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2025-11-13 21:34:00

It’s been more than a week since Tucker Carlson’s interview with groyper leader Nick Fuentes roiled the right. Many felt a line had, finally, been crossed by Carlson platforming someone who described Hitler as “really fucking cool.” The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro accused Carlson of “normalizing Nazism;” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Fuentes had “spread a poison that is profoundly dangerous” and scolded Republican senators for staying silent on the issue; Newsweek columnist and conservative radio host Josh Hammer posted on X, “The great Charlie Kirk is rolling in his grave right now. Simply despicable.”

Others were not so sure that Carlson’s hosting a Hitler fanboy, autocracy enthusiast, and opponent of mixed-race marriage amounted to a lapse of judgment. Far-right pundit Candace Owens declared that Carlson was “very well-liked now by both sides” and called his critics “Zionists.” Kevin Roberts, president of the arch-conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, fired back at those who criticized the organization’s “close friend” Tucker Carlson, labeling them a “venomous coalition.” (The next day, Roberts clarified that he and Heritage did “denounce” Fuentes. But, ever since, the organization has been in a messy, public civil war.)

Amid this, you might think it might be time for a reckoning. Everyone who even lightly affiliates with the GOP could, say, go look in a mirror and ask themselves whether they should keep debating the level of Nazi loving that is acceptable.

Instead, the far-right’s favorite fellas keep recording podcasts.

Enter into this fray a couple more pundits: Conservative provocateur Christopher Rufo and far-right publisher and shitposter Jonathan Keeperman, better known on X as @L0m3z. Hosting their brand-new show earlier this week on the right-wing network The Blaze, the duo attempted a sort of meta-commentary on the Tucker and Fuentes incident.

“We’re maintaining strategic distance and an emotional coldness with this bait. We’re looking at the bait. We’re analyzing the bait. We are—we are kind of deconstructing the bait. But we’re not taking the bait,” said Rufo of taking the bait and recording a podcast about the Fuentes situation.

Keeperman then waxed grad-school with a postmodern theory of the situation:

Historical Nazism was awful. It was monstrous. It was a disaster. But they’re falling for what postmodern theorists called ‘hyperreality.’

There’s reality, the world as it is, social connections, material connections, really meaningful things in the world. Then there’s hyperreality. These are simulations, or digital representations, or zeros and ones that simulate some past reality, but they don’t actually have the embodied force or real social weight of those past events.

So, I like to say that Nick Fuentes is not a Nazi, because Germany was denazified in the 1940s. And—besides pockets of skinheads or neo-Nazis in Europe and elsewhere—Nazism is a long-dead ideology; and instead, he’s using the symbols of Nazism to drive controversy and then to increase his kind of attention and notoriety; to play the villain in the left, to play the spoiler on the right.

To sum up: Fuentes saying positive things about Nazis doesn’t matter because Nazis don’t exist anymore. Somehow, despite the invocation of “postmodern,” this intricate argument seems to miss that the first part negates the second part. Can Nazism be a “long-dead ideology” if a major right-wing figure is saying Hitler is “cool”? Tough to argue, but Lomez tried!

In general, this academic framing tracks with the thinking-man’s-far-right personas that both Rufo and Keeperman have carefully curated. Rufo, a former documentary filmmaker, rose to prominence with his online crusades against critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Keeperman has said that he aims to create a “right-wing counterculture.” Here’s how I described him in the piece I wrote about a pronatalism conference earlier this year, of which his company, Passage Publishing, was a sponsor: 

Keeperman, who often uses the pseudonym Lomez, has created a niche in republishing works by fascist thinkers—for example, a British volunteer soldier who fought on Francisco Franco’s side, a WWI-era German nationalist, and a Russian czar loyalist who “chronicles the chaos, courage, and tragedy of his struggle against the Bolsheviks.” On X, where Keeperman posts to [118,000] followers, he decries immigration (“no, actually we don’t want your huddled masses”), makes liberal use of slurs, and theorizes about “bio­leninism,” the idea that the political left exists because “the dregs of society cannot accrue status of their own, and so depend instead on the state and its unofficial organs to give them status in exchange for loyalty.”

Rufo and Keeperman’s new show is on Fuentes’ radar, too, and it doesn’t seem like he’s very happy about it. In fact, there was a subtle whiff of competitive panic when he mentioned it on a broadcast earlier this week:

Who the fuck is watching that? “By the way, I know how we’re gonna fight Nick Fuentes. You like Nick Fuentes and the groypers, you’re gonna love this.”

It’s Jonathan Keeperman, a Jew academic…here’s another Jewish academic who’s 50 years old telling you it’s about the left… Passage Press. The guy sucks—three feet tall, and the guy sucks, and Chris Rufo is even worse. Eat shit. Place your bets.

Fuentes has reason to be concerned. Rufo and Keeperman’s intellectual posturing appears to be capturing a mainstream audience in a way that his own, far cruder, approach has failed to do. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat interviewed Keeperman on the paper’s “Interesting Times” podcast. Keeperman spoke at this year’s National Conservatism conference, an increasingly influential annual conservative confab. Passage Publishing produces the books of Curtis Yarvin, one of the intellectual darlings of the tech-right, and a reported influence on Vice President JD Vance.

