'What corruption looks like': How Trump 'went to war' to protect family’s businesses

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump react outside the Nasdaq building after ringing the opening bell at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, August 13, 2025. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

Thomas Kika

April 09, 2026

ALTERNET

Critics attacked President Donald Trump's newest move against states as a "war" against betting market regulations meant to help enrich his family's business interests, with one activist stating bluntly, "This is what corruption looks like."

According to a Thursday report from the Popular Information substack, Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois have launched lawsuits against "prediction market" platforms Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Robinhood, alleging that they have worked to "circumvent state laws" in order to run "illegal gambling sites." As these services have exploded in popularity, critics have accused them of turning a wide range of random circumstances into opportunities for betting, as well as offering betting opportunities on things like sporting events that critics say are indistinguishable from real gambling altogether.

In response to these state-level efforts to rein in these platforms, Trump's Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed counter lawsuits, arguing that the services those sites offer "are distinct from traditional gambling." That is the same line of argument the platforms themselves have put forward as they have attempted to avoid being regulated or outright banned under traditional gambling laws.


As Popular Information laid out in detail, Trump has extensive connections to these platforms, owning the largest share of the Trump Media & Technology Group, which in turn does significant business with Crypto.com. Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., is also "deeply enmeshed" in the industry, serving as an advisor for both Kalshi and Polymarket. And it does not stop there.

"Many of Trump’s political allies also have connections to the prediction market industry," the report elaborated. "Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, for example, has helped raise millions in funding for Polymarket. Paradigm, an investment firm, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz also participated in a funding round for Kalshi. Paradigm donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz both donated millions to a super PAC supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign, and Trump recently appointed Andreessen to his 'President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.'"


Melanie D'Arrigo is an executive director for the New York Health Campaign, which advocates for universal single-payer healthcare, and has co-founded non-profits involved with the LGBTQ community. Sharing a link to the report on X Thursday, she was unsparing in her appraisal of the corruption at play with the CFTC's lawsuits.

"Donald Trump Jr. is a paid strategic advisor for Kalshi," D'Arrigo wrote. "Trump Jr. is a major investor and advisor for Polymarket. Trump Media has a $6.5 billion+ investment and partnership with Crypto.com. Robinhood runs the Trump Accounts. The Trump administration is blocking states from suing them. This is what corruption looks like."

MAGA Christians unleash unintentionally hilarious Ben Franklin film

By Joseph-Siffred Duplessis - ZgEyj5EEKdux-g at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21880454

Matthew Rozsa

April 05, 2026

ALTERHET


Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect that the Val Kilmer play "Citizen Twain" was renamed "Cinema Twain" upon being released as a film.


In theory, “A Great Awakening” could have been a fascinating film. It depicts the real-life friendship between American founding father Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield, one of the founders of the evangelical movement. Franklin was a deist intellectually and a lapsed Puritan emotionally, while Whitefield was Calvinistic.

Yet “A Great Awakening” has no interest in exploring their relationship in any thoughtful or dramatically interesting way.

It’s easy to see why that happened. Despite focusing on religion, “A Great Awakening” is not a good faith movie, at least in the sense that it exists primarily to entertain, enlighten or in some other way enrich the lives of its audience. Director Joshua Enck and his co-writers Jeff Bender and Jonathan Blair, have created a bad faith film, a Trojan horse of Christian nationalist propaganda packed inside as a supposedly poignant tribute to two 18th century luminaries. Blair also stars as Whitefield, and the film’s lone virtue is that his performance is so horrible, it becomes unintentionally hilarious (more on that later). Blair’s costar John Paul Sneed, a longtime veteran of Christian Right schlock, plays Benjamin Franklin with such blandness that I laughed when my autocorrect tried to change his surname to “Snooze.” Sneed could learn a lot from cinema’s greatest Franklin, Howard Da Silva in “1776.”

The propaganda behind “A Great Awakening.”

The movie’s central plot is the claim that George Whitefield inspired Benjamin Franklin to support human equality; for this reason, I cannot talk about it with any semblance of intellectual honesty and not dive into the story. While Franklin did ask the 1787 Constitutional Convention to open its daily sessions with prayer, he was not particularly religious and seems to have done so because — like millions of Americans today — he could simultaneously want to be on God’s good side without also being a theocrat. Yet the movie draws from a controversial account by a man named William Steele, written almost 40 years after the event occurred and relying entirely on Steele’s unverified second hand recollections supposedly relayed by New Jersey delegate Jonathan Dayton. Steele was later contradicted by Virginia delegate, future president and the Constitutional equivalent of influencer James Madison, who recalled that Franklin, who represented Pennsylvania (where much of the movie is set), had not asked for that prayer in quite the dramatic fashion that Steele relayed. Madison was confident that Franklin’s “proposition was received and treated with the respect due to it; but the lapse of time which had preceded, with consternations growing out of it, had the effect of limiting what was done, to a reference of the proposition to a highly respectable Committee.”

