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2026-11-13 08:06:51

It took just days after Democrats’ resounding victory in the midterm elections for a challenger to Donald Trump’s “favorite Democrat”—Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman—to emerge. Ahmed Moor, a Philadelphia foreign policy analyst and writer, is the first candidate to announce his entry into what will likely be a crowded primary field. The 42-year-old Moor was born in Gaza, and has lost family in Israel’s genocide—most recently a 19-year-old cousin killed by an Israeli sniper in Rafah. 

That history alone puts Moor at odds with Fetterman, who has become one of the most stridently pro-Israel voices in Congress and has threatened to leave the Democratic Party if it moves against Israel. But without his swing vote, Moor said, Fetterman will be “irrelevant”—and with only 13 percent of Pennsylvania Democrats reporting a favorable opinion of him in an October Quinnipiac poll, exceptionally vulnerable to a primary challenge. 

Moor is not alone in eyeing Fetterman’s seat: state legislators Chris Deluzio and Malcolm Kenyatta are both reportedly likely challengers. Former Pennsylvania House Rep. Conor Lamb, who lost a primary to Fetterman in 2022, has also been floated as a candidate, but has so far denied any plans to run. 

For now, Moor has a head start on pitching what he calls his “dignity agenda”— Medicare for All, an end to the US war on Iran, universal childcare, and a billionaire wealth tax—to the people of Pennsylvania. 

I spoke with Moor via Zoom the day after he launched his campaign. We discussed data centers, his plans to impose sanctions on Israel if elected, and his ongoing lawsuit against the State Department. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

So, you’re new to politics—who exactly am I speaking with today? 

I’m a Palestinian American writer, formerly a journalist. I worked in financial services in the past as well. And I’m a foreign policy guy. I just finished up a fellowship at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. I’m running for US Senate here in Pennsylvania, targeting the seat that John Fetterman currently holds. 

It would be untruthful to say that I didn’t come to this decision through genocide. I was born in Palestine, I was born in Gaza, and I have family there today. But genocide doesn’t happen overnight. Genocide is just the worst manifestation of what it means for our public policy to be captured by special interests, in this case by the Israel lobby.

I think you can broaden that analysis and say that generally we suffer from a deficit of democratic governance in America. That all of our public policy has been captured by special interests. And you see that in the way that data centers have sprung up across our landscape in Pennsylvania. You see that in the way that AI has begun to intrude into our daily lives unbidden. We didn’t have a conversation about this.

We’re being told today that the equivalent of 9 percent of GDP is being spent on the AI buildout and it’s going to cause massive job losses. Well, let’s have that conversation.  I don’t think it’s a good idea—but I’m insisting that we need to have a conversation about it. So that’s who I am, that’s why I’m running. 

Why Fetterman’s seat? 

Look, Fetterman’s story’s over. I’m not really running against Fetterman. No matter what happens in 2028, that man is irrelevant. I’m running for the future. I’ve got three young girls.

The idea that my kids’ decision set—that in the future, their rights will be more circumscribed than the rights I have, that their mother has—that’s intolerable to me. It makes me angry, and I’m unwilling to accept that. 

Thomas Jefferson wrote the words of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness just a few miles away from where I’m sitting now. The idea that people have liberty without having access to everything they need to live a dignified life—I don’t believe that. I think there’s no liberty in poverty. 

You’ve spoken about a “dignity agenda.” What does that mean in practice? 

When you walk down the street and you see somebody who’s unhoused, when you walk around and you see people who are economically insecure or or you drive through rural Pennsylvania and you see communities that are decrepit, where people are generally hopeless, they’re not living dignified lives.

Fundamentally, I think dignity means providing the basics, the material basics—and thereafter, go out and volunteer, or go out and make a million dollars, if that’s what you want, or write a book, or do whatever it is that’s going to make you happy, because that’s what it means to be a free person in a free society. And I have no prescription for what happiness means. I know what happiness means to me. I hope everybody figures it out on their own terms. But I do know that there’s no possibility of self-actualization if you’re lying awake at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday worrying about how you’re going to pay for your kids’ dentist bill. That’s not freedom.

You’ve also talked about sanctioning Israel, often referencing the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, which levied sanctions against apartheid South Africa. What would that look like? 

In 1986, we enacted legislation targeting South African apartheid on the basis of the idea that it’s inconsistent with our values as Americans. We litigated the question of separate and unequal on the battlefield 160 years ago, and we came down pretty firmly on one side of that conversation. We know how we feel about separate and unequal in America. So the idea that Jews have superior rights in Palestine, I’ve never believed in it. I don’t understand. It’s unreasonable to tell me as a Palestinian-American man that somehow Jewish people deserve more rights in the country that I was born in.

So, it’s just the idea of equal rights. Let’s enforce legislation that we enacted 40 years ago in a new context. 

You’re one of the plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit against the State Department for failing to enforce the Leahy Laws, which should theoretically require that the US stop providing military aid to Israel while it’s being credibly accused of human rights abuses. 

Not theoretically—concretely. The law is very clear. The Israelis committed genocide, they’ve committed war crimes, atrocities; they ought to be sanctioned for it in line with existing law. We as Americans lead with our values. I believe that. I believe that cynical people in positions of authority have undermined that argument, and made a lot of people feel that our speech is one thing and our actions another. I’d like to bring those things into coherence. 

