Janine Jackson interviewed CODEPINK’s Danaka Katovich about attacks on activists for the May 2, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin
Janine Jackson: It is misleading to portray public protest simply in photos of people being dragged off the street by law enforcement, because protest and dissent take many forms, some less visible than others. Still, the people in those photos have meaning for us, about being vocal and visible in frightening times. If standing up and speaking out loud in oppressive times were easy, well, there’d be less oppressive times, wouldn’t there? Whatever one’s imaginings about what they woulda, coulda done, the reality is that it is not a walk in the park to protest in person, knowing that you may face a lethally armed officer, tasked with grabbing you and throwing you in a cell, with the weight of the state behind them.
The state also has many forms of attacks on protesters and protest, and those are not always so visible, either. All of that is in play right now, and here to talk about it is Danaka Katovich, national co-director of the group CODEPINK. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Danaka Katovich.
Danaka Katovich: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.
JJ: I know that you see what’s happening to CODEPINK as just a piece of a bigger issue, but maybe first tell us a little about what’s been happening to CODEPINK in the last few months.
DK: Yeah. I think this new wave started with Sen. Tom Cotton, who’s the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When he was at a hearing, during a CODEPINK disruption of the hearing, he stated, like it was a fact, that CODEPINK is funded by the Chinese Communist Party. We’re not, but someone in such a high position of power saying that is difficult to navigate, scary; you wonder what they’re going to do next.
And the very next day or two days later, Sen. Jim Banks, in a different Senate hearing, repeated and regurgitated the same lies about us, and asked Pam Bondi to investigate CODEPINK for these fake and not real ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
And they’re doing that to—you know, we’re very in their face. We’re in Congress every single day, challenging them on the genocide in Gaza, and their support for the genocide in Gaza, and their constant willingness to ignore the American public. It’s their job to listen to the American public and represent us, but they don’t do that. And we’re very in their face, and they’re trying to intimidate us, and scare us into being quiet.
JJ: MAGA couldn’t hate CODEPINK any more than they do, to the extent that they know you exist. So is the hope to isolate CODEPINK, even among other pro-Palestinian groups?
DK: I don’t think so, to be honest. In my honest assessment, I think they are going after us because we’re a well-known group—online, at least—and we posteverything that happens to us, and all the interactions that we have, to educate the public on what’s really going on in Congress. So I don’t think it’s to isolate us from the Palestine movement. If it is, it’s absolutely not working.
JJ: I sense that CODEPINK, along with other groups, understands that you have to talk around dominant media narratives. I just saw a message today talking about how simple it is to want a child born in Gaza to live. I think people can get explained away from that basic human understanding, told that politics is over your head and let smarter folks decide. But folks who don’t do organizing think maybe you just come up with a magic message, but it’s much more human to human than that, isn’t it?
DK: Oh, absolutely. And that’s what’s really rooted me in this work, is our position on this is not fringe. A poll came out last week that said 70% of Democratic voters do not support sending weapons to Israel. That is so vastly different than what that poll would’ve been two years ago, or was two years ago.
I’ve not had to read a million books—I mean, I have, but a lot of people haven’t read a million books—to have the opinion that Palestinians in Gaza, and children in Gaza, deserve every single right to dignity and life that any person on this Earth has.
Because we’re seeing their faces, we’re hearing their voices. We see what they’re going through on our phones every single day. There’s no shortage of content coming out of Gaza that Palestinians have demonstrated their humanity in the worst situations of their life. And I think people don’t have to be even politically aware to not support what’s going on in Palestine.
JJ: The expansive and transparently intimidating effort, the work that’s being applied against CODEPINK, to say you’re funded by Communist China, that’s meant to keep folks from listening to you, or thinking about what you have to say. But that intimidation could be applied to anyone that they designate they don’t want us to hear from. So it’s not like they’ve set themselves any guardrails. This is a bigger thing.
DK: Yeah. What’s funny is this morning, before we did this interview, the Trump administration was doing a press conference about Amazon. Amazon said that they were going to post the prices for how the tariffs are affecting consumers, and the Trump administration and the press secretary, I can’t remember her name, said Amazon is partnering with a Communist China propaganda arm.
JJ: Right. So it’s a go-to.
DK: It’s literally whoever they disagree with, which is probably great for us, because they’re completely making their propaganda seem so pathetic and deluded.
JJ: Right. But following from that, because it’s fascinating to me, in the way that MAGA and the right will just throw charges out there. And then when they’re disproven, they’ll say, Yeah, but they’re really still true.
It reminds me of the way prosecutors will never accept a wrongful conviction: If he didn’t do what we sent him to prison for, he did something else. So we were still right to send him to prison.
And I think, at a certain point, an observer has to acknowledge that truth is not the point. It’s just us versus them. And I think a lot of folks lose the plot right there, because we don’t know how to operate in a system where truth doesn’t matter. So in the face of just blatantly false charges against you, how do you keep going forward, and help other folks go forward themselves?
DK: I think one way we’ve done it is help people realize just how ridiculous it is, because they can say whatever they want, and they will continue to say whatever they want. They’re saying it as if it’s a fact. Even though, if any of this were true, they would’ve shut us down years ago, when they started bringing up these allegations. I think that is one way we approach it, is just making it as ridiculous as it is, and unserious as it is.
JJ: Finally, we need a brave independent press corps right now, that could push back on these scurrilous attacks—scratch ’em, you can see their falsehood, but they’re part of attacks on democracy and on human rights. Corporate media—spotty, good things here and there. But in the main, I don’t see it.
But of course, corporate media are not the only media. I wonder what your thoughts are, overall, on the state of journalism and protest, and just what you would like to see from reporters in this moment.
DK: When Mahmoud was arrested by ICE agents, I think there was a different sort of pushback than there were on groups that are being attacked in such ways, like these vague and false claims about supporting terrorism, or supporting Hamas, or being funded by these foreign agencies or whatever. I think there was some pushback from even mainstream media. They were asking critical-thinking questions that I feel like they’ve been completely not doing for years and years.
But when it’s a group, when it’s CODEPINK or all these other Palestine organizations, they don’t ask these critical-thinking questions that they’ve asked when it happens to individuals. So, when someone accuses a feminist organization in the US of being funded by a foreign government, I would like to hear them challenge that, because it’s a direct attack on civil society. We are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and they’re trying to take us down a peg, and even mainstream media who claim to support women’s rights and all of these things don’t even question it at all. So I’d love to hear them actually be critical of the Trump administration in a way that’s not just benefiting their specific neoliberal values.
Danaka Katovich: “Their goal here is to make people afraid of expressing a very normal human opinion.”
JJ: And then, any final thoughts for activists who might be kind of afraid to go out in the street or to join an organization, because they feel targeted and fearful? What do you have to say to folks?
DK: I would say the fear is the point of all of this. I fluctuated between being scared that they want to shut down CODEPINK… The thing that I come back to is, their goal here is to make people afraid of expressing a very normal human opinion. The point is fear. And I think if they’ve instilled fear, then they’re winning. And I think it’s OK to be afraid. I think it’s normal and human. But in this trajectory that we’re on, it will only get scarier to resist what is happening.
JJ: And we’ll do it in community, yeah?
DK: Absolutely.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Danaka Katovich. She’s national co-director at the group CODEPINK. Thank you so much, Danaka Katovich, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
A sweeping pro-Israel bill backed by Republican leadership and AIPAC collapsed this week after a rare revolt by right-wing lawmakers who argued it posed a direct threat to Americans’ First Amendment rights.
The bill, H.R. 867 — known as the IGO Anti-Boycott Act — would have imposed up to $1 million in fines and prison terms of up to 20 years on Americans who support international boycotts of Israel, even those led by the United Nations.
The bill had been scheduled for a vote Monday but was abruptly pulled from the House calendar following backlash from a broad coalition of critics, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and conservative firebrands like Rep. Thomas Massie, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Going after public broadcasters is…part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark.”
The death of former 1960s radical turned right-wing provocateur David Horowitz brought to mind the time he called me “stupid” (Michigan Daily, 9/8/03) because he disliked a column (Michigan Daily, 9/2/03) I wrote about neoconservatism.
I was reminded of that again just days later when Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25), a journalist who left Occupy Wall Street populism for ruling class sycophancy, attacked my recent article, “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook” (FAIR.org, 4/25/25). In his response, titled, “No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand in Hand.’ Just the Opposite,” Taibbi asked, “How nuts do you have to be to think ‘strong state media’ doesn’t have a dark side?”
It’s a straw man argument, with a heavy dose of McCarthyism thrown in to boot. I’d encourage everyone to read both pieces in full, but here I’ll break down the main problems with Taibbi’s piece.
Public vs. state media
Matt Taibbi (Racket News, 5/4/25): “The above is either satire or written by someone consciously ignoring the history of state media.”
Taibbi’s main trick is to pretend that “state media” and “public media” are interchangeable. They’re not. State media consists of government propaganda outlets that answer directly to executive authority, rather than independent editors. Public media are independent outlets that receive taxpayer subsidies. As I wrote in my piece, NPR “only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB,” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Obviously, if NPR and PBS were “state media,” Trump wouldn’t need to try to shut them down; he would already control them editorially. That’s not to say that they’re perfectly independent. FAIR writers, including myself (11/26/20), have for decades been critical of NPR and PBS political coverage. FAIR (e.g., 6/1/99, 9/17/04, 5/11/24, 10/24/24) has pointed out again and again that right-wing complaints about supposed left-wing bias in public broadcasting have repeatedly resulted in compromised coverage. (I noted in the very piece Taibbi purports to critique that Republican critics of public broadcasting “use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right.”)
FAIR’s Julie Hollar (FAIR.org, 5/2/25) wrote just days before Taibbi’s post that NPR had downplayed the Trump administration’s attack on free speech, taking a false “both sides” approach to the issue. So, yes, FAIR is outspoken about the “dark side” of NPR and PBS, and Taibbi surely knows it. But he doesn’t seem interested in an honest argument.
His words, not mine
White House Wire (4/30/25) is already the kind of state media Taibbi warns PBS could turn into.
Taibbi used quotation marks around “strong state media” twice, when those aren’t the words I used—they’re his. He claimed that I was “consciously ignoring the history of state media,” though much of my piece concerned state efforts to force conformity on public outlets. While failing to engage with the rest of my article, he took the reader to Russia in the 1990s, when independent journalists (like himself) were working:
That period, like the lives of many of those folks, didn’t last long. Vladimir Putin sent masked police into the last independent TV station on May 11, 2000, capping less than ten years of quasi-free speech. “Strong state media” remained, but actual journalism vanished.
I’m very open about my opposition to the tyranny of autocrats shutting down and raiding journalistic institutions (FAIR.org, 5/19/21, 6/8/23, 8/14/23, 10/22/24). And my article noted that other wannabe autocrats are attacking public broadcasters, notably in Italy, Israel and Argentina, a fact that does not undermine but rather supports the idea that there’s a correlation between public broadcasting and democracy.
If Taibbi were truly worried about “state media,” he wouldn’t be mad at a meager government subsidy to NPR or PBS, but instead would show more concern for something like the Trump administration’s White House Wire, “a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers” (Guardian, 5/1/25). And mentioning Putin’s attacks on “independent TV” is certainly a better argument against Trump’s FCC investigations into private US outlets like ABC and CBS than it is against the existence of NPR or PBS.
Taibbi’s invocation of “Putin” and “Russia” as a reason why we should not be concerned about Trump’s attacks on public broadcasting is such an illogical non sequitur, it makes more sense to interpret it as standard-issue McCarthyism. This is bolstered by Taibbi’s invocation of more paranoia about any state subsidy for media:
Yes, Car Talk and the MacNeil/LehrerReport were cool, but outlets like Neues Deutschland, Télé Zaïre and Tung Padewat more often went “hand in hand” with fingernail factories or firing squads than democracy.
He seemed to be trying to scare the reader into thinking that we are just one episode of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! away from the Cambodian genocide.
The neo–Cold War trick is to just say “Putin” enough times in hopes that the reader will eventually realize that the US government funding anything is a sign of impending tyranny. It’s an old joke to accuse greying reactionaries of hating publicly funded snowplows because “that’s socialism,” but that appears to be where Taibbi is these days.
A sloppy attack
Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (International Journal of Press/Politics, 7/24): “High levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.”
Taibbi pretended to refute my claim that “strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand,” but in his article’s large block quotation, he omitted two embedded citations to scholarly studies that support this assertion. One of those was from Political Quarterly (3/28/24), the other was an Annenberg School study (3/16/22) whose co-author, Annenberg’s Victor Pickard, has also written about the importance of public media for TheNation (4/15/25).
Taibbi could have challenged those studies if he wanted, and good-faith disagreement is welcome. Omitting them from the quotation, though, leaves out the critical part of my statement.
