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The Imitation Game: With Zionist Help, Hindutva Ideology Rises in America

On or around March 14, 2026, Laura Loomer, a Jewish Zionist journalist whose screeds against Islam, tabloid approach to reporting, Air Force One conversations with President Donald Trump, and purge lists for the White House’s National Security Council have fairly earned her the label “notorious,” sat down for a public interview at the India Today summit in New Delhi and apologized for past “hurtful tweets,” for example referring to Indians as “third world invaders.” She went on to say that “I am an advocate for Hindu people and continue to speak against brutalities on them.” This was a seemingly staged moment, apparently scripted by a figure who is a relative unknown, but whose notoriousness should by all rights dwarf Loomer’s own. Rajiv Malhotra, the figure in question, appears to be a modest man. A 75-year old Indian-American with a receding grey hairline and the hint of a smile who dresses in dark clerical-adjacent shirts and wears thick black glasses, Malhotra describes himself as a “researcher, author, speaker” on “current affairs, inter-civilization,” and “science.” Elsewhere, though, Malhotra is known as one of America’s and India’s preeminent ideologues of Hindu supremacy, Hindutva, which was founded in the early 1920s in India and, like Zionism is for Jews, is now the dominant version of Hinduism in America, with half of Hindus supporting it and the most powerful members of the community firmly in support. In the lead-up to Loomer’s apology, Mahotra, in his own words, “developed a back channel” to Loomer “with the help of certain unnamed MAGA leaders”; ascertained that she had “changed” her views of India “in the past 60 days”; and also, according to him, “worked hard to make that happen” as part of “the art of building strategic alliances.” Not unpredictably, Malhotra responded generously to Loomer’s comments at the India Today conclave, though with telling venom directed elsewhere: So glad she visited India & spoke. Ignore the IDIOTS who don’t understand the complexities, black/white binaries, blind idolatry/hatred, and over emotional. I can vouch that @LauraLoomer changed over past 2 months. Should be nurtured as solid Hindu supporter inside the MAGA camp. https://t.co/xOhmMAgxpE — Rajiv Malhotra (@RajivMessage) March 14, 2026 Considering that, a little more than a year ago, Loomer was amplifying her own name among Republicans for her stance against H-1B visas issued disproportionally to high-skilled Hindus by the United States government, there is more to this shift than meets the eye. Namely, the increasing ties between Israel and India, and between Hindu ideologues and Zionists in America, brokered by figures like Malhotra. As I reported for the Libertarian Institute in September, Malhotra had already authored an article to this effect in Sapir, the New York-based Jewish Zionist journal which regularly features major financial and intellectual players in the Zionist movement. Malhotra’s piece, entitled “A Hindu Jewish Partnership” and citing the Jewish Zionist hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, argued that, like Jews, Hindu Americans are “‘model minorities’ who have made much of the American dream” and generated resentment as a result. What this “synergy” between Hindutvas like Malhotra and Zionists like Ackman represents is the rise to explicit prominence in America of Zionism’s stealth imitator, Hindutva. This rise is facilitated by the same means that were used to facilitate Zionism: vast sums of money into philanthropy, nonprofits and politics from the finance and tech sectors to support the interests of a foreign nation. It represents arguably the most significant infiltration of a foreign ideology in our country since Zionism; and, like Zionism, it appears to be assuming, by stealth, a position of seemingly unchallengeable authority. A promising entry point for understanding this infiltration can be found three days after Loomer’s and Malhotra’s public rendezvous. March 17 was the date of the Illinois Democratic primary for an open U.S. Senate seat, and included Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton and U.S. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, who is one of four Hindu members of Congress and who outraised Stratton by a 10-to-1 margin. Like the Loomer-Malhotra alliance, the outcome of the race does not quite add up to its underlying reality: Stratton won but Krishnamoorthi, like Malhotra, is the more influential player. He is a standard-bearer of a politics of influence that is lean and mean and powerful, predicated on “his ability to tap into a largely affluent Indian American community, whose growth and increasing political engagement — and giving — has paralleled his own rise.” This ability, according to a report in The Chicago Tribune, is based on Krishnamoorthi’s proximity to “industries in which Indian Americans are well represented” including “the health care sector” and “the world of tech and tech investment.” And it is based on Krishnamoorthi’s proximity to “segments of the Indian American community with ties to India’s…Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” who leads “a transnational…political ideology grounded in Hindu supremacy.” Prominent on Krishnamoorthi’s list of donors or supporters in 2026 was Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, and Bharat Barai, a “[Narendra] Modi friend who has helped arrange large events with the prime minister, including a 2019 rally in Houston, where Krishnamoorthi attended and Modi appeared onstage with Trump.” Others included Ramesh Kapur and Ajay Bhutoria, arguably America’s most influential Democratic operators linked to Hindutva and Indian causes. And there was Mihir Meghani, the founder of the Hindu American Foundation. Finally, not surprisingly, there was Rajiv Malhotra, Hindutva’s resident intellectual and an “amplifier” of Krishnamoorthi’s since the latter condemned India’s neighbor, Muslim-majority Bangladesh, for what Krishnamoorthi saw as its persecutions against Hindus. The Hindu supremacist vision that these backers of Krishnamoorthi’s share has, at its heart, an antipathy to Islam. But it also has at its heart an antipathy to what Islam in its vision represents: savagery, populism, and opposition to “modernization” and “progress,” which is to say opposition to technological dominance of some groups over others. According to Audrey Truschke, the most comprehensive scholar of Hindutva in America, Hindutvas’ commitment to modernization and technology is based on their “embarrassment [derived] from the British colonial period [in India] when [British] scholarship demeaned much about premodern India.” It is also, according to Truschke and others, an elite phenomenon, adopted by Hindus of the upper caste of the social hierarchy, the majority of high-skilled Indian immigrants to America. These were people from the class which served the British Empire and got close enough to watch its technological primacy, then chose to imitate empire rather than, like Gandhi or other founders of India, resist it. Just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is, since October 7, 2023, a figure around whom both liberal and conservative American Zionists increasingly rally support, Narendra Modi is Hindutvas’ standard bearer. He is their unapologetic beacon for what they see as an appropriate level of Hindu assertiveness to correct for what in their view are past wrongs that have submerged Hindu potential. Audrey Truschke’s notions that “anxiety and shame” and a corresponding drive to western imperial imitation explain Hindutva ideology might be dismissible as armchair psychologizing, except that they show up repeatedly in the rhetoric of Hindutva operators. They speak of their scientific prowess in self-defensive terms—“we are a race which is not inferior to any other race in the world”—and also speak, ahistorically, of “1,000 years of slavery” under Muslim rule. They accuse those Hindus who choose not to subscribe to a Hindutva read of Hindu tradition, and who argue for other less hierarchical strands of Hinduism in public discourse, as attempting, in Rajiv Malhotra’s words, to “hide their Hindu shame behind complicity or outright support of Hinduphobia.” Hindutvas’ stand is in many ways imitative of the stand of Jewish Zionists in America. They champion the “secrets of Jewish genius” based on Jews’ success in empire; and they argue that that those Jews who don’t believe that “the Jewish nation is owed the unconditional respect of its fellow nations” are guilty of “join[ing] the blame-shifting ranks, castigating the Jewish state for engaging in self-defense rather than apology.” Over the past forty years, these Zionists have successfully turned the focus of Jewish life in America to “self-defense” by consolidating power in America’s institutions. Indeed, as analysts ranging from the academic Lila Corwin Berman to Adam B. Lerner of Politico have noted” “…an important factor in consolidating Jewish-Americans political power since the mid-20th century has been the community’s targeted interest in Israel…Together powerful Jewish-American organizations…which receive much of their funding from wealthy Jewish-American donors, have transformed an otherwise small population’s activism on Israel into a potent force on a wider set of issues.” These wealthy Jewish-American donors accomplished this feat by taking advantage of loosened government rules toward financial philanthropy to reconstruct Jewish identity along Zionist lines, via such nonprofits as the Wexner Heritage Foundation and Michael Steinhardt’s and Charles Bronfman’s Taglit Birthright Israel. From this base, they have used philanthropic and advocacy organizations (Steinhardt’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Middle East Forum, Paul Singer’s the Manhattan Institute) to