Sometimes it’s darkly funny what it takes for stories to gain traction. Trump continues to put his name on things, apparently forgetting that everything he touches turns to shit. Most recently, he’s calling it the Strait of Trump, at a time when the waterway is effectively closed, outside of ships whose passage directly benefits Iran.

Which makes it tough to talk 24/7 without just repeating the fact that the US has started a dumb war in the Middle East, that in turn has, very predictably, blown up the world wide economy. Just like every Republican President of my lifetime. Once you move past the Presidential Daily Brief of 2 minutes or less of video clips of things going boom, there’s just not much you can cover to try to pretend the US is winning.

Over just the last few days, we’ve moved from public social media threats to commit war crimes if Iran doesn’t reopen the Strait, to the suggestion that the US actually wins if Iran controls all passage through the Strait when the “war” is over, which of course is already weeks overdue. In trying to avoid discussing the regular cadence of US losses, CNN has accidentally highlighted the ongoing crimes against humanity that the Israeli Government, and settlers, continue to commit in the West Bank.

Sure, they did it because their own white, American citizen reporter was accosted by the violent occupying forces of the West Bank, also known as the Israeli Defense Forces. But they decided to air it. The Israeli Government is “investigating” not because the army supporting illegal settlements and protecting settlers as they violently attack Palestinians in their homes is a problem. In fact that’s official policy. But because the soldiers made the mistake of doing it on camera in front of an international TV crew. Ooops!

So while Iran is manipulating the American government into mistake after mistake like they’re a gullible child, TV news is struggling so hard to not talk about how dumb this unprovoked attack on Iran is that they’re accidentally covering the other violent and illegal attacks that the US openly supports. It’s disappointing this is what it takes, but it is important. Thousands of people have seen the CNN story. Thousands more than have seen Palestinian journalists and just regular folks sharing these same stories for decades without any real pick up. Which is part of why I am sharing the types of pieces I do here. To try to help folks see the stories that our society has tended to ignore. The stories that don’t get coverage, or that get sloppy, both sides coverage that’s designed to drive advertising dollars, not convey how things actually are in our communities.

Acting

Sign the petition to introduce a data center moratorium in NJ

Happy Birthday to me!

Since the US, under the Biden Administration, stopped funding UNRWA because of Israeli propaganda, I have refused to donate to any national political candidate that doesn’t support Palestinian self determination and an end to US funding for the Israeli Genocide. Instead I’m donating to UNRWA directly, as they continue to support Palestinian Refugees from the Nakba in Palestine and the surrounding area. So if you can, send some money UNRWA’s way, and you can count it as a birthday present for me.

Donate to UNRWA to celebrate my birthday

Seeing

People are tracking this shepherd fleeing Israeli strikes in Lebanon | Israel attacks Lebanon | Al Jazeera

People are tracking a shepherd who has been walking with his herd for days across Lebanon, fleeing Israeli strikes.

As someone whose tech/AI exit plan is to open a goat farm with a former co-worker, solidarity with this shepherd.

“This Is What It Means to Be Minnesotan” by Peter DiCampo, Zisiga Mukulu.

As I’ve watched the Twin Cities rally to respond to Operation Metro Surge, I’ve wanted to see the one thing I had not: What do these people look like in their day-to-day lives? I wanted to know who they are and what motivated them to patrol their streets, drive strangers to work and provide food and rent money for the families who have been in hiding since the surge began. While media coverage has moved on, and there are fewer ICE agents on the streets, they’re still here, and my neighbors are still providing mutual aid.

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“We’re just watching out for our neighbors. If that’s a form of protest, so be it.”

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“We’re retired. We have white privilege. We have to be the ones to stand up.”

Why Minneapolis Continues to Stand Up Against ICE After Operation Metro Surge — ProPublica

After ICE came to Minneapolis, ProPublica journalist Peter DiCampo saw his community step up to patrol the streets, drive strangers to work and provide aid to families in hiding. These are his neighbors, in their city, in their own words.

Israeli soldiers echo settler ideology, talk of revenge after targeting Palestinians and detaining CNN crew in the West Bank by Jeremy Diamond, Abeer Salman, Cyril Theophilos

The two hours we spent detained by them laid bare the settler ideology motivating many of the soldiers who operate in the occupied West Bank – and the ways in which soldiers frequently act in service of the settler movement. Their comments build on a large body of evidence documented by journalists, activists and Palestinians that show Israeli soldiers supporting or standing idly by as Israeli settlers attack Palestinians or encroach on their land.

