CovertAction Bulletin

In over 3,500 cities and towns across the United States, workers took to the streets on May 1st for a day of no work, no school, and no shopping on the fourth day this year of mass organized action. Following the January 23rd and 30th shutdowns that started in Minneapolis and spread coast to coast and the No Kings Day in March, May Day was the latest in what’s becoming a building process of collective power and consciousness. Around the world, May Day or International Workers’ Day, is a celeb...

Imagine being forced to prove how old you are - and having it verified by a third party - before unlocking your phone or signing up for a social media site. That’s the goal of legislation introduced or passed in some U.S. states, the UK and Australia. Age verification requirements for social media and “adult content” are being proposed across the US, Europe and beyond with the justification of protecting children. But verifying your age basically means scanning your ID, and therefore ty...

Congress is set to vote soon on reauthorization of the Section 702 warrantless surveillance program, part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. 702’s authorization expires on April 20th. On its surface, the program allows intelligence agencies to spy on non-citizens outside the United States - without their knowledge, or the consent of their governments. But people inside the US can be and are caught up in this surveillance if they’re in contact with targets of the program fo...

NOTE: This episode was recorded hours before the announcement of the 2-week ceasefire on April 7th. Just a day after Donald Trump made a national prime-time address on April 1st claiming the US is “winning and winning big” in the war on Iran, an American F-15E Strike Eagle fighter plane was shot down over a mountainous region of eastern Iran, kicking off a frantic search-and-rescue and a covert misinformation operation by the CIA within Iran. The U.S. military has over 200 F-15E planes, at a ...

Cuba is set to receive oil for the first time in 2026, following the March 31st arrival at Matanzas Bay of the Russian tanker Anatoly Kolodkin with over 730,000 barrels, or 100,000 tons, of crude oil. The tanker and its owner, the state-owned company Sovcomflot, have had sanctions on it since 2024. Late last year, the Trump administration announced severe tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba and, after the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores, prevented Venezuelan ships from re...

Former FBI Director Robert Muller died on March 20th. He entered into that position on September 4th, 2001. Within eight weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had arrested over 1,200 people - mostly Muslim men in the United States. None of them were shown to have any connection to Al Qaeda, but that didn’t deter the FBI and its partners in local law enforcement agencies like the NYPD from heightening their surveillance of Muslim communities, even sending informants into mosques. All of this was...

Swarm Forge. Ender’s Foundry. Project Grant. Open Arsenal. These are the names of just some of the “Pace-Setting Projects” that Pete Hegseth identified in a January memorandum on the “Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the Department of War.” Their names are as hard to take seriously as “Operation Epic Fury,” but like the war, the Pentagon’s AI initiatives are already having a significant impact on the world. AI systems were reportedly used to select targets for more than 1,000 attacks in t...

The 82nd Airborne Division has canceled a training exercise to keep the Division ready to deploy with just 18 hours of notification for what it calls “forcible entry parachute assaults.” Parts of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, are being moved from South Korea to the Middle East. As we are recording on Tuesday, March 10th, Pete Hegseth said it would be “yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran - the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes” wit...

The US/Israeli war on Iran could easily spark a greater regional conflict if it continues. Donald Trump at first said Tehran would be taken in 3-4 days, then a day later claimed the war would last no more than 4-5 weeks and threatened that the US has enough weapons to fight “forever.” Already, the bombing has killed 787 people, including 180 at a girls’ school in Minab on Saturday as Operation Epic Fury began. Iran is responding in self-defense with attacks on important regional bases ...

Is the U.S. government preparing to go to war with Iran? Leading up to talks set to happen towards the end of the week in Geneva, the Trump administration has also threatened Iran with war, saying the country has “10 to 15 days” as of February 20th to agree to a deal - putting Trump’s one-sided deadline somewhere in the first week of March. In apparent preparation for military strikes, massive amounts of military equipment have been sent to the region, including dispatching the USS Gerald R F...

While border czar Tom Homan announced last week that the surge of federal agents in Minnesota could be winding down, he signaled that other cities could be next. “I’m hoping other sanctuary cities look at what happened,” he said, threatening cities that have various levels of protection for undocumented residents. It’s unclear where ICE’s next moves might be, but they have also been ramping up their surveillance online. The Department of Homeland Security has sent hundreds of administrative ...

The situation in Cuba is dire as the Trump administration ramps up its campaign to destabilize the country and destroy its revolution. The island has not been able to import a single drop of oil all year, according to President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Tanker ships headed to Cuba from Venezuela were intercepted and seized by the U.S. military, which has been significantly building up its naval presence in the region with a blockade of both countries. A January executive order targets the countries ...

