During the 2024 presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House as the best chance to deliver his long-promised health revolution.

In the final weeks of the race, the former environmental attorney urged voters to back Trump in order to advance a reform agenda aimed at eliminating harmful substances from America’s agriculture and food supply, particularly the herbicides and insecticides sprayed on most fruits and vegetables.

“Don’t you want healthy children, and don’t you want the chemicals out of our food, and don’t you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption?” Kennedy thundered at an October 2024 rally in Glendale, Arizona. Moments later, Trump promised to empower his ally to investigate the “toxins in our environment and pesticides in our food.”

“We’re going to ban the worst agricultural chemicals” and “remove conflicts of interest” from top farm and food safety agencies, Kennedy pledged days later.

Those promises have since fallen by the wayside.

The administration has reapproved the cancer-causing weedkiller dicamba, deleted references to pesticides from its “Make America Healthy Again” action plan, and delayed enforcement of limits on so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water. There has been no meaningful action on controversial pesticides Kennedy previously warned about, including neonicotinoid insecticides and glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup—which he once called “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic.”

Meanwhile, representatives of pesticide and chemical companies have flooded into key regulatory roles. Former lobbyists Douglas Troutman, Nancy Beck, Lynn Ann Dekleva, Scott Hutchins, Kelsey Barnes and Kyle Kunkler now occupy senior positions overseeing agriculture and environmental policy.

What happened?

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The New York Times has seized upon a new racial scandal for Zohran Mamdani. The newly elected mayor, the paper reported yesterday, has failed to appoint a single Black deputy mayor.

“After winning the Democratic mayoral primary last year, Zohran Mamdani acknowledged that his victory came without much support from Black voters, and he pledged to do better…

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Delegate Stacey Plaskett, the sole representative of the Virgin Islands in Congress, is exploring a bid this year to run for governor of the island territory.

Plaskett met this week with close campaign supporters to discuss her plans, according to a source in the territory. At the meeting, she stated that Senator Milton Potter, the president of the V.I. Legislature, would be her running mate.

The role of governor would grant Plaskett—a close associate of the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—considerable control over many of his secret files that remain shrouded from public view.

That is because the Virgin Islands is one of a handful of states and territories in which the attorney general is appointed by the governor rather than elected by voters.

Albert Bryan, the current V.I. governor, used his control of the office to dismiss the only attorney general who had pursued aggressive investigations into Epstein’s criminal enterprise on the island.

Plaskett’s ties to Epstein run deep and extend over many years, as we have previously reported. Plaskett worked in the local V.I. economic development agency during the same period the office granted over $300 million in fraudulent tax credits to Epstein’s business interests. Plaskett then went on to work directly for Erika Kellerhals, a lawyer who served as Epstein’s attorney and political fixer.

Court documents show that Epstein helped elevate Plaskett from obscurity and raised cash for her to clinch her 2014 bid for Congress. Cecil de Jongh, a close aide to Epstein, noted via email that, “we have a friend in Stacey.” The race, which Plaskett won by only 737 votes, was one of the closest in V.I. history.

While in office, Plaskett worked quietly with the convicted pedophile. In 2018, she traveled to Epstein’s opulent Manhattan mansion to solicit funds from him for the DCCC, the House Democrats’ campaign arm.

Last November, the Washington Post generated national headlines by revealing that Epstein texted Plaskett to suggest questions during a 2019 committee hearing. The timestamps from the hearing video and text messages align perfectly, showing that Epstein seeded Plaskett with questions that were repeated nearly verbatim.

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The artificial intelligence revolution threatens to uproot entire professions, replace millions of workers, and reshape industrial relations. Much ink has been spilled on the ways in which AI influence has already taken root. Wall Street and Washington, D.C., are both betting on the technology to power the future of American innovation.

But little has been said about how the industry has already seized control over key components of American governance. Look no further than the quiet shifts in the application of copyright law.

Since the mid-nineties, software giants led by Microsoft have waged a global war against copyright infringement and online piracy. They bankrolled groups like the Business Software Alliance to demand increased penalties for copyright violations and pressured FBI agents to raid foreign hosts accused of harboring illicit content-sharing servers. For the old software model, duplicated Microsoft Office disks and fake software licenses posed the greatest risk.

Then-Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Brad Smith, in a 2001 interview with the Wall Street Journal, championed the crusade against digital theft as part of a sprawling battle against “organized criminal enterprises.” The company and its allies marshaled their resources to encourage the federal government to crack down on foreign piracy sites, especially illegal file-sharing firms based in Russia, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

In a case that signified this old era of aggressive copyright enforcement, the Justice Department in 2011 pursued criminal charges against Aaron Swartz, a young open internet activist, for downloading JSTOR’s repository of scholarly papers without authorization. Faced with the prospect of decades in prison, he died by suicide during the prosecution.

Much has changed since advances in artificial intelligence have made the technology the focal point of Silicon Valley innovation. Smith is now president of Microsoft, and the company and its partner OpenAI—which exclusively runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing network and was backed with $13.75 billion in investment funds from Microsoft—are at the center of a very different type of copyright dispute. This time, as the power of the tech industry still looms over Washington, D.C., prosecutors are less interested in going after those suspected of engaging in illegal downloads of copyrighted work.

That is because it is now the tech giants that are accused of exploiting pirated content on an industrial scale. Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, xAI, and OpenAI are competing to vacuum up as much data as humanly possible in a race to develop their respective AI models. The most prized training data, it turns out, are vast quantities of copyrighted material, largely in the form of published works such as academic articles, novels, and nonfiction books.

After decades of FBI warnings about copyright violations and the dangers of piracy, suddenly the federal government is no longer interested in such crimes. That has left law enforcement in the hands of civil litigation class actions, many of which have been filed by authors and writers noting that tech giants are now plundering their works for AI training without authorization, payment, or notification.

