Chokepoint
Week of March 6-12, 2026
Welcome to TRACKING THE CRISIS, a weekly round-up from The Democracy Collaborative tracking the administrative, legislative, and other actions of the Trump Administration as well as the many forms of legal and movement response from across a broad range of social, political, and economic actors. TDC is providing this service for collective informational purposes, as a tool for understanding the times during a period of disorientingly rapid flux and change in the U.S. political economy. This round-up is produced by humans, not by Artificial Intelligence. TDC should not be understood as endorsing or otherwise any of the specific content of the information round-up.
TRUMP TRACKER: Administration actions
“Largest energy supply disruption in history”: War sends oil skyrocketing above $100/barrel, threatening global economy as Iran holds Strait of Hormuz closed with no end in sight. Less than two weeks since it began, the impacts of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran have spiraled out of their control, bringing the world economy to the edge of crisis as the “largest energy supply shock in history” chokes global trade in petroleum. Having declared on March 2nd that “the Strait of Hormuz is closed,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has maintained a de facto blockade of the Strait since at least March 4. The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most critical oil chokepoint, through which approximately 20-25 million barrels of petroleum products per day – up to 20% of the world’s crude oil and a significant share of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies – normally pass. As JP Morgan Chase noted, it is the first time in history that this critical waterway has been effectively closed off to shipping. It touched off shockwaves through the global economy, sending stock markets crashing as oil prices spiked to near $120 per barrel on Monday, March 9. Global markets lost over $6 trillion as investors, leaders of commerce, national governments, and nearly everyone who depends on petroleum feared that the “nightmare scenario” for energy and the global economy had begun to materialize. Several Middle Eastern countries have drastically cut or suspended oil and gas production after Iranian drone and missile attacks damaged oil production and refining facilities throughout the Persian Gulf region. Markets eased at the Monday close after Trump attempted to assuage fears of a protracted energy shock, saying the war “was very complete, pretty much,” insisting that Iran had “nothing left in a military sense” and that he was “thinking of taking over” the Strait in short order. Meanwhile, Iran announced that they would guarantee unrestricted passage to any country who expelled their U.S. and Israeli diplomats. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt reiterated on Tuesday that the Administration estimated the war could be over in about four weeks, before oil supply disruptions would ‘seriously’ impact prices.
Later that day, Iran announced that it had begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, as Central Command said U.S. forces destroyed up to 16 mine-laying ships. As maritime insurers backed away from underwriting trade shipments in the Gulf, Trump announced a $20 billion fund to cover maritime trade in the Gulf. Then on Wednesday, at least six commercial ships and oil tankers were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz and across the Persian Gulf as Iran debuted a new weapon: a sea-based naval drone carrying explosive payloads that experts say rival those of ballistic missiles and are capable of immobilizing large ships. At least four sailors were killed, more than 20 were rescued from a Thai tanker ship that caught fire, and two tanker ships were struck off the coast of southern Iraq, causing the world’s second largest oil producer to close its oil terminals as the IRGC warned that “not a litre of oil” will pass the Strait, telling the world to “get ready for oil to be $200 a barrel.” Contrary to Trump’s earlier stated guarantees, the U.S. Navy refused dozens of escort requests from the shipping industry, saying it was “not possible” to escort ships safely through the Strait; Energy Secretary Chris Wright tweeted that one ship had successfully passed through the Strait, briefly easing oil prices before he hastily deleted the tweet several minutes later, costing traders $84 million and raising questions about market manipulation and insider trading. Oil prices jumped back up to near $100 levels as U.S. intelligence indicated that a “multitude of reports” had concluded that the Islamic Republic – which had appointed a new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, on March 9 – was “not at risk of collapse anytime soon” as two weeks of U.S./Israeli bombardment, including the killing of over 160 schoolchildren, appeared to rally Iranian resistance, at least temporarily, around a sense of nationalism. As U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, the top commander of U.S. forces in Europe, testified: “What I’ve observed over the course of studying air power in history is that any time you attack a civilian population, you usually end up finding that it just hardens their resolve.” In a bid to ease oil prices, the 32 member nations of