Rufo has made even wider inroads into the political mainstream: Florida governor Ron DeSantis has praised him and he has been described as a major influence on the Trump administration. Vance has amplified Rufo on social media, both retweeting him and responding to his tweets.

In contrast, last year, Vance called Fuentes “a total loser.”

Fuentes proclaims to return those sentiments. “You can’t make me go and vote for some fat‑ass with some mixed‑race family,” he said on a broadcast earlier this year.

But might he also crave the same attention the vice president has paid to Rufo and Yarvin? Toward the end of the broadcast earlier this week, Fuentes appeared to extend an invitation—in a roundabout, backhanded way—to Vance. “We want to leave the door open,” he said. “I don’t trust Vance at all. I don’t trust anything he says, but it’s a long way away until 2028, and I’m open to talking to anybody.”

2025-11-13 20:31:00

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has said Donald Trump is an “invasive species” whose dismissal of the climate crisis is an “abomination,” in a fiery attack at the UN climate talks in Brazil—from which Trump and his administration have been completely absent.

Newsom is the most senior American politician at the Cop30 summit in Belém, after Trump took the unprecedented step of not sending a delegation to the talks. Newsom sought to fill the notable void of official US activity by lambasting the president for tearing up climate policies and pushing for burning more of the fossil fuels that have caused dangerous global heating.

On Tuesday, it emerged that Trump has drawn up plans to open up the coast of California for oil and gas drilling, a move that Newsom said would happen “over my dead body, full stop. He said he wants to open up the coast of California, but he doesn’t want oil-drilling rigs off the coast of Florida, not across the street from Mar-a-Lago. He’s silent on that. But it’s not going to happen. It’s dead on arrival.”

Accusing Trump of an assault upon the climate and on democracy, Newsom said of the president: “He’s an invasive species, he’s a wrecking-ball president. He’s trying to roll back progress of the last century. He’s trying to re-create the 19th century. He’s doubling down on stupid.”

Trump has called the climate crisis a “con job” and urged countries to remain wedded to coal, oil, and gas, and even remove their climate policies if necessary in order to purchase more US fossil fuels.

The Republican president declined to send any representatives to Cop30, where countries are thrashing out new emissions-cutting targets and climate finance.

Newsom said Trump’s rolling back of climate policies and removing the US from the Paris climate agreement is “an abomination, it’s a disgrace” and added this would benefit China, which is dominating the world in the manufacture and deployment of clean energy such as solar and wind.

“You know who is cheering, who is singing his praises? President Xi of China,” Newsom said. “They are sitting back and dominating supply chains, because they understand the great opportunity of clean energy.”

Newsom, a Democrat who became governor of California in 2019, is heading an alternate US delegation at Cop30 that includes more than 100 elected officials who are stressing that subnational jurisdictions in the US are still committed to tackling the climate crisis.

Newsom is one of 24 governors who are part of the US Climate Alliance, a group of states that represents more than half of the US’s population and has stated support for climate action.

This motley group has not glossed over the jarring absence of the US government in Belém, however, and some other leading figures at the talks have expressed relief that the Trump administration wasn’t there.

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations framework convention on climate change, said on Tuesday that the US’s absence from the talks “actually is a good thing.”

“Ciao, bambino,” was her response to the US’s departure from the Paris agreement.

At a press gaggle, Newsom said: “That’s a hell of a statement coming from the mother of the Paris agreement.” In light of the Trump administration’s behavior at an international maritime meeting last month, where officials menaced some foreign leaders and threatened tariffs on those who supported a carbon fee on shipping, a US presence could be a threat, Newsom added.

Trump’s absence “creates opportunity” for local leaders to step into the fold on climate policy, Newsom said.

“What stands in the way becomes the way. This is an opportunity for us bottom up at the local level to assert ourselves,” he said. “He pulled away. That’s why I pulled up.”

Newsom is considered a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 2028 presidential race. While he said he wouldn’t be drawn on whether he would run, he stressed that Democrats needed to reframe the debate around the climate crisis, to focus on simple messages around cost of living and the problems American households are facing in getting insurance due to repeated climate-fueled disasters.

Joe Biden attempted to sell his climate policies as being a benefit for jobs and the economy, a pitch that failed to resonate with voters. Biden then dropped out of his struggling re-election campaign, with Kamala Harris losing to Trump.

“Climate change can seem abstract,” Newsom said. “We need to talk in terms that people understand. It’s about people, places, lifestyles, and traditions. If we put things in those terms, we can start winning people over.”

2025-11-13 20:30:00

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

The caravan of executions started with a US Army veteran in March.

It continued in May with a former Army Ranger who served in the Gulf War, then an Air Force veteran in July, a former National Guard member in August, and a Navy veteran in October. 

This week, a former Marine, and next week, yet another Army veteran are scheduled to die in what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called the “most veteran-friendly state in the nation.” 

He’s the one who signed all seven of their death warrants. The governor wielding the executioner’s pen is a Navy veteran himself. 

“They are coming so hard and so fast that it’s hard to keep track,” said William Kissinger, a Vietnam veteran who spent over four decades behind bars in Louisiana and now advocates on behalf of veterans on death row. “It’s heartbreaking.”

It’s also historic. Florida is on pace to more than double its record of eight executions in a year since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty nearly a half-century ago. The number of military veterans on the list is startling. 

