The Intercept Briefing

Continued campus protests against the Gaza war have sparked heated debates around free speech, academic freedom, and the role of universities in addressing global issues. 

This spring saw an outpouring of students demanding that their institutions divest from Israel. Since then, universities have taken sometimes draconian measures to stop protests before they even begin.

On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, Intercept reporters Akela Lacy and Jonah Valdez, who have been following the protest movements for months, discuss the latest developments and how college administrators are responding. 

Lacy followed one such case at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where students were hit with severe charges for vandalism. “The school is trying to make an example of student leaders in the movement for Palestine to chill further speech,” Lacy says. “I want to emphasize the fact that these are felony charges for undergraduate students for a nonviolent offense that is putting paint on a building.”

Students and organizers who spoke with Valdez anticipate even greater hostility for protesters of every kind once Donald Trump takes office again in January. “This is what a lot of organizers were telling me leading up to Election Day was that there’s going to be so many other attacks on the rights of many other people," he says, "whether it’s reproductive rights, rights of trans people, LGBTQ community at large, rights of immigrants, all on top of the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.”

To hear more about the chilling effects on free speech and protest, listen to this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.

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As the clock winds down on the Biden presidency, Democrats have a limited window to act. Come January 20, Republicans will control the executive branch and both houses of Congress.

On this week's episode of The Intercept Briefing, Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., acknowledges the need for swift action, particularly on the war in Gaza, prison pardons, and immigration. “I’ve been on calls with advocacy groups around immigration,” she says. President-elect Donald Trump's promises to conduct mass deportation are “an imminent threat.” 

One tactic she’s employing to drive home the urgency is bringing Dreamers and their stories to meetings. “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power, closest to the policy solutions. That is not just a cute saying," Lee says. "It is, I would say, a very lifesaving way of thinking about the policies and the solutions that we have for the very real problems that we face. We can't keep icing out the people who live it.”

But she is also planning beyond the next eight weeks and is determined to fight the Trump administration. “When you're playing, it's Friday night football, it's raining out, you should not leave that field and your jerseys white. You gotta get dirty,” she says. “Not a single voter wants to see us looking pristine when we're in the fight for our life right now.”

To hear more about how Lee and her colleagues on the left are planning to handle the next four years, listen to this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.

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In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, Democrats and those on the left are grappling with what comes next.

On The Intercept Briefing podcast this week, columnist Natasha Lennard critiques the Democratic Party. “You can’t be both at once: You can’t be the party of Wall Street, and you can’t be the party of the working class,” Lennard says. By acquiescing to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the Democrats failed again “to offer a robust politics that serves the working class."

Facing a second Trump term, Lennard says the way forward is a politics of everyday life and radical action that focuses on empowering grassroots movements and labor organizations. “When we look at what people can [do] — involving people at a local level, building community so that it is truly kind of a form of life to be in this politics, rather than just a donation, rather than just a vote, rather than just canvassing even.”

In conversation with Jessica Washington and Jordan Uhl, Lennard emphasizes the importance and resilience of the working class. "Nurses unions, food workers unions. Most of the working class in this country are women. And it is a profoundly multi-racial working class. And we have a working class of care workers. And a service economy. And an increasingly growing care economy," she says. "That needs investing in. That needs support. That needs building."

To hear more about the future of progressive politics, listen to this week's episode of The Intercept Briefing.

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There will be much analysis and innumerable postmortems of what Kamala Harris and her campaign got wrong about the electorate this election.

Already, the trends are becoming clear: She failed to reach Black and Latino men, who flocked to Donald Trump this cycle. She underperformed in cities, typically Democratic strongholds. And she even lagged among younger voters vital to her party’s present and future.

What’s behind this dismal showing? One explanation is Harris’s inability to put forth a distinct agenda that would appeal to disaffected Democrats. Instead, she held steady to the policies of President Joe Biden, despite general voter dissatisfaction and anxiety about the economy and the direction of the country.