Madison added, “That the communication [Steele’s account of Dayton’s testimony] was erroneous is certain; whether from misapprehension or mis-recollection, uncertain.”

"We know little of relevance about either William Steele or Jonathan Steele,” scholar Louis J. Sirico, Jr., wrote in 2018 (Benjamin Franklin, Prayer, and the Constitutional Convention: History as Narrative, 10 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric 89 (2013)). “We know that William Steele was a Revolutionary War veteran who was born in New York, lived in New Jersey, married Mary Dayton, possibly a relative of Jonathan Dayton, and moved to upstate New York. He was an active Presbyterian and often wrote poetry for his family. Jonathan D. Steele became a wealthy businessman and served as president of the Niagara Fire Insurance Company."


Sirico added, “Nothing in the available historical record offers any insight into the genesis of the false narrative.”

Sirico is not the lone voice casting doubt on the credibility of the Steele account. John Fea, Professor of American History and Chair of the History Department at a private Pennsylvania Christian college called Messiah, wrote for Commonwealth Magazine in 2024 that “the Awakening had nothing to do with the American Revolution (and, in fact, may never have happened in the first place),” and that indeed there is a “twenty-five-year gap between the First Great Awakening and the Revolutionary Era.” He concluded that a 1981 thesis by historian Jon Butler disproving any link between the two events (to the extent that the former occurred at all beyond a few local incidents) was “groundbreaking and convincing.”

Yet with powerful Christian nationalists like informal President Trump adviser Steve Bannon and longtime theocrat David Barton spreading the lie that the Great Awakening inspired the American Revolution, “A Great Awakening” is guaranteed a built-in audience, especially with it being distributed by a mainstream studio like Roadside Attractions.


Which brings us back to the movie on screen.

Christian Right movies are notoriously second-rate.

The only people who enjoy these movies are either those who deliberately dull their tastes to insensitive nubs in order to “own the libs” or those who enjoy laughing (often with gallows humor) at the fact that these movies exist at all. The most notable entries in the genre include “Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas,” “War Room” and the five “God’s Not Dead” movies. None of them amount to much as serious or even unironically funny films, but like “A Great Awakening,” each is rip-roaringly hysterical if you have a taste for the specific type of cheese produced by these particularly talentless people.

“A Great Awakening” has plenty such moments, at least when Blair is gnashing his teeth, contorting his face and otherwise mugging as the most unlikeable and histrionic Whitefield ever performed by an actor. There is a maudlin scene of foot washing in which Blair and an extra seem to compete to overact, a narcissistic so-called “self doubt” set piece that had me agreeing with a John Wesley put-down and several blatant uses of African Americans as props, even though Whitefield in real life had a very complicated relationship with race. My favorite moment was when Blair’s Whitefield insults the clerical establishment in a scene intended to come across as free-thinking but instead seems needlessly rude. He is given a command that he may no longer “preach inside.” With a look of triumph he declares, “Then I will preach outside!”


I try to be polite during movies, but at that moment I couldn’t stop myself from guffawing so loudly my voice literally reverberated against the auditorium walls. Where else is he going to go? Fortunately, the theater was empty except for me, so I wasn’t technically rude.

Yet I don’t think those theaters will remain empty (I was at an early morning screening and paid because it is the film critic’s tax, so to speak), as much as I hope my cynicism is misplaced. I’ve seen advertisements for “A Great Awakening” everywhere, and if you go to my earlier list of Christian Right films that normal people laugh at, you’ll see that several of them were box office successes. The audience for these films are not the early 21st century equivalents of Franklin or Whitefield or either man’s many contemporary followers in the 18th century, but rather of the people from that era too mediocre to be remembered. The individuals who earnestly support “A Great Awakening” or any similar slop films own themselves as the world laughs that such insipid material can economically support itself at all. Unfortunately, because they believe they're owning their ideological opponents, millions of such mediocrities are out there, happy to part with their money to prove a point.

