Family of American Student Urges US to Secure Her Release from Israeli Detention

Sami Safi’s arrest is part of a “concerted effort to crush the new generation of Palestinian leaders,” her aunt said.

By Shireen Akram-Boshar , 

Truthout

September 2, 2026

Israeli soldiers walk through an open field in Beit Sahour, south of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank on August 14, 2026. Violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank has increased dramatically since October 7, 2023.Ahmad Gharabli / AFP

The family of Sama Safi, a Palestinian American student who is being detained in an Israeli prison, has urged the U.S. to do more to secure her release.

Grassroots pressure “has been effective in forcing the U.S. embassy to visit Sama,” Sama’s aunt, Leila Farsakh, told Truthout. The embassy has now visited her twice since her imprisonment in June, and has reported on the poor conditions of her detention. “But we need intervention from the U.S. government to release and protect Sama and all American citizens.”

Sama, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen and psychology student in the occupied West Bank, was detained by Israel along with three other female students of Birzeit University in June, and has been imprisoned without formal charges. The other students detained with Sama are Jolan Abu Awad, Laila Nail Khalil, and Natalie Abu Dayyeh, who is a player on the Palestinian women’s soccer team.

“She was wrongly detained,” said Farsakh, who lives in Boston. “They’ve accused her of belonging to a student group, which she denies.”

Sama is being held in Israel’s Damon Prison, under harsh conditions, and has reported facing verbal abuse at the hands of Israeli soldiers, medical neglect, overcrowding, and the spread of a skin disease among the women being detained.


40 Democrats Demand Israel Free Sami Safi, US Citizen Detained Without Charges
Lawmakers warn Rubio that Safi, who has chronic health issues, may die in Israeli prison if he doesn’t take action.  By Sharon Zhang , Truthout August 25, 2026

Women being detained at Damon prison have spoken of punitive measures and medical neglect, including being dragged and humiliated when taken outside for “yard time” each day.

On August 19, Israel’s far right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir visited the prison and boasted of worsening the conditions of confinement for male and female Palestinian detainees, while making threats against them.

Sama’s case is particularly acute as she suffers from a chronic health condition which comes with “risk of organ failure” if not properly treated, Farsakh, Sama’s aunt, explained. “She has to have an injection once every month, and she has to take her medication, but they’re not being regular in giving her medication.”

In this regard, Sama’s case is reminiscent of the case of Terry Boulata, who was a student leader at Birzeit University during the 1980s and was imprisoned during the First Intifada. During her imprisonment, she suffered from a rare, severe health condition, and was only released after international pressure and global leaders stepped in.

Grassroots pressure has had an impact on Sama’s case, Farsakh said – and more must be built on that momentum. Farsakh spoke of the efforts of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in agitating for Sama’s release. Over 100 human rights organizations, civil rights groups, and youth organizations have also signed a letter calling for Sama’s release.

“It’s been very important to see grassroots mobilization in the U.S. for the sake of freedom of Palestinian prisoners,” Farsakh said.

These grassroots efforts brought Sama’s case to the attention of U.S. senators and members of Congress.

Shortly after her arrest, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) spoke about Sama’s detention. In a video message, Van Hollen described her unlawful arrest, saying, “Israeli security forces came to her home at 3 am in the morning, and just took her without explanation. She told them she was an American citizen. They didn’t care.”

Van Hollen pointed out that U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio “always tell us that their number one priority” is “to protect American citizens,” and that they must secure Sama’s immediate release to live up to these claims.

In August, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) posted on X that Sama “has been subjected to unspeakable cruelty in Israeli prison after being kidnapped from her home,” and that “her doctors warn that she now risks irreversible organ damage” due to Israel’s medical neglect of her chronic health condition.

Tlaib then took the lead in putting forward a letter, signed by 41 senators and representatives, calling for Rubio to pressure Israel for Sama’s release.

“Every day that Sama remains unlawfully detained in these inhumane conditions, she is at greater risk of irreversible and life-threatening repercussions,” the letter explains. “It is your responsibility to ensure the safety of all Americans abroad, with no exceptions. Her life is at risk on your watch.”

U.S. citizens have not been immune from Israeli violence. In 2024, Israeli forces shot and killed American protester Aysenur Ezgi Eygi in the occupied West Bank. In 2022, Israeli forces killed Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as she was reporting in the West Bank. And in 2024, U.S.-Canadian Jacob Flickinger was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. It is unclear how many Palestinian Americans have been killed in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Israel has also detained other Palestinian Americans in its prisons. In 2025, Israel detained Mohammed Ibrahim, a teenager from Florida, in the West Bank. Detained at 15 years old, Mohammed turned 16 while in detention, and was finally released after a campaign brought about pressure from U.S. lawmakers.

Farsakh insisted that grassroots pressure must continue, not only for the sake of Sama, but for all Palestinian prisoners. Grassroots pressure can “use the case of Sama to talk about all Palestinian women prisoners, and how this is unlawful under international law, and against American laws,” she added.

Sama’s case should also serve to highlight the worsening conditions in the occupied West Bank, Farsakh said: the increasing annexation, ethnic cleansing, and fragmentation that are part of Israel’s intensifying settler-colonial project.

“This is an attack on freedom of education, freedom of expression, freedom of association,” Farsakh said. “[Israel] doesn’t want people to organize, to talk, to socialize; they want them separated, and to leave the country.”

“I think it’s really a concerted effort to crush the new generation of Palestinian leaders.”

Israel’s Gaza “Solution” Is to Empty It of Palestinians, Defense Minister Says

“There is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration,” said Israel Katz.

By Sharon Zhang , 

Truthout

September 3, 2026

A view of Palestinian displacement camps amid widespread destruction in Gaza City on August 29, 2026 in Gaza City, Gaza.Omar Ashtawy / Getty Images

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz admitted this week that Israel’s goal for Gaza is the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza in “every way possible,” despite denying allegations of ethnic cleansing for years.

“There is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration,” Katz said at a conference hosted by Israeli outlet Yedioth Ahronoth on Wednesday, per a translation by France 24. Israel “is organized and prepared to get them out — by sea, by air, by every way possible.”

This plan would amount to ethnic cleansing, something that Palestinians and human rights advocates have long said Israel is carrying out in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In a report earlier this year, the UN Human Rights Office warned that Israel was carrying out policies consistent with ethnic cleansing between 2024 and 2025, including famine, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and overall imposing conditions “incompatible with [Palestinians’] continued existence in Gaza as a group.”

Katz said that Israel is “seeking Trump’s support” for the idea because no country will take in Palestinians without the approval of the U.S.

The White House has not commented on the plan. When Donald Trump took office last year, he proposed a plan for forced displacement of the entire population of Gaza, dubiously framing it as “voluntary.”

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The administration’s stance has since evolved, however. In July, Trump’s “Board of Peace” announced a plan that would still implement colonial control over Gaza, but that would transition power over the Strip to a Palestinian board and demand Israel withdraw its troops from the Strip.

In a rare break with the U.S. last month, Netanyahu announced that he would not be supporting that plan. Keeping with his usual practice of introducing unworkable provisions into negotiations, he said that Israel would not withdraw until Hamas was totally disarmed.