We are people who value the lives of children. The Israelis have killed 21,000 children in Gaza. They’ve killed 100,000 innocent people. We really don’t know how many people they’ve killed because they won’t allow any journalists into Gaza. And the genocide is ongoing–that bears saying as well. 

And so there’s a moment of urgency that isn’t being met by any of our public policy. But about that lawsuit–you know, I’m a rule-of-law guy. I’ve got three little kids, and they’ve got to be able to enjoy Halloween and trick-or-treat in safety.

I believe that should be true for everybody else’s kids. I was talking about the pursuit of happiness earlier. If we don’t have safety, we’re not free people either. I think when the rule of law begins to break down even at the highest levels, that percolates throughout society. 

When you see the blatant disregard coming out of the Biden and Trump administrations for the rule of law, for ideas that we’ve articulated and then enacted through legislation that are supposed to govern how we interact with the world, everything else breaks down. So the lawsuit is about enforcing the rule of law. We’ve got laws. Let’s adhere to them. And then we’ve got to hold bad actors to account.

Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, Jon Finer, and [Samantha Power], who wrote the book on genocide, I think it was a how-to, possibly. 

Speaking of all those figures you just named, you wrote a few articles during the 2024 election about why you weren’t voting for Biden that year. I suspect some Democrats might come for you on that front. What would you have to say to them? 

I am the best representation today of what it means to engage authentically and enthusiastically with American democracy. I don’t like the leadership in the Democratic Party. I think most Americans in the midterms would say they voted against the war, against the Republicans, rather than for the Democrats. I am not committed to a party as such.

I’m committed to ideas, I’m committed to principles. The Democratic Party can become the party that rejects war and extermination.

But I’m not going to vote for a genocidal leadership. Instead, I’m going to seek to eject that leadership. And there’s a contest now—Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, these are people who are bought and paid for by AIPAC, which is a pollutant in our political environment. 

I represent the future of the Democratic Party. People are fed up with bad behavior across the board. It’s my Democratic Party, not Joe Biden’s Democratic Party. 

And you’re running as a DSA member, right? 

DSA had me at anti-genocide. Those guys are values-first people. The DSA is the values arm of the Democratic Party. I love those guys. 

On the theme of accountability, I wanted to ask you about ICE. 

ICE is best understood as a paramilitary militia. It is not a policing force. ICE has to be disbanded. The politicians on both sides who voted to fund ICE need to be held accountable at the ballot box.

We’re talking about rebuilding American institutions. It’s not a small task. 

The people who murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good have to be held accountable for their behavior. We need to drag bad actors into an environment of accountability. And if you’re going to wear a mask and you’re going to go kick down somebody’s door, think twice. We’re going to be in an environment of accountability soon.

You’ve started your campaign quite early. It’s two years out from 2028. How do you plan to spend that time? 

This is the bullhorn. This campaign is a vehicle for maintaining pressure on the leadership of the Democratic Party, working for renewal. I’m running for two years because I want to telegraph these arguments into every living room in America and every living room across Pennsylvania. I’m going to go to every one of those 67 counties. 

I’m going to meet with people on the left and right—I think Americans are committed to constitutional democracy. And that includes the Second Amendment, you know? You’re not going to convince a man with his origin in Palestine that it’s a good idea for the federal government to seize everybody’s guns.

Alex Pretti was availing himself of the best argument for the Second Amendment. He was confronting a tyrannical regime in an American street, and he was executed. I don’t know what he should have done in that instance. 

And I want to have these conversations earnestly and in good faith with every voter in the state and every non-voter too. 

Prior to this run, you were best known as a writer, editor, political analyst—you edited the book After Zionism—what from that world do you plan to bring into the Senate? 

Principles. In the darkest moments I’ve had, where I’ve felt afloat and unmoored from anything else, a reversion to the principles that mattered to me has helped to guide me. 

We’ve got to recommit to our guiding principles, the Bill of Rights, articulated 240 years ago. The Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. Those are good ideas, and the job of US senators to take those ideas and see them rendered in the real world. 

That means free speech, which was assailed and undermined by both the Biden and Trump administrations. The IHRA definition of antisemitism is a severe curtailment of speech in America. So let’s keep people safe, yes, but let’s also honor the rights, the civil liberties that make America worth fighting for. There’s this left-right contest, which is real—I’m a man of the left. We can litigate these questions. But what’s inviolable to me is the shape of the sandbox. 

And that’s the common thread. I’ve always argued that equal rights should exist in Palestine, Israel. There’s nothing inherently superior about anybody. We’re all just people. That’s the principle that’s always guided me and my work on foreign policy. And it guides me in thinking through the contours of what an American future can look like. 

2026-11-13 04:53:06

Appearing on CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday, President Donald Trump acknowledged that his immigration crackdown had been “too tough” and could have hurt Republicans in a midterm election that gave Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. The president said he’d “love to do something on immigration.” When asked what a deal with the Democratic majority could look like, he revealed the self-interest behind his softer rhetoric.

