“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
Pro-Palestinian protesters march through Manhattan near the United Nations as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the General Assembly during the 80th session of the annual event on September 26, 2025, in New York.(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The mayor has said New York can’t enforce the ICC warrant against Israel’s prime minister, but one human rights lawyer argued it’s “not the only tool available to the US when it comes to holding Netanyahu accountable.”
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to land in New York for a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, calls are once again mounting for the accused war criminal to be arrested.
After becoming mayor, Mamdani backed off the pledge earlier this summer, stating that New York lacked the “independent legal authority” to detain him under the ICC warrant. However, he said Netanyahu should still be “arrested and tried” by the federal government.
In the days leading up to his visit to New York, which is expected to be brief, Netanyahu indicated he planned to address the mayor during his General Assembly speech, falsely accusing him of supporting Hamas and inciting riots against Jewish New Yorkers.
“I’m coming to the UN,” the prime minister said. “I’m going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I’m going to tell the truth about you.”
Mamdani hit back during a CNN interview on Tuesday: “I have been clear about the way that I see the world. And I always owe New Yorkers that honesty. And when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, I have described him as I believe him to be: a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Of the ICC warrant, he reiterated that it was “something that should be honored, because what we want to see… is a faith in our politics, a faith in accountability.”
In July, a YouGov poll found that 49% of Americans believed the US government should arrest Netanyahu under the warrant, 27% said it should not, and 23% were unsure.
President Donald Trumpstated earlier this summer that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form” while visiting the US. His administration’s position, as stated in a February 2025 executive order, is that Netanyahu can’t be arrested. The ICC, it says, “has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel” because, unlike most other nations, neither is a party to the Rome Statute, which created the court.
Jake Romm, a legal adviser for the Hind Rajab Foundation—a group named after a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces—argued Tuesday in The Nation that even if the ICC warrant can’t be enforced on US soil, it “is not the only tool available to the US when it comes to holding Netanyahu accountable.”
Romm noted the existence of “two robust federal criminal statutes,” the War Crimes Act and the Genocide Statute, which he said incorporate “important international instruments into US law”—the Geneva Convention governing the laws of war and the Genocide Convention, respectively.
He wrote that both of these laws give the US jurisdiction over alleged war criminals “regardless of where the crimes have been committed” when the suspect is physically present in the US, or the crimes were committed against US nationals.
Romm acknowledged that Netanyahu is shielded from arrest during his official UN visit and that sitting heads of government generally enjoy immunity from national courts, but argued that those protections do not eliminate the United States’ underlying authority to prosecute him under federal war crimes and genocide laws.
“The United States has the ability to arrest Netanyahu for crimes under US law and to prosecute him in US courts,” Romm wrote. “I stress this not because I believe that an administration that has, at every turn, deepened its complicity in Israel’s crimes will suddenly change. I stress the US’s ability and obligation to arrest Netanyahu—and all Israeli perpetrators of the genocides in Palestine and southern Lebanon—in order to make one thing clear: Every day that Netanyahu remains free is a day that the US has allowed him to remain free.”
It’s not just the United States that has allowed Netanyahu to travel freely despite the warrant. Emma Fourreau, a French member of the European Parliament, accused her nation’s government—which is obligated to arrest Netanyahu under the Rome Statute—of having “trample[d] on international law” by giving his aircraft clearance to pass through its airspace en route to New York.
Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN human rights official who resigned in 2023 while accusing Israel of carrying out a “textbook genocide” in Gaza, said the fact that Netanyahu would be showing up at the UN unencumbered, even while being “universally despised, and blocked from travel to most countries on the planet,” was a “stain” on the entire institution.
“He will even be allowed to enter UN premises and to address the [General Assembly], received as a VIP rather than the blood-soaked war criminal that he is,” Mokhiber said on social media, describing it as one of many failures of the institution to respond to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
He noted that the General Assembly had not stripped Israel of its credentials as it did with apartheid-era South Africa, that the UN Security Council had endorsed the Trump-led “Board of Peace” proposal to govern postwar Gaza, and that Secretary-General António Guterres had declined to use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s conduct, even while other top UN experts had.
“The genocidaires are not just walking among us, they are ruling over us. They are trying to normalize genocide and apartheid,” Mokhiber said. “We, in our millions, must act to denormalize these scourges, to hold the perpetrators and accomplices accountable, and to ensure they never have a moment’s peace until justice prevails.”
Dear Common Dreams reader,It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits.
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Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi discussed her evolving stance on Israel’s war in Gaza, stating that “in life the people you trust the most and love the most can disappoint you the most.” Syontoni Hattori-Chatterjee | Staff
This past Monday, House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi reiterated her “love” for Israel while expressing concern about Israel’s genocide in Gaza at a guest-speaking event for University of California Washington Program, or UCDC, students.
Pelosi will launch the Nancy Pelosi Institute in partnership with UC Berkeley in January. Pelosi said the institute will encourage campus students to become involved in public policy around questions of democracy and diversity.
Pelosi discussed her evolving stance on Israel’s war in Gaza, stating that “in life the people you trust the most and love the most can disappoint you the most.” She contextualized her position by discussing the 1940s congressional tenure of her father, whom she described as a “champion for Israel” because of the affinity between Italian Americans and Jewish Americans in her hometown of Baltimore.
“That’s how we were raised about loving Israel, loving Israel, establishing a state of Israel, loving Israel, loving Israel, loving Israel,” Pelosi said.
The former speaker’s comments came in response to a question about her and the Democratic Party’s perspective on the geopolitical outlook in the Middle East. Pelosi called Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack “horrible” and Israel’s response in Gaza “disproportionate.”
In September 2025, a United Nations legal analysis found that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians during its war on Gaza.
Nevertheless, Pelosi said she disliked statements by “the candidate in Michigan,” likely referring to Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, an outspoken advocate for Palestine. The former speaker still maintained that differences between aspiring Democratic Party officials and current elected officials “are not dividing us completely.”
