US PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN IN KYIV, UKRAINE ON FEBRUARY 20, 2023. (PHOTO: PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE VIA APA IMAGES)
Biden staffers admit what we all knew: White House lied about ceasefire efforts
Originally published: Mondoweiss on May 2, 2025 by Mitchell Plitnick (more by Mondoweiss) | (Posted May 07, 2025)
There were many disheartening moments during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign for progressives who support Palestinian rights. Yet few were quite as deflating as that moment when the ostensibly progressive, leading member of The Squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood at the podium at the Democratic National Convention and told the audience that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.”
We knew she was lying. AOC herself knew she was lying. But it was just the message that the crowd—who were more than eager to show their support for the Democrats despite the party’s utter refusal to allow even the most conciliatory and moderate Palestinian voice to be heard—wanted to hear, and they ate it up.
The utterly shameless nature of the lie has now been confirmed by no less than nine officials from Joe Biden’s administration and reported on by Israel’s own Channel 13 news program, Hamakor, which, aptly, translates as “The Source.”
No push for a ceasefire
Various members of the Biden administration, including prominent figures such as former U.S. Ambassadors to Israel Tom Nides and Jack Lew and former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, discussed their frustrations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yet they, like Biden and Harris, were unwavering in their support for Israel despite their clear dislike of Netanyahu.
Perhaps the most damning statement came from former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog, who said,
God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.
It’s hard to imagine it being any clearer than that. Once and for all, we need to lay to rest the notion that the Biden administration ever did anything to secure a ceasefire.
Sullivan summed it up perfectly:
Having the Prime Minister of Israel question the support of the United States after all that we did, do I think that that is a right and proper thing for a friend to do? I do not…And I will always stand firm behind the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself and the United States has a responsibility to help Israel. And I’ll do that no matter who the prime minister is, no matter what they say about me or the U.S. or the president I work for.
Sullivan, like Biden, Harris, and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken made this attitude plain during his time in office. The Biden administration did all of this for Netanyahu despite the fact that the Israeli prime minister made no secret of his support for Donald Trump, and that it was undeniable that Democratic voters disapproved of Biden’s blind support for Israel.
Ilan Goldenberg held several advisory roles in the Biden administration, mostly in the office of Vice President Harris, for whose campaign he later served as Director of Jewish Outreach and Policy Advisor. He is currently the Senior Vice President and Chief Policy Officer at J Street. He made it clear to Hamakor that the administration understood perfectly well that Netanyahu was dodging any effort at stopping the genocide in Gaza (though he would call it “the war”).
Goldenberg lamented the fact that any discussion about an endgame in Gaza was obfuscated by Netanyahu and ended without any results. “If they’re never going to do this, it doesn’t matter what the outcome is, Hamas is still going to control Gaza,” Goldenberg told Hamakor.
You’re just killing and destroying for the sake of killing and destroying. But you’re not building an alternative.
This, of course, is familiar to anyone who has been criticizing Israel’s genocide from the start, as it is exactly what we have been saying Israel was doing. Goldenberg’s statements erase any possible argument that Biden and Harris genuinely wanted a ceasefire but were duped by Netanyahu. They knew. They simply didn’t care.
Falsifying reports to Congress
In February 2024, the White House issued a memorandum, NSM-20, titled “National Security Memorandum on Safeguards and Accountability With Respect to Transferred Defense Articles and Defense Services.” The purpose of the memo was to order the State and Defense Departments to report to Congress within 90 days and every year after on any country engaged in active conflict that was receiving military support from the United States. The reports were to confirm that U.S. law was being upheld, and specifically that American arms were not being used and recipient countries were not engaging in violations of human rights or international law.
Israel wasn’t named specifically, and the memo applied to all recipients of U.S. aid, but there was no mistaking that it was intended to mollify the growing criticism of American blind support for the genocide in Gaza.
In May, the report, as it pertains to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, was due. After some delay, the report was finally submitted, much to the shock of Stacy Gilbert, a twenty-year State Department lawyer, who resigned as a result of it.
The NSM-20 report, as it was called, stated not only that there was “insufficient evidence” linking U.S. arms to specific human rights violations but, even more alarmingly, that the State Department did not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance” in Gaza.
Anyone paying attention at the time knew that this was a blatant lie. Gilbert told Hamakor that the report was “shocking in its mendacity,” adding:
Everyone knows that is not true.
This was her position when she quit State over the report last May. At that time, she said,
There is consensus among the humanitarian community on [Israel obstructing aid into Gaza]. It is absolutely the opinion of the humanitarian subject matter experts in the State Department, and not just in my bureau—people who look at this from the intelligence community and from other bureaus. I would be very hard pressed to think of anyone who has said [Israeli obstruction] is not an issue. That’s why I object to that report saying that Israel is not blocking humanitarian assistance. That is patently false.
Twenty-year State Department veterans don’t make statements like that lightly, even after they leave.
Biden officials also spoke about how Netanyahu obstructed ceasefire deals that would have freed the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, fearing the end of the genocide and what that would mean for him personally and politically.
Biden’s efforts to broker Israeli-Saudi normalization were similarly frustrated by Netanyahu’s refusal to offer even a glimmer of hope for Palestinians. There were also views expressed to Hamakor that Netanyahu didn’t want to give Biden that victory, preferring that a Saudi deal be a Trump accomplishment.
It all paints a very clear picture of Biden going out of his way, enduring humiliations and insults, even breaking U.S. law and violating his own orders to facilitate a genocide in Gaza. It comes as little surprise that figures like Sullivan seemed to feel no regret, much less remorse, over allowing Netanyahu to run roughshod over them. The lack of concern about Palestinian lives is palpable here.
None of this comes as any surprise to advocates for Palestinian rights, who were arguing that this was exactly what was going on from the start. But the fact that it is now being so clearly confirmed by those who were responsible is important.
Accountability for Democrats
The importance of these confirmations was underlined by a very simple tweet from Rep. Ilhan Omar. She shared the Dropsite News report on the Hamakor interviews and commented,
We all knew they weren’t working tirelessly on a ceasefire and it was all a lie.
Her use of the word “tirelessly” was clearly intentional. It was the buzzword that was used by Biden, but even more by Kamala Harris on the campaign trail. It was the word that AOC used in lying to cover for Harris.
This isn’t Omar trying to “get” Harris, much less AOC. On the contrary, she is actually continuing the efforts of many Palestine solidarity activists in and around the Democratic party who were desperately trying to get Harris and other center-right Democrats to understand that their lies about Gaza were sanitizing a genocide and putting Donald Trump back in office.
It wasn’t only the policy on Gaza, which was opposed by a vast swath of American voters who might have been convinced otherwise to vote for Harris and prevent Trump’s return; it was the utter disrespect for the wishes of her own constituents that Harris and her fellow travelers were displaying.
Now, Gaza has been destroyed. The number of dead, both from direct Israeli attacks and from the miserable living conditions Israel is certainly far greater than the current death toll of more than 52,000. Donald Trump has doubled down on support for the genocide that Biden and Harris initiated and stepped up the game by openly calling for the complete ethnic cleansing of the Strip.
Whatever the future holds for the U.S. role in the region, it is virtually certain that there will be a role. As such, American advocates for Palestinians need choices that are better than having to decide between a hateful, racist Trump and the actual architects of the policy of full partnership in genocide, Biden and Harris.
Ocasio-Cortez has a very spotty track record on Palestine. Yet she also has a better one than most of Congress, a truly damning, if sadly routine, statement on the American political scene. She is currently trying to build support for her progressive leadership by touring the United States with Bernie Sanders (who is perhaps the best in the Senate on Palestine, though he still falls well short of a genuinely ethical or practical stance).
AOC needs to be supported for her courageous stance last year when she named what was happening in Gaza a “genocide.” Yet she must also be held accountable for lying for Harris about the latter’s efforts to secure a ceasefire.
Politics is a cynical arena. Political leaders who truly reflect the desires of their constituents are less often presented to the people than made by them. Many noted, in response to Dropsite’s reporting on Hamakor’s interviews, that AOC lied about ceasefire efforts to protect Harris last summer. She needs to be shown the error of that action, but not discarded out of hand for it.
Ocasio-Cortez has been caught red-handed, and her lies have been exposed by the very people she lied to protect. That can be used to press her to become someone who, if perhaps not everything that proponents of Palestinian rights might want in a Democratic leader, can start to blaze a political trail toward a U.S. policy that respects the humanity, and, more importantly, the rights of the Palestinian people.
This is almost hysterical, we are now to hold AOC's feet to the fire, because that worked so well with Obama, I guess.
Democrats lie, water is wet...
These fucking people hang on to their 'lesser-evilism' regardless of how often they are shit on. What does it take? They ain't stupid, perhaps class interest?
I've got some 'accountability for the Dems:
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Corruption, Lies, Biden's Health and Trump's Victory
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 14 May 2025
President Biden and President Obama during a campaign fundraiser at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles in 2024. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images.
The same corporate media talking heads who told us to ignore Biden’s failing health are now cashing in with books that may reveal political cover ups but that also cover up their own role in facilitating corruption and inevitably a defeat.
In 2020, this columnist and many other people observed that Joe Biden was not a healthy man. His confusion and his strange and angry outbursts, such as telling a voter who questioned his position on the second amendment that he was, “Full of shit,” are now legendary. Robert Hur, appointed special counsel investigating whether Biden had improperly held classified materials, not only described Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” but gave examples of troubling lapses for a man who was president and expected to run for office again.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden's memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ("if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?"), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ("in 2009, am I still Vice President?"). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
But in 2020 and again in 2024 before his calamitous debate with Donald Trump, the Biden team assured the public that he only had a stutter. Despite the fact that his decades in public service never indicated the presence of a speech impediment, the public were reassured that if they thought they noticed anything else, they should not believe their lying eyes. Corporate media amplified the narrative and ridiculed anyone who attempted to counter it.
Now some of those same individuals who denounced anyone who raised questions about Biden’s health are writing articles and books revealing what they previously tried to hide. Jake Tapper of CNN argued on the air with Lara Trump when she noted Biden’s cognitive decline. Tapper accused Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law of mocking what he called Biden’s stutter and added she had “no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
Now Tapper has co-authored a book which focuses on the decline he said others were not qualified to discuss. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again is also a cover up by Tapper, who was assisted by others in corporate media who supported Biden’s re-election and who had an incentive to downplay what the public observed despite their efforts.
Joe Biden’s problems didn’t start in 2024. They began with the process rigged by the Democratic Party establishment in 2020 and the oligarchs who gave them their marching orders. But Biden’s candidacy presented problems for the democrats. He was always a right winger, who made sure that Clinton’s Crime Bill put Black people in jail and that student loan debt could not be discharged in bankruptcy. Given that he would sometimes speak of a “racial jungle ” and other very problematic language, it is perhaps understandable that his behavior in later years didn’t seem to be very different from what had been observed about him previously. As for representing the right wing of the party, his role there made him attractive as a running mate for Barack Obama in 2008. Obama needed a white conservative counterweight to his false but well orchestrated image as a progressive. In 2020 they had the conservative democrat they wanted and they succeeded in getting him elected.
Biden managed to win in 2020, but the behind the scenes maneuvering needed for a re-election in 2024 was too much for him or for corrupt operatives, including Obama, to handle. The dishonest way in which he became president couldn’t work a second time, considering that he lied about being “the most progressive president since FDR.” Instead he lived up to his promise to the party’s rich donors. "We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it's all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one's standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change."
Therein lay a problem for voters, who did want fundamental change. They didn’t get the Build Back Better legislation they were promised or the continuation of covid pandemic era programs such as a child tax credit and increased eligibility for medicaid and SNAP benefits. Instead they saw a faltering man, sometimes literally, who would only commit himself to arming Ukraine and Israel and breaking a railroad workers’ strike.
No one was willing, as the saying goes, to tell grandpa he had to turn over his car keys. They hoped lightning would strike twice and that Biden, with all his weaknesses, could be re-elected. When they should have had a primary to give voters a choice, they instead chose to cover up what could not stay hidden. While democrats were subverting the desire for change, Donald Trump emerged from the republican primaries as the nominee and the clear favorite of his party’s members.
Now we are being told that in fact Obama had to lead Biden off the stage after a fundraiser in Los Angeles when previously we were warned about “deep fake ” videos showing a confused president wandering off as if he were a toddler. Tapper and others are cashing in on democrats’ angst after living through another Trump victory. But the apologists are playing another role too.
Real journalists would reveal the extent of oligarchic control of the U.S. political system. That control made the losing effort to keep a failing man afloat seem like the best choice. Opening up the process would mean the possibility of dealing with another Bernie Sanders, a milquetoast faux progressive, but still anathema to the wealthy donors who ultimately forced Biden to stand down.