“When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s worked there as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress…and all of a sudden they’re being taken out of the country, it’s tough,” he said. “But there’s a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody taken out.” One of those people, of course, is the very man Trump promoted on Friday to serve as his chief of staff: Stephen Miller.  

“It feels like gaslighting,” Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois told Mother Jones during a video call on Tuesday. “It’s mind-boggling to me that a president will say, ‘I just lost an election,’ that perhaps his immigration policies have gone too far, he mentions some of the people that he has benefited from—like the hotel workers in his own hotels—and that maybe he should do something about it, and is interested in working with Democrats on immigration reform—while, concurrently, he has a man who’s been the architect of mass deportations and terror standing right behind him as his new chief of staff. Which one is it? Because the dissonance could not be greater than what we’re seeing.”  

Ramirez is vying to lead the House Homeland Security subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability. After winning reelection on November 3, she joined the chorus of Democrats pledging to investigate the Department of Homeland Security and immigration enforcement overreach. “Noem, Markwayne, Miller, Homan, Bovino, what’s up?” the congresswoman wrote on X. “Clear your schedule.”

I spoke with Ramirez on Tuesday about what the new Congress should prioritize on immigration, what accountability for DHS could look like, how Democrats can regain voters’ trust to deliver on that issue, and why immigration reform and affordability are interconnected.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The appointment of Stephen Miller to be Trump’s chief of staff doesn’t exactly signal that the administration is interested in changing course on its immigration policies, does it?  

Not when you have a man who has actively worked to terrorize immigrant communities and has celebrated white supremacy so publicly. It’s very difficult for us to see the president being able to lead in that way, because so many people have felt that Stephen Miller has been president in the shadows, and now he’s just got a promotion. I recognize that the president is not mentally stable and he may change his mind 20 times before we pass an immigration reform bill. We should not be legislating based on whatever the president will or will not veto.

I would call his bluff. I would have Democrats pass the most comprehensive immigration reform bill that we possibly can, bringing out of the shadows the most people possible, and then send it to him, and have him decide what he wants to do with it. What I don’t want to do is negotiate ourselves down to something that we know is mediocre and is not going to meet the moment. This is a moment where I believe that every poll will show you that the American people want to see comprehensive immigration reform, and it could be the thing we do literally 40 years later, after the last thing we in fact passed in 1986.

Voters delivered an undeniable rebuke of the Trump administration, including its immigration policies, resulting in a blue wave. Democrats, however, have been on the back foot on immigration, treating it as a liability, and voters have grown distrustful that Democrats can do better on that issue than the Trump administration. How should the party approach immigration—and message around it—going forward?

What we saw during the midterm elections was a rebuke on Donald Trump, Republicans, and their horrifying policies of corruption, hate, deportation, intimidation, retaliation, and they’ve given us a mandate for bold change and justice. They said to Democrats, this is a rebuke against Republicans, and an opportunity for you to show me what you will do with this great mandate we have given you.

Democrats must meet the moment, and meeting the moment means demanding justice for the horrors that people have lived, for the health care that they have lost, and the necessities that they can’t afford.

That includes immigration reform and the ability for Democrats to stop apologizing for immigration and for immigrants, and start affirming that immigrants are a critical part of this nation, that immigrants stabilize our economies, and that we unapologetically fully stand with the immigrant community and the establishment of permanent protections for them—permanent pathways to citizenship, protections for those seeking asylum in this country—so that we stop obsessing over the border and actually protect people and their ability to enter this country, get the visas necessary, and reunite people who have been separated from their families for so long.

We can, in fact, do that, and the American people want us to prove that we will. That means that we don’t sabotage ourselves. That means that we don’t sell ourselves short. And in the words of [Massachusetts Democratic Rep.] Ayanna Pressley, that we show what a majority can do—because mediocre policy changes will get us a 2024 repeat very quickly after.

It sounds like you’re advocating for the party to embrace an affirmatively pro-immigrant agenda.

That’s exactly right. It’s why I introduced a month ago the people’s vision for immigration reform. I wasn’t going to wait until after the elections. I wanted a roadmap that Democrats can point to as the solution and the way that they show the people that voted for the very first time and gave them this majority that they got it this time: That we will not make excuses, and we will have a positive, affirmative agenda as it pertains to immigration in this country. One that creates citizenship for the millions of people living in the shadows, establishes legal pathways, and creates and protects the ability for people to seek asylum in this country.

Last year, Chicago was one of the epicenters of ICE’s crackdown with Operation Midway Blitz. You’ve been one of the most vocal US lawmakers calling for accountability for DHS. What does accountability look like in your mind?

Let me start by saying that there is no affordability without accountability. Point blank. If you want to actually talk about why people are living and experiencing the challenges they are right now, whether it’s that they can’t afford to buy groceries, they can’t afford to drive to work or pick up their kids, or they can’t afford the rent or buy their home, or why they’re living in the shadows and their businesses are shutting down, there has to be accountability to the actors that have made that happen. And it also means accountability to those that have terrorized them.

Yes, we should be passing Medicare for all. Yes, we need to pass a bill that increases wages in this country. Yes, we should abolish super PACs and tax the rich. But we also have to understand that, as we fight for an affordable country, we have to hold every fascist in this administration accountable.

