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I would have bet money the dems would do everything in their power to fight positive change their voters want, but for Israel to be the canary in the coal mine tanking popularity of candidates? Never would have guessed that, I guess it shows just how brutal their genocide campaign has been.
I would’ve agreed with you until very recently. The unpopularity of the Israel lobby has been becoming a much bigger thing in the last year or so, and, while it doesn’t surprise me that this is the Canary in the coal mine as you put it, it does surprise me that it’s starting to happen now, instead of closer to the midterms.
As soon as it kicked off I knew we’d be here. They really didn’t care, or understand, how badly this would affect their global image. They burned about 50% of their goodwill in the first year, and it only got worse. Just like Brexit and trump, obvious horrible decisions that don’t get stopped.
Lol Mayo Pete is hilariously unsuited to this moment yet establishment dems think he is perfect.
Take, for example, Pete Buttigieg. In a recent interview with Pod Save America, the usually eloquent Buttigieg was asked a series of straightforward questions. Would he support restricting aid to Israel? Would he recognize the State of Palestine, as other G7 countries have done recently? Would Israel’s behavior finally be a factor in how we treat the country? Instead of having a ready answer, Buttigieg delivered vague platitudes about moral conscience and needing to support Israel’s security. In particular, Buttigieg told Favreau, “I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” It was an odd choice, to say the least, to call an apartheid state a friend and talk of genocide as somethig akin to self-harm.
Get lost Pete and take Gavin Newsom with you.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, for his part, fared even worse when podcaster Van Latham asked him about AIPAC in a recent interview, responding by short-circuiting and saying the question was “interesting” a full seven times.
The thing that infuriates me the most is the smugness of these people to act surprised, as if this WASN'T a decades old dam that just broke that we all knew would break. Adapt or get the fuck out of the way, stop acting like the flood waters hurtling at you are something your wealthy friends can magically make go away and then being genuinely shocked when you are consumed by a rush of public backlash.
Buttigieg told Favreau, “I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” It was an odd choice, to say the least, to call an apartheid state a friend and talk of genocide as somethig akin to self-harm.
This is standard American foreign policy, whether we're defending Pinochet in Chile or Park in Korea or Milei in Argentina or Marcos in the Philippines or Modi in India.
There's no limit to the atrocities you can commit, so long as you operate as a forward base for the American military.
Adapt or get the fuck out of the way, stop acting like the flood waters hurtling at you are something your wealthy friends can magically make go away and then being genuinely shocked when you are consumed by a rush of public backlash.
Public backlash comes and goes. But the oligarchy endures. Better for American liberals to stay friendly with Israel until they can sweep this genocide under the rug and refocus angry American voters on China or Iran or Mexico again.
Public backlash comes and goes. But the oligarchy endures. Better for American liberals to stay friendly with Israel until they can sweep this genocide under the rug and refocus angry American voters on China or Iran or Mexico again.
I understand your cynicism, but this is just Not Going To Happen. The US electorate is still pissed about the Iraq War and if anything the Palestinian Genocide has cemented in the minds of people here that they cannot trust politicians who will not openly speak about the Palestinian Genocide as a Genocide. No, this is not an issue people in the US are going to budge on or soften on, rather it is the opposite, the Palestinian Genocide has become a litmus test for whether a candidate serves their constituents or whether a candidate is an unserious corporate shill.
Just to elaborate, even Republicans are pissed about the Iraq War. They pretend it was all the Democrats fault for voting for it in Congress (which they did), or that the Tea Party sweapt away all the RINOs who were responsible (which it did not). In any case, it's hard to find anyone in 2025 who still thinks Iraq 2003 was a good idea.
Which is also kinda funny considering the outcome in Iraq has been objectively better than Afghanistan. You could argue that America ultimately accomplished its strategic goals in Iraq but not Afghanistan.