Disarmament — which critics say would still give Israel massive power over Gaza — was already included in the Board of Peace’s 15-point plan. But Netanyahu seems determined to ensure Israel can still carry out its genocide and occupation in Gaza, pledging again on Wednesday that Israel is “not retreating.”

“We control 60 percent of the Strip, and we are not stopping, because we are eliminating the terrorists who threaten us, day in and day out,” he reportedly said.

Trump also previously vowed to end aid to Israel if it annexed the West Bank, however, despite Israel’s ongoing annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory.

The Israeli officials’ remarks were made just weeks before critical Israeli elections in October, in which Katz and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are hoping to retain far right control of the state.

Politicians in Netanyahu’s caucus have been openly calling for cruelty toward Palestinians as a campaign strategy. This week, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted then deleted an AI-generated video that showed a line of Palestinians on a conveyor belt being loaded into a detention facility operated by Ben-Gvir. The Palestinians are then shown leaving the facility emaciated, with the politician seemingly showing off Israel’s systematized policy of starvation of Palestinians.

Israeli officials have denied allegations of ethnic cleansing for years.

“The charge of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Israel is false and dangerous. It is not a legal definition but a political label, used to inflame tensions, spread hate, and fuel antisemitism,” said Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, last year. “Israel does not deport Palestinians because of their identity. Israel has, rather, temporarily removed non-combatant populations from war-zones in order to guarantee their safety.”

The statement was made in response to a September 2025 report released by Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) and Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) saying that Israel was deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure and starving Palestinians with the goal of ethnic cleansing.

“After our trip to the Gaza-Egypt border last year, [Merkley] & I released a report entitled, ‘The Netanyahu Government is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians.’ Now the Israeli Min[ister] of Defense confirmed that’s the goal,” said Van Hollen on Wednesday. “We must end our complicity.”

Op-Ed

Releases, Not Transfers, Must Be at the Center of Prison Closure Plans

As former residents of a California prison, we celebrated its closure but abhorred the punitive transfer process.

By Mathew Witecki & Ryan Brennan , 

Truthout/TheAppeal

August 31, 2026

California Rehabilitation Center located in Norco, California.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

For decades, the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) in Norco has been known for its deplorable conditions: extreme heat, pest infestations, unreliable programming, and water so unsafe that guards refuse to drink it. As residents of CRC, we experienced these conditions firsthand. So we celebrated when the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced in August 2025 that CRC had been named for closure. Almost one year later, as of July 29, 2026, CRC has officially been emptied. Today, the empty prison remains in “warm shutdown” mode, costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

The announcement of CRC Norco’s closure was a testament to years of community advocacy to reduce the imprisoned population, expose systemic issues in CRC that are reflective of those throughout the prison system, and highlight possibilities for non-carceral reinvestment in California’s Riverside County. Imprisoned people, loved ones, and advocates had exposed the toxicity in CRC for decades — leading to the prison being marked for closure in 2012 by the CDCR under then-Gov. Jerry Brown. In 2021, Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) named CRC Norco as the top state prison to close based on a survey of more than 2,000 imprisoned people. We connected with CURB in 2024 to share testimony about CRC’s horrific conditions and failing infrastructure.

There is much to learn from looking back at CRC’s closure process. During its closure, imprisoned people in CRC Norco have been subjected to a gauntlet of unnecessary burdens and persecution, similar to those endured in prior closures. California needs to close more prisons — they cause more harm than they address while draining billions of dollars in resources from the communities that need them most. But we also can’t let the CDCR use closures as an excuse to punish imprisoned people with tumultuous transfers, denial of food and medicine, restricted access to rehabilitative programming, and retaliation. Releases, not chaotic transfers, must be the center of any future closure plan.

As CRC emptied out, one of us stayed behind while the other was transferred to another prison. From both sides of the closure process, we have seen the same pattern of preventable harm.

For those who remained inside CRC during the closure process, including college students finishing classes at Norco College or UC Riverside’s prison education program, conditions rapidly worsened. After the announcement of CRC’s closure, we were moved to the “punishment dorm,” where roughly 200 people were packed together with only six small tables for studying. We endured barely functioning sinks and showers, cockroach infestations, and unbearable heat with no working swamp coolers or ventilation. These conditions served no legitimate purpose and disrupted those trying to study, participate in programs, and cope with institutional stress. 

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A new facility celebrated by Gov. Gavin Newsom will disrupt prisoner-led programming and normalize our captivity. By Steve Brooks , Truthout/TheAppeal  April 3, 2026

In May 2026, those who remained saw their already child-sized meal portions cut in half because CDCR allegedly failed to order enough food to sustain us during the closure process. First, the eggs disappeared from breakfast trays, leaving empty compartments. Was this a mistake, or another CDCR policy that rewards neglect? The answer became clear when portions were reduced again, leaving us hungry and undernourished.

Accustomed to operating with little scrutiny, CDCR bristled when we sought support from our loved ones about the food shortage. At first, administrators denied the problem, then threatened us, demanding we “stop calling our people and complaining.”

Later that month, correctional officers forced last-minute housing changes in the middle of the night, pushing dorms beyond mandated capacity limits and making already unsafe conditions worse. The roughly 400 people who remained in CRC at the time were packed 80 to a dorm designed for 60. These conditions were compounded by rising temperatures and recent fires that filled the air with asbestos-contaminated smoke.

For others, the transfer process carried its own set of abuses.

Calls for transfer came with no warning, and often in the middle of the night. This is standard protocol, as exhaustion is meant to disorient us. Caffeine and nerves had us trembling as we marched to the transfer cages. We waited in that cramped concrete box until 7:45 a.m. with nothing to eat but a single PB&J. After hours on a prison bus, shackled at the waist, ankles, and wrists, the same snack was provided again while we waited at the receiving institution. These are the conditions of transfer: hunger, exhaustion, and nagging uncertainty — all used to mentally subdue us.

Some of us left CRC on December 22, 2025, and were transferred to California State Prison in Lancaster (CSP-LA). A handful of us arrived without our property. After watching others receive their personal items, we were told that ours were never loaded onto the bus.

During transfers, some wait weeks for belongings, and others never receive them. A person’s property can disappear without a trace, with no consequences for staff involved. To make matters worse, CSP-LA was in no hurry to issue state clothing. With only one outfit and no winter apparel, those of us without clothes went freezing in our cells with no food, hygiene products, and nothing to do but think and wait.

It took weeks for some of us to receive our property, and even longer to get our state-issued tablets, which are used for phone calls and text messages. During those weeks without them, guards barely let us out to use the phones. When they did, the process was not set up to guarantee access, making it nearly impossible to contact our loved ones. Days went by waiting in phone lines, only to be forced back into our cells, sometimes without even the means to send a letter.

These harms are not an inevitable part of the prison closure process. Instead of addressing preventable problems, CDCR has used transfers, overcrowding, and long program waitlists to argue for preserving and expanding corrections budgets, even as incarcerated populations decline. The most insidious part: CDCR uses the allure of initiatives that, in reality, mask the harms of incarceration by building “kinder, gentler cages” to justify its power grabs, convincing lawmakers that spending billions on newer prisons and other gimmicks are somehow the antidote to the devastation that prisons cause in the first place. Reducing reliance on a toxic prison system and preventing harm are not at odds; in fact, they must go hand in hand.