Taibbi continued:
People who grew up reading the BBC or AFP may imagine a correlation between a state media and democracy, but a more dependable indicator of a free society is whether or not obnoxious private journalism (like the Russian Top Secret, whose editor Artyom Borovik died in a mysterious plane crash) is allowed to proliferate.
I’ve written at length about that dangers that the Trump administration poses when it comes to censorship, intimidating journalists, lawfare against media and using the power of the state to chill speech (FAIR.org, 12/16/24, 1/23/25, 2/18/25, 2/26/25, 3/28/25, 4/29/25). Taibbi ignored this part of my record, which is referenced in part in the very article to which he’s responding. This is crucial, because my defense of PBS and NPR in this instance is part of a general belief that the government should not attack media organizations, public or private.
As someone who read Taibbi enthusiastically when he was a Rolling Stone and New York Press writer, it’s sad to see someone I once admired so sloppily attack FAIR’s defense of press freedom against anti-democratic state power. But on the bright side, his outburst acts as an inspiration for a place like FAIR to continue defending free speech and a free press, while mercilessly calling out state propagandists who disguise themselves as journalists.
President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that his administration is implementing a 100 percent tariff on all films produced in foreign countries, denouncing them as “propaganda” as he aims to wrest further control over information and the media in the U.S. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that the tariff would help revive the “DYING” U.S. film industry. He dubiously declared it a…
A growing coalition of activists, civil rights groups, and concerned citizens is pushing back against anti-boycott laws in the Midwest, which they say are eroding fundamental freedoms. Organizers are starting with efforts to repeal such legislation in Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin. These states have come under scrutiny for enforcing laws — often passed quietly — that penalize contractors or…
Green Card–holding students are being abducted from the streets by agents of the state for attending protests and writing op-eds. News outlets are being investigated by the FCC for reporting that displeases the president. Federal web pages are being scrubbed of a lengthy list of words, including “race,” “transgender,” “women” and “climate.”
“Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy Era?” NPR (Morning Edition, 4/7/25) asked—with the argument for the former position being that “conservatives are just, in general, much more willing to speak their mind.”
NPR responded to this shocking government attack on free speech with a Morning Edition series on “The State of the First Amendment,” whose introductory episode’s headline (4/7/25) declared freedom of speech to be “shifting under the Trump administration”; it promised that the show would be “exploring how.”
The wishy-washy language wasn’t a promising start, and the segment only went downhill from there, taking an “on the one hand/on the other hand” framing to an assault on core democratic rights.
Host Leila Fadel explained: “All this week, we are going to look at the state of free speech in the United States. Who feels more free to speak? Who feels silenced?” After offering soundbites from people on “both sides” of this debate, she asked:
Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and ’50s, when fearmongering around Soviet and Communist influence led to the political persecution of academics and leftists?
It’s a vital question with a very clear and obvious answer—one that NPR, facing an investigation from the FCC into its corporate funding and a drive by Trump to end its federal funding, and laboring under ideological overseers installed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), refused to offer its listeners. (Trump signed a new executive order last night to attempt to defund NPR and PBS, accusing them of “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”)
‘Too early to tell’
NPR‘s Leila Fadel (4/7/25): “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?” (Photo: Mike Morgan/NPR)
After airing Trump’s claims to have “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” Fadel offered brief descriptions of “attacks on the press” and actions that have “broken other norms as well, often in legally questionable ways.” (The first example: “Universities face uncertain futures as they become targets of the Trump administration.”)
The episode then took its balanced framing to an interview segment featuring two legal scholars, Lee Bollinger, former Columbia University president, and Jonathan Turley, a Fox News regular. Fadel introduced the two by noting that “they see the threats to [the First Amendment] in this moment differently. Bollinger sees danger under Trump,” while “Turley says he thinks this president could be an unexpected advocate.”
In her questioning of Turley, Fadel did rebut his claim that the Biden administration and social media companies colluded to censor conservative speech. She then brought up “actions by this administration that seem to be chilling speech,” citing “college professors warning students not to discuss or post opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza or Russia’s war in Ukraine for fear of deportation or arrest.” She noted as well that “government websites have taken down thousands of pages featuring information on vaccines, hate crimes, diversity.” She asked: “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?”
It’s perhaps meant to be a tough question to make him admit that calling Trump a protector of free speech would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. (Turley responds, “Well, it’s too early to tell whether the Trump administration will make free speech truly part of its legacy in the second term.”) But Fadel’s language—”is censorship shifting?”—turns around and concedes the right’s false claims of censorship under the Biden administration (which she’d just rebutted!). Fadel and NPR offer only two ways of looking at the situation: Trump is increasing free speech, or censorship is just a swinging pendulum whose victims change as administrations change.
The segment wraps up with Bollinger and Turley finding at least one point of agreement: that the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil violates, in Turley’s words, “part of the core protections that define us as a people.”
‘They feel more free’
NPR (4/7/25) framed the First Amendment question as “who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”
The online version of the show (4/7/25), in which the audio transcript is condensed into an article format, bent even further backwards to find balance. It explained that the series “will explore who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”
That exploration started by naming real censorship that has already taken place: “scrubbing reports and federal grant applications of words the Trump administration has banned,” fears that “participating in protests could lead to deportation,” an online portal where people can “file complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion lessons in class with the US Department of Education.”
If this were a report on a foreign country, it’s hard to imagine NPR offering an “on the other hand” to that list of clearly authoritarian crackdowns on speech. But here comes the next paragraph, trotting out the obligatory balance:
Yet plenty of others—including anti-abortion activists, the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty and members of university Republican clubs—say they feel more free today to express views without fear of a backlash now that President Trump is back in office.
The article eliminates references to Turley and Bollinger, but includes two quotes. One is from a history teacher who feels afraid to answer student questions related to the Trump administration. That’s “balanced” by one from the president of the College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, who says they have more members willing to “be outwardly and openly conservative than we did before the election.”
Orwellian redefinition
When you define the threat to free speech, as the New York Times (3/18/22) does, as “being shamed or shunned”—that is, criticized by others’ speech—it opens the door to suppressing speech in the name of free speech.
This absurd and harmful false balance NPR creates is predicated on the idea that “free speech” can mean simply how unconstrained a person feels to speak what might be unpopular opinions, including the various forms of bigotry and disinformation that have been unleashed by the Trump administration. But free speech is not, in fact, about feelings; it’s about consequences. It’s one thing to feel less afraid that your peers will criticize or even yell at you for speaking your opinions on campus. It’s another to fear that expressing your opinions will bring down official sanction, up to and including banishment from the country.
Free speech is not the freedom from “backlash” from those who disagree with your views, despite the MAGA movement’s best efforts to convince people of that—aided and abetted by many “liberal” elites and pundits who feel they have been “canceled” by left-wing criticism of their own (often bigoted) views. If college Republicans, anti-abortion activists or the Moms for Liberty feel constrained by peers harshly criticizing them or not inviting them to speak at public events, that’s not censorship; that’s ideas being contested in the public arena. Their right-wing perspectives still have many, many places to be heard, including the huge right-wing media ecosystem.
NPR concluded its article, “[Trump’s] critics say his concern for free speech is only for speech his administration finds acceptable.” That is, in fact, the only way you can make sense of the claim that Trump stands for “free speech”—by defining it as the ability of the approved people to speak, while those who would criticize (and thereby “cancel”) them are silenced (FAIR.org, 3/4/25).
The Trump administration is bringing the power of the state down on people who express opinions and ideas it finds objectionable. The consequences of that power, for both individuals and democracy, are quite dire. When NPR talks about “who feels more free to speak” and “who feels silenced,” it’s defining free speech the way MAGA wants it to be defined—as a vibe, not as a right. Ultimately, though, NPR‘s complicity in this Orwellian redefinition will not protect them from Trump’s vendetta.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here, or via Bluesky:@kellymcb.bsky.social. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.
This week on CounterSpin: You can say someone ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to vote, or to have our experience and history recognized—as though that were a passive descriptor; she ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to be seen and heard. The website of the Kairos Democracy Project has a quote from John Lewis, reminding us: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”
Tanya Clay House is board chair at Kairos and a longtime advocate for the multiracial democracy that the Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail—in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country. As part of that, she’s part of an ongoing project called Freedom to Learn and its present campaign, called #HandsOffOurHistory. We hear from Tanya Clay House about that work this week.
Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin
Also on the show: Corporate news media evince lofty principles about the First Amendment, but when people actually use it, the response is more telling. When USA Today covered activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported: “Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world.” You see how that works: If you’re the little-noticing “public,” you’re cool; but if you band together with other people and speak out, well, now you’re a “protester,” and that’s different—and marginal. Whatever they say in their Martin Luther King Day editorials, elite media’s day-to-day message is: ‘Normal people don’t protest.’ In 2025, there’s an ominous addendum: ‘Or else.’
Danaka Katovich is co-director of the feminist grassroots anti-war organization CODEPINK, currently but not for the first time at the sharp end of state efforts to silence activists and activism. We hear from her this week.
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump—and many of his most prominent right-wing supporters—are directly linked to some of the most radically pro-war, pro-Israel organizations in the country. These connections form a sprawling web of lobbying groups, tech billionaires, and media figures who consistently promote Israeli interests above those of ordinary Americans.
Why has the pro-Trump right suddenly pivoted from branding itself as a bastion of free speech to openly supporting censorship and state-led crackdowns? This MintPress News investigation uncovers a donor-driven advocacy network driving that ideological shift.
Wikipedia editor Molly White told the Washington Post (4/25/25) that the Trump administration was “weaponizing laws to try to silence high-quality independent information.”
The Trump administration is very upset with Wikipedia, the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia. Ed Martin, acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter (4/24/25) to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s parent nonprofit, accusing it of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”
The letter said:
Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.
The letter threatened the foundation’s tax-exempt status, demanding “detailed information about its editorial process, its trust and safety measures, and how it protects its information from foreign actors,” the Washington Post (4/25/25) reported.
Wikipedia has been attacked before by countries with censorious reputations. Russia threatened to block Wikipedia “because of its entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” reported Euractiv (3/4/22), and the site has been blocked in China (BBC, 5/14/19). Turkey lifted a three-year ban on Wikipedia in 2020 (Deutsche Welle, 1/16/20).
Martin’s letter indicates that the Trump administration is inclined to join the club.
‘Notice a theme?’
Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post (6/25/24) that Wikipedia displayed “bias” because its article about her used to quote her tweet (6/30/14) about Hamas: “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis.”
Right-wing media in the US have been complaining about Wikipedia for a while, displaying the victim mentality that fuels the conservative drive to punish media out of favor with the MAGA movement. Here are a few headlines from Pirate Wires, a right-wing news site that covers technology and culture:
“How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel/Palestine Narrative” (10/24/24)
“How Soros-Backed Operatives Took Over Key Roles at Wikipedia” (1/6/25)
“Wikipedia Editors Officially Deem Trump a Fascist” (10/29/24)
“More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” reported the New York Post (3/18/25), citing the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League. “Conservative public figures, as well as right-leaning organizations, regularly fall victim to an ideological bias that persists among Wikipedia editors,” Post writer Bethany Mandel (6/25/24) alleged, citing research by the right-wing Manhattan Institute.
Under the headline “Big Tech Must Block Wikipedia Until It Stops Censoring and Pushing Disinformation,” the Post (2/5/25) editorialized that the site “maintains a blacklist compendium of sources that page writers and editors are allowed to cite—and …which will get you in trouble.” The latter category, the Post claims, includes “Daily Caller, the Federalist, the Washington Free Beacon, Fox News and even the Post. Notice a theme?”
(Wikipedia’s list of “perennial sources,” which are color-coded by reliability, marks numerous left-wing as well as right-wing sources as “generally unreliable” or “deprecated”; the fact that the Post implies only right-wing sources are listed is an indication that its reputation as “generally unreliable for factual reporting” is well-deserved.)
‘Stop donating to Wokepedia’
Early Wikipedia staffer Larry Sanger told Fox News (3/7/25) he wants the government to investigate government influence on Wikipedia.
This hostility is amplified by one of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, who accused the site of having a left-wing bias on Fox News (7/16/21, 7/22/21), although he has reportedly not been involved with the site since leaving in 2002 (Washington Times, 7/16/21). He even requested Elon Musk and the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to investigate possible government influence at Wikipedia (Fox News, 3/7/25). It’s an Orwellian situation, asking the government to use its muscle against the site on the grounds that it might have previously been influenced by the government.
Musk, the mega-billionaire who bought Twitter, rebranded it as X and lurched it to the right (Guardian, 1/15/24; NBC News, 10/31/24), also has his problems with Wikipedia. Before he took on a co-presidential role in the Trump White House, Musk (X, 12/24/24) posted, “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation is also gunning for Wikipedia. The think tank developed Project 2025, the conservative policy document guiding the Trump administration (Atlantic, 4/24/25) that has also called for tighter government control of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, it “plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic,” the Forward (1/7/25) reported. The paper speculated that the group was targeting “a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions.”