the International Energy Agency agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil from its strategic reserve, its largest-ever release, in coordination with the U.S. as U.S. Energy Secretary Wright announced 172 million barrels will be released from the national strategic reserve. Trump also temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil to keep oil flowing during the crisis. On Thursday, the new Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who had been injured in the attack that killed his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and most of his immediate family, issued his first public message in which he called for Iranian unity and vowed that Iran “will not refrain from avenging the blood of its martyrs.” He also proclaimed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain closed “as a tool to pressure the enemy” and urged U.S. military bases in the Gulf states to be closed immediately as they “will be attacked.” Markets plunged and oil prices surged again on the realization that the United States and Israel were no longer in control of the oil supply situation, as oil closed slightly over $100 on Thursday and Trump was trolled by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Gas prices rose across the United States and diesel was up as much as $1 over last week at the pump as fuel surcharges of up to $24 for delivered goods are set to kick in, raising consumer prices across the board. Experts are also warning that soaring grocery prices and even food shortages threatening global food security may lie ahead, as the closure of the Strait also cut off a major supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a key element of modern industrial fertilizer, just as planting season begins for agricultural producers. Qatar and Oman, major LNG producers, have declared force majeure on their contracts with major companies, including Shell, TotalEnergies, and several distributors in Asia as urban residents in India, the world’s second largest LNG consumer, rushed to panic-buy cooking gas as a brisk black market trade emerged. Governments are scrambling to take action as the squeeze takes hold, especially in Asian countries that get nearly 60% of their oil supply from the Gulf and will bear the brunt of the immediate impacts of the oil shortage, which is already about twice the total volume of supply shortages caused by the Arab oil embargo in 1973. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Iran is currently exporting more oil than it was before the war; over 11 million barrels on Iranian ships have gone through the Strait, mostly to China, since the war began. Taking a classic page from the mercantilist playbook, the Wall Street Journal argues Iran is showing that it is “in control of a strategic waterway that it has closed off to the rest of the region’s oil producers,” effectively ending its own sanctions while sanctioning the rest of the world. Trump’s options to reopen the Strait are limited as the astronomical costs of the war continue to mount; economists warn that this could leave the United States “woefully underprepared” for the economic shock, recession and potential ‘stagflation crisis’ that looms larger each day the Strait remains closed.
Asymmetric Warfare vs. Artificial Intelligence: Iran pierces the veil of U.S./Israeli invincibility by drawing aggressors into protracted conflict on home turf. While Donald Trump claimed victory in the Iran war at least three times this week, the rest of the world grappled with the reality that the ‘greatest military in the world’ is being dragged into a quagmire with no plan to end it and few stated ideas beyond ‘bomb everything in sight’. Nearly 1,500 Iranians have been killed in the war, including hundreds of children in Iran and Lebanon, and over 3.2 million have been displaced, including Afghan refugees from the U.S. military’s last war in the region who have to flee U.S. bombs a second time. The United States has taken a number of critical missteps since before day one; nuclear scientists speaking to MSNOW this week detailed how U.S. negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff repeatedly misinterpreted technical information about Iran’s uranium stockpile, suggesting their misunderstandings may have led to war; although many analysts are now of the opinion that war was the plan all along and Netanyahu, who exhorted multiple U.S. administrations to bomb Iran over the last two decades, had finally found a willing dupe in Trump, who thought that ‘decapitating’ the Iranian regime’s leadership would be as easy as the earlier operation against Maduro in Venezuela, despite the reams of intelligence reporting that suggested the opposite. Moreover, the United States and Israel appear to have divergent ideas of how to pursue the war; while Trump aims for regime change, he has expressed that he “can end the war any time [he] wants to,” but Netanyahu and Israel clearly intend to pursue a long-held wishlist of destroying their enemies in the region, as was evidenced with their escalation of the war inside Lebanon, which has so far killed 630 people and displaced 800,000. Trump chided the Israelis on Monday for striking Tehran’s oil processing and storage facilities, causing widespread environmental damage over the weekend as black rain briefly fell from the sky.
