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Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently

Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram… even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that?

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As tick bites surge, conspiracy theories follow

“Tell you what,” Drew Maciel told his Instagram followers in April, “I’m sick of finding dead moose.” He zoomed in on a dead bull moose lying prone on the ground, running the camera over clusters of ticks nestled within every crevice of the corpse. Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90 percent of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species. But where scientists see the hand of climate change at work — average temperatures in Maine have risen 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1985 — others see the designs of a global cabal. “Human engineered biological warfare,” read a comment on Maciel’s video posted by Dries Van Langenhove, a far-right former member of the Belgian government who was recently convicted of violating the country’s Holocaust denial laws. The comment got 32,000 likes. “It’s Bill Gates,” someone else posted. Chuck Lubelczyk, a vector-borne ecologist with Maine Medical Center, collects ticks at a site in Cape Elizabeth. John Ewing / Portland Press Herald / Getty Images These posts are part of a wave of tick-related conspiracy theories garnering millions of views online. In April, a self-proclaimed holistic doctor on Instagram claimed to have spoken with multiple farmers in the Midwest who told her that they were finding boxes of ticks dumped on their properties. “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she posted alongside a video that got 10 million views across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The MAHA Moms Coalition, a nationwide group inspired by the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, reposted the claim asking affected farmers to come forward. The theory dates back to 2023, with viral claims that Pfizer and Valneva, pharmaceutical companies developing a vaccine for Lyme disease, were planting boxes of ticks on farms to drum up demand for their product. A separate theory that gained traction around the same time linked a British research program to genetically modify cattle ticks, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to rising cases of red meat allergies in the U.S. The biggest problem with that theory is that the allergy, Alpha-gal syndrome, is caused by the bite of a Lone Star tick — a completely different species from the cattle ticks in the research program. While all these conspiracies involve different ticks, different diseases, and different alleged culprits, they are often treated as interchangeable evidence of the same broader claim: that rising tick encounters are a part of a nefarious human plot. The theories are right about one thing: Ticks are getting worse. Some of the same ecological changes fueling Maine’s winter tick boom are also making tick encounters more common in broad swaths of the U.S. The arachnids are showing up earlier in the year, expanding into new terrain, and biting people more often than they used to. But the force driving those shifts is not a clandestine bioweapons program, a vaccine plot, or Bill Gates — it’s climate change. A screenshot of an Instagram post furthering the unproven claim that Midwestern farmers are finding boxes of ticks left behind on their properties. Instagram Richard Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, said a warming world is “bringing ticks out earlier in the year” in states like New York, where he lives. “It used to be we were pretty safe in the month of May,” he said. “Now, not so much.” Tick season is off to an unusually early start across most of the U.S. this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said in an alert published late last month. Emergency room visits for tick bites in four of the five geographic regions the agency tracks are the highest they’ve been for this time of year since the CDC started keeping tabs on tick-borne illness rates in 2017. While the CDC hasn’t said what’s behind the uptick in bites this spring, ample snow cover earlier in the year helped insulate adult ticks from the cold of winter, and an early spring bloom across much of the U.S. likely brought those hungry adults out of the leaf litter earlier than normal. But regardless of the specific dynamics at play this year, rising average temperatures will lead to more robust tick exposure on balance. That’s because warmer temperatures both coax ticks north into territory that was once too cold to host them and also extend the length of time that ticks are active every year. More tick bites mean more opportunities for infection — and the list of infections doctors are watching for is getting longer. Positive tests for alpha-gal syndrome have increased 100-fold since 2013; nearly half a million people in the U.S. now carry an allergy to red meat. Cases of anaplasmosis, a disease carried by black-legged ticks that hospitalizes roughly 30 percent of the people who contract it, increased 16-fold between 2000 and 2017. Babesiosis, a malaria-like illness also carried by black-legged ticks, has risen roughly 10 percent year-over-year since 2015. It’s not uncommon now for a single tick to carry two or more diseases. Ecologists who study ticks see an interwoven mix of factors driving these increases. Land-use and wildlife changes are increasing contact between humans and ticks, invasive and expanding tick species are bringing different disease risks to new parts of the country, and better testing and reporting of tick-borne illnesses is making diseases more visible. But there is widespread agreement in the scientific community that those trends are unfolding against the backdrop of climate change. Ostfeld worries that the complexity of the factors that lead to higher rates of tick-borne disease, paired with the allure of online conspiracies, will make it harder for people to understand why backyards in some parts of the country are getting more dangerous. “The more I read about people actually believing some of these conspiracy theories, the more I worry that even moderately complex explanations or phenomena we care about — like how likely we are to get bitten by a tick — might be too much,” he said. Scientists collect Lone Star ticks, which can cause an allergic reaction to red meat, for research. Ben McCanna / Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images It doesn’t help that conspiracies about ticks have now been legitimized by federal government officials. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has at various times in his career opined that Lyme disease, which now affects an estimated half a million Americans every year, was created as a byproduct of vaccine research and originally used as a military bioweapon. (This flies in the face of genomic evidence that the bacteria causing Lyme has existed in North America for at least 60,000 years.) Both Kennedy and Tucker Carlson, one of America’s most prominent Republican-aligned media figures, have hosted the writer Kris Newby on their podcasts in recent years. In both cases, Newby espoused debunked claims about the military origins of Lyme. The idea that Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses were created by a U.S. military bioweapons program is so pervasive that a formal initiative to investigate the origin has twice been introduced by lawmakers in the House of Representatives. Chris Smith, a Republican representative from New Jersey who spearheaded those efforts, was successful on his second attempt. A directive in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, signed by President Donald Trump last December, includes a provision requiring the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to investigate whether the military used ticks as biological warfare agents in the middle of the twentieth century. “GAO will be fully empowered to leave no stone unturned, and now it’ll have a congressional mandate to get to the bottom of it, because they were weaponizing ticks,” Smith said at a Lyme disease roundtable convened by Secretary Kennedy last year. But away from the congressional roundtables and viral videos, the plot begins to lose some of its drama. Even in the Midwest, where millions of social media viewers have been told that boxes of ticks are being dumped on unsuspecting farmers, evidence of foul play is hard to find. Terry Hoerbert and her husband Bob own Little Brown Cow Dairy, a small dairy farm in Delavan, Illinois. The lane down to the farm is short, Terry said, so she would have seen someone dropping off packages of ticks. Had the Hoerberts heard of any other farms in the area receiving packages of live ticks? “We have not,” Terry told me. “You are the first to enlighten us.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As tick bites surge, conspiracy theories follow on May 14, 2026. From Grist via This RSS Feed.