While veterans represent an estimated 12 percent of Florida’s 256 death row inmates, they account for nearly 40 percent of the 18 death warrants that the governor has signed this year.

DeSantis, a former JAG officer who served as a legal adviser to SEAL Team One in Iraq, has ignored the pleas of some veteran advocates and refused to address the disproportionate ratio of former service members he is sending to the Florida State Prison’s execution chamber.

“I don’t think he [DeSantis] is targeting vets specifically,” said Art Cody, a retired Navy captain and director of the Center for Veteran Criminal Advocacy. “He is just not taking [their military backgrounds] into consideration.”

But should he? 

While death penalty opponents and tough-on-crime hard-liners clash over the moral arguments and political motivations of DeSantis’ historic urgency, another debate is suddenly raging: Should an inmate’s military service matter when a judge, jury, or governor decides who deserves the ultimate punishment for society’s most heinous crimes?

The US Supreme Court weighed in on that question 16 years ago in a case out of—none other than—Florida. The justices overturned the death sentence of Gregory Porter, a decorated Korean War veteran convicted of killing his former girlfriend and her boyfriend, because his attorney had presented no evidence about the combat that left him “a traumatized, changed man.” 

“Our Nation has a long tra­di­tion of accord­ing lenien­cy to vet­er­ans in recog­ni­tion of their ser­vice, espe­cial­ly for those who fought on the front lines,” the court stated in a 2009 opinion. “Moreover, the relevance of Porter’s extensive combat experience is not only that he served honorably under extreme hardship and gruesome conditions, but also that the jury might find mitigating the intense stress and mental and emotional toll that combat took on Porter.”

What makes the recent surge in veteran executions stand out, veterans advocates say, is how they contrast with the historic declines in death sentences nationally and the rising understanding of the traumatic impact of military service.  

A new report released this week by the Death Penalty Information Center tallied more than 800 veterans sentenced to death in the US since 1972. 

About one-fifth of those veterans served in a major conflict, with the largest group—106 veterans—from the Vietnam War. About 40 percent of those Vietnam veterans had a known diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and many had been exposed to Agent Orange, the report found.

Jeffrey Hutchinson, the Gulf War veteran executed in Florida this May, traveled what the report called the ​“bat­tle­field-to-prison” pipeline. The former Army Ranger’s appeals for mercy included his diagnoses for PTSD, trau­mat­ic brain injury, and neu­ro­tox­in expo­sure.

“In many cases in Florida, the juries that sentenced these veterans to death never understood how seriously they were harmed by their experience in the military and what effect those injuries had on their ability to conform their behavior to the law,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research center that focuses on how the death penalty is implemented. “Gov. DeSantis is in a position to recognize that and do something about it. But he, instead, has been scheduling them for execution and letting them be executed at his sole discretion.” 

Yet, victims’ advocates argue that Hutchinson’s horrific crimes speak for themselves: He was convicted for the murder of his girlfriend and her three children, after busting down the front door of their north Florida home on Sept. 11, 1998, and finding them in the master bedroom. He shot mom Renee Flaherty and her kids, seven-year-old Amanda and four-year-old Logan, all in the head. Then he turned the gun on nine-year-old Geoffrey.  

“The terror suffered in that moment is incomprehensible to this court,” the trial judge said.

More than 26 years later, Florida carried out Hutchinson’s execution. 

Until this month, DeSantis said little about why he has so dramatically accelerated the pace of executions in the Sunshine State. Before this year, Florida had executed nine people—including two veterans—since the Republican became governor in 2019. Six of those were in 2023, critics note, as DeSantis launched an unsuccessful campaign for the White House.

The governor said during an appearance in Jacksonville earlier this month that he’s trying to do his part for victims’ families who deserve to see justice served. 

“We have lengthy reviews and appeals that I think should be shorter,” DeSantis said, according to WUSF. “I still have a responsibility to look at these cases and to be sure that the person is guilty. And if I honestly thought somebody wasn’t, I would not pull the trigger on it.”

But the governor has failed to address why so many of those inmates this year are veterans. 

“By the time I’m writing about one, he has already signed another death warrant,” said Kissinger, a former airman first class and Vietnam War veteran who has led appeals to the governor on behalf of Florida’s veterans on death row. Three years after returning from the war, Kissinger killed a man during a drug robbery and was locked up in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he eventually became an inmate counselor on death row. 

Kissinger was among 161 veterans who signed a letter calling on DeSantis to stop signing death warrants for veterans, including former National Guard member Kayle Bates, convicted for the 1982 murder of an office manager in Lynn Haven near Panama City.

A week before Bates’ execution in August, many of those petitioners gathered in Tallahassee, urging DeSantis to reconsider, arguing that executing veterans affected by war and denied mental health care was “not justice.”

They called the executions a “final abandonment.”

When asked for last words, Bates, who had been deployed during the deadly 1980 Miami race riots, said nothing. He had maintained his innocence for more than 43 years.

He was the fourth veteran executed in Florida this year. But his lethal injection became a tipping point for scores of veterans and death penalty opponents who say serious questions remained about his case.

When The War Horse reached out to DeSantis’ office with questions about Bates and whether the governor takes into account an inmate’s military service, a spokesperson replied with the same two sentences shared with other media: “Kayle Bates was executed after receiving the death penalty for murder, sexual battery, kidnapping, and robbery. His sentence had nothing to do with his status as a veteran.”