What the United States and Israel share is an enthusiasm for showcasing their bespoke, AI-driven high tech aerial targeting systems, crafted by Silicon Valley’s best programmers to compile vast datasets and identify thousands of targets for delivering ‘precision strikes’ and stunning displays of superior air power with which they can intimidate opponents into submission. The Trump Administration has made this dimension of the war rather obvious with their social media videos that hype the war by portraying real strikes in Iran as video game scenes (in retaliation, Iran trolled Trump with an AI-produced Lego video referring to the Epstein files). The AI-driven systems are not without problems; this week, an investigation revealed that the U.S. strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, killing 175 schoolchildren and teachers, was found to be the combined result of human and AI error as outdated data fed into the AI targeting system was never updated with the correct information. The vigor with which the war is being pursued is also raising questions of religious fundamentalism, often portrayed within the Islamic Republic but this time evidenced inside the U.S. military as watchdogs say they are being “inundated” with calls from servicemembers across the armed forces who report that dozens of Christian nationalists in command positions are portraying the war against Iran to their troops as a ‘holy war’ or messianic battle in which Trump lights the “flame” in Revelation that will bring about the Apocalypse and the second coming of Christ.Despite their superior weaponry and messianic zeal, the United States and Israel appear to ‘have bitten off more than they can chew’; after ‘decapitating’ much of the existing command structure in Iran in the first few days of the war, both have run into difficulty achieving their other objectives of regime change and annihilating Iran’s military capacity, as Iran’s asymmetric counterattacks are keeping the aggressors on the back foot politically and economically as well as in military terms. Despite the United States eliminating much of its leadership, the IRGC’s unique, decentralized structure has not only kept the regime intact thus far, but also appears to have strengthened its position as there is a rally-around-the-flag effect from national defense; and indeed, the IRGC was intentionally de-centralized along these lines several years ago in anticipation of the exact scenario they find themselves in today. Several war and foreign relations experts, including Professor Robert Pape, note that the United States and Israel may have fallen into a common “escalation trap” laid for stronger invaders and colonial armies by weaker, native populations practicing asymmetric warfare. Pape explains: “Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime. Rather, they represent a strategy of horizontal escalation, a bid to transform the stakes of a conflict by widening its scope and extending its duration.” By striking at U.S. facilities in neighboring Gulf states, damaging oil infrastructure and blocking off the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has ramped up the geopolitical and economic stakes of the conflict to stoke international pressure to ensure their demands are heard and taken seriously by making it clear to global markets just who controls the global oil situation at present. The IRGC have also outfoxed the U.S. and Israel on multiple tactical levels, leveraging their arsenal of relatively weaker and inexpensive drones and missiles to undercut superior U.S./Israeli air power. One example that has gone viral is their use of 900,000 inflatable decoys purchased from China to simulate military sites that are picked up by AI targeting systems, wasting the U.S. and Israel’s more expensive munitions (averaging around $2.5 million per Tomahawk missile). This tactic also works to shift the timeline of the war itself as supplies of U.S.-made interceptors are being depleted fast and replacements are both costly and time-intensive to use. Iran is also using ‘swarm’ tactics, sending waves of drones and missiles to overwhelm interceptor capacity, which has led to successful strikes that dealt damage to oil infrastructure in the Gulf states and hits on Israel. Haaretz reports that the IDF has admitted that it is struggling to keep up with interception of missile barrages from Hezbollah; they expect it to be a long war, and it may be necessary at some point to evacuate Israeli communities near the border. These tactics have exposed critical vulnerabilities in the material capacity of the U.S. and Israeli military, its economic supply chain, and in the political-economic façade of U.S. hegemony in the region that have only been amplified by the Trump Administration’s incompetence. Many experts are starting to say that the U.S. and Israel are headed for ‘strategic defeat’ by the IRGC, even as their weapons and air dominance cause more destruction to its military infrastructure.
