What...

What do you mean this is the torment dimension!?

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29694

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (left)

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The public has claimed an incredible streak of scalps this year, torn from the skulls of figures so powerful they were supposed to be untouchable.

The fall of super-elites from former Prince Andrew to Bill Gates stems from an American public hell bent on transparency around the Epstein scandal, refusing to accept one official assurance after another that there was nothing to see.

The anti-ICE protests that forced the Trump administration into retreat in Minnesota reflect the same attitude. In both cases, people were told that nothing could be done. But they didn’t listen.

The revolution is here, against royals both literal and figurative who think they have some divine right to rule over public life. But you’d never know it from the news media. They’re busy with wall-to-wall coverage of the disappearance of Today show host Savannah Guthrie’s mother.

Spoiler: at 84-years-old, I’m pretty sure this won’t end well for her regardless.

Activism is the reason for Epstein justice and the federal withdrawal in Minnesota. People demanded the files and that ICE and company leave—again and again and again. It is an unlikely coalition that cannot be reduced to one political tendency, right or left, team red or team blue, united in their demand for accountability.

Public pressure works—even in ways deemed impossible. Zohran Mamdani’s victory last year flew in the face of the expert consensus that young people don’t vote at rates high enough for a campaign like his to succeed.

The media can’t see much of this because it wants you to believe change comes from Washington (where they live).

The combined Epstein-Minnesota victory is also not merely some triumph of resistance Democrats against the Trumpublicans. It’s much bigger than that, encompassing groups as varied (and weird!) as Evangelicals obsessed with Pizzagate-style conspiracy theories, “Antifa”-types, liberals, leftists, as well as generally apolitical types, and even the NRA, which defended Alex Pretti’s right to bear arms.

Now this motley group has claimed its biggest scalp yet. Today, on his birthday, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—previously His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, His Royal Highness The Duke of York, the Earl of Inverness, the Baron Killyleagh and I’m sure exchequer of self-enrichment—has been arrested.

The man formerly known as prince had been lying about his criminality since 2011, when he was initially stripped of his role as a UK “trade envoy” because of his involvement the Epstein crime family. The Prince then continued to feign amnesia for the next decade, but in 2022, he ended up paying victim Virginia Giuffre undisclosed millions to settle her sexual assault charge.

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but as more and more Epstein dirt emerged, King Charles III finally stripped Andrew of his title as prince and evicted his younger brother from the royal estate at Windsor. The massive Epstein dump includes photos of the former Duke of Yuck with a girl lying on the floor, and evidence of financial impropriety.

If the takedown of a literal royal isn’t enough to please just about any red-blooded American, then there’s also the demise of Bill Gates, the high priest of the Appistocracy and the canonized global do-gooder at large. With barely hours to spare, the Gates Foundation announced today that the computing god and gazillion-dollar philanthropist would not be delivering the keynote at a global AI summit in India.

“After careful consideration, and to ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit’s key priorities, Mr. Gates will not be delivering his keynote address,” the Foundation dryly said.

The decision follows the recent disclosure of an email sent by Epstein alleging that Gates had asked him for advice about antibiotics to treat an STD contracted from “Russian girls”—so he could dose his then-wife Melinda Gates! (Bill Gates, you’ll be shocked to learn, denies this.)

These fuckers, literally, are what the media offers up as the royals who embody wisdom and leadership. Though they represent different ends of the political spectrum, they have one thing in common: money and power. That’s what connects them all, rich, politicians, million dollar media, and that’s the universal Epstein lesson: they will always invest in each other, consort with each other and protect each other.

There’s a reason why Marjorie Taylor Greene’s story rings true: that Trump complained to her in a private phone call that he couldn’t allow the Epstein files to be released because his “friends will get hurt.”

And yet the decision turned out to be above his paygrade. It belonged to the people.

Will that be the story you’ll read or hear in the media ? No, instead, what you’ll hear about the Epstein files is that the files “prove” nothing and are just some partisan tempest in a teapot, all of which ignores the reality that accountability, whatever it is and will be, is the product of public opinion and pressure. The Congressional “leadership” never supported the Epstein law; the public alone made it happen.

Similarly about Minneapolis, you’ll hear the federal retreat was the work of Congress, that Chuck Schumer or some other power broker forced x or y to happen. That the Democratic mayors and governors stood up. Assuming that’s even true—I recall days of radio silence from officials like Tim Walz—why did they stand up? Because the people forced them to.