“Based on the Democratic Party’s loss, you would think the party would at least make their campaigns, agenda and PR comments a bit more conscious of the relentless and indiscriminate bombings in Palestine — war crimes, in other words,” said UC Berkeley student Gabriela Parada Ramirez, who attended the event. “However, based on Pelosi’s responses to student questions about Gaza, they seemed watered down without any regard for the unprecedented killing on Palestinian civilians by the Israeli government.”
A UCDC student in the audience asked Pelosi if polls demonstrating that young people are “far more critical of what’s going on in Israel and Gaza” motivated her House vote to reduce military funding to Israel, which Pelosi earlier described as a “departure” from her previous support for U.S. military aid to Israel.
Pelosi answered “No,” stating that pro-Palestinian sentiment among young people “had existed for a while.” The former speaker shared that her support for the Leahy laws, which ban selling weapons to actors violating the human rights of others, informed her decision. “We’ve been sending stuff in violation of that for a while, and then it was just like no,” Pelosi replied.
“But in our caucus, it’s been very prayerful, very thoughtful about supporting Israel. We’ve always had a little tension because some people were way over there; we were sort of in the middle,” Pelosi said. “We love Israel. We love Israel. We love Israel, but we want some balance in all of this.”
Campus junior Ananya Bamidipati was excited about the opportunity to hear from a well-renowned political figure, but felt that Pelosi’s comments were “unfocused” and did not demonstrate tact toward her student audience.
“The message that I got out of it at the end of the day was that it was anti-war,” said UC Irvine student Angela Liao. “It’s important to realize that and not get lost in the ‘I love Israel’ — the whole scheme.”
Ramirez was unsurprised by Pelosi’s persistent expression of support for Israel because of the “concerning” amount of lobbying funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in U.S. politics.
According to Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, a group that tracks lobbying activity from groups supporting Israel, Pelosi has taken $188,554 from pro-Israel political action committees as of Aug. 2.
Yotam Marom, who helped lead Occupy Wall Street, discusses why power must be built through movements, not simply through elected officials
Yotam Marom knows why the Occupy Wall Street movement fell apart 15 years ago. The New York-based organizer and author was a key participant in the nationwide constellation of encampments and rolling protests that brought tens of thousands of people into its fold. But the movement could not withstand police raids, evictions, a bitter winter and, as Marom sees it, an internal “politics of powerlessness”, which mistook a healthy distrust of institutional power for a failure to build a strong, coherent strategy for political change. Occupy splintered within a few short months and never seriously revived.
As he recounts in his new book, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness, Marom has again and again seen similar dynamics weigh down social movements in his work as an organizer and facilitator. He founded the Wildfire Project, a training organization for grassroots groups, and has worked with organizations including the Sunrise Movement agitating against climate decimation, the abolitionist Dream Defenders fighting for racial justice, the Uncommitted movement to end Democratic party support for Israel’s war crimes, tenants unions battling landlords, and more.
A lot has also shifted for the broader left and its relationship to power since 2011: a democratic socialist is mayor of New York City and a slate of serious leftwing candidates are challenging establishment Democrats for congressional seats.
I first met Marom back in the heady days of Occupy. When we spoke recently, we discussed what movements have learned, what they must continue to learn, and why power must be built through movements, not simply through elected officials.
We first met at Occupy Wall Street. That was a hugely politicizing and lesson-filled time for both of us, and many others. Beyond your personal experience, why do you think it might be important to look back on Occupy now?
We’re in this moment in which we’re seeing some winning for the left, including winning actual governing power. I think there is a pretty direct through line from Occupy Wall Street to here. There are a bunch of ways in which we fell short, obviously. But Occupy brought thousands of people into the movement, trained hundreds of leaders, and led to the foundation of a bunch of different organizations. And it changed the public’s common sense around class in this country; it introduced the narrative of the 99% versus the 1%. It’s pretty hard to see how you get something like Bernie [Sanders]’s run in 2016 without that, and now this opening of mass socialist politics, with the elections of the Squad and Zohran [Mamdani] and a slate of DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] candidates in New York.
Occupy Wall Street protesters lock arms and block access to the New York Stock Exchange area on 17 November 2011. Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images
Your key takeaway from Occupy, and from a lot of the organizing work you’ve done since, is the notion of the “politics of powerlessness” and how it harms movements. What is the politics of powerlessness, why is it a problem, and with that in mind, what do you mean by power?
So, first of all, when I talk about power, I mean power to bring about a society whose institutions are geared toward people getting their material needs met and thriving. We want a powerful multiracial working-class movement that can bring about the world we all deserve.
The politics of powerlessness is a set of ideas and behaviors that turn us inward, away from our opponent (the forces of capitalism and state violence) and the public, toward – and often against – one another. It often looks like a fear of leaders within the movement, a narrow and individualistic way of understanding identity like race and gender rather than a systemic one, and a kind of belonging that’s meant to protect our spaces and feel good to the people already in them rather than one that’s meant to welcome in the many millions of people our movements need if we hope to win.
I think a lot of that stems from fear of our much more powerful opponent (billionaires, the far-right government, the police), and despair at the state of the world. I came up in a political generation that didn’t really believe leftwing political movements could win, and the natural thing to do, if you don’t believe you can win, is to abandon the risky and difficult work of building power and focus instead on being right, being surrounded by people who are like us, using our differences as weapons against each other. And then that creates unhealthy movements that people mostly don’t want to be a part of, and we lose.
I do think we’re in a special moment of seeing in real-time some organizations intervening in that dynamic – most notably this electoral insurgency around the country and especially in New York with Zohran and this DSA slate – where they’re essentially saying, “No, we want power. We want to govern. We know it’s risky and complicated, but it’s the only way.”
