The Intercept Briefing

• The Struggle for the Future of the New York Democratic Party

  New York City is on the cusp of an election in which what once looked impossible has begun to seem inevitable. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist member of the New York state Assembly, is heavily favored to beat Andrew Cuomo, New York’s onetime Democratic governor and a former icon of the party establishment, in a race for mayor that has become among the most-watched in the nation.Cuomo and Mamdani articulate two vastly different visions for New York City — and where the Democratic Party is going overall. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Akela Lacy speaks to people hoping to see each of those two visions fulfilled.“Traditionally, we've thought about politics as left, right, and center,” says Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist who has worked on local and national campaigns. “Zohran offered a message that was less about ideology and more about disrupting a failed status quo that is working for almost no one.”Cass, who worked on Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign in 2021, isn’t working for Mamdani but says his candidacy indicates “that Democrats can win when we have ideas.”In the view of Jim Walden, a former mayoral candidate who is now backing Cuomo, those ideas are “dangerous and radical policies.” He says Mamdani’s popularity is an indication that “there's going to be a flirtation with socialism and maybe some populist push” among Democrats. But “ultimately,” Walden says, “the party will come back closer to the center.”Chi Ossé, a City Council member who endorsed Mamdani, sees Mamdani’s success as evidence of the opposite. “We could have gone back to or continued this trend of electing centrist, moderate Democrats,” Ossé says. Instead, he thinks that New Yorkers want “someone who ran as a loud and proud democratic socialist who has always fought on the left.”While New York City is preparing for a general election, Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is unlikely to win — turning the race almost into a second Democratic primary. “The party is now confronted with a choice,” said Lacy, “between a nominee who has become the new face of generational change in politics and a former governor fighting for his political comeback. The results could reveal where the party’s headed in next year’s midterms and beyond.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Trump’s Gaza Ceasefire Deal Is Already Failing Palestinians

  The first phase of the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal began to move forward this week as Israeli and Palestinian hostages have been released and aid trickles in. “The crossings were partially reopened, so some aid is coming in — food, water, and medicine — but only a small amount compared to the huge need,” says Intercept contributor Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi. “People are surviving, but every day it is still a struggle.”“There is a pause in the bombing, and I say 'a pause' because there are still people being killed,” says James Zogby, the president and co-founder of the Arab American Institute.This week on the Intercept Briefing, we hear from poet and writer Al-Wawi about what it’s been like in Gaza over the first few days of the ceasefire. Then reporter and host Jonah Valdez speaks to Zogby who, along with a delegation of Palestinian Americans, are meeting with members of Congress to ensure the current ceasefire holds and to push for an arms embargo on Israel.“We were challenging members of Congress, not just on ending the weapons supplies to Israel because they've so abused them — in violation of U.S. and international law — but also to consider what are the needs of those who remain behind, the millions of Palestinians still in Gaza,” says Zogby. Valdez and Zogby dig into the details — or lack thereof — in Trump’s plan, how Israel is already breaking the ceasefire agreement, takeaways from past efforts to broker peace through the decades, and how the American public can continue pushing lawmakers to achieve lasting peace, healing, and reconstruction that benefits Palestinians. “Nothing's going to happen on the Israeli side in terms of concessions, unless there's a threat of punishment coming from the U.S. or the international community,” says Zogby. “That's what happened during Oslo [Accords]: The U.S. let Israel get away with murder, and they just kept doing it. If Donald Trump lets them do the same thing — and I fully expect that he probably will — then I don't expect this to move toward completion.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Introducing Collateral Damage: Ep. 1 Dirty Business: The Atlanta Narcotics Unit’s Deadly Raid on 92-Year-Old Kathryn Johnston

