Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-05-06 Wednesday

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Headlines for May 06, 2026; Global Press Freedom Hits Record Low, U.S. Drops to 64th in the World: Reporters Without Borders; Israel’s Destruction of Southern Lebanon Turns Villages into “Moonscapes”: Reporter Lylla Younes; “Backtalker”: Kimberlé Crenshaw on New Memoir, Voting Rights, Critical Race Theory & Clarence Thomas

From New York, this is Democracy Now. For the first time, the state of press freedom in more than half of all countries is now classified as difficult or very serious. Journalist work has never been more complicated or more dangerous. And our collective right to be informed has never been more under threat. 13 journalists have been killed this year. More than 500 reporters and media workers are currently detained worldwide. Reporters Without Borders has just released its annual press Freedom Index. The U.S. has fallen to 64.

We'll speak to R.S.F. Clayton Wymer's then as the world's attentions focused on negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, 12 more villages and towns in the south of Lebanon have been told to evacuate by the Israeli army. Demolitions and fighting continues despite a ceasefire. In the same way that the Israeli military flattened vast swaths of Gaza's cultural heritage, universities, mosques, archives, the same thing is happening in southern Lebanon. It's this exact same playbook. We'll speak to Beirut-based independent journalist Lely Yunus. She's here in New York. Then Backtalker, an American memoir.

We'll talk to the acclaimed constitutional law scholar Kimberly. Crenshaw, known for her work on critical race theory and intersectionality. All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. President Trump has announced he's pausing the so-called Project Freedom operation in the Strait of Hormuz, saying there's, quote, great progress toward a complete and final agreement, unquote, with Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said the offensive stage of the U.S. Israeli war in Iran is over. Meanwhile, Iranian President Masoud Pazashkian called U.S. demands impossible, saying Washington expects Iran to submit to unilateral conditions. Oil prices plunged earlier today amidst reports that the U.S. and Iran could reach a deal soon. This comes after a day of intense fighting in the strait. According to the U.S. military, Iran launched cruise missiles, drones, and small boats at U.S. protected ships, and a South Korean-operated vessel caught fire. President Trump said the U.S. sank seven small Iranian boats and denied any U.S. warship was struck. Meanwhile, Iranian foreign minister of Basarakhqi held talks with Chinese

foreign minister Wang Yi in Beijing today. Wang said China is ready to play, quote, a greater role in restoring peace and tranquility to the Middle East, unquote. The husband of Iran's imprisoned human rights activist Nargis Mohamedi is speaking out after her hospitalization for severe medical problems. Her families demanding she be transferred from Zanjan prison to Tehran, where she could receive better medical care, but authorities continue to deny her transfer. Nargis Mohamedi has been arrested 13 times, and sentenced to a cumulative 31 years in prison. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 for her advocacy against torture and the death penalty in Iran.

This is Nargis Muhammad's husband, Taghi Romani. Nargis believes in human rights, injustice, and inequality for women. She sees the struggle for human rights as an ideal and has extraordinary courage. And she has expressed this. She has always had this. Nargis in any situation works for the improvement of human rights. That is her belief. In Gaza, Israeli strikes killed at least three Palestinians, including a 15-year-old on Tuesday.

Gaza health authorities said one Palestinian was killed and two others were wounded in an air strike near the Sheikh Rathwaan neighborhood in Gaza City, while another was killed by Israeli tank shelling in the central part of the besieged strip. A third strike hit a police station in northern Gaza. killing the teenager. Despite the U.S. brokered so-called ceasefire, Israel's been conducting near daily attacks on Gaza. At least 830 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire took effect in October. This is an eyewitness to the Israeli strike on the police station Tuesday. We suddenly heard a blast. I ran outside and found the police station had been hit. I looked

and saw people lying on the ground, martyrs and wounded. I started moving wounded people and putting them in the car. We came here to Al-Supah Hospital with a martyr. When will the war stop? When will the strikes on us stop? When will the injustice end? Will all of this continue to happen to us? A court in Israel has again extended the detention of two members of the Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla that was violently intercepted by Israeli forces and international waters last week. Spanish national, Seif Abu Keshik, and the Brazilian citizen, Tiago Avila, were among an estimated 175 activists forced off their humanitarian aid ships at gunpoint during Israel's raid on the flotilla. The other activists were taken to a port on the Greek island of

Crete. This is a lawyer representing Abu Keshek and Avila, who had visible bruises on his face after Israeli soldiers beat him. We also talked about the detention conditions, which amount to psychological torture since both Tiago and Seif are being kept in isolation since they were moved to the custody of the Israeli prison services

and are blindfolded each time they are taken out of the cell even when they go through a medical procedure which also violates the most basic medical ethical standards Saif Abu Keshek and Tiago Avila are being held by Israel without charge.