Importantly, the IRGC’s tactics have also served to provoke disillusionment among Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf monarchies that have in recent years allied more closely with the United States and Israel, exposing the fickle nature of U.S. pledges to protect them as military personnel abandoned U.S. regional bases once they came under fire from Iranian drones. Gulf countries on Friday began to press the United States and Israel to pursue diplomatic negotiations for an end to the war. Oman Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, the chief mediator between the United States and Iran in the days before the war, spoke out Thursday to say the U.S. and Israel’s “real agenda” behind the war was to “weaken Iran, reshape the region, and push the normalization agenda,” including efforts “to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” He also said that “Iran is not the only target” and that there is a “broader plan targeting the region.” He called for a return to negotiations, saying the war may end soon, but also urged Gulf states to reconsider their security strategies and prepare for worst-case scenarios. Saudi Arabia is exploring agreements with other countries, while other states are seeking private military specialists from the Muslim world instead of the United States, complaining that U.S. and Israeli military personnel have “proven ineffective in light of recent developments” as some consider closing U.S. bases, and even reassessing their deep investments in U.S. dollar-based securities and withdrawing from American markets. Iran has also shifted gears in the last few days to focus more attacks directly at Israel, where drones knocked out all power to Tel Aviv and caused significant damage in other cities. The IDF have been smashing surveillance cameras in Israeli cities in an attempt to conceal the extent of the damage. A senior Iranian official told Drop Site News that “Iran’s position [is] that it will continue to defend itself firmly until a credible and robust framework is established for a ceasefire and for preventing any renewed attacks by the United States or Israel.” What that means, according to Amal Saad, an international relations lecturer at Cardiff University, is that “Iran will not accept any ceasefire at this stage because what it is pursuing is not a mere end to hostilities, which can and will be easily broken by Israel and the United States, but a deterrence-restoring outcome that creates the conditions for a lasting and enforceable settlement… a ceasefire concluded only after Iran has demonstrated sufficient retaliatory capacity to make the cost of violating it prohibitive for the other side.”
Trump pressures Senate GOP to pass the SAVE Act, while more Republicans are staking their midterm hopes on affordability. With midterm polling giving Democrats a solid lead on the generic congressional ballot, Trump and Congressional Republicans are getting ever more desperate to swing voters their way. Trump has staked everything on the SAVE America Act, the controversial voter suppression bill passed by the House in February that requires a Voter ID and proof of citizenship to vote, and can potentially disqualify voters whose name has changed since birth, including many millions of married women. 21 million U.S. citizens do not have one or both forms of ID required in the bill, and could therefore be disenfranchised or effectively subjected to a poll tax; in contrast, the number of “fraudulent” votes this bill purports to avoid – non-verifiable or non-citizen votes that the Trump DOJ found in their review of nearly half of state voter rolls (~650 million ballots over 3 elections) – is just 50. Moreover, Trump is requesting provisions to the Senate bill that codifies anti-transgender policies into federal law, ends no-excuse mail voting and requires states to share voter data with the federal government. The bill is currently stalled in the Senate with less than 60 votes secured. Trump has made the SAVE Act his number one priority to preserve Republican power in Congress, and has been pressuring Senate Majority Leader John Thune to call a vote – and if support still lags behind 60 votes, to kill the filibuster. On Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social that “It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE,” and declared that “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed.” Speaking to Republicans at his golf club on Monday, Trump said, “It’ll guarantee the midterms… if you don’t get it, big trouble.” GOP Senators and aides described “disarray” behind the scenes at the Capitol as Republicans scrambled to find a way to appease Trump on the bill while also seeing through what many see as