For all the right-wing media agita about Wikipedia‘s alleged pro-Palestinian bias, there is of plenty evidence that Zionists have for years been trying to push the site into a more pro-Israel direction (American Prospect, 5/1/08; Guardian, 8/18/10; Bloomberg, 3/7/25).
Capturing online media
AI’s heavy reliance on Wikipedia for training data (Verge, 4/17/25) means Wikipedia‘s point of view will largely shape the answers we get from AI.
One might ask, “Who cares if Wikipedia is biased?” Lots of media are biased in one direction or another. And the notion that any nonprofit organization’s political leaning requires its status be investigated is ludicrous, considering that three of the organizations hyping Wikipedia’s alleged wrongdoing—the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and the ADL—have the same tax-exempt status. It’s hard to imagine the New York Post accepting a Democratic administration pressuring these groups to change their right-wing positions.
Wikipedia remains popular, with some 4 billion visits a month worldwide. In addition to its lengthy entries, it’s a repository of outside citations that are important for researchers on a wide range of subjects. AI models heavily rely on Wikipedia articles for training—so much so that Wikimedia offers developers a special dataset to help keep the regular site from being overwhelmed by bots (Verge, 4/17/25).
Wikipedia is being targeted by an administration that clearly wants to bring all of Big Tech and major online media under its ideological watch. So far, the right has made progress in capturing the giants in Big Tech and social media. Musk turned the site formerly known as Twitter into a right-wing noise machine (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Rolling Stone, 1/24/24; PBS, 8/13/24; Guardian, 1/4/25).
“In recent months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a series of specific moves to signal that Meta may embrace a more conservative administration,” reported NBC News (1/8/25). Google donated $1 million to this year’s inauguration fund (CNBC, 1/9/25). Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has grown closer to Trump (Axios, 2/27/25; FAIR.org, 2/28/25).
At the same time, the administration is disappearing international students who voice disagreement with US policy (FAIR.org, 3/19/25, 3/28/25), seeking to defund public broadcasting (FAIR.org, 4/25/25), attacking academic freedom (Guardian, 4/27/25) and weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).
So it is fitting that this administration also wants to pressure Wikipedia into moving rightward. What differentiates an authoritarian regime from other right-wing administrations is that it doesn’t just establish extreme policies, but it seeks to eradicate any space where free thought and discussion can take place. The Trump administration’s actions against media and academia show he’s not just right-wing, but an authoritarian in a classic sense.
The efficacy of Martin’s letter remains to be seen, but this is an attack on Wikipedia’s editorial independence. It will undoubtedly cause other websites and media outlets with nonprofit status to wonder if their content will be the next in the government’s crosshairs.
A top official in the Department of Labor this week informed all staff members that they could face criminal charges if they speak to journalists, former employees or others about agency business. A memo sent Monday by Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff, Jihun Han, and obtained by ProPublica, states that “individuals who disclose confidential information or engage in…
The government funds institutions that stretch across American society. The Trump administration is demanding the relinquishment of constitutional rights to keep the money flowing.
US President Donald Trump and his team is pursuing a white man’s racist agenda that is corrupt at its core. Trump’s advisor Elon Musk, who often seems to be the actual president, is handing his companies multiple contracts as his team takes over or takes down multiple government departments and agencies.
Trump wants to be the “king” of America and is already floating the idea of a third term, an action that would be an obvious violation of the US Constitution he swore to uphold but is doing his best to violate and destroy.
Every time we hear the Trump team spouting a “return to America’s golden age,” they are talking about 60-80 years ago, when white people ruled and schools, hospitals, restrooms and entire neighborhoods were segregated and African Americans and other minority groups had little opportunity.
Every photo of leaders from that time features large numbers of white American men. Trump’s cabinet, in contrast to recent cabinets of Democratic presidents, is mainly white and male.
This is where the US going. And lest any white women feel they are included in the Trump train, think again. Anything to do with women’s empowerment — including whites — is being scrubbed off the agenda by Trump minions in multiple government departments and agencies.
“Women” along with things like “climate change,” “diversity,” “equality,” “gender equity,” “justice,” etc are being removed from US government websites, policies and grant funding.
The white racist campaign against people of colour has seen iconic Americans removed from government websites. For example, a photo and story about Jackie Robinson, a military veteran, was recently removed from the Defense Department website as part of the Trump team’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Broke whites-only colour barrier
Robinson was not only a military veteran, he was the first African American to break the whites-only colour barrier in Major League Baseball and went on to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame for his stellar performance with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
How about the removal of reference to the Army’s 442nd infantry regiment from World War II that is the most decorated unit in US military history? The 442nd was a fighting unit comprised of nearly all second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry who more than proved their courage and loyalty to the United States during World War II.
The Defense Department removing references to these iconic Americans is an outrage. But showing the moronic level of the Trump team, they also deleted a photo of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II because the pilot named it after his mother, “Enola Gay.”
Despite the significance of the Enola Gay airplane in American military history, that latter word couldn’t get past the Pentagon’s scrubbing team, who were determined to wash away anything that hinted at, well, anything other than white, heterosexual male. And there is plenty more that was wiped off the history record of the Defense Department.
Meanwhile, Trump, his team and the Republican Party in general while claiming to be focused on eliminating corruption is authorising it on a grand scale.
Elon Musk’s redirection of contracts to Starlink, SpaceX and other companies he owns is one example among many. What is happening in the American government today is like a bank robbery in broad daylight.
The Trump team fired a score of inspectors general — the very officials who actively work to prevent fraud and theft in the US government. They are eliminating or effectively neutering every enforcement agency, from EPA (which ensures clean air and other anti-pollution programmes) and consumer protection to the National Labor Relations Board, where the mega companies like Musk’s, Facebook, Google and others have pending complaints from employees seeking a fair review of their work issues.
Huge cuts to social security
Trump with the aid of the Republican-controlled Congress is going to make huge cuts to Medicaid and Social Security — which will affect Marshallese living in America as much as Americans — all in order to fund tax cuts for the richest Americans and big corporations.
Then there is Trump’s targeting of judges who rule against his illegal and unconstitutional initiatives — Trump criticism that is parroted by Fox News and other Trump minions, and is leading to things like efforts in the Congress to possibly impeach judges or restrict their legal jurisdiction.
These are all anti-democracy, anti-US constitution actions that are already undermining the rule of law in the US. And we haven’t yet mentioned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its sweeping deportations without due process that is having calamitous collateral damage for people swept up in these deportation raids.
ICE is deporting people legally in the US studying at US universities for writing articles or speaking about justice for Palestinians. Whether we like what the writer or speaker says, a fundamental principle of democracy in the US is that freedom of expression is protected by the US constitution under the First Amendment.
That is no longer the case for Trump and his Republican team, which is happily abandoning the rule of law, due process and everything else that makes America what it is.
The irony is that multiple countries, normally American allies, have in recent weeks issued travel advisories to their citizens about traveling to the United States in the present environment where anyone who isn’t white and doesn’t fit into a male or female designation is subject to potential detention and deportation.
The immigration chill from the US will no doubt reduce visitor flow resulting in big losses in revenue, possibly in the billions of dollars, for tourism-related businesses.
Marshallese must pay attention
Marshallese need to pay attention to what’s happening and have valid passports at the ready. Sadly, if Marshallese have any sort of conviction no matter how ancient or minor it is likely they will be targets for deportation.
Further, even the visa-free access privilege for Marshallese and other Micronesians is apparently now under scrutiny by US authorities based on a statement by US Ambassador Laura Stone published recently by the Journal
It is a difficult time being one of the closest allies of the US because the RMI must engage at many levels with a US government that is presently in turmoil.
Giff Johnson is the editor of the Marshall Islands Journal and one of the Pacific’s leading journalists and authors. He is the author of several books, including Don’t Ever Whisper, Idyllic No More, and Nuclear Past, Unclear Future. This editorial was first published on 11 April 2025 and is reprinted with permission of the Marshall Islands Journal.marshallislandsjournal.com
Freedom of speech at the Marshall Islands High School
Messages of “inclusiveness” painted by Marshall Islands High School students in the capital Majuro. Image: Giff Johnson/Marshall Islands Journal
The above is one section of the outer wall at Marshall Islands High School. Surely, if this was a public school in America today, these messages would already have been whitewashed away by the Trump team censors who don’t like any reference to “inclusiveness,” “women,” and especially “gender equality.”
However, these messages painted by MIHS students are very much in keeping with Marshallese society and customary practices of welcoming visitors, inclusiveness and good treatment of women in this matriarchal society.
But don’t let President Trump know Marshallese think like this. — Giff Johnson
In a federal court in Maine on Friday, two human rights advocates argued that U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic and travel sanctions against International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan violates their First Amendment rights, because of Trump’s stipulation that U.S. citizens cannot provide Khan with any services or material support as long as the sanctions are in place.
There are reasons that the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is an opaque entity for many people. The fact that there is a federal agency setting the terms for media companies’ operations conflicts with many Americans’ understanding of the press corps as a group of brave, independent individuals looking to tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may.
There are, in fact, many community-supported, differently structured news outlets doing just that. But, listeners know, the big major papers and stations and channels we may look to for news are owned and sponsored by big profit-driven corporations that share the status quo–supporting interests of other big profit-driven corporations.
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press’s Jessica González about Trump’s FCC for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: There are reasons that the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is an opaque entity for many people. The fact that there is a federal agency setting the terms for media companies’ operations conflicts with many Americans’ understanding of the press corps as a group of brave, independent individuals looking to tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may.
There are, in fact, many community-supported, differently structured news outlets doing just that. But, listeners know, the big major papers and stations and channels we may look to for news are owned and sponsored by big profit-driven corporations that share the status quo–supporting interests of other big profit-driven corporations.
In allowing these companies’ increased conglomeration, and sidelining their nominal public interest obligations, the FCC has long played a role in determining whose voices are heard and whose are not. But maybe not quite as loud, as proudly prejudiced and bare-knuckled a role as right now.
Our guest reports how Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has got straight to dangerous work, undermining free speech and press freedom right out of the gate. Jessica González is co-CEO at the public advocacy group Free Press. She joins us now by phone from Los Angeles. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jessica González.
JJ: As you have noted, Brendan Carr is not so much regulating as delivering on Trump’s threats to punish anyone who reports critically about him, including by giving any space to anyone who opposes him politically. It’s beyond the beyond, and we see there’s no piece of government that MAGA will not weaponize.
And so appeals to gentility, and “let’s agree to disagree,” are just not serving the public, not serving marginalized communities or democracy, even a little bit.
So what do you have your eye on right now? What should we know is not “maybe going to happen” with a Trump-led FCC, but actually happening?
JG: You know, Janine, I remember 10, 15 years ago when the concerns we had about the FCC were structural in nature. They were allowing runaway media consolidation, which was resulting in fewer voices, and particularly fewer voices of color, controlling the narratives that we were hearing on broadcast media. Or we were concerned about net neutrality, making sure that internet service providers were not allowed to stop or slow down the traffic online, so that everyone had an equal opportunity to be heard. These, of course, were free speech issues, but they weren’t quite as in-focus threats to free expression as what we’re seeing now out of the Brendan Carr FCC under Donald Trump.
Brendan Carr has systematically gone after broadcasters who have given Trump’s political opponents airtime, or who have factchecked the president. For instance, in his first week in office, he revived three out of the four claims against broadcasters that the FCC chair under Biden had dismissed as politically biased. He left in place the dismissal of a complaint against Fox News, and revitalized the complaints against ABC, NBC and CBS, under claims that are specious, to say the least.
It’s very clear that his intent is to punish broadcasters who have broadcast opposing viewpoints—in ABC‘s case, factchecked the president at a debate before the election, in CBS’s case, they aired on 60 Minutes a recording of Kamala Harris that was edited as per normal standards in broadcast. We saw Brendan Carr going afterNBC when they aired an SNLsegment with Kamala Harris, even though they gave the president airtime the next day during a NASCAR race. This appears to be a clear and systematic effort to weaponize the FCC against broadcasters whose political speech, or just their news reporting, the president and his allies don’t like.
Another case in San Francisco is an investigation that the FCC chair has opened into KCBS radio station, where he is complaining that KCBS aired information about an ICE raid that was happening in the area. This is clearly First Amendment‒protected speech that these broadcasters are—you know, we expect them to cover the news, that’s presumably part of a public interest obligation. But the FCC chair is going after any political speech or any news reporting or any speech, frankly, that the president and his allies don’t like.
Jessica Gonzalez: “They are directing the reporters to be careful, because they fear government retribution for their speech.”
This is chilling. We heard from FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, who’s a Democrat, that she has visited radio and television broadcasters across the country, and is already hearing that they are directing the reporters to be careful, because they fear government retribution for their speech. And this is exactly the type of environment where authoritarianism thrives. Not only is Brendan Carr going after broadcasters, which are clearly regulated entities under the FCC’s scope of work, he’s also, in his diatribe in Project 2025, threatened to go after social media companies, and forced them to leave up hate and lies.
