Thumbnail has the same energyExactly the same picture.
From the Article
Many of the purge’s casualties were honorable Americans whose revulsion toward the genocide of the Palestinian people had professional costs. The first publicized victim came on October 8, 2023, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced he was cutting off all food, fuel, and electricity to the “human animals” of Gaza, and a website owned by the daughter of a centimillionaire New Jersey developer fired its NBA blogger for posting, “Solidarity with Palestine always.”
On social media and group chats, the billionaires raised funds to hire a private detective team to assist the NYPD crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters and reward the gang of thugs who violently attacked peaceful protesters at UCLA with sticks, clubs, chemical sprays, and a backpack full of poisoned mice. International humanitarian organizations with operations in Gaza suffered as well, with the World Food Program reporting a near halving of its fundraising haul in 2023; a colleague who works in fundraising for UNICEF told me the group’s most loyal mega-donors would not touch “anything Gaza” with a ten-foot pole.
This was nominally about Israel, but it also always seemed obvious that it wasn’t principally about Israel at all. At its heart, the billionaire revolt was the expression of a broader dissatisfaction with Joe Biden that was most surely rooted in the real, substantial, and (in the post–Cold War neoliberal era) unprecedented things his administration was quietly (too quietly!) doing for working people, small-business owners, and the proliferating subsistence entrepreneur class that falls somewhere in the middle. It sued Amazon for squeezing sellers to the bone while manipulating prices ever higher, Albertsons and Kroger for conspiring to gouge shoppers by littering the country with dead strip centers where supermarkets once stood, Live Nation for indenturing a generation of young musicians and turning tickets to concerts and sports events into luxury goods, Welsh Carson (the most powerful private equity firm in health care) for gouging hospital patients and suppressing the wages of anesthesiologists in multiple states, and more. It even got a court to label Google a monopolist.
This stuff was extremely popular, and Democratic leaders never talked about it, likely because it pissed off the donor class—which is of course the very reason they should have been talking about nothing else.
Also they weren’t very careful with that donor money. They could afford to lose it, if they’d cut spending on various kinds of stupid advertising. Half the media would turn against them, but that’d have upsides too - in the exact area of swaying Trump votes, both those voting contrarian and those voting for destructive change.
Reported for “Cabal” being an anti-Semitic dog whistle, which it can be:
https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/cabal
But that doesn’t appear to be the use case here.
It does appear to be the case. This article is peppered excessively with antisemitic dog whistles. One or two could be a coincidence but this is something else entirely.
- “Cabal”
- “billionaire class”
- “Santa Claus” (depicting a literal war on Christmas)
- “imaginary surge in “campus antisemitism.””
The entire premise of the article is that evil Zionists sabotaged the American left and manipulated the election, which is itself an antisemitic trope.
The whole point of using dog whistles is to create a sort of plausible deniability. I’m sorry, but in this case it seems like they slipped one by you.
I am copying a reply I made to another post:
…no.
The DNC brain trust thought they could get away with ignoring an absolutely fucking HUGE part of their base. And they were fucking WRECKED for it.
Trump got just about the same number of votes as he did in the last election. Harris got 11M less votes than Biden got. ELEVEN. MILLION. PEOPLE. STAYED THE FUCK HOME. BECAUSE THEY SAW THE ESTABLISHMENT CIRCLEJERK. AND HARRIS FUCKING LEANED INTO IT. AND IGNORED THE VERY FUCKING REAL LIVED EXPERIENCE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS GETTING HOLLOWED OUT, AND THE LOWER CLASS CONTINUING TO GET CRUSHED TO DEATH.
And now we get to listen to pundits and DNC leadership and Biden admin people and Harris campaign people circlejerk themselves about how it wasn’t their fault, it was those goddamn progressives and the stupid Arab Americans who cared about Gaza too much.
Genuinely: fuck all the way off with that narrative. the Democratic Party snatched this defeat from the jaws of victory. There was a path to victory. They simply didn’t fucking take it.
I don’t like the phrasing here. The Democratic party could have done better. They weren’t forced not to. They chose to support genocide, they chose to run a dementia patient, they chose to appoint a wildly unpopular candidate, they chose to appeal to the center right, and they chose to run without clear economic policies. I genuinely believe they could have won while still supporting genocide if they didn’t do everything so awfully. I mean seriously, the Cheneys? Ffs
This is severe cope. The democrats are not being controlled by big money they are big money, they chose this and failed us. We don’t need to continue apologizing for them and pretending they have our best interest at heart. We need to abandon them just as they abandoned us here.
