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Each time I return to the West Bank, I tell myself—against all available evidence and my better judgment—“Maybe it’ll be calmer this time.” Never have I been proven wrong so thoroughly as I was this past month. I’m back home in New York now, and as ever, I have more material than I know what to do with.

The story, at the most basic level, is that the settlers have seized more land. With the full support of the government, they have just about finished their takeover of Area C and have moved on to Areas A and B—ostensibly under Palestinian Authority control and off limits to Israelis—something that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago. Villages that had never seen a settler before are now finding themselves encircled by outposts, facing daily attacks.

I’ve had countless settler encounters over the past several years, but never have I seen them come out swinging the way they are now—showing up in a village and wasting no time before physically assaulting people. Of course it’s because they know that they are far more likely to be rewarded than punished; they are, after all, doing the state’s bidding.

There are stories I want to tell about the courage of Palestinians—men, women, and even children—whom I watched fend off settler attacks, resisting the occupation with whatever they could find. They are brave because they have no choice. But I can’t tell those stories without risking their lives. This is a riddle about writing on Palestine I haven’t yet solved.

In my first dispatch from the West Bank in January 2024—You Don’t Understand How Bad It Is Here—I wrote:

So there is my next obstacle: the struggle to convey the utter pervasiveness of the occupation’s cruelty. I worry that each story I share undermines this essential aspect by implying a start and stop when the reality is more like a poison coursing through every inch of soil, emitting noxious fumes into schools, museums, hospitals, and homes, causing constant pain and suffering and degradation and, on occasion, a seizure or toxic shock or explosion of blood and death. I am convinced that no reasonable person could spend even a week here and come away believing the occupation is morally defensible under any circumstances; the trouble is that most will neither come nor even look too closely.

I haven’t solved that problem either, but I’ve committed to several larger projects that will let me dive more deeply into individual communities. Those will take time, so the pace of my posts here may slow for a bit.

For now, here’s a brief “travelogue”—written in a jetlagged haze shortly after returning home—that I hope conveys something of what it feels like on the ground in the West Bank right now.

In Bethlehem, I met Fahed Abu Haikal, whose seven-month-old son Sam was shot dead by an Israeli soldier weeks earlier while sitting in his mother’s lap inside the family car. Fahed remembers everything. He remembers the soldier’s nonchalant expression as he raised his weapon toward the car’s windshield. He remembers slamming on the brakes, then watching the soldier pull the trigger—the first bullet shattering the windshield, passing through his hand, into his baby’s face, out the back of his tiny head, and then into his wife’s face and chest. He remembers pulling Sam from the car and trying to plug the hole in his head as thick, hot blood poured out, before realizing he was holding his dead child. The car seat is still stained a dry, crusty brown. When Fahed got home from the hospital, the first thing he did was disassemble the crib and hide the parts, along with Sam’s box of toys—including the rattle he was holding when he was shot in the face—so his wife wouldn’t have to see them when she returned home.

Fahed believes they will get justice because the footage of the shooting so clearly shows a cold-blooded murder. He believes his baby’s killer will go to jail. I do not.

Just beyond Bethlehem, in Beit Sahour, settlers took over an abandoned Jordanian military base late last year, chased Palestinian farmers off the surrounding agricultural land, and installed a handful of mobile homes. Months later, the Israeli government retroactively authorized it as a legal settlement and allocated it more than 100 dunums of Palestinian land, including a public park belonging to the town of Beit Sahour. In other words, the settlers’ land grab—illegal even under Israeli law—was rewarded with post-facto legalization and even more land. That’s the whole game: violent settlers are the tip of the spear in Israel’s project of annexing the West Bank. So it goes. That night, Beit Sahour’s semi-pro basketball team beat Qalandia Refugee Camp 66–62. It was the talk of the town.

I returned to Turmus’ayya, where a group of Palestinian farmers and I were attacked by settlers last October. After footage of that attack went viral, Israeli authorities arrested the man who nearly clubbed a grandmother to death. I told them that their arrest would mean virtually nothing if they didn’t dismantle the settler terror network in the olive fields. You arrested a grunt, I told them, good for you. Now do something to actually stop the violence. You have a playbook for this sort of thing, I reminded them, you do it to Palestinians every day. Arrest their leader, Amishav Melet, the notoriously violent armed settler who established the illegal outpost. Demolish their structures. Tear gas them if they try to return. They told me they would—that they were serious about cracking down on settler violence. I told them I didn’t believe them. They said they’d prove me wrong.

The outpost has tripled in size since then. When I arrived at the lookout point, a cement truck, escorted by the IDF, was pouring the foundation for a large new structure. The large Palestinian home visible in the background of the October attack video is now occupied by settlers and off-limits to its owner, a businessman who lives primarily in Chicago. Amishav Melet is still menacing any Palestinian who dares approach their farmland. While I was there, he stole a man’s ATV at gunpoint. The settlers have taken the entire field, and the battle line has moved to the village itself. Settlers now routinely march through Turmus’ayya carrying machine guns, terrorizing residents. They want the homes. They want the whole village, of course. Maybe they’ll get it.

In neighboring al-Mughayyir, I visited the site of a school shooting in April, walking the grounds of Al Mughayyir Secondary School with its principal, Bassam Abuassaf. He showed me where a settler with a rifle crouched on a hill, peered through the scope, and took aim at panicked students trying to evacuate. Where 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan was shot in the back of the head and killed as he frantically searched for his little brother. The whole town is traumatized. Of course it is. That’s what happens after a school shooting. But in this case, the shooter roams free, and the entire village remains under constant attack.

After the shooting, Bassam told me, Israeli authorities never even reached out to take a statement. A school shooting—and the police couldn’t be bothered to speak with the principal! But he was determined to get his students back in the classroom, and he did the following week. He found he could no longer focus on education or administration. Instead, he became consumed with protecting his nearly 500 students and staff, pacing the school’s perimeter from the first bell until dismissal. “I just thank God we made it through the school year,” he said.

I met the father of Jihad Abu Naim, the 32-year-old good Samaritan who was shot in the chest while rushing to the school to help. He showed me a photo of Jihad’s infant daughter—his new granddaughter—who was born weeks after her father was killed. Then he showed me a photo of his son’s corpse. This is a common occurrence in the West Bank: someone showing you a picture of their dead child.

As he scrolled through his camera roll, he landed on video of Israeli forces uprooting his olive trees, perhaps as punishment for having a dead son. He showed me a map, and I saw how the people of al-Mughayyir have been boxed into a fraction of their village, encircled by settler outposts and cut off from their farmland. The local economy, which relies almost entirely on agriculture, has collapsed. Military gates seal off the community for days or weeks at a time.

While I was in town, I met a friendly local who took me to see his home, which is, in fact, a pile of crushed stone and mangled rebar. The Israelis demolished it. He never found out why. Next door to his would-be home stood a house under construction, now indefinitely stalled because its owner was killed by settlers. I visited Um Saleh, the woman whose near-fatal clubbing in Turmus’ayya I documented last year. She cannot hold heavy objects with her right hand and still feels pain when walking downhill, but otherwise she is much improved. It was wonderful to see her laugh. A fundraiser after the attack helped her family buy a small flock of sheep, which now produces enough milk to support them, with virtually all other work in the area gone.

Almost in passing, she mentioned that two months earlier, soldiers had entered her home, beaten her son in front of her and his own child, slapped his wife, and stolen all the money from his wallet before leaving. She didn’t know why. They rarely do.

Last week, armed settler militias began a new round of daily, violent raids on al-Mughayyir. Another student at Al Mughayyir Secondary School, 17-year-old Fadi Al-Nassan, was shot. Months earlier, he had been filmed sprinting toward his cousin, 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan, after Aws was killed in the school shooting.

Fadi, who had just finished 11th grade, had his leg amputated. He was supposed to play on the national soccer team next year, and his family dreaded the moment he’d wake up and realize his leg, and his dream, were gone. Then, on Friday, he died.

In Taybeh, I visited a tiny Bedouin community—Naif—that is perhaps in the process of being run off its land. A settler arrived on a donkey with a herd of camels. Camels serve no real purpose for the settlers, I learned, except to eat Palestinians’ crops—which is, in fact, the opposite of no purpose for a group whose raison d’être is tormenting their indigenous neighbors. The camels fed from Naif’s olive trees for more than an hour as the settler rode increasingly tight circles on his donkey around a small shed, throwing the occasional stone to frighten the children playing inside.

I followed him for as long as I could, trying to keep myself between him and the home, but at a certain point I realized he was laughing at me—wearing me down so that he could later cut their water pipes with less interference. A few nights later, settlers burned down a small home there.

Khallat al-Sidra, a Bedouin village on the outskirts of Mukhmas that I visited last year, had already met the fate that may await Naif: ethnically cleansed from the land, like more than 60 other communities since October 7. It once served as an incidental buffer for the village of Mukhmas itself, absorbing the worst of the settler violence. But after settlers burned it to the ground for the third time, the Israeli military finally intervened—not by protecting the community, but by expelling the people from their land.

And so the settlers pushed the frontier once again, now setting their sights on Mukhmas, where they shot an American teenager dead in February. Nasrallah Abu Siyam may be gone, but he is everywhere in the village. A ghost. Like so many Palestinian villages, the martyr is painted on walls, displayed in restaurants, dangling from rear-view mirrors. Nasrallah was the point of reference for everyone I met in Mukhmas—Nasrallah’s aunt, his cousin, his very best friend.

I visited his father, Mohammed, who was building a house for his son when he was killed. He was a wreck. Regret was eating him alive: he’d asked Nasrallah to stay and help with the farm when he’d considered moving to America. He could barely speak. He couldn’t understand why it had happened. What had they ever done to deserve any of this? Why couldn’t it have been him instead of his son? Nasrallah’s horse, a dapple gray mare named Shams, is still out back, but Mohammed can’t bear to ride her. So Nasrallah’s friends come every day to care for Shams—to clean her pen, feed her, and take her out for rides.

I hung out with the shebab—the young men of the village who have been forced into the role of its protectors. A farmer, a student, a car mechanic.