So this is an all-out war on the First Amendment. It’s chilling. And this is the type of stuff that our allies in Hungary tell us they were seeing before Orban took power. A couple weeks ago, we had a convening with András Biró-Nagy from Hungary, and Maria Ressa from the Philippines, who tracked Duterte’s authoritarian takeover of the government, and they were pointing out how similar the attacks on free speech in the United States look to the attacks on free speech in their countries, the similar tactics of quashing dissent, dehumanizing people, of going after minority groups. This is really clearly giving us great concern.
JJ: I will just say, finally, and thank you, we are gripping on with our fingernails, and thank you for acknowledging lessons from other places. We’re so committed to US exceptionalism, but we actually need to be listening to other countries right now.
But if we are dreaming, if we are not just trying to hold on to scraps, are there policies, is there legislation, is there a vision that we can be looking to as a template, imagining that we are surviving this moment?
JG: Yeah, I mean, I imagine we are surviving this moment, and I’m looking to what you’re doing, Janine, and what thousands of other reporters are doing throughout the country, to hold the power to account, be a Fourth Estate. And we’re looking at state policies, and maybe one day federal policies, to expand community journalism, noncommercial journalism that is not relying on moneyed interest to call the shots, that’s really just helping people understand what is happening when people take action when they don’t like what they see.
And so we have, with the Media Power Collaborative that Free Press is helping convene, and with the Media 2070 project that my colleagues are convening as well, that holds attacks on communities of color to account, and that repairs the harm that’s being done, not just now, but that historically has been done through our media system, what does it look like? This is what the Media 2070 project is queuing up for us. What does it look like to have a media system that loves Black people? The Media Power Collaborative is really looking at state-based policies to make sure that there is more public money for noncommercial journalism.
And so these are the types of models that are infusing new reporters on the ground. There was a bill in California that actually didn’t pass, but there was a budget line item for $25 million that went to UC Berkeley here. And we have local reporters embedding inside of newsrooms that are covering city halls, that are covering the state house. This is bringing much-needed capacity to track what’s actually happening in local civics to participate in our democracy.
JJ: All right, I’m going to end right on that note. We’ve been speaking with Jessica González; she’s co-CEO at Free Press. They’re online at FreePress.net. Jessica González, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
A federal judge has placed a block on the Trump administration’s retaliation against The Associated Press (AP) over the organization continuing to refer to the body of water south of the U.S. as the Gulf of Mexico. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump renamed that geographical landmark as the “Gulf of America” in an executive order entitled “Restoring Names That Honor American…
Janine Jackson interviewed Mondoweiss‘s Michael Arria about Gaza “Power & Pushback” for the March 28, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Listeners may have heard about the violent attack by Israeli settlers on Hamdan Ballal, who had recently won an Academy Award for the documentary No Other Land. He has since been released from Israeli detention, but that doesn’t erase or obscure the fact that he was assaulted, arrested and spirited away in an overt attack on free expression and truth telling.
As his co-director told AP: “We came back from the Oscars, and every day…there is an attack on us. This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like punishment.”
Listeners may not have heard of all the non-Oscar-winning people who have been swept off the street and disappeared for voicing any concern about the Palestinian people, who are victims of what the majority of the world outside these borders are calling genocide.
Into the current context comes “Power and Pushback,” a new feature at Mondoweiss written by our guest. Michael Arria is Mondoweiss‘s US correspondent, and author of the book Medium Blue:The Politics of MSNBC. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Michael Arria.
JJ: Mondoweiss has been reporting, calling attention to, critiquing the occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide of Palestinians, and the US role there, and US news media’s distorted narrative for some time now, and yet there are still so many fronts to this fight. There is still so much that calls for resistance that you saw a place for a new intervention, this new focused feature. Tell us what you’re trying to do with “Power and Pushback.”
MA: I think the idea behind “Power and Pushback” is we’re in a situation, as you described, where there’s so much happening, and this can often be a challenge, I think, for any media, let alone independent media, to keep up with. We have a very small staff; obviously we don’t have the capacity that mainstream outlets do. And with so much happening on the domestic front, especially over the last few weeks, but really dating back to the immediate aftermath of October 7, when we saw the student protests begin, I think there was a need to develop another place to catch stuff before it fell through the cracks, so to speak.
So the idea behind “Power and Pushback” is to put a focus on repression that we’ve seen throughout the United States targeting the US Palestine movement, but also to talk about some of these local fights and local battles that not just students, but people in their communities or in their workplaces, are waging on behalf of Palestine.
And the idea is to really center that and focus on that, and just put a spotlight on these fights, and show people that they’re not alone, that people are fighting. There’s victories throughout certain states.
We didn’t want it to be just, like, this is the suppression report, and this is all terrible things that are being done. We wanted it to have both elements, which is the idea behind the title. We want to cover the power centers; we want to cover lawmakers pushing draconian policies, and pro-Israel groups moving to target Palestine protesters. And we wanted to cover, obviously, these terrible unconstitutional moves by the Trump administration. But we also wanted to show the resistance that’s developing domestically against those policies, and the people who are pushing for that.
JJ: It seems so important on many levels. First of all, if folks think there’s just no pushback or resistance happening, that shapes their understanding of what’s going on. But also, one person speaking out is easier to suppress, and they need to be backed and supported by a community, and by other people. So it’s not just, “Here’s a cool story about somebody resisting this.” It seems to me to give meaningful support to the individuals who are putting themselves on the line.
Michael Arria: “It’s not just one person or two people, it’s thousands of people that oppose these policies, and are trying to fight back.”
MA: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And I think something we should keep in mind—one of the objectives of these kind of moves that we’ve seen in recent weeks from the Trump administration is to obviously crack down on dissent. And part of that is to make people fearful about fighting back, for fear that they might be scooped up by ICE if they’re not a citizen, or their student organization might be suspended from the given college or university.
Really, throughout American history, whenever we’ve seen these kinds of campaigns, they purposely have this chilling effect on the population, and that’s kind of the idea. So as you say, we’re kind of also developing the newsletter with this in mind to show people that it’s not just one person or two people, it’s thousands of people that oppose these policies, and are trying to fight back in the face of this, despite these attempts by lawmakers and pro-Israel groups to really chill the environment, and make people skeptical about standing up and voicing support for Gaza.
JJ: Particularly at a time when, it used to be, “Well, write your congressperson, if you’re upset about something.” And we see the frustration with that avenue. And lots of folks will say, “Well, go out in the street; protest.” And so then you have to ask, OK, what’s the follow-up to that when people do protest and they are harmed for that? You can’t simply say, “We all ought to be out in the street,” and then not care about what happens to people who go out in the street, is my feeling.
MA: Absolutely true, and to your point, I think this time around with Trump, we have seen a slightly different approach from the liberal establishment. I think they’ve been much more willing to go along with his plans, and much more complicit. We see the anger towards politicians like Chuck Schumer for approving the Trump budget.
But I think that focusing on the liberal establishment and their reaction tends to get people maybe to look at the situation the wrong way. I think there actually has been a lot of protest. The numbers indicate there’s been consistent protest.
And there’s also been a lot of attempts to challenge the Trump administration legally. So Just Security runs the tracker. This is just in my head, I just wrote a piece where I referenced it, but I think there’s 146 current lawsuits or legal challenges attempting to stop the Trump administration, when it comes to many issues across the country. But more than a few of those lawsuits are connected to our issue, the issue of Israel/Palestine and student protest.
So like you say, people want to do something that they feel goes beyond just sending a letter, just calling and leaving a message for their congressperson. Especially because, it’s worth pointing out, what we’ve seen for the last three weeks has really been a culmination of a push that we’ve seen for years, in terms of stifling pro-Palestine sentiment, and in terms of stiflingcriticism of Israel. And that’s really been a bipartisan project. Even though Trump is amplifying it now and increasing it and has taken it to these draconian levels, we’ve really seen both sides of the aisle embrace some of these policies that he is currently amplifying.
I was, along with many, struck by the statement of Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb to students, after they’d been told to scrub their social media, to essentially thought-cleanse evidence of concern for Palestinians, or protest against US actions. And this is in the context of the ICE arrest and whisking away of Mahmoud Khalil. And Cobb said, “Nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times.” He’s speaking to future journalists. What is the lesson there? What else might he have said?
MA: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. He said that in response to another professor making a comment, basically telling students not to post about the Middle East conflict on their social media page. I think we’re really at an interesting and scary time when we look at universities and colleges in this country, just the overall state of higher education. I think that, just like I was talking about before, how the stifling of pro-Palestine sentiment is not a new issue. It’s really been a culmination of something that’s been happening for years.
We can say the same things about our university system, right? Over the last 40 years, 50 years maybe even, we’ve seen this real push to neoliberal policies across higher education, to move to a donor model, as opposed to a model where these schools are set up and live up to the grandiose words of their mission statements, this idea that they’re these places that kids can go and learn about freedom of speech and have the freedom of inquiry, and learn about how society works and how the world works.
After October 7, we saw some big-time pro-Israel donors threaten to take away money to schools, or actually do it. I think the schools are really between a rock and a hard place, because they don’t want to see their endowments threatened. And in recent decades, we’ve seen that that is the important thing. An institution like Columbia, as a private university, they’re not really beholden to the First Amendment, technically, in the way that other places throughout the country are.
And, first of all, we should say the Trump administration first canceled about $400 million worth of contracts and grants to the school, for what it said was their inability to crack down on antisemitism. I mean, we know that they’re referring to the fact that there were pro-Palestine protests on campus. It had very little to do with antisemitism. We know that they’re being targeted because they were the first school to erect a Gaza encampment last spring, which kicked off a wave of protests throughout the United States, obviously across college campuses. We know why they’re being targeted.
But I think the very scary thing here is they withheld that money, and then they sent Columbia a letter detailing things that Columbia could do in order for them to revisit that issue, essentially implying that maybe you could get the $400 million if you did the following things. And those things include instituting a mask ban, suspending a number of students who were connected to an occupation of Hamilton Hall on campus last spring. They wanted new protocol in terms of disciplinary actions. They wanted someone to oversee the Middle East Studies Department, among other things.
And almost immediately, Columbia complied to all these demands. They’ve said publicly that they were actually thinking about doing some of this stuff before Trump had asked them. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
But that’s a huge part of this story. We’ve seen the universities in this country really cower and just respond to the Trump administration, and do pretty much everything they’ve asked for in this regard. And shortly before Mahmoud Khalil was detained on March 8 by plainclothes ICE agents, despite the fact he’s a permanent resident with a Green Card, Columbia had actually changed their protocol when it came to its status as a sanctuary campus.
Sanctuary campus is essentially the same as a sanctuary state. They had previously said that they wouldn’t comply or assist ICE if they were on campus. And days before Khalil was detained by ICE agents, they sent an email out to faculty and students and staff saying, “We’ve modified these policies. There are some situations where we’re going to let ICE on campus without a warrant in certain circumstances.”
So that’s a huge part of the story here. I just think that the university’s going along and being complicit in this entire ordeal. And we’ve seen a lot of resistance from faculty and Columbia students, and students across the country, who are really protesting not just these policies that we’ve seen from Trump and lawmakers, but also the complicity of their schools.
JJ: Gosh, there’s so much to say and to respond to. But along with, in particular, the Columbia protest, you see the erasure of Jewish people, of antisemitism being used as a cover to punish and penalize a community that is composed, in large part, by Jewish people who are protesting the actions of the state of Israel. And Trump, of course, being Trump, just says, “If Chuck Schumer opposes my policy, he’s a Palestinian.” He’s in his own world, but we are seeing other institutions essentially say, “Jewish people, you’re not Jewish if you are critical of Israel.” That seems like another shadow horror that is happening, and that media are playing a role in.
MA: It’s a very dark irony. I mean, not only have there been vast protests by Jewish activists and Jewish students; we saw Trump Tower occupied in the wake of Khalil’s arrest. The fact that the Trump administration is citing antisemitism as their reason for detaining these people, essentially…
I think when Khalil was first detained, there was maybe a belief that the Trump administration was going to rely on some War on Terror policy, or maybe something from Bill Clinton’s anti-terrorism law from 1995. But what we saw is that they’re actually relying on an immigration bill from 1952, which was introduced at the height of the Red Scare.
And that bill was introduced and wielded as a way to target, actually, survivors of the Holocaust, Jewish refugees in the United States, who conservative lawmakers had targeted because they accused them of being Soviet agents. So the irony here is that we see this law that was used to target Jewish people in the United States now used allegedly to protect them.