The state can take concrete steps to mitigate harm, the clearest being prioritization of releases over transfers in closure plans. One way to do this is by evaluating people for resentencing eligibility when a prison gets named for closure. On average, it costs at least $128,000 annually to imprison one person, with additional resources being spent on the transfer process. If individuals are assessed for release following a closure announcement, the transfer process could be avoided altogether and eligible individuals can return home.

In cases where release does not happen, imprisoned people should be given meaningful choice in the transfer process. Their needs, including proximity to loved ones, health care, continuation of programming, and completion of programming scheduled to finish before closure, should be honored.

Rushed transfers are preventable — and a product of CDCR’s own making. By labeling closure-related transfers “emergencies,” CDCR circumvents laws designed to reduce involuntary and adverse transfers. CRC Norco was not scheduled to close until the fall of 2026; had CDCR followed that timeline, more of us could have had our family and programming needs met. Instead, many have spent over two months without timely hearings. Within this period, our family visitation was severely limited and we were barred access to programming, education, employment opportunities, yard, religious services, the library, and even purchasing basic hygiene and food items.

The suffering unfolding at CRC and in the transfer process is not a necessary part of closure. These are choices made by CDCR and CRC staff. As CDCR continues to push prison expansion, California can and should remain focused on closing more prisons without the abuse. Future plans should center releases over transfers so closure meaningfully reduces the human cost of incarceration.



This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Mathew Witecki

Mathew Witecki is a 2026 graduate of University of California, Riverside with a bachelor’s degree in Education, Society, and Human Development and an inside advocate with Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB). Mathew was imprisoned at the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC), Norco and transferred to San Quentin. He is scheduled to be released in 2027 and hopes to continue his education in the Masters of Public Policy program at UCLA.



Ryan Brennan

Ryan Brennan is a queer advocate and community organizer. While in prison, he developed and facilitated the LGBTQ Allies program. He also earned a bachelor’s degree in organizational studies from Pitzer College. It was this program that inspired him to become a Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) abolitionist. Ryan is currently imprisoned at CSP-LAC, Lancaster. He plans to continue organizing against the PIC when he is released at the end of the year.

HINDUTVA

World’s Largest Far Right Paramilitary Rallied in NYC. It Should Alarm Everyone.

Five thousand people attended a rally in New York City led by the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

By Samantha Agarwal ,

Truthout

September 1, 2026

New Yorkers rally outside of Madison Square Garden to condemn Mohan Bhagwat and the RSS on August 29, 2026.Samantha Agarwal

On February 20, 1939, the Madison Square Garden arena in New York City hosted a chilling spectacle. A portrait of George Washington hung at the center of the arena, flanked by U.S. flags and swastikas. Over 20,000 people packed the stands to hear Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German American Bund — one of the most prominent U.S.-based organizations aligned with the Third Reich — project his vision of a “white, Gentile-ruled United States.” Outside, 100,000 anti-Nazi protesters clashed with police on Eighth Avenue, determined to stop the legitimization of European fascism on U.S. soil.

Eighty-seven years later, global leaders in ethno-fascism and their sympathizers returned to Madison Square Garden.

On August 29, 2026, 5,000 people gathered at Madison Square Garden to hear Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak (Supreme Leader) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). As the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the RSS is the world’s largest far right paramilitary organization, with an estimated 4 million members spread over 73,117 branches across India. Just as the Bund attempted to leverage the image of George Washington to legitimize Nazism in their rally of 1939, the RSS used this invite-only event — apparently attended by 180 religious leaders from 30 countries — to sanitize a century-old project of Hindu fascism. Obscuring its extremist agenda, the RSS cloaked the gathering in the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism, branding it with the theme “Universal Oneness.”

In his 42-minute keynote, the septuagenarian Bhagwat played the part of a playful but discerning uncle, dispensing meandering aphorisms about an “innate, eternal oneness” that connects humanity and nature. Rooting these concepts in the Atman (soul) and India’s civilizational values, Bhagwat painted a picture of a nation that champions “unity in diversity.” In a jarring contrast to his movement’s actual record, he claimed that India chooses to tolerate its enemies rather than subjugate them — elevating the country as a global exemplar of enlightened governance.

While Bhagwat spoke inside, an interfaith and anti-caste coalition protested outside. It consisted of groups like SALAM (South Asian Left), Hindus for Human Rights, and the Indian American Muslim Council, along with members of some of the 66 organizations that signed on to a statement earlier this week condemning Bhagwat’s visit. Their speeches exposed the hypocrisy of Bhagwat’s claim to “unity in diversity,” demonstrating how the RSS and its massive network of Hindu supremacist partners — including nearly a thousand nonprofit organizations, cultural organizations, paramilitary groups, unions, and political parties, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar (or the Family of the Sangh) — routinely practice the exact opposite of what Bhagwat preaches.

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Speakers pointed out how the RSS’s notion of unity is, in fact, exclusively reserved for Hindus — and only for those who are wealthy and upper-caste. Shree Baphna from SALAM talked about how Hindutva (or the Hindu supremacist movement) attempts to divert mass anger “away from those in power and towards those communities who are exploited and oppressed.”

Baphna added:


When a Dalit [lower caste person] demands land, dignity and the annihilation of caste, Hindutva says, ‘forget caste – you are Hindu. When an Adivasi [Indigenous person] defends jal, jungle, zameen [water, forests and land] against mines, dams and corporations – Hindutva says, ‘forget your history – you are a vanvasi – a child of the Hindu nation.’ Shame!

Ritu Gupta from the nonprofit Hindus for Human Rights, noted that Mohan Bhagwat is here “pretending to spread the message of oneness.” But this is not the message Bhagwat’s supporters spread in India, Gupta retorted. “In India they say, ‘Hindus only – everybody else, get out!’ These Hindus who support the message of purging India of its minorities do not represent all Hindus. There could be no bigger hypocrisy than this!”

Demonstrators display signs reading, “RSS Out of NYC.”

646onrecord

Others, including a spokesperson for the Palestinian organization Pal Awda, extended the critique of Bhagwat’s rhetorical “oneness” to India’s role as a regional colonizer in Kashmir and partner to genocidal Israel. “We have a responsibility to stand against genocide whenever, and wherever,” the Pal Awda representative, who requested anonymity, said. “The RSS has deep ties to Zionism and has worked to create an Israel-like vision for India based on [an] ethnonationalist state and subjugation of minorities.” Moreover, the “Hindutva-Zionism relationship is not merely ideological,” the spokesperson added, explaining that the relationship is constructed through diplomatic links, military cooperation, and corporate capital flows.

As one striking example of this strategic alliance, in 2022 the Adani Group owned by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, a personal friend to Modi, purchased 70 percent of the Haifa port. Today, the Indian flag flies next to the Israeli flag in Israel’s second largest port. The Indian and Israeli governments also cooperate heavily on military equipment, counterterrorism, and surveillance technology, including software partnerships. Another speaker on August 29 added, “The Hindutva politics that normalizes repression in Kashmir is a mirror image of the Zionist state — carrying out the same occupation and dispossession in Palestine.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a number of New York City council members have also publicly opposed the RSS rally. Additionally, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom urged the U.S. government to sanction the RSS due to its violent attacks on religious minorities.
Hindu Supremacy’s Enduring Ties to European Fascism

To fully understand the significance of Bhagwat holding court at Madison Square Garden — and the intensity of the counter-protests — one must grasp the bloodline that binds his organization to the very regime the German American Bund was celebrating in 1939. The founders of the RSS, which was created in 1925, met with and drew direct lessons from the European fascists.