What can you say? The man loves cars. When it was quiet, we went for drives into the mountains. Tested the boundaries—the outposts were always in view. We smoked cigarettes and talked shit. I rode on the back of a motorcycle. We went to a local honeybee farm, but the beekeeping suits left something to be desired. Like, say, full-body coverage. Like a true seal. Between the four of us, we were stung maybe a dozen times. Let me tell you, it was pure chaos. I don’t remember the last time I laughed like that. The honeycomb was warm and chewy, and I’ve never tasted anything so sweet.

I love the shebab of Mukhmas. Fearless—minus the bee thing. I joined their night watch, guarding against settlers who come from all sides, on ATVs and in trucks, smashing windows, pouring kerosene, and setting buildings on fire. Menacing with their guns. You become fast friends after nights like this.

Days after I left, a car full of Haredi settler kids being chased by Israeli police—probably on account of the clown-car number of people packed inside—drove into Mukhmas at 4 a.m. The police car turned around and left as soon as they entered the village, leaving the kids to joyride through its streets and wake its residents before they crashed straight into a wall and ran screaming for the hills. Nobody in Mukhmas ever saw them—only the car tearing through their narrow streets—but the kids reportedly called the army and pleaded for help. And so the army came in force: dozens of jeeps, drones, even helicopters. Soldiers kicked down doors, dragged people from their beds, zip-tied them, and beat them senseless. “We didn’t ask for any of this,” my friend later said. By 8 a.m., Israeli media was reporting that the Haredi boys had been “rescued” from Mukhmas and were safe. But that didn’t stop the raid from continuing until 3 p.m. Fifteen boys and men were arrested that day in Mukhmas. It appears soldiers chose their targets after stealing someone’s phone and searching a group chat for people who had warned about the settler and soldier incursion. Incriminating texts like, “Be careful.” They broke the mechanic’s jaw in four places, along with his shoulder and a rib. He said it all happened in his bedroom, seconds after he woke up. The soldier pulled him out of bed then teed off on him with haymakers and jackboot kicks before he'd even registered what was happening. Today, two young men remain in jail. Nobody knows what they’re even being held for.

I left Mukhmas for Tamoun in the Jordan Valley, where I stayed with the family of Aymen Ghreyab, a local activist and journalist who has been in jail since November over his social media posts about state and settler violence. He was taken away just weeks after his daughter’s first birthday. His wife knows what happens inside those jails—the torture, the sexual assault, the starvation. She hasn’t heard a word from him. She cries all the time, but she has young children to raise.

I visited farmland being severed in half by Project “Crimson Thread”—Israel’s plan to build a wall across the entire Jordan Valley, from the occupied Golan Heights all the way to the Red Sea. The Jordan Valley is the most fertile land in the region, the “breadbasket of the West Bank,” so it’s only natural that Israel would try to take it. The plan would annex everything east of the wall, roughly 22 percent of the West Bank. Communities there would be expelled. Everything in the wall’s path would be demolished, and a buffer zone west of the wall would make tens of thousands more dunams of land inaccessible to farmers.

From Tamoun, I traveled north to Jenin, stopping just outside the city, next to a Palestinian amusement park, to see Israeli forces rebuilding the settlement of Ganim, which was evacuated in 2005 as part of the disengagement. It’s one of four settlements they’re rebuilding in the north. Israelis resettling the northern West Bank is one of the most underreported stories in the region right now, and you can see it in the widespread construction, multiplying outposts, and attacks in Areas A and B becoming increasingly routine.

The plan had been to venture into the Jenin refugee camp, whose more than 20,000 residents were forcibly evacuated in February 2025. The Israeli military has occupied the camp ever since, leveling entire neighborhoods, leaving parts of it looking more like Rafah than anywhere else in the West Bank. From the outside, you could see buildings speckled with bullet holes, gaping craters left by drone strikes, homes turned to rubble. The IDF is currently building a military base inside the camp, the first base in Area A since the Oslo Accords.

In the end, locals warned us not to go into the camp. They insisted, in fact. May have stopped me by force—for my own safety. Too many Israeli snipers hiding inside. It’s where they killed Shireen Abu Akleh, after all. We drank coffee and ate cookies instead. I thought about the familiar online taunt: “Go to Jenin as a Jew and see how they treat you.”

We raced to Zabouba, just outside Jenin, where the earthy smell of freshly uprooted trees hung in the air after IDF bulldozers destroyed an olive field. Kids danced and played among felled trees, but the landowner walked solemnly, cursing the destruction of the land that had sustained his family for generations.

From Jenin, I drove southwest to Tulkarm, where two more refugee camps—Tulkarm and Nur Shams—remained destroyed and abandoned after the same military operation that cleared out the Jenin camp. I met Fadwa, 55, who stayed in Tulkarm Camp for nine months after the mandatory evacuation, hunkering down in her home with her cat, Koshkosh, and her dog, Jean Valjean. She had enough food and all of her books, her own private library, so she saw no reason to leave—until her health deteriorated to the point that she had no choice. I met a young man who was expelled from Nur Shams and later watched from a nearby hilltop as his home was demolished. During the demolition, Israeli soldiers shot at his feet to force him away.

I made it into the Nur Shams camp with a few other independent journalists in press vests. The word is apocalyptic. So much destruction, but so much evidence of recent life still there.

When we exited, a neighbor of the camp warned us that an IDF jeep was racing out behind us. We ran for our lives. Later that night, I got this message from a friend I made in Tulkarm:

I traveled southeast to Qusra, where settlers had recently stolen a Palestinian home on the peak of the highest hill and were using it as a launchpad for attacks on the village. In February, they beat two Israeli activists, including an elderly woman, nearly to death, cracking their skulls with clubs. In March, they shot a Palestinian man dead and nearly stabbed his father to death. The surviving members of that family, strawberry farmers, have imprisoned themselves inside a cage to keep the settlers out.

I stayed with the shebab in another home on the stolen hill, where they kept a 24/7 watch. The attacks were constant. They went on all night. A pickup truck full of settlers arrived and unloaded a flatbed of large stones on us. They came with clubs and knives. Eventually, the army arrived. Soldiers chatted with the attacking settlers, smoked cigarettes with them, before coming to the home and throwing four Palestinian men against the wall. They were there to investigate the settlers’ claims that the Palestinians had thrown rocks at them. They had no answer when I asked why the settlers were allowed to live in a stolen home and attack locals from it—but the stones allegedly thrown in response were treated as a matter of grave concern.

Nobody was abducted, fortunately, perhaps because an American journalist was sticking a camera in their faces. But the settlers returned minutes after the soldiers left, cutting the electricity, blacking out the home—including the security camera system—and attacking again, nearly scaling the wall and making it inside. Fortunately, we had an amateur electrician inside who MacGyvered a new power source.

The next day, we watched a settler grazing sheep just outside the home. “Those are my sheep,” one of the guys told me. The settler had stolen them. “That’s my land, my crops. And he’s living in my uncle’s home.” That night, settlers broke into another home on the hill and stole the doors and windows right out of the frames.

I went from Qusra to Sebastia, where the town’s beautiful archaeological sites were teeming with Israeli workers. I’ve been reporting on this town for years, but I have never seen so much occupation activity. The day before, they had stolen a newly excavated Roman column, lifting it with a bulldozer onto a truck and driving away with it. Looting the town’s treasures—exactly what they accuse the Palestinians of doing to justify their takeover of heritage sites. At a wedding, I bumped into Ayman Schaer, who was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier with a butterfly bullet during one of my visits in 2024. I saw him last October, and he was still undergoing surgeries, still unsure if he would ever walk again. He was grimacing in pain, sweating just from sitting up to talk. At the wedding, he was on his feet and smiling—the first time I’d ever seen him like that. Outside, soldiers were raiding Sebastia again, kicking in the municipality’s door.

In Masudiya, next door to Sebastia, settlers had stolen the historic Ottoman-era railroad station, where families from across the region once gathered for festivals. It’s the same story, over and over: Settlers showed up one day and planted a flag. Then they built a fence. Then their flocks were grazing there. Then local farmers were beaten and tear-gassed for trying to reach their own land. It had only been a few months, but settlers had already taken over 4,000 dunams of land—everything in Area C—and were now pushing into Areas A and B. I met a young woman who had just graduated from Birzeit University and returned home to Masudiya. Already, she wants to leave again. “I can’t even leave the house by myself anymore,” she told me.

In Burqa, settlers had stolen a natural spring that supplied water for the village and many neighboring ones. Imagine stealing a spring. They’d cut all the pipes, built a swimming pool for settlers, and rerouted the flowing water into the nearby outpost.

Next to a wall commemorating the town’s 72 martyrs since 1936, soldiers spent the night with an electric saw, cutting down a thick metal statue of Handala, the Palestinian cartoon icon. Only its two feet remained.

I drove all the way south to Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills, staying in Umm al-Khair, where a settler murdered Awdah Hathaleen less than one year earlier. I’d planned to spend a week visiting different villages in the hills, but the situation in Umm al-Khair was so bad that I wasn’t able to leave for more than a short day trip. The outpost had grown exponentially since I was there in October. Israeli flags were everywhere, including covering the sign welcoming visitors to the small hamlet. A new gate was installed and closed at will by soldiers and settlers alike, blocking the only road in and out of the village. One indication that a settler attack was coming was that they’d locked the gate. A close friend of mine there told me he’d been diagnosed with depression. “I just see no hope,” he told me. “It’s all so dark.” Another told me he’d quit activism. “What’s the point?” he said. “It accomplishes nothing.” Before Portugal vs. Spain, he’d told me, “All I have left is Ronaldo.” We watched together. “If Ronaldo played for Israel, I’d have no choice but to cheer for them,” he said. He spit out his soda laughing. After Portugal lost, I barely saw him again.

The settlers’ latest gambit was attempting to steal an entire home. Salim’s home. They had been showing up in his backyard, ripping out his fence, and planting Israeli flags. They had kicked a woman out of a bathroom. On my first night there, they attacked, trying to push through the backyard and reach the house. The Palestinians and international activists formed a defensive line to try to stop them. Many of them were beaten. The settlers threw chairs and razor wire. A settler with a pistol swept my legs out from under me with a metal rod, then three men jumped on me, one of them swinging at my head. The soldiers came and arrested three activists. They declared Salim’s home a closed military zone—a classic technique to clear the area of activists—which did not stop the settlers from returning the next morning to drink coffee in his yard. Salim had not been able to reach his livestock in nearly a week. They had no food or water.