And it is another dark irony, I think, that it’s coming from this administration of all administrations. As you said, Trump casually will criticize Chuck Schumer by claiming he’s not Jewish, calling him a “Palestinian.” Trump has repeatedly criticized Jewish people more broadly for not voting for him, questioning whether Jewish voters are even Jewish, because he did all this stuff for Israel. Inherent there is the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, which in itself I think is antisemitic.
But it goes without saying that you don’t have to travel very far down Trumpland to start seeing examples of people that have been accused of antisemitism in his administration. We’re dealing with multiple people, either directly in his administration or in that broader world, who have literally given Nazi salutes in recent weeks.
So there is a real, like I said, irony to this whole situation that’s very disturbing, where you have this administration, which has a clearly anti-immigrant, bigoted, history of antisemitism in many areas, and they are detaining people for defending Gaza, for fighting against genocide; and claiming that they’re doing it because they’re antisemitic, and that antisemitism somehow threatens American foreign policy interests. So we’re really in a dark, upside-down time, I think, and it’s very terrifying.
JJ: Looking at what we know about media, we know that years from now, they will tell us, “Remember when we were all out in the streets protesting Israeli genocide in Gaza.” We know that they will say that “Martin Luther King would’ve said….” The powers that be, including in corporate news media, will co-opt the actions of today. Columbia University will have a photo montage about the protesters, and how they allowed protests to happen.
I mean, we know how history can be rewritten in real time by news media. It’s so frustrating to look at it today, and know the way that these folks are going to try to claim ownership of protest later.
That’s not a question, it’s just a rant. We can see it. We can see the way that they will talk about, “Oh, the Civil Rights Movement. That was good protest. This is bad protest,” when in real time, they hated the Civil Rights Movement.
MA: It’s very true. And these images and videos people probably have seen yesterday, a tremendously disturbing video coming out of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk, who’s a 30-year-old Turkish national and doctoral student at Tufts, was detained, much like Khalil, snatched up on the street by undercover ICE agents wearing masks, where the police took her phone away from her. And it’s not hyperbole to say these people are being disappeared in broad daylight.
And to your point, I think people love to look back on history and convince themselves they would’ve been on the right side. They like to watch movies about historical time periods, and think that they would’ve been siding with the right side. But I think the way that people are reacting to this now, if they are supporting it or ignoring it, I think it’s pretty clear what side of history they would’ve been on if they had lived through something like the Holocaust, or like the Civil Rights Movement.
And also to your point, there is no kind of accountability for the media whatsoever, where—this is just an aside—but in the last couple of days we’ve seen this big controversy over the Signal chat, obviously, where the bombing of Yemen was revealed to a reporter.
That reporter is Jeffrey Goldberg, a former IDF soldier who has contacts throughout prominent politicians in the United States. But he’s also somebody who helped push a fabricated story about Iraq’s alleged connection to Al Qaeda, which, over 20 years ago, helped pave the way for the Iraq War. And the media is just filled with reporters like that, who have faced no accountability, or have actually moved up in their careers, and have more power now than they did 20, 23 years ago.
So it just speaks to your point, what will things look like a couple of decades from now? I think all the people who are maybe ignoring this or cheering it on, or not responding to it in any serious way, will probably not have to face any type of consequences. And to your point, they’ll also be controlling the narrative in terms of how this period gets remembered.
JJ: You can always fail upward in news media.
I’ll just ask you, finally, for any thoughts about “Power & Pushback,” what you hope folks will take from it, what you hope to uplift, any final thoughts on this intervention that you’re spearheading?
MA: I would encourage people, if they’re interested in this subject, to go on our site where they can subscribe to “Power & Pushback.” We’re really hoping, beyond this being a way to highlight the fights that I’m talking about, that it also opens up a dialogue, that people feel if they’re working in their community in terms of something, or they see something where free speech is being stifled, that they can reach out to us, and we can potentially shine a light on it and cover it.
Sometimes this stuff doesn’t happen where it’s a lot of news cameras. Sometimes it’s not a thousand people. Sometimes it’s just as simple as somebody being told they can’t wear a certain pin to work, or their website faces some sort of crackdown, or their student group at a small college is suddenly suspended. So we really are focused on covering this big-picture Trump stuff, and this big-picture higher education stuff. But we really hope that it also becomes a forum for these smaller-scale battles, because I think these are really going to add up.
And polling shows us that things have really shifted, Israel’s brand has really diminished over the past decade, particularly among progressives and Democratic voters, even if party leaders and Democratic lawmakers haven’t caught up to that. So I think, in some capacity, the momentum is on the side of the people who are protesting on behalf of Palestine, even though when you look at the media, it seems to be the opposite.
I think that a lot of these draconian measures are obviously a response to those successes. We’ve seen this crackdown on the BDS movement. We’ve seen this push to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates some criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
So I really think, insofar as Trump represents a backlash politics, and he does in many capacities, it’s also a backlash to the advances the Palestine movement in the United States has made over the last few years.
So like I said, in addition to covering the repression and suppression, we really want it to be a place that takes a close look at that progress, and looks at this in a wider way, where people can turn and you can talk to us about that.
So that’s what we’re hoping. I encourage people to check out our site where they can read about this stuff pretty consistently, but also sign up for our newsletter so they can get that information.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Michael Arria. He is US correspondent at Mondoweiss—that’s Mondoweiss.net—and author of their new feature “Power and Pushback.” Michael Arria, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Sen. Dick Durbin (Verge, 3/21/25): “I hope that for the sake of our nation’s kids, Congress finally acts.”
In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.
According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.
Section 230 grants platforms the ability to moderate without shouldering legal liability, a power that has historically had the effect of encouraging judicious content management (Techdirt, 6/23/20). Additionally, it indemnifies ordinary internet users against most civil suits for actions like forwarding email, sharing photos or videos, or hosting online reviews.
Dissolving the provision would reassign legal responsibility to websites and third parties, empowering a Trump-helmed federal government to force online platforms to stifle, or promote, certain speech. While the ostensible purpose of the repeal, according to Durbin, is to “protect kids online,” it’s far more likely to give the Trump White House carte blanche to advance its ultra-reactionary political agenda.
More power for MAGA
Mike Masnick (Techdirt, 3/21/25): “These senators don’t understand what Section 230 actually does—or how its repeal would make their stated goals harder to achieve.”
The effort to repeal Section 230 isn’t the first of its kind. Lawmakers, namely Republicans Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and former Florida senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been making attempts to restrict or remove 230 for years, sometimes with explicitly censorial aims. But with a White House so hostile to dissent as to target and abductanti-genocide activists (FAIR.org, 3/28/25; Zeteo, 3/29/25), abusing immigration law and violating constitutional rights in the process, the timing of the latest bill—complete with Democratic backing—is particularly alarming.
To imagine what could become of a Section 230 repeal under the Trump administration, consider an example from July 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic remained severe enough to be classified as a public-health emergency. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.)—now a co-sponsor of Durbin and Graham’s 2025 bill—introduced an amendment to 230 that would authorize the Health & Human Services Secretary to designate certain online content as “health misinformation.” The label would require websites to remove the content in question.
News sources heralded the bill as a way to stem the “proliferation of falsehoods about vaccines, fake cures and other harmful health-related claims on their sites” (NPR, 7/22/21) and to “fight bogus medical claims online” (Politico, 7/22/21). While potentially true at the time, Klobuchar’s bill would now, by most indications, have the opposite effect. As Mike Masnick of Techdirt (3/21/25) explained:
Today’s Health & Human Services secretary is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who believes the solution to measles is to have more children die of measles. Under Klobuchar’s proposal, he would literally have the power to declare pro-vaccine information as “misinformation” and force it off the internet.
‘Save the Children’
ACLU (6/27/22): The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking. Instead, it has chilled speech, shut down online spaces, and made sex work more dangerous.”
Since Klobuchar’s bill, Congress has drafted multiple pieces of bipartisan child “safety” legislation resembling Durbin and Graham’s bill, offering another glimpse into the perils of a Trump-era repeal.
Consider 2023’s Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which the New York Times (2/17/22) welcomed as “sweeping legislation” that would “require online platforms to refrain from promoting harmful behavior.” KOSA enjoys robust bipartisan support, with three dozen Republican co-sponsors and nearly as many Democrats, as well as an endorsement from Joe Biden.
Though KOSA doesn’t expressly call for the removal of 230, it would effectively create a carve-out that could easily be weaponized. MAGA-boosting Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), a lead sponsor, insinuated in 2023 that KOSA could be used to “protect” children “from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence” on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram (Techdirt, 9/6/23). In other words, lawmakers could invoke KOSA to throttle or eliminate content related to trans advocacy, should they deem it “harmful” to children.
KOSA has drawn criticism from more than 90 organizations, including the ACLU and numerous LGBTQ groups, who fear that the bill masquerades as a child-safeguarding initiative while facilitating far-right censorship (CounterSpin, 6/9/23). This comes as little surprise, considering the decades-long history of “Save the Children” rhetoric as an anti-LGBTQ bludgeon, as well as the fact that these campaigns have been shown to harm children rather than protect them.
Some outlets have rightfully included the bill’s opponents in their reportage (AP, 7/31/24), even if only to characterize it as “divisive” and “controversial” (NBC News, 7/31/24). Others, however, have expressed more confidence in the legislation. The New York Times (2/1/24), for instance, described KOSA as a means to “safeguard the internet’s youngest users.” Neither Blackburn’s publicly-broadcast intentions nor the protests against the bill seemed to capture the paper’s attention.
Instead, the Times went on to cite the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a 2018 law that amended Section 230, in part to allow victims of sex trafficking to sue websites and online platforms, as a regulatory success. What the Times didn’t note is that, according to the ACLU, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which is included in SESTA, “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking,” and could be interpreted by courts as justification to “censor more online speech—especially materials about sex, youth health, LGBTQ identity and other important concerns.”
False anti-corporate appeals
A bipartisan pair of lawmakers argue in the Wall Street Journal (5/12/24) that repealing Section 230 would mean tech companies couldn’t “manipulate and profit from Americans’ free-speech protections”—which is true only in the sense that platforms would be forced to assume that their users do not have free-speech protections.
Protecting kids isn’t the only promise made by 230 repeal proponents. In a statement made earlier this year, Durbin vowed to “make the tech industry legally accountable for the damage they cause.” It’s a popular refrain for government officials. The Senate Judiciary Democrats pledged to “remove Big Tech’s legal immunity,” and Trump himself has called 230 a “liability shielding gift from the US to ‘Big Tech’”—a point echoed by one of his many acolytes, Josh Hawley.
And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/24) headlined “Sunset of Section 230 Would Force Big Tech’s Hand,” former Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, and New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Democrat, argued:
We must act because Big Tech is profiting from children, developing algorithms that push harmful content on to our kids’ feeds and refusing to strengthen their platforms’ protections against predators, drug dealers, sex traffickers, extortioners and cyberbullies.
These soft anti-corporate appeals might resonate with an audience who believes Big Tech wields too much power and influence. But there’s no guarantee that dismantling Section 230 would rein in Big Tech.
In fact, Section 230 actually confers an advantage upon the largest tech companies—which at least one of them has recognized. In 2021, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg proposed reforms to 230 that would increase and intensify legal requirements for content moderation (NBC News, 3/24/21). The apparent logic: monopolistic giants like Facebook and Google can more easily fund expensive content-moderation systems and legal battles than can smaller platforms, lending the major players far more long-term viability.
But regardless of Meta’s machinations, the fundamental problem would remain: Democrats have embraced the MAGA vision for online governance, creating the conditions not for a safer internet, but a more dangerous one.
This week on CounterSpin: Israel has abandoned the ceasefire agreement and restarted its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, a war that has destroyed the region and killed tens of thousands of human beings. The ceasefire, as Gaza-based writer Hassan Abo Qamar among others reminds, still allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of “food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement.” But it wasn’t enough and, as Belén Fernández writes for FAIR.org, Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat, but was reported in, for instance, the New York Times as “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.”
We know that elite media will tell us someday that the whole world was horrified by the genocide of Palestinians, and that journalists decried it. But someday is not today. We need reporters who aren’t not afraid they will be targeted, but who may be afraid and are nevertheless bearing witness. Reporters like Hossam Shabat, 23-year-old Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, targeted and killed March 24, and not even the first Israeli journalist assassination for the day: Hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.
The genocide of Palestinians is a human rights emergency, and also a journalism emergency. US reporters who don’t treat it as such are showing their allegiance to something other than journalism. A key part of their disservice is their ignoring, obscuring, marginalizing, demeaning and endangering the many people who are standing up and speaking out. Pretending protest isn’t happening is aiding and abetting the work of the silencers; it’s telling lies about who we are and what we can do. We build action by telling the stories powerful media don’t want told.
We’ll talk about that with reporter Michael Arria, US correspondent for Mondoweiss and the force behind their new feature called “Power & Pushback.”
