Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to end his troubled independent presidential campaign this week, according to three people briefed on his plans, and is in talks to throw his support behind former President Donald J. Trump.
Three of the people briefed on Mr. Kennedy’s plans emphasized that nothing was final, and that the iconoclastic Mr. Kennedy could still change his mind, but said that plans were in the works for him to appear alongside Mr. Trump on Friday. Some people close to Mr. Kennedy were still arguing against an endorsement, according to two of the people.
Biden dropping out of the race changed my personal calculations. Not being a straight-ticket voter, between Trump, Biden, and RFK, my choice was RFK. Trump is deranged, Biden is unfit for four more years, and RFK was the only candidate talking about the role of corporate profit in our politics.
But given his position on corporate control of our politics, that he’s even considering a Trump endorsement at this stage is unconscionable.
And while I’m still a bit unsure about Kamala, I’m way more comfortable with her than I am Trump or RFK. Hell, I don’t have to preface every comment about her with “I don’t agree with everything she says, but…”
But that’s more of a commentary on public sentiment than anything else, and I’ve long been wary of public sentiment.
I’ll work out my thoughts on Kamala another time, though it’s clear that my problems with Kamala aren’t with her at all, but with the Democratic Party. If they hadn’t spent the Trump era reacting to Trump by swinging out wide to appeal to the Nonsense Left (of which, don’t forget, I was a member!), desperate to make Kamala’s centrist, moderate record as a prosecutor seem like a negative, I wouldn’t feel so much whiplash around her nomination.
This is why I’m so uneasy about the Democrats: there’s a profound lack of reckoning with their own decisions. For years, I’ve heard how Hillary wasn’t elected because Americans hate women, but almost nothing about how she A) insulted half the electorate, B) refused to travel to certain key swing states, C) carried a profound sense of entitlement that her time had come, and D) was the obvious corporate candidate. (Though Trump turned out to be one, too, as they almost all do.) Rather than reckon with some of their own irrational decisions on covid, George Floyd, even Trump himself, most Democrats exclaim how stupid, hateful, and ignorant Trump voters must be to present any criticism of the Left at all.
Believe me, that’s a very tempting, addictive narrative. But it’s too easy. There’s zero introspection involved, and that is always dangerous.
The panic of the Trump era gripped us all — Right, Left, and everyone else — in different ways, but the Democratic Party suffered acutely. Any criticism of the party line and suddenly you were tantamount to a fascist.
And while I believe that the Left’s heart is in the right place, we cannot abandon logic and reason when we get scared. As a country, we’ve made this mistake too many times — Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind.
It’s the reticence of the Democrats to grapple with their own fear that I find unsettling. That fear motivated them to insist that Joe Biden was fit for another term.
“He’s wearing clothes!” they’d shout of their emperor, furious if you said otherwise.
That same fear has motivated them to turn on a dime to Kamala. Her narrative changed from ‘ineffectual’ to ‘savior’ overnight.
Let’s be honest: she’s neither of these things. But the way the Democrats have treated her in the last month has me deeply unsettled by the sentiments and excitations of the party.
The Republicans have scared me for a while now, but the Democrats, in their inability to introspect, are dutifully following along behind.
Strangely, his story is remarkably similar to not one but two stories I know of personally from my time living in Montana. A guy, or should I say a dude, finds a dead bear on the side of the road, moves it to another more populated place, thinks it's funny.
But it's stupid. Is it disqualifying stupidity? No. But is it a stupidity that's remarkably common among men, particulary (though obviously not exclusively) out West, of a certain class? Go to any bar in Big Sky or Jackson or Bozeman and you'll discover that this shit is obnoxiously common.
RFK has certainly become weird enough in the minds of most people that he’ll never be elected. What bothers me is the entitlement he’s displaying here. Sure, it might pale in comparison to Hunter Biden on the board of a Ukranian energy corporation or Trump’s, well, entire life, but c’mon. Rich people doing rich people shit isn’t charming.
This election will have real consequences, but reality is in danger of being squeezed off the agenda in favor of a heightened performance piece that calls itself the election but is actually a multimedia event, cut up and memed across social platforms, re-edited, rolled in conspiracy theory and baked under oodles of manipulated footage, ready to pop up on your last remaining sane aunt’s media feed.
Biden’s cabinet is carefully mixed, for better or worse, with progressive and conservative-leaning Democrats — a balance that reflects the President’s preferences as a leader. But Harris is less of a known quality. Faced with this reality, we can only look to her inner circle. There, with its deep ties to Silicon Valley and the business wing of the Democratic Party, the real vision of Harris 2024 starts to emerge.
