September 20, 2025
Jai Dulani
Announced in July 2025, Trump’s AI plan aims to accelerate the construction of data centers by bypassing public protections, environmental laws, and critical oversight. This push for federal deregulation is a direct response to more and more local communities fighting back to unveil who actually benefits from these massive investments — and who is being sold out in the process. Data centers powering AI require an enormous amount of water and energy. A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day. A data center campus using one gigawatt of electric power annually would use more power in a year than consumers use in Alaska, Rhode Island, or Vermont. As tech companies scramble to build data centers in the relentless “AI race,” they are creating infrastructure that will lock us into burning fossil fuels for decades. They are seeking a future where we have to compete with corporations for drinking water and subsidize Big Tech’s energy costs with our own wallets due to increased utility bills.
In their search for cheap land, cheap energy, and cities and towns that have been structurally disempowered, Big Tech has descended upon the South. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have committed over $200 billion to build medium and large data centers in North Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. As the South becomes the new epicenter of data center growth, it is becoming increasingly clear that Big Tech is following Big Oil’s footsteps, compounding the harms of decades of environmental racism in the South.
Elon Musk’s $12 billion artificial intelligence company, xAI, is poisoning Black communities in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk’s supercomputer, Colossus, sits a few miles from Boxtown, where nearly half of the residents have an annual household income below $25,000 and the cancer rates are four times the national average. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, the data center has been fueled by 35 unpermitted gas turbines that produce smog-forming pollution and harmful chemicals like formaldehyde. Peak nitrogen dioxide concentration levels have increased by 79 percent from pre-xAI levels in the areas immediately surrounding the data center. Nitrogen dioxide is linked to respiratory diseases. Memphis already leads Tennessee in emergency department visits for asthma and received an “F” from the American Lung Association for ozone pollution in 2025. Memphis resident KeShaun Pearson states, “We are breathing dirtier air, experiencing higher rates of asthma, and our children are spending more time in emergency rooms due to the misguided ambitions of billionaires who don’t see us as human.”
Similarly, Meta’s largest data center to date is being built in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where over a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Meta’s $10 billion complex will consume an unprecedented amount of energy from the state — approximately three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans annually. According to the permit for the data center, it will directly emit 5,862 tons of CO2 annually, equal to the annual emissions of 1,108 homes in the U.S. Three new methane gas plants are being built just to power this one data center. Two of the power plants will be built in Richland Parish, while the third power plant will be built at an existing nuclear power plant site in the region known as “Cancer Alley.” Cancer Alley is an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where Black and low-income communities have been getting sick and dying for decades due to emissions from over 200 petrochemical and fossil fuel plants in the area.
In South Carolina, power plants are being built in predominantly Black communities to keep up with data centers’ energy needs. In Mississippi, the state’s Public Service Commission unanimously approved a special contract to extend the life of a Mississippi Power coal unit, Plant Victor J. Daniel, to meet energy needs for a new data center project. This comes after the state government had ordered the utility company to phase out coal in 2020 due to its detrimental impacts on health and the environment. In 2022, Plant Victor J. Daniel reported more than 6 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, higher than any other facility in Mississippi, according to Grist. The plant has also been reported to be one of the nation’s top groundwater polluters, with excessive amounts of lithium, which is associated with neurological damage.
Big Tech has pushed rapid data center development forward through opaque and corrupt processes to avoid public scrutiny. Wanda Mosley, a resident of South Fulton, Georgia, told Truthout that the public processes related to data center development have been biased, saying, “They’re holding these town halls but they’re only having people who benefit from the data centers speaking at the town halls.”
In Georgia, county commissioners have been easing requirements for Project Sail, a data center which would use up to 6 million gallons of water per day — over a fifth of the entire county’s daily water allotment. Officials adopted new planning laws which were watered down by industry lobbyists and removed provisions that aimed to limit harmful environmental impacts and that would require special public hearings for proposed data centers. This was only revealed through a public records request that matched anonymous comments with emails.
Major project developers in the South have concealed key information from the public, including water and energy consumption, deals with local officials regarding tax breaks and other incentives, and even company names. Local politicians make backdoor deals with tech companies before the public has a chance to be fully informed of the harms and have a say in data centers entering their communities. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina all provide major tax exemptions for data center companies. Louisiana’s GOP-controlled legislature fast-tracked Act 730 in 2024, granting data center companies 20-year tax exemptions, extendable to 30 years, for projects creating just 50 jobs and investing at least $200 million. The bill was championed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and corporate lobbyists, under the guise of economic development.
Big Tech promises thousands of jobs when data center projects are announced. However, in reality, data centers create very few permanent jobs. Even Microsoft admits that a data center can run with less than 50 technicians. According to a Business Insider analysis, “tax breaks given to developers can amount over time to more than $2 million for every permanent, full-time job at an operational data center.” Despite the widespread talking point that data centers bring jobs to local areas, half the states that provide tax subsidies for data centers do not actually require job creation. States that do only require a small number of jobs to be created. In Tennessee, only 15 jobs are required for data centers to qualify for tax breaks.