As we reported last week, well over 100,000 people shut down Minneapolis on January 23rd in response to the terror of ICE and CBP agents. The next Friday, in response to a call that originated with the Somali Student Association at the University of Minnesota, businesses across the country shut down and people went to the streets in hundreds of cities, continuing the protest movement nationwide. Even the Trump administration has been forced to make moves in response, replacing Greg Bovino w...

Rachel was in Minneapolis last week where over 100,000 people took to the streets and reports on the mass action that happened Friday, shutting down businesses, schools and the city in response to the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to Minneapolis and the brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good earlier this month. The next day, CBP agents killed Alex Pretti, a VA nurse, while he was pinned to the ground, firing 10 rounds in less than 5 seconds. Again the people of Minneapolis and beyond ...

Mass protests have taken place across the country after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis, executing her in her car as she tried to drive away. The shooting has ignited an extraordinary wave of resistance. In the Twin Cities and beyond, students walked out of school on Monday in protest, refusing to sit in silence while federal immigration officers operate with impunity in their cities and refusing to accept state violence in their neighborhoods as normal. Peo...

At his first court appearance in New York along with his wife Cilia Flores, Nicolás Maduro told the judge, “I am innocent. I am not guilty. I am a decent man, the constitutional president of my country.” He declared himself a prisoner of war and a political prisoner, and along with Flores pleaded not guilty to all of the ridiculous counts of narcoterrorism and gun charges against him. Outside the court on January 5th, supporters rallied and chanted, “no boots on the ground, no bombs in the ai...

As 2025 comes to an end and we enter a new year, we’re looking back on the past 12 months that sometimes feel like a never-ending cycle of bad news. The year began with Trump’s inauguration,kicking off massive protests in cities and towns across the country that have continued throughout the year, spawning the No Kings movement as well as other national and local resistance. Instead of quietly letting the Trump administration implement Project 2025 and worse, peoples’ movements have taken ac...

To protect the huge profits of unregulated AI companies, the Trump administration is trying to bring back a punishment that was stripped from this year’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. In a December 11th Executive Order titled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” individual states will lose access to the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program if they establish their own regulations around the use and development of Artificial Intelligence in many circumst...

A recent op-ed by the New York Times Editorial Board calls for the U.S. military to reinvent itself and rearm itself in new ways in the face of the Western capitalist order losing its hegemony to rising powers across the world. The very idea of returning to a multipolar arrangement without the United States at the forefront terrifies the ruling class - including those elements who are at odds with the Trump administration on specific policies, tactics or details of how things are implemented....

At the final Cabinet meeting of 2025, Donald Trump said that the strikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean would continue, and that “We're going to start doing those strikes on land, too” - signaling that a ground invasion of Venezuela and possibly other countries may be imminent. On this episode, we review the lies the U.S. government has been putting forward about where drugs are coming from and why the U.S. has wanted to overthrow the Venezuelan government for decades - for access to its r...

On November 20th, a group of six Democratic Senators and Representatives released a video addressing American servicemembers, reminding them that they can and must refuse illegal orders that are given to them. The video comes as the Trump administration continues deploying the National Guard to cities around the country - and a day before a judge ruled that the National Guard deployment in Washington, DC was illegal. In the video, Representatives Chris Deluzio, Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander a...

Over 20,000 documents related to the Estate of Jeffrey Epstein have been released by the House Oversight Committee, and an unknown number more may be coming as the House of Representatives voted 427-1 on Tuesday for their release.. Donald Trump has flipflopped on whether he’d sign the bill if it passes the Senate and comes across his desk. First, he called Republicans who supported the release like Marjorie Taylor Greene and bill sponsor Thomas Massie “RINOs” - Republicans in Name Only. Then ...

Over two million New Yorkers voted in the mayoral elections, which saw Zohran Mamdani win with more than one million votes himself. It’s the highest voter turnout seen in the race since 1969, when John Lindsay won re-election after switching from the Republican to Liberal Party. In 2025, the popularity of Mamdani’s campaign and the mass voter turnout was a clear result of widespread disillusionment with the entirety of the political and economic system. The Mamdani campaign spoke to what New...

After almost a year of an escalating trade war, U.S. President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea last week. While official statements from both sides framed the summit as a positive move forward in a period of growing political, economic and military tensions on the international scale, it may also mark a distinct change in the U.S. approach. The Trump administration had imposed extremely high tariffs on Chinese exports to the US this year. China then imposed i...

Funding for SNAP, the federal Supplemental Food Assistance Program, is set to expire on November 1st due to the ongoing government shutdown that’s about to hit the one-month mark. A banner on the Department of Agriculture’s website blames Senate Democrats, immigrants and trans people for the crisis, but also says, “Bottom line, the well has run dry.” At the same time, the USDA said last week that it would not use contingency funds already allocated for such an emergency. The bottom line is t...

