In September, the House of Representatives quietly passed a piece of legislation unanimously that stands up for the right of a free press against intrusions by the federal government.

That legislation, the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act, or PRESS Act, stands a real chance of becoming law if the Senate takes it up before the expiration of the lame-duck session. The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he supports the bill, which gives it a boost in its quest for a floor vote.

The PRESS Act is sponsored by Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, and it effectively blocks the federal government from using subpoenas, jail, or the threat of jail to force reporters to turn over sources, and it blocks tech companies from sharing sensitive information from journalists’ devices with the federal government.

This week, Durbin announced in the Chicago Sun-Times that he would be pushing for a vote by unanimous consent on the bill. “At a time when the former president is calling for journalists to be jailed and referring to the press as the ‘enemy of the people,’ it’s critical that we protect this pillar of our democracy,” he wrote. “That’s why I support the PRESS Act and have cleared it for fast-track consideration on the Senate ‘hotline.’”

On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, tried to move the bill through the Senate by unanimous consent, like had been done in the House, but it was blocked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. “The press unfortunately has a long and sordid history of publishing sensitive information from inside the government that damages our national security,” Cotton said on the Senate floor, going on to cite the Pentagon Papers as an example of such a leak, which he claimed was published by the New York Times in order to turn the public against the war effort. He also criticized reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he claimed similarly undermined those war efforts. “Yet the PRESS Act would immunize journalists and leakers alike from scrutiny and consequences for their actions.”

The act would not, in fact, immunize leakers. The government would still be able to hunt and prosecute them as they do now; they just wouldn’t be able to threaten to jail journalists to pressure them to turn in their sources, as they did to The Intercept’s James Risen.

As for consequences for journalists, the First Amendment already bars the government from restricting the publication of any material, including classified information. The government can criminalize leaking but not publishing. That 200-year-old First Amendment protection is currently under threat by the prosecution of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange for publishing national security secrets, though the PRESS Act itself would not cover the case, because the government uncovered his source, Chelsea Manning, without relying on Assange.

“This effectively would grant journalists special legal privileges to disclose sensitive information that no other citizen enjoys,” Cotton falsely claimed. Indeed, all citizens have the right to publish classified information; the crime, again, is in the leaking of it.

Cotton added that he had a particular grievance with the Fourth Estate itself. “If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that too many journalists these days are little more than left-wing activists who are at best ambivalent about America and are cavalier about our security and about the truth,” Cotton said, ironically attacking under the guise of patriotism those working under the First Amendment.

“The PRESS Act does not say, ‘Let’s have a fast-track for the liberals,’” Wyden told The Intercept.

The bill does not restrict protections to professional journalists but to any “person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.”

Given Cotton’s objection, the remaining viable path for the bill is to get included in the year-end omnibus spending legislation, according to congressional sources and those working on the outside to push the bill through. A floor vote, given the need to overcome a filibuster, would eat up too much of the little floor time left in the session. Durbin’s support is crucial for such an inclusion, and the bill would also likely need the backing of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who told The Intercept he was still reviewing requests for the omnibus. Wyden said that he didn’t want to get into individual conversations with other senators but expressed optimism about the potential for the omnibus.

“After the PRESS Act passed the House with unanimous bipartisan support this fall, it came closer than ever to becoming law,” said Raskin. “A federal law to protect journalists in their work against the political whims of the day is a necessary step to defend press freedom. I am hopeful this measure can be included in a year-end omnibus package. It would be a great unifying statement.”

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wasn’t immediately able to comment on the status of the talks, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to do so. “I don’t have anything to say about it right now,” McConnell said Thursday afternoon.

A second problem that has stalled previous press shield bills like this one is fearmongering about a terrorist with a ticking bomb somewhere, along with vague claims like Cotton’s that reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan empowered terrorists. The ticking-bomb situation has likely never occurred in the real world, but Raskin’s bill writes an exception directly into the law for that fantastical scenario.

The bill makes an exception if “disclosure of the protected information is necessary to prevent, or to identify any perpetrator of, an act of terrorism against the United States; or disclosure of the protected information is necessary to prevent a threat of imminent violence, significant bodily harm, or death.”

The final important question the bill addresses is what information is protected, and it arrives at an impressively sweeping definition. “The term ‘protected information’ means any information identifying a source who provided information as part of engaging in journalism, and any records, contents of a communication, documents, or information that a covered journalist obtained or created as part of engaging in journalism.”

Previous press shield laws have included huge gaping loopholes, written into the law at the behest of the national security establishment, which end up gutting the law. James Risen, back when he was at the New York Times, was in a long-running legal battle with the Bush administration and then the Obama administration in which they repeatedly threatened him with jail time for not revealing sources. He refused, and they eventually backed off, but if this bill were passed into law, prosecutors would not have been able to come after Risen. In Risen’s case, there was no imminent threat claimed by the government, just vaguely worded assertions about national security that shouldn’t be taken seriously coming from a government that lies regularly about such threats.

None of this is new for Cotton. He rose to right-wing fame writing to the New York Times from active duty in Iraq, calling for the jailing of Risen and two of his Times colleagues. “I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars,” Cotton wrote.

Wyden rejected Cotton’s argument. “You can’t get 435 members of Congress to vote for something if the intelligence community is saying it’s going to tie their hands,” Wyden said, pointing to the bill’s exceptions, and noting that he may be the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee in American history.

The bill would have also protected Risen from government prosecutors looking to go straight to tech companies for his data. Before a tech company could turn anything over under the new law, they’d have to let the journalist know about the subpoena and give them a chance to respond in court, unless doing so would undermine an ongoing investigation, in which case the government can get a delay of no more than 90 days.

The bill also narrows what can be requested by subpoena down to information needed to confirm that what was reported is true. In other words, if a journalist exposes a crime with his or her reporting, that’s often not enough for a prosecutor to use against the perpetrator, because a news article is technically hearsay. This bill limits what can be obtained “to the purpose of verifying published information,” which would block fishing expeditions from prosecutors trying to find out the identity of every person a journalist spoke to over a specific period of time.

A coalition of advocates of press freedom is urging the Senate to move the bill before the term expires. Wyden said he plans to stay in Washington the next few days to work on the upcoming tax package and will be focused on the PRESS Act as well. “We’re going to pull out all the stops to get this in,” he said.

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The 45,000 or so residents of Dunn County live off on the western side of Wisconsin, not far from central Minnesota, but not close to much of anything. Like other rural counties, it leans heavily Republican, going by double digits to Donald Trump in 2020. This year, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., notched a 14-point margin there, and Tim Michels beat the incumbent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers by 9 percentage points.

But when it came to health care, Dunn County voters said they would support a national health insurance program. The overwhelmingly Republican residents of this farming community approved a ballot measure that affirms their support for a single-payer public health insurance program. The idea, which passed 51-49, ran 11 points ahead of Evers, who was reelected statewide, and 16 points ahead of Senate candidate Mandela Barnes.

The largely unnoticed rural election result affirmed support for nationalizing and expanding health insurance, a program popularly known as Medicare for All. While the national media discourse about the election largely ignored health care issues beyond abortion rights, voters across the country registered support for progressive reforms focused on improving health care access and reining in the for-profit industries that dominate the medical system.

In Arizona and South Dakota, like in Dunn County, progressive health care initiatives outpaced Democratic Party candidates by a wide margin. Arizona voters passed Proposition 209, a measure that reduces the allowable interest rate for medical debt and expands exemptions for what can be garnished by medical debt collectors, with a landslide 72 percent in favor. South Dakota became the 40th state to expand Medicaid coverage, making an additional 40,000 residents eligible.

Oregon passed Measure 111, making it the first state to enshrine a right to “cost-effective, clinically appropriate affordable health care” for every resident in the state constitution. In Massachusetts, voters enacted Question 2, which forces dental insurance companies to spend at least 83 percent of premiums on actual dental care, rather than administrative costs and profits.

Medicare for All has become associated with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party — not a large population in Dunn County. National party operatives consider it an albatross around the neck of Democrats, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has warned candidates to stay away from it, and to focus instead on lowering prescription drug prices, which everyone who doesn’t work for the pharmaceutical industry supports instantly.

“The wording of the question sold it to them, because we avoided using words like Medicare for All and single payer,” said John Calabrese, a Dunn County board supervisor who works for Our Wisconsin Revolution, an offshoot of Sanders’s 2016 campaign for president. Taking the issue out of a partisan lens allowed for conversations that, he believed, wouldn’t have otherwise been possible.

In a divided Congress, there is little prospect for a sweeping reform such as single-payer health care. But lawmakers, a growing number of whom support Medicare for All, are likely to face growing pressure to take action on rising costs — and the industry is mobilizing accordingly.

A post-election report by the Healthcare Leadership Council, a trade group that represents the bulk of the private health care system — hospitals, drugmakers, medical device companies, insurers, and electronic records firms — flagged the state ballot measures and scored incoming lawmakers. The update featured polling that showed among voters who prioritized health care issues, apart from Covid-19, there is sweeping support for the need to tackle “high health care and drug costs/prices.”

The group was formed in the early ’90s as part of industry push to defeat progressive provisions of the health reform overhaul announced by President Bill Clinton, and now works to prevent policies that may reduce the ability for investors to make profit from the current system.

The council maintains a team that carefully screens candidates for Congress on health care issues in an attempt to inform industry lobbyists and help foster relationships for influencing legislation. HLC alerted its members about a wave of incoming Democrats who are not considered a “Healthcare Champion” — in other words, candidates who do not favor corporate positions on health policy.

Ohio Republican J.D. Vance and Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman are listed prominently as potential critics of the industry. Vance, HLC noted, “has staked out healthcare positions that break from traditional Republican orthodoxy, including support for government involvement in Medicare drug pricing and advocacy for prescription drug importation.” Fetterman, the document explains, adds to the “Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party” and supports “lowering of the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and advocating even tighter government controls on prescription drugs.”

A slew of newly elected House Democrats also support Medicare for All, HLC’s report noted, including Sydney Kamlager, Kevin Mullin, and Robert Garcia in California; Yadira Caraveo in Colorado; Summer Lee in Pennsylvania; and Hillary Scholten, who defeated a Republican opponent in a Michigan swing race. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who succeeds retiring Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., also backs single-payer health insurance. Subject Matter, a lobbying firm that represents UnitedHealth Group and the Federation of American Hospitals, in a similar note to clients, lists Becca Balint, D-Vt.; Maxwell Frost, D-Fla.; Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill.; Shri Thanedar, D-Mich.; and Glenn Ivey, D-Md., as other candidates who voiced support for Medicare for All.

In addition, many new House Democrats have voiced support for lowering the Medicare eligibility age. The document circulated by Subject Matter observed that Gabriel Vasquez, a New Mexico Democrat who unseated Rep. Yvette Herrell, R-N.M., supports expanding Medicare eligibility, as does Chris Deluzio, who succeeded moderate Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa.

The support for an expanded public support for health care across the country gives the administration a mandate as it drafts rules implementing key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which allows Medicare to negotiate prices on the costliest prescription drugs covered by the program.

That sets the stage for the next confrontation. Industry lobbyists have fought bitterly against allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices. HLC President Mary Grealy previously denounced the proposal as “heavy-handed government regulation” that imposes “the dangerous precedent of importing the price control policies of foreign governments.”

And the industry are moving to influence the Biden administration to derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s provisions on drug prices. Shortly after the election, Grealy sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to ask that the administration provide an opportunity for groups such as HLC to weigh in on the implementation of the drug pricing program.

Wisconsin is one of just 10 states that has yet to accept the Medicaid expansion included in the Affordable Care Act. Calabrese, the Dunn County board member, said that the toll health insurance takes on the county budget helped persuade his fellow board members to allow the referendum to go forward. The county has roughly 350 employees, he said, and insuring them costs roughly a half million dollars every month.

“So when you’re at the end of the year trying to balance the budget button, and we’re cutting $1,000 here and 500 bucks there and having to cut jobs, I mean, half a million dollars a month?” Calabrese, who helped shepherd the referendum through the maze of committees needed to get before the full board, said. “I thought, I bet there’s a way where we can talk about this single-payer system, this national health insurance program at a county level, and talk about the finances — maybe that’s worth putting some volunteer effort into and could really start to shift some conversations.”

On the day of the hearing, residents showed up to tell stories of their nightmare experiences either with insurance companies or without insurance. It also happened that the state had just released its annual health and human services report, and a state official was on hand to walk the county lawmakers through the budget.

“Nobody on that committee said, ‘I think that our health insurance system is great,’’’ said Calabrese. And really, nobody said that to me in going around the county for a month and a half handing out literature, not a single person started a conversation with ‘This is crazy, our health insurance system is great.’ We got some people saying, you know, this sounds like a socialist takeover, or whatever.”

The board’s most conservative member, Larry Bjork, was apoplectic at health care costs the county was accruing for people in its care in jails and other institutions. “Where does the money go?” he asked. “It blows my mind when I look at the financial statement, Chris, and we spend 38 percent of our budget on behavioral health services and health and human services. … I guess my question to you is, in listening to the presentations from the public today about universal health care, do you think there would ever be a universal — can counties get out from underneath that 38 percent going to mental health care by a federal program of any sort?”

The state official told him that if it was implemented, it would indeed resolve it for the county. She noted that before implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the county was spending roughly $100,000 a year to treat uninsured indigent patients at local hospitals, but that number had fallen to around $10,000. “Medicaid expansion to childless adults helped with some of that,” she said, according to audio of the hearing. “In direct answer to your question, if people had affordable health insurance available to them and coverage to get them the care that they needed when it wasn’t a crisis or emergency, it seems hard to not conclude that there would be cost savings to that.”

Calabrese said that Bjork’s approach to the issue, moving away from ideology toward practicality, was common among the board members confronted with the overwhelming cost of health care. Bjork said he was all in, and the referendum was moved to the ballot unanimously.

The measure would ask Dunn County voters, in an obviously nonbinding fashion, “Shall Congress and the president of the United States enact into law the creation of a non profit, publicly financed national health insurance program that would fully cover medical care costs for all Americans?”

Members of Our Wisconsin Revolution and other supporters of the referendum made day trips around the county throughout the fall, leafleting in small villages and hitting every door they could find. Calabrese had run unsuccessfully for state legislature in 2018 and 2020, and had gotten access to Democratic voter data to help with his targeting. He noticed that the county’s trailer parks and many of the apartment buildings weren’t included, as many of the residents there move frequently and/or aren’t registered to vote. “We visited every trailer park in the county,” Calabrese said.

On election night, as the returns came in, he watched as the villages they visited sided with a national public health insurance program. Those same towns had soundly rejected him for state legislative office. “All these little townships started to come in first for the referendum,” Calabrese said, “and what I was noticing was there are the little villages — the village of Elk Mound, village of Boyceville, village of Wheeler, and these little places — and as the names kept coming in, I noticed that those are the places where me and some other volunteers spent entire days doing lit drops and talking to anybody that we could. And so in those places that I know always go Republican, we were winning in these little villages by 10 or 15 votes and I’m like, oh my God, we spent a day in Wheeler, we spent a day there.”

