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Gaza flotilla boats get their resilience from Palestinians.
Gaza flotilla boats have become like Palestinians. They, like Palestinians, have been attacked, beaten, partially destroyed, and thrown to the four winds by a brutal, violent Israeli government.
Some of the 2026 Gaza flotilla boats were purposefully damaged so severely by Israeli military forces that they sank, like Palestinians who are under the genocidal rubble of endless criminal Israeli bombings.
After two brutal interceptions in international waters in April and May 2026, many resilient Gaza flotilla boats have been found floating in a variety of places around the Mediterranean, just as Palestinians as refugees are found all over the world.
Flotilla boats been found adrift off the Turkish coast, some have been found off Crete, two have been found off Lebanon, one in Egypt, and several have been found near Cyprus.
In an allegory to Palestinian history with Palestinian homes bombed into pieces from Israeli government violence, one flotilla boat, the KASR-Sadabad, found its way home to Gaza where it washed ashore at the beach Mawasi Khan Younis… in pieces, where Palestinians lovingly welcomed the boat and pulled large pieces ashore.
For the first time since 2008, an international boat, although in pieces, reached the shores of Gaza.
In declaring contemporary social movements and the people who support them anti-American, Fox News is essentially designating the majority of Americans as official enemies under Trump's NSPM-7.
One of the secret strengths of right-wing propagandists is their ability to say a few words that are so wrong on so many levels that they take an essay to untwist. Case in point: a recent Fox News post on Facebook. Summarizing a longer article on contemporary political movements, the post reads in full:
Anti-Israel agitators. Climate activists. Communist groups.
Experts warn a growing activist network united by anti-American sentiment—and in some cases China-linked funding networks—is now targeting America’s AI infrastructure and industrial power.
Fox News Digital found many of the same movements protesting side-by-side across the country, including groups opposing new AI data centers over energy and environmental concerns.
“What all of these protests have in common… is that anti-American trend within them,” Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua told Fox News Digital.
While disguised as serious findings from a scholarly exposé about subversive trends in America, the article mostly just lumps together all the usual enemies of corporate, far-right interests and labels them all “anti-American.” Even as pure propaganda, it’s unsubtle and uncreative.
But with the Trump administration’s recent issuance of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7)—a sweeping memo that tries to connect beliefs like these to terrorism and calls upon law enforcement to treat them accordingly—such propaganda now carries more sinister implications.
What unites them is that they are enemies of one aspect or another of the fascist techno-petro-state the Trump administration is attempting to cement. And they all have very real, very valid reasons to hold their positions.
Taken together, the groups in question make up a significant majority of the American population. What unites them is not anti-American sentiment. What unites them is that they are enemies of one aspect or another of the fascist techno-petro-state the Trump administration is attempting to cement. And they all have very real, very valid reasons to hold their positions.
Labeling critics of US-Israeli policy “anti-Israel agitators” is meant to dismiss them as irrational, antisemitic extremists—and, according to Fox News, anti-American. While there’s no room in this article to litigate the issue of Israel-Palestine, suffice it to say the reality is far more complex.
Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza over the last two and a half years, combined with decades of abuse of Palestinians leading up to the terror attacks of October 7, has made them a global pariah. Making matters worse, the US government has given billions of dollars to fund that genocide and provided bipartisan diplomatic cover for it. In addition, many believe—because Trump administration officials have suggested as much—that Israel goaded President Donald Trump into our unpopular, costly, disastrous war with Iran.
All this adds up to a steadily worsening public perception of Israel, with 60% of US adults now having an unfavorable view, according to Pew. Which begs the question: Can 60% of Americans be anti-American?
Perennial foes of the big business interests Fox News and the Republican Party represent, neither climate activists nor communists, sadly, have a significant presence in contemporary American politics. But Fox News would never miss an opportunity to put such scary words in front of their audience.
The idea here, to the extent that there is one, is that concern for the climate limits our energy and defensive options, weakening us as our biggest rival, China, is ascendent. Of course there are ulterior motives. One of the biggest goals of the right-wing project is to simply shut down all green energy, as President Trump essentially did in 2025, so that he and the oil tycoons who prop him up can benefit.
There’s nothing anti-American about wanting clean or renewable energy. The Constitution doesn’t mandate that we be a petrostate. It’s also largely agnostic on the question of economic organization. Labeling environmentalism or leftist economic beliefs anti-American is an attempt to shut down the debate before it can happen—lest the American people choose a path that inconveniences the mega rich who are harming the environment and hoarding all the money.
Tech oligarchs and corporate pundits repeatedly insist that America needs to win the AI race against China, virtually no matter the cost. But the American people are not yet on board. According to Gallup, 70% of Americans oppose AI data center construction in their communities. And this is largely a bipartisan consensus, with Republicans being only slightly more supportive of data center construction.
Either way, sticking the anti-American label on data center opposition is a tough sell for Fox News. The environmental cost and resource drain of data centers is already impacting communities. At the same time, tech oligarchs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are frighteningly candid about how AI, which compiles our accumulated knowledge and then sells it back to us in the form of slop, is intended to permanently displace the workforce. There is no serious plan in place to support the millions of people they’re threatening to make unemployed.
No surprise, then, that the massive push for this technology is meeting resistance all over the country. Even in conservative states like Utah, not widely known as a hotbed for political activism, residents are demanding that Big Tech be held accountable for their reckless AI ambitions.
