For ten years, I co-hosted a modestly successful podcast with Rania Khalek called “Unauthorized Disclosure.” She took a job with BreakThrough News while we were producing the show, and Rania is a chief news correspondent for the media organization.
But now House Republicans under President Donald Trump have subpoenaed BreakThrough News and placed everyone who works for the organization under a microscope. Republicans demand that the outlet provide financial records and copies of internal communications to further their fishing expedition.
BreakThrough News is not only a platform for left-wing political thought and news discussion. Its reporters, commentators, and producers do what any respectable outlet engaged in journalism should do. They seek out the voices of people in countries impacted by United States foreign policy, who can speak about their struggles for peace, justice, and human rights. Oftentimes they even travel to these locations in pursuit of the truth.
I have appeared on the outlet’s news show, “BT Live,” several times, particularly when the United States government was engaged in a political prosecution against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. I interviewed Brian Becker, host of BreakThrough News’ “The Socialist Program,” and Zoe Alexandra, who is now their news director. I even donated to BreakThrough News because their coverage of the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America tends to be perceptive and thorough.
In this darkening political climate, it is crucial to put forward a message of solidarity instead of running from past associations.
The goal of targeting BreakThrough News is not to root out “foreign influence” by the Chinese Communist Party. Rather, the intent is to delegitimize the outlet, strip the organization of its tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization, and frighten Americans so that it becomes much more difficult to raise funds for their work.
Certainly, given the rise of financial censorship, it is possible that putting BreakThrough News in the crosshairs will eventually mean that payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe abruptly cut off access to their services—for the outlet as well as any staff member or freelancer.
The best way to make it difficult for the Trump administration and Republicans to succeed in this attack on the First Amendment rights of a dissenting media organization is to keep watching and sharing their videos. Donate if you have a few dollars to spare because every little bit will undermine this witch hunt.
Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long been a ghoulish anti-Cuban war hawk, led a summit on “political terrorism” and released an unhinged State Department report that insists Cuba has turned “Americans into instruments of their own nation’s undoing.” It is supposedly a “staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside [U.S.] borders.”
A key part of this “subversive foreign influence” apparently involves “conferences, rallies, and organized travel delegations to Cuba” that—wait for it—oppose the Trump administration’s oil blockade and sanctions, which have plunged the country into a humanitarian crisis as part of a vicious effort to collapse the government and force regime change. So appalling!
The report was a total throwback to McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, and it named names.
CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans were mentioned. I interviewed Medea at least a half dozen or more times, and I’ve met both Medea and Jodie. They have voiced support for my work, and I support their activism as well, especially because CODEPINK is one of the only groups willing to consistently confront people in power engaged in forever wars.
Incredibly, the report named Democracy Now! co-founder Amy Goodman. I’ve appeared on her news program multiple times, and recently, she toured the country with a film that was produced about her called “Steal This. Story, Please!”
This report went on to single out Ben Cohen and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). I crossed paths with Ben, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, while I was in Washington, D.C., to oppose the prosecution against Assange.
At almost every protest that I have ever covered, there is an NLG legal observer in a bright green baseball cap. They are key to ensuring the safety of everyone as people exercise their First Amendment right to assemble, and when police harshly respond or violently disperse protesters, it is the NLG who are there to clearly inform the public about what really led to the chaos and disorder.
We face a broad-based effort to weaponize the U.S. government against any individual, media organization, activist group, or nonprofit organization that has scrutinized the Trump administration or challenged his policies.
All of us should take note of who is targeted and which organizations are placed under clouds of investigation. Because what Trump and Republicans are telling the public when they name people and organizations is that they represent the biggest obstacle to their insidious agenda. They blame them for their failures as well as rare but important moments of accountability and political embarrassment.
Few U.S. media organizations with a wide audience will show solidarity, even though the Trump Justice Department has been subpoenaing their records, too. Which is why it is a positive sign that “Connect with Jacob Soboroff” on MS Now spoke with Manolo De Los Santos, the co-executive director of the People’s Forum, and contributor to BreakThrough News.
“We’re organizers. We’re activists. We’re on the ground almost every day, whether it’s organizing to support families who are deported by ICE, whether it’s going against the genocide in Gaza, [whether] it’s about standing up to different sanctions and blockades that the U.S. government imposes on people around the world, including Cuba,” De Los Santos told Soboroff. “We’re just literally pointing out injustice where we see it.”
“That is our daily work, and all of a sudden that becomes an un-American activity. And we’ve seen this script before. It’s not new. It has a long history in the United States, but it’s taking a dangerous turn now. Because it’s basically a wholesale attack on our free speech.”
De Los Santos said, “From the beginning their requests have been, why do you oppose Trump’s war on Iran? Why do you oppose our policy toward Palestine? Why do you oppose our stance on ICE? It’s essentially going to the question of what our political positions are.”
“That’s why we won’t surrender our free speech rights. If we were to accept what this committee is demanding from us, it essentially would be to accept that people in the United States have no right to protest, no right to organize, no right to express their differences with the U.S. government.”
Importantly, in an interview shared with nearly 10 million subscribers, De Los Santos was allowed time to outline the following:
The Trump administration is mired in a series of failures. It has been incapable of convincing the American people that deporting millions of immigrants is the right thing to do, and therefore it goes after the people who organize in defense of immigrant families. It hasn’t been able to convince millions of Americans that bombing Iran, bombing school girls in Iran, is a good idea. So the fact that we’re organizing protests against that is all of a sudden an issue. The fact that we stand with the Palestinian people, that we say no to a blockade against Cuba. These are not fringe positions. These are the positions of a majority of Americans right now.
To which Soboroff agreed that people across the political spectrum hold these views as well. That means Trump and Republicans are trying to suppress a majority, which will not succeed.
As Rania said during BreakThrough News’ live show, “They don’t even need to win here or prove we did anything wrong. I think this is really just about trying to bury us in legal proceedings until we’ve basically run out of money or stop reporting out of intimidation.”
The disjointed and difficult media environment makes it easier for the government to bully outlets like BreakThrough News and silence them through false accusations that they are “foreign agents.” Everyone is working on their own projects, and we are engaged in a daily scramble for any dollars that will help sustain what we do.
Still, our best chance at defending our collective rights to freedom of expression is not by turning inward but through alliance-building. We have to stand together on key issues, which we have a moral imperative to weigh in on as we inform readers and fight for a more equitable and just future.
You are always such a beautiful comrade! Thank you for speaking out, this is serious even in it's stupidity and we need to remember that. You are always on the front lines calling out this insanity, thank you.
Thank you for the solidarity, Kevin, and for consistently standing against government attacks on speech and the press.