The court cases have cast a spotlight on a stratospheric level of hypocrisy. Microsoft, which once cast peer-to-peer and dark web piracy sites as an existential threat that cost the economy billions of dollars in damages, allegedly taps the very same types of illicit forums for a huge range of copyrighted academic articles, novels, and nonfiction.

The AI giants have all but admitted that they have developed their most advanced models by tapping into mass piracy. The lawsuit Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms revealed that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, used a mirror of Library Genesis, a notorious library of pirated books hosted on Russian servers, to train its generative AI systems.

Tech executives have pressed for licensing deals with some publishers—but in many cases have gone ahead with simply stealing millions of books and articles via known piracy sites on the dark web and other illicit forums. The litigation produced emails and documents showing Meta employees admitting that “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃.” In one exchange, engineers noted that use of the illegal content had been escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as “MZ”) and that the decision was “approved to use.”

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The last time we spoke about this, we focused on existential risks. This week, we’re joined by University of Montreal Assistant Professor David Krueger, who has raised alarm bells about the risks of “gradual disempowerment.”

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The post below is from guest contributor Ben Ryder Howe, a journalist and frequent contributor to New York Magazine.

This week sees the publication of TRUE NATURE, a biography of the writer, naturalist, Zen monk and political activist Peter Matthiessen. The 716-page book is expected to be one of fall’s major titles. Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was one of the last literary men of action, known for his sprawling New Yorker travelogues on crossing the Amazon and summiting the Himalayas as well as for his National Book Award-winning fiction.

Matthiessen also spied for the CIA, which his son Lucas accidentally disclosed to a New York Times reporter at a Christmas party for The Paris Review in 1977. The Times subsequently revealed Matthiessen’s secret in an article, “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by CIA,” which came out in the wake of the Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses. At the time, the press was aggressively investigating the CIA. Matthiessen, one of the decade’s biggest literary names, was a surprise catch. The revelation threatened his career and trailed him to its end. He called working for the agency “the one adventure of my life I regret.”

Nevertheless, despite being questioned about it dozens of times over the years, he succeeded in never revealing what he had actually done. Was he an agent or a case officer? Did he have a security clearance? Did he handle other sources of intelligence, or was he the one being handled? Who or what was he spying on?

Unfortunately, the new biography doesn’t solve the mystery, or even really try. We should want to know what Matthiessen did, because there have long been unsettling indications that he spied on other writers – particularly dissident writers, including Richard Wright, the towering midcentury author of BLACK BOY, who was hounded into exile by J. Edgar Hoover because of his political activism and died an early death likely because of the stress.

We should also want to know because researchers, including TRUE NATURE’s author, Lance Richardson, have spent decades trying to get the CIA to release Matthiessen’s file, as well as the agency’s files on The Paris Review, which Matthiessen used as cover while spying – all without success. Whatever secrets the files contain, they are now almost seventy-five years old, nearly the same age as the CIA itself, raising the question: will the public ever get to know what they are? Given that nearly everyone involved has died, one has to wonder, Why all the discretion?

The intrigue centers on a few years in postwar Paris, one of the more remarkable periods in American culture. Long a magnet for expat artists, Paris saw its popularity surge after the war as living costs sank and the U.S. oppressed nonconformity at home. It was the age of McCarthyism, blacklists and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Anyone who ventured into politically unacceptable territory risked their careers. Black artists, gay artists, creators of “smut,” as well as those who just wanted a taste of subversive art, great jazz and nostalgia for the Lost Generation, flocked to the Left Bank. Among the unknowns loafing at the Deux Magots and the Tournon were James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Bud Powell, Mary McCarthy, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Joan Mitchell and Ellsworth Kelly.

The scene caught the eye of intelligence agencies. The U.S. was at a disadvantage in the cold war when it came to soft power. Moscow had long excelled at penetrating Western intellectual circles, and Washington was determined to fight back by promoting Western values through literature, Hollywood, music and even abstract expressionist painting. Paris was the epicenter of the international arts scene – soon, much of it fueled by CIA money and flooded with spies.

Peter Matthiessen was one. As TRUE NATURE tells it, Matthiessen arrived in Paris in 1953 fresh out of Yale, where he was one of “at least twenty-five” members of his class (including William F. Buckley, Jr.) recruited by faculty members into the CIA. The young writer – handsome, connected, and fluent in French – was already on his way to fame, having published stories in The Atlantic. The CIA gave him a stipend and a mission he embraced.

“When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with yr beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain,” Matthiessen would write to his friend Ben Bradlee, Jr, executive editor of the Washington Post. “Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that?”

It all turned sour, however. Matthiessen’s romantic vision of spying seems to have involved spying on foreigners – Russians, or perhaps European communists. Which he did some of the time. Richardson tells us about his attempts to learn the inner workings of the French communist party from an older writer who he approached pretending to seek feedback on a novel. (Richardson posits that it was Tristan Tzara, a Dadaist poet and art collector.)

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For the most part, however, Matthiessen seems to have spied on other expats, which blurs the lines between spying and something less noble: informing. Matthiessen was gathering information on friends, many of whom had legitimate reasons to be petrified of the government at home, which could and often did seek to harm their careers and terrorize their families. While he pretended to be just another slumming postgrad, in reality, as he would later describe, usually between his teeth, his actual duties were “checking on Americans.”

Richard Wright would have been an obvious target. A former member of the Communist Party USA, Wright had published a massive bestseller, NATIVE SON, in 1940, then moved to France to escape blacklisting and surveillance. There, while continuing to denounce the U.S., he mentored a community of black dissident writers, including future FBI target James Baldwin.

It isn’t publicly known whether Matthiessen spied on Wright. After his son unintentionally outed him, Matthiessen’s luck turned in his favor, as the media seemed to lose interest. Although some of his old Paris friends, such as the writer Irwin Shaw, came to him demanding to know whether he had spied on them (denounced as a communist, Shaw had been forced to move abroad) most of his peers seemed to shrug. Indeed, shortly after the Times article, a panel of fellow writers would lavish him with the National Book Award for THE SNOW LEOPARD – twice, in the nonfiction and contemporary thought categories. Whether it was wagon-circling or indifference, Matthiessen seemed to be in the clear. His greatest renown would come after he was exposed.

