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It’s the genocide, stupid

You’ll recall that Harris never distanced herself from Biden on this question. In her first interview after becoming the nominee, she maintained the party line on Israel, reciting the usual claptrap about the country’s right to “defend itself.” Asked point-blank whether her foreign policy would differ from Biden’s at all, she said it would remain the same. That is to say, the United States would continue to send weapons to Israel while the country carried out a genocide.

The DNC finally released its long-awaited autopsy of Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign, and it doesn’t mention Gaza. The Democratic leadership’s refusal to acknowledge the party’s shift on Israel could spell another defeat in 2028.

By Michael Arria  May 22, 2026, https://mondoweiss.net/2026/05/its-the-genocide-stupid/

On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) finally released its long-awaited autopsy of Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign.

The rollout was highly on-brand for the Democratic establishment. The 192-page document seems slapped together, is full of typos, and was released only because CNN obtained a copy. In an accompanying note, DNC Chair Ken Martin said the report didn’t meet his standards, but that it was being released “because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

In fact, the report has further eroded that trust by omitting some big, obvious reasons why Harris lost. Concerns about Biden’s age and his inexplicable decision to run for reelection are barely mentioned, and there’s virtually no analysis of the Democratic policies that might have helped propel Trump to another victory.

If one were compiling such a list, support for the Gaza genocide would presumably be near the top, but the issue is not mentioned once in the massive report.

You’ll recall that Harris never distanced herself from Biden on this question. In her first interview after becoming the nominee, she maintained the party line on Israel, reciting the usual claptrap about the country’s right to “defend itself.” Asked point-blank whether her foreign policy would differ from Biden’s at all, she said it would remain the same. That is to say, the United States would continue to send weapons to Israel while the country carried out a genocide.

A couple of months later, she reiterated her position on The View, telling the hosts that she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently. Although later in the interview she said that, unlike Biden, she would put Republicans in her cabinet.

Throughout the Harris campaign, Palestine advocates called on the former Senator to shift her position and take a firm stance against Israel’s actions.

“By taking a strong stand against Netanyahu’s authoritarian policies, the Biden-Harris administration can unify the Democratic Party and regain the trust of key voter bases, including young people, Arabs, and Muslims,” read an open letter to Harris from the Not Another Bomb coalition to Harris at the time. “This decisive action will reinforce the administration’s commitment to democracy and human rights, contrasting sharply with the far-right extremism embodied by Trump and his supporters. It sends a clear message that the Democratic Party stands for peace, justice, and the protection of all people, thereby strengthening the coalition needed to secure victory in the 2024 elections and beyond.”

She wouldn’t budge.

At the Democratic National Convention that August, the Uncommitted Movement pushed for a Palestinian speaker to be included. “The difficulty in approving even a single Palestinian American speaker among the dozens of speakers on the convention stage sends a troubling message to our anti-war voters, suggesting they aren’t truly included in this party,” explained a statement from the organization’s founders.

The request was denied.

It’s inaccurate to say the campaign simply ignored these issues. On the contrary, they leaned in from the opposite direction, embracing hawkish former House member Liz Cheney and sending Rep. Ritchie Torres to Michigan, the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans, to tell voters that Harris would stand with Israel.

There’s a certain kind of centrist pundit who likes to wax sarcastic about the 2024 election and point out that Trump is also an ardent supporter of Israel. The inference is that people concerned about Gaza accomplished nothing by voting against Harris.

However, this brand of snark often presupposes that people fed up with the genocide actually voted. Yes, some people backed Trump because they irrationally believed that the guy currently bombing Iran was antiwar, but the actual number of people that foolish is presumably negligible. Much hay is also made over the Green Party, but Jill Stein got fewer than 900,000 votes and thus had no discernible impact on the ultimate result.

One of the biggest stories of the 2024 race is how many people stayed home.

“The most telling fact in this race is the drop in voter turnout,” wrote Mitchell Plitnick days after the election, pointing out that Harris netted millions less votes than Biden did in 2020.

“Theories will emerge, but the cause of Harris’ disastrous failure will forever be debated,” he wrote. “Still, there are good reasons to believe the Middle East in general and Gaza in particular played a significant role.”

