Freedom House, the $94 million, nominally independent “human rights” NGO, has been suspiciously quiet as the Trump administration disappears, imprisons, and deports activists opposing the US and Israel’s assault on Gaza. 

The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil on March 8 kicked off an harrowing wave of free speech suppression aimed at those protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Over 300 high-profile arrests and deportation threats followed Khalil, including that of Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who has been rotting in a prison for 41 days for simply writing an op-ed critical of Israel in a student paper. She is being held in gulag-like conditions in a Louisiana prison, far from her family, despite the fact that the State Department’s own internal report found she broke no law. Since March 8, Freedom House has published dozens of reports, essays, blog posts, articles, media quotes and social media posts. But, strangely for an alleged human rights group, none have mentioned the White House’s unprecedented crackdown on free expression.

Freedom House’s own website makes clear that defending “free speech” is central to its mission. “Free speech and expression is the lifeblood of democracy, facilitating open debate, the proper consideration of diverse interests and perspectives,” they wax romantically. Which makes it all the more strange they have said nothing about these textbook cases of criminalizing freedom of expression. 

TRNN reached out to Freedom House several times for comment on their silence, or to explain why they haven’t issued a statement of solidarity with any of those who disappeared for Gaza activism, but the organization did not return our emails. Freedom House receives over 80% of its budget from the US State Department and, by its own admission, has been hit hard by Trump’s cuts to foreign aid. In their statement asking for private donors to fill the void left by the Trump cuts, they hinted at one reason why they are silent on Trump’s authoritarian crackdown—it seems only “America’s adversaries” can be authoritarian, not the US or its allies. “Freedom House has been severely impacted by the disruption of US foreign assistance,” they wrote, “and the termination of critical programs that Congress funded to counter America’s authoritarian adversaries and support the global struggle for democracy.”

So what happens when the US is the authoritarian in question? It seems the response is to simply act like the draconian suppression of speech doesn’t exist. Trump’s crackdown on Gaza activists isn’t the first time the US has been authoritarian, of course. The US has long had the world’s largest prison population by a wide margin, long had a deeply racist and unequal justice system, long visited authoritarian violence and economic hardship on other countries—including the underlying genocide in Gaza in question. 

But Trump’s deportation and imprisoning of people for—by the White House’s own admission—pure political speech marks a meaningful escalation that is clearly in conflict with Freedom House’s already limited, negative rights framework of “freedom.” Plenty of other freedom of speech organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have aggressively defended Khalil and others by filing lawsuits, issuing statements, and making clear where they stand. Why hasn’t an organization with tens of millions of dollars like Freedom House done the same?

The answer is obvious: Freedom House is not an independent organization. They are, and always have been, a soft power organ of the US State Department that uses the thin patina of independence to meddle and concern troll the human rights abuses of “foreign adversaries” while downplaying and whitewashing those by the US and its allies. Israel, for example, always gets their nice green “free” label despite currently carrying out what Amnesty International labels a “genocide” and militarily occupying 4.5 million Palestinians who, even before Oct. 7, were either subject to decades of siege in Gaza or brutal occupation in the West Bank. But don’t worry, Freedom House bifurcates the West Bank from Israel’s score. Why? It’s unclear. Israel has waged a decades-long occupation of Palestine, where the freedom of movement, commerce, food, everyday internal travel, and basic human dignity of Palestinians is subject to the whims of Israeli leaders, but, Freedom House has to get that score above 70 and bestow Israel with a nice green label, lest they get angry phone calls from Congress and the White House.

The silence from the risibly named “Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners” program housed within Freedom House is the most conspicuous. We tried to reach them specifically for comment, but they also did not respond to our request. The program is named after the late Washington Post columnist Fred Haitt, whose most impactful contribution to American politics was lying and lobbying for the Invasion of Iraq both in his personal capacity and as editorial page editor at the Post. Which is the perfect face of an organization entirely neoconservative in its feigned concern for “freedom,” a selective tool of shallow moralizing unconcerned with introspection or criticism of the myriad ways the United States suppressed freedom of speech and human rights. Even when Trump comes into office and unleashes an unsophisticated, explicitly illiberal attack on basic liberal rights, Freedom House can’t bring itself to release a token statement or half-hearted condemnation to maintain the pretense of independence. Instead, its reaction is cowardly silence and moving on to condemn safe, official Bad Guy Countries like China and Cuba.

On March 18 Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire and recommenced its full scale assault, siege, and bombing of Gaza. Since then, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and the humanitarian situation is as desperate as ever. Watching mainstream media, however, one would hardly notice. 

While US media outlets continue to report below the fold on the daily airstrikes, they are no longer treated as major stories meriting emphasis and urgency. This is especially true for the New York Times and TV broadcast news, which have all but forgotten there’s an unprecedented humanitarian crisis ongoing in Gaza–still funded and armed by the US government. 

The paper of record, the New York Times, ran a front page story March 19, the day after Israel broke the ceasefire and killed hundreds in one day, but didn’t run a front page story on Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza in the 13 days since. (They ran a front page story on April 3 that centered Israel’s military “tactics” in Gaza but didn’t mention civilian death totals.) The Times did find room on March 27 for a front page image of anti-Hamas protests in Gaza which, of course, are a favorite media topic for the pro-genocide crowd as they see it as evidence their “war on Hamas” is both morally justified and, somehow, endorsed by Palestinians themselves. 

Like the New York Times, the nightly news shows–CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight–covered the initial bombing and breaking of the ceasefire the day after (ABC News’s lede after Israel killed 400+ in under 24 hours: “What does this mean for the hostages?”), but have subsequently ignored Gaza entirely, with one notable exception. CBS Evening News did a 4-minute segment on March 26 on “allegations” Israel was using Palestinians, and Palestinian children in particular, as human shields and even this was front loaded with bizarre denunciations of Hamas “using human shields”:

Most conspicuous of all was the total erasure of Gaza from the “agenda-setting” Sunday news programs that are designed to tell elites in Washington what they should care about. Gaza wasn’t mentioned once on any of the Sunday news shows–ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press, and CNN’s State of the Union–for the weeks of March 23 and March 30. Despite Israel breaking the ceasefire on Tuesday March 18 and killing more than 400 Palestinians–including over 200 women and children–in less than 24 hours, none of the Sunday morning news programs that have aired since have covered Gaza at all. 

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said yesterday that at least 322 children had been killed and 609 injured since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18. 

Whereas the media approach during the Biden years was to spin, obfuscate, blame Hamas, and help distance the White House from the images of carnage emanating from Gaza by propping up fake “ceasefire talks,” the media approach now that Trump is doubling down on Biden’s strategy of unfettered support for genocide appears to be to largely ignore it. 

All indications are that Israeli officials were banking on US news outlets normalizing the ongoing genocide of Gaza, assuming–correctly, as it turns out–that the death and despair would become so routine it would take on a “dog bites man” element. Combined with the nonstop “flood the zone” strategy of the Trump White House as it attacks dozens of perceived enemies at once, the US-backed genocide in Gaza is now both cliche and low priority. 

By way of comparison, the Sunday shows, nightly news shows, and the front page of the New York Times ran wall-to-wall coverage of the Yemen-Signal group chat controversy. Obviously, administration officials using unsecured channels to discuss war plans is a news story (though not nearly as important as the war crimes casually being discussed) but the fact that Israel recommenced its bombing, siege, and starvation strategy on an already decimated population is, objectively, a more urgent story with much higher human stakes. 

Indeed, Palestinians reporting from Gaza say the situation is as dire as it’s ever been. Israel cut off all aid on March 2 and the bombings have been as relentless and brutal as any time period pre-ceasefire. Meanwhile, with Trump openly endorsing ethnic cleansing, “debates” around how best to facilitate this ethnic cleansing are presented as sober, practical foreign policy discussions–not the open planning of a crime against humanity. “You mentioned Gaza,” Margaret Brennan casually said to Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, the last time Gaza was mentioned on CBS’s Face the Nation, March 16. “I want to ask you what specifics you are looking at when it comes to relocating the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In the past, you’ve mentioned Egypt. You’ve mentioned Jordan. Are you talking to other countries at this point about resettling?” 

Witkoff would go on to say Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza would “lead to a better life for Gazans,” to which Brennan politely nodded, thanked him and moved on. Watching this exchange one would hardly know that was being discussed–mass forceable population transfer–is a textbook war crime. Recent revelations by the UN that aid workers had been found in a mass grave have also been ignored by broadcast news. 15 Palestinian rescue workers, including at least one United Nations employee, were killed by Israeli forces “one by one,” according to the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS). This story has not been covered on-air by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, or CNN. 

The ongoing suffering in Gaza, still very much armed and funded by the White House, continues to fade into the background. It’s become routine, banal, and not something that can drive a wedge into the Democratic coalition. This dynamic, combined with US media’s general pro-Israel bias, means the daily starvation and death is not going to be making major headlines anytime soon. It’s now, after 18 months of genocide, just another boring “foreign policy” story. 

Mega billionaire Jeff Bezos made news yesterday by formally announcing the parameters of the Washington Post opinion section in clear ideological terms, making explicit what has long been implicit in corporate media and, like then-New York Times opinion editor James Bennet did seven years ago when he said that the New York Times was  “pro-capitalism,” effectively doing my job for me. 

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” the Amazon founder and executive chairman wrote in an open letter to Post employees. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

As I wrote in 2018 when Times opinion editor James Bennet said in a closed-door meeting with staffers that the Times was a “pro-capitalism” newspaper, “Media criticism is, more often than not, a practice of inference: seeing patterns and inferring from those patterns the political make-up of media. Occasionally, however, decision-makers from major media outlets come right out and openly declare their ideology.” 

Bezos has done us a favor by removing the mystery and inference and cheeky “open debate” pretense from the process of inferring the ideological perimeters of corporate media and laid it all out bare.

Obviously this dictate is, in theory, limited to the opinion section, not the news section, but those working on the other side of the firewall will no doubt take a hearty hint––if they didn’t the last time Bezos explicitly interfered in the opinion output of the paper. The fact is that, compared to peer outlets, the Washington Post’s current national labor coverage, while by no means aggressively anti-capitalist, is robust and generally favorable to workers. Reporters such as Lauren Kaori Gurley and Jeff Stein and columnist Perry Bacon Jr. have done excellent work highlighting the plight of Amazon employees and those on the business end of US sanctions, often in direct contradiction to Bezos’ bottom line and ideological preferences. While the Post’s local metro coverage, as I’ve documented, has often doubled as an Amazon lobbying front, its national coverage has often remained independent of the billionaire’s direct control. Indeed, the Post’s newly anointed chief economics reporter Jeff Stein publicly criticized his boss yesterday morning, writing on social media: “Bezos declaration Massive encroachment by Jeff Bezos into The Washington Post’s opinion section today – makes clear dissenting views will not be published or tolerated there I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side of coverage, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.”

One wants to be careful not to totally trivialize this escalation. While it is making explicit what has largely been implicit in corporate media, it appears to be removing even token and limited dissent. In some ways this could accelerate a long-overdue erosion of corporate media’s image as independent of owner influence; on the other hand it may just further codify corporate media’s drift to the right and awaken nothing but more open oligarch-endorsed fascism. 

It’s a more open right-wing drift that’s manifesting as well with liberal news channel MSNBC this week, as the Comcast-owned network laid off big name personalities Joy Reid and Ayman Mohyeldin—who, incidentally, were the two best anchors on the topic of the Gaza genocide—in exchange for mid-tier Biden alum Michael Steele and Jen Psaki. Reid and Mohyeldin were, by no means, meaningfully subversive or existentially critical of Biden and his support for genocide (and Reid has a long history of smearing left-wing candidates in sloppy and dishonest ways) but, compared to their media peers, they ran sympathetic and nuanced segments that laid out the human stakes of Israel’s myriad war crimes. This isn’t a narrative being retconned after their firing either. I said this in October of last year, highlighting Mohyeldin and Reid explicitly, when publishing a comprehensive study of cable news’s Gaza coverage for The Nation. 

Bezos’ on-the-nose power grab over the ideological output of the Washington Post’s opinion output is useful to analyze, as well, in the context of the media meltdown over then-candidate for president Bernie Sanders’ 2019 suggestion the Post’s coverage of him was, in the aggregate, more negative because the Post was owned by a billionaire. Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron called it a “conspiracy theory,” and CNN handwrung over the claim for days, with its anchors saying it was “dangerous.” NPR, like CNN, predictably drew facile equivalence with Donald Trump’s anti-media rantings. On its face, Sanders’ claim is fairly banal and obvious: clearly media outlets will reflect the ideological preferences of those who own them. There will be exceptions, there will be a scattering of dissenting voices—all sophisticated media understands the importance of permitting 10% dissent—but, generally, being owned by the world’s third-richest person will result in a specific ideological output, in the aggregate. 

Bezos making this influence explicit could perhaps reduce some of this feigned indignation and pearl clutching when those on the Left dare suggest that having a handful of corporations and billionaires own our major media outlets limits the scope of debate and coverage of the news, or that capital-owned media will necessarily result in a media that favors the interests and ideology of capital. Yes it’s not neat and clean, yes there are exceptions, and no it’s not the top-down cartoon version of censorship and control we grew up learning about reading 1984—but concentrated wealth curating and dictating how the public interprets the world is inherently anti-democratic. A major media owner worth $235 billion saying the quiet part out loud is menacing, yes, and certainly portends a dark next few years. But in some ways it’s refreshing and—if we approach the broader corrosive nature of oligarch-owned media with open eyes—could be a first step towards a vision of how media can challenge the interests of capital rather than serve as its ideological play toy.

In his 2009 paper Worst-Case Scenarios, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein coined the term the “Goldstein Effect” to describe a government’s “ability to intensify public concern, by giving a definite face to the adversary, specifying a human source of the underlying threat.” His basic argument was that in the instance of the “War on Terror,” the US government had Osama Bin Laden and his steady stream video messages. Selling the Iraq War, the Bush administration, obviously, had Saddam Hussein. The term came from Emmanuel Goldstein, the mysterious Party villain and counter-revolutionary in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Bad Guys, in other words, need a human face for the public to care about a threat. And climate change, unlike the war on terror or other real wars, by its very nature, has no singular villain, nothing the public can put a literal face to. And this, Sunstein argued, is one of the primary barriers to get the public to truly care, on a visceral and real level, about pending climate chaos. 

The reality, of course, is climate change does have villains, with an “s.” The line of demarcation isn’t neat and clean, but, broadly speaking, it’s fossil fuel executives, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and media propagandists, and the private equity and hedge funds that fund them. And there are faces of the victims as well: the climate refugees in the Global South who are already suffering mass displacement whose numbers are expected to reach as high as 1.2 billion by 2050, those subject to increasing flash floods, fires, hurricanes, and tsunamis. A demographic that––despite what Serious Centrist Pundits Insist––increasingly includes Americans.

That climate change directly causes more frequent and more severe wildfires is no longer in dispute. A 2022 United Nations report concluded that the risk of wildfires around the world will surge as climate change intensifies. “The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes, while more extreme weather means stronger, hotter, drier winds to fan the flames,” states the report, produced by 50 researchers from six continents.

Media coverage of these sensationalist events almost never connects the dots. A survey of Nightly News coverage from the first full day of the LA fires showed that, in 16 minutes of coverage ABC, NBC, and CBS nightly news broadcasts did not mention climate change once. In their Wednesday morning coverage of the LA fires, neither the New York Times Daily podcast nor the New York Times Morning Newsletter addressed climate change at all. The Daily had a single throwaway mention but didn’t actually talk about it, and the newsletter just ignored it. One can see dozens and dozens of examples of lurid coverage of the LA Wildfires—and other extreme weather events—in US media that doesn’t mention climate change at all or relegates it to a throwaway line. 

Climate change-fueled extreme weather disasters overseas are typically ignored or downplayed altogether. A survey of two weeks of coverage from April 15 to 29—when the 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan was at its most acute and newsworthy,ultimately killing almost 100—showed that it was ignored entirely by CNN’s primetime news programs: The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper 360°. The heat wave was also entirely ignored by NBC News (Today, Nightly News with Lester Holt, and Meet the Press), CBS News (Evening News, Sunday Morning News, and CBS Mornings), and ABC News (Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week With George Stephanopoulos). By way of comparison, a survey of the same news programs from the week of May 30 to June 6 showed almost 2.5 hours of coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee, a holiday in the United Kingdom celebrating the 70th anniversary of her coronation.

To be clear, many of these outlets do sometimes have separate articles about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. But they’re typically relegated to “science” stories isolated from the original, far more impactful reporting of the human tragedy unfolding before our eyes. They read more like liberal box-checking than a fundamental feature of how these stories are covered. Severe weather events, when they’re reported on at all (typically because they’re within the US) are indexed in the “Oh, Dearism” genre of reporting, where politics and human decision making are stripped away entirely, and all one can do is look on helplessly and say “Oh, Dear.” There’s no villain, victims but no victimizer, no political actors or politics at all, and—above all—no explicit or implicit call to action. Just agency-free human suffering that may sorta kinda be linked to erratic weather patterns, with no sense there’s anything the viewer or reader can actually do about it. It’s just vaguely sad and everyone is expected to chip in a few dollars to GoFundMe, gawk at the suffering, and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Nothing is ever part of a pattern, a broader human-driven context. The headlines should, at least occasionally, read “Human-Caused Climate Change Fuels Another Disaster With LA Fires, not just a stream of “LA Fires Grip Nation.” 

If one accepts the basic tenets of the scientific consensus around climate change, that we more or less have a decade to radically alter course, then why wouldn’t our media outlets be more clear about the causes of the suffering, and what forces would have to be curtailed to practically do so? In March 2023 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released another damning report, authored by 93 experts, which found that the Earth’s average temperatures are likely on pace to rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels by the first half of the 2030s. This shift would surpass a climate threshold, they argue, which will unleash unprecedented flooding, heat waves, megastorms, and famines that could very well threaten all of human civilization. The only chance we have to avoid this extremely plausible scenario is for rich nations to immediately slash their greenhouse emissions and do so right away. 

Newsrooms are still neatly delineating the human story and the “science” story, when these are one and the same. Without centering the scientific explanation of the why—which is to say, the cause of the human suffering on display—journalism is just emotional pornography. We can’t cover school shootings without centering lawmakers who defend and take large sums of cash from gunmakers. We can’t cover mass death in Gaza without centering Israel and the White House’s central role in causing it. And we can’t cover extreme weather events without centering climate change, and the fossil execs and their media and political organs that fuel it. To do so is to take politics out of what is inherently political, to only show a small slice of a much larger and richer story. If US media won’t permit its viewers to put a face to the villain of extreme weather––and in the wake of media anger over Luigi Magione’s online popularity, this will almost certainly never happen––they can at least permit its viewers to put a face to its victims. On a negligent, massive scale, they are still failing to do so.

In his final weeks as president of the United States, Joe Biden is using whatever remaining time and capital he has to continue his lockstep support for Israel as it continues violating the so-called ceasefire in Lebanon, as it further immiserates, starves, and destroys what remains in Gaza, and as it codifies the ethnic cleansing and permanent settlement of Northern Gaza. In a 24-hour period two weeks ago, The Times of Israel reported that the Biden White House aggressively lobbied “Democrats to reject [the] progressive push to block arms transfers to Israel” (which most ultimately did). And Biden’s UN ambassador, Robert Wood, vetoed yet another UN resolution calling for an immediate, lasting ceasefire in Gaza and a return of all Israeli hostages.  

This fact is at odds with a broader excuse-making media regime that assured readers over the past few months that Biden was only backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza because he was compelled to by mysterious outside forces: a bearhug “change things from the inside” strategy, electoral considerations in the lead-up to Nov. 5, the Israel lobby, or a broader assumption he is simply too helpless to do anything. Once Biden was no longer constrained by these factors, it was assumed, the White House would finally make some effort to rein in Israel. But the election came and went and Biden’s support for Israel has only intensified, capping off with a scathing admonishment and delegitimization of the International Criminal Court, which finally issued an arrest warrant last month for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Recently in The Nation, I detailed how this elaborate excuse-making regime emerged over the last year, and how US media helped shape, promote, and disseminate this regime to the broader public. The three major media tropes are as follows:

• Helpless Biden is any report, analysis, or opinion that describes Biden as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the war overall. This is typically framed as a “limit” to US power, often accompanied with a picture of Biden looking overwhelmed, sad, or doddering. These are sourced almost entirely by anonymous Biden aides and Biden allies in the think-tank world. 

• Fuming/Deeply Concerned Biden is any report, analysis, or opinion that paints Biden as secretly upset, outraged, or privately sad or anguished about civilian casualties. These articles are also sourced almost entirely by anonymous Biden aides and Biden allies in the think-tank world. 
  
• Third Partying is a variation of an anti-labor propaganda concept whereby corporations treat unions as somehow separate from workers and worker democracy in order to portray unions as an outside “third party.” Just the same, media reports consistently paint the United States as separate from the conflict, despite the United States being the major patron of one side, deploying troops and military hardware, assisting in military operations, providing intel, and protecting Israel at the United Nations. US media consistently frames the United States as a neutral party—even a humanitarian force—always looking (but, mysteriously, always failing) to end the conflict. This is typically done through coverage of largely fictitious cease-fire talks, whereby US media conflates efforts for a short-term pause for the purpose of hostage exchanges with “ending the war.”

To quote the late British theorist Stafford Beer, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” We can say that Biden supports genocide because, for almost 14 months, this is exactly what he has done. Everything else is window dressing, moral performance, unfalsifiable theory of mind assumptions, and collective partisan delusion. These media genres fed into a broader excuse-making regime that also includes popular assumptions about Biden being held back by electoral considerations and being subject to the undue influence of the Israel Lobby.

On the issue of electoral considerations, this excuse, even if true, was never morally useful. If “winning elections” justified everything—and surely genocide would be the most extreme example of a policy that ought not be permitted simply because it could “win” an election—then every single bad thing Trump does could be defended along the same lines. Mass deportations are popular. Does this make Trump campaigning on them and carrying them out justified? Of course not. 