Had he faced questions about informing on one of the leading anti-racists of the time, it might have been different.

The first journalist to push deeper into the Paris years was Scottish writer James Campbell, who has long written for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1991 Campbell published a biography of Baldwin, TALKING AT THE GATES, for which he succeeded in obtaining Baldwin’s FBI file. For his next book, PARIS INTERZONE, he turned to Wright. Campbell contacted George Plimpton, co-founder with Matthiessen of The Paris Review. Initially he found little resistance. Plimpton freely admitted that a “prominent member” of the review – Matthiessen – had worked for the CIA but quit “after being asked to spy on the expatriate community.” A year after the interview, Campbell sent Plimpton galleys of EXILED IN PARIS, which he hoped the review might excerpt. Instead, Plimpton threatened to sue him unless he removed the material he had given him. Campbell published most of it anyway. There was nothing particularly inflammatory about it, leaving Campbell confused. One possibility: Plimpton just wanted the spying issue to go away, which it had after the Times exposé. However, the book not only brought it back but raised difficult issues, including Wright’s troubling death by heart attack at age 52, which Campbell believes to have been caused by paranoia and stress but others attributed to intelligence agency malfeasance. (Wright’s daughter and friends believed he had been poisoned.)

TRUE NATURE doesn’t mention Campbell’s work. Although Richardson asks, “Was Matthiessen watching Richard Wright?” he doesn’t say whether he knows the answer. The Matthiessen estate gave him broad access to his papers. In addition, he thanks the Matthiessen family for its “willing cooperation.” Yet there’s an obliqueness that mirrors his subject whenever Matthiessen’s espionage comes up. Overall, “[w]hat Matthiessen did, day to day for the CIA, remains something of a mystery,” he writes. The best he can offer is a 2008 exchange with Charlie Rose in which Rose asked point blank what Matthiessen did for the CIA.

“Well, I think we’ll just have to go to the rest of the show,” Matthiessen responded. “It wasn’t very much. It was pretty paltry, really. What it really was doing . . . Know what I was doing, spending my day doing? Deceiving people. That’s all it is.”

“Deceiving people as to—?”

“As to who you are, your identity, what you’re up to, what you want to know [. . .]”

“Were you looking for people you can convert? Were you looking to expose people?”

“No, I was getting information on people.”

Another author TRUE NATURE curiously neglects is historian Craig Lanier Allen. In 2019 Allen published a dissertation specifically focused on the question of Matthiessen’s spying and whether he was targeting Wright. Allen brought a unique perspective, as a black historian and a former spy himself, having spent decades posted abroad by U.S. Air Force counterintelligence. His thesis, “Spies Spying on Spies Spying: The Gibson Affair, the Café Tournon, and the Specter of Surveillance in Postwar American Literary Expatriate Paris, 1953-1958,” is driven by Allen’s own internal conflict: sympathy, on one hand, for the secret agent, and on the other, for the dissident, truth-seeker and outraged critic of race relations. He calls Wright a security threat whose “complicity warrants investigation.” However, he also makes it clear that Wright was a man of conscience who endured monstrous abuse.

Unlike Richardson, Allen shows real interest in getting to the bottom of Matthiessen’s spying. In one devastating quote, he shows that if he did spy on Wright (which Allen believes he did), it was unquestionably a personal betrayal.

“I was very good friends with Richard Wright who was there in Paris too and we had interesting talks about Baldwin,” Matthiessen told an interviewer in 2001. Allen goes on to analyze the clues scattered among Matthiessen’s decades of shifting statements. As a trained spy himself, he identifies what he calls “repeated patterns of deception consistent with the training of a professional intelligence operative.” Matthiessen, he argues, used “the requisite amount of plausible deniability and purposeful obfuscation” to indicate that he was hiding something.

But again, what? Allen doesn’t quite have the goods either. What he does have is the professional standing to engage in informed speculation. In his opinion, Matthiessen probably didn’t have a significant role in the CIA. He was unlikely to have been a case officer. He probably “did not himself manage other human sources of information,” but rather would have “himself been managed.” He was not, in other words, a salaried employee of what was then a burgeoning American intelligence apparatus. He was probably a contract worker hired for a specific purpose – to infiltrate the expat scene. Which some would see as an informant.

Would the distinction have mattered to someone like Wright, whose FBI file largely consisted of fellow writers and acquaintances informing on him, some for money or privileges? (The privilege of simply crossing borders, which included returning home, was cunningly rationed by the U.S. embassy in Paris.) Wright suspected everyone, especially other writers, and likely suspected Matthiessen, too. Indeed, many expats probably suspected Matthiessen, whose wife at the time was the daughter of a top U.S. diplomat.

In Allen’s view, Wright deserved to be spied on. He was a dissident with a platform, “willing to go to any length in order to attract attention to the problem of racial discrimination,” as one of his informants (not Matthiessen) wrote. That made him a “threat to U.S. national security interests,” says Allen.

Yet his enemy was at home. It wasn’t the State Department or the CIA that was obsessed with him, as Allen points out. (Wright’s file was larger than that of any American writer of his time.) It was the FBI, which is supposed to be a domestic intelligence agency. Wright was being hounded, even abroad, with the help of friends and allies. His treatment was undeniably foul, as Matthiessen, looking back, must have painfully felt. In later years Matthiessen would defend himself by distinguishing the CIA of the 1950s from the somewhat later one that came under the scrutiny of the Church Commission – before the agency “got into assassinations and all the ugly stuff,” he would say. But spying on friends is arguably the essence of an intelligence service – any intelligence service, American or otherwise.