Millions of people in over 2,700 cities and towns took part in No Kings Day protests across the country on October 18th. Organizers estimate that seven million took part, two million more than the same actions in June. From the streets of big cities to the squares and streetcorners of smaller towns, this was one of the biggest days of protest in U.S. history and highlights the vast unpopularity of the Trump administration’s pro-billionaire and anti-worker policies as the government remains sh...

Donald Trump did not win the Nobel Peace Prize, as he boasted he should for supposedly being the “peace President” - a claim we’ve debunked numerous times on this show. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that the Nobel Committee “places politics over peace” - which actually does have some truth to it, like a broken clock does twice a day. The award was instead given to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan “opposition” leader hell-bent on overthrowing the government of Nicolá...

The Israeli government has waged the latest campaign of its effort to wipe out and destroy the Palestinian people entirely for over two years now, with the full financial, diplomatic and military backing of the United States government. Using a conservative estimate of 66,600 deaths, the toll from Gaza since October 7, 2023, represents 14% of all conflicts worldwide in that time period according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. As the Trump administration puts forward a ...

At a gathering of senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday, Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signaled that they’re preparing to imminently expand the scope and size of the U.S. military, both inside and outside the United States. Trump made it clear that he knows sentiment against not only him but the entire capitalist system is growing - as are the movements of organized people in resistance. He said Tuesday, “Last month, I signed an executive order ...

In a rambling speech that lasted nearly an hour at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Donald Trump spent a significant amount of time condemning immigration in the west as well as the use and development of clean energy alternatives to coal and oil. In typical Trump fashion, he talked up his supposed accomplishments both in the U.S. and internationally, claiming he has ended seven wars and fixed the U.S. economy. But a new Washington Post/Ipsos poll shows that 53% of Americans oppose Trump...

Gaza is burning. Anyone who’s watched the livestreamed genocide of the Palestinian people over the last 23 months knows that this is true. But the Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz was boasting when he posted those words on X early Tuesday, also saying “The IDF strikes with an iron fist” and “We will not relent and we will not go back - until the completion of the mission.” His post came as two divisions of the IDF entered Gaza City and with additional reinforcements soon to be joining the...

According to recent reporting by Taylor Lorenz in Wired, a secretive dark money group is funding influencers to post pro-Democratic Party messaging on social media services - paying them up to $8,000 per month to do so and holding them to a secretive contract that prevents them from even revealing their relationship to the organization Chorus, backed by the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Some of those named as affiliated with the program including Brian Tyler Cohen, Olivia Julianna, David Pakman and Po...

In a stark escalation, Donald Trump has armed the National Guard members on the streets of Washington, DC. He’s also signed an executive order getting rid of cashless bail - putting poor people who are arrested at significant risk of being stuck in jail waiting months or longer for trials if they can’t afford outrageous cash bails. He then signed an executive order suggesting a one-year prison sentence for anyone who burns an American flag - in complete contradiction to the 1989 Supreme Court...

The founder of Tech Buzz China, Rui Ma, posted on X after a recent trip to China about her observations on energy there. “Energy is considered a solved problem. The Chinese government’s investment in sustainable energy – from advanced hydropower to next-generation nuclear – means that, relative to many other markets, electricity supply is secure and inexpensive. Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given. This is a stark contrast to the U.S., where AI growth is increasi...

Donald Trump has taken yet another step in the ruling class’ quest to trash civil liberties, expand the brutal role of cops and other agents of the state and wage an all-out assault on Black people across the country. On Monday the 11th, he announced that Attorney General Pam Bondi would be in control of the DC police, and that Secret Service, DEA, FBI and National Guard troops would be deployed around the District. Trump and Bondi’s claims about crime in DC are just an excuse to launch an a...

Militarized ICE and Homeland Security raids targeted farms in California’s Central Coast on July 10th, with 200 farm workers ending up arrested, some being critically injured and one tragically losing his life. Masked and heavily armed ICE agents used tear gas and rubber bullets to target workers and those who came to their defense. As soon as community members got word of the possible raids, they sprung into action, tracking the ICE caravan and sharing notifications through community network...

In 2024, Donald Trump said he’d declassify and release the files the U.S. government has on notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But recently, responding to disappointment and growing demands from his base to actually release the full files, he told a crowd of reporters in Pennsylvania that “I don’t understand why the Epstein files would be of interest to anybody. It’s pretty boring stuff. It’s sordid, but it’s boring. And I don’t understand why it keeps going.” Even among the MAGA f...