“In the townships, people don’t really trust the government, don’t trust it can do anything good for them,” said Dr. Lorene Vedder, a retired general practitioner and one of the leaders of the referendum. Vedder is active with Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, which supports single payer. She noted that in rural areas they visited, the numbers were good. “Otherwise it was just dismal in the townships,” she said.

In Boyceville, for instance, voters went 239-132 for Ron Johnson over Mandela Barnes, but supported single-payer by 183 to 171. In Wheeler, Johnson won 52 votes to Barnes’s 27, but the referendum carried by 40 to 37. In Elk Mound, Johnson won 190-142, but health insurance won 184 to 124. The county seat of Menomonie delivered the biggest margin for the referendum, where it won by 1,369 votes.

In some parts of the surrounding countryside, the results fell along more partisan lines, but the overperformance in places like Elk Mound meant that even outside the county seat, it only lost by 485 votes, close enough to let Menomonie carry it. Rural townships “[are] much harder to get to, it’s rural country roads and we only had so much time and our resources weren’t as locked in as we hope to be in the future,” he said.

“I don’t want to get too high-minded and idealistic about it, or whatever the word is,” he added, “but I felt, at the end of it all, this real connection to my neighbors, in a time where it seems like if you watch national news, there’s this almost push in some networks and from some politicians who actually further the division and tell people that half the country is irredeemable, these people should just be written off and so to approach every trailer, whether it had big Trump flags or not, was — I just felt like talking about issues that affect everybody, it’s kind of the secret to us getting along better.”

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has hotlined a bill that would redistribute almost $3 billion to the families of victims of 9/11 that had initially been appropriated for the Covid-era Paycheck Protection Program, according to multiple Democratic Senate sources.

Hotlining a bill is the first step in an effort to move legislation through the Senate by unanimous consent. If no senators object, then the measure will pass with no debate and no vote. Families of 9/11 victims were compensated by a special fund created shortly after the 2001 attack. In 2015, Congress established the U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund to use billions more in U.S. tax dollars to compensate terrorism victims’ families who could not force foreign states into court. The measure excluded 9/11 families since they had already been compensated. 

Since then some of the families have been lobbying to repeal the provision that excluded them and appear closer than ever to another payout. The 2015 legislation also excluded families of the victims of the 1983 Marine base bombing in Beirut, and those families have been fighting their exclusion as well, though not as successfully as the 9/11 victims’ families. This week, a slate of seven four-star generals raised issues with the bill in a letter directed to Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seeking to amend it to include families of the Beirut victims.

The bill was hotlined Monday and has not hit the floor yet, suggesting that there may be opposition, which would require a floor debate and vote. The bill would authorize payments from the U.S. State Sponsored Terrorism Fund, paid for by unused money from the CARES Act’s loans for small businesses.

Schumer’s attempt at a rapid passage through unanimous consent would bypass debate over whether a fresh payout to 9/11 families and their attorneys is the best use of the unspent $3 billion at this moment. “I fought long and hard with 9/11 families and allies in the Senate and House to pass the United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund Clarification Act in 2019 that fixed the mistake of excluding certain 9/11 families from United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund,” Schumer said in a statement to The Intercept. “This catch-up payment will rectify that original error and provides 9/11 spouses and children as the victims of the worst foreign terror attack in American history the funds that they should have had access to from day one.”

At the end of September, all but one Democrat in the House — outgoing Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore. — voted to approve H.R. 8987, a bill that would distribute money authorized under the Paycheck Protection Program to the families of 9/11 victims. The Fairness for 9/11 Families Act represents another multibillion-dollar distribution to 9/11 victims’ families. The first, known as the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund, came in the weeks following 9/11 and authorized some $7 billion. A special master overseeing the fund began distributing it, but those who had already received payments under an earlier program were barred from double dipping into the new fund in 2015. The recent passage of the Fairness for 9/11 Families Act attempts to correct that perceived miscarriage of justice with another cash payment. 

“I hope that these funds can provide some measure of comfort and justice to the people whose lives were changed forever that day,” House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said in a press release after the bill’s passage in the House on September 30. “As we pass this legislation, we must not forget the survivors and first responders who continue to suffer the health effects of the 9/11 attacks. I will continue to fight to ensure that these people have the care they need.  We can — and we must — look after everyone who was affected that fateful day.”

The legislation follows an August recommendation by a federal magistrate judge seeking to block 9/11 victims’ families engaged in a suit to force the government to use billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s central bank assets frozen by the United States. The Afghan currency and gold reserves are being held in the New York Federal Reserve Bank, as Afghanistan struggles under widespread economic collapse from the devaluation of the central bank, which has resulted in starvation conditions for tens of millions of citizens. As The Intercept reported in February, President Joe Biden’s former Afghanistan adviser Lee Wolosky has joined other lawyers representing families seeking payments from the frozen funds. Together, the lawyers likely stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars from the suit. 

In September, Biden signed an executive order to create a Switzerland-based foundation to distribute $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan central bank funds in a highly controlled scheme that attempts to use the funds to benefit Afghanistan without ceding assets to the Taliban. According to a State Department press release, “Disbursements from the Afghan Fund could include keeping Afghanistan current on its debt payments to international financial institutions, which would preserve their eligibility for development assistance, and paying for critical imports, such as electricity.”

Former central bank employees and experts have criticized the failure to recapitalize the central bank’s frozen funds. Without recapitalization, there is little chance the economy can regain its footing, ensuring continued economic fallout and mass immiseration of tens of millions of people. Multiple family members of 9/11 victims, in opposition to those engaged in the suit against the Biden administration, have called for the recapitalization of the central bank in an effort to head off a humanitarian crisis initiated by the decadeslong war in Afghanistan and rendered even more dire by the seizure of bank funds. 

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When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset Joe Crowley in the summer of 2018, the political environment on the left was drastically different than today. The Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 had brought together disparate progressive forces and merged them into something resembling a political movement. That energy buoyed Ocasio-Cortez and what would become known as the Squad, and only grew stronger throughout 2019 and into the presidential race, where Sanders won the popular vote in the Iowa caucuses, finished on top in New Hampshire, and blew the other candidates out in Nevada, producing a meltdown among the party establishment and on cable news.

The party brass recovered quickly, consolidated behind Joe Biden ahead of South Carolina, came from behind on Super Tuesday, and finished Sanders off. Over the next year, the ecosystem that came together, increasingly organized around YouTube shows and podcasts, began splintering off. Some followed Tulsi Gabbard as she drifted out of the party, while others worked to build an alternative to the Democratic Party.

At the start of her career, Twitter was a place where Ocasio-Cortez could be seen to be leading an army of supporters, but often today it seems more like she’s fighting off an army of critics from the left. Others in the progressive ecosystem who still support Ocasio-Cortez complain that she isn’t invested heavily enough in building infrastructure or supporting candidates early enough for it to matter.

She responds to those criticisms and others in the second part of an interview, the first part of which was posted on Wednesday. The transcript has been lightly edited for filler words.

Ryan Grim: The party machine players that you talked about, and the big money groups, they often work really closely together. But that doesn’t seem like it’s been happening as much on the left. Like there’s a coalition of groups — [Working Families Party], Indivisible, Justice Dems, etc. — that gets behind candidates, but often the stars of the progressive world like yourself or Bernie or others don’t seem to be working as closely with them as corporate Democrats are working with corporate groups. And you guys often don’t, say, endorse a candidate until pretty close to the end of the campaign. It doesn’t seem to be the same level of teamwork as on the right wing of the party. Why is that?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, I think some of it just has to do with resources. I think the ability to do that with big money is very different than the ability to do that with not big money. But I also think that the left in this country, like we’ve just been in this — in a big way — for just a couple of years. And so I think that the left is really going through a lot of growth. And I do think that, and I hope that over time, this degree of collaboration gets even better and gets even stronger.

Because yeah, I mean, I think there’s so much work to do, but there’s fewer organizations and resources to do it on the left than there are, of course, just on the monied right wing and corporate wing, that it then falls on individual organizations to have like these huge missions, which sometimes can lead to a little bit of a dilution of focus — a lot of people arguing over what one organization should do, as opposed to the corporate wing of the party where every small priority has its own PAC, has its own organization. And so that level of granularity takes time to achieve. So, I think that there’s that, but I don’t think that it’s something that we count out on doing. And I do think that there’s examples of us being able to do that. More successfully, like on the local level. So nationally, I think things can be hard, because we don’t have as much of an insight into some other communities, races, dynamics, etc.

But locally, for example, we coordinated with the Working Families Party, and we were able to pick up 17 or so seats on the [New York] City Council. And we were able to run slates of candidates. We’ve coordinated with [Democratic Socialists of America] to elect slates of candidates, and I actually believe that — and I’m gonna get the year wrong on this — but one undertold story from yesterday is that in Astoria, we elected the first democratically socialist slate, full ballot from city to federal, for the first time, I think, since 1917. And again, I’m probably gonna get the year wrong on that, but I think it’s been over 100 years. This is the first time in American history, or the first time in 100 years in American history, that the city council person, the state assembly person, the state senator, and a member of Congress are all not capitalists.

Not only that, but they also drove and delivered a sea of statewide victory for the governor. I mean, if you look at where these votes are coming from, it is this seat of organizing that really helped contribute very strongly to a Kathy Hochul victory. Queens turnout was up very high relative to a lot of other communities and areas.

“The left of the United States, until very, very recently, is not used to power, not used to being in power, not used to wielding power.”

So, taking some of what we’re learning in our state-level work and city-level work and busting up some of these local political machines, I think if we can take some of those lessons and apply it to our national coordination that can definitely help us strengthen the progressive movement. But I do think that we’re growing, and I do think that the left is growing and maturing. I think that for a very long time, the left of the United States, until very, very recently, is not used to power, not used to being in power, not used to wielding power. And I think sometimes the immediate reaction to making gains is being suspicious of it, because then you can, after so long in the wilderness, eventually — I think sometimes people make the mistake of associating losing with virtue, and winning with a lack of virtue, like you must have done something wrong. And I think that we’re starting to shake that a little bit as a movement and learning to wield some of these wins, especially as we’ve made gains in the last two cycles.

We went from four to — then we added [Jamaal] Bowman and [Cori] Bush. We were able to help support in that cycle the ousting of [Illinois Rep. Dan] Lipinski, etc. And then on top of that, now, in this most recent cycle, we’ve added [Greg] Casar and Summer Lee. And we also have Delia Ramirez and other great candidates. So now this isn’t really a voting bloc to sniff at anymore. It’s becoming very real and big, to a level that I don’t think is being — is really appreciated how significant that is.

RG: It’s interesting because when the left was totally out of power from say, like, you know, 2015, up through the election of the Squad, that unity among kind of the national grassroots online left was really strong. That unity has really frayed; you can feel it online. What do you think brought that about? And what do you think can be done to recharge it?

AOC: Well, you know, again, I think a lot of it has to do with — It’s one thing to be united in what’s wrong, but it is a much more complicated, nuanced thing to navigate uncertainty. And so then once you have the responsibility of power, you have to make decisions on a daily basis, about what to do with it. And that takes a lot of communication and, frankly, maturity and understanding and discussion. And sometimes, the responsibility of wielding power for people requires a lot of discussion and debate, and also disagreement and how we manage disagreements.

“There needs to be a differentiation between an individual decision and a record and a pattern.”

If someone makes a mistake, it’s not the same thing as someone selling out. There needs to be a differentiation between an individual decision and a record and a pattern. And so in the initial aftermath of gaining power, having to have these conversations require a lot of growth. And it requires a lot of debate. And yeah, I mean, I think sometimes it’s very easy to turn on each other and have people turn on each other, and oftentimes mistake a disagreement with malintent or lack of character. That’s what we saw for a little bit. But I actually am also sensing a moving beyond that. Of course, much of that is still going to exist, but I actually do sense a growth in that, if you look at the growth in national DSA, for example.

These periods of growth can look messy, but actually, public debate and struggle is what allows there to be the transparency and also trust necessary in decisions. And to be able to hash out these disagreements, but then understand that despite disagreements a person may have made a decision, but it doesn’t — there’s an understanding when to draw the line between there being a difference of approach or that difference of strategy, even if it’s when you vehemently disagree with, and someone who’s just, like, not on our side. Those are two different things. And I think that there’s a greater appreciation of that.

I think that there is more movement building that’s happening. And I think that that is evident with the enormous electoral gains that progressives are making down ballot. I mean, if you look at the state Senate seats that we are picking up in places like Georgia and other areas across the country, like this is nothing to sniff at. I really do think that we’re building a bench. It’s trending in the right direction. Electorally, we are setting ourselves up for good things. But yeah, I think online discourse is — we can grow up like we can. And I don’t mean that in an accusatorial way. But I think that we can become more sophisticated. I think that we are becoming more sophisticated, but it definitely takes growing pains.

RG: And when you say “we,” are you including yourself in that too? When you look back, are there any things that you think your critics got right? If I were trying to pinpoint one, I’d say, the Amazon warehouse fight that was being waged where they were trying to get a whole bunch of support and didn’t. If you had to do that over again — or are there any things that you would have done differently if you could do them over again, to try to rebuild that communication, trust?

AOC: The thing is, it’s really about intra-left relationship, right? So if you look at that incident, now we’re all good. You know what I’m saying? That relationship, we’re cool. We dove in, and it wasn’t just about showing up at a press conference. We have offered infrastructure support.

But there really is a difference between asking one person to be there for every single thing, and then when they can’t make it for one thing, like, “Oh, it must be because they abandoned all principle.” There’s a difference between that and just like, “Hey, OK, we missed it on this one because there were literally 800 other things” — other fights that people were asking us to take up. And you know what? We showed up, and we’re back together again. And the discourse of that moment is so out of step with the reality of what played out, because we’ve continued to support and do everything we can to make sure that we’re up on that. And we’re good now.

I think there’s a temptation — and we have to be aware of the role that even algorithms play in this, right? YouTube, Twitter, all of it is designed to make us fight with each other; like, that is rewarded algorithmically. And so I think with the awareness of that — and it’s not to say that we shouldn’t [fight] ever — we’re better with sound criticism. But I think we really need to be grounded in strong citation and not just incitement of emotion. Like, let’s talk about having really thorough arguments to make each other better. That’s what political struggle is all about. And engaging in that with one another as a movement.

The post AOC Responds to Critics: “If Someone Makes a Mistake, It’s Not the Same Thing as Someone Selling Out” appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

On Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for the head of the New York State Democratic Party to resign in the wake of the catastrophic performance by Democrats in the state in the midterms — an underperformance so stark that it may make the difference in control of the House of Representatives, and by extension the party’s ability to enact its legislative agenda.