CNBC reports that states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to tech companies. Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, called this “a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders.” These tax breaks divert funds away from direct government expenditures in support of schools, tackling income inequality, investing in public transit, environmental remediation and other community needs. This affects marginalized communities the most, especially communities of color in the South. Georgia is projected to waive roughly $296 million in sales tax revenue this year for large data centers. This economic extraction through subsidies parallels the fossil fuel industry.
These subsidies extend beyond state tax breaks. In South Carolina, Dominion Energy will provide electricity to Google for multiple data centers at a discounted rate that amounts to less than half of what residential customers have to pay. Dominion has not disclosed how much electricity it is going to provide to Google data centers, saying the information is a protected trade secret. However, data centers in South Carolina will drive a whopping 65 to 70 percent of the state’s increased energy use, forcing consumers to pay more in utility bills. Jennifer Whitfield, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, has stated, “The highest low-income energy burden is seen in the South, specifically in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.” Energy burden refers to the percentage of personal income needed to pay energy bills. Data centers will exacerbate this systemic inequity.
The South has long been a site of both corporate extraction and fierce political resistance. Continuing this legacy of resistance, data center opposition is increasingly strong across the South. A proposed $14.5 billion hyperscale data center in Bessemer, Alabama, has been paused after facing a united front of residents concerned with the data center’s local impact. The center would require 2 million gallons of water per day, or roughly the same amount of water as two thirds of the city’s population. In Warrenton, Virginia, residents voted out all town council members in the November 2024 election who supported Amazon’s proposed data center. In July 2025, the newly elected council voted to ban data centers from Warrenton. In Georgia, the Monroe County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to deny a data center proposal that would rezone 900 acres of land after residents pushed back and said it posed environmental threats.
Mosley, the South Fulton resident, told Truthout:
They don’t understand what they have started. They don’t understand the coalition that we’re about to build, because all of us have high electricity bills. All of us have high water bills. And so, people who don’t normally rock together, oh, we about to rock together, and we are about to make some changes in Georgia.
It is critical that we pay attention to fights like these and stand in solidarity with the Black, brown and working-class communities being harmed by Big Tech and federal and state governments. The people are saying no.
September 18, 2025
Jai Dulani
The
American South has long been a site of both corporate extraction and fierce
political resistance.
At a recent televised dinner at
the White House, Big Tech executives profusely thanked Donald Trump for
unleashing “American innovation,” while the president, in turn, praised Big
Tech for “investing billions in the country.” This orchestration of Big Tech
executives kissing the ring was more than a display of how tech oligarchy has
become the new normal. It was a dramatized, Gilded Age-type demonstration of
Trump’s AI Action Plan, which grants Big Tech the unfettered ability to expand
AI infrastructure.
Announced in July 2025, Trump’s AI plan aims to accelerate the construction of data centers by bypassing public protections, environmental laws, and critical oversight. This push for federal deregulation is a direct response to more and more local communities fighting back to unveil who actually benefits from these massive investments — and who is being sold out in the process. Data centers powering AI require an enormous amount of water and energy. A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day. A data center campus using one gigawatt of electric power annually would use more power in a year than consumers use in Alaska, Rhode Island, or Vermont. As tech companies scramble to build data centers in the relentless “AI race,” they are creating infrastructure that will lock us into burning fossil fuels for decades. They are seeking a future where we have to compete with corporations for drinking water and subsidize Big Tech’s energy costs with our own wallets due to increased utility bills.
In their search for cheap land, cheap energy, and cities and towns that have been structurally disempowered, Big Tech has descended upon the South. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have committed over $200 billion to build medium and large data centers in North Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. As the South becomes the new epicenter of data center growth, it is becoming increasingly clear that Big Tech is following Big Oil’s footsteps, compounding the harms of decades of environmental racism in the South.
Elon Musk’s $12 billion artificial intelligence company, xAI, is poisoning Black communities in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk’s supercomputer, Colossus, sits a few miles from Boxtown, where nearly half of the residents have an annual household income below $25,000 and the cancer rates are four times the national average. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, the data center has been fueled by 35 unpermitted gas turbines that produce smog-forming pollution and harmful chemicals like formaldehyde. Peak nitrogen dioxide concentration levels have increased by 79 percent from pre-xAI levels in the areas immediately surrounding the data center. Nitrogen dioxide is linked to respiratory diseases. Memphis already leads Tennessee in emergency department visits for asthma and received an “F” from the American Lung Association for ozone pollution in 2025. Memphis resident KeShaun Pearson states, “We are breathing dirtier air, experiencing higher rates of asthma, and our children are spending more time in emergency rooms due to the misguided ambitions of billionaires who don’t see us as human.”