Cynicism is a protection racket for the powerful. They’re desperate to keep you from realizing the power you have and (gasp!) using it.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

From Ken Klippenstein via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29700

If there’s one person onto whom establishment media have projected their anxieties about race, class and democracy, it’s the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who died this week at the age of 84.

Four-page newspaper insert outlining Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential platform.

The civil rights icon, a protege of Martin Luther King and a brilliant community organizer, made history with his groundbreaking runs for the presidency in 1984 and 1988 (Extra!, 3–4/88). He put together what he aptly called a Rainbow Coalition: African Americans (a term he popularized), Latino Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, workers of all colors, family farmers, immigrants, feminists, peace activists, environmentalists.

Notably, he was the first major national political figure to bring gays and lesbians—as LGBTQ folks were then called—into the tent as a community whose votes were valuable and whose rights were worth defending. He was the first mainstream presidential candidate to raise the issue of justice for Palestinians.

Advocating for these constituencies with an unabashedly left agenda—a brave move in Reaganite America—Jackson did well in both of his races for the Democratic nomination: He came in third with 3 million votes in 1984, and second in 1988 with 7 million. And he changed the rules of politics by offering an alternative to the top-down, big money-driven hegemony of the Democratic establishment: grassroots-funded, solidaric, genuinely populist.

And that kind of politics terrified an elite that thrives on keeping the 99 Percent divided and conquered. “Jesse Jackson scares the bejesus out of me,” then–New York Times publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger Sr. confided to FAIR’s Jeff Cohen in a private meeting in 1990 (Extra!, 3–4/90).

And this fear was palpable in corporate media coverage, from the right to what passed as the centrist “left,” from 1984 well into the 21st century. “I don’t want Jesse Jackson stirring up racial tensions and class warfare,’’ Bill O’Reilly declared on Fox News (11/8/00). (O’Reilly had a special animus against Jackson, with an endless slew of hit-job segments like “How Personal Are African Americans Taking the Moral Failures of Rev. Jesse Jackson?”—Fox News, 2/19/01.)

“Why hasn’t someone given the hook to Jesse Jackson, with his phony claims of African-American disenfranchisement?’’ Al Hunt, a TV liberal, wondered in the Wall Street Journal (11/16/00). NPR (2/23/88) compared him to a fortune cookie, which “you get whether you want it or not.” The Washington Post‘s Michael Kinsley (3/17/88) actually called Jackson the “Monster From the Black Lagoon.”

A figure so threatening had to be trivialized. In 1984, the San Diego Union Tribune (2/25/84) called him the “clowning, flamboyant, sometimes irreverent reverend who some say entered this race to prove that a minority candidate can run for president and be taken seriously.”

Dan Rather (CBS News, 7/13/92): “There’s Jesse the radical…and there’s Jesse the self-promoter.”

CBS‘s Dan Rather (7/13/92), with his talk of the “two Jesse Jacksons,” showed how corporate media needed to willfully misunderstand in order to neutralize him:

There’s Jesse the radical, who preaches rage and black separatism. That Jesse has always angered whites. And there’s Jesse the self-promoter, who preaches desegregation and compromise.

Of course, it was the fact that Jackson didn’t preach separatism—that he called for a broad coalition against the elite—that made him dangerous.

Jackson served as a symbol of everything the Democratic Party needed to turn its back on to merit a seat at the grownups’ table; putting Jackson in his place was a media-required right of passage for Democratic nominees, from Walter Mondale through Bill Clinton (Extra!, 9/92). As George Will (Washington Post, 7/20/88) put it during the 1988 Democratic National Convention:

Jackson’s overreaching gave Dukakis an opportunity to act presidential and he seized it, giving Jackson nothing but rhetoric as he cut Jackson, the would be co-quarterback, down to the subservient role of blocking back.

And the punditocracy was always looking for a Black leader to replace Jackson, someone who could symbolize racial equality without the challenge to social hierarchy that would be necessary to achieve it. “Jesse Jackson now must look around and see there are lots of other responsible office-holding black leaders, so he cannot wag the Democratic Party quite so much,” Will (This Week, 11/12/89) declared wishfully.