Following President Joe Biden’s press conference Wednesday afternoon, Ocasio-Cortez spoke with The Intercept to elaborate on her critique of the state party and discuss the role of abortion and the youth vote in the midterms, Ukraine, and the political distinction between unemployment and inflation. 

An unedited (except for ums and such) transcript of part one of the Q&A is below. Part two, on the evolution of the left and her relationship to it, will follow.

Ryan Grim: What did you make of Biden’s press conference?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, I mean, I was able to catch the beginning of it, I think most of it. But I think it was smart for him to come out right away and to really continue and formalize what was already emerging as the narrative, which is that this was, despite Republicans potentially taking back the House by a very slim margin, to really cement this as a Democratic victory and not a Republican one. I think it was smart to do that. And I think it was quite notable that he mentioned young people and the climate crisis and youth turnout. I think it was just a smart thing to do in order to frame overall, some of what we saw.

RG: Because of that big polling miss, it makes it easier for him to do that. But I’m curious if you think Democrats could have done better. What could they have done differently to make it an even better night?

AOC: Well, I mean, New York, I think, is the glaring aberration in what we see in this map. I have a front row seat to what was going on here so I think it’s natural for me to gravitate towards that. But I think even nationally, what happened in New York really bucks a lot of the trends in what we saw nationwide, I think that a lot of these races were much more uphill than what we saw in other places. I think, in New York, the way that those campaigns were run were different than the way a lot of winning campaigns across the country were run. And I think the role of the state party had very strong national implications. If Democrats do not hang on to the House, I think that responsibility falls squarely in New York State. And so I think we definitely could have done better there. And I think that that’s kind of like the glaring hole in where we did not perform as strongly as other areas in the map did.

RG: What were those key differences, you think between the way they were run in New York and elsewhere?

AOC: I think policing was a big one, I think the choice among certain Democrats to validate Republican narratives and amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it — validating these narratives actually ended up hurting them. Much more than a different approach. I think that what we saw in other races was that they were able to really effectively center either their narratives and the narratives that they wanted to run with, whether it was abortion rights, whether it was democracy, whether it was, you know, other key and top priorities. I think Democrats in New York, they did a couple of things. They ran ads around that were explicitly very anti-defund, which only served to re-invoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying. If we’re going to talk about public safety, you don’t talk about it in the frame of invoking defund or anti-defund, you really talk about it in the frame of what we’ve done on gun violence? What we’ve done to pass the first gun reform bill in 30 years. That’s actually–our alternatives are actually effective, electorally, without having to lean into Republican narratives. So I think that was one prime mistake. And I think another prime mistake is that in New York State, I think that–Cuomo may be gone, but his entire infrastructure, much of his infrastructure, and much of the political machinery that he put in place is still there. And this is a machinery that is disorganized, it is sycophantic. It relies on lobbyists and big money. And it really undercuts the ability for there to be affirming grassroots and state level organizing across the state. And so when that languishes and there’s very little organizing happening, yeah, I mean, basically, you’re leaving a void for Republicans to walk into. And so I actually think a lot of these Republican games aren’t necessarily as strong as they may seem, I think it’s really from an absence. And it’s a testament to the corruption that has been allowed to continue in the New York State Democratic Party. And I mean, we saw that with India Walton, we saw loud and clear there were a lot of canaries in the coal mine from the state ballot initiative. I mean, Jay Jacobs [the New York State Democratic Committee chair] — Republicans put millions of dollars into defeating the redistricting ballot measure last year that would have protected the map, that would have put us ahead. And so I really believe that we would have won Democratic seats, potentially gained Democratic seats in New York State, but Republicans put millions of dollars against this ballot measure, they organized against it, and the New York State Democratic Party didn’t drop $1 in making sure that we got this thing passed. And this was in an off year election, this was in 2021. We could have done this. And the fact that that happened, and there still was no implication for the state [party], and for state party leadership, I mean, a lot of this was really about these calcified political machines being asleep at the wheel, and there being a complete lack of desire to hold any of it accountable.

RG: And you called for Jay Jacobs to resign. What leverage do you and other progressives in the state have to make that happen? Is there anything being done organizationally to push that? What kind of structure would you see replacing the structure of the former Cuomo folks?

AOC: Well, I think, right now, the New York State Democratic Party, the way that it is currently structured, is very reliant on the governor. And I think that between Cuomo resigning late last year, Hochul then very unexpectedly taking the gubernatorial seat, then immediately dealing with a natural disaster, having to contend with a potential primary and then a general, I don’t really think that there’s been as much breathing room to address that issue in that whole environment. But it’s very clear that the New York state Democratic Party has been — was designed under Cuomo to be very reliant on the governor’s seat, the governor very much determines who the state party chair is, etc. And I think that, given how progressives really organized and helped deliver that margin, I think that there very much is room for a conversation to be held here about how we can restructure how the party is selected and established in perhaps a more decentralized way, or perhaps in a more democratic way, that is more representative of communities and more encouraging of engagement across the state — and less meddling to be frank. And so, you know, because these little cuts really do build up, whether it was the failure on the ballot initiative, whether it was the refusal to recognize and respect when progressive candidates do win democratic nominations outright that the party doesn’t work against its own nominees, which is what happened at Buffalo, or, you know, I can say, I’ve been in Congress for four years, I have never had a conversation with the New York state Democratic Party chair ever. And in fact, he’s done nothing but attack progressive Democrats all across the state. And so what he has done is created an environment where the only quote unquote, or the main quote unquote, legitimate Democratic candidates worthy of support are those who fight both progressives and Republicans, which is clearly not a winning strategy, especially not in the state of New York. And so when he has invested so much energy into demoralizing the grassroots and making sure that a lot of this grassroots energy gets busted up all across the state, of course, we’re going to see these margins swing towards Republicans. And so I think there really is something to be said here about a change in leadership and a change in structure of the state party, because this was really — I mean, when, in 2018, when Cuomo was running against Cynthia Nixon, the state convention, first of all, didn’t even invite really any progressives that were there, even after my I won my primary. But beyond that, it voted to endorse Cuomo by a margin of something like 97%, which is nowhere near what the primary was, it was like a banana republic. And so it really just solely exists to just reaffirm the image of the governor, as opposed to actually investing in infrastructure that promotes democratic organizing. A lot of it is also driven by big money. And both the real estate and charter lobbies invest very heavily and have an enormous amount of influence in terms of what candidates get Democratic support in the state and which ones don’t. But I think that even if there’s no movement on the state party, I think their neglect has created enough space for there to be alternative structures to pop up. And some already have, like, if you look at NYPAN, the New York Progressive Action Network, they were kind of an offshoot of the Our Revolution chapters that cropped up all across New York state, but they’ve actually retained their infrastructure, and they’ve continue to remain active across the state. And that is very much a I think that NYPAN’s organizing is very ripe to fill the role that the state Democratic Party has left vacant if we don’t reform it in a more serious way.

RG: And one of the key players in that kind of real estate/charter-school/state-party apparatus that you talked about, is [House Democratic Caucus Chair] Hakeem Jeffries. Do you think that there ought to be a reckoning for what his role is in this? It looks like he’s going to make a bid for party leader if Pelosi steps down. What do you think the repercussions are of how New York played out for that?

AOC: Well, you know, I think what we should really do is  — I think there are quite a few figures who really affirmed and really pushed this playbook. And it’s not even just this year. I think there has been a multi-year strategy to try — it’s essentially been a campaign within the Democratic Party — to try to undermine progressive politics and try to mischaracterize it as toxic. And I think a continued insistence on that is going to hurt the party. Because I think one of the big things that we learned last night is that not only is it not true, but that candidates who refuse to overcompensate and overly tack right, were actually rewarded for sticking to their values, and while doing their best to represent their communities. And so I personally do think that there should be a political cost to being heavily backed by big money. That, to me is just a primary concern. And regardless of who it is in this discussion about generational change in the Democratic Party, I think we also need to be looking at donor bases. And we shouldn’t be shifting in a direction where the party or our party leadership becomes even more dependent on large donors and corporate backers, not less dependent, especially in a time when more Democrats are being elected independent of that and where the infrastructure for small dollar fundraising has only grown and become more vibrant. So I do hope that there really is reflection on some of the strategies that went awry in New York, and how that was different from other places in the country. And I do hope that there is a reflection on being outwardly antagonistic towards a very enthused progressive base, especially one in which young people delivered these wins. If you look at the difference between Tim Ryan and John Fetterman, as races, some of the preliminary data is suggesting that they had the same turnout in almost every demographic except young people. And as we know, young people skew way progressive within the party. And so when you outwardly antagonize, and outwardly seek to belittle and distance oneself from progressive values, you demoralize your base. And so, you know, I think there’s gonna be a lot more of that analysis as more data rolls in. But it’s not to say that everybody has to be holding the same line on progressive causes dependent on their community. But it doesn’t — I do think that this is a signal that being outwardly antagonistic, including trying to defeat progressive candidates, trying to demoralize those bases, is not healthy for the prospect of democratic gains.

RG: The election did offer a clear mandate for abortion rights, not just the House and Senate races, but in every state it was on the ballot. Yeah, Kentucky, Montana, Michigan, California, Vermont, the pro choice side one. So what do you think Democrats can do with that mandate? You know, just saying like, vote again and vote harder in 2024 can’t really be all there is. What should Biden do? What should Congress do with this new mandate?

AOC: Depending on how slim this margin is, if Democrats are somehow able to eke this out with a one or two seat — a similar margin that we’ve had, I think we need to go all out, we need to codify Roe v. Wade. If we’re able to pick up our Senate margin, then we deliver on the things that we weren’t able to deliver before. I think we try again on a $15 minimum wage. I think we codify Roe v. Wade, I think we go for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, I think we go all out on the litany of legislation that was stalled by Manchin and Sinema. And I think it’s a very unique opportunity for us to do that in a very big way. Now, if the Republican caucus, it ekes this out with a very narrow margin, which some folks are saying may be the case. If that is the case, I think we take advantage of the disorganization of the Republican caucus. I do not believe that Kevin McCarthy is a strong leader whatsoever. And I think we inflict a lot of pain on this. And either it becomes enough of a liability with them, that they have to let something through because they’re just getting killed on this issue, or they lose in two years. But on top of that, I also think that this, the results of tonight or last night do give Biden actually a bit of a strengthened mandate, in that I believe that the message from the electorate was very clear. And I think that over the last two years, there has been a lot of self doubt about how far to go. And I think we learned an economic lesson, which is that full employment is politically stronger than inflation, as opposed to when we were in the situation under Obama, where they tried the other tack and unemployment was punished much more severely. And so I think we learned that economic message on employment. I think we learned [the value of] a very strong message on abortion. And whether that means Biden leaning into his pen a little bit more on executive orders and other tools at his disposal, I think that that’s going to be very important, including the bully pulpit. And I also think that there was very strong implications around public safety that like once and for all after two years of the party insulting criminal justice organizers, accusing them of sloganeering, of trying to out conservative the conservatives on this issue. I actually do believe that there was a very clear message here that the American electorate understands that the conversation about public safety extends beyond policing. And that it also includes many other issues as well. Because it’s like what we say back home. We were able to communicate to our electorate, you know, are we here to talk about police? Or are we here to talk about bringing down crime? Because those are two different conversations. And I actually think that that’s starting to sink in for people more that this is not about rejecting safety. But this is about actually solving the problem, and using evidence based approaches to tackle this problem. And so I don’t think we run away from these things anymore, and I don’t think we run away against healthcare writ large. I think, depending on what happens with the House, if we have the opportunity, we also need to strike the Hyde Amendment, as well. And I think that that’s going to be increasingly important. And if we retain the Senate, and even if the House goes towards Republicans, given the very narrow margin of Republican victories, they too, are also going to have to negotiate, they too are also going to have to compromise. And I think that they are in a much weaker position as a party, which means they have more to concede, not us. And we can stand in that in that confidence, in that power a little bit more.

RG: Picking up on that point a bit more, when you’re talking about inflicting pain on McCarthy, or on the Republicans. Are you thinking discharge petition on Roe? Because like, you’ll probably have at least 210 members?

AOC: Yeah, I think discharge petition is an excellent vehicle. I do think that using rules is going to be quite important. I think, yeah, I think I think using rules is going to be quite important and I know that that’s going to be subject to negotiation within the Republican caucus as well. This is something that they’ve already started to use as a lever. And so part of me doesn’t want to — I want to make sure that we’re navigating this carefully. Because, like, motions to recommit, once one party kind of messes with it, it could create a precedent. And so I would be concerned if they did something like try to blow up the process of discharge petitions, because it’s such an essential part of our of our procedures. And they use them as well. They use discharge petitions as well, they’re not always successful, but it is a mechanism.

RG: Speaking of discharge petitions, on the stock trading ban, you had pushed a discharge petition, and then withdrew it after Pelosi promised to bring that to the floor. I’m sure you saw Elaine Luria last, looks like Cindy Axne is trailing, both of them were kind of like public defenders of congressional stock trading and just got hammered for it during their campaigns. Do you think it was a mistake to withdraw that and where is that fight now?

AOC: I’m trying to remember when this happened, I believe it was early summer when this happened. And so when I filed the discharge petition, for me, I felt like it was important to file it because it felt clear to me that leadership was trying to, or it just felt clear to me that there was just a lot of slow walking around this. And I felt like there was just kind of a hope that this was just gonna try to disappear into the background. And I just filed my discharge petition in an attempt to get this thing going again. And as far as that happened, it was successful, we were able to get leadership to move on this. And I think that there were some of these negotiations that were happening in good faith and not only when we filed the discharge petition, because the thing is, that petition was filed for my bill with [Joe] Neguse and [Raja] Krishnamoorthi. But we do have a broader coalition of people who support the concept in general, but there are many different kinds of proposals that are out there. And so I had concerns that it wouldn’t be successful without the other folks in that coalition on board. Because we really needed like everybody to sign this thing in order for us to get to this vote. And so I think that just what the discharge petition was successful in was was getting leadership to take this seriously, get momentum for it, but I also think that it was helpful in bringing this coalition together. We were able to do that press conference, but not only that, we were also able to come together and really start negotiating much more seriously on what a piece of compromise legislation among all of us with different proposals looks like. And when we actually came to that, when we actually came to that in early fall, that was when leadership announced their bill, frankly, without consultation with anybody in that coalition. And that was very shortly before we recessed it, it was just like a week or two before we recessed. So, you know, whether it was a mistake or not to withdraw it? I’m not sure. I think there were definitely some positives to it. And I certainly reserve my right to do it again. Because I do think there’s a point where we are running out the clock here, and we need to get this thing done. It will not happen under a Republican Congress, that’s for sure.

