The Daily Mail promotes an Israel lobby campaign goal last month. (Photo: Steve Travelguide / Alamy)
Because they’re part of it.
Britain’s national media fails to recognise the influence – and even the existence – of an Israel lobby, our new media analysis shows.
Declassified researched two years of reporting by seven British media outlets and found only 16 mentions of the phrase Israel lobby without speech marks.
Nearly all those mentions are in comment articles rather than news pieces and none we found expound on what influence such an Israel lobby might have.
The phrase “Israel lobby” – used with speech marks – is slightly more common in these outlets, with 26 mentions in two years, and tends to be used to quote others in a disparaging way or to suggest such a lobby does not exist.
For example, one Guardian article refers to “the trope of the ‘Israel lobby’”. The Daily Mail reported in May 2024 of hecklers at a speech by then foreign secretary secretary David Lammy “accusing the MP of having taken ‘shady money’ from the ‘pro-Israel lobby’ on the grounds that he once lawfully accepted £30,000 from a Zionist lobbyist named Trevor Chinn.”
In fact, British businessman Trevor Chinn has funded Keir Starmer and several senior Labour ministers and was awarded the Israeli medal of honour for his “dedication” to and “love” for Israel.
Of the seven media outlets analysed – BBC articles, Express, Guardian, Independent, Mail, Telegraph and Times – the BBC and the Express are the most extreme, and no mentions of the phrase Israel lobby, used without speech marks, could be found at all in their publications.
The BBC is failing to mention the Israel lobby while having regular meetings with it. As Declassified recently revealed, the BBC held nine meetings with Jewish groups strongly sympathetic to Israel in the first year of the Gaza genocide.
The Guardian was found to have made only five mentions of an Israel lobby without speech marks, three of which are in comment pieces by columnist Owen Jones.
By contrast, independent Scottish newspaper The National, which has consistently criticised UK policy towards Israel, has mentioned the Israel lobby 23 times in the two year sample period, never in speech marks.
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Nigel Farage objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Reform has run councils for a year. As local elections near, we ask: how has the party performed in power?
Broken promises, broken roads, and broken council leadership teams – that’s the outcome of Reform UK’s first year in power, an investigation by openDemocracy reveals.
Twelve months ago, Nigel Farage’s latest party took control of 10 English councils, meaning they now hold a total of 985 seats across Britain. Now, as Reform seeks to increase its foothold at elections in other English local authorities and pick up seats in the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments next week, we have examined its track record in office, finding that it failed to deliver on its pledges across the board.
Reform is still a young party, founded in 2022. To win so many seats after just three years – and on a promise to do things ‘differently’ – demands scrutiny, particularly when early polls suggest they could win government at the next general election.
While Reform was never going to be able to meaningfully deliver on many of its 2025 campaign points, which focused on policy areas not devolved to local government – such as illegal immigration, net-zero “madness” and law and order – we have been able to shed some light on its local priorities by reviewing election leaflets that it distributed in different areas of the country.
These materials reveal that Reform intended to slash council tax, fix potholes, and cut council waste by emulating Elon Musk’s ‘DOGE’ drive in Donald Trump’s White House. Yet even in these areas, our analysis shows it frequently fell short on its promises.
Instead, Reform raised taxes in every council where it holds or shares power. Potholes continue to cause accidents and damage, and councillors’ struggles over where to make promised savings have put much-loved local services at risk of closure.
For some Reform councillors, the broken promises were too much. The party has lost more than 70 of its elected local politicians in the space of a year, according to research by Liberal Democrat peer Mark Pack, although some were forced to resign or sacked.
One former Reform councillor, David Taylor, resigned from the party during a live BBC interview in February over the 9% council tax rise in Worcestershire, where Reform is the largest party but lacks overall control.
Taylor, who now represents the ward of Redditch East as an independent councillor, told openDemocracy of his discomfort at being expected to pass both the tax increase and bonuses of up to 10% for the council’s senior staff, who reportedly have six-figure salaries.