Juan Williams

Douglas Wilder, an African-American governor of Virginia, was one such hopeful (Extra!, 4–5/92), whom Juan Williams (Washington Post Magazine, 6/8/91) hilariously deemed “arguably the most important Black American politician of the 20th century”:

It is not just that Wilder is an alternative to the best-known Black spokesman, Jesse Jackson: His success is a rebuke to Jackson’s 1980s political vision of Blacks as America’s victims.

Barack Obama, too, was initially embraced by corporate as an anti-Jackson (Extra!, 3–4/07): “Unlike…Jesse Jackson, Obama is part of a new generation of Black leaders who insist on being seen as more than representatives of their race,” Time (2/12/06) wrote.

Again, it was important to misunderstand Jesse Jackson in order to minimize the threat he posed to the powers that be. His key insight was that to represent any race, you need to represent all races.

From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29487

For a month, Michael Rectenwald had been trying to get Nick Fuentes to notice him. Rectenwald had a new political action committee devoted to anti-Zionism, and he hoped the far-right influencer would promote it to his legions of perpetually online, often antisemitic fans. But Rectenwald, a former New York University professor and one-time presidential hopeful, had struggled to stand out to the ascendant Fuentes, who has come to symbolize the formerly fringe extremes of the online right. So in October, Rectenwald posted something sure to catch Fuentes’s eye: “Nick has sold out to the cabal.”

It worked. “Fuck you,” Fuentes wrote back.

This was Rectenwald’s shot. He apologized, calling Fuentes “a brilliant guy.” He reposted an uncannily gorgeous, computer-generated woman in a cross necklace and blazer encouraging the two men to “drop the beef.” She sat in front of an American flag and six light-up letters spelling “AZAPAC,” the acronym for Rectenwald’s new group. If Fuentes would just endorse it, Rectenwald promised, he’d “take it all back.”

Rectenwald launched the Anti-Zionist America Political Action Committee in August, vowing to fight to end U.S. financial and military aid to Israel and root out pro-Israel influence in Congress. AZAPAC aims to raise money to unseat pro-Israel legislators in the coming midterm elections, targeting some of the main recipients of cash from influential groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel.

It’s a goal that might sound appealing for the electoral left, whose members have long struggled to make meaningful progress on Palestinian rights in Washington, D.C., largely because of the strong grip the pro-Israel lobby holds on U.S. politicians. And as Israel’s genocide in Gaza stretches into a third year, AZAPAC’s policy goals may tap into a political energy currently unaddressed by either major party: growing anti-Israel sentiment on the right.

Though the Republican party loudly backs Israel and its war effort, far-right online spaces are growing increasingly critical of Israel. While accusations of antisemitism from the pro-Israel mainstream often dog Israel’s critics on the left, they appear as little cause for concern to far-right figures and their followers. As the nonpartisan AZAPAC works to sway the 2026 midterms, Rectenwald’s group will test whether candidates across the political spectrum will be similarly pressed on the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

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The AZAPAC founder has attempted to connect with openly antisemitic figures like Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who famously praised Hitler. Rectenwald is a regular on The Stew Peters Show, which streams on the Peter Thiel and JD Vance-funded YouTube alternative Rumble, where the host has used slurs to describe Jewish and Black people — to no objection from Rectenwald. He’s courted support from popular manosphere influencer Dan Bilzerian, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who has falsely claimed Jewish people are behind DEI policies, transgender identity, and “open borders.” AZAPAC is helping fund at least one candidate who is a Hitler apologist and another who has participated in white nationalist demonstrations.

In a conversation with The Intercept, Rectenwald made clear he’s aware such affiliations could be detrimental to his cause. He said he is no longer seeking the support of Fuentes, though he remains interested in his fan base — they’re “more sincere than him on some things” — and that he was unaware of “the depth of” Bilzerian’s antisemitic views, which are well–documented online.

Asked about Peters’s language, Rectenwald told The Intercept he would no longer appear on his show, then reversed and said he didn’t want to “throw him under the bus.” Peters, Rectenwald added, has “helped us quite a bit.”

Affiliating with such figures perpetuates harmful and often violent rhetoric toward Jewish people, antisemitism and hate speech experts told The Intercept, and in the most extreme cases, conspiracy theories can motivate violence, as occurred when a white nationalist shooter massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.