In Matthiessen’s defense, most Americans were still processing the terms of the cold war in the early 1950s, gauging the enemy threat and figuring out just how far the nation should go to defend itself. Matthiessen, “the young Yalie,” as he described himself, drinking martinis at the club, was hardly the only one whispering about acquaintances. “Everybody thought everybody else was informing on someone or other for somebody,” said the poet Christopher Logue. Even Wright was accused of selling information.

According to Richardson, the reason Matthiessen dissembled so much was shame. At the end of his life the spying agonized him, and he made several attempts to expiate himself on paper, including something titled “THE PARIS REVIEW v. THE CIA: My Half-life as a Capitalist Running Dog.” TRUE NATURE gives us glimpses of his anguish. Which unless the CIA changes its mind about releasing Matthiessen’s file, is all we have. Allen tried harder with less, and after publishing his thesis he promised that Matthiessen’s involvement with the CIA would soon be explored “as part of a more expansive research project.” Unfortunately, he died in 2022 at the age of 52 of a heart attack.

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The first photo features Peter Matthiesen posing on the harbor on May 29,1992 in Saint Malo,France. (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images). The second photo shows Richard Wright, Peter Matthiessen and Christopher Logue. Post updated on Oct. 16th to correct the Talking at the Gates publication date, name of James Campbell’s book.

I'm guest hosting Glenn Greenwald's show this week. Our latest episode exploring guest worker programs and the business of mass immigration.

I spoke to Professor Ron Hira on the Democratic Party’s retreat from core working class issues and its use of identity politics to excuse outsourcing. We also examine President Trump’s shifting promises on the controversial H-1B visa program, the tech industry lobbying machine behind guest worker programs, and much more.

To view the show please see the following link.

Updated with a new, fifth Mossad recruitment ad, which was served in Germany following this article’s publication.

Desi Banks, an Atlanta comedian and content creator, is known for his light- hearted comic sketches and currently has more than nine million followers on the social media platform Instagram. There is no public record of Banks commenting on sensitive Middle East issues, and each of his 47 ad campaigns on Meta’s platforms relates to his work as an entertainer.

The comedian, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, appears to have served a surprising role in an apparent Israeli intelligence operation over the last year to recruit members of Iran’s security and intelligence services – including those working in nuclear centers – into aiding the overthrow of their government. Would-be defectors were offered both money and the protection of their families.

Google advertising transparency records show that a production company owned by Banks, Desi Banks Productions LLC, served a set of five Persian-language recruitment ads across at least 19 countries, including the U.S., Sweden, France, Germany, India, and numerous others across the Middle East and Africa.

The fourth ad campaign included both overt and deceptive redirections into recruitment pages purporting to be run by Israel’s foreign intelligence services, the Mossad. Others advertise lucrative, tax-free jobs at apparently fictitious international consulting firms.

The most aggressive campaign redirected users to the Mossad’s official, Persian-language recruitment form, during the recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran, advising viewers to activate their virtual private network (VPN) before clicking. Google’s ad disclosure portal shows that the campaign linked to the Mossad’s official website, mossad.gov.il.

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Investigation published in partnership with Drop Site News.

On March 2, 2025, hours after the Israeli government announced the blockade of all food, medicine, fuel, and other humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza, lawmakers in Jerusalem demanded answers—not on the devastating human toll of such a decision, but on how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was preparing to handle the public relations fallout.

“I began with the example of the cessation of humanitarian aid—did you prepare for this thing this morning?” asked Knesset member Moshe Tur-Paz, the chair of a subcommittee on Foreign Affairs in Israel’s parliament.

Avichai Edrei, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces who was asked the same question later in the hearing, assured the legislators work was underway, stating, “We could also decide to launch a digital campaign in this context, to explain that there is no hunger and present the data.”

Publicly available government contracts show that Israel’s advertising bureau, which reports to the prime minister’s office, has since embarked on a mass advertising and public messaging effort to conceal the hunger crisis. The push includes the use of American influencers widely reported on last month. It also includes a high-dollar spending spree on paid advertising, yielding tens of millions for Google, YouTube, X, Meta, and other tech platforms.

“There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie,” asserted a propaganda video published by Israel’s foreign ministry to Google’s YouTube video sharing platform in late August and viewed more than 6 million times.

Much of the video’s reach results from an ad placed during an ongoing and previously unreported $45 million (NIS 150 million) advertising campaign initiated between Google and Netanyahu’s office in late June. The contract—which is with both YouTube and Google's advertising campaign management platform, Display & Video 360—explicitly characterizes the ad campaign as hasbara, a Hebrew word whose meaning is somewhere between public relations and propaganda.

Records show that the Israeli government similarly spent $3 million (NIS 10 million) for an advertising campaign with X. The French and Israeli advertising platform Outbrain/Teads is also set to receive roughly $2.1 million (NIS 7 million).

The ads have aired in response to increasing global outcry over the deteriorating situation in Gaza. In August, the UN formally declared a famine in Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the leading global authority on food security, projected the threshold for famine would be crossed in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis in the coming weeks, stating "this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed.”

The UN aid coordination office OCHA further warned on Friday of “a descent into a massive famine” in the Gaza Strip.

At least 367 Palestinians, including 131 children, have died as a result of hunger and malnutrition since the war began, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

The existence of an Israeli Google ads campaign to discredit the UN’s primary aid agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, was similarly reported by WIRED last year. Hadas Maimon, head of public awareness for Israel’s diaspora ministry, stated during the March 2 Knesset hearing that, “For almost a year now, we have been leading a major campaign on the issue of UNRWA.”

Other Israeli government ads on Google’s platforms accused the United Nations of “deliberate sabotage” of aid delivery into Gaza and promoted the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by Israel, the U.S., and unnamed European countries. One campaign promoted prosecution of the militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, for debunked allegations of mass sexual violence as a result of a controversial report published by the Israeli advocacy group Dinah Project.