The corporate media work with the democrats to ensure that the public’s choices remain limited to the favorites of the party establishment, who regardless of what else they claim, will maintain neo-liberalism at home and imperialism around the world. They are still playing that role of cleaning up for the party with these revelations which tell anyone who was paying attention what they already knew. The Tappers of the world can hide the truth or reveal it, but they remain on the gravy train. Rich donors have been picking the nominees and putting their thumbs on the scale of the process for decades. Sometimes they win and sometimes, as in the 2024 election, their machinations blow up in their faces.
The incompetence driven by corrupt wheeling and dealing didn’t end with kicking Biden out, but continued with Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Obama and Nancy Pelosi did not want Biden to endorse Harris. But congressman James Clyburn wanted Biden to endorse her and Harris pressed the case for herself. Biden endorsed her, an unenthusiastic Obama took five days to do so, and she went on to be a $1 billion loser in November.
The illusion of democracy in the United States is a very dangerous one. Millions of people are told that their votes matter, but in reality the decisions are made long before they cast a ballot. The story of the 2024 election did not end the way the Democratic Party wing of the duopoly wanted. Some of their methods may change but top-down decision making will not change.
Prostate Cancer Has A Right To Exist. Biden’s Tumor Has A Right To Defend Itself.
Biden’s malignant metastatic tumor must be given everything it needs to defend itself from unprovoked attacks by radical oncologists.
Caitlin Johnstone
May 19, 2025
❖
Joe Biden reportedly has an aggressive form of prostate cancer which has spread to his bones.
On this day we must all stand in solidarity with Biden’s cancerous growth. Prostate cancer has a right to exist. Biden’s malignant metastatic tumor must be given everything it needs to defend itself from unprovoked attacks by radical oncologists.
❖
None of the people wishing Biden well today have ever really stood for anything. Nobody who chides those who are celebrating his cancer diagnosis actually cares about human beings. They inhabit a different moral universe from the rest of us. One where politeness and decorum matter more than human lives. One where it’s more important to preserve one’s political image in the eyes of the establishment than it is to oppose an active genocide. One where a rude tweet about a blood-soaked monster provokes more outrage than daily footage of children ripped to shreds by western-supplied munitions.
Those who are applauding Biden’s tumor today are obviously not saying that cancer is good. They are saying that Biden’s victims matter more than the rules of imperial etiquette. They are saying the mountains of human corpses he created matter more than protecting the feelings of those who believe he’s a swell guy. They are rejecting the empire’s demand that they dehumanize and dismiss all those people who were killed, crippled, displaced, traumatized and bereaved by the abuses of this fugitive from The Hague in order to demonstrate docility and obedience to their masters.
When Biden finally dies there will be people falling all over themselves to sanctify his image and grieve him as a kind and beneficent leader, and there will be those lining up to piss on his grave. The latter group will be of far greater moral quality than the former, no matter what they try to tell you.
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Israel has greatly escalated its murderous aggressions in Gaza in its efforts to fully capture the enclave and empty it of its inhabitants.
Opposing Israel’s western-backed genocide in Gaza is the bare-minimum requirement for anyone to take you seriously on any other issue, in the same way nobody cares what a neo-Nazi thinks about healthcare or what someone who wants to abolish age of consent laws thinks about taxes.
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Israel and its apologists permanently lost the argument as soon as they started telling you it’s racist to oppose genocide. From that point on there was no reason to listen to them or engage them in any way.
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They’re trying to tell you that genocide is normal. THEY’RE TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT GENOCIDE IS NORMAL. Reject the mainstream western worldview. Everything you’ve been taught about the world is a lie.
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Saying the US is “complicit” in the Gaza genocide is like saying Hitler was complicit in the Holocaust. This is the USA’s genocide as much as it is Israel’s.
If you saw one man holding someone down while another man slashes their throat, you wouldn’t say you saw one murderer and one complicit bystander, you would say you saw someone being murdered by two men.
If you drove your friend to the house of someone you hate, helped him break in, tackled your victim together, handed your friend a knife, held your victim down while your friend slit their throat, and then drove the getaway car and helped your friend dispose of the evidence, nobody would describe you as merely “complicit” in that crime. If you were caught, you would both be charged with premeditated homicide, and everyone would view you as a murderer.
The US — and to a lesser extent its western allies — have been actively participating in this genocide since day one. They’ve been supplying the weapons. They’ve been providing military intelligence. They’ve been backing Israel in the UN. They’ve been bombing Yemen off and on to stop it from imposing a blockade in an effort to rescue Gaza. They’ve been providing political and diplomatic cover to ensure that the genocide can continue uninterrupted without any consequences.
Israeli military insiders have openly acknowledged that this genocide would have been impossible without Washington’s backing. Both Biden and Trump have had the ability to end this nightmare at any time with a single phone call threatening to withhold aid if peace isn’t made. Instead of making that call, they have continued knowingly and actively participating in the crime. Holding onto the struggling victim while the knife blade comes down.
The argument for the US-led world order is over. It’s done. There is no coming back from this. That they would commit history’s first live-streamed genocide in full view of the entire world means they cannot be left to lead the world any longer. The globe-spanning power structure that is loosely centralized around Washington must be brought down. Humanity has no future if these monsters are left in charge.
Temerity, Tartuffery, and Toxic Identity Reductionism…the Latest Democrat Party Hoggwash
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright 21 May 2025
The Democratic Party would rather silence critics like Hogg than fix its own rot. Their reliance on Black Misleaders to do the dirty work exposes once again that the Democrats care more about power than progress.
When David Hogg announced that he would actively seek to challenge certain House Democrat incumbents during the 2026 primary election cycle, responses ranged from support, to shock, to chagrin. Making Hogg’s proclamation to, “replace asleep at the wheel Democrats, ” even more controversial is that it was announced just months after he was elected as a Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the executive arm of the Democrat party. Hogg also expressed his intention to raise $20 million through his Leaders we Deserve group to challenge incumbent Democrats who hold “safe seats” as part of his overarching mechanism to establish a new generation of Democrat Party leaders.
I give Mr. Hogg props for his temerity as it’s clear the current base of Democrat party leadership has exposed itself as the antithesis of a proper opposition party. Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer exemplified this most recently when he not only capitulated to President Trump , but also mustered enough senate Democrats to deliver the requisite number of votes to hand the president a continuing budget resolution victory that essentially amounts to a blank check and red carpet rollout to continue his policy agenda. But more so than props, I must extend gratitude to Mr. Hogg as his actions have provided another great elucidation of the Democrat party’s grand tartuffery that commenced almost immediately after his intraparty insurgency.
Last month, newly elected DNC Chairman, Ken Martin, reacted to Hogg’s announcement with a series of statements that can only be characterized as a cauldron of contradictions that both vindicate Mr. Hogg’s aspirations and reveal the insidious nature of the Democrat party’s modus operandi. For instance, Mr. Martin, in response to Hogg, noted, “If you want to challenge incumbents, you’re more than free to do that, but just not as an officer of the DNC, because our job is to be neutral arbiters,” he continued, “We can’t be both the referee and also the player at the same time. You have to make a decision.” This is quite a revelation or, at the very least, an ostensible shift in policy as the Democrats didn't act as players and referees contemporaneously as much as they changed the game entirely while it was being played in 2016 when the malfeasance against Bernie Sanders was so profound that then DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, who was caught in the act of tipping the primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton , had to be quarantined from the DNC convention in Philadelphia.
Adding to the Hogg pile on was Nebraska Democrat Party Chairwoman, Jane Kleeb, who was recently elevated to Martin’s previous position, President of the Association of State Democratic Committees. For her part, Kleeb sternly reminded Hogg, “We hope that he realizes that he got elected to be an officer of the DNC, which means that we remain neutral.” Kleeb added that many state parties prohibit “putting our thumb on the scale” during Democratic primaries. This coming from a Democrat party operative who was not only allegedly putting her thumb on the scale during a primary, but also dipping her toe into the waters of the opposing party when it was reported that she was in communication with a Republican mayoral candidate who was running against a Democrat . And, of course, neither Martin or Kleeb demonstrated any semblance of chagrin when the DNC refused to allow candidates challenging Biden during the 2024 primaries to even appear on the ballot in certain states .
But none of this should come as a surprise for a party that once, literally, asserted they have every right to favor one candidate over another despite any party rules since the DNC is a “private corporation.” To this end David Hogg is the latest individual to dissipate the opacity of the myriad derelictions ensconced in the DNA of the DNC…and he will likely pay a price for his insolence. In fact, in another example of the Democrats changing the rules whenever they like, be it during the game or well after it to arrive at the outcome of its liking, the DNC announced it would be voiding the result of a vote that elected Hogg as a DNC Vice Chairman citing “procedural concerns.” Nevermind that the charges of “procedural concerns” were brought by a DNC operative who lost her run to be a DNC Vice Chair, or that the charges were brought after Hogg’s announcement to primary incumbent Democrats - it’s all just a coincidence, right?
Time and time again when the Democrats can’t sell their charades to the larger public, a public that puts the approval rating of the party at an abysmal 27 percent, which is lower than Trump’s, they turn to their damage control ethos of “send in the clowns,” which in their case is actually, “send in the sellouts.” Enter the tactic of toxic identity reductionism.
Malcolm Kenyatta, a Black Democrat from Pennsylvania was also recently elected as a Vice Chair. But as far too many Black Democrats from the great Charles Barron to Jesse Jackson know all too well, what the Democrats give to the negroes, they can and will quickly take away. Due to the “procedural concerns” that will likely cost Hogg his Vice Chair role, Kenyatta will likely lose his. You’d think that this would cause Kenyatta to establish camaraderie with Hogg, but think again - this is the Democrat party after all, and their alabaster puppet masters have an uncanny ability to keep their negroes in line, even when they are seemingly in the midst of being subjected to demonstrable injustices.
For his part, Kenyatta did not only accept being a fall guy in the malaise of DNC vindictiveness, but he also seems happy to act as one of their attack dogs. While acknowledging that he was “frustrated” that the DNC will be holding new Vice Chair elections, in the same breath he went as far to challenge Hogg’s veracity insinuating, “David has a very casual relationship with the truth.” But Kenyatta is not the only negro operative to jump on Hogg, the DNC called in plenty of reinforcements including some of the highest ranking officials in the party as well as some of their melanated talking heads.
When asked about Hogg’s plans, top House Negro, Hakeem Jeffries noted his opposition while retorting, “I look forward to standing behind every single Democratic incumbent, from the most progressive to the most centrist and all points in between.” Quite curious coming from a man who started a Political Action Committee (PAC,), Team Blue, with the expressed goal of challenging “progressive” Democrats like those who are members of the now all but defunct “Squad.” This on top of the fact that Jeffries is one of the largest recipients of AIPAC’s blood money, who consistently spend millions of dollars to target pro-Palestine Democrat incumbents like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush who were both vanquished during the 2024 election cycle. For Jeffries it’s clear that selling out is much easier than selling abject hypocrisy.
And it doesn’t stop with Jeffries. In a recent interview with Hogg, Dem Negro Elder, Donna Brazile exemplified with negro doublespeak looks like in full force with some sprinkles of toxic identity politics to top it off. While offering measured praise for Hogg, Brazile also admonished him when quipping, “My position is many of these so-called safe blue seats, and I can get in trouble, many of them are seats that women and minorities finally had an opportunity to come and sit in because there were no seats at the table for us. So before you start wiping clean the menu and the plates and the seats, be very careful.” But where was Brazile when the aforementioned Bush and Bowman were subjected to a zionist funded primary challenge? And where was Brazile in 2018 when the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) endorsed a white man over Ayanna Pressley in her first primary race for congress?
Brazile was also quite aloof when the same CBC endorsed Jamaal Bowman’s challenger, Elliot Engel - this after he was caught on a hot mic saying he would not care about speaking to police brutality against people of color if he wasn’t in a contested primary. The endorsement of Engel should be of note because it included that of James “Africanus” Clyburn who has also been entangled in Hogg-gate. After Clyburn declared that, “giving up his seat would mean giving up his life,” Hogg clapped back, “get over yourself…that seat is not yours, it’s your constituents’.” For this infraction, the DNC sent in one of their favorite Black hatchetmen, Bakari Sellers who referred to Hogg’s response to Clyburn as, “wild” and demanded more respect for Clyburn.
It’s clear that the Democrats and their negro sentries are paving a pathway to soon declare Hogg as someone who lacks racial sensitivity if not an outright racist to obfuscate the fact that the Democrats may know better than anyone else that they are unmoored, un-prinicipled, and unwilling to take the necessary steps to emancipate poor and working class people from the oligarchy they willingly assist with upholding.