“Nobody is going to get excited about the ‘politics of joy’ and ‘endless brat summer’ when they’re watching a kid raising his hands while he’s being burned to death attached to an IV,” political consultant Peter Feld told me at the time. “It pretty much puts an end to any of the vibes that they were trying to run on.”

“I don’t think you can explain this election without explaining the non-voters, and I think some of the post-election polling that’s come out and attempts to explain it by talking to voters is going to miss this story,” he continued. “If you haven’t spoken to non-voters, you haven’t explained the election.”

Among those who actually voted, the numbers indicate that many 2020 Biden voters jumped ship from the Democratic Party. A January 2025 YouGov survey found that among 2020 Biden voters who didn’t vote for Harris in 2024, Gaza was cited as the top reason they chose another candidate.

If you need further proof that Gaza hurt Harris at the polls, just look at what’s happened since November 2024. Israel critics are prevailing in Democratic primaries, and groups like AIPAC have become entirely toxic, and support for Israel has plummeted to historic lows amid the war on Iran. A recent NBC News poll found that just 32% of U.S. voters view Israel positively, which is down from 47% in 2023.

It’s difficult to overstate the incompetence of the DNC, but leaving this kind of stuff out of the “autopsy” report certainly feels like much more than oversight. Officials formerly connected to Biden and Harris are openly admitting as much.

“What’s important is what’s missing, what they’re not releasing,” Harris’s former communications director, Ashley Etienne, told Politico. “It feels like what the DNC is doing is cherry-picking the parts of it that it wants to actually release, that [are] less problematic for the party going forward.”

It’s an oversimplification to say Gaza is what cost the Democrats the election. There are multiple factors in every presidential race, and many of them have nothing to do with foreign policy. However, ignoring the genocide’s obvious impact on voters is malpractice and suggests that Democratic leadership could be poised to repeat the same mistakes in 2028.

May 29, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

American Democracy Does Not Exist

Caitlin Johnstone, May 20, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/american-democracy-does-not-exist?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=198559968&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Thomas Massie has lost his congressional seat against a primary opponent whose Israel lobby funding made the race the most expensive House of Representatives primary in history. Massie has been a rare Republican opponent of Israeli abuses on Capitol Hill.

The spending on Massie’s ouster topped out at a staggering $32 million when all was said and done. The second- and third-most expensive House primary races were also heavily slanted by Israel lobby funding, with AIPAC pouring millions into toppling progressive Democrats Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman.

Americans just watched the Israel lobby openly manipulate yet another election, and then in like two weeks they’re going to hear their government tell them they need to regime change another foreign country to bring “democracy” to its people. Americans themselves do not have democracy.

The ceasefire with Iran is tenuous and could end at any time. Washington is currently drumming up ridiculously transparent pretexts to justify attacking Cuba. And you just know as soon as the bombs start falling on whatever country they’re going to fall on, Americans will be told this is a good thing because it will bring freedom and democracy to whatever population is getting ripped apart by military explosives.

It’s just so silly how often the US propaganda machine bangs on about “democracy” while vast fortunes are poured into slanting the American electoral process to advance the agendas of plutocrats and special interest groups.

Let’s bring democracy to the Iraqi people! Oh no, the Russians are interfering in our democracy!

And meanwhile nothing of the sort actually exists in America. When the elections go toward whoever can afford to spend the most on manipulating and deceiving the public into voting their way, that’s not democracy. That’s plutocracy.

The rich buy up news outlets and social media platforms, pour funding into think tanks and lobby groups, and sponsor the primary campaigns of anyone who disagrees with them, and in so doing they are able to exert enough influence to get the public to vote in whatever way advances their agendas.

That’s why Americans have a joke of a minimum wage and no normal healthcare system. It’s why corporations are allowed to exploit the working class and pollute the environment without consequence. It’s why AI is being shoved down our throats with zero regulation while it consumes our clean water and takes our jobs. And it’s why American-made bombs are still falling in Lebanon and Gaza.

The rich and powerful are going to keep doing this until they are made to stop. They’re going to keep using their wealth and influence to manipulate public behavior until people stop allowing them to. You can’t vote this problem away, because they control the votes.