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The war on our sight

An earlier version of this speech was delivered at the 2026 Izzy Awards ceremony at the Park Center for Independent Media in Ithaca, NY, on April 21, 2026. Friends, colleagues, fellow human beings, You don’t need to read Project Censored’s latest State of the Free Press report to know that the state of the free press in America is not good (but, obviously, you should still read the report). And it’s not just President Trump, his administration, and the MAGA faithful repeatedly, publicly expressing their hatred and verbalizing threats towards journalists and media organizations that don’t tow the Supreme Leader’s line. It’s not just Trump and his cabinet bullying and berating journalists at press briefings, restricting their access, and trying to make them sign loyalty pledges. It’s also Trump’s absurd and gangsterish lawsuits targeted at ABC News, which is owned by Disney, and CBS News, which is owned by Paramount, and the morally spineless, financially self-serving capitulation of these corporate cowards to Trump by settling, rather than fighting, those lawsuits—setting the precedent for more shakedowns. It’s the multi-pronged attempt by the Trump administration and the ruling-class-serving authors and executors of Project 2025 to destroy the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which they succeeded in doing, and to defund and destroy PBS and NPR, which they are still trying to do now. It’s the federal harassment, capture, imprisonment, and even deportation of journalists like Estefany Rodríguez, Mario Guevara, Sami Hamdi, and Georgia Fort. Even Don Lemon. Even Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was snatched off the street last year by plainclothes federal thugs for co-authoring an op-ed in her campus newspaper. It’s the professional journalists, student journalists, and citizen journalists alike covering the federal invasions of our cities and the protests against them, from LA to Minneapolis, who are being targeted by law enforcement, shot in the head or body with rubber bullets, detained, menacingly scanned and tracked by masked agents with shadowy surveillance tools. It’s the professional journalists, student journalists, and citizen journalists alike covering the federal invasions of our cities and the protests against them, from LA to Minneapolis, who are being targeted by law enforcement, shot in the head or body with rubber bullets, detained, menacingly scanned and tracked by masked agents with shadowy surveillance tools. It’s the ongoing, longstanding, bipartisan effort to silence and punish whistleblowers who risk their jobs, their freedom, and even their lives to inform the public. And then, on top of that, it’s Trump and his administration seizing or deliberately dismantling the state infrastructure of recorded, verified, and publicly available information that is in the public’s necessary interest—from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Weather Service to the uncertain futures of FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, from the feds commandeering and hiding the “investigation” into the ICE killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis to the coverup of the Epstein Files. It’s industry lapdog, fanatical ideologue, and literal Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr using his post as Trump’s appointed head of the FCC to impose Trump’s will on the world of broadcast media and speedrun the corporate consolidation of control over it, from the major networks to all the local TV and radio stations we still have left. All of this is part of the multi-frontal assault on and erosion of press freedom and the people’s right to know. It’s TV shows canceled, web verticals discontinued, people let go, newsrooms restructured, either in reaction to Trump and MAGA’s ire, in fear of it, or in self-serving pursuit of profit from it. It’s the acceleration of yearslong trends of newspapers closing, news outlets merging and consolidating or getting bought out, followed inevitably by mass layoffs, ever-expanding the number of unemployed journalists and media workers and the size of America’s local news deserts, where there are no longer professionals being employed and paid to find and document and verify the truth of what’s actually happening. Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report listed over 130 newspaper closures in the US in 2025, bringing the total to nearly 3,500 newspapers and over 270,000 newspaper jobs lost over the past two decades. And more, deeper cuts are coming, especially with the world- and industry-changing introduction of AI. Nearly one-half of the Washington Post staff was laid off in February; 30,000 more at Amazon in recent months because of an AI pivot, including many jobs in the media, gaming, and entertainment arm of the Bezos behemoth. Large layoffs announced last month at Disney. In 2026, like we saw in 2025, like we saw in 2024, the media industry job cuts keep coming, and they are deep, widespread, and significant: CNN, NBC, Vox Media, HuffPost, Politico, CNBC, Time, Univision, Nexstar Media Group, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Wall Street Journal, and so many more. To say nothing of all the big layoffs and AI-impacted restructuring in tech, from Meta to Microsoft to Google to X (aka Twitter) to Amazon. Now, I’m sure you’re saying to yourself, “Geez, Max Alvarez, I didn’t realize you cared so deeply for all these legacy media giants and Big Tech mega-corporations…” But it’s not about that. All I’m saying is that, if you start to look at all of this stuff happening together with the cold focus of an air-traffic controller or a general surveying the battlefield, you realize that something big is clearly happening in media, to media, and big moves are being made by the people who own the media that all of us, across the political and consumption spectrum, depend on. It’s TV shows canceled, web verticals discontinued, people let go, newsrooms restructured, either in reaction to Trump and MAGA’s ire, in fear of it, or in self-serving pursuit of profit from it. Also, as someone who interviews workers for a living, I have to stress one other point here: More often than not, these job cuts, even when they hit at networks and parent companies we rightly despise, are hitting the few people left who are still trying to do actual journalism or keep our media products and tech platforms from getting worse than they already are. For example, last year, I was honored to win the Izzy Award with the great Steve Mellon for reporting we had done on the aftermath of the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Steve did all that reporting, and so much more, all while he and his fellow union members were on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. These incredible workers were on strike for over three years. And after they finally won that strike and returned to work at the end of last year, the paper’s rich, law-breaking owners, the Block family, announced at the beginning of this year that they would be closing the Post-Gazette—a paper whose roots go all the way back to 1786. Then, news broke in April that the Post-Gazette had been bought by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, the owners of the Baltimore Banner back home. Then, in the beginning of May, the union learned that the new leadership was cutting at least 40 percent of its staff, including 80 percent of the union workers who participated in the recently ended strike. This is a travesty. And this is the journalism industry, such as it is, today. All of this, too, is part of the multi-frontal assault on and erosion of press freedom and the people’s right to know. (What does “press freedom” even mean when there are hardly any press left? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are collectively and individually losing our ability to discern what’s true and real as we continue to lose the organizations that exist and the people who are paid to find, document, expose, and communicate the truth responsibly, and to quality-control and fact-check the stories we’re presenting as true to the public.) I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are collectively and individually losing our ability to discern what’s true and real as we continue to lose the organizations that exist and the people who are paid to find, document, expose, and communicate the truth responsibly, and to quality-control and fact-check the stories we’re presenting as true to the public. And it’s also this horrifying, techno-feudal arrangement of billionaire oligarchs and their corporate empires gobbling up all legacy and social media and controlling the information chokepoints that connect us to the world beyond our immediate sight. From fourth richest person in the world Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post to billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong owning the LA Times, from fifth richest person in the world Mark Zuckerberg and Meta (aka Facebook) also controlling Instagram, Whatsapp, and Threads, to richest man in the world Elon Musk buying Twitter, to Paramount Skydance just winning the bid to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN and HBO, further expanding the vast media empire of Trump-loving tech moguls Larry Ellison (the sixth richest person in the world) and his son David Ellison—an empire that also includes CBS News and a significant chunk of the now “American owned” TikTok 2.0. The buyouts and mergers and consolidations and corporate capitulations to Trump have been so swift and so massive, it’s honestly head-spinning. And the billionaire oligarchs are openly putting their hands on the scales to try to condition us, to influence our thoughts and control our sight; to normalize and invisibilize genocide, ecocide, and Epstein-level atrocities; to try to forcibly shift the Overton window in the realm of public discourse by publishing more viewpoints and content that align with Trump’s agenda, just like they did with all the so-called “woke” stuff when it was profitable for them. Because these oligarchs have their own agendas, too: they want to bend and push and twist the world to serve them, to benefit their bank accounts, and to continuously, endlessly deliver more wealth and power and market dominance to them at the expense of us, our societies, and the planet we live on. And they are pursuing those agendas through Trump and with his help, from the Ellisons installing Bari fricken Weiss as Editor in Chief of CBS and very visibly steering the network and the reputation it still had into the Trumpstream, to the fricken Washington Post editorial board publishing an endless litany of missives that read like they were written by Mr. Monopoly, including an opinion last month titled “America’s income tax is already progressive”; subtitle, “The rich already pay more than their fair share.” Jesus Christ, man… [T]hese oligarchs have their own agendas, too: they want to bend and push and twist the world to serve them, to benefit their bank accounts, and to continuously, endlessly deliver more wealth and power and market dominance to them at the expense of us, our societies, and the planet we live on. And they are pursuing those agendas through Trump and with his help… It’s hard to get your hands and mind around all this at once, and it’s going to keep getting harder. That’s the point. To get an accurate picture of the media ecosystem we are operating in today, and the massive changes that have shaped it into what it is (and shaped us in the process), we have to remember something. For all the long-running historical dynamics and political, economic, and industry trends that are always also at play here—in media and journalism, in the United States, and in the world writ large—a lot has happened, or dramatically accelerated, in a really short amount of time. Since the end of the last Trump administration, and in comparison to the world we lived in during the last Trump administration: COVID hits us in 2020, a lot of people die, everyone else goes kinda berserk (some people a lot more than others), and we all become more “socially distanced” than ever before and more dependent on media to connect us to the outside world—and, thus, more vulnerable to the whims and designs of the owners who control those points of connection. In 2021, Twitter bans and Facebook suspends Donald Trump’s accounts after the failed January 6 insurrection—a move that, in retrospect, marked the last gasps of the limp-wristed and seemingly doomed-from-the-start era of social media content moderation. Trump launches Truth Social in the beginning of 2022 (where he doesn’t post “tweets,” but posts “truths,” which you can “like” and “retruth”). Then, at the end of 2022, Elon Musk buys and acquires Twitter, which he subsequently destroys and turns into the bizarre cesspit called X—an event that, whatever you think or thought of Twitter, completely reorients the way our whole media ecosystem works and how people, governments, and corporations participate in it. In 2023, Tucker Carlson is fired from Fox News. Carlson tries to launch his new show on Musk’s X, which fails spectacularly, so then he launches a new streaming service. By July of 2024, The Tucker Carlson Show, for the first time, hits the #1 spot on Spotify podcasts, briefly ousting Joe Rogan. Conservative broadcast giant Nexstar Media Group—the largest owner of local TV stations in the US, right above Sinclair—announces its deal to acquire Tegna Inc. in August of 2025. Over time, like everything else in this post-competition capitalist hellhole of a country, local television stations have been gobbled up by conglomerates. “Despite a federal rule that restricts any one company from owning stations that reach 39 percent of all households,” David Dayen notes, “the Nexstar-Tegna merger would join together 265 stations in 44 states and raise that coverage to 80 percent.” 80 percent! Now, there is a glimmer of hope that the deal may be on the rocks after a federal judge halted it in court last month. But the halt is only temporary, and it could be overcome. While all of this is happening, Substack is exploding as a major new player in the increasingly hyper-fragmented, post-COVID, post-content-moderation media ecosystem. Now, Substack was founded in 2017, and its largest outside shareholder is Andreessen Horowitz, led by Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump donor and advisor Marc Andreessen. But in 2023, Substack really takes a warp-speed jump to becoming the player it is today by adding the Notes feature—effectively making it a new social media platform resembling the old Twitter—and by introducing new video creating and editing tools, enabling content creators to launch and host original shows on the platform. In January of this year, the company announced Substack TV, a standalone app for Apple TV and Google TV that will support videos and livestreams. That same month, January 2026, a deal finally closes that was set in motion in 2024 when then-President Biden signs a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in the US. This is Biden’s and the Democrats’ answer to the reality that a majority of the population is seeing Israel’s genocide in Gaza for what it is and seeing how Biden and the US are facilitating it: blame and take control of the platforms where they’re seeing it. So, now, a majority stake in TikTok’s US operations is owned by a “US-led” investor group, which includes the Ellisons, who “will ‘retrain, test, and update’ TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm on US user data.’” 2024 was a big year for them, too. The Ellison-led merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media is announced in July 2024. Paramount Skydance installs Bari Weiss as Editor in Chief of CBS in October of 2025. Just last month, Paramount Skydance and the Ellisons win the bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, after a failed buyout by Netflix. And, of course, amid all of this, there’s the giant elephant in the room of AI: The commercial phase of generative AI makes broad contact with the general public with the rollout of ChatGPT in November of 2022. AI generated or altered content starts visibly flooding social media feeds and YouTube, and permeating cable shows and TV commercials between 2023-2024. The rolling waves of layoffs related to AI (or layoffs that companies say are related to AI) start hitting around 2024-2025, and have continued to rise since. The scale-at-all-costs phase of AI—and the mutual dependence of Silicon Valley, the government, and the economy on it—reaches new heights in July of 2025, when President Trump signs Executive Order 14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” slashing regulatory and permitting hurdles and unleashing the rapid expansion of AI data centers around the country. For all the long-running historical dynamics and political, economic, and industry trends that are always also at play here—in media and journalism, in the United States, and in the world writ large—a lot has happened, or dramatically accelerated, in a really short amount of time. This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch, but it should be an illustrative one. And, of course, you can’t really get an accurate picture of the changing media ecosystem over the last 5-6 years without factoring in three key historical ruptures that occurred in this time, and that changed people’s perceptions and media consumption habits, for better and for worse. And these were ruptures, in part, because they were also profound media events: First there’s the war in Ukraine, which began for much of the outside world as a media event with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, but which erupted out of a history going back to the end of the Cold War. Then there’s the genocide in Gaza, which began for much of the outside world as a media