push Washington to invest blood and treasure in fights against Muslim nations which opposed Israel, and to back politicians who backed those investments. A similar but swifter and more streamlined path has played out for Hindutva operators in America. Namely, a consolidation of wealth-based philanthropy and politics to define the Hindu American community along Hindutva lines and turn Washington policy against Muslim nations to the benefit of India. (This also applies to some extent to the Indian-American community, since, as I will lay out in a coming report, some supporters of Hindutva are Indian but not Hindu.) Like Zionism’s rise in the 1980s and 1990s, this operation started in the 2000s and 2010s at the margins, with apparently benign concerns like Hindu representation in American society and apparently distant ones like Indian policy towards Muslims or American policy in Pakistan. But, enabled by Zionist-like operators with access to the hinges of power, these concerns have come to shape both foreign policy and, increasingly, American life. It was in 2003 that Raja Krishnamoorthi’s donor Mihir Meghani, who was “born in Philadelphia to parents from India” then graduated from University of Michigan before working in emergency medicine for Kaiser Permanente, co-founded the Hindu American Foundation (HAF): “today…[a] professionally staffed” organization which “seeks to serve Hindu Americans…based on…deep consideration of Hindu principles and American values, such as pluralism, freedom, equality, and justice.” Some of this work means cultural initiatives that are apparently if not necessarily actually educational. In 2005, “HAF and other Hindu groups proposed more than 117 edits to California textbooks that tackled India and Hinduism.” In 2007, the group helped shape resolutions which passed the U.S. House and Senate recognizing the “religious and historical significance of the festival of Diwali.” And in 2008, it “launched the Take Back Yoga campaign” to emphasize what it called the Hindu roots of Yoga. Some of this work, Hindu principles or no, means supporting causes that do not necessarily line up with “freedom, equality, and justice.” For example, in 2013 and 2019, HAF mobilized to defeat congressional efforts to include “a human rights framework within the growing US-India strategic relationship and criticized Hindutva.” It also successfully “urged legislators to pass a resolution that would elevate India to a major non-NATO ally…of the US” as well as to pass an amendment to “bolster US-India ties” as part of the National Defense Reauthorization Act. In 2021, when South Asian academics created a conference called “Dismantling Global Hindutva,” HAF “accused the conference of platforming…Hinduphobic discourse’ and expressed concerns that the event would impact Hindu students who already ‘report feeling under attack.’” (Tellingly, “it provided no proof that Hindu students…had experienced any such hate crimes on account of discussions about Hindu nationalism at universities.”) And in 2022, HAF tried to push congresspeople to “back a ban on sustainment packages for F-16 fighter jets sold to Pakistan due to that country’s alleged persecution of its Hindu minority.” HAF also allegedly has a “fiduciary relationship” to the Indian Embassy, which would make it an unregistered foreign agent in the United States. If Meghani’s Hindu American Foundation works for Hindutva institutionally, Meghani’s fellow physician and Krishnamoorthi donor Bharat Barai has become over these past twenty years a freelance Hindutva operator par excellence. Barai, who was born in Mumbai then migrated to the United States in 1974 and received MDs in Medicine, Medical Oncology and Hematology, came to prominence among Hindus in 2007 after the U.S. State Department denied Narendra Modi, not yet prime minister, a visa to deliver a speech here on the grounds that he had allowed the slaughter of Muslims in 2002, when he was chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat. In response, Barai “organized a…videoconference for Modi to address the diaspora” and made this conference into “a biennial event.” Barai then made his organizational skills into his calling card, which connected him to other Hindu professionals who followed his example. In 2014, after Modi’s election as prime minister, an event for Modi in New York was put together “single-handedly by Barai.” This event included Hindu Chicago businessman Shalabh Kumar, who two years later formed the Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC) with Steve Bannon its honorary co-chair. Kumar also, with Barai’s help, became instrumental in bringing to the Hindutva cause one of its first Republican congressmen: Joe Walsh, who in 2014 began advocating for Narendra Modi before his election. According to the investigative magazine The Caravan, this seemingly random transformation happened as advertisements began appearing in Hindu diaspora newspapers funded by Kumar—“If you love Modi, send Walsh back to Congress”—and as Kumar “put up more than $500,000 to support Walsh.” Not unpredictably, Walsh became an eager Hindutva acolyte: Speaking as the chief guest at Barai’s biennial videoconference with Modi, he promised not to smile until Modi was invited to the United States. At a Chicago press conference, he declared, ‘I am here because Chief Minister Modi has become a hero of mine.’ Flanked by Barai on his right and Shrinarayan Chandak, the vice-president of the midwest chapter of the HSS, on his left, Walsh continued, ‘No music until Modi is here.'” By 2019, the Republican Hindu Coalition founded by Kumar was deeper into Republican ranks: hosting Steve Bannon and around 1,400 Hindu-American luminaries “in an event titled: ‘A Call To Arms Against China’s Unrestricted War On American Manufacturing.’” For the Republican Hindu Coalition, this “was an opportunity to bring the American right-wing establishment up to speed on ‘China’s increased aggression and intrusion into Indian territory,’ as well as their ‘support of the terrorist harboring nation of Pakistan.’” And Barai’s connections extend elsewhere. In 2023, when Prime Minister Modi visited again from India, Barai partnered with the Hindutva-linked Silicon Valley entrepreneur MR Rangaswami “to host the diaspora event,” and both attended the White House dinner for Modi hosted by President Joe Biden. By this time, Barai had also begun surfacing among Democrats more generally, pressing them on the matter of Modi’s visa in conjunction with the Hindu American Foundation and seeding new Hindutva supporters inside the Democratic Party. Around the time that he and Kumar cultivated Walsh, Barai was cultivating U.S. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who represents large numbers of Hindus. Barai had also “discerned the potential of an ambitious young [Democratic] politician from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard” who “identified as Hindu” because “her mother was a convert” and “began making sizable donations to her campaigns.” Gabbard met Modi “four times between 2014 and 2016,” saying that “she and Modi discussed ‘how America and India can work together to help combat the global threat posed by Islamic extremism.’” She is not the only lawmaker whose stance on Modi seems shaped by the influence of Barai, who, notably, has registered “as a foreign agent on behalf of the consul general of India.” Another of these lawmakers is Ro Khanna of California, who is a beneficiary of Barai’s donations and a beneficiary of donations from Mihir Meghani’s Hindu American Foundation. Since Khanna was elected to Congress in 2016, his position on Hindutva ideology has shifted, as described by Andrew Cockburn in Harpers and Deeksha Udupa in The Nation, in much the same direction as Gabbard’s: Making his name as a progressive, especially as an articulate critic of Pentagon spending and foreign wars, he has been sharply critical of the Hindu-nationalist agenda, calling in 2019 for ‘every American politician of Hindu faith to reject Hindutva.’ But…four years after his denunciation of Hindutva, he urged to have Modi address a joint session of Congress during his June 2023 state visit, an event boycotted by several of his fellow progressives. That same year, he and Krishnamoorthi sponsored legislation to fast-track weapons sales to India. By this point, June 2023, the major players in the Hindutva movement in America had defined themselves. When Politico and the Los Angeles Times and Harpers and The Chicago Tribune ran pieces on the increasing role of Hindu and Indian and Hindutva donations in presidential campaigns, it was Bharat Barai and Mihir Meghani whose names appeared, alongside Shalabh Kumar for Republicans and Ramesh Kapur and Ajay Bhutoria for Democrats; the “money quotes,” figuratively and literally, about the growing influence of the community. Much as with Zionists and Israel, there are geopolitical ramifications to Hindutvas’ advocacy. Israel and India are outliers in Western, Central, and Southeastern Asia: non-Muslim countries at intense odds with Iran, Pakistan, and public sentiment across the region. Every time America makes a deal with India despite Modi’s extremely public persecution of its Muslim minority, our estrangement from many of the world’s two billion Muslims deepens. This may or may not be a “cost worth paying” to contain China in the region, but it is noteworthy that it also serves other interests. Namely, it facilitates the power of both India and of Hindu technologists who, along with Zionists, are assuming arbitrative power in Silicon Valley monopolies as Washington D.C. “takes the brakes off” those monopolies in order to compete with China. What’s more, the ramifications of America’s growing alliance with Hindutvas, as with most alliances of empire, are not just geopolitical. They reach back to empire’s heart. In 2023, as Andrew Cockburn reported for Harpers, California legislators approved a bill