The sad thing is, as I mentioned earlier, it didn't have to be this way. I think back to "Cinema Twain," an obscure play-turned-movie directed, written by and starring Val Kilmer as an American secularist as iconic as Benjamin Franklin, author Mark Twain. The 19th/early 20th century novelist had a respectful-yet-critical epistolary relationship with Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. Kilmer (who busted my balls when he saw there was a journalist in the audience) did a poignant job of vividly bringing to life both the brilliant personalities and the sharply different ideas of his two central figures. Kilmer's passion project, which sadly was never adapted into a film, moved me because it came from a place of authentic curiosity and was executed with talent. By contrast, "A Great Awakening" strives only to manipulate, and it does so ineptly.

Like all movies made by the Christian Right that intend to proselytize, “A Great Awakening” is full of lazy exposition, flat dialogue and cringey pandering to reactionary self-glorification. This movie is so dumb that it has the gall to insert in one character’s mouth the line “How long will you hide behind your wit?”, as if any substantial amount of that precious commodity exists in this motion picture.

Trump nominates extremist to lead world's largest humanitarian agency

(REUTERS)

Matthew Rozsa

April 10, 2026 

ALTERNET

President Donald Trump’s choice to fight global hunger subscribes to a philosophy that will only make it worse.

Trump appointed Luke Lindberg, the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs, to lead the Rome-based World Food Program, which is the world’s largest humanitarian agency, according to a report by PassBlue. Yet Lindberg’s most recent job was rebranding the Food for Peace international food aid program as "America First" international food assistance. Under Trump the federal government has pushed for cuts to the McGovern-Dole program, which provides food assistance to low-income nations, as well as for Lindberg’s own Food for Peace program.

“Under the second Trump administration, funding for the World Food Program was slashed in half after the dismantling of USAID,” PassBlue reported. “The loss of $2.6 billion in US funding in the last year triggered the layoff of a third of WFP’s staff and a surge in malnutrition in some of the most fragile countries. Despite the cuts, Washington remains at the top of the donors’ list for WFP. This reality makes it more likely that Trump’s nominee will pull through the Senate confirmation hearings without major opposition.”

In addition to supporting Trump's funding cuts, Lindberg is also linked with unpopular food distribution methods. Both the World Food Program and other UN humanitarian agencies prefer to either provide cash or help local and regional governments obtain food, arguing that these approaches are cheaper, more efficient and less disruptive. But Lindberg advocates exporting US-grown commodities to provide the same international food aid.

“Sam Vigersky, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that recourse to the old practice of WFP procurement restricted only to US commodities is a strong possibility if an American leads the agency again,” PassBlue reported.

“The practice is inefficient in that it involves shipping grain at significant cost from America, which is rarely the most readily available or the cheapest source; nor is it always the locally preferred kind of grain,” Nick Coghlan, a former Canadian diplomat with experience in Sudan and South Sudan, told PassBlue.

He added, “Moreover, the practice seriously undermines regional food markets which would otherwise receive a useful boost; and it discourages more innovative WFP programmes that require cash injections.”

When Trump dismantled USAID, more than a million people were left without three months worth of food because $98 million in ready-made meals and other rations were abandoned in four warehouses by the administration.

“Contracts with suppliers, shipping companies, and contractors have been canceled since USAID was taken over by the Trump administration's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with the White House saying the agency—with a relatively small budget of just $40 billion—was responsible for ‘significant waste,’” Common Dreams reported in May. “Since DOGE, run by tech billionaire Elon Musk, targeted USAID in one of its first full-scale attacks on a federal entity, the agency is being run by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.”

In response to Trump’s attacks on food programs, a current federal official told NOTUS in July that Trump’s actions are a sign of America slipping into authoritarianism.

“Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one,” the official told NOTUS. “They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well‑trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.”

Small Wisconsin City Overwhelmingly Passes First-of-Its-Kind Measure Restricting AI Data Centers

“This is really setting a precedent,” said one activist. “This is something that other communities can look to."


Protesters gather for a statewide data center day of action at the Wisconsin State Capitol on February 12, 2026 in Madison, Wisconsin.
(Photos by Joe Timmerman/Catchlight/Wisconsin Watch via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Apr 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The nationwide backlash against the artificial intelligence industry entered a new stage on Tuesday after a small Wisconsin city overwhelmingly passed a first-of-its-kind referendum limiting AI data center construction.

According to a Wednesday report in Politico, voters in the Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington, home to roughly 12,000 residents, supported the data center restrictions by a margin of around 2-to-1.


With First-of-Its-Kind Bill, Sanders and AOC Propose Moratorium on New AI Data Centers

The referendus requires town officials to seek voter permission before approving or providing tax incentives for any future data centers in the community, giving residents veto power over new projects.