event with the Hamas-led attacks on Israeli settlements on Oct. 7, 2023, but which erupted out of a history going back to 1948. Throughout this period, those of us witnessing these events from afar are being overwhelmed by the pain and death and crimes against humanity we’re seeing on our phones daily, but it’s also becoming more apparent in the media ecosystem where we’re seeing those things, where we’re not, and who wants to obscure the truth or keep it from being seen altogether. The virally visible double standards and Orwellian editorial doublespeek that are on display in how these events are being covered in the media and talked about by political leaders; the naked elevation of certain voices and suppression of all others to sustain the empire-serving, reductive, and often nakedly racist narratives of the US, NATO, and Israel; the outright free-for-all of lies; the censorship and criminalization of pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist speech; so many blatant, top-down attempts—from the US, from Israel, from corporate media—to hide or bend or muddle the full truth of what’s happening and why. All while people are being bombarded by innocence-destroying images of death and suffering for weeks and months and years, and as they are simultaneously seeking in independent media the perspectives, voices, context, and analysis they noticeably haven’t been getting in corporate media (which includes all of this year’s incredible Izzy Award winners, it includes us at The Real News and all of our Movement Media Alliance partners—Project Censored, Mondoweiss, Prism, Truthout, The Progressive, In These Times, and so many more). And if we’re just focusing on the media side of things for now, the point is these profound historical events have had profound effects on us and our world through media, they’ve had profound effects on the whole media ecosystem, and on how people are using media to find the truth about the world beyond their immediate physical-visible sphere. The other profound media event to account for is the 2024 presidential election, particularly when it comes to the impact of non-legacy media (and the Trump campaign’s deft use of it) on the election itself: podcasts, YouTube, Joe Rogan, the manosphere, the whole assemblage of contemporary rightwing media. To say nothing of all the other media-related events that shaped our very, very strange election—from Biden’s disastrous televised debate to the reality-splitting circus of lies and stipulations of no fact checking in subsequent debates, to the politics-as-spectacle era reaching dizzying new heights with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, 2024. All of that has to be factored in. [T]hose of us witnessing these events from afar are being overwhelmed by the pain and death and crimes against humanity we’re seeing on our phones daily, but it’s also becoming more apparent in the media ecosystem where we’re seeing those things, where we’re not, and who wants to obscure the truth or keep it from being seen altogether. And then, well, we enter the era of the spectacular, deadly, brain-numbing, neverending media event of the second Trump presidency. And that’s when you really start to see all this shit coming to a head. An authoritarian political regime of sociopaths, thieves, liars, and conmen, half of whom are creatures of corporate and rightwing media themselves who crawled out of their screenworlds, like the girl from The Ring, into the halls of power. A chaotic reality in which the Trump administration’s war on press freedom and the people’s right to know is happening simultaneously with a “flood-the-zone” policy blitz that is overwhelming us and our screen-glued brains with a daily bombardment of horror and stupidity and (good/bad/fake) information. A reality where the difference between politics and media spectacle has completely collapsed; where Trump tries to rule the world through his social media posts and dictate reality from his phone; where a former Fox News host is the Secretary of War and quoting fake Bible quotes from Pulp Fiction to justify real war crimes in a real-life war with Iran; where incredibly consequential policy decisions—from illegally invading and kidnapping the President of Venezuela to sending federal troops into American cities—are made according to the “logic” of a shitty 1980s action movie, and where the reality of what’s actually happening on the ground anywhere is profoundly muddled by fake news, AI slop, bots, scrambled timelines and search engines, platform suppression, etc.; where virtually all of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who own the media and control the means of communication and reality-perception are fully collaborating with the regime, sitting at Trump’s inauguration, in the White House, providing horrifying surveillance tech to the government, securing massive contracts for their companies, taking a chainsaw to government agencies and exposing our government data. I don’t need to tell you, but I will: This is a nightmare scenario, and the nightmare is here. It is not just press freedom: It’s the First Amendment itself—and all the basic freedoms that fall under that umbrella—that is under full-on attack. Regarding the current state of press freedom in America and the people’s right to know, none of what I’ve discussed so far can be disentangled from the simultaneous authoritarian attacks on the free speech of students and professors on college campuses, as well as teachers and librarians at K-12 schools—attacks coming from the federal government, certain state governments, and from criminally complicit administrators who are throwing the very people and constitutional principles they’re supposed to protect into the woodchipper. None of this can be disentangled from the federal attacks on the labor movement—from charges filed against union leaders like David Huerta to bullets fired into union members like Alex Pretti, to Trump firing or stripping union bargaining rights from millions of federal workers and crippling the National Labor Relations Board. None of this can be disentangled from the firings and investigations into people for posting online after events like the assassination of Charlie Kirk; from the federal machinations to use Big Tech to surveil and police all of us, to centralize and expose all our sensitive data, to try to create a national registry of voter information, and try to criminalize our constitutionally protected speech, posts, and protests by redefining them as “terrorism”; from politically weaponized lawsuits, investigations, and threats to use the vicious might of the federal government and the prison-industrial complex against nonprofits and activists and more. It is not just press freedom: It’s the First Amendment itself—and all the basic freedoms that fall under that umbrella—that is under full-on attack. And none of this has even yet touched on the greatest crime against press freedom and the people’s right to know, which we continue to bear witness to to this day. The crime of our journalist colleagues and comrades who are fulfilling their sacred duty to help us get the truth out of places like Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and who are being murdered in cold blood for it. We’ve never seen anything in our lifetimes like the mass slaughter and targeting of journalists that’s happened around the world over the past 4 years, with Israel being by far the worst offender, murdering hundreds of journalists and media workers with the full financial and political support of our country. I am sickened and shattered that humanity has allowed this to happen. Yet I am eternally, mournfully grateful for our brothers, sisters, and siblings who have made the ultimate sacrifice, in pursuit of the ultimate good, and with the ultimate hope that the horrifying realities they’ve documented would be seen and not forgotten. I am honored to be here with all of you keeping that fire burning and carrying on this noble and necessary mission for truth at all costs. I am fueled by it, and I am here, like you, to fight for it. As I already said, you don’t need me telling you how bad things have gotten out there, and how much worse they’re getting month after month. All you need to do is open your eyes and see for yourself. But in the Year of Our Lord 2026, even that most basic of existential needs—to see and know the world we’re living in—is under direct assault, with disastrous individual and societal consequences. And that’s really what I came here to talk to you about today… We are seeing and experiencing these changes at the same time that they are changing how we see and experience things. Again, many of these great, terrible, and swift changes to our media ecosystem and our political reality have unfolded in a relatively short amount of time, in pretty rapid succession. We have experienced these changes as average people in the world, as media users and consumers, and we’re navigating them as best we can