Similarly, Meta’s largest data center to date is being built in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where over a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Meta’s $10 billion complex will consume an unprecedented amount of energy from the state — approximately three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans annually. According to the permit for the data center, it will directly emit 5,862 tons of CO2 annually, equal to the annual emissions of 1,108 homes in the U.S. Three new methane gas plants are being built just to power this one data center. Two of the power plants will be built in Richland Parish, while the third power plant will be built at an existing nuclear power plant site in the region known as “Cancer Alley.” Cancer Alley is an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where Black and low-income communities have been getting sick and dying for decades due to emissions from over 200 petrochemical and fossil fuel plants in the area.
In South Carolina, power plants are being built in predominantly Black communities to keep up with data centers’ energy needs. In Mississippi, the state’s Public Service Commission unanimously approved a special contract to extend the life of a Mississippi Power coal unit, Plant Victor J. Daniel, to meet energy needs for a new data center project. This comes after the state government had ordered the utility company to phase out coal in 2020 due to its detrimental impacts on health and the environment. In 2022, Plant Victor J. Daniel reported more than 6 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, higher than any other facility in Mississippi, according to Grist. The plant has also been reported to be one of the nation’s top groundwater polluters, with excessive amounts of lithium, which is associated with neurological damage.
Big Tech has pushed rapid data center development forward through opaque and corrupt processes to avoid public scrutiny. Wanda Mosley, a resident of South Fulton, Georgia, told Truthout that the public processes related to data center development have been biased, saying, “They’re holding these town halls but they’re only having people who benefit from the data centers speaking at the town halls.”
In Georgia, county commissioners have been easing requirements for Project Sail, a data center which would use up to 6 million gallons of water per day — over a fifth of the entire county’s daily water allotment. Officials adopted new planning laws which were watered down by industry lobbyists and removed provisions that aimed to limit harmful environmental impacts and that would require special public hearings for proposed data centers. This was only revealed through a public records request that matched anonymous comments with emails.
Major project developers in the South have concealed key information from the public, including water and energy consumption, deals with local officials regarding tax breaks and other incentives, and even company names. Local politicians make backdoor deals with tech companies before the public has a chance to be fully informed of the harms and have a say in data centers entering their communities. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina all provide major tax exemptions for data center companies. Louisiana’s GOP-controlled legislature fast-tracked Act 730 in 2024, granting data center companies 20-year tax exemptions, extendable to 30 years, for projects creating just 50 jobs and investing at least $200 million. The bill was championed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and corporate lobbyists, under the guise of economic development.
Big Tech promises thousands of jobs when data center projects are announced. However, in reality, data centers create very few permanent jobs. Even Microsoft admits that a data center can run with less than 50 technicians. According to a Business Insider analysis, “tax breaks given to developers can amount over time to more than $2 million for every permanent, full-time job at an operational data center.” Despite the widespread talking point that data centers bring jobs to local areas, half the states that provide tax subsidies for data centers do not actually require job creation. States that do only require a small number of jobs to be created. In Tennessee, only 15 jobs are required for data centers to qualify for tax breaks.
CNBC reports that states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to tech companies. Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, called this “a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders.” These tax breaks divert funds away from direct government expenditures in support of schools, tackling income inequality, investing in public transit, environmental remediation and other community needs. This affects marginalized communities the most, especially communities of color in the South. Georgia is projected to waive roughly $296 million in sales tax revenue this year for large data centers. This economic extraction through subsidies parallels the fossil fuel industry.
These subsidies extend beyond state tax breaks. In South Carolina, Dominion Energy will provide electricity to Google for multiple data centers at a discounted rate that amounts to less than half of what residential customers have to pay. Dominion has not disclosed how much electricity it is going to provide to Google data centers, saying the information is a protected trade secret. However, data centers in South Carolina will drive a whopping 65 to 70 percent of the state’s increased energy use, forcing consumers to pay more in utility bills. Jennifer Whitfield, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, has stated, “The highest low-income energy burden is seen in the South, specifically in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.” Energy burden refers to the percentage of personal income needed to pay energy bills. Data centers will exacerbate this systemic inequity.
The South has long been a site of both corporate extraction and fierce political resistance. Continuing this legacy of resistance, data center opposition is increasingly strong across the South. A proposed $14.5 billion hyperscale data center in Bessemer, Alabama, has been paused after facing a united front of residents concerned with the data center’s local impact. The center would require 2 million gallons of water per day, or roughly the same amount of water as two thirds of the city’s population. In Warrenton, Virginia, residents voted out all town council members in the November 2024 election who supported Amazon’s proposed data center. In July 2025, the newly elected council voted to ban data centers from Warrenton. In Georgia, the Monroe County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to deny a data center proposal that would rezone 900 acres of land after residents pushed back and said it posed environmental threats.