“I run a small recruitment company, and the party wanted me to sit on the council’s employment panel,” he said. “The discussion was on bonus payments. This was to pay a retention bonus to all staff, but realistically in that panel you are only dealing with senior staff. I was not going to vote for that, not when there is so much debt, redundancies and people being put on shorter hours – and then put up council tax.”
The policy shift felt at odds with the reasons why Taylor ran for office in the first place.
“I live in my community, all my family live in my constituency, all my friends live in my constituency. I talk directly with people who are impacted every day and who know the things we want to change,” he explained. “As a councillor, I could focus on helping people who matter most to me. We campaigned on lowering taxes and saving money, and none of it happened.”
‘If anything, it’s worse’
As last year’s local elections neared, Farage seized on one particular issue that he said was “getting worse all over the country”. He rode into a Reform rally on a JCB Pothole Pro and posted videos of himself playing ‘pothole golf’ and planting flowers in holes in the road.
Since then, though, Reform has struggled to keep its promise to drivers, according to Freedom of Information data obtained by openDemocracy.
We asked the ten Reform-led councils how many complaints they received about potholes in the years before and after the party took power. Only five councils responded; complaints had increased in four.
Staffordshire, where Farage filmed himself planting flowers in potholes, was among four councils to fail to respond to our FOI request within the 20-day legal time limit, while a fifth rejected our request.
In West Northamptonshire, residents made an average of 1,193 complaints about potholes each month after Reform took power – a sharp increase since the council was controlled by the Conservatives, when it received an average of 860 pothole-related complaints each month, according to data obtained by openDemocracy.
The data also shows that many of the complaints made since Reform took office concerned potholes that the council claimed to have already fixed, and that council staff marked 381 as “unable to fix”..
In March of this year, one aggrieved local complained: “Pot hole has been reported, a bodge job infill was done, this was not done to any standard, when your workmen arrived today they were very rude to my husband when he asked if he could help. THIS POT HOLE IS STILL THERE.”
“I had an email though today, marking this pothole as fixed at 15:12,” wrote another resident. “I can confirm that I drove past this pothole at 15:49 and it definitely has not been repaired, and if anything has got significantly worse!”
This sentiment was echoed by Sally Keeble, the leader of the Labour group at West Northamptonshire council. “They are not repairing potholes,” she told openDemocracy. “If anything, it has got worse.”
Doncaster City Council received an average of 165 pothole complaints a month before Reform took power, rising to 147 complaints a month after. It did, however, also fix more potholes under Reform. Other councils recorded smaller numbers of complaints.
While complaints persist, one company benefiting from the pothole crisis is JCB, which donated £200,000 to Reform in 2025 and whose owner, Conservative donor Lord Bamford, paid £8,400 for Farage and an aide to visit the firm’s factory via helicopter in October 2024.
The Reform-run council in Lincolnshire has invited the heavy machinery outfit back to re-trial its Pothole Pro despite it previously being rejected by the council after a nine-week trial in 2021, when engineers concluded “better tools” were available. The same model is now also being trialled by the Reform councils in Derbyshire and Staffordshire.
Culture wars
Reform also promised to cut council waste by slashing spending on projects linked to “diversity, inclusion and equality” and “net-zero”. Once in power, however, the party found little to cut.
Four of the 10 councils had no equality officers even before Reform took control, according to their Freedom of Information responses to openDemocracy. The three that did have a small number of equality staff still employed them one year later (three councils did not respond to our request). DEI training programmes were also still being run at the same levels.
“Everyone thought we’d come in and there were going to be these huge costs we could cut away, but there just aren’t,” one anonymous Reform cabinet member at Kent County Council told the Financial Times in October last year. Months later, a cabinet member at the council, Matthew Fraser Moat, told the same paper that Reform had “not actually made any cuts”. He later resigned from cabinet over the comment, which he said had been “twisted to fit what I believe to be an anti-KCC narrative”.
Durham council chose to attack “DEI” by withdrawing the £2,500 funding set aside for the annual local Pride march, a celebration of LGBTQ+ rights, which is due to take place on 30 May this year. It justified its decision in an email to organisers, and seen by openDemocracy, by saying that “the focus of the modern Pride movement has shifted in a way that many find divisive”.