I spent time with Hanady, Awdah’s wife, and her three small children. She has been baking a lot because it is the only thing she enjoys. She discovered that I would eat anything she made. Her kids are afraid. She doesn’t know what to do. She wants to leave, but she has nowhere else to go. More than anything, she misses her husband. “Our love story was so rare,” she told me. “There’s no one else like him.”

One morning, two bulldozers drove into neighboring Deirat, accompanied by dozens of soldiers. We followed them and watched as families in every home along the demolition crew’s path scrambled to salvage their belongings. When the bulldozers stopped in front of their targets, soldiers began firing sound grenades and dragging people out with zip-tied hands. The smell of a demolished home is acrid. It burns your eyes and throat. A soldier took a video, panning from the home being demolished to the weeping women and children watching it happen. Maybe for TikTok. A young girl screamed. Her father was in jail, and now they took her home. The homes they destroyed had been beautiful.

Congressman Ro Khanna came to visit Umm al-Khair. The locals took him in, showed him how the state was erasing their lives. Shortly after he left, I got frantic texts from one of his staffers saying that their bus had been hijacked by machine-gun-wielding settlers. When soldiers showed up, they sided with the settlers. Days later, when the story made international headlines, Israel’s allies would claim it was embellished or entirely fabricated. Obviously, it was not. There is nothing remarkable about what happened there. In fact, they got off easy.

I didn’t respond to the staffer’s texts right away because I was busy being attacked myself. Shimon Attaia, the sadistic settler who established the outpost in Umm al-Khair, showed up with a mob of his vicious young disciples. They were trying to steal another tract of land. First they went for the men. I was hit more times than I could count. Kicked repeatedly in the inside of my kneecap. Punched in the gut. Jabbed in the throat. You cannot fight back, because they’ll take revenge on the community itself. It’s just what they want, and when we wouldn’t give it to them, they turned on the women and elderly. Hanady’s mother was thrown to the ground. She had to be hospitalized. Attaia kneed an old man in the groin. But it still wasn’t enough. Attaia threw a tantrum and flipped a dumpster. He called his friend, who showed up with an assault rifle that got tangled in his dog leash. Attaia called the army and stamped his feet, pointing at who he wanted arrested. I was one of the chosen ones. They detained me for thirty minutes, demanded I unlock my phone and give it to them. When I told them I was calling my lawyer, they left without a word.

(More videos from the attack can be found in this thread.)

Khanna would go home and talk about what happened to anyone who would listen. It was great exposure, I thought. You can read his account here. He said he’d never experienced racial profiling like he did in the West Bank. Then he started getting pressed on his policy positions. No to broad economic sanctions on the state. No to a full arms embargo. No to blocking the sale of Iron Dome parts. Israel had a right to defend itself, he said, but Palestinians should focus on nonviolent resistance. I found it inexplicable.

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My last stop was al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya. This is where Mohammed Ibrahim, the 16-year-old Palestinian American kid who was abducted by soldiers and held in military prison for nearly ten months, is from. And also his first cousin Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by settlers there on July 11, 2025. I went there for the anniversary. To accompany his father, Kamel, to the site where his son was killed. Settlers had occupied the land since last April. Anyone who went near was attacked, including me, when I tried last October. The mayor of neighboring Sinjil warned us that a settler with an M16 lived on the mountain and shot from afar. We knew it was dangerous. Kamel traveled in an armored SUV with a CNN crew. I followed behind in a rental Kia with a few other independent journalists. Of course, we were attacked.

(You can watch the Democracy Now! segment about the attack here.)

I talked to an Israeli soldier after. I informed him that the settlers who attacked us were living in a Palestinian home in Area A. “Are you sure?” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.” He told me he’d visited the home and was pretty sure it belonged to the settlers. Of course I wasn’t wrong.

CNN aired the footage of the attack. Millions of people saw it. It was another PR disaster for Israel, and so they went out and arrested four settlers. It was just like Turmus’ayya—they arrested a few grunts to quiet the critics, but unless the settlers were removed from the land they had stolen, it would be meaningless. The settlers told a judge they had been sent down to detain us by the leader of the outpost. They said there was a “gun attack threat.” Ha ha. One of them was 14 years old—a child soldier. How about going after the leader?

It was a terrible week of press for Israel when it came to settler violence. First Ro Khanna, then the CNN attack. Here’s the part that didn’t make headlines in the US: that same week, Israel approved dozens of new settlements in the West Bank—including the retroactive legalization of violent outposts—committed more than a billion shekels to building them, and announced plans for new access roads to connect them. In the Jordan Valley, the government distributed drones and other military equipment to settlers living in illegal outposts. The IDF’s West Bank chief then appeared at a conference for settlers living in illegal farming outposts, many of which have been linked to violence and the displacement of Palestinian communities, where he told residents that they “greatly strengthen security.” “I love you,” he said. “I appreciate you, and I appreciate what you do.” How nice.

Five days after the anniversary of Sayf’s death, settlers came down from the same olive fields where they’d attacked us to assault Sinjil with fire and guns. Apparently those four arrests didn’t make the problem go away.

With CNN cameras gone, the military responded by tightening the siege on Sinjil, a community already trapped inside a cage. As I write this, the attacks by both settlers and soldiers are ongoing. The West Bank is the most predictable place on earth.

The Iran War is going on and on, and I've been AWOL. I'm in China with family, and trying to move my tech stack behind the Great Firewall, so either I'm breaking things or my son is on the verge of, excuse my mess and absence. With your leave, this is a short update.

Zerothly, if you want up-to-the-minute information, I refer you to my 'How To Follow' guide from the first iteration of devastation. My sources, and song, remain the same. The only thing I'd add (to the sourcing) is that Fotros Resistance is the best (and least voluminous) source for Iran in particular. All the usual disclaimers apply, merely possessing this information is dangerous in the White Empire, especially since the IRGC has been designated a terrorist organization in terrible places like the UK. I assume you know all this by now, but if you don't, get out of here now. There's very little you can do with this information, but much can be done to you. With that/them out of the way, here is my unsolicited opinion.

I refer again and again to the report a former CENTCOM commander made to his Jewish masters (literally, JINSA). This McKenzie character's point was the all of the US Gulf Bases were (militarily) indefensible in the case of all-out war, which is the case now. He advocated retreating to a second line of defense in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and 'Israel', which is what's happening now. But this is still indefensible, as we are finding out.

The current phase of war has Iran hitting Greater Israel's frontline of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and even Oman, but also their backline of Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. They're near the goal now. People ask 'why not 'Israel'' and I repeat that we are facing the final boss of colonialism now, the White Empire entire, and 'Israel' is increasingly irrelevant. Indeed, they're currently sitting this one out, and even asked 'America' to leave Ben Gurion Airport ('Israel' is, ironically, the one place 'America' doesn't have a base).

It has been a journey, and the real Greater Israel was the fiends they made along the way. The Arab Apostates that paid to occupy themselves, who preoccupied themselves with football teams and toy planes. Now that's all in flames. 'America's' debasing across the region is being methodically cleared out by Iran, as much as the White media tries to hide it. But follow Fotros for a day and see, Greater Israel is getting hammered on the daily.

This is the first war (what Bikrum Gill calls the first anti-imperial war) where the natives have not only missile defense but air superiority. 'American' bombers are too scared to fly over Tehran (which as of press time has not really been bombed) and Iran is unafraid to bomb every 'American' position in the region. Iran's smart-missiles are superior in both quantity and quality to 'America's' and 'America' cannot use their dumb-bomb advantage without losing some planes, and they are fundamentally cowards. So they continue targeting cancer hospitals and fisherman and flee from men in the field. I would say like the 'Israelis', but it's the same thing.

This is thus the first war where the Empire can't just bomb from afar, have a Burger King, and laugh about it. 'American' soldiers are being killed, as you'll find out from all the hiking accidents and people falling off boats and dying of explosive diarrhea in the weeks and months to come. Those HIMARS and ATACMS don't fire themselves and 'Americans' are in the line of fire. They are arriving vertically and leaving horizontally. They are even being hit, like at the Crowne Plaza in Oman, in targeted assassinations.

US bases on the frontline of Greater Israel (along the Persian Gulf) were well-nigh uninhabitable after the 40 Day War, and things are even worse now. And now things are getting as bad in Jordan (which hilariously says it doesn't have US bases, but just US soldiers hanging around) and Saudi Arabia (which also wants to start a war with Yemen for some reason). These were never morally defensible positions, and now they're obviously not militarily defensible either.

The other point (chokepoint) is Hormuz, which is even more closed than before, but not before Iran scooted a bunch of oil out during the MOU. Now China has turned the teapots on again and the imperial economy is going to boil soon. I'd make some money if I knew exactly when, but Trump said they had four weeks about four weeks ago. Trump trying to whip the Persian Gulf into shape is as useless as Xerxes the Great trying to whip the Hellespont to take Greece. Trump is no Xerxes and both attempts failed.

'America' will never take Iran, as you could see from the Imam Khamanei's funeral. The Islamic Revolution has been reignited in millions of hearts. At this point. the Islamic Republic is holding its people back more than driving them forward, they want revenge, and they want Trump dead, as they have said through red flags and posters. They are protesting for the regime, and have been since the day Khamenei was martyred. Trump said a civilization would be destroyed, but as the oracle story went, he didn't say which one.

What is happening is that the White Empire is being pushed back. Not out of Iran, as in anti-colonial wars like Vietnam, but out of the frontline of Greater Israel, out of its backline of Jordan and Kuwait, and finally 'Israel' itself. As the late, great Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, when 'American' soldiers arrive vertically and leave horizontally, they will eventually leave the region, and we may not even have to fight 'Israel' at all. And this is happening. Follow Fortros for a day and you'll see it happening. But today, from behind the Great Firewall, let me just say, 'America' lost the Iran War long ago. Now they are losing Greater Israel and soon, inshallah, the White Empire itself.