To this end, perhaps the main critique of Mr. Hogg should be that he believes that there’s an actual opportunity to transform a party that perpetually demonstrates its intransigence and willingness to pull out all of the stops to remain in the clutches of its corporate and elite masters as well as its zionist overlords. Mr. Hogg would have done better to demonstrate a comprehension that it’s not so much that the Democrat Party is incapable of fostering a message and platform for true multi-racial and multi-ethnic class solidarity as much as it's simply irredeemable. Machinations are already in place that will force him to learn this lesson the hard way, as the Democrats will do all they can to deracinate any influence he has over the party and in general.
Yet the real question that remains is why so many Black people allow themselves to be useful idiots for a racist, capitalist party that continues to sell them down the river like their Democrat slave owners of the past. Until we provide the answers to this salient question and develop the mechanisms for a grand emancipation proclamation from the Democrats, Black people will continue to sell out like [Bakari] Sellers, hacking like Hakeem [Jeffries], and tap dance like Donna [Brazile]. I had the opportunity to speak to this with Black Agenda Report editor, Margaret Kimberly, that can be heard on my recent edition of Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright.
Following Kamala’s Script, Maryland Governor Vetoes Reparations Bill, Angering Black Voters He Will Need in White House Bid
Jon Jeter 28 May 2025
By vetoing a bill to study reparations, Maryland Governor Wes Moore has aligned himself with a long line of Black Democrats who prioritize white approval over their own base.
With his veto earlier this month of legislation to study reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, signaled two things: first, he intends to seek his party’s nomination for the White House in 2028; and secondly, he plans to redeploy the discredited strategy of appealing to white voters by distancing his campaign from African Americans.
If recent history is any guide, that dog won’t hunt for Moore, the nation’s lone African American governor, any more than it did for Kamala Harris in her presidential campaign last year or Hilary Clinton in 2016. Both Harris and Clinton cut their teeth as politicians with policies that the African American working class widely regarded as deeply racist; both lost to Donald Trump.
In explaining his decision, Moore told reporters that his administration was focused on managing the impact of Trump’s federal spending cuts to the state budget and workforce. In that context, he said that the reparations bill creating a commission to study racial disparities in Maryland did not go far enough. The state, he said, does not need another study; it needs action.
“I was very transparent with the leadership and members of the General Assembly that anything that fails to meet the urgency of this moment, I will not sign it and it must wait for another time.”
Continuing, he said:
“A study group that is saying that they’re going to present reports to the governor in two years is fine. But the governor is ready to engage now.”
In an op/ed for Baltimore’s AFRO American newspaper, Dayvon Love, the policy director for the think tank, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, dubbed Moore’s veto “counterrevolutionary,” and described his explanations as cynical, noting that his organization had introduced a concrete reparations plan to the governor’s office in the summer of 2024 only to be told by the governor’s staff that the plan was a non-starter; the state budget shortfall made any proposal to redistribute resources a “nonviable political option.”
The legislation that Moore vetoed was, in fac,t written as a compromise measure to appease the governor, Love told the Baltimore Sun:
“...to say he wants to act now, that doesn’t square with the fact that I know my organization presented actual policy prescriptions and we were told that they weren’t inclined to move on them. I think, to be honest, he does not want to be associated with the radical Black nationalist movements [from] which the reparations demand emerges.”
Across social media platforms, whites have widely hailed Moore’s veto while African Americans have excoriated him for it, reflecting a yawning racial divide on the issue. A 2022 Pew Research poll found that while 77 percent of Blacks support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, only 18 percent of white Americans do. An AI-generated summary of 832 responses to a Washington Post article on Moore’s veto asserted that the comments were “overwhelmingly” in support, with many writing that reparations are “impractical, divisive and politically damaging.” Wrote one poster on Facebook:
“The guy will be the Democrats nominee. He is what real leadership looks like.”
Unsurprisingly, African Americans expressed a dimmer view of Moore, who pledged to reduce the state’s racial wealth gap in his 2023 inauguration speech. Many Blacks offered scathing critiques not only of Moore, but of the African American misleadership class as a whole. Wrote one African American poster on Facebook:
“Just remember that Wes Moore is in the good graces of AIPAC and Zionist(s) like the rest of them.”
Wrote another:
“He needs to get (the) silent treatment from all Black people. Traitor for sure…”
And another:
“Unfortunately here is another example of a Black Democrat(‘s) loyalty to a racist party opposed to its Black constituency…”
The bait-and-switch strategy dates back to 1992 when Democrats were plotting how to reclaim the White House after 16 years, choosing Reagan’s racial wedge politics over Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns which achieved some measure of success in reuniting the New Deal’s loose federation of Black and white workers.
Just days before Super Tuesday’s primaries in 1992, for example, Bill Clinton appeared at a press conference outside the Stone Mountain Correctional Institution in suburban Atlanta. Appearing alongside Georgia Governor Zell Miller, U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, and Congressman Ben Jones—who played “Cooter” on the Dukes of Hazzard—Clinton would say later that his only motivation was to shine a light on an innovative prison reform project that had reduced recidivism. But the writer Nathan Robinson would describe the event as “a press conference of little apparent purpose except to show [white politicians] standing in front of a phalanx of dour, jump-suited inmates, all but a sprinkling of whom were Black .”
Responding to newspaper photographs of the media event, Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic party’s nomination were quick to denounce the Arkansas governor. California Governor Jerry Brown compared Clinton and his mates to “colonial masters” soothing white settler fears of a rumored slave revolt or an attack by a Native American tribe. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep them in their place. ... Two white men and forty Black prisoners, what’s he saying? He’s saying we got ’em under control, folks.”
All the more revealing was that Clinton’s electoral strategy did not reach out to disaffected African Americans in any substantive way—other than playing the tenor saxophone (badly) on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show-- but instead focused on white suburban Democrats who were attracted to Reagan’s sectarianism.
Moore is clearly parroting Clinton’s strategy like Obama, Hilary Clinton and Harris before him. President Joe Biden reversed his position the moment he took the oath of office but among his campaign promises was a proposal to reform a criminal justice system that kills African Americans like George Floyd at nearly three times the rate of whites. Blacks turned out to vote for Biden, unlike Hilary Clinton and Harris who asserted proudly that she had no intention of pushing for reparations or any other policy that advanced the interests of the Black community alone. That, combined with her support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and her “lock-em-up” reputation as San Francisco and California’s top prosecutor, doomed her presidential campaign by tamping down African American voter turnout.
Similarly, Clinton’s support for her husband’s 1994 omnibus crime bill when she was First Lady, combined with her support of foreign commercial interests in Haiti and her cackling jubilation at Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi’s murder by US-backed rebels in 2011 when she was Secretary of State, sank any hopes she had of being elected president by reducing Black voter turnout .
Love, the policy director at the Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, wrote that Moore’s “political integrity and standing amongst the masses of Black people is dependent on whether or not he follows through with his commitment stated in his rationale for vetoing the bill.”
But if remarks made on social media are any yardstick, that ship has sailed, and African Americans have already tuned Moore out for duplicating a losing campaign strategy in which politicians ignore their most loyal constituents and yet bizarrely expect their votes.
Charles Rangel and the End of Black Politics[
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 28 May 2025
Founding 13 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, 1971. Charles Rangel, standing second from the left. (Courtesy Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives)
The late Charles Rangel served as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus for more than 40 years. But the goals of Black politics and electoral politics are not necessarily the same.
“We are also supposed to be very excited about the prospect of Charlie Rangel, of Harlem, becoming head of the House Ways and Means Committee. Why? Rangel has been a front for the Clinton duo --- Hillary and Bill --- for many years. He carried their water in the NAFTA-for-Africa bill, which expanded U.S. corporate penetration of the continent exponentially.” - Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report, November 1, 2006
The recent passing of former Congressman Charles B. Rangel at the age of 94 does not mark the end of a political era. The era which defined Black politics – that is to say, a politics which consciously and purposefully made demands on behalf of Black people – ended long ago. Rangel’s 44-year tenure spanned the founding of the Congressional Black Caucus, which became known as the “conscience of the congress,” until the Democratic Party’s takeover by corporate and neoliberal interests killed off any vestiges of Black and progressive politics.
Rangel first won election in 1970 to a congressional district which primarily consisted of the majority Black neighborhood of Central Harlem. He defeated the incumbent, Adam Clayton Powell, in the democratic primary and went on to comfortably win a general election in November of that year. Rangel would continuously win elections for that same district until his last race in 2014. Over time his district came to include a portion of the Bronx and the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But Rangel was always known as Harlem’s congressman and in that role was seen as a Black political leader for the entire country. He was a founding member of what was originally a thirteen-member Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in 1971. Now a much larger organization with 61 members, the CBC is a shell of its former self, a reliable and silent partner to the Democratic Party oligarchy which no longer attempts any efforts to speak or act independently from its white corporate overlords.
The moniker “conscience of the congress” was not an exaggeration. In its early days the CBC was given free rein and often very publicly objected to decisions made by the party leadership. As time went on, after the corporate and conservative leaning Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC) put Bill Clinton in office and took over the party, Rangel and his colleagues moved to the right along with everyone else. The defeats of CBC members Earl Hilliard and Cynthia McKinney after they were targeted by the zionist lobby in 2002 represented a political sea change. Corporate money and the insistence on complete obedience to the dictates of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) signaled the end of Rangel and the rest of the CBC advocating for their constituents.
There was a brief reminder of what the CBC was capable of in 2004 after the George W. Bush administration carried out a coup against Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Rangel was among the CBC members who were closely monitoring the situation in Haiti and, after Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that Aristide asked to be flown out of the country because he feared for his life, Rangel was polite but clear that Powell was a liar : “Both Senator [Tom] Harkin and I were in constant communication with Secretary Powell by phone, and this information about Aristide asking to leave the country or that his life was in danger was never shared with us.”
Those brief acts of resistance were the last gasp of the CBC as a meaningful political force. Although it is quite possible that if Aristide had been ousted by a democrat in the white house instead of a republican, Rangel and the rest of his CBC colleagues would not have questioned the policies carried out against Haitian democracy.
In one of the earliest editions of Black Agenda Report in November 2006, Glen Ford explained in an article entitled, “Let Black Democrats Be Black ! ” that Nancy Pelosi, then the democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives, kept Rangel and other CBC members on a very tight leash. Democrats were poised to win control of the House, but Ford explained the paradox of Rangel, John Conyers and other CBC members with many years of seniority becoming committee chairpersons. “On election night, we all will look forward to a bluer map on the television screens. But bluer does not mean Blacker, in a meaningful sense, if Black politicians continue on their path of subservience to corporate dollars and obeisance to the dictates of Democratic leadership.”
Rangel did become chairman of the Ways and Means Committee which, then as now, plays a large role in determining priorities for federal government spending. The position is so powerful that nearly every Harlemite anticipated the day that Rangel would chair that committee. Eventually he did, but he was undone by his own sloppiness in following ethics rules. In 2011 he was found guilty of 11 different ethics rules which included using a rent stabilized apartment for campaign purposes, and failing to file financial disclosures including income from a rental property. In the process Rangel was forced out of his chairmanship and was eventually censured.
But the committee chairmanship held only illusory benefits for Black Harlem, as did Rangel’s presence itself. Rangel was able to dispense patronage, as all members of congress do, along with Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, David Dinkins, who later became Borough President and mayor, and Basil Paterson, State Senator and later Secretary of State. They became known as the Gang of Four. But electoral politics didn’t control the fate of Harlem, the capitalist class did. While it can be said that he and his cohort did some good, they couldn’t end practices such as redlining which deprived Black communities of resources needed to develop.
After real estate developers decided to put money back into the cities, Harlem was full of new housing, but not for the benefit of those who lived there during Rangel’s congressional career. In the more than 40 years that he served in congress, demographics changed and so did the contours of his district. At the end Rangel had as many Latino constituents as Black constituents, and it was said that it should have a Latino representative. He faced tough primary challenges from Adriano Espaillat, who now holds that seat. Rangel was determined to leave on his terms, despite the ignominious end of his congressional career and he decided that the 2014 race would be his last.
Rangel’s last public act came after he left congress when he came to the defense of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was fighting resignation over scandals in his personal life. Rangel’s name recognition still meant something but he squandered what was left of a good reputation when he and other Black “leaders” held an embarrassing press conference in support of Cuomo who eventually did resign. Rangel spoke of the need for due process and fighting false allegations . Some Black legislators even compared the nepotism baby governor to Emmett Till and the Exonerated Five, who were falsely accused and imprisoned for a rape they did not commit. The disgraceful showing ended as it should have, with Cuomo resigning and Rangel disappearing again from public life. Ironically, Cuomo is once again a figure in New York politics, running for mayor of New York City, an office he has a good chance of winning.
Charles Rangel’s passing is an opportunity to think seriously about how Black politics can be revived without being sentimental about politicians who happen to be Black. The CBC has nearly 50 more members now than it did when Rangel and Shirley Chisholm and John Conyers and Ron Dellums and others founded it 50 years ago. Does it matter if Black people hold office but do not meet the needs of Black voters? May Rangel rest in peace, but the rest of us should focus on how to make politics work for millions of people who currently have little or no representation in the electoral sphere that we are told is all-important but which in reality is not.