RG: And Democrats also hammered progressives for that CPC letter encouraging the pursuit of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, you know, saying that like doing it, right before the election would end up hurting Democrats. That letter, as you know, that was retracted. You never commented on that, on whether you still stood by it. And you and other progressives have been criticized for not laying out your thinking on kind of what the progressive position ought to be when it comes to this war. I don’t know if you saw this, but Russia just announced its withdrawing from Kherson, which is a massive defeat for them. But so why hasn’t there been more of a progressive voice on the debate over war funding? And what’s your thinking on what the U.S. approach should be now?

AOC: Well, to be clear, both the decision to publish that letter at that time and withdraw that letter at that time, were decisions that we were not made privy to. But in terms of the content of the letter — like timing aside, in terms of the content of the letter, I believe that a lot of it is quite consistent with what we’ve also been hearing from former Obama administration officials, the Biden administration and now even recently, there have also been I believe, some developments coming out of Ukraine, indicating an openness to negotiate under certain preconditions. And I believe that progressives have always advocated to leaning on diplomatic solutions, we should continue to lean on that. I just, I think that the large asterisk is, is will Russia, is Russia, how can we bring Russia to the table without compromising Ukrainian sovereignty and just core principles of self determination, but that is really what the landscape of diplomacy is about. And even when Obama was on PodSave America several weeks ago, he discussed about how, at this present time, diplomatic relations are likely worse than they may have been almost at any point during the Cold War, which is a very dangerous place to be. And so the reaction to the publication of this letter I think continues to be a bit overblown. And I think that there’s almost a — it’s almost like people are looking for a problem, where there really I don’t think is any intent for there to be one. And I also think that it’s quite consistent with what we’ve been hearing from, frankly, the Biden administration, former Obama administration officials and even certain Ukrainian officials. And now when it comes to that recent development on Russia, I do believe that there’s some skepticism that we’re hearing from Ukrainian officials about whether that is — the genuineness or authenticity of good faith that that announcement was made, but you know, I think that’s something that that we will soon see play out.

RG: Back on that point about making some pain for Republicans on abortion rights, if you do end up losing those seats in New York, probably a lot of them are going to be uncomfortable with the Republican position and politically vulnerable around it. Yet they do feel pretty confident saying that they’re against WHPA [the Women’s Health  Protection Act] — because they caricature it as, you know, you’re killing babies right before birth. But WHPA does go beyond codifying Roe v. Wade, so where do you come down on the question of trying to get get the codification of Roe into law versus holding out for the kind of maximalist WHPA legislation?

AOC: Well, you know, I think when it comes to something like WHPA, I think that a lot of this is just about messaging, right. And so, Roe, I think in public imagination, I believe that what Roe really stands for and what people really see as Roe is, is a woman or person’s ability to have bodily autonomy and make these decisions between them and their doctor. And Republicans where they tried to go in against WHPA is by trying to slice and dice and make these questions about 15 weeks or 20 weeks or 30 weeks. And I think for a very long time, people have kind of run away from that fight. I don’t think that we need to litigate number of weeks. I think, if anything in the aftermath of Roe, there have been an enormous amount of conversations about the enormous amount of circumstances in which this is not applying to this kind of myth of third trimester elective abortions where like, there’s nothing else that’s wrong. And I you know, I think that when we try to, like really bring this down and campaign on WHPA, I think we do ourselves a disservice. I think we can remain focused on the overall principle here, which is, people should be able to make these decisions between themselves and their doctor. And there are — I mean, I know people who have been in situations where they are, they are in like late second, sometimes even early third trimester and horrifying. complications arise. And the procedure to save the mother’s life is known as an abortion even though the fetus was not viable. And so, you know, I think especially in places like Westchester County, we can make this an issue, we just need to actually make it an issue. And we need real organizing happening in communities like these, but I don’t think we need – I don’t think we’re at the place of concession on that. Because I just don’t think that we’ve tried, I don’t think we’ve exhausted our options here by any means.

RG: And any thoughts of anybody in the progressive wing running for leadership?

AOC: I don’t know because there’s still a lot of question marks that I don’t know what a lot of these leadership races may look like. I still think that there’s questions about what’s even going to happen in terms of transitions. Like, I don’t think that any of that has really been made clear yet. That may also be a result of the fact that we don’t know what the final tally is, I think there are going to be different considerations where if we end up eking this thing out with a one or two seat majority, not too dissimilar from the three or four seat majority that we had dealt with, I think people are going to prioritize different characteristics and leadership. I think that the value and the ability to hold this caucus together and organize it, that’s a Herculean feat, for us to be able to pass the legislation that we did with the margins that we had, it’s really quite unbelievable. And so if we are in the majority again, with that very small margin, I think there’s going to be a focus on making sure that we have someone that can really retain that ability. But if we’re the minority, I think people may prioritize different kinds of skill sets to navigating being an opposition party in the minority, and so I’m not too sure yet, I think all these races being called are going to have an impact on what direction people go in, and whether they decide to run for things or not as well.

The post AOC: The New York State Democratic Party’s Corruption May Have Cost Democrats the House appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The Democratic mantra headed into Election Day was that two things were on the ballot: democracy and abortion rights. In a stunning rebuke to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, voters turned out en masse to stun pundits, delivering a mandate to Democrats to codify abortion rights into law.

Republicans had hoped that inflation would produce a red-wave rejection of Democrats, and the media talked of little else in the run-up to the election. But the economy has continued adding jobs, with real wages at the bottom rising for the first time in generations, even as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell tightens monetary policy. Paying more for groceries and at the pump is a painful squeeze, but being unable to find a job can destroy your life. It may be that voters’ recent memory of the Great Recession undercut the potency of the former as a weapon for Democrats.

For Democrats, according to exit polls, abortion was the top concern. Of the 27 percent of all voters who prioritized the issue, Democrats carried them 3-1.

Where abortion rights were literally on the ballot, they won there too. Kansas voters had already stood up for abortion rights in August, and were joined Tuesday by voters in not just California and Vermont, but in Michigan and Kentucky, as well. The message was clear, and showed up in exit polls too, as voters said that a key driver of their vote was the fight over the right to choose.

But the question of democracy is a different matter: If Democrats eke out a House win, they have an even more clear mandate. If Republicans capture control of the House of Representatives, they would render it impossible for the next Congress to act on the will of voters when it comes to abortion rights. 

But that next Congress wouldn’t begin until January, leaving a lame duck session in between, in which newly empowered Democrats hold a majority in both chambers. Forty-eight Democrats have expressed support for a change in Senate rules that would allow a majority of senators to enact legislation codifying Roe v. Wade. Only Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, of West Virginia and Arizona, respectfully, remain holdouts.

Sinema claims to oppose the move in support of abortion rights, warning that changing the rules would make abortion too easy to ban for Republicans. That may have made sense years ago, but it’s absurd today, with Democrats staring down the prospect of not holding a legislative majority again anytime soon. Manchin’s opposition is more institutional, but the results of the election ought to put pressure on the West Virginia senator, who is a supporter of abortion rights, to rethink his position. In Pennsylvania, the one state that has been called as a flip so far, the mandate was only expanded, as voters chose Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who embraced abortion rights and has promised to reform the filibuster to allow for democracy to work in the Senate.

If Democrats, given this new mandate, don’t even try to enact the will of the voters into law during the lame duck, their future protestations that democracy is on the ballot will ring hollow. Were abortion rights and democracy on the ballot, or not?

The post The Midterms Handed Democrats in Congress a Mandate to Codify Abortion Rights appeared first on The Intercept.

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On Monday morning, 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to the White House that attempted to gingerly open a conversation about a potential diplomatic end to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The door was slammed shut by the evening, met with enough fury to elicit a “clarification” in the form of a statement from caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal.

“Let me be clear,” Jayapal said in a statement issued just before 7 p.m., “We are united as Democrats in our unequivocal commitment to supporting Ukraine in their fight for their democracy and freedom in the face of the illegal and outrageous Russian invasion, and nothing in the letter advocates for a change in that support.”

Statement from @RepJayapal reaffirming support for Ukraine and clarifying the position of a letter to President Biden ?? pic.twitter.com/ddcoyHu94H

— Progressive Caucus (@USProgressives) October 24, 2022

That morning, the Washington Post reported, CPC members were “urging President [Joe] Biden to dramatically shift his strategy on the Ukraine war and pursue direct negotiations with Russia, the first time prominent members of his own party have pushed him to change his approach to Ukraine.” Such diplomacy could ultimately end with Russia gaining territory by force, even as it is faltering on the battlefield.

That the letter was met with fierce opposition is a measure of the space available for debate among congressional Democrats when it comes to support for the war and how it might be stopped before it turns nuclear: roughly zero.

“I have voted for every defense package to Ukraine and stand firmly for Ukraine’s sovereignty,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a letter signer, told The Intercept. “It should not be controversial to say we need to explore every diplomatic avenue to seek a just peace and to end the war, including the engagement of our allies to help with that.”

The CPC letter took every pain to account for the argument against U.S. negotiations with Russia over the war — the most common being that Ukraine is the one at war, therefore only Ukraine can open the door to diplomacy. “We agree with the Administration’s perspective that it is not America’s place to pressure Ukraine’s government regarding sovereign decisions, and with the principle you have enunciated that there should be ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,’” the letter read.

“The shrill response to this utterly moderate letter exposes that war proponents are scared of an open debate.”

“We are under no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in engaging Russia given its outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine and its decision to make additional illegal annexations of Ukrainian territory. However, if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.”

It added that any ultimate framework would need to be approved by all parties, “particularly Ukrainians.”

“The alternative to diplomacy is protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks,” the letter read. It had been endorsed by the nonprofit groups Campaign For Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security; Just Foreign Policy; Friends Committee on National Legislation; MoveOn; Peace Action; Physicians for Social Responsibility; the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; and Win Without War.

Late on Monday, Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., also issued a clarifying statement. “Only Ukrainians have a right to determine the terms by which this war ends,” he said.

My statement regarding my continued support for President Biden’s policies towards Ukraine: pic.twitter.com/P5kHbjVJ1X

— Mark Takano (@RepMarkTakano) October 25, 2022

That notion that Ukraine is fully guiding the policy is undermined by NATO’s intervention against peace talks last spring. And the idea that only Ukraine has an interest in the war ignores not just the fact of U.S. funding for it, but also the obvious point that global nuclear war — or any global war —  is a concern not just for Russia and Ukraine. That reality was referenced in the initial statement accompanying the letter. “As the risk of nuclear war increases, fighting in Ukraine escalates, and global economic insecurity deepens, 30 members of Congress urged President Biden to pursue direct diplomacy for a negotiated settlement to end Russia’s war in Ukraine,” the press release read.

But the constraints of the debate have made discussing what it could take to stop it off-limits. “Diplomacy is an important tool that can save lives — but it is just one tool,” Jayapal’s “clarification” read. “As we also made explicitly clear in our letter and will continue to make clear, we support President Biden and his administration’s commitment to nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., was among those to criticize the letter obliquely, writing on Twitter, “There is moral and strategic peril in sitting down with Putin too early. It risks legitimizing his crimes and handing over parts of Ukraine to Russia in an agreement that Putin won’t even honor.”

The letter also ran into an electoral buzzsaw. House Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., recently told Punchbowl News that with Republicans in charge, Ukraine policy could change. “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he said. Democrats have pounded McCarthy for the suggestion.

Others came at it directly.

DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas deployed a rhetorical device increasingly used to build guardrails around debate: If you’re not fully supportive of the party position, you are effectively aligned with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “These 30 House progressives are now making common cause with Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, JD Vance, and the rest of the MAGA crowd. You’d think that would give them *some* pause,” Moulitsas wrote on Twitter. “Which Ukrainians do these ‘progressives’ want abandoned to mass murder and rape, in their attempt to prop up a flailing Russia? The only way to end this war is to help deliver a decisive Ukrainians victory.”

This, by @RepRashida, @RepRoKhanna and other progressives is unbelievably naive and stupid, asking for “diplomacy” with a murderous terrorist regime literally raping and pillaging through Ukraine. Biden tried diplomacy to prevent the war. Only overwhelming force will now end it https://t.co/Nm1Yrp35B6

— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) October 24, 2022

Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, which endorsed the letter, cast the extreme opposition to it as a sign of the fragility of the anti-diplomacy consensus. “The shrill response to this utterly moderate letter exposes that war proponents are scared of an open debate about the range of potential approaches to address this escalating conflict,” Sperling said. “As happened with the war in Iraq and many others throughout human history, war proponents attempt to silence debate in large part because they aren’t confident in their arguments and are afraid that pro-diplomacy views will appeal to average Americans. With polls already showing growing opposition to U.S. military involvement in Ukraine, increasing concern from progressives will only make it harder for war proponents to cast conventional pro-diplomacy views as ‘far-right’ or ‘pro-Putin.’”

Meanwhile, Biden himself has said repeatedly that only negotiations can ultimately end the conflict, as the letter noted — and that nuclear war is more imminent now than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. “We urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire,” the letter offered. “This is consistent with your recognition that ‘there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here,’ and your concern that Vladimir Putin ‘doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.’”

Among congressional Democrats, however, the process of figuring that out is apparently not allowed to include discussion of how to get to a negotiated settlement.

The post House Progressives Float Diplomatic Path Toward Ending War in Ukraine, Get Annihilated, Quickly “Clarify” appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

As Maram Al-Dada, a 34-year-old aviation engineer in Orlando, Florida, prepared to speak at a rally in May 2021, he couldn’t help but think of his family. One particular moment from his childhood in Gaza was seared into his memory. His grandmother would often walk him as a boy to the border fence and point to the property on the other side that had been the family’s home until 1967, when the community was evacuated amid the Six-Day War. On the seventh day, the family hadn’t been allowed to return, but his grandparents would sneak out at night to tend to their crops, making sure things would be in good shape for the family when they eventually did make it back. They’d be shot at by Israeli troops and sneak back. But soon the fencing went up, leaving only the pointing to be done.

Then one day in the early 1990s, about 25 years after the family had been forced from their home, a lighter-skinned man speaking broken Arabic came to their southern Gaza village of Bani Suheila looking for Al-Dada’s grandmother. His grandparents still held the deed — or the paper, at least — but the man was now living on their property. Al-Dada still doesn’t understand why the man came to see his grandmother, or what he wanted, but vividly remembers an intensely demeaning experience.

Now there was more fighting, and Al-Dada and his fellow Floridians — he’d moved to the Sunshine State in 2011 — were there to protest Israeli evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, and airstrikes on the Gaza strip during Ramadan, 2021. They were the latest violent attacks in what had become known as the Gaza War.

Al-Dada hadn’t been back in years. In 2008, as his grandfather was dying, he tried to visit through the border with Egypt but was denied. A crossing from Israel for a Palestinian is effectively impossible, given travel restrictions that apply only to Palestinians. His grandfather died, a follow-up attempt to gain humanitarian entrance for the funeral was rejected, and he hasn’t been to Gaza since.

Al-Dada saw those at the rally as another type of family. After he’d gotten to the U.S., he joined the Florida Palestine Network, a thriving grassroots organization that included many Palestinian emigrés and non-Palestinian kindred spirits. One of the most active young men in that group stood next to Al-Dada: Maxwell Alejandro Frost, who, for all appearances, was a true believer in the cause. “Free, free Palestine!” he and Al-Dada chanted as they both got ready to address the crowd. “‘Y’all are gonna hear me say this over and over again,” Frost told those gathered when it was his turn to speak. “We have to demand — not ask — we have to demand that our leaders see the world through the eyes of the most vulnerable and use that vision to make every goddamn decision they ever make.”

Maxwell Frost speaking at a Gaza War rally in May 2011. The appearance drew the attention of AIPAC and DMFI. pic.twitter.com/WsOHCCQXFd

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) October 16, 2022

Following the rally, Frost, 24, posted a photo on Instagram, with the caption, “Orlando is in solidarity with all facing oppression across the globe. From Palestine to Colombia, we denounce it all.” He added a thank you to his friend, Rasha Mubarak, another Palestinian American, for leading the organizing of the rally. “Much love!” The most committed activists were all part of a group chat, where several dozen of them, including Mubarak, Al-Dada, and Frost, all celebrated the successful event.

It was also the start of something bigger. In the weeks leading up to the rally, rumors had swirled around Orlando political circles that Val Demings, the local congresswoman and former sheriff, was being courted by party leaders in Washington to run for Senate and would soon take the plunge. Frost reached out to Mubarak, who he had met amid the street protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and asked her to be part of his kitchen cabinet, an informal circle of advisers who make up the early infrastructure of a campaign. “Rasha connected me with a few different politicos, people here in Florida, and stuff like that. And then she was a member of the kitchen cabinet,” Frost said.

Mubarak laid out his path to victory. “We need to run a really progressive race that’s people-centered and inclusive of Palestinian human rights. Understanding that this is a Black seat and that many of the other establishment Democratic candidates will split the vote,” she said. Frost is Afro-Latino so they thought he would have a shot, even if he wasn’t a shoo-in. “If he’s willing to be the progressive, bold candidate, people are gonna believe in that. And he’s gonna bring out a different base.”

Just being the “first Gen Z candidate” for Congress wouldn’t be enough. “Being the first is historic, but changing history via policy is entirely different. Being the first Gen Z is only surface-level and what we need as his residents are deeper: a congressional leader in the state of Florida that aligns with the notion that everyone deserves to move with freedom, experience liberation, and live equitable lives. A congressional leader that did not leave any community behind. We do not have that in Florida,” she said.

A week after the rally, Demings made it official. Mubarak began connecting Frost with donors around the country and activist groups in the district. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Central Florida, Mubarak’s Palestinian family hailed largely from the West Bank and Jerusalem. A national political consultant and organizer, she’d become a prominent figure in Orlando politics. Frost also brought on Rania Batrice, progressive Palestinian American consultant, to do his media strategy. Word spread that Frost, an anti-gun violence advocate connected to the Parkland survivors, was the genuine progressive in what was, as hoped for, becoming a crowded field. In August 2021, he officially launched his campaign.

While bombs were raining down on Gaza that May, another air war was playing out in Cleveland, Ohio, that would not just profoundly reshape the Orlando election but bend the arc of the Democratic Party in a new direction.

In a special election to replace Rep. Marcia Fudge in the House after Fudge was named Housing and Urban Development secretary, Nina Turner, a former state senator and surrogate for both of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, was polling some 30 points ahead of the field. Amid the Gaza War, she retweeted a Jewish advocacy group, IfNotNow, that is the bane of right-wing “pro-Israel” groups.

Solidarity is a verb ?? https://t.co/Kupgdtuqey

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) May 12, 2021

Jewish Insider flagged the post in an article, noting the divergence on the issue between Turner and her leading opponent, Cuyahoga County Chair Shontel Brown. “Advocacy groups such as Pro-Israel America and Democratic Majority for Israel,” reported Jewish Insider, “have also thrown their support behind Brown, who has had to contend with Turner’s substantial warchest with less than three months remaining until the August 3 primary, according to the latest filings from the Federal Election Commission.” Brown would not have to contend with that disadvantage for long.

Two groups — Democratic Majority For Israel, or DMFI, and Mainstream Democrats PAC — began spending millions pummeling Turner on the airwaves. The two were effectively the same organization, operating out of the same office and employing the same consultants, though Mainstream Democrats claims a broader mission. Strategic and targeting decisions for both were made by pollster Mark Mellman, according to Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic operative and Silicon Valley executive who serves as the political adviser to LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, who funds the Mainstream Democrats PAC. DMFI has also funneled at least $500,000 to Mainstream Democrats PAC.

“Our money is going to the Mainstream Democrat coalition, which we trust to identify the candidates who are most likely to convey to Americans broadly, an image of Democrats that is then electable,” Mehlhorn told me earlier this year, saying he relies on the consultants linked to DMFI to make those choices. “I trust them. I think Brian Goldsmith, Mark Mellman, they tend to know that stuff.”

DMFI, Mainstream Democrats PAC, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have spent so much money that the question of Israel-Palestine now dominates Democratic primaries.

While DMFI is ostensibly organized around the politics of Israel, in practice, it has become a weapon wielded by the party’s centrist faction against its progressive wing. In fact, DMFI, Mainstream Democrats PAC, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have spent so much money that the question of Israel-Palestine now dominates Democratic primaries.

Across the country, progressive candidates who a cycle earlier had been loudly vying for national attention with bold ideas to attract small donors were instead keeping their heads down, hoping to stay under the radar of DMFI and AIPAC.

When Justice Democrats, in the wake of Sanders’s first presidential campaign, began its effort to pull the party to the left by competing in Democratic primaries, the issue of Israel-Palestine was not central to its strategy. But its candidates tended to be progressive across the board, rather than what had previously been the standard, known as PEP, for “progressive except for Palestine.” The insurgency inside the Democratic Party has since produced a counter-insurgency, funded heavily by hedge fund executives, private equity barons, professional sports team owners, and other billionaires and multimillionaires, many of them organized under a “pro-Israel” banner.

“It’s been a radical transformation in the politics of Israel-Palestine and the politics of Democratic primaries,” said Logan Bayroff, director of communications for J Street, which describes itself as a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization. This cycle, Bayroff helped run J Street Action Fund, an outside spending group designed specifically to counter the influence of DMFI and AIPAC. It spent less than 10 percent the amount its rivals were able to put in the field.

Mehlhorn was explicit about his purpose. “Nina Turner’s district is a classic case study where the vast majority of voters in that district are Marcia Fudge voters, they’re pretty happy with the Democratic Party. And Nina Turner’s record on the Democratic Party is [that] she’s a strong critic,” he said. “And so this group put in money to make sure that voters knew what she felt about the Democratic Party. And from my perspective, that just makes it easier for me to try to do things like give Tim Ryan a chance of winning [a Senate seat] in a state like Ohio — not a big chance, but at least a chance. And he’s not having to deal with the latest bomb thrown by Nina. So anyway, that’s the theory behind our support for Mainstream Democrats.”

Mellman, in an interview with HuffPost, acknowledged that his goals extended beyond the politics of Israel and Palestine. “The anti-Biden folks and the anti-Israel folks look to her as a leader,” Mellman said. “So she really is a threat to both of our goals.”

Turner said she was told she had to distance herself from members of the Squad, particularly Muslim Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, or face an onslaught. “I was told by a prominent Jewish businessman that ‘We’re coming at you with everything we got, you need to disavow the Squad,’” Turner said, and “if I didn’t do it, they were coming for me. And that also the Palestinian community didn’t have rights that were more important than the state of Israel.”

“I even have emails right now, to this day, of local primarily business leaders in the Jewish community where they were encouraging Republicans to vote in this primary and were saying things like: We must support Shontel Brown, in no way can we let Nina Turner win this race,” Turner said.

“This is a very important election for our community!” wrote one Turner opponent in an email to neighbors. “Shontel’s main opponent, Nina Turner, was the honorary co-chair of the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, as well as the leader of ‘Our Revolution,’ the post-2016 organization of Sanders enthusiasts. She has raised money proclaiming her desire to join ‘the Squad’ and has been endorsed by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (see Turner fundraising emails attached below).”

Another neighbor forwarded the email on to still more folks, adding, “Many of us wouldn’t bother with this primary election but this one is really important and electing Shontel Brown is a must. Whether a R or a D you can elect to vote in the D primary.”

On August 3, 2021, Turner lost to Brown 50 percent to 45 percent, falling short by roughly 4,000 votes. The deluge of money — DMFI had dropped more than $2 million — following the Gaza attacks tilted the race, Turner told me later. “Had that race been in May, you would be interviewing Congresswoman Nina Turner, that’s irrefutable,” she said.

“I am going to work hard to ensure that something like this never happens to a progressive candidate again,” she said on election night. “We didn’t lose this race — the evil money manipulated and maligned this election.” The characterization of the funding as “evil,” mixed with the notion of manipulation, brought out fresh charges of antisemitism.

The race in Orlando largely stayed off the national radar through the rest of 2021, since the primary wouldn’t be held until August 2022. As the year closed out, Mubarak set about posting her end-of-year Instagram shoutouts and wanted to highlight the work they’d all done the past May in opposing the Gaza War. She went to dig out Frost’s old post, which had singled Mubarak out for her organizing that day and discovered it had been taken off his feed. Mubarak called Frost out on it; she said he explained that a social media staffer had scoured his accounts and archived some posts and that it must’ve been caught up in the sweep. He’d put it back up, he said.

But the reference to Mubarak was removed and a subtle but meaningful edit was made to the caption: Gone were references to “all facing oppression across the globe” and the pledge that “we denounce it all.”

The post now reads simply: “Orlando stands in solidarity from Palestine to Colombia!” When Mubarak flagged the change and her omission, she said, he explained that “local endorsers have a problem with your advocacy.”

Frost told another ally that his goal was to avoid getting crushed by DMFI. “We’re just trying to see if we can keep them out, and maybe if they come in, they won’t spend anything,” they recalled him speculating.

Frost told The Intercept that he wasn’t really aware of the influence of outside spending at that point in his campaign. “I honestly didn’t know much about outside spending at that point, or IEs” — independent expenditures made by Super PACs — “or kind of the role that they play,” Frost said. “I didn’t really learn about the outside money that played into [Turner’s] race until months after, to be honest. … I saw the results come in, I looked at my phone, I remember I was like, sitting in my kitchen and I was just like, Damn, we lost. I remember being surprised and being upset and then kind of saying, you know, I need to win, we need more progressives in Congress. So I hadn’t really connected those dots, to be honest, and wasn’t really fully aware of, kind of, the role of outside money in general in these Democratic primaries.”

Campaign sources, however, say the issue was front and center, with questions about what type of positioning might keep the outside money out. When allies in the free Palestine movement warned him that capitulating to DMFI and AIPAC wouldn’t let up even after he was elected, whether he capitulated or not, they recall Frost saying, “I’ll figure that out when I get there.”

On January 31, kickstarting the primary season, Jewish Insider published a list of 15 DMFI House endorsements. Among them was Randolph Bracy, a local state senator who was considered one of the most competitive moderates in Frost’s race. Mubarak texted Frost the news. “Didn’t think they would hop in so early,” Frost replied. “They hate progressives lol.”

The names on DMFI’s endorsement list, and the names left off, tell a story of the group’s commitment to fighting back against the party’s left flank in Democratic primaries and an increasingly extremist view of what being pro-Israel meant.

“In Michigan and Illinois, Reps. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and Sean Casten (D-IL) are, with support from DMFI, waging respective battles against progressive Reps. Andy Levin (D-MI) and Marie Newman (D-IL), who have frequently clashed with the pro-Israel establishment over their criticism of the Jewish state,” the Jewish Insider piece read.

Levin was an incumbent member of Congress and a scion of a powerhouse Michigan family that included Carl Levin, his uncle and a former lion of the Senate, and former House Ways and Means Chair Sander Levin, his father. Levin had been redistricted into a primary against another incumbent Democrat, Stevens, who became conspicuously outspoken about her unwavering support for Israel, becoming one of just 18 Democrats casting public doubt on the wisdom of President Joe Biden reentering the Iran nuclear deal. To include Levin among an anti-Israel cohort stretched the definition to a breaking point. Wrote Jewish Insider:

While Levin, a former synagogue president, describes himself as a Zionist and opposes BDS, the Michigan political scion has frequently clashed with the pro-Israel establishment over his criticism of the Israeli government, including the recent introduction of legislation that would, among other things, condemn Israeli settlements while placing restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel.

The attack on Levin helped define what DMFI meant by pro-Israel, and it included support for expanding settlements and ruled out criticism of the Israeli government. That Levin couldn’t be written off as antisemitic made him that much more of a threat. That he was willing to defend his colleagues like Omar and Tlaib was intolerable. Accusing Tlaib of antisemitism is made difficult if a former synagogue president has her back. AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr, asked by the Washington Post in a rare interview why Levin was targeted, said, “It was Congressman Levin’s willingness to defend and endorse some of the largest and most vocal detractors of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

The list also included Summer Lee. In 2018, as an unapologetic democratic socialist, she unseated a member of a powerhouse Pittsburgh political family in a state House race. Her win made national news. Now she was running for an open congressional seat with the backing of Justice Democrats, and, Jewish Insider noted, was a member of “the Democratic Socialists of America, which formally endorsed the BDS movement in 2017.” BDS — which is modeled after the effort to boycott South Africa’s apartheid government and stands for boycott, divestment, and sanctions — was launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society groups in response to Israel’s construction of a wall that cut deep into occupied Palestinian territory.

DMFI came out early for her opponent, attorney Steve Irwin. “There’s a context here that I think we ought to take cognizance of, which is to say that we have had some organized groups out there that have said they are attempting to execute, in their words, a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party,” Mellman told Jewish Insider, referring to the organization Justice Democrats, which cultivates progressive congressional candidates to primary moderate Democrats, but expanded his discussion to include DSA. Freshman Rep. Marie Newman had also been backed by Justice Democrats in her campaign to unseat a conservative Democrat the previous cycle. “A number of those groups have moved anti-Israelism from a peripheral part of their issue agenda to a central part of their issue agenda,” Mellman said. “Their strategy is to go into deep-blue districts that the party doesn’t care about because it’s going to be a Democrat no matter who wins.”

Lee heard early on that her campaign was going to have an “Israel problem,” she told The Intercept. “We heard people in the establishment talk about it, you know, Summer’s gonna have an Israel problem,” Lee said. “It’s an issue that we knew was going to come up. And I think it’s really funny because, for me, as a Black woman who is a progressive, Israel is not, at the state level, it’s not an issue that we ever had to talk about, that we broached.”