Organizations who take winning seriously do the hard work of crafting good strategy. They get over their ambivalence about leadership. They create structures and processes that let huge numbers of people feel that they belong and are part of the project.
Is there a risk of overstating this moment of winning? We are still in the context of power concentrated with billionaires, a burning planet, authoritarian rule, our inability to stop Israel’s ongoing genocide, brutal border regimes; I could go on.
For sure. In New York, where I live, we might be feeling on top of the world – Knicks in five! Zohran and the recent DSA sweep! And our movements are more mature than they were 15 years ago at Occupy. We have a lot more assets at our disposal now, and we’re a little more practiced at winning and building organizations that want to win, and that’s a huge deal.
But, of course, we’re only at the beginning of this trajectory. And around the country, a lot of people don’t feel this way at all. The far right controls the federal government; they’re gutting the institutions that would make it possible to replace them. We’re facing the ticking timebomb of climate change. We’re up against some of the most powerful people who have ever walked the planet, who run some of the most violent institutions that humans have ever designed. We have a very long road ahead of us.
When movements face serious barriers and real loss, we often feel the temptation to shrink – to narrow the playing field so that we can feel powerful in our tiny corner rather than powerless in the big wide world. I think that can happen here in New York, too.
In your book you describe a particular moment on an organizing retreat with the organization CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence), and how the group shifted towards building a strong strategy, and the difficulty that can entail.
Members of Occupy Wall Street sleep, spending the night on Zuccotti park in New York City on 11 October 2011. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
The book is really full of stories, and one of my favorites is about CAAAV, a New York City community organization that organizes Chinese and Bengali tenants in Manhattan’s Chinatown and in Queens.
In a strategy retreat years ago, they faced this hard moment of having to decide whether to continue doing what they’re doing, which is comfortable and known and righteous, or to choose to prioritize some things over others even though it was painful. They decided – against this enormous pressure that most groups have to maintain the status quo – to shut down a chunk of their organizing in Queens and reprioritize the people, time and money they had spent on a particular campaign in Chinatown, which they would probably have lost if they didn’t. But it was heartbreaking. It meant having to go back to the projects in Queens and say, “We’re going to close this campaign down. This isn’t a winnable campaign, and we’re not going to organize this building any more.” It meant that some of the people on staff who were hired for that work could lose their jobs. But there was this very powerful moment where they came to grips with this. In fact, a young woman at risk of losing her job said very bravely, “No, we have to do this. We have to make this choice.”
Years later we can see that the choices they made there led to their sister organization, CAAAV Voice, being one of the early endorsers of Mamdani, and then playing a significant role in organizing a Chinese and Bengali base for his victory. But none of them knew at the time that that’s what it was going to be. The important thing then was telling the truth, being willing to be in conflict with each other and lose some things. That’s what leads to good strategy. It’s what leads to organizations healthy enough to carry it out. It’s also what leads to real transformation.
Theorists like Anton Jäger have criticized the last 15 years of leftist movements and uprisings for failing to translate this work into mass politics and strong leftwing parties. What sort of structures – institutions, infrastructures – does the left need for power, in your view?
In the same way as we’re not going to have real meaningful social transformation by hopping from one big movement moment to the next, we’re also not going to get it by hopping from one election to the next. That’s not going to happen.
I also have fantasies of “the big party”, but I don’t feel qualified to say what exactly the form is. What would be wise for us to do is ask, “What would the big party be made up of?” We should build up those institutions and capacities with or without the umbrella.
It’s made up of the capacity to mount an electoral challenge and govern. It’s the capacity to wage campaigns against a boss or a landlord and win concessions. The space to welcome people in and become politically educated and meet each other and have social relationships that are good and healthy. A compelling vision for this society. And a relationship between these different things, especially the non-electoral power-building slice of the movement and the electoral one, so that they really mutually support each other.
Yotam Marom is an organizer, facilitator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, with over 20 years of participation in movements and experience in facilitation, strategic planning, group dynamics and conflict work
Natasha Lennard is a columnist for the Intercept and a professor of critical journalism at The New School in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Nation, Bookforum, Dissent and the New York Times, among others. She is the author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life and the forthcoming On Un/Certainty
A radical, urgent plan for how the Democratic Party and its supporters can maintain power at one of the most pivotal moments in the history of our nation’s democracy
Why do Democrats fail to win voters to their side, and what can they do to develop new winning political strategies—especially as the very fate of democracy hangs in the balance in 2024? Too often the carefully constructed, rationally minded arguments of the Left meet a grisly fate at the polls, where voters are instead swayed by Republican candidates hawking anger, fear, and resentment. Only when Democrats are handed an overwhelming motivational issue—like the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade>/i> —have they found a way to counter this effect.
Political scientist and strategist Rachel Bitecofer came to prominence after predicting to the seat the size of the Democrats’ rare Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms. At the heart of her prediction lay a powerful concept—negative partisanship, or the idea that voters, even most so-called independents, don’t vote for their candidate so much as they vote against their candidate’s opponent. Seen through this lens, Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts is a deep dive into the Republicans’ own playbook, sharing how Democrats can turn the Right’s own tactics against them. The way for Democrats to wage—and win—electoral war, Bitecofer writes, is to present themselves as “brand ambassadors for freedom, health, wealth, safety, and common sense,” the very opposite of the extremist, freedom-fearing Right. This is a last-ditch effort to armor democracy while there is still time to save it and strengthen it so it can never again be hijacked by a small minority of ideologues.
As America careens into the election cycle that determines its democratic future Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts is the book for any Democrat who has ever banged their head against a wall when obvious rational arguments failed to sway voters over to their side. This guide is a lifeline to save American democracy in its own darkest hour.
Rachel Bitecofer is a political scientist and election forecaster turned political strategist. Bitecofer’s interviews and analysis have been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Politico, The New Republic, Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN, MSNBC, and many other prominent news sources. Bitecofer was recognized for her novel theory that predicted the size of the “Blue Wave” in the 2018 midterm elections much earlier than other forecasters.
