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journalism
When Covering Trump, Pay More Attention to the Team Behind the Curtain
While we’re kept dizzy and disoriented by Trump's onslaught, a behind-the-scenes team, which consists of players like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the tech broletariat, are quietly busy with the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
May 06, 2026
I’m old enough to have been politically cognizant, admittedly less so for a couple of the earliest, of 13 presidents (14 if you count one of them twice). Through all of those decades and all of those administrations nothing comes close to the way the current regime takes up ALL THE AIR IN THE ROOM! In fact, dare I say, no one has ever seen anything like it. The fire hose is so voluminous, ubiquitous, and inescapable that it literally takes one’s breath away.
How is this gargantuan enterprise sustained? I have a theory that President Donald Trump (or whoever are the real masters puling the strings on the public puppet) has at least two teams at work constantly. One team is in charge of producing the daily (or hourly or minute-to-minute) outrage and distraction. This is the team that has given us the Gulf of America, the takeover of Greenland, the cancer-causing windmills, the never-ending toilet flushing and never-working showers, the fight with the pope, etc., and then the really crazy stuff like the current war.
While we’re kept dizzy and disoriented by this onslaught, the other team, which consists of players like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the tech broletariat, and other bastions of the oligarchic overlords, are quietly busy with the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Steve Bannon put it so aptly early on). At least those parts of the administrative state that serve the more general public interests. The parts that serve elite interests, however, like the military and their domestic adjuncts in the militarized police, the repressive courts and “justice” system, and the subservient elements of the media, are richly endowed and strengthened.
For just a moment, I’d like to dwell on the central role of the media (in its legacy and social forms) both in amplifying and downplaying the crazy as well as ignoring, minimizing, or trivializing the serious. Right now, both of these outcomes are accomplished through one certain mechanism, which I’ll name presently. One way that I try to keep up with the sometimes subtle changes in the inflections in the news cycle is by maintaining an evolving and revolving list of key words or phrases that become especially annoying, but through their (over)use capture an essential dominant characterization of events. Over the course of the past several months, and particularly at the height of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement invasions, the phrase du jour was “appears to contradict,” almost always in the circumstance of video footage putting the lie to the lies of administrative officials.
What might happen if serious journalists finally said enough is enough with the spectacle and distraction?
In a similar vein, and most often in the context of displaying the utter incompetence and buffoonery of administrative nominees or officials facing congressional “oversight,” we were repeatedly subjected to the slight variant phrase, “And he (or sometimes she) brought the receipts.” And finally, along these same lines, the now ubiquitous, “He (and again, sometimes she) said the quiet part out loud.”
What all of these anodyne formulations have in common is that they all highlight the crazy or horrendous without really calling them out explicitly. Which brings me to the current term of art, which because of its complete inadequacy is the most dangerous and enabling of all: sanewashing. This flaccid, hand-wringing, bland lament is now so easily deployed that those uttering it seem completely oblivious to its actual implications. Here the more “conscious” in the media have the opportunity to lodge a complaint against their less aware colleagues or competitors without themselves then having the obligation to call things out as they really are.
But do things have to be this way? I understand the exigencies that accompany access-requiring reporting, and I also understand the necessity for profit maximization for “news” organizations. But what might happen if serious journalists finally said enough is enough with the spectacle and distraction, and stopped covering the non-stop shit show that Team One puts out, and instead started to provide in-depth, relentless coverage of the activities of Team Two. The outrage and tantrums that would come from the main inhabitant of the White House at not being given constant attention, which could be covered as the lunacy they are, would produce enough controversy to guarantee viewer- and readership and healthy profits. And we could all use this breath of fresh air.
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The Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza—A Cry at Sea to the World's Dormant Conscience
Activists, representing the best of humanity, have come from all seven continents because history is being written beneath the stars and across the cobalt waters. They stand apart in a world that has chosen to look away.
Apr 30, 2026
While the world’s attention has been hijacked by the new American, made-for-Israel war against Iran, a quieter act of resistance is gathering on the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. An act of defiance determined to remind the international community that there is no pause in Gaza’s genocide, and there will be none for those fighting to end it.
The Global Sumud Flotilla, (sumud means "steadfast" in Arabic), is now on its 2026 spring mission. International activists boarding close to 100 boats, with Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise providing technical and operational support, are sailing to Gaza under the slogan: We sail until Palestine is free.
The goal is clear, and against all odds, to establish a direct maritime corridor to Gaza's shores, delivering what Israel's blockade has long denied the more than 2.2 million human beings. The 1,000 multinational seafarers carry something harder to quantify: the accumulated moral weight of a world that has grown tired of watching governments perform concern while doing nothing.
