who can galvanize young men to support Democrats in the way that popular right-wing creators like Rogan, Adin Ross, and the NELK Boys have done for President Donald Trump. Now, it appears that Democratic operatives have a $20 million plan to build such a figure.

Nina Smith, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Stacey Abrams, said instead of propping up a creator who checks the perfect ideological boxes, Democrats should embrace the online spaces for young men that already exist.

For example, creators like Hasan Piker, a left-leaning creator with over 5.5 million subscribers on Twitch and broad popularity among young men, has largely been ignored by the Democratic establishment. Piker’s political content leans farther left, sharing a populist economic message paired with strong criticism of U.S. foreign policy in Israel.

“There is a tendency to shy away from those spaces because our favorite thing to do in the Democratic Party is to, pardon my language, shit on the left,” said Smith.

Harvard University on Thursday won a brief reprieve in its fight to continue enrolling international students after a federal judge upheld a block on a governmental order.

US district judge Allison Burroughs ruled to uphold the terms of a temporary restraining order (TRO), which froze the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) revocation of the university’s student and exchange visitor programme (SEVP) certification programme, the process that enables universities to enrol foreigners, and preserved the status of international students.

The news came as Harvard’s Class of 2025 was assembling for commencement exercises. The order grants relief to around 7,000 international students - a quarter of Harvard’s student body - whose lives have been thrown into limbo over the last few weeks.

Aid began to trickle into the territory this week. But there is never enough.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham will join the next sailing of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) as it attempts to break Israel’s months-long blockade of Gaza.

The “Madleen” is due to disembark from Catania, Sicily, on Sunday with a cargo of humanitarian aid and several high-profile activists on board, including Thunberg, European Member of Parliament Rima Hassan and Palestinian-American lawyer Huwaida Arraf.

The Supreme Court let Trump end protections for 500,000 migrants, putting nearly 1 million at risk of deportation.

Trump’s dystopian plan is already underway.

Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team is demanding answers as to where exactly the Trump administration got the idea to target him in the first place. The demands underscore the legal team's suspicion that federal officials coordinated with a network of outside anti-Palestinian groups to target Khalil and others over their pro-Palestinian speech.

In a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request obtained by Zeteo, Khalil, a green card holder, and his legal team from the Center of Constitutional Rights seek information from several government agencies “that would document and expose the reported collaboration between federal officials and private, anti-Palestinian organizations who have identified, doxxed, and reported him and others for purposes of securing the deportation of student activists advocating on behalf of Palestinian human rights.”

Not long ago, artificial intelligence executives were asking Congress for more regulation. The House of Representatives budget bill passed last week demonstrates how quickly the industry has changed course.

Inside the House bill is a moratorium on the sort of state-level AI regulations that have addressed political “deepfakes” and using AI to deny medical claims. At the same time the House bill cuts Medicare, it would funnel more money to tech companies to develop kamikaze drones.

“The message is clear. The House Republican proposal is stealing from poor people to give huge handouts to Big Tech to build technology that is going to perpetuate the president’s authoritarian plans and crackdowns against vulnerable people,” said Kevin De Liban, the founder of TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit aimed at preventing tech from harming low-income people.

1. Choose your moment. Ok, you’ve been ethnically cleansing, occupying, oppressing and killing your neighbours for decades. The international courts have ruled your actions illegal. But none of that will matter the moment your neighbours retaliate by attacking you. Don’t worry. The western media can be relied on to help out here. They will be only too ready to pretend that history began on the day you were attacked.

2. Declare, in response, your intention to starve your neighbours, treating them as “human animals”, by blocking all food, water and power. You will be surprised by how many western politicians are ready to support this as your “right to defend yourself”. The media will echo them. Important not to just talk about blocking aid. You must actually do it. There will be no serious pushback for many, many months.

3. Start relatively slowly. Time is on your side. Let a little bit of aid in. But make sure to relentlessly smear the well functioning, decades-old aid distribution system run by the international community – one that is transparent, accountable and widely integrated into the community it serves. Say it is infiltrated by “terrorists”.

4. Use that claim – evidence isn’t really necessary, the western media never ask for it – as the pretext to bomb the aid system’s warehouses, distribution centres and community kitchens. Oh, and don’t forget to bomb all the private bakeries, destroy all the farmland, shoot all the animals and kill anyone who tries to use a fishing boat, so that there are no other sources of food. You are now in control of the trickle of aid reaching what is rapidly becoming a severely malnourished population.