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of transphobia, and remembers FAIR board member Robert McChesney.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear a case brought by Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn that aimed to lessen the standard for libel laws. Had the court taken up the issue, it could have made journalistic reporting on public figures — including the ultrarich and politicians — far more difficult in the future. Wynn wanted to sue The Associated Press over reporting it published in 2018…
The new book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by The New York Times business investigations editor David Enrich chronicles an ongoing campaign by the wealthy and powerful to overturn the landmark Supreme Court decision New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which in 1964 established bedrock protections against spurious defamation and libel cases…
Mahmoud Khalil (In These Times, 3/18/25): “At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”
The arrest and possible deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder with a student visa, for his organizing role at Gaza solidarity protests last year has sent shockwaves throughout American society.
As I wrote at Haaretz (3/11/25), Khalil’s arrest is an intense blow to free speech, as punishment for speech and other First Amendment-protected activities will create a huge chilling effect. In a piece denouncing Khalil’s arrest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (3/10/25) quoted American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Brian Hauss saying, “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat, to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years.”
In a letter (In These Times, 3/18/25) dictated over the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, Khalil said, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
While a judge blocked his deportation, as of this writing, Khalil is still in ICE custody (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). AP (3/9/25) reported that his arrest is the first known “deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses” last year. The Trump administration argues, according to the news service, that people like Khalil, whose Green Card was revoked by the State Department, “forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.”
Alarms raised
The Intercept (3/13/25) points out that the law being used against Khalid Mahmoud says one can’t be deported based on “past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations, if such beliefs, statements or associations would be lawful within the United States.”
Many in the media have raised alarms about the extreme threat to free speech represented by Khalil’s arrest. Even the editorial board (3/12/25) of the increasingly Trump-panderingWashington Post warned, “If the secretary of state can deport a legal resident simply because he dislikes his or her views, whose First Amendment rights are next?” Other corporate newspapers and outlets (Bloomberg, 3/11/25; USA Today, 3/13/25; Boston Globe, 3/14/25; Financial Times, 3/14/25) published similar defenses of Khalil’s First Amendment rights, arguing that his arrest fundamentally threatens American liberty.
There is a good reason for the outcry. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the executive branch, without consulting a judge, revoked his legal status based on his political speech. As the Intercept (3/13/25) described, the federal government is invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the secretary of state has
the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a US citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The Department of Homeland Security justified the arrest on its claims that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas.” In other words, the Trump administration has revoked Khalil’s Green Card, arrested him and intends to deport him based on his constitutionally protected protest activities.
Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, rather than speak out against this shredding of the First Amendment, have been promoting the Trump administration line. The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.
‘Inimical to the US’
The New York Post (3/10/25) cheers on “President Trump’s crackdown on unrest at colleges.”
The New York Post (3/10/25) ran the cover headline “ICE Knowing You!” Its editorial board (3/9/25) childishly wrote that “ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” It said that the anti-genocide protest “movement was never merely about protest.”
Two scholars at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and Daniel DiMartino, took to the Post op-ed page (3/11/25) to counter the free-speech defense of Khalil. They deemed the Gaza protests “illegal,” saying that stripping permanent residents of the legal protections for those “who reject our values or are hostile to our way of life” doesn’t threaten constitutional freedom.
While admitting “we don’t know the details of the due process he’s been given”—which is a crucial consideration when it comes to constitutional protections—the duo said, “But one thing is clear: the executive branch has the authority to vet noncitizens based on their views, thanks to the laws Congress has passed and the Supreme Court has upheld.”
The Post piece repeats a point Shapiro made at the conservative City Journal (3/7/25): “While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States.” Who decides what are “causes” that are “inimical”? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently.
Fox News (3/12/25) also referred to Khalil as “pro-Hamas,” reporting that the Department of Homeland Security said “that Khalil ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.’” The link between Khalil’s participation in protests and supporting Hamas is spurious on its face. If demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too. Younger Americans, in particular, stand out for their support of Palestinians in the current war (Pew Research, 4/2/24).
Not ‘really about speech’
Matthew Hennessey (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/25) is an extreme example, but many right-wing journalists seem to revile free expression.
The more erudite but no less fanatically right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/12/25) said, “A Green Card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism,” and that “Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.” The board matter-of-factly stated, “The case against Mr. Khalil will depend on the facts of his support for Hamas.”
Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor (3/12/25), also called him a “pro-Hamas Columbia agitator,” adding, “If he didn’t love [the US], why didn’t he leave it? The world is big. It has many elite universities.” Hennessey added, “When you’re a guest, it’s more than bad manners to cheer the slaughter of your host’s friends.” There’s no proof offered that Khalil did anything illegal, only that he said some things Hennessey didn’t like.
Journal columnist William McGurn (3/10/25) also dismissed the free speech concerns, saying that these protests went beyond speech—again, offering no evidence other than that the president said so. And he warned that pesky judges who stick too close to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law will get in the way of Khalil’s deportation. He said:
“So I bet what will happen,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo, “is that even though the immigration law says the alien students can be deported, there will be a district judge somewhere who says that the president cannot use that power to punish people based on their First Amendment–protected beliefs and speech. But the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the law.”
These “protests” weren’t really about speech. If all the “protesters” had done was stand outside waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans, no one would be talking about deportation. Mr. Trump laid out his rationale on Truth Social: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.”
‘War on Terror’ playbook
Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11): “Elite media’s fealty to official rationales and their anemic defense of the public’s rights have amounted to dereliction of duty.”
Feeling some déjà vu? The right-wing media’s defense of arresting and deporting a Green Card holder for engaging in protest rests on simply labeling him and the protests as “pro-Hamas,” the idea being that any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza is an endorsement of the Palestinian militant group that the US State Department designates as a terrorist organization.
As I told CNN International’s Connect the World (3/12/25), the situation feels similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when it was common for supporters of George W. Bush, including his allies in the right-wing press, to label antiwar protesters as endorsers of anti-American terrorist violence.
Oppose the invasion of Afghanistan? You must be pro–Al Qaeda. Oppose the invasion of Iraq? You must be supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This helped brand any questioning of the administration as treasonous, helping to build consensus not just for aggressive military imperialism at abroad, but in curtailing civil liberties for Americans at home (Extra!, 9/11).
So it’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.” Calling Khalil and the anti-genocide protests, which include thousands of supporters of many backgrounds—prominently including Jews—“pro-Hamas” is just another tired trick in the “War on Terror” propaganda playbook.
To understand how shallow this tactic is, keep in mind that Khalil has been on record about his politics and the issue of antisemitism. As a key negotiator for the protests, he had appeared on CNN and was asked about the protests and their impact on the Jewish community. The network (CNN, 4/29/24) summarized:
“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.
“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.
Helping to crush dissent
The Guardian (7/20/20) more helpfully IDed John Yoo as a “Bush torture lawyer.”
Note that the Journal‘s McGurn sought comments from Yoo, who is identified only as a law professor, and not a Bush administration attorney who notoriously supported the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” (NPR, 2/23/10), or as an advisor to the first Trump administration on its aggressive anti-immigration methods (Guardian, 7/20/20). Yoo is also a proponent of applying the unitary executive theory to the Trump administration, which for Yoo, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books (11/1/20),
becomes a springboard to justify Trump’s authoritarian policies on war, immigration, deregulation, executive branch appointments, pardons and the supervision of Justice Department investigations.
Israel’s own record on respecting freedom of speech is spotty, and has gotten worse since it launched the assault on Gaza (Democracy Now!, 11/9/23; CBC, 5/30/24; 972, 6/24/24; Freedom of the Press Foundation, 10/25/25; Times of Israel, 3/12/25). Israel, however, does not have a constitution, and activists and scholars have chronicled the nation’s erosion of democratic norms (Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Journal of Democracy, 7/23; Haaretz, 8/1/23; Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24). The United States is supposed to be governed by a constitution that, at least on paper, sets the gold standard among nations in protecting freedom of speech.
Alas, in the name of patriotism, the Murdoch press wants to erode that part of America’s tradition in order to help the Trump administration amass power and crush dissent.
Mahmoud Khalil (In These Times, 3/18/25): “At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”
The arrest and possible deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder with a student visa, for his organizing role at Gaza solidarity protests last year has sent shockwaves throughout American society.
As I wrote at Haaretz (3/11/25), Khalil’s arrest is an intense blow to free speech, as punishment for speech and other First Amendment-protected activities will create a huge chilling effect. In a piece denouncing Khalil’s arrest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (3/10/25) quoted American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Brian Hauss saying, “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat, to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years.”
In a letter (In These Times, 3/18/25) dictated over the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, Khalil said, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
While a judge blocked his deportation, as of this writing, Khalil is still in ICE custody (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). AP (3/9/25) reported that his arrest is the first known “deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses” last year. The Trump administration argues, according to the news service, that people like Khalil, whose Green Card was revoked by the State Department, “forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.”
Alarms raised
The Intercept (3/13/25) points out that the law being used against Khalid Mahmoud says one can’t be deported based on “past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations, if such beliefs, statements or associations would be lawful within the United States.”
Many in the media have raised alarms about the extreme threat to free speech represented by Khalil’s arrest. Even the editorial board (3/12/25) of the increasingly Trump-panderingWashington Post warned, “If the secretary of state can deport a legal resident simply because he dislikes his or her views, whose First Amendment rights are next?” Other corporate newspapers and outlets (Bloomberg, 3/11/25; USA Today, 3/13/25; Boston Globe, 3/14/25; Financial Times, 3/14/25) published similar defenses of Khalil’s First Amendment rights, arguing that his arrest fundamentally threatens American liberty.
There is a good reason for the outcry. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the executive branch, without consulting a judge, revoked his legal status based on his political speech. As the Intercept (3/13/25) described, the federal government is invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the secretary of state has
the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a US citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The Department of Homeland Security justified the arrest on its claims that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas.” In other words, the Trump administration has revoked Khalil’s Green Card, arrested him and intends to deport him based on his constitutionally protected protest activities.
Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, rather than speak out against this shredding of the First Amendment, have been promoting the Trump administration line. The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.
‘Inimical to the US’
The New York Post (3/10/25) cheers on “President Trump’s crackdown on unrest at colleges.”
The New York Post (3/10/25) ran the cover headline “ICE Knowing You!” Its editorial board (3/9/25) childishly wrote that “ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” It said that the anti-genocide protest “movement was never merely about protest.”
Two scholars at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and Daniel DiMartino, took to the Post op-ed page (3/11/25) to counter the free-speech defense of Khalil. They deemed the Gaza protests “illegal,” saying that stripping permanent residents of the legal protections for those “who reject our values or are hostile to our way of life” doesn’t threaten constitutional freedom.
While admitting “we don’t know the details of the due process he’s been given”—which is a crucial consideration when it comes to constitutional protections—the duo said, “But one thing is clear: the executive branch has the authority to vet noncitizens based on their views, thanks to the laws Congress has passed and the Supreme Court has upheld.”
The Post piece repeats a point Shapiro made at the conservative City Journal (3/7/25): “While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States.” Who decides what are “causes” that are “inimical”? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently.
Fox News (3/12/25) also referred to Khalil as “pro-Hamas,” reporting that the Department of Homeland Security said “that Khalil ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.’” The link between Khalil’s participation in protests and supporting Hamas is spurious on its face. If demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too. Younger Americans, in particular, stand out for their support of Palestinians in the current war (Pew Research, 4/2/24).
Not ‘really about speech’
Matthew Hennessey (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/25) is an extreme example, but many right-wing journalists seem to revile free expression.
The more erudite but no less fanatically right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/12/25) said, “A Green Card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism,” and that “Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.” The board matter-of-factly stated, “The case against Mr. Khalil will depend on the facts of his support for Hamas.”
Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor (3/12/25), also called him a “pro-Hamas Columbia agitator,” adding, “If he didn’t love [the US], why didn’t he leave it? The world is big. It has many elite universities.” Hennessey added, “When you’re a guest, it’s more than bad manners to cheer the slaughter of your host’s friends.” There’s no proof offered that Khalil did anything illegal, only that he said some things Hennessey didn’t like.
Journal columnist William McGurn (3/10/25) also dismissed the free speech concerns, saying that these protests went beyond speech—again, offering no evidence other than that the president said so. And he warned that pesky judges who stick too close to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law will get in the way of Khalil’s deportation. He said:
“So I bet what will happen,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo, “is that even though the immigration law says the alien students can be deported, there will be a district judge somewhere who says that the president cannot use that power to punish people based on their First Amendment–protected beliefs and speech. But the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the law.”
These “protests” weren’t really about speech. If all the “protesters” had done was stand outside waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans, no one would be talking about deportation. Mr. Trump laid out his rationale on Truth Social: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.”
‘War on Terror’ playbook
Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11): “Elite media’s fealty to official rationales and their anemic defense of the public’s rights have amounted to dereliction of duty.”