These antisemitic allyships also risk undermining legitimate criticism of the state of Israel — a heightened liability at a time when the federal government and its pro-Israel allies have launched largely spurious claims of antisemitism against advocates on the left who support Palestine and oppose Israel’s genocide.

“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders,” said Ben Lorber, an author and researcher of antisemitism and white Christian nationalism. “It stands to really harm the movement.”

“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders.”

Rectenwald appears to understand what he’s risking. After The Intercept reached out to AZAPAC-endorsed candidates for this story, two rejected the group’s backing and were scrubbed from the site, and a third threatened to do the same. Rectenwald accused The Intercept of trying to sink his PAC.

Rectenwald himself has used language commonly associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories of global Jewish control, and he argues that other Israel critics embrace similar language. Online, he regularly refers to “the Jewish mafia” and “Jewish elites,” and last April, he self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” as he said on a podcast, but Amazon barred him from using the title.

“We don’t use the same language and talk about the same things with the same terms,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, referring to Peters. And yet, he said, “I do believe he’s doing pretty good work in terms of exposing the Zionist network and what it’s up to.” He said a significant portion of AZAPAC’s early donations arrived after his appearances on Peters’s show, which also runs commercials for the group.

Rectenwald self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” but Amazon barred him from using the title.

During a September episode while introducing Rectenwald, Peters referred to Jewish people using a common antisemitic slur. A month earlier, he used an anti-Black slur to describe Department of Justice attorney Leo Terrell in another episode with Rectenwald. In that episode, Peters said the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad, satanic, Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.”

Rectenwald promised Peters in his August appearance that AZAPAC does not have “infiltrators,” “dual allegiances,” or “sneaky Jews coming in and running the show.” He closed out the episode by offering Peters an invite — which he told The Intercept has since been rescinded — to be a member of AZAPAC’s board.

The 2026 Slate

An AZAPAC ad launched in November and produced by the far-right company Dissident Media shows Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands, Palestinian children killed by Israel, re-enactments of the American Revolution — and the red, clawed hands of a puppet master manipulating strings overlaying a mashup of the American and Israeli flags.

Rectenwald told The Intercept that he was not aware “puppet master” was a well-known antisemitic trope and that the strings represented the pro-Israeli donor class’s influence on the Trump administration. Plus, the trailer was a success: Donations poured in as it drew attention online, Rectenwald said.

AZAPAC had raised $111,556 by the end of December, according to recent FEC filings.

Of AZAPAC’s 10 publicly endorsed candidates, six are running as Republicans with three Democrats and a Libertarian on its slate. The group is more focused on Republicans, Rectenwald said, because he aims to put a dent in the GOP’s pro-Israel base. AZAPAC is backing Aaron Baker, for example, an America First conservative who is running to unseat Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a vocal supporter of Israel and Netanyahu.

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AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/30/aipac-campaigns-elections-israel-congress/)

At least one AZAPAC candidate drew national headlines five years ago. Tyler Dykes, a Republican candidate running for Rep. Nancy Mace’s congressional seat in South Carolina, was famously accused of performing a Nazi salute, which he denies, while storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers with a stolen riot shield. (Trump pardoned Dykes on his first day in office.) Dykes also received a felony conviction for his participation in the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where organizers protested the removal of a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and yelled, “Jews will not replace us.”

Reached by The Intercept, Dykes said in an emailed statement he denounces “violence and extremism in all its forms.” He added that “Robert E. Lee was a hero, and deserves to be honored as such.”

Rectenwald told The Intercept that AZAPAC’s board had vetted Dykes and other candidates. He said he was willing to tolerate certain disagreements with the candidates and their views. The endorsements, Rectenwald said, are “a pragmatism of sorts.”

“We don’t agree with all of these candidates,” Rectenwald said. “We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”

AZAPAC’s endorsement process is primarily based on a 19-part questionnaire, which Rectenwald shared with The Intercept. It asks things like whether a candidate would pledge not to receive campaign donations from prominent pro-Israel groups or “any other foreign lobby/PAC”; what they think of laws restricting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement or imposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism; and whether they would vote to end military aid to Israel.

“We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”

The group’s contradictions are perhaps best captured by two brief recent endorsements: two former American soldiers, Anthony Aguilar and Greg Stoker, running for Congress as progressive Green Party candidates. As a contractor working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Aguilar, who is running in North Carolina, became a whistleblower alleging that GHF employees were firing into crowds of starving civilians at aid sites. Stoker, running in Texas, took part in last year’s Global Sumud Flotilla, a humanitarian mission meant to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Their AZAPAC endorsements were short-lived.