  We're excited to share a new podcast from The Intercept called Collateral Damage. The investigative series examines the half-century-long war on drugs, its enduring ripple effects, and the devastating consequences of building a massive war machine aimed at the public itself. Hosted by Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years, each episode takes an in-depth look at someone who was unjustly killed in the drug war. This is Episode One: Dirty Business. In 2006, a 92-year-old Atlanta woman was gunned down in her own home by police during a drug raid. The police initially claimed the woman was a marijuana dealer who fired a gun at them. The story might have ended there. But an informant bravely came forward to set the record straight. Subsequent investigations and reports revealed that the police had raided the wrong home, killed an innocent woman, then planted marijuana in her basement to cover up their mistake.In the ensuing months, we’d learn that the Atlanta Police Department’s narcotics unit routinely conducted mistaken raids on terrified people. The problem was driven by perverse federal, state, and local financial incentives that pushed cops to take shortcuts in procuring warrants for drug raids in order to boost their arrest and seizure statistics. Most of those incentives are still in place today.The raids haven’t stopped. And neither have the deaths.Subscribe and listen to the full series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. New episodes every Wednesday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• License to Kill: Trump’s Extrajudicial Executions

  The United States has executed 21 people over the last month in targeted drone strikes off the coast of Venezuela. The Trump administration has so far authorized at least four strikes against people it claims are suspected “narco-terrorists.”The strikes mark a dark shift in the administration’s approach to what it’s framing as an international drug war — one it’s waging without congressional oversight.“There actually could be more strikes,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Turse joins host Akela Lacy and investigative journalist Radley Balko to discuss how the administration is laying the groundwork to justify extrajudicial killings abroad and possibly at home.The Trump administration’s claims that it’s going after high-level drug kingpins don’t hold water, Turse says. “Trump is killing civilians because he 'suspects' that they're smuggling drugs. Experts that I talk to say this is illegal. Former government lawyers, experts on the laws of war, they say it's outright murder.” Trump has repeated claims, without evidence, that a combination of immigration and drug trafficking is driving crime in the United States. It’s part of a story Trump has crafted: The U.S. and the international community are under siege, and it’s his job to stop it — whether by executing fishermen or deploying the National Guard on his own people. And while the latest turn toward extrajudicial killings is cause for alarm, it’s also more of the same, says Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has covered the drug war for two decades and host of the new Intercept podcast, Collateral Damage. “The notion of collateral damage is just that: this very idea that, when you're in war, there are some who can be sacrificed because we have this greater cause that we have to win or this threat we have to overcome. And these people that are being killed in these incidents, they're collateral damage from the perspective of the U.S. government because Trump clearly doesn't care,” Balko says.“There are a lot of parallels between what Trump is doing with immigration now and what we saw during the 1980s with the drug war. There was an effort to bring the military in,” Balko says. “This idea that Reagan declared illicit drugs a national security threat — just like Trump has done with immigration, with migrants — this idea that we're facing this threat that is so existential and so dangerous that we have to take these extraconstitutional measures, this is a playbook that we've seen before.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Government Shutdown and Free Speech Showdown

  The federal government shut down on Wednesday as President Donald Trump threatened mass federal layoffs. Republicans are blaming Democrats for the shutdown, while Democrats are refusing to support a Republican spending bill without guarantees to extend Obamacare provisions set to expire and reverse GOP health care cuts earlier this year.“Democrats are ... trying to reverse some of the cuts from the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' that was passed earlier this year to Medicaid,” says Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. “So what Democrats are really trying to message here is that they're fighting for health care, both to reverse some of these Medicaid cuts and also to ensure that the Affordable Care Act subsidies continue.”This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks to Washington about the government shutdown and the impact it will have on public services, including essential services and federal workers.We’re also following a federal court case where an appointee of Ronald Reagan blasted the Trump administration for unlawfully targeting pro-Palestine students for protected speech. “It’s a historic ruling that rightly affirms that the First Amendment protects non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. just as it protects citizens,” says Ramya Krishnan, lecturer at Columbia University Law School and senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented plaintiffs in the case. “And if free speech means anything in this country, it means the government can't lock you up simply because it disagrees with your political views.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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