US President Donald Trump reads a note as Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a roundtable discussion at the White House in Washington, DC on October 8, 2025. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
US Attorney General Pam Bondi generated alarm on Wednesday when she said the Trump administration is going to take the “same approach” to Antifa as it has to drug cartels—as the military bombs boats in the Caribbean it claims are smuggling drugs.
Antifa encompasses autonomous anti-fascist individuals and loosely affiliated groups who lack a national organizational structure or leadership. Still, as the increasingly authoritarian administration works to quash dissent on all fronts, President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order designating the Antifa movement as a domestic terrorist organization.
During a related roundtable on Wednesday—held as the administration worked to deploy the National Guard in Democrat-led cities—Bondi said that “we’re not gonna stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets. Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets; it’s breaking down the organization brick by brick, just like we did with cartels.”
Glancing toward Trump, she continued: “We’re going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa: Destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart. Thanks to your bold leadership, and the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization—which is exactly what they are—Americans will no longer tolerate their unhinged violence.”
Lawyer and radio host Dean Obeidallah warned: “Please understand that this is Trump regime explaining how they will use the government to prosecute Democrats. Page 1 of the fascist playbook is imprison political opponents so that the fascist has one-party rule.”
Others noted the violence the administration has already taken. Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker said: “My gosh. After the US bombed multiple boats in the middle of the ocean, murdering people on grounds that they were allegedly ‘carrying drugs,’ the US attorney general says, ‘Just like we did with cartels, we’re going to take the same approach…with Antifa.’”
Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan said, “So he is going to drone strike American citizens?”
HuffPost‘s SV Dáte similarly asked, “So the US military will be summarily killing them from above now?”
Trump has recently announced four bombings of boats he claimed were running drugs, without releasing any evidence. Those US military attacks have killed at least 21 people. Critics in Congress and beyond argue the strikes are illegal under federal and international law.
On Tuesday, top Democrats from key committees in the US House of Representatives demanded further information about the bombings and reminded Trump: “Congress has the sole constitutional responsibility to declare war and to authorize the use of force. You have failed to secure such authorization for these strikes.”
Also on Tuesday, Bondi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where lawmakers grilled her on a range of topics. Asked about legal justification for the boat bombings by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), she declined to comment.
COONS: How did you conclude that these strikes on boats in the open ocean are legal?
BONDI: I'm not going to discuss any legal advice that my department may or may not have issued pic.twitter.com/Lg1FNPBpk7
Ahead of Bondi’s Senate testimony, watchdog groups and hundreds of former employees of the US Department of Justice expressed alarm about her leadership of the DOJ.
“We’re seeing the erosion of the Justice Department’s fabric and integrity at an alarming pace,“ says a letter signed by 282 former DOJ officials. ”Our democratic system cannot survive without the primary institution that enforces the law.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Larry Ellison speaking at a conference. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The pending purchase of TikTok, blessed by the Trump-Netanyahu duo, once again sets off alarm bells regarding the marriage of economic, geopolitical, and military interests.
Launched in 2017 by the private Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok quickly became one of the most important social networks on the planet. By early 2025, it had 1.6 billion active users, more than half of them outside China, of whom an estimated 170 million are North American; 1 in 5 people in the US get their news from this network, 4 in 10 among the 18-29 age group. Today, it is the fastest-growing platform among the younger segments of the global population.
The US government has waged a long battle to force ByteDance to sell the US branch of TikTok to a group of “domestic” capitalists, citing national security concerns and threatening to ban the platform in the US if the deal did not go through. On September 25, the White House announced through an Executive Order signed by Trump, “Save TikTok by Protecting National Security”, the terms under which the transaction would take place. According to the document, the app in the US “will be majority-owned and controlled by US persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary, as ByteDance Ltd. and its affiliates will own less than 20% of the entity, with the remainder held by certain investors.” Who are these mysterious “certain investors” that the Executive Order does not directly mention?
None other than a consortium led by the giant Texas-based company Oracle, which already stored TikTok data in the US. Its main shareholder is an 81-year-old American tycoon who, unlike Elon Musk, is relatively unknown to the public: Larry Ellison. Ellison, in addition to being the new owner, would also take on key roles in managing security, data, and algorithm auditing. In a nutshell, he will be the new boss of the vertical video platform in the United States, a company valued at USD 14 billion. But perhaps the most relevant aspect of the case is not the amount of the transaction, but its long-term implications for power. As a BBC article states, “Investors will control the algorithm that powers the US version of TikTok, and Americans will occupy six of the seven seats on the board of directors that will oversee it.”
Why is Larry Ellison’s role (geo)politically relevant, and what does Israel have to do with it?