Tiago Avila's mother died yesterday in Brazil. To see our coverage of this story, go to our website, DemocracyNow.org. In Britain, four, Palestine action activists have been convicted of criminal damage over their involvement in a 2024 protest and raid on a factory operated by the Israeli military. military firm Elbit. Two other defendants on the same trial were acquitted. The four activists were found guilty Tuesday of smashing up Elbit military equipment. Their legal team said in a statement, quote, they went into this trial with their heads held high and with the knowledge that, no matter the verdict, by destroying Israeli military drones, their action likely saved lives in Palestine, unquote. The British governments banned Palestine action under its Terrorism Act.

30 House Democrats sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, urging the Trump administration to publicly acknowledge Israel's undeclared nuclear weapons program. Led by Democratic Congress member, Joaquin Castro, the lawmakers wrote, quote, Congress has a constitutional responsibility to be fully informed about the the nuclear balance in the Middle East, the risk of escalation by any party to this conflict, and the administration's planning and contingencies for such scenarios. We do not believe we've received that information, they wrote. The letter breaks a bipartisan policy of silence on Israel's nuclear program dating to a secret 1969 agreement between President Richard Nixon

and Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Mayer. The Pentagon says it launched another strike on a vessel in the Eastern Pacific, killing three people Tuesday. The Trump administration once again claimed the vessel was carrying drugs without providing any evidence. Since September, the Pentagon says it's killed at least 190 people and strikes on the boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The attacks have been widely condemned as illegal. Tightening U.S. sanctions on Cuba are likely the main cause. for the sharp increase in the island's infant mortality rate from 2018 to 2025. That's according to a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research,

which found the infant mortality rate in Cuba has increased by 148 percent and is likely to get worse due to harsher sanctions under President Trump's second term. Infants with cancer have been particularly impacted as hospitals and clinics face extended power, blackouts, and diminishing medical supplies. CEPR's Director of International Policy, Alexander Maine, one of the reports co-authors, said, quote, the Trump policy of maximum pressure on Cuba has killed a lot of babies. It's highly likely that more babies are dying now and at an even higher rate than last year as a result of the current U.S. blockade targeting Cuba, unquote.

The Guardian reports ICE has high. a private security company accused of torture, forced disappearances, and child abuse to help track down undocumented immigrant children who came to the United States alone. MVM is a security contractor based in Ashburn, Virginia, that abducted and transported immigrant children under the Trump administration's first-term family separation policy. The company's been at the center of legal turmoil over reports of child abuse, including detaining children in a vacant office building in Phoenix, Arizona, four weeks in 2018. A CNN report has found the Department of Veterans Affairs opened investigations into multiple

staffers who attended vigils at VA clinics and hospitals nationwide in honor of Alex Preti, who was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents deployed to Minneapolis in January. Precti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. Union leaders have called the probes a witch hunt. Senate Republicans unveiled a $70 billion immigration enforcement package Monday that includes $1 billion for the Secret Service tied to Trump's White House ballroom project. The Trump administration has insisted the East Wing renovation would be privately funded and cost taxpayers' nothing. But Democrats called the bill a giveaway, noting the bill's language is broad enough to cover

the entire ballroom construction. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Budget Committee, said Republicans were, quote, ignoring middle class needs and funneling money into Trump's ballroom while throwing billions at two lawless agencies, unquote. In Indiana, Trump back challengers unseated five Republican state senators who'd voted against his redistricting plan last year with the incumbents losing by double digits. Roughly $12 million was spent on advertising across the seven contested state Senate races, most of it from Trump allied outside groups. In Ohio, Vivek Ramoswamy won the Republican gubernatorial primary and will face Democrat Amy Acton, the state's former public health director in November.

Former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown won the state's Democratic Senate primary. And here in New York, dozens of activists staged a protest in front of the Philippines consulate calling for an investigation into the killing of 19 people, including a journalist and two Filipino Americans in the province of Negroes. The Filipino Army claims those killed or suspected members of New People's Army, an armed wing of the Constitution. Communist Party, the Philippines. This is Andan Bonifacio of the group Bayan USA, speaking to democracy now. Negros is an island that has long been plagued by a lot of different social problems. Landlessness, exploitation of sugarcane workers. And for that reason, a lot of the communities there have been fighting back and have been organizing, protesting for their rights. And it's inspired many, many people to go to Negros, to integrate with those communities, to live with them.

And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Reporters Without Borders is warning press freedom has fallen to its lowest level since the group began publishing its annual World Press Freedom Index 25 years ago. According to the group, more than half the world's countries fall into the difficult or very serious categories for press freedom, as journalism is increasingly criminalized across the world. Over the past 25 years, the index charted how press freedoms have deteriorated here in the United States. In 2002, the U.S. was ranked 17th in the world.