In 1931 BS Moonje, a Hindu nationalist and mentor to the first Supreme Leader of the RSS, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, traveled to Italy to meet with Benito Mussolini and tour various military academies and militant youth organizations such as the Opera Nazionale Balilla and the Avanguardisti. Moonje wrote in his diary that he was inspired by these fascist organizations and intended to reshape the RSS along these organizational lines. It is said that under Hedgewar the RSS adopted many of their core features — such as their targeted recruitment of young boys (beginning at age 5), use of paramilitary training, and the total subordination of the organization to a supreme, lifetime leader — from Moonje’s accounts of the Italian Balilla.

Further, in 1939 M.S. Golwalkar — the RSS’s second Supreme Leader, whose portrait Bhagwat still routinely garlands — wrote in his manifesto, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, that Germany’s ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people was a model for India “to learn and profit by.” In that same text, he characterizes Muslims as historical “despoilers” and “murdering hordes” who destroyed Hindu kingdoms, arguing that they should either be forced to assimilate to Hinduism. If they refuse, he argues, they should be “wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges.”

Today, under Bhagwat’s leadership and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12-year reign, Golwarkar’s 1939 blueprint has become de facto state policy. In 2019, the RSS-backed Modi regime passed a slate of controversial laws effectively dismantling what was left of India’s secularism, tying citizenship to religion, explicitly excluding Muslims. This legal subordination works in tandem with extralegal vigilante violence committed by partners of the RSS like the Bajrang Dal.

Lynchings and mob attacks on individuals or small groups of people constitute a kind of slow-burning structural violence that has led Brown University political scientists Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs to compare Hindu nationalism to America’s Jim Crow South. There has been a steady rise in such incidents since 2014, disproportionately in BJP-ruled states. In just the first year of Modi’s third term (2024-2025), the Association for Protection of Civil Rights recorded 602 such hate crimes. Of these, 173 involved physical violence against minorities, resulting in 25 deaths — every one of them Muslim.

Punitive home demolitions and evictions are also surging. According to the Housing and Land Rights Network, evictions across India climbed from 107,625 in 2019 to 222,686 in 2022, before reaching 515,752 in 2023 — a 379 percent increase over five years. The network’s data also reveals that Muslims are vastly overrepresented among those whose homes are destroyed.

Waging sustained opposition to the regime on any of these counts has become nearly impossible. Critics — including peaceful activists, academics, media, and dissident politicians — are routinely persecuted under draconian laws like the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which eliminate standard burdens of proof to permit the indefinite pretrial detention of political opponents. This systematic criminalization of dissent has led the prestigious V-Dem Institute to classify India as an electoral autocracy, dropping the country’s democratic freedom ranking from 65th in 2016 to 106th in 2026 — the bottom 20 percent globally. Even more alarming, Genocide Watch has repeatedly warned of an impending genocide against India’s 250 million Muslims, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ranks India at the “second-highest risk of a new mass killing.”

Yet, despite this grim record, the highest leader of this fascistic movement was handed one of the world’s most coveted stages — welcomed to preach and court donors in the heart of the U.S.’s financial capital.
Bhagwat’s Event Was the Culmination of a Decades-Long Strategy to Influence U.S. Politics

Just as the German American Bund sought to build a fifth column in the U.S., the RSS has for five decades worked to build material power in the diaspora. To organize its Madison Square Garden rally, the RSS drew on sophisticated, multi-layered clandestine networks, the mechanics of which were exposed in a new, multi-part investigative series on the RSS’s “Vishwa Vibhag” or “Overseas Department” by Savera, a U.S.-based coalition against supremacy.

In this series Savera tracked the shell organizations facilitating the RSS’s U.S. activities. Bhagwat’s event was formally hosted by the innocuous-sounding American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue (also known as “AHEAD Forum”), which poses as an independent diaspora group.

The Savera series shows that this is a bald-faced lie. AHEAD Forum was, in fact, incorporated in California in May 2025 by Khanderao Kand, a long-time RSS operative and founder-president of the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies. Kand’s deep ties to the RSS and the BJP were exposed when the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies was implicated in a potentially illegal lobbying effort to influence the U.S. Congress. When Kand became a public relations liability, his name was quietly scrubbed from AHEAD Forum’s paperwork and replaced by a colleague. AHEAD Forum’s other directors are similarly embedded in the “American Sangh,” the network of U.S.-based RSS affiliates.

At the top of this hierarchy sits Saumitra Gokhale. Gokhale is listed on tax forms for the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh — the U.S. wing of the RSS — as a yoga instructor earning $36,000 a year, according to Savera. But researchers found no record of Gokhale teaching yoga. In reality he is a senior RSS pracharak (full-time missionary) and the global coordinator of the Vishwa Vibhag.

The Savera series reveal how the Vishwa Vibhag — or the “largest far right network in the world”— operates across 1,600 branches in 55 countries, utilizing organizations like the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America to weave a dense web of “transnational entanglements.” Contrary to claims that they operate independently of the RSS, the series shows how they in fact are so closely intertwined that Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh leaders are made to attend regular RSS training camps in India. They employ the same terminology (“shakhas”) to refer to branches, borrow from RSS’s prayers and paraphernalia, and pay obeisance to portraits of RSS leaders, including none other than Golwalkar himself. Sewa International is the main fundraising arm of the Vishwa Vibhag — and rakes in millions of dollars of revenue each year.

Ideologically, the American Sangh appropriates the language of Western multiculturalism, global peace, and even decolonizationto shield its majoritarian, proto-fascist project. This was on full display at the Madison Square Garden event. At the same time, it openly allies itself with white nationalists and Zionists — as seen in Trump’s 2019 “Howdy Modi” mega rally in Houston or in the Republican Hindu Coalition formerly chaired by Steve Bannon.

These two faces of the Sangh are not solely fixated on India; they actively intervene in U.S. politics. For example, they have waged aggressive, well-funded campaigns to rewrite California school textbooks to reflect right-wing nationalist histories. They recently spearheaded a successful push to kill a civil rights bills aimed at banning caste-based discrimination — culminating in an infamous veto by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom). Taking a page from the Zionist Anti-Defamation League’s playbook, they weaponize U.S. civil rights rhetoric framing any criticism of the RSS or the BJP’s human rights record as “Hinduphobia” to intimidate lawmakers and silence academics.

The Hindu right wields this outsized political and lobbying muscle despite the fact that only a minority of Indian Americans actually support the BJP. Affiliates like the Hindu American Political Action Committee and Hindu American Foundation have spent years embedding themselves within Washington and local municipalities. Federal Election Commission reports show them donating handsomely across the aisle to Democrats such as Raja Krishnamoorthi and Shri Thanedar alongside Republicans such as Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, and many more.

Typically, the use of front organizations has worked to hedge against accusations of operating on behalf of a foreign agent. However, recently, for reasons that are still unclear, the RSS has also sought to deepen its directinfluence over U.S. politicians. In late 2025, an investigation by the U.S.-based news outlet Prism revealed that the RSS had hired Squire Patton Boggs — one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms — to influence U.S. lawmakers. The firm was paid $330,000 during the first three quarters of 2025.

