The Intercept Briefing

The United States has executed 21 people over the last month in targeted drone strikes off the coast of Venezuela. The Trump administration has so far authorized at least four strikes against people it claims are suspected “narco-terrorists.”The strikes mark a dark shift in the administration’s approach to what it’s framing as an international drug war — one it’s waging without congressional oversight.“There actually could be more strikes,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Turse joins host Akela Lacy and investigative journalist Radley Balko to discuss how the administration is laying the groundwork to justify extrajudicial killings abroad and possibly at home.The Trump administration’s claims that it’s going after high-level drug kingpins don’t hold water, Turse says. “Trump is killing civilians because he 'suspects' that they're smuggling drugs. Experts that I talk to say this is illegal. Former government lawyers, experts on the laws of war, they say it's outright murder.” Trump has repeated claims, without evidence, that a combination of immigration and drug trafficking is driving crime in the United States. It’s part of a story Trump has crafted: The U.S. and the international community are under siege, and it’s his job to stop it — whether by executing fishermen or deploying the National Guard on his own people. And while the latest turn toward extrajudicial killings is cause for alarm, it’s also more of the same, says Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has covered the drug war for two decades and host of the new Intercept podcast, Collateral Damage. “The notion of collateral damage is just that: this very idea that, when you're in war, there are some who can be sacrificed because we have this greater cause that we have to win or this threat we have to overcome. And these people that are being killed in these incidents, they're collateral damage from the perspective of the U.S. government because Trump clearly doesn't care,” Balko says.“There are a lot of parallels between what Trump is doing with immigration now and what we saw during the 1980s with the drug war. There was an effort to bring the military in,” Balko says. “This idea that Reagan declared illicit drugs a national security threat — just like Trump has done with immigration, with migrants — this idea that we're facing this threat that is so existential and so dangerous that we have to take these extraconstitutional measures, this is a playbook that we've seen before.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The federal government shut down on Wednesday as President Donald Trump threatened mass federal layoffs. Republicans are blaming Democrats for the shutdown, while Democrats are refusing to support a Republican spending bill without guarantees to extend Obamacare provisions set to expire and reverse GOP health care cuts earlier this year.“Democrats are ... trying to reverse some of the cuts from the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' that was passed earlier this year to Medicaid,” says Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. “So what Democrats are really trying to message here is that they're fighting for health care, both to reverse some of these Medicaid cuts and also to ensure that the Affordable Care Act subsidies continue.”This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks to Washington about the government shutdown and the impact it will have on public services, including essential services and federal workers.We’re also following a federal court case where an appointee of Ronald Reagan blasted the Trump administration for unlawfully targeting pro-Palestine students for protected speech. “It’s a historic ruling that rightly affirms that the First Amendment protects non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. just as it protects citizens,” says Ramya Krishnan, lecturer at Columbia University Law School and senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented plaintiffs in the case. “And if free speech means anything in this country, it means the government can't lock you up simply because it disagrees with your political views.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, drones attacked a fleet of small boats bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Global Sumud Flotilla, as it’s known, is the latest group attempting to break Israel’s siege on Gaza to deliver food and medical supplies.This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks to Tommy Marcus, who goes by Quentin Quarantino on Instagram, about the convoy enduring attacks on international waters as volunteers remain resolved to continue their mission to deliver aid to Gaza. “It's pretty jarring. I'm not going to lie. I'd love to put on this really tough, confident face and say I’m totally fearless. But I'm just a normal guy, and I'd expect and hope to live past 30,” says Marcus, who is among the roughly 500 volunteers in the convoy from 45 different countries. He adds, “There is truly no way to deter us, I suppose unless they kill us. But let's hope that doesn't happen.”Diana Buttu, the former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization and an analyst on issues related to Palestine and Israel, says Israel’s blockade of all entrances to the Gaza Strip is illegal and that “Israel's attacks on these flotillas are similarly illegal.” Uhl spoke to the Palestinian human rights lawyer about Israel escalating strikes on Gaza as the U.N. met this week and more Western countries recognize the Palestinian state — a gesture she calls hollow.“This is an American Israeli genocide,” says Buttu. Donald Trump “could have easily ended this, but he's choosing not to.”