their priority for the midterms: the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a landmark affordable housing bill and the first piece of major housing legislation to be enacted by Congress in 36 years. On Thursday, March 12, the Senate voted overwhelmingly (89-11) to advance the housing bill, where it faces some headwinds in the House but is likely to pass given its exceedingly rare degree of bipartisan support, in part because of the desire among incumbent lawmakers to pass a piece of historic legislation before the midterm elections to convince voters they are serious about addressing affordability issues. The SAVE America Act poses a major math problem for the GOP: at present the bill only has the support of 53 Senators, a simple majority but not enough to bypass the filibuster. Trump is pressuring Thune to pass the bill anyway, either by killing the filibuster or by holding a “talking” filibuster, which would force Democrats to hold the floor continuously if they wanted to block the legislation. Thune did not love the idea of holding a talking filibuster, telling Politico that such a procedural maneuver is “more complicated and risky than people realize.” For Thune, who supports the bill, it comes down to math; he doesn’t have 60 votes, nor does he have the votes to change the filibuster rule. Thune plans to enact a compromise: a marathon debate on the Senate floor that can force overnight sessions for Democrats and make them state their case for why they oppose the bill; it would be similar to a talking filibuster, but would still require 60 votes. To satisfy Trump he promised a vote on the floor next week, in which case it will most likely fail given the staunch opposition of some Republicans whose districts depend on mail-in voting. Many of the old guard Republicans also do not support killing the filibuster, fearing the same will be done to them whenever Democrats have the majority. But on Wednesday, March 11, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas announced that he would flip his position and support killing or reforming the filibuster in order to get the bill passed. Cornyn, who faces a tight race against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, needs Trump’s endorsement to gain the advantage, and thus committed his vote to pass the bill AND to kill the filibuster. The next day at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting, Cornyn said that he didn’t understand how the SAVE Act could disenfranchise legitimate U.S. citizens; Sen. Dick Durbin obliged him, explaining that voter ID requirements of the bill are not satisfied by a driver’s license, but only a passport – a document 50% of U.S. citizens do not have, and at $186 in fees too expensive for many, thus amounting to a poll tax. The other requirement, a birth certificate, requires further documentation if one’s name has changed since birth – for example, someone who changed their name upon marriage. Cornyn appeared incredulous, having heard it explained for the first time, and asked if it could still be amended.
On Friday, Sen. Ron Wyden and Oregon Secretary of State held a press conference in Portland to warn that congressional Republicans’ efforts to end mail-in voting and impose strict voter ID requirements are voter suppression tactics disguised as election integrity. Sen. John Fetterman, who has often voted with Republicans, said he will not vote for the Act in its current form, recalling that Republicans in his state had fought hard to get mail-in voting to serve rural citizens. Trump’s desire to end mail-in voting is a primary source of opposition from Republicans, who point out that it would make it prohibitive for many of their own primary constituents – elderly people, rural communities – to vote. To complicate matters, House Republicans and MAGA influencers have joined the pressure campaign on Thune and the Senate GOP, refusing to pass any Senate legislation – including the housing bill – if the Senate does not pass the SAVE America Act. If the Senate cannot pass it next week, Trump instructed House Speaker Johnson to attach it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization coming up next month. Barring that, Trump further suggested bringing Washington to a full stop until the Act is passed, telling Republicans that “I don’t think we should approve anything until this is approved.”
Also in the news this week: Economic flashpoints. This week’s oil shock was just one of the many economic distress signals emerging in multiple sectors, each of which have the potential for systemic risk, or could have synergistic dynamics that herald a broader crisis to come. A brief list is below; we will keep watching and updating on the situation as it develops.
