The Office of Director of National Intelligence Should Not Exist

The Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, which followed 9/11, was totally inadequate to the task of reform, creating an intelligence tsar and centralizing intelligence analysis. As a result, the White House and the Pentagon received enhanced roles in the structure of intelligence, making future intelligence failures and the politicization of intelligence more likely. To make matters worse, the congressional oversight process has been broken, with little scrutiny of the intelligence community in the wake of the failures of 9/11 and the Iraq War.
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What’s Wrong With the American Left: Captured by the Professional Class

BY David Schultz

Ideas do not float free of the people who hold them, and the abandonment of class has a sociological shape. The center of gravity of American progressive politics has shifted from the working class to the college-educated professional. The activists, staffers, donors, writers, and increasingly the voters who set the tone of the movement are drawn from a stratum secure enough to treat economic survival as a solved problem. For this group, politics can become what it cannot be for the precarious: a matter of values, expression, and culture rather than of rent, wages, and health. More

Pete Hegseth’s Invasions

BY John Feffer

The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign. More

Cornelia Gipson: Unlearning Racism

BY Robert Jensen

Cornelia Gipson is trying to understand the hold that whiteness has on white people. “I grew up black in Mississippi, and from the time I was 4, I knew I was black and what that meant,” she said. “How do white people come to understand they’re white? When did you first realize what it meant More

UFC White House and the Billionaire Alliance w/ Nate Wilcox

June 12, 2026

CounterPunch explores the upcoming UFC White House spectacle and the Hollywood, DC, and Gulf power brokers at the nexus of US politics, sports and entertainment. Host Eric Draitser welcomes veteran combat sports journalist Nate Wilcox, Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw, to the show to discuss the White House event, the mythology around Trump’s relationship with the UFC and Dana White, the role of Ari Emanuel and TKO Group in monopolizing combat sports and playing all sides of the power structure, the Gulf monarchies and their projection of soft power, the overlap between entertainment, finance, and geopolitics, and so much more.

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When State Disaster Response Fails w/ Dr. Nadine Ortega

June 5, 2026

In this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt speaks with Dr. Nadine Ortega, co-founder of Tagnawa Hawai’i, about grassroots mutual aid disaster recovery. Dr. Ortega breaks down the socio-economic and historical conditions that have led to the recent Kona Low flooding on O’ahu and the 2023 Lahaina, Maui fires, which have disproportionately affected Native Hawaiian, Filipino, and other immigrant communities. She shares stories about the importance of cross-class and interethnic organizing when state-run disaster response fails.

Visit Tagnawa.org for more information.

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The State of the US Left w/ Arun Gupta

May 29, 2026

Journalist Arun Gupta returns to CounterPunch Radio to discuss the state of the left, antiwar politics, and much more. Arun talks to host Eric Draitser and provides his analysis of the No Kings movement and how leftists should understand it, as well as a retrospective of the antiwar movements around Iraq and Vietnam. He explores the importance of physical community and organization using the example of New York’s Lower East Side, where he resides. The conversation also touches on the Left’s historic role in countering the hegemonic view of global affairs. A devoted leftist, Marxist, investigative journalist, chef, and food tour guide, Arun Gupta always brings incisive analysis and thoughtful critique to CounterPunch.

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