But even accepting the logic of the excuse, it falls apart. Poll after poll shows support for an arms embargo would have helped Harris defeat Trump: The massive reduction in support from Arab and Muslim voters, young voters, and the fact that there were 6.2 million fewer votes overall compared to 2020, clearly indicates that Gaza helped depress turnout. It wasn’t the decisive factor—indeed, no single factor was—but it no doubt was a major contributor in alienating core constituencies and helped doom Harris’ campaign. And we know those running her campaign thought so because her superficial distance from Biden on Gaza was, according to a leaked internal memo prior to Biden dropping out, listed as a major factor in her favor. ”She’s broadly considered to be to Biden’s left on Israel-Palestine, an issue where he has major vulnerabilities,” it read. The day after the election (before the usual scapegoats were settled on), the New York Times reported that campaign officials “conceded that Ms. Harris had paid a price for not breaking from Mr. Biden’s support of Israel in the war in Gaza.” The premise that the general voting public was crying out for more shredded Palestinian toddlers on their social media timeline was always a dubious one. Yes, the public supports Israel in the abstract. But when asked specifically about an arms embargo and ceasefire, the public was—even despite the overwhelming power of bipartisan polarization—opposed to the Biden/Harris policy of unqualified support for Israel’s “war in Gaza.” 

Another popular excuse, which often veered into antisemitism, was that Biden only backed genocide in Gaza because the Israel lobby forced him to do so. While there is obviously an influential Israel lobby in Washington, its impact is largely relegated to the margins of Congress, having recently been decisive in pushing out Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. Biden, a self-identified Zionist for decades, with nothing to lose in the 2024 election, early on supported the genocidal logic of Israel’s campaign in Gaza—and likely never thought much about it beyond that. While backing Israel was no doubt helpful to Biden’s rise in politics (and certainly essential to pro-Israel groups spending millions targeting Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary), pro-Israel lobby groups had little influence over Biden in his final year in office. Even after he dropped out of his ill-fated re-election bid, even after his replacement lost the election itself, Biden continued and continues to this day to do nothing but arm, protect, and justify Israel’s countless war crimes. This is why there is a whiff of antisemitism to this popular line: If Biden had been Jewish, his ironclad commitment to Zionism would simply be seen as an earnest ideological commitment. But because he’s Catholic, there has to be dark and mysterious forces making him do bad things against his will. 

But if the past 14 months have shown anything, it’s that Zionism is a colonial ideology that requires no religious or ethnic identity. It is as American as apple pie, and the simplest explanation—that Biden just agrees with Israel’s genocidal campaign and thinks it’s justified—is all there needs to be. No lobby pressure necessary.   

But these excuse-making regimes aren’t only about providing a moral cover for President Biden. They’re very much about creating—to use a vogue term of the day—a permission structure for liberals to go about the usual work of Professional Politics. They permit compartmentalization, however tenuous. This system, over the past 14 months, has allowed, above all, liberals to enjoy politics. From TikTok memes to MSNBC to the social settings of campaigns and government workers, people develop a parasocial relationship with those in power, especially those leading their own party. Uncle Joe, Joe of the Parks and Rec cameo, Obama’s lovable sidesick, Joe of the AOC selfie, Joe of the “a decent man who has done nothing wrong” fame—surely he can’t back the genocide of Palestinians. This reality is too difficult to face; it offends both our chauvinism and partisan identity which, in key ways, is more essential to people’s sense of self than religion or race. So the incentives to build these excuse-making regimes, to provide thin journalistic legitimacy for them, and to push out into our airwaves and Twitter timelines pat thought memes—“… Biden’s bear-hugging Netanyahu so he can influence him as a friend…,” “… he has to back Israel to win the 2024 election…,” “… It’s the Israel Lobby…,” “… he’s working for a ceasefire…,” “…even if he cut off Israel, it wouldn’t matter…”—is tremendous. 

It is not only essential to ameliorating cognitive dissonance, it is essential to the basic functioning of civil society and our liberal body politic. So it developed, became a career-maker for many, and largely served its function. But this doesn’t make it any less of a lie. There was never any outside force compelling Biden to back the wholesale destruction of a people, and there was nothing compelling liberals to look the other way. There was nothing forcing progressives, nonprofits, labor unions to endorse Biden, or his equally pro-genocide replacement, without conditioning said endorsement on a change in Gaza policy. These were choices they made. And when it’s all said and done—when the legacy of the Biden administration is invariably written about and debated—the choices we make, more than any hand wringing or “change things from the inside” self-rationalization, are all we have and all we are. 

The exact cause of the Democrats’ catastrophic loss last night was, of course, no one thing. The leader of the incumbent party, Joe Biden, was deeply unpopular, with disapproval ratings of 56% on the eve of the election. The public felt inflation had eaten away at modest income gains. And, of course, shadowy billionaires spread false narratives and juiced social media.

Everyone is going to have their own reasons in the coming days—no doubt many based on their own priors and grievances. But one reason why the Harris campaign was bogged down from the outset, I will argue, was its moral and strategic refusal to break from the White House’s deeply unpopular position on arming and funding an ongoing genocide. 

Not because the issue itself was dispositive, but because it played a central role in alienating the democratic base and compelling Harris to find votes elsewhere–a disastrous choice which appears to have lowered turnout and sowed cynicism.

As much as the pollsters and consultants in charge of Democratic campaigns may dislike the so-called “base,” the base remains an important part of social media reach, campaign volunteers, and canvassers—the evangelical core of any campaign. For Biden, when his campaign was terminal last summer, this element was almost entirely gone, and indeed, this fact was one of the motivating factors pushing to drive him out. But Harris—at least initially—made up a lot of ground in this regard, mostly through better vibes and slightly more sophisticated HR empathy-speak.

But feigned concern and vibes can only go so far. As the honeymoon of “brat summer” gave way to a codified campaign theme, it was clear not only was Gaza going to be ignored entirely as an issue—and the death machine would churn on without pause—but Team Harris would be leaning into a strategy of attempting to woo so-called “disaffected Republicans.” She made the centerpiece of her campaign Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president of George W Bush. To the Savvy Commentators this made sense—obviously, winning over fence-sitting Republicans was the right call. And few in our media questioned whether this strategy had any downsides. 

But, of course, it did. Going to the center has costs; it’s not a perpetual vote-getting machine. A campaign that embraces conservative themes and personalities, even while throwing out progressive policies here and there, is bound to alienate voters for whom politics isn’t just a platform for endless triangulation.

To be clear: The costs could have been worth it. The votes gained from sounding like 2012 Mitt Romney may be greater than those lost to non-voting or third-party voting among the base. But this calculus was never shown. The campaign and its major PAC allies driving the strategy, namely Anita Dunn and pollster David Shor, never had to show the math on how this gambit made sense. It was simply assumed to be true, obvious, and inevitable.   

It wasn’t until there were two weeks left in the election that the New York Times even entertained the idea that, perhaps, a campaign theme built around the progeny of a deeply unpopular war criminal who, herself, had negative favorables, was not the free real estate Dunn & Co. made it out to be. “As Vice President Kamala Harris makes a broad play to the political center,” the Times would hand-wring, “some Democrats worry that she is going too far in her bid to win over moderates who are skeptical of former President Donald J. Trump. In private—and increasingly in public as Election Day fast approaches—they say she risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”

It would be very convenient for me if what I ideologically supported—in this case, ending a genocide—also happened to be what was electorally advantageous for the campaign. The moral thing and the politically useful thing are not, of course, inherently aligned. But the inverse is also true: There’s no law of nature that says tacking right, and doubling down on a deeply unpopular and morally ruinous Gaza strategy, is the smart and savvy thing to do. The burden ought to have been on those running a $1.8 billion campaign to show how their approach made sense, but they never bothered doing this. It was just dogma—dogma few ever questioned.

But there’s a cruel reality behind the decision to track right: The campaign, once it hitched its wagon to Biden’s policy of unqualified support for genocide in Gaza, really had no other choice. In 2020, the Biden campaign tentatively rode the progressive wave of the George Floyd protests, anger about Trump’s racist border policies, COVID activism, and anti-war protests against Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen to energize the Democratic Party base to defeat Trump. It was, in retrospect, mostly lip service, and certainly no one at the time thought Biden a firebrand progressive. But the broader theme of the campaign was that everyone would have a seat at the table, even if the plate would most likely end up being empty. 

Harris made no such pretensions, because any strategy that played to similar themes would have had to address the elephant in the room: the Democratic Party’s “ironclad” support for Israel’s elimination of a people in whole or in part. And this simply would not have worked. One can’t really bank on activist energy, youth turnout, and base-mobilizing when those involved—while canvassing together, or running phone banks at each others apartments, or getting drinks afterwards—have to awkwardly address the fact of genocide and their candidate’s support for it. This isn’t to say there was no activist or youth energy in the campaign—clearly there was. But those in charge quickly decided against making this their central theme and vote-gathering strategy, given the uncomfortable questions that would naturally arise from campaigning in these spaces. So Liz Cheney and her negative-2 favorables it was.  

Countless pro-Democratic Party pundits tried to warn Harris. Polls were commissioned. The Uncommitted Movement very politely, and well within the bounds of loyal party politics, begged Harris to change course. But she refused. The risk, to her, was worth sticking to the unshakable commitment to “eliminating Hamas” no matter how many dead Palestinian children it required, or the degree to which images and reports of these dead children would fuel cynicism and create an opening for Trump to win. 

To the extent grassroots energy was maintained, and the awkward fact of Gaza didn’t ruin the vibes more than it ought to have, this was made possible by an elaborate responsibility-avoidance PR regime of compartmentalization built up over months by the Biden campaign and a compliant media. Key to this compartmentalization were supposed “ceasefire talks” that the White House and campaign were allegedly “working tirelessly to secure,” but could never, alas, get across the finish line. Liberals were also soothed by the vaguely true-sounding refrain that Trump “would be worse for Gaza.” Turning every party advocate into a dead-eyed trolley problem expert triaging which genocide was morally preferable may have made cold logical sense, but it was hardly an inspiring message. Making it less compelling was that, by and large, it was not a position emanating from Palestinians themselves, as virtually every major Palestinian organization and the sole Palestinian-American in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, refused to endorse Harris. 

But to an unmovable contingent of liberals—motivated by a combination of self-delusion and genuine and understandable fear of a second Trump term—it didn’t matter. They just wanted not to think about Gaza. It didn’t matter that the White House could simply assert a ceasefire whenever it wished, and the whole basis for the supposed “negotiations” was equal parts fictitious and internally inconsistent. These pat lines mostly worked.

Mostly. Aside from foreclosing on a progressive track that tapped into the base and emphasized turnout over converting fence-sitting Republicans, the fact of genocide in Gaza continued angering and alienating many voters not fooled by the “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire” PR regime and patronizing I See You, I Hear You rhetoric from Harris. Further research is needed to measure the exact extent this bitterness, this enthusiasm-suppressing support for genocide played a role in losing potential Demcoratic voters, but one thing is clear: It rotted the campaign from the beginning, made going right more or less inevitable, and loomed over every brat summer selfie, phone bank interaction, and water cooler conversation. In late July when Harris took over the Biden campaign, she could have chosen to break from the White House, she could have chosen to follow international and US law, she could have chosen progressive energy and greater support from the base, she could have chosen life. Instead she chose genocide. And this was the inevitable outcome.

“Why is the Biden administration helping migrants and not hurricane victims?” You’ve no doubt heard this line, or some version of it, from your Facebook Uncle over the past two weeks. “Why is the government spending money on food stamps for drug addicts and not taking care of homeless vets?”

Rhetorical questions like these, drenched in faux-populist concern for the “average American,” have always been crowd-pleasers in conservative media and online circles, but their popular appeal is growing as climate chaos accelerates acute disasters and exposes the broken liberal state of the world’s ostensibly wealthiest country. As bridges fail, trains derail, disaster responses struggle to keep up, and infrastructure continues to erode, the very same forces that seek to gut the social state will turn to these failures—some real, some imagined—and exploit them to show how the priorities of liberalism are “anti-white” and anti-rural. 

None of it makes any sense; it’s draped in transparent cynicism and hypocrisy. But this doesn’t matter. What matters is that this line works, and liberals have failed to sufficiently build a media and political system that can counter it—a problem that will only get worse as climate chaos exposes the United States’ uniquely poor infrastructure and social welfare system. 

This talking point has become a full-blown Trump campaign focus in the last few weeks before the election. As dual hurricanes, Helene and Milton, destroyed much of the southeastern coast of the United States, Republicans didn’t even wait for the dead to be named and counted before exploiting the tragedy to attack immigrant communities. “A lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already,” former President Donald Trump told a crowd last Friday. “It’s been gone for people that came into the country illegally.” 

“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason,” Elon Musk insisted on Twitter. 

“There’s a bucket of money in FEMA that’s gone to illegal aliens and that’s somehow separate than the bucket of money that should by right go to American citizens,” JD Vance told Fox News’s Fox & Friends last week.

None of these claims, of course, are true. It’s simply a variation on an increasingly popular GOP attack line: feigning social welfare concerns for True Americans while claiming sinister minority groups or immigrants are soaking up free government cash. The most recent “Appalachian hurricane victims are left to die while migrants live high on the hog” meme comes after a similar lie, since debunked, was spread by Republicans last year, this time pitting “homeless vets” against migrants supposedly getting free housing. 

Thus far, liberals’ response to this line of attack—which we’ll call The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican—has been to feign incredulity and fact check. Incredulity and fact checking are fine, and the White House was smart to quickly put up a website debunking the most outlandish of the lies, but not before they went viral and created a contagious thought meme that permeated online to millions of Americans. 

So how can liberals and leftists counter this seemingly effective talking point? A useful place to start would be to not point out Republican hypocrisy for its own sake, but orient this hypocrisy in contrast to a liberal vision of a more egalitarian, social welfare worldview for everyone—poor whites and poor migrants alike. 

Republican hypocrisy, make no mistake, is galling and worth noting. 

Trump, while president, sought to cut $271 million for FEMA disaster relief and redirect the money to “cracking down” on border enforcement. The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025— which Trump and his running mate Vance have championed, despite efforts to distance themselves from it—explicitly seeks to gut FEMA response capacity. As Ali Velshi documents at MSNBC, the authors of the Heritage foundation’s blueprint call for ““Privatizing … the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government, eliminating most of DHS’s grant programs.” The blueprint also says the federal government’s cost-sharing for disaster response should be reduced, which would be particularly burdensome for poor states.

Likewise, Republicans—chief among them then-President Trump—have sought to gut housing services for veterans and cut the budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs more broadly. 

The groups right-wing demagogues like Trump and Vance claim are being harmed by liberals shoveling money to immigrants are the exact same groups these demagogues routinely seek to cut services and support for. They’re the exact same groups the corporate-funded think tanks that will take over and run Trump’s policy priorities have spent decades disempowering, endangering, and polluting.  

But it can’t all be hypocrisy gotchas. While it may feel good to point out what naked phonies Trump and Co. are, doing so is no substitute for politics. There’s a fairly competent and well-funded center-left media industry that can do the work of pointing out both that Republicans are lying, and that they are totally full-of-shit, small, austerity-driven hypocrites. 

The next part––the hard part––is where liberals have more or less given up. Tales of widespread FEMA neglect are false. But Democrats countering Trump’s dark nativist vision with the politics of social welfare is a dream that more or less died when the Sanders campaign fizzled out in early Spring 2020. From de-industrialization to free trade ideology to sunsetting COVID-19 aid, Democratic leadership, with some exceptions, has proudly adopted the mantle of On Your Own politics, embracing austerity and free market dog-eat-dog capitalism. Add to this Democrats’ almost wholesale concession on the racist premises of immigration panic, and the ability to credibly combat The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican becomes that much more difficult. From a messaging standpoint, Democrats’ defense of the Department of Homeland Security’s meager support for migrants is unconvincing when these same Democrats consistently frame migrants as little more than a burden on civilized society. 

Misdirecting populist anger toward vulnerable populations is, of course, not new. Peasant uprisings in 1848 Europe sometimes turned their ire away from the aristocrats and focused it on local Jewish communities. In his excellent book Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, historian Christopher Clark recites dozens of examples of local clergy and petit bourgeois redirecting popular anger towards the “other.” In revolutionary Galecia, he illustrates one example: prominent Polish-Armenian priest Karol Antoniewicz told the angry masses that the chief culprit for their ills was “the Jews” who, “like spiders, had wrapped the poor peasants in their web of immoral behaviour.” Antisemitic pogroms followed throughout central Europe, while the landed gentry watched in comfort and amusement from afar.  

But we can look to more recent examples to elucidate this point. Ronald Regean rose to popularity reciting a made-up story about a “welfare queen,” a Chicago woman who supposedly had “80 names,” “30 addresses,” and $150,000 a year in income from public coffers. And during his speeches throughout the South, while campaigning for the presidency in the 1970s, he made up an equally fictional “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”

Using immigrant scapegoats to channel justified—and sometimes unjustified—popular anger is as old as popular anger and immigrants. 

To an extent there’s only so much liberal-left messaging can do. Conservative media is sprawling, well-funded, and exists in its own alternative universe. They’ll use brain-dead fascistic claptrap to divide and conquer Americans no matter how economically populist Democrats become. 

But working to create a genuine social safety net, openly campaigning on universal, non-means-tested programs like single-payer healthcare and free higher education for all, would combat the image—not altogether unfounded—that Democrats are increasingly the party of only the highly educated and professional. Democrats have lost large swaths of the white working and middle class, and, increasingly, working and middle-class minorities. This is the logical outcome of (1) an overt pivot to Wall Street and neoliberal ideology (self-inflicted), and (2) the fact that Republicans just got better at exploiting racism (out of Democrats’ control). 

To combat fake populism requires not just hypocrisy dunks or fact checks—both of which are fine and true as far as they go—but a vision of actual populism, of a government that fights for and with the working class, whether they be migrants or born in the US, Black or white, rural or urban. These divisions are artificial constructs of class control, ones gleefully used by billionaire-funded Republicans. Liberals should work to erode them with a broad message of collective social welfare. This, more than any front-row-kid “fact check” or whining to the media refs, would inculcate Democrats from charges of abandoning disaffected working-class voters.

This past week, Israel massively escalated its attacks on Lebanon, killing 32 and maiming over 3,000 in so-called “pager attacks” (e.g. a textbook war crime), and killing 558 people, including 34 children, by dropping over 2,000 bombs in 24 hours and unleashing a fresh set of bombings in Beirut on Friday, flattening several residential buildings and killing hundreds more. The scenes of carnage are staggering, hospitals are overwhelmed, families are running for their lives, people are justifiably scared of all electronic devices, and terror permeates Lebanon. This was, by far, the deadliest week in Lebanon since the Lebanese Civil War ended 34 years ago. 

But, rest assured—influential Western media outlets tell us—Israel was only dropping bombs on Lebanese people and exploding their devices in a coordinated terrorist attack in order to bring about peace. The escalated violence, we’re told, is actually a means of de-escalating the conflict. In the wake of the attacks, without a whiff of skepticism, both The New York Times and The Guardian were quick to parrot the Israeli government and military’s self-serving justification; that is, that they are massively ramping up their war on Lebanon not because they want to kill and humiliate a designated enemy, but because they want to compel the militant group Hezbollah into a “ceasefire” or to “withdraw” its forces. 

Chief among those buying this convenient talking point is Patrick Kingsley of The New York Times. After allowing “ex” Israeli officials to echo this line without pushback for several days, Kinglsey skipped the middleman and just parroted the line himself in a September 23 “analysis,” writing:

Israeli officials had hoped that by scaling up their attacks over the past week — striking Hezbollah’s communications tools, and killing several key commanders as well as Lebanese civilians — they would unnerve the group and persuade it to withdraw from the Israel-Lebanon border. The officials believed that if they increased the cost of Hezbollah’s campaign, it would be easier for foreign diplomats, like Amos Hochstein, a senior United States envoy, to get the group to stand down.

Kingsley takes for granted that Israel’s goal with these acts of war is not to encourage more war but to simply push Hezbollah into a ceasefire at their Northern border—nothing more. Such a premise is so squishy and nebulous as to be meaningless, yet still hard to falsify. It also defies the basic tenets of military strategy and historical precedent. What we saw this week were not “defensive” actions taken with the objective of peace and getting Hezbollah to step back and stand down. The objective is surrender and calling it peace, which is tantamount to saying, “We’ll have peace after I kill you and control large parts of your territory.” 

Israel is bombing Lebanon to achieve a military goal. It is not bombing for peace, it is bombing to control the terms of capitulation. 

Israel is most likely attempting to militarily occupy Lebanese territory, as it did from 1985 to 2000. So yes, if Hezbollah simply hands over Lebanese territory—just like if Hamas unilaterally surrenders and allows Israel to occupy Gaza uncontested—then indeed there would be “peace” in the sense that Israel will have used extreme violence and human suffering to achieve domination. Again, this is a feature of winning a war, and it has been a feature since there’s been war, but Western commentators today are trying to rebrand the long-established terms of war with the vocabulary of peace.

If Hezbollah or Palestinian militants attacked Israel in the same fashion right now, killing 558 people, including 34 children, in one day, one wonders if Kinglsey would have taken at face value that they only did so reluctantly with the hopes of forcing a peace deal, compelling Israel to grant them a Palestinian state, or securing an agreement from Israel to never bomb Lebanon. The answer is mostly likely not. There is a subtle but effective mode of propaganda at work here: It’s just taken for granted that the US and Israel only engage in wide-scale violence as self-defense, as a tool to achieve peace, as a last resort. US and Israel’s enemies, on the other hand, whether they be Palestinian militants or Hezbollah, are assumed to be violent for the sake of violence. They are assumed to be ontologically sadistic, with no strategy beyond mindless death. 