134 people have died and 101 remain missing after the Guadalupe River in central Texas overflowed as a result of 6.5 inches of rain falling over the course of three hours on the morning of July 4th. Though the floods are being called just a natural disaster, mounting evidence shows that climate change, budget cuts, crumbling infrastructure and political infighting contributed not just to the flooding but the resulting destruction and loss of life. Even in a real freak incident, a true once-in...

Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill has passed and been signed into law. What the White House has deemed an “historic” is actually the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of the United States, benefiting the already-wealthy with massive tax breaks and devastating cuts to social programs. The bill also accelerates militarization at home and abroad, with millions more in funding for ICE to terrorize immigrants in the country and the military to terrorize others outside its borders. The b...

What do Palantir, DoorDash, Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg have in common? They all joined the campaign against candidate Zohran Mamdani, the state Assemblymember who exceeded expectations and effectively won the Democratic NYC mayoral primary when Andrew Cuomo conceded around 11PM on election night. As of July 1st, with ranked choice calculations completed, Mamdani has officially won the primary. A Cuomo-aligned super PAC, Fix the City, raised $20 million, much of which came through bil...

Mahmoud Khalil is free! After spending 104 days unjustly held in an ICE detention center in Jena, Louisiana, he was reunited with his wife Noor, newborn son Deen and community over the weekend. At a press conference and rally at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine near Columbia University on Sunday, he said “I must call the hypocrisy of Columbia University, a university that just two weeks ago said that they want to protect their international students. Why? While over 100 [days] later, I ha...

Donald Trump posted to his social media site Truth Social on Monday evening that “Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” as he made an early departure from the G7 summit in Canada to “attend to many important matters,” according to the White House. The U.S. government is also moving the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz away from the South China Sea canceling a planned port call in Da Nang City, Vietnam scheduled for this week as the ship continues to move West towards the Arabian Sea where ...

Over the weekend, ICE agents invaded Los Angeles and its suburbs, kidnapping dozens of people on Friday and threatening more near a Home Depot on Saturday. These masked and heavily-armed forces are part of Trump’s promised 30-day surge in anti-immigrant attacks in the LA area. But wherever there is repression, there is resistance - and the people of LA are fighting back. The community in LA and the suburbs continues its anti-deportation mobilization as we record this episode. Donald Trump has...

Big data and surveillance tech firm Palantir is working with the U.S. government to bring its software into multiple government agencies under the Trump administration. In April, Wired reported that the company had a $30-million contract with ICE to provide “near real-time visibility” on immigrants in the country. Late in May, the New York Times revealed that the company is expanding its government work across agencies including the Social Security Administration, Department of Homeland Secur...

NATO held its 2025 Parliamentary Assembly in Dayton, Ohio between May 22 and 26. Though it promotes itself as a force in defense of peace and security, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s history exposes its true purpose: propping up Western imperialism and hegemony. It’s an international body started with the goal of containing and threatening the Soviet Union, and since the fall of the USSR has expanded well out of its target areas of North America and the Northern Atlantic, causing de...

Donald Trump held phone calls with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, then announced that the two countries will “immediately start negotiations toward a ceasefire” in the 3-year-long conflict between the two. His announcement also touted a goal of increased trade and economic ties with Russia. It also comes weeks after the U.S. and Ukraine signed what’s been called a “mineral for muscle” deal, giving the United States the ability to pr...

On Tuesday, UnitedHealth Group announced that CEO Andrew Witty was stepping down. The announcement came from Witty as the company suspended its full-year financial outlook - because it believes that medical costs will be higher than forecast. UnitedHealth’s revenue was over $400 billion. The year before Witty became CEO in 2021, its revenue was $257 billion - that’s a 55% increase. At the same time, the Trump administration’s 2026 budget will slash $880 billion in cuts to the critical program...

Israeli Minister of National Security and supporter of extremist, far-right policies Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the United States in late April. From the time he got off his plane in Florida and throughout events in New Haven, CT, New York City and Washington, DC, he was met with opposition, protest and resistance. Even some Zionist groups opposed his visit, which included stops at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago, a Jewish society tied to Yale university, the halls of Congress, and a fundraiser in New York. ...

April 20th marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest oil spill in U.S. history, which killed 11 workers and spilled 134 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. For those who rely on fishing and related industries off the Gulf Coast, as well as for those who were involved in the recovery and cleanup efforts, real relief is still yet to come. The AP reports that “all but a handful of roughly 4,800 lawsuits seeking compensation for health probl...

Mahmoud Khalil, likely days away from the birth of his first child, is still being held in Louisiana as his lawyers fight for his freedom after a judge ordered that he can be deported. Just Monday, Columbia student Moshen Mahdawi was detained by ICE during a regular interview as part of the citizenship process. Hundreds of students from more than 90 institutions across the country have had their student visas revoked. And the Trump Administration is doubling down on the disappearance of hundr...