Israel and Ukraine. Western liberals and their Russian allies.
Events in Ukraine
Jun 15, 2025
I can see you smile and say: what good will that do? Revolutions are not made by shame. And my answer is that shame is a revolution in itself. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.
—Karl Marx
In August 2024, American lawyer Ralph Nader estimated that 300,000 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli army since October 2023, based on a range of empirical, historical, and clinical records. In February 2025, it grew to 400,000.
When Trump came into power, there seemed to be a decrease in bombings of Gaza. But soon, of course, Trump reverted to the great bipartisan passion of American politicians - murder.
The main reaction to this, of course, is indifference. Many millions have been killed by Washington and its Civilized friends over the centuries. Most people are quite content to ignore the ambient murder their tax money funds, even though social media has made this holocaust far more visible than, say, the time when the US army killed a comparable number of Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century.
There are still plenty of reactions. There is no shortage of western journalists to be found that justify the Israeli military one way or another. Now, on the one hand, one might say that all such legitimizations are equally reprehensible. But personally, there’s one that particularly disgusts me.
It’s one thing for the likes of Republican Senator Mike Huckabee to praise Israel. This is quite in line with his messianic devotion to global western hegemony. The Bible talks about Israel, hence ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian’.
Huckabee, US envoy to Israel
Such people are honest genocidal maniacs that are fairly open about their dedication to global military domination by the ‘Civilized World’ - europeans and their descendants. What I find truly revolting are those Democrats who pretend to be otherwise.
An example of such shamelessness is Biden state department spokesman Matthew Miller. After a year spent smirking at the small group of journalists who brought up his administration’s full-throated support for Israeli genocide, he now righteously condemns Trump’s role in the slaughter.
(Video at link.)
Why the long face, Matthew?
Trump is certainly not opposed to Zionism. However, the attempt by Democrats to launder the reality of their reign is ridiculous. For their part, the Times of Israel wistfully recalls the days of the Biden presidency in a June 14 article on US reactions to the latest Zionist attacks on Iran:
the Jewish Democratic Council of America criticized Secretary of State Marco Rubio for insufficient support of Israel’s actions. The first official US statement in the wake of the attack, by Rubio, did not praise Israel’s success and emphatically sought distance, calling it “unilateral” and saying that it did not coordinate with Israel. (By contrast, the Biden administration praised Israel’s attacks on Iran last year and emphasized coordination.)
I spent a significant part of my life surrounded by the likes of Matthew Miller. I have always found their psychology puzzling. I don’t know how they live without intense shame.
Is it naivete, is it cynicism, is it stupidity? These people obviously aren’t naive, despite their best attempts to appear so. Their cynicism often seeps through quite clearly. Stupidity? I find that one harder to answer. Regardless, when one is in charge of a state conducting mass murder, intelligence levels don’t affect responsibility.
Still, where did this come from? There is something deeply strange and unsettling about that generation of American liberals born in the 1960s and 70s. Miller, for his part, was born in 1973. They seem to have internalized self-confident Anglo-Saxon moralism more than any other generation I know of. Previous generations lived through Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, one that was hardly popular domestically. They also fought in foreign wars - a reliable inoculator against imperial moralism.
The generation born in the 60s and 70s grew up at the peak of US economic prosperity and cold war propaganda. Naturally, that left its marks.
But they were also children during the Vietnam war. However, they merely internalized the righteous atmosphere, but without engaging with the theoretical principles of adult activists at the time. Many of the latter knew that what was at stake wasn’t some abstract struggle ‘against human rights abuses’. They knew that what was at stake was the struggle against western imperialism.
Some of this generation, like Hillary Clinton, were more or less adults then. But what she and the other Matthew Millers of the world have in common is the following formula: plenty of righteousness of the 60s, none of the materialism. An excellent formula for those interested in becoming the new defenders of empire.
The young radical Hillary
The stage was set for the crop of human rights warriors of the 1980s and 1990s, those utterly independent recipients of USAID, NED, and Open Society Foundation grants who did their best to draw attention to the horrendous ‘human rights abuses’ committed around the world.
Of course, to avoid sanctions or invasions, the best medicine is pro-American policies. One need only look to Egypt, which has managed to stay in the top three recipients of US military aid ever since its 1978 capitulation to US-Israeli interests. This, despite the fact that it has been just as consistently ruled by brutal dictatorships. According to western media, the military junta holds over 60,000 political prisoners in its brutal jails. More on political prisoners in various countries later on in today’s article.
Plenty of America’s starry-eyed liberals even admit that the US isn’t without its black spots. But the evil alternative, of course, is far worse. Those barbarians in Moscow and Tehran… At least we’re trying to make the world a better place! Sometimes we make some mistakes, but at least our intentions are good.
Now that their party is no longer the one committing the genocide, these Democrat hacks can now claim to be against ALL invasions, to support ALL oppressed nations. Both Ukraine and Palestine will march to victory under the rainbow banner of human rights activism.
The most obvious obstacle to that is absolutely real: the United States sends hundreds of billions of military aid to Israel and Ukraine. Why should Palestinians ally with those killing them? Especially when the Ukrainian government, for its part, constantly refers to Israel as its state-building model.
Such fanciful ideological constructions as Ukro-Palestinian alliance, however, are much less common outside of twitter and the imperial core.
Imperial ideologists need to put a great deal of effort into making their rhetoric appear to be universal. That’s natural, given their pretensions to global domination. But the imperial proxy - the avant-garde of western civilization, as they call themselves - need not pay attention to such facades. They are engaged in a life or death battle with the ‘axis of evil’. They don’t need to pretend to believe in human rights. They can readily declare that their aim is the extermination of barbarian orcs, of ‘biomatter’.
So I decided to have a look at how pro-Ukrainian liberals in the post-soviet world feel about Israel. Naturally, they believe that both are fighting the same war - against the barbarism of the non-western world. No wonder Ukrainian neo-nazis and liberals are such tight friends. The 1941 rhetoric of Evropa versus oriental savagery doesn’t need an iota of modification.
I took a photo in March 2022 of this Nazi poster from 1942 that had been adapted in west Ukraine. Read more about it here.
Today, I’ll be looking at prominent pro-Ukrainian Russian liberals living in the west. Their views on Israel are somewhat simpler than ordinary Ukrainian liberals. The latter have their share of jealousy towards Israel, since they believe they deserve military aid from the US more than Israel.
They also feel they are a more effective form of Israel than Israel itself. I’ll treat these entertaining debates in a future article. For now, Russia’s brave warriors against Putinist dictatorship.
Russians
Let’s begin with a true classic of the Russian liberal scene - Garry Kasparov. This former chessmaster heads a formidable array of organizations that support everything good and are against everything bad.
Let’s have a look at Kasparov’s democratic army. First of all, the Renew Democracy Initiative. Truly, when I think Martin Luther King, Mike Pence just springs into my mind.
Next, the Human Rights Foundation. Naturally, it has a focus on ‘authoritarian regimes’, which happen to coincide with countries not aligned with NATO. Honestly, I found it difficult to figure out what the HRF actually does, but its website does feature a great deal of projects aimed at boosting bitcoin in the interests of ‘financial freedom’.
Finally, the World Liberty Congress. I like their cover photo, nice and to the point - a white man bringing freedom to the oppressed third worlders.
Moving onto Yuliya Latynina. Lately, she has been more and more skeptical of Ukraine, but she is still legally considered a ‘foreign agent’ in Russia, and resides abroad. She and her Ukrainian friend Alexey Arestovych have been trying to market themselves as the ‘true east slavic MAGA’ to Trump, so far with no clear success.
Next, Tamara Eidelman. A long-standing fixture on the Russian liberal scene. She considers herself a historian. One of her historical feats, for instance, is justifying the actions of the Nazi collaborator Andrey Vlasov - allying with Hitler was pardonable, given that the enemy was Stalin. For the Russian speakers following me, I recommend this take-down by the great historian Egor Yakovlev:
Of course, for Eidelman, support for Israel is not only pardonable, but absolutely necessary. She has particular disgust for the ‘humanists’ who attempt to draw attention to the ‘Hamas lies’ about dead Palestinian children.
Next, Leonid Volkov. The current leader of the late Alexei Navalny’s ‘Anti-Corruption Foundation’.
Volkov and Navalny (right)
While every second Russian liberal (including members of my family) migrated to the peace-loving Israel in 2022 because ‘they couldn’t bear living in militaristic Russia’, Volkov only saw fit to mention Israel once in the past two years. He did so on October 10, 2023. Here are some of the highlights of his long post:
Of course, there’s no need to say again that my heart is entirely with Israel. My friends are there. So much of what matters to me is there. There’s immense pain from all the horrifying videos and testimonies. A terrorist attack comparable only to 9/11 — ruthless and cynical, with indiscriminate mass killings and hostage-taking — a wound that will not heal for many years to come. A world that will never be the same. (And even the old world wasn’t exactly a paradise.)
Of course, he then tried to make the show of warning Israel not to discredit itself by mass murders. A ‘warning’ which he concluded with the Zionist ‘Am Yisrael Chai’, a phrase IDF maniacs enjoy shrieking out when blowing up another residential apartment block:
And in this unique moment, it seems to me (from the outside! I make no claim to expertise here!) that Israel’s military and political leadership is likely to go down the path of “paving everything over with asphalt.” They have a carte blanche from most of the population, of course — after all, every soul in this small country is walking around with an open wound. But I fear this is a road to nowhere.
…
And so, not to end on too dark a note: I believe that eventually Israel will find a way to become better. It will find a way out. Because it is, for all its problems, a democratic country — a country capable of national self-reflection. There will be commissions and investigations, all the uncomfortable questions will be asked — and answers will be found. There will be forward movement — because Am Yisrael Chai!
Don’t forget - Israel is a democracy, unlike its barbaric neighbours! Ukrainian liberals adore this parallel when explaining Ukraine’s relationship with Russia (and the relationship between Ukrainian liberals and working class Ukrainians).
Still, Volkov is certainly by far the least enthusiastic supporter of Israel among Russian liberals. I am sure he would be lynched by his fellow freedom-lovers were he to say such things while in the Promised Land.
Now onto Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Having escaped a Russian penitentiary facility for Europe last year during a prisoner exchange, he hasn’t been particularly interested in Israel. He has, however, called for excluding the most populous country on earth for the UN, because he is just ever so worried about those poor Chinese Muslims. Vietnam and Cuba are also absolutely intolerable in his eyes. I’m sure he would rather they learn from Ukraine’s great lessons in democracy-building.
No doubt the less Asians, Africans, and Arabs in the UN, the more democratic it is.
His role as a liberal activist also involves constantly calling for regime change in Russia. How this can be achieved without western military intervention, he does not explain. He clearly doesn’t care, as long as he can be in charge of some clump of land in the future hypothetical ‘former territory of the Russian Federation’. On this topic, I recommend Moss Robeson’s article on the alliance between neo-nazis and liberals in the drive to ‘decolonize’ Russia.
Of course, American bleeding heart liberals can’t get enough of Mr Kara-Murza. No doubt they are also looking forward to the lucrative consultancy opportunities in a ‘democratic’ Russia, just like those they received in the democratic Russia of the 1990s.
A few million Russians died an early death in those years according to the British Medical Journal, but what does that matter - about as important as a few hundred Palestinians dying. It certainly wasn’t the likes of Kara-Murza dying of hunger and unemployment, or his fellow western consultants.
Source
Prisoners
Let’s return to the supposed root causes of Israel’s valiant struggle for the defense of western civilization.
Israel supporters claim that an infinite number of Palestinians can be killed as long as Israeli hostages are held in Gaza. Currently, that number stands at 53, half of whom have probably been killed by Israeli terror bombing.
The Palestinians, for their part, captured these hostages in 2023 because it wants Israel to release the 9,619 Palestinian political prisoners it holds. Over 5,000 of them were imprisoned in the past two years. Thousands are imprisoned without charges:
there were about 4,450 Palestinian “security prisoners” in Israel in April 2022, including 160 children, 32 women, and 530 administrative detainees; all were incarcerated without charge or trial.
Imprisoned Palestinians are treated to the most horrific torture imaginable. The Euro-Mediterranean human rights monitor has reported on the widespread Israeli use of dogs to savagely bite and rape Palestinian civilians and prisoners. The western press is even sometimes obliged to report on it.
The Washington Post, July 2024:
Muazzaz Obayat, 37, could barely walk when he left Ktzi’ot, in southern Israel, last week. He was arrested in the aftermath of Oct. 7 on suspicion of ties to Hamas, but no charges were ever brought against him.
