When David Hogg suggested this was needed the #DNC forced him out of the leadership ----- if they won't fight, they need to go and that goes triple for Schumer, Jefferies and so many more.
I'm ready to donate to whomever takes down Fetterman...
I referred to TRUE progressive #Democrat citizens of USA. Not career politicians. The people who are working to replace the current regime with a compassionate society.
Brother, you need to talk to some actual #USA citizens and find out what they truly think. You can either try to shape the future with friends or make everybody hate you. Your choice, friend.
they hate all grassroots because it means they would be answering to two masters: their billionaire donors vs the motley crew of working class organizations and voters.
in other words, the #DNC stands in diametrical opposition to the local and state Democratic parties that actually do the work of democracy.
Urge your Members of Congress to call for an end to Netanyahu’s intentional starvation of over two million people in Gaza. Elected officials from both parties must force the issue with Trump’s administration with demands to lift aid restrictions and allow trusted third parties to distribute food. https://act.indivisible.org/sign/gaza-aid-full-congress/?source=mastodon
'#DavidHogg, a controversial {no he isn't} #DNC vice chair, is pledging to upend #Democratic#primaries by funding #candidates who will challenge “ineffective, asleep-at-the-wheel” Democrats.
The move puts Hogg, the now 25-year-old who first gained national stature as an outspoken survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School {#Parkland} shooting, on a collision course with his own party and some Democratic House members.'
In unprecedented move, DNC official to spend big to take down fellow Democrats
David Hogg, the DNC vice chair, wants to take down some safe incumbents.
Parkland survivor and activist David Hogg speaks to the crowd during in the second March for Our Lives rally in support of gun control on Saturday, June 11, 2022, in Washington.
Parkland survivor and activist David Hogg speaks to the crowd during in the second March for Our Lives rally in support of gun control on Saturday, June 11, 2022, in Washington. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
My review in Storygraph of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
The author weaves in his own experience as he, often through the lens of the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism, discusses the failures of the American capitalist war machine and political system designed to grind us all down.
If you're conservative Republican, maybe you'll enjoy the critiques of liberals. If you're a Democrat, this could unmoor you in the best way. If you're neither, idk -- everyone needs to read it. See if your moral compass holds up to scrutiny.
💥💥💥💥💥
Via Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
"Tonight an unbelievable 34,000 people gathered for our Denver rally to take on billionaires and win our country back.
This was the largest political gathering in Denver since Obama in 2008.
Also bigger than the 2024 DNC.
And the largest ever rally in Bernie’s career (and obviously, mine too)."
Via Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
"Tonight an unbelievable **34,000 people** gathered for our Denver rally to take on billionaires and win our country back.
This was the largest political gathering in Denver since Obama in 2008.
Also bigger than the 2024 DNC.
And the largest ever rally in Bernie’s career (and obviously, mine too)."
Given the corporate media sane-washing and general kissing of the ring, I choose to believe what has been shared with me directly over the "actchually, it was an awkward gesture of exuberance" milquetoast media.
Especially when the list looks like this:
Hastags that have also apparently been blocked from user experiences. Will keep updating. Range is worldwide.
In about an hour and a half a ceasefire is finally expected to start in Gaza.
In on the ground reports from Gaza and the West Bank Palestinians are hopeful and celebrate a possible end to large scale bombardment of Gaza. In the West Bank there are reports from Friday of the Palestinian Authority and IOF putting down celebrations.
In Gaza reports are of increased IOF bombings of tent cities.
How did Tulsi Gabbard go from defending Assad’s regime and echoing Kremlin propaganda to becoming Trump’s top pick for Director of National Intelligence? There’s a lot to unpack and the latest write-up from The Big Picture is a great place to start. https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/tulsi-gabbard-trump-dni-syria
@georgetakei #Gabbard got her first taste of "celebrity" when she was the first member of Congress to endorse #Bernie in 2016. A lot of Sanders supporters praised her and even recommended #Sanders pick her to be his VP. But it quickly became obvious the only reason she endorsed him was b/c (like all #Republicans) she despised #Hillary.
Then she ran for prez in 2020 thinking her feux "populism" would be a big hit. It wasn't.
She turned on the #DNC, changed parties, and praised T****.
Excellent demo of how to shame politicians who are complicit in genocide. In 2018 Kansas Democrat Sharice Davids, was the first openly LGBT Native American elected to Congress.
By 2024 she was voting to send more bombs to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, and giving Netanyahu a standing ovation.