In the latest index, the U.S. is down to 64th, falling seven places since last year. Reporters Without Borders, RSF, says, quote, President Donald Trump has turned his repeated attacks on the press and journalists into a systematic policy, unquote. Reporters Without Borders says the state of press freedom is most catastrophic in the Middle East and North Africa. The group notes more than 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli Army since October 2023. We're joined now by Clayton Wymer's, the North America director for RSF, for reporters without borders. Thanks so much for being with us. You're in Washington, D.C. In fact, you are one of the journalists at the Washington, the White House Press Corps dinner

the other night, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. But first, this report. Clayton, talk about your findings. Yeah, and thank you for having me, Amy. The findings, the findings, the findings are really stark. We have never measured a lower average number in the scores that we give every country for press freedom on our index in the 25 years that we've been doing this. We're seeing deterioration pretty much across the board, both in authoritarian countries and in democracies. And one of the really startling findings is that the legal indicator, one of the subscores that we look at, has deteriorated the most. And what we're seeing is the, the, the erosion of the legal protections intended to safeguard journalism and everyone's access to

information. But we're also seeing the weaponization of other types of laws, especially in national security laws against journalism. These are the laws that are supposed to keep us safe, but often in practice are being used to stifle journalism and free speech. So talk about the United States. 64th in the world for press freedom when freedom of the press is enthrined in the U.S. Constitution. Talk about what the parameters are and how it's gone from 17th to 64th. It's been a long backslide for the United States on the index. And look, it's tempting to lay all of this at the feet of President Donald Trump.

And to be clear, he is the same. the single biggest threat to American press freedom today. But the mere fact that we fell from 57th last year tells us that this isn't just the Trump problem. We have structural deficiencies that are imperiling the future of press freedom in this country. And I think that shocks a lot of Americans when they hear it because, as you said, press freedom isn't shrined in the First Amendment. Journalism is the only profession actually called out by the Bill of Rights. But when you dig into it, it becomes a little bit less surprising. You think about the economics of the news industry right now. Thousands of jobs lost over recent years, an average of two local newspapers closing every week in this country,

and tens of millions of Americans living in news deserts. Meanwhile, there's a great deal of consolidation of the media with fewer and fewer people owning the airwaves and owning the conduits of digital information. We have a crisis of trust in the news media. The esteem that, the public holds journalism and has never been lower. We have politicians regularly emboldened to attack individual journalists and media outlets. And, you know, we have a safety problem in this country. There is a startlingly high incidence of violence against journalists. And what we've especially seen in 2025 is violence committed by law enforcement agents, particularly masked anonymous law enforcement agents who are policing protests, particularly the New King's protests or

anti-ice protests, and journalists getting caught. up in that dozens and dozens of very violent incidents against journalists sending them to the hospital, causing journalists to be blinded, one lost a finger, concussions, visits to the ER. These are very serious conditions. In fact, it's caused us to introduce a new program that provides independent and freelance journalists with protective gear. That's the kind of program we've been running for years in places like Ukraine and Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of Congo. And it really is, is a sad state of affairs that we now feel compelled to do the same thing in the United States. I want to ask you about Lebanon, about Israeli attacks on journalists there.

Last month, Israeli forces killed the prominent Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, a correspondent for the daily newspaper Al-Aqvar. In 2024, Amal told local media she'd received an Israeli death threat, warning her to leave southern Lebanon or risk decapitation. This is what she said. I received direct targeting on my phone from the Israeli Mossad. They threatened to kill me. They literally said, we will separate your head from your shoulders if you don't leave from the south.

They advise me to leave the south. So talk about what happened to Amal and the photojournalist she was with as she was covering an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon and then fled into a house for protection. and then Israel bombed the house. Well, that's right. And it didn't stop there. We know that Amal initially survived the strike. We were aware of her position, as was several of our colleagues in the international community.

And we were urging the Israelis to allow the Red Cross to get through in order to access her and hopefully save her. But for hours, the IDF refused to relent its bombing campaign, even though they knew very well what was happening. they allowed not only did they target a mall with an airstrike they then allowed her to die by denying ambulances access to the site it's the latest in a series of quite literally hundreds of targeted killings of journalists while they're doing their jobs as journalists

not just in Gaza but also across the border in Lebanon the targeted killing of journalists in Lebanon has been going on since the very beginning of the war I'm thinking back to Isam Abdallah, a Reuters journalist who was killed just across the border in Lebanon in the first weeks of the war in a targeted double-tap airstrike. And so this is really just a policy at this point to target journalists and also to add insult to injury by slandering them and calling them Hamas terrorists. These are journalists who are known to us. And we do the work to ensure that every journalist that we are counting in our data, is in fact who they say they are, is a reporter.