Lee’s point echoes a similar one made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in 2018 when getting knocked around in the press for flubbing an answer on the Israel-Palestine question. “I come from the South Bronx, I come from a Puerto Rican background. And Middle Eastern politics is not exactly at my kitchen table every night,” she said.

But, during the Gaza War in 2021, Lee had once posted support for the Palestinian plight. “It was really one tweet that kind of caught the attention of folks,” Lee said. “Here, this is it, we got you. And it was really a tweet talking about Black Lives Matter and talking about how, as an oppressed person, I view and perceive the topic. Because the reality is — and that’s with a lot of Black and brown progressives — we view even topics that don’t seem connected, we still view them through the injustice that we face as Black folks here, and the politics that we see and experience here, and are able to make connections to that.”

When I hear American pols use the refrain "Israel has the right to defend itself" in response to undeniable atrocities on a marginalized pop, I can't help but think of how the west has always justified indiscriminate& disproportionate force &power on weakened & marginalized ppl

— Summer Lee (@SummerForPA) May 14, 2021

The comment was shocking to some in Pittsburgh. Charles Saul, a member of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle’s board of trustees, was later quoted by the paper saying he was concerned about Lee because “she’s endorsed by some people I believe are antisemites, like Rashida Tlaib.”

“Another thing that worried me was her equating the suffering of the Gazans and Palestinians to the suffering of African Americans. That’s one of these intersectional things. If that’s her take on the Middle East, that’s very dangerous,” Saul said.

Lee had no doubt she would be hit, she just didn’t know when or how hard. “I’m being very honest, there was no world in which I did not think this was gonna happen,” she said. “From the moment I saw the ways in which the four Black and brown women who came in in 2018, which is the same year that I came into the state House, watching the way that they had to navigate the issue, knowing the way that they had to navigate money and politics, then seeing Nina Turner, it was a very clear trend to me.”

“We honestly knew on day one — and before. So on day zero, it was something that we were thinking about,” she said. “The question was always, when does it come in, but I didn’t think that I would have the privilege of avoiding it.”

Tweet or no tweet, Lee is convinced that she would have been targeted regardless, because the issue of Israel-Palestine is a cover for a broader assault on the progressive wing of the party. “There’s a difference between having controversial views. There’s a difference between having problematic views. But what this does is it says you can’t have any views,” she said. “To say that you should fall in line and I am still not convinced to this date that that is where they exclusively expect us to fall in line. Because the reality is is that if this were about that topic, if this were about Israel-Palestine, then they would have come into this district 10 toes talking about Israel-Palestine. But they didn’t. This is a way to chill and to keep the progressive movement from growing as a whole. This is a way to temper a movement that centers, particularly Black and brown women who are progressive, and stops them from building power right here.”

But not exclusively Black and brown. “I mean, the reality is that they went after Andy Levin,” she noted. “He’s a self-described Zionist. So they’re coming after progressives and the way that we’re able to build power for working-class folks.”

Marshall Wittmann, a spokesperson for AIPAC, denied the group targeted progressives specifically. “The sole factor for supporting Democratic and Republican candidates is their support for strengthening the US-Israel relationship,” he said. “Indeed, our PACs have supported scores of pro-Israel progressive candidates, including over half of the Congressional Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus and almost half of the Progressive Caucus. Our political involvement has shown that it is entirely consistent with progressive values to support America’s alliance with our democratic ally, Israel.”

“They’re coming after progressives and the way that we’re able to build power for working-class folks.”

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, another Braddock resident was looking for a way to dodge DMFI’s fire. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman was locked in what threatened to be a tight race with Rep. Conor Lamb for a Senate nomination, and Lamb’s campaign was openly pleading for Super PAC support to put him over the top. Early in the year, Jewish Insider reported, Mellman had reached out to Fetterman with questions about his position on Israel. “He’s never come out and said that he’s not a supporter of Israel, but the perception is that he aligns with the Squad more than anything else,” Democratic activist Brett Goldman told Jewish Insider.

Mellman said the campaign responded to his inquiry and “came with an interest in learning about the issues.” Following the meeting, the Fetterman campaign reached back out. “Then they sent us a position paper, which we thought was very strong,” Mellman said. But it wasn’t quite strong enough. Jewish Insider reported that DMFI emailed back some comments on the paper, which “Fetterman was receptive to addressing in a second draft.”

In April, Fetterman agreed to do an interview with Jewish Insider. “I want to go out of my way to make sure that it’s absolutely clear that the views that I hold in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party,” he said. “I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense.”

Fetterman, unprompted, stressed there should be zero conditions on military aid to Israel, that BDS is wrong, and so on. “Let me just say this, even if I’m asked or not, I was dismayed by the Iron Dome vote,” Fetterman added. DMFI and AIPAC stayed out of the race.

As the campaign wore on, progressive forces consolidated around Frost. It was a meaningful achievement, since the left is often hobbled by multiple progressive candidates splitting the vote and allowing a centrist candidate to slip through. (Levi Strauss heir Dan Goldman winning a Manhattan primary with less than 30 percent of the vote is just the latest example.)

The field initially included not just Frost, but also populist firebrand former Rep. Alan Grayson and Aramis Ayala, a popular former progressive prosecutor in Orange County, Florida, who had repeatedly clashed with state Republicans. Grayson had a dedicated but diminished base in the district, but Frost, in significant part thanks to the alliance with movement organizers in the district that Mubarak helped him build, began emerging as the leading progressive. A truce was brokered, with Ayala dropping out of the race in early March and winning the nomination for state attorney general instead.

Consolidating support was key but so was fending off DMFI. The critical question was whether DMFI or AIPAC would put money against him. “It was a conversation from the jump, honestly, because DMFI endorsed Bracy so early,” recalled Mubarak. “Every progressive under the sun who has even a little sympathy for Palestine, [the question of DMFI] comes up, because they just dump so much money.” Frost, according to people on his campaign, made it his mission to keep the groups at bay or find a way to neutralize them. But he had a balance to strike: Until March, Ayala was still in the race, so he needed to keep the full support of the progressive wing of the party without inviting a multimillion-dollar onslaught.

The answer came in the form of Ritchie Torres. A Bronx congressman in his first term and also Afro-Latino, Torres had made a name for himself in three overlapping areas. He was at war with the progressive wing, an outspoken ally of right-wing pro-Israel groups, and a cryptocurrency evangelist.

“In New York City we’ve seen the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is explicitly pro-BDS,” Torres said in a private meeting with DMFI after winning his 2020 primary, video of which was leaked to me. “The democratic socialist left endorsed in about 11 races and won every single one except mine. So it’s proven to be effective at winning elections and I worry about the normalization of anti-Semitism within progressive politics.”

Wild video: Incoming Rep. Richie Torres, in a private zoom with Democratic Majority For Israel, goes hard at DSA, calling its embrace of BDS “profoundly evil” and something that will rot the progressive movement from within pic.twitter.com/2vAiHoG1Wx

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) August 26, 2020

Torres went on to say that his own identity as a gay man influenced how he approached the question of Israel: “If the message to those who are both progressive and pro-Israel, especially to those of Jewish descent, is that in order for you to be part of the progressive community you have to renounce your identity and your history and your ties to your own homeland — and you have to be in the closet — that to me is profoundly evil. That’s a perversion of progressivism.”

A DMFI board member told him, “It was so beautiful and almost not otherworldly, but amazing the way you speak with such honesty and conviction about Israel. … I just wish we could clone you so there were a million Ritchies running around talking about Israel.”

Another DMFI member on the call asked how a progressive, pro-Israel Squad could be built, and Torres told them it was all about building infrastructure and support for progressive candidates willing to side with Israel.

When the January list of races DMFI was building infrastructure around came out, the progressive campaign ecosystem breathed a sigh of relief that Austin, Texas, was not on it. Progressives were backing a would-be Squad member in the form of 33-year-old City Council Member Gregorio Casar. Frost said he watched Casar’s race. “We watched all the races,” he said, “keeping up to date on everything that was going on across the country as far as voting trends, especially looking at the youth vote, different stuff like that that we thought might give us some trend information to help us in our race.”

Casar’s absence on the list, it turned out, came after a letter he had sent that month to a local rabbi laying out his position on Israel: He was opposed to BDS, he promised; supportive of a two-state solution; and in support of military aid to Israel. Casar’s letter to the rabbi was published by Jewish Insider the day after DMFI’s endorsement list was unveiled.

“The letter was in response to a lot of people continuing to insinuate that progressives,” Casar said, “are antisemitic. That is just not true. And in particular, I also mean really progressive members of Congress, who fight for Palestinian rights, I do not believe are antisemitic. But I have a certain policy position, which is, I do not believe we should be writing a blank check on military aid, I think that we should provide some amount of aid, but we should also make sure we’re not funding human rights violations anywhere in the world. So that’s what I told folks when I was asked privately. People pushed for me to think about things differently and learn more, and I’m always open to learning more.”

He decided to put that position down on paper. “I said, ‘You know what, let’s just write this down, so that Rabbi Freedman can share this with people.’ And that means that there’s a very decent chance it’ll become public. I did not share it with JI, but I’m not, you know, I don’t hold it against journalists to get hold of things however you guys do it.”

His colleagues in DSA were shocked and began the process of rescinding their endorsements. To avoid a nasty fight, Casar voluntarily rescinded his request for DSA backing. “We have a long history of working with Greg Casar on health care, paid sick time, police budgets, homelessness, housing justice, union rights, and more. We will continue to discuss this issue within our chapter and many individual members will continue to support the campaign, but we will no longer be working on this campaign as an organization,” the Austin chapter said in a statement. Justice Democrats, which does not have an Israel-Palestine litmus test, despite the protestations of DMFI, continued to back him, spending just over $100,000 in support.

An infrastructure around Democratic candidates who sided with Israel was, more or less, already the stated vision of DMFI. In late January 2019, in the wake of the election of the first two Muslim women to Congress, Omar and Tlaib, Mellman announced the formation of a new hybrid PAC, saying in a statement that he would stand up for Israel inside the “progressive movement.”

Mellman had been the leading pollster for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004 and was also a longtime AIPAC strategist. DMFI was an effort to do something of a rebrand for AIPAC within Democratic circles. AIPAC itself had become a toxic brand inside the Democratic Party after the organization worked to torpedo Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. Mellman’s firm, the Mellman Group, had consulted for AIPAC’s dark-money group, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran. The Mellman Group was also the second-largest contractor for AIPAC’s educational arm — the American Israel Education Fund, which organized congressional trips to Israel — in the year it fought the Iran deal. The biggest contractor that year was a travel business then-owned by Sheldon Adelson, a casino mogul and Republican mega-donor.

DMFI would also be able to deploy tactics AIPAC wasn’t yet ready for. Before Citizens United, AIPAC had grown its power not simply with the wealth of a handful of mega-donors, but through genuine and sustained grassroots organizing. Synagogue to synagogue, from the 1980s onward, AIPAC organized powerful local support for politicians who voiced unqualified support for Israel and ran high-profile campaigns against those who deviated. AIPAC’s informal slogan was that it didn’t have enemies in Congress, but had “friends and potential friends.”

David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to AIPAC’s annual conference, described in 2016 how AIPAC and its donors organize fundraisers outside the official umbrella of the organization so that the money doesn’t show up on disclosures as coming specifically from AIPAC.

“In New York, with [hedge fund titan] Jeff Talpins, we don’t ask a goddamn thing about the fucking Palestinians. You know why? ’Cause it’s a tiny issue. It’s a small, insignificant issue. The big issue is Iran. We want everything focused on Iran,” Ochs said. “What happens is Jeff meets with the congressman in the back room, tells them exactly what his goals are — and by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million — basically they hand him an envelope with 20 credit cards, and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit cards for $1,000 each.’”

Much like the National Rifle Association, its strength was in numbers and a narrow focus on a particular issue. After Citizens United, DMFI could skip the grassroots organizing component and go straight to big-money efforts directed through Super PACs. At least 11 of DMFI’s 14 board members had links to AIPAC; DMFI’s founding chair, Wall Street banker Todd Richman, also sat on AIPAC’s national council.

Mellman told me that his work against the party’s left was meant to undermine the Israeli right. “I have substantial direct experience in Israeli politics, having helped bring down Netanyahu,” he said, referring to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mellman had worked as a key election consultant for Yair Lapid’s political campaign, serving as a paid adviser, consulting with him in Washington, and meeting with his deputy minister of foreign affairs. Lapid’s center-right political party, Yesh Atid, would surge under Mellman’s guidance, making Lapid prime minister of Israel.

“The simple fact of Israeli politics is that the right uses attacks from the U.S. and Europe to its great and consistent benefit,” Mellman said. “That’s correct, anti-Israel forces in the U.S. do vastly more to help the right than to hurt it. They enable Bibi to run as the guy who will stand up to the U.S. and the world to protect his country. That has been a key element of most of his campaigns. …The anti-Israel far left has propped up the Israeli right and done tremendous damage to the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Dmitri Mehlhorn made a similar argument about Mainstream Democrats PAC’s interventions against progressives: that they were actually targeting the left to beat the right.

“If you look at America as a whole, and you want the fascists not to take power, what you need to do is trade a little bit of your enthusiasm in urban districts — enthusiasm that does not generally translate into meaningful votes, because a lot of those people … [are] often in a safe district, [and] they often don’t vote. … Just trade it for people who are actual swing voters who vote but make up their mind kind of at the last minute. If you go with a populist strategy, on the other hand,” he said, “you’re also handing a message that is going to motivate the shit out of the other side, because remember, they’re already amped to be motivated out of fear. … If Nina Turner would have won that [Ohio House] race, she would have been 20 percent of Sean Hannity’s chyrons out of the gate. You know, it just makes their job easier if some of what they’re saying is actually based in some fact of some sort.”

Mellman’s new organization was rolled out with a splashy New York Times profile and supportive comments from Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (who leads the AIPAC-sponsored congressional trips), Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez, and Arizona’s freshman Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema. DMFI provided a forum for Lapid’s first call with an American Zionist organization after his election, during which he declared his intention to reinvigorate Israel’s ties to American political parties.

But in DMFI’s first cycle, it hit obstacles. The group’s first play for power, an effort to persuade Bernie Sanders to dismiss two Muslim advisers from his presidential campaign, was unsuccessful, as was DMFI’s later effort to hit him with TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. Next, would-be Squad member Jamaal Bowman of New York overcame more than $2 million in DMFI spending in 2020 to oust Rep. Eliot Engel, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and one of the most outspoken Israel hawks in Congress. That Bowman won in a landslide, and even carried heavily Jewish precincts, was a stinging defeat for DMFI and AIPAC, as Bowman had refused to back off his support of Palestinian human rights.