Feeling some déjà vu? The right-wing media’s defense of arresting and deporting a Green Card holder for engaging in protest rests on simply labeling him and the protests as “pro-Hamas,” the idea being that any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza is an endorsement of the Palestinian militant group that the US State Department designates as a terrorist organization.
As I told CNN International’s Connect the World (3/12/25), the situation feels similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when it was common for supporters of George W. Bush, including his allies in the right-wing press, to label antiwar protesters as endorsers of anti-American terrorist violence.
Oppose the invasion of Afghanistan? You must be pro–Al Qaeda. Oppose the invasion of Iraq? You must be supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This helped brand any questioning of the administration as treasonous, helping to build consensus not just for aggressive military imperialism at abroad, but in curtailing civil liberties for Americans at home (Extra!, 9/11).
So it’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.” Calling Khalil and the anti-genocide protests, which include thousands of supporters of many backgrounds—prominently including Jews—“pro-Hamas” is just another tired trick in the “War on Terror” propaganda playbook.
To understand how shallow this tactic is, keep in mind that Khalil has been on record about his politics and the issue of antisemitism. As a key negotiator for the protests, he had appeared on CNN and was asked about the protests and their impact on the Jewish community. The network (CNN, 4/29/24) summarized:
“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.
“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.
Helping to crush dissent
The Guardian (7/20/20) more helpfully IDed John Yoo as a “Bush torture lawyer.”
Note that the Journal‘s McGurn sought comments from Yoo, who is identified only as a law professor, and not a Bush administration attorney who notoriously supported the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” (NPR, 2/23/10), or as an advisor to the first Trump administration on its aggressive anti-immigration methods (Guardian, 7/20/20). Yoo is also a proponent of applying the unitary executive theory to the Trump administration, which for Yoo, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books (11/1/20),
becomes a springboard to justify Trump’s authoritarian policies on war, immigration, deregulation, executive branch appointments, pardons and the supervision of Justice Department investigations.
Israel’s own record on respecting freedom of speech is spotty, and has gotten worse since it launched the assault on Gaza (Democracy Now!, 11/9/23; CBC, 5/30/24; 972, 6/24/24; Freedom of the Press Foundation, 10/25/25; Times of Israel, 3/12/25). Israel, however, does not have a constitution, and activists and scholars have chronicled the nation’s erosion of democratic norms (Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Journal of Democracy, 7/23; Haaretz, 8/1/23; Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24). The United States is supposed to be governed by a constitution that, at least on paper, sets the gold standard among nations in protecting freedom of speech.
Alas, in the name of patriotism, the Murdoch press wants to erode that part of America’s tradition in order to help the Trump administration amass power and crush dissent.
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.
Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.
Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.
Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.
On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours — I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear.
While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration’s latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students — some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation — and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples.
If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.
The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.
Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.
Janine Jackson interviewed EarthRights International’s Kirk Herbertson about Big Oil’s lawsuit against Greenpeace for the February 28, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Energy Transfer is the fossil fuel corporation that built the Dakota Access Pipeline to carry fracked oil from the Bakken Fields more than a thousand miles into Illinois, cutting through unceded Indigenous land, and crossing and recrossing the Missouri River that is a life source for the Standing Rock tribe and others in the region.
CounterSpin listeners know that protests launched by the Indigenous community drew international attention and participation, as well as the deployment, by Energy Transfer’s private security forces, of unleashed attack dogs and pepper spray, among other things, against peaceful protestors.
Now Energy Transfer saysit was harmed, and someone must pay, and that someone is Greenpeace, who the company is suing for $300 million, more than 10 times their annual budget. No one would have showed up to Standing Rock, is the company’s story and they’re sticking to it, without the misinformed incitement of the veteran environmental group.
Legalese aside, what’s actually happening here, and what would appropriate reporting look like? We’re joined by Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International. He joins us now by phone from the DC area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kirk Herbertson.
Kirk Herbertson: Thanks so much, Janine.
JJ: Let me ask you, first, to take a minute to talk about what SLAPP lawsuits are, and then why this case fits the criteria.
KH: Sure. So this case is one of the most extraordinary examples of abuse of the US legal system that we have encountered in at least the last decade. And anyone who is concerned about protecting free speech rights, or is concerned about large corporations abusing their power to silence their critics, should be paying attention to this case, even though it’s happening in North Dakota state court.
As you mentioned, there’s a kind of wonky term for this type of tactic that the company Energy Transfer is using. It’s called a SLAPP lawsuit. It stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” But what it really means is, it’s a tactic in which wealthy and powerful individuals or corporations try to silence their critics’ constitutional rights to free speech or freedom of assembly by dragging them through expensive, stressful and very lengthy litigation. In many SLAPP lawsuits, the intention is to try to silence your critic by intimidating them so much, by having them be sued by a multimillion, multibillion dollar corporation, that they give up their advocacy and stop criticizing the corporation.
JJ: Well, it’s a lot about using the legal system for purposes that most of us just don’t think is the purpose of the legal system; it’s kind of like the joke is on us, and in this case, there just isn’t evidence to make their case. I mean, let’s talk about their specific case: Greenpeace incited Standing Rock. If you’re going to look at it in terms of evidence in a legal case, there’s just no there there.
KH: That’s right. This case, it was first filed in federal court. Right now, it’s in state court, but if you read the original complaint that was put together by Energy Transfer, they referred to Greenpeace as “rogue eco-terrorists,” essentially. They were really struggling to try to find some reason for bringing this lawsuit. It seemed like the goal was more to silence the organization and send a message. And, in fact, the executive of the company said as much in media interviews.
Civil litigation plays a very important role in the US system. It’s a way where, if someone is harmed by someone else, they can go to court and seek compensation for the damages from that person or company or organization, for the portion of the damages that they contributed to. So it’s a very fair and mostly effective way of making sure that people are not harmed, and that their rights are respected by others. But because the litigation process is so expensive, and takes so many years, it’s really open to abuse, and that’s what we’re seeing here.
JJ: Folks won’t think of Greenpeace as being a less powerful organization, but if you’re going to bring millions and millions of dollars to bear, and all the time in the world and all of your legal team, you can break a group down, and that seems to be the point of this.
KH: Absolutely. And one of the big signs here is, the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline were not led by Greenpeace, and Greenpeace did not play any sort of prominent role in the protests.
These were protests that were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who was directly affected by the pipeline traveling through its primary water source, and also traveling a way where they alleged that it was violating their treaty rights as an Indigenous nation. So they started to protest and take action to ask for this pipeline not to be approved. And then it inspired many other Indigenous tribes around the country, many activists, and soon it grew into a movement of thousands of people, with hundreds of organizations supporting it both in the US and internationally. Greenpeace was one of hundreds.
So even in the case where Energy Transfer’s “damaged” and wants to seek compensation for it, it’s really a telltale sign of this abusive tactic that they’re going after Greenpeace. They have chosen to go after a high-profile, renowned environmental organization that played a very secondary role in this whole protest.
JJ: So it’s clear that it’s symbolic, and yet we don’t think of our legal system as being used in that way. But the fact that this is not really about the particulars of the case, an actual harm being done to Energy Transfer by Greenpeace, that’s also made clear when you look at the process. For example, and there’s a lot, the judge allowed Energy Transfer to seal evidence on their pipeline safety history. There are problems in the process of the way this case has unfolded that also should raise some questions.
KH: That’s right. So when the case was first filed–I won’t go through the full timeline of the protests and everything that happened. It’s very in-depth, and it’s well-covered online. But the pipeline became operational in June 2017, and a little over one month later, that’s when the first lawsuit was filed against Greenpeace and others.
And that first lawsuit was filed in federal court. Energy Transfer brought it into federal court, and they tried to claim at that point that Greenpeace was essentially involved in Mafia-like racketeering; they used the RICO statute, which was created to fight against the Mafia. That’s when they first alleged harm, and tried to bring this lawsuit.
The federal court did not accept that argument, and, in fact, they wrote in their decision when they eventually dismissed it, that they gave Energy Transfer several opportunities to actually allege that Greenpeace had harmed them in some way, and they couldn’t.
So it was dismissed in federal court, and then one month later, they refiled in North Dakota state court, where there are not these protections in place. And they filed in a local area, very strategically; they picked an area close to where there was a lot of information flowing around the protest at the time. So it was already a situation where there’d already been a lot of negative media coverage bombarding the local population about what had happened.
So going forward, six years later, we’ve now started a jury trial, just in the last week of February. We’ll see what happens. It’s going to be very difficult for this trial to proceed in a purely objective way.
JJ: And we’re going to add links to deep, informative articles when we put this show up, because there is history here. But I want to ask you just to speak to the import of it. Folks may not have seen anything about this story.
First of all, Standing Rock sounds like it happened in the past. It’s not in the past, it’s in the present. But this is so important: Yesterday I got word that groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, National Students for Justice in Palestine, they’re filing to dismiss a SLAPP suit against them for a peaceful demonstration at O’Hare Airport. This is meaningful and important. I want to ask you to say, what should we be thinking about right now?
Kirk Herbertson: “This is a free speech issue that in normal times would be a no-brainer.”
KH: There’s a lot of potential implications of this case, even though it’s happening out in North Dakota state court, where you wouldn’t think it would have nationwide implications.
One, as you mentioned, this has become an emblematic example of a SLAPP lawsuit, but this is not the first SLAPP lawsuit. For years, SLAPPs have been used by the wealthy and powerful to silence the critics. I could name some very high-profile political actors and others who have used these tactics quite a bit. SLAPPs are a First Amendment issue, and there has been bipartisan concern with the use of SLAPPS to begin with. So there are a number of other states, when there have been anti-SLAPP laws that have passed, they have passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.
So just to say, this is a free speech issue that in normal times would be a no-brainer. This should be something that there should be bipartisan support around, protecting free speech, because it’s not just about environmental organizations here.
I think one of the big implications of this trial going forward at this time, in this current environment, is that if Energy Transfer prevails, this could really embolden other corporations and powerful actors to bring copycat lawsuits, as well as use other related tactics to try to weaponize the law, in order to punish free speech that they do not agree with.
And we’ve seen this happen with other aspects of the fossil fuel industry. If something is successful in one place, it gets picked up, and used again and again all over the country.
JJ: Well, yes, this is a thing. And you, I know, have a particular focus on protecting activists who are threatened based on their human rights advocacy, and also trying to shore up access to justice for people, and I want to underscore this, who are victims of human rights abuses perpetrated by economic actors, such as corporations and financial institutions. So I’m thinking about Berta Caceres, I’m thinking of Tortuguita.
I don’t love corporate media’s crime template. It’s kind of simplistic and one side, two sides, and it’s kind of about revenge. And yet I still note that the media can’t tell certain stories when they’re about corporate crimes as crimes. Somehow the framework doesn’t apply when it comes to a big, nameless, faceless corporation that might be killing hundreds of people. And I feel like that framing harms public understanding and societal response. And I just wonder what you think about media’s role in all of this.
KH: Yes, I think that’s right, and I could give you a whole dissertation answer on this, but for my work, I work both internationally and in the US to support people who are speaking up about environmental issues. So this is a trend globally. If you’re a community member or an environmental activist who speaks up about environmental issues, that’s actually one of the most dangerous activities you can do in the world right now. Every year, hundreds of people are killed and assassinated for speaking up about environmental issues, and many of them are Indigenous people. It happened here.
In the United States, we fortunately don’t see as many direct assassinations of people who are speaking up. But what we do see is a phenomenon that we call criminalization, which includes SLAPP lawsuits, and that really exploits gray areas in the legal system, that allows the wealthy and powerful to weaponize the legal system and turn it into a vehicle for silencing their critics.
Often it’s not, as you say, written in the law that this is illegal. In a lot of cases, there are more and more anti-SLAPP laws in place, but not in North Dakota. And so that really makes it challenging to explain what’s happening. And I think, as you say, that’s also the challenge for journalists and media organizations that are reporting on these types of attacks.
JJ: Let me bring you back to the legal picture, because I know, as a lot of us know, that what we’re seeing right now is not new. It’s brazen, but it’s not new. It’s working from a template, or like a vision board, that folks have had for a while. And I know that a couple years back, you were working with Jamie Raskin, among others, on a legislative response to this tactic. Is that still a place to look? What do you think?
KH: Yes. So there’s several efforts underway, because there’s different types of tactics that are being used at different levels. But there is an effort in Congress, and it’s being led by congressman Jamie Raskin, most recently, congressman Kevin Kiley, who’s a Republican from California, and Sen. Ron Wyden. So they have most recently introduced bipartisan bills in the House, just Senator Wyden for now in the Senate. But that’s to add protections at the federal level to try to stop the use of SLAPP lawsuits. And that effort is continuing, and will hopefully continue on bipartisan support.
JJ: Let’s maybe close with Deepa Padmanabha, who is Greenpeace’s legal advisor. She said that this lawsuit, Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace, is trying to divide people. It’s not about the law, it’s about public information and public understanding. And she said:
Energy Transfer and the fossil fuel industry do not understand the difference between entities and movements. You can’t bankrupt the movement. You can’t silence the movement.