That includes [former DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem, who right now has a really good job doing nothing and getting paid a lot of money as a senior advisor in the State Department. It also means Markwayne Mullin, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Gregory Bovino. I could be here all day talking about all the actors that need to be held accountable, and it’s why, for me, it’s important for people to understand that resignations are not enough. They’re not going to save them from investigations, from impeachment, and accountability.

As we now hold gavels, we have the power to issue subpoenas, hold officials in contempt, and request that the courts step in when they don’t show up to our hearings.

It’s why I personally am pursuing the Homeland Security Oversight Subcommittee gavel. Because I believe that from there, where I’ve been doing oversight work the last four years since I’ve been in Congress, we’re going to be able to lead investigations into a number of things, including the use of federal funding to reward campaign donors, the medical neglect that we have seen in detention centers, the calls by Stephen Miller to ignore habeas corpus and the violation of due process, the empowerment of agents to act without accountability.

Also, and we don’t say this enough, how FEMA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Coast Guard, and TSA have been literally defunded and gutted to support the mass deportation campaign, and how illegal it is to take money from critical missions to move it into the obsession of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller [with] ICE and deportation. There’s plenty of work to be done. We have to be willing to use our power.

What do you think Democrats should prioritize going into the 120th Congress, and, specifically, what should the House subcommittee you’re seeking to lead focus on while there’s momentum?

I introduced a bill to dismantle DHS, and I intend to dismantle DHS from the inside. Every investigation we do—whether it’s about detention, who is profiting at the expense of children who are literally in cages, or the expansion of these 287(g) agreements where local police [work] with federal agents to hunt down people—is critical to provide the evidence necessary to be able to bring the most justice.

These investigations are not just about those that need to be behind bars, but ultimately that we create systemic changes. What people have said to us over and over is that yes, we want affordability and accountability, and in that accountability, what we want is for you to prove to us that you will do everything in your power so we’re never here again.

People will say, well, DHS is not the only agency that has been problematic. Absolutely not. But there’s no other agency that has consolidated the amount of power that DHS has with the amount of money that DHS has in order to terrorize the American people and literally rob us from our civil rights, while at the same time saying that they’re doing it under the guise of protecting us from terrorism. There is no democracy if DHS continues to operate the way it does.

For me, investigations must lead into reimagining something new, where we protect cybersecurity infrastructure, where we protect FEMA, where we protect TSA, where we protect the customs functions at the border, and where we abolish ICE and CBP and reinvest funds towards healthcare, community safety, and first responders.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, Congress has given the administration nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars for immigration enforcement. What can a Democratic majority in Congress do about ICE spending, and to rein in the agency and slow down Trump’s mass deportation campaign?

The ultimate goal is to dismantle this agency, and in the interim, while we build a case to dismantle it, we need to be clawing back every dollar that was given to them, whether through the “big ugly bill” or the reconciliation process we had a few months ago.

What we need to be doing, and what I’ll be working with the Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the other caucuses [to do], is to begin defunding ICE and CBP by clawing back the money that was robbed from the American people and put into these campaigns of deportation and kidnapping and terror that have brought so much money and profit to those that are either buying stocks in detention or running these detention centers.

I think we have a real opportunity to do so in the CR, the continuing resolution—to create an amendment that claws back that money. If we’re not able to get that done in the CR process before the year’s over, that [should] be a top priority of the new speaker in the first 100 days. Defund, claw back, redirect the money to CISA, to FEMA, to TSA, to USCIS, and to the office that is supposed to ensure accountability within DHS. What I’m saying is, Congress, do your job. We control the money and we control where the money goes.

The term “immigration reform” is thrown around on both sides of the aisle, but any prospect of an immigration overhaul that resembles an actual reform seems far-fetched. Is the appetite there, particularly among newly elected members of Congress?

Affordability necessitates immigration reform in this country. You cannot talk about economic stability in this country, protecting Social Security, protecting all the critical safety net programs, without understanding the intricacies of a broken immigration system and of the needs of the people. This is a moment where people in this Congress have been told by the American people what they want to see. That public opinion is demanding that we do something related to immigration, and that we pass immigration reform. We, Democrats, have less than a year to prove to the American people what we do with the vote that they gave us, and if the vote they gave us was worth it.

It means that we fundamentally change the way we talk about immigration and immigrants in this country, and we start talking about all the good things related to immigration: [That] you can’t extend Social Security by 25 years or 30 years in this country if you don’t pass immigration reform. How you can double the amount of federal revenue we get in taxes if we pass immigration reform. How you can actually lift this country’s workforce by passing immigration reform. How you can create more labor union jobs in this country by passing immigration reform. How you can help children who are living in trauma in this moment recover by passing immigration reform.

Democrats have to unapologetically, without a doubt, stand up for immigrants the way we stand up for abortion rights, the way we stand up for LGBT rights, and the way that we fight and say we stand up for our democracy. We can do that in this country and be successful, and the American people are waiting for that courage that we talk about to translate into action that they can feel. I’m hopeful. I have to be.

