Obviously the message substance is the important thing here but man I hope going from small town guy to instantly nationally relevant doesn't break this guy's brain

That is thousands of people who immediately want to use you for their own ends, good or bad. Cannot be easy if you've not steeled yourself for it / have a trusting, small town mindset.

tell him to move to Maine

That one Palestinian women on Xitter who tweeted about how America should defund the MIC to pay for our healthcare really knew ball.

I mean these sorts of arguments are working well on people like him over Ukraine, no

at the end of the day the argument of 'ukraine are the good guys, so they should get everything they need, and israel are the bad guys, so they should get nothing' is perfectly coherent and also essentially platner's position

my dad also thinks Ukraine should be given enough materiel to flatten Moscow

Cool dad 😎

(North Jersey is heavily Ukrainian and I have Ukrainian friends)

i actually think there is a wide open lane in american politics right now for “get the US out of israel.” the challenge is having the steel to weather the inevitable attacks from the right. but “israel has forfeited american aid because of its behavior” plays.

I know the “MAGA fever” is never going to break per se. But once Trump is off the board one way or another I think right wing support for Israel collapses pretty quickly. It’s already an odd fit amongst the “America first” (and frankly largely antisemitic) crowd as is.

Not with the Christian per-millenialists. All Jews have to go back to a reconstituted Israel to bring back Armageddon.

(and i were advising a candidate i’d say they should take this stance *because* you are likely to be attacked for it)

They would not be supported by Jeffries and Schumer.

So what? All politicians in America are entrepreneurs, who have to build their own support base. The endorsement whining is just left's way of processing loss.

I guess in case of Mamdani, it's left's way of processing not losing, which is tantamount to a loss (as it interferes with whining).

The problem of course being that they would find and fund a competitor for the primary. That would have to be factored into the cost of going against them. Either have the funding lined up or make sure you knew your path and pushed it hard. It'd be a one way street till you won.

There are specific states where this is hard (really just New York I think), but I think the more people just do it, the more the cordon sanitaire weakens.

And Zohrans success in NYC proves it

Why do you say that? Mamdani just did it and won the most votes in a NYC mayoral primary ever.

Against an unusually weak candidate, among the most left-wing electorate in the state. If you add in heavily Jewish suburbs of the city, the dynamic changes.

Put another way: the parents of Mamdanis's leftist Jewish voters live in Westchester and LI, and they're fucking insane.

Also he’s mayor. He doesn’t hold the fate of Israel in his hands the way the media seemed to pretend.

Maybe wouldn’t change much. Normie liberal jews are pissed at Israel. A skilled candidate who can avoid anti-semitism pitfalls can probably say he’s going to kick netanyahus ass

I think it makes the dance a lot more precarious than elsewhere. Like, look at how Rye and towns like it voted in 2024 vis a vis Bowman.

I think there are a lot of normie liberal jews pissed at Israel who also don't like candidates who criticize Israel a lot especially ones who aren't Jewish and it shows up in vote numbers.

Does it?

read the thing you posted again

Like I do think this would count against a candidate where I am (purple NY suburbs), but even here not by as much as one might think.

Seems like every Jewish Democrat I know has more or less come around to the idea that the state of Israel needs to be stopped. Most think of this just as a Netanyahu problem, though, and most were not here in 2023 or 2024. But they're there now.

Israel is not a developing country and doesn't not need $4 billion annually from the US. If the US is conditioning weapons transfers to all it allies, it can and should do the same with Israel as well.

#AIPAC 🤔 I have heard that the Zionist funding model is a huge blackmail-scam.

Are you going to hold other US allies/aid recipients to that standard? If so, will the US erase itself from most of world politics, a new age of Dem isolationism? Are we cutting off Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt...? Or is this just the consequence for Israel?

Are those countries bombing tf out of kids right this moment?

Saudi Arabia's proxy war with Iran is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Yemen. Turkey and the UAE are funding the Sudan conflict (albeit on opposite sides) Drone Attacks in Darfur, Port Sudan Reflect Growing Turkey-UAE Tensions - Africa Defense Forum share.google/ll7JoF3bcTby...

Turkey is part of NATO...

That doesn't mean its hands are clean.

And I didn't say that, but including Turkey, and Egypt, in your list just points out how your whataboutism is nothing more than an unserious deflection.