What is admitted need not be proved, as the old adage goes. The day after the announcement, before an audience of podcasters and TikTokers at the Israeli consulate in New York, a blunt Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Weapons change over time; the most important ones are social media,” adding that the purchase of TikTok “is the most important purchase being made right now.” A purchase that, incidentally, had been preceded a month earlier by the appointment of Erica Mindel, a US citizen and former Israeli military instructor, as the company’s new Director of Public Policy for Hate Speech. So did Israel buy TikTok? It depends on how you look at it. The key lies with Larry Ellison and his ties to the genocidal state. So who is this Ellison?
The owner of Oracle – cloud applications, databases, and servers, with 160,000 employees around the globe – is currently the second richest person on the planet (behind only Musk), with a fortune valued at USD 350 billion, according to Forbes. He lives on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he bought in 2012 for USD 300 million; he is a shareholder in X and Tesla; he owns almost 50% of the media giant Paramount-Skydance (including CBS), valued at USD 28 billion. An interesting fact provided by Forbes: “Ellison never finished college. He started out creating databases for the CIA.” His trusted business partner: Safra Catz, Oracle’s CEO since 2014, born in Israel and, like Ellison, a personal friend of … Netanyahu. According to a press release, “a few months before the start of the genocidal war in Gaza, Catz met with Netanyahu to discuss the expansion of Oracle’s projects in the Israeli-occupied territories.” But this is not an isolated incident. The close relationship between the new owner of TikTok and Israel goes back a long way, so much so that on one occasion Ellison even offered Netanyahu a seat on Oracle’s board of directors.
According to data provided by the BDS Movement, in 2019, Oracle leased an underground data center in Har Hotzvim, Jerusalem, to provide Israeli banks, health funds, and military forces with AI processing and information storage services; in 2021, it became the first multinational technology company to sell cloud services to Israel within the occupied territories; in 2022, it hosted soldiers and software developers from the Israeli army’s C41 Corp. to learn how to use Oracle’s cloud for military purposes…
It is no coincidence that Catz, Oracle’s all-powerful CEO, states that “for employees, it’s clear: if you’re not pro-US or pro-Israel, don’t work here”; nor is it surprising that some of her employees commented to The Intercept that “the atmosphere is horrible, people are terrified to even mention Palestine.” According to the same source, as soon as Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza began in October 2023, Catz demanded that the inscription “Oracle Stands with Israel” appear on all company screens in more than 180 countries. In the same context of the aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, Oracle developed the “Words of Iron” project, in collaboration with Israeli ministries, “to help the country elevate pro-Israel content and counter critical narratives on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.” In other words, a weapon at the service of propaganda, in that theater of operations that has now become fundamental, as Netanyahu himself knows: cognitive warfare. The Intercept also reports that a year ago, Oracle partnered with one of Israel’s largest defense companies, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, on an AI project to provide “fighters with rapid, actionable information on the battlefield.” In other words, war on the ground.
The relationship with Trump and his consolidation as media emperor
However close Ellison’s relations with the State of Israel and its army may be (he has also been a major donor to the US organization Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), which channels millions of dollars to the soldiers of that country) it would have been very difficult for his company to win the approval of the Trump administration if its owner were not close to the president of the United States himself. After many years of donating to both parties but closer to the Democrats – an admirer of Clinton, disenchanted with Obama – Ellison’s balance began to shift toward the Republican side, especially its more radical wing. In 2016, he donated a significant sum to Marco Rubio in the Republican primaries and, according to Wired, later became a “reliable donor and fundraiser for the Republican Party during the 2020 and 2024 cycles,” which allowed him to become very close to Donald Trump. Although perhaps somewhat exaggerated, one of Trump’s advisers interviewed by that website referred to the Oracle owner as “the shadow president of the United States.”
In any case, what is certain is that Netanyahu and Trump’s personal friend will not be satisfied with his latest acquisition from the Chinese. The US media has been reporting in recent weeks that the Ellisons, Larry and his son/heir David, are going for more. They now have their sights set on the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery – which includes CNN. According to the national media watchdog organization FAIR, if the sale goes through, it would “create an unprecedented level of media consolidation” in the history of global media, including powerful news channels, film production companies, cable television … to which must be added control over TikTok. The danger of hyper-concentration of media power has been pointed out by various groups. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that regulatory agencies should block the potential merger “because it is a dangerous concentration of power.” Or, as professor of digital sociology Steven Buckley points out: “It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires buy up all the cultural consumption media.” For now, regardless of whether this latest move by the Ellison clan comes to fruition, his purchase of TikTok, blessed by the Trump-Netanyahu duo, once again sets off alarm bells regarding the marriage of economic, geopolitical, and military interests; just at a time when global awareness seems to be awakening to the urgent need to stop the war machines of Israel and the United States.