banning discrimination on the grounds of caste, “an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status.” This bill was put forward by California’s Dalit community who “occupy the bottommost rung of the Hindu hierarchy…traditionally…confined to menial occupations on the fringes of Indian society, purely by virtue of their birth.” According to Cockburn, “Dalits in California report that this ancient system has been imported to the United States where it remains prevalent in the Indian diaspora, including among those in the tech industry.” Though the bill passed the California legislature, where Hindus are not directly represented, it was vetoed unexpectedly by Gavin Newsom. Newsom issued his veto after Ramesh Kapur, in his own telling, “made it clear to Newsom that he faced an important choice: if he ever hoped to secure Kapur’s support, he had better make the right decision on the caste bill”; and after Ajay Bhutoria, also in his own telling, told Newsom that “he has a bright future in national politics…But at the same time, if there’s a mistake made on his side, he loses the support of the community.” California’s result is notable in that it was influenced directly by donors, but Hindutvas also have influence inside state governments via personnel. Nearly fifty Indian Americans, the vast majority Hindu, hold spots in state legislatures across the country, and Hindutva influence over U.S. House and gubernatorial races has increased precipitously. According to Andrew Cockburn, the Hindu American Foundation has backed U.S. congressman Rich McCormick of Georgia, a Republican “hailed by the group for his stand on ‘Hinduphobia and Pakistan-supported terrorism against Indians in Kashmir.’” It has also backed Bhavini Patel, a challenger to U.S. Representative Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, a Democrat with deep ties to her district who also happens to be a defender of Palestinians. David Brog is “another [Hindutva friendly] Republican endorsed by the PAC as a candidate for the Nevada state assembly.” In Maryland, Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, and his Lieutenant Governor, Aruna Miller, accepted sizeable donations “from people affiliated with Hindu nationalism” off connections of Miller’s, whom “the website of Hindu American Foundation…features…in support of the group’s efforts to implement a revisionist version of Indian history into California textbooks.” Many of these actions are taken in alliance with Jewish Zionists and their Christian Zionist supporters. The Jewish Zionist technologist Ben Horowitz, the son of the Jewish Zionist intellectual David Horowitz, is a Krishnamoorthi donor. Bhavini Patel, Summer Lee’s challenger who ran against Lee two years after “pro-Israel groups had spent $5 million…in a failed attempt to defeat Lee,” was “funded to the tune of $800,000 by the Republican billionaire Jeffrey Yass, a staunch supporter of Israeli causes.” David Brog, the Nevada candidate, is “the co-founder of the hugely influential Christians United for Israel”; “a fervent advocate for a ‘Jewish–Hindu alliance’”; a “protégé” of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson; and “a distant cousin of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.” Just as state-based politics have become hospitable to joint Hindutva-Zionist operations, so have national and foreign policy politics proven fertile ground. Hindus’ biggest supporters for a closer India-America alliance are the same Jewish Zionists, including Rahm Emanuel, who are the biggest proponents of empowering Silicon Valley monopolies to ratchet up competition with China. These “anti-China” operators include financial operators like John Gaunt and Matt Pottinger and the Iraq War orchestrator Douglas Feith and his son David, who are tied to Zionist outfits like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And, according to Azad Essa, “Zionist and Islamophobic groups in the U.S. have been operating in concert with each other to vilify critics of Hindutva”: taking aim specifically at pro-Palestinian groups and arguing that “friends of both Israel and India must work to counter this shockingly effective political activism before it is too late.” Since the start of the Gaza genocide, as Jewish Zionism has come under unprecedented scrutiny in America, this alliance has tightened. Sadanand Dhume of The Wall Street Journal—seemingly a secular liberal who nonetheless defends Modi, is cited by Hindutvas, and writes for Jewish Zionists—has unironically compared the proposed relocation of Gazans to the bloody relocation and slaughter of Muslims who founded Pakistan in 1947, a process which also led to the slaughter of Hindus. Rajiv Malhotra has proposed an AI-based system to track speech which has been adopted by one of these Zionists and is being institutionalized at Harvard. And Laura Loomer, who made her name as a journalist and provocateur, has allied with Rajiv Malhotra and Hindutvas who benefit most