The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.
These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce. We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.
In 2019, Ms. Harris was competing on progressive bona fides with the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She was running at a time when progressive voters were uniquely focused on criminal-justice reform and suspicious of law enforcement, which was a problem for Ms. Harris, who had built her political career as a prosecutor. Hemmed in by these dynamics, Ms. Harris struggled to define her brand.
She faces a different moment today. Less than four months from the general election, she would be competing not for progressive points but to keep the felon Donald Trump out of office. She would be doing so at a time when many voters are concerned about crime and public safety, and when prosecutors have assumed heroic status in the fight to prosecute Mr. Trump and his cronies.
Based on personal conversations, there are (at least) three prevailing sentiments on the Left:
The first is the “Never Cop” Left, which is adamant that they do not want a former cop in the White House. This is largely the “Defund the Police” crowd, a stance I personally think is deranged to the point of unreason. Policing is a necessary component to our (or any) culture, though reforms to the criminal justice system are absolutely necessary.
The second is a feminist angle. They argue that at this point, any vote against Kamala is simply because she’s a woman, and thus this “entrenched misogyny” will get Trump re-elected. This is a little confounding, though it largely comes from the same folks that argued that the only reason people voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 was because they hated Hillary…because she was a woman. This crowd seems unwilling to confront Hillary’s many flaws — flaws that had nothing to do with her being a woman, but rather her being an establishment figure that represented continued corporate control of the Democratic Party and politics in general. In other words, Clinton was a status quo that many people found intolerable.
The third group is uneasy with the process by which she was anointed as the presumptive nominee. Remember, she won no primaries. There has not been an open contest. And while she’s won enough delegates to secure the nomination (though it won’t be official until the convention), the voters did not have a say. Though I am no longer a member of the Democratic Party, I count myself in this camp.
For the last three-plus years, Kamala has been kept on the sidelines by Biden’s team, never having been given a chance to shine. Quite the opposite: she was tasked with dealing with immigration, and that has largely been a disaster during Biden’s term. She hasn’t been given the opportunity to show off her personality, to show that she’s a competent, intelligent, capable person. When I go back and listen to many of her speeches, she has clearly been told to play to the far Left, and as such her speeches come off sounding, um, let’s say…detached. (A close friend called them “word salad.”) Is this fair? No. Is this messaging and media distorting reality? Sure. But let’s be honest: a candidate is only as electable as people think she/he is. That’s the whole damn game.
As such, Kamala has been hamstrung by the Biden Administration for much of Biden’s term as president. And now, that has come back to bite the Democrats.
Which is why I think this article articulates exactly the right tack. Highlight her record as prosecutor. Highlight her tough-against-crime elements. Yes, I’m aware that crime has fallen across much of the country in the last three years (with some very notable exceptions, often in Democrat-controlled cities). But that’s just not how people feel.
Believe me, no one gets as heated by the differences between perception and reality, but if they are going to defeat Trump, the Democrats have to quit telling voters their feelings are wrong and instead meet them where they are.
That’s politics, baby.
We owe President Biden our gratitude, not just for his service as president, but for the wisdom to recognize ego for what it is. He was right to drop out of the race.
The Democrats still have the spirit of democracy in them yet, and I’m rooting for them. Let’s hope they pick a candidate that inspires us, not one that’s merely a cynical response to Trump.
While I’m heartened by the events of the day, I can’t shake the feeling that the last few weeks have laid bare some problems that run deeper than I had initially thought. I watched good people from my own end of the political spectrum endorse, explicitly or otherwise, the assassination of a presidential candidate. I’ve watched many of those same people cling to a candidate so obviously unelectable and insist that I had lost my mind for saying as much. The Left, my political home, has succumbed to the pressures put upon it by years of Trumpist populism, and they are not better off for it. Trump, and more pointedly the fear of Trump, stole a little of their souls, and that breaks my heart.
I don’t know where we now sit. I hope the Democratic Party can rise to the occasion, and I am holding my breath.
There’s still hope, but only if we on the Left remember that after the election, regardless of who wins, we have work to do. We have to push back on corporations and the money they pump into our elections, swaying the outcome. We must go to places that make us uncomfortable and be with people that challenge us. We’ve got to convince Trump supporters that we care about them, and that we don’t think them all to be ignorant racists. We have to meet people where they are, without judgment — or rather we should be as transparent and honest and humble about our judgments as we are able.
I fear that this country places too much stock in the office of the president, and whoever wins in November, we will largely be placated into another round of political somnambulism. We must resist this.
Stay curious, be kind, and get outside your comfort zone.