This isn’t to deny that Hezbollah has fired rockets into Israel—rockets that, according to Hezbollah, were fired in solidarity with those being bombed and starved in Gaza, and that still constitute a fraction of the attacks Israel has launched on Lebanon since October 7. Yet the former is always painted as the aggressor—and Israel is perennially, by definition, a purely defensive rational actor. 

NPR’s report from September 22 allowed Israeli officials to run with the “bomb to de-escalate” line with zero pushback. The report gave Israeli officials the last word, paraphrasing Amir Avivi, a “retired Israeli brigadier general,” and telling listeners that “Israel was seeking to force Hezbollah to withdraw with these ever intensifying aerial attacks… Israel is basically putting in front of Hezbollah a very clear message, either you withdraw or it’s a full-scale war.” Maiming thousands and killing over 600 people in one week is apparently not an act of a “full scale war,” just penny ante messages from Israel, truly a reasonable and measured actor simply looking to de-escalate, signaling they want peace.   

“Escalation suggests Israel gambling on bombing Hezbollah into ceasefire,” Dan Sabbagh, Defence and Security Editor at The Guardian, headlined his equally credulous piece published on September 24. “What is now unfolding is an Israeli strategy of military escalation against Hezbollah,” Sabbagh writes, “premised on the risky belief that the militant group can be bombed into a ceasefire before fighting in Gaza ends.” 

“Bombed into a ceasefire,” again, is a concept so vague as to be meaningless. In principle, all war is pursuant to some eventual “ceasefire” in the sense that one side will capitulate once the other party achieves its military goal, thus ceasing fire. But this is not how the concept of launching large-scale attacks killing hundreds and maiming thousands is typically framed. It is only put in “peace” terms when done by a US/UK ally.

Pearl Harbor was designed to compel a “ceasefire” from the US and allow oil to flow back into Japan, but framing it this way would have been considered bizarre, insensitive, credulous, and—above all—extremely fatuous. A similarly Orwellian framing, of course, has dominated the fake “ceasefire” coverage with respect to Gaza. For months, Israel has successfully branded its repeated demand for unconditional surrender of Hamas and other militant groups as a “ceasefire offer.” The term has lost all meaning, and now, demands of total capitulation on pain of continued bombing by Israel and the slaughter of hundreds a day are presented to confused liberal readers in the West as magnanimous olive branches. 

“War is peace” is a popular cliche in reference to Orwell used to mock deceptive language like this. So when The New York Times and Guardian adopt, more or less, this exact phrasing unironically, it doesn’t bode well for Western media’s ability to accurately capture how extreme, dangerous, and wanton Israel’s latest escalation in violence is. 

I’ve never thought it very useful to poke and prod everything Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, mostly because I feel like criticism of her often takes on a strange disproportionality, and is a proxy for deeper ideological disputes. AOC Discourse also seems to forget she’s not the leader of the Democratic Party; she’s one of 535 members of Congress. But she may be the most famous progressive in Congress, and a favorite punching bag of Fox News. This doesn’t, in and of itself, necessarily entail any added moral burden. But Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s comments last week on the topic of Gaza during the Democratic National Convention ranged from insipid to actively harmful. They are worth discussing because they are a useful example of a mode of politics that has completely captured the far-right and the far-left wings of the Democratic Party, and Ocasio-Cortez playing into this mode of politics shows just how total their dominance over liberal discourse has become. 

This is the politics of Feigned Helplessness. Democrats, we are repeatedly led to believe, are not a party of powerful people with the privilege and duty to help, to shape the world, to work for votes and constantly reassert and earn their moral authority, but a passive club of entitled do-gooders, bureaucrats, social media influencers, and human rights champions watching history unfold as they struggle to keep the far right at bay. Much has been written about the Democrats’ reliance on a related model of politics, Learned Helplessness—which psychologists define as a phenomenon whereby a person or group of people “continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to change their circumstances, even when they have the ability to do so.” The general idea is that the Democrats’ default position, because they’ve lost so much for so long, is concession, so they start every political fight with lowered expectations, thus moving our politics rightward.

And while this is no doubt partly true, I think something deeper and more sinister is going on. I think there’s increasingly an element of Feigned Helplessness—a posture, an agreed- upon framework, an increasingly go-to path of least resistance. This is especially true on the subject of genocide in Gaza and Democrats’ continued arming of it.

The animating element behind most liberal discourse is the avoidance of ideology and expressing ideological preferences. Instead, what our center-left media feeds us is an elaborate regime of excuse-making, process issues, burden-shifting, and insistence upon powerful Democrats’ alleged lack of agency. Everyone is an intern, no one knows who’s really in charge, and while there’s often a manager to talk to, the manager’s manager remains elusive. This makes sense: Ideology is messy, it’s bad for politicians’ careers, and—because politicians are disproportionately lawyers—it’s simply not their preferred language. From college they are inoculated against viewing themselves as ideological agents, but rather as technocratic managers of a system that works well—even if it needs tweaking and better rules.

Let’s begin with an interview Rep. Ocasio-Cortez gave New York City Councilperson Chi Ossé during the DNC. It’s a particularly cynical and bleak example of this mode of politics that’s worth using as an object lesson in how Feigned Powerlessness limits debate and protects reactionary positions. Asked about Harris’ refusal to meet the baseline demands of the Palestinian civil society, the Uncommitted movement, and seven major labor unions, all calling for an arms embargo, Ocasio-Cortez gives a defeated, meandering answer loaded with contestable assumptions: 

Ocasio-Cortez simply accepting the premise that Harris’ position of refusing to support an arms embargo (e.g. use actual leverage to end genocide) is a fixed feature of the universe—like the speed of light or the gravitational constant—reduces Gaza to a trolley problem of oppressed people competing for support, and is a very blinkered framing that removes all agency from Harris. The dilemma she lays out in the clip, while superficially sensible, is not a law of the universe. It isn’t an inherent feature of the world imposed on Democrats by an outside force. It isn’t imposed by Republicans. Biden can end this perverse trolley problem overnight with a simple phone call. Harris can appease voters angry about her pledge to continue arming genocide in Gaza by simply not arming genocide. We don’t have to pit oppressed people stateside against oppressed people in Gaza and elsewhere. It’s a false choice created entirely by the administration and the Democratic candidate.

Rather than treating Harris’ pro-genocide policy commitments as an unchangeable law of nature, and placing the onus on powerless voters to simply suck it up, progressive electeds ought to reframe the issue altogether. The moral and useful response to the question of Harris’ indefensible Gaza policy is, “Harris should do the right thing and back an arms embargo and render this dilemma a non sequitur. Justice in Gaza and justice in the United States for oppressed communities need not be in competition with each other.”

Certainly this would be a perfectly reasonable answer. It’s not needlessly combative, it doesn’t speak ill of the President or Vice President, it’s not snarky or dismissive. It simply wishes she do the right thing without accepting her pro-genocide policy as something outside her control.

By running with the premise that months more of suffering and death in Gaza is baked in, all of the agency is placed upon faceless voters rather than the most powerful humans on earth. Why are maimed children in Gaza being pitted against trans kids being oppressed in Texas as if these are the only two options? This is a dilemma entirely of Harris’ making, and she can end it at any time.

But the politics of Feigned Helplessness reign supreme in liberal discourse. The burden is not on Harris to switch course, to reject Biden’s manifestly horrific and—by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s own admission—genocidal policy. The burden is on angry and disillusioned voters to suck it up and pull the lever because if they don’t, we are extorted, they’ll have the same genocide anyway, plus other bad things.

But, Harris has power. She has agency, and, more importantly, she has the ability to radically alter the course of the lives of millions of people in Gaza in a matter of days by simply doing the obviously right thing.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is, of course, not alone. On no other issue have the politics of Feigned Helplessness driven the discourse more than that of Gaza. The vast majority of Democratic electeds still support sending endless bombs to Israel so their payload can continue to shred babies and unleash increasingly novel hells, ad infinitum and without conditions. It should be noted that a handful of congressional Democrats, including Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, back an arms embargo in theory. But only one, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, was willing to condition their support for Harris on it.

Democrats don’t want to own the inevitable implications of their anti-arms embargo position. With the notable exception of John Fetterman, who at least has the decency to rationalize the scores of dead Palestinian children coming across our timelines every day, the bulk of liberals who support the continued arming of Israel are too cowardly to own their support for genocide, or defend why they are backing a candidate doing so. Instead they try to bifurcate Netanyahu from the Israeli military campaign premised on collective punishment and mass killing, and continue to thread the needle of arming a genocide while opposing its more vulgar aspects.

Pursuant this increasingly untenable goal is a never-ending list of prefabricated excuses ready, at a moment’s notice, for intellectual installation.

You’re a leftist, or just a morally sane human being, outraged Harris and Biden refuse to condition aid to Israel at all? Don’t worry, there’s a revolving door of excuses at the ready. After all, those in power aren’t actually responsible for anything. The goal is to avoid the fact of genocide and Democrats’ support for it. The goal is to reduce any and all moral objections to non sequiturs, to avoid the ideological debate.

Harris is Vice President, she can’t undermine President Biden.

Wait, this is just a made up norm and not a real limitation? Okay, well, Biden is working on a ceasefire. 

Wait, he actually isn’t? Okay, well, it doesn’t matter because Israel wouldn’t listen.

Wait, Israel has no choice but to listen, because US military support is dispositive? Okay, well, it would be electorally bad and we can’t lose to Trump.

Wait, an arms embargo against Israel actually helps Democrats electorally? Well, okay, but Harris is Vice President, she can’t undermine President Biden.

Rinse and repeat the excuse-making routine until you no longer remember why it is we even have a liberal political party in this country. The point is, no one is actually responsible for anything. No one has to own the consequences of the policies they support. Everyone’s hands are tied. Israel has gone rogue. The US has to arm a genocide or Israel will turn to China, or AIPAC will unleash spending or Trump will be worse, blah blah, on and on. 

One element of this disempowering brand of politics is that those adjacent to powerful institutions—those in the party’s prime-time speaking slots, elected to Congress—present themselves as just another voter forced into the hard choice of Lesser of Two Evils. And while it’s true that the average person is more or less forced to pick a less aggregate evil, influential party spokespeople like Ocasio-Cortez, while not leaders, have some leverage, some influence over those asking for their support. But countless progressive electeds and institutions did not condition their support for Harris in exchange for a commitment to arms embargo. They handed it over right away in the interest of “parity unity” and moved on to the rah-rah section of the presidential campaign, which perhaps makes sense in some moral calculus (again, it’s odd to see the crime of crimes being treated as just another boutique ideological hang up), but it’s very clear that—even in the event they could have potentially exercised power and joined with their colleague Rep. Rashida Tlaib in conditioning endorsements in exchange for commitments on Gaza—our progressive champions avoided power like it was a hitchhiker with pets.

This bizarre theater of Feigned Helplessness was also reflected in Bernie Sanders’ DNC prime-time speech. The Vermont senator got favorable write-ups for simply “calling for a ceasefire” (something he refused to do for months, and then suddenly agreed to do but never explained why he shifted). 

“We must end this horrific war in Gaza,” Sanders said. “Bring home the hostages and demand an immediate cease-fire.”

Demand from whom exactly? If Sanders is demanding a ceasefire from a specific person or entity, then he ought to say this. The person who can force one, and the person who can very likely force one in January (though, realistically, Harris’ support for an arms embargo now would likely compel Biden to do the same) is backstage. Go talk to them! They’re responsible, the people you are endorsing are responsible. Is Sanders calling for a real ceasefire in which the US actually uses its leverage and forces Israel to agree to a cessation of hostilities? Or is he appealing to the bad-faith, fake “ceasefire talks” the US is propping up to buy Israel time? 

Unclear. Remaining vague is part of this broader regime of powerful people not being responsible. Of course, DNC speeches are vetted by the campaign, but if Sanders is going to speak in campaign-approved platitudes then he shouldn’t bother discussing Gaza at all. It’s an insult to the anti-genocide movement and, more broadly, everyone’s intelligence. 

Indeed, the average viewer could watch the whole of the DNC, listen to all the follow-up interviews from liberals, conservatives, and progressives, and have zero idea what all the fuss was about or why Pro-Palestinian marches and the Uncommitted movement were even bothering to protest Harris. After all, isn’t the issue of a “ceasefire” out of her hands? Isn’t Biden pursuing some nebulous “talks” to achieve one? Haven’t Biden and Harris done all they can? 

One expects this regime of Feigned Helplessness to be a feature of centrist and liberal discourse—it long has. But watching pillars of the electoral left, such as it is, embrace and employ it to win over voters who are justifiably angry over Gaza shows just how ubiquitous this formulation is, how grim our prospects are. Powerful people, they tell us, are spectators, standing by and watching horrible things unfold before them. They have no agency or responsibility for committing to open-ended arms transfers fueling an ongoing genocide. The moral demand is not on them, every progressive elected except Rep. Rashida Tlaib tells us—it’s on you, the voter at home. Your duty is to accept this as inevitable and engage in isolated acts of harm reduction. The burden is on you to fall in line, not on those seeking your vote to do the morally obvious thing.

In her first week officially running for president as the de facto Democratic nominee, there’s been a lot of confusion over Vice President Kamala Harris’ position on Gaza. After the moral and electoral nightmare that was President Joe Biden’s 9.5 months of lockstep support for Israel’s campaign of destruction and mass killing, many are looking for a sign—any signal—that a Harris White House would change course. This desire for good news is understandable, but in the rush to turn the page on the horrific Biden record, one must be sober and honest about what Harris is actually saying—and, more importantly, not saying—on the fact of genocide in Gaza. 

Thus far, we’ve seen no evidence she would break from the White House’s current position, and in key ways she appears to be latching on to the same obfuscating tactics of her 81-year-old predecessor.

Now, this isn’t to say Harris won’t eventually change—or that her position is cemented—but it’s essential to be clear-eyed and know what meaningful change would look like in the event she actually does go beyond the superficial tweaks. 

First, what we do know and where we currently are: As I laid out last week for In These Times, Palestine solidarity activists, the National Uncommitted Movement, and mainstream labor unions have shifted their demands of the White House from simply calling for a “ceasefire” to ending military aid to israel. The reason for this, as I’ve been documenting for months, is that the White House PR machine has successfully warped the commonly understood definition of ceasefire to mean something else entirely. The term, based on its usage in half a dozen other Gaza bombings over the past 17 years, was broadly understood to mean a demand was for the US to use its dispositive leverage to compel Israel to withdraw from Gaza and end the bombing. But the White House—after initially banning everyone in their administration from using the word—began to embrace the label “ceasefire” on the eve of the Michigan primary in February, but shifted its definition to mean only a “temporary pause.” Basically, the White House supports a brief pause in fighting followed by continued, indefinite support for Israel waging war in Gaza under the unachievable auspices of “eliminating Hamas.” As such, they can continue to appeal to open-ended, bad-faith “ceasefire negotiations” that must be “pushed”—while painting themselves as a neutral, powerless third party. 

Evidence of Israel’s bad faith “negotiations” was made undeniable early Wednesday morning when they apparently killed the head of the Hamas ceasefire delegation, Ismail Haniyeh, while he visited Iran for their presidential swearing-in ceremony. This is not consistent with a party seeking to “end the war,” but it is consistent with a party that has pledged––as they have dozens of times, including in front of Congress last week––to achieve “total victory.” US officials and pundits simply ignoring this reality and projecting peaceful intentions onto them won’t make it so. 

But this fictitious support by the White House for a “ceasefire”—which we will call NuCeasefire—has worked to perfection, confusing liberals and leftists alike and lowering the temperature on the protests. The US is no longer seen as the sole patron of a country leveling Gaza that could stop backing genocidal acts whenever they choose. It can now be seen as a force of peace, brokering a mysterious “ceasefire negotiation” process that simply never gets anywhere as deaths in Gaza continue mounting. 

From what we’ve seen of Harris’ comments on Gaza since Biden withdrew from the race, this appears to also be her position, with modest changes in tone. Harris’ public comments made before and after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the day after his July 23 speech before Congress indicate that she has settled on a combination of bleeding-heart empathy-speak and vague appeals to NuCeasefire.

Many have noted a shift in “tone,” but this is true only if one limits the Biden administration to Biden. While it’s true President Biden hasn’t really bothered even acknowledging Palestinians exists, much less are human—and Harris rhetorically doing so is a change—Secretary of State Antony Blinken has trafficked in similar crocodile tears, so it’s not clear what Harris’s use of Empathy-Speak really counts for. If anything, savvy and convincing use of Empathy-Speak while still rubber-stamping shipments of weapons and munitions could be less of a “step in the right direction” and more a harbinger of an increasingly sophisticated bullshitting media apparatus.  

Part of this media curation process aimed at low-information liberals is the specter of meaningful disagreement between Harris and Netanyahu. Biden aides have been feeding these stories to the press for months in a trope so stale I wrote about it for The Real News back in December. The most egregious laundromat for these self-serving non-events, as I’ve noted many times before, is Barak Ravid at Axios. So it’s entirely predictable that the first outlet to run an “Increased Tensions Between Harris and Netanyahu” story was Ravid, a White House stenographer whose primary beat is creating the illusion of anger and dissent from an administration that keeps, mysteriously, signing off on every single weapons and munitions shipments to Israel. 

A common rejoinder to the left’s criticism of Harris not shifting policy on Gaza is that she simply cannot. She’s running for office while at the same serving in an administration, and she can’t openly break from the president. While it seems morally stunted to not act as if there aren’t more important things in life than loyalty to one’s boss (say, for example, ending a genocide), this evasion misses the obvious solution to this problem: Harris can have conversations with—and make assurances to—independent groups who could very easily vouch for her. There is no shortage of independent Palestinian groups or individuals (not tasked with simply electing Democrats) who would be more than happy to take her phone call, listen to her pitch, and endorse her candidacy in exchange for an actual end to the mass killing of Palestinians. Alas, these phone calls have not been forthcoming and, as the vice president of the United States, we have little reason to believe it’s because she doesn’t have their contact information. 

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the sole Palestinian American in Congress, has said she is withholding her endorsement of Harris until she hears a credible plan to end US backing of Israel’s “war.” Thus far she has not mentioned seeing any such changes. 

So, will a meaningful shift in policy come? It’s still possible, and one should not stop pressuring. Indeed, this is the aim of the mass protests planned for the DNC in late August. But one should not let rose-tinted campaigning get in the way of what is actually said and what policies are actually being laid out. In a time of ever-shifting focus, sophisticated social media narratives, and the genuine fear of a second Trump term, it’s easy to simply vibe one’s way into thinking Harris is breaking from Biden on Gaza. But one must stay focused and keep in mind three central questions: (1) Are kids still being bombed? (2) Are US bombs still being shipped? (3) Is the person in question refusing to commit to stopping the shipment of said bombs? If the answer to all three questions is yes, then bleeding-heart box checking and vague appeals to “ceasefire negotiations” don’t matter much at all.

The party responsible for a war crime—or any act of mass violence—is important information and something that should be named at the forefront of any news documenting said war crime or act of mass violence. This much seems obvious, but the “War in Gaza” has created a particularly grimy editorial genre of Natural Disaster-izing mass death. Specific episodes of mass killing, disease, and displacement at the hands of Israel as it carries out siege, occupation, and bombing are all too often covered like one would a deadly volcano or earthquake: The party responsible is not a specific government or military but a mysterious, agency-free “war,” “disaster,” or “humanitarian crisis.”

Israel’s responsibility is often mentioned or alluded to––typically in scare quotes––in the text further down the page, but it is not centered or made obvious, thus meaningfully reducing any political urgency around their guilt. 

The most egregious practitioner of this grim editorial genre is the New York Times, which has obscured who is killing tens of thousands in Gaza with new lows of confusion and hand-wringing. Here are just a handful of headlines published over the past eight months which one could read, and re-read a dozen times, and still not be sure who is killing whom:

• Explosion Gazans Say Was Airstrike Leaves Many Casualties in Dense Neighborhood (11/3/23)
• “Gazan officials said that at least 21 people were killed and dozens injured on Tuesday in a strike that hit a tent encampment housing displaced people in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area in southern Gaza where Israel has designated a humanitarian safe zone” (5/28/24)
• “U.N. Shelter in Besieged Khan Younis Is Struck, and at Least 9 Die” (1/24/24)
• Half of Gaza’s population of about 2.2 million people are at risk of starvation and more than 90% say they have regularly gone without food for a whole day, according to a recent UN report (1/1/24)

Reading these headlines, it’s impossible to know who is responsible for these human tragedies. 

Take one May 6 report in the New York Times detailing how Israel’s assault has completely destroyed the education system of Gaza. “With Schools in Ruins, Education in Gaza Will Be Hobbled for Years,” read the headline. The subheadline continued, “Most of Gaza’s schools, including all of its universities, have severe damage that makes them unusable, which could harm an entire generation, the United Nations and others say.”

Not until paragraph seven does the New York Times mention who actually destroyed the schools and, even then, it’s framed as an accusation by UN officials and Palestinians. Repeatedly, both in framing and text, the cause of the annihilation of Gaza’s education system is presented as a vague, agency-free, symmetrical “war.” As if there are two equally powerful armies facing off in some type of a Napoleonic battle with unfortunate civilians on both sides caught in the middle, rather than a virtually one-way bombing, siege, and occupation of the most powerful military in the Middle East against a people with no modern defense systems. 

One nonsensical New York Times social media post from Feb. 22 reads like a parody:

Deadly strikes in Rafah, in southern Gaza, flattened the Al-Farouk mosque, seen here, on Thursday, residents and the Palestinian Authority’s news agency said. Only Israel, which declined to comment on the attacks, carries out airstrikes in Gaza.

So why not just say it was Israel? Clearly it was. It’s the obvious implication of this language, which is at war with itself. But, alas, the New York Times can’t spell out the obvious, lest they offend the crybully pro-Israel media watchers and their right-wing “liberal media”-complaining confederates.