5. Time to move into higher gear. Stop the international community’s aid getting in all together. You will need a humanitarian cover story for this bit. The danger, particularly in an age of social media, is that images of starving babies will make you look very bad. Hold firm. You can get through this. Claim – again evidence isn’t really necessary, the western media won’t ask for it – that the “terrorists” are stealing the aid. You will be surprised how willing the media is to talk about babies going “hungry”, ignoring the fact that you are starving them to death, or speak of a “famine”, as though from drought and crop failure, not from your carefully laid plans.

For the second time in a year, the FBI came to my home yesterday after I published the so-called manifesto of the man charged with killing two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington.

Not a single mainstream media outlet has published the text because, as they claim, the FBI hasn’t confirmed its authenticity. But the real reason is simple. The media just doesn’t want to publish it. And the FBI doesn’t want the media to think it can

These are those 11 questions (from the email I’ve reproduced below):

• When did he first encounter the manifesto?
• How did he first encounter the manifesto?
• Did he receive any instruction from the source of the manifesto about how to disseminate it?
• Does the system or platform from which he received the manifesto capture metadata concerning the transfer of the manifesto?
• Did he make any edits or changes to the manifesto?
• Was this his first and only interaction with whomever submitted the manifesto?
• Has anyone else submitted any other documentation regarding this incident?
• Did his receipt of the manifesto predate the attack?
• Where else, if anywhere, did he disseminate the manifesto?
• Does he have any knowledge of where else the manifesto was published or shared?
• Why does he think he was the one who received the manifesto?

Other than the questions implying the FBI is entertaining an outlandish theory that I conspired with the shooter, the others seem pretty straightforward and routine.

But there’s a Trump administration dimension to all of this. The administration has many times publicly warned about shadowy, unseen forces that it believes are bankrolling everything from Tesla vandalism to the college protests. That tone from the top, labeling seemingly everything terrorism, tells personnel that the gloves are off and more aggressive work in the field is now permissible.

Get ready to hear that I’m impeding the investigation, giving people a roadmap to the “sources and methods” that are used to catch terrorists, or whatever reason the national security state soundboard offers up for why the public isn’t allowed to know things.

Recorded back in November, the Minister of Defense for the Black Panther Party talks rednecks and shares his time-tested wisdom with the current social revolutionary movement, warns us of past and coming challenges to our solidarity and solutions to overcome the divide-and-conquer tactics that have separated us for far too long.

That means we could soon live in a world where all online transactions will require us to pay for goods in billionaires’ own made-up monopoly money, for which tech giants will be able to charge exorbitant transaction fees.

After hours of waiting under the scorching sun, starving Palestinians stormed the militarized aid distribution point run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Live fire was reportedly opened on the crowd, as people struggled to get their hands on aid.

A global military buildup poses an existential threat to climate goals, according to researchers who say the rearmament planned by Nato alone could increase greenhouse gas emissions by almost 200m tonnes a year.

With the world embroiled in the highest number of armed conflicts since the second world war, countries have embarked on military spending sprees, collectively totalling a record $2.46tn in 2023.

For every dollar invested in new hardware, there is not only a corresponding carbon cost but also an opportunity cost to potential climate action, critics say. This is on top of the huge death toll resulting from armed conflicts.

Few militaries are transparent about the scale of their fossil fuel use, but researchers have estimated that collectively they are already responsible for 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The freeze is a further escalation from current screening measures, which have primarily targeted students who participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Since March, consular officers have been required to conduct mandatory social media reviews looking for evidence of support for “terrorist activity or a terrorist organization” which could be as broad as showing support for the Palestinian cause, according to a cable obtained by the Guardian at the time. That directive required officers to take screenshots of “potentially derogatory” content for permanent records, even if posts were later deleted.

The new expansion would apply social media vetting to all student visa applicants, not just those flagged for activism. Under the screening process, consular officers would examine applicants’ posts, shares, and comments across platforms such as Instagram, X, and TikTok for content they deem to be threatening to national security, which has since been tied in to the Trump administration’s stance on combating antisemitism.

Accused killer of two Israeli Embassy aides ranted against many things — but not Jews