She can run to the toilet but at some point she'll have to come out and face her constituents.
I've been thinking about #kamalaharris 's speech at the DNC (1st night) for a few days. OK, the part about #Gaza, specifically.
I decided to annotate my thoughts with terrible graphic design.
Note: the part on Gaza/Israel was about 200 words, just over 5% of the speech. It was placed 4/5 of the way through the speech.
I believe Harris emphatically promised to never stop selling weapons to Israel, but maybe that's just my interpretation.
I think this speech was carefully crafted to walk a fine line: expressing sympathy for Palestine while never implicating Israel in Gaza's destruction and reinforcing Kamala's commitment to #AIPAC.
A very messy annotated version of the 200-word segment. Mastodon won't let me put all the words in here.
My summary:
Mentions of the genocide in Gaza are mostly in passive voice, as if nobody in particular were causing the violence, though the Palestinian people are humanized and given sympathetic presentation (though they are apparently victims without an aggressor). Israel is portrayed in light of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, labeled as a terrorist organization with implication that they are linked to Iran and "tyrants." There is no mention of the fact that Israel is the entity causing suffering in Gaza.
Harris uses 1st-person active voice to take ownership of Israel's goal of defending itself and achieving "security," as well as gaining release of the hostages. She says she will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, which I interpret as her promising to never stop selling Israel weapons.
The speech ends, somewhat bizarrely, with Harris swearing to defend "our forces" (American soldiers? in Israel? IDK) and "our interests" (your guess is as good as mine) against "Iran and Iran-backed terrorists." She then immediately swears she will not cozy up to "tyrants and dictators" like "Kim Jong-un" (WTF), because they are "rooting for Trump."
This week I put together a medium-length essay on my observations in the wake of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. While Democrats celebrated the “unity” on offer at the convention, informed observers who read the 2024 platform and saw the way anti-genocide protesters were treated, found a party shifting significantly to the right to appease fascism.
"Of course I mention all this in the past tense because after less than four years of the Biden presidency and this year’s DNC gathering, I no longer have the ability to delude myself with any such hopes for American liberalism. While everyone around me was squealing in approval about the “joy” and “unity” on display, the DNC I saw represented a cynical, realpolitik-style commitment to genocide, the carceral industrial complex, and the appeasement of imperialists, nativists, and other fascists, that has brought the Party back to the dark days of Clintonism, even though the political moment – and the ideals of their own voters – have long since left those politics behind. This convention was no triumph; it was a surrender to the reactionary right on so many levels it made my heart hurt, and dashed my (already quite low) expectations for a likely Kamala Harris presidency before that hypothetical administration even exists."
Alright, so as I promised yesterday I've spent much of my day writing up my thoughts about the 2024 Democratic Party National Convention, and what I learned from observing it. Furthermore, as I promised you yesterday, I don't think what I have to say is going to make liberals high on "unity" vibes very happy, but I also don't really give a fuck because I'm just here to call balls and strikes while speaking truth (as I understand it) to power; and that's never going to change.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to say everything I had to say in a single post, and breakdown between sections didn't come in easy 5,000 character blocks, so this is going to be three posts, published one after another - sorry folks, it's either this or just taking the material directly to my website and I already did that once this week.
Finally I'm going to publish a bunch of source links underneath this whole thing; I would encourage low-information Stans caught in their feels to peruse those links before they try to call me a liar. You don't have to agree with my analysis, but if you start insulting my integrity because you have no idea what you're talking about, I will be hostile and you can expect rain. I didn't want to write this, but I feel like the shitshow that was this year's DNC forced my hand.
I'm going to start here by making an awkward confession, particularly for an anarchist who wants to smash the state and end capitalism, so that you know everything I'm about to say is sincere and from the heart. After the 2020 Democratic National Convention, I had some small degree of hope for organized American liberalism. To be sure, I remained suspicious that an old dog like Joe Biden could learn new tricks, but with a Party Platform denouncing the carceral state and racialized police violence, promising an end to forever wars and regime change policies, to reduce military budgets, pledging an end to Trump-era fascist immigration policies and an expansion of the asylum system, offering increased action on climate crisis, and a promise to vigorously defend trans rights, plus what at least appeared to me a pledge to condition U.S. financial support and arms salves to Gulf states on increased respect for human rights, I allowed myself to believe that just maybe, U.S. liberals as exemplified by the Democratic Party were taking baby steps toward justice, equality, and the proverbial "right side of history."