During just one 24-hour period in June, the New York Times ran three responsibility-absolving headlines and subheadlines that capture the agency-removing ethos of the paper:

• Pregnant in Gaza With Nowhere to Go: As war killed all hope around her, Nevin Muhaisen fought to bring a new life into the world.
• ‘A Hellscape’: Dire Conditions in Gaza Leave a Multitude of Amputees: Access to medical care and even clean water is limited, and the risk of infection is high, making it difficult for patients to get follow-up surgeries, prosthetics and rehabilitation.
• Amid the devastation, Gaza is the world’s deadliest place for aid workers, the U.N. says.

“War” has “killed” Palestinians. “Dire Conditions in Gaza” created “a multitude of amputee” Palestinians. Gaza is the world’s deadliest place for aid workers because of some abstract “devastation.” Who is causing all this suffering? Reading the headlines and subheadlines, one would have no idea. Contrast this with how the Times covers Russian war crimes. Here, agency is clear upfront, as are the deadly consequences of the guilty party’s actions. 

• Russian Missiles Hit Ukraine’s Energy System, Again
• The Russians Destroyed Their Villages. Now They Rebuild.
• Russian Attack Leaves Over a Million in Ukraine Without Electricity
• Russian Attacks Crush Factories and Way of Life in Ukrainian Villages
• Russia Targets Ukraine With Large-Scale Missile Attack

It is possible that the New York Times has a policy similar to that of CNN, which does not ascribe responsibility to the IDF until after Israeli officials formally confirm it. We know that CNN’s policy exists thanks to reporting from the Intercept in early January. An anonymous CNN staff member told the Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw, “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”

That CNN Natural Disaster-izes Gaza is thus evident in their headlines, which routinely obscure Israel’s role in the carnage being reported on. Here are a handful of the worst examples from the past few months:

• Many casualties have been reported after a massive explosion at a densely populated refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. (10/31/23)
• Gaza suffers another communications blackout, telecoms firms say, after the deadly refugee camp strike. (11/1/23)
• Journalists injured in attack on Gaza refugee camp, including CNN stringer
• At least 13 killed, including 7 children, after strike on Gaza’s Al-Maghazi refugee camp (4/16/24)

Who did what to what? Impossible to tell from reading the headlines. In all these reports, much further into the article, Israel’s potential culpability is mentioned buried in the text, but typically attributed to “Hamas-run” ministries or “Gaza officials,” reducing the horrific sights to a he-said-she-said situation, despite Israel being the only party remotely capable of carrying out the attacks in question. An otherwise useful, detailed analysis of how Israel systematically destroyed the healthcare system in Gaza is framed by CNN as “How Gaza’s hospitals became battlegrounds.” 

Battlegrounds? Were there battles in these hospitals? No, there weren’t. For the most part, the IDF shelled them, bombed them, cleared them out to make life unsustainable, pursuant to their Oct.r 13 evacuation order of Northern Gaza. Occasionally, Palestinian fighters would attack IDF convoys as they approached hospitals, but at no point was there anything like a “battle” inside any hospital. Nor did CNN’s report show anything like this. It showed Israel attacking hospitals to clear them out, then they’d move on. This isn’t “hospitals” “becoming battlegrounds”—this is Israel attacking hospitals. 

Again, contrast this Fog of War, who’s-to-say-who-did-what framing with how CNN covered Russian attacks on hospitals in a straightforward way. “Deadly Russian strikes obliterate Dnipro medical facility in central Ukraine,” read one headline from May 2023. “Anatomy of the Mariupol hospital attack,” read one March 22 headline. “Medical facilities and workers have been repeatedly hit by Russian forces since their invasion of Ukraine, despite this being against the rules of war.” the subhead stated. “Russian missile strike on Zaporizhzhia maternity hospital kills newborn baby,” a November 2022 CNN headline reads.

When it comes to Ukraine, responsibility is clear, the nature of the crime apparent and the moral implications are obvious. With Israel’s repeated war crimes against Gaza, agency is removed and the human suffering is framed like the result of a mudslide or earthquake. 

Another recent example: Last week the Associated Press did a deep dive investigation into entire Palestinian families being wiped out by Israel, and even then framed the culprit not as a military, a government, or even a leader of Israel, but as a nebulous “war.” “The war in Gaza,” the headline read, “has wiped out entire Palestinian families. AP documents 60 who lost dozens or more.”

A different AP report from Wednesday read, “the war has largely cut off the flow of food, medicine and other supplies to Palestinians who are facing widespread hunger.”

But “war” didn’t wipe out entire Palestinian families, nor did “war” cut off food and medicine to Palestinians in Gaza—Israel did. And we know this because, as several genocide scholars and the International Court of Justice clearly documented, Israeli officials kicked off their revenge campaign on Oct. 7 with explicitly genocidal intent. While the AP has been better at framing stories of mass death with a responsible party than the New York Times and CNN, they too often fall into the agency-removal trap. 

Another reason for the widespread Natural Disaster-izing of Gaza is that pro-Israel pressure groups are constantly working the refs, whining to editors, reporters, and media owners that the media is being too hard on Israel. This crybully campaign escalated to great effect after the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing on Oct. 17 where, allegedly, a single Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket killed over 200 people (despite approximately 1,800 Hamas/PIJ rockets landing in Israel and killing only 15 people in the first three months of war, but this is a different article). After this incident, headline writers became uniquely allergic to assigning Israel blame for anything, lest they be subject to the faked outrage of those seeking to make the Times and CNN look like Hamas mouthpieces. 

Obviously, there is more to news reporting than headlines, subheadlines, and framing. But polls show over half of Americans frequently don’t read past the headline, so how our news is framed for the passing media consumer is of tremendous importance, politically. This is why pro-Israel media bullies put so many resources into attacking outlets that center Israel’s responsibility for the daily atrocity they are reporting on. They know it matters. And it matters that a deliberate, well-documented strategy of mass killing, displacement, and very likely genocide by a specific party that has repeatedly express genocidal intent, is obscured and removed from the reporting. And, instead, the suffering that appears on people’s TV screens and social media timelines is given the “Oh, Dearism” treatment, something with no author, no cause. Because, after all, if it’s not the US and its allies doing the killing, what can be done about it other than generally feeling bad and moving on? 

Mockery and hard questions are pouring in over the White House’s decision to build a so-called “humanitarian pier” to “deliver aid to Gaza” that has since failed, spectacularly.  

The March announcement of the pier perplexed establishment aid organizations—Doctors Without Borders called it a “glaring distraction”—because the idea of a military circumventing a blockade that its own government is funding, arming, and militarily supporting seemed both unprecedented and absurd on its face. The $320 million pier was finished a few weeks ago, only to deliver virtually no aid then unceremoniously fall into the sea due to severe weather last week. 

While the nominal failure of this project has, of course, received some criticism in US media, this criticism is small compared to the initial torrent of glowing headlines that accompanied the announcement that painted the Biden administration as a bold humanitarian force coming to the aid of Gazans in crisis. Using this metric of public relations and general media vibes, the pier was a stirring success and, all things considered, a fairly cheap and easy way to generate some positive coverage for the White House that risked—and remains at risk of—being too closely associated with a “war” that 56% of Democrats believe to be a “genocide.” 

As I’ve written before, the White House’s Gaza policy is best understood, first and foremost, as a PR strategy. The US’s underlying military and diplomatic support for Israel’s unrelenting violence and mass displacement campaign is unwavering. When it comes to material things that exist in material reality—weapons shipments, military hardware, intelligence support, vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN—the US has been 100% behind its closest Middle East ally. But, given the non-stop images of charred kids and crying, displaced mothers flooding people’s social media timelines, and increasingly making their way into mainstream media, the White House knows it needs to manage popular perception of its support for Israel. 

The strategy it’s taken is that of Mitigating, Humanitarian Inside Man. The basic narrative is that Israel is an otherwise maximally violent rogue nation and the US, by arming and backing them, somehow earns sway over Israel and thus mitigates their naturally violent tendencies for humanitarian purposes. It’s a pleasing fiction because it allows American liberals to paint supplying bombs, logistics, and diplomatic cover for what Human Rights Watch founder Aryeh Neier recently labeled a “genocide” not as support for war crimes, but an act of social justice intervention in service of Palestinians.

Palestinians, of course, don’t see it that way, and find the White House’s ad hoc moral worldbuilding, propped up by New York Times-types, as convoluted, nonsensical, and deeply perverse: Framing genocide support as a humanitarian gesture stretches the limits of credulity and cynicism to the point of spaghettification. 

It’s in this context that we must understand the “humanitarian pier” stunt was an unmitigated success. The point was to paint a general picture for low-information and half-paying-attention liberal and independent voters that the US is not only not a participant in genocide, but is, in fact, helping counter the genocide. Like with the rebranding of the term “ceasefire” the week of the Michigan primary and its attendant Uncommitted campaign, or the cruelly inefficient air drops that ended up killing several Palestinians, or the posturing about “red lines” for invading Rafah that evaporated overnight, or the constant White House-curated leaked stories of Biden’s alleged “anger” and “tension” with Netanyahu, the point is to distance the White House from the visible carnage it is facilitating. Anything that muddies these waters, that convinces a sufficient number of voters that Biden is a third-party humanitarian force simply spectating and nudging from the sidelines—rather than the primary patron of the death they see on their screens—has served its fundamental purpose. For weeks, the average American media consumer was flooded with heroic headlines and chyrons of Biden coming to the aid of Palestinians. Here is just a small sampling:

• Biden directs U.S. military to build temporary pier in Gaza for humanitarian aid – PBS (March 7)
• Biden to announce the setting up of a temporary Mediterranean port to deliver Gaza aid – NPR  (March 7)
• U.S. to Build Pier to Allow Aid Into Gaza by Sea – The New York Times (March 7)
• Biden Seeks to Boost Emergency Aid to Gaza With Offshore Pier – The Wall Street Journal (March 7)
• How the U.S. military will use a floating pier to deliver Gaza aid – The Washington Post (March 8)
• US dispatches aid ship to Gaza after Biden vows to build pier  – Reuters (March 9)
• US Army boats head out on a mission to build a floating pier off Gaza’s shore for food deliveries – AP (March 12)
• US-built floating pier that will allow delivery of humanitarian aid has been anchored in Gaza – CNN (May 16)
• U.S. military anchors pier in Gaza for humanitarian aid – NBC News (May 17)

As images of starving children flooded social media and traditional media, the White House had to look like it was doing something, anything, to stem the suffering. The most obvious solution—to simply force Israel to open up aid routes and agree to a ceasefire by withholding military support—was simply never an option, though actual aid organizations and experts argued for it at the time. Absent a real political solution, the White House was going to engage in another half-assed stunt, motivated by perception management, not solving the actual crisis at hand.

Those watching these PR gestures fall flat are understandably confused by how weak and incompetent they make the United States and the White House look. Watching Israel cross Biden’s red lines with murderous abandon, blockade the US’s nominal aid, and ignore these alleged warnings to “better protect civilians” is a constant source of very public humiliation. After Israel rammed tanks right through the White House’s alleged Rafah “red line” last month, The Nation’s Jeet Heer tweeted, “Looks like Biden got outfoxed by Netanyahu once again. This makes Biden look weak and feckless.”

While this is true, it misses the point, and it’s important that this be clear: The White House doesn’t care. Weakness, helplessness—powerlessness, but with good intentions—is the Democrats’ entire brand. The White House and top liberals in their orbit decided long ago that they’d much rather look bumbling than like they are the primary sponsor of the mass killing in Gaza. 

Far more central to their brand and self-identity is the idea of “liberal rules-based order” pablum. Biden, Blinken, and Democratic leaders would much rather see themselves—and, more importantly, have others see them—as feckless, failed humanitarians than as evil. Stumbling Empire has served them well thus far; there’s no reason to change course now. A key element of neoliberal political formations is the avoidance of ideological discussion. Neoliberalism, in practice, is deeply ideological, of course. But one must never cop to this, lest one have to stand for anything, and thus be accountable. The posture of perpetual powerlessness helps avoid this problem altogether. It helps avoid accountability altogether, it helps avoid discussing the substance of their backing of a genocide altogether. 

So what we have is a series of PR stunts designed to get good press and confuse just enough voters—stunts that enable Biden to, at a minimum, sufficiently distance himself from the horrors unfolding in Gaza and, ideally, to brand himself as a friend of the Palestinians working hard to protect them from the hot-headed and vengeful Israelis. Using this deeply cynical—but, at this point, obvious—criteria, the “humanitarian pier” wasn’t a failure at all. It was a pretty effective marketing spectacle in service of the Biden administration’s larger strategy of whitewashing its role in facilitating mass death in Gaza.  

Over the past six months, dozens of ostensibly mainstream politicians and commentators—including senators and spokespeople for the White House—have echoed a popular Tough Guy talking point that sounds superficially reasonable but, upon even the most casual inspection, is an explicit advocacy for collective punishment, which is, of course, a black letter war crime. In response to countless stories, reports, and gruesome videos of children being bombed, contracting diseases in refugee camps, or wasting away from starvation, these politicians and commentators reply that all this suffering, while perhaps indirectly caused by Israel, is fundamentally the result of Hamas refusing to “release the hostages” or “surrender.” 

The syllogism goes something like this: “Why are you blaming Israel? If Hamas released the hostages or surrendered, this could all end overnight.”

Setting aside the fact that this isn’t true even on its own perverse terms (Israeli officials have said that, even if all Israeli hostages were returned tomorrow, their “war on Hamas” would not end), it’s fairly brazen advocacy for collective punishment as a tool of war. It’s simply a variation on siege war logic: attack and punish a civilian population until the military actor, ostensibly operating on said population’s behalf, capitulates to particular demands. Siege warfare is one of the oldest known forms of warfare, dating back at least 3,500 years, but every one of these pundits and politicians acts like they’ve cracked the Da Vinci code by reciting this facile, Tough Guy line:

There are a few important things to point out about this glib formulation. First, and most obviously, calls for Hamas to release Israeli hostages are almost always paired with calls for Israel to comply with a ceasefire—independent of the release of hostages, not in exchange. Because, again, Israel’s military response to a paramilitary group cannot be contingent on the threat of punishing civilians. 

Secondly, the way this pro-war-crime argument poses as something more benign is by sidestepping the fact of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment altogether, framing Israel’s campaign as a “war” against Hamas. Indeed, if this was a “war” in any meaningful sense—which is to say, a generally symmetrical battle between two armies—they may have a point. But, as Rep. Ocasio Cortez points out in the Jake Tapper clip above, and thousands of others have noted for months, the assault on Gaza is very much not that. It’s a campaign that is openly predicated on depopulation and collective punishment of a largely defenseless refugee population. It exists within the context of over half a century of military occupation, apartheid, and the maintenance of a caged population in Gaza that has no control over its borders, civil society, air, water, power, imports, or exports. As such, Israeli officials have stated dozens of times that they are using food, medical care, water, and electricity as leverage over the civilian population of Gaza to try to influence the actions of Hamas and other militant groups living in what’s left of Gaza. This admission was read aloud, in detail, by the International Court of Justice on Jan. 26, which laid out the case for “plausible genocide” on the part of Israel. 

One cannot deflect from accusations of genocidal acts against civilians (as Israel has done, and as the US has done on behalf of Israel) by simply claiming the genocide would stop if militant group X simply did Y. What combatants do or don’t has no bearing on the morality or legality of mass killing and starvation of a civilian population. It’s a non sequitur, and we know this because that non sequitur is the entire foundation of all post-World War 2 international law. 

Perhaps if we turned the tables, the racist logic underpinning this Tough Guy line would be more apparent: “Hamas should be able to kill Israeli children every day, by the dozens, until Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank, ends its siege and blockade of Gaza, and permits a Palestinian state.” If a pundit or elected official were to say this on American airwaves, it would be universally condemned, and this person would be rightly and summarily fired. The “argument” would be called genocidal, cruel, heartless, and objectively in favor of war crimes. And yet one is allowed to freely spout different variations of this argument about Palestinian children, day in and day out, on US airwaves, in newspaper columns, on social media, and it’s presented as a normal, healthy, mainstream, Tough on Terror opinion. Using starving children in Gaza as a bargaining chip is an entirely acceptable position in US media because these children are not seen, per se, as innocent, much less human. They are collectively responsible proto-terrorists who, instead of searching for grass to eat, should be personally taking on Hamas militants with their bare hands—or so the logic goes; it’s not entirely clear.

US pundits and politicians’ feigned concern for Israeli hostages in Gaza is all so cloying and bad-faith: a cheesy gotcha line used to paper over support for an indefensible mass killing campaign that ignores the fact that many of the hostage families are, themselves, begging for a ceasefire. And Israel has arbitrarily detained thousands more Palestinians in its prisons, but literally no one in power in the US cares about them, despite the fact that they are being held without trial or they were judged before a rigged military tribunal that every human rights group dismisses as a kangaroo court. If unlawful detainment of people is a major worry for our pundits and politicians, it is only so, clearly, in a selective, racist, and self-serving way. 

This would all be much simpler—and less grating—if those supporting Israel’s policy of collective punishment of civilians in Gaza would just come right out and support collective punishment on its own terms, out in the open, and defend the practice as such, rather than trying to couch their sociopathic support for starving children as some heavy-hearted lament for Israeli hostage families. “The killing in Gaza will end when Hamas releases the hostages” isn’t some novel insight, or appeal for the freeing of hostages, or savvy statement of realism. It’s a dead-inside call for a continued policy of extermination, a defense of collective punishment, and an open admission that the speaker supports clear-as-day war crimes.

The evidence that Israel planned and carried out starvation as a deliberate policy choice and siege tactic is overwhelming. Rarely in the history of war crimes has a war crime been so telegraphed, openly discussed, and executed to the letter.

In its Dec. 18 report, “Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza,” Human Rights Watch lays out all the relevant evidence: “Since Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, high-ranking Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Energy Minister Israel Katz have made public statements expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water and fuel – statements reflecting a policy being carried out by Israeli forces.”

The report details how Israel has blocked the overwhelming amount of food aid, and repeatedly cut off fuel, water, and electricity, all in a clear-as-day campaign of collective punishment. Virtually every major humanitarian and human rights group—Amnesty International, OxFam, the EU’s foreign affairs chief—has stated that Israel is using the denial of food as a weapon of war in Gaza.

Yet one would hardly know this from the US media’s coverage, which depicts mass starvation in Gaza as an inevitable, increasingly grim reality. With at least 21 children dying of starvation over the past few weeks, and mounting pressure on the US to stop its lockstep support of Israel’s genocidal war, the stakes of framing this accurately—as a tactic of war, rather than a natural disaster—couldn’t be higher. Yet US media has largely failed to do so, instead treating the mass starvation campaign as something more akin to a tornado or earthquake.

Headlines from the past week from major media outlets leave readers entirely unaware this is a policy choice by the US-Israel coalition, rather than an act of god:

• New York Times: The 10-Year-Old Boy Who Has Become the Face of Starvation in Gaza The harrowing image of a skeletal Yazan Kafarneh circulated widely on social media and has served as a graphic warning about the enclave’s dire food situation (3/09/24)
• New York Times: Ramadan Begins as Hunger and Fear Stalk Gaza (3/11/24)
• New York Times: The Daily Hunt for Food in Gaza (3/12/24)
• CNN: ‘Catastrophic’ hunger in Gaza (3/07/24)
• CNN: ‘We have nothing’: Children face starvation in Gaza as supplies run out (3/06/24)
• Politico: Ramadan begins with hunger worsening in Gaza and no end to war in sight (3/11/24)
• NBC News: Hunger in Jabalia as civilians struggle to survive in northern Gaza  (3/12/24)

Many of the reports do mention, typically a few paragraphs down, that the starvation is a product, at least in part, of Israelis blocking aid convoys at the Egyptian border. But none mention the explicitly genocidal statements made by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Energy Minister Israel Katz, where they lay out their plan to collectively punish Gazans using hunger. There’s no sense of intentionality, or that this is a well-documented tactic. It’s just mentioned in passing that Israel blocks aid, and it’s almost always framed as a security measure to prevent the shipping in of weapons. This is despite the fact that several high-ranking Israeli officials explicitly said starvation would be used as a siege tactic, and major human rights groups believe that it is.

Given that only 40% of Americans even read past the headline, framing intentionality is important in terms of how the public assigns blame, and thus demands the US act. Without this intentionality, without a sense that this is a deliberate siege tactic to collectively punish a civilian population, all moral content is stripped from the story and the horrific images are easily compartmentalized and indexed as simple, but regrettable, cases of “Oh, Dearism.”

The only headline from the aforementioned outlets to get the framing right was one CNN article from March 7, with the headline “Newborns die of hunger and mothers struggle to feed their children as Israel’s siege condemns Gazans to starvation,” which assigns both blame and intentionality.

But this was the exception to the rule. Overwhelmingly, Western media outlets have chosen to obscure both responsibility and intent. This squeamishness, however, was non-existent when US media covered Russia cutting off food to Ukraine in its invasion; Western outlets routinely framed hunger in Ukraine as the result of a specific plot with intention and execution:

• New York Times: How Russia Is Using Ukrainians’ Hunger as a Weapon of War Residents of Mariupol, Ukraine, described how they are surviving a monthlong siege of the southern port with little food and other necessities. “No roof, no food and no water,” survivors texted relatives. (3/30/22)
• Politico: The starvation of a nation: Putin uses hunger as a weapon in Ukraine The specter of the Holodomor famine of the 1930s is haunting Russia’s war (4/1/22)
• CNN: Why Russia is being accused of using food as a weapon of war (6/10/22)
• NBC News: Putin’s newest instrument of war: Food (6/28/22)
• CBS News: How Russia is using hunger as a weapon in Ukraine (5/7/22)

Enemy countries deliberately starve civilians because they are ontologically evil. The US—and the allies it arms, funds, and backs at the UN—are passive observers to the human suffering they unleash. Or, more perversely, they are humanitarian saviors because they announce a trivial or pointless PR stunt to work around the very horrors that they, themselves, deliberately created. “Urgent aid en route to Gaza amid severe food crisis,” CBS news announces while showing triumphant b-roll of US war ships carrying token, PR-driven aid deliveries to circumvent a blockade they, themselves, are arming and funding. “Inside a U.S. airdrop mission to rush food into Gaza,” another CBS News report breathlessly proclaims.