The full article throws together more scary bad guys: “Agitators united by Chinese money, hate for America target data centers… linking environmental, Islamist, and far-left political movements… Climate activists, anti-Israel protesters, and other activist movements with very different agendas have become strange bedfellows united by a shared disdain for America and funding from China.”
The accusation that any of these causes are backed by “Chinese money” is loose and largely unsubstantiated. The article names one accused funder, as if supporting causes was a crime in and of itself: Neville Roy Singham, an American expat who now lives in China. And the only justification that any of this is “anti-American” comes from vague warnings about falling behind China (which, by many metrics, we did long ago) and the fact that China dominates much of the green energy market—all the more reason, one would think, to invest in our own.
Guilt by association can be an effective propaganda technique, though. If Fox can connect all these disparate causes under the banner of anti-Americanism and Chinese subversion, they can encourage their audience to reject any sympathies they may be tempted to feel with such movements—in case they don’t want a data center in their county, say, or they see what’s been done to Gaza.
In declaring all these causes and the people who support them anti-American, Fox News is essentially designating the majority of Americans as official enemies under NSPM-7. According to NSPM-7, “anti-Americanism” is part of a cabal of threats, along with anti-capitalism; anti-Christianity; “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Each of these beliefs is now treated as an indicator of violent, terroristic inclinations. As such, falling under any such label carries with it the threat of surveillance, investigation, prosecution, and other potential law enforcement actions.
Exactly how, where, and when NSPM-7 has been or will be used is still tough to know. That’s part of what makes it so dangerous: The language is so sweeping that, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, it could target “pretty much anyone who isn’t a MAGA faithful.” The purpose here is to clearly define what a proper American ought to believe, to chill any dissent with that agenda, and to lay the groundwork for criminal investigations of any American who’s uncooperative.
As things continue to break down in this country, and as Trump continues to become more emboldened even as his approval rating tanks, it’s not hard to imagine him weaponizing his corrupt FBI to go after, say, a data center protest organizer. Actually, this may already be happening: leaked reports, covered extensively by Wired, claim that multiple US agencies are already monitoring what they call “anti-tech extremism.” Such so-called extremism apparently includes activities as banal as photography and other constitutionally protected activities.
It’s awfully bold of Fox News to declare the majority of Americans anti-American. Such is the potency of right-wing propaganda’s complete disregard for nuance, truth, or morality. To untangle the minds of the people who consume this stuff on a regular basis, and actually believe it, is a thoroughly challenging project that will likely take generations.
With politics as heated as they are right now, and so close to getting even further out of hand with directives like NSPM-7, it’s important to reiterate the obvious: Not only are environmental protection, support for Palestine, and anti-AI activism legitimate and well-reasoned, they’re also all perfectly American.
A new House Bill provision would arguably do more to intertwine the US military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the US since its founding in 1948.
At a time when the American public is expressing unprecedented levels of distrust in the Israeli government, Congress just proposed tying the US to the Israeli military more than ever before.
Buried in the House's version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” The provision would arguably do more to intertwine the US military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the US since its founding in 1948.
Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of US-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The US and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.
If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the US has with any other country in the world. To be sure, the US has worked closely with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan. And, as the No. 1 arms dealer in the world, the US provides weapons to militaries across the globe. But that is mostly a one-way street, with the US providing weapons to foreign buyers who only occasionally make parts for those weapons themselves, as in the case of the F-35’s global supply chain.
The enormous gulf between what most Americans want and what the president is doing when it comes to Israel and what Congress is proposing here should not be ignored.
Section 224 would be a different beast entirely. It would fuse the US and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber. It would also bring extraordinary Israeli influence to the US beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its robust network of social media influencers. It would give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in US politics: jobs in the US. By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on US soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie.
The result could well be a US political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the US into military conflicts in the Middle East.
This unprecedented level of US-Israeli military integration stands in stark contrast to the traditional aid model of defense cooperation, in which Israel already stood out as the top recipient of US military assistance. As laid out in a recent Quincy Institute brief, authored by Steven Simon, this shift from an aid model to a military integration model has troubling implications, namely:
The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.
This all comes at a time when the Israeli military has repeatedly used US weapons in strikes that have violated international humanitarian laws in Gaza, and as Israel has repeatedly violated ceasefires (as has the US itself) in the Trump administration’s unnecessary war with Iran.
The enormous gulf between what most Americans want and what the president is doing when it comes to Israel and what Congress is proposing here should not be ignored. Just 30% of respondents to a New York Times-Sienna poll from mid-May believe President Donald Trump made “the right decision” to go to war with Iran, with 64% saying it was wrong. An Institute for Global Affairs poll released earlier this week dove even deeper into the American psyche when it comes to arming Israel, finding that “just 16% say the United States should keep supplying Israel with weapons without new restrictions. Thirty-eight percent want to stop supplying weapons entirely, and another 24% want weapons conditioned on how they’re used.”
Yet, mainstream leadership in both parties remains largely pro-Israel and continues to shape the base legislative text before amendments and broader congressional debate open it to the full body, as is the case with this NDAA provision.
Though slowly, tides within both parties are shifting as more and more members speak out against the growing divide between Israel’s actions and America’s interests. For example, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday that, “the Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” On the Republican side of the aisle, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) have openly decried the Israel lobby’s corrosive influence—a stance that may have, at least partially, cost both of them their seats in Congress.
What can other members of Congress who are concerned about Israel’s destabilizing actions do right now? Stop the Israeli-US military-industrial merger in its tracks. Lawmakers should reject Section 224 from the NDAA to avoid deep integration with Israel's military at a time when a growing number of Americans oppose Israel's actions in the region.