as professional journalists and media makers, all while life continues to get harder, scarier, more expensive, and the conditions for making a good living are increasingly precarious or nonexistent for most people. We are seeing and experiencing these changes at the same time that they are changing how we see and experience things, all while the world spins madly into chaos, war, fear, neo-feudal wealth inequality, and industrial-scale violence, and while our cyborg brains are being cooked from too much news, too much content, too much awfulness, too little IRL contact with other people, and a rapidly decreasing ability to individually and collectively discern what’s real. But I am here to stress that this generalized existential state we’ve entered in the 2020s is not a byproduct of neutral technological advancements or big industry changes that have simply happened around us. They are effects of a war being fought against us—a war that we are currently losing. It is a war on our eyes, on our minds, and on our human faculties, developed over millenia, to understand the world we inhabit and to figure out what is true and what is not. We are not just increasingly exhausted and discombobulated because more awful shit is happening in faster succession in our country, in the world, in the news cycle, and because we are seeing more of that awful shit on a daily basis across a media ecosystem that permeates more of our lives than ever before. That is part of the reason, for sure. Humans have undergone a compressed evolution in the digital age unlike anything in our species’ history, and for all the good it’s done, it has also, frankly, fried our brains, frayed our hearts, and immobilized the parts of us and the organs of our being that turn information into action, reducing them and us to pure consumers, scrollers, clickers, and red-eyed observers. [T]his generalized existential state we’ve entered in the 2020s is not a byproduct of neutral technological advancements or big industry changes that have simply happened around us. They are effects of a war being fought against us—a war that we are currently losing. But it is not an unrelated accident that this is all happening to us while we careen towards civilizational oblivion. We are cooking our planet at a blinding pace and life is dying off en masse all around us, war and genocide and imperialist plunder are ripping our world and our people apart, the maga-rich are speedrunning our society to collapse and pillaging everything they can like Earth is having a going-out-of-business sale. We have descended quickly into what sisters Astra Taylor and Noami Klein rightly call “end-times fascism.” The levers of power are controlled by a ghoulish death cult of sociopathic billionaire oligarchs, war hawks, bigoted misanthropes, religious fanatics, and monstrous pedophile cabals who have given up on this world and the very notion that we can have a society that works for everyone, opting instead for a future that only works for them. It is not an unrelated accident that the richest, most powerful, and most sociopathic people in the world—from Trump to Musk to Bezos, are gobbling up and taking control of our media ecosystem while they’re gobbling up everything else. This is a class war happening on two fronts: A war in reality, and a war on reality and our capacity to perceive it. And it’s high time we all start seeing and responding to all of this in the terms of a war that we are not just reporting on but on the frontlines of. As journalists and media makers, we are trained to focus on one side of this war. You could say that I and everyone at The Real News Network are class-war correspondents, reporting around the US and around the world from the front lines of the ruling-class assault on working people’s lives, our health, our communities, our freedom, our democracy, our planet, and on life itself. But you cannot do this work today and not also realize that the very people, governments, and capitalist entities whose crimes we’re trying to report on are waging an all-out effort to demolish the very cognitive and societal foundations of our human abilities to see and know and remember the truth, to speak the truth and be heard, to trust what our eyes are seeing as truth. To be clear: “All governments lie,” as Izzy Stone famously said, and power lying to us is not new. Oligarchs controlling the media and bending and warping the truth for their own ends is not new. What is new about what we face today is the scope and scale of the ability of society’s powerbrokers and power-wielders to collaboratively seize the means of communication and reality-perception and to attack our minds to the point that we have no idea what is true. It is not an unrelated accident that the richest, most powerful, and most sociopathic people in the world—from Trump to Musk to Bezos—are gobbling up and taking control of our media ecosystem while they’re gobbling up everything else. I say this not to depress you, not to overwhelm you, but to motivate you. The fate of journalism itself has never been more precarious, but the need for truth, truth telling, and defenders of truth has never been more clear. This is real Lord of the Rings shit: it’s light versus darkness, truth versus lies, people versus profit and the profiteers; it’s a future in which we’ve collectively chosen to reclaim our reality, preserve the power of truth, and rebuild a better, truer democracy versus the future we’ll get if we don’t. There is no neutral territory here, no safe harbor, no sidelines to stand on. The class wars in reality and on reality are accelerating, the ruling class is winning, and the disastrous effects concern all of us, our future, and everything we hold dear. It’s time we start acting like this is the case, and stop operating under the daily delusion that we can keep doing our work like normal and all of this will go away like a bad dream, that we can somehow remain “objective” and evade getting sucked into a war that’s already changing us and everything around us. In closing, my message to all of you—to my journalist colleagues, to our students and future journalists—is this: We are not just doing a job here, and you are not just preparing for a career; we are, all of us, soldiers on the front lines of a war that is already being fought against us, our profession, and our ability to see and discern what’s real. So let’s start acting like it! Don’t just see press freedom and the people’s right to know as things that are under attack and must be defended, but wear them as armor and hold them high like flags in an offensive charge to defeat these lying, reality-warping, planet-gobbling psychopaths and hold them accountable for their crimes. This is a class war happening on two fronts: A war in reality, and a war on reality and our capacity to perceive it. And it’s high time we all start seeing and responding to all of this in the terms of a war that we are not just reporting on but on the frontlines of. Our journalistic ability to find and tell the truth is only half the battle; the other half is fighting, adapting, and moving strategically to get people to see the truth and to make truth mean something in a world where the richest and most powerful are doing everything they can to dilute the power of truth and inoculate themselves from it. Don’t let them get away with it! Don’t let them win! Use media and journalism as weapons to fight back. Accept that, in 2026, to be a journalist is not simply to be a documenter and teller of truths, but to be an activist for truth as such. Be better at telling the truth than they are at selling lies. Be rigorous and ferociously committed to the truth, but be creative, too, and be cunning, be collaborative, be persistent. Use every tool at your disposal to make reality undeniable and make resistance to unreality irresistible. And recognize that media can only do so much to make that happen: We must use media to do the most good we can with media, but independent media can and must also play a role in catalyzing or facilitating immediate, in-person connection and grounding people in a shared, agreed-upon reality. No politics, no grassroots movements, can survive without that. With all of our skills, tools, platforms, and networks, those of us in independent media must be a critical rebel force, fighting in a digital and analog battlefield not just for the truth, but for our very ability to see and know and remember and act. Really, when it comes down to it, the fact is that we’re fighting for the very mindful faculties that make us human against the inhumane designs and insatiable desires of those who would reduce us to mindless cattle—and who are reducing our world to rubble. They must be stopped, and we must beat them. Not just our profession, but our future depends on it. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and the battle lines couldn’t be clearer. I know which side I’m on. Do you? From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.