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If the settlers come back, he said, his only recourse is to record them.

“If they come, I will just hold my phone and film … I can’t push them or touch them – I will be taken to the police and imprisoned if they don’t kill me,” Dabak said. “The camera is my only weapon – it’s the only thing that can prove that I am innocent.”

Now that something has happened to a white dude on the CNN payroll, suddenly this is a real thing. This follows a very similar track to when there are rebellions against police violence. Everything is hedged, presented using the police’s language, asterisked with the fact that someone broke a window or started a fire, until a white reporter is on the ground and gets gassed by the police, or a live shot gets busted up by the goon squad. Then all of a sudden there’s an appreciation of the protestors point of view and the stories the authorities are telling are correctly questioned.

Israeli soldiers echo settler ideology, talk of revenge after targeting Palestinians and detaining CNN crew in the West Bank | CNN

Twelve hours after Israeli settlers brutally attacked several Palestinians and established a new illegal outpost in their village, the Israeli military stepped in.

Reading

US justice department sues UCLA over alleged antisemitism amid pro-Palestinian protests by Cecilia Nowell

In December, nine justice department attorneys told the Los Angeles Times they felt pressured by the Trump administration to accuse the University of California of discriminating against Jewish students and faculty.

“The political appointees essentially determined the outcome almost before the investigation had even started,” Jen Swedish, a former justice department lawyer who worked on a case against UCLA, told the LA Times.

Since Trump took office, the president’s administration has launched investigations, filed lawsuits and frozen grant funding to universities across the country, citing issues ranging from diversity, equity and inclusion to transgender policies.

US justice department sues UCLA over alleged antisemitism amid pro-Palestinian protests | California | The Guardian

Lawsuit is latest action by Trump administration against a university and escalation of president’s feud with California

White House Sues Harvard Over Campus Antisemitism Claims, Seeks Federal Funds Back by Hugo C. Chiasson, Elise A. Spenner

The lawsuit marks the latest escalation in a now yearlong conflict between the federal government and Harvard. Over the past year, the Trump administration has frozen research funding, launched multiple investigations, and challenged the University’s governance and admissions practices.

Harvard has pushed back against the Trump administration’s attacks in court, winning a key ruling last September that restored more than $2.7 billion in federal funding after a judge found earlier cuts unconstitutional. That decision is currently under appeal.

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The complaint also calls on the court to require Harvard to more actively involve law enforcement in policing campus protests. Federal attorneys asked that the University adopt policies mandating cooperation with police to remove and arrest demonstrators who block access to campus spaces. (Harvard has avoided turning to law enforcement during student protests — including during the 20-day pro-Palestine encampment in spring 2024 — in contrast with several peer institutions.)

Why aren’t there campus protests over Iran? First of all, there are, many, they’re just not covered on the evening news. Second because the Trump Administration is looking to force administrations to call the police on their students. Because when you can’t dispute the message, you attack the messenger.

White House Sues Harvard Over Campus Antisemitism Claims, Seeks Federal Funds Back | News | The Harvard Crimson

The United States Department of Justice sued Harvard on Friday, alleging that the University violated federal civil rights law by failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment on campus.

Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South by Alan Elrod

The consequences of this, as of the Civil War, are still being felt. In a 2024 essay for Aeon, academic and writer Keri Leigh Meritt laid out the many ways the South as a region lags economically—pinned down by poverty, hobbled by an absence of public investments, and choked by a miasma of disillusionment and isolation:

Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.

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Faulkner’s old mot—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”—is as true, and as deeply felt, as ever. This is partly the result of a refusal to reckon deeply and profoundly with the traumas, shocks, and violence of Southern history. The process is not unimaginable: Germany undertook a public reckoning that led to reparations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But Southerners like myself might have to wait a long time for our region to gain the political will to displace its deeply entrenched traditions of anti-liberalism, state violence, and inequality. For now, our deep political deficit remains, and it threatens not only the region but America as a whole.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/liberal-democracy-american-south-vance-bourbons

Palestinians in the West Bank Are Now Experiencing Multiple Settler Attacks Per Day by Naqaa Hamed

Violence by Israeli settlers and soldiers, that had already reached record levels in 2025 alongside the genocide in Gaza, has escalated further since the U.S. and Israel launched a war on Iran last month. Since the beginning of 2026 through to March 16, a total of 26 Palestinians, including six children, have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers, according to the UN, including 18 by Israeli forces and seven by Israeli settlers. More than 260 Palestinians have been injured by Israeli settlers alone.