Mosley, the South Fulton resident, told Truthout:
They don’t understand what they have started. They don’t understand the coalition that we’re about to build, because all of us have high electricity bills. All of us have high water bills. And so, people who don’t normally rock together, oh, we about to rock together, and we are about to make some changes in Georgia.
It is critical that we pay attention to fights like these and stand in solidarity with the Black, brown and working-class communities being harmed by Big Tech and federal and state governments. The people are saying no.
September 18, 2025
Negin Owliaei & Maya Schenwar
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said while speaking on pundit Benny Johnson’s podcast on September 17. Carr was responding to a question from Johnson about comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who suggested on his late-night show that members of the MAGA movement were trying to “score political points” on Kirk’s death, comments Carr called “truly sick,” adding, “these companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
A few hours later, ABC announced that it had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show.
The Kimmel suspension happened just days after Vice President JD Vance criticized an op-ed in The Nation while hosting Kirk’s own podcast on September 15, erroneously accusing the piece’s author of celebrating Kirk’s death. Vance also falsely claimed that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation fund The Nation. (Neither foundation currently funds the outlet, and Open Society never has.)
“There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers,” Vance said, vowing “to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.”
The comments were meant to terrify, and they did just that. They were shocking, but they were not unexpected.
Last year, as the world began to come to terms with the potential implications of another Donald Trump presidency, we wrote about the playbook we anticipated his administration and its allies would use to clamp down on dissent. Drawing on detailed plans and documents published by two right-wing think tanks, we anticipated a wide variety of attacks. In the documents, the Heritage Foundation and Capital Research Center identified a litany of tools in their arsenal to suppress the left. Those range from attacks on the immigration status of people who speak out, to threats to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status.
They also include frivolous lawsuits that could weigh organizers down, including sweeping RICO charges, which are famously easy to abuse; under them, prosecutors can lump together wide varieties of activity under the umbrella of a conspiracy and make criminal charges simply by association.
In our analysis of those right-wing plans, we perceived that the right seemed poised for a broader attack, unlikely to stop at setting up a few specific scapegoats and relying on a climate of fear to do the rest of their work. While certain activists and movements — especially people working in solidarity with Palestine — would surely have bigger targets on their backs, we warned, the broader progressive movement could easily be ensnared.
We see now how the language Vance is using — both the specific threats and the references to nebulously defined “networks” — echoes what we read in those documents last year. Back then, we voiced our fear that the new administration would use the battering ram of the state to target a broad range of left movement infrastructure: activists, of course, but also independent media, as well as the legal groups that serve as a crucial avenue of defense, and the foundations that provide financial support.
As Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made clear on Monday, the administration is indeed preparing to identify how to take out the entire progressive civil society ecosystem. Kirk’s killing may offer them the opportunity to attempt that with a few forceful knocks — unless we act.
While speaking with Miller on Kirk’s podcast, Vance acknowledged the blowback he anticipates receiving for the wide-ranging crackdown they have in store. “You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech,” Vance said. “No, no, no, we’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
What does violence look like to them? According to Miller, it is “the organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.”
These are no off-the-cuff remarks. That same day, Trump himself said he would be willing to classify “Antifa,” short for anti-fascists, as a domestic terrorism group, despite the fact that there is famously no single antifa group. Trump followed that up on September 17 with a social media post announcing he would do just that, stating that he would be “designating ANTIFA” as a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.”
“I will also be strongly recommending that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices,” Trump wrote.
There is no actual system for slapping the terrorism label on a domestic group. The State Department can add groups to its own classification of foreign terrorist organizations, but no such official list exists for domestic groups. But while Trump didn’t explain how he might enact this classification of “Antifa” from a legal or logistical standpoint, the threat of the terror label alone is enough to cause concern.
Once a set of accusations has been marked by the “terror” label, it’s no surprise when declarations of “war” follow. As Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski wrote a decade ago in urging progressives to disavow the “terror” framing, “The ‘terrorism’ frame offers only intensified surveillance, policing, and deployment of military force as its preferred strategies for creating safety and justice.”
After Kirk’s killing, like clockwork, the “terrorism” label has been deployed hand in hand with the war label. “Civil war” mentions surged on social media, and far right figureheads from Andrew Tate to Steve Bannon to Alex Jones and many more announced that a war had arrived, with some explicitly calling for escalated violence.
During his interview with Vance on Kirk’s podcast, Stephen Miller declared something of a holy war, with state violence as the primary weapon: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these [leftist] networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he said. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Calling the current moment a “war” is not simply a provocation; it’s a strategic move. In wartime, many rules fall away. Crying “war” is the public-discourse equivalent of declaring martial law; “war” means the norms and laws change. State-sanctioned murder — including mechanisms like an increased use of the death penalty and state-justified police-perpetrated killings, as well as jailing and confinement without due process — become not only admissible, but normalized practices.
