Letter from prison

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What we're reading

• Two months after agreeing to a ceasefire deal that should have ended the war, Israel has resumed its bombardment of the Gaza Strip with an intensity that recalls the earliest days of the onslaught. Within the first few hours, Israeli air strikes killed more than 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more, and the army has ordered thousands of residents of the towns and neighborhoods spanning the perimeter of the Strip to flee their homes. The Nation

• Many of DOGE’s cuts to public spending thus far remain more performative than transformative, but the intent is clear: to gut the regulatory apparatus, loot public resources, and erode one of the state’s core functions — providing the conditions for capitalism to reproduce itself. A truly transformative shift, such as a major Medicaid cut in Congress, would mark a decisive turn in this trajectory. This is not simply an assault on the administrative state; it is also an attempt to replace a system geared toward the functioning of capitalism as a whole with one that privileges specific capitalists. Jacobin

• The abduction of Mahmoud Khalil is not an isolated event—it is a chilling testament to the authoritarian turn in the United States, where dissent is met not with debate but with brute force, and the machinery of state terror moves with ruthless precision. In his own words, Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, an activist for Palestinian freedom, and a permanent U.S. resident, was seized by ICE agents without warning—handcuffed, dragged from his apartment lobby, shoved into an unmarked black car, and disappeared. Counter Punch