This inversion of reality is not a new phenomenon. For years, US media ignored or downplayed the US role in the famine in Yemen while painting the US military as a heroic humanitarian force bringing aid to the very war zone it was helping bomb and siege.

The goal, of course, is to keep temperatures down, to not inflame the so-called “Arab world” or anger progressives stateside. Western media can document the horrors, it can even humanize them, but it cannot clearly assign blame for them. It cannot make deliberate policy of starvation by the US and Israel the story, despite this being the most important and politically consequential part of it. Highlighting widespread human suffering without clearly stating its causes, its human authors, and its human agents isn’t journalism—it’s moral pornography.

Over the past few years, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell has perfected a particular genre of Pentagon PR, doing numerous glossy ride-along reports and softball sit-down interviews with military brass and promoting the Pentagon’s overall message that it simultaneously keeps the world free from Bad Guys and desperately needs more and more money to keep up with a rotating cast of villains.

If CBS was paid to make PR packages for the Pentagon, they wouldn’t look any different than this. 

Let’s begin by breaking down her most recent Pentagon infomercial—a 60 Minutes lead segment from last Sunday detailing how the US Navy is “protecting international waterways” from Yemeni Houthis. O’Donnell’s puffy ride-along has all the trappings of the genre: no critical questions, only superficial historical context, sexy b-roll of American technological power, sycophantic sit-down interviews with US military officers, and, of course, no humanization of or perspective from the Official Enemy—just presenting them as faceless Arabs hellbent on terror for its own sake.

Essential context, that President Biden’s refusal to back a ceasefire in Gaza is leading to an escalatory framework, isn’t explored at all. That there could be an alternative to blowing up even more of the poorest country on earth, that pushing to end the bloodshed in Gaza is one path to reducing piracy in the Red Sea (something the White House itself admits behind closed doors), is simply not an option. Because it’s not an option the military presents O’Donnell, and their word is total. 

This embarrassing segment comes on the heels of last year’s more overt—and explicit—Navy commercial where O’Donnell aggressively analyzed the “State of the Navy” and determined they were scrappy underdogs who needed more money and more support in Congress. 

O’Donnell’s questions in the fawning report fall into two general—and seemingly contradictory—categories of Kettle Logic military propaganda of the kind used by empires to describe themselves as always “falling behind” but also very slick and capable: (1) She uncritically accepts the premise that the US military is falling behind a “growing,” “increasing” military threat, and thus there is an urgent need to bloat the Pentagon budget to keep up; or (2) She examines how the latest sexy military tech is doing a wonderful job keeping everyone safe in their beds and upholds an alleged Liberal Rules-Based Order. In this segment we get tough-as-nails questions from O’Donnell such as:

• “Do you get briefed on China’s growing military threat and the progress they are making?”
• “How aggressive has China become, in the air?”
• “How much do you worry about the People’s Liberation Army rocket force?” 
• “How much more advanced is US submarine technology to Chinese capabilities?” 
• “Is it your hope that the force posture of the US Navy will deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?” 
• “At some point are [the Chinese] going to reach numbers [of naval ships] that we can’t prevail over?” 
• “How would you describe what China has been able to do militarily over the last 20 years?”
• “Why is China able to build more warships more quickly than the US?” 

Later, when tossing even more softballs to hawkish lawmakers Democrat Elaine Luria and Republican Mike Gallagher, O’Donnell—looking Very Concerned—asks, “What is it about the US Navy that has allowed the two of you to find common cause?”  

Wow, really tough stuff. O’Donnell could have mentioned that Luria paid off her considerable campaign debt with super PAC money from Raytheon and General Dynamics, but this would involve actual journalism and we couldn’t have that. The closest O’Donnell gets to anything remotely approaching pushback is when she tees up a grapefruit for Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of US Pacific Fleet, by asking, with a wry, skeptical smile, “China has accused the United States of trying to contain them. What do you say to China?” 

Paparo gives a glib response, asking China: “Do you need to be contained?” O’Donnell nods along and it’s off to more b-roll of scary Chinese rockets.

The entire point, of course, is to lobby the public and, by implication, Congress, to shovel more money into the US military—a public debate which, such as it is, happens every summer. The tough journalistic posture O’Donnell is striking here is that of a reporter bravely taking on military skeptics. “60 Minutes spent months talking to current and former naval officers, military strategists, and politicians about the state of the US Navy,” she says to open the second half of the segment. “One common thread in our reporting is unease both about the size of the US fleet and its readiness to fight. The Navy ships are being retired faster than they’re getting replaced.” 

So, O’Donnell talked to a bunch of conflicted parties who are funded by the military industrial complex and get rich off of it, and they said they need more money? Does O’Donnell talk to any peace activists or anti-escalation voices in Japan or the Philippines? Any senators opposed to the unprecedented large military budget? Anyone who thinks these billions could better be spent housing the poor? Or expanding medicare? Obviously not. 

O’Donnell’s wide-eyed aircraft carrier field trips are just a variation on an old media workover trope of The Media Ride-Along, perfected in the context of police departments by local TV news and shows like COPS and Live PD for years, which themselves are variations on military embedding reporting. Only O’Donnell isn’t even feigning like she’s on the front lines, or reporting on anything that can’t be gleaned from a Senate military report. She’s just there to lob handpicked military spokespeople softballs and take sweet b-roll of kick-ass military hardware.

The idea that China would be increasing its naval presence because of US expansion in the region, rather than it being the cause of US expansion, is never explored. That the US spends more on national defense than the next ten countries—China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine—combined is seen not as something that is per se threatening to other countries, but is a reluctant response of an altruistic global policeman. The possibility that this dynamic may be fueling Chinese fears of encirclement is not something O’Donnell feels needs to be asked, much less answered. She just assumes China has sinister goals of world domination and the US is simply a benevolent hall monitor enforcing “international law,” constantly reacting to diabolical threats from The Orient. Even the once-mainstream Cold War liberal idea of mutual antagonism, that hardliners in two Cold War countries could fuel each other’s paranoia and fear—regardless of who was the first mover—is an idea lost somewhere in the 1980s. Today’s great power standoff isn’t even allowed this possibility; it’s just evil Chinese communists all the way down.  

O’Donnell then bizarrely asserts that China ignored American diplomatic outreach over a “spy balloon”—a “spy balloon” the US government later acknowledged wasn’t actually doing any spying. “Chinese military leaders have been mostly silent, and have ignored efforts by the US military to keep the lines of communication open,” O’Donnell tells the viewer. “Even when a Chinese spy balloon entered US airspace, and was shot down by the US.” 

But other reports contradict the implication: Chinese officials discussed the alleged spy balloon incident with the White House and State Department and insisted it was just a weather balloon (a position, it’s worth nothing, supported by US-based hawkish think tank CSIS). Is O’Donnell under the impression the US military engages in diplomacy? What does this even mean? It’s not clear; the narrative that China is an irrational belligerent actor pushing war and skirting diplomacy must be maintained.

To compound these fears, throughout the segment O’Donnell insists China “now has the biggest navy in the world,” which is true in the technical sense that it has the most boats, but as David Axe at Forbes notes:

There’s an important caveat in this hull tally. American vessels on average are much larger than Chinese vessels are. The smallest USN warship type—the Littoral Combat Ship—displaces 3,000 tons of water. The median USN ship—an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer—displaces up to 9,500 tons. The smallest PLAN ship in the DoD count is the Type 056 corvette, displacing 1,500 tons. The median PLAN ship is a Type 045 frigate displacing around 4,000 tons. In all, the U.S. fleet weighs in at around 4.5 million tons. The Chinese fleet might slightly exceed 2 million tons.

All of these nuances and qualifications are lost. Instead, the viewer is fed only panic-inducing talking points of an axiomatically expansionist and sinister Chinese threat and a brave US empire that simply needs more money to keep up. This kettle logic, inherent in all military propaganda, is central to every single talking point O’Donnell gets across: The US military is simultaneously all-seeing and all-powerful but also woefully underfunded and in urgent need of hundreds of billions more dollars.  

This isn’t to say O’Donnell has never criticized the military, but when she does it’s internal issues, not criticisms of its fundamental purpose. In 2020, she did a series on a failure of the Defense Department to properly investigate rape and assault cases in its ranks—a report she followed up in 2021 and again last December. Good reporting, no doubt, but nothing genuinely subversive to hawks in Congress or military leadership who tolerate this type of house cleaning so long as the budget remains unaffected. 

There are too many other military infomercials to count. On Oct. 8, 2023, O’Donnell had a sit-down with retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. Here, again, no difficult questions were asked—except, of course, consistent with the media’s consensus on Biden, an attack from the right on the US withdrawal process from Afghanistan. But Milley’s spin was front-loaded on the segment, with O’Donnell telling viewers that “in 2021, Gen. Milley had counseled President Biden to keep 2,500 troops in and around Kabul,” as if preventing the Taliban takeover, long viewed as inevitable, was that easy. 

In March of last year, O’Donnell did the obligatory imperial feminism segment about women rising up the ranks of the Pentagon, featuring a vacuous sit-down interview with “the four highest-ranking women in the US military to discuss learning lessons of resilience, battling discrimination with determination, and cultivating the next generation of leaders in the military.”

CBS News has a recurring segment called “Profiles in Service” that’s directly sponsored by weapons-maker Raytheon (now—after years of bad press—rebranded RTX), where O’Donnell does puff pieces on various military personnel.

Last December, O’Donnell did a workout segment for CBS Nightly News with “badass” US Marine Corps Captain Riley Tejcek, another “report” that looks indistinguishable from a military zoomer recruitment campaign.

She hosted CBS Evening News directly from a US military base in Bahrain on Jan. 29 where she, according to CBS’s press release, “got rare access to the United States Naval Forces Central Command and the United States Fifth Fleet.”

O’Donnell, who once did a rose-tinted nostalgic segment on the military base she grew up on in South Korea, clearly doesn’t think critically about any potential downsides to the US’s obscene Pentagon budget—which is predicted to top $1 trillion in the coming years. The sprawling global US military architecture is simply seen as a law of nature, an obvious and unquestionable good that is a force of order and humanitarianism. That it could, for example, be propping up ethnic cleansing in Gaza, is too unbearable to imagine, so this part of their duties is glossed over, bracketed as an unfortunate but separate part of their core function, and stripped from the context of broader regional conflict. After all, the Pentagon is just a humble enforcer of the Liberal Rules-Based Order. That it could do illiberal things, prop up illiberal ends, and work to defend myopic, brutal. and petty US imperial interests flies in the face of this cheesy 8th grade book report narrative. And to strip this narrative apart, or challenge it in serious ways, would be too messy, too unpleasant. And, most frightening of all, may involve doing actual journalism.

Combing through the recent torrent of reports about the high-stakes “border deal” being debated on Capitol Hill, one would hardly know that the “dealmaking” involved concerns the lives and fates of actual flesh-and-blood human beings. Instead, euphemism reigns as both Republicans and Democrats execute the kind of rhetorical magic trick that takes a humanitarian crisis and disappears all traces of humanity from it. Both parties agree that “something must be done” about the so-called “border crisis,” and that something, per usual, is more law enforcement, punishment, incarceration, asylum denials, and violence to deter humans from attempting to cross into the United States. 

The worst place on Earth for any vulnerable group to be is on the business end of a bipartisan Washington consensus, and the consensus in Washington now regarding the US-Mexico border is that there’s an “invasion” that must be repelled with force and deliberate cruelty. Even the nominally liberal party in the United States, the Democratic Party, is increasingly abandoning the pretense of taking a humanitarian approach to the state-enforced violence at the border. For 30 years, the bipartisan consensus on “border security” has amounted to a perpetual policy commitment to “deterrence” through violence, mass expulsions, and incarcerations, but Democrats and the White House outright embracing what is, by their own admission, a far-right border bill is an escalation heretofore unseen. Yes, in one sense, it is an unmasking of what was already present in the longstanding bipartisan regime of US border and immigration policy enforcement, but there is something different here, too. This is new political territory.

And this abstract, dehumanizing partisan back-and-forth is largely how this high-stakes issue of “border security” is being framed by US media. A “deal” that could entail decades of widespread suffering for hundreds of thousands of current and future immigrants is being presented to the public as an anodyne policy dispute with only rare—if any—mention of the actual human stakes of said policies. 

Taking the lead on this new harsh approach is the Biden White House, which has lurched to the right on “border security,” attempting to “call the GOP’s bluff,” adopting many of the cruelest, most carceral policies of the Republicans and Trump in an effort to score some type of hypocrisy gotcha in what they are selling as a bold attempt to secure an electoral victory in the 2024 presidential election. By adopting all of the Republicans’ “border security” bill language, they insist, they can neutralize the “soft on immigration” attack against Biden 2024 and turn the tables on Republicans as the party dedicated to “border chaos.” 

Immigration advocates are sounding the alarm on the proposed Senate plan shaped by the White House that, among other brutal measures, more than doubles ICE’s enforcement budget against immigrants. The National Immigrant Law Center released a statement Sunday admonishing Biden, writing that the president “campaigned three years ago on the promise of restoring America’s historic status as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers. Now near the end of his presidential term, he is threatening to close the southern border and shepherd legislation which would violate humanitarian norms and international refugee law.” United We Dream, a youth-led immigration rights group, said in a statement, “This deal guts our asylum system, closes our borders to the most vulnerable, increases detention and deportations.” The ACLU has condemned the bill’s framework, writing that the deal “would destroy longstanding protections for people seeking asylum and does nothing to fix our immigration system.” The human stakes of tripling down on the US’s already severe, punitive approach to “securing the border” are not academic. According to the International Organization for Migration, the US-Mexico border is the world’s deadliest land route. The organization documented 686 deaths and disappearances of migrants on the US-Mexico border in 2022, which is almost certainly an undercount. 

But one would not learn any of this from recent mainline media reporting on the “border” plan or the subsequent partisan back-and-forth.

Take this CNN report on the “border deal” and the broader debate around funding military supplies for Israel and Ukraine. The human stakes are entirely omitted and the cruel and violent policies are presented as sterile and generalized policy preferences. We are given the normal euphemisms: “tighter border security,” “significantly restrict,” and “tough” (used 4 times). Indeed, Biden is stripped of all moral agency, as readers are informed by CNN that circumstances have “forced [Biden] to take a tougher stance.” One is given the deliberate impression that Biden has no choice but to adopt many of the far right’s border policies for both practical law enforcement reasons and to fend off attacks in the upcoming presidential race. 

Likewise, the New York Times offers no substantive criticism of the “deal” on humanitarian grounds. The only pushback we get is one throwaway line from ‘influential left-wing Democrat” Sen. Alex Padilla, who offers a polite and vague critique that the deal “misses the mark” and “includes a new version of a failed Trump-era immigration policy that will cause more chaos at the border, not less.” The rest of the article treats the deal as a sensible, reasonable compromise between two bickering parties. 

The Washington Post report ignores any immigrant voices or immigrant rights groups entirely, seeking affirming quotes from the “Bipartisan Policy Center,” a conservative think tank funded by Walmart and a consortium of banking interests, whose previous claim to fame was defending worker regulations in sweatshops. We also hear from the centrist Migration Policy Institute, which offers some process feedback, but no criticism. Like with the New York Times article, the only token criticism is from a “handful of Democratic defections” in Congress—in this case, Sens. Alex Padilla and Robert Menendez—but no actual immigrants or immigrant rights groups are heard from. 

The Associated Press ran the same script, using sanitizing cliches like “strict,” “tough,” and “overhaul the asylum system” without offering any voice to migrants or their advocates or detail any of the human stakes of the “deal.” Financial Times called the violent and cruel new laws a potential “showdown” over a “border crackdown.” FT did not mention any opposition to the “crackdown” at all—in Congress or otherwise—insisting that “Biden’s allies in Congress have been making increasingly impassioned pleas for fellow lawmakers to support the plan.” Reading the FT report on the debate, not only would one be totally ignorant of the actual human stakes being debated, they wouldn’t even know there is opposition at all. 

These reports in CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, and Financial Times on the proposed “border deal” did not print comments from any immigrants or any immigrant rights group. Immigrants and their advocates are simply a nonfactor in the ongoing political “debate” over the “border crackdown.” 

Most sociopathic of all the coverage was in Politico, whose Jan. 29 roundup of the negotiations was headlined “Can Dems flip the border script?” In this piece, the Democrats calling the GOP’s bluff on immigration is entirely framed as a clever election year strategy with absolutely no mention that these policies could potentially harm and deport tens of thousands of people. “Democrats believe they can make the case to voters that despite years of shouting about the crisis at the border, Republicans are the ones sitting on their hands as the migrant influx strains law enforcement and social services — all because they are beholden to Trump.” Politico’s Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, and Ryan Lizza write like gossipy middle schoolers. “We’re about to find out whether this turn-the-tables strategy will work. Text of the months-in-the-making Senate deal is expected to finally be released in the coming days, with full details on its overhaul of asylum policies, new powers to expel migrants and beefed up federal resources.” 

“Expel migrants” seems bad—perhaps Bade, Daniels, and Lizza thought it prudent to ask one of these thousands of migrants who could be “expelled” how they feel about the legislation? Obviously not, Instead we are simply given multiple quotes from dead-eyed political consultants about how this will all play out in the polls and the 2024 election. 

And this is how the brutality, violence, and dehumanization of our border surveillance and punishment system is sanitized and packaged to the public: Not as a strategy of systemic dehydration, violence incarceration, and breaking up of families, but a vague system of “strict” “enforcement” of “tougher laws.” If these right-wing policies are going to become bipartisan consensus and soon—it seems—law, perhaps American media outlets can stop framing them as mere partisan horse race gotcha issues and instead try, at least for one token paragraph, talking to those actually impacted by them.

As a general rule, no one wants to be the overdog. In the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and about other people, the figure of the underdog and the narrative arc of their struggle against stacked odds is synonymous with virtue. We can’t help but root for the underdog—we are compelled to sympathize with them, to identify with their plight, and to paint ourselves and the others we want to be viewed sympathetically in the mold of some under-resourced, disregarded, but plucky archetypal underdog taking on the powerful. 

Even the richest of rich kids and the nepo-est of nepo babies manufacture narratives of their own hardscrabble experience, typically through some mix of psychobabble, solipsism, and retconned hardship—no matter how self-inflicted. Stories to tell themselves, and to others, about themselves, so they’ll be seen in a kinder light, and appear more sympathetic and relatable to kinder eyes. This is doubly true for politicians who, more than anyone, want to be on the side of money, power, and the elite, but don’t want you to think they are on the side of money, power, and the elite. That is why the Republican Party and its attendant conservative media have, over decades, constructed an entire bizarro universe in which they and their supporters can perennially paint themselves as scrappy underdogs fighting a power that is not monopolized by the wealthy, but by an elite cabal of Soros-funded activists, academics, greedy immigrants, layabout government bureaucrats, and race-hustling DEI consultants lighting their cigars with your hard-earned $100 bills.

Unmoored to this same totally-made-up partisan alternate universe, conservative Democrats have to work a bit harder to sell the idea that they’re bold, courageous outsiders taking on the powers that be—because people want that, people vote for that, people like the underdog—while still taking the same, banal, power-serving positions as their predecessors. This is not a new phenomenon in politics: it is a constant, like time or gravity. The most notable recent example, of course, concerns Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and his so-called “break” with the “progressives,” which has essentially entailed Fetterman making his boilerplate AIPAC-fed talking points seem like something brave or principled or something other than heartless support for ethnic cleansing. 

Nowhere in recent memory has the need to make an overdog seem like an underdog been greater and more grimly transparent than with Israel’s full-court-press efforts to convince the world that an occupying force with one of the largest militaries on Earth, with the endless backing of the largest military power the world has ever seen, is the besieged underdog that is ethnically cleansing a population of millions of civilians out of “self defense.” This has, in turn, prompted an equally cynical and half-assed effort by Fetterman and his team of dead-eyed, social media-savvy hipster aides to “change the narrative” and paint the Senator’s thoughtless support for Israel as edgy truth-telling, and his gutless falling in line with the DC establishment and the Israel lobby as a brave stand against Big Progressive.

In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel and the genocidal, scorched-earth response from Israel that followed, Fetterman quickly staked out a position that went admittedly beyond the normal pro-Israel liberal clichés and into the realm of sadistic glee and indifference toward the suffering of Gazans. In interview after interview, Fetterman shows a callous disregard for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed in the past three months, the majority of them women and children, and instead resorts to simplistic War-on-Terror style moralizing. “Now is not the time to talk about a ceasefire. We must support Israel in efforts to eliminate the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered innocent men, women, and children,” he tweeted. “Hamas does not want peace, they want to destroy Israel. We can talk about a ceasefire after Hamas is neutralized.”

Even though it is well known that Fetterman’s position on Israel was always firmly in line with standard-issue Zionist pablum, many of his progressive and left-of-center supporters have been understandably upset by his total lack of even feigned empathy for Palestinians. After all, Fetterman has staked out a position to the far right of even the extremely pro-Israel White House; he not only opposes a ceasefire, he opposed the idea of a temporary pause for hostage exchanges. As the Palestinian body count piled up—now well over 23,000, including an estimated 12,000 children—young Pennsylvania voters sought to convey their anger and frustration with their Senator. 