Please forgive me for barely editing this, I'm sleepy. Some completely unrelated China photos for paying subs:

What do the Ukraine, 'Israel', South Korea, and Taiwan have in common? They are all governed by the same devilish equation. Divide and conquer. As Vladimir Putin said, "The formula they apply has been known from time immemorial – divide and rule. There is nothing new here." Or as Nasrallah said, "it ['Israel'] was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world." Or as Kim Il-Sung said, "U.S. imperialism’s basic strategy for world aggression at the present stage is to destroy the small and divided revolutionary socialist countries." Or as Mao said to the Palestinians, putting it all together, "You are the front gate, and we are the rear. They created Israel for you and Formosa [Taiwan] for us." 

This tactic has been known since time immemorial, as Putin said, but damned if it don't still work a devil's charm. If you sow division inside a city (or a world), then they'll open the gates for you, sometimes without firing a shot. It doesn't even take much of the population, just a few dumb, devious, or naive enough. The Trojan Horse metaphor is apt because this is indeed how 'Greek' democracy works under the White Empire. Democracy™ is a system they know how precisely to corrupt (they themselves have legalized corruption) and if you bring it inside your nation, bankers and CIA agents and soldiers pile out. You're in debt and occupied before you know it and if you dare elect someone they don't like, they'll rig the election, wreck your economy, and lawfare or warfare them out. It really is a foolproof system. It's fooled people over and over and the proof is in the pudding. Almost the whole world got cooked, except for the people they're attacking now. Those they call 'authoritarians', meaning just that they claim sovereignity outside the Empire. That's what the widely propagandized drama of 'democracies vs. authoritarians' means in the real world. It's anyone claiming their own authority vs. a demos driven crazy from without. And if you're wondering where you are, if you're not actively fighting the White Empire, you're in it. Good luck.

They reap what they sow, and the White Empire cultivates dissidents and activists and religious fundamentalists and entire breakaway provinces or states if it can get them. Hence in Ukraine they USAID Sorosified liberals, doing it for the 'democracy', and CIA neo-Nazis, doing it for the White Fuhrer (an actual person). In Palestine, they used Zionists—once a fringe within the Jewish population—to corrupt the Jews in general and frack an entire region. They'll use corrupted takfiri groups like ISIS or the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia too. They're largely agnostic, any traitor will do. In South Korea they used oligarchs and a military dictatorship and in Taiwan they use the breakaway losers of a civil war. It's the same formula. Add shit, and stir.

It's important to understand all of these 'conflicts' as civil wars fomented from without. Ukrainians—including Zelensky—speak or understand Russian and were one people with Russians. They're naturally connected to Russia, as is Europe, but this 'America' (10,000 km away) does not want, so here we are. 'American' foreign policy has been on autocratic autopilot since the 1980s and it's unclear if they know the USSR has fallen. They're still trying to foment civil war within the USSR and now they've got what they wished for. They'll happy to fight to the last Ukrainian. Who cares about a little Slavic civil war? Certainly not the Nazis that won.

Take Palestine, also, as the White Empire did. Jews lived peacefully in the Muslim World (unlike in Europe) until Palestine was turned into a Jewish ghetto to dump European Jewry. It's well established that Europe didn't want to give them their homes back and 'America' didn't want them either, so they used their own mythology to get the Jews to deport themselves, and volunteer their grandchildren as conscripts in the imperial army. This is not to absolve the Jews, but to condemn the White Empire entire. Some Jews were native to the region, but from that foothold they were used to divide (multiply) and conquer an entire region.

Then take South Korea, as the Empire did, or Afghanistan or Vietnam where they tried. They setup puppet governments in all these places, which didn't even have to be 'democracies'. South Korea was a brutal military dictatorship for many years, until people protesting (and dying) got them this current fig-leaf democracy, where almost every President ends up in jail because the society is so corrupt and their military is under the command of foreigners. Korea is the most obviously divided and conquered. It's cut in half and the 'American' imperialists use the southern part as a conscript colony.

Finally, take Taiwan, as the KMT did after a Chinese civil war, which is still going on until the whole is reunited. Both China and Taiwan claim to be China and both are populated by people that consider themselves Chinese. Reunification would be much easier if 'America' wasn't trying to keep them divided.

All these divisions are not coincidences. They are not unrelated local problems, they are an intentional, international strategy. This is the White Empire in action, or more specifically, inaction. 'America' is the most indirect incarnation of the beast, but even the British and Dutch used local squabbles to cobble an international empire together. As Shakespeare said, "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean." If people are fighting amongst themselves, they're not fighting them. If you feed different factions with petty privileges (Nobel prizes, titles, book contracts, celebrity) and other factions with raw weapons, you can get entire populations to throw themselves at their neighbors, or even their family.

It's important to understand that none of these 'conflicts' would be happening without imperial meddling. We live under one White Empire and World War II never ended for most of us, what they call the Cold War was, for us, just World War Too, and what they call the War On Terror was World War III and is still going hot and heavy. None of the people I listed would be fighting each other naturally, without someone thousands of kilometers away pitting brother against brother for their own benefit. It is simply common sense to not fight with a larger neighbor, unless you think you have someone even larger behind you. And you don't even need a majority of the population to think this way, just a fraction willing to betray the other for petty privilege, or just to get one over on their local enemy.

You can see this in Ukraine, which should have and did have decent relations with its giant neighbor until distant 'America' intervened. Ukraine had a Russia-friendly government and even Zelensky said, in 2014, that "Russia and Ukraine really are brotherly nations." He was Russian speaking. But that Ukrainian government was couped and the corrupt comedian began persecuting Russian speakers and banning political parties and religions and so on, before throwing the entire male population into a meat-grinder and cancelling elections in a bloodbath of corruption. It makes no sense for Ukraine to be fighting Russia, and it made sense for them to take a deal in 2022 when it was offered, but because the country has been lobotomized by foreign interests, it keeps lumbering forward. They have been divided from their natural instinct for self-preservation and conquered, not by Russia, but by the White Empire.

You can see it in Palestine, also, where Jews were given refuge by Muslims from European predation, but their desire to be Europeans made them worse than Nazis in the end. It makes no sense for such a minority population to anger everyone in the neighborhood, but with White Empire behind them, that's how they're behaving. It's the same for South Korea, which is literally split along family lines and which really does not want to be divided in half, or for Taiwan, which is deeply integrated with the mainland. None of these conflicts would be happening without the White Empire fomenting them, while pretending it's 'just helping'. Helping themselves, more like it.

The benefit of divide and conquer is that you don't actually have to conquer much. You get other conquered people to do the fighting for you. You get them to fight each other, and they're not fighting you. All you have to do is give a narrow class of hyenas some scraps and you can take the lion's mass. And if you let a certain class use your weapons against their enemies (usually the masses), they'll line up to betray each other, for petty advantage. This worked since time immemorial, as Putin said, but now it isn't working because of people like him, like Nasrallah, like the Kims, or like the CPC. Who are refusing division and conquering the White Empire instead. All White Wars have division and conquest in common. But there is increasingly common cause in uniting and defeating them.

Nothing happened after the Epstein scandal, they just normalized raping children. White elites raped, murdered, and did it all in public. They weren't confessing, they were bragging. If you make all this noise and nothing changes, you're not averting a behavior. You're advertising it. The elites of the White Empire want you to know. They can kill and rape children, they can violate the most basic norms of human behavior, and what are you going to do about it? Nothing.

In fact, they have made the 'American' people accessories after the fact. When their elites raped people and their dumb masses gossiped about it, it became entertainment for all of them. The pointless gossiping about the victims without doing anything just victimizes them again. Private abuse became public spectacle. Forget justice, the Justice Department released these files like a perverted PR department. Note that no one was charged from the Epstein Files. There was nothing legal happening here. They were really just normalizing the behavior and have been remarkably successful.

The pimp and many of the victims are dead, but what of the perps? They've only gotten ahead. I just saw Bill Gates at the World Cup, Donald Trump is President, and Elon Musk became the richest man in the world. These people are not embarrassed by their appearances in the Epstein Files, if anything they're empowered. They raped the girls, manipulated evidence, killed witnesses, and did it all in public. That's really power, especially in the capitalist sense, which is getting one over on somebody else. They displayed power over humanity in general. Can you even call this a scandal anymore? Is it a scandal if it becomes boring? Raping kids is just the new normal.

Everyone on the stock market who floated a obvious fraud like Musk, everyone in Congress who hasn't impeached (at least) Trump, and everyone at the World Cup who didn't stone Gates and the Epstein Class in the luxury boxes; they're all in on it. They know and they did nothing. They are accomplices. As Dan Hodges said after a slaughter of little kids in school, “in retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” Kids get slaughtered all the time now, this is normal in 'America' (and nowhere else). In antrospect, Jeffrey Epstein marked the end of the US child-rape debate (what marvelous debates White people have). Once 'America' decided raping children was bearable, it was over. They must be raping kids even more now. Why wouldn't they? Nothing happened. What better way to display power over one innocent soul, and the concept of innocence in general?

Like so much 'news' for White people, this is, of course, old news to most of the world. Turtle Island has been Epstein Island since Christopher Columbus landed. Columbus immediately began sex trafficking native children among his men. Those dear souls still don't count because the Empire is still historically abusing them by whiting them out. 'America' has been rape continent since White people were invented, they immediately began raping Black women and enslaving their own children. Again, these rapes historically don't count, White people don't even have three-fifths of a conscience. There is no redeeming this White identity, nor 'Americans' in general. Rape and murder is what 'America' is and Epstein Island is wherever White people be. This is Whiteness, and now it's come for White children, and even then they're not bothered. There is no redeeming this identity.

The problem isn't Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was just a Jew pimp, meanwhile look at all the gentiles Johns who got off without a hitch. The problem is the people that 'suicided' Epstein and erased the tape, a media that only sensationalizes rape, and a justice system that looks the other way. The problem is the people that did the raping and still rape and are still at the top of every White state. The problem is the entire class that killed the pimp, killed the girls, kill children in their day jobs, and are still at this every day. To distract from raping children in the Epstein Files they killed school-children in Iran. They doubled down on deranged.

The White Empire has a lot of fake two-party system when it's really one sex party. These people will share STDs before they ever share the money, and do you think they've stopped raping for an instant? Again, why would they? They got away with it. The whole thing is a power trip and getting away with it is part of the thrill. They get to show those little girls they don't matter in private and then show them they really don't matter in public, suiciding them if they talk. These killers and rapists and (not to mention) war criminals and thieves are just out here in public like nothing happened because nothing happened. The public are their accomplices by just gossiping instead of guillotining. The Epstein Files was not them getting caught. It was them getting off.