And for the IDF to slander their memory like this really is just beyond insulting. I wanted to turn to what has recently happened here. In January, FBI agents raided the home of the Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. Authority seized her phone to laptops and a Garmin watch. She spent the past year covering the Trump administration. cuts to the federal workforce. Matt Murray, the executive editor of the Post, said in a staff message, quote, this extraordinary aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work. According to the Post,

investigators reportedly told Natinson she wasn't the target of the probe, a warrant obtained by the Washington Post cited an investigation into a government contractor with a top secret security clearance who's been accused of taking home classified intelligence reports. Just this week, Hannah won a Pulitzer Prize, along with her colleagues, for their reporting on Doge. The significance of this Clayton and what happened to her. I don't think we can overstate how dangerous that raid is. It is unprecedented for the FBI to raid the home of a journalist and seize both their professional and personal devices. They took her laptops.

They took her phones. They took her Garmin watch, which suggests that they are tracking her movements. And there are legal protections against this. There's the Constitution, obviously, but there's also the Privacy Protection Act, which flatly rejects, which flatly makes searches like this illegal. And in fact, when the government went to court over this against the Washington Post, the judge admonished the government lawyers for failing to disclose the specific legal protections that they should have when they sought the warrant. And so, you know, we've now had two judicial decisions that have ruled that this search was improper. And what I think is really scary about this is if you dig deeper into the government's justification, they cite possible violations of the Espionage Act that they've done. thought Hannah may have committed, which is a preposterous conclusion for them to draw. But unfortunately,

not totally unexpected. You know, the Espionage Act is an overly broad piece of legislation from World War I that makes no distinction between an act of journalism and an act of espionage. And at RSF, we've long warned that there is this sort of backdoor that the federal government could use in order to target journalists. And we've been urging reform of the Espionage Act going back a long time. And, you know, viewers of this program may remember the Espionage Act is also what was used to prosecute Julian Assange. And our argument at that time was, you know, whether or not you think Julian Assange is a journalist is kind of beside the point. What Julian Assange did was publish secret government documents. And fundamentally, that is no different

from what other journalists are doing like Hannah when she obtains leaked information from whistleblowers in the government. And I also want to point out that Hannah is, a really talented reporter who has communications with hundreds, if not over a thousand sources in the government who are all trying to blow the whistle on wrongdoing and corruption. I don't think it's any coincidence that she's the one who was targeted because that has a profound chilling effect on anyone else being willing to come forward and blow the whistle when they see something wrong. Clayton Weimers, I wanted to also ask you about your experience at the White House Correspondence Association dinner.

You were at the dinner when a gunman rushed a security checkpoint. The suspect now faces a number of charges, including attempted assassination of President Trump. Can you describe what happened? You were at dinner at a table with Georgia Fort, is that right? A journalist who was arrested recently in Minneapolis. That's right. And Georgia's case also really exemplifies the weaponization of the Department of justice against journalism. She was arrested and charged for her reporting in Minnesota along with

Don Lemon. And it's really outrageous that those charges are moving forward. And I know it was an act of courage for her to go to that dinner and be in the same room as the president and the officials who are actively pursuing her and trying to put her in jail. And, you know, we were sitting together. Raised her. Before you talk about the experience at the dinner just because you've told Her story, who was arrested along with former CNN anchor Don Lemon. Let's go to Georgia Fort when she came on Democracy Now and talked about her arrest at the city's church in St. Paul where protesters confronted a top ICE official who served as pastor there. My home was surrounded by about two dozen federal agents, including agents from DEA and HSI.

I asked to see the warrant. My mother was here. My mother asked to see the warrant. They did show us an arrest warrant, which was then sent to my attorney who verified its legitimacy. Since it was an arrest warrant, we decided that it would be safest for me to exit through the garage so that we could lock the door to our home behind me. And so I surrendered. I walked out of my garage with my hands up. And I asked the agents who were there to arrest me if they knew that I was a member of the press.