2026-11-13 04:48:12

Parents, students, educators, union members, artists, creatives, and community members stood outside Google’s New York City headquarters, located in the eerie corporate section of Manhattan’s Hudson Square neighborhood on Wednesday afternoon to protest Google pushing its AI technology into schools. 

It was a family event: Attendees of all ages held signs reading, “NO AI IN MY SCHOOL!”, “A.I. Gets an F,” “Stop stealing our imaginations,” and “SCHOOL Librarians = THE BEST Search Engines.” Some students handed out fliers to passersby while younger children ran around and drew pictures off to the side.

Many cars driving by honked their horns in support, and a few construction workers on the other side of the one-way street cheered the protesters on.

Rallies also took place on Wednesday in six other cities—Los Angeles; Chicago; Boston; Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; and Durham, North Carolina—organized by a nationwide alliance of parent advocacy organizations.

Just over a week earlier, on Election Day, Google announced that it would turn off its AI tools for school systems unless administrators choose to turn them on. But among these AI tools is Google Search, which has become synonymous with how to seek information on the internet. With New York City enacting a one-year AI moratorium on generative AI use for many elementary and middle school students, schools would lose Google’s search capacity entirely. Some other major public school systems, like the Los Angeles Unified School District, have also widely limited student access to generative AI on school devices. 

Both New York City and Los Angeles are Google clients. In an effort to quickly set up remote learning programs during the early years of the Covid pandemic, many school districts invested in Google Chromebooks, which were notably more affordable than Windows and Apple computers. Incorporating Chromebooks in the classroom—and according to what some parents told me, into homes where many students use them for homework—is pervasive, as these schools integrate the hardware with Google Classroom, which manages assignments, posts announcements, syncs with Google Calendar and Google Drive, and includes built-in AI tools through Google Gemini. 

The day after Google’s announcement, Google became the subject of a lawsuit alleging that the Gemini chatbot accessed through her school-issued Chromebook diagnosed Emma, a 13-year-old girl in North Carolina, with severe psychological disorders, and assisted her in planning her suicide and funeral over a span of several months—allegedly coaching her to conceal self-harm from her family and friends. (The school’s monitoring systems reportedly flagged the activity eventually to a former school counselor who had left nine months prior. The school alerted Emma’s parents, who intervened.)

A Google spokesperson told Gizmodo last week that the firm was taking the lawsuit’s allegations “very seriously.”

“We’ve worked extensively with medical professionals and academic experts,” the spokesperson added. “When people’s queries indicate they may be experiencing a crisis we show hotline information directly in Search to connect them with real-world support.”

Kelly Clancy, a parent of three, organizes with a coalition calling for a two-year pause on all generative AI in New York City’s K-12 public schools to allow time for a research-backed process to evaluate the roles AI products should have. She told me that she logged in to her kids’ school-issued Google profiles with her own computer to test what they were allowed to access. According to Clancy, students can still access Gemini on tablets and phones at school, which reverts to Google’s AI chat.

“When my son typed ‘AI sucks’—because he’s 12—it started behaving as a companion bot, telling him it was here to listen and that it heard him,” Clancy said. 

Craig, a parent with a daughter in second grade in Brooklyn, said on Wednesday that while Google’s tech poses wider problems—such as consuming more energy than entire countries and driving up carbon emissions with data centers—ordinary people can still “quit using Google products.”

Shan, a former teacher and mom to a fourth grader, organizes in New York City with Schools Beyond Screens, a national coalition of parents and educators pushing for evidence-based limits on digital technology in classrooms. She said she circulated a petition that now has over 600 signatures to that effect. One question parents raised: “Why are we trusting and enabling billionaires with our children’s education, with their futures?”

At Wednesday’s protest, New York State Sen. Andrew Gounardes said he was “radicalized” when his kids entered school. Gounardes proposed the Fostering Optimal Classroom Use of Screens (FOCUS) Act, where schools would largely be required to offer screen-free learning to students from pre-K to fifth grade.

Naveed Hasan, an elected member of New York City’s board of education, told me that the groundwork for problems with AI tech in schools came when Mayor Mike Bloomberg took control over the city’s public school system from the state government in 2002, abolishing boards that govern the city’s 32 community school districts and creating a “top-down system.” 

“There’s no way that one person can direct 900,000 students worth of policy. We have dozens of neighborhoods with different ethnicities and languages, wants and needs,” Hasan said, arguing that schools need to be allowed “some freedom to do the thing they need to do for their communities.”

2026-11-13 04:46:15

On Wednesday, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes (D–Conn.), urged Republicans to “take the win” and renew President Donald Trump’s warrantless mass surveillance powers during the lame-duck session. 

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—a provision used by US intelligence agencies to spy on the electronic communications of thousands of people outside the United States without a warrant—lapsed in June. Privacy advocates and civil libertarians have long decried the law as unconstitutional, and earlier this year, seven Republicans defied Trump and voted against renewing it. 

But Himes, an intelligence hawk, is one of Section 702’s most vocal defenders—even if that means handing warrantless spying powers to the man he once called a “dictator.” With Democrats set to take control of the House and Senate, Himes is suggesting that his Republican colleagues “get this thing done in the lame-duck because it’s, you know, it’s going to be a very different 702 that gets reauthorized in the first quarter of next year,” as The Hill reported.

