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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Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation uncovered a mass grave of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia, Canada. This week on Intercepted: Naomi Klein speaks with residential school survivor Doreen Manuel and her niece Kanahus Manuel about the horrors of residential schools and the relationship between stolen children and stolen land. Doreen’s father, George Manuel, was a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, where unmarked graves of children as young as 3 years old were found. Kanahus’s father, Arthur Manuel, was also a survivor of the Kamloops residential school. This intergenerational conversation goes deep on how the evils of the Kamloops school, and others like it, have reverberated through a century of Manuels, an experience shared by so many Indigenous families, and the Manuel family’s decades long fight to reclaim stolen land.

Warning: This episode contains highly distressing details about the killing, rape, and torture of children. If you are a survivor and need to talk, there is contact information in the show notes.

If you are a former residential school student in distress, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419

Additional mental-health support and resources for Indigenous people are available here.

Show notes:

Doreen Manuel can be found @DoreenManuel1 and www.runningwolf.ca

Kanahus can be found at @kanahusfreedom and www.tinyhousewarriors.com

“Unsettling Canada: A National Wake Up Call,” by Arthur Manuel

“The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy,” by Arthur Manuel

“From Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement,” by Peter McFarlane with Doreen Manuel, afterword by Kanahus Manuel

“The Fourth World: An Indian Reality,” by George Manuel and Michael Posluns

“These Walls” directed by Doreen Manuel

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The Israeli military assault on Gaza has continued for nearly six months, with word of an impending attack on the densely populated town of Rafah. Against this backdrop, a shadow war has continued to play out between Iran and a network of militant groups on one side, and the U.S. and Israel on the other. Iran today supports and arms not just Hamas, but also groups like Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Syrian and Iraqi militia groups. Aside from the U.S. itself, Iran today is likely the most important outside power in the Gaza war, though its role is often ignored. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain discusses the role of Iran in the region with historian Arash Azizi. The author of "What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom," Azizi also discusses political developments in the country in the aftermath of recent elections.

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Safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP are in peril after the House Republicans passed a budget resolution this week that proposes massive $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, alongside $2 trillion in spending reductions. The math doesn’t add up: There is no realistic way to achieve the necessary savings without slashing entitlement programs that the most vulnerable Americans depend on.

While the Republicans claim they won’t cut these programs, they are simultaneously setting up eventual changes. House Speaker Mike Johnson characterized Medicaid as "hugely problematic" with "a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse." This rhetoric echoes that of Elon Musk, who labeled those affected by federal program cuts as the "parasite class."

On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political messaging expert, and Sunjeev Bery, a foreign policy analyst and Intercept contributor, discuss how Republican messaging is previewing what’s to come and why Trump and his allies have been successful in the court of public opinion.

“One of the most persuasive tools that we have in our arsenal is repetition. Messages that people hear over and over, irrespective of their actual content, are rated to be more credible,” says Shenker-Osorio. “Familiarity gives our brains what we call cognitive ease, they give us what's called the illusory truth effect that if you've heard something over and over, like if you've heard government is wasteful, government is wasteful, government is wasteful ... then the next time that you hear it, you're like, oh, yeah, that sort of seems true.”

Bery believes the way to fight back is by first changing our language. “Republicans are very good at trapping our country and our society with their language. You take something like the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, simply to repeat that phrase is to be trapped by its false logic and by the fraudulent claims of its master, the billionaire Elon Musk,” he says. “We need to use different language entirely. This is an attempt to steal from the American people and hand a fat check to Elon Musk and all the billionaires who stood on stage with Donald Trump during his inauguration. That's what this is.”

And while the speed of change and upheaval seems dire, both Shenker-Osorio and Bery remain optimistic.

Shenker-Osorio thinks Americans who disagree with the Trump administration’s actions should step up in this moment. “The opportunity, if we were to seize it, is a recognition that the only thing that has actually toppled autocracy, I would argue both in the U. S. past and also, most certainly, in other countries, is civil resistance. It is a sustained, unrelenting group of people showing, not telling, being out in the world, demonstrating their resistance, their refusal, and their ridicule,” she says. “The future is still made of the decisions that we take together. That is what makes the whole thing crumble. And the possibility, not the inevitability, but the possibility of a very different kind of governing regime.”

To hear more of the conversation, check out The Intercept Briefing wherever you get your podcasts.

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When government agents surrounded Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and his pregnant wife outside their New York City apartment over the weekend, it marked a chilling escalation in the battle over free speech in America. Those agents weren't enforcing immigration policy; they were sending a message about the consequences of political expression.

After serving as a negotiator during campus protests against Israel's war on Gaza, Khalil became the target of what his attorney called "a profound doxing campaign for two months related to his First Amendment protected activities" — harassment so severe he had desperately sought help from university leadership.

Despite being a lawful permanent resident entitled to constitutional protections, Khalil was transported to a detention facility thousands of miles away, effectively "disappeared" for over 24 hours. The political motivation became explicit when President Donald Trump celebrated the arrest on social media, calling it "the first arrest of many to come."

On this week's episode of The Intercept Briefing, we discuss the profound implications Khalil’s case raises for free speech and due process with Edward Ahmed Mitchell, civil rights attorney and national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Columbia Journalism Review reporter Meghnad Bose.

"It's very clear the administration is waging a war on free speech — free speech for Palestine. They said they were going to do it when they took office. And that is what they are doing. Their issue with him is that he is a Muslim who is a lawful, permanent resident of America and he exercised his right to speak up for Palestinian human rights," says Mitchell.

Bose adds, “ It's this sort of thinking that if you are somehow critical of a certain position of the United States government, except this isn't even a position of the United States government. You're basically saying, if you're critical of the position of a foreign government — in this case, the Israeli government — that you can be penalized in the United States, even if you've not broken any law.”

Mitchell warns even U.S. citizens face risk: "American citizens should be safe in all this, but Stephen Miller and others have said they want to review the naturalization of citizens to see whether or not there are grounds to remove their citizenship. So in the worst-case scenario, you can imagine them trying to find or manufacture some way to target even the citizenship status of people who were lawful permanent residents and then attained citizenship. So they're going all out to silence speech for Palestine."

Bose says it's not just about immigration status; the government has other draconian tools at its disposal as well. "They can jail U.S. citizens too. They don't have to deport you or take away your citizenship, he says. “They can incarcerate U.S. citizens too."

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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