Forget about bringing democracy to Cuba. Try bringing democracy to the United States.

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May 25, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Trump is the joke….. that is no longer funny

While comedians laughed at his rallies, millions of Americans saw something entirely different. They saw somebody attacking a political establishment they already despised.

Trump discovered scandal itself could become a weapon. Every controversy kept him at the centre of public attention

20 May 2026 Roswell, https://theaimn.net/the-joke-that-lost-its-punchline/

In 2015 and 2016, much of the world treated Donald Trump like a political novelty act.

He was loud, theatrical, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore. Commentators laughed at the rallies. Late-night comedians built entire careers around his speeches. Political experts dismissed his presidential campaign as a publicity stunt that would eventually collapse under the weight of its own absurdity.

The assumption shared by many journalists, academics, and political professionals was simple: America would never elect him.

Then America did.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary political transformations in modern democratic history. A man once regarded as a sideshow became the central figure in American politics. More remarkably, he reshaped the Republican Party, dominated the global news cycle for nearly a decade, survived scandals that would have destroyed conventional politicians, lost an election, refused to accept the result, returned to power, and began a second presidency stronger and more experienced than the first.

The joke had become reality.

And now, nobody is laughing.

That shift reveals something deeper than the story of one man. It exposes how badly political institutions, media organisations, and intellectual elites misunderstood both Trump and the conditions that made him possible.

In the beginning, ridicule was seen as sufficient. Trump was mocked endlessly for his speaking style, his exaggerations, his vanity, his midnight meltdowns on Twitter and his disregard for political norms. Satire became the preferred language of opposition because satire is easy when a figure appears ridiculous.

But ridicule can become dangerous when it replaces analysis.

Large sections of the media spent years treating Trump as entertainment rather than understanding him as a symptom of growing political anger, institutional distrust, economic frustration, and cultural division inside the United States. While comedians laughed at his rallies, millions of Americans saw something entirely different. They saw somebody attacking a political establishment they already despised.

Trump understood something many professional politicians did not: people who feel ignored do not necessarily want polished leadership. Sometimes they want disruption. Sometimes they want revenge against systems they believe abandoned them.

His critics often focused on his behaviour while his supporters focused on what his behaviour represented.

That distinction changed American politics.

By the time Trump entered his second presidency, the atmosphere surrounding him had fundamentally altered. The humour remained, but the comfort had disappeared. Even opponents who once treated him as a temporary political accident now understood that Trumpism was not a passing phase. It had become a movement with enormous influence over American institutions, courts, media ecosystems, and foreign policy.

There is also a psychological shift that occurs when a political figure survives everything thrown at them.

Every investigation, scandal, indictment, controversy, and prediction of political death that failed to remove Trump strengthened the perception among supporters that he was being targeted by a hostile establishment. At the same time, every failed prediction weakened public trust in the experts making those predictions.

Eventually, mockery stopped looking powerful.

It started looking ineffective.

History contains many examples of societies underestimating disruptive political figures because they appeared too strange, too vulgar, or too unconventional to succeed. Democracies often assume their institutions are strong enough to absorb any personality. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not.

The danger is rarely the joke itself.

The danger is failing to notice when the audience stops laughing.

Trump’s rise also revealed the growing collapse of shared reality in modern democracies. Americans no longer consume the same information, trust the same institutions, or even agree on basic facts. In that environment, outrage becomes fuel, controversy becomes visibility, and constant attention becomes political power.

Trump mastered that environment better than any modern politician.

Traditional politicians speak carefully because they fear scandal. Trump discovered scandal itself could become a weapon. Every controversy kept him at the centre of public attention. Every attack reinforced his image as a political outsider fighting entrenched power.

His opponents often helped build the mythology they hoped to destroy.

That does not mean Trump is invincible, nor does it mean his critics were entirely wrong. It means modern politics no longer behaves according to old assumptions. The rules changed while much of the political class kept pretending they had not.

And perhaps that is the real lesson.

The story of Donald Trump is not merely the story of one man rising to power. It is the story of institutional complacency, media failure, public anger, and a society increasingly unable to distinguish politics from spectacle.

In 2016, many believed the joke would end.

Instead, the joke outlived the punchline.

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May 23, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment