Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour. | Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Utah has filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its executives, accusing the prediction market of breaking anti-gambling laws, as reported by The Salt Lake Tribune and the Associated Press. The state has filed 14 charges against Kalshi, as well as CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara, including 12 counts of illegally promoting online gambling.
The move marks an escalation in a nationwide battle against prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. Utah has already sued Kalshi over claims that it's operating illegally in the state, joining several other states, including New York, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington, Connecticu …
MONTREAL, Canada — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Thursday she aims to bring EU-Canada relations to the “highest level possible,” touting potential associate member status in the bloc for Ottawa despite capitals having rejected the term a day earlier.
Von der Leyen’s overture comes on the eve of a landmark EU-Canada summit in Montreal where she and Prime Minister Mark Carney are due to announce plans for deeper cooperation against a backdrop of rising autocracy globally and unpredictable relations with U.S. President Donald Trump.
“Canada cannot become a full-fledged member of the EU because of geography, but we both want to bring our relationship to the highest level possible,” von der Leyen said in a speech hosted by the C.D. Howe Institute. “This is why we are discussing the idea of Canada becoming the first associate member of the European Union.”
No sooner had von der Leyen finished speaking than German Chancellor Friedrich Merz issued a statement saying that the EU and Canada were establishing an “Alliance for the Future” — without mentioning the associate member status. Germany has led the opposition to using the term, according to EU diplomats.
“We are fighting each other about a few words which von der Leyen pulled out of thin air,” one of those EU diplomats told POLITICO on Wednesday. “It’s a bit silly while we should have ambition and focus on other things. This is not our proudest moment.”
In a speech hours later on the sidelines of the summit, European Council President António Costa sought to bridge the divide by playing down the importance of the term.
“Tomorrow, the European Union and Canada will launch an Alliance for the Future of Europe,” he said in a nod to Merz’s statement and using the term preferred by Carney to describe the relationship.
“President von der Leyen has even put forward the bold idea of making Canada an ‘associate member’ of the European Union,” he said, noting “I share her ambition.”
“Whether that ends up being the term or not, one thing is clear: our partnership will be the closest, deepest and most unique of its kind,” he added.
The Commission president said in her speech that talks about associate membership would focus on deeper cooperation across AI, climate and energy policy, as well as bolstering shared work between the European Commission and the Canadian government as well as “Parliament to Parliament” and “Court to Court,” a reference to the European Court of Justice and Canada’s Supreme Court.
Such a status, she said, would be open “only to our closest partners outside of Europe, who are ready to open a new frontier together — and to chart the course together, to think beyond the terms of our partnership today, toward the most ambitious vision we can build.”
Von der Leyen’s use of the term associate membership — which she first mentioned in September — is likely to rub some EU capitals the wrong way after a group of countries led by Germany objected to including a reference to the term in a joint EU-Canada statement that was seen by POLITICO and is due to be published on Friday.
After days of talks, EU countries opted for softer language to describe the two sides’ future relations, including the “Alliance for the Future” — the term used by the Canadian side — as well as an “even closer association … short of full membership.”
EU diplomats have told POLITICO that while capitals support the broader aim of closer ties with Canada, they are wary of offering a status that has never been proposed before and whose legal contours remain undefined. Berlin had previously floated associate member status for Ukraine, including specific privileges such as observer status in the European Commission, but that effort was rejected.
Reacting to reports that EU countries would drop the “associate member” term, Carney said on Tuesday: “The good news is it doesn’t matter about specific names or nomenclature. What matters is the difference that it will make to the lives of Canadians … and Canada as a whole becoming a more independent, more sovereign nation, so we can live our lives as we choose.”
Both Carney and von der Leyen have cast this week’s summit as part of a broader effort to deepen ties at a time when both Ottawa and Brussels have clashed with the Trump administration, with von der Leyen warning in her speech about “deeper decay in the international order.”
“Alliances and assumptions that have enabled our prosperity and security are changing rapidly, and each nation or region is looking at how to secure its own interests and its own independence,” she said. “We can no longer let ourselves be shackled by the limits of the old-world order.”
This story has been updated. Camille Gijs contributed reporting from Brussels.
Chattanooga’s publicly owned internet network has helped transform the once struggling city into an unlikely marvel of civic reinvention. | Lucy Jones for Vox; Getty Images
Most Americans hate their cable companies. But not the 200,000-odd residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city nestled in the Appalachian foothills.
For many people, the city might seem off the beaten path — enough so that when Spain’s national team chose the city as their base during the FIFA World Cup over the summer, the internet exploded with jeers of incredulity. And yet, as many an urban planner, and certainly many a local, will tell you, Chattanooga is a special place, known not just because the Glenn Miller Orchestra immortalized it as a scenic hub for the choo-choo train.
No, what really has put Chattanooga on the map recently is its ridiculously fast, municipally owned internet.
Key takeaways
Chattanooga, Tennessee, is home to some of the fastest, most beloved broadband in the nation.
It’s all thanks to the city’s publicly owned internet network, which has been linked to billions of dollars in economic benefits since coming online in 2010.
Hundreds of other cities have followed suit in the years since, but many others have been stymied by opposition from major cable companies.
And that’s a shame, because if every city was like Chattanooga, our internet could be so much better than it is now.
Unlike almost everywhere else in the country, the fiber-optic cables that keep much of Chattanooga online were laid neither by Comcast nor Spectrum, but by the city itself. In a $220 million gamble, its public power utility, EPB, has helped transform the once struggling post-industrial city into anunlikelymarvelofcivicreinvention, and an inspiration for many other dozens of copycat towns around the country.
When it debuted in 2010, at one gigabit per second, the city’s ultra-speedy broadband was among the fastest in the world, as fast as global meccas like Hong Kong, and over 200 times faster than the average top-tier offering across the US. “This makes Chattanooga, a mid-sized city in the South,” declared then-Mayor Ron Littlefield to the New York Times, “one of the leading cities in the world in its digital capabilities.”
In the decade and a half since Chattanooga rebranded as “Gig City,” its trademark broadband has proved to be far more than a mere fancy gimmick. It has added billions of dollars to the city’s economy, lured in hundreds of new startups, and, according to EPB, become the single largest source of funding for local public schools, and delighted hundreds of thousands of local customers.
If you’re not a tech company or a prolific streamer, of course, you may not need such intensive internet service. But the city’s broadband service is widely beloved locally for bringing 70 percent of households online at, by far, the lowest price per megabit of bandwidth in the area and quite possibly, among the lowest in the country. Consumer Reports perennially ranks EPB among America’s best providers, a sentiment apparently shared by the legions of Chattanoogans who take to social media to sing EPB’s praises every time it swoops in to fix an outage minutes after a storm hits, or bemoan their loss when they move away and witness the sludgy pace at — and high rates — which the rest of us browse and scroll.
“Chattanooga turned out better than anyone could have hoped,” said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, part of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that researches locally owned infrastructure, “and the one thing that hasn’t changed are their prices. It’s rare, remarkable even.” That original single-gig service runs $68 per month, and faster speeds aren’t too much more.
But even as the benefits of Chattanooga’s internet supremacy have compounded, public broadband networks like it are still a rarity across the US, which you probably already know if you, like most Americans, have ever sensed your internet growing ever more lethargic, even as your fees climb month after month.
There is a better way, and Chattanooga has long since shown the nation how. Forbetterorworse, the internet drives much of our daily lives and the economy, and what makes the internet possible? Broadband, which is powered by those stiff plastic-sheathed cables filled with strands of thin glass or braids of copper wire, beaming pulses of light or electricity into your modem. And yet, the US has outsourced the provision of this precious public good almost entirely to de facto monopolies that keep our internet slower, more expensive, and above all, more infuriating than it needs to be.
“There was a generation that built water systems and electric systems. There was a generation that built the roads,” Mitchell said. Today, however, “People are just afraid of the idea of the government being ambitious and doing what Chattanooga did.”
How Chattanooga built the world’s best broadband
Long before Chattanooga grew famous for its broadband, it was known, for a period of time, as “the dirtiest city of America,” a moniker bestowed by Walter Cronkite in 1969.
According to local lore, the moon pie, which originated at a bakery in Chattanooga, came to be when a coal miner asked for a snack “as big as the moon” to sustain him for long shifts down the shaft. The coal he mined fueled the industrial boom that defined Chattanooga until the mid-20th century, when the city’s factories, furnaces, and railroads belched a smog so noxious, it melted women’s nylon stockings off their legs as they walked.
By the 1980s, the city knew it needed to change, seeding a hunger for reinvention that experts told me would come to define its municipally-owned internet. By the 2000s, Chattanooga had more than cleaned up its air and its reputation, building a huge aquarium in the heart of downtown and carefully revitalizing its riverfront and natural areas. But in the early aughts, with the remaining heavy industry in deep retreat, and a fragile recovery threatened by the Great Recession, the city craved a new economic engine.
The city’s EPB, which originated as a municipally owned electric utility in 1935, had already set out to build a smart electrical grid in 2008, retrofitting it with a two-way digital communications system that could detect and fix problems as they arise. This process would involve laying hundreds of miles of new fiber-optic cable lines along existing power lines, monitoring them and relaying information back and forth with operators. But as the EPB laid plans for its new grid-helping fiber, it realized that for roughly the same amount of effort and cost, it could repurpose those cables to also serve as a cutting-edge internet service.
Laying those hundreds of miles of new cables, along every single power line in the city, is an expensive and time-consuming process. But since EPB already had power lines plugging into almost every home and business throughout the city, it didn’t even need permission to get it done. And once the cables are there, there’s no real limit on how much data they can carry, meaning that they’ll work just as well whether they’re relaying the power grid’s data exclusively or if they’re carrying petabytes upon petabytes of data from hundreds of thousands of internet customers. This same quality has made it easy for EPB to pump up the volume of data it offers over the years, eventually allowing it to become the first city in the nation to offer a 25-gigabit-per-second service, which it did for its customers in 2023. More recently, EPB became the first provider nationwide to hook its fiber-optic cables up to a quantum computer — which uses advanced physics to solve mind-bogglingly complex problems — and offer its use to researchers and customers across the city.
“If we’re going to own that fiber communications network to help automate our grid, why not offer that as a service to our customers? We thought, ‘Why not go big? Why not be ambitious?’” Janet Rehberg, CEO of EPB, told me. “People thought we were crazy. And we said, ‘If we can do it, why not?’ So, we did.”
Equipped with a $111 million federal stimulus grant from the recession-era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, plus about $222 million in municipal bonds, EPB was able to complete the project — initially expected to take a decade — in just two years.
In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the nation to offer one-gigabit-per-second fiber optic internet.
“This was a huge shift for our city’s fortunes,” Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga from 2013 to 2021, told me. “All of a sudden, we were a place where you could try to discover the next big thing.”
Hundreds of startups flocked to the city for its super-fast broadband, with tech incubators setting up shop in shuttered storefronts and abandoned industrial factories dotted along the city’s downtown. In its first 10 years, EPB’s fiber network brought more than $5.3 billion in economic benefits and 10,420 jobs to the city, about 31 percent of all jobs created during that period, according to a study by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This has transformed “the way we thought about ourselves and what we thought was possible technologically,” Berke said.
The broadband investment has long since paid for itself and then some in the fees people pay to access its service. EPB expects to earn about $190 million over the next year alone from its telecommunications and enormously popular internet service, all of which will flow back into the business itself or into the city. As a result, EPB chose not to increase electricity rates at all this year, in stark contrast to much of the rest of the country. And the utility now pays tens of millions of dollars annually straight back into city services, like public schools.
Under Berke’s mayoral administration, the city also integrated EPB into initiatives meant to get more Chattanoogans online. When the pandemic hit, and local schools went virtual, the city built a new program called EdConnect that saw EPB provide free internet to every family with a child who received free or reduced lunches, the first program of its kind nationwide, and one that continues to this day.
“A lot of communities set up something similar during the pandemic, but most of those are done, they kind of faded away. But we made a commitment — our community did — for 10 years, and we’re already discussing what the next 10 years looks like,” said Sammy Lowdermilk, CEO of the Enterprise Center, the nonprofit that administers EdConnect. “We’ve heard from parents using online resources to look for a job, to create resumes, to do medical research. The entire family gets to benefit from it.”
Your city could have Chattanooga’s internet. It just has to try.