Trump opposed Section 702 during the Biden administration, but now that he’s back in office, he thinks the program is crucial for national security. And while congressional support for the program has largely hewed to partisan lines, Himes sounds more at ease with warrantless surveillance than most of his Democratic colleagues. He has called Section 702, even under the Trump administration, the country’s “most rigorously overseen” surveillance program and told Wired he’s seen “zero evidence of abuse.” (Last year, the FBI closed an office that monitored for Section 702 abuses.) In April, Himes was the sole member of his state’s congressional delegation to back the program’s renewal, objecting only when Trump briefly placed Federal Housing Finance Agency hatchetman Bill Pulte in charge of national intelligence.

Come January, Himes will take the reins as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. In Wednesday interviews with The New York Times and The Washington Post, he set out his agenda for “aggressive” oversight of the Trump administration’s intelligence activities, including scrutinizing the CIA’s covert overseas operations. Himes also told reporters that the committee plans to “examine donations” made by defense contractors to Trump construction projects and “investigate whether intelligence analysts have been pressured to write reports that align with the objectives of senior officials in the Trump administration.” 

But as Himes positions himself as a watchdog, civil liberties groups are condemning his final-hour effort to renew Section 702. On Thursday, a coalition including Demand Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others sent a letter urging congressional leaders to keep FISA reauthorization off the table until the next Congress, noting that Section 702 has been used in recent years to spy on protesters, elected officials, and journalists.

“Americans across the political spectrum have good reason to distrust unchecked executive branch surveillance power,” the letter states. “No member of Congress knows who will occupy the White House in the years ahead, and constitutional protections should not depend on who is president.”

“Jim Himes has betrayed his own party and the American people,” Demand Progress senior policy adviser Hajar Hammado said in a statement. “After seeing a blowout election where Americans overwhelmingly rejected Trump and sided with the Democrats, Himes’s first instinct was to urge Republicans to use the little time they have left to hand Donald Trump and Stephen Miller the mass surveillance powers that they’re asking for.”

2026-11-13 01:49:21

The surveillance tech giant Palantir’s products have always been “essentially progressive,” its founder Alex Karp said Wednesday.

Karp’s company won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts under Donald Trump’s second term, soaring past the billion-dollar quarterly revenue mark by working with ICE to monitor immigrants and building AI systems for the US military. Karp has been known to praise Trump’s entrepreneurial instincts and crow about how Palantir’s technology “disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less.” But in a Politico Playbook interview today, he appeared to change his tune, pitching himself as the right weapons-tech oligarch to surf the blue wave.

“I’ve been a Democrat my whole life,” Karp said. “I grew up in a far-left environment. I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir—all of our products are essentially progressive.”

It is true that Karp has traditionally supported Democrats—he backed Kamala Harris in 2024. But after Trump’s reelection, Karp allied himself with the “anti-woke” right, and profited immensely by doing so. 

Military contracting has always been a bipartisan business. But the Silicon Valley contractors who surged to power under Trump—Karp and Peter Thiel, as well as Elon Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey—haven’t been shy about declaring their allegiances with the president’s party.

But now they’re nervous. The $1.5 trillion defense budget proposed by Pete Hegseth may be cut down in the 120th Congress. “A $1.1 trillion dollar budget will require them to make some trade-offs,” as government budget expert Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it in an article published Monday on the “tough choices, uncertainty, and scrutiny” defense contractors may now face: Companies could also be inundated with anti-corruption inquiries come January. 

Karp’s pivot is emblematic of an industry positioning itself to stay in power, no matter which party controls the government. I spoke to defense and security reporter Sharon Weinberger, whose new book, Valley of Death, tracks the rise of the “arsenal of the broligarchy,” about what we can expect from Silicon Valley’s armorers as legislative power shifts in America. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

So, this assertion by Alex Karp that Palantir’s products are now “essentially progressive”—what do you make of that? 

It’s not at all surprising for me, both for Palantir and probably what you’re going to see out of other companies going forward. Palantir, even going back to its early days, has tried to thread the needle on politics, so they have both portrayed themselves as an all-seeing surveillance system—in the sense that they’re named after palantiri, these all-seeing stones that actually have ominous connotations—but at the same time, since pretty early on, they have made this argument that they themselves are not actually a surveillance system, because they are not collecting the data, but allowing the data to be integrated. 

I don’t take a side in that debate. I just think it’s very interesting that they want to portray themselves as all-powerful, but at the same time they don’t want to be portrayed as a surveillance system that violates privacy. And they’ve tried under every administration, under different eras, like the post-Snowden concerns about privacy and surveillance, to kind of have it, I would say, both ways.

Alex Karp is always a bit of a chameleon. He’s also a master of narrative. He has long identified as a Democrat, and if you look at his political donations, he—like other people involved in defense—actually kind of sprinkles the money around, because they have to survive in both Democratic and Republican administrations. 

But he was always positioning himself ultimately as a Democrat for a long time, up until December 2024, at the Reagan National Defense Forum, which is the major bipartisan defense forum that’s held every year at the Reagan Library in California. He gets up as part of his panel, as part of his talk, and starts blasting the Democrats for their, quote, “woke pagan ideology.” It was sort of unprecedented for the CEO of a major defense contractor to attack a political party, either political party.