Bringing RSS on as a domestic client rather than registering it under FARA was likely in violation of federal transparency norms. After the Prism report was published, thus, Squire Patton Boggs hastily amended its congressional disclosures, scrubbing the RSS from the paperwork and claiming that its “ultimate client” was actually Vivek Sharma, a Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical executive.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the RSS’s shadowy lobbying initiative and Bhagwat’s visit come at a moment when the Modi regime is facing an unprecedented crisis. Economic stagnation, recurring labor unrest, Hindu temple scandals, and mass student protests have mired Modi’s third term and substantially weakened his domestic standing. Bhagwat’s liberal-sounding message thus appears aimed at restoring a more palatable “brand” for the Sangh Parivar, laying the groundwork for global cooperation under a future leader. This is also a stark reminder of who, in fact, controls the levers of power — the parent RSS — no matter the ultimate fate of Modi or even the BJP.

But if the RSS believes it can quietly secure its legacy, the communities resisting it tell a very different story. Outside the venue, Safa Ahmed of the Indian American Muslim Council spoke directly to Bhagwat’s underlying anxiety, saying:


Islam and Muslims have been in India for 1,400 years, and they will [remain] here after another 1,400 years and even beyond that. So long as we exist, we will never be erased from India. But you — Mohan Bhagwat, and your fascist … fan pals — the masks are off for you. You are being mocked by the youth of India. You are being mocked by New York City. You are afraid of losing it all … And it’s you who will be remembered as a sad, insecure group of people who could only take pride in your identity via the erasure of another — that is, if you are remembered at all

!

Protesters hang garlands of shoes around effigies of Narendra Modi (left) and
Mohan Bhagwat (right)Samantha Agarwal

Ahmed’s prophecy will ultimately bear out, but we cannot afford to passively wait for it. We cannot leave our Muslim, Adivasi, Dalit, and left comrades on the front lines in India to fight this battle alone. Rallies, social media mockery, and the construction of broad, intersectional coalitions like we saw on Saturday are a strong start. But sooner than later we need to go beyond symbolic protest to challenge the Sangh at its root.

This will require disrupting Hindutva diasporic organizations wherever they operate, ruthlessly exposing these “cultural organizations” as fronts for the spread of fascism. It means cautioning the public about the bad-faith weaponization of “Hinduphobia” — which the Hindu right uses to shield itself from criticism — and impeding the Sangh’s ties to global right-wing players like MAGA and Israel. It means educating the nascent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) movement on the violent reality of the Sangh, so it compels DSA-elected officials to act. Finally, just as global movements boycotted the Nazis, the apartheid-era Afrikaners, and now Israel — the left needs to develop creative strategies to choke off the Sangh from its financial lifelines in the U.S. A first step would be to scrutinize its various alliances with big capital, including in the tech and defense sectors, and examine how these partnerships enable funds to flow into India via charitable fronts like Sewa International, IDRF, and Ekal Vidyalaya.

The 1939 Bund rally is remembered today as a sinister moment in U.S. history — a time when New York allowed the most violent political current in the globe to claim a major stage in our financial capital. Mohan Bhagwat’s 2026 visit must be recognized as its modern equivalent. To avoid repeating the horrors of interwar fascism, we must urgently build a transnational, intersectional bloc capable of defeating the American Sangh.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
, and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Samantha Agarwal
Samantha Agarwal is an Assistant Professor at School of Labor and Urban Studies at City University of New York. Her writing and research focus on neoliberalism, social movements in India, and the rise of authoritarian ethnonationalism globally.

Op-Ed

Big Tech’s Debate Over “Open” and “Safe” AI Leaves Corporate Power Unquestioned


Two seemingly contradictory letters emerging from the AI industry point toward the same future.

By Tim Scott ,

Truthout

September 1, 2026

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei looks on during a meeting with France's President Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India, on February 19, 2026.Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images

On July 24, 2026, an initial coalition of 25 technology companies and organizations, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Meta, released the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter, calling for wider adoption of AI models that institutions can download and modify. By August 3, more than 270 companies and organizations had signed, spanning Big Tech, venture capital, investment management, and the defense and security industries. Four days after Open Weights’ release, another letter, Pacing the Frontier, organized by employees of frontier AI companies with support from two AI-policy nonprofits, drew more than 1,300 signatures. It warned that leading companies may be close to automating AI research, accelerating development beyond society’s ability to understand or control the resulting AI systems.

The letters seem to argue for opposite futures. One presents wider access and fewer restrictions as the route to security and prosperity. The other asks the U.S. government to support an international effort to slow frontier development before competitive pressures make coordinated restraint impossible.

But they address different levels of the industry. Open Weights seeks to deepen AI’s already pervasive presence by making customizable models easier to embed throughout the economy and public life. Pacing the Frontier proposes government-backed management of frontier AI, the industry’s term for its most advanced and broadly capable models. That framework could make the small circle of companies building these systems indispensable to defining the dangers and writing the rules meant to restrain them.

Read together, the letters point toward a two-tier arrangement. AI becomes entrenched across society while ownership of its most powerful systems, infrastructure, and governance remains concentrated at the top. Their connection requires no secret agreement. It lies in what both take for granted: AI development will continue, public institutions will finance and adopt it, and private ownership and corporate power will remain intact.

The letters leave out harder questions: Who will own AI and decide its direction? How will it be used in surveillance and war, and how will it reshape work and deepen inequality? Whose lives and futures will be valued, and does the public have any right to limit or refuse a technology presented as inevitable? Beneath the language of openness and safety lie deeper a general agreement over corporate power, military dominance, elite rule, and the authoritarian currents shaping Silicon Valley’s vision of the future.

Open Weights Are Not Open Source

An AI model is the underlying system that generates answers, predictions, images, or other outputs. Its “weights” are the billions of numerical settings developed from patterns in training data. Releasing those weights allows organizations with computing power and expertise to download, run, and modify the model rather than use it only through a company-controlled service such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude.

Researchers can examine these models, test their weaknesses, and build specialized tools, while organizations can run them locally rather than send sensitive information to a commercial service. Yet proprietary, company-controlled services such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are not inherently safer: their operators can keep flaws from public scrutiny, monitor how people use them, impose restrictions, raise prices, or withdraw access.

But releasing a model’s weights does not by itself make the AI system open source. Under the Open Source Initiative’s definition, open-source AI must provide the necessary materials and the legal freedom to use, study, modify, and share the system for any purpose. Those materials include the model’s parameters, the complete code used to train and run it, and detailed information about its training data and methods. Most open-weight releases, by contrast, provide the finished numerical settings and enough supporting files to run or adapt the model, but not the complete training code or the required details about its training data and methods. The training data itself and much of the development process often remain proprietary or unavailable. Beyond the definition’s formal requirements, the labor arrangements and corporate decisions behind these systems also remain undisclosed. Users of open-weight models can therefore operate and adapt them without gaining a full account of how they were built.