Port Washington is already home to a $15 billion, 1.3-gigawatt data center funded by tech giants Oracle and OpenAI, and local residents wanted to ensure that no additional facilities are green lit without their express approval.

The referendum was pushed by a grassroots community organization called Great Lakes Neighbors United, which advocates “advancing transparency, environmental stewardship, and responsible development in Wisconsin.”

Christine Le Jeune, founder of Great Lakes Neighbors United, told Politico that she hopes the work done limiting AI facilities’ construction can be replicated nationwide.

“This is really setting a precedent,” Le Jeune, said. “This is something that other communities can look to.”

Politico noted that similar anti-data center measures are coming up for votes later this year in communities across the US, including in Monterey Park, California; Augusta Township, Michigan; and Janesville, Wisconsin.

Opposition to AI data centers has become a major political issue in recent months, as local residents have objected to the large facilities consuming massive amounts of electricity and water, while also generating significant noise pollution.

Data centers also put a major strain on the US electrical grid, causing a spike in utility bills across the country. PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid operator that serves over 65 million people across 13 states, projected earlier this year that it will be a full six gigawatts short of its reliability requirements in 2027 thanks to the demands of data centers.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a bill in March that would impose a nationwide moratorium on AI data center construction “until strong national safeguards are in place to protect workers, consumers, and communities, defend privacy and civil rights, and ensure these technologies do not harm our environment.”

At the same time, the AI industry is planning on spending big money in 2026 to influence elections, with the goal of passing legislation setting a single set of AI regulations that will take effect throughout the US, overriding any restrictions placed on the technology by state governments.

CNN reported in February that Leading the Future—a super political action committee (PAC) backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, is pledging to spend at least $100 million to ensure AI-friendly candidates get elected to Congress this year.

Iowa farmers sound alarm as Trump economy leaves them 'on the brink of something bad'

President Donald Trump speaks at a farmers' roundtable event during the 2024 presidential election, Image via C-Span.

Sarah K. Burris

April 09, 2026 

ALTERNET

U.S. farmers are continuing to get slammed by President Donald Trump's administration, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has drastically increased costs for the industry.

CNN spoke with farmers for an update as they kick off the spring planting season. "They're at a breaking point," the report began.

"A lot of farmer discouragement out there. Prices of our soybeans, prices of all our commodities started going down, prices of fertilizer and other things we import to plant a crop started going up. So for a year, we've seen some real chaos on all sorts of trade tensions," Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation farmer, told CNN's Jeff Zelany.

"I see so many farms are reporting that they're on the brink of something bad, that their communities are on the brink of something bad," he added.

The farmer said that there are more uncertainties than in most other years.

Not only does oil come from Iran, but the war is also making fertilizer costs soar. Planting season for large crops such as corn, soybeans, and other major agricultural crops is typically in the spring, between March and June, depending on the area of the country.

At the same time, the weather this year hasn't been kind to both farmers and ranchers. A heavy drought in Texas has resulted in half of the winter wheat being rated poor to very poor, said the USDA’s first Crop Progress report of the season.

That drought is also driving up beef prices. In 2025, the U.S. faced the lowest cattle numbers since 1951.

"Severe drought over the past few years has discouraged cattle being retained for breeding," said CNBC. That drought hasn't changed much over the past 6 months.

"Tariffs and cattle disease have further exacerbated consumer price increases, though imports mainly affect the ground beef supply," the report said.

Farmers and ranchers were already suffering because of Trump's tariffs.

Bill Watts wrote for the Farm Journal that "in its monthly Agricultural Trade Monitor, NDSU found that tariffs imposed by the Trump administration under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) collected an estimated $958 million in revenue from selected imports of agricultural inputs between February and October of last year. Of that, about: $273 million came from agricultural chemicals, $530 million from farm machinery, $110 million from fertilizers and $44 million from seeds."

Lehman noted that the Iran war is causing high fuel prices for all of the equipment. So, they're filling up 100 gallons of gas "multiple times a week."

Wes Rieth, farm manager of Longview Farms, explained that each farmer gets one chance each year to plant and one chance to harvest.

Serial failure Jared Kushner has no business negotiating peace

Jared Kushner looks on during a swearing-in ceremony of Special Envoy Steve Witkoff in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 6, 2025.

 REUTERS/Kent Nishimura/File Photo

Sarah K. Burris

April 10, 2026 

ALTERNET

President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, was working with Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Iran when the U.S. began its bombing campaign. They were close to an agreement, but Trump went to war anyway, said a report from The Guardian.

It's prompting one national security analyst to question why the two are trying again to negotiate if they weren't able to succeed the first time around.