Talks are set to begin on April 12th in Oman between the United States and Iran about Iran’s nuclear program. The announcement was made as Benjamin Netanyahu left the White House after his second visit to DC in as many months. In a short video posted after the meeting in Hebrew with English subtitles, Netanyahu praised Donald Trump and said, “We agree that Iran will not have nuclear weapons,” adding that any such agreement coming out of these meetings would need to be “Libyan style” - where I...

After breaking the ceasefire deal, Israel is continuing its ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, and threatening to further ignite wider conflict by bombing Syria and Lebanon. In just one 48-hour period after the end of the ceasefire, a combination of bombings from the air and a ground invasion killed over 500 Palestinians in just 48 hours. Though both countries are increasingly isolated in public opinion and on the world stage, the U.S. government continues to provide full fi...

Tens of thousands of new and newly-unredacted documents related to the killings of JFK Jr, his brother RFK and Martin Luther King Jr have been released over the past week. While historians and journalists are still pouring over the files to see what new historical information can be learned from them it’s becoming clear that there’s no smoking gun - no document changing the official narrative of the JFK assassination. But we are learning more about CIA tradecraft as well as a number of clande...

The Israeli government, with the full backing of the White House, has completely thrown out the January ceasefire and negotiations and resumed the genocidal bombing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, which may be followed up by a full-scale ground invasion. Over 400 people were killed, including over 170 children, in Israeli air strikes on Monday night. It was the deadliest nights of the last 15 months in Gaza, since November 7, 2023, and the death toll may end up being significantly high...

Over the weekend, federal agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the United States, and said they were stripping him of his permanent resident status and going to deport him back to Palestine. During the student encampments and protests at Columbia University last year, Khalil was a public figure involved in negotiating with the University’s administration on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Though the Trump administration is promising more arrests and de...

Following up on last week's show where we discussed the quickly-changing dynamics of U.S.-European relationships under Donald Trump, we look at the “peace deal” Trump has penned with Ukraine that reportedly includes significant mineral rights for the U.S. we focus on how the Ukraine conflict and its possible end reflect the shifting focus of U.S. imperialism. Ukrainians have been used as pawns in this war and in the conflicts that precipitated it, and as we’ll get into, the U.S. government is...

As the Trump administration openly threatens historic American allies in Europe, weighs in on German elections in favor of the far-right, and pushes the idea of MEGA - Make Europe Great Again - it’s becoming increasingly clear that the relationships and dynamic between the US and Western Europe is changing at a scale we haven’t seen in almost a century. The uneasy transatlantic alliance could be at risk of unraveling, and these tensions could reshape geopolitics for years. But what exactly is...

Donald Trump has nominated Linda McMahon, a former executive with World Wrestling Entertainment and twice-failed Senate candidate as well as the Administrator of the Small Business Administration under his first term, to lead the Department of Education. Speaking about her nomination in early February, Trump said he wants her to put herself out of a job - to shutter the US Department of Education. McMahon is wholly unqualified to run the Department. The nomination of this multi-billionaire se...

After Hamas submitted a two-page report documenting multiple violations of the tense ceasefire in place since January 19, and said it would on its end delay the release of some hostages until the issues are resolved, the Israeli government is now ramping up for another phase of all-out war against the Palestinian people. Benjamin Netanyahu threatened that if all Israeli hostages are not released by Saturday the 15th, he would “let all hell break loose.” The developments also come days after ...

Over the weekend and early into this week, Elon Musk’s so-called DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, effectively shut down the US Agency for International Development on a temporary basis. Musk, Donald Trump and their lackeys attacked USAID because they claim it’s a “viper’s nest of radical-left [m]arxists who hate America,” to quote a Musk post on X, saying it’s a corrupt organization that promotes so-called DEI across the world and is used to waste money. But behind the scenes, Secre...

After getting rain over the weekend, three of the main fires devastating the Los Angeles area are nearly 100% contained, meaning that firefighters have been able to create barriers around the fires. But the Palisades Fire, the Eaton fire and the Hughes fire continue to burn a combined nearly 48,000 acres of land. And to the south, just a few miles north of Tijuana Mexico, the Border 2 Fire has burned over 6,600 acres and is only 74% contained. More than two dozen people have been killed as a...

Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday was met with protests around the country. As he immediately launched attacks on immigrants, the environment, LGBTQ people, labor and beyond, people took to the streets in opposition, pledging to continue organizing to defend the oppressed against the onslaught of attacks from Trump and the billionaires. On this episode, we get into some of the many executive orders that Trump put out on his first day in office. We also analyze the foreign leaders he did -...