Miguel Ruíz is a Mexican-Ecuadorian sociologist. He holds a PhD in Latin American Studies (UNAM). He has been a professor and researcher at various universities in Mexico and Ecuador. He currently teaches at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences and is a member of the Institute of Economic Research, both at the Central University of Ecuador.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
The Democratic National Committee sponsors a billboard about then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and Project 2025 at 12th & Vine Streets on September 9, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for the Democratic National Committee)
“A Trump denial is not a fact,” said one media critic.
As President Donald Trump openly embraces Project 2025, mainstream media outlets are facing criticism for their role in helping him downplay his ties to the wildly unpopular far-right governing playbook in the lead-up to his reelection last year.
After she became the Democratic nominee in July, former Vice President Kamala Harris made the Heritage Foundation’s over 900-page manifesto for “the next conservative president” central to her case against Trump during the 2024 election, often referring to it as “Trump’s Project 2025.”
She and other Democrats warned that if he retook power, he would swiftly enact many of its most extreme and unpopular proposals and dramatically expand executive power while doing it.
Among those proposals were steep cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the “mass deportations” of millions of immigrants, the elimination of the Department of Education, new restrictions on abortions, the gutting of climate protections, and the replacement of career civil servants with political appointees, among many others.
Democrats amplified the plan’s danger at the Democratic National Convention and in campaign ads, and Trump began to distance himself from the platform. Despite the fact that as many as 140 people who’d worked in his first administration—including Paul Dans, Heritage’s director of Project 2025—had a hand in its creation, Trump said: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”
This was demonstrably untrue, even at the time. Media Matters for America dug up a clip from as far back as May 2023 of Dans stating that “President Trump’s very bought in with this,” speaking of the program.
🚨 In video published by Media Matters, Project 2025 director says "President Trump's very bought in with this."
Trump recently claimed to know "nothing" about the plan for his second term but added that he "wish[es] them well" pic.twitter.com/i8hgpcdvZd
Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that while 57% of registered voters viewed the plan negatively, just 4% viewed it positively.
But in the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump’s denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats’ warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.
Last year, CNN ran a “fact check” of Kamala HQ that claimed we were lying for saying Trump’s plan is Project 2025.
Responding to a social media post in July stating that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan,” a fact check by USA Todayrated the statement “false,” because, as the headline said, “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump.”
In September, after Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 at the first and only debate between the two, the paper published another fact-check with the headline: “Harris repeats claim that Project 2025 is Trump’s plan. That’s still not right.”
In response to Harris’ claim during the debate that Project 2025 was “a detailed and dangerous plan… that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, whose coverage received a fair bit of criticism during the 2024 cycle, reported in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document.”
A CNN fact check of the Harris campaign’s social media in September remarked that one account “frequently invokes Project 2025,” before caveating that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative, and he has said he disagrees with some of its proposals.”
In an October interview on CBS‘s“Face the Nation,”anchor Norah O’Donnell, Harris attempted to warn about Project 2025, before O’Donnell responded: “You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025. He says that is not his campaign plan.”
After nine months back in power, the website Project 2025 Tracker estimates that Trump has already implemented approximately 48% of the objectives outlined in the policy document.
In addition to his key campaign promises many of his second administration’s policies are highly specific to Project 2025, such as his pledge to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), his efforts to privatize the National Weather Service (NWS), his reconfiguration of Title X funding to promote pregnancy, and his elimination of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Trump is no longer hiding his connection to Project 2025, having brought in many of its hiring picks and authors to staff his administration almost immediately after his victory last November.
This week, he began to boast about it openly. As his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Russ Vought, one of Project 2025’s architects, began using the current government shutdown to unilaterally cut off funding to infrastructure projects in blue states and cities, Trump lauded him as “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”
“This was always the plan,” Harris responded on social media.
This was always the plan.
Project 2025 was Donald Trump's blueprint to seize unchecked power within the federal government and restrict Americans' freedoms. And he is implementing it right in front of our eyes. pic.twitter.com/rsU6So6tyN
While many commentators expressed outrage that Trump blatantly lied about his connections to Project 2025, others dredged up old clips of newspapers and anchors taking him at his word.
“All those 2024 media fact checks that said, ‘Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025’ look pretty ridiculous right now,” saidMeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski. “A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to ‘debunk’ a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention.”
Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the independent media company Zeteo, highlighted the CBS interview, saying Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 was “embarrassing not just for Norah O’Donnell but a whole host of leading American anchors and reporters who echoed Trump’s false denials.”