In a BlueSky thread, Marcy Wheeler questioned why folks are focused on things like the 25th Amendment and impeachment, instead of asking about Kushner, who doesn't even work for the White House and has his own economic interest in continuing the war. The New York Times reported last month that while he was negotiating a peace deal, he was also trying to raise money from Gulf states.


"NO ONE is really holding the GOP accountable for letting Trump send his son-in-law on a diplomat's errand, EVEN AFTER his incompetence led to war, or the fact that he has rid his White House of either experts or grown-up advisors," wrote Wheeler.

She added that there's also "the fact that they let him go to war without fully briefing before and during. It's that accountability that matters, one way or another. And impeachment/25A can be a tool to force that accountability."


Wheeler said that House and Senate Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) are "intent" on demanding a vote over the War Powers Act.

"That would have the effect of peeling off a few members in both [houses]. But you need a larger narrative that GOP refusal to do its job enabled a catastrophic war," Wheeler added.

The comment comes as Trump posted on Truth Social that, despite closing the Strait of Hormuz and causing a possible global economic collapse, he believes Iran has "no cards." He called the closure of the strait "extortion."

The Guardian reported a few weeks after the bombing began that one Gulf diplomat, with direct knowledge of the negotiations, is furious with Witkoff and Kushner’s behavior. That person described them as “Israeli assets that had conspired to force the US president into entering a war from which he is now desperate to get himself out of."

Now, Vice President JD Vance is en route. Vance never wanted the war to begin with, so he might have more success than Kushner and Witkoff.

Meanwhile, inflation has risen above the level it was at when Trump took office in Jan. 2025.

Under Trump, US Disapproval of Israel, Netanyahu Hits All-Time High in Pew Research Poll

“A foreign country that a majority of Americans now disapprove of gets $3.8 billion a year from them.”


Pro-Palestinian demonstrators are gathered outside of the Port of Oakland building as they demand an end to military shipments to Israel on December 18, 2025 in Oakland, California.
(Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Apr 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The bipartisan support Israel and its powerful lobby have enjoyed for decades in the US—with lawmakers from both parties insisting the federal government must help Israel “defend itself” with nearly $4 billion per year in military aid—is likely to shift considerably in the coming years as public support for the country continues to collapse, particularly among young voters, in the latest Pew Research poll.

The survey was taken last month as the US-Israeli war on Iran, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly pitched to President Donald Trump in an unusual Situation Room meeting in February, was escalating and spreading across the Middle East. It found that overall, 60% of US adults had an unfavorable view of Israel.
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Majority of American Jews Oppose Trump-Netanyahu War on Iran: Polls



Poll Shows Double-Digit Drop in US Voter Support for Israel Since 2023

That share has grown considerably since 2022, before Israel began its US-backed war on the population of Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack. That year, just 42% in the US viewed Israel unfavorably.

Public opposition to the country’s government has also gone up by seven percentage points since last year, according to Pew. The share of adults who describe themselves as having a “very unfavorable” view of Israel has gone up by 9% since 2025 and has nearly tripled since before Israel began waging war on Gaza.

Journalist Prem Thakker commented that it was “absurd” to continue providing a country that a sizable majority of Americans disapprove of with military funding.



Over the past two-and-a-half years—as US public support for Israel has steadily declined—that funding has helped Israel to kill more than 72,000 Palestinians; injure more than 172,000; displace more than 90% of Gaza’s population; carry out nearly 800 attacks on the healthcare system, damaging 94% of hospitals; damage or destroy 97% of school buildings; and impose a mass starvation policy through a blockade on humanitarian aid. Israeli officials have publicly called for the killing of 50 Palestinians for every Israeli killed in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks, for Gaza to be burned to the ground, and for Israelis to “remember what Amalek has done to you,” a reference to the Israelites’ enemies in the Old Testament, whom King Saul was ordered to massacre.

All the while, Israeli officials and bipartisan US lawmakers who continue to support the Israeli government—and take donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other influential pro-Israel lobbying groups—have accused Americans who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza of being antisemitic.

In the poll released by Pew, the shift away from support for Israel is most pronounced among voters aged 18-49, with 70% of respondents in that age bracket reporting unfavorable views. Majorities of both Democrats (84%) and Republicans (57%) under 50 had unfavorable views. In 2025, just 50% of Republicans under 50 viewed Israel negatively, while 71% of young Democrats said the same—representing a 13-point jump in just a year among the latter group.

Americans’ views on Netanyahu have also grown more negative, with 59% of respondents saying they did not trust the prime minister to do the right thing in terms of world affairs—up from 53% last year.