If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, Kalmoe and Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.
The result is a climate of what Kalmoe and Mason call “moral disengagement.” It is not violence, but an essential precursor, and it has reshaped the language of political violence in this country — and its targets. Rhetoric that two or three decades ago might have been directed at the federal government is now directed at other partisans, too.
I was surprised by how many people expressed the sentiment "too bad it missed" after the assassination attempt last weekend. People I know to be well-meaning.
But why am I surprised?
In my twenties, I was in a conflict resolution masters program, a program I was inspired to enroll in after I was the victim a physical assault (in which I was beaten because I was gay). In classes, each a deluge of nonviolent rhetoric, I was often the sole advocate for the effectiveness of violence. (I was not an advocate for violence itself, but for the fact that it is indeed effective at making change. To ignore that empirical fact is dangerous, as inconvenient as it might be.)
I don't regret that stance, and I largely still feel the same as I did then. Violence, often perpetrated by the state, is indeed effective, and it might very well be the only way we are able to resolve some of the intractable issues we face.
But the implications of it are terrifying. I'm shocked those aforementioned well-meaning people don't grasp is what would've happened had Trump been killed. This country would be on the brink of a civil war. We're already teetering a little too close to that edge, but Trump's murder would put us right over that cliff.
Violence (and the effectiveness of it) in theory and in study is one thing, but when faced with the reality, it's quite another.
In Wisconsin, Dan McNeil, 71, a Democratic school board member in the farming town of Barron, called the situation “scary.” “You walk into a place in town, and it is, like, ‘Whose side are you on? Are you a liberal Democrat or a Trumper?”
An hour away in St. Croix County, Scott Miller, 42, who said he is a member of the local Republican Party, wondered if it was already too late: “These corporations are putting out millions and trillions in profits, donating unlimited amounts to politicians,” he said. “How can the average person compete?”
“Americans in the middle have been acting like spectators at a train wreck, but we’re all on the same train,” he said. “And if the train goes over a cliff, we’ll all go with it.”
That’s why liberals are so fascinated and horrified by Trump: to avoid the class topic. Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.
Slavoj with the clearest distillation of our current politic.
The Left’s obsession with Trump — something I’ve only recently recognized as such — is a strange phenomenon. I should first say (because I feel obligated to do so, lest I be cast out of polite society) that Trump is a grave threat to democracy. I’m in no way diminishing that opinion.
But the Left does indeed fetishize him. I’m guilty of this as well. During his first term, I was a ball of nerves much of the time. I hated Trump, and that hate began to spill over onto his supporters. I excised Trumpers from my life and felt no shame in doing so.
At least not for a while. In the first year of Biden’s presidency, something in me changed. Perhaps it was living in a small, rural, conservative town that helped me to realize most Trump supporters are not monsters. They’re not fascists, nor do they hate me or people like me. Many people support Trump for purely economic reasons, regardless if I think those reasons are sound. (Do I think many of those people are ignorant of the implications of his re-election on democracy? Yes, but you can't hate someone for their ignorance. Or so I'm told.)
But I have so many friends that hate Trump, yet refuse to reckon with why he's so popular. They insist that his supporters must be racist, stupid, or Christian Nationalists. And while some are, they're not the majority. The Left has to reckon with the underlying causes of his popularity, and those causes are clear as day from where I sit: class issues. This is all about class.
I'm astonished by how Liberals are so unwilling or unable to acknowledge this. It's been nearly a decade and they keep insisting that if we could just get rid of Trump, things'll get better. There is zero reckoning with their role in neoliberalism or with just how profoundly the Democratic Party is controlled by corporations and their money, just as the Republican Party is.
To add insult to injury, the populist Right is largely correct when they say "coastal elites" are calling the shots, looking down on the common people, etc. Highly educated people, myself part of this crowd, do judge the hell out of conservatives and of rural people. I see this all the time. The Left's hatred of Trump and their treatment of his “basket of deplorables” is proof.
That we feel repulsed by the alternative to our constitutional democracy, having seen it up close, is a very good sign. In this sense, hypocrisy plays an important part in the moral formation of us fallen creatures. Pretending to be a better person than you are is a pretty good way to become a better person than you are. So let’s allow each other the space to do that. Let’s take one another’s embrace of the boundaries of our politics seriously, even if the people you oppose aren’t about to confess all their past sins.