In 1982, Bates was an active member of the National Guard when he was charged in the brutal murder of Janet Renee White. Prosecutors say he abducted White from her office, stole her diamond ring, attempted to rape her, and stabbed her to death. 

The trial of Bates, who was Black, opened with a prayer from the victim’s minister, who asked for the judge and the all-white jury to have “wisdom.” With no mention of Bates’ military background, he was sentenced to death within an hour of deliberations. 

But the Florida Supreme Court threw out his original death penalty and ordered the trial court to reconsider his sentence. This time, attorney Tom Dunn, a US Army veteran, represented Bates with one aim: to persuade the jury that Bates was not the “worst of the worst,” and that life in prison, not death, was appropriate.

Dunn presented Bates’ military service and lack of criminal history, and put forth 18 character witnesses, including fellow National Guard members.

They testified about how Bates’ deployment to the Miami riots, two years before his arrest, had affected him. Bates was among thousands of National Guard members sent into Miami after an all-white jury acquitted four white police officers in the beating of Arthur McDuffie, a Black Marine Corps veteran, left in a coma after a traffic stop in December 1979. For three days, Black neighborhoods in and around Miami burned. Vehicles were set on fire, people were dragged and beaten, and businesses were looted. At least 18 people were killed and hundreds injured. 

One fellow Guard member described how Bates was afraid and nervous during patrols, according to court records, and another testified about the gruesome violence, especially against Black residents. No one came out of that experience unaffected, the Guard member testified. 

Bates’ wife described him as distant and plagued by nightmares, and she said he often woke up screaming and not recognizing where he was. A forensic neuropsychologist testified that the trauma Bates endured could have influenced his later behavior. 

But Bates’ attorney Dunn also focused on another argument: As an alternative to a death sentence, he said, the jury should be able to recommend life in prison without the possibility of parole, a new option under Florida law. At Bates’ original trial, the only alternative to death was 25 years to life. By 1995, Bates had already served nearly 13 years on death row, so Dunn worried jurors would feel forced to impose the death penalty so Bates couldn’t be eligible for parole in another 12 years.

When the jury asked the court after nearly three hours of deliberation if it could sentence Bates to life in prison without parole, the judge said no. 

Ultimately, the jury voted nine to three to sentence Bates to death again. In a US federal court, the lack of a unanimous decision would lead to a hung jury and no death sentence. That is not the case in Florida. 

A dissenting Florida Supreme Court judge later criticized the ruling, calling the court’s refusal to accept Bates’ waiver “unnecessarily harsh” and inconsistent with past rulings.

In 2024, almost three decades after his resentencing and a year before his execution, Bates’ legal team uncovered information suggesting a potentially fundamental problem with his original conviction: The jury may have included a relative of the victim. They asked the Florida Supreme Court to allow them to interview the juror.

If true, such a discovery could have led to a retrial. Florida law, like that of most other states as well as the federal system, explicitly bars jurors related to a victim by blood or marriage. The court, however, rejected the request as being too late, records show. 

So on July 18, 2025, almost 42 years after Bates’ conviction, Gov. DeSantis signed a letter addressed to the warden of the Florida State Prison in Raiford about 140 miles away. 

The death warrant was brief, outlining Bates’ court rulings, and concluded with a note saying that the governor’s office did not find executive clemency “appropriate” for him. It did not provide any further explanation for the decision.

Janet White’s husband, Randy, had been waiting for this resolution for four decades. He said he attended every hearing and every trial to “let Renee know that justice has finally been served for her,” he told USA Today. He attended the execution, but not out of revenge, he said. He had actually made peace and forgiven Bates years ago as a way to move forward. 

“You’ve got to find a shorter route than 43 years,” he told USA Today. “There’s got to be a better system that will see all these appeals through quicker.”

On D-Day, just over two months before Bates was executed, DeSantis signed three separate bills “strengthening Florida’s support systems for veterans and their families,” according to a news release. 

One was toward long-term care access for veterans and their spouses; another aimed to expand the state’s suicide prevention program specifically for veterans; and the last one proposed a crackdown on those trying to exploit veterans seeking their benefits. 

“On D-Day and every day, Florida honors those who served our country in uniform,” the governor said in his announcement. “Florida remains the most veteran-friendly state in the nation.”

It is also one of the seven states in the US where a dedicated clemency board listens to pleas to commute sentences and is required to make recommendations to the governor. But unlike in the other states, Florida’s four-member board is headed by the governor himself. The state has not granted clemency to a death row prisoner since 1983. 

That appears to also be the case in the two executions scheduled for this month—both of whom are veterans: Bryan Jennings, a Marine Corps veteran, has been on death row for more than four decades for the rape and murder of a six-year-old girl in 1979; Richard Randolph, an Army veteran, was convicted of the 1988 rape and murder of his former manager. 

This week, Jennings’ attorneys filed a final legal appeal for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.   

“Florida’s practice transforms clemency from a constitutional safeguard into a secret administrative ritual,” his lawyers wrote.

For Kissinger, who has become a vocal advocate for criminal justice reform in Florida, the quest to be heard has become an endless battle. As the dizzying pace of executions keeps growing, he has repeatedly requested a meeting with the governor to discuss veterans on death row. 

He knows it’s a long shot. 