The poll was released as Israel continued its assault on Lebanon, which it began attacking in March after Hezbollah retaliated against Israeli forces for the US-Israeli killing of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israeli officials claim the two-week ceasefire reached between the US, Israel, and Iran does not include Lebanon, despite statements from Pakistan, which helped broker the deal declaring otherwise.

Israel has killed more than 1,400 people in Lebanon in the last month, in addition to striking Iran along with the US in attacks that have killed more than 2,000 people.

The Pew survey was released days after a poll by the IMEU Policy Project and Data for Progress found that among Democratic primary voters in Texas, the US relationship with Israel was not seen as an abstract foreign policy issue, but one that significantly impacted how many chose between US Senate candidate James Talarico and his primary opponent, US Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas).

The poll found that Talarico gained a 4-to-1 advantage over Crockett when he spoke out against providing US weapons to Israel. Nearly 90% of respondents agreed with his stance, and 44% of his supporters said his position deeply influenced their vote.

“Democrats,” said political operative Isi Baehr-Breen in response to the poll of Talarico supporters, “are gonna have to choose between Israel and winning elections.”

White evangelicals’ 'persecution' fantasy fueling Trump’s 'disastrous' war

Evangelical Pastor Paula White with U.S. President Donald Trump on July 14, 2025 

(Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian/Flickr)

Alex Henderson

April 10, 2026 

ALTERNET


When U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy "a whole civilization" in Iran in an April 7 post on his Truth Social platform, the comment drew scathing condemnation not only from countless liberals, progressives and centrist Democrats, but also, from many Never Trump conservatives and libertarians. Even some far-right MAGA influencers, including Infowars' Alex Jones, former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), are calling Trump out.

Yet in far-right white evangelical circles, Trump still has plenty of loyal supporters.

In a biting article published on April 10, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that white evangelicals' feelings of "persecution" are helping fuel a "disastrous" war.

"For over a decade now, the Christian Right has deflected criticism of Trump's immorality and sadism by insisting they are facing persecution for their religious beliefs," Marcotte explains. "In their minds, they are the real victims of a culture gone to hell, and they see the president as their only hope to beat back these imaginary forces of oppression. Nothing, it seems, can shatter this persecution complex. As the Iran war continues to become an ever-bigger disaster, evangelicals are clinging harder than ever to the notion that because they need to defeat their fictional persecutors, Trump's myriad flaws are excusable and forgivable."

Far-right white evangelicals' "paranoid anger," Marcotte argues, is so extreme that they even view "devout Catholics" like Pope Leo XIV as persecutors.

"Regardless of what is being said in private to Catholic leaders," Marcotte observes, "it's clear that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his allies are furious at the pontiff for undermining their efforts to frame this war as a Christian enterprise — and are suggesting that those who oppose it are the equivalent of Christ's persecutors…. (Pastor) Doug Wilson, who heads the denomination Hegseth belongs to, demonstrated how valuable the phony Christian persecution narrative is for conservatives who need an excuse to stick by the (Trump) Administration amid the Iran debacle…. In the real world, Hegseth is a belligerent official who relishes threatening Iranians with 'death and destruction from above.' But in Wilson’s telling, the defense secretary is a humble servant of God, besieged on all sides by the faithless in their ongoing war against Christ's followers."

Marcotte adds, " As the administration's skirmish with Pope Leo shows, though, it's getting harder for the Christian Right to package the Iran war as a product of God's love — even to followers who have a long history of swallowing all sorts of cruelty in the name of Christ…. Some who have been among the president's loudest supporters in the past, like former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcaster Tucker Carlson, are now proclaiming that this war goes against everything Christians should stand for. In an effort to bring critics like these back in line, many evangelical leaders are clinging to false narratives of religious persecution."

The American Medical Association Is Failing to Speak Up for Dr. Abu Safiya

If they speak out to save just one Palestinian doctor’s life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other prisoners.


Healthcare workers and allies rally in support of Palestinians and to demand the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and all Palestinian healthcare workers in Israeli jails as they gather in New York, United States on January 6, 2025.
(Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jenin
Apr 10, 2026

Common Dreams


Israel tortured a 1-year-old baby. They burned him with cigarettes and drove nails through his feet as a form of torture during his father’s interrogation. This isn’t some twisted, made-up movie scene; this is real life. And it’s the one case we know of right now, but who knows how many other babies, in all their innocence, have been tortured by the Israeli military? It also begs the question: Since they’re willing to do this to an infant, what are they doing to older prisoners?