The Open Weights letter borrows the democratic reputation of open source to present open-weight access as a path to competition, independence, and shared prosperity. Yet an open-weight release gives the public access to a corporate product without transferring ownership or giving workers, affected communities, and the broader public meaningful power to govern the data, computing infrastructure, labor conditions, and deployment decisions behind it. A genuinely open-source release would provide broader materials and legal freedoms, but even that would not place the resources, infrastructure, or institutional uses of AI under public, community, or worker governance. In either case, access remains unequal. Individuals may run smaller models, but corporations and agencies possess the data centers, private datasets, institutional records, and specialists needed to customize them, connect them to institutional data systems, and deploy them at scale. An open-weight model that supports independent research can therefore also expand institutional surveillance and coercion by enabling governments and corporations to monitor and classify people, inform or automate consequential decisions, and control access to services.

That unequal distribution of power is only one danger. Open weights also create an irreversible loss-of-control problem. Once copied, a model cannot be fully retrieved, monitored, or patched across all distributed copies, nor can its safeguards be guaranteed to remain intact. Those with sufficient technical expertise and computing resources can modify open-weight models, remove their refusal mechanisms, introduce discriminatory behavior or hidden backdoors, and redistribute the results. Modified models could facilitate cyberattacks, fraud, impersonation, targeted disinformation, nonconsensual sexual imagery, harassment, or guidance involving weapons, abuse, and self-harm. Connected to institutional records, they could expose private information, intensify surveillance, discriminate, restrict services, or help target communities. Responsibility then fragments as developers, vendors, and institutions blame one another.

Even as the weights circulate and open the door to still more harmful uses, the infrastructure remains firmly closed. AI depends on specialized chips, enormous data centers, electricity, water, and cloud platforms. Open weights may reduce an institution’s dependence on a particular model provider, but training, adapting, and deploying AI at scale still depend on highly concentrated infrastructure markets, led by NVIDIA in advanced AI accelerators and by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in cloud computing. All four companies now appear among the letter’s signatories. The model may be downloadable, but control over the infrastructure surrounding it remains concentrated in a small group of corporations.

For researchers and organizations in the Global South, open weights may provide some genuine independence from closed commercial services and make it easier to adapt models to local languages and needs. But that limited autonomy does not alter the global labor system through which AI is produced, requiring a vast workforce largely across the Global South that gathers, labels, cleans, translates, moderates, and evaluates data and model outputs. These workers are often monitored and managed algorithmically, bound by nondisclosure agreements, and required to endure prolonged exposure to traumatic material. Releasing a model’s weights reveals none of these labor conditions and gives the workers neither an ownership stake nor decision-making power over the systems their labor helped create.

Open Weights asks policymakers to expand computing access, fund datasets and testing tools, avoid restrictions that might slow development, and spread AI throughout the economy. This is a familiar Big Tech strategy: use public resources to build markets for privately controlled technology and make everyday life dependent on products the public neither owns nor governs. The costs are distributed across workers and the public, while private companies retain control over much of the infrastructure, intellectual property, and resulting wealth.
Pacing the Frontier — But Under Whose Authority?

Building frontier AI requires extraordinary amounts of computing power, energy, data, and capital, largely confining its development to a small number of Big Tech corporations, heavily financed AI laboratories, and state-backed institutions. Pacing the Frontier warns that if AI systems begin automating the research and engineering needed to create more powerful successors, development could outpace researchers’ and governments’ ability to test, understand, or control them. These systems could facilitate cyberattacks, weapons development or deployment, mass manipulation, and other catastrophic harms before effective safeguards are in place. Because no company or country wants to surrender its competitive position while others continue racing ahead, the statement calls on the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop technical and governance mechanisms for deliberately pacing frontier development.

Many of the letter’s signatories may sincerely seek to prevent catastrophe, and coordinated restraint may indeed be necessary. Yet the letter calls for no immediate pause and leaves the decisive questions unanswered: Who decides when development must slow? What capability threshold or kind of security breach would trigger intervention? Who oversees the companies, and what prevents the largest laboratories from shaping rules that entrench their dominance by imposing barriers smaller competitors cannot meet?

Many of the signatories work for companies that would be subject to any resulting rules, yet these same companies possess enormous power to shape those rules. These firms are private centers of power and rank among the world’s wealthiest and most politically connected institutions. Collectively, they own or control much of the frontier-model, cloud, and data-center infrastructure, as well as the proprietary information and technical expertise on which regulators depend. Their wealth funds lobbying, research partnerships, political access, and policy campaigns. Through search engines, social platforms, AI assistants, media partnerships, and sponsored research, they also shape public perceptions of AI: what it promises, which harms receive attention, and which alternatives appear possible.

Yet this power is subject to little democratic accountability. Major decisions are made without public scrutiny, while the people and communities affected by these systems have little power to inspect them, challenge their decisions, or refuse their use. The companies can help define what constitutes a danger, which responses are acceptable, and which restrictions remain outside serious debate. Those creating the risks thereby become indispensable government partners and coauthors of the rules meant to restrain them.

The emphasis on future catastrophe can push present harms out of view. AI is already intensifying racist systems of mass surveillance, policing, detention, and deportation; supporting military targeting and the rapid development of increasingly autonomous weapons systems; automating work and displacing workers; deepening data extraction; and accelerating environmental destruction. A Brennan Center report details racial disparities in facial recognition and notes that Black people account for at least 8 of 10 known wrongful arrests based on faulty matches. The Department of Homeland Security AI inventory documents ICE’s use of facial recognition. An ACLU investigation traces Palantir’s role in ICE’s detention and deportation infrastructure. A Government Accountability Office review describes the Pentagon’s Maven program using machine learning to identify potential targets from geospatial imagery. The AI Now Institute’s 2025 Landscape Report documents AI’s energy and water demands, worker displacement and exploitation, workplace surveillance, deepening inequality, and risks to critical infrastructure and national security. Debate over hypothetical loss of control can obscure the harms already imposed on people by systems functioning as designed.

Pacing the Frontier does little to challenge the structures producing these harms. Its limits are especially clear on labor. A genuine slowdown could reduce the pace of worker displacement, resource extraction, and demand for exploitative or psychologically harmful data work, but it would not by itself change the ownership structures, working conditions, or power relations governing AI production. The letter does not include these present harms in its case for restraint. It defines danger primarily through frontier capabilities, geopolitical competition, and possible future catastrophe, not through low wages, algorithmic management, psychological injury, labor displacement, or the transnational contracting chains already sustaining AI development.

That narrow conception of danger also shapes the safety framework envisioned by Pacing the Frontier. Evaluating and stress-testing models, reviewing content, and monitoring systems after deployment would still require human labor. Given the tech industry’s entrenched labor practices, this framework would almost certainly continue to rely on workers who toil in the shadows. The letter calls for none of the protections or decision-making power these workers would need: labor standards, transparency about who performs the work and under what conditions, collective bargaining rights, protections against workplace surveillance, or a meaningful role for data workers in determining what their labor is used to produce.

The concentration of authority in laboratories and government experts can fortify the companies already at the top. Frontier regulation may reduce genuine dangers, but expensive testing, security, and reporting requirements can exclude universities, public-interest researchers, and smaller developers while the largest firms absorb the costs. Because governments depend on corporate expertise, oversight can become a wall shielding Big Tech from public accountability and leaving the labor regime on which it depends untouched.