from H-1B visas, transforming herself, in Malhotra’s words, into “a solid Hindu supporter inside the MAGA camp.” Malhotra, in turn, is embracing Loomer’s concern over visas from an Indian perspective, arguing that they cause a “brain drain” from India, a stand that cultivates America First supporters even as many other powerful Hindutvas go the other way on the issue. This in turn functions to hedge the community’s bets with different political factions in America. It is a recognizable move from the playbook of Jewish Zionists, who have been highly effective embracing a wide range of politics—from progressive to centrist to America First—that function to keep some version of Zionism in the mainstream of most American political cohorts. All of this is highly conscious on the part of Hindutvas. Shalabh Kumar said he formed the Republican Hindu Coalition in explicit imitation of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Rajiv Malhotra, as in many things ahead of the curve, co-founded the New Jersey-based Hindu Jewish Coalition in 2013 with funding from Jewish Zionists. Mihir Megani, who consorts with Miss Israel on his X account and praises Benjamin Netanyahu while supporting, via Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, is said by a confidante to be “doing a lot of work with the Jewish community” and “learning from its success in shaping and promoting a favorable narrative.” Bharat Barai has received at least one award for “fighting antisemitism” from Jewish Zionists. Bharat Barai’s ally MR Rangaswami has, according to Politico, “a very clear benchmark in mind as he tries to navigate his educated and wealthy ethnic group towards political power: Jewish-Americans.” As Rangaswami puts it, “We’re learning a lot from the Jewish diaspora here and what we have noticed from the Jewish diaspora is that they’re willing to contribute, invest, and write checks.” Of equal concern regarding Hindutva’s infiltration is the fact that, like the spread of Zionism in the 1980s and 1990s, it is going largely underreported relative to its importance, particularly in mainstream media. I have written, as part of my work on Zionism, about the subject for the Libertarian Institute; and the Libertarian Institute’s Jose Nino has reported on links between Israel and India in multiple investigations on his Substack. Audrey Truschke and the magazine Caravan have mounted in-depth examinations of Hindutva ideology; and left publications like Jacobin, Mother Jones, The Intercept, Political Research Associates, and The Transnational Institute have reported on it. The Middle East Eye’s Azad Essa recently authored a book on the subject while Alexander Cockburn at Harpers wrote a groundbreaking report on it in 2024. Besides that, there is relatively little coverage, which means there is relatively little work on the mid and long-term consequences of Hindutva’s rise to influence in conjunction with Zionism in American life. In some ways, the best indication of where two minoritarian groups operating under similar claims of supremacy in this country might lead comes from testimony from dissenters within their own religious traditions. Jewish Currents, the anti-Zionist magazine, wrote last year “that virtually the entire enterprise of Judaism—and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it—is infected with a voracious rot” and that “it is the Zionists who have been the primary actors over much of the last century of Jewish history, who have strangled our diasporic languages and disinvested from our cultural and spiritual life, who have made ignorance of Judaism the norm for Zionists and anti-Zionists alike.” Pankaj Mishra, the Indian writer and critic who grew up in a Hindu household, wrote this year, as Narendra Modi broke from other Southeast Asian countries to support Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran, that India’s “Hindu supremacist prime minister” along with other wealthy Hindus had “convinced themselves that their personal flourishing depended on diligent concord with…supremacism,” showing, “at the highest levels of policymaking, a lack of supporting traditions and historical memory.” These prognoses from people inside the corrupted traditions are instructive for Americans. Indeed, it is “culture” and “spiritual life” as well as “supporting traditions” and “historical memory” that are Zionism’s and Hindutva’s targets inside America, in favor of a belligerent, “supremacist” and manifestly ahistorical “ignorance” of our own founding values. As I will investigate in a coming report, Hindutva and Zionist operators like Rajiv Malhotra and Laura Loomer may speak in terms of the “American dream” and of apparently “liberal” attempts to overcome “false binaries,” but their project is recognizable, conceptually and historically, as something very different. It is one aimed at denuding the heart of America: our Constitution and the spirit of laws and culture of republican government it bequeaths to us.