On May 13, 2021, around the same time Frost was rallying in Orlando, history was made on the floor of the House of Representatives, as Democrat after Democrat paraded for an hour to denounce Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Throughout the 2020 cycle, AIPAC had been content to let DMFI run the big-money operation in Democratic primaries. To encourage support for it, AIPAC donors were even allowed to count money given to DMFI as a credit toward their AIPAC contributions, which then won them higher-tier perks at conferences and other events. But the unprecedented display of progressive Democratic support for Palestinians amid the Gaza War on the House floor was triggering.

“We’re seeing much more vocal detractors of the U.S.-Israel relationship, who are having an impact on the discussion,” AIPAC’s Howard Kohr told the Post. “And we need to respond.” The problem, he said, was “the rise of a very vocal minority on the far left of the Democratic Party that is anti-Israel and seeks to weaken and diminish the relationship. Our view is that support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is both good policy and good politics. We wanted to defend our friends, and to send a message to detractors that there’s a group of individuals that will oppose them.”

That group of individuals began coming together in January 2022. AIPAC transferred $8.5 million to the Super PAC it set up called United Democracy Project. Private equity mogul and Republican donor Paul Singer kicked in a million dollars, as did Republican Bernard Marcus, the former CEO of Home Depot. Dozens of other big donors, many of them also Republicans, kicked in big checks to give United Democracy Project a $30 million war chest. By the end of March, it had spent $80,000 on polling, as it targeted races and honed its messaging, according to disclosures.

In April, it dropped its first ads of the cycle, tag-teaming with DMFI to make sure Turner’s second run against Brown never got off the ground. That same month it launched its assault on Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner and the first Muslim woman elected in North Carolina. She ran for office after three of her Muslim friends were murdered in the gruesome Chapel Hill hate crime that drew national attention. AIPAC spent millions to stop her rise, backing state Sen. Valerie Foushee in the May primary. Elsewhere in the state, AIPAC spent $2 million against progressive Erica Smith in another open primary.

“We’re always gonna expect the right to have more money, given that they’re operating off of the basis of big donors. But that’s a little bit more of a fair fight. But now you add to what DMFI is doing 30 million from AIPAC, that’s just in a whole other realm.”

United Democracy Project also began hammering away at Lee, who was running in an open primary to be held the same day as North Carolina’s. J Street’s new outside money group had been planning to raise and spend about $2 million to compete with AIPAC, which they guessed would spend somewhere between $5 million and $10 million. That, said J Street’s Logan Bayroff, would at least be something of a fair fight, given that AIPAC and DMFI had to overcome the fact that what they were advocating for — unchecked, limitless support for the Israeli government, regardless of abuses — was unpopular in Democratic primaries. “We’re always gonna expect the right to have more money, given that they’re operating off of the basis of big donors. But that’s a little bit more of a fair fight,” he said of the disparity between J Street and DMFI. “But now you add to what DMFI is doing 30 million from AIPAC, that’s just in a whole other realm.”

Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, Indivisible, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and the Sunrise Movement worked in coalition with J Street on a number of races that DMFI and AIPAC played in, and where they could muster enough money, the candidates had a shot.

“If you look at the races we lost, we were outspent by the bad guys 6, 8, 10 to 1. If you look at Summer’s race, it was more like 2-1,” said Joe Dinkn, national campaigns director for the WFP.

In a Chicago-area district, DMFI, AIPAC, and Mainstream Dems backed Gilbert Villegas against progressive Delia Ramirez. But DMFI put in only $157,000, Hoffman’s PAC chipped in $65,000, and United Democracy Project didn’t run an independent expenditure. VoteVets, an organization that almost exclusively backs centrist veteran candidates against progressives when it comes to Democratic primaries, was the big spender, putting more than $950,000 in.

With support from WFP (which dumped more than $600,000 into the race), the CPC PAC ($400,000), Emily’s List ($262,000), Indivisible ($240,000), J Street ($45,000), and a slew of progressive members of Congress — Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley — Ramirez won by more than 40 points and is poised to become a Squad-adjacent member of Congress. All told, Ramirez had more outside support — $1.7 million — than did Villegas, at more than $1.2 million, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. (Villegas’s campaign outraised Ramirez directly by about $400,000.)

And in one case, where the PACs found themselves up against somebody with pockets as deep as theirs, they fell short. In Michigan, AIPAC spent more than $4 million against Shri Thanedar, an eccentric self-funder who didn’t know what party he wanted to join before he funded a bizarre run for governor in 2018, followed by a successful buying of a state House seat in 2020, then followed by his 2022 House bid. DMFI didn’t run an independent expenditure, but AIPAC’s effort was backed up by $1 million from Protect Our Future. Their candidate, state Sen. Adam Hollier, fell short by 5 percentage points. Thanedar had loaned his campaign more than $8 million and spent around $4 million of it to win.

In the wake of DMFI’s endorsement of Frost’s opponent, Torres and Frost began talking. Mubarak warned him away. “I said, do you know that this person is not progressive at all? I go, he seems progressive, but he’s actually very problematic, not just on Palestine.” She pointed out that he had been dodging other candidate questionnaires yet made time for Torres. “He told me, Oh, I know, but he just took me under his wing because I’m Afro Latino.”

To reassure his early and most energetic supporters, Frost sat down for a Zoom call on March 9 with several dozen activists with the Florida Palestine Network for a conversation about his views.

A former state senator, Dwight Bullard, joined the call as well. “My hope was in being on that call that he would feel a sense of camaraderie, if you will: ‘I’m letting you know publicly I’m an ally of Florida Palestine Network, and it’s OK to speak your mind,’” said Bullard.

In the legislature, Bullard had been introduced to the issue of BDS when Florida lawmakers pushed to strip state contracts from any company that endorsed the boycott. Bullard was not himself a BDS supporter but believed the right to boycott was central to any struggle for dignity or civil rights, and certainly no business of the Florida state Senate. “To me just on its face, it sounded like a repressive anti-First Amendment kind of thing,” he said. “If students at Florida State wanted to boycott Coca-Cola we wouldn’t even be having this conversation, but here we are making this part of our legislation.”

He took enormous heat for voting against the measure and began looking into the issue further. The organization Dream Defenders, affiliated with Florida Palestine Network, invited him to visit the region, and he took them up on it in 2016. “You can’t unsee what you saw, and to come back and have people be like, no, it wasn’t that — I had people trying to tell me that everything I had experienced was a completely staged exercise,” he said.

That year, thanks to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Bullard’s district was redrawn, and he spent the 2016 campaign not just fending off charges of antisemitism, but also of terrorism. One of the tour guides, a Palestinian, had previously been affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the State Department labels a terrorist group, and an attack ad overlaid images of 9/11 with Bullard.

“Seventy percent of the district is new voters and you have to reintroduce yourself to people while they’re putting up television ads saying you’re a terrorist,” Bullard recalled. “So that was my journey.”

On the Zoom call, Bullard came away believing Frost was in sync. “I heard him say he was in alignment with that group, that he would be an ally if elected to Congress,” Bullard said.

A year earlier, Frost had signed a Palestinian Feminist Collective pledge that was to be delivered to Demings. Among its propositions, it pledged to “heed the call of Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” and called “for an end to US political, military, and economic support to Israel, and to all military, security, and policing collaborations.”

According to four Florida Palestine Network members and allies on the call, Frost was clear he still stood with them. “I support BDS, which is a grassroots movement,” Frost said. Though there is no recording of the call, Ahmad Daraldik, who was on it, added the quote to a group text that was going on at the time, and others on the call remember him saying it as well. “AWESOME!! Good job everyone,” Maram Al-Dada texted the group in response to Daraldik’s transcription. Perhaps even more importantly, Frost had said that as he crafted his official Israel-Palestine policy position, he would do it in direct collaboration with his longtime allies in the Florida Palestine Network.

As far as political organizing in America is supposed to go, the Florida Palestine Network had done everything right: build an association of like-minded people, project power through rallies and lobbying of local officials, and back a candidate for Congress, holding him accountable to the positions he staked out. Alexis de Tocqueville would have easily recognized their work as a quintessential element of democracy in America in action. But Tocqueville knew nothing of Super PACs.

Later in March, Torres publicly endorsed Frost. “Multiple members [of Congress] approached me and said you have to meet Maxwell Frost. And what I found most compelling about him was his youth. I remember running for the city council at age 24, and I was drawn to the notion of the first Gen Z member of Congress. And then when I met him, he’s just incredibly impressive,” Torres told me. “I’ve long been critical of Congress as a gerontocracy.”

I asked if he had talked to Frost specifically about the Israel-Palestine issue. “We spoke about a variety of issues and it is not my place to tell either a present or future colleague how to think or what to think,” he said. “You know, I might encourage him to keep an open mind, listen to every side of the debate. But ultimately when you’re a member of Congress, you have to be your own person. You have to come to your own conclusions and he’s going to be fiercely independent.”

DMFI had already endorsed Bracy in the race, and I asked if Torres helped talk the group out of spending actual money on behalf of Bracy. “We had a difference of opinion in the race. I’m convinced that Maxwell represents exactly what we need in Congress,” he said. “Those organizations are going to do what’s in their interests. It’s not my place to tell people whom to endorse or what to endorse, just like I want others to respect my right to act independently, I would extend other individuals and institutions that same courtesy.”

I also asked if he had put in a good word with the crypto world on behalf of Frost. “I don’t tell them what to do, and you have to be careful,” he said, referring to campaign laws around Super PACs and coordination. “But obviously it was known that I had publicly endorsed him.”

“We mainly just spoke about being young and Afro Latino,” said Frost. “He said that he was really excited to get more Afro Latinos in Congress, and especially young men of color, and that’s when he offered up his endorsement and his help and support.”

In early April, in the wake of Torres’s endorsement of Frost, the fight for crypto support was on. Bracy, the DMFI-backed candidate, announced the formation of a legislative caucus that would include federal and state lawmakers interested in crafting crypto policy. Frost followed on April 27 by announcing a “national council” to advise him on “cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.”

The council included experts but also Adelle Nazarian, CEO of the American Blockchain PAC, and Sean McElwee, co-founder of the progressive polling operation Data for Progress, who had played an early role in Torres’s election to Congress.

On May 10, Frost appeared on a crypto podcast hosted by one of the crypto council members, and that evening, at an Adams Morgan bar in Washington, D.C. that held a fundraiser hosted by McElwee; Ben Wessel, campaigns director for the Emerson Collective, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs; and Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a progressive organizer and founder of Way to Win and a member of Frost’s crypto advisory board. Gabe Bankman-Fried, the brother of crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, spoke at the fundraiser. Gabe is the head of Protect Our Future, a PAC funded by his brother and dedicated to policy advocacy around pandemic prevention, which teamed up on high-profile races, such as Nida Allam’s, with DMFI, AIPAC, and Mainstream Dems. (Building a Stronger Future Foundation, one of Sam Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic entities, provides financial support for The Intercept’s bio-risk, pandemic prevention, and lab-bio safety coverage. A nonprofit affiliated with Way to Win, Way to Rise, has also donated to The Intercept, facilitated by Amalgamated Foundation.) In April 2022, according to campaign finance records, Protect Our Future paid the Mellman Group for polling. (The report doesn’t indicate which race they collaborated on, but both DMFI and Protect Our Future spent heavily to beat Allam in North Carolina.)  

At the fundraiser, for longtime D.C. hands who’d seen hundreds of candidates come through town, Frost, charming in person and charismatic on the stump, was talked about as a future presidential candidate, not in terms of if but when.

It was becoming difficult for Frost’s activist allies to square his commitments to the Palestinian community in Orlando with his alliance with Torres.

Frost said that his involvement with Gabe Bankman-Fried’s Super PAC was rooted in an interest in preventing future pandemics. “I remember we had our first Zoom,” Frost said, “where Gabe was talking to me about, what are the policies that they’re championing? Why are they doing this at this time? And honestly, pandemic preparedness was something I knew zip about. So I actually had a pretty informative call with Gabe about what Guarding Against Pandemics is fighting for and it actually really piqued my interest, because I remember a few weeks prior to that I was speaking with some community members, and they had brought that up. And I felt like wow, the appetite for pandemic preparedness will kind of get lower and lower and lower as time goes, as that happens with mass shootings and gun violence. And I saw a parallel there. So I told Gabe this is something I can get behind.”

Protect Our Future (a Super PAC linked to Guarding Against Pandemics) announced on May 17 that it would be spending at least $1 million to back Frost. Former Rep. Alan Grayson, competing with Frost for progressive votes, didn’t buy the rationale that it was all about pandemic preparedness. “I don’t think you’ll ever see a more clear-cut example of somebody putting themselves up for sale,” said Grayson, noting the proximity of the creation of the advisory board with the influx of crypto money. He would hammer Frost for it in the closing weeks of the campaign. “He auditioned for the role of corruption, and he won the part,” said Grayson, who was polling competitively before the deluge of money. 

Mike Levine, a spokesperson for Protect Our Future, said the group’s support of Frost revolved genuinely around his pandemic preparedness position. “Protect Our Future’s support for Maxwell Frost and other candidates across the U.S. was driven exclusively by our desire to prevent the next pandemic. We take no position on anything related to cryptocurrency,” he said. “Florida primary voters clearly saw through efforts to distract from the real issues and overwhelmingly nominated a leader who will do what it takes to protect against catastrophic pandemics.”

Relations between Frost and his earliest backers deteriorated further, even as that week he also received a number of endorsements in Congress, from Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ed Markey to Rep. Pramila Jayapal and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

It was becoming difficult for Frost’s activist allies to square his commitments to the Palestinian community in Orlando with his alliance with Torres. On May 11, Israeli forces sparked global outrage first by killing Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and then again days later by attacking mourners and pallbearers, nearly toppling her casket at the funeral procession.

Mubarak reached out to Frost, asking why he hadn’t spoken out yet. “A journalist was murdered,” she texted him. “This is an easy time to speak out in solidarity for Palestine.”

“You’re mad because I didn’t put out a tweet,” she recalled him saying. That missed the point, she said. A tweet was the bare minimum she was calling for. “I said it’s as if you don’t believe in the humanity of the Palestinians anymore for you to respond that way,” she said. “Our lives are discounted, our freedom isn’t measured, all of a sudden, the same way as others. That’s what it felt like when he reacted that way. And he was like, OK.”

He told Mubarak he had seen the horrifying video of the funeral and was willing to do a post, he texted. She asked him to send her a draft first. She was underwhelmed, to say the least, by what he sent. “I said, you’re not even using the word Palestinians? That’s part of an erasure in itself,” she said, flagging his use of “folks” instead of Palestinians. “In how people message things it erases us as Palestinians and doesn’t name our oppressor. That’s a reason why this continues to happen. Because the world lets them get away with it by misleading/reporting the reality,” she texted him.