Indeed, the right’s calls for indiscriminate criminalization have been rampant — as have enthusiastic calls to abandon the usual limits on state power. Far right influencer Laura Loomer, who has a history of concretely impacting Trump’s decisions, suggested, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.”
The administration itself has hit similar notes: Speaking to NBC News, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson unleashed a torrent of allegations against left-wing organizations writ large, from fueling “violent riots” to coordinating doxing attacks.
“The Trump administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities,” Jackson said. “This effort will target those committing criminal acts and hold them accountable.”
The administration has considered using RICO charges to do this. Trump himself has repeatedly suggested going after Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros using such racketeering and conspiracy charges. Supposedly intended for targeting organized crime, RICO laws have long been controversial due to the expansive powers they can give prosecutors and their ability to capture people in their dragnet. Republican lawmakers are seeking to add more powers to that list. This summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) proposed a bill that would add rioting to the list of potential RICO offenses. This would allow prosecutors to conduct sweeping investigations of foundations and people, such as Soros, that they allege are funding “riots.”
Beyond organizations, the threats of prosecution are also being leveled against noncompliant individuals: Pam Bondi is currently threatening to criminally prosecute an Office Depot employee who refused to print a customer’s flyers for a Charlie Kirk vigil.
As Trump and his lackeys use the aftermath of Kirk’s killing to quash leftist speech and organizing, we must be clear about the fact that plenty of these tactics are not new; this sweeping crackdown is not simply a reaction to an instance of violence. It is an exploitation of Kirk’s killing to further the ultimate goal of a right-wing movement hell-bent on winning more power.
Vance’s threat to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status, for example, is clearly reminiscent of the infamous “nonprofit killer bill,” which would have given the Treasury secretary the authority to strip tax-exempt status from nonprofits they unilaterally deemed to be “terrorist-supporting organizations.” After failing to pass the standalone bill in Congress in November, Republicans attempted to stick the provisions of the nonprofit killer bill into their massive budget bill this summer, though it was eventually removed. It is not law.
The absence of such a law has not stopped those on the right from trying to use other mechanisms to further the nonprofit killer bill’s goal of suppressing progressive civil society. And the attempt to investigate left groups does not come from the Trump administration. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is perhaps most famous for demanding in The New York Times that the Trump administration send the military to cities to quell uprisings for racial justice in 2020. Now, he has moved on to demand that the Internal Revenue Service investigate groups he does not like, including the Palestinian Youth Movement and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The use of RICO charges to go after the left, too, does not begin or end with the Trump administration. In Georgia, the state’s attorney general stuck those charges on dozens of Stop Cop City organizers who were fighting the construction of a massive police training facility in Atlanta. While a judge eventually dropped the charges, fighting those charges still sucked up crucial time and resources from abolitionist organizing. And in 2017, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, filed a RICO suit that accused environmental groups like Greenpeace of a racketeering conspiracy over the pipeline protests. When that was thrown out, the pipeline company filed a similar suit in a North Dakota court and won a staggering $660 million from the environmental organization.
And, of course, it is critical to point out how the bipartisan targeting of the Palestine movement for the past two years has made much of this specific moment possible. While the assault on free speech has certainly escalated in the last week, it is impossible not to look at the precedent set by college administrators, private employers, Congress, and both the Trump and Biden administrations for their sweeping crackdown on people who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
That crackdown intensified with the Trump administration’s attempts to deport scholars based on their speech, activism, or family ties. While the courts have stopped the deportations of academics like Badar Khan Suri and Rümeysa Öztürk for their speech for now, an immigration judge has ordered Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, to be deported to Algeria or Syria, unless Khalil is successful in an appeal.
Those cases were likely top of mind for Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast when he put forth a provision this month that, as The Intercept reported, would allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip American citizens of their passports if he unilaterally determines they “knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.” The vagueness is surely intentional, and could include lawyers who provide legal advice, for example, or people who speak out against genocidal policies like Öztürk did. Fortunately, thanks to overwhelming backlash from civil rights groups, Mast backtracked on the provision.
What examples like this do show, though, is that pushback can help stem the fascistic tide. The right is loud. Its actors have a terrifying amount of power and the machinery of the state at their disposal. Nothing about their playbook, though, is inevitable. And we in the media have a specific responsibility in acting as a bulwark.
Media organizations have been quick to point out the various inconsistencies that Vance pushed in his address on the podcast, honing in on the cherrypicked statistics he used to imply that political violence is a bigger issue on the left, and pointing to Vance’s omission of recent violence aimed at notable Democrats, including the assassination of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman in June.
It’s critical for the media to jump in and correct the record — it’s a core responsibility. But calling out hypocrisy and inaccuracy alone won’t save us. We must also shed light on the various mechanisms the administration and its allies have at their disposal to enforce its terrifying agenda, as well as the complicity of organizations willing to do their dirty work.
For example, we must be clear about what Carr meant when he said the FCC could deal with Kimmel’s speech “the easy way or the hard way.”