It’s always been clear that the Zionist settler colony will go to any length to achieve its goal of being an ethnostate. To achieve this goal, it subjects Palestinians to mass-imprisonment campaigns. No title—child, teenager, mother, father, health professional, aid worker—is spared from the Israeli prison system. Because if Israel can’t just outright exterminate all Palestinians at once, the next best option is to round them up and slowly kill them behind bars.



UN Experts Urge Israel to Free Gaza Doctor, Citing Reports of ‘Severe Torture’



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Well, that was the case before March 30, 2026, when the Israeli Knesset passed a bill that calls for the hanging of Palestinian prisoners within 90 days of being convicted of killing Israeli settlers. The bill was introduced by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been wearing noose pins and carrying around a physical noose to publicly show his excitement for potentially becoming Israel’s official executioner. When the vote was called out and the bill was passed, Ben-Gvir popped champagne bottles with his cronies, celebrating the essence of killing more Palestinians.

These are illegal settlers under international law, who have been terrorizing Palestinian villagers for years, their attacks becoming increasingly frequent and heinous. Palestinians have had their houses set on fire while inside them at the hands of these settlers, backed by the state. It is important to remember that the Israeli military courts operate outside of constitutional processes and have been widely condemned for their human rights abuses. In these courts, Palestinians have a conviction rate of over 96%, most often for crimes they never even committed.

Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured.

Israel promotes its interests by incentivizing settlers to brutalize Palestinians and destroy their land. And now, after systematically denying Palestinians’ right to defend themselves, they are branding them as cattle to be killed by hanging. Israel is carrying out its genocide in the form of codified law. This is the true face of the settler colonial state of Israel: dehumanization to the lowest level.

Right now, Israel is holding the highest number of Palestinian prisoners ever recorded. One such prisoner is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. He was the sole lead of the only functioning hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital. For the “crime” of providing medical aid to Palestinians, he was surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers and forced into imprisonment in December 2024.

Israeli society is getting more and more draconian: no prosecution, no unanimity, nothing. Simply put, if the Israeli military sees fit to kill a Palestinian prisoner, they will do so. Dr. Abu Safiya has been in an Israeli prison for 16 months, and there is speculation that he is being tortured. But again, if they can torture an infant, what’s a middle-aged man to them? The new Israeli bill gives the IOF a pathway to execute prisoners like Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: torturing them to force a confession, convicting them, and then hanging them. Clearly, he’s been deemed a threat to the very existence of Israel because he helped save the lives of Palestinians.

This is the situation of medical professionals outside of the West, heroes who put everything on the line to provide care for their people. In comparison to the most “esteemed” doctors in the US—like those within the American Medical Association, with all their prestige and shiny titles—the healthcare workers subjected to deadly imperialist brutality deserve our recognition, and they urgently need our help.

You might be thinking, “What does the American Medical Association have to do with a detained Palestinian doctor?” Firstly, we need to contend with the fact that it is our US tax dollars that fund these genocidal soldiers, prisons, and policies that got Dr. Abu Safiya arrested in the first place. The American government and its institutions are just as guilty of the oppression of the Palestinian as the Israelis are. We need to stop operating on willful ignorance because it has cost thousands of lives in the region, a tally that is increasing by the second with the recent attacks on Iran and Lebanon.

Secondly, the American Medical Association (AMA) prides itself on its strong relationship with the World Medical Association, which has already called for the release of Dr. Abu Safiya, demonstrating alignment with its policies that “support the rights of physicians worldwide.” The advocacy of foreign doctors is integral to the AMA as a whole. Why is a Palestinian doctor being ignored by them, then? Maybe the topic of genocide is too taboo for them. That would be ironic if so, when a genocide is the culmination of healthcare sectors being destroyed, lineages lost, and eugenics shaping a land and people forever. These are topics any medical association should be speaking about, especially one that represents the literal country that enabled this violence. Imagine the leverage the AMA could have in the halls of Congress when advocating for change.

The recent codification of the execution of Palestinian prisoners poses a grave threat to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s life. Will the AMA finally act now, in the face of such injustice and wickedness? If they speak out to save just one doctor’s life, they could pave the way to save hundreds of other prisoners.

The genocide in Gaza has shown me that so much of what I thought about society was false. I once believed I lived in a world where good prevails, but I have come to realize that selective empathy is the rule. The leaders of this world don’t hold empathy for anything or anyone that stands in their way of global domination. I frequently think of how many lives have been lost at the hands of US-Israeli imperial violence. The sheer number of casualties in Gaza, despite being predicted to be in the hundreds of thousands, has never been enough reason to stop. I think of how one of the first targets in the US war on Iran was a girl’s elementary school, which they targeted with not just one strike, but three in a row.