“I keep waiting on emails,” he said. “I keep waiting on some sort of acknowledgement.”

2025-11-13 03:14:54

More Epstein files could, in theory, be coming soon.

That’s because, at 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson will finally swear in Rep. Adelita Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who has promised to provide the final congressional signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on a bipartisan bill to release government files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. That would include flight logs, names of people and entities with ties to Epstein, sealed settlements, and internal Department of Justice (DOJ) communications related to the case.

The discharge petition—introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—back in July, allows members to bypass House leadership and force a floor vote once 218 members have signed on. It currently has 217 signatures, with four Republicans—Massie, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)—among them. Grijalva, who won her House seat in a special election in September, will provide the critical 218th vote to move the vote forward; she told Semafor that signing the petition is the first thing she plans to do after being sworn in. The rules of the House stipulate that members can initiate a floor vote seven days after filing a successful discharge petition, and that the Speaker must schedule a floor vote within two days of getting that notice, which Johnson has committed to doing. Top aides told Politico they expect the House vote will take place just after Thanksgiving.

In the nearly two months since Grijalva won the election to fill her late father’s seat, Johnson has refused to swear her in—pointing to the government shut down and his own decision to largely keep the House out of session as justification for his obstructionism. Last month, Grijalva and Arizona’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the House, alleging that the delay was unconstitutionally leaving Grijalva’s district without representation. Survivors of sex abuse and trafficking by Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, also called for Grijalva’s swearing-in, alleging the delay “appears to be a deliberate attempt to block her participation in the discharge petition that would force a vote to unseal the Epstein/Maxwell files.”

Johnson has denied claims that he delayed Grijalva’s swearing in due to the files and has called the discharge petition a “gambit,” arguing the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee is already working on releasing the files. The committee has, indeed, released more than 33,000 pages of documents that it secured by subpoenaing the DOJ, and it released another 20,000 pages on Wednesday morning provided by Epstein’s estate. Democrats and Epstein survivors have pointed out that some of the documents released by the committee had already been made public through prior court cases. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, said Wednesday that the DOJ has more files and alleged that the White House is behind a “cover up” to prevent their release. In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Massie said: “The Epstein files should be released in their entirety, not leaked selectively by members of the Oversight Committee. When we get the 218th signature on the discharge petition today, we will be one step closer to delivering justice to Epstein’s victims and transparency to the American people.” A spokesperson for Khanna added that there are “at least hundreds of thousands of documents still out there.”

On CNN Tuesday night, Grijalva called the delay to swear her in “unconstitutional” and “illegal,” adding, “This kind of obstruction cannot happen again.” The newly elected congresswoman also said that House members are “hoping” to expedite the vote on the Epstein files. “I feel like at this point we’re done sort of tap dancing around what it, the implications of those files really mean,” Grijalva told host Kaitlan Collins. “And anyone who is implicated needs to deal with the legal consequences for breaking the law and committing horrific crimes against children and women.”

If the bill passes the House, which Massie has said he expects, it would still need to get through the Republican-controlled Senate. Leadership there has not indicated on whether they would allow a vote, but Politico reports that Republicans expect it to die there. If public pressure does succeed in pushing it through the Senate, President Donald Trump could still choose to veto it. Trump, of course, is the guy who has called the whole thing “a hoax”—despite the fact that, according to newly released emails sent by Epstein, Trump may have been aware of at least some of what Epstein was doing.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that House Democrats’ release of those emails represented “nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”

In the meantime, the president already appears to be doing everything he can to try to tank the petition’s chances of success: CNN reported Wednesday afternoon that Trump officials have a meeting planned with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Boebert to discuss the matter. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports Trump has also been trying to get Mace to remove her name. Neither she nor Boebert, according to the Times, have agreed to Trump’s request.

Update, Nov. 12: This post was updated with statements from spokespeople for Massie and Khanna.

2025-11-13 00:58:36

Beatings. Sexual assault. Psychological abuse. These are some of the horrors endured by the more than 250 men the United States sent to El Salvador on flimsy evidence of gang membership, according to a new comprehensive report released on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a human rights group focused on Central America.

In early 2025, the Trump administration flew Venezuelan migrants to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they were held for four months without communication with their families and lawyers. The US government had accused the men of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua and removed most of them from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act—an 18th-century law that President Donald Trump has invoked for only the fourth time in US history.  

As Mother Jones and other outlets have reported extensively, most of the men had no serious criminal history in the United States or elsewhere in the world. What they often had instead were tattoos that bore no relation to the gang.

The new report offers even more evidence of the inhumane treatment the Venezuelan migrants endured in El Salvador. Based on the testimonies of 40 men who were detained at CECOT, as well as interviews with 150 other people—including lawyers and relatives in Venezuela, Colombia, and the United States—it paints a damning picture of the abuses inflicted at CECOT.

The Venezuelans were released in July and returned to their country of origin as part of a prisoner swap deal. Shortly after their release, three of the men told us that they faced severe abuse.

“They’re going to kill me here,” Neri Alvarado told us he remembered thinking. “If I survive, I’ll be locked up my entire life.” Alvarado’s case was emblematic of the cruelty of the CECOT detentions. He was targeted by the Trump administration because of his tattoos—the largest of which was an autism awareness ribbon adorned with the name of his younger brother.