Of course I mention all this in the past tense because after just under four years of the Biden presidency, and this year's DNC gathering, I no longer have the ability to delude myself about any such hopes for American liberalism. While everyone around me was squealing in approval over the "joy" and "unity" on display, the DNC I saw represented a cynical, realpolitik-style commitment to genocide, the carceral industrial complex, and the appeasement of imperialists, nativists, and other fascists that brought the party back to the dark days of Clintomism; even though the political moment, and the ideals of their own voters have long since left those politics behind. This was no triumph, it was a surrender to the right on so many levels it made my heart hurt, and dashed my (already quite low) expectations for a likely Harris presidency before that administration even exists.
As I've already written, the degree of surrender the 2024 Dem Party Platform presents to reactionary ideology on policing, the carceral state, and migrant justice is utterly shameful, and objectively fascist. Rather than criticizing still quite deadly, violent, and racist American policing, Democrats are now literally applauding murderpigs for their sacrifices; I guess we've come along way from even the tepid support liberals offered the Black Lives Matter movement and folks protesting the police execution of George Floyd back in 2020. To wit, the Party has replaced calls for police reform, with promises to fund more violent, racist murderpigs; the terms “mass incarceration” and “police brutality” have been stricken from the platform entirely.
On the subject of immigration and border policing, the Democrats have all but surrendered to fascist rhetoric and a moral panic cooked up by the Republican Party. Promises to fight against "kids in cages" and expand the asylum system for migrants have been replaced with plaudits for a Biden deportation regime Politico recently suggested was so expansive that Trump would have a hard time surpassing it. The platform also offers up the proverbial three cheers for Joe's illegal adoption via executive order of Trump's objectively fascist immigration policies designed to limit the number of asylum seekers entering the U.S. based on harsh quotas dictated by the president, not risk or need; policies that are likely in direct violation of international laws on asylum, by the way.
On the subject of foreign policy, 2020's criticisms of Trump's "race for a war with Iran" have been replaced with celebrations of Biden's escalating military actions against Iranian-linked groups and admonishing Trump for being too soft on Iran, here in 2024. After decrying Saudi Arabia's disastrous war in Yemen and promising to turn the country into a "pariah" in it's 2020 platform, the Dem Party touts Biden's plans to normalize relations between the KSA and Israel; which is both an extension of Trump era policy and entirely unsurprising after Biden lifted his ban on providing Prince Bonesaw's country with offensive weaponry. Given all this it should surprise no one that the 2024 Dem Party platform has also stripped mention of opposing forever wars and regime change operations, while dropping promises to decrease defense funding. Gone too are vague nods to avoiding "a new cold war" with China, and reforming the U.S. sanction regime.
On the subject of climate crisis, Dem speakers at the DNC were mostly silent; although organizers did allow Punchbowl News to hold an event sponsored by ExxonMobil nearby without comment. Hey, what's the big deal, it's not like we're already in a mass extinction event and fossil-fuel driven capitalism is threatening to kill billions of people, right? While the Party Platform offered some assurances on protecting the right of trans people, if anyone pushed back on or mentioned at all the fascist right's ongoing pogrom and eliminationist policies targeting trans folks, I certainly missed it. Don't worry though, I'm sure working behind the scenes and refusing to publicly stand up for a vulnerable minority group being demonized as pedophiles and targeted for extermination by fascists will win Democrats a many as a half dozen cracker suburban voters who want to pogrom trans people out of existence; so clearly doing nothing to push back on that dangerous rhetoric and these monstrous policies has no downside and was the smart play here.
Nowhere however was the Dem's betrayal of its own voter's values more apparent than on the subject of Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. The Party's 92 page platform appears completely unchanged from Biden's disastrous pro-Israel, pro-genocide Gaza policy. Anti-genocide protesters were assaulted by Chicago Police outside the convention; nobody inside even mentioned it. The DNC refused to allow a single Palestinian American to speak at the convention; despite a wildly publicized sit-in outside the hall by Uncommitted delegates begging for a few minutes of their time while offering officials the chance to vet the speech in advance. Naturally, they Dems allowed Israeli and even Republican speakers. A Harris delegate was physically attacked with "we heart Joe" signs by attendees for raising a banner that read "Stop Arming Israel," while folks calling out to "stop killing women in Gaza" where shouted down by nationalist chants of U.S.A. from the crowd around them. Did I mention that progressive prodigy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised Harris's "tireless work" to obtain a ceasefire despite no evidence that work exists at all? Well now I have. There was also no mention whatsoever of an arms embargo on Israel while it conducts a genocide, which forces one to assume that nothing has changed since a Biden spokesperson said it was off the table even under Harris.