On January 13th, CovertAction Magazine held a webinar featuring whistleblowers and activists who formerly have served in various U.S intelligence agencies to discuss their perspectives on what to expect from those agencies and beyond under Donald Trump. On today’s show, we bring you part of the webinar, which featured John Kiriakou, Coleen Rowley, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson, and was moderated by Jeremy Kuzmarov. To watch the full panel, including Kuzmarov’s introduction, Johnson’s present...

Early on New Year’s Day, a truck drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, resulting in dozens of injuries and at least 14 deaths. The alleged attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police. Immediately, the media and government seized on supposed and self-described connections with ISIS with no critical thought towards what they’re calling a terrorist attack. On this episode, we interrogate who benefits from this framing, what else is behind this story and how ...

When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed on December 4th in New York, the casings of the bullets used to kill him had “deny”, “delay” and “depose” written on them. These so-called “three Ds” of the insurance industry describe how companies go out of their way to get out of paying claims. Even before a suspect was identified and arrested, popular sentiment was broadly with the shooter. The health insurance industry in the United States is so hated that people sympathized with the mo...

Calls for the resignation of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol have rung out from civil society and beyond after Yoon declared martial law on December 3rd. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) called for strikes until Yoon steps down, and groups under and beyond that organization are heeding the call. Yoon’s brief and apparently sudden declaration of martial law caused many to protest outside of the National Assembly chanting “Abolish Martial Law! Down with Dictatorship!” The me...

At the end of November, groups aligned with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or the “Levant Liberation Committee” and previously known as the Al-Nusra Front, launched significant attacks on the Syrian government in the Idlib and Aleppo regions, taking part of the city of Aleppo. The Syrian Arab Army has mobilized to push back against HTS. The offensive of course comes within days of the ceasefire in Lebanon that we discussed in our last episode, but also after more than a decade of US-backed insu...

On Tuesday afternoon, the Israeli security cabinet approved a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the cabinet and then with a pre-recorded video addressed the Israeli public, expressing his support for the deal. But in the leadup to the security cabinet vote, and while Netanyahu was making his case in support of the deal, Israel has been engaging in some of its heaviest bombardment of southern Lebanon since mid-September. On Monday the 26th, attacks...

Shortly after we recorded our last episode and mentioned the bill, the House of Representatives tried and failed to vote on HR 9495, the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act” bill. House Republicans tried to suspend the rules and push a vote through, and got 52 Democrats to vote with them, but weren’t able to get the ⅔ majority they needed under House procedural rules. But HR 9495, also called the “nonprofit killer” bill, isn’t dead yet. If passed, it would allow ...

Within days of winning the election, Donald Trump is already making announcements about who will - and won’t - be in his cabinet and influencing his administration. On today’s show, we’re going to take a look at what a second Trump term is going to look like. From Elon Musk being on calls with Trump and Zelenskyy to RFK having influence over health policy and beyond, workers in the US and around the world will be under attack on many fronts. We’re joined later in the show by Walter Smolarek, ...

We’re just days out from the US presidential elections. With many polls putting Trump and Harris within just a few points of each other, it’s easy to get caught up in the fear and uncertainty of the race as we continue to see horror after horror unfolding in Gaza and Lebanon as well as critical domestic crises like housing and infrastructure going unaddressed. On this show, we’re focusing on the work of activists looking past the mainstream. They’ve been in the streets, they’ve pushed local ...

The devastation of Hurricane Oscar, which hit Cuba on October 18th, has significantly worsened the deep crisis of the island’s electric grid. The U.S. government and its media lackeys are trying to blame the socialist government for supposed mismanagement of the country’s power system, but the reality is that the biggest contributor to the situation is the US blockade of Cuba. On October 22nd, The People’s Forum published an open letter in the New York Times calling on President Biden to over...

Hurricane Milton approached the physical limits of what a hurricane can be before it made landfall, and this was driven in part by the fact that 13 major Western corporations are responsible for the deforestation of 17% of the Amazon rainforest over the last few decades. The drastic effects of climate change are causing havoc across the globe. In the southeastern US and into Appalachia, hurricanes Helene and Milton have killed hundreds, left thousands without shelter and caused untold billion...

As the U.S. & Israeli war in the Middle East continues to expand with new threats of a significant Israeli attack on Iran, the Pentagon last week sent thousands of additional troops to the region. The USS Harry S Truman has been preparing for much of 2024 for a deployment to the Mediterranean Sea and departed on September 20th. Squadrons of F-15E, F-16 and F-22 fighter jets, along with A-10 attack aircraft, will not replace the American troops and equipment already in the region, but inst...

On Monday, September 30th, an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah killed Wafa al-Udaini, her husband and two of her children. Wafa was a founder of the October 16 group, a mentor to young journalists and media professionals in Gaza and especially worked to highlight the voices of women impacted by the Israeli occupation. Wafa was the 174th journalist to be killed by Israel in Gaza since Israel began its bombardment of Gaza just under a year ago. Romana Rubeo wrote at the Palestine Chronicle, “...