Related

“What They Did There Was Torture Us”

These stories were common. Once free, many of the young men were finally able to recount what had happened to them in the Salvadoran prison. They described routine beatings and humiliations, medical neglect, and severe punishments in an isolation cell referred to as la isla, or the island, according to our reporting. “What they did there was torture us,” one of the men said.  

HRW and Cristosal found similar evidence of abuse. They concluded that the Venezuelans sent to CECOT “were subjected to what amounts to arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance under international human rights law.” They also found that detainees were subject to “constant beatings and other forms of ill-treatment,” including sexual violence. They also noted guards withholding food and medicine. “Many of these abuses constitute torture under international human rights law,” the report says.

The human rights organizations determined that the abuse was the result of “systematic violations,” rather than independent actions by guards and other officials at the prison. All forty of the men interviewed reported facing severe psychological and physical abuse on an almost daily basis.

The researchers found that the United States became complicit in the men’s forced disappearances by repeatedly denying family members information about where their loved ones were being held. According to the report, the Trump administration violated its legal obligation to uphold the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits sending people to countries where they are likely to be tortured or persecuted.

In several cases, the men had originally left Venezuela fleeing threats and persecution by the government’s security forces and criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua. After seeking asylum in the United States, they have now been sent back to their home country before they could make their case for protection before an immigration judge in the United States.

“These are hundreds of men who were disappeared into a prison, never accused of anything, with no due process, and no jurisdiction to appeal,” Noah Bullock, Executive Director of Cristosal, said in a press conference on Wednesday outlining the report.

The report also sheds new light on the nightmares faced by family members trying to locate relatives who disappeared from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detainee locator system after being flown to El Salvador. It documents numerous cases in which ICE officials refused to tell relatives where their loved ones were. Instead, the agency’s representatives would only say that the men were no longer in the United States. “Don’t insist,” one family member recalled being told over the phone by an ICE official. “They’re no longer here, find a lawyer to help you.”

The men interviewed by the human rights organizations reported facing severe beatings following visits by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Red Cross officials. “After the gringa left, the guards came in to beat us,” one former detainee recalled. “The usual, kneeling outside in the hallway and we were hit with sticks, fists, kicks, slaps on the head … I think that lasted about seven minutes, and then they took us back to our cells.” He also recalled that guards took away their food and confiscated the hygiene products that had been distributed before Noem arrived.

Another Venezuelan, identified in the report as Daniel B, said that after speaking  with Red Cross staff, he was taken to “the island” and hit in the stomach until he started choking on the blood.

“My cellmates shouted for help, saying they were killing us,” he recounted, “but the officers said they just wanted to make us suffer.”

In April, riot police retaliated against the men, after they protested guards pepper-spraying a fellow detainee who fainted, by firing rubber pellets at close range. At some point during a hunger strike, the men even used their own blood to write “we are migrants, not terrorists” on a bed sheet.  

Along with beatings, the Venezuelans were denied any contact with their families and lawyers as they were held in inhumane conditions. The men said the cells were dirty and moldy and the water—which they used for bathing once a day, as well as drinking—had “visible vermin.” Thirty-seven out of the 40 former detainees interviewed reported falling sick while detained. CECOT, the report states, “appears to have been built to violate the dignity and rights of the people held there.”

The Venezuelan migrants interviewed by HRW and Cristosal said guards repeatedly told them they would never leave CECOT alive and that their loved ones had forgotten them. Some expressed feeling suicidal. “I thought I would be better off dead,” one former detainee said. After their release, many have reported lingering physical injuries and trauma from their time in prison. They described feeling depressed and anxious and having trouble sleeping. “I wake up traumatized, thinking that they are going to arrest me and beat me up,” a man identified as Felipe C. said. “I can’t sleep well. Another told the interviewers: “I feel like I’ve lost everything.”

The organizations are now calling on the Trump administration to stop sending any so-called third-country nationals to El Salvador. They also recommend that Trump revoke the Alien Enemies Act proclamation, and that Venezuelans deported to El Salvador under the act be given a chance to return to the United States to pursue asylum claims.

Human Rights Watch’s Washington director Sarah Yager said the White House, when presented with the findings of the report, repeated that the men sent to El Salvador were criminals.

2025-11-12 22:51:12

“All art is propaganda,” George Orwell wrote in 1940. “On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.”

That, in Orwell’s view, was a lost understanding: clear to Victorian authors like Dickens; obscure to his contemporaries of the late 1930s, who were too coy or deluded to square “art for art’s saking in the ivory tower” with “political propaganda” and “pulling in the dough.” The man born Eric Blair was not.

The filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, a sweeping overview of the writer’s life and work, opens with a snippet of “Why I Write,” the 1946 manifesto in which Orwell laid out an aim to “make political writing into an art”:

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

Orwell had been shot in the neck by Franco’s fascists in 1937, as a foreign volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He was stunned by writers who used their pen to write around the jagged, bloody, earnest, coarse, partisan demands of the moment. Nazism was an event horizon. There’s no floating above it.

Jackboots are back. Orwell is bluntly relevant. But he’s an interesting subject for Peck, known for his definitive film on James Baldwin (2016’s Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro), historical dramas about the iconic Congolese decolonial leader Patrice Lumumba and the young Karl Marx, and Exterminate All the Brutes, a brutal survey of European colonial genocides.