You can't just blame the Jews (though they're certainly not blameless) and you can't even blame the elites (though they are certainly shameless). This is 'America', this is Whiteness, and if you claim any of those cursed identities, this is on you too. Jewish identity, 'American' identity, White identity, these identities are all cooked. This is only debateable because they also cooked the history books. Western philosophy is not coincidentally founded by pedophiles, that really is the foundation of Western Civilization. A bunch of high-fallutin debates while raping children.

Whites, ever since Whitness was invented, were always raping and pillaging. As Columbus said while he was ruling the colonies, “There are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.” And they don't just rape us, they rape each other. As Cesaire said, no one colonizes innocently, and a culture which does this is already diseased. The only comfort is that the sex offender map of 'Israel' looks the increasingly like their missile alert map, lit up all over. But this reckoning has yet to come to 'America', which honestly deserves it more. They've certainly been at it longer.

So forget Epstein, look at the Epstein Class, which has graduated with all pomp and ceremony. And hell, forget the class and look at the dumb masses, who are worse than complicit, they are entertained by this. Not only do the vaunted 'democracies' of White Empire do nothing when children are raped, they do nothing when children were killed, and still happily ruled by pedophile serial killers. And still merrily sharing their opinions on how Iran or China should govern themselves. These are useless people. You simply cannot be a good 'American' or a White person anymore. This evil is America, this horror is Whiteness. It's not just Epstein, it's Columbus, and it's not just Jews, it's the whole White crew.

White culture keeps normalizing new atrocities as they become more and more depraved and decadent. Bombing hospitals, double-tapping ambulances, raping men to death, raping men, women, and children, this is all normal now. I can't imagine anything worse than what I've seen, but I'm sure they'll think of something. And it's not just the elites doing this, it's the people that normalize it, that just go on with their lives like they're the good Nazis. But there are no good Nazis and there are no good 'Americans,' and there were never any good 'Europeans'. These are all cursed identities and I'm putting them in the historical dustbin. Who am I? I'm angry.

Look at what these rapists can do and still get away with it! They can be the richest man in the world, they can be President, they can go to the games with the masses. If anything their fortunes have improved by making their perversions public, they've hazed everyone into it. At this point, if you're a rich guy inside the White Empire and you're not raping children you must be limiting your career prospects. Honey, I really don't like it, but you want the second yacht, don't you? What ghouls. We should have Captain Cook'd White people the minute they got off the boats, and it's not too late I tell you. It's Epstein Island wherever they go.

I offer all my news and analysis posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please subscribe, paid if you can, and like, comment and share my posts if they move you. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day keep me writing full time.

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On June 23, 2026, a federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas,sentenced eight people to prison terms ranging from thirty to one hundred years. A ninth defendant was sentenced separately on the same theory. They are now collectively known as the Prairieland Nine. Their offense, in the government’s framing, was domestic terrorism.

On the night of July 4, 2025, roughly eleven people stood outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, a facility holding more than 1,000 immigration detainees in a building rated for 707. The demonstrators set off fireworks, spray-painted cars in the parking lot, and called through a megaphone toward the windows where detainees waved back. At about 11:00 p.m., an Alvarado police lieutenant arrived alone. One of the protesters, a former U.S. Marine Corps reservist named Benjamin Song who had brought an AR-15 — legally, under Texas law — opened fire and wounded the officer. Song received a 100-year sentence for the shooting.

What the Justice Department did with the other eight defendants is the story.

Daniel Sanchez Estrada was not at the protest. He moved a box of antifascist pamphlets from his parents’ house to a friend’s apartment after his friends were arrested. He received thirty years.

Autumn Hill, whose prior political activity consisted of volunteering for a nonprofit and marching in a Pride parade, received fifty years. Her home had been where some of the defendants gathered the night before.

Savanna Batten, who arrived at the demonstration late and who Song himself described as having no knowledge of what was planned, also received fifty years. Her sister told the court that Batten dreams of opening a bakery.

Maricela Rueda, who used the megaphone, received seventy years — fifty for her role at the protest, twenty more for asking her husband to move the same pamphlets that put Estrada in prison.

The federal statute under which they were charged is 18 U.S.C. § 2339A, “providing material support to terrorists.” It was enacted in 1994 and used for thirty years against Al-Qaeda supporters and ISIS recruiters. It had never been used against American domestic protesters until this case. It does not require any organization to be designated as terrorist. It requires only that prosecutors connect the defendant to one of a list of predicate offenses.

The Justice Department’s theory, accepted by the court: spray-painting parked cars constitutes “depredation of government property,” a predicate offense. Consumer fireworks constitute “explosives.” Wearing matching black clothing constitutes providing one’s own “personnel” as material support to terrorism, because the indistinguishable appearance gave Song visual cover from which to shoot. The defendants did not need to know the shooting was coming. They did not need to want it. Their presence in similar clothing, the government argued, made them logistical support to a terrorist act.

This is unprecedented in American law.

It is not unprecedented in modern history.

What Italy Did in 1926

Italy did this first.

On November 25, 1926, Mussolini’s government enacted Law No. 2008, the “Act for the Defense of the State.” It was the centerpiece of what came to be called the Leggi Fascistissime — the “most fascist laws.” The 1926 act did three things. It reinstated the death penalty for political offenses. It created a Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State (Tribunale speciale per la difesa dello Stato), a parallel court system for trying enemies of the regime. And it formally criminalized antifascism.

Mussolini’s government, in its public framing of these prosecutions, called the defendants “terrorists.” The historical record on this point is precise. The fascist regime, in the words of one recent scholarly study, “maintained that force and repression were used only in cases where clear proof of culpability for ‘terrorist’ crimes was present.” The word in their mouths was the same word in the mouths of American prosecutors now. And in both cases, being opposed to fascism — you know, the thing the USA used to stand against — is grounds for being considered a ‘terrorist’.

The Special Tribunal operated in Italy from 1927 to 1943. During those sixteen years, it processed 6,929 antifascist defendants drawn from a population of roughly 101,000 Italians the regime had identified as political opponents. Most were not violent. They were trade unionists, journalists, teachers, intellectuals, members of the Socialist and Communist parties, and ordinary citizens who had expressed the wrong opinions in the wrong places. The Tribunal imposed 31 death sentences. It sent thousands more to confino politico — internal exile on remote islands and in mountain villages. The full apparatus of fascist repression sent roughly 15,000 Italians to internal exile between 1926 and 1943.

The most decorated targets included Antonio Gramsci, who would die in fascist prison after eleven years of confinement, and Sandro Pertini, who survived to become President of the Italian Republic in 1978. Both were tried before the Special Tribunal under the 1926 act.

Two features of the Italian system deserve close attention because both are present in the American case.

First, Mussolini did not repeal the Italian constitution. He did not abolish the ordinary criminal courts. He built, alongside the existing legal system, a parallel mechanism — the Special Tribunal — that operated under the procedures of military justice but maintained the formal trappings of European liberal jurisprudence. Defendants had lawyers. Verdicts were issued in written opinions. The regime insisted, in its propaganda, that what was happening was law, not violence. As one contemporary scholar of the period put it: “Rather than changing the existing criminal court system or amending the constitution, the fascists positioned the Special Tribunal as a parallel system of justice.”

This is the technique. Comparative law scholars call it autocratic legalism — the dismantling of constitutional protections through legal forms rather than against them. The forms remain. The function changes.

Second, the fascist regime named the agency that enforced the 1926 laws with extraordinary candor. Mussolini’s secret police was called the OVRA — Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo. The Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. The state literally named its enforcement apparatus after the ideology it existed to suppress. That ideology was opposition to fascism. There was no ambiguity. The regime was open about what it was doing.

The American Adaptation

On September 22, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order designating “Antifa” — the contemporary movement whose name comes directly from the German Antifaschistische Aktion of 1932 and the broader European antifascist tradition that defeated Mussolini and Hitler — as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The order has no statutory basis. The United States has no domestic terrorism designation framework. The executive branch has no legal authority to make such designations. The order, by its own terms, cites no law. It is the political naming of a target.

Days later came National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directed the entire federal government — Justice, Treasury, the IRS, federal law enforcement — to investigate, prosecute, and defund anyone the administration characterizes as connected to antifascist activity.

In December 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an implementing memorandum directing federal prosecutors to charge “the most serious, readily provable offenses” in such cases and to seek terrorism sentencing enhancements as a matter of course. The same memo bypassed the historical role of the Justice Department’s National Security Division — the career attorneys who had vetted material support cases under every prior administration of both parties. The Prairieland indictment proceeded without them.

The Justice Department then used an existing counterterrorism statute, enacted thirty-two years ago for an entirely different purpose, against American protesters. The judges who ratified the novel theory were both appointed by President Trump. Judge Reed O’Connor characterized the Prairieland protest from the bench as not a protest at all but, in his words, “an assault on democracy.” The same week, federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged fifteen more people on substantially the same theory.

The government’s expert witness at trial was a researcher named Kyle Shideler, employed by the Claremont Institute, who had published a piece in The American Mind one week after the Charlie Kirk assassination titled “How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks” — explicitly subtitled a roadmap for the Trump administration. Shideler then, by his own account, conferred with prosecutors a month before the indictment was filed. He helped shape the indictment. Then he testified for the government about the tactics his own memo had recommended be prosecuted.

The American system has not created a Special Tribunal. It has not had to. The Justice Department reached into the existing federal criminal code, found a counterterrorism statute that did not require any organization to be designated, and used it against a category of Americans the executive branch has named as the enemy.

The mechanism is the Mussolini mechanism. The legal forms are intact. The function is the prosecution of political opposition under counterterrorism law. The defendants are called terrorists. The targets are antifascists. The vocabulary is identical because the technique is identical.

Why Americans Are Sleepwalking

Most Americans do not see this because most Americans have been taught that fascism arrives in jackboots, with slicked back hair. It does not. It arrives in court filings.

The Prairieland sentencings happened in a federal courtroom under a sitting federal judge in proceedings with defense attorneys, jury verdicts, and written opinions. There were no tanks in the street. The defendants did not disappear in the night. The forms of liberal jurisprudence were observed. The man who shot the police officer received the longest sentence, which is what most readers, scanning the headline, will register as the story. The eight other sentences, ranging from thirty to seventy years, will be filed mentally under “co-conspirators” without further inquiry. This is precisely the response the prosecution counted on.

Most Americans also do not see this because the targets are presented as unsympathetic. The defendants wore black. They used encrypted messaging. They were associated, in the prosecution’s narrative, with antifa. The press, in much of its coverage, has accepted the prosecution’s category labels without examining what they actually meant. To question the sentences is, in the framing that has prevailed in much of the news cycle, to defend cop-shooters. The fact that most of the defendants did not shoot anyone, did not want anyone shot, and in one case were not even present, gets lost.

And most Americans do not see this because the historical literacy required to recognize the pattern is rare. The Italian precedent is not widely taught in American schools. The phrase “Leggi Fascistissime” appears in no major newspaper’s coverage of the Prairieland case. The fact that the regime that invented the prosecutorial template now being deployed against American protesters called its enforcement agency the Organization for the Repression of Anti-Fascism — and meant it — is the kind of historical detail that ought to be in every editorial about this case and is in none.

Here is what every American needs to understand, even if the language is uncomfortable to hear.

A government that wishes to criminalize political opposition does not need new laws. It needs new readings of the laws it already has, prosecutors instructed to charge aggressively, and judges willing to ratify. Each of these conditions now exists. The legal theory that just sent nine Americans to prison for terms longer than most murderers serve was authored by an Israel-funded think-tank researcher, adopted by the Justice Department, and ratified by federal judges. The youngest of those nine defendants will, if the convictions stand, die in federal prison.

The United States in 1941 mobilized sixteen million people, spent the equivalent of four trillion present-day dollars, and lost 405,000 American lives in a war whose stated purpose was the defeat of fascism. American soldiers, including the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team — whose families were imprisoned in domestic concentration camps — fought their way up the Italian peninsula and helped end Mussolini’s regime. The Office of Strategic Services trained antifascist partisans across occupied Europe. American occupation policy in Germany was explicitly named Entnazifizierung — denazification. The work was antifascism. The word for what we were doing was antifascism. The men who did it understood themselves to be antifascists.

Their grandchildren are now being sentenced to life in federal prison for being, the government says, antifascists.

The doctrine that has just been established in a Texas courtroom is a fascist doctrine. It is the same doctrine, applied through the same mechanism, with the same vocabulary, against the same political category. The country that defeated fascism by force of arms has now imported the legal model of the regime it defeated. American federal courts are administering it. American federal prosecutors are pursuing it. American federal judges are signing the orders.

If the Trump administration's prosecutorial framework gets applied at the same per-capita rate as Mussolini's, the United States will catalogue roughly 847,000 Americans as political opponents, prosecute approximately 58,000 of them under counterterrorism statutes, send 126,000 into some form of state custody outside the ordinary criminal system, and execute about 260 for political offenses.

As things now stand, voicing antifascist opinions can get you imprisoned for life in the United States of America, as can voicing views critical of capitalism, Christianity or the government itself. Unlike when this happened in Italy, there is no larger country coming to save us.

I offer all my news and analysis posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please subscribe, paid if you can, and like, comment and share my posts if they move you. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day keep me writing full time.

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Norman Caruso (Gaming Historian) announced his retirement recently, and as a parting gift he uploaded the files from the Universal v. Nintendo case over Donkey Kong. This had been in the works for many years but now we can finally look at this seminal lawsuit that helped define Nintendo’s future!

While many have been digging into the files after the launch, I was originally working with Norm on a summary of the whole case for his next video. The case is often misreported and slightly misunderstood, so this is a summary of the events as they happened: According to the original files (which I have reuploaded and organized on my Archive page as individual files). Though many files from the original case were destroyed as part of regular court cleaning procedures, we still have a relatively complete view of the narrative of the lawsuit and all its drama!

Universal v. Nintendo

We’ll start after the release of Donkey Kong, first shipped to coin-op game distributors in July or August 1981. The game quickly became incredibly popular in both the United States and Japan – a vital part of the video game boom that flourished in 1982. But even being part of this growing industry, the game would not have been part of anything dramatic had it not been for a routine check done by a lawyer.

MCA/Universal (hereafter, Universal), the major motion picture studio, had been involved in a dispute around the rights to the classic 1933 film King Kong a few years earlier. RKO Pictures – the original distributor of the film – had all but collapsed as a film studio but there was ample interest in the King Kong intellectual property. Universal sought those rights, but RKO granted them to Dino De Laurentiis Corp to create a remake with Paramount Pictures instead. In the subsequent court case, Universal assumed several rights to King Kong from the estate of the original creator and in December 1980 started exploring those license rights more affirmatively.

When Donkey Kong first released, it garnered no notice from Universal. Video games may have been big, but not yet a threat to movie studio cultural dominance. However, with the increasing need for companies to stand out in the market, the potential of attaching a license video games was being explored – which was the spark that brought the two gorillas into conflict.

In August 1981, Universal’s legal department received a letter from Randy Rissman, co-founder of Tiger Electronic Toys. Tiger (later Tiger Electronics) was an Illinois-based company primarily creating handheld electronic games and they were seeking a license for King Kong. As it turned out, Rissman had been early to see Donkey Kong when he was visiting Japan. Predicting its success, he arranged for Tiger to create clones of the game: Both an electronic handheld game as well as an Atari VCS game cartridge.

Universal were a little befuddled at this sudden question about King Kong rights – which had little perceived value. The only current project with the IP was a proposed section of the Universal Studios Tour. With the remake by Paramount some years in the past, there was little reason to license the property. Nevertheless, on September 18, 1981 Universal signed a fairly generous licensing agreement with Tiger for electronic and cartridge games.

In late September 1981, Universal conducted a routine trademark search for King Kong to see if there were any conflicting businesses using the name. While there were a few take-offs on the wording of the name, they did not turn up Donkey Kong, which had been filed in July that year. In December, anticipating the need to establish trademark protection for the Tiger game, Universal licensing expert Loretta Sifuentes procured a Parker Brothers electronic game from the Universal Studios Tour that could be temporarily rebranded with the “King Kong” name for purposes of trademark filing. However, when the lawyers did their search this time in January 1982, they turned up a conflict: Donkey Kong.

Immediately suspecting something, Sifuentes and fellow licensing department employee Steven Adler went to check out Donkey Kong in a nearby arcade. They put two and two together: Tiger was clearly intending to copy Donkey Kong for their King Kong game. Sifuentes later claimed that she alerted Universal’s law department to this forthcoming issue.

A few weeks later in mid-February 1982, Adler and Sifuentes attended the New York Toy Fair to be on the lookout for licensing opportunities. They were approached by a man representing an electronics company who sought permission to create an electronic wrist watch game (a rising category at the time) with the King Kong license. As part of their inquiry, they asked if Universal would shield them from potential litigation by Nintendo. These worries were compounded as they saw that Tiger Electronics had sent out a catalog at the show which advertised their upcoming King Kong game – doing so without even speaking to Universal for permission to use their trademark.

These tensions simmered in the background while the situation became even more complicated. Just before Toy Fair, Coleco Industries had concluded a licensing arrangement with Nintendo Co. Ltd. to produce adaptations of Donkey Kong in cartridge form as well as their tabletop mini-arcade electronic games – plus a separate agreement for Donkey Kong dolls. The cartridge rights had been bargained hard for and they intended to exploit their victory by making Donkey Kong the pack-in with their Colecovision console, forthcoming that June.

Coleco had also been in discussions with Universal over licensing since Fall of the prior year. Their licensing expert Al Kahn (later head of 4Kids Entertainment) had kicked the tires on the movie studio about licensing properties like Smokey the Bandit and Jaws for adaptation to video games. While these talks didn’t amount to anything specific (aside from Coleco later bidding on the video game rights to E.T.) they did turn Universal’s attention more firmly towards the video game market. Universal had to consider who they might partner with and how best to tackle the new commercial opportunity.

Head of Universal Sid Sheinberg very much wanted King Kong to be part of that future. Sheinberg had been gung-ho on Universal’s rights battle for King Kong and he felt there was something to mine out of the old Hollywood icon. He would commission a script for another King Kong remake later that year in hopes of bolstering the property. With all of these business opportunities colliding, it was inevitable that he’d find out about Donkey Kong.

According to the court records, April 1, 1982 is when the head of Universal was first informed about Donkey Kong. He first read about the game in a publication – though what specific profile was never identified. Knowing nothing of the prior investigations, Sheinberg instructed the company’s outside counsel, Robert Hadl, to look into the game and see if it infringed on King Kong. Sheinberg was informed by Hadl that the game did infringe, on the basis of its general premise and name. Convinced of an easy case with the leverage they possessed as major motion picture studio, Sheinberg planned to spring the trap later in the month.

Arnold Greenberg, head of Coleco, met with Sheinberg, Steve Adler, and Universal chairman Lew Wasserman on April 27 to discuss potential deals – including a substantial 20% investment into Coleco. Sheinberg led the conversation to Coleco’s video game business, which Greenberg was more than happy to talk about. When broaching the topic of Donkey Kong, Sheinberg wasted no time in telling Greenberg that Coleco was infringing on Universal’s rights to King Kong by selling the game. Later in the day, when Greenberg showed off one of their upcoming commercials for the game which directly riffed on King Kong, Sheinberg once again agitated for a settlement.

The next day, Universal sprang into action. They sent telegrams to both Coleco and Nintendo of America – being informed of this situation for the first time – to cease their infringement of King Kong. Coleco, anxious over their potential dealings with Universal and the upcoming launch of the Colecovision, was under extreme pressure. They had to consider very carefully what would be the next move for the company in the long term.

Nintendo, meanwhile, caught a sense that something was suspicious. On May 3, their law firm conducted a trademark search for King Kong on a hunch. In their search, they did not find any evidence of consistent, recent uses of the King Kong trademark; their verdict was that no singular entity had expressed its use in a long time, certainly not Universal. This affirmed to Nintendo of America’s chief legal counsel, Howard Lincoln, that they could not rush into a decision.