His curly black hair and beard were unkempt; his cheekbones jutted out, and his eyes were sunken.
At a clinic in the West Bank town of Beit Jala where he was receiving medical care, he said he wasn’t sure how old he was or the ages of his five children.
“I know nothing but imprisonment,” he said.
Once an amateur bodybuilder, he said he’d lost more than 100 pounds in nine months.
He whispered as he described a guard sexually assaulting him with a broom. His doctors said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress and malnutrition.
CNN, May 2024:
CNN spoke to three Israeli whistleblowers who worked at the Sde Teiman desert camp, which holds Palestinians detained during Israel’s invasion of Gaza…
They paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.
According to the accounts, the facility some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.
…
The same whistleblower also said he witnessed an amputation performed on a man who had sustained injuries caused by the constant zip-tying of his wrists. The account tallied with details of a letter authored by a doctor working at Sde Teiman published by Ha’aretz in April.
There was also the case of renowned Gazan surgeon Adnan Al Bursch - raped to death in an Israeli prison last year:
A new report on Thursday revealed chilling new details of the circumstances surrounding the killing of the famous Gaza surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh in an Israeli prison in May.
A captive at Israel’s Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank told Sky News how Israeli forces left Dr Al-Bursh, who had been severely tortured, to die alone in agonising pain and naked from the waist down in the prison’s yard.
The captive, who previously knew Dr Al-Bursh in Gaza, provided details in a deposition to lawyers from the Israeli human rights organisation HaMoked.
"In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body.
"The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr Adnan Al-Bursh (was dead)."
Dr Al-Bursh was then taken to the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev, which whistleblowers and former inmates have likened to a concentration camp.
Reports of physical, mental, and sexual abuse are widespread at Sde Teiman, with instances of rape so severe that prisoners have been died and seriously injured.. Dr Khalid Hamouda, a former inmate of the Sde Teiman camp, told Sky News that many of the prisoners held there were medical professionals.
It is here that Al-Bursh underwent brutal torture, being viciously beaten by Israeli guards. The full extent of his torture is not known.
"He thought he may have broken ribs," Dr Hamouda said. "He was unable to even go to the toilet alone."
Israeli prison authorities in turn denied responsibility for his death. In July 2024, there were mass riots in Israel because Zionists were outraged at the possibility of arresting guards who raped Palestinian prisoners. An Israeli poll found that the majority of Jewish citizens opposed criminal prosecution for the rapists:
In a remarkable example of imperialist sophistry, Reuters ‘fact-checked’ claims that the poll showed Israeli support for raping Palestinians:
However, the three answers relate to how Jewish Israelis believe soldiers who commit abuses should be disciplined, not whether abuses are acceptable.
Ah, well that clears things up. The poll doesn’t show that 65% of Israeli Jews think that raping Palestinians isn’t a crime - it simply shows that 65% of Israeli Jews think that raping this particular group of Palestinians isn’t a crime. Fact: checked!
Now, back to our equally valiant Russian liberal oppositions. They are also quite preoccupied with prisoners.
First, some context. They have been finding life quite difficult abroad of late. Their beloved Biden gone, the new Big White Man in Washington not particularly enthusiastic about indefinitely continuing the proxy war against Russia. The prospect of a world without the ongoing killing of hundreds of thousands in an unwinnable war is quite sad indeed for the likes of Kara-Murza, Volkov, and Eidelman.
The main cause they have nowadays is ‘releasing Russian political prisoners’. Now, I certainly won’t argue that it is quite sad indeed that plenty of young - barely adult - Russians have been given lengthy prison sentences due to their participation in political protests organized and encouraged by Navalnites living in Europe.
But it’s still worth taking a look at this pet cause of theirs, since they constantly shriek about it whenever even a hint of Russia-Ukraine peace talks begin. Why? Because they believe that no peace should be signed without the release of these political prisoners.
In other words, they cynically use these imprisoned individuals as a way to prevent any end to the war in Ukraine. No proxy war against Russia means far fewer western grants for the brave Russian warriors for democracy. In fact, they have been complaining heavily the past year over the grant cuts for democracy warriors abroad instituted by the cruel Orange Man.
And how many political prisoners are there in Russia? According to one of the main Russian liberal organizations, Memorial, there are currently 524 political prisoners in Russia (excluding those imprisoned for religious reasons). Back in October 2024, that figure stood at 769.
Russian liberals interviewed by Radio Free Europe claimed that this was merely the minimum number, but failed to give an estimate beyond ‘possibly thousands’. According to another Russian liberal organization, ‘FSIN Archipelago’. there were 1198 political prisoners as of October 2024. The highest estimate I found comes from OCD, which claims that 1588 political prisoners are currently in jail. Clearly, more well-known organizations like Memorial believe that some of those included in this number are not true political prisoners.
What about Ukraine?
I’ll reproduce something I wrote about this back in 2024:
Besides the war, I want to bring attention to those who are unjustly killed, tortured and imprisoned in Ukraine. Like Dnipro’s leftwing activist Oleksandr Matyushenko, kidnapped by Azov on the spurious, unproven grounds of ‘guiding Russian rocket fire’ on March 26, 2022. His brutal beating was approvingly shared to social media. His supposed cooperation with the Russian army was never proven, and he was later sentenced to prison on a different charge - the thought crime of ‘questioning Ukraine’s territorial integrity’. He remains imprisoned. (Video at link.)
The telegram channel ‘Repression of the left and dissenters in Ukraine’ published this information and much more. It found, for instance, that public records showed that 34,323 Ukrainians had been criminally charged with collaborationism, ‘encroachment on territorial integrity’ and other political thought-crimes from February 24 to July 15, 2022.
Volodymyr Chemerys was soon after visited by the Secret Services (SBU). They were accompanied by masked rightwingers, who broke one of his ribs. He was then charged with state treason. Their main claim - that he managed the ‘repression of the left’ telegram channel.
According to the Guardian in February this year:
Ukraine’s SBU security service says it has opened more than 8,100 criminal proceedings “related to collaboration and aiding and abetting the aggressor state” and Ukrainians convicted on these counts are only held in certain prisons, where they are kept away from other inmates.
The article illustrated its coverage with a photo of a person who had had ‘orc’ carved into their head. Note how casual the article itself is. And how all those imprisoned are described as industrial workers, cleaners… In a word, people who don’t speak English and hence can’t be classified as ‘Ukrainian voices’ in western media.
The latest update I know of came from the BBC in August 2024 - almost 9,000 imprisoned for political crimes:
Collaboration offences range from simply denying the illegality of Russia’s invasion, or supporting it in person or online, to playing a political or military role for the occupying powers.
Accompanying punishments are tough too, with jail terms of up to 15 years.
They include a school principal jailed for accepting a Russian curriculum - his defence, his lawyer says, was that although he had accepted Russian materials, he didn’t use them. And in the Kharkiv region, we heard about a sports stadium manager facing 12 years in prison for continuing to host matches while under occupation. His lawyer says he had only organised two friendly matches between local teams.
In the eyes of the United Nations (UN), these collaboration convictions breach international humanitarian law. A third of those handed down in Ukraine from the start of the war in February 2022 until the end of 2023 lacked a legal basis, it says.
“Crimes have been carried out on occupied territory, and people need to be held to account for the harm they’ve done to Ukraine - but we’ve also seen the law applied unfairly,” says Danielle Bell, the head of the UN's Human Rights Monitoring Mission in the country.
Ms Bell argues that the law doesn’t consider someone's motive, such as whether they are actively collaborating, or trying to earn an income, which they are legally allowed to do. She says everyone is criminalised under its vague wording.
“There are countless examples where people have acted under duress and performed functions to simply survive,” she says.
The article gives an example of one ordinary woman imprisoned for the following crime:
Before the full-scale invasion, Tetyana used to liaise with local officials to provide her neighbours with materials such as firewood.
Once the new Russian rulers were in place, she says she was convinced by a friend to also engage with them to secure much-needed medicines.
“I didn’t co-operate with them voluntarily,” she says. “I explained disabled people couldn’t access the drugs they needed. Someone filmed me and posted it online, and Ukrainian prosecutors used it to claim I was working for them.”
After Lyman was liberated, a court was shown documents she had signed that suggested she had taken an official role with the occupying authority.
However, such dangerous individuals as Tetyana aren’t only imprisoned to protect the endangered Ukrainian nation. The Ukrainian government has other goals as well - it has been ‘exchanging’ Ukrainian citizens imprisoned for ‘collaboration’ with Ukrainian prisoners of war held by Russia. Here’s what CNN wrote on this at the start of June:
According to the Ukrainian government, 70 Ukrainian civilians convicted of collaborating with Russia were released as part of the 1,000 for 1,000 prisoner exchange between Kyiv and Moscow last month.
Ukraine said all of them went into exile voluntarily, as part of a government scheme that gives anyone convicted of collaborating with Russia the option of being sent there.
But human rights groups and international lawyers say the scheme is problematic, contradicts previous statements made by the Ukrainian government, and could potentially put more people at risk of being snatched by the Russians.
“I completely understand the sentiment, we all want the people (who are detained in Russia) to be released as quickly as possible and Russia has no will to do that… but the solution that is offered is definitely not the right one,” said Onysiia Syniuk, a legal analyst at Zmina, a Ukrainian human rights group.
The program, called “I want to go to my own,” was launched last year by Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, the Ministry of Defense, the Security Service and the parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights.
So, to sum it all up. Ukraine, a country with a population of 20-30 million people, has around 9,000 political prisoners. Russia, a country with a population of 140 million people, has 500 to 1,200 political prisoners. Israel, with a population of around 12 million (including the Gaza strip), holds 10,000 prisoners.
Today I’ve mainly been writing about Russian liberals. But now, consider yourself in the position of a western citizen dedicated to fighting human rights abuses. Would you push for your own government to force its allies to release political prisoners?
Or would you join your Russian friends in exile by calling for a foreign state that your government is at war with to release its political prisoners?
Personally, it seems to me that your own government is more likely to listen to complaints by its tax-payers.
However, the Matthew Millers of the world and their ‘non-government organization’ allies had other ideas during the Biden administration. It was much better to focus energy on angrily demanding things from Vladimir Putin.
According to them, it was easier for the US to affect change in Russia than in countries with a US-funded army.
Now, they change their tune. Hopefully their true nature won’t be forgotten.
As the State’s Complexion Darkens, Minnesota’s Liberalism Wanes
Jon Jeter 18 Jun 2025
The dashcam video from July 2016 showing St. Anthony Police officer Jeronimo Yanez aiming into the vehicle driven by Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn. St. Anthony Police Department. AP
Minnesota’s progressive myth shatters as its racial gaps in income, education, and housing eclipse even Deep South states, and right wing whites turn to violence against their own people.
Known alternately as the “Happy Warrior” and the “Liberal Lion,” Minnesota’s U.S. Senator, Hubert H. Humphrey, often scolded his colleagues for failing to address racial discrimination against African Americans in the final days of the Jim Crow era of the 1950s and 60s, often triggering southern Democrats, in particular, to bristle. Said Florida’s George Smathers, who served with Humphrey in the U.S. Senate:
“In the whole state of Minnesota at that time, they didn't have 5,000 Blacks living out there.”
My, how times have changed.
Ninety-three percent white as recently as 1970, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St, Paul has seen its minority population nearly quintuple to 31 percent since Mary Tyler Moore last tossed her bonnet towards the Minneapolis skyline in the iconic opening of her eponymous show. An influx of African Americans, Hmong, Laotians, Latinos and east African refugees has reshaped the politics of this metropolitan area that was widely regarded as among the most liberal in the country a generation ago, eclipsed only by San Francisco and Seattle in the minds of many.
The arrest Monday of a Minnesota man on charges that he assassinated one state lawmaker and shot another is yet another reminder that the state is not the quaint, Scandinavian enclave that was the basis of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon.
On Monday, interim U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson said 57-year-old Vance Boelter had compiled a hit list of more than 45 elected officials in the state, all Democrats, and was carrying out his attacks early Saturday morning when he was confronted by patrol officers in a suburb north of Minneapolis. Thompson would not address Boelter’s motives but a friend, David Carlson, told CNN that Boelter was a conservative who was staunchly opposed to abortion. In texts to his wife and daughters, Boelter seems to acknowledge that he was motivated by the same sense of aggrievement that has animated reactionary white male terrorists dating back to Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the 1995 bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City; Dylann Roof who gunned down nine Black worshippers at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. 10 years ago this week; and 18-year-old Payton Gendron who fatally shot 10 African American shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022. Wrote Boelter in one text:
“Dad went to war last night…I don’t wanna say more because I don’t want to implicate anybody.”
The slain state Representative, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark were white, but their killings appear to bear all the hallmarks of an attack carried out by a “lone-wolf” gunman angered by people of color or white liberals whose political values he considers a threat to white America.