There’s more to Peck’s Orwell than 1984 and Animal Farm: Intercut with contemporary footage, the film follows Orwell through his imperial twenties—a cop in colonial Burma, doing “the dirty work of empire”—his anti-fascist thirties, and his truncated forties, producing his best-known works as he battled tuberculosis, which killed him at 46.

And there’s much more to Peck, Haiti’s former minister of culture, than Orwell. with an academic background in economics and engineering, his documentaries are the product of exhaustive archival research and broad historical scholarship; like Orwell, his thinking bridges the colonial era and our own.

We spoke in Los Angeles about the new fascist moment, the arc of his work, and the genesis of Orwell: 2+2=5.

You started work on this documentary before the election, when it was still of the moment, but obviously a little less. What’s that been like—making this film in the middle of this kind of change in America?

My films, usually, I try to make sure that they will still have value and impact in 10, 20, 30 years. I never go for immediacy, for whatever is going on in the world. My work is always about going to the fundamentals to try to explain how democracy functions, how power functions, how abuse or authoritarianism functions, to explain what capitalism is. Because whether we like it or not, we are still in this long piece of history that we call capitalism.

You’d call this a film about capitalism, in the long view?

Well, of course. Because again, if you have to analyze what is happening in your country or in any other country, you have to contextualize, you know, what is this time in history? What is this society? How does it function? And we know economy is the central part of it. We know class is another part. When you have those elements, you are always capable to analyze where you are, with cultural differences or historical differences. We are not the same people all the time. We change, we evolve.

But more or less the way you would analyze what used to be called rabid capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century—the concentration of news ownership, you have those same symptoms today. You know that the press are in the hands of a few billionaires until there is a backlash, until the state comes in and regulates—those are cycles that we’ve seen before.

That’s why in my films I always make sure that I contextualize: Where are we in that long, dramatic arc of history, and how can we analyze what is happening right now? It’s part of understanding what’s going on: if you don’t know where you come from—where did that story start? What were the consequences?—you won’t understand what’s going on, and you won’t be able to imagine what’s next.

That’s interesting, because I was going to ask how you see Orwell’s life in conversation with others you’ve focused on: what’s the dialogue between Orwell and James Baldwin, or Orwell and Marx, or influences of yours like Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire?

All of them have analyzed society, their own society, in the historical moment that they lived. And all of them have traveled, all of them have included me in their analysis. I know my place through them. They all differ from the Eurocentric history, the rewriting of history. All of them deliver you instruments to analyze your own situation, your own life, your own place.

One of the authors I use immensely in Exterminate All the Brutes is Michel-Rolph Trouillot, his work Silencing the Past. All my life, I’ve tried to come to that understanding of where I come from, what I am, in the bigger story of the planet and human history. Fanon, Baldwin—that’s the basis of all their work.

Baldwin is probably the greatest psychoanalyst of [the] American psyche, of the white psyche especially, and I learned from them. For me, they are my elders. I stay on their shoulders and use them to continue that job, you know, to make sure that our current generation are aware of that heritage, those instruments of analysis.

Was it particularly important to you to have as much footage as you did of Palestine, of Gaza, in terms of understanding of the present moment?

Yes, Gaza in particular, because we are witnessing a genocide on TV every night—the one TV that shows it, of course. I’ve made at least four films that deal with genocide, and I know the signs; I recognized it very early on, since the beginning, and saw also the parallel: how states refused to recognize that word, scholars are hesitating to name it what it is.

I remember that footage that I use in Sometimes in April where the US spokesman is struggling in front of journalists to name the genocide going on in Rwanda. And she’s telling the definition, while realizing she’s exactly describing what is happening, but still trying to—we are in an Orwellian world there, you know, where you’re twisting words, or you don’t want to recognize what the words are saying, just not to say the truth.

It seems like genocide is such a point of genesis of [Orwell’s] Newspeak—it’s the one thing people can’t bear to name, would rather lie than name.

The word itself did not exist until after the Holocaust; Raphael Lemkin had to invent the word. And that tells you the if you can’t even name something, it doesn’t exist. But when you name it, it makes an impact. It forces you to have a political position on it. Do you support it? Do you agree with it? But you can’t say it doesn’t exist.

Definition is the thing. You see that what’s happening today with Donald Trump is the destruction of words, even the illegality of certain words. What is a lie becomes truth, and the truth becomes a lie. He makes sure that you are lost. You don’t know. He tends to accuse you of what he did; he reverses, constantly, his own deeds and puts it in your words.

Orwell [addressed] that when he said the degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy, and it’s exactly that. They attack academia because academia is supposed to be the place where you define words, where you survey words, where facts are on the table.

And you attack justice. You attack all the institutions that are supposed to make sure that we speak the same language and have the same definitions, that there are laws we follow, that there are regulations. When you explode all that, or you make a sort of Italian salad with it, of course you’re lost, and that confusion is what they need to continue.

What makes people so vulnerable to that in a time when, in theory, you can get your information from wherever and whoever you want?

We overestimate the capacity of people to to stay awake all the time. It’s exhausting. That kind of propaganda of constant pummeling on you every day—and the news is part of it as well. It’s hard to keep up. People have jobs. They have problems every day. They have to survive. How long can you support that?