After receiving questions from The Intercept about Rectenwald’s language and AZAPAC’s associations with far-right figures, both Aguilar and Stoker rejected the group’s backing. Mentions of them had been erased from AZAPAC’s online presence by Tuesday.

In explaining his withdrawal, Aguilar’s campaign acknowledged that anti-genocide and anti-Zionist activists “are falsely accused on antisemitism on a regular basis” to discredit their work. “For that reason, we want to avoid being associated with any group whose statements or actions raise credible concerns of actual antisemitism,” Aguilar’s campaign manager said in a statement.

Stoker told The Intercept that “I have always used my platform to fight against racial superiority,” adding that AZAPAC’s narrow focus on “old conspiracy theories” and eradicating the pro-Zionist lobby “is not going to fix any of the larger systemic issues facing working class Americans.”

Christine Reyna, a professor at De Paul University who studies the psychology of extremism, questioned why AZAPAC would endorse candidates like Dykes and Casey Putsch, a racecar driver and AZAPAC-backed Republican candidate for Ohio governor. In August, Putsch posted a video asking Grok to list “all the good things Adolf Hitler did or was responsible for creating in his life” and railed against the Jewish right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whom he called “an annoying little rodent.” While there’s a growing number of other candidates who oppose sending military aid to Israel or have sworn off AIPAC donations, backing candidates like Putsch and Dykes could serve as a dog whistle, Reyna said, to some of the most extreme corners of the far right.

“When you package these really frightening and terrible and dangerous ideologies and you hide them behind this front-facing organization that gives them legitimacy,” Reyna said, “That can be extremely dangerous.”

Aligning with such America First nationalists, who tend to ignore the issue of America’s own ambitions of control and profit, can harm other communities, antisemitism researcher Lorber warned, because of their anti-Blackness, xenophobia, or anti-LGBTQ views. In the case of Israel, these far-right alliances can also injure the movement for Palestinian liberation, he said.

“If we get distracted chasing fantasies of Jewish cabals, it harms our analysis, it makes our work less informed and less effective,” Lorber said, “and it also divides our movements.”

“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel. But neo-Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”

Palestinian-American advocate and analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa, whose family is from Gaza, is acutely aware of the ways pro-Israel institutions have attacked anti-Zionist work for being antisemitic. He said those bad-faith attacks were why he was concerned about AZAPAC’s affiliations with the far right, which has long rooted its criticism of Israel in “actually racist and antisemitic” beliefs.

“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel,” Kenney-Shawa said. “But neo Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”

The day after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Putsch, who did not respond to outreach from The Intercept, doubled down on his support for ICE’s mass deportation campaign. On social media, Putsch, who is Christian, often attacks his opponent Vivek Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith and Indian ancestry. On his campaign site, his platform includes anti-immigrant calls to “accelerate deportations” and limit the number of H-1B visas offered to immigrant workers.

His platform makes no mention of Israel or foreign policy.

The Founder’s Journey

“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, acknowledging that on occasion, he has used the words “Jew” or “Jewish” instead. A search of his X account turned up at least 43 references to the “Jewish mafia,” and he’s repeatedly invoked the “Jewish elite” on his Substack. He claimed to have borrowed the latter term from Norm Finkelstein, a pro-Palestinian author and activist who, unlike Rectenwald, is Jewish himself.

“It’s not just an ‘israeli lobby.’ LOL. It’s a Talmudic Jewish mafia that runs the U.S. and the world,” Rectenwald wrote in one post in March. The same day, he claimed that “the Jewish mafia did 9/11.”

“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist.”

When The Intercept asked about Rectenwald’s use of the term “Zionist Occupation Government,” which has a history of popularity among white supremacists, he brought up AZAPAC-backed candidates like Bernard Taylor, a firefighter and Democrat hoping to unseat Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast, a former IDF volunteer. Rectenwald cited Taylor, who is Black, as proof that “we are not like bigots,” adding that AZAPAC planned to endorse other people of color.

Taylor, who accepted an endorsement from AZAPAC in December, said he also was not aware of Rectenwald’s rhetoric until approached by The Intercept for this story.