They said they did know that I was a member of the press. I informed them that this was a violation of my constitutional right, the First Amendment. And they told me, you know, we're just here to do our job. And I said, I was just doing my job. And now I'm being arrested for it. So that is George. Georgia Ford, describing her arrest in February on democracy now. She was with you at the White House Correspondence Dinner. So you both went under the table? Yeah, well, you know, one minute

I was actually telling Georgia and one other person sitting with us about this new protective gear program that RSF introduced in the United States. And the next minute, we're all taking cover under the table because there was a loud bang and secret service agents rushed in guns drawn. And frankly, we didn't know what was going on. But, you know, it was just coincidental that we had just been talking about the risks of violence that journalists are increasingly facing. And a moment later, we were faced with a really stark reminder of what those risks can entail. And frankly, this is something that's going to continue.

but journalism is a really unique profession because you have an obligation to go towards the story, to go towards the chaos. And I saw so many journalists around the room, you know, eagerly trying to document what was going on because that's their job. And, you know, that's a reminder of why this job can be risky, but also why it's so essential. We just can't understand what's going on in our world without journalism. And finally, the president is using the attack. on the White House Correspondence Dinner to justify the, what looks like now,

billion-dollar ballroom that he wants to build at the White House. He said no taxpayer money would be used for it. And now apparently it's looking like they're putting it into the ICE budget. And I'm wondering, you know, in that justification, even that night, saying it's because of events like these that we would need. to have the full military protection of such a ballroom. Your thoughts, Clayton Weimers, I think of Eugene Daniels, a former head of the White House Correspondence Association, saying we would not want to have it at the White House.

Look, billion-dollar ballrooms are a little bit outside my area of expertise, but I agree with Eugene. It would be inappropriate for the White House correspondent's dinner to take place at the White House. It's not the president's dinner. It is the correspondence. The president is an invited guest, and the idea that it would move into the White House I think really violates the spirit of an event that is intended to celebrate the First Amendment and the excellent journalism being done by the White House Press Corps. And so, yeah, I agree with Eugene there. Clayton Weimers, I want to thank you for being with us, Director of Reporters Without Borders

in North America. We'll link to the new RSF World Press Freedom Index at DemocracyNow.org. When we come back, Beirut-based independent journalist Lely Eunice, she will join us here in New York. A line no separate from, since it's a time, a line that me impede to get to get to you. That line capriciousa that divida in our world, to leave you to a one side, that no is for me. I'm I'm

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This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Mimi Goodman. The Israeli militaries issued new evacuation orders in southern Lebanon, warning residents of 12 towns and villages, including some north of the Latani River to leave their homes. Those warnings were followed by reports of air strikes in the south. In mid-April, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a fragile, temporary ceasefire that's since been extended, but fighting continues at a lesser scale. Israel maintains an occupation of southern Lebanon. More than a million people are displaced.

About a fifth of the Lebanese population, according to the Lebanese health ministry, more than 2,600 people have been killed since March 2. Israel reports two civilians and 17 soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah in U.S. Iran negotiations, Tehran has repeatedly said, Lebanon must be included in any deal to end the wider war a condition the U.S. so far rejects. For more, we're joined today in studio, usually in Beirut, by independent investigative journalist Laila Yunus. She has family in the south of Lebanon, but joining us here today in New York. Thank you so much for being with us. Can you talk about the level of destruction in Lebanon right now, the number of people. displaced, what people in the United States should understand and around the world?

Lebanon is a very small country with densely populated urban areas, and so the 1.2 million people that were displaced after March 2nd have created very, very, very difficult conditions across Lebanon. Most of them have been unable to return home. I think what Americans should understand is that there have been not one but two exodus from southern Lebanon. The first, of course, happened after March 2nd when Israel issued its sweeping displacement orders for the region. And then when the ceasefire was announced between Lebanon and Israel, people went back to their homes to check on their homes to see if they were still there. Many of them, I remember that day that I saw the highway to the south was backed up, even past Beirut mattresses on top of cars,

people trying to return home and very quickly realizing that this was not a ceasefire. at all, that the bombing was continuing. And we can talk about the death toll since this so-called ceasefire went into effect. But essentially, a second exodus then occurred out of southern Lebanon, and now people are back in shelters, back in tents on the streets of Beirut and back, you know, in sort of rentals that they're kind of pooling funds to be able to afford. According to Lebanon's health ministry, Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon killed 17 people on Monday alone in one of the deadliest days since the ceasefire began. 60 people killed over the weekend.

Then those 17 on Monday, just today in Zalaya and the Western Bikha Valley, the mayor's home was bombed. He was killed alongside four of his relatives, including women and children. I mean, this is the sort of thing that we're seeing every single day. And I think it's important for people to remember that when the ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. and Israel was announced, the fire stopped falling on Iran, right? But when Iran attempted to or announced that Lebanon would be included in the ceasefire, Israel issued an emphatic no by bombing over 100 locations across Lebanon within 10 minutes and killing

more than 350 people. So this is really the conditions that we're seeing right now in Lebanon is escalating attacks across the south. And the destruction, it's hard to describe. I mean, we're talking about entire villages that have been reduced to moonscapes, essentially. People, as Dropside News recently reported, are pooling funds to buy satellite imagery so that they can check and see whether or not

their homes are still there because they're not able to reach them. Some of the last people on the border, you spoke earlier about Amal Khalil, the journalist who was assassinated by Israel, She's based in southern Lebanon. She's from southern Lebanon. She's from southern Lebanon.