Such attacks are sparked by an economic downturn like the Great Recession that began in 2008, and coincide with a surge in state violence targeting African Americans by a ratio of nearly three to one over whites. According to data compiled by the Washington Post , nearly 2500 Blacks were killed by police nationwide between January 1st 2015 and January 1st, 2025. That includes several high-profile cases in the Twin Cities.
In 2017, jurors cleared a police officer in a St. Paul suburb of fatally shooting an African American passenger , 32-year-old Philando Castile during a 2016 traffic stop. Five years later, the mother of Daunte Wright complained that a judge was swayed by “white woman tears” in sentencing the suburban Minneapolis police officer, Kim Potter, to only two years for fatally shooting her 20-year-old African American son during a traffic stop . That same month, Minneapolis police executing a no-knock search warrant in a homicide investigation fatally shot a 22-year-old African American, Amir Locke, in a downtown apartment. Locke was not named in the warrant; no police officers were charged in the shooting.
Those killings bracket the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, launching a season of worldwide protests and calls to defund the police. A jury found Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder and a number of lesser charges, and Minneapolis officials created departments to promote greater police oversight, yet neither the city nor state passed legislation to eliminate qualified immunity for law-enforcement officials involved in fatal encounters. Robert Lilligren, the first Native American elected to the Minneapolis City Council, told the New York Times in 2020:
“Minneapolis has ridden this reputation of being progressive. That’s the vibe: Do something superficial and feel like you did something big. Create a civil rights commission, create a civilian review board for the police, but don’t give them the authority to change the policies and change the system.”
It is not that the electorate in Minnesota has flipped from blue to red; Kamala Harris won 51.1 percent of the vote in last year’s presidential election and the state has voted for every Democratic presidential nominee since 1976. But increasingly, the state is of two minds, with Trump decreasing the Democrats’ margin from 7.1 percent in 2016 to 4.2 percent in 2024. Trump last year even managed to flip four Minnesota counties from blue to red.
And while discriminatory policing is the most visible emblem of Minnesota’s growing racial divide, yawning gaps in health , income and homeownership are also among the worst in the nation. Home to more Fortune 500 companies on a per capita basis than any other state, employers in Minneapolis once boasted of a public school system that was regarded as one of the best in the nation. But as student enrollment has grown increasingly darker–nearly 62 percent of students enrolled in Twin Cities public schools are now nonwhite–Minnesota’s education system has produced worsening outcomes. White Minnesotans are 15 percentage points more likely to graduate than Black ones, the sixth-highest disparity in the nation, according to federal data .
In the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual rankings of education quality, Minnesota’s public schools have plummeted from 6th to 19th among all states . Similarly, national benchmarks found that Minnesota fourth graders’ reading proficiency fell below the national average for the first time in 2022. In fact, elementary school students in the deep-red state of Mississippi now perform slightly better on national reading tests than their Minnesota peers.
In the 2018 book that he co-authored, Professor Samuel L. Myers Jr., the retired director of the Roy Wilkins Center of Human Relations and Social Justice at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota refers to the paradox between the veneer of civility known as “Minnesota Nice” and the reality that it is no less racist than any other state.
Myers writes that racial disparities in wealth and income are due largely to housing discrimination just as is the case nationwide, noting that only a quarter of African American households in Minnesota own their own home compared to three-quarters of white households in the state, representing the nation’s third widest racial gap in homeownership.
Minnesota’s progressive myth shatters as its racial gaps in schools, housing, and bloodshed eclipse even Deep South states.
A 2015 study co-authored by Myers analyzed the lending practices for the Twin Cities 50 largest banks between 2008 and 2013 and found that lenders rejected Black mortgage applications at significantly higher rates than whites, and that gap in loan denial rates cannot be explained by credit scores or applicants' income. Said Myers to reporters in 2018:
“How is it possible for poorly educated whites to have homeownership that is higher than middle-income, well-educated blacks?”
It is not that Minnesota has only recently discovered racism but that liberalism acted as a masking agent that disguised it as something more anodyne in a state where for the longest, there was no need to be anti-Black because there were, for all intents and purposes, no African Americans.
Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, told the New York Times in 2020:
“The racism has been around for a very, very long time. You can see it in the redlining of neighborhoods, the education system, the transportation system and, obviously, policing.”
Minnesota’s rightward political shift serves as a validation of Smathers’ riposte to Humphrey’s advocacy for civil rights 65 years ago and a reminder that liberalism is no less a failed political ideology than conservatism.
‘Looking Backwards’ and Forward: How Democrats Who Voted for Iraq Cashed In and How It Ensured the Rise of the Imperial Uniparty
Posted on June 25, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
As the US government flirts with becoming more directly involved in yet another war, Democrats are largely in support or complain of procedural process. They do not criticize the empire nor challenge the military-industrial-technology complex.
Former President Barack Obama recently took time away from his busy cashing-in schedule to warn about the dangers of authoritarianism. He made no mention of war. That was entirely unsurprising, but provides a nice jumping off point to our current stage of imperial collapse.
Not only did he, much like Trump, ride opposition to foreign wars into office only to change his mind once in the oval office. Not only did he launch a foreclosure party while bailing out banks and allow Citigroup to pick his cabinet, launch a nationwide paramilitary crackdown on Occupy, destroy Syria and Libya, ramp up Project Ukraine, and so much else, but perhaps worst of all was his fateful decision to effectively bless torture and wars of agression:
"We don't look backwards, we look forward." —President Obama
And with that all the crimes of Bush administration—from an illegal invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands to a global torture regime—were swept under the rug. It is a decision that has reverberated ever since, growing with ferocity, and bringing us to the current moment of support for genocide, torture, and another illegal war against Iran. Not only did he cement the lawlessness by deciding not to go after torturers, but he prevented any consequences for members of his own party who cheerleaded the slaughter of Iraqis.
Instead so much remains the same with even Benjamin Netanyahu playing a lead role in both. Back in 2002 he urged US politicians to invade Iraq: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” And so it goes—except Iran 2025 isn’t Iraq 2003.
Here we do have the opportunity to look back at Democrat support for that war and forward to more madness from the US lawless mafia state. It’s perhaps unfair to place so much at the feet of Obama. He is, after all, just another smooth-talking used car salesman that the system pumps out and promotes. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. He did, however, come at a turning point: when there was popular support to turn back the tide of lawlessness and set the US on a course for a graceful journey into multipolarity.
With that said, let’s look back at the Democrats that supported the Iraq War and what became of them. This is important because it shows that while some might have been held accountable by voters, they were rewarded by the system for their bloodthirstiness. That helps explain why Democrats today are either mum or in full support of war with Iran.
***
Of the 29 Senate Democrats (58% of the 50 at that time) who voted for the resolution, two are still in the Senate:
Maria Cantwell (WA). Voted to fund Israeli genocide in Gaza. In 2017, she co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which would have made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment, for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Supporter of Project Ukraine and Project Taiwan.
Chuck Schumer (D-NY). What else can be said about the weasel of weasels? If it was revealed he bathes in children’s blood, it wouldn’t be surprising at this point. He’s spent recent weeks trying to push Trump into war with Iran.
Of the 81 House Democrat YEA votes for the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF) for Iraq in October 2002, six are currently still in the House, and one is in the Senate.
Here are the seven in the House:
Brad Sherman (CA-30). He is leading a resolution expressing support for Israel’s unprovoked and illegal assault on Iran.
Sanford Bishop (GA-02). The 78-year-old is now the dean of Georgia’s congressional delegation after the death of John Lewis. He’s a Blue Dog, voted to provide Israel with funding for its genocide, supports the National Security Agency’s powers to spy on Americans without a warrant, and is an all-around embodiment of the Black Misleadership Class.
Steny Hoyer (MD-05). He supports Israel’s illegal agression and says that “America needs to do its part to counter further Iranian strikes against Israeli and American targets in the region.” Hoyer opposed Trump’s planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan. He supported military action in Syria, the destruction of Libya, and Project Ukraine. Oh, and he also supports genocide in Palestine.
Stephen Lynch (MA-08). A longtime supporter of American intervention in the Middle East. He was one of seven Democratic representatives who voted against an amendment to the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act prohibiting “unauthorized military force in or against Iran.”
Adam Schiff (CA-28). A wholly-owned stooge of the military-industrial complex. Became a hero of liberal “resistance” for his Russiagate promotion. This weasel has voted for every increase in the defense budget during his time in Washington, is a major backer of Project Ukraine, and he supported the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya wars, and regime change in Syria.
Adam Smith (WA-09). Has supported military actions in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, as well as Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Is opposed to war with Iran without Congressional vote, however, and has indicated he is opposed.
And the one who has moved up to the Senate:
Ed Markey (D-MA). He has categorized his vote for the Iraq War as a “mistake”—albeit not one he has paid for or learned from. He continues to support militaristic policy against China and others. An example of what passes for Left in the US, he wants Trump to get Congressional approval for Iran war.
***
A pretty repulsive list, and yet there’s more. Because just focusing on these losers who remain in office rather than cashing in doesn’t do the party full justice.
Here are all the other Senate Democrats who voted YEA and moved up to higher government positions, skedaddled out the revolving door, or went elsewhere.
Max Baucus (D-MT). Despite not being able to speak Mandarin, Baucus became ambassador to China in 2014 and stayed in that role until 2017. He then joined the Board of Advisors of Alibaba Group. He started his own lobbying group and is currently representing companies such as Binance, Earnin, Infervision, Montana Technologies, Tonix Pharmaceuticals, ASAAP, Q-Cells, Rose Lake Capital and ZhenCai. He also writes op-eds advising Democrats that their political fortunes depend on maintaining low, low tax rates for wealthy heirs.
Evan Bayh (D-IN). Became an adviser to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, as well as as a partner at the D.C. law and lobbying firm McGuireWoods, and got positions on the boards of Berry Plastics Group in Evansville, Ind.; RLJ Lodging Trust in Bethesda, Md.; Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati and Marathon Petroleum Corporation in Findlay, Ohio. His wealth skyrocketed despite only working part time.
Joe Biden (D-DE). “The Big Guy” became VP and later POTUS. Long known for his war mongering and adorable “gaffes,” they really blossomed during his time as president when his mind got stuck on permanent gaffe, and he brought the US to the brink of war with Russia and killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.
John Breaux (D-LA). Retired from the Senate in 2005 and embarked on a long and illustrious lobbying career.
Jean Carnahan (D-MO). She was appointed to fill the Senate seat of her husband Mel Carnahan, who had been posthumously elected after his death three weeks before the election. She didn’t last long, losing the special election in 2002, but voted for war during her brief stint. She returned to Missouri and largely wrote books before her death in 2024.
Max Cleland (D-GA). Spent some time as lobbyist and eight years as Secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission. Died in 2021.
Hillary Clinton (D-NY). Secretary of State where she helped get slave markets going in Libya. 2016 presidential candidate when she ran a lazy campaign and lost to Trump. Helped launch Russiagate. Clinton Foundation donations are way down since Hillary’s exit from the political stage, but don’t worry, the foundation had built up a substantial endowment —which increased during the Covid equities boom.
Tom Daschle (D-SD). He continues his lobbying work for The Daschle Group, a Public Policy Advisory of Baker Donelson. His clients have included the government in Taiwan, lobbying to get it into the Trans Pacific Partnership pushed by the likes of Hillary and Obama. He’s gotten very rich doing so.
Chris Dodd (D-CT). Retired in 2010 to become chairman and chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America from 2011 to 2017. Was an advisor and surrogate to the 2020 Biden campaign, which he turned into a senior advisor position at Teneo, the public relations and strategy giant that has shady clients from across the globe.
Byron Dorgan (D-ND). A Senior Policy Advisor at lobbying giant ArentFox Schiff and Co-Chair of the firm’s Government Relations practice.
John Edwards (D-NC). Ran for president in 2004 and 2008. Was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2011 on six felony charges of violating multiple federal campaign contribution laws to cover up an extramarital affair. After his political career ended, Edwards co founded the law firm Edwards Kirby in Raleigh, specializing in medical malpractice cases.
Tom Harkin (D-IA). As far as I can see, did not cash in. Has been involved in disability rights causes and the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University.
Fritz Hollings (D-SC). Did not cash in. Wrote op eds and contributed to the HuffPost. Was also on the board of advisors as a distinguished visiting professor of Law with the Charleston School of Law. Died in 2019.
Tim Johnson (D-SD). Doesn’t appear to have cashed in.
John Kerry (D-MA). Democrat’s presidential nominee in 2004. Secretary of State 2013-2017. US special presidential envoy for climate 2021-2024.
Herb Kohl (D-WI). Was already plenty rich. From the family that owned the Kohl’s department stores chain, and he was company president from 1970 to 1979. Owned the Milwaukee Bucks.
Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Became an energy industry lobbyist, as well as a paid consultant for the Walton Family Foundation, working on projects to “transform” public schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. She was also on the board of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.
Joe Lieberman (D-CT). One of the all-time great “centrist” warmongers.
Spent time as senior counsel at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, a law firm in New York City whose notable clients include Donald Trump, and co-chairman of the American Internationalism Project at the American Enterprise Institute, among other activities.
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR). Has had a successful self-enriching lobbying career since leaving office.
Zell Miller (D-GA). Immediately became a registered lobbyist for the firm of McKenna, Long and Aldridge—despite revolving door rules prohibiting ex-Congressmen from lobbying their old colleagues for one year after they leave office. Also a Fox News contributor.
Bill Nelson (D-FL). In 2019 after leaving office was appointed to serve on NASA’s advisory council and then became Administrator of NASA in 2021 where he helped fan space race flames with criticism of China and Russia’s activities in space.
Ben Nelson (D-NE). After the famous “Cornhusker Kickback” claim attached to Obamacare, he became the CEO of the influential National Association of Insurance Commissioners in 2013. Also started his own lobbying firm.
Harry Reid (D-NV). Mainly dealt with illness. Retired in 2017. Died in 2021. Did co-chair the MGM Resorts Public Policy Institute at UNLV with former House Speaker John Boehner, focusing on “bipartisan solutions” to workforce issues. Had already gotten plenty rich(er) during time in office.
Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). Joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a distinguished fellow.
Robert Torricelli (D-NJ). Became partner in real estate firm Woodrose Properties, which is invested in over 50 multi family or commercial properties in 10 states. He also founded business and government affairs consulting firm Rosemont Associates. Among his clients is the Iranian opposition group/cult, the MEK.
Senator Tom Carper (D-DE). Retired 2025. Has yet to take on new position. One of his final votes was against a resolution, proposed by Bernie Sanders, to apply the human rights provisions of the Foreign Assistance Act to U.S. aid to Israel’s military.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). Died in 2023. She continued to “serve” even when she was not much more than a corpse being rolled around in order to vote for more war and surveillance that her husband’s company profited from. She was still calling for US military action in Iraq in 2014, and her final vote included a bunch of money for Project Ukraine.
Due to time constraints I can’t track down all the other 73 members of the Democrat caucus who voted YEA, but it’s probably safe to assume most of them are out there somewhere screwing over working people and/or lobbying for more war to vaporize brown people across the globe while proudly brandishing a BLM yard sign in their gated community.
Democrats like those who recently supported a resolution backing war on Iran know it’s unpopular with the voters, but are also sure they’ll be rewarded financially if those people vote them out. They certainly won’t be punished by the party whose big tent now recruits spooks.
Obama’s effective pardon for all the war crimes of the Bush administration led directly to the rise of the CIA Democrats like Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Elissa Slotkin— military-intelligence officers who moved from the Blob to Congress in 2018. And they’re being heavily promoted by the party with Slotkin, a senator from Michigan, chosen to give the Democratic response to President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress. So the question is:
Would things be different if Dems who voted for the Iraq War were punished instead of promoted? Biden (VP, president); Clinton (Sec of State, presidential nominee); Hoyer (House leader); Schumer (current Senate leader); Smith (current ranking member of Armed Services Cmte)
I’d say yes, but that was never going to happen. What the above brief bios show is that just as imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, getting rich is the highest plane for our elected leaders who are overseen from cradle to grave by their plutocratic masters. These forces are combining to fuel the accelerating death spiral of the US and its “rules-based” order and help ensure that our “leaders” continue to support war despite overwhelming public opposition and no matter how stupid the plan, the record of failure, or the long term blows to the country.
Unable to Reinvent Itself, Dems Can’t Capitalize on Trump’s Missteps
Jon Jeter 25 Jun 2025
Bill Clinton signing the 1994 crime bill
The Democratic Party is in crisis—divided, broke, and struggling to counter Trump’s agenda despite growing public backlash. Internal battles over strategy and leadership have left the DNC paralyzed.
Donald Trump’s polarizing second term in the White House has left the party in disarray, riven by infighting over electoral strategies ahead of the 2026 midterms and unable to raise money. So extraordinarily dire is the party’s financial situation that top officials have weighed borrowing money just to pay bills.
In a recording of a May 15 ZOOM meeting leaked to POLITICO , the party’s chairman made this extraordinary confession to his top aides:
“I’ll be very honest with you, for the first time in my 100 days on this job … the other night I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore.”
Anyone with an understanding of U.S. politics could be forgiven for assuming that the description above is of Trump’s Republican party but it actually refers to the Democratic National Committee and its embattled chairman, Ken Martin. More puzzling than the White House’s deranged attacks on immigrants and constitutionally protected speech, or the administration’s deepening austerity measures that include cuts to the federal workforce and popular social services such as Medicaid and the supplemental nutrition vouchers known as SNAP, is the Democrats’ bewildering failure to capitalize on the growing outrage over Trump’s polarizing policies.
The DNC owes its stasis to the internecine feud that came to a head with Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in last year’s general election and which spilled over into the New Year. That split pits party stalwarts against younger progressives who want Democrats to break from the conservative tradition established by Bill Clinton in his 1992 presidential campaign in a misguided effort to “out-Republican the Republicans.”
The DNC’s election of new leaders, including 25-year-old David Hogg, as one of four vice chairs, widened the political fissures. A survivor of the 2018 shooting at Parkland High School in Ft. Lauderdale that left 17 dead, Hogg championed gun control, health care reform and a change to the Democrats’ elitist messaging, telling reporters last year:
“When people are feeling like the economy is not going well, our message should not be: ‘No, you don’t understand. Look at how much worse off all these other countries are in the G7 . “It comes down to making sure that we are not choosing to live in a comfortable delusion and actively choosing to live in an uncomfortable reality where we might actually be able to win.”
As a vice-chair, Hogg’s proposal to effect generational change by raising $20 million to seed primary challenges to moderate Democratic incumbents in next year’s midterms shook up the party and led to his ouster earlier this month. But Hogg’s departure was followed days later by the resignation of two of the nation’s most influential labor union leaders from their posts.
Randi Weingarten, the longtime head of the American Federation of Teachers and a high-profile figure in Democratic politics, and Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, declined Martin’s offers to remain at-large members of the national party after they were removed from the party’s powerful Rules and Bylaws Committee that sets the process for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating process. Both labor leaders had supported Mr. Martin’s rival in the chairmanship race, Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. In their messages announcing their resignation, the two labor leaders both hinted that Martin was failing to expand the DNC’s coalition. In her resignation letter to Martin, Weingarten, who is herself known as a moderate, wrote:
“While I am proud to be a Democrat, I appear to be out of step with the leadership you are forging, and I do not want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent and actively trying to engage more and more of our communities.”
This message is apparently resonating with party donors. According to campaign reports released this month, the Republican Party’s main fundraising arm began the month with nearly five times the cash on hand, $72.4 million, than its DNC counterpart, which has only $15 million.
The party’s disunion is the culmination of Bill Clinton’s strategy to compete with Ronald Reagan’s GOP for the votes of white, suburban racists by effectively being more conservative. Covering the tune, “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” Clinton razed the Wall Street regulations that Reagan only loosened. When Reagan left the White House, the number of conglomerates controlling the bulk of U.S. media outlets had been whittled from 50 to 29; by the time Clinton left office, the number was six. And while Reagan talked a good game about lifting trade barriers, the U.S. tariff regime was largely intact when he left office; the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed into law by Clinton opened the floodgates for employers to ship the nation’s manufacturing sector offshore.
It was, however, Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that was the focus of intense scrutiny in the 2020 U.S. presidential season, and rightly so. The Reagan and Bush administrations nearly doubled the nation’s federal prison population yet Clinton jailed more inmates in eight years than the Reagan and Bush administrations did in 12.
While Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 as a traditional liberal who pledged to do something about police killings of African Americans such as George Floyd, he quickly retreated from that position once elected, and governed as a moderate Republican. In fact, with the lone exception of Biden, each Democratic presidential nominee–including Harris–has adopted rhetoric that is more conservative than the last nominee, leaving progressives with no viable alternative to the GOP’s policies.
Perhaps the best example of this is the tepid response of top-ranking Democrats on Capitol Hill to Trump’s handling of the military conflict between Israel and Iran. After Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities on June 12, Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the U.S. Senate, urged Trump to be “tough” on Iran and not make any “side deals” without Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. In a June 13 press statement, he wrote:
“The United States’ commitment to Israel’s security and defense must be ironclad as they prepare for Iran’s response. The Iranian regime’s stated policy has long been to destroy Israel and Jewish communities around the world.”
Schumer’s remarks are largely consistent with Capitol Hill Democrats who complain that Trump bombed Iran without Congressional approval but are mute on the violations of international law incurred by the attack because they too seek regime change in Iran.
As Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III, a political scientist and host of “Inside the Issues” on SiriusXM Satellite Radio is fond of saying, the Democrats aren’t likely to regain their stride until they understand the difference between a minority party–whose differences with the ruling party are more style than substance– and an opposition party that challenges the very foundations upon which the government is built.
Well, kick them when they're down. The capitalist-lite party will never serve the people's interest, though they fool some of the people most of the time. The Democratic Party must be destroyed, it is no more redeemable than Trump himself.
PS - The DNC should be fed to starving baby elephants.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
It should not surprise that many US leftists are excited by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in last Wednesday’s New York City primary election. They should be buoyed by a rare victory in a bleak political landscape.
Mamdani defeated an establishment candidate showered with money and endorsed by Democratic Party royalty. His chief opponent, Andrew Cuomo, enjoyed the support and the forecasts of all the major media, locally and nationally. Cuomo fell back on every cheap, spineless trick: redbaiting (Mamdani is a member of Democratic Socialist of America), ethnic and religious baiting (Mamdani is a foreign-born Muslim), and “unfriendliness” to business (Mamdani advocates taxing the rich, freezing rents, and fare-less transit). And still Mamdani won.
Admittedly, Cuomo is ethically challenged and tarnished by his prior resignation from New York’s Governorship. One supposes that Democratic bigwigs could easily have seen an advantage in masculine sliminess after witnessing the king of vulgarity-- Donald Trump-- enjoy great electoral success.
But for the left, the important fact was that Cuomo represented the strategy and tactics, the program (such as it is), and the machinery of the Democratic Party leadership. The left needed a victory against the Clintons, Obamas, and Carvilles to demonstrate that another way was possible. And more pointedly, the left needed to see that a program embracing a class-war skirmish against developers, financial titans, and a motley assortment of other capitalists can win in the largest city in the US. Nearly every major policy domestically and internationally that the Democratic Party considers toxic was embraced by Mamdani’s campaign. And still Mamdani won.
And why shouldn’t he?
Democratic Party consultants methodically ignore the views of voters-- views expressing economic hardship, a broken health care system, mounting debt, a housing crisis, etc.-- delivered by opinion polls. Mamdani listened. And he won.
Clearly, the seats of wealth and power were shaken, reacting violently and crudely to Mamdani’s victory. A major Cuomo backer, hedge fund exec, Dan Loeb, captured the moment: “It’s officially hot commie summer.”
We wish!
Wall Street quickly panicked, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Corporate leaders held a flurry of private phone calls to plot how to fight back against Mamdani and discussed backing an outside group with the goal of raising around $20 million to oppose him, according to people familiar with the matter.
The WSJ quotes Anthony Pompliano, a skittish CEO of a bitcoin-focused financial company: “I can’t believe I even need to say this, but socialism doesn’t work… It has failed in every American city it was tried.”
Others, including hedge-fund manager, Ricky Sandler, threaten to take their business outside New York City.
The Washington Post editorial board scolds readers with this ominous headline warning: Zohran Mamdani’s victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party.
It gets even wackier in the right wing's outer limits. My favorite libertarian site posted a near hysterical call for the application of the infamous 1954 Communist Control Act to remove him from office, even put Mamdani in prison. The never-disappointing, notorious thug, Erik D Prince, calls for Kristi Noem to initiate deportation proceedings.
Yet not so shockingly, many fellow Democrats nearly matched the scorn and contempt heaped on Mamdani by Wealth, Power, and Trumpers. Senate and House minority leaders-- Schumer and Jeffries-- refused to endorse the primary winner. New York Representative Laura Gillen declared that Mamdani is the "absolute wrong choice for New York." Her colleague, Tom Suozzi, had “serious concerns,” as reported by Axios under the banner: Democratic establishment melts down over Mamdani's win in New York. Other Democrats ran away from discussing the victory and, of course, the overworked, overwrought, and abused charge of “antisemitism” was tossed about promiscuously.
Where there is no fear and alarm, there is euphoria. Nearly every writer for The Nation enthused over the primary victory, with the capable Jeet Heer gleefully proclaiming that “Zohran Mamdani Defeated a Corrupt, Weak Democratic Party Establishment”.