As the United Nations General Assembly meets this week, world leaders have adopted a Pact for the Future to build towards a multilateral world. But the meeting is happening as regional conflicts could flare up and ignite across many parts of the globe. The US & NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine rages on with few serious efforts being made towards a peaceful resolution. And it comes just days after Israel killed dozens and injured thousands in Lebanon with a long-term coordinated plan to explode...

The first and maybe only debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris happened just after we recorded our last show on Tuesday, September 10th. Over nearly two hours, the candidates attempted to talk over and through each other, regurgitating some of the same old talking points of each of their campaigns. It was light on policy and heavy on racism, bigotry and threats of war. Ultimately, what the debate showed us is that this contest is not about actually improving the lives of working-class...

Fifty-one years ago, a bloody coup in Chile overthrew the democratically-elected president Salvadore Allende, leaving him dead. Sometimes now called “the other 9/11,” it ushered in the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which lasted for 17 years. Over 3,000 people were killed or disappeared in that period, and nearly 40,000 people were targeted for political repression and tortured because they were leftists or suspected of being leftists. The US government played a significant role in ...

John Stockwell is a former CIA officer who became a whistleblower and outspoken critic of the Agency, the US intelligence community and the imperialist policies of the US government. He left the CIA in 1976 after serving there for 12 years following service in the US Marine Corps. During that time, he was told to fabricate intelligence reports on the situations in Vietnam and Angola, and eventually exposed a significant amount of information through his books and public talks. He was an early...

The founder and CEO of social media and communications app Telegram, Pavel Durov was arrested in France on August 24th. The country, one of the Nine Eyes intelligence partners along with the US, UK, Australia and others, claims that the social media app is a hotbed for illegal activity, and Western media coverage blasts it as a tool of the Russian government. But the attack on Telegram is actually a testing ground for future attacks on encrypted messaging platforms and alternative news source...

The Democratic National Convention is taking place in Chicago this week. Amidst the fanfare and extravagance, there’s very little actual democracy inside as big-name politicians and those trying to make a name for themselves attempt to make the case for Kamala Harris to be the next president. Hillary Clinton, AOC, Jill and Joe Biden and Barack Obama have taken the stage among others. But with Joe Biden out of the race, the DNC has made it a foregone conclusion that Kamala Harris will be the n...

Venezuela’s elections took place on July 28th. Nicolás Maudro defeated the right-wing candidate Edmundo González Urrutia by over a million votes. The imperialist machine immediately jumped into action to denounce the elections, condemning Maduro as a dictator and calling the results undemocratic. Over 1,000 international observers from 100 countries were in Venezuela for the election, and with few exceptions of those who are against the Bolivarian Revolution, they’ve stated that the electoral...

In a ruling on July 19, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that confirmed what Palestinians have been saying for over 7 decades: That the Israeli occupation is illegal, that the way Palestinians are treated by Israel is a form of apartheid, and that the occupation must end. This ruling includes the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which have grown especially since the Israeli military withdrew from Gaza in 2005. As we are approaching 300 days of the genocide ...

Just over 100 days away from the 2024 election, Joe Biden has dropped out of the race and endorsed Kamala Harris, signaling to the Democratic Party that there should be no debate, no other nominations and certainly no floor fight over delegates at the upcoming Democratic National Convention next month. This of course comes after a period where there were no real primaries for the Democratic Party. That’s not unusual when a sitting President is running for reelection, but questions about Biden...

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13th changed the political situation in the United States and especially surrounding the 2024 election in an instant. The Biden campaign canceled events and advertisements, while the Trump campaign began preparing for the Republican National Convention happening this week. Within minutes of the shooting, the chorus from mainstream commentators and politicians effectively had one voice. Republicans and Democrats alike condemned “political vio...

Project 2025 bills itself as a comprehensive plan to undo decades of social progress - in its own words, to “dismantle the administrative state” and “return self-governance to the American people.” Democrats have jumped into using it and its connections to the Trump agenda and former staff as a reason to rally behind Joe Biden. Among its 922-page Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 suggests eliminating the Department of Education, increasing the US nuclear weapon arsenal, harshly limiting ac...

The U.S. government is spying on you through your mail. The little-known program called mail covers lets law enforcement request that an investigative bureau inside the Postal Service track and report on all the mail you’re getting. And it’s done without a warrant, without any real oversight or transparency, and at the request of agencies like the IRS, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and ICE. While the USPS Office of the Inspector General hasn’t provided updates on the program in a decad...