“Everyone joined this mission because they're so horrified by the genocide unfolding in Gaza and also the inaction of all of our governments around the world," says Marcus.Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.  You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, conservatives have moved quickly to consolidate power and attack their political enemies, whose relative impotence and penchant for capitulation to power and decorum have been on full display this week."You have these right-wing forces that smell blood, they smell weakness, and they're going after everyone who doesn't comply and run through the obligatory kind of mourning," said Adam H. Johnson, a media analyst and co-host of the “Citations Needed” podcast. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Johnson about the White House's weaponization of Kirk's death and the broader rightward tilt of the media ecosystem."I think what they're doing in part [is] to make it very, very difficult for Democrats to ever beat Republicans. If you gut their media, if you gut their nonprofits, if you snuff out any kind of dissent, if you punish people at the workplace and dox them,” says Johnson. “They're basically trying to make 9/10 the new 9/11. Obviously the scope is different, but in terms of the sort of emotion, the shock. Obviously it was on video, which adds to this extra layer of psychology that's being exploited. They want to exploit that to jam in policies which they've long wanted to jam in.”Johnson also noted that part of what we're witnessing with the increasing alignment between corporate media and Trump is the end of the "veneer" of liberalism among the billionaire class."You have this increasingly postmodern lack of a need for this liberal patina, this kind of veneer of universalism, and everything is just about the exercise of raw power, the exercise of pure racist propaganda," he said. "So yeah, things are bad. But I think what we've learned is that they can get worse." Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After the fatal shooting of right-wing personality Charlie Kirk on Wednesday afternoon, the rhetoric on the right quickly escalated. Influential voices on social media declared war on the left, despite the absence of any knowledge about the suspect or their motive at the time. President Donald Trump made a formal address where he pledged to go after the “radical left.” “We are seeing language weaponized so swiftly,” says Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard.  “I think the Trump administration has a clear track record at this point of taking these little chips that they can leverage to induce state repression and encroach on civil liberties,” says Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic.This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lennard and Breland about the implications of Kirk’s killing and how we think about political violence in the U.S. “We already know that whoever it does turn out to be, we are living in a moment with an authoritarian government that will weaponize this moment either way,” says Lennard. “This is about finding any opportunity to further escalate the white nationalist project.”“I worry that his assassination is a progression toward something darker in which a wider group of people are considered to be targets for political violence,” says Breland. “And I don't think that the rhetoric that's coming out right now is doing anything to stop it or off-ramp us on this dark path.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Another government shutdown. The U.S. military shooting down a boat. The Centers for Disease Control is in turmoil just ahead of flu season. And where in the world will the National Guard go next? This is the world Congress returned to this week. If your head is spinning, you’re not the only one. This week on The Intercept Briefing, we break it all down with host Akela Lacy and politics reporters Jessica Washington and Matt Sledge. “The biggest thing hanging over everybody is this looming shutdown,” says Sledge. Congress needs to negotiate a budget extension before a potential October 1 shutdown. And, as Sledge notes, there are a handful of expected fights this session that could hamstring Congress. “There are a million other things happening on Capitol Hill. There's a big defense bill working its way through the House and Senate. And then there’s this whole Epstein situation,” he says, “which threatens to derail everything else.”On Wednesday morning, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-KY, and Ro Khanna, D-CA, held a press conference with Epstein’s victims, where they announced a bill to force a vote to release the full Department of Justice investigation into the late Jeffrey Epstein.“Democrats are saying, well, this is something we should do regardless, it is very clearly also a political issue in the sense that Trump has a real weakness with his base,” says Washington. “Democrats perhaps were slow to understand how much of a political liability this was for Trump. But they’re waking up, and this does very clearly seem to be an issue that is, if not partisan — obviously we're seeing Republicans join in as well — deeply political in nature.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Homeless sweeps have become the go-to, bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the U.S. housing crisis — a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House alike. But sweeps are not a solution. They’re a way to make homelessness less visible while the crisis deepens.The roots stretch back decades. President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing, paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits. The result is the system we live with today — one that does little to stem the tide.Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And that number leaves out the “hidden homeless”: families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels.“What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” says Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the new book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.”This week on The Intercept Briefing, Goldstone tells host Laura Flynn that the housing emergency is no accident; it’s the product of deliberate political choices: “It's an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Democratic Party has lost millions of voters since 2020, according to new analysis from the New York Times. Meanwhile, Republicans are gaining ground, even in traditional blue states, as more voters register with the GOP.“We're missing layups on the basics right now,” says longtime Democratic strategist Nina Smith, alarmed by the news. “We're losing on voter registration in 30 states — the only 30 states that track voter registration between parties. We're losing in every single one.”This week on The Intercept Briefing, Smith, a former senior adviser to Stacey Abrams with more than two decades in Democratic politics, joined host Jessica Washington to explain why the party keeps failing at the fundamentals — like voter registration, building the base, and party infrastructure — while Donald Trump consolidates power despite record-high disapproval ratings.“Voter registration is like the layup of Democratic basketball politics,” says Smith. “How do we expect to win elections if we're not registering voters who are committed to us on our issues?” Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since the Supreme Court’s landmark June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade and federal abortion protections, a wave of state legislatures have rushed to impose bans and restrictions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 41 states now have abortion bans in effect, including 12 with total bans. “We hear about the endless, supposedly unintentional consequences of abortion bans like rising maternal mortality, child rape victims forced to travel across state lines, increased risk of criminalization, pregnant victims coerced by their abusers, all of that,” says journalist Kylie Cheung, author of “Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans.” “But I very much argue that these aren't unintended consequences.” This week on The Intercept Briefing, Cheung joins host Jessica Washington to trace the direct line from the Dobbs decision to state-sanctioned gender-based violence and control. “This is what abortion bans function to do, which is to police and control pregnant people, to feed cycles of abuse, to be this tool in the toolbox of abusers. To enact racial violence and economic subjugation and essentially lower women and pregnant people and people who can become pregnant to this lowered class in our society,” says Cheung. “And that is not unintentional at all.Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As the Israeli government weighs, once again, expanding its genocidal military campaign in Gaza, the enclave is sliding into a full-scale famine.“We're seeing a purely manmade famine,” says Bob Kitchen, vice president of emergencies at the International Rescue Committee. “The Gaza Strip is surrounded by very fertile farming territory. All of the countries around Gaza have more than enough food.” This week on the Intercept Briefing, Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez speaks with Kitchen about what U.N.-backed hunger experts have called a “worst-case scenario.” Kitchen lays out how Israel’s ongoing war, combined with severe restrictions on humanitarian aid and commercial access, has created near-impossible conditions for food and medical supplies to enter Gaza — accelerating a crisis that could soon be irreversible.“The only thing that's changed is the war, the restrictions on humanitarian aid, the restrictions on the market economy where commercial traffic can't get in,” says Kitchen. “That's the only thing that is driving the hunger right now.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nationwide protests. Racist discrimination. Militarized police. These were the characteristics used to describe America during the long hot summer of 1967, when riots swept through more than 150 cities. They still describe America today, as the government has responded to protests against racist policing and immigration raids with militarized police forces backed by the Marines and the National Guard. It all sounds eerily similar to the America of more than half a century ago, when a presidential commission diagnosed the country’s problem: racism, particularly in policing, was causing widespread political unrest. “When a protest becomes that broad-based — cutting across gender lines and ethnic lines — then I think you have the opportunity to realize this is a true political movement,” says Rick Loessberg, an urban historian and the former planning commissioner for Dallas County, Texas, and the author of “Two Societies: The Rioting of 1967 and the Writing of the Kerner Report.”“This is not just a group or a segment of the population letting off steam,” says Loessberg, “which was what was one of the explanations that was used in the 1960s. This is something else that's much, much deeper and much more significant.”This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Loessberg about what America learned — and didn’t learn — from our history of racist policing and political unrest.Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last few months, according to the United Nations. Israel’s blockade on aid, ongoing bombardment, and the dismantling of independent relief efforts have pushed Gaza to the brink of mass famine. At least 600,000 people are suffering from severe malnutrition, and aid groups warn of a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe.“It's not about the distribution of food, it's not about humanitarian aid. It's about creating — luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south, putting them into a closed military zone,” says Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times.This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Hedges about how we got here and what’s at stake. Hedges spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestine, much of that time in Gaza. He’s the author of 14 books, the most recent being “The Greatest Evil Is War” and “A Genocide Foretold.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

During Donald Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court made some effort to check his power. But that era is over. The court has ruled that Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions he took as president, including for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and it just wrapped its latest term by restricting lower courts' power to block his unlawful orders on issues like birthright citizenship, abortion care, and immigrants’ basic rights. “What the Supreme Court did is it limited lower courts’ ability to use what has been the most effective tool that lower courts have to reign in the Trump administration's lawlessness, which is to block a policy on a nationwide basis,” says Leah Litman, author of the new book, “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.” This week on The Intercept Briefing, newsroom counsel and correspondent Shawn Musgrave speaks with professor and attorney Litman and politics reporter Jessica Washington about how the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority is laying the legal foundation for unchecked executive lawlessness — and signaling to Trump that it won’t stand in his way. Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the Fourth of July, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill that constitutes one of the largest transfers of wealth in history — taking money away from working people and giving it to the nation’s elite. The bill is the culmination of years of giveaways that have allowed corporations and billionaires to tighten their grip on the government. The law triples the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, slashes taxes for the most wealthy, and pays for it all by cutting health care for as many as 20 million people and gutting funding for public education and meals for school children. “ The reconciliation process goes hand-in-hand with all the executive orders that we've been seeing,” says Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa. “It goes hand-in-hand with all of the different things that DOGE was pretending to uncover. It goes hand-in-hand with so much of Project 2025. So this is all just one kind of super villain packed into this — what they call this one big bill — that's like thousands of pages.” This week on The Intercept Briefing, Lee speaks to host Akela Lacy about what Democrats are doing to meet the moment and how they can break through Republican messaging on the bill. “ Democrats are screaming into a void,” Lee says. “The reality is that we have been talking about Medicaid, and it's very hard to break through in a 24-hour news cycle and this big bubble where we are in a sea of red coverage, conservative media, conservative narratives, disinformation, misinformation. And to break through in that moment takes more than just us.”At the heart of it all is one core problem: the power of money in politics, Lee says. She introduced a bill to ban super PACs, the kind of groups that helped elect Trump and have pushed Democrats to the right. “ You cannot have a democracy and super PACs,” Lee says. “If you are able to influence and shape the politics, shape information — what information gets out, which information doesn’t — because you have more money, then we don't have a level playing field.”You can hear the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, we're re-sharing a conversation we first aired on March 7, 2025 – a conversation that’s only grown more relevant since it first aired. It’s a deep dive into the right-wing Christian ideologies shaping Donald Trump’s inner circle, featuring journalist and author of “Wild Faith,” Talia Lavin, and Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. As Trump consolidates power — with the backing of a hardline Congress and a Supreme Court increasingly aligned with his agenda — understanding the religious forces behind his movement is more important than ever.We’ll be back next week with a new episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran announced Monday appears to be holding. President Donald Trump made the announcement after unilaterally dragging the U.S. into the conflict and authorizing strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites using 30,000-pound bunker busters. Israel attacked Iran on June 13, just days before Iran and the U.S. were set to resume talks in Oman over the country’s nuclear enrichment program.“ You don't have to be anti-war to understand that diplomacy in this case would've been better,” said Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer and the author of three books on Iran. Majd is a contributor to NBC News and covered the 2015 Iran deal for the network. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Majd joins host Akela Lacy to discuss what's left of the path to diplomacy after years of sabotage, from Israel's aggressive military posture to Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal.  