Over the years, Chattanooga’s publicly owned internet has drawn countless city planners and far-flung mayors to Tennessee’s fourth-largest city to learn just how they pulled it off.
But every time one visited Berke in his time in office, and every time he gave one of his “little sales pitches” on EPB’s success, over and over, they’d replied with the same refrain: “Oh, it’s incredible what you’ve done here. I mean, we can’t do it, but it’s great — good for you guys,” he recalled. Many cities don’t have a publicly owned electricity company at the ready as Chattanooga did, and many face significant barriers from state laws that restrict or heavily discourage the development of municipally owned broadband altogether.
“The number one challenge for most infrastructure projects is political. It’s not financial. It’s not conceptual. It’s not technological. It’s the web of difficulties that make it harder to get it done.”
Andy Berke, former mayor of Chattanooga
Nevertheless, some places tried anyway, and many have succeeded — over 700 of them, according to Mitchell’s last count. In Utah, for example, a consortium of cities has spent the past few decades building out a municipally owned fiber network with the bold name Utopia. For many years, said Mitchell, the network suffered from severe financial and legal roadblocks. But even so, Utopia has managed to build out a system that Mitchell calls an “unqualified success” today, bringing tens of thousands of households online across the state.
However, Chattanooga’s brand of municipally owned broadband hasn’t spread nearly as widely as many people hoped it would, or think it could. And most of that, said Mitchell, can be attributed to the fact that large internet companies like Comcast or AT&T, clearly aware of how dominant well-run municipally owned networks can become, have spent the past several decades fighting to prevent more from coming online.
More than 12 states now have explicit laws barring or restricting cities from offering publicly owned broadband, which has made it difficult for many municipalities to create networks of their own. Even Chattanooga faced a brutal legal challenge when it tried to expand EPB’s coverage to rural and underserviced areas right outside of the city, the result of a 1999 state law meant to restrict municipally owned broadband access.
“The number one challenge for most infrastructure projects is political. It’s not financial. It’s not conceptual. It’s not technological,” said Berke, but rather, it’s a matter of navigating the special interests and lobbyists that dominate the status quo. “It’s the web of difficulties that make it harder to get it done.”
But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to pull off. Utopia, for example, has withstood a blitz of dark money attack ads likely bankrolled by cable companies in its effort to expand across the state. And in Colorado, hundreds of communities over the years across the state have voted to opt out of a 2005 law banning municipal broadband networks. This momentum ultimately proved strong enough to convince the state legislature to repeal the original ban in 2023.
Even today, broadband remains out of reach in many parts of the country that are either too rural for for-profit networks to build there at all, or where it does exist, locals can’t afford it. Americans consistently pay more for slower service, compared with their counterparts in Europe or Asia.
Combined, those barriers have left tens of millions of American households without internet access. With AI poised to further transform our economy, Chattanooga, it seems increasingly clear, could be among the first few cities outside of Silicon Valley to truly benefit from the biggest technological shift in generations, while many other post-industrial cities seem likely to fall even further behind because they don’t have the right digital infrastructure to thrive in the economy today.
Quietly chugging along on the banks of the Tennessee River, the city is making a case that states and cities should take broadband seriously as a transformational infrastructure that underpins our modern lives much the way the rail lines did in the 19th century or highways did a century later.
Luckily, there are now hundreds of models — from fully public utilities like EPB to Tribal-built broadband networks to public-private partnerships — for cities hoping to carve a publicly owned path to a better internet themselves. Laying coils of fiber-optic cables is still much cheaper and, lawsuits notwithstanding, far easier a feat than building a new highway system or a railway network. But even if it were harder, Chattanooga shows that it would be worth doing. “Projects that are most difficult are also the most rewarding,” as Berke put it. “You have to be willing to take on the status quo — that’s what can transform a community.”
This story was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
The social networking site is facing criticism for blocking access to the site, which identifies thousands of ICE agents and other employees working for Homeland Security.
Christine Lagarde said she will step down as president of the European Central Bank on Feb. 7, creating a vacancy at the top of one of Europe’s most powerful institutions and fueling further speculation about a possible return to French politics.
An official familiar with Lagarde’s thinking, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said she made her move now, almost a full year before the end of her term, to have “greater freedom to express her views and to engage in non-monetary matters, because she cannot remain neutral when she sees the developments taking place in her own country and in the world.”
The ECB said in a statement only that Lagarde had informed European Council President António Costa of the decision earlier on Thursday.
The announcement clears the way for a package deal among EU capitals over at least three appointments to the ECB’s six-strong Executive Board. Isabel Schnabel, head of the Bank’s markets department, is due to leave in January to take a senior role at the International Monetary Fund, while Philip Lane is due to depart the influential chief economist’s position in May.
Negotiations over the appointments are likely to be intense, given the ECB’s vital influence in international markets, and the never-ending pressure on European government finances. Former Dutch central bank chief Klaas Knot and Spain’s Pablo Hernández de Cos, who heads the Bank for International Settlements, are seen as the two frontrunners in the race for the top job. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said a decision would be taken by year-end.
The timing of the announcement means that President Emmanuel Macron will have a say in choosing Lagarde’s successor before he himself leaves office next spring. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally leader and a longtime critic of the EU, is currently well ahead in the polls to win the French presidency, and may take a radically different view about who should lead the ECB.
“The EU is trying to guard at least somewhat against the risk that right-wing Marine Le Pen may win the French presidential election,” said Berenberg Bank’s head of research Holger Schmieding.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party, protested that Macron had already engineered a similar situation at the Bank of France, where François Villeroy de Galhau’s early departure “allowed Macron to install his assistant,” Emmanuel Moulin, as governor.
Speculation has long swirled that Lagarde, formerly finance minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy, may throw herself back into French politics. She has stressed the need for “a pro-European voice” in the French elections, while still being consistently coy about running herself. Thursday’s announcement comes at a time when candidates from mainstream camps in France are all losing ground to Mélenchon, who wants the ECB to “set fire” to its French debt holdings. None looks likely to make the final round of the presidential election in May.
Whoever follows her as ECB president will inherit an increasingly tense situation in Europe’s bond markets, where borrowing costs are hitting their highest level in years due to a cocktail of war-fueled inflation, demographics and competition from capital from Big Tech companies chasing AI-related riches.