Our government is killing people in cold blood, and the institutions meant to advocate for us remain silent even when it is their peers being forced into tanks, handcuffed, and locked away and tortured. At this point, advocating for the release of our prisoners who were wrongfully detained is the least we can do.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Jenin
Jenin is CODEPINK’s Palestine campaigner. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago in December of 2023. For over five years, Jenin has been a community organizer and dedicated individual focused on the Palestinian movement through advocacy, digital storytelling, and grassroots mobilization. She is a firm believer in intertwined struggle and liberation for all.
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‘It Seems Nothing Is Moving the World to Stop Israel’s Terrorism’: Palestinian Poet Shares Photos of 9-Year-Old Girl Killed

“Even when kids try to learn, after over two years of nonstop running from the bombs, Israel shoots them.”


The body of nine-year-old Ritaj Rihan, who was killed in an Israeli attack on the northern Gaza Strip, is taken from the morgue of Al-Shifa Hospital for funeral prayers and burial in Gaza City, Palestine, on April 9, 2026.
(Photo by Anas Zeyad Fteha/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Apr 09, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


WARNING: The following article contains graphic video and images that some people may find disturbing…

Israeli forces shot and killed a 9-year-old girl in northern Gaza in front of her third-grade class on Thursday, local news sources report.



Israeli Forces Kill Parents and 2 Children in West Bank, Beat Surviving Children

According to a report Thursday from the Gaza Education Ministry, Ritaj Rihan was sitting at her desk at Abu Ubaida bin al-Jarrah School in Beit Lahiya when she was shot in front of her classmates, who were left in “psychological shock.”

“We suddenly heard the students screaming, so we rushed to the tent to find Ritaj lying face down, blood gushing from her mouth,” her teacher told the Xinhua news agency.

Photos of Rihan’s dead body were shared on social media by Mosab Abu Toha, a local poet. He said that the makeshift tent where Rihan studied was built on top of the ruins of his former high school, which was destroyed during Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.





“Even when kids try to learn, after over two years of nonstop running from the bombs, Israel shoots them,” he wrote in a post which accompanied a photo of Rihan wrapped in a body bag at a hospital in Gaza City.

“It’s painful for me to post this,” Toha said. “It seems nothing is moving the world to stop Israel’s terrorism.”

Photos and videos showed Rihan’s bloodied body being rushed through the streets on foot. The school’s principal told the Quds News Network that there was no medical transport in the area, so the only way to carry her to the hospital was via horse-drawn carriage.

Another photograph shows the bullet that reportedly killed the child.

“We were stunned,” another of the educators said. “A 9-year-old child. By what right was she martyred? For what sin was she shot while she came just to learn to write?”

The Israeli military has not commented on the shooting.



The killing came on the six-month anniversary of the “ceasefire” in Gaza that has been in place since October. At least 738 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,000 injured since then, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. In January, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that more than 100 children had been killed since the ceasefire began.

Authorities in Gaza have accused Israel of violating the ceasefire thousands of times. And according to a report out Thursday from Oxfam and other humanitarian groups, “Palestinians are continuing to suffer extreme deprivation, hunger, injury, and death due to the Israeli government’s continued attacks, movement restrictions, and aid obstructions.”

Israel still occupies more than half of the Gaza Strip, leaving more than 2 million residents crammed into about a third of the strip’s territory. With most buildings either damaged or totally destroyed, the vast majority of the population lives in makeshift tents and is left with little protection from storms and ongoing attacks by Israel.

According to Human Rights Watch, 97% of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks. But educators, most of whom are volunteers, have still tried to use the few resources they have to provide schools for Gaza’s more than a million children.

The school attended by Rihan was just two kilometers away from the yellow line dividing Israel’s official occupation zone from the rest of Gaza.



Rihan’s mother said she woke up excited to go to school that day and was looking forward to wearing her favorite dress to her uncle’s wedding the next week.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” her mother said, while holding her daughter’s bloodstained school notebook. “She wore her shroud instead.”

The reported attack also comes just a day after Israel launched an unprecedented assault on civilian areas across Lebanon, which has threatened to destroy the ceasefire reached earlier this week between the US and Iran.

The Gaza Ministry of Health described the attack that killed Rihan as a “brutal and horrific crime, adding to Israel’s long, dark record of atrocities.”

“It was not an isolated incident,” the ministry said, “but a direct extension of a systematic policy targeting the Palestinian people.”