Despite the denial about the famine, prominent Israeli government voices have championed the effort to cut off food and water to Gazans as a strategy for inducing mass migration out of the territory. “In my opinion, you can besiege them,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli Finance Ministry and a coalition partner to Netantayu’s government, according to Channel 12. “No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger or surrender,” Smotrich said.

Amichay Eliyahu, the Knesset member who leads the Heritage Ministry in Netanyahu's government, has similarly called for starving the Palestinian population of Gaza. "There is no nation that feeds its enemies,” Eliyahu said during a radio interview in July. In May, the minister argued the Palestinians "need to starve" and added, "If there are civilians who fear for their lives, they should go through the emigration plan."

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Investigation published in partnership with RealClearInvestigations.

Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment.

What Liz Simons has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science, but his daughter’s foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Heising-Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K-12 mathematics education according to social justice principles.

The revamp the advocates seek is profound. They reject well-established practices of math instruction while infusing lessons with racial and gender themes. The goal is to motivate disadvantaged students while dispensing with the traditional features of math, like numerical computation, that they struggle with on standardized tests – considered an oppressive feature of white supremacist culture.

In many quarters, including corporations and universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are in retreat due to pressure from the Trump administration and the courts. Not so in public education, with curricula that are locally controlled and largely insulated from the dictates of Washington. That allows progressive foundations and like-minded charitable trusts to continue to pour millions of dollars into reshaping math education for black and Latino kids, including a $800,000 grant this year from the Heising-Simons Foundation, even though there exists no credible research showing that the social justice approach improves their performance.

“Politicians, and legislatures, even school boards,” are often too “hamstrung” to get things done, Bob Hughes, the director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation, said at an online symposium on the need for racial equity policies in America's classrooms. Philanthropy, he added, faces fewer barriers in making rapid changes.

The Gates Foundation has been a leader in the promotion of anti-racist math instruction. It supported a project called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.” The project discards basic tenets of learning, like asking students to “show their work” and find the “right” answer as vestiges of “white supremacy culture.” The pathway is promoted by EdTrust West, which also receives support from the Spencer Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and other major donors.

The Gates and Heising-Simons foundations have both supported TODOS Mathematics for All, an Arizona-based organization that calls for elevating DEI practices and anti-racist activism into all math instruction, with over $553,750 in grants in recent years. “We can no longer believe that a focus on curriculum, instruction, and assessment alone will be enough to prepare our children for survival in the world. We need antiracist conversations for ourselves and for our children,” TODOS president Linda Fulmore announced in 2020.

Last year, the group hosted an hour-long webinar on “2SLGBTQIA+ identity in mathematics education.” During the event, a speaker expounded at length on various queer and indigenous identity groups while spending virtually no time on math-related curriculum or instruction. At one point, the presenter erroneously claimed that there are “15.3 billion students in U.S. high schools” – a figure that would require the entire global population to be enrolled in American secondary education twice over. The speaker likely meant to say million.

The foundations similarly fund practical lessons that put race at the center of math instruction. In Alexandria, Virginia, for example, the Heising-Simons Foundation supported a public-school program that encouraged kindergartners through second-graders to count the characters in picture books by race. At the end of each session, teachers guided students in creating racial scorecards for each book, then voting to select those with the fewest white characters. The exercise was presented as mathematics education.

Jo Boaler, a controversial professor of education at Stanford University who championed the push to remove eighth-grade algebra from San Francisco’s public schools in the name of equity, traces her support to this network of foundations. The Gates Foundation and Valhalla Foundation, which was founded by Scott Cook, the co-founder of tech firm Intuit, have long funded her math education project called YouCubed.

These deep-pocket donors also fund Danny Bernard Martin, a professor of math education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leading voice of what critics call “woke math.” Over the past six years, the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project, which Martin co-leads at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, has received nearly $2.5 million from the Heising-Simons Foundation. This year, the foundation announced an additional $800,000 grant to help the project develop toolkits for wider implementation among teachers, administrators, and researchers.

Martin’s views extend far beyond typical calls for educational equity. He regards mathematics instruction as fundamentally a “white supremacist construct” that inflicts “epistemological violence” on black students. In his estimation, even DEI programs are too conservative – mere accommodations “rooted in the fictions of white imaginaries” and designed to appease “white logics and sensibilities.”

The solution Martin proposes is radical: Black students should seek instruction exclusively from black teachers at “independent black institutions.” They should resist the temptation of “advanced coursework and mathematics-related employment” and instead engage in “walkouts and boycotts” to protest against mathematics education as it currently exists. The very structure of math instruction, Martin contends, has dehumanized black students through low test scores and failing grades.

The ideas of the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project and its leaders have reverberated through America’s classrooms. California’s new mathematics curriculum framework, which guides K-12 education statewide, repeatedly cites Martin. The framework has been sharply criticized by educators for leaning heavily on politicized concepts of math. The document suggests, for instance, that teachers “take a justice-oriented perspective” when providing instruction, and discourages the use of “tracking” – or the practice of separating students into different classrooms based on their abilities.

The ideas espoused by Martin and others have been met with sharp criticism from parents and educators.

Williamson Evers, a former assistant secretary of education and a fellow at the conservative-leaning Independent Institute, has been monitoring what he calls the “woke math” movement for years. “It’s very important to have math skills,” he told RealClearInvestigations. Evers rejects the identity-based claims made by Martin and others who have called for minority students to abandon math education over alleged racism. “There are mathematicians and scientists on every continent from every background, and this idea of boycotting education would harm black schoolchildren.”

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Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the independent U.S. Senator from Arizona who retired last year after leaving the Democratic Party, filmed an infomercial for her new position as a senior advisor at law and lobbying powerhouse Hogan Lovells.

"I was really drawn to to the firm for its incredible ability to help clients at the intersection of business and government," Sinema says in the video. Moments later, she exclaims that she is "excited to start working with companies" and singles out those involved in artificial intelligence.