The problems are particularly acute in France, the eurozone’s second-largest economy, which faces a political impasse and mounting pressure over its public debt.
Lagarde succeeded Mario Draghi at the ECB in 2019, after leading the International Monetary Fund and, in her time in office, has been a stalwart of the centrist mainstream that is now being squeezed by both wings of the political spectrum across Europe.
“Christine Lagarde has led the European Central Bank through difficult times,” German finance minister Lars Klingbeil said in a statement. “Under her leadership, the ECB has kept the euro stable even during crises: when the coronavirus pandemic hit Europe hard, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and most recently in the face of the economic shocks caused by the war in Iran.”
“Christine Lagarde’s tenure at the helm of the ECB has only strengthened the confidence in the European single currency,” Eurogroup President Kyriakos Pierrakakis said in a statement, promising to give the council a “swift” recommendation on the succession to heads of government.
The ECB gave no details about Lagarde’s plans after leaving Frankfurt. However, she has talked to the World Economic Forum about taking over as chair, according to its founder Klaus Schwab. Reuters reported that the organizer of Davos could announce her appointment as early as this month.
“I leave this institution with a sense of good work done, and an ECB that is fit for the future,” Lagarde said in a video post on LinkedIn.
This story has been updated.Giorgio Leali contributed reporting.
Quebec’s separatist premier says that he will boycott the EU-Canada summit that opens in Montreal on Thursday, warning European leaders that deals struck there without his government’s consent may not be applied in the country’s second-biggest province.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon confirmed his absence late Wednesday in an open letter to the European delegation, which he posted on X. His announcement followed two days of public sparring with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney over Ottawa’s refusal to let him address the summit.
“This dynamic creates uncertainty as to the application of the agreements you could negotiate during the summit,” he wrote in French.
In the letter, St-Pierre Plamondon says Ottawa has “decided to sideline Quebec” from the talks. He says this leaves his government with “neither a chair at the negotiating table nor the opportunity to speak,” even though the summit is on Quebec soil.
Under Canada’s federal system, he argued, the provinces implement international agreements that fall within their powers. Without Quebec’s consent, a deal that runs against its interests “will simply not be implemented,” he wrote. He also accused Ottawa of withholding “critical information” on the negotiations.
He offered to meet European leaders “in the near future, in a more opportune context.” He will send Quebec’s chief diplomat, Pascal Paradis, to the summit in his place.
Carney said Wednesday his office had offered the premier the honor of welcoming the Commission president to Montreal, and a seat at the head table. “I hope he will reconsider,” he said. On Tuesday, the prime minister had accused St-Pierre Plamondon of choosing to “leave an empty chair again.”
The row has soured the upbeat mood around the summit, which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa have billed as a milestone. Leaders will launch an “Alliance for the Future,” a framework for shared prosperity and economic security.
St-Pierre Plamondon’s letter says many of its topics fall under Quebec’s responsibility, including health, education and natural resources.
The premier has also pursued his own contacts with European leaders.
He spoke by phone with French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday, and said the two had agreed on a possible meeting in France in the coming weeks.
At working level, ties have held so far, and officials describe the relationship as constructive.
Hélène Drainville, Quebec’s delegate general in Brussels, told POLITICO last week that Quebec was in talks with the European Investment Bank and the Commission, and that “all the signals are green.”
Carney, Costa and von der Leyen are due to hold a joint press conference on Friday.
Ein rein berufliches Frauenproblem bringt den Kanzler in Bedrängnis. Zwar stößt die Aussicht auf die erste Bundespräsidentin im kommenden Jahr auf breite Zustimmung, doch die historische Personalie entwickelt sich zur politischen Hängepartie.Friedrich Merz droht die Kontrolle über die Debatte um die richtige Kandidatin zu entgleiten. Dabei drängt die Zeit massiv vor der Wahl Ende Januar, sodass plötzlich wieder völlig offen ist, ob am Ende wirklich eine Frau oder doch ein Mann antritt.
Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert die hitzige Diskussion um das höchste Staatsamt. Er beleuchtet das strategische Dilemma der Akteure und den wachsenden Druck vor der nahenden Entscheidung.
Während der außenpolitische Fokus auf der Asienreise des Kanzlers liegt, ist die SPD-Entwicklungsministerin Reem Alabali Radovan im Libanon unterwegs. Carlotta Diederich von POLITICO begleitet sie und ordnet ein, welche Auswirkungen die Wahl in Israel auf den blutigen Konflikt im Süden haben könnte und wie Deutschland versucht, seine humanitäre Rolle in diesem Teil des Nahost-Konflikts versucht einzunehmen.
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We live in an era where wars are fought not just on battlefields, but also on our screens, in our minds and through the narratives we are led to believe. Narratives are influencing perception while missiles destroy infrastructure. What happens when the war for truth becomes more dangerous than the actual battle itself? Who’s controlling the narrative?
Najla Al Midfa, researcher, TRENDS Research & Advisory
When wars end, the fighting over what they meant begins: who won, who was to blame and who can be trusted to keep the peace. These questions are settled less on the battlefield than on screens, in feeds and in group chats. For a Middle East emerging from the war that began on February 28, that contest may decide whether any new security order holds.
The region is now asking what comes after deterrence. That question brought policymakers, military leaders and researchers from the United States, Europe, Asia and the Gulf to the TRENDS 6th Annual Conference, held in Abu Dhabi and organized by TRENDS Global, in collaboration with its global offices. The answer cannot be measured only in missiles and alliances. Information resilience should be treated as security infrastructure, planned and funded like air defense, not managed as public relations.
What happens when the war for truth becomes more dangerous than the actual battle itself?
The struggle over perception can now matter as much as events on the ground. That is no longer hyperbole. In any crisis today, governments, media outlets, political movements and non-state groups compete in real time to define what is happening. Disinformation, coordinated propaganda and now content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) mean a false account can reach millions before an official one is drafted.
As former BBC correspondent Karen Allen put it at the conference, “Now in an instant, I’m able to influence millions of people,” and algorithm manipulation is what we are increasingly seeing.