Apr 15, 202612 votes

Another Trump Flip Flop: From ‘Kill FISA’ to ‘Clean Renewal’

With its April 20 deadline for congressional renewal looming, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is back in the spotlight. The provision, first adopted in 2008 as a part of the FISA Amendments Act as an update to the original 1978 Act, allows U.S. intelligence agencies to target “non-US persons located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information” as a response to perceived technology gaps exposed in the years after 9/11. It achieves this by compelling American telecom companies to collect intelligence on foreign targets and turning over data to federal officials. Many aspects of Section 702 are concerning to civil libertarians. The provision includes a “backdoor search” loophole that allows agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation to search the database for communications belonging to U.S. citizens without a warrant. On the topic of warrants, individual warrants for each target are not required by Section 702. Instead, the government gets annual approval via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to conduct broad spying operations with little to no oversight, with no requirement that the government proves to the court that a specific target is even suspected of being an agent of a foreign power. Recently, President Donald Trump asked Republicans to unify to extend the program with no changes in oversight or accountability. Trump posted on Truth Social, “When used properly, FISA is an effective tool to keep Americans safe. For these reasons, I have called for a clean 18-month extension.” The adjective “clean” is not politically neutral: it implies that attempts to reform the program are partisan clutter, and that re-evaluating the practical or constitutional application of such a tool is a waste of time. But this isn’t the position shared by those who have been wrongly targeted by the intelligence community, including President Trump himself. In May 2020, Trump urged Republicans to vote “NO” on FISA, explicitly tying the law to fears of abuse, including against his own re-election campaign. Four years later, he told lawmakers to “KILL FISA,” claiming it had been “illegally used” against him and that officials had “spied on my campaign.” On Monday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote to National Security Agency Director Joshua Rudd to address “deeply troubling abuses of power” by NSA analysts, alleging the agency has used Section 702 to search the private communications of individuals ranging from dating apps to rental agreements. In his latest departure with the administration, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) said, “I vote with GOP 91% of the time, but that’s about to go to 90%. I won’t vote to let feds spy on you without a warrant. FISA 702 allows the government to search for your information in vast databases compiled with targeting foreigners.” That charge of “vast databases” of Americans’ private data is precisely the overreach that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on in 2013 when he revealed that the NSA was using its authority to collect telephone records in bulk. But the Fourth Amendment’s logic does not dissolve in the presence of large databases. According to the Supreme Court, a search that intrudes on a reasonable expectation of privacy requires a warrant supported by probate cause. In Carpenter v. United States, SCOTUS held that the government’s acquisition of historical cell-site location information was a Fourth Amendment search, emphasizing how modern technology can transform ordinary records into comprehensive tracking. Intelligence gathering at such a sheer scale, while politically attractive to those who crave power, is constitutionally dubious for all the ways it could be used to target individuals, even if the initial data collection is impersonal. The secrecy and structure of the reviewing court compound the problem. Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz described FISA proceedings as “ex parte,” with only the government appearing, which deprives the process of “adversarial testing.” In ordinary constitutional practice, laws that burden speech, association, and privacy are tested by said adversarial litigation to force factual development, limiting principles, and public reasoning. This leaves the FISC’s decisions and operations shrouded in secrecy. Annual statistics help to explain why civil liberty advocates criticize the FISC as a compliance venue rather than a constitutional barrier. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reports that in 2024 the FISC granted or modified the overwhelming majority of items before it, with no applications denied in full. In 2025, it only denied four applications in full while continuing to grant or modify most of the remainder. While these numbers do not necessarily prove bad faith by the judges involved, they do underscore the institutional asymmetry: a secret court hearing only one party (the state) is predisposed to side with it without due courtesy to the target of the government’s ire. A surveillance state that cannot be meaningfully challenged in court is not merely powerful, it is structurally insulated. In another SCOTUS ruling, Clapper v. Amnesty International, the court ruled that the plaintiffs, including lawyers, journalists, and human-rights advocates, lacked the standing to challenge FISA Section 702 because they could not prove their alleged injuries. In other words, since potential government surveillance of their activities is done in secret, they can’t be sure that such surveillance took place, even if possible or even likely. The practical result is a legal regime in which the people most likely to become targets of the surveillance state are told, in effect, that they must wait until the government admits to its own wrongdoing, if it ever does. Such doctrine rewards opacity, discourages accountability, and converts constitutional limits into after-the-fact internal policy debates. A free society does not need to prove it is being watched before it can object to the creation of institutions engineered to snoop first and justify later. Another perspective to judge such unconstitutional surveillance is the imposed cost, even when not aimed at a particular citizen. In Clapper, the plaintiffs described costly precautions taken to protect confidential communications, precautions the Court treated as self-inflicted for standing purposes. Yet those precautions are better understood as the rational price of uncertainty: when citizens cannot know whether their interactions with foreign sources, clients, colleagues, or family are subject to state capture, prudence demands self-censorship, detours, and silence. This burden falls especially hard on professions that depend on confidentiality, such as investigative journalists, advocacy groups, and legal counsel. The effect is fewer inquiries, fewer candid conversations, and fewer whistleblowers that might be identified by an algorithm or an analyst. As a result, the same surveillance state that should be met with a multitude of challenges from civil rights advocates chills its opposition into less resistance. Americans should oppose Section 702 because it builds a durable exception to the Fourth Amendment. It vests immense surveillance discretion in the executive branch and invites political abuse, as the president knows from personal experience. It conscripts private companies as unwilling deputies to the intelligence community and treats the public like criminals-in-waiting. Predictably, citizens trim speech and associations when they suspect the state can catalog their correspondence. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” has never been an acceptable argument for the curtailment of privacy. A free people should not live by such a gross exception to liberty.