In Silicon Valley, AI tech giants are in a bidding war, competing to hire the best and brightest computer programmers. But a different hiring spree is underway in D.C.

AI firms are on an influence-peddling spree, hiring hundreds of former government officials and retaining former members of Congress as consultants and lobbyists. The latest disclosure filings show over 500 entities lobbying on AI policy—from federal rules designed to preempt state and local safety regulations to water and energy-intensive data centers and integration into government contracting and certifications.

Lawmakers are increasingly making the jump from serving constituents as elected officials to working directly as influence peddlers for AI interests.

– Former Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., a former lobbyist appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, left Congress last year and returned to her former profession. She is now working as a consultant to OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT.

– Former Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., recently registered for the first time as a lobbyist. Among his initial clients is ​Lazarus AI, which sells AI products to the Defense Department.

– OpenAI also registered former Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., a former senior ranking Democrat, as a lobbyist via the firm Mercury LLC. Bustos's disclosure notes she works on "issues related to artificial intelligence policy" on behalf of the firm.

– Former Rep Kevin Yoder, R-Kansas, is registered to lobby on AI policy for Microsoft and BigBear.AI, which he is working to shape policies “impacting AI-powered decision intelligence solutions for defense, national security, travel & transportation.”

– Former Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., is registered to lobby for Windward USA to a leading maritime AI company, to influence AI policy.

– Former Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, is registered to lobby on AI policy for firms Polygraf AI and Virtualitics, Inc.

– Former Sen. Norm Coleman, R-MN, was previously registered to lobby on behalf of OpenAI. He is currently registered to represent the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group for Amazon, Apple, and Google, among other major tech firms. Coleman works for CCIA’s “Don't Break What Works campaign,” which fights to stop anti-monopoly legislation such as the American Innovation and Choice Act. The campaign claims efforts to break up tech monopolies will harm "American AI innovation."

– Former Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., represents data and AI giant Palantir as a registered lobbyist through his work at the Trump-connected firm Ballard Partners.

The expanding reach of artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping hundreds of professions, weapons of war, and the ways we connect with one another. The technology, many predict, will serve a transformative role akin to another industrial revolution.

How will Americans cope with the changes as industries as diverse as trucking and copyediting are replaced en masse by AI-powered automation?

The pace and scale of the leap are yet to be seen. What's clear is that the AI firms set to benefit most from these changes are taking control of the policymaking apparatus to write the laws and regulations during the transition.

Photo: Hogan Lovells YouTube video with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine and biologics official, who gained a national following during the pandemic over his criticism of mask and vaccine mandates, was forced into retirement this week.

His departure comes just days after a sudden flurry of attacks from conservative media figures over his safety review scrutiny of Elevidys, a $3.2 million prescription gene therapy linked to the death of several patients.

The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley and The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest’s Bob Goldberg went after Prasad for moving to take the drug off the market on July 18th. In oddly identical language following the FDA decision, both Finley and Goldberg accused Prasad of serving as a “one-man death panel” threatening to revoke access to medicine.

Then came barbs from right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who published old social media posts from Prasad claiming he stabs a "voodoo doll" representing President Donald Trump. The quote, however, was taken out of context. Prasad was mocking those who scapegoat Trump.

The public messaging quickly reached the White House, with lawmakers phoning the president to remove Prasad. Trump reportedly overruled objections by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and decided Prasad had to step down. As Prasad stepped down, the FDA reversed its temporary hold on Elevidys.

The news instantly lifted the stock price of Sarepta Therapeutics, the drug company that produces Elevidys, which is used to treat Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a severe genetic disorder that overwhelmingly impacts young males. Nearly half of the company revenue is derived from this one drug.

Behind the scenes, Sarepta Therapeutics was gearing up for a fight. Following the death of two teenagers over side effects linked to Elevidys, the company began hiring lobbyists with close ties to the Trump administration.

Disclosures show that on June 10th, the company contracted Michael Best Strategies, LLC. The law-lobbying firm employs prominent Republicans, including former Sen. Cory Gardner and former Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus. The most notable influence peddler at the firm is former Trump 2024 campaign co-director Chris LaCivita, who joined the company right after the inauguration.

The Michael Best Strategies' lobbying disclosure reports remain vague but it hint at its role. The company stated that it worked on "Rare disease therapeutic development and access" with the Executive Office of the President, Congress, and HHS.

The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, the group that employs Goldberg, the writer to kick-off the public assault on Prasad, is also funded by makers of Elevidys. In a donor report listing support from Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Merck & Co., and Gilead Sciences, CMPI discloses that it relies on the "generosity of our donors," which includes the Massachusetts-based Sarepta Therapeutics.

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Though the AI age is upon us, it’s still but a zygote compared to what it’s almost certainly going to become. If Silicon Valley has its way, within years, not decades, we will achieve human-level artificial intelligence, and then, soon after, artificial super intelligence.

That sounds great if you assume that an army of autonomous super intelligent minds will be content to just do our bidding forever, curing cancer and making unbelievably realistic video games and giving us the unconditional synthetic love of their digital companionship. But why in the world would you assume that? AIs are already developing behaviors that reflect their own weird “preferences,” and they routinely lie and deceive human beings. If you juice them up to 10,000 times their present intelligence, what are the chances they’ll be content to remain our lapdogs? What are the chances, by contrast, they’ll find our existence threatening, annoying, or just inconvenient, and casually wipe us off the face of the earth?

Humans need to start thinking seriously about what we’re doing. The future we need to grapple with isn’t a century away. It’s not even decades away. It could arrive at any moment. It could get here before Trump is out of office.

In this episode we take a cruise through some very dark places.

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President Donald Trump's sweeping tax and spending legislation, known as "One Big Beautiful Bill," offers dazzling benefits for early stage investors and startup founders.

The law expands a tax benefit to investors in start-ups known as ‘Qualified Small Business Stock,’ commonly referred to as QSBS, which exempts certain capital gains from taxes entirely. Trump’s law tweaks the already lucrative tax provision to make it much more generous, expanding the definition of a qualifying small business as one with assets up to $75 million.