More than half the killings and over 100 of the injuries were inflicted between February 28, when the Iran war began, and March 16. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC), a Palestinian governmental body, has documented over a thousand attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers from the beginning of January through to mid-March, with more than 200 of them occurring in the first two weeks after the Iran war began.

Since December 2025, Israeli authorities have unleashed a series of measures “deliberately designed to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to make the annexation of the territory an irreversible reality,” according to Amnesty International. The measures include authorizing a record number of new settlements, expanding existing ones, and formalizing registration of land in the West Bank as Israeli state property in what Amnesty described as “turbocharged” and illegal efforts by Israel to dispossess Palestinians. “The accelerating expansion of unlawful settlements and the rise in state-backed settler violence and crimes across the occupied West Bank are a direct indictment of the international community’s catastrophic failure to take decisive action,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, said in a statement.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/palestinians-west-bank-israeli-settlers-attacks-iran-war

What If Iran Doesn’t Want the War to End Yet? by Nicholas Grossman

Militarily, Iran can probably keep this position for a while, taking a lot of damage, but still getting shots off. And every day further disrupts the global economy, creating shortages in gasoline, jet fuel, fertilizer, and more that will be increasingly unignorable. Concern about the economic damage likely drove Trump’s offer to negotiate.

But would Iran want to end the war now? In hard power dynamics, this is the strongest position the Islamic Republic has ever been in, the most leverage they have over the United States since the 1979-80 hostage crisis.

Iran is likely thinking of longer-term security. If they can endure more U.S.-Israeli bombing — and the war so far indicates that they can — then they can increasingly establish their ability to crash the global economy, a deterrent even the United States must respect.

Iran can also show nearby Arab states that their bargain with America isn’t worth it. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait all host U.S. bases, and are all under daily Iranian attack, running low on American air defense interceptors, their economies squeezed. They’re surely mad at Iran for bombing them now, but after the war, their most lasting impression might be that the U.S. couldn’t protect them.

Under these conditions, Iran has good reason to reject any peace offer from Donald Trump that includes concessions, or even an unconditional ceasefire.

What If Iran Doesn’t Want the War to End Yet?

America is not the sole actor in this war—the enemy always gets a vote.

Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant by Jude Joffe-Block

Courts have not weighed in on the practice of the federal government buying up bulk data from data brokers, making it an untested legal gray area. Privacy advocates argue the practice circumvents the Fourth Amendment and is contrary to a 2015 law that bars federal agencies from collecting bulk data on Americans. That law, the USA Freedom Act, came after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information on how the agency was collecting Americans' phone records.

Purchasing bulk data from data brokers is "very much not what Congress intended when it said we are banning bulk collection," said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "It wasn't, you know, 'do bulk collection, but also pay taxpayer money for it.' It was 'don't do bulk collection.'"

This piece is good, outside the random aside about how great Anthropic is for fighting the Pentagon, without any mention that they partner with Palantir for bulk data analysis, including that of Americans, which is kind of central to the piece. In fact Palantir isn’t even mentioned in the piece, even though Palantir software is where all this bulk data being purchased is being processed, stored, and analyzed.

Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it up : NPR

Data brokers buy up huge amounts of information from cell phones and browsers to sell for targeted advertising. But the government, including ICE, also buys the data.

The Movement to Abolish ICE Must Fight for Full Rights for All Immigrants in Left Voice

The events in Minneapolis showed us that possibility. When immigration enforcement threatened members of the community, divisions within our class melted away. Workers from different sectors showed up for one another. People mobilized in droves to defend their neighbors regardless of their immigration status. It showed that unity across the working class can flourish if we prepare along these lines. At the height of the backlash against the ICE surge in Minneapolis, furthermore, an assembly of hundreds of workers and community members not only voted for a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on May Day, but also resolved to form strike committees across workplaces to make it real.

The experience in Minneapolis points toward what we need nationwide. The fight for immigrant rights must become a fight taken up by unions, community organizations, students, and social movements together. It requires consciously rejecting the divisions that are imposed in our workplaces and across society. Everything that we win will come from organizing and strengthening this fight from below: workers, students, and communities linking their struggles, building the committees and assemblies that can coordinate action across neighborhoods, cities, and industries.