“Nothing showed the difference between mainstream and independent media better than the response to Trump’s obvious lie about not knowing anything about Project 2025,” said David Pepper, author of the book Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual. “Most mainstream media started fact-checking those who claimed a connection to be somehow false. Others ‘both sides’ed’ it. Far more in independent media called it out as a whopping lie.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that they bombed another boat in the Caribbean on October 3, 2025. (Photo: screenshot/Donald Trump/Truth Social)
“The US government must be held accountable,” said Amnesty International USA.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on social media Friday that they bombed another boat in the Caribbean—at least the fourth alleged drug-smuggling vessel attacked by the US military since early September.
Critics, including congressional Democrats, legal scholars, and human rights groups, have stressed that even if any of the boats recently bombed by the Trump administration were trafficking drugs, the strikes still violate international and federal law. Such criticism has not deterred the administration.
Hegseth, who leads what Trump renamed the Department of War, said Friday that “earlier this morning, on President Trump’s orders, I directed a lethal, kinetic strike on a narco-trafficking vessel affiliated with designated terrorist organizations. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike, and no US forces were harmed in the operation.”
“The strike was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics—headed to America to poison our people,” wrote the Pentagon chief, including a video of the bombing, but no evidence that the boat was involved in running drugs.
Hegseth claimed that “our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics, the people onboard were narco-terrorists, and they were operating on a known narco-trafficking transit route. These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!”
Trump similarly said, without offering any proof, that “a boat loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE was stopped, early this morning off the Coast of Venezuela, from entering American Territory.”
Why does the U.S. have a license to kill? Today four people on a boat off the coast of Venezuela were executed by U.S. naval forces in an unprovoked attack & extrajudicial murder in international waters. Trump’s aggression against the Venezuela will provoke a regional conflict. pic.twitter.com/pGAJDF2NFj
Responding to the latest lethal bombing, Amnesty International USA declared: “This is murder. The US government must be held accountable.”
Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as chief White House ethics counsel under former President George W. Bush, said, “Again, this is a violation of international law, and without the consent of Congress a violation of federal law.”
The strikes come amid Trump’s ”aggressive pursuit” of a Nobel Peace Prize. Nodding to this, Congressman Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) wrote on social media Friday, “To President Trump: They don’t give Nobel Peace Prizes to people who murder civilians without a trial.”
The first confirmed bombing, on September 2, killed 11 people. The second and third, on September 15 and 19, each killed three. In at least one case, a woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the men killed said her husband was a fisher.
Friday’s bombing followed the leak of a confidential notice that the administration sent to multiple congressional committees this week, attempting to legally justify the bombings. It says in part, “The president determined these cartels are nonstate armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.”
Multiple legal experts and members of Congress publicly weighed in on the memo, including Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI), who said that “every American should be alarmed that President Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy.”
After the Friday attack, Tess Bridgeman, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security and a nonresident senior fellow at New York University School of Law, emphasized that “if it can happen at sea, it can happen anywhere.”
“Trump has offered no definition or limiting principle for who can be labeled a ‘terrorist’ and summarily killed,” she added. “And no plausible legal theory for why an armed conflict exists.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei delivers his speech at the Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP
The wild politics and chainsaw made Argentina’s president an economic hero for the right. And now, with his nation’s finances in chaos: silence
So you really want to know how Prime Minister Farage would pan out? Well, speculate no longer. An excellent test case is unfolding right now, in a country that just so happens to be run by one of Nigel’s heroes. Javier Milei is “amazing”, said the CEO of the private company he calls Reform. “Cutting and slashing … doing all the things he’s done … that’s leadership.”
You may know some of this story, about how a political outsider took power in Argentina. You’ve seen photos of El Loco, the self-styled madman, in a black leather jacket, with sideburns like hedges and wielding a giant red chainsaw – all the better to slash the public sector with.
Taking over Latin America’s second-largest country made Milei the poster boy of the international hard right. Elon Musk: “I love Javier Milei.” Kemi Badenoch: “Javier Milei is the template.” Donald Trump: “My favourite president.” In office, he was lionised by Wall Street and the international commentariat. Milei’s economy was declared by no lesser sage than Niall Ferguson as a “man-made miracle”.
Donald Trump with Javier Milei at the UN general assembly in New York last month. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Yet over the past few weeks, Argentina has gone into freefall. Investors have yanked billions out of the country, and the peso has dropped like a stone. A few days ago Trump was forced to pledge $20bn (£15bn) to prop up his friend, in addition to a rescue loan from the IMF. Later this month, Milei faces midterm elections that will serve as a referendum on his presidency and the results are expected to be bad. “We are seeing in real time how a government can melt in front of our eyes,” Alejandro Bercovich, a leading Argentine TV and radio journalist told me this week. “I never thought they would collapse this quickly.”