Private credit meltdown: Morgan Stanley became the latest shadow banking ‘cockroach’ to sound the alarm bells this week when its stock value plummeted after it closed the gates on retail investors, whose redemption requests to its $7.5 billion North Haven private credit fund topped 11% (more than twice its quarterly cap of 5%). Cliffwater was another major private credit firm that was forced to sell assets when redemption requests to its flagship $33 billion private credit fund topped 14%. Cliffwater capped its redemption payouts at 7% after which it imposed restrictions. JP Morgan made the telling move of marking down collateral held by private credit firms (primarily but not limited to software business development loans), thus tightening up lending and the capacity to leverage within the entire $3 trillion sector. Many analysts recognized the pattern of events that echoed the early stages of the last financial crisis in 2007, months before the collapse of Bear Stearns catalyzed a global market meltdown. New research released this week found that the ‘true’ rate of defaults within the private credit sector may be upwards of 5% or more, which intensified the retail investor ‘run’ on private credit institutions and sent markets spiraling. Citi CEO Jane Fraser opined that private credit should be relatively contained and contagion could be limited, while Mohamed El-Arian, remembering the lessons of 2007, warned that this looked like it could spiral into a classic ‘contagion phenomenon’, especially if the convergence of oil shock, war, AI, and general uncertainty sent investors running for the exits in otherwise healthy sectors. Reuters explains how crises in just two of those sectors – oil and private credit – can feed on each other and amplify contagion. Asset management company Pimco notes the risk that private credit vehicles have had excessively loose lending standards and faces a problem of ‘bad underwriting’, especially in software, which could inexorably lead to a ‘full-blown default cycle’ as the sector continues to return less value.
AI and Fiscal Stimulus: Economist David Rosenberg, who has been tracking the dynamics of the AI bubble and the downturn in the real economy, thinks that those two sectors could trigger a recession by 2027 as both sources of liquidity start to be in short supply. Although there is much to question about the political dynamics of his analysis, it is likely that liquidity issues may be a key catalyst and/or driver of wider economic stress, especially since it is near impossible in the current political environment to predict whether federal interventions such as QE or bailouts will be available in the event of a meltdown. One signal example in the AI industry is the announcement from Oracle this week of mass layoffs, totaling around 20,000-30,000 jobs. The layoffs come as Wall Street itself is tightening its access to liquidity flows and lines of credit to AI companies on the revised assumption that AI hyperscalers will remain cash negative for years to come before seeing a profit. Several U.S. banks have also scaled back lending to finance Oracle’s data center buildouts after lenders voiced concerns about the company’s ability to pay back its massive debt load, estimated at approximately $100 billion. Morgan Stanley sounded the alarm this week on AI bubble risks, warning that AI hyperscaler capital expenditure is “set to exceed dot‑com era telecom capex in both magnitude and length,” driving about 40% of capex among Russell 1000 index companies over the next two years, creating systemic risk due to its sheer size and share in the sector.
Mortgage Delinquencies: This week, warning signals for the mortgage industry came out of Texas as housing markets have stalled, home prices (and therefore equity) have been stagnant or are deteriorating, and lower-income homeowners are falling behind on their loans. In Laredo, Texas, the mortgage delinquency rate is 23.85%, the highest in the country. Other cities in Texas similarly high, with 14.69% in El Paso and 14.47% in Lubbock. Cities with rising unemployment are showing comparatively high rates of mortgage loan delinquencies, which have steadily been rising since 2022. By the end of 2025, 1.6% of all U.S. mortgages had entered serious delinquency. The New York Fed’s housing report for Q4 2025 shows mortgage delinquencies rising at a fast pace, especially in lower income areas and cities with declining labor markets. A major driver of rising mortgage costs has been the rise in property insurance rates, especially in areas that have been especially hard hit by the impacts of climate change; homeowners paid a record average high of $201 per month in 2025. Combined with rising energy costs, these mounting bills have hit lower-income households hard in recent years. FHA delinquencies are currently at around 11.5%, its highest level since the pandemic, causing lenders to tighten their FHA lending standards as delinquency pressure hits government lending. This week, Fitch raised a red flag for mounting NQM (non-qualified mortgage) delinquencies, with serious delinquency rates hitting nearly 4% in February. NQMs are the most precarious forms of home lending, such as adjustable rate mortgage loans (many of which are financed by private credit); with the private credit bust and oil shock pushing the prime mortgage rate above 6% this week, homeowners in this class could be hit with ballooning payments or other troubles, especially if the war continues and uncertainty in financial markets remains high.