Turkey is funding the atrocities in Sudan, not to mention its continuous offensives against Kurds in Syria, Iraq and East Turkey.

Lmao wait until you hear about the shit the United States is complicit in.

Yes, that does go along with my point.

So we should just fund Isreal because the US is an authoritarian shithole?

So we should just keep selling/giving arms to Israel because the world is full of bad people doing bad things? Nihilism is a hell of a drug.

So we can take measured steps against the Netanyahu administration relating to the humanitarian disaster in Gaza without holding Israel to a standard we don't hold ourselves, or any other ally/aid recipient, to. Dumping Israel as an ally altogether is both morally and strategically bankrupt.

Again, not something I dispute, but saying we'll just cut off any aid to a NATO ally shows either that you are disingenuous, unserious, or both, all in an attempt to deflect from Israel.

Egypt is perhaps an even worse one to include as the vast majority of aid the US has given to them since the 1970s is about Israel's safety and security. So which is it?

Would also bolster law and order bonafides with the right rhetoric, given the fact that the current supply of military aid to Israel is already illegal. "I will follow the law" over and over again, including with prosecuting corrupt Republicans

We need an amicable divorce

once you inform the median voter that the average Gazan is a clinically malnourished minor they get, like, really upset about it, wonder why

I think the answer in most places is to lean into the right's attacks

Hamas can end the war at anytime, its not about the suffering in Gaza, its about finding someone to blame with liberals,

You keep calling it a war. One side is starving the other side, including the hostages Netanyahu pretends to care about. The day Netanyahu stops receiving aid is the day this ends, and he can go on trial for all his corruption charges.

do you know how many of Hamas troops are counted in the death toll? Do you know how many people Hamas has killed? If we stop aid to Isreal, we not only jeopardize a nation of 9 mill we help Iran who supplies China with oil, and facilitate the transfer of missiles to Russia to use in Ukraine

If Israel wants a war with Iran they can have at it without our help. American are living paycheck to paycheck funding this genocide while Israelis have universal health care. I say good luck to them on their future endeavors without us.

genocide is the PC word now and fashionable, don't want to hear war, it upsets the lefty world, when was the last time they listed the dead piled up by Hamas, or revealed the number of Hamas fighters and associates included in the fatalities, abandon all common sense who enter PC world

Looks like hard work you're doing. I'll take a shot for every time you type Hamas to cover for IDF war crimes.

we will accept any article that says Israel is the bad guy, nothing else please

so i guess then we disengage from any humanitarian efforts around the world and any help to Ukraine forget it, and when Iran gets a nuclear bomb, they get one I guess, we are all going to die anyway, i am all for health care thats for sure

When Iran gets a nuclear bomb I guess Israel won't be the only country with Nuclear weapons in the Middle East anymore. The Samson directive is public information.

yep, and they might go ahead and go sampson on everyone, that will make libs happy

Im sure the moment Bibi does that, he knows it's all over. There will be no Greater Israel after the Samson option.

they have nine million people over there, they are attacked with missiles and drones from Yemen, Iran, Lebanon, Gaza (maybe not now), Syria, Iran is probably sending misslies to Russian for use in Ukraine, go ahead abandon them, and then we will talk about a real genocide

he learned on his own that the average Gazan is a starving teenager and I think it broke something in him tbh

for all of the talk about social media pickling everyone's brain, it also does raise the salience of things like Gaza through the roof. virtually all of my immediate family members are on the pro-Palestine side and I've barely had to convince anyone

my dad isn't even on social media, the print and TV coverage has just been so abjectly horrifying that I think he wants the US to cut Israel off

well social media rubs off on the elite media now too, that explains how you get people like that to notice

he has close Israeli friends and everything but children are children and he can't stomach violence against them

big “median american voter (laudatory)” vibes

It seems pretty common for older people to figure out one thing is not what they thought and just kinda break like that. Like, my mom did basic research on trans people in like 2021, and is now hoping there's a Federal lottery to flip the switch with Elon Musk in the chamber and she wins it.

Kerry and then Obama used the same lines about Iraq ("building firehouses in Ohio instead of bombing counties half a world away"). Always effective

Why didn't he give a shit about Gaza last year when Trump was saying he'd pave over it?