On labor, then, the letters are less opposed than they appear. Open Weights would diffuse models whose dependence on human labor remains concealed; Pacing the Frontier would subject the most powerful models to expert oversight without democratizing the labor relations or restructuring the supply chains behind them.
The Ideology Behind the Two-Tier System

Both letters treat AI’s advance as inevitable, leaving the public to adapt and government to manage its deployment. That technological determinism merges with Silicon Valley solutionism: questions about ownership, labor, surveillance, military power, and the right to refuse AI shrink into matters of design and oversight. Within that shared premise, Open Weights gives institutions greater freedom to deploy AI, while Pacing the Frontier places corporate laboratories, experts, and officials at the center of determining whether and when AI development poses an unacceptable danger. The public remains a population to manage rather than a political force empowered to decide whether and how the technology should be developed and used.

The division between the letters is not ideological alone. It also corresponds, although imperfectly, to different positions and material interests within the AI economy. The largely industry-based coalition behind Open Weights spans chipmakers, cloud providers, model developers, software companies, security and military contractors, and venture capital firms. Pacing the Frontier emerges from a different institutional position. It was signed in individual capacities by employees, researchers, and executives of frontier AI companies, including some of the industry’s most influential figures, rather than formally endorsed by the companies themselves. Their concerns cannot simply be reduced to their employers’ economic interests. Yet their place within the industry matters: they work inside the small group of elite laboratories where computing power, investment, proprietary knowledge, and technical authority are most heavily concentrated.

The letters, however, should not be treated as expressions of completely separate blocs of capital. Google, Meta, OpenAI, and other companies appear in the Open Weights coalition, while employees and executives of the same firms signed Pacing the Frontier. A single corporation can benefit from broad diffusion across the AI market and concentrated control at the frontier: it can encourage widespread adoption, sell the infrastructure and services that adoption requires, and retain control over its most advanced systems. What appears to be a conflict among different sections of AI capital can therefore also reflect competing strategies within the same corporations and investment networks. This is primarily a dispute within AI’s corporate and technical elite over the terms of expansion, not a challenge to corporate ownership or concentrated control.

Open Weights echoes themes found in Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, effective accelerationism, and techno-libertarianism. These currents treat technological expansion as a social good, private markets as engines of progress, and regulation as an obstacle. Pacing the Frontier departs from techno-libertarianism’s hostility to government restraint, but it does not overturn the distribution of power that techno-libertarianism legitimates. Frontier systems remain privately owned, development remains organized through corporate competition, and technical and corporate elites retain a privileged role in defining danger. The letter therefore represents less a rejection of techno-libertarianism than a technocratic effort to contain the dangers created by unrestrained corporate competition while leaving its underlying structures of ownership and control intact. At the same time, its emphasis on possible future catastrophe and expert-led restraint more closely resembles longtermism, which can assign greater moral importance to hypothetical future populations than to people suffering now, and singularitarianism, which anticipates that superhuman AI will transform society beyond recognition. These currents overlap with transhumanism, which envisions using technology to enhance selected human capacities and ultimately create supposedly superior “posthuman” forms of life.

Despite their differences, these ideological currents converge around the pursuit of ever-more-powerful AI. Accelerationists seek more computing power, faster deployment, and fewer restraints, convinced that technological growth will produce abundance and solve social problems. Longtermist safety frameworks may urge greater control over the pace of development, but they often leave that underlying project and its private corporate ownership and direction unquestioned. In the framework developed by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, these visions share a tendency to centralize power, elevate technical elites as humanity’s guardians, and invoke “safety” or universal benefit while pushing out of view the exploitation, discrimination, and environmental destruction already affecting dispossessed peoples.

They trace transhumanism, singularitarianism, longtermism, and related ideologies to Anglo-American eugenics. In their account, transhumanism recast improving the “human stock” as creating enhanced or “posthuman” beings. The language shifted from compulsory breeding to innovation and personal choice, but the sorting logic endured: ideas about race, intelligence, productivity, able-bodiedness, and capacity for enhancement continue to shape whose lives and futures are valued. Eugenics has not disappeared. It has been updated for an age in which powerful elites imagine redesigning humanity through technologies that reproduce existing hierarchies.

Techno-optimism turns this hierarchy into a story of liberation, presenting corporate technologies as neutral instruments of progress while concealing who owns them and who bears their costs. At its authoritarian edge, it overlaps with neo-reactionary or “Dark Enlightenment” thought, which rejects egalitarian democracy and imagines society governed like a corporation by CEOs or technocratic elites. Such an order need not announce itself as a dictatorship. It can emerge through privately owned systems that monitor, classify, restrict, and punish people without meaningful consent or appeal.

Silicon Valley’s supposed hostility to the federal government is selective. The industry resists the state as regulator while embracing it as investor, customer, military partner, police force, and border authority. It does not necessarily seek a smaller state, but one that protects a techno-capitalist oligarchy, suppresses resistance, and uses privately developed systems to govern.

That bargain has entered the machinery of the Trump administration. Reuters reported that technology executives and companies gave more than $300 million to support Trump’s 2024 campaign and an allied political committee. Elon Musk spent more than a quarter-billion dollars, while David Sacks and figures from Marc Andreessen’s network entered or advised the administration. Whether driven by ideology, profit, or access, this alliance advances domestic authoritarian priorities (including ideological policing, mass surveillance, and deportation) and an imperial project of military dominance and worldwide dependence on American technology. The state gains private infrastructure and expertise. The companies receive deregulation, subsidies, contracts, and support for global expansion.

The administration’s America’s AI Action Plan turns that bargain into policy through accelerated adoption, fewer regulatory barriers, rapid data center construction, and global export of American chips, models, software, and standards. A related executive order on “Preventing Woke AI” directs agencies to buy models conforming to the administration’s definitions of truth and neutrality while casting systemic racism, intersectionality, and what it calls “transgenderism” as ideological threats. The state is not removing politics from AI. It is using public purchasing power to present its own politics as neutral truth.

None of this means every signer or developer endorses the Trump administration or shares the ideological commitments described here. The point is structural: both letters operate within a political order built around private infrastructure, concentrated wealth, U.S. geopolitical dominance, and interstate competition for AI-enabled military and technological superiority. The race (especially between the United States and China) to develop AI for weapons, intelligence, surveillance, cyberwarfare, logistics, and military planning turns continued expansion into a national-security imperative and makes restraint appear to be strategic surrender. Open weights accelerate diffusion, frontier-safety governance can legitimize control by insiders, and public institutions supply the money, data, infrastructure, legitimacy, and users. AI spreads throughout society, but ownership, power, and wealth remain concentrated.



This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Tim Scott is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Central Connecticut State University, a tech industry researcher, and the author of the book, Schooling for Silicon Valley.

AI Data Center Boom Pushes U.S. Power Equipment to the Breaking Point

By Irina Slav - Sep 03, 2026

• AI-driven data center growth is creating severe shortages of transformers, substations, gas turbines and cooling equipment as electricity demand surges.
• 
  
• U.S. transformer supply is running about 15% short, while major manufacturers have order backlogs stretching more than three years.
• 
  
• Data centers could absorb 40% of U.S. power-equipment supply, making physical infrastructure and supply chains a major bottleneck for the AI boom.
• 
  

Big Tech is betting trillions of dollars on artificial intelligence, with a lot of that to be spent on building the data centers that would power large language models. Stock markets are reflecting this in Big Tech stocks, but that’s not the only industry riding the artificial intelligence wave. Because that wave runs on electricity and the equipment that brings it from generator to consumer.