So she wasn't based, obviously, where she was. She was actually near my village, near the village of Bintesh Baird, where Israel was carrying out demolition operations. And she must have wanted to write about it and report on those operations when she was effectively, you know, stocked to her destination and killed. And another thing I think that we're seeing another pattern that's repeating is the Red Cross being barred from reaching victims of Israeli violence. So they were barred from reaching her, and you heard that she survived the initial strike and then died from her wounds because she couldn't be reached.

It's an unbelievable story, but we're seeing the same thing repeat. Would the prime minister or president demanding medics be allowed to go into help her, of course, then hours later it was too late? We all know that in emergency response work, every second counts and came to the difference between life and death. And so with similar reports emerging, one of a Syrian family struck and left basically to die. near Der Serian, another family in Majdal-Salem. And this is something that we're seeing now repeat over and over is Red Cross being barred from rescuing the people, civilians that are being struck. How is the situation in Lebanon comparable to what Israel has been doing in Gaza?

Just last week, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Kat, said, quote, the fate of southern Lebanon will be the same as that of Gaza. earlier this year, a senior Israeli official told Axios, quote, we're going to do what we did in Gaza. Can you explain what the yellow line is that Israel has established? So the yellow line began, right, in Gaza, after the ceasefire that was announced there. 60% of the Gaza Strip now is enveloped in this so-called yellow line. Residents of these areas that have been ethnically cleansed there,

when they try to access them, have been shot and killed. the same thing is effectively happening in southern Lebanon. There's now been a new yellow line declared. It is 6 kilometers, approximately 10 kilometers, sorry, 6 miles into Lebanese territory. So this is dozens of villages that now no one can technically access. They're calling it a, quote, forward defensive zone, but I shouldn't have to tell you that there's nothing defensive about it. It's an offensive operation, and they're using the word cleanse to describe what they're doing there. They're just, you know, bulldozing homes.

We just saw over the weekend a mosque destroyed, a school destroyed. And when the Israeli military destroyed a 100-old community center in the town of Dwar in the south, press TV correspondent, I want to read you a quote that he wrote after that. He said, his name is Hadith. And he said, we can barely process the amount of terror against our people, the collective memory of a sense. has been erased. And I think that that, you know, really sounds a lot like what we've seen in Gaza. If you can talk about this round of talks first time that Israel is having with Lebanon in Washington, D.C.,

in a recent address, the Hezbollah leader, Naeem Qasem said, quote, direct negotiations are a free concession without results serving the interests of Netanyahu, who seeks a symbolic image of victory and serving Trump ahead of the midterm. elections. Also talk about where Hezbollah fits into this picture and how people who are not Hezbollah in Lebanon feel. It's quite a complicated picture. I mean, I think it's important for people to remember that Israel actually did occupy southern Lebanon for 18 years. Liberation was in 2000. And after that, Israel was declared an enemy state by Lebanon. So, you know, people in Lebanon, you're not actually, by law, you're not allowed to speak to Israelis. They are, in official Lebanese media referred to as the enemy. And so direct talks are quite a big deal

for Lebanon. It hasn't happened in three decades, at least in a public form. And so, you know, to remind you what I said earlier, which is that when the ceasefire was declared in Iran, the bomb stopped falling on Iran. But, you know, Lebanon is negotiating under fire and from an extremely weak position, you know, we don't have a street of Hurtumos that we can kind of dangle as a bargaining chip. So the government is attempting to kind of signal to the American. that listen, we're committed to disarming Hizbalah, we are, you know, these direct talks are kind of a way to signal that, this willingness to kind of, you know, change three decades of kind of indirect talks with Israel.

However, with Hizbullah not being at the table and announcing that, hey, because we're not at the table, you know, and because these talks are direct, we will not be consenting to anything that comes out of them. With dozens of people being killed every single day in the South, it's hard to see these talks as anything but sort of like a background political theater while a, you know, war rages in the south of Lebanon and in the Bikla Valley. Laila, Eunice, I want to thank you for being with us, investigative journalist and writer based in Beirut. Speaking to us, though, here in New York, Leila is a contributor to Dropsite News.

Coming up, Back Talker, an American memoir. We'll speak with the acclaimed constitutional law scholar Kimberly Crenshaw, known for her work on critical race theory and intersectionality. Where does this country stand today? Stay with us. Because no, supiste to understand my carousal, what there in him,

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someone that can't I'm leaving by by by our Democerinegas in our Democracy Now studio. To see the whole interview with Julietta and her music in our studio, go to Democracy Now.org in English and in Spanish.