Similarly, David Sirota, former advisor and speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, wrote-- with understandable gloating-- on The Lever and in Rolling Stone:
Democratic Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary victory in New York City has prompted an elite panic, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen: Billionaires are desperately seeking a general-election candidate to stop him, former Barack Obama aides are publicly melting down, corporate moguls are threatening a capital strike, and CNBC has become a television forum for nervous breakdowns. Meanwhile, Democratic elites who’ve spent a decade punching left are suddenly trying to align themselves with and take credit for Mamdani’s brand (though not necessarily his agenda).
This breakthrough-- he surmises-- could lead to a “Democratic Party reckoning.”
But wait a minute.
We can’t let euphoria blind us to the track record of other Democratic Party insurgencies. We cannot forget how deeply opposed the Democratic Party’s bosses, consultants, and wealthy benefactors are to popular reforms and even modestly visionary candidates. Party intellectuals fully understand-- as hotshot consultant James Carville bluntly reminds us-- that in a two-party system all the oppositional party has to do is wait for the other party to stumble and then take its turn. Why would the Democrats bother to construct a voter-friendly program leaning towards social justice?
A glance at the crude sabotage of two Bernie Sanders Presidential campaigns by the Democratic Party Godfathers should dispel even the most gullible from any delusion that the party will change course.
Should Mamdani actually win the mayoral race-- and we must work hard to see that he does-- there is absolutely no reason to believe that the Party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama will draw even the most modest conclusion about the way forward. They are not interested in going forward, only in returning to power. Of course, they will-- as they have in the past-- welcome idealistic foot soldiers who want to believe that the Democratic Party is the path to social justice. Generations of well-meaning, change-seeking youth have been ground up by this cynical process of bait-and-switch.
Though the Party’s leadership will not acknowledge it, the Democrat brand is widely discredited. As Jarod Abbott and Les Leopold conclude: “Polling shows Americans are ready to support independent populists running on economic platforms. But what they don’t want is anything associated with the Democratic Party’s brand.”
Stopping short of calling for a new party, Abbott and Leopold asked poll respondents in key rust-belt states if they would support a worker-oriented association independent of both parties to support independent candidates. Fifty-seven percent of respondents would support or strongly support such an association.
This squares with recent polls that show strong disapproval of elected Democrats and the Democratic Party. The recent late-May Financial Times/YouGov poll shows that 57 percent of respondents have an unfavorable view of Democrats in Congress. And a similar 57 percent have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. Only 11 percent have a very favorable view of the Democratic Party.
Whether an “association” or a party is necessary, Abbott and Leopold are correct in recognizing that it must have a strong working-class base in order to break away from the corporate ownership of the Democratic Party.
As Charles Derber has perceptively noted on a recent podcast, the worse outcome of the current multi-faceted crisis is to revert to the earlier times that spawned the Trump phenomena. And that is exactly what the Democrats are offering.
With the Republican Party leadership facing a schism over Iran between war hawks and non-interventionists (Greene, Bannon, and Carlson) and with the growing split between cultural warriors and Silicon Valley libertarians (Musk’s threat to launch a third party), the Democrats may well slip back into power by default.
Collaborators Like Al Sharpton Can’t Assist Zohran Mamdani with Circumventing Pigmentation Politics and the Black Misleadership Class…But Principled Black Radical Organizing Can
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright 09 Jul 2025
Former Gov. David Paterson said other candidates should back the strongest choice to challenge Mamdani. Matthew McDermott
Zohran Mamdani’s victory rattled NYC’s political elite. But to win Black voters and defeat the Democrat machine, he must reject Al Sharpton’s co-optation and align with radical Black organizers.
The Democrat Party establishment, zionist industrial complex, and the billionaire class, as well as New York based cartels representing real estate/developers and polluters all know the best weapon to use against Zohran Mamdani is the Black Misleadership class in concert with elements of the petit bourgeois. This is quite evident in the weeks that have passed since Mamdani secured the Democrat Party nomination for Mayor of New York City (NYC) by winning the primary and, in the process, vanquishing establishment Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and the machine that backed him with a $25 million Super PAC funded by billionaires including, but not limited to, Michael Bloomberg.
This week the Black Misleadership Class dispatched former New York governor, David Paterson, to act as its spokesman and make the case for a united front against Mamdani. Earlier this week, Paterson, who supported Cuomo during the primaries, appealed to members of the Democrat Party to defeat Zohran Mamdani due to his “lack of experience.” Paterson more recently suggested that Mamdani is an “antisemite,” who needs to apologize for past comments he’s made about a “global intifada,” and generally apologize to the people he’s “harmed.” This is curious coming from Paterson given that he endorsed Cuomo who many believe offered nothing more than meretricious apologies to women who were allegedly sexually harassed while he was governor and the families of victims of COVID-19 related deaths in nursing homes due to intentional derelictions of duty while Cuomo was governor.
That said, it’s clear that the Black Misleadership Class has been given its orders by their white capitalist masters, especially the zionist industrial complex, to paint Mamdani as a wild, political novice, out of touch, frivolous, and dangerous Islamic radical antisemite who will make life precarious for NYC’s Jewish population - the second largest outside the zionist ethnostate of Israel. The zionist industrial complex’s favorite House negro and a top recipient of AIPAC blood money, Hakeem Jeffries declared that Mamdani, will have to do more to convince NYC’s Jewish voters that he will stand against antisemitism based on the nominee’s past staments on the zionist ethnostate of Israel, which included his suggestion that he would have Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu arrested for war crimes as Mayor noting, “this is a city [where] are values are in line with international law.” Jeffries makes these specious claims despite the fact that Mamdani has received the endorsement of Jewish lawmakers such as Representative Jerrod Nadler (D-NY) and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander , as well as national organizations including Jewish for Voice for Peace Action and Bend the Arc (albeit a tacit endorsement),
While Mamadani appears to be adroitly navigating the false claims of antisemitism against him, it’s still not clear if he’s prepared or best positioned to navigate a favorite tactic of the Black Misleadership Class, pigmentation politics. This is key due to Mamdani’s performance with Black voters during the primaries - according to exit polls, Cuomo, in precincts where at least 70 percent of the residents are Black, defeated Mamdani 59% to 26% . Additionally, Cuomo won 51% of all precincts with majority Black residents. Equally troubling for the Mamdani campaign is the fact that Cuomo won 49% of precincts with a majority of low-income residents compared to 38% for Mamdani. The outcome of the primaries continues a trend from a Marist poll from May that revealed 50% and and 47% of Black and households with an income less than $50,000, respectively, planned to vote for Cuomo versus 11% and 8% for Mamdani.
These numbers will undoubtedly be utilized by the coalition, currently in the process of forming, in an attempt to prevent Mamdani from becoming the Mayor of New York City. I spoke with the venerable Charles Barron, a veteran of both New York City and State politics [Barron served both as a member of the New York State Assembly and New York City Council, collectively, for nearly two decades], about the results of the primaries and Mamdani’s performance with Black and low-income New Yorkers. Barron noted that Mamdani’s win “rocked the Democratic Party establishment citywide, statewide, and nationally.” However, when I inquired how a candidate who ran and won on a bold and, seemingly, unapologetic platform that should benefit poor and working class people - including a rent freeze, free and fast buses, and universal child care - still lost the Black and working class vote, Barron lifted up two critical variables; the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and gentrification.
DSA would likely agree that the successful election of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) represents their most renowned and celebrated electoral victory to date. But DSA may not necessarily agree on how AOC won her 2018 election. In a piece in The Intercept entitled, Data Suggests that Gentrifying Neighborhoods Powered Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Victory , authors Zaid Jilani and Ryan Grim reported that contrary to the narrative that AOC won because Latino and other non white voters propelled her over her then white, male opponent, she actually performed best in whiter, more gentrified precincts in Queens, NYC neighborhoods like Astoria, Sunnyside, and Jackson Heights. According to Mr. Barron, this trend continued for Mamdani, noting that he won in areas like New York’s 57th Assembly District, which includes the Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant communities. As Mr. Barron explained, the district was 72% Black in 2006 when Hakeem Jeffries was its Assemblyman and Letitia James was its NYC Councilwoman. In 2025 the district is 32% Black and 38% white.
Gentrification will be a key issue moving forward as it will likely be espoused, albeit speciously, by the Black Misleadership class, as well as the anti-Zohran coalition, to create a wedge between Black and low-income and voters and Mamadani. And while DSA, which Mamdani is a member of, can certainly point to the progressive platform that just won the Democrat Party primary for NYC mayor, it must also contend with the fact that the vast majority of its members, by their own assertion, are white. It must also be stated that many of DSA’s white members live in rapidly gentrifying districts like Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant. As Mr. Barron noted, Mamdani will need to address how issues like gentrification and other challenges associated with affordability specifically impact Black New Yorkers just as he’s made specific commitments to combatting antisemitism and making NYC a safe place for its Jewish population. Barron further indicated that DSA will have to overcome its propensity for class reductionism, an issue that he believes has afflicted the white left since his days as a member of the Black Panther Party.
In a discussion with Al Jazeera, Portia Allen-Kyle , executive director of the Black-led group, Color of Change, suggested that Mamdani must better understand the, “spectrum of viewpoints in the Black community,” as well as apply a combination of “authenticity and innovation” to better reach NYC’s Black voters. Applying authenticity, especially given the platform that Mamdani ran and won on, will require organizing and conferring with principled Black radical organizations and leaders in New York City, New York State, and across the nation. That’s why it’s flummoxing that Mamdani chose to meet and appear with Al Sharpton and his National Action Network soon after winning the primary. During the appearance, Sharpton praised Mamdani for his “courage” and willingness to speak to the Black community - as if he speaks for the entire Black community. Sharpton neglected to name the fact that he he applied the use of pigmentation politics just a week before the primary election when he suggested that Mamdani is not progressive because he did not rank former mayoral candidate and Speaker of the NYC City Council, Adrienne Adams, who is a Black woman, as his second choice.
Sharpton has not endorsed Mamdani and will, of course, not formally endorse him. He will use Mamdani’s meteoric rise to center and benefit himself just as he did with Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. If Sharpton is serious about his praise for Mamdani, why is he not working as hard to get more Black Democrats like Jeffries, Representatives Gregory Meeks and James Clyburn, and the so-called Congressional Black Caucus to endorse him as he is trying to force Cuomo to drop out of the race, to allow for a “two person race? ” The answer is simple, Sharpton is more a leader of the Black Misleadership Class than he is a leader for poor and working class Black people, in addition to, like Hakeem Jeffries, being an AIPAC errand boy and mouthpiece for the zionist industrial complex. Mamdani and his team must realize that counter-revolutionaries like Sharpton may help him bridge gaps with the Democrat party establishment, but will not help him bridge gaps with an aggregate of Black people and poor and working class people writ large, which may cost him the election and a key opportunity to advance policies that improve material conditions and pry power from the capitalist class stranglehold in NYC and beyond.
As Mr. Barron noted, there have been too many examples of DSA-backed candidates making Faustian agreements with the Democrat establishment only to become compromised agents of U.S. empire-driven imperialism and neo-colonialism fully supported and facilitated by the Democrat party. In compounding this point, Mr. Barron stated, “I’d rather fight to get Zohran to respect us [as Black radicals] more and to not play us like so many Black members of the Democratic Party.” He added, “You can’t run to Sharpton and run away from Black radicals.”
Zorhan Mamdani has done something that is quite extraordinary and we cannot dismiss the organizing of DSA and other left-leaning groups in that process. That said, the issues that Mamdani won on are much bigger than he is - these issues must be addressed in such a way that they can be efficaciously implemented and primarily serve and center poor and working class people. At the same time, organizing around these issues requires an analysis and understanding of how the most oppressed groups, including Black New Yorkers, are specifically and disproportionately impacted by the material conditions that continue to make their lives less safe and their humanity less affirmed.
Author and thinker David Roediger reminds us, “we must stop drawing lines dividing class and race and start drawing lines connecting them.” The Black Misleadership Class and their pigmentation politics is the antithesis of this edict. If Mamdani has any chance of winning in the general election, he and his team should be conferring with principled, Black-led radical organizations like Barron’s Operation P.O.W.E.R and the political operation it’s created that has successfully contended with and defeated the Black Misleadership Class and Democrat party establishment for decades. To do otherwise and bend the knee to race peddlers like Sharpton risks blowing a major opportunity to assist with the edification and emancipation of Black and all poor and working class people in NYC. This would not only be a major setback for the city, but also, potentially, for the process of building and sustaining multiracial and multiethnic independent political organizations necessary to vanquish the duopoly.
A timely reminder that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. 'DSA' says it all, poison pill compromise and opportunism. Yes, it would be nice to see the establishment take one on the chin but don't get your hopes up.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