“I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s not concerning to me,” Taylor told The Intercept in a phone call, referring to Rectenwald’s language. In an emailed statement, he said his campaign rejects antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy, but would keep the AZAPAC endorsement based on policy. Taylor said that if he feels AZAPAC is “crossing the line” into overt antisemitism, he will reject its endorsement and refund donations from the group.

“If I made, you know, some slips here and there, it isn’t intentional — I’m not trying to dog whistle to anybody,” Rectenwald said. “I’m just trying to be precise, and sometimes, you know, precision is difficult.”

In “The Cabal Question,” Rectenwald’s self-published novel, a former professor finds his worldview transformed when a friend “thrusts him into the JQ,” or Jewish question, as the book’s Amazon summary puts it, working with “a steadfast ex-occultist turned Christian nationalist to trace the strands of the cabal’s reach.” The story mirrors his own evolution of getting “J-pilled,” or “Jew-pilled,” Rectenwald has said, though he insists the novel is not about promoting antisemitism but rather “a Christian redemption story.”

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Rectenwald once identified as a leftist. He taught liberal studies as a Marxist at New York University — until a fallout that began in 2016, when it was revealed that he was behind the since-deleted Twitter account @AntiPCNYUProf with the screen name “Deplorable NYU Professor.” Rectenwald used the account to act “in the guise of an alt-righter,” as a way to argue against politically correct use of pronouns, trigger warnings, and safe spaces.

He took a paid leave from NYU and claimed he was a victim of liberal censorship in a splashy op-ed and a sit-down on Fox & Friends. When he came back, Rectenwald invited far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos to speak to his class and later sued NYU for defamation. Court records indicate the case was dropped with prejudice, and Rectenwald said he settled out of court for a cash payment in exchange for his departure from the school in 2019.

NYU did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

The experience prompted Rectenwald to denounce the left and his several decades of Marxist scholarship, and in 2024, he launched a failed bid for president as a Libertarian, representing the conservative Mises Caucus.

It’s unclear when his fixation on Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories took hold. But on the right-wing podcast The Backlash in May, Rectenwald used the protagonist of “The Cabal Question” to describe how his views developed.

In the book, Rectenwald said, the main character flees persecution and surveillance from the government controlled by “the Jewish mafia.” The character ends up finding refuge with “radical right wingers,” who help him escape the country. The more closely he affiliates with the right-wing network, however, the more he risks damaging his own reputation.

“Art imitates life, right?” said the host. Rectenwald agreed.

The post A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists. appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/28850

President Donald Trump's administration has officially denied law enforcement officials in Minnesota access to evidence related to the fatal shooting of Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti last month.

In a Monday announcement, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) revealed that the FBI on Friday delivered a formal notification informing the agency that will not receive "access to any information or evidence that it has collected" related to Pretti's shooting at the hands of federal immigration enforcement officials.

BCA described the refusal to share evidence as "concerning and unprecedented," but it vowed to conduct a "thorough, independent, and transparent" investigation into the Pretti shooting "even if hampered by a lack of access to key information and evidence."

In addition to requesting evidence gathered in the Pretti shooting, the BCA reiterated its call for federal law enforcement to share whatever evidence it has collected in relation to last month's fatal shooting of Minneapolis mother Renee Good and the shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.

"BCA investigations of these incidents continue," the agency vowed. "The BCA will present its findings without recommendation to the appropriate prosecutorial authorities for review."

Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz slammed the Trump administration for denying his state's officials access to evidence, and he demanded a real investigation into Pretti's killing.

"Minnesota needs impartial investigations into the shootings of American citizens on our streets," he wrote in a social media post. "Trump’s left hand cannot investigate his right hand. The families of the deceased deserve better."

In a Sunday interview with CBS News Minnesota, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty revealed that her office was not getting any help from the federal government in its investigation into the Pretti shooting, though she said her team was continuing to gather evidence and interview witnesses.

Moriarty emphasized that her office, which is currently working with the Minnesota BCA in its investigation, can bring criminal charges against federal immigration officers if they have enough evidence to do so, even without the cooperation of the Trump administration.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/28642

While Operation Metro Surge imposed serious casualties, it was a battle the White House lost. The lessons of this latest phase of mass organizing against ICE must be studied and learned by all.

From Liberation News – The Newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation via This RSS Feed.