States giveth corporations the right to exist, so the states can taketh away their political spending power—or at least, Hawaii and Montana are trying.
Voters in Montana will vote on a plan to get corporate money out of state politics this November. Maddie McCuddy for Montana Free Press.
This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
By the time this year’s primary season was winding down, corporations had already shelled out more than half a billion dollars in support of congressional candidates, exceeding the previous record of $461 million set during the 2024 election cycle. The flood of campaign contributions was driven in large part by the artificial intelligence, crypto, and online gambling industries. And independent expenditures—not to the candidates but on (or against) their behalf—also surged to record levels this year.
According to OpenSecrets, outside groups spent more than $790 million on independent expenditures over the eight months ending August 10, up from about $477 million during the same period in the 2024 election cycle.
“That’s just a fraction of what we will end up with when we get to November,” Brendan Galvin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, told the Prospect.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) defines independent expenditures as spending on communications, such as television or social media ads, that expressly advocate for the election or defeat of a particular candidate. Outside groups that engage in this spending include political action committees (PACs) and super PACs. As a practical matter, PACs can make direct campaign contributions and independent expenditures within applicable limits. Super PACs, which unlike PACs cannot contribute directly to campaigns, exist to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money independently of a candidate. Federal election law also prohibits coordination between super PACs and any candidate, their campaign, or political party, but cooperation remains common.
This article was featured in the Daily Prospect newsletter. Sign up for it here.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United held that corporations have the right to spend their own money to advocate for or against candidates because “independent” spending is protected under the First Amendment. It was this ruling, as well as subsequent court decisions, that opened the floodgates of dark money into our elections. Corporations, billionaires, and otherwise moneyed interests have since been able to spend as much as they want to influence voters without having to disclose it because the justices relied on the assumption that existing transparency rules would be enough to preserve voters’ right to know.
Virtually every state can curtail the corporate domination of politics—without amending the Constitution.
That assumption aged like milk.
“What we’ve seen since then,” Galvin said, “is a massive increase in money being spent in elections that is not transparent at all.”
Much like PACs, super PACs must also report their donors to the FEC. But when they receive contributions from a nonprofit, the often unilluminating name of that nonprofit is all that is disclosed. Its own sources of funding stay hidden, as nonprofits themselves are not required to disclose their donors.
Democratic members of Congress reintroduced the DISCLOSE Act earlier this year in a bid to “shut the dark money floodgates,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who has been leading the charge alongside Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and two of their colleagues. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first introduced the DISCLOSE Act in 2010 following the Citizens United decision. Whitehouse has reintroduced the legislation in every subsequent congressional session. While hearings are on the horizon, the bill has yet to surmount Republican opposition in Congress.
Fortunately, a separate track has emerged to eradicate the scourge of dark money in our elections.
Corporations derive their power from the states where they are chartered. For that reason, virtually every state can curtail the corporate domination of politics. Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the mastermind behind the “Corporate Power Reset,” a legal framework for states to leverage their existing authority to end the era of corporate and dark money in politics—all without amending the Constitution, or waiting around for the Supreme Court to reverse its decision in Citizens United. This framework, which is rooted in 200 years of corporation law, was the focus of a paper Moore authored in September 2025.
States possess what is known as the reserved powers clause, which “has been sitting around since 1819,” Moore told the Prospect. He was referring to Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Dartmouth v. Woodward. As Marshall wrote at the time, a corporation “is an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence.” In other words, the right of corporations to exist at all is given to them by the states in which they are chartered.
“If business corporations and nonprofit corporations are destroying our democracy through a bunch of unregulated, undisclosed spending, we have the authority … to haul them back in, chop that power off, and send them back out,” said Moore.
In addition to reserved powers, the other two pieces of this framework are what give it its teeth: Any change made to corporation law applies to both existing corporations and new ones, and no out-of-state corporation can exercise power that an in-state corporation cannot exercise. “The three of those working together,” Moore said, “that’s the key.” Over the past two years, at least 14 states have introduced legislation seeking to invoke their power to curtail corporate political influence through their campaign spending, with Hawaii enacting its own law in May, and Montana’s secretary of state certifying in August a statutory ballot initiative that will come before state voters in November’s midterm elections. Organizers in Montana collected more than 50,000 signatures to get I-194, also known as the Montana Plan, on the ballot.
“I’d expect at least 30 states to have this in front of their legislatures next January,” Moore told the Prospect. “It is moving.”
THE MONTANA PLAN BEGAN WITH A CONVERSATION between Moore and Jeff Mangan on a Friday evening in the fall of 2024.
“Tom reached out and said he had this white paper that he’d been working on that might be able to address some of the issues that we have with Citizens United,” Mangan said in an interview. “We both are always looking for a way to combat dark money in elections, and fix what we believe is a broken system.”
He reached out to Moore immediately after reading the white paper.
“I just called him up that night and said, ‘We’re doing this in Montana; I’m starting tomorrow,’” Mangan told the Prospect. “I started laying the groundwork that next day.”
When they first met, Mangan was early into his six-year term as Montana’s 12th commissioner of political practices. It was 2017. At the time, Moore served as counsel and chief of staff for FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. “I met Ellen at a conference, and then subsequently met Tom,” said Mangan. The three of them have “remained friends” ever since.
In April 2025, Mangan formally established the Transparent Election Initiative (TEI), a 501(c)(4) organization focused on passing the Montana Plan and supporting similar state-based reform efforts around the country. TEI has spent the past two years engaging people around the state to support the Montana Plan.
“I started traveling across the state of Montana … asking people to come talk to me about campaign finance,” he said. “I did a little presentation on Montana’s history with corruption and campaign finance, and why this state would be a perfect state to launch a nationwide effort to get this done.”
As the plan gained traction, interest in it expanded beyond the state’s own borders.