This year’s war showed how real that is. Within days of the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, an AI-generated video of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa on fire, with crowds fleeing, was viewed tens of millions of times, according to BBC Verify. Fabricated images of damaged U.S. facilities in the Gulf spread just as fast, some posted by Iranian state-linked outlets. UAE Minister of State Noura Al Kaabi later described the attacks on the country as coming “from the sky and behind our screens.” Her government’s answer was to treat “fake news and misinformation as a security threat.”
A more damaging false story was not a single video. It was the idea that the Gulf was a party to the war. The UAE did not want this war and said so. On March 3, Minister of State Reem Al Hashimy said the UAE did not “seek to expand the circle of confrontation,” that it had “repeatedly confirmed” its territory could not be used for any military operation against Iran, and that “returning to the negotiating table is the only rational way forward.” The attacks continued anyway. Reuters reported, citing UAE defense figures, that 186 ballistic missiles and 812 drones were fired at the country in the first days of the conflict.
Information resilience should be treated as security infrastructure, planned and funded like air defense, not managed as public relations.
Tehran sought to blur that record, framing strikes on Gulf cities as retaliation against American aggression. Its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told NBC News that Iran had “not attacked our neighbors,” only “American bases,” and called the hotels hit in Dubai “collateral damage.” Countering that narrative does not require propaganda of our own. It requires putting the record in front of the world quickly and repeatedly: the UAE’s public calls for restraint before the war, its refusal to let its territory be used against Iran, and the hundreds of missiles and drones fired at it, most of which it shot down. Facts published fast, through verified channels, in Arabic, English and Farsi, are harder to bury than corrections issued too late.
Even after a war ends, the threats do not disappear; they simply take different forms. Ceasefires and reconstruction depend on public trust. If populations come to believe that the peace is a betrayal, or that a neighbor cannot be trusted, no deterrence framework or security pact will survive contact with domestic politics. Spoilers understand this. Their cheapest weapon is a story.
Seen from the Gulf, the lesson of recent years is that speed and credibility beat silence. Crisis communication is not a side function of security. When official channels inform the public quickly, consistently and honestly, rumors have less room to grow. When they hesitate, someone else fills the gap.
None of this is simple. Governments everywhere are still working out where countering disinformation ends and controlling speech begins, and that debate should stay open. But the common ground is wider than it looks: a society cannot be secure if it cannot tell what is true.
The harder test comes now. After a war, influence campaigns shift from shock to slow erosion: relitigating who was to blame, questioning whether Gulf governments can protect their people, and setting neighbors and communities against each other. Young connected audiences are the main target. They are also the best defense.
Protecting our societies from that influence does not mean closing them. It means official channels fast and credible enough that people turn to them first. It means platforms held to clear rules on labeling AI-generated conflict content, as X began to do in March. And it means a generation of young Emiratis and Gulf citizens equipped to verify what they see and able to tell the region’s story themselves rather than leaving it to others.
The harder test comes now. After a war, influence campaigns shift from shock to slow erosion.
This is not only a Gulf problem. The campaigns aimed at audiences in the Gulf also shape how Washington and Brussels understand the region. The UAE and its partners already work closely on defense and intelligence. Detecting and exposing cross-border influence operations belongs on that shared agenda as a joint effort between governments, platforms and researchers.
Diplomacy, investment, and deterrence will rebuild the region’s security. Whether that security holds will depend on something harder to measure: what people across the region believe about each other, and about who protects them. For the UAE, winning that argument with facts is not public relations. It is part of keeping the country safe.
Najla Al Midfa is an Emirati researcher at TRENDS Research & Advisory, a company under TRENDS Group. Her research focuses on geopolitics, international relations, economic diplomacy and regional security, with a particular interest in the UAE’s foreign policy and strategic partnerships. She holds a master’s degree in Global Affairs and Diplomatic Leadership from the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, where her thesis examined the UAE’s economic diplomacy through its Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement strategy.
Sources
Sixth Annual TRENDS Conference 2026 kicks off on October 12 — WAM (Emirates News Agency), September 2026
TRENDS 6th Annual Conference 2026 — Sustainable Security: programme and speakers — TRENDS Research & Advisory
AI-generated Iran war videos surge as creators use new tech to cash in — BBC Verify, March 7, 2026
Factbox: Iranian missiles and drones fired at Gulf countries — Reuters (republished by Al-Monitor), March 3, 2026
X suspends revenue sharing for undisclosed AI war videos — AFP, March 3, 2026
UAE urges the US, Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table — Euronews, March 4, 2026
Fake news treated as security threat during Iran war, says UAE minister — The National, September 15, 2026
EU and Canada eye now-or-never window to Trump-proof their ties
Brussels and Ottawa aim for ambitious upgrade in their relationship while the U.S. president is occupied by the midterms — and before Europe’s political landscape shifts.
By SEBASTIAN STARCEVIC
Illustration by Hèctor Mixed for POLITICO
The EU and Canada are betting they can deepen their partnership while Donald Trump looks inward at the U.S. midterms — and before European elections upend the political calculus.
Their strategy is to push for the broadest possible upgrade and hope Trump is too busy campaigning to respond, four EU officials and two Canadian diplomats familiar with preparations for this week’s summit in Montreal said.
Trump, whose Republican Party is fighting to retain control of Congress in next week’s midterms, has called the EU’s offer of associate membership for Canada “laughable” and threatened “serious tariffs” if the two sides get too close.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa will join Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for two days of talks on trade, security, energy, education and the Arctic on Thursday.
The summit “is a very strong statement,” said Mark Camilleri, president of the Canada and EU Trade and Investment Association. “I don’t think there’s any feeling that this is going to be some discreet get-together.”
Canada is also looking to move before Europe’s politics shift. Ottawa wants changes to the partnership that will outlast Trump and Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally is polling ahead in France and has criticized the EU-Canada trade pact, CETA, said a Canadian diplomat. All the officials and diplomats in this article were granted anonymity to speak frankly about the summit preparations.
Avoiding Trump’s ire
Brussels and Ottawa are pushing to strengthen their relationship, including by cooperating more closely on trade and defense, international engagement and institutional links, according to a draft joint statement obtained by POLITICO.
In her September State of the Union speech, von der Leyen emphasized that the EU-Canada alliance is “not against anyone else.” Yet officials acknowledge that a stronger alliance risks triggering retaliation from Trump.