“These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr added. FCC approval is key for networks to maintain their broadcast licenses; it’s even more crucial for networks undergoing potential corporate mergers. That includes Nexstar Media Group, one of the country’s largest TV operators, which runs programming from ABC. The FCC famously approved a controversial merger between CBS parent company Paramount and media company Skydance earlier this year. Even before this week, we already had serious indications that the Trump administration was turning the agency into a political weapon, as Carr started investigations into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at ABC and NBC.
Those of us in the media must call out these power plays for what they are. We must continue to highlight threats of censorship wherever they spring up — from the administration, from corporations, and from college administrators. By persistently investigating and exposing these threats, we can provide the media equivalent of pushback in the streets, and let the administration and its allies know that their attempts at repression won’t come easy.
Finally, funders supporting left and progressive organizations, including movement media, should recognize their power — and refuse to retreat. In fact, now is the time to recognize that left and progressive movements and journalism organizations need more resources, in order to face down threats from the right and keep building a transformed world for us all.
For those of us in the movement media space, the coming months and years will necessitate resources to cover the intensifying mechanisms by which fascism is tightening its hold, from criminalization to fear campaigns to the erosion of democratic systems. And as the administration’s recent threats against media outlets attest, journalism organizations will also need resources to legally defend ourselves against powerful forces, simply in order to maintain our platforms to speak out.
Vance’s erroneous assertion that the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation fund The Nation demonstrate that the right will attack progressive and mainstream funders whether or not they support social justice-driven organizations. While some may be tempted to fund less in order to avoid being targeted, there’s no “safety” in pulling back. So, why not go ahead and throw support behind the wide range of organizations struggling against fascism, which urgently need resources?
As right-wing leaders and influencers wield the “terror” label and threaten to wage war on left organizations, those of us within those organizations need to ground ourselves in our own power. As Vance promises to dismantle progressive networks and the White House compiles its ominous list of left organizations to target, let’s reconnect with our own left lists — strengthening our relationships with each other, deepening our cross-organizational partnerships, and reminding ourselves to have each other’s backs.
As the administration carries out the strategies in its fascist playbook, we can remember we, too, have strategy. Where are we in our own playbooks? Those of us in media can keep seeking new, wider-ranging, and creative ways to raise our voices to counter the vicious rhetoric-turned-policy erupting around us. And instead of heeding the threats of warmongering bullies, we can start each day by rooting ourselves in our solidarities, and in our commitment to a more just, interdependent, and liberatory collective future.
The
ouster of comedian Jimmy Kimmel signals a broader crackdown on media. Let’s
double down, not back off in response.
In the week since Charlie Kirk
was killed, members of the Trump administration have been honoring him by using
one of his favorite platforms — the right-wing podcast — to continue his
tradition of threatening people who say things he did not like.“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said while speaking on pundit Benny Johnson’s podcast on September 17. Carr was responding to a question from Johnson about comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who suggested on his late-night show that members of the MAGA movement were trying to “score political points” on Kirk’s death, comments Carr called “truly sick,” adding, “these companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
A few hours later, ABC announced that it had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show.
The Kimmel suspension happened just days after Vice President JD Vance criticized an op-ed in The Nation while hosting Kirk’s own podcast on September 15, erroneously accusing the piece’s author of celebrating Kirk’s death. Vance also falsely claimed that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation fund The Nation. (Neither foundation currently funds the outlet, and Open Society never has.)
“There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers,” Vance said, vowing “to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.”
The comments were meant to terrify, and they did just that. They were shocking, but they were not unexpected.
Last year, as the world began to come to terms with the potential implications of another Donald Trump presidency, we wrote about the playbook we anticipated his administration and its allies would use to clamp down on dissent. Drawing on detailed plans and documents published by two right-wing think tanks, we anticipated a wide variety of attacks. In the documents, the Heritage Foundation and Capital Research Center identified a litany of tools in their arsenal to suppress the left. Those range from attacks on the immigration status of people who speak out, to threats to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status.
They also include frivolous lawsuits that could weigh organizers down, including sweeping RICO charges, which are famously easy to abuse; under them, prosecutors can lump together wide varieties of activity under the umbrella of a conspiracy and make criminal charges simply by association.
In our analysis of those right-wing plans, we perceived that the right seemed poised for a broader attack, unlikely to stop at setting up a few specific scapegoats and relying on a climate of fear to do the rest of their work. While certain activists and movements — especially people working in solidarity with Palestine — would surely have bigger targets on their backs, we warned, the broader progressive movement could easily be ensnared.
We see now how the language Vance is using — both the specific threats and the references to nebulously defined “networks” — echoes what we read in those documents last year. Back then, we voiced our fear that the new administration would use the battering ram of the state to target a broad range of left movement infrastructure: activists, of course, but also independent media, as well as the legal groups that serve as a crucial avenue of defense, and the foundations that provide financial support.
As Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made clear on Monday, the administration is indeed preparing to identify how to take out the entire progressive civil society ecosystem. Kirk’s killing may offer them the opportunity to attempt that with a few forceful knocks — unless we act.
While speaking with Miller on Kirk’s podcast, Vance acknowledged the blowback he anticipates receiving for the wide-ranging crackdown they have in store. “You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech,” Vance said. “No, no, no, we’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
What does violence look like to them? According to Miller, it is “the organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.”
These are no off-the-cuff remarks. That same day, Trump himself said he would be willing to classify “Antifa,” short for anti-fascists, as a domestic terrorism group, despite the fact that there is famously no single antifa group. Trump followed that up on September 17 with a social media post announcing he would do just that, stating that he would be “designating ANTIFA” as a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.”
“I will also be strongly recommending that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices,” Trump wrote.
There is no actual system for slapping the terrorism label on a domestic group. The State Department can add groups to its own classification of foreign terrorist organizations, but no such official list exists for domestic groups. But while Trump didn’t explain how he might enact this classification of “Antifa” from a legal or logistical standpoint, the threat of the terror label alone is enough to cause concern.
Once a set of accusations has been marked by the “terror” label, it’s no surprise when declarations of “war” follow. As Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski wrote a decade ago in urging progressives to disavow the “terror” framing, “The ‘terrorism’ frame offers only intensified surveillance, policing, and deployment of military force as its preferred strategies for creating safety and justice.”
After Kirk’s killing, like clockwork, the “terrorism” label has been deployed hand in hand with the war label. “Civil war” mentions surged on social media, and far right figureheads from Andrew Tate to Steve Bannon to Alex Jones and many more announced that a war had arrived, with some explicitly calling for escalated violence.
During his interview with Vance on Kirk’s podcast, Stephen Miller declared something of a holy war, with state violence as the primary weapon: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these [leftist] networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he said. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Calling the current moment a “war” is not simply a provocation; it’s a strategic move. In wartime, many rules fall away. Crying “war” is the public-discourse equivalent of declaring martial law; “war” means the norms and laws change. State-sanctioned murder — including mechanisms like an increased use of the death penalty and state-justified police-perpetrated killings, as well as jailing and confinement without due process — become not only admissible, but normalized practices.
Indeed, the right’s calls for indiscriminate criminalization have been rampant — as have enthusiastic calls to abandon the usual limits on state power. Far right influencer Laura Loomer, who has a history of concretely impacting Trump’s decisions, suggested, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.”
The administration itself has hit similar notes: Speaking to NBC News, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson unleashed a torrent of allegations against left-wing organizations writ large, from fueling “violent riots” to coordinating doxing attacks.
“The Trump administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities,” Jackson said. “This effort will target those committing criminal acts and hold them accountable.”
The administration has considered using RICO charges to do this. Trump himself has repeatedly suggested going after Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros using such racketeering and conspiracy charges. Supposedly intended for targeting organized crime, RICO laws have long been controversial due to the expansive powers they can give prosecutors and their ability to capture people in their dragnet. Republican lawmakers are seeking to add more powers to that list. This summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) proposed a bill that would add rioting to the list of potential RICO offenses. This would allow prosecutors to conduct sweeping investigations of foundations and people, such as Soros, that they allege are funding “riots.”
Beyond organizations, the threats of prosecution are also being leveled against noncompliant individuals: Pam Bondi is currently threatening to criminally prosecute an Office Depot employee who refused to print a customer’s flyers for a Charlie Kirk vigil.
As Trump and his lackeys use the aftermath of Kirk’s killing to quash leftist speech and organizing, we must be clear about the fact that plenty of these tactics are not new; this sweeping crackdown is not simply a reaction to an instance of violence. It is an exploitation of Kirk’s killing to further the ultimate goal of a right-wing movement hell-bent on winning more power.
Vance’s threat to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status, for example, is clearly reminiscent of the infamous “nonprofit killer bill,” which would have given the Treasury secretary the authority to strip tax-exempt status from nonprofits they unilaterally deemed to be “terrorist-supporting organizations.” After failing to pass the standalone bill in Congress in November, Republicans attempted to stick the provisions of the nonprofit killer bill into their massive budget bill this summer, though it was eventually removed. It is not law.
The absence of such a law has not stopped those on the right from trying to use other mechanisms to further the nonprofit killer bill’s goal of suppressing progressive civil society. And the attempt to investigate left groups does not come from the Trump administration. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is perhaps most famous for demanding in The New York Times that the Trump administration send the military to cities to quell uprisings for racial justice in 2020. Now, he has moved on to demand that the Internal Revenue Service investigate groups he does not like, including the Palestinian Youth Movement and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The use of RICO charges to go after the left, too, does not begin or end with the Trump administration. In Georgia, the state’s attorney general stuck those charges on dozens of Stop Cop City organizers who were fighting the construction of a massive police training facility in Atlanta. While a judge eventually dropped the charges, fighting those charges still sucked up crucial time and resources from abolitionist organizing. And in 2017, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, filed a RICO suit that accused environmental groups like Greenpeace of a racketeering conspiracy over the pipeline protests. When that was thrown out, the pipeline company filed a similar suit in a North Dakota court and won a staggering $660 million from the environmental organization.