In Hawaii, state Sen. Karl Rhoads (D) proposed a bill seeking to curtail undisclosed political spending by corporations after reading about Montana’s efforts on Prospect co-founder Robert Reich’s Substack. “It clicked with everything that I’ve been thinking about for years,” Rhoads said at Indivisible Hawaii’s post–legislative session webinar in May.
“Some folks in the activist community reached out to me to see if I could get a draft together that would slip into Hawaii’s laws, and I got that to them,” Moore told the Prospect. “Didn’t hear anything for a couple months, and then all of a sudden, we found that there [were] something like six bills on the House and Senate side, all introduced, all pretty much the same.”
In addition to Rhoads’s bill and four others, another had been introduced by state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole (D), who told the Prospect he also learned about the framework on Reich’s Substack. According to Moore, Keohokalole’s bill was good, but Rhoads’s was “a little bit better.” Keohokalole then put his own bill aside and helped steer Rhoads’s bill, SB 2471, through the Senate Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee, which Keohokalole chairs.
Hawaii Sen. Karl Rhoads got the idea for his corporate charter reform law, which passed this session, from Prospect co-founder Robert Reich’s Substack. Jennifer Sinco Kelleher/AP Photo.
“It was one of these things where it’s not that everybody loved it, but nobody wanted to be the one to kill it, and everybody kind of hoped the next guy would kill it,” Moore said. “At a certain point, I was talking to Sen. Keohokalole about it, and he said, ‘This thing has become a runaway freight train, and no one wants to step in front of it—not even the governor,’ and he was saying it admiringly.”
Keohokalole told the Prospect that much of the force pushing that train forward came from “the strength of the community support” for SB 2471. “It is part of why we structured the bill the way we did.”
Activists and organizers with Indivisible Hawaii consistently pushed Hawaii legislators to advance the bill. “By the end of the legislative session,” said Sam Guckenheimer, lead organizer at Indivisible Hawaii’s Kona chapter, “we had people calling their state representatives and senators from practically every district in the state.”
That approach was especially critical when the bill was headed to the conference committee. In Hawaii, bills can die in conference if leadership fails to assign conferees. Indivisible Hawaii activated members with this in mind. “By getting members to call the offices of the right people at the right time, we got the mindshare to get the conferees assigned,” Guckenheimer told the Prospect.
The bill’s opponents were working the legislature, too, led by the Pacific Resource Partnership (PRP), a nonprofit organization representing Hawaii’s largest construction union and some 250 contractors around the state. The PRP, which Guckenheimer called “the main user of dark money here,” was “sowing doubt on this,” arguing the measure would hamper the voices of its members.
“In the end,” Guckenheimer said, “the conference committee submitted the final version of the bill and amendments five minutes before conference committee cutoffs, and the last amendment was a floor vote on the last possible day in the session … and that morning, the sponsors were not sure it was going to pass.”
The last amendment extended the date the measure would take effect to July 1, 2027, giving legislators more time in the forthcoming legislative session to “provide an opportunity for us to get it right and to make changes before the implementation of the measure,” Keohokalole told the Prospect.
SB 2471 passed the House and Senate by a combined two-chamber total of 74-1. Following demonstrations in support of the measure and outreach by Indivisible Hawaii, Gov. Josh Green (D) signed it into law as Act 11.
THE NEW LAW QUICKLY BECAME THE TARGET of the libertarian Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, which filed a federal lawsuit in June to strike it down. Though the legal theory underpinning Act 11 and the Montana Plan might be ironclad, Moore anticipates that any legal challenges will eventually work their way up to the Supreme Court. If and when they do, he predicted, the justices would have to “shatter foundational state corporation law in a way that can be very destabilizing and shatter the federalism that the Roberts Court has been developing for the last 20 years.”
“I’m never ever going to convince the Supreme Court that they’re going to enjoy eating the spider,” Moore, opting for vivid imagery, told the Prospect, “but I will convince them to eat the spider if the alternative is drinking a glass of battery acid.”
And by the time this case would reach the Supremes, there may be more than two state laws with which the justices would have to grapple. “The path that we should be taking in fighting Citizens United is to get lots of states picking this up so that we create an unmistakable groundswell, and then force federal action on this,” Guckenheimer said. Should the Court’s conservatives strike down such state laws, the mobilizations around those laws could prompt federal action, including constitutional action, to strike down Citizens United.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks at an event in New York City on March 29, 2026. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“If there was ever a time in human history, in our country and throughout the world, that we have got to come together and create a world not based on greed but based on justice, based on decency, now is the time.”
US Sen. Bernie Sanders warned in a speech late Monday that the world is hurtling toward “an extremely dangerous global oligarchy” whose unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power endangers democratic institutions, the environment, and humanity’s collective future as artificial intelligence rapidly advances.
“The oligarchs of today, worth hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, having investments all over the world, fervently believe that they are the masters of the universe, and that they, through their enormous wealth and power, have been ordained to rule the world,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an address at the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a famous speech condemning the Vietnam War. “Today we say to those oligarchs: This country, this world, belongs to all of us, not just you.”
Sanders used his remarks, delivered as world leaders arrived in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, to decry a massively unequal status quo under which political leaders cater to the needs of billionaire donors and corporate interests rather than the broader population, whose wages are being swallowed by rising costs and whose communities are increasingly devastated by pollution and war.
Sanders also warned about the rise of “right-wing demagogues” who are exploiting real material struggles and government failures to advance nefarious agendas that pit “working people against each other based on the color of their skin, where they were born, or their religion.”
“Instead of producing more bombs and weapons and seeing the military-industrial complex enjoy huge profits, governments throughout the world need to come together to feed the children, take care of the vulnerable, and protect our planet from the ravages of climate change,” said Sanders, calling for an end to US military assistance to Israel, which is using American-made weaponry to carry out its genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip.