Von der Leyen, Costa and Carney “are fully aware that the eyes of the world are upon them,” said Camilleri.
The Europeans and Canadians know “the U.S. is watching,” a senior EU official said, adding that the bloc and Canada were nevertheless proceeding with business as usual and pushing for the most expansive possible relationship with Ottawa.
Another possibility is that the summit yields only “nice pictures” and little substance, a third senior official said, making it less likely to “trigger” the president.
European capitals, EU institutions and Canada’s provinces are all waiting to see what von der Leyen and Carney agree on in their meeting, the Canadian diplomat said, adding it was impossible to pre-judge how Trump would react.
Shadow of Le Pen
For Ottawa, pressure comes from another direction: Europe’s electoral calendar and the rise of the far right.
With Spain, France, Poland and Italy all set to go to the polls in the next year, Canadian officials want to secure concrete gains while EU governments remain receptive to closer cooperation and keep the topic front of mind, before elections across the bloc risk shifting priorities and upsetting the political balance.
When Carney came to Strasbourg to lay out his vision for a closer alliance in September, he was heckled from the gallery by the far-right Alternative for Germany MEP Siegbert Droese, who led chants of “USA!”
But it’s France’s presidential election in April — and the prospect of Le Pen in office — that is causing the most concern, according to a second Canadian diplomat.
“It’s very fortunate we’re doing this summit now and not in six months,” the diplomat said, referring to the French election date.
Canada is pushing for big, bold “structural changes” in its relationship with the EU now that will outlast Trump and Le Pen, the diplomat added. Carney has grasped the moment’s rarity and urgency and will not leave the summit without securing major wins, the first Canadian diplomat said.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Canada’s PM Mark Carney at a G7 summit in France on June 16, 2026. | Pool photo by Evelyn Hockstein via Getty Images
Another question is whether Brussels and Ottawa can upgrade their partnership without eventually drawing the U.S. president’s ire. The midterms might buy them some time, but the vote will not keep Trump busy forever.
Trump might be even more dangerous and more likely to take out his anger on the EU and Canada after the election, given that he will retain many of his tariff and foreign policy powers even if the Republicans lose Congress, the second Canadian diplomat warned.
“At the end of the day, his reaction could be anything,” Camilleri said. “We can only control what we can control.”
On Tuesday, defense contractor Anduril and chipmaker Qualcomm announced a partnership to build laptops entirely in the United States, starting with a single model in 2027. They also announced a "long-term goal" of pushing the computer industry to create "a fully domestic supply chain."
Even a single Made-in-USA laptop would be a surprise, because no major US computer company builds its laptops here - not Apple, not Dell, not HP, not Microsoft. We're not aware of any company that does.
A hacker stole a trove of personal information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The breach exposes the names, job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and office locations of more than 41,000 employees, including those in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to TechCrunch and Wired. The data also linked the agencies to specific surveillance tools.
As reported by TechCrunch, a hacker known as "Department of Peace" gained access to the data through Okta, an identity and access management service used by the DHS. Around 21,000 records pertain to CBP employees, and ne …
Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a Democrat, speaks at a public exhibit about the Epstein files in Dallas. | Chitose Suzuki/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again.
He’s the subject of scores of midterm campaign ads, each more lurid than the last. A second bill mandating the release of the Epstein files is currently kicking around Congress. And on Monday, House Democrats released a new report alleging that the Justice Department helped cover up details of Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump, calling — very aspirationally! — for an independent criminal investigation.
Of course, no one really expects Trump’s attorney general to name a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration. In a statement, one White House spokesperson panned the report as “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans.” (The timing, just one week before the midterms, does seem pretty fortuitous.)
The document, which runs to 50 pages, draws on public accounts and staff interviews with an unspecified number of survivors, including a former pageant queen who alleges that Trump raped her in 1993. The woman had previously accused Trump of groping her, which a Trump spokesperson dismissed at the time as “fake.”
When it comes to Epstein, however, Democrats don’t need a lot of new material to damage Trump. The scandal, and his administration’s handling of it, continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Republicans.
That’s surprising to me, candidly, because the decades-old dealings of even a very despicable sex offender don’t have any bearing on Americans’ day-to-day costs or experiences. And Trump has been able to brush off a lot of other unsavory behavior and associations.
Many of these young voters “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment” and see the Epstein files as evidence of that, the political analyst Rachel Janfaza recently told Vox. Some also feel burned by Trump’s campaign promise to release the government’s investigative files on Epstein…and his about-face once in office.
Democrats, sensing an opening, are hammering the issue. Relentlessly so. According to data from the tracker AdImpact cited by NBC News, there are currently more than 500 campaign ads airing across the country that include the words “pedophile” or “predator.”
Many of them reference Epstein or the so-called Epstein files, and three-quarters are backed by Democrats. One recent ad featuring an Epstein survivor, and targeted at Kansas Republican Roger Marshall, slams the incumbent senator’s September 2025 vote to block a procedural measure that would have released the Epstein files. (The Senate later moved to release the files by unanimous consent.)
Another ad, this one in Maine, claims that Epstein’s “business partner” funneled $3 million to Sen. Susan Collins’s super PAC. (Importantly, the connection between Epstein and this purported partner is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.)
These ads will fade after Tuesday, of course. But you haven’t heard the last word on this. Should Democrats win control of either chamber, they’ll gain the power to subpoena witnesses and documents for yet more Epstein investigations.
Some Democratic leaders in the House are already salivating over that prospect.
One link for later
➨ Ask better questions than “what do you do?” Small talk is often dominated by idle chatter about traffic, weather, or jobs. To actually get to know your conversation partner, try leading with questions that get at their interests: what a friend’s friend is reading, for example, or what a barista’s favorite beverage is. You can even draft a little list of go-to questions in advance to deploy in conversation when you need them. Just don’t treat the exercise like a checklist. The real key to better small talk is being curious.
Before you go…
Did you know…that concrete is the second-most-used material on Earth? (The first is water!) Mixing and pouring concrete is responsible for a huge share of global emissions, but there are efforts underway to make it more sustainable.
Today’s trivia: An arroyo is a stream — or at least, a streambed — found in what type of environment? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield. That would be Odie, whose look evolved over the years as illustrator Jim Davis sought to distinguish him from his iconic canine rival Snoopy.