The US electorate is still pissed about the Iraq War
The joke is that you had Dems defending the war all through the '00s and even the '10s. It got so bad that Republicans were able to outflank them by mouthing even the most menial anti-war rhetoric.
if anything the Palestinian Genocide has cemented in the minds of people here that they cannot trust politicians who will not openly speak about the Palestinian Genocide as a Genocide
You have a cohort of Americans who are genuinely horrified at our participation in a genocide. But they've been systematically marginalized, stripped of their political autonomy, and silenced in public and private media. Meanwhile, you have a very wealthy, very influential, and very fascist corporate oligarchs with both a material interest (harvesting natural resources through slave labor) and an ideological interest (rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem because it'll bring about a magical utopia) in waging these wars.
They're buying up major media outlets, orchestrating police raids on protest groups, and monopolizing every elected office through a buyout of the party system.
No, this is not an issue people in the US are going to budge on or soften on
We spent 23 years in Afghanistan. And the primary reason we withdrew wasn't domestic opposition to the occupation. It was our soured relationship with Pakistan, which provided the primary inroad to resupply our main base in Kabul. At the same time, we were escalating conflicts in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, which had stretched our - extensive but not unlimited - resources to their limit.
And since we left, the US media has bombarded the public with "The Taliban is eating babies!" scare stories in an effort to poison the notion of a future retreat from a primarily Muslim country. US voters don't need to budge. Nobody currently in contention for office appears interested in ratcheting back the national security state. Nobody is talking about "Defund ICE" anymore, much less defunding the police. The anti-war marches of the '00s/'10s are fully extinguished. Even the Gaza Genocide protests are just shooting galleries for Canary Mission and other reactionary groups, looking to get people arrested, fired, or deported.
Palestine is just one more horror story in a multi-generational bloodbath. Americans continue to be the sheep arguing over which wolf to invite to dinner.
Because they execute US policy that US citizens find distasteful.
Democrat voters have consistently opposed israel's genocide since before the election and only now are politicians shocked that they're experiencing consequences from obeying their money instead of their base.
Not only are people like newsom and buttigieg just gaping voids of amoral ambition that cannot be trusted, but the system that's supposed to direct their ambition towards what the public want has clearly not been working for their entire career. If it had been, they wouldn't be so surprised by this.
Maybe it's the people I talk to, but has the Israel thing ever really been all that popular with the Democratic base?
I just assumed it was the corporate news masquerading as "liberal media" that kept that facade going....
Supporting Israel was never really popular in the sense of being something that the Democratic base was clamoring for, but now it's become so unpopular that it's something candidates feel the need to hide or run away from.
Yeah, I think it's mostly because the facade cannot be propped up by the corporate media any more. It's so glaringly obvious that calling everyone that criticizes Israel's foreign policy and America's unwavering support for it "antisemitic" just isn't going to fly any more and that most people openly point and laugh at the attempts now...
I guess Chomsky was considered outside the acceptable parameters of discussion in the corporate media/"liberal media"/MSM, but he has been pointing out what outliers both Israel and the U.S. are and have been for things like UN votes for decade upon decade.
I'd be surprised if a majority of Democratic voters even know who Chomsky is, and I'm sure quite a bit less have read him or have seen him talk, but even those that haven't probably have had their own thoughts about blind support of Israel maintaining an open-air prison. Out of fear of being called an "anti-semite", maybe 20-25 years ago, they might have kept that to themselves. I think the 'net started to change that quite some time ago, though.
It sure is interesting to see someone like Seinfeld still floating along on the vapors of the old paradigm, though.
I tend to talk with people at the dog park. They are by and large very very stupid.
While I'm glad that AIPAC is facing a lot of backlash, publicly, the problem is AIPAC as an org doesn't really matter. It can rebrand and become something like "The Middle East Peace PAC" and do literally the same thing, fund the same congressmen and ensure the same support for Israel from both parties.
Got to focus on the bigger issue of politicians taking big donor bucks to support Israel rather than the names of the particular vehicles for that money.
This website is cancer on mobile.
Ugh I know. I don't understand how generally classy magazine like the Nation lets its mobile viewing experience turn into such garbage.