This is Democracy Now. I'm Amy Goodman. And we end today's show with the acclaimed legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. She coined the term intersectionality in 1989, which she's described as a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides where it interlocks and intersects. Kimberly Crenshaw went on to write, it's not simply that there's a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or or LGBTQ problem here, many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things. Kimberly Crenshaw is also a leading scholar in the field of critical race theory. For years, President Trump has led a campaign against CRT as part of a broader attack on how history is taught

and told in the country. Well, Kimberly Williams Crenshaw has just published a new book. It's titled backtalker, an American memoir. In the book, she writes, quote, when the federal government silences the past, it destroys the foundation upon which civil rights and equality are grounded. Professor Crenshaw, it's such an honor to have you here, Backtalker. What does that mean? Backtalker is a frame that I use to encourage people to talk back against claims that the world, as we have experienced it is the way it can only be, that there is no reason to continue to advocate for change, that what we have is pretty much all we deserve. I am thinking about backtalking as the kind of resistance that we need to the logics that tell us that the world is pretty

much okay the way it is, and we know it isn't. So put that back talk, um, against the Voting Rights Act and what has happened with it. And for people who don't understand what exactly has happened, and if you can also talk about the Supreme Court finding that Louisiana's current congressional map is unconstitutional, which followed Governor Landry suspending the state's primaries for the U.S. House of Representatives. Well, the Voting Rights Act was the crown jewel of the civil rights movement,

And in part because it said, look, it doesn't matter the specific thing that you're doing to undermine the voting strength of traditionally excluded populations. The Voting Rights Act protects against intentional or effective disenfranchisement of protected groups. Well, what this Supreme Court has now said is that if you take race into account in trying to address racism in the voting rights system, that you are the one. that is guilty of creating a racialized system. So what they're effectively saying is that if you draw a district in order to protect an incumbent, that's okay. If you draw a district in order to maximize minority voting strength, that's not okay. Now, let's be clear about one thing.

Incumbency is often the product of racial power. Incumbency, particularly in Louisiana, is made. and reinforced by packing, cracking, stacking, African-American voters. What they're basically saying is you have to take the baseline as is, even though that's the product of race discrimination. If you try to remedy the racial discrimination that's built into incumbency, that's when you're being racist. That's the problem. So it's turning reality completely on its head and destroying the Voting Rights Act while they're doing so. So you are known around the world for your work on intersectionality, on critical race theory.

But let's hear for a moment the personal story behind the public intellectual. Talk about how you came to be, Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, your background. Well, I wrote this book as a tribute to my parents who were, as we call them, race men and women of the 20th century. What that meant is that they were vigilant in pushing back against the barriers, the illegitimate ways in which black people were told that they didn't belong in this country. My mother integrated her local swimming pool when she was three years old. So they were keen to make it clear that we understood the history upon which we stood, the places and spaces of racial discrimination, but also that we were prepared. to walk into institutions that were being opened at that very time. You know, a lot of people think that this period of discrimination and segregation was ancient

history a long time ago. It was during my lifetime. I was born into a society in which I was not free. I was born before the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 64 and 65. So when my parents raised us, they raised us to be aware. that the context that we were in might often be shaped by illegitimate racial barriers, but also raised us to be prepared to talk back to them. That's what we had to do at the dinner table.

That's how they shaped me. So much of the book is trying to trace the arc of the civil rights movement and locate my parents nurturing to allow me to be able to understand and talk back against racial power when I saw it. How did you grow up? I grew up in Canton, Ohio, an industrial town in the Midwest on its way from the south to Chicago and Detroit. A lot of black folks escaping the South, ended up staying in Canton, Ohio, and being part of the industrial core there. Talk about what exactly intersectionality is and critical race theory and what it means today under President

Trump, the vicious attack and how that was really the underpinning of DEI. Yeah, well, intersectionalogist refers to the idea that disadvantage, discrimination, marginalization often is based on more than one axis of inequality. Those often overlap. They reinforce each other. So I began to write in this arena when I was trying to understand how black women, who sometimes sued employers because they were subject to gender discrimination and race discrimination. Many times black jobs were for men and women's jobs were for white women,

which meant that there was precious little space for African American women. But courts couldn't really understand that. They were saying, you know, how can you claim race discrimination because we hire black people? They just happen to be men. How can you claim gender discrimination? We hire women. and they just happened to be white. And I couldn't understand what the courts couldn't understand.