“We see Democrats over and over turning to courting this mythical moderate voter,” says senior politics reporter Akela Lacy on this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing. “We also see a big failure to account for the rightward shift among young people and figure out how to give young voters a reason to support the Democratic Party.”

Listen to understand what Intercept reporters were hearing at the polls in Georgia and Pennsylvania this week.

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Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, a new podcast from our newsroom. In our first episode, politics reporters Jessica Washington and Akela Lacy break down The Intercept’s recent investigation on how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has shaped U.S. foreign policy, as well as, as well as its record-breaking spending in the 2024 election cycle to unseat members of Congress who are who are insufficiently pro-Israel. 

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The process of Jewish expansion over Palestinian land has involved maintaining a "system of domination," says author Nathan Thrall on this week's Intercepted. In order to constrict "Palestinians into tighter and tighter space" over the decades, Israel has deployed a strict permit system, movement restrictions, walls, fences, segregated roads, and punitive actions such as arrests and detentions, even of children.

In “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy," Thrall’s book, published just before the start of the current war, tells the story of one Palestinian man’s struggle to navigate Israel’s painful system of legal and security controls after his son’s school bus is involved in a fatal accident. Thrall joins host Murtaza Hussain in a discussion about the system of control that Israel maintains over Palestinians, violence in the West Bank, the future outlook for a negotiated solution to the conflict in Gaza, and possible escalation amid fighting at Israel’s northern border.

"A Day in the Life of Abed Salama" is a 2024 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize winner. Thrall is also the author of "The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine."

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Throughout the past nine months of Israel’s scorched-earth war against the people of Gaza, the world has watched as the official death toll has increased by the day. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. These figures are likely a stark undercount of the true devastation. A recent report from the British aid organization Save the Children estimates that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. A new documentary by Fault Lines called “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” tells the story of the war's impact on the lives of three Palestinian families in Gaza.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill speaks to the film's correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous and executive producer Laila Al-Arian, the Emmy award-winning executive producer of Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English’s flagship U.S.-based news magazine.

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The escalating military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel now threatens to expand the conflict in Gaza into a full-blown regional war. For the past eight months, Israel and Hezbollah have traded missile attacks, leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians from northern Israel and southern Lebanon. The two sides have fought devastating wars in the past, but a cold peace has reigned for nearly 17 years. That peace is now in jeopardy, as Hezbollah has mobilized in sympathy with Hamas following Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip. To discuss the situation this week on Intercepted is Sam Heller, a fellow with the Century Foundation and expert on Lebanon and Hezbollah. Heller spoke with host Murtaza Hussain on the prospects of the conflict escalating, as well as the potential impact on the Lebanese, Israelis, and the broader Middle East.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].

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An Israeli military operation in Gaza this week aimed at rescuing four hostages from Hamas killed over 270 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. The Nuseirat refugee camp, where the attacks occurred, became a scene of horror as the injured sought care from Gaza's few remaining hospitals. Karin Huster, a Doctors Without Borders medical coordinator, witnessed the aftermath. She joins host Murtaza Hussain on Intercepted to discuss what she saw following the Israel Defense Forces attack alleged to involve grave war crimes, and the ongoing impact of the war on Gaza's civilian population.

Transcript coming soon. 

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After eight months of brutal fighting with no end in sight, the war in Gaza is at risk of metastasizing into a regional conflict. Recent tensions between Egypt and Israel — normally security partners who have cooperated in the blockade of Gaza — have thrown into stark relief the growing risks of a spillover from the war.

This week on Intercepted, security expert H. A. Hellyer discusses with co-host Murtaza Hussain the growing hostilities between the two countries, which have resulted in Egypt joining the International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel, threats to annul the Camp David peace accords, and even a fatal shooting incident between Egyptian and Israel troops.

The war in Gaza is at risk of exploding into a far greater war that could cause the destruction of the tenuous security architecture that has held the region together for decades.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join, where your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at [email protected].

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