Please keep in mind that all of this is despite recent polling that shows 70% of likely voters, and 83% of Democrat voters support a permanent cease fire and all evidence indicates that nothing short of an arms embargo on Israel will force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hand enough to grant one. As representatives from the Uncommitted movement itself have stated, even a large number of the delegates at the 2024 DNC support a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo; there was little to no public indication of this on offer at the DNC however. Furthermore this recalcitrance and silencing in support of a genocide was also going on despite the fact that the slaughter in Gaza has a very real chance of being the number one election issue for folks who might vote Democrat in the must-win swing state of Michigan.
Naturally, I suspect that this is the part where a few outraged liberals in their feels will pop into my mentions to call me a liar, point out that a Trump administration will almost certainly allow Israel to keep conducting a genocide in Gaza, or perhaps gleefully tell me to "enjoy the camps" the American fascist party no doubt has in mind for folks like me, whether they mean trans women or anarchist shit disturbers. They will tell me that a Trump administration would be a far more enthusiastic supporter of the carceral state, deportations, and boiling the planet like soup so his rich donors can make a quick buck. Of course I won’t argue most of these points with them, but as I’ve written multiple times in the past my question here is how much does it mean that the Democratic Party of 2024 is merely better than the most unhinged, genocidal, nativist freakjob in American politics since the presidency of Andrew Jackson? What kind of campaign slogan would it be to proudly shout “we’re less fascist than Donald Trump?” What possible result can appeasing fascists and surrendering to fascist ideology on all of these issues have, but to produce more fascism? Please keep in mind here that you cannot tell me with a straight face that I’m asking for too much out of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party because the Party itself agreed with me on most of these issues as recently as the day it released its 2020 Party Platform; a platform I personally voted for, and Joe Biden won a presidential election running on, by the way.
In the end, that final point is the part I can’t rightfully shake from the darkest corners of my mind; the fact that all this appeasement and the open rightward shift of the Democratic Party since 2020 isn’t even remotely necessary because Joe Biden won the 2020 election without appeasing the fascists at all. In that context, I’m forced to assume that the Party, and its presidential candidate are for some reason choosing to embrace reaction, appease cracker fascists who’re voting for Trump anyway, and alienate the very same broad, diverse, progressive coalition that got them over the finish line only four years ago. Despite what I said at the top of this blog, I must confess that I don’t believe this is really even about cynical political maneuvering or acquiescence to the dictates of realpolitiks; these choices represent what the Democratic Party wants to be, and what its leaders want to show the voting public. And given that reality, I’m forced to conclude that the Party and a potential Harris administration have willingly surrendered whatever meagre claims they ever had to anything resembling a soul.
Look, I’m certainly not here to tell anyone how to vote this election, but after what I’ve seen this week during the 2024 Democratic National Convention you cannot tell me that the Party itself hasn’t succumbed, at least in part, to the sickness of fascism and the dubious idea of a rightward shift in the Overton Window. Kamala Harris may well be the next President of the United States, but unless something changes drastically between now and November, there will be no victory over fascism. How could there be when reaction, nativism, and genocide are set to win no matter who we elect this fall?
"The stage played host to speakers from every other walk of life—including multiple Republicans and a top executive at Uber—but a Palestinian speaking about the situation in #gaza even with a party-vetted speech, was just too much for the DNC. The Uncommitted movement had proposed Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman and you can read what she would have said here." via ryan grim
"Rep. Romman and #Uncommitted organizers both confirmed that this was the speech she was planning to give if allowed for a potential 2-minute speaking slot. Uncommitted said they were open to the speech being edited and vetted. They said the #DNC did not ask to see the speech."
2 MINUTES! They could not give 2 minutes to a #Palestinian - American Democrat?
Shameful. Stupid. Counterproductive. And heartbreaking.
DNC attendees mock and cover their ears as they pass protesters namin... ( video.mondoweiss.net )
DNC attendees mock and cover their ears as they pass protesters naming Palestinians killed by Israel. #fyp #DNC #TikTok
Instagram blocked searches for #democrats and other political hashtags ( www.engadget.com )
Instagram unterdrückt Suchtreffer ( www.spiegel.de )
Hier noch der deutsche Artikel zum Beitrag ...