Fetterman and his team tried to paint Fetterman as a “heterodox” thinker; they were quick to mock these genuine concerns from his former supporters, belittling activists as irrelevant nuisances whose brains have been “warped” by social media. Tweets from Fetterman Chief of Staff Adam Jentleson were equal parts glib and smug:

Friendly media has mostly played along with the charade. Politico framed Fetterman loudly taking a right-wing position on Israel as him being a rogue free thinker who is, roguely, uninterested in being popular:

“‘I’m not a progressive’: Fetterman breaks with the left, showing a maverick side,” reads a sycophantic headline in a December NBC News article by Sahil Kapur. Kapur, quoting Jentleson, would go on to add that, contrary to what internet-addled critics suggest, Fetterman never misrepresented himself as a progressive, he never adopted the progressive label or courted progressive votes:

A claim that Fetterman’s main Twitter account repeated, and that was easily and summarily debunked in the community notes:

A USA Today column by Ingrid Jacques published a week later would double down on this Sassy Fetterman narrative. “It’s a new year and a whole new John Fetterman: He’s kissing his progressive ways goodbye,” the headline reads. Jacques buys into the self-styled Fetterman-as-maverick framing hook, line, and sinker: “[Fetterman] is not afraid… to speak up for what he thinks is right, even if that means bucking the progressive mantra.”

Note how swiftly opposition to ethnic cleansing is reduced to a partisan-ized “progressive mantra,” and supporting the continued bombing, starving, and collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza is “speaking up” for what one “thinks is right.” Progressive activists don’t have sincere convictions, only TikTok-fueled neuroses. Indeed, this is how Fetterman explained the massive gap between Democratic voters, and Democratic officials like him in the Senate and White House who continue to support Israel’s destruction of Gaza despite the fact that poll after poll shows over 75% of Democrats support a ceasefire. 

“I really don’t know,” Fetterman told Jake Tapper when asked about his unpopularity with the Democratic base. “I know that a lot of people are getting their perspective from TikTok.”

Acknowledging that the widespread contempt for Fetterman’s position is borne from genuine opposition to mass slaughter and displacement would undermine his alleged “maverick” rebrand. He can’t look like he’s “standing up” to popular sentiment, so the manifest popularity of the ceasefire position must be pathologized as a social media brain disease emerging from Sinister Actors From the Orient.

This is an object lesson in how the media vapidly reduces the content of politics to pure form. For the Fetterman-as-maverick-bucking-Progressive-dogma rebrand to stick, the substance of what Fetterman is advocating fades into the background and “the story” becomes an underdog tale of one unpopular man of conscience standing athwart history, shouting “No!”—and being commended by a credulous media for that, rather than for what he is actually saying. The content of his position is important only insofar as it departs from the popular majority now and the consensus position of progressives past, thus situating Fetterman in the cookie-cutter role of the seemingly less powerful party taking on a domineering foe (even though—again, it must be stressed—Fetterman has cast himself in that role because his position on Israel is callous, heinous, and out of step with the majority of people with a conscience).

That there exists some radical pro-Palestinian Democratic Party status quo that Fetterman is “bucking” is essential to maintain any pretense of an underdog narrative. But, of course, there isn’t. It’s the position of the angry base, the masses, the majority of Democrats who simply have no purchase on Capitol Hill. Fetterman is simply taking an easy, cheap, racist, pro-power position that will no doubt pay dividends in campaign contributions next cycle. It’s a boring story, but it is the story. 

But Fetterman’s Maverick gambit in the media, before our eyes, shifts our attention from a substantive debate of morality and ideology and the stakes of continued support for Israel’s unprecedented brutality, into a high school cafeteria narrative about how “haterz don’t bother” Fetterman. Clearly, they don’t, and neither do the hundreds of weekly images of dead children. This doesn’t make Fetterman a “heterodox” thinker, or a brave truth teller. It makes him an asshole.

Ten weeks and over 20,000 dead Palestinians in, including over 10,000 children, President Joe Biden and his diplomatic retinue—including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin—are once again “urging” Israel this week to “better protect Gaza civilians.” 

At this point, one can set their watch to weekly matinee showings of what we’ll call “Concern Theater,” which is best defined as the performative spectacle of US officials publicly—or privately, but leaked to a public media outlet—expressing “concerns about” Gaza’s unprecedented civilian death toll. Since Israel began bombing Gaza on Oct. 7, the day after a Hamas-led attack killed 1,139 Israelis, the Biden administration has conspicuously expressed “concerns” or leveled “urgings” about high death tolls on Oct. 11, Oct. 15, Oct. 29, Oct. 31, Nov. 3, Nov. 10, Nov. 29, Dec. 2, Dec. 6, Dec. 11, Dec. 14, and Dec. 18.

Yet the rate of IDF killing hasn’t changed at all, remaining fairly steady since the “war” began: 

Israel has dropped over 30,000 bombs (almost half “dumb bombs”) on the roughly 140-square mile Gaza Strip, destroying or damaging 60 percent of buildings and displacing 90 percent of the population, according to the UNRWA. (“Unguided munitions are typically less precise and can pose a greater threat to civilians, especially in such a densely populated area like Gaza,” Natasha Bertrand and Katie Bo Lillis write at CNN about the “dumb bombs.” “The rate at which Israel is using the dumb bombs may be contributing to the soaring civilian death toll.” May be…) 

The United States, meanwhile, has not paired its “warnings” or “concerns” with actual consequences of any kind, continuing its longstanding unqualified support for Israel with weapons transfers, military support, intelligence, and diplomatic cover. Biden himself has been the single biggest mouthpiece for some of Israel’s most blatant lies. Going on month three of Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians and critical food, sanitation, transportation and medical infrastructure, one is compelled to ask: What, exactly, is the point of these manifestly toothless “urgings” and “raisings of concerns” if US support for Israel continues all the same? 

Primarily, the function of Concern Theater is to placate a domestic audience that needs to be convinced we’re the good guys. Aware of how much the horrific images coming daily out of Gaza are harming their re-election prospects at home, Biden and his team have to do something to make it look like they aren’t heartless monsters. And since they cannot cut off or punish Israel in any way—because they ideologically agree with its military campaign and strategically depend on Israel’s existence in the region, and on its command of all this deathly power—they have to engage in empty, vague expressions of “concern” to make us feel better about them doing what they were always going to do, regardless. Israeli leaders are aware of this and don’t really mind these consequence-free scoldings every few days. So long as the tank artillery shells, rifles, and 2,000-pound bombs are delivered on time, who cares if the Biden White House needs to throw its half-distracted base the occasional liberal PR slop. 

Nothing the US claims it has “concerns” about is at all quantifiable or specific, by design. “‘Far too many Palestinians have been killed,” Blinken told reporters on November 9. Compared to what? What would a sufficient number of Palestinian deaths be? What’s the ratio Blinken would be okay with? The details don’t matter, because Blinken isn’t making an intellectual statement—he’s making a performatively emotional one. His aim is to look concerned, not to actually express concerns that can lead to actionable changes in policy. 

And US media largely runs with this framing. Every single time Sullivan, Blinken, Austin, or Biden engage in Concern Theater, outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN dutifully report it without context or criticism. The fact that the White House has issued almost the exact same word-for-word “concerns” a dozen times before doesn’t seem to bother any of these reporters or editors, or merit a mention. US media seems largely unphased by this moral pantomime, still playing along with the polite fiction that the United States isn’t entirely acting in lockstep with Israel and its attendant, manifest war crimes. Skimming The New York Times on Monday, a reader would be under the distinct impression the United States is a disinterested, third-party human rights organization:

Behind closed doors, Biden officials admit it’s mostly hot air, telling reporters that the goal is to cover their asses professionally and morally. One NBC News CYA-themed article, composed largely of Biden administration leaks, explained how the game is played: “If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” one senior US official said. It’s not as if those in the White House, the military, and State Department aren’t aware they and their boss are a willful party to serious, ongoing, inexcusable war crimes. Dozens of State Department staffers filed dissent memos objecting to Biden’s lockstep support for Israel, and Biden’s own staffers put on a pro-ceasefire vigil outside the White House. 

Biden and his team are aware of all of this and have to do something to fill up time while they continue to arm, support, and back Israel’s scorched-earth assault, with a scale of killing efficiency not seen in modern times. (The quicker the leveling of Gaza and the expulsion/extermination of Palestinians happens, the sooner this performance can enter its second act: lamenting that more Palestinian deaths weren’t avoided.) Roughly 70 percent of Palestinians killed thus far have been women and children. As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic notes, this puts the rate of dead women and children far above that seen in any recent conflicts: 

At the height of the Syrian civil war in 2015 and 2016, a conflict considered especially deadly for women and children, those two groups comprised 25 percent of the civilians killed by one count, or 37 percent by another. When civilian deaths in Afghanistan reached an all-time high in the first half of 2021, women and children comprised 46 percent of all civilian casualties. Over the first two years of the Iraq War, that figure was just under 20 percent. In Yemen — generally considered one of this century’s ghastliest wars — from 2018 to 2022, women and children made up 33 percent of civilian casualties, according to data compiled by the Civilian Impact Monitoring Project on the consequences of armed violence. (If indirect causes of the war like starvation and disease are accounted for, Yemen’s numbers are significantly higher.)

This isn’t to say Palestinian men’s lives don’t count as civilian or innocent—it’s simply a harrowing reminder of the utter falseness of the manifest lie that Israel is targeting combatants or militants. All evidence indicates that Israel isn’t just indifferent to civilian deaths but is, in fact, targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Palestinian civilians who have been killed, maimed, and displaced are not just collateral damage or fallen “human shields,” they are part of a population that is itself being targeted for death or forcible population transfers. That is the only clear and obvious explanation for what Israel is doing and how it is doing it.

A secondary function of Concern Theater is a last-ditch effort to maintain America’s self-appointed Human Rights Hall Monitor brand on the so-called “global stage.” Unlike Trump’s brash, might-makes-right overt nihilism, the Biden White House, like Obama before, repeatedly puts on lofty airs as defenders of “democracy” and “human rights.” This posture has, of course, always been selective and largely pretextual, but the last 10 weeks have removed any doubt about its artifice that may have remained. As Oliver Stuenkel noted in Foreign Policy last month, the United States’ unwavering support for Israel’s uniquely horrific siege and bombing of Gaza has vindicated the commonly held belief in the Global South that all of America’s meddling and sanctimony was entirely self-serving. 

Blinken has a fiction to maintain in this moment, that is among his top duties, and he appears to just be powering through it, despite any and all semblance of credibility evaporating weeks ago. The State Department is going to keep pushing the image of the United States as the arbiter or enforcer of the “liberal rules-based order,” no matter how many bodies pile up in Gaza or how little credibility it has. After all, without this narrative continually propping up the fiction of America’s exceptional righteousness, the US diplomatic corp may view itself as nothing but greasy extortionists like their Chinese and Russian counterparts. And this simply cannot be the case. 

All this is to be expected, no matter how unseemly the whole production is. Blinken is fundamentally a PR agent for US security interests, of which Israel is a constituent member, and spinning that country’s repeated war crimes as simple miscues, mistakes, or temporary hot headedness is inherent in the undignified, amoral work of imperial middle management. What isn’t inevitable, though, is our media treating this Concern Theater as meaningful, newsworthy, or morally relevant, framing it like the US is merely a third-party coming in to do a little Genocide Harm Reduction via “nods” and “nudges”, rather than the transparent ass-covering of a co-conspirator helping execute one of the greatest crimes of the 21st century.

When the US is directly or indirectly involved in conflicts around the world, it will almost always, like clockwork, seek to exploit pre-existing tensions between military or social factions within the country in question. Leading up to the Iraq invasion, for instance, there existed a long-standing, often Kurdish-led, opposition to Saddam Hussien’s rule. Polls taken after the Iraq invasion indicate that said opposition was a minority opinion overall, but it was real, and those within particular factions felt sincerely about their position—and had clear historical reasons for feeling the way they did. Nevertheless, the point is that the American military apparatus deliberately seized upon and amplified these existing intranational divisions to foment and justify the invasion of Iraq. The US has drawn from the same playbook in its involvement in conflicts from Venezuela to Ukraine to Yemen, seeking out some sizable cohort of people who hate the same government Washington wants to replace, and instrumentalizing that group for its own less noble ends. When it comes to the US backing of different factions in Enemy States, its efforts range from exploiting organic, long-existing discontent to attempting to manufacture discontent and “opposition leaders” out of thin air.  

Nowhere has the more cynical and inorganic end of this spectrum been more obvious than an old talking point made new again over the past few weeks. As calls for a ceasefire continue to grow among the public and in Congress, in the face of over 16,000 Palestinians—including over 7,000 children—killed by Israel’s siege, pro-bombing pundits are dusting off a classic line that, in the context of Palestine, is manifestly absurd: Palestinians actually want Israel to bomb Gaza. 

It’s a common tough-guy line regurgitated by those rejecting calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. Here is Eli Lake, former Bloomberg Opinion columnist, contributing editor at Commentary, and host of the Re-Education podcast, evoking the talking point while dressing down UK MP and former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn:

The “point” Lake is trying to make is that Palestinians want Hamas “permanently destroyed” as much as the Israeli military says it does; thus, Palestinians want the mass bombing of Gaza to continue until Hamas (and, at this rate, everyone else) is gone; thus, it is actually a denial of Palestinians’ own wishes to call for a ceasefire. This line, of course, is beyond absurd and has no basis in reality. There is not a single prominent Palestinian politician, scholar, civil society organization, or diaspora group calling for Israel to bomb Gaza in order to “liberate it from Hamas.” Moreover, as I laid out in The Nation last week, the vast bulk of Palestinians—regardless of their views on Hamas—are keenly aware that Israel’s objective is not to “hunt for Hamas” in some targeted or deliberate way, but to administer collective punishment and forcible population transfers of Palestinians out of Palestine. 

Nevertheless, those claiming to speak for the underrepresented constituency of pro-bombing, pro-invasion Palestinians keep going back to this well. 

When confronted by a reporter on Oct. 27 about her stance on ending the bloodshed in Gaza, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)—who still refuses to back a ceasefire—responded, “I am not willing to call for a ceasefire at this point because that would not help the residents of Gaza nor would it help the security of Israel.” 

A ceasefire would not help the residents of Gaza? Which residents? The tens of thousands of dead residents, or the over 1 million former residents who are now refugees? If it were possible to conduct a snap poll of those living in Gaza right now, one wonders what percentage of respondents would agree with Sen. Duckworth’s assessment that a ceasefire is bad for them. But, alas, our politicians know best.

The bombing-Palestinians-for-their-own-good line is one frequently used by Israeli officials themselves. Israel’s UK ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely, for instance, recently told Sky News that “the Hamas regime is bad for Palestinians and Israelis.”

It is also a line repeatedly parroted by pro-Israel politicians across the US. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, reiterating his support for Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza while still trying to pay lip service to displaced Palestinians, told reporters on Oct. 19, “Our hearts are broken for you as well. This is a deeply difficult and of course divisive issue. I will say I have zero empathy for Hamas, at all. And Hamas is bad for Palestinians.”

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) echoed a similar line on Dec. 1 when defending Israel’s ongoing siege and bombing of Gaza, while simultaneously insisting the need to tone down the wanton slaughter of civilians. “Israel has a responsibility to take out Hamas,” Moulton said. “You cannot have peace with Hamas in power. Hamas isn’t good for the Palestinians either, Hamas is using them as human shields in this conflict. So, everyone benefits from Israel taking out Hamas.” 

Someone should let the Palestinians running for their lives, having their whole families wiped out, futilely scrambling for clean water, and watching their entire society be destroyed know that this is all to their benefit.

Neoconservative, staunch Biden defender, and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin recently added to the “We know what’s best for Palestinians” concern troll chorus of Beltway hacks, penning a Nov. 28 piece titled “Why backers of a Palestinian state should oppose an immediate cease-fire.” In this post, Rubin sagely details how a ceasefire would actually harm the Palestinian cause. “As long as Hamas, a sworn enemy of the Palestinian Authority, held power, there would be no chance for a unified Palestinian state coexisting with Israel,” she writes. “Ironically, the fiercest American critics of Netanyahu, in pursuing an immediate cease-fire before Hamas is defeated, effectively adopt the very same failed strategy that Netanyahu did.”

Rubin’s heart presumably bleeds for the people of Palestine and their fight for liberation. Never mind that Rubin was censured by her own publication in 2011 for endorsing a far-right article advocating that Palestinian children be “fed to the sharks.” As Ali Gharib wrote at the time for Think Progress, “Rachel Abrams, a board member of a right-wing pro-Israel organization, wrote a controversial blog post calling for Palestinian militants — and their children — to be fed to sharks. After Abrams linked the blog on Twitter,” Gharib continues, “Washington Post neoconservative opinion blogger Jennifer Rubin retweeted it, eliciting another round of controversy. Now, the Post’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, weighed in to declare his ‘disappointment’ with Rubin.”

It is, indeed, curious that Rubin, who also backed the Iraq War and reflexively blamed Muslims for Anders Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attack in Norway, suddenly cares about the dispossessed Arab populations of the Middle East.

It’s not just bombing that’s good for Palestinians, apparently. The Israeli government is currently shopping around a plan to “resettle” Palestinians (e.g., ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Palestine once and for all), which relies on the faux-humanitarian premise that, in order to save Gazans from Hamas, they must be forced to flee to other countries. “The neighboring borders have been closed for too long,” the proposal states. “But it is now clear that in order to free the Gazan population from the tyrannical oppression of Hamas and to allow them to live free of war and bloodshed, Israel must encourage the international community to find the correct, moral and humane avenues for the relocation of the Gazan population.” (Read that last sentence as many times as you need to for the horrific, genocidal logic at the center of it to sink in.) 

Former Bush and Trump advisor John Bolton uses the same argument to justify explicitly advocating genocide in a Nov. 16 Hill op-ed. “The real future for Gazans is to live somewhere integrated into functioning economies,” Bolton says about what, in his mind, is a “viable long-term solution that receives little attention”: forcing Palestinians out of Palestine and “resettling” them elsewhere. “That is the only way to realize the promise of a decent life and stability for a people who have been weaponized for far too long.” He reiterates this point in a Dec. 2 Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which he states that “the only long-term solution is to deny Hamas access to concentrated, hereditary refugee populations by resettling Gazans in places where they can enjoy normal lives.” 

All of these prominent backers of Israel’s bombing, siege, and ethnic cleansing campaign of Gaza—that includes textbook war crimes and collective punishment tactics of cutting off civilian access to fuel, water, food, medicine, and electricity—want you to know that they absolutely, for sure, love and care for Palestinians. It’s certainly reasonable to argue that Palestinians would be better off without Hamas’ rule over Gaza in an abstract or theoretical sense. However, given that these statements are not abstract but actively supporting a very real and ongoing campaign of collective suffering in Gaza, it’s more than reasonable to suspect that this feigned concern for the plight of Palestinians, who must be removed from Gaza “for their own good,” may not be entirely useful or sincere.

Reports about Biden’s tanking poll numbers over the past week show an incumbent president in unprecedented trouble. In the 2020 election, Biden’s support from young voters was a commanding 20 points higher than Trump’s; now, he’s virtually tied with Trump with young voters in five key swing states. The headlines don’t look good for the President. “Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds,” The New York Times warned on Monday. The headline of another article published in Politico this week reads, “Biden’s Big Hole, and How to Dig Out of It.” The voter malaise predates Biden’s blank check for Israel’s current war in Gaza, which began after the Oct. 7 surprise Hamas-led attack and dramatically escalated with Israel’s subsequent, unprecedentedly brutal siege, invasion, and bombing campaign. But it has gotten much worse of late, raising alarm bells for donors and party leaders.   

This plummet in support for a sitting president is certainly newsworthy in its own right, but what could possibly be causing so many potential voters to sour on Biden? The vast majority of mainstream reports try to answer this question by pointing to broader, more evergreen indicators of voters’ concerns like election integrity and voting rights, gun policy, crime, immigration, abortion, climate change, and the ever-so-vague “foreign policy.” What’s missing from most of these same reports, though, is an accounting of the specific role Joe Biden’s support for the carnage in Gaza is almost certainly playing in this freefall in support from young voters, progressive voters, and Muslim and Arab voters more broadly. 

Recent reports on Biden’s bad polling in The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, ABC News, New York Magazine, and Financial Times ignore the role of Biden’s backing of Gaza’s bombardment entirely. None of the above polls even asked respondents specifically about Biden’s role in Israel’s scorched-earth bombing and siege of Gaza. Instead, they focused on generic contributors like economic malaise and perennial “swing” issues like those listed above. Which are all fine enough, but they may not be sufficient to explain how poorly the President is doing, especially among young voters. 

Some outlets have connected the dots. Rolling Stone ran a piece showing how Biden’s support for Israel’s onslaught is harming his 2024 prospects, as did NBC News, Daily Beast, Mother Jones and Slate. But such reports, especially over the past week, have been, by far, the exception rather than the rule. The Washington Post mentioned Gaza in its breakdown of Biden’s terrible poll numbers, but then quickly dismissed this as a fleeting issue that will simply blow over. Although the Post concedes that “Some Biden allies argue that because the latest polls were conducted in the midst of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the results paint a picture that is likely to change.” Okay, well, never mind, then. 

This is all in spite of the fact that key indicators suggest there are real shifts taking place in the base of the Democratic Party. A Gallup poll released in March found that Democrats’ “sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%.” And a separate survey conducted on Oct. 18 and 19 by Data for Progress found that 80% of Democrats either “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with the following statement: “The U.S. should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza. The U.S. should leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.” 

Yet Biden—and the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats—are glaringly out of step with these shifts among their own base.

As NBC News notes, “Muslim and Arab Americans, who overwhelmingly backed Biden in 2020, have threatened not to vote for him next year over what they say is a lack of U.S. action to help Palestinian civilians. A new survey of Michigan Democrats finds his support cratering among the group.” 

Again, the majority of reports published at major outlets this week leave one with only a partial picture of what could be driving that “cratering” support, but Al Jazeera recently produced a segment capturing the outrage and disgust among the reliably Democratic voting base of Arabs and Muslims in the swing state of Michigan. It’s certainly worth watching:

In a forceful op-ed published in In These Times on Oct. 25, Saqib Bhatti, co-executive director of the Action Center on Race & The Economy, unequivocally declared, “I will not vote for Joe Biden in 2024.” Bhatti writes, “There are few things as dehumanizing as when a politician you voted for greenlights the genocide and purposeful starvation of children who could be your own. For many, like me, Gaza is the last straw.”