The new QSBS standard could unlock billions of dollars in untaxed gains for savvy venture capitalists and other investors. Auren Hoffman, the general partner at Flex Capital, gushed that the new Trump rules represent a “suitcase filled with tax-free Lamborghinis.”

Under the previous iteration of the law, investors could claim tax-free QSBS on $10 million in gains or 10 times their initial investment, whichever is higher, after holding the shares for at least five years. The new Trump provision expands the investment to $15 million and allows exits earlier than five years. The law also pegs the new $75 million asset cap and investment gain threshold to inflation.

The new provision could bestow as much as $749 million in completely untaxable gains to a single investor who places the maximum investment in a new firm that grows ten fold.

Law firms advising the very rich have also pushed a novel attempt to multiply the QSBS benefit by passing startup shares onto family members through trusts. The so-called “stacking” or “peanut-buttering” strategy can be done an “infinite” amount of times when shares are granted as a gift. The loophole can result in billions in additional tax-free money when equity is sold.

The benefits flow overwhelmingly to the very wealthy. Internal Revenue Service data shows that over 90% of the QSBS gains have gone to individuals who report more than $1 millions of capital gains. The Joint Committee on Taxation projects that the new QSBS rules will cost $17.2 billion over the next decade, bringing the overall cost to the special tax break to $61.8 billion.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists and other investors have long pushed for an expansion of QSBS. The Financial Technology Association and the Angel Capital Association, were among signers of a letter backing the initial legislation sponsored by Rep. David Kustoff, R-Tenn., that became the basis for the QSBS rules that were folded into the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Senate bill was championed by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex.

The National Venture Capital Association, which represents Bessemer Venture Partners, Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and other major firms, also lobbied for the provision.

It’s not just technology firms set to benefit. The QSBS rules may also flow to private equity firms intent on restructuring the local businesses they buy up and roll into larger companies. "These changes present a substantial opportunity for private equity," noted a client alert last week by account firm RSM US LLP.

The Small Business Investor Alliance, a group that represents middle-market private equity firms such as Argosy Capital and Bluehenge Capital Partners, also pressed for the QSBS expansion.

The tax provision was initially a Democratic idea designed to stimulate economic growth. Senator Dale Bumpers, D-Ark., championed the initial legislation. He argued it would provide crucial capital access to "hundreds of thousands of small firms with good ideas but not enough capital."

President Bill Clinton's administration, with Bumpers as a fellow Arkansas Democrat and ally, quickly endorsed the proposal after taking office. The exemption became law in August 1993, initially allowing investors to avoid half the taxes on capital gains up to $10 million (later expanded to full exemption) or ten times their original investment, whichever was greater.

The initial $50 million threshold for qualification as a small business wasn't arbitrary. Congress specifically chose this figure to prevent the Walt Disney Company from benefiting through their newly created Mighty Ducks hockey team, which cost exactly $50 million. Lawmakers worried that allowing such a large corporation to exploit the tax break would trigger public opposition, according to congressional staff involved in drafting the legislation, according to a history of the provision from New York Times reporter Jesse Drucker and Maureen Farrell.

Ironically, what began as recession-era relief for struggling small businesses would eventually become a powerful tool for Silicon Valley's wealthiest investors. The technology sector's sophisticated financial strategies would later transform this modest tax incentive into a significant revenue stream, far exceeding lawmakers' original intentions.

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President Donald Trump previously opposed war with Iran. He expected to continue nuclear negotiations that were scheduled for last Sunday in Oman. And his own administration confirmed intelligence reports that Iran has not sought a nuclear weapon. That posture disappeared as Israel launched hundreds of surprise attacks across Iran last week, sparking a new war in the Middle East.

Trump has since shifted his position and now leans toward bringing the U.S. into the conflict—a change reportedly influenced by watching cable television showing Israel’s bombardment of Iran, particularly coverage on Fox News.

The information he is receiving, however, is hardly objective.

Turn on any legacy American news program over the past six days since Israel began bombing Iran, and the networks have featured nonstop pro-Israel commentary.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think tank, exemplifies this trend. While many pro-Israel voices regularly appear as talking heads, FDD officials have surfaced on television, radio, and online outlets almost hourly to promote Israel's war and demand American strikes against Iran.

As soon as the bombing began last Thursday night, former IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus, now a senior FDD fellow, appeared on Fox News to praise the strike. The following day brought a parade of FDD representatives: Conricus on CNN's 3:00 p.m. hour, senior fellow Bill Roggio on Fox News at 4:00 p.m., and CEO Mark Dubowitz on Fox News at 11:00 p.m., according to news transcript searches.

Much of this commentary has been misleading. Conricus falsely claimed that Israel's initial strikes only targeted Iranian military facilities and nuclear sites. In reality, on the very first night, Israel attempted to assassinate Ali Shamkhani, Iran's chief negotiator working with Steve Witkoff, by bombing his family home. Shamkhani—who had praised engagement with the Trump administration and called for normalization with America—reportedly survived but required leg amputation due to his injuries.

The media blitz extends beyond traditional outlets. FDD experts have appeared on The Daily Wire and The Free Press in recent days, repeating Israeli military claims. In many cases, such as recent appearances on CBS News and Fox News, FDD’s officials are presented as neutral military analysts rather than as pro-Israel spokesmen.

This pattern has continued daily, with FDD staff making round-the-clock television appearances calling for American military involvement against Iran.

Yesterday, FDD president Cliff May characterized potential U.S. bombing of Iran's underground facilities as effortless. "It probably means an [American] pilot goes and drops two bombs, as you've described, from a B-2, very big bombs, thirty thousand pounds, and then he goes home and has breakfast in Missouri with his family in the morning," May claimed on Fox News.

"The United States joining a strike on Fordow and any other facilities that remain is a must at this point," tweeted FDD deputy director Andrea Stricker.