Even more, a big part of society is very often just to obey the law. People obey the law. That’s why a dictatorship or authoritarian regime, you can see in history that they the first thing they touch is always the law—to give a semblance of authority, of legitimacy. They need some cover. They need some sort of justification. So a big bulk of a population says, Well, it’s the government, it’s the law, and if they do it, it’s because they can do it, et cetera.

[Then it’s] let’s erase everything, reframe everything, and let’s start from scratch, and now I’m going to fill up your head with new material and tell you two plus two equals five. The same toolbox.

It seems like you trace an arc in Orwell’s work. In the ’30s, in Spain, he’s full of hope for a future where we take charge of our destinies. Post-war, when he’s writing 1984, he’s much less optimistic about people. Like you say, just taking care of the necessities is a struggle.

Does that resonate with you—in your own work and your own life, do you see an arc where it’s gotten harder and harder for people to resist the pressure?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because, first of all, the constant bombardment that we have today is unprecedented. We have that object [the phone] with us day and night, and I know I try to stay away from it, but it invades you whether you like it or not. You are afraid to miss something, which, of course, doesn’t make sense. So it’s harder today.

There is also a deterioration of institutions: the deterioration of schools [means] schools can’t keep up. They have been cutting their budget since the ’70s. Teachers have too much to do every day. They can’t follow each student the way they could sixty years ago. Life is quicker; it’s difficult even to concentrate. We’ve accelerated the destruction of the planet as well. So we are on the verge of something that’s never existed.

Fukuyama would say at the end of history. No, it’s capitalism [that’s] brought us on the verge of explosion. Will it explode? We don’t know. Will there be another crisis? Yes, probably, because that’s the cycle of capitalism. When the profiteers have gone too far, there is a bubble explosion. And who comes each time to save them? It’s the state. The last time was 2008: we were really near a [global] explosion, and Obama had to take care of that here and everywhere. Everyone had to save the banks who had made, very consciously, the damage. They knew what they were doing. Everybody was bailed out.

Not long after he died came Sputnik and an age—it was still a scary time, but one where you could argue that a lot of human development tilted towards progress. Do you look at this moment in a similar way, where there are also changes and developments that give you some optimism?

Yeah, but you have to distinguish between technological progress—you know, we have [made] incredible progress. But the problem is, in what hands are those new instruments, that new progress?

As long as profit is the first reason, or the first goal, to continue to develop, we are in trouble, because profit cannot be a rational way to deal with human society, to deal with common life. You know, it’s an aberration.

Marx’s economic analysis demonstrated the absurdity of that cycle. And by the way, something people don’t realize: Marx did not say the capitalists are bad guys. He said they are almost puppets in that system. You know, there is not—people can’t imagine how a billionaire is so scared, like a little boy, to lose his billions. You would think that, you know, it gives you a maturity, you are sure—no! How do you explain it psychologically? Why do you hang on [to] hundreds of billions when you know there is [only] so much you can do a day about eating, sleeping, and having fun, or even help other people? It’s totally irrational. So you let something irrational decide the fate of humanity. It doesn’t make sense.

Look at AI today. My problem is not AI as such. My problem is AI unregulated. The internet was an incredible instrument, an instrument of progress. But when it became privatized for profit—I remember the day I heard that first little music of AOL. I said, Oh my God, we are fucked. I knew that because we have seen different development, technological development, medical development, go the same way.

The progress of medicine. How many sicknesses are not cured because capitalistically, they’re not worth it? [Where] you have, actually, the technology to cure those sicknesses, but because the people who are sick don’t have the money to pay for it—usually poor people, Black, indigenous people—they estimate that there is no buying capacity, so let them die. So no research.

Do you see any counter to those trends? When you talk about the conjuncture of colonialism, authoritarianism, capitalism—when you look at the situation, do you see opportunities for politics to move in a different direction?

If we take humankind as a whole…you know, even democracy is progress. It’s in the renewal of democracy that we have been let down. The role of the citizen within democracy—especially in the Western world, where we have become perfect consumers, and where the self, [personal] happiness is the most important, not the collective—we’ve lost that. We’ve lost the connection with the other, not only the other far away, but the other very close to you.

Your world, your surroundings, are getting smaller and smaller. The connection with society is not as close. And you become more isolated, more fragile, if you can’t discuss what’s happening, [or] trust the person you’re discussing it with. Or if you’re just doing it through the social network, where you don’t shake hands and see eye to eye. It is hardly possible today with the life we are having.

If you take all the small organizations in the whole country here, they’re all doing a great job. But to connect them means that they have to sit down and discuss and come to an agreement about the diagnosis, and then an agreement about what’s next. What is our strategy? What is our tactic? That takes time. And you can’t do it on the internet.

The Civil Rights Movement was one of the last big movements. It was a lot of meetings, in churches, in universities, in every place where you can have people—people of different race, class, gender—with fights. Some of them were pushed back. Some of them were excluded. But if you take the whole movement, young people decided that they would go to the South and risk their life. And some of them were arrested, tortured, killed. They knew that [was possible], and they took that choice.

That’s the thing you can only do when you you feel that there is a collective behind you, there is a sense of the history, and everybody agrees to it. This is where we need to go, because our survival depends on it. As Orwell said, if there is hope, it lies in the proles. Not in the definition of the Marxist proletariat, but the bigger definition of society—civil society, with all its nuance and differences.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.