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Meet Myriam Bregman, the Revolutionary  Congresswoman in Argentina More Popular Than Milei

In the land of Javier Milei, who is the most popular political figure among Argentineans? Who is considered the main opponent of the far-right government? Myriam Bregman, a human rights lawyer, congresswoman, and leading figure of the Left and Workers’ Front — Unity (FIT-U), the electoral coalition of the revolutionary Left. This marks a significant development in an Argentina that appeared to be tending toward authoritarian, ultra-neoliberal, and reactionary politics. Yet a major challenge lies ahead in transforming this situation into an organized political force … and in turning the tables. And the Winner Is … The news has been making waves in Argentina in recent weeks. On TV stations, in newsrooms, and on the streets, it’s no longer Milei’s TikTok videos that people are debating, nor the content spread by his influencers on social media. What had been looming for some time is now official, confirmed by several opinion polls: Myriam Bregman, a leading figure in the Left and Workers’ Front – Unity (FIT-U) and a member of the leadership of the Party of Socialist Workers — a sister organization of Left Voice — is now recognized as Argentineans’ favorite political figure. We are familiar with debates over the reliability of polls, but in this case, several surveys — conducted by Tendencias, Opina Argentina, and Atlas Intel — corroborate this trend and confirm that it is here to stay. These results are causing panic in political circles, both within the government and among the Peronists. For instance, Atlas Intel’s survey conducted on the eve of May 1 places Bregman at the top of the list of the country’s most popular political figures, with a 47 percent positive rating, just ahead of Axel Kicillof, the current Peronist governor of the province of Buenos Aires (46 percent), and former Justicialist president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (41 percent), who is under house arrest following her corruption conviction. Although Kicillof and Kirchner are currently at odds, both are on the left of the Argentinean political spectrum. Kicillof is considered the Peronists’ main hope for the 2027 presidential elections. Even more significantly, Bregman is well ahead of President Milei, who trails far behind, in fifth place, with only 36 percent approval and 62 percent disapproval. This is quite a feat for the man who won the 2022 presidential election with 55 percent of the vote in the second round, intending to “shake up” the Argentinean political landscape. He even managed — against all odds, and with a helping hand from the White House — to gain ground at the polls during the last midterm elections. In other good news, Milei’s decline in popularity is also affecting most of the figures in the far-right coalition currently in power. This sympathy for the Trotskyist congresswoman does not automatically translate into voting intentions. This arena is far from what revolutionaries consider key to transforming society. But if we use it as a barometer, the Trotskyists’ gains are undeniable. According to leading Argentinean polling firms, if Bregman were to head the FIT-U presidential ticket — as she did in the 2023 elections, where she finished fifth with 2.7 percent (720,000 votes) — she is projected to come in third, surpassing her previous result. Tendencias even projected that she could receive 11.4 percent of the vote, and as high as 13.8 percent in a survey conducted by the Hugo Haime Institute. This situation is indeed unique, bringing both hope and challenges. It is quite unprecedented, even for a country like Argentina, where the revolutionary Left has historically had a stronger political and electoral presence than elsewhere, dating back to the era of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) in the 1980s. Political instability, the Crisis of the Far Right, and the Weaknesses of Peronism The “Bregman phenomenon” didn’t come out of nowhere. “La Rusa” — as her supporters affectionately call her — has been in the national political spotlight for some time. Even during the presidential campaign, she was recognized as the one who stood up to Milei most firmly, particularly during the debate before the first round. The far-right candidate, who presented himself as a lionhearted, disruptive, anti-establishment rock star, was sent reeling by the Trotskyist candidate, who compared him to a “cuddly little kitten” (gatito mimoso) under the thumb of U.S. imperialism and big business. This phrase resonated and significantly tarnished Milei’s image even before his victory. The power Milei displayed at the start of his term primarily stemmed from the weakness of Peronism, which had been discredited — both figuratively and literally — following the presidency of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner, leaving the country in the grip of runaway inflation. This is precisely what Milei capitalized on to win: the promise to crush double-digit inflation — which had plunged millions of Argentineans into poverty — in exchange for a shock therapy regimen, ostensibly “libertarian” but in reality very classically (and violently) neoliberal. Over the past two years, Argentineans have experienced the second phase of Milei’s program, as inflation, poverty, and real unemployment remain extremely high. Job losses, business closures, budget cuts, and freezes on public sector wages and retirees’ pensions have heavily affected the situation — not to mention the labor market counter-reform tailored for employers. The living conditions for the vast majority of Argentineans have worsened over the past few months. At the same time, Milei, who claimed to be putting an end to “the caste” (i.e., the political class), has found himself embroiled in a series of scandals involving cryptocurrencies, corruption, influence peddling, and the escapades of his chief of staff, Manuel Adorni, known as “Hondurasgate,” which involves collusion with Trump, Netanyahu, and drug trafficking. As a result, the government’s position is becoming increasingly precarious. Milei is “holding on” thanks to his external supporters — foremost among them, Trump — and the weakness of the Peronist institutional opposition, which exists merely in name. In fact, the latter refuses to confront the government and has instead opted for compromise and collaboration. Some Peronist leaders align with Milei’s choices, dictated by the International Monetary Fund, while their bureaucracies, which manage the main union structures, systematically hinder the development of a genuine plan to oppose the government, despite calls for isolated and fragmented general strike days. In some cases, entire sectors of Peronism have supported or joined Milei, including the former Kirchnerist presidential candidate Daniel Scioli, who is now close to the government. For those who intend to oppose Milei — like Kiciloff, Cristina Kirchner’s former heir apparent — the top priority is to seek unity within the Peronist movement, even at the cost of greater moderation in preparation for the upcoming elections. Just a “Bregman Moment”? In this political landscape, the FIT-U stands out as the only meaningful opposition to the government and its underhanded tactics. In the legislature, while the Far Right has revealed its true colors by voting to freeze pensions and benefits for retirees and people with disabilities, the FIT-U is the only bloc that has neither voted for nor supported any of the bills introduced by the president’s supporters. The latter, on the other hand, have repeatedly relied on full or partial support from opposition deputies and senators. Moreover, as Argentineans have witnessed the Peronist camp’s crackup, as governors and deputies defect to join Milei — a classic occurrence