The council said it was taking “a principled stand that the council should not be in the position of subsidising events that have become primarily associated with the promotion of a specific and contested political ideology.”
This week, it was reported in local media that Reform’s leader of the council, Andrew Husband, had been accused of homophobia after using an offensive slur on a social media post that openDemocracy has reviewed but is choosing not to repeat for legal reasons. We put this allegation to Husband, who called it “desperate deflection from the Labour Party which doesn’t deserve a response”.
Despite the cut, Pride is going ahead, with organiser Mel Metcalf saying: “We are fighting hate with love. We have a lot of support. A lot of unions are coming together to support us.” Still, Reform’s attitude to LGBTQ+ rights has had an effect, he said.
“Some of our volunteers no longer feel confident wearing their rainbow T-shirts or lanyards in public for fear of being challenged. That’s the difference. There is a hesitation now in Durham, about not being as out or open as previous,” he said. “It is sad that people are feeling that way.”
But, Metcalf insists, “what will get us through is love, not hate.”
Reform councils have become embroiled in culture wars on issues surrounding flags, misogyny and racism.
“The equalities stuff is appalling,” said Sally Keeble in West Northants. “Reform’s Peter York was in trouble for saying women should never have left the kitchen. Female councillors have resigned and when I challenged the leader of the council Mark Arnull about what he was doing to get more women into the cabinet, he accused me of promoting toxic identity politics. I thought it was an appalling response when you have to provide services to all communities.”
Further north, in Derbyshire, councillor Stephen Reed apologised at the end of last year after using a council meeting to declare that if having a “view that says our citizens should come first rather than people jumping on boats and getting into the country illegally is racist, then guess what? I’m a racist and I’m proud of it!”
The climate crisis is another front in Reform’s culture war.
Derbyshire council scrapped its climate change committee, with Labour group leader Anne Clarke telling openDemocracy: “They don’t believe in climate change. The committee ran for four years and was looking at the reductions on carbon in the council portfolio. Work was progressing’.” She added that the savings Reform made by scrapping the committee “are small”, describing the decision to do so as “disappointing”.
Reform councillor Carol Wood, Derbyshire County Council’s cabinet member for net zero and environment, said: “Making sure this council is as efficient as it can be and that every pound of council tax-payers’ money is accounted for and spent wisely is our top priority.” Focus on environmental issues, she said, has moved under the “existing ‘Place’ scrutiny committee to streamline operations.”
Kent council has similarly abandoned its Net Zero 2030 Plan in favour of an Energy Efficiency Plan, branding the original as “unattainable” and a source of “financial and operational risk.”
In Lincolnshire, rejecting what Conservative MP-turned-Reform mayor Andrea Jenkyns called “the net-zero bandwagon” has opened the doors to US fracking interests. According to reports in The Guardian, Jenkyns has courted Egdon Resources and its parent company, US fracker Heyco Energy, in the hope of bringing fracking to the region. The controversial energy method was effectively banned in England in 2019 due to earthquake concerns.
Losing out
Despite promises to put Britain’s people first, our investigation learnt that Reform is failing local residents, including by threatening to close much-needed local services such as Glossop tip.
“The local tip is something that everyone uses; it impacts on everyone,” Derbyshire’s Anne Clarke told openDemocracy. “It has really sparked local concerns and the savings made will be small. It’s in a Reform councillor’s patch and even he is campaigning to keep it open!”
Clarke is concerned that a longer drive to a local tip will lead to more fly-tipping, which affects quality of life and tourism. “We are reliant on our visitor economy, so even a small increase in fly tipping could affect our local businesses.”
Also facing permanent closure is the Grange care home, a centre that is close to the heart of Labour district councillor for North East Derbyshire and parish councillor for Eckington, Kathy Clegg. Her grandmother, also a councillor, helped to open the home.
“It’s a special place,” she said. “Everyone would consider this as the place to go to for care. It’s local, we all know each other. It’s hugely sad to see it closed. Residents had to move out and were effectively homeless. There’s an issue of relocation stress syndrome. People die due to the stress when moved out of care homes.” Some of the residents have lived there for more than two decades.