So I was looking for a metaphor, a way that would allow judges to understand that discrimination isn't just along one axes or another, but just like intersections, they might criss-cross each other. So intersectionality was really a remedial framework for judges that are supposed to be very smart, but they weren't that smart at all when it came to understand. what black women were experiencing. Can you talk about Clarence Thomas and the tensions around his confirmation as justice of the Supreme

Court? You write a lot about this. Yeah. So when Clarence Thomas was nominated to take over the seat that Thurgood Marshall had occupied, the great civil rights giant, my initial thought was, this isn't going to work. Everybody knows there's a difference between Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall. And to my surprise and disillusionment, a lot of people didn't understand the difference between the two. Eventually, there became a moment when it was known that there was someone, a former employee who had told someone that she'd been sexually harassed by him, that person turned out to be Anita Hill. turned out I knew Anita. There weren't a whole lot of black women law professors. So I contacted her. I offered support. Before I knew it, I was on my way to Washington, D.C. to support her. But the shocking thing that happened was when Clarence Thomas denounced the entire inquiry as a high-tech lynching. And what that did was it provided a metaphor for him to speak to the history of anti-blackness to pull. place himself in the middle of that narrative and to draw a support of large numbers of African

Americans to his side. And she had nothing equivalent that she could say. I wanted to turn to then Senator, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden, questioning Anita Hill back in 1991. Can you tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidences that you have alleged? I think the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of pornography involving these women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people or animals. That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated. Law Professor Anita Hill testifying at the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas. Professor Crenshaw, the lessons you draw from what happened there and what it means for today. You know, Amy, I want to take you to the moment that Clarence Thomas was finally confirmed.

My co-founder of AAPF, Luke Harris and I were sitting on the stairs of the Supreme Court. At that moment, I said, this is going to change the rest of our lives. Luke said all because they refused to believe a black woman. I call this a massive intersectional failure, a coalition of civil rights groups, feminist groups. They successfully blocked Bork. Clarence Thomas was basically an acolyte of Bork. There wasn't really much daylight between them. What was different was Clarence Thomas,

was able to wrap himself in a sympathetic framework as someone who is being unfairly treated by the testimony. And Anita Hill, partly because the history of black women, the experiences that they've had with sexual harassment, really since we arrived here, and the fact that black women were some of the first plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases, that just wasn't part of the common knowledge. So she was framed as someone who was complaining about some of the first plaintiffs, something that black women don't complain about. There was an op-ed in the New York Times that said that what Clarence Thomas had done to Anita was just basically down-home courting. So there was a cultural defense that was being made to block the significance of her testimony. So what we often

say now is when we look at some of the consequences of that failure, some of the long-term results of that. We've lost campaign finance reform on a 5-4 vote. We lost Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 5-4 votes. We look at all the 5-4 votes that were made possible by that failure to believe Anita Hill, and we have to recognize that this intersectional failure not only impacts black women, not only impacts communities of color, it undermined the security and the democracy, of the entire nation. Before we go, if you could define CRT critical race theory, also talk about what gives you hope today. Well, critical race theory is basically the study of the way that racial disempowerment and other

forms of exclusion are not principally the product of individual people making decisions to exclude people because they hate them for the color of their skin. Critical race theory looks at the ways that institutions, once they've been structured in context where people of color had not been part of it, that exclusion can continue even if there isn't explicit policies and practices that say black people, brown people, Asian people can't come in. It's embedded in our systems. I often liken it to asbestos. We used to build institutions with asbestos, right? And we know. it's toxic, it would be crazy to say that we can protect ourselves from asbestos-related diseases by stop talking about asbestos, stop looking at it, stop teaching people how to find it. That would make no sense whatsoever. Critical race theory says the same thing about race and racial exclusion. And what gives you hope? What gives me hope is the fact that when I was born, Amy, there was no reason to really have faith. that this American Republic would actually reform itself, would create opportunities.

Yet there was the recognition that the one thing that was clear is if we didn't fight it, if we didn't prepare ourselves for these opportunities, they would never come. I'm hopeful because that same energy, that same recognition I think is growing all over the United States today. We have to be willing to speak against power, to backtalk against all those who tell us, it's impossible because we know it's not impossible. It's happened before it can happen again. So you say backtalking is the answer to backsliding. Back talking is the answer to authoritarian backsliding.

Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, her new book, Backtalker, an American memoir. She's also the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. the AAPF. That does it for today's show. I'll be in Minneapolis on Thursday night and Friday morning for screenings of the new documentary of Act Democracy Now steal this story, please. I'll be at the main in Minneapolis.

Then in Chicago on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening at the Music Box movie theater, joined by Juan Gonzalez and the film's directors Tia Lesson and call. deal. Then on to Milwaukee at noon on Sunday, at the Oriental, a massive theater in Milwaukee. You can check our website at DemocracyNow.org for all details. That does it for our show. I'm Amy Goodman. This is another edition of Democracy Now.