in the country’s politics — the FIT-U parliamentary bloc is the only one to have maintained its cohesion. This has resonated with the public. On the chamber floor, in the face of the Far Right’s systematic alignment with Washington’s foreign policy, support for genocide in Palestine, backing for Netanyahu, rallying behind aggression against Venezuela, and endorsing Washington’s military threats against Havana, the FIT-U has distinguished itself through its consistent opposition to Milei’s pro-imperialist stance — demonstrating, in practice, what the “nationalism” of the Argentinean Right truly represents. But the rise of Bregman and the FIT-U cannot be attributed solely to the actions of far-left representatives in Congress or within provincial and local bodies that Trotskyists entered during the last elections. In the arena of social and labor struggles — most recently in the auto industry, against the closure of FATE, and alongside retirees — in environmental battles against extractivism and agribusiness, in the women’s and LGBTQ+ movements, and among students defending public universities or honoring the memory of the struggles of the 1970s, as well as opposing the denial of state-sanctioned genocide and attempts to rehabilitate the last dictatorship — Bregman and her comrades have gained visibility by participating in these mobilizations, in which FIT-U militants are also involved. It was primarily in the streets, neighborhoods, and places of study and work — settings for protests, sometimes massive in scale, such as student demonstrations and the events of March 24 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1976 coup — that the revolutionary Left solidified its image as the only significant opposition to the Far Right and the business establishment. It has also succeeded in gaining ground among new sectors of the working world and the working classes — who, having broken with Peronism, have grown wary of the “libertarian” promises of Milei — even though, for the time being, this situation has not led to widespread confrontation in response to the government’s extremely harsh attacks. A testament to this political momentum was the large rally organized by the PTS on May 1 at the Ferro Indoor Stadium in Buenos Aires. Thousands of workers, students, retirees, and social movement activists participated in the event alongside Bregman and Nicolás del Caño, as well as delegations from France, Brazil, and Chile, among others. On this occasion, “La Rusa” issued a new challenge: not merely to organize resistance against Milei and his ilk, but — precisely to organize this resistance — to build a party of the working class and the world of labor. Building a Mass Workers’ Party: The Challenges for Trotskyists in Argentina and Elsewhere Argentina’s workers are facing the crisis of the far-right government, which has neither relented in its offensive nor abandoned its authoritarian and reactionary agenda. Meanwhile, Peronism, which many workers once supported, is disoriented and cannot and will not embody a genuine opposition, much less an alternative. As a result, significant sectors of the working class are now rejecting or distancing themselves from both Milei and Peronism. This situation poses new challenges and calls for a renewed commitment: to transform this support and sympathy for revolutionary ideas — for the positions defended by Trotskyists in struggles and mobilizations — into a tool capable of confronting Argentinean capital, multinational corporations, and their imperialist backers, starting with the Trump administration. Further, we must commit to offering a perspective of hope to the working classes and the youth, one that can exert a lasting influence in the class struggle. Myriam Bregman, flanked on her left by Nicolas del Caño and on her right by Alejandro Vilca, both leaders of the Socialist Workers’ Party. For Bregman, the issue extends beyond merely organizing a genuine plan of action and a general strike — one that cannot be reduced to the isolated days of mobilization initiated over the past two years by Peronist union leaderships, which officially aim to pressure the government but ultimately serve to alleviate social pressure. It is on the political front that those disillusioned with Milei, who will never return to Peronism, must organize, as workers, around a program of class independence, specifically that of the FIT-U, with the goal of establishing a government representing the working world and the popular classes. This call is primarily directed at the organizations that make up the FIT-U, particularly the MST, PO, and IS, and has ignited several heated debates that can be followed on the websites of various FIT-U member parties. It also targets those who have joined the ranks of the revolutionaries during recent mobilizations, participated in strikes, stood on picket lines, and wish to confront Milei without reinstating Peronism. In a country like Argentina, with its Trotskyist tradition, where the revolutionary Left plays a significant role in social struggles, the goal must be to overcome current organizational fragmentation and limited electoral unity in order to meet the challenges facing the Far Left. As Bregman said at the this year’s May Day rally, the goal is “to be thousands in order to organize millions.” In the current Argentinean context, this formula is far from abstract. If this challenge is met, it could help transform the situation — and not just in Argentina. The current dynamics of the Far Left in Argentina — centered around Bregman and the PTS — offer valuable lessons at the regional level and for the revolutionary movement as a whole. Beyond the specific factors characterizing the instability of the Argentinean situation and the crisis of the far-right government, it raises several questions. This dynamic illustrates that the “strength” of the Far Right is always directly or strongly correlated with the weakness of its opposition — whether social democratic, progressive, or left wing — and is incapable of presenting an alternative for the working world and the working classes as radical as the one the Far Right offers in favor of employers and the powerful, regardless of its populist postures designed to obscure these realities. Furthermore, this dynamic demonstrates that it is possible to engage with and intervene in all struggles led by the working class, the working-class population, and young people, without segmenting them or pitting them against one another. The central focus of political intervention should be to mobilize the world of work as a fundamental lever for transforming the parameters of the situation. This dynamic illustrates how revolutionaries can and must address the youth, the most precarious, and the fragmented and fractured “new working class” — which is racialized and stigmatized — with a program of class independence and revolutionary mobilization. This dynamic presents a challenge that can be met: to commit to a Far Left that neither withdraws into itself, clinging to an “orthodoxy” that offers no protection against opportunism, nor constantly seeks shortcuts to broadly reach the working class. It illustrates that the revolutionary Left is not doomed to folkloric marginality or to adapting to the “Left of the possible,” which ultimately leads to powerlessness and dead ends. In the U.S., the current dynamics in Argentina should serve as a source of reflection — not for blind replication or imitation, but to consider our differences, our common ground, and the tasks that should unite us in overthrowing the bosses. This article was originally published in French at Revolution Pèrmanent Translated and edited by Stacey Bear for a U.S. audience The post Meet Myriam Bregman, the Revolutionary Congresswoman in Argentina More Popular Than Milei appeared first on Left Voice. From Left Voice via This RSS Feed.