“Never before in human history have so few people held so much wealth and so much power, never before in human history have we had such enormous concentration of ownership,” the senator said, warning that advancements in AI technology could dramatically intensify the crises facing humanity if control isn’t wrested from “a handful of Big Tech oligarchs.”
Watch Sanders’ full speech:
Sanders called on US President Donald Trump, a billionaire who has dismissed warnings about the threats posed by AI, and Chinese President Xi Jinping to “begin the process of negotiating a comprehensive treaty to establish a pause on advanced AI and a ban on AI superintelligence” when the leaders meet this week.
The progressive senator also cautioned against “despair and depression” in the face of pressing global challenges, saying, “We got to stand up, we got to fight back, we’ve got to create the kind of nation and world that you and I know we can create.”
“If there was ever a time in human history, in our country and throughout the world, that we have got to come together and create a world not based on greed but based on justice, based on decency, now is the time,” said Sanders.
It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits.
It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do.
Many people said we wouldn’t last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong.
Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work.
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A petition sponsored by the BDS National Committee (BNC)
Sign the petition addressed to UNGA President H.E. Dr Khalilur Rahman and demand apartheid Israel be suspended from the UN, just as apartheid South Africa was once suspended.
Also, for anyone interested in following the United Nations General Assembly General Debate of the 81st UNGA that opened today, here is the official schedule. You can see morning and afternoon sessions (see the tabs) live-streamed, with speeches by the heads of UNGA member states delivered in realtime, watch archived videos, as well as see the schedule of the order of countries that will appear over the entire General Debate through September 28. They add the specific countries into the schedule one day in advance. This morning Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva was the 3rd speaker, U.S. President Donald Trump the 4th, Jordan’s King Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein the 5th, Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the 6th, and Qatar’s Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani the 8th. Note that President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran will be the 5th speaker in tomorrow morning’s session, and President Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón of Spain will be the 15th speaker in tomorrow afternoon’s session.
And BTW, there is another petition similar to the new BNC one that was initiated in June 2025 and authored by Nelson Hadad, Former Chilean ambassador to Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Ecuador and Former professor in the Department of International Law at the University of Chile Law School and I’m guessing was targeting the 80th UNGA that began in September 2025. I just learned that it is still active and has almost 77,000 signatures, but they are currently being added very slowly if at all. OTOH, the number of signatures on this new BNC petition has been growing rapidly over the day today shortly after the BNC announced it, and it is addressed to the new UNGA president. Does anyone know if the BNC doesn’t support Hadad’s petition, and if so why not? My take is that Hadad comes from the establishment while BNC aligns with the resistance. And I guess there’s no harm in having more than one petition.
SAN FRANCISCO / MADRID / AMSTERDAM / PARIS / DUBLIN — September 17, 2026 — As the movement that gave the world the language of “the 99 percent” marks its 15th anniversary on September 17, 2026, a coalition of authors, activists, families, and human rights advocates is using the occasion to launch its most ambitious accountability effort yet: a coordinated legal and public campaign demanding that courts in four countries investigate Amazon, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, and their senior executives for alleged complicity in genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank.
The campaign is anchored by NoEthicsInBigTech.com, the platform built by Vahid Razavi — a former Amazon Web Services employee, author of “No Ethics In Big Tech” and “Ethics In Tech and Lack Thereof,” and producer of the documentary film “Forever Peace Now” — and is supported by allied organizations including World BEYOND War and RootsAction.org, which co-hosted a public panel discussion following a screening of the “Forever Peace Now” documentary.
OCCUPY AT 15: FROM ZUCCOTTI PARK TO SILICON VALLEY
Occupy Wall Street began on September 17, 2011, in Zuccotti Park, popularizing the framework of “the 1 percent” versus “the 99 percent” that reshaped American political discourse and helped seed movements including Fight for $15 and the Sanders campaigns. Fifteen years later, organizers behind the Occupy 2026 anniversary commemoration argue that the target of accountability has shifted: from Wall Street’s banks to the small handful of technology companies that now supply the cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and data infrastructure used by militaries and governments around the world.
“Occupy taught the world to ask who benefits and who pays,” the campaign states in materials published on NoEthicsInBigTech.com. “Fifteen years later, the answer runs through data centers, not just trading floors.”
THE PETITION: FOUR JURISDICTIONS, ONE DEMAND
The coalition’s petition — live at actionnetwork.org and addressed initially to the Attorney General of Spain, the Central Courts of Instruction of Spain’s Audiencia Nacional, and the Government of Spain — calls for:
1. An immediate formal investigation into Amazon, Oracle, Palantir, Microsoft, and Google for allegedly providing technology and services that substantially aid and abet international crimes;
2. Investigation of senior executives — CEOs, chairs, and board members;
3. Subpoenas for internal documents and communications to determine what these companies knew, and when;
4. Pursuit of charges of complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, and arrest warrants for executives should the evidence warrant it.
Legal arguments published on the NoEthicsInBigTech.com blog extend the campaign’s strategy beyond Spain to three additional European jurisdictions: the Netherlands, where reporting by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call — later acknowledged in substantial part by Microsoft Vice-Chair and President Brad Smith — found that Israeli military intelligence data was stored on Microsoft Azure servers on Dutch soil; France, where the 2022 Lafarge ruling established that corporate knowledge of atrocities, combined with assistance, can support charges of complicity in crimes against humanity; and Ireland, where the International Criminal Court Act 2006 directly incorporates the Rome Statute’s provisions on aiding and abetting international crimes, and where Google’s EMEA operations are legally headquartered.
The campaign is explicit that these are allegations advanced through petitions and legal filings, not adjudicated findings — and that the process exists precisely so that courts, not campaigners, make that determination. “This is not a call for a corporate apology tour,” the campaign states. “It is a call for the same criminal process that any other alleged accessory to mass atrocity would face.”