If I had to choose between these two tendencies I would obviously have to choose the blue MAGA over the red. Doing so would protect abortion and environmental regulations and the NLRB, among many other things. It’s not a contest, for me. But of course I’d prefer to choose neither. Blue MAGA is very, very real; the paranoid style has spread like a coronavirus from Republicans to Democrats. Put “The New York Times” into the Twitter search bar on any given day and you’ll find relentless, enraged invective coming from Democratic loyalists who insist that the paper of record is on a mission to reelect Donald Trump. They used to laugh at Republicans when they groused about “skewed polls,” but now they do the exact same thing - any poll that emerges that suggests Biden is losing is a conservative op, run by a firm with a well-known Republican bias.
This, it seems, is where we are: two warring political tribes who share the foundational principle that anything that goes wrong for them is the product of a rigged system. Two angry players, too busy working the refs to concentrate on the game, looking for some higher authority to declare that the other side broke the rules. This isn’t fair. They’re breaking the rules. I’m telling the teacher. They’re denying us what we’re owed. Today the parties are united only in their belief that, on a neutral field and playing a clean game, they cannot lose. If a single voter endorses the opposition, their opponents must be cheating. How could it be otherwise? Surely only conspiracy could defeat us. Surely only The Man could pull the wool over the eyes of millions. This was much more of a Republican thing, and I know that people hate any argument that sounds like “both sides.” But both sides, in fact, are now operating this way. The notion that Democrats cannot fail in a clean election, cannot stumble but through illegitimate outside force, is now fully enculturated into the party. They hate Trump so much they’ve adopted his signature contribution to American politics. And I don’t know how you get out of this without violence, at this point. I really don’t.
The speed with which the paranoid insanity — the same that took hold on the Right a generation or two ago — has consumed the Left is alarming. I can’t quite make sense of how many people refuse to acknowledge Biden’s disaster of a debate performance simply because they’re terrified of Trump.
Trump or no, Biden is unfit for the office.
As a friend put it, “how is it possible we have a choice between two emperors, both of whom insist they’re wearing clothes?”
…watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.
The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?
Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially towards government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.
Still, rageful stereotypes sell better than complex backstories. And they’re easier for our political and media ecosystems to make sense of. Reference some data point about QAnon conspiracies in the heartlands, and you’ll raise more money from nervous liberals in the city (who just so happen to live next to three times as many conspiracy believers). Lash out against the xenophobia in small towns, and you’ll mobilise your city voters to the polls. Rage draws clicks. It makes a splash.
However, unlike rage, which is explosive and directed towards immediate targets, scholars have shown that resentment in rural areas emanates from a sense of enduring injustice and marginalisation. It is not primarily about anger towards specific groups such as black Americans, immigrants, or LGBT individuals. Instead, resentment or grievance is a deeper, more persistent feeling that arises from real and perceived slights against rural communities. These include economic policies that have devastated local industries, a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and education, and a sense of cultural dismissal from urban-centric media and politics.
I’m currently reading White Rural Rage and boy, do I have thoughts. It’s clearly written by two people who do not live in rural spaces, but about people that do.
In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex — and by far the biggest group in the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity — indeed merged it into its opposite. But they have another tea dance to get to and another Instagram vacation pic to post. Most are pathetically uninformed, or programmed by tribal insecurity to follow the queering herd.
Andrew Sullivan, yet again.
The madness of being called “LGBTQ” still makes my head spin (how can I be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender?), but stranger still is how prevalent it is among fellow gay men. Many seem to have internalized this language — this ideology — part and parcel.
And good luck saying as much out loud. I’ve been chastised, yelled at, lectured, ignored. The groupthink on this runs deep.
“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Mr. Trump said. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” he added, “but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”
Mr. Trump tried to ban TikTok while in office, pushing its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform to a new owner or face being blocked from American app stores. A House committee advanced legislation last week that would similarly force TikTok to cut ties with ByteDance.
This says everything you need to know about Trump. He’ll say anything that serves him in the right now. He has no impulse control, he has no ability to think strategically, he has no long-term plan.
Banning TikTok (i.e. forcing ByteDance, a Chinese company, to sell off TikTok) is the right thing to do. It’s a parasite destroying the ability of people to think critically and deeply. It has decimated the attention spans of our young people, who don’t know a world without social media. TikTok is a cancer.
And so is Facebook. Merely forcing the sale of TikTok to an American company won’t fix the problem. Letting our corporations mine the attention of our young people is better than letting China do it, but not by much.
Start treating all social media like what it is: addictive advertising.
Members of Mr. Biden’s team insist they feel little sense of concern. The president’s closest aides push back in exasperation against those questioning his decision to run again and dismiss polls as meaningless this far before the vote. They argue that doubters constantly underestimate Mr. Biden and that Democrats have won or outperformed expectations in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 and even a special House election this year.