I find that powerful. We’re in a very scary time. Folks are looking to the law to save us in a place where the law can’t necessarily do that. But what are your thoughts, finally, about the importance of this case, and what you would hope journalism would do about it?
KH: I think this case is important for Greenpeace, obviously, but as Deepa said, this is important for environmental justice movements, and social justice movements more broadly. And I agree with what she said very strongly. Both Greenpeace and EarthRights, where I work, are part of a nationwide coalition called Protect the Protest that was created to help respond to these types of threats that are emerging all over the country. And our mantra is, if you come after one of us, you come after all of us.
I think, no matter the outcome of this trial, one of the results will be that there will be a movement that is responding to what happens, continuing to work to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, and also to put a spotlight on Energy Transfer and its record, and how it’s relating and engaging with the communities where it tries to operate.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kirk Herbertson. He’s US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International. They’re online at EarthRights.org. Thank you so much, Kirk Herbertson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow note that the Western notion of freedom derives from the Roman legal tradition, in which freedom was conceived as “the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.”
Because of this, “freedom was always defined—at least potentially—as something exercised to the cost of others.”
You have to understand this notion of freedom—that to be free, you have to make someone else less free—to make sense of the idea that Donald Trump is a champion of “free speech.”
Ezra Klein (New York Times, 2/25/25) thought Martin Gurri’s argument that “maybe Trump is building something more stable, creating a positive agenda that might endure….was worth hearing out.”
This is, unfortunately, not a fringe idea. Last week, the New York Times (2/25/25) ran a long interview Ezra Klein did with Trump-supporting intellectual (and former CIA officer) Martin Gurri, who said his main reason for voting for Trump was that “I felt like he was for free speech.” “Free speech is a right-wing cause,” Gurri claimed.
Trump is the “free speech” champion who said of a protester at one of his rallies during the 2016 campaign (Washington Post, 2/23/16): “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that…? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
Trump sues news outlets when he doesn’t like how they edit interviews, or their polling results (New York Times, 2/7/25). Before the election, future Trump FBI Director Kash Patel (FAIR.org, 11/14/24) promised to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections…. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Trump’s FCC chair is considering yanking broadcast licenses from networks for “news distortion,” or for letting Kamala Harris have a cameo on Saturday Night Live (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).
Nonetheless, Trump is still seen by many as a defender of free speech, because he sticks up for the free speech of people whose speech is supposed to matter—like right-wingers who weren’t allowed to post content that was deemed hate speech, disinformation or incitement to violence on social media platforms. As the headline of a FAIR.org piece (11/4/22) by Ari Paul put it, “The Right Thinks Publishers Have No Right Not to Publish the Right.” Another key “free speech” issue for the right, and much of the center: people who have been “canceled” by being criticized too harshly on Twitter (FAIR.org, 8/1/20, 10/23/20).
Now Trump (Truth Social, 3/4/25) has come out with a diktat threatening sanctions against any educational institution that tolerates forbidden demonstrations:
All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!
The reference to banning masks is a reminder that, for the right, freedom is a commodity that belongs to some people and not to others. You have an inalienable right to defy mask mandates, not despite but mainly because you could potentially harm someone by spreading a contagious disease—just as you supposedly have a right to carry an AR-15 rifle. Whereas if you want to wear a mask to protect yourself from a deadly illness—or from police surveillance—sorry, there’s no right to do that.
But more critically, what’s an “illegal protest”? The context, of course, is the wave of campus protests against the genocidal violence unleashed by Israel against Palestinians following the October 7, 2023, attacks (though Trump’s repressive approach to protests certainly is not limited to pro-Palestinian ones).
On January 30, Trump promised to deport all international students who “joined in the pro-jihadist protests,” and to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” He ordered the Justice Department to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”
A federal task force convened by Trump (CNN, 3/3/25) is threatening to pull $50 million in government contracts from New York’s Columbia University because of its (imaginary) “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students,” which has been facilitated, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, by “the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.”
So the expression of ideas—Palestinian solidarity, US criticism, generic “radicalism”—has to be suppressed, because they lead to, if they do not themselves constitute, “harassment of Jewish students” (by which is meant pro-Israel students; Jewish student supporters of Palestinian rights are frequently targets of this suppression). Those ideas constitute “censorship,” and the way to combat this censorship is to ban those ideas.
No one is talking about cracking down on students who proclaim “I Stand With Israel,” on the grounds that they may intimidate Palestinian students—even though they are endorsing an actual, ongoing genocide (FAIR.org, 12/12/24). That’s because—in the longstanding Western tradition that Trump epitomizes—free speech is the possession of some, meant to be used against others.
Featured Image: Demonstration in London in support of a free Palestine (Creative Commons photo: Kyle Taylor).
In a Truth Social post on Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump said he would punish students who engage in demonstrations of any kind — a clear violation of their First Amendment speech and assembly rights — and threatened consequences for any college or university that allows protests to take place. “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal…
An Arab American 8th grader in Plymouth, Michigan, was berated by a teacher earlier this year for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance — a direct violation of her First Amendment freedoms, the Arab American Civil Rights League (ACRL) said last week. On January 10, 14-year-old Danielle Khalaf sat during her class’s daily recitation of the pledge as an act of protest against the U.S.’…
Deadline (1/22/25) noted that the last FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, dismissed the complaints Brendan Carr reinstated because “they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent.”
Brendan Carr, newly appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is waging a war on the news media, perhaps the most dangerous front in de jure President Donald Trump and de facto President Elon Musk’s quest to destroy freedom of the press and the First Amendment.
Trump’s FCC has revived right-wing requests to sanction TV stations over their election coverage—complaints that had previously been dismissed by the FCC as incompatible with the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. The media industry news site Deadline (1/22/25) summarized:
The complaints include one against ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate, WPVI-TV, alleging bias in ABC’s hosting of the September presidential debate; one against WCBS-TV in New York that accuses CBS of “news distortion” in the way that 60 Minutesedited an interview with Kamala Harris; and another against WNBC-TV in New York for alleged violations of the equal time rule when Saturday Night Livefeatured Harris in a cameo the weekend before the presidential election.
Carr announced an investigation into the diversity, equity and inclusion policies of Comcast and NBCUniversal, and vowed that other media companies would face the same scrutiny. He targeted PBS and NPR for their underwriting practices, while warning that their government funding would be in the crosshairs of congressional Republicans.
FCC vs. dissent
Despite his claim that “”I don’t want to be the speech police,” Ars Technica (12/17/24) reports that Carr has “embraced Trump’s view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias.”
Carr has also made it clear that will use the FCC to attack dissent. Ars Technica (12/17/24) reported:
Carr has instead embraced Trump’s view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias. Carr has threatened to revoke licenses by wielding the FCC’s authority to ensure that broadcast stations using public airwaves operate in the public interest, despite previous chairs saying the First Amendment prevents the FCC from revoking licenses based on content.
Revoking licenses or blocking license renewals is difficult legally, experts told Ars. But Carr could use his power as FCC chair to pressure broadcasters and force them to undergo costly legal proceedings, even if he never succeeds in taking a license away from a broadcast station.
The impulse to go after broadcast licenses for airing unsanctioned viewpoints is similar to the methods used by authoritarian regimes like Hungary, Russia and Turkey to crush the free press (Deutsche Welle, 2/9/21, 9/15/22; Reuters, 10/17/24).
And no Republican crusade would be complete without fearmongering about George Soros‘s alleged control of media and politics. Fox News (2/25/25) reported that Carr “is expected to brief GOP lawmakers on the FCC’s investigation into Soros, including an investment firm he’s linked to purchasing over 200 Audacy radio stations nationwide.”
Regulation to benefit the right
What Carr “wants to do is use his bully pulpit to bully companies that moderate content in a way he doesn’t like,” Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer told Wired (11/20/24). “And if he continues to do that, he’s very likely to run smack into the First Amendment.”
Carr, one might remember, wrote the policy section on the FCC in Project 2025, a right-wing policy agenda that is guiding the second Trump administration. In it, Carr complained that the “FCC is a New Deal–era agency,” which has the “view that the federal government should impose heavy-handed regulation rather than relying on competition and market forces to produce optimal outcomes.” He vowed to eliminate “many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo.”
It all sounds like old school, free-market Reaganism, but Carr is actually very much inclined to use state power to interfere in the media marketplace when he has a chance to enforce the ideological limits of political discussion in the news media.
US conservatism likes to sell itself as a general resistance to federal regulation in the marketplace, allowing for capitalism to run wild without government interference. In reality, the struggle between American liberals and conservatives is more about what kind of regulation they want to see.
Just look at Carr’s record: He likes regulation when it benefits the right, and opposes it when it doesn’t. His reported use of his FCC power to investigate the Soros-linked fund buying Audacy stations contrast with his rejection of calls to block Musk’s takeover of Twitter (FCC, 4/27/22).
He has spoken out against social media content moderation (Wired, 11/20/24), but he has supported the move to ban TikTok (NPR, 12/23/22), a campaign based on anti-Chinese McCarthyist hysteria (FAIR.org, 3/14/24). And as the first Deadline piece notes, Carr revived FCC complaints about CBS and ABC, both Trump targets, but didn’t reintroduce a similarly dismissed complaint alleging
that the revelations from the Dominion Voting System defamation case against Fox News showed that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch lacked the “character” to hold a broadcast license.
While press freedom advocates fear Carr’s crusade against liberal speech, local television news giant Sinclair (11/18/24), known for its right-wing politics (On the Media, 5/12/17; New Yorker, 10/15/18), embraced Carr’s FCC leadership.
‘To punish outlets Trump dislikes’
Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz told the Guardian (2/24/25) that Trump plans to “use the power of the state to ensure that the media is compliant, that outlets are either curbed and become much less willing to be critical, or they are sold to owners who will make that happen.”
The aggressive drive to go after outlets like CBS and ABC stems from Trump’s longstanding belief that these networks are conspiring with the Democrats against him. The Trump administration, as FAIR (11/14/24) had predicted, will try to use the state to cripple media it deems too critical to his regime.
The FCC’s tough approach is already having an impact. Trump sued CBS and its parent company Paramount for $20 billion on claims that 60 Minutes had deceptively edited an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris; Paramount is considering settling the suit, despite its baselessness, as the litigation could impede a lucrative potential merger that requires government approval (New York Post, 11/20/24; Wall Street Journal, 1/17/25).
ABC has already settled another bogus Trump lawsuit for $15 million (FAIR.org, 12/16/24)—which indicates that even giving Trump massive amounts of money will not protect media outlets from the wrath of MAGA.
Carr’s ideological campaign will almost certainly have a chilling effect on any media outlet with an FCC license. News managers may veer away from too much criticism of the Trump administration out of fear that the FCC could strangle it with investigations and red tape. The Guardian (2/24/25) cited American University law professor Rebecca Hamilton on the danger that “the FCC investigations could affect journalists’ ability to report on the Trump administration”:
Valid FCC investigations can have a positive impact on the information ecosystem. But the latest FCC investigations launched by Carr are aligned with a broader effort by the Trump administration to punish outlets that Trump dislikes. Such investigations risk creating a chilling effect on the ability of journalists to report without fear of retaliation.
‘No regard for the First Amendment’
More than a year ago, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (12/7/23) warned that “the American press is facing, arguably, the gravest potential threat to its freedom in a generation.”
Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told FAIR that “rather than guessing precisely what line of attack might come next, broadcasters will be incentivized to tone down their coverage overall, and make it more friendly to the Trump administration.” Worse, he added, the viewers won’t know that such self-censorship is happening. “We only know what gets aired,” he said. “We don’t know what gets pulled.”
Before Trump’s election, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (12/7/23) fretted that Trump was “overtly vowing to weaponize government and seek retribution against the news media, showing no regard for the First Amendment protections afforded to the Fourth Estate.”
We’re seeing those fears already beginning to materialize in the FCC. The only way to truly resist is for media outlets to simply not comply with the insane, authoritarian dictates of the Trump administration—as AP has done by refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico, despite having its White House correspondents blacklisted (FAIR.org, 2/18/25).
But now is the time to relentlessly and honestly report on the most powerful political figure on earth, and not to back down.
Stern said the press can continue to take legal action to defend the First Amendment under Trump. But also said journalists should advocate for free speech through their outlets. “Journalists are always hesitant to write about press freedom, for fear of making themselves the story, but the time for that is long gone,” he said. “You’re not making yourself the story, Trump is.”
An Idaho woman was restrained and removed by an unidentified security force after she expressed her dissent during a town hall meeting hosted by Republican lawmakers over the weekend — a blatant violation of her First Amendment rights, witnesses to the ordeal have said. Teresa Borrenpohl, a former Democratic candidate for the Idaho state legislature, called out Republican corruption in the…