A gavel prior to an open commission meeting at the FCC. | Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
What do drones, routers, and Roombas have in common? The US government wants to keep Chinese ones from entering the country. They’re the first consumer gadgets that are facing de facto import bans because of the US government’s xenophobic stance — and they might not be the last.
Originally, the US government was just worried about US networks. It’s been distrustful of Chinese telecom equipment providers Huawei and ZTE for well over a decade, eventually requiring telecom providers to “rip and replace” their gear. (Many telecoms have still failed to do so.) It established an “Entity List” for companies whose gear should be banned from import, marketing, and sale.
But under the second Trump administration, that list has been weaponized against entire home consumer gadget categories too — starting in December 2025 when Trump and Brendan Carr’s FCC banned all future foreign drones unless their companies obtained a waiver.
Next was a ban on all future foreign routers, all future foreign robots and power inverters, and within the robot ban, all future foreign robovacs. In each case, the government claims it’s because those gadgets fundamentally pose an unacceptable threat to US national security. But in each case, the US has provided zero public evidence of a threat, has done nothing about existing drones and routers and robots that might pose such a threat, and hasn’t given us any reason to trust that its waivers have anything to do with security.
Besides, there are rarely any US companies to fill the gaps left by foreign ones. Consumer gadgets are largely made overseas, including practically all routers and practically all drones — just like how your Apple, Dell, and HP laptops are not made in the US.
In this StoryStream, we’re following the latest on the foreign gadget bans.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced the agency will vote on November 19th on rules that would allow prisons to use signal jamming. Radiofrequency jammers are generally banned under Section 333 and the Communications Act of 1934, with few exceptions, and Carr has noted they've been permitted for use at some federal facilities already. Carr claims in a statement that jammers are needed because "For years, thousands upon thousands of contraband cellphones have been pouring into prisons, and some of the worst possible offenders have been using them to order hits, coordinate violent gang activity, and aid criminal enterprises."
Constellation Energy will get $5 billion in government loans to modernize nuclear reactors. Most of the new capacity is already committed to Google, Amazon, and Meta.
BRUSSELS — EU countries have dropped the idea of offering Canada “associate member” status in the 27-member bloc, opting instead for softer language promising “ever closer association” ahead of a landmark EU-Canada summit, according to the latest version of the draft statement, seen by POLITICO.
A group of countries including Germany, Greece and France all objected to mentioning associate membership in a joint EU-Canada statement to be issued in Montreal, the diplomats said.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had originally proposed “associate membership” for Canada in her State of the European Union speech in September, catching some EU countries off-guard.
A previous draft of the joint statement had read that the EU and Canada would “work to define by the 2027 EU-Canada Summit the concept of Associate Member that will reflect, through this even closer association, our common endeavour and cooperation towards our shared goals of prosperity, economic security and strategic autonomy.”
In the final version, the text reads: “We will create an even closer association between Canada and the EU… and work to define by the 2027 EU-Canada Summit the concept of an ever closer association of Canada to the EU, short of full membership itself.”
Later in the statement, the language changes from “even closer” to “ever closer.” The text still needs final approval. EU countries have a deadline of 6 p.m. to raise objections.
While countries disagree over the wording to describe the relationship, Brussels is not softening its offering to Canada of a vastly expanded partnership.
“The good news is it doesn’t matter about specific names or nomenclature,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday. “What matters is the difference that it will make to lives of Canadians.”
As the landscape of higher education has evolved from the eras of segregation to the civil rights movement to Trump-era racial politics, Black students have had to adapt on college campuses nationwide as government mandates, school policies, and the dismantling of affirmative action have impacted their education over the years.
Hosted by Kahlil Greene, this video is part of our new series, Kahlil Explains, that unites Vox’s unique brand of explainer journalism with Greene’s expertise in how politics and culture shape society. This first episode traces the history of HBCUs and the experience of Black college students to unpack why Black student enrollment is growing at HBCUs yet declining at other elite institutions.
Read more about HBCUs and race in higher education:
The move to strip citizens of their passports and their rights is not a new one, nor is it limited to the United States and Rep. Ilhan Omar. | Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
What do a Bollywood actor, a member of Congress, and Israeli directors have in common?
It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. The punchline, though, is that governments of India, the United States, and Israel, respectively, think they should be stripped of their national status.
Bollywood star Imran Khan, nephew of Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, was told he has until October 28(and since extended to November 2) to leave India, where he resides on an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card. India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, but OCI status gives individuals of Indian descent and their family members the right to permanently live, work, and study in India; its revocation uproots its holders from their homes and their lives. Khan had protested in a demonstration demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, India’s chief election commission. He is challenging the order in court.
Earlier this month, US Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home was raided by federal authorities who are reportedly preparing a case to strip her of citizenship, alleging that her father said she was 17 when she was really 18 when he filed her naturalization paperwork. President Donald Trump subsequently said that, because a federal court filing allegedly referred to her as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar,” she should have to resign from Congress.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has intimated that Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, directors of the film NAZA, in which Abraham interviews Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on Tel Aviv rooftops about how they assessed and decided to kill civilians in Gaza, could be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, saying he would pursue legislation to go after critics of the military who crossed a line. “We will revoke citizenship for anyone who defames IDF soldiers around the world — he will be deeply hurt in his pocket,” said Netanyahu, who cited the filmmakers as a potential example and called their work “intolerable.”
The move to strip citizens of their passports and their rights is not a new one, nor is it limited to these three countries. Perhaps most famously, Jews were stripped of citizenship by the Nazis in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. To take a more recent example, over the summer, Russia passed legislation that effectively strips Russians abroad facing domestic prosecution on political grounds of their citizenship (the law takes away their property, freezes their bank accounts, and refuses them consular services).
Still, that three high-profile cases are coming from three countries that claim to be democracies raises the question: Why do reactionary leaders in democracies reach for denaturalization (or quasi-denaturalization, in the case of loss of OCI) as a weapon against political and cultural elites? What do they hope to gain? And, relatedly: What might they lose instead?
It’s not just about the high-profile targets
Reactionary leaders do not typically threaten to make an example of high-profile political opponents or cultural elites as a first step. In each of these cases, there are demographic groups — whole swathes of the population — whose governments have been trying to disenfranchise, denaturalize, or deport them (or some combination of the three) long before the recent spate of high-profile headlines.