Apr 15, 202618 votes

Another Trump Flip Flop: From ‘Kill FISA’ to ‘Clean Renewal’

Apr 15, 202610 votes

Another Trump Flip Flop: From ‘Kill FISA’ to ‘Clean Renewal’

Apr 15, 20268 votes

Trump Flirts With War Crimes

President Donald Trump owes the Pakistanis for securing a fourteen-day ceasefire with Iran. He now has a chance to extricate the United States from the biggest blunder of his second term. Tensions, however, remain high. “It is emphasized that this does not signify the termination of the war,” the Iranian government said in a formal statement. “Our hands remain upon the trigger, and should the slightest error be committed by the enemy, it shall be met with full force.” One must worry that Trump does not appreciate the ceasefire off-ramp as good luck or an unmerited gift; instead, he likely will credit his threats to destroy “a whole civilization…never to be brought back again.” If the ceasefire breaks down, Trump could fulfill his commitment to “rain Hell” on Iran. While typing away on Truth Social, Trump is oblivious that he is giving an anticipatory confession to war crimes. In addition to the posts quoted above, the president has threatened to destroy Iran’s power plants, oil wells, and desalinization facilities if certain demands are rejected. Civilizational devastation, Trump raved, “will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’” Trump’s promises violate fundamental tenets of the laws and customs of armed conflict (also known as international humanitarian law, “IHL”) which yields individual criminal responsibility under international law. This area of IHL is clear and not subject to different spins. As an initial matter, Trump’s war plans violate protocols to the Geneva Convention codifying the principle of distinction. According to Article 48 of the relevant protocol, “the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” [Emphasis added] Article 51 further prohibits “[a]cts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population.” Trump’s possible targets enumerated on Truth Social are integral to provision of basic services to civilians. The president is not threatening military bases, missile silos, or drone manufacturing facilities. Instead, he proposes to bring suffering on Iran’s civilian population simply because he can. IHL prohibits such methods of war as uncivilized. Trump and his war hawk apologists will likely counter that destruction of certain infrastructure could produce a military benefit and thus is allowed. This is not true. Article 51 sets forth the principle of proportionality which prohibits military attacks expected to cause harm to civilians that is excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Just because soldiers use electricity and drink water does not mean that the United States is justified in destroying all of Iran’s power plants and desalinization facilities. Further damning to the president’s case is his stated reason for attacking civilian targets and infrastructure: “retribution” for the conduct of a regime he alleges no longer holds power. IHL strictly prohibits reprisals against the civilian population. A reprisal is an action typically illegal that is taken to force the enemy to stop its own violations of IHL. For example, if Iran executed American prisoners of war (“POWs”), the United States could execute Iranian POWs to persuade Iran to comply with the Geneva Convention. In the present conflict, Trump has not identified Iranian IHL violations and even if he had done so, the United States could not institute reprisals against civilian targets or persons. At best, Trump’s statements on Truth Social are desperate bombast from a leader who regrets taking advice from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). At worst, they are an outline for barbarism unfit for the leader of a federal republic. If the ceasefire does not result in a permanent settlement and Trump follows through on his threats to civilians and civilian infrastructure, IHL is squarely against him. He should not be surprised if the International Criminal Court (“ICC”), which is charged with investigating war crimes and similar matters, issues a warrant for his arrest. Such a warrant would prevent Trump from traveling outside of the United States because of the risk of arrest. No more golf trips to Ireland for the Donald. While Trump has just complaints about the lawfare waged against him by the likes of Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis, an ICC matter would be different. Trump’s own words convict him and are counter to the established laws and customs of armed conflict.

Apr 13, 202618 votes

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The Imitation Game: With Zionist Help, Hindutva Ideology Rises in America

Another Trump Flip Flop: From ‘Kill FISA’ to ‘Clean Renewal’

Another Trump Flip Flop: From ‘Kill FISA’ to ‘Clean Renewal’

Another Trump Flip Flop: From ‘Kill FISA’ to ‘Clean Renewal’

Trump Flirts With War Crimes