PARENTSPLEA.COM: NAMING THE DEAD
Central to the campaign is ParentsPlea.com, a living memorial that has grown to document 142,584 individual lives lost to war, corporate harm, and injustice, each entry researched and sourced, spanning Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and beyond, and covering losses recorded both before and after October 7, 2023. The site’s stated purpose is to ensure that casualty figures are not reduced to statistics, and to give prosecutors, journalists, and the public a sourced record connecting documented harms to the technology and infrastructure the petition alleges enabled them.
BEYOND THE COMPANIES: THE NETWORKS BEHIND THEM
The campaign’s research, published in “No Ethics In Big Tech,” also examines the financial and social networks connecting a number of Silicon Valley’s most prominent early PayPal-era investors and founders — a group the book refers to as the “PayPal Mafia” — to individuals who maintained relationships with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction. The book documents, with sourcing to DOJ-released records and reporting including Jacobin and Boing Boing, that Epstein arranged introductions between Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak beginning in 2014 — introductions that the book states led to Thiel’s Founders Fund making its first Israeli investment. The book is direct in stating that these are documented associations and business outcomes, not criminal findings, and that it is for prosecutors and courts — not the book’s author — to determine what legal consequences, if any, follow.
A CALL TO CONSCIENCE
“No one is too small to demand justice, and no one should give up hope,” said Vahid Razavi, founder of NoEthicsInBigTech.com. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but we believe it bends toward justice — and it bends because ordinary people push it. This petition is proof that a single private citizen, backed by a growing global coalition, can put the question of accountability in front of courts in four nations. The companies and executives named in our petition and legal filings are entitled to due process, and we welcome it — because due process is exactly what victims documented on ParentsPlea.com have never received.”
The coalition is actively seeking additional sponsor organizations, signatories, pro bono legal counsel, and media partners in the jurisdictions named above and beyond.
ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN
NoEthicsInBigTech.com publishes research, legal strategy memoranda, and reporting on Big Tech accountability, including the free book “No Ethics In Big Tech” (released Hiroshima Day, 2026) and “Ethics In Tech and Lack Thereof.” ParentsPlea.com is a sourced memorial documenting lives lost to war and injustice. Forever Peace Now (ForeverPeaceNow.com) is a documentary film examining technology’s role in modern conflict. The petition is hosted at ActionNetwork.org and has been supported by allied organizations including World BEYOND War, RootsAction.org and Occupy2026.org .
Research assistance for this release and the accompanying fact sheets was provided by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant.
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EDITORS’ NOTE ON SOURCING: This release characterizes pending legal petitions and published research; allegations against named companies and individuals are attributed to the petition and cited publications and have not been adjudicated by any court. Source documents, including the Netherlands, France, and Ireland jurisdiction memoranda and the original Spanish petition text, are available at NoEthicsInBigTech.com and upon request.
People living at a homeless encampment move their belongings before a sweep on 16th Street between Folsom and Harrison Streets in October 2024.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
Local housing and homelessness organizations hosted a screening of a new documentary at UCSF on Tuesday, highlighting the causes and effects of homelessness and the different strategies used to address the crisis in cities across the country.
Don Sawyer and Tim Hashko, the filmmakers behind “Beyond the Bridge: A Solution to Homelessness,” traversed the nation, speaking with local officials, policymakers, advocates, and people currently or formerly unhoused.
The film is a follow-up to Sawyer’s 2015 documentary, “Under the Bridge: The Criminalization of Homelessness,” which focused on a tent encampment in Indianapolis.
Tuesday’s screening was followed by a panel of speakers that included licensed clinicians, homelessness advocates, and housing legal experts.
The film asserts that a housing-first strategy, in tandem with support services, is the most effective method of reducing homelessness in large cities. That strategy — which coincided with reductions in homelessness in cities such as Milwaukee and Houston — is still met with resistance in other parts of the country due to bureaucratic challenges, cost and other roadblocks.
Such obstacles are not unique to San Francisco, said Tramecia Garner, the executive director of Swords to Plowshares, an organization that helps place veterans in affordable housing.
“It is very challenging to build housing in San Francisco,” Garner said. “We’ve done a number of new housing projects that have taken at least five, eight years, sometimes 10, to make it happen.”
There are several factors in San Francisco that create those challenges, the panelists said, including negative narratives around the population that needs affordable housing, building requirements in California, and high rental costs in The City.
“We don’t have a problem with a lack of sufficient housing,” said Ora Prochovnick, the director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative. “We have a lack of sufficient affordable housing … 80% of the evictions we defend are for non-payment of rent because the rent is too damn high.”
But even taking those issues into account, the solution is far less complicated than it needs to be, they argued.
“As it was stated over and over and over again in this documentary by people who have massively reduced homelessness, it’s a very simple equation: housing and resources together equals less homelessness,” said Whit Guerrero, a member of the San Francisco Homelessness Oversight Commission.
Housing — particularly affordable housing — is a pressing issue in The City. Last week, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced several new initiatives aimed at addressing the high rental costs in San Francisco and the rising tide of evictions.
They included expanding investment in the Tenant Right to Council program by an additional $3 million to provide full legal representation to hundreds of households that previously received only partial representation in their eviction cases, along with providing $27 million in local funding to cover households with expiring federal housing vouchers.
Lurie also allotted $1 million for a rights-education campaign to provide more informational outreach to renters and landlords about what their legal protections and responsibilities are, and he introduced an ordinance drafted by Supervisor Jackie Fielder that would provide further protections against eviction.
“San Francisco is in a rent emergency,” Lurie said at the Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.
“When San Franciscans sit down at the kitchen table at night, many are asking if they can still afford to live,” he said. “Rents are rising faster here than anywhere else in the country. We’re on track for the most evictions in nearly a decade, and with so few homes vacant and available for rent, people who lose their homes are struggling to find somewhere to go.”