You can hear the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the wake of the political assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, prominent right-wing figures moved quickly to assign blame. Utah Sen. Mike Lee pinned the killings on “Marxism.” Elon Musk pointed to the “far left.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, said it “seems to be a leftist.”But the facts quickly told a different story: The suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter is a Trump supporter who held radical anti-abortion views. “There's an entire right-wing media machine aimed at pushing disinformation around breaking news events and specifically attributing violence to the left,” says Taylor Lorenz, independent journalist and author of “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.” “You see this over and over and over again, no matter who is perpetrating the violence.” “The reality is that the vast overwhelming majority of political violence in recent years has come from the right,” adds Akela Lacy, The Intercept’s senior politics reporter. “It basically treats that fact as if it's not real, as if it doesn't exist,” she says — a dynamic that then fails to address the root causes.This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl talks with Lorenz and Lacy about how online disinformation is distorting public understanding of major events — from political violence to immigration to potential war with Iran. In this chaos-driven ecosystem, the right — and Trump especially — know how to thrive.You can hear the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Across the country, demonstrators are preparing for a weekend of protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, Donald Trump's planned June 14 military parade, and Trump himself.Ground zero for these demonstrations is likely to be Los Angeles, where heavily armed ICE agents have carried out raids at churches, graduations, parking lots, and scores of other gathering spots recently.“ The level of armament that these guys are wearing is out of a GI Joe movie,” said Salvador G. Sarmiento, the campaign director and lawyer for the 70-member National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “It seems like the federal police is just driving around willy-nilly — dressed up as a goon squad — picking up people that they see on a street corner.” “The federal government [is] violently taking people from their work sites in military fashion,” added Jonah Valdez, reporter for The Intercept.This week on The Intercept Briefing, Sarmiento and Valdez joined host Jordan Uhl to discuss the wave of ICE operations sweeping Los Angeles that have sparked a week of protests and the militarized response from law enforcement.As people head to the streets again this weekend, protesters should be informed about their constitutional rights and safety options. The episode also features practical advice from attorney Isabella Salomão Nascimento.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At a recent rally at U.S. Steel in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump stood in front of a row of workers in hard hats and safety vests and proclaimed, “We're right now on the verge of passing the largest working class tax cuts in American history.” He framed his “Big Beautiful Bill” — a massive tax cut for the wealthy — as a blue-collar blessing. The sleight of hand is classic Trump, and what makes his appeal to voters enduring. “The Republican Party is building the multiracial working class coalition that the Democrats have always said that they want to build,” says David Sirota, founder of The Lever and a former Bernie Sanders speechwriter. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks to Sirota and politics reporter Jessica Washington about how Trump has successfully used culture-war grievances to win over working-class voters, and why the Democratic Party continues to hemorrhage support.The episode also features Ilyse Hogue, the former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America and the co-creator of a new $20 million project called Speaking With American Men, or SAM. The initiative aims to understand — and win back — young male voters who’ve drifted to the right. “ A lot of what we heard from people is that they feel invisible to the Democratic coalition,” she says. You can hear the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Catch and revoke” — the phrase sounds like something from a dystopian thriller, but it's Secretary of State Marco Rubio's very real characterization of the Trump administration's new one-strike visa cancellation policy targeting foreign students. A State Department spokesperson said that "full social media vetting" will be used for visa interviews and will be ongoing while the student remains in the U.S. for studies.On this week's episode of The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to anthropologist Sophia Goodfriend and Chris Gelardi, a reporter for New York Focus investigating surveillance and the criminal legal system. They unpack how AI and surveillance technology are being weaponized to silence dissent on American campuses and fuel the deportations of immigrants nationwide."In the past few months, as we see the expansion of government surveillance, the crackdown of ICE on both legal residents and undocumented people in this country, we see these technologies lending a veneer of algorithmic efficiency to increasingly draconian policies," says Goodfriend.To understand more about the tech infrastructure powering deportations and what this digital crackdown means for everyone, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.