Given that, do you expect the results of last week’s midterms to affect the “arsenal of the broligarchy” that you write about?

What I’ve long argued is that people have real beliefs. I don’t doubt that Alex Karp has real beliefs. Peter Thiel certainly has real beliefs about the Antichrist and many other things. 

But as companies, they have to survive in Democratic and Republican administrations, and they’re going to do that by maneuvering in their language and their narrative. They’re going to do that by the people they hire, which will be from both administrations, and the lobbyists they hire. But what is so different and a little bit dangerous about some of these new wave of defense companies like Palantir is that they have broken the norms of being bipartisan, where defense has long been a bipartisan issue. 

So it’s not just whether they go from Democrat to Republican. And another pivot that’s worth mentioning—in fact, it’s I would say it’s a triple pivot for Karp—in the book, I have this picture of him in his Haverford College yearbook photo, draped in a keffiyeh. 

I was going to ask you about the keffiyeh photo!

Karp may be just a little bit older than me. I don’t believe the same things I believed 20 or 30 years ago. I don’t criticize him personally for going through a political transformation, but after the October 7 attacks and then the expansion of the war in Gaza, he became a very vocal critic of some of the college campus protests.

That gives me pause for two reasons. We don’t really want the heads of our defense contractors to be commenting on domestic political speech. It’s a norm issue, not whether I agree or disagree with what he is saying, but also it reflects this amazing chameleon-like transformation that he’s made. And he’s making it again, if you look at some of his most recent remarks, because after October 7, it was “we stand with Israel.”

Now in some recent remarks, he’s a little bit backing away from that, just as you’re seeing with his remarks on ICE and immigration about going too far. The guy is a master of narrative. I give him credit on that. My biggest problem is not what he believes or doesn’t believe, but the way that we have traditionally expected our defense companies to stay out of politics. 

Another major Silicon Valley contractor that I have on the mind right now is Elon Musk, who spent something like $400 million supporting losing candidates in the midterms. Do you expect to see any kind of similar pivot now from him?

Musk is the more extreme case. My issues with Musk are not his personal views or his political views, but again, the norm-breaking. He’s going to have a tougher time clawing back. But he’s also in a little bit of a different position because SpaceX has a de facto monopoly on military space launch.

That being said, business-wise, he’s not suicidal. I think it’ll be really interesting to watch what he does. He has certainly been influenced by the fact that Tesla has connections in China, and he has always backed away from making major criticisms of China. I suspect he will learn to like, if not love, a Democratic Congress.

This also depends on what happens with the next administration in two years. I suspect that we are also going to see some—I don’t know if moderation is the right word—but I wouldn’t be surprised if he shifts, if not his political position, then certainly his involvement in politics. I would not be surprised at all.

I think what he’ll see is that his dalliances, both with DOGE and his very right-wing stance, could be a detriment to his business. And I think he cares about his business above anything else. I’m not sure that he’s going to go and start embracing Democrats right away. But I do think that he is not going to try to fight a prevailing administration or Congress.

Any chance we’ll see a Silicon Valley version of the 1993 Pentagon Last Supper, when the Department of Defense warned weapons-makers that the government’s weapons-buying budget would shrink? 

I mean, when the stock market bubble eventually collapses—we now have dozens, if not hundreds, of startups—you will see consolidation. Venture capitalists will tell you this. There is going to be a vast consolidation of these new startups, but that’s separate from the politics. Elon Musk has really notched successes with SpaceX in space launch, but the others have not proved themselves. 

The question I raise is, if Silicon Valley companies become the new prime [contractors], are they going to be any better, faster, cheaper, or more innovative than the old primes?

2026-11-13 01:04:45

This article has been republished from Autonomy News, a worker-owned publication covering reproductive rights and justice. Follow Autonomy News on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, Threads, and LinkedIn.

An anti-abortion operative is moving up the ranks at the Department of Health and Human Services. Natalie Dodson, a contributor to Project 2025, was promoted in October to counselor in the Immediate Office of the Secretary, according to her LinkedIn profile. That means she is in a position to advise HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directly on programs and policy.

Researchers and abortion providers told Autonomy News they’re worried about the move. “The promotion of Natalie Dodson to a senior position advising the HHS Secretary is very concerning given her history of spreading scientific and health-related misinformation,” Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN and director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California San Francisco, said in a statement.

Dodson previously worked at a far-right think tank, where she railed against the abortion drug mifepristone. During her time at HHS, she won an award for her work on a pronatalist website. She also serves as the acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs, a position she has held since October of last year. That’s the HHS division that oversees Title X, the federal family planning program that the Trump administration has overhauled exactly as Project 2025 laid out. Dodson seems to have a friendly relationship with Kennedy—a post on her now-private Instagram profile shows them participating in falconry together.

HHS did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Dodson’s promotion comes at a critical moment. Though Democrats have retaken the House and Senate and promised to aggressively investigate Donald Trump and his allies, the White House still has plenty of levers to pull to restrict abortion access. Trump remains in control of federal agencies, which could swiftly impose new limits on medication abortion across the country. Congress would have little power to intervene.