After 1,901 days in Belmarsh Prison, and many more years fighting for his freedom, Julian Assange has agreed to a plea deal with the United States and is back in Australia. There, he’ll reunite with his wife, Stella, and his children who have only seen him in jail. The official Wikileaks account on Twitter posted: “Julian's freedom is our freedom.” The struggle for Julian Assange’s freedom has been a global one, involving many sectors of society - advocates, activists, whistleblowers, a...

In 2020 and 2021, a secret Pentagon program deployed fake social media accounts to sow distrust among people in Southeast Asian countries, particularly the Philippines, around China’s Sinovac vaccination for COVID-19. Clusters of accounts identified as having ties to US Central Command (CENTCOM) made posts with the hashtag #ChinaAngVirus - or “China is the virus” in Tagalog suggested that the coronavirus is real, but China’s vaccinations were not to be trusted. Posts in Arabic and Russi...

Over 100,000 people surrounded the White House on Saturday, June 8th, wearing red and carrying a 2-mile long banner with the names of the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died since the renewed Israeli assault began eight months to the day before. Through a rally, march and followed by a People’s Court of Justice on the Ellipse, the message was clear: the People’s Red Line rejected Biden’s lie that an Israeli attack on Rafah would be a so-called “red line” for him. Though most mains...

On May 19, forces calling themselves the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo launched what appears to be a failed coup attempt, attacking the home of the Deputy Prime Minister of Economy Vital Kamerhe, as well as the Congo’s presidential palace, Palais de la Nation. The country’s Republican Guard forces were able to put down the attack within hours. Three of the 50 people arrested were U.S. citizens, and another U.S. citizen who reportedly led the operation was killed during the ...

Over 3,500 people gathered in Detroit, Michigan for a three-day People’s Conference for Palestine on May 24, 25 and 26. Led by the Palestinian Youth Movement, the conference highlighted the work that has already been done over the last 8 months but also the historical work done over years and decades in the struggle to end Zionist occupation. Participants heard about how education, art, music, literature, labor and much more play a role in this evolving struggle. The conference celebrated and...

Student encampments and street protests for Palestine have been hit with a heavy wave of police violence and repression from coast-to-coast. In some cases, it’s the same police departments whose staff and leaders get training from the Israeli Defense Forces that are attacking peaceful events calling for divestment and justice. In Salt Lake City, police viciously attacked students at the University of Utah on April 29th, and then arrested student organizers the next day before a demonstration ...

Hamas on Monday accepted a ceasefire deal that Israel has effectively rejected, instead moving forward with their invasion plans for Rafah, taking control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah gate that separates Palestine from Egypt, and making incursions into Rafah with tanks and shelling from the air. Over 100,000 Palestinians have been told to evacuate from Rafah, but are left with very few places to go. Student encampments and protests in the US continue, and have been recognized by Pales...

Student protests in solidarity with Palestine have set up protests and encampments on campuses across the country from Columbia, NYU and the New School in New York to Berkeley, Stanford and Cal Poly Humboldt in California. Students are demanding that their universities - many of them among the most elite in the country with giant endowments - divest from weapons manufacturers and Israeli companies. They’re being met with fierce repression by police, but along with solidarity from faculty and ...

Iran carried out a strike over the weekend of April 13 and 14 in retaliation for the Israeli bombing on April 1 of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria. Embassies are the sovereign territory of the country represented, effectively making it an Israeli attack on Iran. In the West, the Iranian response, which was announced in advance and targeted only a military base, has received significantly more attention. Pundits and politicians called it a grave escalation, the opposite of reality. And ...

The Biden Administration is pursuing a policy of “energy chasing,” where U.S. regulators put pressure on foreign-owned fuel supply companies, shippers and even financial insurers so that they back out of deals to bring “fuel to our ports.” On March 17, there were significant protests in eastern Cuba against the blackouts. The president says the authorities have gone to dialogue with them and explain the country’s energy problems. “Two or three [protest] events that were fundamentally pe...

The Korean War has never ended - despite the US government’s attempts to portray it as a long-ago victory, it has never signed a peace agreement with North Korea. Tens of thousands of US troops continue to be stationed on the Korean peninsula, first part of the Cold War and now part of the New Cold War encirclement of China. The devastating war killed 4 million Koreans and left much of the North absolutely devastated. Peace activists continue to fight for a true and just end to the conflict. ...

The British High Court of Justice ruled on March 26 that the United States government has until April 16 to make “assurances” that if extradited, Julian Assange will be treated fairly by US courts and prisons. But this is hard to believe when the US government already had plans to kidnap and kill Assange, drawn up by Mike Pompeo’s CIA. We’re joined by Sean Blackmon, host of Darker than Blue on WPFW, to talk about the latest in the Assange case. We also talk about the US government abstaining ...