Even if data scientists are not certain Biden’s Gaza policy is a major factor in his declining approval ratings, surely it’s at least a potential factor that warrants some mention? Any mention at all? 

The absence of these perspectives from our popular discourse is no small matter; it has tremendous political consequences. If Biden’s role in the destruction of Gaza—and his lockstep support for the killing of over 12,000 civilians, including 4,600 children—isn’t connected to some political downside, especially when this downside is easily inferred from virtually every poll over the past month, the pressure on the White House is diminished and the status quo can be seen by those with influence and power as politically sustainable. The public is deprived of an opportunity to weigh in on a large-scale, US-backed massacre as it is unfolding. Polling, with all of its flaws, can serve as a useful mechanism for accountability, and popularity (or lack thereof) can drive public policy decisions. But it’s impossible to register public outrage over Gaza when pollsters don’t even ask about it and our media overlooks it when trying to solve the mystery of Biden’s relative lack of support and enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, politicians are far more influenced by electoral consequences than persuasive moral arguments or shaming.

The overwhelming media response to the upswell of youth-driven outrage—after attempts to semantically sidestep the reality of genocide, deny and debate death counts as bodies are piling up by the thousands, and to ban the allegedly pro-Palestinian TikTok app became untenable—has been to either falsely claim Biden is powerless to stop Israel, or to play the classics and refocus on voter-scolding and rote, Lesser-of-Two-Evils arguments. There is a dearth of coverage taking this outrage seriously as a political force, even as tens of thousands take to the streets, and creative direct actions on a stunning scale pop off across the country, from Grand Central Station and downtown Chicago to the Statue of Liberty, to weapons manufacturers, to ports, to Congress members’ offices and homes. We are seeing such a tremendous upsurge in mobilizations, in the US and beyond, that it is difficult to track. For those paying attention, it is clear that the liberal and progressive despair over the rising deaths and suffering in Gaza is boiling over; people are desperate to stop the onslaught. The problem is that the powers that be are not listening, and much of the media is ensuring that the volume of that despair and desperation is turned down to zero.

Any party, organization, or class of political power brokers that is not paying attention to this reality is bound to lose a good chunk of its base. The press, by shielding the broader public from this clear, emerging dynamic that is, at least in part, driving Biden’s bad polls, is not only helping to hide the political downside to backing mass killing in Gaza, but potentially making any course correction—no matter how remote—that much less likely.

As the staggering number of civilian deaths in Gaza grows every day, and as fresh reports of Israel’s brazen attacks on mosques, hospitals, churches, refugee camps, and other civilian targets come across our social media timelines every few hours, there’s a mounting urgency among Israeli officials, pro-Israel groups in the US, and the US media and political establishment that’s backing these manifest war crimes to downplay the horrific mass killing of Palestinian noncombatants. With polls showing that a majority of voters, including 80% of Democrats, back a ceasefire—putting the vast majority of Democratic politicians at odds with their own constituents—excuses are needed to justify and handwave away the reports of carnage coming out of Gaza every day. 

There are three popular tropes commonly employed by US media, politicians, and pundits tasked with supporting President Biden and his lockstep backing of the Gaza bombing to effectively, ex post-facto, militarize civilians being killed and maimed by Israel:  

1. “Terror Tunnels” 

Over this past week, The New York Times ran three different articles full of handwringing over what to do about the scary reality of Hamas’ underground tunnel network in Gaza. Such a network, to some extent, no doubt exists. Many Palestinians have argued it’s more of a network for smuggling harmless goods in and out of Gaza due to the Israeli blockade preventing imports and exports, rather than a sprawling, sophisticated underground lair teaming with Bond-like Hamas villains. The tunnels in Gaza almost certainly serve a combination of functions, for Hamas and non-Hamas-affiliated Palestinians alike, but the breathless coverage of the alleged “terror tunnels” serves one primary purpose: to justify massive civilian death. 

Serious Reporters at the Times have focused intently on the Terror Tunnel issue, including lead liberal opinion-shaper David Leonhardt, who built a whole article around it for his very popular daily newsletter. He writes:

The battle over the tunnels is a major reason that this war already has a high civilian death toll. More than two million people live above the tunnels — a layer of human life between many Hamas targets and Israeli missiles.

Hamas has hidden many weapons under hospitals, schools and mosques so that Israel risks killing civilians, and facing an international backlash, when it fights. Hamas fighters also slip above and below ground, blending with civilians.

Citing a 2014 Washington Post article—an article that largely relies on Israeli and pro-Israel sources—Leonhardt casually asserts that these tunnels are deliberately placed under hospitals, schools, and mosques so that they can be used as protection from bunker busters aiming for the tunnels. Surely, such a major claim would require more neutral sourcing, or evidence, or some type of demonstrable methodology for coming to this conclusion (rather than, say, concluding that tunnels in urban areas naturally undergird all types of civilian infrastructure, by definition). But Leonhardt is unconcerned with these deeper questions. He has lazy conventional wisdom to spout and articles to write that Boomer Liberals can brandish at friends on Facebook expressing concern about mounting child body counts in Gaza.

There are also two massive holes in the ghoulish logic of “we have to kill civilians because the Terror Tunnels leave no other option,” neither of which Leonhardt, nor the Times reporters who provided the collateral for his newsletter, seem concerned with addressing.

1. If Israel Has No Choice™ but to kill thousands of innocent civilians because these civilians are placed between Israel’s otherwise “targeted” bombs and the Terror Tunnels in which the Hamas baddies dwell, then why doesn’t Israel publish a map of the tunnels and advise civilians to avoid these areas? Israel has provided such information about so-called “safe zones” in the past; it has also bombed those “safe zones.” In theory, the Israeli government could provide a clear map of the Terror Tunnels—they supposedly know where the tunnels are. Yet, it doesn’t do this. Why? Is Leonhardt even curious about why Israel doesn’t do this? Apparently not.
   
2. An enemy “blending with civilians” was the exact same logic the US used to justify killing over 3 million Vietnamese civilians—or 10% of the country’s population—in its decade-long war against the Vietnamese insurgency. “That’s the same crap we did in Vietnam,” Marc Steiner pointed out this week on The Real News, recalling the ways the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians was similarly justified by the repeatedly stated suspicion that enemy combatants were hiding among them. “[We said], ‘Let’s destroy that village, because the [National Liberation Front] is there, the Viet Cong are there.'” Clearly, insofar as this tactic is or was employed by fighters in Palestine and Vietnam, the tactic itself wasn’t devised out of some discrete moral failing on the part of Palestinians in Gaza, or the Vietnamese, but is a specific feature of an occupied people engaging in asymmetrical war with a military power with total aerial dominance. Doesn’t this invite bigger questions about the nature of the Israeli occupation, the blockade of Gaza, and the cycle of violence they perpetuate? There are no Hamas or Terror Tunnels in the West Bank, for example, but Israeli military and settlers are also killing hundreds there as well. If collateral damage killing of civilians has to do with Terror Tunnels, then why have 144 Palestinians been killed in the West Bank in the past four weeks as well? 

Ultimately, scare stories about Hamas Terror Tunnels have no practical journalistic effect other than militarizing the whole of Gazan society. After all, if the Terror Tunnels are everywhere, and the Terror Tunnels are legitimate military targets, then any civilian standing in any Gazan population center is little more than a Hamas “human shield.” Which leads us to our second trope:

2. “Human Shields”

A variation on the Terror Tunnel panic is the idea that Israel reluctantly kills civilians because Hamas uses them as “human shields.” This was casually asserted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren Tuesday while she lamented the deaths of hundreds killed by an Israeli airstrike targeting Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.

This is a trope that has been debunked by human rights groups for years, namely by Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson in 2021. 

The short version is: Even if one accepts the premise that Hamas is using human shields, from an ethical and legal standpoint, Israel is compelled by international law to not kill hundreds of civilians at a time in order to target, allegedly, one “Hamas commander.” That is a war crime. But the premise itself needs to be questioned, too. As Whitson notes, a Human Rights Watch report of Operation Cast Lead in 2009 found that, “In the killings documented in this report, Human Rights Watch found no evidence that the civilian victims were used by Palestinian fighters as human shields or were shot in the crossfire between opposing forces.”

The claim that Hamas is “using human shields” is a specific charge that requires a specific standard of evidence to prove, none of which has been publicly provided by Israel thus far to any media outlets or third-party human rights groups of any kind. Israel’s definition of “human shields” is simply “a combatant may or may not be in the same general area as hundreds of civilians.” Israel rarely bothers naming these combatants, much less providing evidence that they were in the area in question after said area has been reduced to rubble and corpses. The “human shields” talking point can’t simply be tossed around as a post hoc justification after a crater in the ground leaves hundreds of Palestinian civilians dead. But, thus far, Israel has mostly gotten away with doing just this. 

3. “Hamas Strongholds” 

A breaking news alert Tuesday by The New York Times about an Israeli strike on the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, which killed hundreds of civilians, revived an old racist trope used to militarize civilian populations by referring to them as living in, or being part of, a militant group’s “stronghold”:

In 2015, the Times’ Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard infamously reported on an ISIS suicide bombing that killed 43 and maimed over 200 civilians in a market in Beirut in an article with the headline, “Deadly Blasts Hit Hezbollah Stronghold in Southern Beirut.” A Reuters headline published around the same time read, “Two Suicide Bombers hit Hezbollah Bastion in Lebanon.”

This framing was widely criticized on social media, and the Times eventually changed its headline (Barnard even published a half-hearted mea culpa following the controversy). The Times, of course, would never frame an ISIS attack in downtown Paris with a headline like “Deadly Blasts Hit NATO Stronghold in Paris,” but the paper of record has no problem doing this for Arabs in Lebanon for no apparent reason other than orientalist dehumanization. Referring to Paris, London, or New York, after an ISIS attack on civilians, as a “NATO stronghold” would be seen as bizarre, callous, and effectively doing free propaganda for ISIS. 

While the context is obviously different, a similar dehumanizing effect is achieved when sites of mass civilian death are callously referred to as “Hamas strongholds.” Justifying airstrikes that kill hundreds of civilians by claiming that the struck site was an enemy “stronghold,” even though Israel cannot be bothered to produce evidence of any military personnel or activity at the site, serves no other purpose than to posthumously conscript the dead men, women, and children buried under rubble as Hamas militants who deserved to die.

Another Times report from Oct. 14 noted that Gaza City is itself “Hamas’s stronghold and the enclave’s largest urban center.” USA Today, reporting on the Jabaliya refugee camp airstrike, wrote, “Israeli airstrikes hit apartment buildings in the Jabaliya refugee camp, a Hamas stronghold near Gaza City.” On Oct. 10, AP told us that “Israel pounds Hamas stronghold in Gaza’s Rimal.” On Oct. 31, Axios referred to Gaza City as a “Hamas stronghold.”

What purpose does this orientalist framework serve other than implying, not so subtly, that the civilians who were killed more or less had it coming because many of them support, in some abstract way, the goals of Hamas? If spatial proximity to Hamas fighters means one’s collateral murder is already justified, then Israel already had its built-in justification for eliminating or displacing anyone and everyone living in the 22-by-5-mile open-air prison that was Gaza.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Southern Israel that killed 1,300 Israelis, The Atlantic has published 38 articles, podcasts, and Q&As on the assault and Israel’s subsequent retaliatory bombing campaign, which has killed over 4,000 Palestinians and counting. Only one of these pieces was written by a Palestinian, whom the story is, at least in theory, 50% about.

The writers The Atlantic has featured in the past two weeks are mostly Americans—there were also several Israeli and a few Lebanese and Lebanese-Americans, but only one Palestinian writer, Ghaith al-Omari, who is a senior fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institiute for Near East Policy, which was founded by the pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The article, “How the Palestinian Authority Failed Its People,” is a fairly dry and academic breakdown of the positions of the Palestinian Authority on the current crisis. Beyond this one token entry, The Atlantic has not published any Palestinian writers.

That erasure is not an accident; it is consistent with The Atlantic’s almost-uniform pro-Israel bent and its long history of excluding Palestinian voices in discussions of Palestine. Even a cursory survey of their coverage throughout the years shows that the writers whose perspectives on the conflict have been published at The Atlantic have been overwhelmingly American and Israeli in nationality and perspective.

The Real News reached out to The Atlantic several times to see if they could point us to the last time a Palestinian writer other than al-Omari wrote for The Atlantic about Palestine but did not receive a response to our request for comment.

In 2018, The Atlantic ran a much-publicized series about a “Muslim Among Israeli Settlers” in which the hook was having “a Muslim” visit the West Bank Jewish settlements—a hook that, one assumes, was supposed to have some clever fish-out-of-water appeal. Ostensibly, the objective was to provide readers with a better, more textured understanding of the conflict; to carry out this objective, The Atlantic spent considerable resources sending Pakistani-American Wajahat Ali to go chat with settlers removing Palestinians from their homes. The piece was criticized for displaying a map that removed Palestinian East Jerusalem entirely, whitewashing the reality of settler violence, and, by virtue of using interchangeable “Muslims,” for contributing to the perspective that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is primarily a sectarian or religious conflict, rather than one of apartheid and subjugation or, at the very least, dueling nationalisms.

This kind of patronizing, view-from-the-outside-looking-in storytelling pervades The Atlantic’s coverage of the issue of Palestinian oppression and Palestinian liberation. Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen articles such as: “A Devastating Attack by Hamas,” by former Department of Homeland Security and Lebanese-American Juliette Kayyem; “Four Misconceptions About the War in Gaza,” by former American Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Andrew Exum; “A Message From Iran,” from the Lebanon-born Kim Ghattus; and a half dozen pieces from Israeli and Israeli-American authors.

Eliot Cohen, former Bush official and signatory of the Project for the New American Century (the think tank most widely credited with shaping US policy regarding the Iraq War) wrote his own orientalist screed after the Oct. 7 attack. In his article “Against Barbarism,” Cohen tells The Atlantic’s sophisticated liberal readers that Americans have spent the last two decades fighting “barbarians in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.” And he matter-of-factly states that Israel’s fight against the Palestinian people is a fight against “barbarism.”

The article continues: “Barbarians fight because they enjoy violence. They do not only kill and maim—the armies of civilized states do that all the time—but go out of their way to inflict pain, to torture, to rape, and above all to humiliate. They exult in their enemies’ suffering. That is why they like taking pictures of their weeping, terrified victims; why they make videos of slow beheadings; and why they dance around mutilated corpses.”

To The Atlantic’s editors, such nuanced analysis from a discredited architect of the Iraq War is apparently more valuable than anything any Palestinians could offer readers.

The Atlantic is not alone. In a blockbuster report published last Friday, Semafor’s Max Tani documented how MSNBC was sidelining three Muslim anchors they felt were too pro-Palestine. Jewish Currents’ Mari Cohen detailed Wednesday how CBS producers took down an interview from its online archives with Palestinian-American legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat because she didn’t play the one-noted role of grieving victim and, instead, pushed back on the interviewer’s loaded questions. “They wanted me to be up there to lament our dead,” Erakat told Jewish Currents, “but not to establish international responsibility for [their deaths].”

Cohen’s reporting also brought to light that Palestinian-American writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer and Palestinian-American political analyst Omar Baddar were booked on CNN, given pre-interviews, and then, without explanation, were asked not to come on. As Cohen pointed out, this is part of a general trend, citing historian Maha Nassar, who, in a 2020 investigation for +972 magazine, documented how, since 1979, only 46 of 2,490 (1.8%) New York Times op-eds discussing Palestine were authored by Palestinians.

Further revealing the mechanisms of sidelining Palestinian voices, The Intercept broke a story Thursday showing that “leadership at Upday, a subsidiary of the Germany-based publishing giant Axel Springer, gave instructions to prioritize the Israeli perspective and minimize Palestinian civilian deaths in coverage, according to the employees.” Axel Springer, somewhat infamously, announced in 2021 that it would require all of its media employees to sign, upon hire, a loyalty pledge to NATO, capitalism, and Israel.

Palestinian and Jewish American attorney Dylan Saba wrote a piece about Palestinian voices being silenced in media and academia that was supposed to run in The Guardian a couple days ago but, according to Saba, “minutes before it was supposed to be published, the head of the opinion desk wrote me an email that they were unable to run the piece. When I called her for an explanation she had none, and blamed an unnamed higher-up.” It would later run in N+1 and In These Times.

In addition to curating what’s in The Atlantic magazine, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg oversees the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival, an annual gathering where a who’s who of policy makers, corporate advertisers, government officials, and think tank hangers-on shape political and ideological consensus. Panels focusing on the Israel-Palestinian conflict in recent years—namely, one in 2018 and two in 2023—did not feature a single Palestinian. All the panelists were Americans and Israelis.

Goldberg’s own career took off, most notably in the run-up to the Iraq War, a period in which Goldberg proved to be instrumental in laundering mis- and dis-information for the war effort. In addition to his extremely dubious claim in October 2002 that Iran-backed Hezbollah had sleeper cells within the United States ready to attack at any time (“Are terrorists in Lebanon preparing for a larger war?” the subheadline asks. Turns out, no.), Goldberg also legitimized the idea in the minds of American liberals that Saddam Hussein not only had an active Weapons of Mass Destruction program, but that he also had “ties” to al Qaeda and played a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Jeffrey Goldberg Discusses Possible Links Between Iraq and al Qaeda and Evidence That the Iraqis May be Trying to Evade Weapons Inspectors” read one February 2003 All Things Considered headline, published three weeks before the invasion.

All of these claims would, of course, turn out to be false. All of these major blockbuster reports were based on lies, disinformation, misinformation, or, at best, extremely sloppy journalism. Nevertheless, because such claims supported the already-existing aims of the US security state, they would all eventually disappear down the national memory hole, and Goldberg would soon join The Atlantic as a star reporter, going on to interview presidents, write long think pieces, and continue to run trial balloons for potential Israeli airstrikes on Iran that never came to fruition, eventually being named editor-in-chief in 2016 where he, in the deepest of deep ironies, became a self-appointed expert on “conspiracy theories” (naturally, he ignored his own history of peddling discredited conspiracy theories).

All of this paves the way to the latest iteration of The Atlantic’s coverage of the so-called Israel-Palestinian conflict. Readers of The Atlantic are fed a steady stream of standard pro-Israel talking points and framing devices that involve putting Palestinians in a specimen jar and examining them solely through an “anti-terror” framework that set up discussions about, rather than by, those most affected by the ongoing apartheid and siege imposed by Israel. The result is more of the same rote conversations and dehumanizing, dead-end War on Terror framing, while the dead in Gaza continue to pile up.

Listening to Americans, Israelis, and others is, of course, perfectly fine. But maybe, as the ongoing siege and potential ethnic cleansing of Palestinians escalates more and more by the day, the country’s most influential center-left publication could maybe bother publishing more than one token Palestinian.

Every few years, the public is force fed another manufactured attempt to rebrand the GOP as a party that is “no longer in lockstep with corporate America” and is “newly focused on winning over more of the working class.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) triumphantly announced in Nov. 2020 that Republicans “are a working class party now. That’s the future.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has repeatedly heralded the Republican party as the most likely space for a “working class multiethnic party” to converge. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has been auctioning off this talking point to any credulous or complicit media platform that will give him airtime. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said in 2021 that “the most significant political change of the last decade has been that the heart and soul of the Republican Party—we are a working-class party now. We are a blue-collar party.”

But it’s easy to claim this mantle when the stakes are low and rhetoric is the only currency. It’s when there are actual points of significant class conflict—when history forces one to pick a side, when the chance comes to actually fight for workers, not just say you’ll fight for them—that this self-styled pro-worker branding is put to the test. And after last week’s United Auto Workers (UAW) strike began in earnest—marking the first time in history the union has struck all of the Big Three automakers at once—it’s clearer than ever that this branding is, at best, entirely hollow and, at worst, deeply calculated.

First off: Let’s discuss the working-class warriors who have been suspiciously silent. Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Ted Cruz haven’t mentioned the strike at all.

But what about the Republicans who have issued statements on the strike? All of them “support” it as an abstract thing in their head, yet they are throwing their backing behind a version of the strike that doesn’t exist. And they offer no support for the actual demands of the strikers or the duly elected representatives of the UAW membership. 

The talking point every single Republican has been handed, and all who have spoken on the strike have echoed, centers around a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy that pits organized labor against climate activists and reflects entirely partisan, pro-fossil-fuel grievances that in no way represent the demands of autoworkers. 

Let’s start with Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio took five days since the strike began last Friday to finally release a statement. In those five days, though, he apparently had time to introduce a bill that would cut off “’radical gender ideology in healthcare systems,” demand military bases allow screenings of the popular QAnon-adjacent film Sound of Freedom, and pen an op-ed in The Miami Herald on Sept. 14, when the UAW’s contracts with the Big Three expired, about how “American men are falling behind.” That piece laments the decline in good-paying jobs, but somehow manages not to mention the UAW strike, the word “strike,” or even “union” once. How this disillusioned American Man is supposed to achieve economic gains beyond a tax credit and “borrowing” from his own social security fund (a discredited hare-brained right-wing stalking horse) isn’t explained. Rubio’s “working-class” politics don’t have any actual class politics in them, because he is (poorly) trying to fashion a class politics that avoids real class conflict, hence his attempt to indict selected “elites” without indicting the ruling class to which they belong, hence his attempt to subsume the systematic attack on the working class under some ill-defined attack on masculinity and “strong families and cultural values.” He hardly acknowledges class at all. Far from embodying a new political direction for the GOP, Rubio’s schtick is just another example of Republicans finding new ways to launder whatever Heritage Foundation policy points Corporate America approves through political pandering that, if you squint hard enough, vaguely gestures to the material needs of working people before swiftly diverting focus away from the true sources of their material immiseration.