And, of course, it is critical to point out how the bipartisan targeting of the Palestine movement for the past two years has made much of this specific moment possible. While the assault on free speech has certainly escalated in the last week, it is impossible not to look at the precedent set by college administrators, private employers, Congress, and both the Trump and Biden administrations for their sweeping crackdown on people who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
That crackdown intensified with the Trump administration’s attempts to deport scholars based on their speech, activism, or family ties. While the courts have stopped the deportations of academics like Badar Khan Suri and Rümeysa Öztürk for their speech for now, an immigration judge has ordered Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, to be deported to Algeria or Syria, unless Khalil is successful in an appeal.
Those cases were likely top of mind for Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast when he put forth a provision this month that, as The Intercept reported, would allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip American citizens of their passports if he unilaterally determines they “knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.” The vagueness is surely intentional, and could include lawyers who provide legal advice, for example, or people who speak out against genocidal policies like Öztürk did. Fortunately, thanks to overwhelming backlash from civil rights groups, Mast backtracked on the provision.
What examples like this do show, though, is that pushback can help stem the fascistic tide. The right is loud. Its actors have a terrifying amount of power and the machinery of the state at their disposal. Nothing about their playbook, though, is inevitable. And we in the media have a specific responsibility in acting as a bulwark.
Media organizations have been quick to point out the various inconsistencies that Vance pushed in his address on the podcast, honing in on the cherrypicked statistics he used to imply that political violence is a bigger issue on the left, and pointing to Vance’s omission of recent violence aimed at notable Democrats, including the assassination of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman in June.
It’s critical for the media to jump in and correct the record — it’s a core responsibility. But calling out hypocrisy and inaccuracy alone won’t save us. We must also shed light on the various mechanisms the administration and its allies have at their disposal to enforce its terrifying agenda, as well as the complicity of organizations willing to do their dirty work.
For example, we must be clear about what Carr meant when he said the FCC could deal with Kimmel’s speech “the easy way or the hard way.”
“These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr added. FCC approval is key for networks to maintain their broadcast licenses; it’s even more crucial for networks undergoing potential corporate mergers. That includes Nexstar Media Group, one of the country’s largest TV operators, which runs programming from ABC. The FCC famously approved a controversial merger between CBS parent company Paramount and media company Skydance earlier this year. Even before this week, we already had serious indications that the Trump administration was turning the agency into a political weapon, as Carr started investigations into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at ABC and NBC.
Those of us in the media must call out these power plays for what they are. We must continue to highlight threats of censorship wherever they spring up — from the administration, from corporations, and from college administrators. By persistently investigating and exposing these threats, we can provide the media equivalent of pushback in the streets, and let the administration and its allies know that their attempts at repression won’t come easy.
Finally, funders supporting left and progressive organizations, including movement media, should recognize their power — and refuse to retreat. In fact, now is the time to recognize that left and progressive movements and journalism organizations need more resources, in order to face down threats from the right and keep building a transformed world for us all.
For those of us in the movement media space, the coming months and years will necessitate resources to cover the intensifying mechanisms by which fascism is tightening its hold, from criminalization to fear campaigns to the erosion of democratic systems. And as the administration’s recent threats against media outlets attest, journalism organizations will also need resources to legally defend ourselves against powerful forces, simply in order to maintain our platforms to speak out.
Vance’s erroneous assertion that the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation fund The Nation demonstrate that the right will attack progressive and mainstream funders whether or not they support social justice-driven organizations. While some may be tempted to fund less in order to avoid being targeted, there’s no “safety” in pulling back. So, why not go ahead and throw support behind the wide range of organizations struggling against fascism, which urgently need resources?
As right-wing leaders and influencers wield the “terror” label and threaten to wage war on left organizations, those of us within those organizations need to ground ourselves in our own power. As Vance promises to dismantle progressive networks and the White House compiles its ominous list of left organizations to target, let’s reconnect with our own left lists — strengthening our relationships with each other, deepening our cross-organizational partnerships, and reminding ourselves to have each other’s backs.
As the administration carries out the strategies in its fascist playbook, we can remember we, too, have strategy. Where are we in our own playbooks? Those of us in media can keep seeking new, wider-ranging, and creative ways to raise our voices to counter the vicious rhetoric-turned-policy erupting around us. And instead of heeding the threats of warmongering bullies, we can start each day by rooting ourselves in our solidarities, and in our commitment to a more just, interdependent, and liberatory collective future.
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