Fools.
Arrogant fools.
If we lose our republic, it’s because the Democrats became as power-hungry as the Republicans.
The trouble is that words have meanings, and the term “LGBTQ+” — like the term “Hispanic” or “Latino” — is not like NATO. It doesn’t refer to a single, identifiable group, experience, or community. It refers to multiple ones. And each is distinct, discrete and often very different. When you examine its component parts, you realize that the Ls and Gs and Bs and Ts, let alone the Is and the +s, differ dramatically in basic things like psychology, lifestyle, income, geography, education, and politics.
Lumping them all together and treating them as a single unit is like treating Jews and Arabs as the “Middle East community,” or Cubans and Salvadorans as indistinguishable “Latinos.” “LGBTQ+” is a term that obscures and misleads more than it enlightens and clarifies. And it has made any study or understanding of homosexuals as a discreet [sic] group close to impossible.
Indeed the will of the voters, but the divide between the east and west sides of the state is profound. Democratic legislators and the bulk of Oregon’s population on the west side of the state (majority democratic) don’t often represent the values of people around here. (Whether I agree with them or not.) It’s fostering real resentment, and I worry about what that means long-term.
Those that win elections should be as gracious as the losers, and in this state, that doesn’t always feel true.
(That said, I’d much rather live here than in almost any other state.)
When Betty Friedan called attention in the 1960s to the lack of women’s rights, she described it as “the problem that has no name.” In a similar way, there isn’t a good term for the bundle of pathologies that have afflicted working-class Americans like Bill.
My “How America Heals” series has explored how to overcome these afflictions, which include stagnant incomes, addiction, homelessness, suicide, chronic pain, loneliness and early death. We still don’t fully understand how they are correlated or why most of them affect men more than women. I do believe that, as with Friedan’s probing of gender inequity, our explorations of these problems will help us chip away at them. That’s the reason for this series: A nation cannot thrive when so many have been left behind.
“A nation cannot thrive when so many have been left behind.”
If there’s any one sentence than could sum up my feelings about America, it is this one.
Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue.
The endgame is unclear. Reoccupation? Mass emigration? Who can say? Yes, Hamas can be physically destroyed. But support for it has soared since the war began; and I know of no person more committed to revenge than a parent whose child has been murdered. We were right to note how tight-knit Israeli society is, and how deep a trauma October 7 was for so many. Can we even imagine the psychological impact of 9,000 dead children? The Gazans are humans too. Am I being too sentimental in talking about infanticide rather than just civilian deaths? Not when the vulnerable population is so disproportionately young; not when just war theory would demand safety for every single one of them.
This is how it is when wars are launched swiftly, overwhelmingly, and in an understandable spasm of justified rage. Think of the position of Israel on October 8. The true evil of Hamas was exposed; most of the decent world grieved with Israel. Think of the long-term goals the Israelis could have achieved if they had taken a breath, thought deeply and strategically, and acted deliberately, in consort with their recently acquired Arab interlocutors.
Now look: a wasteland of death, a charge of genocide at The Hague, a huge propaganda loss in the wider world, 132 hostages still out of reach, and no coherent idea of what to do the day after, if the day after ever comes.
Andrew Sullivan, doing his damndest to answer my question, "Who do I want to be like when I grow up?"
This war between Gaza and Israel has been brutal. Old personal relationships have resurfaced, only to be ripped away. The subject feels incredibly fraught and tender, full of strange bedfellows and unexpected allegiances. My long-held opinions have been shaken as I watch people who had no interest in the region suddenly espouse strong and often vitriolic opinions of their own. Like anything in America, the Middle East has become a proxy for our culture wars.
A hundred days in, I find myself back where I was immediately after the attacks: Israel cannot call itself "civilized" if it permits the people of Palestine to suffer as it does. Really — what did Israel think would happen after years of an active blockade of Gaza? Sure, Egypt is party to blame, but come on. Let's not bullshit each other.
Over the last hundred days, I've been more persuaded by the principles Zionism than ever before. When I once thought the pluralism of America was proof enough that Israel did not need to exist, I now see that very pluralism threatening to fade away. And in a world with plenty of nations are explicitly and officially Muslim, why not one that is Jewish? Yes.
But this status quo cannot hold. Israel is losing — and perhaps has already lost — any moral high ground it had on October 6th.
Barak remembers feeling deeply frustrated when Netanyahu won the tight 2022 election, “not because he won or there had been some change from the previous electoral cycles,” he said, “but because of the typical weakness of the left, unable to see the whole picture and failing to join forces.”