When Rubio finally did say something this morning, it was, like all the other GOP statements, focused mainly on non sequitur complaints about green energy and manufacturing mandates. Beyond simply ignoring the strike, like many of his colleagues, Rubio actually went further and  condemned the union. True Friend of the Worker that he is, Rubio went out of his way to admonish the primary instrument of power auto workers have at the most critical juncture of their struggle: 

Rubio has claimed for the past three years that Republicans need to “jump start” labor by opposing the actual unions that represent laborers and replace them with company-approved unions. This is a favorite line of the faux-populist GOP set, because it allows them to rhetorically back workers while still being fervently anti-union, which is a requirement of the party and its attendant, ruling-class-serving ideology. Rubio loves to condemn “union bosses” because he’s hoping the average person still lives in 1975 and thinks Jimmy Hoffa is in charge. UAW president Shawn Fain was recently elected to lead the union as part of a reform slate after the UAW held its first truly democratic elections, and the strike itself was voted on directly by the workers last August with 97 percent support. The “union bosses” here were elected by the membership (and the fact that union leaders, unlike bosses, can be voted out by the rank and file is one of many reasons why the term “union boss” makes no sense) and their mandate to strike is virtually uniform. Rubio can’t acknowledge this, though, because it immediately undercuts whatever self-serving point he’s trying to make, so he has to support a group of workers and a slate of worker demands that simply don’t exist in our dimension of time-space.

One need only look at the slimiest of the all of these GOP “populists,” and the one most committed to the bit—Josh Hawley—to see why these ostensibly pro-worker talking points are nothing but vapid partisan pot shots with little to no bearing on the demands of actual workers:

Note how Hawley references “auto workers” here while omitting any mention whatsoever of the union to which they belong. This is deliberate: Hawley doesn’t actually support unions (ie, the tangible, worker-composed organizations that exist in reality right now, fighting for material improvements for the very workers Hawley claims to sympathize with); he only supports an idealized, hardhat-wearing archetype that exists as a branding reference. Hawley continues with vague demands for a “raise,” and “better hours,” but no specific numbers are mentioned. No mention of the 36 percent hike the union is demanding, which would be commensurate with the raises Big Three executives have given themselves since the last contracts were negotiated—a demand that accounts for skyrocketing auto industry profits, inflation and the rising cost of living, and the cuts and concessions the union suffered to keep the industry afloat during the Great Recession. The Big Three have all technically offered “raises” that are still well below the UAW’s demands, and those meager wage increases would seemingly satisfy Hawley’s squishy line about workers deserving a raise. Hawley’s keeping everything deliberately vague because he doesn’t want to upset the automakers that donate to his Super PAC. And he, after all, has a schtick to maintain. 

Hawley’s “support” for auto workers then quickly veers into total non sequitur, focusing mainly on “climate mandates.” One is welcome to check UAW press releases, public statements, interviews, and other public-facing material: Nowhere does the union or any of its representatives say anything about them having any issues with climate mandates. What they’ve said, and what they’ve said for years, is that any transition to EVs and green tech must be a “just transition” that doesn’t leave American workers behind. As Sarah Lazare detailed in a recent piece debunking this narrative that is becoming increasingly popular on both the right and center-left, there is no tension between good, higher-paying jobs and saving the Earth. “Our tax dollars are financing a massive portion of this transition to E.V. We believe in a green economy,” UAW president Shawn Fain told Face the Nation on September 17. “We have to have clean water. We have to have clean air. Anyone that doesn’t believe global warming is happening… isn’t paying attention.”

Read Kate Aronoff’s excellent takedown of another faux-populist, Sen. JD Vance (OH-R), which exposes why his talking points, a carbon copy of Hawley’s, are just grafted-on, partisan point-scoring claptrap. 

So what the hell are Hawley, Vance, and all the Republicans homing in on “radical climate demands” talking about? Credulous pundits and Beltway rags like Politico take these “Republican concerns” at face value without once mentioning this supposed conflict between labor and environmental requirements attached to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), as Lazare lays out in detail, is a talking point being fed to our media by the CEOs themselves. The Hawleys of the world are repeating a company line crafted to undermine support for the union and presenting it as a pro-worker position. It’s not. The central demands of the union—significant raises, shorter workweeks, an end to the tier system—are ignored by Hawley in favor of a list of petty partisan grievances that are in no way reflective of what workers are demanding, in reality.  

This isn’t to say that Democrats’ responses to the UAW strike have been ideal. One public statement of “support” by Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Virginia is genuinely amusing in its equivocation and feigned solidarity:

And who knows if the White House’s own nominal support will amount to anything ground-shifting in the coming weeks. The UAW, for its part, has pointedly stated that it will not automatically endorse Joe Biden’s re-election run to maintain its leverage, leading to an on-air meltdown by MSNBC Morning Joe anchors interviewing Fain the week prior to the strike: 

The one thin example Hawley, Rubio, and Cruz like to point to as proof of their working-class bona fides was their vote opposing the Biden administration and Democratic leadership in Congress shutting down rail workers’ right to strike last fall. But their votes came after the passage in the Senate was already a fait accompli—again, it’s easy to vocalize support for workers when the stakes are low, and this oppositional vote was a totally inconsequential and preformative act largely designed to be used as a PR bludgeon later. But Biden and Pelosi’s anti-union, anti-democratic intervention in the rail dispute last year opened the door for Republicans in the Senate to outflank them and rack up a rare, seemingly substantive win for their Republicans-are-the-party-of-the-working-class rebrand. This is what makes the silence—or the bizarre focus on partisan, anti-climate non sequiturs—of Cotton, Hawley, Rubio, and Cruz so illustrative: When the rubber hits the road, when there is a moment of actual class tension and these “populist” senators must choose between the needs of their corporate funders or the working man they allegedly care about, they are either silent or lend support in ways that are superficial and irrelevant. Our media should be pointing this out, making this obvious fact clear, not running another dopey process piece about how the UAW strike is an “opportunity” for Republicans to make gains in the labor movement. Republican support for labor is nonexistent or entirely aesthetic. Reporters should center this fact rather than produce another update on the stale “Republicans are shifting their focus to winning the working class over” trend piece genre that simply, for some reason, just won’t die. 

Whenever there are workers in America standing up for themselves and going on strike against their employer, there is, inevitably, someone in the media hand-wringing about the harmful impact workers standing up for themselves will have on The Economy. But a recent piece by Sarah Lazare, co-published by Workday Magazine and The American Prospect, exposed a glaring conflict of interest for American media’s favorite go-to source when centering the “economic losses” of potential strikes. Here are just some examples of major headlines based on “studies” of how certain impending or potential strikes could harm “the economy”:

All of these stories have one thing in common: each revolves around a “study” providing the ostensibly neutral analysis, and in each case the “study” was done by Anderson Economic Group, a consultancy firm that counts among its clients a veritable murderers’ row of corporate America, including companies central to industries that would be impacted by the very strikes AEG is supposedly quantifying the “economic impact” of. 

One recent AEG study, widely cited in the press, found that an auto workers strike could cost “$5 billion in just 10 days.” What none of the media outlets that cited the study disclose, Lazare notes, is that Ford and General Motors—two of the Big Three auto companies involved in negotiations with 150,000 United Auto Workers on a new contract—are listed as business clients of Anderson Economic Group.

Isn’t this conflict of interest relevant? Shouldn’t that information be disclosed about the supposedly authoritative source throwing out these Big Scary Numbers about how much the public will be harmed by strikes? Apparently these outlets don’t think so. 

Within the world of pro-labor media, a popular retort to scary headlines about strikes and their devastating impact on “the economy” is, “Well, of course, that’s the point of strikes.” This is true to an extent—the point of a strike, by definition, is to cause economic damage to an employer until they come to the bargaining table. But it’s worth considering that not challenging these vague, blanket, corporate-manufactured scaremongering talking points about how much “the economy” is going to be “crippled” is bad for labor messaging, especially when conveying the stakes of a massive strike. After all, there’s a reason why corporate America is laundering this fearmongering through consultancy firms like Anderson Economic Group and uncritical media outlets, and it’s not because they want to let the public know how Badass and Cool striking workers are. They are doing it to erode public support for labor disruption and, more precisely, to put pressure on Washington to intervene on the side of Capital in the event of a prolonged strike. 

Rather than focusing on what is “lost” or how much “the economy” (see: you and your friends) will be “harmed” by a strike, it’s more useful to lobby our media to do two things: 

(1) Stop putting the onus solely on the striking workers, or at least focus as much attention on the stubbornness of management, who are equally, if not more, responsible for a strike occuring and the “economic losses” that result. Why is the strike always presented as the first mover in the timeline of “economic disruption”? As if workers alone are the ones responsible for disrupting an otherwise-doing-fine economy, as if companies themselves do not force workers to the picket line with their own rampant “disruptions,” from years of foot dragging and bad-faith bargaining to spying, retaliation, labor violations, and destructive business practices that hurt everyone in the economy but the owning and shareholding class.

(2) Even if one grants that certain harms could potentially result from a labor action, frame them as short-term, and focus on what is gained by labor action. Historically, strikes have ushered in tremendous gains for both the workers on strike and the working class more broadly, but observing contemporary strikes through such a lens is something our media are loath to do. Most wouldn’t even know where to start, if indeed they were committed to asking the same questions of corporations that they ask of workers and unions. 

How does one quantify the benefits of a strike, for instance? Well, not surprisingly, there isn’t a legion of well-funded “economic groups” mysteriously at the ready to offer these figures to America’s reporters. (At best, outlets will account for workers’ contract wins, but what those wins mean for their daily lives and for “the economy” is seldom explored with the same fervor as the “economic damage” a strike will do.) Such benefits are more difficult to come by, because propaganda that suits the interests of striking workers is, by definition, far less funded than that which speaks, in Business Press-ese, about class-flattening “economic impacts.” 

But one can try anyway. One recent example, based on just the threat of a strike, saw major “economic impact” for workers. UPS teamsters recently extracted an end to a second-tier, full-time position known as “22.4,” and a provision that bans UPS for mandating package drivers to come in on their scheduled days off. Existing full- and part-time UPS workers will get a bump of $2.75 an hour this year, and $7.50 over the duration of the contract (though part-time wages still lag behind full-time wages.) And 15,000 part-time jobs will be converted into 7,500 new full-time ones. According to the union’s general president, Sean M. O’Brien, “UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations.”

Granting that this figure is correct—or at least partly correct—one is compelled to ask: Where were the headlines leading up to the UPS strike that read, “UPS Strike Could Lead to $30 Billion in Gains for UPS Workers”? Where was the headline saying, “Threat of Strike Could Lead to Billions More in the Hands of the Working Class”? No such headlines were published because this type of “economic analysis” is seen as taking sides, whereas generic claims about strikes “harming the economy” are seen as neutral and objective. 

And this is a central problem: Well-funded corporations have time on their side. Their strategy—as evidenced by recent comments from Hollywood studios about “starving” creative workers—is to wait workers out and try to win the propaganda war. In the case of auto workers, ostensibly neutral metrics like “costing the economy $5 billion every 10 days” works to bosses’ advantage. They assume the public will grow tired, blame the workers, and politicians in Washington will do the same. It’s a classic example of Howard Zinn’s adage that one cannot be neutral on a moving train. By tossing out Big Scary Numbers about how much striking workers will harm The Everyman, our media is doing the heavy lifting for executives who have the advantage of inertia and incumbency. 

What’s the “economic impact” on working families when a strike leads to massive concessions from capital? How do these actions benefit workers as well as the working class more broadly? Are well-resourced reporters at CNN, Vox, and CNBC asking those questions? Are they seeking out those studies, asking their team of researchers to crack those numbers? And if not, why not? 

Where are the “economic groups” ready with numbers about the health outcomes of better healthcare or any healthcare at all? Dental care for the workers and their children? What is the “economic impact” of greater dignity, safer working conditions, less sexual harassment? Where is the study quantifying the mental health benefits of better job security, higher wages, and more paid time off so a worker can see their son’s school play, or attend their mother’s funeral? Why is the only metric we ever hear about couched in these abstract, Big Scary Numbers about “economic losses” of strikes, but none of our media giants like CNN or NBC can take the time and money to figure out how strikes can benefit workers?

As auto workers gear up for a major showdown with the Big Three automakers, where contracts are expiring on Sept. 14, media outlets should stop regurgitating the same tired Anderson-Economic-Group-generated Big Scary Number of Economic Losses and try to frame the conflict as something with upside for those at the lower rungs of society. What is the “economic impact” of the strike on the striking workers? How did the $30 billion extracted in the last major labor conflict with UPS possibly translate into gains for auto workers? How does increasing working standards and wages for auto workers help workers in other industries? These are far more interesting, original, and relevant questions than simply tossing out more mystery numbers commissioned by Corporate America about how much workers standing up for themselves will “crippled the economy” for a confused and half-paying-attention media consumer. 

Every few months—sometimes for sinister and ideological reasons, sometimes for just plain ahistorical and dimwitted reasons—a pundit comes along who thinks they’ve cracked the DaVinci code of class politics. “What if,” they ask us (as if the question has not been asked countless times before), “left and right unite to take on the elites”? The phrasing of the question can vary, but it’s invariably some version of the same claptrap. This take has a particular superficial appeal: What if the right and left could set aside their seemingly insurmountable differences and unite to take on these mysterious “elites,” or “those in power”? What if, indeed! On its face, the proposal sounds like something everyone can get behind, and it’s effective RT-bait:

This line is used primarily, though not exclusively, by two groups: (1) milquetoast corporate liberals and centrists embodied by Third Way and other Wall Street-funded front groups attempting to push the Democratic party even farther toward the center than it already is; and (2) right-wing “populists” of varying tendencies (third positionists, producerists, outright fascists). I’ve detailed the problems with Group 1 elsewhere, but I’d like to take some time to discuss this trope’s popularity with Group 2 and why those on the left—or anyone genuinely concerned with the plight of the working class and racial justice, however they define themselves—should be wary of this second group.

From the start, and above all else, what’s important to know is that this trope, and the myriad ways of phrasing it, almost always means nothing. Saying “It’s not about right or left, it’s about power,” or some other variation, will always be a popular, smarmy applause line because such lines possess the mother’s milk of good ad copy: what hack writers call the “generically specific.” They seem specific enough to be meaningful, but are generic enough that listeners can project their own meaning onto the slogan. What is “left” and “right” in this scenario? What does “power” mean here? Who or what is “elite,” and what criteria distinguish them from the “non-elite”? Who knows? Just nod, turn off your brain, and accept whatever fascist or pro-corporate bullshit the speaker is about to jam down your throat.

Take a recent, deeply cynical version of this formulation spouted by one-note “anti-monopoly” producerist Matt Stoller. His Politico article arguing that the right and left can “work together” to “break up our big and slothful monopolies” is an object lesson in how those pushing reactionary politics can use ostensibly “populist” or vaguely left-wing argumentation to smuggle their agendas into mainstream consciousness. For the past few months, Hollywood writers, later joined by actors, have been on strike against the major TV and film studios, demanding better pay and staffing requirements, increased residuals, more control over how studios can use “artificial intelligence,” and less precarity overall. Stoller, for some bizarre reason, sees this as an opening for these writers and actors to partner with the likes of virulently anti-union Florida governor and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis to get one over on a single studio for which they share a superficially similar hatred. 

His lead to the story sounds grand and noble: “There’s a new generation on the right and they think very differently about corporate power. When that right and the left come together, we will break up our big and slothful monopolies like Disney. DeSantis isn’t there yet, but it’s coming.” 

Is it, though? 

The piece suffers from—or, depending on how you look at it, thrives because of—that same aforementioned deliberate vagueness. “The GOP presidential candidate [DeSantis] and the striking Hollywood creatives may not agree on much,” Stoller writes, “but both are aggrieved by Disney’s raw use of power, and perhaps the broader dynamic of corporate monopolies in general.” 

What? Is that really what’s happening here? To say both camps “are aggrieved by Disney’s raw use of power” may not be technically incorrect, but it’s a testament to how vague and squishy one must make one’s prognosis for it to apply to each side. Moreover, this is neither the left nor the right’s explicit reason for criticizing Disney; it’s Stoller’s. He goes on:

The rise of imperial Disney and its vast bargaining leverage has led to considerable fallout. One consequence is simply that Disney, like all giant streaming firms, has reduced its payout to writers, producers, directors, actors, movie theaters and suppliers. The strike consuming Hollywood is a reaction to this dynamic. Another is that the company has raised ticket prices at its theme parks for consumers and eliminated perks that longstanding Disney fans appreciated. A third is that the firm’s creative energy is dissipating, with an endless surfeit of Marvel movies. And fourth, it wields its cultural power in clumsy ways that angered and annoyed large swaths of the public, first by holding its fire on Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law and then by firmly opposing it.

All of these problems are happening now, because Disney, like other firms that have generated bipartisan backlash, such as Google and Facebook, is less a set of businesses trying to sell products than a giant financial institution organized around acquiring and maintaining market power. In other words, the fury directed at the House of Mouse isn’t about Disney, per se; it’s about the end of antitrust enforcement and regulations designed to keep markets open, a shift that’s happened across industries.

Stoller’s matter-of-fact synthesizing of these issues in the second paragraph belie how unconvincing the throughline he draws to connect them is. The left’s criticism of Disney isn’t, as Stoller suggests later, that they pump out cultural schlock (though some may be annoyed about having 19 Wasp and Antman movies, it’s not exactly an urgent priority of leftist politics at the moment). The left’s criticism of Disney is the same as it is for every corporation: that they don’t pay nearly enough in taxes, that they use their money and influence to lobby for pro-corporate policies that benefit them at our collective expense, and that they have too much political power. Leftists have no uniquely vested interest in despising Disney anymore than they would Comcast, Apple, AT&T, Netflix, Amazon, and other large media companies that push for horrible “trade deals,” abuse their workers, and are currently attempting to “starve” writers and actors on strike.

The right’s criticism, of course, has nothing to do with any of this. Aside from vague gestures about Disney being “too powerful,” the critique levied by demagogues like DeSantis’ is not that large corporations are deleterious per se, it’s that the ones who produce content seen as too feminist or gay or pro-trans need to be singled out and punished for doing so—for simply being “woke.” If Disney was focused on pumping out cultural products that aligned more closely with DeSantis’s reactionary weltanschauung, he, of course, would be significantly less concerned with Disney’s “raw use of power.” 

What if DeSantis wanted to go after Wall Street banks that had what he viewed as too many Jewish executives—would this be another Stollerian opportunity for him to “join forces” with Wall Street critics like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and draw up a list of investment firms to break up that each side criticized for overlapping but totally different reasons? Singling out companies that right-wingers see as too pro-Black or pro-gay and then seeing if any of those same companies have also been criticized by Public Citizen or the Roosevelt Institute is not a mode of serious politics; it’s a way to boost the faux-populist credentials of racists and exterminationists. It serves no other functional purpose.

So what’s Stoller’s play here? His play, like the many purveyors of this hollow left-and-right-must-unite-against-the-“elites” mantra mentioned above, is to use the shallow pseudo-politics of “anti-monopolism”or “anti-elitism” to sell right-wingers like DeSantis, Josh Hawley, and other post-Trump right-wing “populists” to low-information, half-paying-attention progressives and independents who are seduced by the supposed ideological overlap. But political coalitions cannot be built on hate and discrimination, the right and left necessarily have different political goals, and the fact that they happen to dislike the same entity, person, or corporation is not evidence that they can band together like an Odd Couple Buddy Comedy. The reasons for this dislike actually matter a lot, because the reasons for dislike pave the road for what the policy solutions should be. The policy proposal Stoller offers in his piece, for example, is to simply “break up” Disney. But the left doesn’t want to just break up one corporation—because their content is too inclusive and queer—while leaving the rest untouched. What good would this do other than incentivize that corporation’s remaining competitors to produce more overtly racist and homophobic content?

The point is not to be precious about this or maintain some type of pure left ideological hygiene; the point is that, very often, when debates emerge about the potential for these supposed cross-ideological alliances, the terms of debate are deliberately muddied, and the end goal is to push the left further to the right, not the other way around. Words matter here, and those who promote this facile “right-left alliance” schlock are counting on the reader or listener not really paying much attention.

There are instances where a “right and left alliance” makes sense in a targeted and concrete context; such alliances are inherent to the political fabric and inner workings of an entity like the US Senate. Mike Lee and Rand Paul co-sponsoring a bill with Bernie Sanders to end the war in Yemen, for example, is a perfectly fine “cross-ideological” partnership, because the purpose of that partnership is the passing of a specific law with a specific scope. This is inherent to all lawmaking in a nominally democratically representative society: bringing people from across the political spectrum—left, center, right, liberal, libertarian—into the process of sponsoring bills or building voting coalitions is a functional necessity for a complex society in which the system of governance ostensibly relies on balancing the collected interests of that society’s respective constituencies. But voting blocs are not political coalitions, and supporting bills without throwing any vulnerable communities under the bus is a perfectly fine use of legislative power.

But what the Stollers and Greenwalds and Taibbis of the world are proposing isn’t this. It’s something much more cynical and calculated. It’s about softening up liberals, leftists, and independents to boilerplate Republicans like DeSantis in the hopes that their “anti-elite” bonafides will somehow translate to “anti-elite” policies, even though their campaigns are funded by the same billionaires and corporations (i.e. elites) as every other Republican. That they pay lip service to “populist” agendas, or target the occasional corporation for being too “woke,” is a far-right co-option tactic as old as the right itself. It’s not sincere, and this insincerity matters in the long term, despite all the hype over this supposed “new” new right we are sold every four years.

The next time a suspender-snapping pundit insists the “right and left” need to “unite” to take on “corruption” or “monopoly” or some other vague Bad Guy, ask specifics about how the right in question define “elite,” “power,” or “corruption.” You may very well get a rambling, unlettered mix of Hunter Biden’s laptop, welfare fraud, trans agenda, and Chinese COVID “globalist” cover-ups. What coalition can be built around this list of enemies isn’t clear, but whatever the end result will be, it won’t look progressive or populist in any meaningful sense.