The Grange is one of eight care homes facing closure following a decision by the previous Conservative administration. Local businessman Matt Davison has since offered to buy the Grange, to rescue it for the community and residents, but said he was rebuffed by the Reform council, which planned to sell all eight homes to one buyer. When that sale fell through, Davison again made an offer, telling local media that he was ignored and Reform wants to “close the home.”
This is in contrast to a second care home, with the council currently in negotiations with a private buyer.
Derbyshire council’s cabinet member for adult care, Joss Barnes, told openDemocracy that “all offers to buy [the care homes] were carefully considered – whether singly, in groups, or as a whole package. Unfortunately, despite intensive negotiations with a provider to take over the running of the homes, the sale fell through and we are now in the process of ensuring residents find new, suitable homes to live in.”
“I think people feel let down, people feel terrified,” said Kathy Clegg. “Some of the Grange carers went to visit a former resident in his new care home. He was inconsolable. I am choking up thinking about it, because he was saying ‘I want to go home, I want to go home.’ Our local Reform councillor is silent. He’s done nothing at all.”
“Derbyshire County Council led by Reform has failed in every promise they made before the election,” she added.
A year of broken promises, attacks on equalities, and unfair spending decisions is a warning for the UK as a whole, said Sally Keeble. “What we are seeing is the reality of how Reform behaves, and what they would do if they got into power.”
openDemocracy approached Kent, Durham, West Northants councils and JCB for comment, as well as Peter York and Mark Arnull. We did not receive a response before publication.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
All those governments and individuals that support Israel e.g. Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, also support this abhorrent treatment – imprisonment, very likely medical neglect, starvation and torture – of a doctor. Dr. Hassam Abu Safia.
Wales Green Party Leader Anthony Slaughter, Reform UK’s Dan Thomas, Welsh Labour Leader and First Minister Eluned Morgan, Plaid Cymru of leader Rhun ap Iorwerth, Welsh Conservative leader Darren Millar and Welsh Liberal Democrat Leader Jane Dodds
RARELY has Wales featured so prominently in all-Britain election coverage as today in the run-up to polling day on May 7. Certainly, it is difficult recall such media interest in any of the six general elections to the National Assembly of Wales and its successor, the Senedd, over the past quarter of a century.
The London-based mass media usually show little interest in Wales unless a gruesome murder, a royal visit or a sporting spectacle has attracted journalistic attention beyond the M25 bubble.
…
What’s so different this time around? The big story is that the Labour Party is set to be replaced as the biggest electoral force in Wales for the first time in 100 years. The old certainty of a Labour victory (and most often a Labour landslide) is dying.
…
Welsh Labour is suffering from over-familiarity and its all-too-supine relationship with Keir Starmer’s government at Westminster. Many thousands of habitual Labour voters in the south Wales valleys are likely to switch to Plaid Cymru, despite not yet sharing that party’s aspiration for Welsh independence from the UK. A smaller number may go Green, and many more probably won’t vote at all.
They don’t feel the change promised by Starmer’s party. They dislike his lack of honesty and integrity. Many are repelled by his refusal to condemn US-Israeli massacres of the innocent in Palestine, Iran and Lebanon.
Neither do they remember — unless forcefully reminded — of the achievements of Welsh Labour and Labour-Plaid coalition governments despite the lack of powers and resources at the disposal of the Welsh parliament: free NHS prescriptions, free hospital parking, free bus travel for the elderly, the reintroduction of student maintenance grants, free museum entry, primary school breakfast clubs, financial penalties for holiday home ownership, aid for the Welsh steel industry, nationalisations to invest in Cardiff-Wales Airport and Transport for Wales rolling stock, etc.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
“Look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece,” writes Hartmann and you will realize our worst nightmares are coming true. (Credit: Armyinform.com.ua, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.
Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.
This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.
That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces… Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”
The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.
Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.
She was 37 years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.
Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.
I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.
Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”
That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.
What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.
To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”
Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.
The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.
Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.
And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”
This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.
Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.
ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.
ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.
Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.
Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.
That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.
And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.
The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”
This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.
Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.
Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.
We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.
If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.
Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”
The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.
With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?
If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.
The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.
And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.
If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.
Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.
Nigel Farage objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
