• Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago
    From the Article

    Many of the purge’s casualties were honorable Americans whose revulsion toward the genocide of the Palestinian people had professional costs. The first publicized victim came on October 8, 2023, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced he was cutting off all food, fuel, and electricity to the “human animals” of Gaza, and a website owned by the daughter of a centimillionaire New Jersey developer fired its NBA blogger for posting, “Solidarity with Palestine always.”

    On social media and group chats, the billionaires raised funds to hire a private detective team to assist the NYPD crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters and reward the gang of thugs who violently attacked peaceful protesters at UCLA with sticks, clubs, chemical sprays, and a backpack full of poisoned mice. International humanitarian organizations with operations in Gaza suffered as well, with the World Food Program reporting a near halving of its fundraising haul in 2023; a colleague who works in fundraising for UNICEF told me the group’s most loyal mega-donors would not touch “anything Gaza” with a ten-foot pole.

    This was nominally about Israel, but it also always seemed obvious that it wasn’t principally about Israel at all. At its heart, the billionaire revolt was the expression of a broader dissatisfaction with Joe Biden that was most surely rooted in the real, substantial, and (in the post–Cold War neoliberal era) unprecedented things his administration was quietly (too quietly!) doing for working people, small-business owners, and the proliferating subsistence entrepreneur class that falls somewhere in the middle. It sued Amazon for squeezing sellers to the bone while manipulating prices ever higher, Albertsons and Kroger for conspiring to gouge shoppers by littering the country with dead strip centers where supermarkets once stood, Live Nation for indenturing a generation of young musicians and turning tickets to concerts and sports events into luxury goods, Welsh Carson (the most powerful private equity firm in health care) for gouging hospital patients and suppressing the wages of anesthesiologists in multiple states, and more. It even got a court to label Google a monopolist.

    This stuff was extremely popular, and Democratic leaders never talked about it, likely because it pissed off the donor class—which is of course the very reason they should have been talking about nothing else.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Also they weren’t very careful with that donor money. They could afford to lose it, if they’d cut spending on various kinds of stupid advertising. Half the media would turn against them, but that’d have upsides too - in the exact area of swaying Trump votes, both those voting contrarian and those voting for destructive change.

    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      The Harris campaign made the decision to not break from Biden on Israel, at the cost of a +6 points gain. That’s the fault of the campaign’s calculations to ignore those voters, take them for granted, and instead run to the right with Liz Cheney and having the most lethal Military.

      I voted for Harris and told others to do the same. It’s still on the campaign. Blaming voters is just sowing division when we need unity and solidarity to fight against Fascism.

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      Our first matchup tested a Democrat and a Republican who “both agree with Israel’s current approach to the conflict in Gaza”. In this case, the generic candidates tied 44–44. The second matchup saw the same Republican facing a Democrat supporting “an immediate ceasefire and a halt of military aid and arms sales to Israel”. Interestingly, the Democrat led 49–43, with Independents and 2020 non-voters driving the bulk of this shift.

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      In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely.

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      Majorities of Democrats (67%) and Independents (55%) believe the US should either end support for Israel’s war effort or make that support conditional on a ceasefire. Only 8% of Democrats but 42% of Republicans think the US must support Israel unconditionally.

      Republicans and Independents most often point to immigration as one of Biden’s top foreign policy failures. Democrats most often select the US response to the war in Gaza.

    • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      This is exactly why dems are just as bad. They chose a genocide over winning. Now they’re congratulating Trump and inviting him over for dinner, etc. Fascists can’t maintain power when people actually resist, but allies don’t resist.

      • AngryRobot@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        She didn’t choose a genocide, Harris repeatedly called for a cease-fire. Trump, on the other hand, encouraged Benny to wipe Hamas out.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    I am copying a reply I made to another post:

    …no.

    The DNC brain trust thought they could get away with ignoring an absolutely fucking HUGE part of their base. And they were fucking WRECKED for it.

    Trump got just about the same number of votes as he did in the last election. Harris got 11M less votes than Biden got. ELEVEN. MILLION. PEOPLE. STAYED THE FUCK HOME. BECAUSE THEY SAW THE ESTABLISHMENT CIRCLEJERK. AND HARRIS FUCKING LEANED INTO IT. AND IGNORED THE VERY FUCKING REAL LIVED EXPERIENCE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS GETTING HOLLOWED OUT, AND THE LOWER CLASS CONTINUING TO GET CRUSHED TO DEATH.

    And now we get to listen to pundits and DNC leadership and Biden admin people and Harris campaign people circlejerk themselves about how it wasn’t their fault, it was those goddamn progressives and the stupid Arab Americans who cared about Gaza too much.

    Genuinely: fuck all the way off with that narrative. the Democratic Party snatched this defeat from the jaws of victory. There was a path to victory. They simply didn’t fucking take it.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      Whenever these kinds of reports come in, I always just assume it’s bad actors who know full well that in context the word being used is perfectly innocent, but they want to muddy the waters.

  • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    I don’t like the phrasing here. The Democratic party could have done better. They weren’t forced not to. They chose to support genocide, they chose to run a dementia patient, they chose to appoint a wildly unpopular candidate, they chose to appeal to the center right, and they chose to run without clear economic policies. I genuinely believe they could have won while still supporting genocide if they didn’t do everything so awfully. I mean seriously, the Cheneys? Ffs

    This is severe cope. The democrats are not being controlled by big money they are big money, they chose this and failed us. We don’t need to continue apologizing for them and pretending they have our best interest at heart. We need to abandon them just as they abandoned us here.