There have been reports about a chip shortage caused by the AI rush, and higher compute prices overall resulting from AI-related demand growth in electronics. But a more serious shortage is unfolding in power equipment, as the companies pledging hundreds of billions in AI investments want everything ready yesterday if possible. Alas, it is not.

Transformers, a vital component of the grid, have been in increasingly short supply for at least two years. The shortage has been driven by the fast growth in electricity demand, mostly coming from the tech sector, and the inability to respond to that growth with equally fast grid expansion.

Transformers are used to convert the high-voltage electricity that runs from power plants to substations along transmission lines to a lower-voltage electric current that can be used by end consumers, including data centers. According to Wood Mackenzie, the shortfall in transformers this year is 15%. Yet there is also a shortage of substations, highlighting the essential nature of power equipment. Per Wood Mackenzie estimates, the substation deficit is 8%. This situation will be aggravated further by a recent executive order by President Trump that banned imports of bulk power equipment from China.

“Outside the industry circle, people are talking about (graphics processing units), but within the circle, people most certainly question you about the lead time for generators and transformers,” the chief executive of a digital infrastructure service provider told Reuters.

The publication went on to report order books stretching ahead for years for the world’s biggest transformer makers. “We currently have an order backlog covering more than three years, with a substantial portion of production capacity for major power equipment secured for the coming three years,” South Korea’s Hyundai Electric told Reuters, noting that its order backlog went up by 23% over the first half of the year, hitting $8.5 billion.

In other words, power equipment makers are enjoying the same trends as gas turbine makers, both driven by Big Tech’s race to outdo rivals in artificial intelligence. Both the gas turbine tightness and the transformer/substation squeeze will affect the pace of what many call the AI revolution because both gas turbines and transformers take time to manufacture. So do cooling systems.

“Power and cooling basically go hand in hand; so basically the more power you use, the more cooling you need to use because you generate heat,” a senior Bank of America analyst told Reuters. Cooling systems are the third industry that is set to enjoy a surge in demand thanks to Big Tech’s artificial intelligence ambitions, according to a recent McKinsey report. That surge in demand, however, will likely lead to further tightness in supply, again due to physical constraints that make it impossible for manufacturers to respond to clients as fast as Big Tech clients would like.

These clients, according to Wood Mackenzie, will absorb as much as 40% of power equipment supply in the U.S. over the next few years. This, the consultancy warned earlier this year, could create a supply chain crisis, simply because the demand is urgent, but the supply cannot be rushed—especially when manufacturers cannot be certain the current rate of demand can be sustained over a longer period of time.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

Faith Leaders Speak Out After DHS Sent Undercover Agents to Spy on MN Churches

People should not have to wonder if “standing with their neighbors will put them in a federal file,” one minister said.

By Shireen Akram-Boshar , 

Truthout

Published

September 3, 2026

People prepare food packages for immigrants at the Dios Habla Hoy church, which became a center for locals opposing immigration raids in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 2026. Pastor Sergio Amezcua started the food aid program in early December to support undocumented migrants who were reluctant to do their shopping for fear of encountering immigration agents.

Roberto Schmidt / AFP

Minnesota faith leaders are sounding the alarm regarding the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) surveillance of churches during and after Operation Metro Surge, President Donald Trump’s violent immigration crackdown in the state earlier this year.

A motion filed in federal court on August 13 revealed that DHS agents surveilled multiple churches in the Twin Cities — as well as schools, libraries, and restaurants — following the launch of Operation Metro Surge in December 2025. The surveillance operation in the Twin Cities lasted through the spring of 2026, and culminated in the prosecution of the Minnesota 15, a group of activists facing federal conspiracy charges after organizing protests against Trump’s deportation campaign.

The months-long surveillance operation included sending undercover agents inside University Baptist Church and Prince of Peace Church, both churches in Minneapolis. Federal agents recorded meetings in the churches and wrote up lists of attendees. They also took down license plate numbers of attendees, and used their license plate information to find their names, then searched for their images on social media.

“It is deeply disturbing that churches can become targets of government surveillance,” particularly when they “care for their neighbors, provide safe places for people to gather, and work together for justice,” Reverend Cody J. Sanders, interim pastor at the University Baptist Church, said in a statement.

Sanders learned that an undercover agent had worn a wire to a self-defense class in his church in May.

Sanders told Truthout that “it was a shock” to find out that his church had been surveilled, but that it “made sense.”

“Intimidation and fear tactics became commonplace during the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities last winter,” he said. “It was infuriating that the government had violated the sacredness of our churches by sending agents to spy on activities taking place here.”

On September 4, a federal court is scheduled to determine whether DHS violated an action protecting houses of worship from immigration enforcement activity in the Twin Cities. The injunction, issued in February, involves churches and other places of worship across the country and forbids DHS and its agencies — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — from conducting arrests, interrogations, or investigations at any of the involved sites. In August, an alliance of churches filed a motion ordering the U.S. government to explain why it should not be held in contempt for violating the injunction in the Twin Cities.

“Both the injunction and pending contempt hearing arose from the efforts of multiple religious groups coming together with legal support to protect religious freedom,” Sanders told Truthout.

Other faith leaders have also decried the effects of the surveillance, saying it has only compounded the trauma of Operation Metro Surge, in which federal immigration agents killed protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti and detained over 3,500 people.

“In the Twin Cities, we experienced Operation Metro Surge as a violent paramilitary occupation, one from which our communities are still recovering,” said Reverend Susie Hayward in a statement. “To learn that federal agents entered our holy spaces against our expressed will, for the purpose of surveillance connected to religious practices grounded in love of neighbor, compounds that trauma.”

“Faith communities here in Minnesota — and religious leaders across the country — are now watching closely to see whether the courts will uphold the protections they have already ordered.”

Faith leaders are also warning that surveillance can result in a chilling effect, leaving community members afraid to speak openly, organize, or even attend their places of worship.

“This winter, Minnesotans of faith responded to extraordinary federal violence with prayer, song, nonviolent action… for the federal government to respond by surveilling churches and the people gathering inside them is not only an attack on religious freedom, it is an attempt to intimidate people out of exercising their most basic constitutional rights,” Minister JaNaé Bates Imari, who is also based in the Twin Cities, said in a statement.

“The church does not exist by permission of the government, and our sacred spaces cannot become places where people must wonder whether practicing their faith or standing with their neighbors will put them in a federal file,” she added.

“Government surveillance inside houses of worship and places of prayer is unfortunately not new,” Sanders noted. “Many of our Muslim friends and neighbors have experienced this reality far more pervasively than Christian communities like ours.”

An amicus brief filed by free speech groups in August said that surveillance by the Trump administration and DHS in Minnesota represents an “assault on free expression that has not been seen since the Second Red Scare.”

Though the September 4 hearing is an attempt to force the Trump administration to respect places of worship, the court case is part of a larger battle. Regardless of Trump’s attacks and surveillance, Sanders told Truthout, “We will continue to serve our community and engage in our ministries of peace and justice. We cannot afford to let fear and paranoia distract us from our mission. And the best antidote to fear is to strengthen the bonds of community and solidarity.”