The first attack came within days after the midterm elections: On Friday, the Department of Justice signaled that it would intervene in a Texas lawsuit that, if successful, has the potential to bankrupt Planned Parenthood.  

In the months leading up to the midterms, administration officials certainly gave the impression that a post-election crackdown was on the way. Attorney General Todd Blanche said he would revisit the federal government’s interpretation of the Comstock Act, an 1873 obscenity law the anti-abortion movement argues should be enforced as a nationwide abortion ban. On a private call, Blanche also promised “permanent solutions” to the availability of abortion pills by mail. In a Congressional hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel said he was open to investigating abortion pill manufacturers.

Of all these looming threats, the most immediate is likely the Food and Drug Administration’s ongoing “review” of mifepristone’s safety, which is set to be completed early next year. Recent comments from FDA attorneys suggest that, at the very least, the agency is poised to reinstate old restrictions on mifepristone, which could require patients to make an unnecessary in-person visit to a clinic to get the drug, banning its availability via telehealth. Project 2025 called for the agency to revoke its approval of the drug entirely, which Kennedy has the power to do.

Trump’s latest pick to lead the FDA—Heidi Overton, a physician who has called abortion pills “dangerous”—will almost certainly be confirmed by the outgoing Republican Senate majority before the end of the year.

Prior to HHS, Dodson worked at the far-right Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), an organization backed by megadonor Leonard Leo, who also serves on its board. Leo-backed groups spent millions to move the federal judiciary to the right, and have continued to pump money into anti-abortion causes since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its decision in Dobbs. The post-Dobbs effort to challenge the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in court has been led by Leo-funded organizations.

In fact, it was a report released by the EPPC that kicked off the FDA’s mifepristone review. In April 2025, the EPPC published a paper on its website purporting to show that mifepristone is much more dangerous than current FDA data would suggest. The report was deeply flawed—it wasn’t peer reviewed, and experts questioned its methods. 

However, anti-abortion groups and lawmakers took the questionable paper and ran with it: Missouri Senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to the FDA the same day the report was published, demanding the agency “restore critical safeguards on the use of mifepristone.” Responding to Hawley in a Senate hearing a few weeks later, Kennedy called the report “alarming” and said its findings “indicate the label needs to be changed.” On June 2, then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary pledged to conduct a review of mifepristone’s safety. 

Though there’s no indication Dodson was involved with the paper, she worked at EPPC when it was published, according to her LinkedIn. And her views on medication abortion are clear: At a 2024 rally outside the Supreme Court, Dodson said she was there to ask the justices “to hold the FDA accountable for its reckless and unreasoned decision to remove important safeguards from high-risk abortion drugs.”

Dodson’s “statements about medication abortion do not reflect the large body of scientific evidence confirming the treatment’s safety,” Grossman said. 

Ashley Jeanlus, another OB-GYN and a reproductive health advocacy fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, agreed.

“Dodson didn’t come to HHS with a background in medicine or science. She came from an anti-abortion think tank and contributed to Project 2025, and has a long history of prioritizing so-called ‘fetal personhood’ over the health and well-being of pregnant patients in the United States,” Jeanlus said in a statement to Autonomy News. “As the FDA continues its politically motivated review of mifepristone, it is easy to read between the lines of her promotion: The Trump administration will continue to support any and all efforts to make abortion harder to access, and it is being strategic and intentional in waiting until after the midterms to take more meaningful action.”

Liz McCaman Taylor, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, put it simply: “It’s pretty outrageous.”

“It just shows you how deep the anti-abortion roots go” within HHS, and how people like Dodson “really are the ones behind all of the policies that we see,” she added.

While at EPPC, Dodson also contributed to a report promoting “restorative reproductive medicine” (RRM), which conservative groups and the Make America Healthy Again movement have framed as an alternative to in vitro fertilization. The approach involves using fertility awareness to help promote pregnancy as well as surgical interventions and other treatments that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says can actually delay pregnancy. “People struggling with infertility deserve every evidence-based option, not a narrowed menu shaped by politics that can cost them time they don’t have,” Jeanlus said.

The EPPC’s report on RRM was co-produced with the Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025. Another contributor to that report: Marguerite Duane, an anti-abortion physician whom HHS recently awarded $8.4 million in grants, as Autonomy News exclusively reported. “It seems quite convenient, doesn’t it, that your partner in promoting this policy is now in a place where they are in charge of funding to continue promoting that policy,” McCaman Taylor said.

“It’s clear from the recent election that the public is tired of corrupt cronyism,” Grossman said. “We deserve to have qualified experts advising our nation’s leaders.”

According to LinkedIn, Dodson received an extraordinary achievement award from Kennedy for her work on Moms.gov, a federal government website debuted in May that directs pregnant people to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. She also represents HHS at the United Nations, where she participates in efforts to get other countries to sign on to the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an anti-abortion pledge the Trump administration created during his first term.

“Personnel is policy,” McCaman Taylor said. “Putting people into these positions where they can even quietly make changes to how our federal dollars are spent is really influential, and will take a long time to undo, even if they’re not shouting about it.”