The Intercept Briefing

President Donald Trump blew up the temporary ceasefire after the U.S. launched a series of airstrikes against Iran over the weekend. The two nations have continued to exchange strikes throughout the week, with Iran targeting U.S. allies in the Middle East, as Congress debates further entangling the United States military with Israel — a proposal that would give Israel enormous leverage over U.S. defense policy.
“This is a formula for a forever war,” national security reporter Spencer Ackerman tells The Intercept Briefing. A major champion of such forever wars was Sen. Lindsey Graham, who passed away over the weekend. “Lindsey Graham never met a war he didn’t like, never met a war he didn’t want to send other people’s children to wage,” says Ackerman, who writes the Substack Forever Wars. “The white whale for Lindsey Graham and many others in the bridge between neoconservatism and MAGA was Iran — assaulting Iran not only at home, but rolling back its regional challenge to U.S. and Israeli power in the Middle East.”
“Whatever else MAGA says about wars,” says Ackerman, “what it wants is domination. It wants domination not only at home, but abroad. That’s where Graham recognized — that instead of being someone like John McCain, who sought to occasionally butt against, fight against Donald Trump — that Graham could help maneuver Trump into being a vehicle for their shared project. And he did that with really tremendous success.”
“You are seeing a more rent-seeking U.S. empire than ever before as a defining characteristic … of the Trump-era empire,” says Ackerman, on the administration’s thirst to turn countries in its orbit, like Venezuela, into “vassal that pay tribute.” “This is the sort of thing that an empire in decline does. Rather than figuring out new strategies to growth, it redistributes wealth from its own people to its driving oligarchic sectors.”
Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many U.S. bases. He currently writes for Zeteo and Forever Wars, where you can sign up for his newsletter.
Politics reporter Akela Lacy also drops in to discuss how the turmoil at home and abroad is impacting the midterms. After Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner dropped out of the race, Lacy says, “Maine Democrats are in a situation where they’re all trying to become the nominee that the party picks to replace Platner on the ballot to go against Collins in November. Many of those candidates have now come out and called to abolish ICE outright after the shooting in Maine.”
Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
Full transcript: https://interc.pt/4wMaTbq
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Intercept Briefing is happy to share the first episode of journalist Rebecca Nagle's new podcast series, First America.

Episode Description: We’ve all been told the American Revolution was fought over taxation and representation. But that’s not what the Declaration of Independence says. According to our founders, in their own words, what they were most upset about was Native Americans. How did we all miss that? Rebecca sits down with historian Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) to talk about how hunger for Indigenous land drove the Revolution. Welcome to First America, the true story of how the United States came to be, and how our current political moment was 250 years in the making.

Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning advocate and writer focused on advancing Native rights and ending violence against Native women. Nagle is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and a two spirit/queer woman. Nagle is the host of the podcast This Land focused on treaty rights and tribal sovereignty in Oklahoma.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last spring, President Donald Trump issued the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, taking aim at federal parks, monuments, museums, and sites that have cast the United States’s “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” On the Fourth of July this year, the White House published its 162-page “Saving America’s Story,” attacking the Smithsonian Institution directly for “anti-white activism,” “illegal alien activism,” “transgender activism,” and more broadly for adopting “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
“We're in this moment where we are fighting over how America tells its past,” journalist Rebecca Nagle tells The Intercept Briefing. “It can be scary in a moment when it feels like the stakes are really high to really interrogate the myths that we all carry, that we all hold about who our country is and where it started because it's really tempting to want to think, 'OK, if we just wind the clock back 10 years, if we just go back a few election cycles, we'll be back to a democracy that's strong, that's stable, that's solid, and we'll all be fine.’ It's much more scary to say, ‘Oh, actually, if we want to talk about where authoritarianism comes from in the United States, it's actually at the foundation.’”
As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday this year, the Trump administration has been ramping up its efforts to erase not just the dark parts of U.S. history but also the contributions of basically anyone who isn’t a white, Christian man. That project has included taking concrete steps to remove all traces of the history of people who don’t fit that description, Black people, immigrants, civil rights advocates, women and gay and trans people — including the first people to live on this land: Native Americans.
This week on the podcast, Nagle speaks to host Akela Lacy about her new podcast series “First America,” which examines how Native people have been largely written out of the American story, and how that story informs the current political crisis in the U.S.
“One of the big claims that the series makes is that the foundation is in itself is a myth. Because at the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire. The way that you govern an empire, the way that you govern other people by force, is not democratic,” says Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation. “This identity crisis we're having around authoritarianism and democracy, and how could authoritarianism be sneaking into our democracy — what we argue is that it's actually always been there.”
“A lot of what is happening now — it's not new, it's not un-American, it's not unprecedented. Sometimes it's not even unconstitutional! It's actually just taking these parts of our government that for a long time most Americans didn't know was there or didn't really think about, and Trump is just pulling it into the center,” says Nagle.
Full transcript: https://interc.pt/44WnPj7
Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Democratic Party is once again in upheaval as Graham Platner, its unconventional nominee to knock out longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, faces a rape accusation that threatens to end his once-powerful campaign and endanger Democrats’ chances of flipping a key seat in the November midterm elections.
Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer whose anti-establishment campaign had already weathered a series of scandals, has denied the rape allegation from ex-girlfriend Jenny Racicot, which Politico first reported on Monday. His campaign said the allegation was “coached and coordinated by out of state establishment operatives,” though it was supported by messages Racicot sent in 2023, long before Platner had a political profile.
Despite Platner’s denials, a cascade of Democratic politicians, operatives, and organizations have called on him to drop out of the race by 5 p.m. next Monday, in time to be removed from the general election ballot. Platner has said he would only drop out if he’s allowed to pick his successor to face Collins in November. If Platner withdraws, Maine Democrats would have to pick a new candidate by July 27.
That’s set off a scramble to find a replacement nominee and point fingers over the darkest chapter yet in a race that had already drawn national attention for a series of controversies — including accusations that Platner had twisted another woman’s arm behind her back and trapped her in a room; a sexting scandal; a Nazi tattoo; and a series of Reddit posts in which he belittled sexual assault, asked why Black people don’t tip, and disparaged white and rural voters. (Platner has denied that he mistreated women and apologized for the tattoo, text messages, and Reddit posts.)
Where does the Democratic Party — and the insurgent movement that saw Platner as a powerful rebuke to the establishment — go now?
We’re bringing you an extra episode of The Intercept Briefing this week to cover Platner’s downfall and where Maine voters might look next. In this episode, host Akela Lacy speaks with Adam Carlson, a Democratic strategist and founding partner of the polling firm Zenith Research who supported Platner through all the other scandals until Monday — and now says he was wrong.
“We — as in, the people who were looking for something different — looked at past nominees against Collins and wanted to try something different,” Carlson told The Intercept Briefing. “An outsider, someone who could appeal to white working-class voters, appeal to disaffected Trump voters, independents, Republicans, maybe someone who didn't fall neatly along partisan lines, progressive economic populist, but also pro-Second Amendment. A bit more heterodox.” When Platner launched his campaign, “it's, like, here comes this guy who epitomizes what we are lacking.”
The story has reanimated the age-old feud between Democrats loyal to the party establishment and a surging cohort of progressive and leftist candidates bucking the party line. But while competing factions rush to use Platner’s downfall as evidence of their own political prowess, Carlson says, they’re learning the wrong lessons.
“Yes, you should have better vetting. Yes, having people who are in public office who have faced some level of media scrutiny are less likely to have these kinds of things appear. Not foolproof — look at Eric Swalwell,” Carlson said. “But I think you can overlearn the lessons from this and try and turn this into a factional win. And I think that all this is subtext for the conversation that we're about to have in 2028.”
Full transcript: https://interc.pt/4vUSFVg
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A noise demonstration that took place outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas one year ago has resulted in decades of prison time for the anti-ICE activists involved. Federal judges sentenced eight defendants, who the government cast as antifa operatives, to between 30 and 100 years in prison for terrorism-related charges last week; seven more people were sentenced this week.
“There's a stunningly wide gap between what the Justice Department has put in its press releases and what top officials have said, versus the evidence that was actually presented at trial,” says Intercept reporter Matt Sledge, who has been covering the Prairieland case and was present at the sentencing. “It’s a real stretch to assert, as the government did, that this was all one coherent group.”
“There's a concerted effort to characterize opposition to ICE or opposition to the Trump administration as some form of conspiracy, as an effort to provoke terrorism,” says Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” “There are a number of things that can be said about the various sentences, but perhaps the most obviously egregious is that handed out to Daniel Sanchez [Estrada]: 30 years for moving some zines, some literature, which is not illegal to possess.”
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Bray and Sledge about Prairieland as a test case in Trump’s war on dissent, and why the administration is determined to convince the public that antifa is a domestic terrorist organization.
“I don't think Trump or his allies really care about antifa per se. It's a useful umbrella term to craft into a boogeyman scare tactic. In a way that ‘Communist’ was used in past generations, antifa is used now,” says Bray. He and Sledge point out that in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Trump administration became much more aggressive in its targeting of the left and dissent in general.
A noise demonstration that took place outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas one year ago has resulted in decades of prison time for the anti-ICE activists involved. Federal judges sentenced eight defendants, who the government cast as antifa operatives, to between 30 and 100 years in prison for terrorism-related charges last week; seven more people were sentenced this week.
“There's a stunningly wide gap between what the Justice Department has put in its press releases and what top officials have said, versus the evidence that was actually presented at trial,” says Intercept reporter Matt Sledge, who has been covering the Prairieland case and was present at the sentencing. “It’s a real stretch to assert, as the government did, that this was all one coherent group.”
“There's a concerted effort to characterize opposition to ICE or opposition to the Trump administration as some form of conspiracy, as an effort to provoke terrorism,” says Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” “There are a number of things that can be said about the various sentences, but perhaps the most obviously egregious is that handed out to Daniel Sanchez [Estrada]: 30 years for moving some zines, some literature, which is not illegal to possess.”
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Bray and Sledge about Prairieland as a test case in Trump’s war on dissent, and why the administration is determined to convince the public that antifa is a domestic terrorist organization.
“I don't think Trump or his allies really care about antifa per se. It's a useful umbrella term to craft into a boogeyman scare tactic. In a way that ‘Communist’ was used in past generations, antifa is used now,” says Bray. He and Sledge point out that in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Trump administration became much more aggressive in its targeting of the left and dissent in general.
Full Transcript: https://interc.pt/4wnyW0e
Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.