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TikTok are allegedly censoring complaints about data centers

A girl is claiming her TikTok videos were banned and her account was threatened with deletion for talking about Georgia homeowners being forced to sell their homes to make way for power lines to support data centers.

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How Hasbara speaks in Indonesia – Part I: The Evangelical Narrative: A Cracked Mirror of the West.

Usman Harun The Republic of Indonesia is made up of thousands of Islands, speaking hundreds of languages, with its people numbering in the hundreds of millions. Indonesia’s large population, its unique archipelagic landscape, and the sheer diversity of its people may become its strength, as it appears that a single narrative is insufficient to convince the population to agree with the Israeli Occupation’s genocidal narrative. Hasbara is a Hebrew word translated variously as “explanation,” “interpretation,” and “propaganda.” In essence, it is propaganda intended to wash out the reputation of the Zionist entity, and especially their armed forces, the so-called “Israel Defense Forces”. One may think that in a Muslim-majority country with rising digital literacy levels and high internet penetration rates, such as Indonesia, it would appear unlikely for Zionist propaganda to penetrate the masses. However, the reality is, as always, more nuanced and complex to say the least. This series of articles will explore the various ways Zionist propaganda tries to convince various demographics of Indonesia to bend to its will. Indonesia is known to most of the world as having one of the largest populations of Muslims worldwide. However, it is less well known that it also has among the highest populations of evangelicals in Southeast Asia. Christians make up roughly 10-11% of the Indonesian population, with a high proportion being Protestant. Roughly 15 million people in Indonesia are estimated to belong to the various evangelical churches, with their population mostly centered on several localized ethnicities through ethnic churches with various networks. To the evangelicals, the message of Hasbara is not so far different from what is fed to Western Christians. They claim that the Israeli Occupation is the same as the one in the Bible, and that the land is promised to the Jews by divine will. Zionist evangelicals often have their ideas spread through so-called religious pilgrimages to the occupied territories, which are unfortunately facilitated widely in the tourism industry of Indonesia in forms such as “Holy Land tours”. Zionist churches in Indonesia often have direct ties with their counterparts in the United States. Political and economic lobby groups in the United States likewise often have their ties stemming from this very same connection. Just as in the United States, Evangelicals outnumber Jews, both in the general population and when comparing the proportion of Evangelical and Jewish Zionists. Among the famous evangelicals in support of Zionism is Monique Rijkers, an individual who has a long history of Zionist activism, who, not too long ago, attended the so-called Christian Media Summit in Jerusalem, hosted by the Israeli Occupation government and the US-based “International Fellowship of Christians and Jews”. Monique Rijkers had proposed relocating Palestinians from Gaza to Indonesia to form a 35th province named “Gaza”, which was ironically somewhat entertained by the Indonesian government in the form of a refugee island in the Riau Islands province, in accordance with the same initiative with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The narrative brought by evangelicals often extends to the ethnic sphere. Aside from believing that the Jews were a so-called “chosen people”, Monique Rijkers also claims that the Batak people of Sumatra are “the same” as the Israelites in the mentality of migrating and adapting. There is also this increasingly unhinged conspiracy theory claiming that the Batak people are one of the lost tribes of Israel, similar to the case of the so-called Hebrew Israelites in the United States. One stark difference, however, is that unlike in the case of the Hebrew Israelites, the Batak people, who claim they are “Israeli” descendants, vehemently support the so-called “State of Israel.” Monique Rijkers Batak Zionists such as Flemming Pangabean have also lived in occupied Palestine and promoted Indonesian work and travel to the occupied territories. The Arava International Center of Agriculture Training in Negevhas actively recruited people from the Tapanuli, Siantar, Dairi, Simalungun, Karo, Tobasa, Samosir, and Sidikalang regionsto enroll in their university, despite a lack of diplomatic recognition. North Sulawesi, the place where Indonesia’s Jewish community is known to come from, is also infested by some of Indonesia’s most Zionist evangelicals. The Gereja Masihi Injili di Minahasa (GMIM) church openly flies the Israeli flag in their marches. In Manado, the so-called saying “blessed are those who bless Israel, and cursed are those who curse Israel” remains popular. This is to the extent that we see people having funerals being draped in Israeli Occupation flags. The Occupation flag, though illegal to fly under ministerial regulation, is often displayed alongside the Indonesian and US flags in the province. In 2023, a peaceful Palestinian rally was violently attacked by Zionist mobs in Bitung, North Sulawesi. The resulting clashes caused the death of one individual and serious injuries to another. Unsurprisingly, the clashes were very sectarian, with muslims on the pro-Palestinian side and evangelicals on the Zionist side. It was this civil conflict that caused the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to reiterate its ban on the Israeli Occupation’s flag. In North Sulawesi, Zionist sentiment is often also tied with pro-Americanism and Minahasa separatist sentiment. In Papua, the entire provincial government had declared support for Israeli recognition and diplomatic ties. Henry Dosinaen, past regional secretary for Papua, believed that the Israeli Occupation is a religiously tolerant multicultural state, and wishes to spread this tolerance of the Zionist entity to Indonesia. In 2022, the International University of Papua claimed that they are ready to cooperate with Ariel University, a university located in an illegal Zionist settlement in the West Bank of Palestine. This is despite the lack of diplomatic relations between Indonesia and the Zionist entity, and despite Ariel University being subject to various academic boycotts due to its blatant illegal location and its normalization of Zionist settlement. Samuel Tabuni, founder of the International University of Papua, was said to be inspired by Agus Suherman, an Indonesian businessman who had previously sent Indonesian agricultural students to study in the Arava International Center of Agriculture Training (AICAT) in Negev. Tabuni had already signed a memorandum with Ariel University’s international relations head, without any comment from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2025, a Papuan contestant to the Miss Indonesia pageant, Merince Kogoya, was disqualified due to openly having pro-Occupation views and openly waving the Israeli flag. Papuan and Manadonese netizens quickly defended Merince, and Merince herself was very defensive on the topic. Her religious movement “Sion kids” defended her flag raising as being religious, as they are part of a Protestant sect called “Messianic Judaism”, which, although it consists mainly of Jewish people who accept Jesus (Prophet Isa [as]) as messiah, still openly collaborates and defends the Zionist entity “State of Israel”. In 2023, the Papuan regional government funded 51 people, including state employees, for a “pilgrimage to Israel”. In 2024, the number of “pilgrims” funded by the state budget increased to 83. The tide of Zionism within the Indonesian evangelical community is not entirely unopposed, however. There are indeed many Protestants in Indonesia who openly reject Zionism and accept the stance of the Republic of Indonesia, which is not to recognize the so-called “State of Israel”, and thus to oppose conflating the modern Zionist entity with the biblical subject. The Indonesian Bethel Church (GBI) mentions in detail about the “relations of the church and Israel” in article 10 of their book of statements, that theologically, the “Israeli” people are no longer “the chosen people”, as they believe God has now chosen the church. The Bethel Church also states that the modern “State of Israel” has no special relation with the Church and sees the matter in the framework of international relations rather than religion. They have also denied that Holy Land pilgrimages are religious. The Communion of Churches in Indonesia (PGI) has, in the past, denied the legitimacy of Trump’s move to recognize Jerusalem (Al Quds) back in 2017 as the capital of the “State of Israel”. Although the PGI regrettably mentions the Zionist occupation as an “Israel-Hamas conflict” in their 2023 statement, they have also condemned the US-Israeli attack on Iran in 2026. The socialization of the reality of the occupation, the fate of the Palestinian Christians, and the factual difference between the so-called “State of Israel” and the biblical subject, as also believed by many Jews, is something that is impeccably needed in the theological discourse of the Indonesian church. Truth and factual clarity regarding Palestine and the plight of Palestinian Christians are desperately needed to be understood, as opposed to myths and conspiracies which Zionists rely on to spread their message of hate and occupation to Indonesian Christians. Seeing the severity of bigoted views of evangelical Zionists in Indonesia, dialogue between pro-Palestinian activists in Indonesia from various backgrounds with Indonesian Christians and evangelicals should be emphasized. A son of a famous Pastor known for having more Zionist-leaning stances made news when he broke ranks and decided to speak with the Palestinian ambassador, immediately asking what to do to help Palestine. Theological critique of Zionism is also desperately needed from a Christian perspective and should be added to the Indonesian mainstream discourse. Decisions from churches such as PGI and GBI should be made more known, and so should the various Christian movements in the world criticizing Zionism, such as the pro-Palestinian stances of some church clergy from the Dutch PKN Church, be shared more in the discourse. The Zionist occupation must stop being conflated with becoming a religious conflict between Islam and Christianity. If Indonesian national media understood enough about the horrible crimes of Zionism, then the least they can do is to de-platform the Zionists and put them out of national TV and national media. As the hero Ghassan Kanafani said, there is no use in talking with those who put their knife to your neck. It would also be beneficial to track the influence of foreign Zionist churches and lobbies in Indonesia and to advocate for their boycott, both through organic mass efforts and political lobbying. Much is to be done within the evangelical Christian community to counter the tide of Zionist heresy among its believers, starting small, however little, would still have potential to bring a glimmer of light in the dark sky. Usman Harun is a lifelong Indonesian patriot, a born and practicing Muslim but “with his entire nation in mind.” From Vox Ummah via This RSS Feed.

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Historic.ly thread on British "historian" Simon Sebag Montefiore

[2022-01-04] @[email protected]: Right now, I have far more evidence that Simon Montefiore had certain indiscretions than anyone he accused. For example: He was found in Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book. [2022-01-04] @[email protected]: lol IIRC Montefiore is the source of the “Stalin rаped a child while in exile in Siberia” claim and absolutely NOT the source of anything explaining how or why there was a child in a Siberian work camp. [2022-01-04] @[email protected]: Some libertarian nerd on Tiktok said something wrong about Stalin. He cited a silly book. Usually, this is how I read western historians. I first go to the bibliography. Selected bibliography is already suspicious for me. [part of a thread] [2] He also celebrated Ghaddafi getting brutally raped and murdered. [3] What a despicable man! [4] Disgusting. He seems to be really enjoying watching that brutal murder. [5] Look who is at @simonmontefiore book launch! [6] LOL! @simonmontefiore comes in defense of Prince Andrew and calls him the real victim in 1992. [7] Well, well, here is another strange connection. Koo Stark used to be @simonmontefiore girlfriend [8] He also called Corbyn evil. Right for the WRONG reasons haha [9] And he is racist to boot! How can you not hate all that slavery, colonialism and genocide? It’s always funny how much hate the loyal social imperialists like Corbyn and Mamdani get from these people. They’ve already been hammered into place, you bald dolt!

Komunitas lemy.nl

Advocaat van TikTok en Meta wordt voorzitter privacywaakhond AP

Geert Potjewijd wordt per 1 augustus van dit jaar de nieuwe bestuursvoorzitter van de Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP). De voormalig advocaat van onder meer TikTok volgt daarmee Aleid Wolfsen op, die na twee termijnen vertrekt bij AP. Hij heeft de functie tien jaar gehad. De AP is de […]