The Intercept Briefing

A quarter century after the September 11 attacks emboldened then-President George W. Bush to launch the “war on terror,” many Americans might like to think they’re wiser than the politicians and pundits who unleashed a flood of anti-Muslim hatred and eroded civil liberties through warrantless wiretaps and racist deportation campaigns.
But some of the most notorious Bush-era advents — like the Department of Homeland Security and the prison colony at Guantánamo Bay — don’t appear to be going anywhere. Nor does the phenomenon of Islamophobia, which is playing a major role in the current political cycle. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed — who, if elected, would be the first Muslim U.S. senator — has been called a terrorist, a radical Islamist, and a threat to national security, as pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs spend millions on ads that paint him as a terrorist sympathizer. In New York City, meanwhile, local media has suggested that the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, should not attend the commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, as if to do so would be an insult to the victims and their families.
“Islamophobia actually becomes more rampant during election season — not necessarily after a terrorist attack, but actually during election season in the U.S.,” journalist Rozina Ali tells The Intercept Briefing. “What's happened over the last three decades is that Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics. ... When you can't actually discuss the policies, when we're not willing to engage in facts, it's really easy to throw racist rhetoric at people.”
“The fight that we're seeing now is whether we are willing to accept all forms of religion in this country. And as much as I want to say this is just more of what we've seen in the past, I think what does frighten me is how quickly we are moving to a place where some governor or some local official might try to outlaw Islam altogether. And mind you, this is even a policy shift from 10 years ago when Trump called for a Muslim ban,” says Ali. “What has been happening recently is that the rhetoric ... has been shifting toward, ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s a political ideology.’ This is not a new talking point, but it is becoming institutionalized. There are efforts to make it into law, which is a frightening place to be.”
This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Ali about how anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies are on the rise and have endured, or even worsened, in the post-9/11 world, as well as her new book, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.” Ali shares the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen, Arab American attorney Abdeen Jabara, as well as the story of imam Yassin Aref, a victim of a controversial sting operation who served 15 years in federal prison due to the ambiguous “material support” for terrorism law first passed in the ’90s. It was the same charge used to convict anti-ICE protesters at Prairieland Detention Center to decades in prison this year.
“This was something lot of civil rights lawyers and activists were warning about even back then, because they recognized that this law and this war on terror can be used to attack dissidents and eventually will be used to attack a lot more people than the Muslim community. And that is what we're seeing now,” says Ali.
“Because we've given so much power to the executive branch, because we've given so much power to the government over the last 25 years, the government gets to decide who they consider enemies, who they consider terrorists, and what they consider support for terrorism,” says Ali. “The Trump administration can say, ‘I now consider leftists terrorists,’ and unfortunately, there are laws in the books that allow him to do that.”
Full transcript: https://interc.pt/4zPINyl
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The WNBA is having a moment. Viewership is up. Attendance for this year’s WNBA All-Star Game surpassed the NBA’s All-Star Game. Games and events can be viewed in a record number of places, from broadcast to cable and streaming. And just this week, Angel Reese of the Atlanta Dream set a single-game record.
But the stories about the WNBA capturing national attention in recent weeks are about none of that. Instead, the focus has been on two retired NBA players, including Enes Kanter Freedom, who showed up courtside at an August 23 Chicago Sky–Indiana Fever game wearing a T-shirt that said "Woman: noun. adult human female."
“I don't believe that he's being genuine in any realm, in order to create this mass hysteria of sorts for an issue that's actually simply a non-issue,” says Angela Perry, a WNBA content creator, tells The Intercept Briefing. “There are no trans women in the WNBA; there are none attempting to be in the WNBA.”
This week on The Intercept Briefing podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Perry and journalist Katelyn Burns about how the premier women’s professional basketball league has found itself at the center of a right-wing manufactured panic.
“The right has made such hay out of trans women in women's sports that they need to keep inventing controversies in order to keep this issue front of mind,” says Burns who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice and co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast.
“We have a midterm election coming up, and to be frank with you, the only thing that the right has done besides terrorizing immigrants is banning trans women from women's sports. It's at the center of almost all of their policies,” continues Burns. “They are inventing controversies about trans people in sports where there are no trans people involved.”
“This is about women in general. They're already talking about not wanting women to have the right to vote,” says Perry. “This isn't just about sports. There's a political party trying to scale us back to what they perceive was a time where things were better. But really, it was when women were more controlled.”