Before speaking of what the flotilla is sailing toward, the world must first reckon with what it has chosen to normalize: Israeli occupation of 53% of Gaza. Its suffocating blockade controls every calorie that enters the strip, so precisely, so deliberately engineered, that humanitarian organizations have documented an official daily intake for Gaza's children, a number calculated not to sustain life but to regulate its slow erosion. A supposed ceasefire that never ceased using food as a weapon in a war of starvation.
For all its firepower, Israel has not found a weapon capable of extinguishing people’s determination to stand up against injustice.
Since the October 10, 2025 ceasefire announcement, the headlines moved on, but Israel kept killing. Six months later, United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk reported that at least 738 Palestinians had been murdered since that ceasefire took effect, with airstrikes, gunfire, and shelling continuing daily across the strip. “Palestinians have no blueprint for survival… Whatever they do or don't do, wherever they go or don't go, there is no safety or protection afforded to them. It is hard to square this with a ceasefire,” he said.
It cannot be squared, because it is a one-sided ceasefire. More than six months on, Israel continues to cordon 2.2 million Palestinians into 47% of their own land, an open-air prison shrinking by the day, its walls drawn not in concrete but by the calculated silence of the international community. Homes, or what had remained of them at the time of the ceasefire, have since been systematically razed to the ground. More than 1 million human beings are not permitted to return, not even to pitch a tent over the rubble of what was once their home.
They are separated from their homes and farms by the so-called yellow line. In reality, it’s a red bloodline, demarcated not by markings, but by the corpses of murdered Palestinians. A moving death trap that follows Gazans into their streets, their neighborhoods, their tents. A father walking his child to what remains of a school. A woman carrying water back to a tent. A man standing outside because his home no longer has walls. Any of them, at any moment, can fall within the “bloodline” death coordinates, and be shot.
To hide the story, Israel kills the witnesses attempting to document the murder. On April 8, the Israeli military murdered another journalist, Mohammed Wishah. Wishah, the 294th Palestinian journalist targeted by Israel in Gaza since October 2023. According to Brown University, Watson School, as of April 2025, Israel “killed more journalists in Gaza than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.”
Israel has exported the same tactic to Lebanon, where the targeting of journalists and media workers has brought the total number of murdered Lebanese journalists to more than 20. It is a regional Israeli strategy of silencing witnesses, not an isolated pattern of collateral damage. The number of murdered journalists in Palestine and Lebanon are not just a statistic. It is an Israeli methodology. Where the blue helmet and the press vest have become Israeli military priorities, not because journalists carry weapons, but because Israel fears the camera more than it fears the gun.
This is why Gaza remains sealed to a complicit international press. A blackout designed to conceal what Israel's killing machine is doing on the ground. When it cannot stop the truth from existing, it kills the locals who expose it. When it cannot stop the world from eventually seeing, it ensures the world sees as little as possible, as late as possible, and filtered through its own hasbara outlets. The camera is the enemy because the camera does not lie, does not accept military briefings as fact, and does not look away from a child pulled from under the rubble in Gaza, or a screeching cat rescuing its kitten from under concrete wreckage in Lebanon. Evidence is the one thing that cannot be bombed into rubble, or starved into submission, so it murders the bearers of the truth.
The Global Sumud Flotilla understands this. Among those sailing are journalists, documentarians, and human rights monitors. People of conscience who have chosen to place their bodies between Gaza and the world's forgetting. Israel has intercepted previous attempts in international waters many times before, jamming their signals, seizing their vessels, humiliating activists, and dragging them into custody. It’ll certainly try again. But the calculus of the world’s public opinion has shifted. Every interception is new proof, and every crew member taken in the dark Mediterranean night is a witness who will tell a story.
Israel has the most sophisticated military hardware American taxpayers’ money can buy. Its drones hunt journalists by name, and a diplomatic shield is held in place by Washington's veto. What it neither has nor can manufacture is the power to kill an idea whose time has come. The flotilla sails, again, because Gazans have not surrendered. It sails because the blue helmet and the press vest, though stained with the blood of nearly 300 journalists, still mean something to the people who wear them. Activists, representing the best of humanity, have come from all seven continents because history is being written beneath the stars and across the cobalt waters. They stand apart in a world that has chosen to look away.
Yet, and for all its firepower, Israel has not found a weapon capable of extinguishing people’s determination to stand up against injustice. Gaza will be free. The only question is, how many flotillas must sail, and how many witnesses must be murdered, before the world’s conscience awakens.
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Press Freedom Groups Demand International Probe Into Israel's Killing of Journalist Amal Khalil
"Responsibility for these crimes also lies with Israel’s allies, who continue to allow the Netanyahu government to commit them with impunity."
Apr 25, 2026
Global press freedom organizations are demanding an immediate international probe into the Israeli military's apparently targeted killing of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, who died trapped under the rubble of a home bombed by Israeli forces earlier this week.
The calls for an urgent independent investigation came as the details surrounding Khalil's killing in southern Lebanon continued to emerge. Khalil's body was recovered by the Lebanese army and Red Cross rescue workers around six hours after the Israeli military bombed the house in which she took cover with fellow journalist Zeinab Faraj—who was badly injured in the attack—following an Israeli strike near their car. Israeli forces obstructed rescue operations by continuing to attack the area.
Reporters Without Borders, known internationally as Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), published an in-depth timeline of events, making the case that the Israeli military intentionally targeted Khalil and interfered with rescue efforts:
- At around 14:30 [Paris time]: a first Israeli strike targets a car near the vehicle carrying Amal Khalil and Zeinab Faraj. The two journalists survive the attack and manage to exit their vehicle.
- 14:52: Amal Khalil is contacted by Al Jazeera’s correspondent in southern Lebanon, Carmen Joukhadar. The call lasts nine seconds. “I could clearly hear that she was running and out of breath while speaking to me, but she told me she was fine,” he told RSF.
- Between 15:00 and 16:00: rescuers await authorization from the diplomatic committee—known as the “mechanism”—which, among other roles, serves as guarantor and mediator for the ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, in order to access the site. The committee, established in November 2024 under the auspices of France and the United States, also includes the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
- Around 16:00: a second strike targets the journalists’ car. Hiding nearby, Amal Khalil calls her colleagues to inform them of the attack, then takes refuge, with Zeinab Faraj, in a three-story house located nearby.
- 16:22: last contact with Amal Khalil. According to her sister, who was on the phone with her at the time, Amal Khalil was unharmed. After this call, the journalist’s phone went dead.
- 16:27: a third Israeli strike targets the house. According to RSF, the strike was carried out by a military aircraft, not a drone. Smoke was captured in a photograph taken by Carmen Joukhadar from the neighboring village of Khiam.
- Around 16:40: Lebanese army and nearby rescue teams are unable to reach the location of the two journalists due to ongoing strikes.
- Around 18:00: the Red Cross finally manages to evacuate Zeinab Faraj, who was suffering from fractures. According to the Lebanese TV channel LBCI, a flash grenade fired by Israeli forces forced the ambulance to retreat without being able to save Amal Khalil. Zeinab Faraj was taken to the local hospital in the nearby village of Tibnin.
- Around 19:20: the Lebanese army decides to accompany the Red Cross despite lacking authorization from the “mechanism” given the urgency of the situation.
- Around 20:20: the Red Cross returns to the scene, accompanied by the Lebanese army and bulldozers begin rescue operations.
- 23:10: the army and the Red Cross publicly announce that they have found Amal Khalil’s lifeless body on the ground floor of the building. The exact time of her death is yet to be determined.
Jonathan Dagher, head of RSF's Middle East desk, said in a statement that "so long as impunity prevails, crimes will continue to be committed."
"The Israeli army has very likely committed two more war crimes on 22 April, by targeting journalists who were identified as such, obstructing rescue operations, and continuing strikes that killed one journalist and injured another," said Dagher. "Responsibility for these crimes also lies with Israel’s allies, who continue to allow the Netanyahu government to commit them with impunity."
"We call on the international community to take firm measures to ensure that the Israeli government brings its massacre of journalists in Lebanon and Palestine to an end," Dagher added. "We also call on the Lebanese government to investigate this crime, which took place on Lebanese territory, and will continue to work to ensure that justice is served for Amal Khalil and every single other journalist killed in Lebanon and the wider region."
I urge everyone to watch this report by Channel 4 News about Israel’s killing of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil.
“Under international humanitarian law, journalists are afforded the same protection as civilians… If that journalist has a particular sympathy with a particular… pic.twitter.com/uzxCENNUqi
— Hamza Yusuf (@Hamza_a96) April 24, 2026
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also demanded an independent investigation into Khalil's killing, which the group described as a possible war crime.
CPJ noted that Khalil "received numerous threats prior to her killing, including a reported death threat in September 2024, and public incitement against her by an Israeli military official days before her killing, leading to widespread accusations that she was deliberately targeted. The reported obstruction of rescue operations, claimed by Lebanese government officials, constitute an additional grave violation of international humanitarian law."
Jodie Ginsberg, CPJ's chief executive, said in a statement that "this is not the first time that Israel has prevented emergency services from reaching journalists injured in their strikes."
"Journalists are civilians and protected under international law," said Ginsberg. "Israel’s blatant disregard for such norms—and the international community’s failure to hold them accountable—is abhorrent."
A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights told reporters on Friday that "deliberately targeting" journalists or rescue workers "would amount to a war crime," pointing specifically to Israel's killing of Amal Khalil and obstruction of emergency teams.
"UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk calls for prompt, thorough, independent, and impartial investigations into all incidents involving allegations of violations of international humanitarian law," said the commissioner's spokesperson. "Findings must be disclosed, and those responsible held to account."
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