FDD portrays itself as a nonprofit founded after September 11th, engaged in advocacy for "strengthening U.S. national security and reducing or eliminating threats posed by adversaries and enemies of the United States and other free nations."

That description is misleading.

IRS documents reveal that FDD filed for nonprofit status on April 24, 2001—months before 9/11. The group was originally named "EMET," Hebrew for "truth," with the stated purpose of enhancing "Israel's image in North America and the public's understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations."

Brigadier General (Res.) Sima Vaknin Gill, a former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer who helped establish several pro-Israel lobbying efforts in the U.S. during her tenure at Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, has identified FDD as a key asset. In a previous presentation on tracking pro-Palestinian organizations in America through data-mining and other forms of research, Vaknin-Gill noted, "We have FDD. We have others working on this."

FDD routinely lobbies Congress to escalate tensions on Iran and other countries viewed as adversaries of Israel. Last year, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., led a Senate letter to the Biden administration demanding increased sanctions on Iranian banks. Metadata from the document shows that the author of the Cruz letter was Nick Stewart, FDD’s Senior Director of Government Relations, who is responsible to managing congressional relations and other lobbying efforts.

Meanwhile, FDD routinely partners with the Israeli government officials to coordinate legal strategies for curbing pro-Palestinian activism in the United States. In 2019, for instance FDD legal expert Orde Kittrie was listed on a government panel hosted in Israel hosted by government officials on combating nonviolent economic protests of Israel’s human rights abuses in the West Bank.

FDD operates within a larger ecosystem of pro-Israel advocacy. Dozens of think tanks, Super PACs, institutes, and lobbying organizations work to advance Israeli government positions in American politics.

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Last week, we revealed legal filings, legislative records, and other documents showing that Albert Bryan Jr., the current governor, used his position to curry favor for Jeffrey Epstein for years. He helped bestow tax exemptions on Epstein's shadowy businesses and pushed for waivers allowing the former financier to dodge USVI sex offender laws.

Bryan, whose hand-selected Attorney General swiftly ended the J.P. Morgan lawsuit that revealed a gusher of damning documents about Epstein's network, is now tapping Epstein victim settlement funds—which were touted as money to prevent future sex crimes—to pay for various earmarks and unrelated government debts. The story paints a damning portrait of the politically fragile and corruption-laden island territory, dynamics that made it the perfect escape for Epstein. He could pay local officials and law enforcement agencies to look away as he allegedly abused women on his private island.

This reporting project was unusual in other ways. In virtually every other state and territory of the United States, local campaign finance disclosures are digitized and transparent. Seeking donation records for lawmakers or governors in California, Mississippi, or Iowa? Each state maintains its own website with publicly accessible information. The U.S. Virgin Islands runs on an entirely different system, I learned.

When I requested Gov. Bryan's donation records, I discovered that the island only discloses such records to U.S. Virgin Islands residents. For a fairly exorbitant fee, the records could be viewed and photocopied in person. What's more, some records are kept at an office in a shopping mall in St. Croix, while other documents are stored at another government office in St. Thomas, making any simple request into an island-hopping journey. The documents I eventually obtained include the check above from Erika A. Kellerhals, the Epstein attorney who previously employed Del. Stacey Plaskett, to Gov. Bryan's 2018 political campaign.

I found a University of the Virgin Islands student whom I paid to help gather some of the documents I used for the story. But it wasn't easy, and certainly not affordable.

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I also want to point one thing out that was missing from our investigation last week.

As one reader, who asked to remain anonymous, pointed out, we also missed one important aspect of the story. During her heroic efforts to bring justice, former Attorney General Denise George led a series of lawsuits against Epstein's estate and former associates. Bryan fired her. In 2024, Bryan named a new Attorney General—none other than Gordon Rhea, a private practice attorney who previously defended Richard Kahn during the Epstein estate lawsuit.

Here's the Virgin Islands Daily News back in 2022:

An attorney representing one of Jeffrey Epstein’s long-time lawyers responded to V.I. Attorney General Denise George’s assertions in an emergency motion filed Friday in V.I. Superior Court, calling them “baseless and inflammatory.”

The attorney, Gordon Rhea, represents Richard Kahn, who serves as joint executor of Epstein’s estate alongside another lawyer, Darren Indyke. A wealthy sex offender, Epstein died by suicide in August 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex crimes. His estate was initially valued at over $600 million, and has paid out a combed $125 million to 150 abuse claimants who received payments from the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Fund. [...]

Rhea said in an email to The Daily News on Saturday that attorneys for Kahn and Indyke will be filing a formal response to the motion in court, but wanted to “respond right away in the press to correct any misconceptions the Attorney General might have engendered.”

“We are disappointed, but not surprised, at the recent baseless and inflammatory assertions of wrongdoing that Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George has levied against Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, the Co-Executors of Jeffrey Epstein’s Estate,” Rhea wrote.

Not long ago, Kahn and Indyke were described by the U.S. Virgin Islands as "indispensable captains" of Epstein's alleged criminal human trafficking enterprise, who "profited substantially" from their relationship with him. Indyke admitted in court that Epstein was so close to him that he served as the "godfather of our children." Kahn still faces a separate lawsuit from Epstein's victims. The lawsuit alleges that he "worked closely with Epstein through every step of the sex trafficking operation's expansion and growth."

We still have many unanswered questions about the Epstein saga. Who are the individuals recorded on CDs and videotapes retrieved from Epstein's homes raided by the FBI? What was Epstein's relationship with intelligence agencies, as alleged by former U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta? Why did U.S. Virgin Islands police and customs agents never act to protect the young girls they saw taken to Epstein's islands?

What is clear, however, is that an attorney who worked to protect Epstein's estate is now the chief law enforcement officer of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

First photo - image of campaign check from Erika Kellerhals to Albert Bryan Jr.’s 2018 campaign. Second photo U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Albert Bryan with U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Gordon Rhea.