“The bigger issue is that the people who think that they're protected, it's always going to get to the protected class eventually,” warns Perry. “Right now, the focus is trans, and people think they're safe because ‘I'm not trans. I'm a cis woman and I'm protected.’ But it will impact you.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Full transcript: https://interc.pt/3UXTwXs
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It’s been nearly three years into Israel's genocidal war on Palestinians, and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest “ceasefire” began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, United Nations experts reported earlier this month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more recently rejected President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace agreement with Hamas for Israeli troops to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
“The burden has really continued to devastate the healthcare system in general. So you're hearing from colleagues every day. They don't have the materials that they need to serve their patients,” Dr. Thaer Ahmad tells The Intercept Briefing. “They don't have even the basic sort of guarantee that there is a cloak of security allowing them to operate in the traditional ways that they would like to.”
This week on the podcast, Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez speaks to Ahmad, an emergency medicine physician and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in conflict zones including Gaza, and director Poh Si Teng about their new documentary “American Doctor.” It follows three U.S. physicians from three different states who volunteer to enter Gaza to provide emergency medical care as best they can, with the insufficient supplies they have, to save lives — under the threat, as healthcare workers and hospitals have repeatedly been the target of strikes, of losing theirs.
The American doctors were not just targeted by the Israeli military, however. Upon returning home and trying to share the atrocities they had witnessed in Gaza, they were “pummeled,” says Teng, in interviews with mainstream media outlets and ignored by lawmakers in Congress.
“There's this refusal to acknowledge what most American people are interested in — and that is money out of the Middle East in terms of military and wars, and into our communities here, into healthcare, and into some of the services that we are deprived of, that, for example, Israeli society is able to provide for their citizens: free education, free healthcare,” says Ahmad. “We don't even have that here, and yet we're still providing a significant amount of aid.”
Teng says, “For everybody who's trying to do something in this moment, it's not like as individuals we have no agency. We do. But it's also important to remind people of the systems in place that make it very hard for us to do the right thing. If there was any path forward or a glimmer of inspiration, I felt, follow these doctors.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Full transcript: https://interc.pt/4xbqfa5
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The stunning momentum of the insurgent left hit a roadblock this week when democratic socialist Francesca Hong narrowly lost her primary race for Wisconsin governor to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a moderate who garnered significant support from establishment Democrats.
“The collective power of that Democratic establishment in a state, where there is a Democratic governor and there is a real Democratic Party establishment machine, all of that power was required to eke out a 0.4 percent victory in the party’s own primary against a previously unknown candidate running as a Democratic socialist,” The Lever’s David Sirota tells The Intercept Briefing.
This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks with Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, about the primaries and how the left is building power within the Democratic Party.
There were bright spots for progressives on Tuesday night. In Minnesota, progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan defeated AIPAC-backed Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., in the Senate primary race. Craig had previously voted for the Laken Riley Act, which requires the federal government to detain people for certain crimes, including shoplifting and burglary. Flanagan, by contrast, told supporters on election night: “We need to rip ICE apart and stop them from terrorizing our communities.”
“What you’re seeing now is, and I don’t want to call it a Democratic Tea Party, but it is certainly organizing and pressuring to take back power in an adversarial way from a set of forces to the left of the Democratic establishment,” says Sirota. “That is what’s new, and that is what’s driving the political dynamic now.”
Washington and Sirota also discuss the intensifying democracy crisis unfolding in the United States. According to Sirota, it “stands on two pillars: concentrated executive power and the supremacy of money.”
Sirota explores this theme and more, in the new season of his show, Master Plan: The Kingmakers. The podcast is all about how a once-fringe legal theory moved into the mainstream and transformed the power of the American presidency.
Full episode transcript here.
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Over the course of Donald Trump's second term, Democratic voters have expressed dissatisfaction with their party over what many view as an inability to stand up to the president and his broader movement. That dissatisfaction with the establishment has manifested in primaries in coastal cities across the country, where the progressive movement appears to be ascendant. On Tuesday, that test played out in Midwestern states, Michigan and Missouri.
Within roughly two hours of polls closing, The Associated Press called the closely watched rematch between Cori Bush and Rep. Wesley Bell for the incumbent. In 2024, AIPAC and other outside groups spent more than $18 million to oust Bush from her Missouri district, and her defeat, along with New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s, has served as a warning sign for Democrats not to be too progressive or too pro-Palestine.
But by Wednesday morning, Abdul El-Sayed, who ran on Medicare for All and ending military aid to Israel for its continued genocide in Gaza, narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens by less than 20,000 votes. According to AdImpact, the Michigan Democratic Senate primary saw $98 million in ad spending and reservations. At least $60 million was spent boosting Stevens or attacking El-Sayed, with more than $30 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC, United Democracy Project — its largest spend in a single race ever, nearly double the then-record-breaking amount spent on Bowman's 2024 primary race.
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Akela Lacy and Jonah Valdez discuss what results from Tuesday's primaries signal for progressives and the broader left in the Democratic Party, especially in swing states and outside of coastal cities.
Full transcript: https://interc.pt/4wgacXj
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