Three years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the U.S. government is still targeting pro-Palestine student activists.

Even before federal immigration agents descended on communities around the country, killing immigrants and protesters, unmarked agents were abducting students who had voiced criticisms of Israel.

Mahmoud Khalil was the first. After federal agents detained him at his alma mater, Columbia University, he spent more than 100 days in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana. It’s been over a year since he was released and returned to live with his family in New York City. The Trump administration is still trying to deport him.

“Part of why I'm doing this right now rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years is because what's happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience,” Khalil tells The Intercept Briefing. “I don't want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what's happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.”

This week on the podcast, Khalil speaks with host Akela Lacy about what he’s learned about how he became President Donald Trump’s top target, the role Columbia University played in that campaign, and his new book, “No Land to Stand On,” which chronicles Khalil’s experience in ICE detention, missing the birth of his first child, his ongoing saga to stay in the U.S. with his family, and more.

“It's been so difficult just to have that conversation with my wife Noor about what would happen,” Khalil says. “What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just leave? But to me, this fight isn't only about whether I get to stay in this country.”

“It's about whether anyone — whether they are citizens or non-citizens — are able to speak out against government policies and against the support of Israel in this country. It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.”

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/4ywVeOA

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It’s the year of the democratic socialist. But the group that helped start the earthquake currently transforming the Democratic Party almost didn't make it to 2026.

After suffering major losses last election cycle after a deluge of pro-Israel lobby spending, Justice Democrats, which supports progressive candidates getting elected to Congress, was on the verge of being written about in the past tense.

“Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what's to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn't endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC,” says communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC's momentum and ability.”

But Justice Democrats resurrected itself, had its most successful primary season to date, and helped put democratic socialism on the map. So what changed?

The group says it won big this year, even being massively outspent, because it tapped into the brewing frustration among voters — frustration directed at Democratic Party leaders. “We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back, and what voters were looking for as we've seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want,” says Andrabi. “That fight doesn't just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Andrabi speaks to host Akela Lacy about how the group that helped elect Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib has seen their candidates make impressive gains in the primaries, and how they're planning to leverage their wins — and what they can learn from their losses — beyond November.

This primary season, Justice Democrats endorsed 15 candidates; seven won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won.

“This work doesn't happen overnight. These losses don't happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress,” says Andrabi. “These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.”

Full transcript: https://interc.pt/4rypFBt

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The fight over the future is rapidly unfolding before our eyes. With debates roiling Washington over calls to rein in artificial intelligence before it’s too late as the U.S. continues to wage official and unofficial wars around the world, many of the world’s most powerful players are licking their chops.

Yes, there’s destruction all around. But these players have carefully concocted a plan: to hasten a familiar vision that combines biblical, militant, and futuristic images of the end times so they can save themselves.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy interviews award-winning authors and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose new book, "End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World," maps the players who want to speed up the end of the world.

“We didn't feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he's trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we're thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador's maximum-security prisons. So we're trying to map this,” says Klein. It seemed to be “a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There's always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm, and we weren't seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down in and taking breakdown for granted.”

“End times fascism is an alliance of three main components,” says Taylor. The religious fundamentalists who helped elect Donald Trump, wanting to hasten along a violent Armageddon so Jesus will return. The tech accelerationists “exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over.” The ethnonationalists who view immigration as an existential threat, so they fortress the border and hoard resources. “These different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world's going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage,” says Taylor.

It may sound bizarre. And it is. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it, Klein says. “This is a really dangerous pattern of thought: that out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that's the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear,” says Klein. “When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower, he's doing a version of that story. When Sam Altman says he's summoning a digital god, and we're going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it's going to be utopia ... he's doing the story. So we have to be able to identify it because we're all living with the consequences of this terrible story and we need better stories.”

“In this moment, we're up against a fascism that is against all humans in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, ‘Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it's just humans in general.’ This is opening up a bigger fight beyond ‘I am a man’ to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there's something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying,” says Taylor, noting that the collective uprising, across the political spectrum, against data centers shows people breaking free of one so-called inevitable future.

Full transcript: https://interc.pt/3V3fTuM

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