Supervisor Danny Sauter introduced legislation Tuesday that would protect renters from exorbitant rent hikes by capping them at 10% annually until 2029.
Lurie said The City will also be focusing on building more housing, easing the permitting requirements for converting office spaces into housing. He said 300 such units are “in the pipeline.”
Lurie’s administration has prioritized recovery and treatment efforts in recent months, approving a new ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors this summer that requires all new city-funded permanent supportive housing to be drug-free, with residents facing eviction otherwise.
That measure was met with opposition from housing and health-care advocates, who said that it goes against the state’s current standard of harm reduction in permanent supportive housing.
Shavonne Allen, an advocate for housing and substance-use recovery who is formerly unhoused, told The Examiner after watching the screening of “Beyond the Bridge” that she agreed with the housing-first approach.
That’s what worked for her, she said, when she was struggling with an addiction to heroin.
“There were outreach people that met me from Rams Peer Support, and I was eventually housed through a permanent supportive housing voucher,” Allen said. “That was where I was able to get stabilized.”
She said that once she felt stable in her living situation, she was comfortable finally seeking out other resources in the community that put her on the path to recovery.
Now, Allen is a participant in the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Living Proof campaign, which highlights people’s addiction journeys in advertisements around The City.
She said that housing is what most people in her situation need. She said people who are experiencing mental-health challenges or processing other trauma might not have the capacity to accept help before they’re in safe places.
“Housing first with services are very important,” Allen said. “I feel like if we can bring back that message and help people understand that, maybe we would have some more success.”
“We’re in a battle right now between recovery first and housing first, and they don’t have to be pitted against each other,” she said.
Dennis McCauley, who is also formerly unhoused, said he struggled with substance-use issues before being offered housing through Swords to Plowshares. He said it was his second time watching the film, and that the housing-first model resonated with him as well.
“How are you supposed to get clean if you’re in a dirty living situation?” McCauley said.
Turkish authorities have banned Pride parades and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has referred to LGBTQ+ people as “deviants” who were “spreading like the plague.” Photo: kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Authorities in Turkey have arrested dozens of people since early Sunday as part of a broad crackdown on LGBTQ+ activists and associations, according to officials, rights groups and lawyers for the detained.
The government has called the campaign an effort to protect Turkish families, but rights organizations have accused the authorities of criminalizing LGBTQ+ people and lifestyles they don’t like, and of seeking to stomp out rights activism.
Some critics of the campaign say the government is also targeting LGBTQ+ people because members of that community are an active part of the political opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Emma Sinclair-Webb, who monitors Turkey for Human Rights Watch, said the actions were “a dramatic escalation in Turkey’s campaign against LGBT rights and civil society.”
The government, she noted, was conflating gay rights advocacy with prostitution, drug use and obscenity in a way that “smears LGBT people.”
“Their very identity is really being criminalized here,” she added.
Homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey, but Erdogan’s government has frequently demonized LGBTQ+ people and sought to push them out of public life. The authorities have banned Pride parades in Turkish cities, and Erdogan has referred to LGBTQ+ people as “deviants” who were “spreading like the plague.”
Erdogan has also promoted a conservative view of the family in which marriage is between a man and a woman, men are the breadwinners and women are encouraged to have at least three children. This year begins what Erdogan has called the “Decade of Family and Population,” during which the government hopes to push up Turkey’s sagging birthrate with cash incentives and other child-friendly policies.
The arrests began early Sunday when the security forces in Istanbul, Ankara and other Turkish cities detained more than 60 people in their homes, and raided gay bars and the offices of gay rights organizations. On Monday, scores of demonstrators protesting the detentions were arrested in Istanbul.
The government also blocked numerous social media accounts belonging to gay rights groups, as well as the accounts of a sexual health organization, a legal monitor, reporters who wrote about the arrests and the Turkey office of Amnesty International.
In a post on social media Sunday, Justice Minister Akin Gurlek said the operation was called “My Family is Safe.” He said the efforts had targeted 162 people, nine associations and 13 businesses suspected of involvement in prostitution and the production and dissemination of “obscene content,” including to minors.
He noted that searches by the security forces had turned up digital materials, drugs and indications of foreign funding for groups that were encouraging homosexual activity and “indecency.”
“We are steadfastly continuing our efforts to protect our children, the institution of the family and the social order,” he added.
Mehmet Sinan Birdal, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin, said the Turkish government was going after LGBTQ+ people because of the community’s political opposition to Erdogan.
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“Obscenity is a very vague term,” he said. “I see this as a step to further pressure civil opposition.”
Those detained in the operation included a women’s rights activist, a journalist who had written an article about gay rights in the Republic of Georgia and two founders of a health association that supports people with HIV.
Multiple members Kaos GL, a prominent gay rights association, were also detained.
Oya Aydin, a lawyer for the detainees from the Kaos GL association who was present during the police questioning, said officers had asked about pictures used with news stories in the group’s online magazine that showed men and women kissing.
Yildiz Tar, editor of the association’s online newsmagazine, denounced the government’s crackdown, saying, “They call the existence of LGBTQ obscene” and noting, “This is discrimination.”
Also arrested was Arif Sacli, a male dancer from the city of Izmir on the Aegean coast in western Turkey.
Sacli was detained this year on obscenity charges after videos of him performing spread online. A Turkish court acquitted him.
The police detained him again Sunday, and he was charged with obscenity and prostitution, according to his lawyer, Alperen Cihan Cetinkaya.
He said his client had nothing to do with either charge.
“They don’t like Arif,” Cetinkaya said. “He represents something not in line with their lifestyle.”
The arrests followed other cases in which the government tried to use obscenity laws to criminalize certain types of behavior.
Twice this year, Mabel Matiz, a singer, has faced obscenity charges over his music. A judge acquitted him in the first case, focused on some of his lyrics. A second case, focused on a video clip that shows a groom at a wedding party dancing with another man, is ongoing.
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