MOVEMENT TRACKER
Local and International Resistance to the Iran War. Protest movements against the U.S./Israel war against Iran are gaining steam across the United States and around the world as polls find the majority of Americans oppose military action in Iran. A New York Times poll found the Iran war to be the least popular war in U.S. history as broad lines of opposition span the traditional political spectrum from the ANSWER coalition and the 50501 Movement to Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. In Los Angeles, home to one of the largest expat Iranian populations that span the pre-Revolution political spectrum, dueling demonstrations for and against the war took to the streets on February 28. Senate candidate and Marine veteran Brian McGinnis has been charged with three counts of assault for his congressional protest last week, where he suffered a broken arm while being forcibly removed from a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. McGinnis has vowed to continue his run for Senate in North Carolina, aiming to replace the outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis. Domestically, discussions of conscientious objection and the possibility of a draft grow as organizations report that many servicemembers oppose the war in Iran. Resources for service members and conscientious objectors can be found through the Center on Conscience and War. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee is working to organize a large-scale tax strike in protest against both the war and ICE. Protests have broken out globally against U.S.-Israeli interventions in Iran and Lebanon, with crowds in London, Athens, Karachi, Jakarta and other major cities marching on American and Israeli embassies. On Wednesday, Spain’s PM announced the country would be withdrawing its ambassador to Israel, reaffirming Spain’s position as one of the strongest European critics of Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Local resistance to construction of new data centers remains strong across the United States. Data Center Watch reports that $64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition nationwide. A volunteer fire department in rural Oklahoma recently turned down a $250,000 donation from Google for fear that accepting it would betray the community’s trust, and families in rural Kentucky have turned down multi-million dollar offers to purchase their land for data center construction. Opposition to a data center in Independence, Kansas has grown a new activist movement and culture as residents band together to defend their town and environment. Critics have dismissed White House moves to regulate data center construction as “too little, too late” as a recent poll shows growing resentment with mounting energy bills and its association with data centers and AI development. Ironically, the war in Iran has put the supply chain for production and distribution of AI chips on shaky ground, which may have a cooling effect on the push for data center buildouts in the near term. The push to rein in data centers has been a hot item on state legislative agendas in recent weeks, where regulation of data center construction is an issue that enjoys rare bipartisan support. Another interesting characteristic of data center opposition battles is that it is, by its nature, a primarily rural movement with a broad constituency that spans the political spectrum from left to right; and similar dynamics emerge wherever data centers are built, connecting rural communities across the country and even the world. A new Pew Research survey shows that the more people learn about data centers, the less they like them; two-thirds of adults who know ‘a lot’ about data centers think they are a driver of high energy bills, compared to about half who know ‘a little’ or ‘nothing’ about them. An article in Tech Policy notes that as midterm elections get closer, political candidates and parties seeking a broad base of support would do well to engage with this issue and the emerging locally-based movements that are rising to meet the challenge.
Owen Jones secures a win for press freedom in libel suit over Gaza reporting. In Britain, journalist Owen Jones has been vindicated by the courts in a libel suit brought against him by BBC editor Raffi Berg, regarding a 2024 article Jones penned titled “The BBC’s Civil War over Gaza.” A High Court judge ruled that Jones was expressing his opinion in the article, meaning Berg will now have to prove that Jones did not genuinely hold the opinions he expressed in the article in order to pursue a libel case further. On Wednesday, Iceland and the Netherlands joined in support of South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, bringing the number of nations backing the claim that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza to 18. Student activist groups in the United States are continuing to resist censorship of discussions of Palestine in universities.