Coleco, on the other hand, felt they needed to settle quickly. On May 5, the day before a scheduled legal meeting between the parties, Coleco agreed that they would settle with Universal. As part of this preliminary agreement, they also agreed not to tell Nintendo of their decision to settle, and act as a supposedly neutral arbiter to push Nintendo into agreeing to terms.

The parties met at Universal Studios the next day to parlay. Representing Nintendo of America was president Minoru Arakawa, Lincoln, and Jim McCree from the same law firm. Coleco was represented by counsels Michael Schwefel and Fred Yerman. For Universal, Robert Hadl – who had advised Sheinberg to pursue legal action – was on hand, later joined in the second meeting by Loretta Sifuentes. Coleco’s counsel pushed for Nintendo to capitulate to Universal’s terms, but Lincoln advised Arakawa to stand firm. They didn’t believe that Donkey Kong constituted infringement or that it was an open and shut case.

Critically, Lincoln asked for something simple from Universal: A chain of title. They wanted proof that Universal truly owned the rights to King Kong before they would consider any sort of disadvantageous agreement. For a company like Universal and its large legal department, this should have been a simple thing to provide. However, in the days after the meeting, Nintendo received no such evidence of ownership. Their suspicions were thoroughly raised.

Nintendo of America informed their parent company of the forthcoming legal action while Coleco formalized a settlement with Universal. They handed over 3% of all of their royalties from all of their Donkey Kong products. If they convinced Nintendo to settle with Universal though, they would get 2% of all royalties received by Universal from Nintendo. Coleco was safe from potentially crippling litigation at the eve of their new major product launch with the Colecovision.

However, this new agreement presented a difficulty: Tiger Electronic Toys. The licensing agreement signed at the beginning of all of this had granted them exclusive rights to King Kong electronic and video games, which was what Coleco’s agreement now constituted. Knowing that Coleco was going to net them a much bigger dividend, Sifuentes was directed by Universal to nullify the existing contract by any means necessary. As it turned out, Tiger had been rather neglectful in providing any materials for their upcoming games directly to Universal – which gave them an immediate excuse for agitation.

On May 4, Sifuentes wrote an angry letter to Tiger over their neglectful hand in the partnership and demanded that the forthcoming games be furnished to Universal within the next few days. Rissman replied the next day, sending over all of their materials for their King Kong games: The VCS cartridge which was nearing production, a tabletop LCD electronic game, and a handheld version of the game which also had an in-built clock function (like Nintendo’s Game & Watch series). While the latter two were non-functioning mock-ups that only displayed the gameplay, Tiger hoped those would be sufficient to allay any doubts.

Sifuentes raised immediate objections that the games had been advertised without Universal’s approval at the Toy Fair, at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, and were planned to be shown at the coming Summer CES. She also said that a game-with-a-watch had not been agreed to in the language of the contract. Then, most importantly, she claimed that because Tiger was clearly copying Donkey Kong, that was a potential infringement on another company’s IP and they could not abide it. Sifunetes declared the contract null and void. On top of that, Coleco sent Tiger a letter over objections to the King Kong tabletop game as being overly similar to the Donkey Kong mini-arcade they were about to release.

Tiger, however, did not wilt at this challenge. They did their own examination and concluded that Universal had never properly transferred rights to them to create an authorized King Kong game – nor did they seem to own the trademark for King Kong more generally. Additionally, they claimed that Universal attempted to use a clause in the contract to assume control of Tiger’s patented technology, which they said was a violation of antitrust law. They requested clarification on Universal’s objections such that they might save their forthcoming games from the fate of having no attached license.

Universal attempted to keep their fingers in their ears, considering the contract legally dead, but they likely suspected Tiger could cause issues if they continued to deny the license. Tiger was offered an amendment to the original contract – so long as they added a few elements to differentiate their games from Donkey Kong. The VCS game previously contained slanted platforms which would now be perfectly straight. The barrels as obstacles were changed to bombs. The LCD games already had the conceit of a fireman as the protagonist, but Tiger were instructed to add a hat to the character to make that clear.

The contract signed a few months later had new stipulations. Most importantly, it was non-exclusive and had been approved by Coleco – who Universal saw as the more important partner. The original royalty expected by Universal would be halved for the first year as a concession for the turmoil they’d gone through. Tiger also received protection against Nintendo by Universal, as well as an agreement by Coleco for them to not take legal action – despite the overlap in product categories.

Ultimately, the rigmarole may not have been worth the hassle. By the end of 1982, Tiger had sold 55,215 of the VCS cartridge, 9,299 of their tabletop games, 15,264 of the LCD games with a clock, and 673 of the standard LCD games which netted Universal a few thousand dollars in royalties. As a small company that may have been decent, but it paled in comparison to Coleco shipping almost 6 million Donkey Kong cartridges by April of the following year with royalties exceeding $2 million. Universal obviously made the better choice for their business.

Nintendo had to make their own resolution. On May 21, 1982, Sheinberg and Hadl met with Arakawa and Lincoln with hopes that settlement was on the table. Both partners were hopeful that they could work together on future projects, as Nintendo already was with the licensing of Popeye from King Features. However, Lincoln asserted that the claims of Universal had no merit. Having gone through the evidence, he doubted Universal’s claim to King Kong and had no intention of diminishing the success of their breakthrough product by admitting an infringement.

Sheinberg was incensed. His anger came out with threats and hard-talk: A true movie mogul’s personality. He claimed that he would do to Nintendo what they had done to Sony in the famous Betamax case – leveraging their power as a major film studio and as a center of strong litigation. In his retort, Sheinberg boasted that “[Universal’s] litigation department even turned a profit” (this was rendered in the book Game Over as Sheinberg viewing “litigation as a profit center” – but the testimony of both Lincoln and Hadl say otherwise). A former lawyer himself, Sheinberg knew the power of legal threats. They gave Nintendo until the upcoming Summer Consumer Electronics Show to settle or else the suit was forthcoming.

Arakawa was understandably unsure about holding his ground, but Lincoln reassured him that they could win this fight. Both sides readied for battle, with Nintendo selecting the firm to represent them in court – as Lincoln was not a trial lawyer. They selected the Seattle firm Mudge Rose Guthrie & Alexander + Sax and MacIver who assigned the tenacious John Kirby to this complicated rights dispute. Kirby, a former civil rights lawyer who’d turned to corporate cases, was fierce on the stand and would leave no stone unturned.

On June 29, 1982, Universal filed suit against Nintendo Co. Ltd. and Nintendo of America in the Southern District of New York state, asking for a preliminary injunction over Nintendo’s alleged violation of the story of King Kong as well as its trademark. Coleco issued a press statement in support of Universal, having failed to push Nintendo towards capitulation. Many headlines about “ten ton gorillas” followed.

Kirby took his time in examining the facts before any evidence was collected. He and his team were digging into Lincoln’s suspicions about Universal’s ownership of the King Kong rights while also asserting that the claim against Donkey Kong was bogus. Nintendo’s first countermeasure claimed they had suffered at the hands of Universal’s dealings with Coleco and Tiger. Before long, this started to affect their bottom line.

Nintendo had courted offers of licensing beyond the agreements they signed with Coleco since April 1982. The first wave of Donkey Kong merchandise sat alongside that of Pac-Man in this period of the arcade boom, with the characters adorning shirts, lunchboxes, cereal, board games, and even getting a dedicated slot on the Saturday Supercade cartoon show. By early 1983, Nintendo of America had signed 40 licensees to their Donkey Kong product – the beginning of an empire that is among the most lucrative licensing enterprises on the planet today.

Universal, seeing these exploitations of the property as further infringement, started going after these third-party licensees in January 1983 with legal threats. Many of these companies were unwilling to fully stand with Nintendo. The likes of Atari (creating the computer versions of Donkey Kong) and Ruby-Spears (producing Saturday Supercade) caved into the royalty demands. Other companies either demanded Nintendo to return their royalty advances, held their royalties in escrow pending the judgment of the case, or canceled their agreements with Nintendo to get Universal off their back.

Nintendo was also moving into damage control to prevent any further confusion regarding Donkey Kong and King Kong. Anytime a magazine or newspaper drew a comparison between the two properties, Nintendo of America’s PR head Susan Schoenecker would send them a letter to clarify the difference and request a printed retraction. The lawsuit was going to be long and complex, and Donkey Kong wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon – they didn’t want to stoke the fire of Universal’s claim of trademark infringement.

On May 10, 1983, Nintendo’s law firm finally submitted their argument: And it was a big one. They had determined in their research that Universal had no right to express ownership of King Kong. Universal had previously argued in court that not only was the King Kong trademark uncertain, but the actual status of the original work was in public domain. They could not assert a right to something which they did not legally possess.

So what was this about?

In intellectual property law, any singular work can have many different parts of law which govern its application. When we are talking about “King Kong“, we are talking about several different things that overlap. There is the 1933 RKO Pictures release King Kong, which most film buffs are familiar with. There is the character within the film, King Kong, which has specific attributes but different expressions of appearance and personality depending on the setting. Then there is King Kong, the story concept dreamed up by Merian C. Cooper.

Cooper came to RKO Pictures in the 1930s with the idea for King Kong in hand to be made into a movie. He had developed the idea some years earlier and pitched it to RKO for development. For the film, he served as co-director, a producer, and received a story credit. With the film in development, he also commissioned a friend of his to create a novelization based on the screenplay – a common Hollywood practice even today. The novel was bundled as a paperback book and then abridged in two issues of the sci-fi pulp publication Mystery Magazine, both prior to the film’s release.

In the following years, Cooper had many rights disputes with RKO over the King Kong character – which he asserted ownership of as an independent contractor and not as a work wholly owned by RKO. These particulars are not overly relevant to our story, up until the point that Universal enters the picture. As previously mentioned, in 1975 Universal sued Paramount over their forthcoming remake of King Kong with Dino de Laurentiis Corp. Universal asserted that a verbal agreement with RKO to make the remake had been broken and therefore sought to challenge the right of Laurentiis to claim exclusive rights to a remake. Roped into this was Merian’s son, Richard Cooper, who still fought for his father’s rights to the property as part of his estate.