In India, there’s currently a politicized election integrity push that experts warn could illegitimately prevent tens of millions of voters from marginalized groups, especially Muslims, from participating in elections. What should have been a routine clean up of voter rolls ended up with 130 million — nearly 10 percent of the population — struck off the lists. The sweeping approach has raised widespread concern from critics that many voters will be incorrectly removed — and deep suspicions that this disenfranchisement is targeted and intentional.
Mukulika Banerjee, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, noted this happened after the position of chief election commissioner was made partisan and given immunity for life. And while normally in India (unlike in the United States) the onus is on the state, not individuals, to register voters, in this case, the state said that if people were to be put back on the voter rolls, they “had to produce a whole bunch of documents…which by implication affected the socially disadvantaged,” per Banerjee.
That meant women, people from lower castes, rural voters — and, since “the Muslim population amongst the most seriously socially disadvantaged, the likelihood of Muslims falling in this category is very high,” Banerjee, author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India, said. In places like West Bengal, where Muslims make up nearly 30 percent of the population, there were some assembly constituencies where, in elections earlier this year, the number of names deleted from the rolls was greater than the margin of victory, and while anti-incumbent sentiment was high and the BJP may well have won anyway, some, per Banerjee, are asking, “was this an attempt to choose the electorate, so to speak.”
In the United States, the Trump administration has made denaturalization a priority, hoping to find people they can make an example of as part of their broader immigration crackdown. They have already filed to strip dozens of Americans of their citizenship by claiming they lied on their naturalization paperwork (“Justice Department Moves to Strip Citizenship from 40 Criminals in Largest Single-Period Filing Under the Trump Administration,” a press release from earlier this month crowed). The White House also tried, unsuccessfully, to revoke America’s constitutional right to birthright citizenship, which could have left future generations far more vulnerable to removal or persecution.
And in Israel, Palestinians have long been made to feel the weight of citizenship — and the heft of its absence. This is not only true in, say, the West Bank, where Jews live as citizens but Palestinians live under occupation and military law, but in East Jerusalem, where most Palestinians are permanent residents, not citizens, meaning they cannot vote in general elections for the Israeli legislature.
“That is a tool that Israel has used in a different way that could easily be transplanted to citizens,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst on Israel at Crisis Group. And if you can strip residency from Palestinians in Jerusalem, maybe you can strip citizenship, too. “If this government is reelected, I could see that becoming a less and less crazy idea” as what was once unthinkable becomes “normalized.” Palestinian citizens in Israel have expressed the same concern.
The chilling effect of deportation threats
How — and why — does an aspiring authoritarian move from threatening the rights and status of demographic groups to going after elites?
Sometimes, the elites are — in addition to being outspoken and high profile — from the demographic group under threat.
Several years before Khan’s OCI status came under threat, the Modi government took journalist Aatish Taseer’s OCI card from him. This happened in 2019 — months after Taseer authored a Time story with “India’s Divider in Chief” plastered across the cover, after which the prime minister himself said, “Time Magazine is foreign. The writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.” Taseer’s father was indeed a Pakistani political figure, but this was hardly some secret of which Taseer had made offhand mention; Taseer had written about his father and the role his absence and rediscovery in his life, including in his first book, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands.
And so with Imran Khan, Taseer said in a phone interview, there is an element of, “Just get the Muslim out” (Khan’s mother is Muslim). In Taseer’s own case, he said, he became “the Paki.”
The same is true at least in one high-profile case in the United States: Omar is Muslim and from Somalia, two groups that frequently attract the ire of the Trump administration. Recently, Trump urged Minnesotans to “fight back” against Somali immigrants before the state is “taken over.” Omar is also a prominent and progressive member of Congress.
“It’s got these two levels,” Taseer said. “One is an ethnonationalist agenda. The other is a blunt instrument of coercion.” If you speak out too freely, Taseer added, “you won’t be able to return home.”
The blunt instrument, though, is more narrowly applied than, say, stripping people from voter rolls en masse. It is designed to cause fear among elites: journalists and actors and academics.
And it is meant, Banerjee said, to raise the price of protest.
The government’s first instinct, she said, is to call protesters terrorists and anti-nationals, rather than citizens exercising their rights: “They don’t seem to understand that to peacefully protest is there in…the constitution.”
And by taking a Bollywood star’s OCI status, the government can “make an example and say, look, we can take the biggest and the richest and the most prominent.” It is a message to the rich and the famous and the powerful: Do not think you are bigger than government coercion. You are not.
Whether it works is almost beside the point. Trump is facing an uphill legal battle in proving that an error committed by Omar’s father, if indeed any error exists, means she should lose her citizenship. Omar has said she sees the administration’s goal as exhausting and intimidating her to the point she leaves politics — something she says will not happen.
And, it’s unlikely, Zonszein said, that Abraham and Szor will actually be stripped of citizenship given Israel’s own judicial protections. But, “It’s an empty threat, but one that works, because it chills dissent, it stifles it, it makes people scared.”
It also suggests that, regardless of whether you’re a member of the targeted group, or have some special status that could set you apart, power can come for you, too. That can scare people out of speaking out for the marginalized. It can also alert them into the need for doing so.
“When it happens in a democracy, one has to always keep one’s radar attuned to who is suddenly becoming prey, whether it’s LGBT in Russia or now in Turkey or in this case in India, Muslims, Taseer said. ”It’s sort of — what they’re going to those people, they’re going to eventually do to the population at large. It’s not one of those things where they’re like, ah, let us do this little thing, and then you guys can all live happily ever after. It’s generally always accompanied by a deeper authoritarian turn.”
For example, in addition to threatening Abraham and Szor, Israel has revoked the entry permits of American Jews who volunteered to work with and protect Palestinian farmers during harvests and froze aliyah — the name for the process by which Jews abroad immigrate — of two Jews over their pro-Palestinian West Bank activism, which, as Israeli outlet Haaretz reported, could be a violation of Israeli law guaranteeing the right of all Jews around the world the right to move to Israel and become citizens.
“I mean, anybody with their head on straight would say, if you treat one person this way, it’s not that hard to treat another person this way,” Zonszein said. “That’s pretty basic, obvious stuff.”
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