Universal’s assertion was that RKO did not have the right to declare exclusive ownership over King Kong. The novelization had never had its copyright renewed – a familiar story to anyone who knows the tale behind the publications of H. P. Lovecraft and other pulp writers. As this was the earliest work formally published, that meant that the King Kong story as presented in the novelization was in the public domain.

Paramount argued that since the novel was based on the screenplay, the movie was the original work. The difference in copyright terms would be that the shared elements of the film and the novel would either be part of or excluded from the public domain, with the unique elements between them given the opposite fate. If Universal won, that meant the character of King Kong, the premise of King Kong, plus any other particulars shared between the film and the book were free for anybody to use. If Paramount won, only the things in the written work which were distinct from the film were in the public domain.

In the verdict on the case, the judge sided with Universal: The only rights RKO possessed regarding King Kong were the elements specific to the original film, plus its sequel Son of Kong. Everything else as presented in the novel was fair game. However, in a follow-up verdict, the judge also declared that Merian Cooper’s estate possessed unique rights to the character of King Kong, as well as the story and the name – what’s come to be known as the “Cooper Judgment”. These carved-out rights, primarily regarding merchandising, were then sold by Richard Cooper to Universal – save for the right of his company to create King Kong-based Halloween costumes for four years afterwards. Universal profited nicely from the case by taking a percentage of income from the 1976 remake and reserved the right to create a King Kong remake of their own sometime in the future.

This state of affairs is a bit confusing. While the Cooper estate had always claimed publication rights to the character of King Kong, how did ownership of the character and story square with the fact that all the critical elements of the narrative were in the public domain? One thing was very clear in this transfer though: Universal possessed no rights to the trademark “King Kong”. Whatever else they owned, they could not assert sole ownership of King Kong as a name for goods, just as they had argued the same against RKO. The argument that Donkey Kong violated their trademarks carried no weight.

Universal thought they had covered their bases, as they had attained legal permission from RKO to assume rights from the original film solely for the purposes of this case. In all other ways, they had tread carefully around those rights in their further exploitation of the brand: Both the teams creating the King Kong-themed Universal Studios Tour addon and the people working on the proposed new remake were specifically instructed to avoid referencing the RKO film or the remake. But in asserting a sole right of ownership to the King Kong property, they had overplayed their hand.

Even with this revelation, Universal attempted to bolster the claim that Donkey Kong‘s success was ultimately derived from its association with King Kong. An independent market research group called coin-op machine operators and asked them questions about the game, as well as the name. Out of the 150 people surveyed, only 21% actually considered that the Donkey Kong name was derived from King Kong – hardly a strong result in favor of Universal.

At the end of 1983, Judge D. J. Sweet made his ruling. He found that Universal had presented no evidence that they owned the King Kong trademark, and that said trademark had no “singular meaning” – essentially concluding it had been diluted beyond sole ownership, much like the brand Kleenex. As such, their brandishing of the trademark was a wonton violation of trademark law and Universal had no standing in the case.

The world was a bit stunned when small Nintendo – who’d not ever since had a hit the size of Donkey Kong stateside – were declared winners on January 4, 1984. Universal, aghast at this judgment, immediately filed for appeal. Unusually, they also had the original case reopened, adding more to the record as they challenged the conduct of the trial for a separate judgment.

The most significant addition to the reopened case was the deposition of Loretta Sifuentes – who had moved from Universal to Coleco. Having been there to observe the earliest conflict of the video game rights, her testimony added much clarity to the reasoning behind Universal’s actions regarding the King Kong IP. When questioned by John Kirby, Sifuentes provided a major revelation about Universal’s knowledge of their rights – or lack thereof.

After the 1982 New York Toy Fair, Sifuentes said she’d spoken with Universal’s legal department about the conflict vis a vis Tiger’s King Kong game and Donkey Kong. Universal legal counsel Joseph Di Muro then confided in her that he’d previously determined that Universal had no actual rights to King Kong and suggested that they cancel any contract with Tiger. As supporting evidence, Sifuentes claimed that Universal’s licensing catalog – which showcased all the intellectual properties that were available for use by third parties – dropped King Kong not long after this conversation.

When Di Muro was called for a deposition, he categorically denied that this conversation had taken place. Universal’s also attempted to cast shade on Sifuentes as an unreliable witness, claiming she had not done her due diligence to inform those within Universal of the negotiations regarding King Kong, including the Tiger deal which had not been worth their while. However, as the person most intimately involved in the negotiations over the video game rights and having many supporting documents to that fact, Sifuentes appears to have mostly told the truth regarding this manic cluster of priorities at Universal.

Supporting this fact was Sid Sheinberg’s own deposition. Despite having a direct, personal interest in King Kong, he avoided the subject of what rights to the property he believed the company owned with a lawyerly agility. John Kirby spared no mercy in his questioning of the executive, but Sheinberg’s obstinance seemed to prove the point: Universal could not clearly state its rights to King Kong. Their inability to provide a chain of title back from the first meeting with Nintendo of America was borne out.

At the end of 1984, the appeals court found that the original summary judgment had been correct. Universal’s flagrant abuse of the legal system to control the rights to King Kong which they knew they did not legally possess was unacceptable. Additionally, using that false claim to bully Nintendo of America’s third-party licensees was unlawful – opening the door for those companies to sue for damages. Nintendo itself was awarded $1.6 million in damages at the end of the following year – right at the time they were launching the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America.

With only one legal recourse, Universal attempted to appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on the conduct of the trial. However, the claims stood, and on July 15, 1986 over four years of legal turmoil came to an end when the 2nd Circuit judges affirmed the lower court judgment. Nintendo was no longer a middling arcade game company – they were a force to be reckoned with in the new entertainment landscape.

Legacy

In recent times, copyright automation systems have been flagrantly abused to assert rights that the claimants may not possess. Universal v. Nintendo proves that even the most powerful business entities are not immune to abusing the copyright system, and how vital a chain of title is for legal recourse.

It is also an unfortunate truth that after Nintendo had firmly established that Universal had no rights to the King Kong trademark, they still had to go through several months of legal proceedings for the case to be rendered – then several more years as Universal fought back on a bogus claim. Individual creators asserting their rights simply do not have the wherewithal to hold out for so long.

This story also highlights the complicated status of the public domain. While the particular status of King Kong has been used to create original works without the need for approvals, the difficulty of avoiding copyright pitfalls remains a sticky issue. Whether it’s Popeye with no spinach or Winnie the Pooh with no shirt, these issues are hard to reconcile with the idea of a character being truly free to use. The original King Kong film will be entering the public domain in 2029, which will undoubtedly bring with it much renewed interest in the character that created the kaiju genre.

Of course, we can’t deny the great irony that Universal Pictures and Nintendo have had several collaborations since then: Such as The Wizard film in 1989 (which features the King Kong Encounter) and being the company that produces the Mario animated films. Neither company is quite the same as it was – in Universal’s case having gone through many ownership changes – but it’s an amusing capstone to the story that it would be under the Universal banner that Donkey Kong received his most successful on-screen appearance.

As it comes to video games, this trial also has its legacy. While the specific aspects of law at play didn’t have much to do with electronic entertainment, the judgment was a huge moment for the legitimacy of video games vis a vis film in the sense of corporate power.

One of the often missed legacies was how this trial factored into Nintendo’s business dealings. Nintendo of America saw the capitulation of both Coleco and Atari as black marks on their relationship. Both companies had to pay a higher royalty for their rights to Donkey Kong Jr., which is attributed in the trial to be due to their capitulation to Universal – also resulting in Nintendo suing Atari for the unpaid royalties. According to Howard Lincoln, after that license Coleco was essentially barred from receiving any further licenses from Nintendo.

These bad feelings also seem to have played a role in Nintendo’s decision to go it alone in the U.S. market. In the book Game Over, it’s reported that Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi had an animated confrontation with Arnold Greenberg of Coleco over a dispute related to Atari’s computer rights to Donkey Kong. However, according to Lincoln’s testimony, this confrontation largely had to do with Yamauchi’s displeasure over their stance in the lawsuit. Coleco did later sue Universal for damages related to the case, but no further dealings were ever made with Nintendo. What this reframing of events means for the scuttled Atari deal for the Famicom is still an open question.

Of course, for Nintendo, this was their establishment as a legal force to be reckoned with. Having never been a particularly litigious company in Japan, Nintendo of America would be reinforced by its legal authority. Over the course of the suit, Howard Lincoln moved from a legal consultant to vice president of Nintendo of America as Minoru Arakawa’s right hand man. His legal acumen helped the company navigate the complicated waters of enormous success – as often in defense as on the attack – which reshaped the landscape of video games in the United States.

Then there’s John Kirby. He continued to serve as Nintendo’s chief trial attorney in their subsequent legal battles: Defending themselves against Atari Games, Atari Corp, Magnavox, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as well as suing the likes of Lewis-Galoob and others. As a result of this case, Kirby was given an exclusive right to the name “Donkey Kong” for sailboats, and was later immortalized as the inspiration for the name of the character Kirby.

Though we can squeeze much out of the remaining case files, the original trial no longer exists. In the process of legal clean-up in the past few decades, many original court records have been destroyed. Accessibility remains an issue for many court records, usually requiring physical proximity to a National Archives office and sometimes with the requirement of purchasing printed copies rather than being able to photograph originals. In some cases – like Atari Corp v. Nintendo – companies have even been able to seal off access to these records.

Many of these cases provide incredibly valuable bastions of information for historical purposes. I’ve previously written on how the Magnavox court files fundamentally reshape the Ralph Baer-centric narrative of the Odyssey. The Video Game History Foundation recently put together a video about new revelations around the launch of the NES, partially drawn from legal papers. Dungeons & Dragons researchers were recently blessed with access to an original draft of the game preserved in court records. These dusty legal papers have preserved many facts, contemporaneous opinions, and stories that enrich our understanding of this history – despite their often dry presentation. Should you be one who wants to find out even more about the case, check all the files out on the Internet Archive.

If you want to help in these efforts of preserving legal documents, read this article I wrote on the subject – and of course join us at Gaming Alexandria! Thanks so much to Norm for taking the time over 6 years ago(!) to scan these materials while they still exist. We hope this story is as exciting to you as it is to us!