“Then he said he was gonna quote-tweet Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken,” she continued. “And I said, Maxwell, you would never quote-tweet Secretary Blinken or align yourself with Secretary Blinken on any other issue. Why on Palestine are you choosing a watered-down approach? And I sent him Marie Newman’s tweet, I sent him Bernie Sanders tweet. Like Bernie Sanders, here’s an example.”

The examples were apparently not persuasive — or, perhaps, were persuasive in the opposite direction. DMFI had spent heavily against Sanders during his presidential run and was also busy spending Newman into the ground in a primary. On May 15, Frost quote-tweeted a 2-day-old Blinken post, leaving in the word “folks” and adding a reference to “Palestinians” at the end as people who “deserve to mourn without facing violence.”

Journalists are the eyes and ears of the people worldwide. I mourn with the folks who looked to Shireen Abu Akleh to help build their truths. The US should launch an independent investigation into her killing and Palestinians deserve to mourn without violence. https://t.co/xIwMzdTA3x

— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) May 15, 2022

That Tuesday was a day that DMFI, AIPAC, and Mainstream Democrats had hoped would be a death blow to the nascent insurgency that had been gaining traction in the primaries. Reid Hoffman’s PAC had spent millions to prop up conservative Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader, who was facing a credible challenge from Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon. There was also Summer Lee in Pennsylvania, and Nida Allam and Erica Smith in North Carolina.

Allam lost 46 to 37 percent. “[Frost] really got scared after Nida got beaten,” Mubarak recalled. Smith, who also faced more than $2 million of AIPAC money and $467,000 from DMFI, was beaten soundly. And in Texas the following week, Jessica Cisneros was facing Rep. Henry Cuellar in a runoff she would lose by just a few hundred votes. But McLeod-Skinner knocked off Schrader, and progressive Andrea Salinas overcame an ungodly $11 million in Bankman-Fried money through Protect Our Future PAC to win another Oregon primary.

The marquee race, however, was in Pittsburgh, where AIPAC and DMFI combined to put in more than $3 million for an ad blitz against Lee in the race’s closing weeks. (Mara Talpins — the wife of hedge funder Jeffrey Talpins, named as hosting credit card-stacked AIPAC fundraisers in New York — gave $5,000 to Steve Irwin.) In late March, Lee held a 25-point lead, before the money came in — and that amount of money can go a long way in the Pittsburgh TV market. As AIPAC’s ads attacked her relentlessly as not a “real Democrat,” she watched her polling numbers plummet.

But then Lee saw the race stabilize, as outside progressive groups pumped money in and her own campaign responded quickly to the charge that she wasn’t loyal enough to the Democratic Party. Justice Democrats poured in nearly $1 million, WFP put in $450,000, and the Progressive Caucus PAC put in $200,000. Her backers made an issue of the fact that AIPAC had backed more than 100 Republicans who had voted to overturn the 2020 election while pretending to care how good of a Democrat Lee was.

“When we were able to counteract those narratives that [voters] were getting incessantly — the saturation point was unlike anything you’ve ever seen — when we knocked on doors, no one was ever saying, ‘Oh, hey, does Summer have this particular view on Middle Eastern policy?’ Like, that was never a conversation. It was, ‘Is Summer a Trump supporter?’” she said. “We were able to get our counter-ad up, a counter-ad that did nothing but show a video of me stumping for Biden, for the party. When we were able to get that out, it started to really help folks question and really cut through that.”

On Election Day, she bested Irwin by less than 1,000 votes, 41.9 percent to 41 percent, taunting her opponents for setting money on fire.

$4.5 mill ?? https://t.co/XI7RmXZx0P

— Summer Lee (@SummerForPA) May 20, 2022

Had she not enjoyed such high popularity and name recognition in the district, AIPAC’s wipeout of her 25-point lead in six weeks would have been enough to beat her. John Fetterman, meanwhile, was able to face his centrist opponent in an open seat for Pennsylvania Senate without taking on a Super PAC too and won easily.

Mubarak let Frost know she was disappointed by the soft-pedaled post on Abu Akleh, but told him not to dwell on Allam’s loss. What was the goal of winning if he didn’t stay true to his values? “Just to put it into perspective, last year, you were screaming and leading chants with us. This year we are begging for a retweet,” she texted. “I keep trying so hard to be a resource, a good friend and an advocate to and for you since the very first day I met you. Even before you wanted to run for office. You can’t say the same to the very folks who you may be listening to re Palestine.” On May 21, Frost dissolved his kitchen cabinet.

Bracy, the Frost opponent whose hoped-for surge of DMFI money never arrived, had been disappointed Mubarak had gone with Frost over him. “I’ve known her for a long time and we’ve worked together on stuff, but she was so mad when I got endorsed by DMFI,” Bracy said. “This was something where we just didn’t agree, because I guess I’ve got a different viewpoint after going to Israel myself and going to Palestine and seeing things for myself.” Bracy had previously gone on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel. Mubarak told him the issue was deeply important to her and that she’d be publicly supporting Frost. “She was saying how she was just going to, as long as she’s known me, she was going to support Maxwell, just because of this issue. And I was like, you know, that hurts, but I get it. And then he basically, after he got all of her contacts, put her political capital behind him — she’s got a following in Central Florida — and he flipped. I was like, at least I really believed it.”

By early June, pressure was building for Frost to grant an interview to Jewish Insider. For months, campaign manager Kevin Lata had been fending off the request, which had come in shortly after Torres’s endorsement. “I’ve been kicking the can on this for 2 months,” he told the campaign’s consultants in a group text on June 4. “I don’t think we can kick it much longer. I was just going to get them to send the questions and we can respond over email. Seems like far too much risk to do it over the phone. J Street has offered to review our responses before we submit them. We’re definitely aware of the sort of coverage that JI does. Any flags or thoughts before we proceed?”

One of the consultants asked if Lata knew the angle of the story and who was reporting it, and Lata shared the reporter’s email with the group. “Maxwell is of interest to us for a variety of reasons, one among them being that he earned an endorsement from Rep. Torres, which is likely of interest to our readers because we often write about his efforts in the House,” the reporter had explained on April 13, noting he’d want to ask about the Iran nuclear deal, combatting antisemitism, and “the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

“He hit me up again 3 days ago,” Lata texted, “which coincided with us sending around our paper. So I feel pretty confident that he has it.”

Our paper. The Frost position paper on Israel-Palestine was out. The paper that the Florida Palestine Network was sure Frost would workshop with them had already been drafted and submitted.

Some of the consultants seemed taken aback. “What is the paper and how did they get it?” asked consultant Victoria McGroary.

Rania Batrice, the Palestinian American media consultant on the chain, asked about it too. “I still haven’t seen the paper. And would very much like to,” she texted the group. “What is Maxwell going to say about the Iran nuclear deal? What about things like additional funding to Israel, etc. What is the ‘non-worst case’ you’re envisioning here?”

“It’s all in the paper,” Lata responded. Batrice continued to argue against granting an interview and insisted the paper be shared more widely. But she and others pushing Frost on Israel policy had already lost. Within 48 hours, Frost fired Batrice, who declined to comment for this article. To replace her as a media consultant, he brought in Mark Putnam of Putnam Partners. Putnam often partners on campaigns with Mark Mellman, the head of DMFI.

Though Frost had formally dissolved his kitchen cabinet, he stayed in touch with Mubarak. On June 23, they met one on one in a cafe in downtown Orlando, where she raised the firing of Batrice. Mubarak warned him that at a bare minimum, the optics of having pushed out the only two Palestinian women on the campaign, while he was shifting his position, were troubling. Frost, she said, denied his break with Batrice had anything to do with her pushback. Mubarak asked if it was true that an Israel policy statement was being drafted or had been drafted, and he told her it was and talked through some of his new thinking on the issue. “I reminded him of his commitment to the Florida Palestine Network saying, you promised this organization, this group of people that you were a part of at one point, that you would only release something with our eyes on it, our review and our approval,” she said. She believed that he would still send them a draft of it, she recalled. “Part of my false hope kicked in, like maybe he’s still gonna come through. And then it just was released.”

The Bracy campaign, concerned that there had yet to be an independent expenditure by either DMFI or AIPAC, reached out to both to ask what was up, according to a source with direct knowledge of the exchanges. Bad news came back: Torres and other influential figures had weighed in on Frost’s behalf, and his new position made Super PAC spending unnecessary.

In mid-July, Maryland voters went to the polls in another Democratic primary, this one pitting former Rep. Donna Edwards, who had won an insurgent campaign against an incumbent-turned-lobbyist back in 2008 and was now trying to make a comeback, against an establishment Democrat. During her first year in Congress, she had voted “present” amid a pro-Israel resolution amid its latest war on Gaza and cast a handful of other votes that deviated from a 100 percent AIPAC-aligned voting record. DMFI and AIPAC backed her corporate attorney opponent, taking a race that was Edwards’s to lose and, with a staggering $6 million-plus in spending, turned it into a landslide against her.

The ads, as usual, did not mention Israel-Palestine but instead attacked Edwards, a Black woman, as lazy when it came to constituent service, a charge even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an ally of AIPAC, weighed in to protest. “It’s focused on the issues that are important to the voters in that district. The objective here is to ensure that your candidate emerges victorious and that the anti-Israel candidate is defeated,” Kohr, the AIPAC CEO, told the Washington Post, explaining why its primary ads don’t mention Israel.

“Part of my false hope kicked in, like maybe he’s still gonna come through. And then it just was released.”

Florida’s primaries were among the last in the country, and the Frost campaign did manage to delay the Jewish Insider piece a bit longer, helping Frost solidify his standing as the leading progressive in the race. But on August 11, less than two weeks before the primary, and after early voting had begun, the article finally ran. (Frost said the campaign had submitted its answers by July, but the article didn’t run until later.) Reported Jewish Insider:

The first-time candidate has indicated that he will pursue a nuanced and somewhat more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than one might expect of a staunch progressive who is otherwise aligned with the activist left on such trademark legislative objectives as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

In a candidate questionnaire solicited by <i>Jewish Insider</i>, however, Frost distanced himself from measures that would penalize Israel, rejecting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as “problematic” while opposing calls to condition U.S. aid to Israel. More broadly, Frost said he is “committed to supporting” continued military assistance that “helps ensure” Israel “can properly defend itself.”

Frost elaborated in his position paper, which was obtained by JI, that he would also advocate for “robust U.S. assistance that benefits the Palestinian people and is in compliance with [the] Taylor Force Act,” referring to a law that withholds aid to the Palestinian Authority on the condition that Ramallah ends payments to families of terrorists. The assistance, he wrote, “serves an essential role in meeting Palestinian humanitarian needs.”

The position paper, published by Jewish Insider, was even starker. No conditions should be placed on military aid to Israel, he wrote in the paper, and he reversed course on BDS:

I believe that the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement is extremely problematic and undermines the chances of peace and a two-state solution. Additionally, It hurts both Palestinians and Israelis who suffer economically from it. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have been designated by the United States as terrorist organizations and all these groups are a part of the Central BDS movement’s council, which in my eye delegitimizes the entire organization and movement.

Al-Dada, who had chanted next to Frost at the Gaza War rally and then volunteered for his campaign, was shocked. But it was so late in the campaign, most voters had made up their minds. “I know personally about 35 people who, for a fact, voted for Max because of me,” Al-Dada said. “I didn’t vote at all.”

Frost said that in his March meeting with the Florida Palestine Network, he was honest about where he stood at the time but later evolved his position, particularly on BDS. His support of it as a “grassroots movement,” he said, was undercut when he learned that groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were central players in it. “There was a nuance that I was trying to hit there,” he said of the meeting. “As I spoke with other organizations, other people from all different sides, I found out that, kind of, what I was trying to hit at just didn’t make sense. And that was part of my being naive on the issue. … As time went past, I contacted Rasha and other folks to express kind of where my head was at.”

As for military aid, Frost said, he had evolved there too after numerous conversations. “I spent a long time speaking with different groups and different people, individuals in my district, clergy leaders, different organizations, and it really came down to understanding how things are over there and in the region,” he said. “I just really feel like our commitment to Israel that we have, and the [memorandum of understanding] that President Obama signed, is something that I support. And so that’s why we were pretty specific writing that out in the paper.”

Bullard said he was disappointed to learn of Frost’s turnaround. “You want people who have a level of conviction who, when confronted with — and I get it, you’re now being put in a position where people are telling you why you need to think a particular way — but you also have to recognize that there’s a dominant narrative that does not create a sense of equity around issues of Palestine in the American context,” he said. “You have to make the decision of whether you’re going to stand firm or you’re just going to take the safe position.”

Frost said that DMFI and AIPAC can’t take credit for his evolution because it came from inside his district. “It wasn’t really about the spending,” he said. “It was about the dialogues in district and my conversations with people. So my district changed a lot in the middle of the campaign. And it became a district where, like, the JCC [Jewish Community Center], is in it now. There’s a lot of Jewish communities in it. And when that change happened, I engaged with those communities and just learned, started to really dive into it. So that was really the initial push. If I were to look at the timeline, the maps, I think, changed around March or April. And that’s exactly when I started having these conversations.”

Whatever the fears of hard-line Israel hawks, the rise of Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez to power in Congress did not materially slow the explanation of Israeli settlements into occupied Palestinian territory.

In 2019, their first year in office, Israel added more than 11,000 new settlement units. In 2020, the figure doubled to over 22,000, many of them in East Jerusalem and deep in the West Bank. “As stated in numerous EU Foreign Affairs Council conclusions, settlements are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible,” said an European Union representative to the United Nations in a report chronicling the increase. The settlement expansion included multiple “outposts” — seizure of farmland and pasture — that puts any semblance of Palestinian independence or sustainability further out of reach. In 2021 — despite Lapid’s campaign promise not “to build anything that will prevent the possibility of a future two-state solution” — settlement expansion in East Jerusalem doubled in 2021 compared to the year before, threatening to fully slice the remaining contiguous parts of Palestinian territory into small, prison-like enclaves.

In Congress, Jamaal Bowman ended up siding with constituents who pushed him to support $1 billion in new funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, drawing the ire of a faction of DSA organized through its BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group. Bowman told me that ahead of the vote, he heard almost exclusively from supporters of the Iron Dome system and “not much at all” from opponents. “Those on the ‘yes’ side were very clear, and very loud, and very consistent with why they believed the vote needed to be ‘yes,’” he said. “It’s an important issue for this district in particular, which is why I voted yes. But … that vote is not going to stop me from continuing to fight for Palestinian rights, to fight to end the occupation which absolutely needs to happen, and to make sure Palestinian humanity is centered.”

On August 5, without the support of his cabinet, Lapid launched airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, agreeing to a truce on August 7. Palestinian militants fired over 1,000 rockets, though no Israelis were killed or seriously wounded. The three-day conflict left 49 Palestinians dead, including 17 children.

Israel’s initial denial of any role in the killing of Abu Akleh gradually morphed under the weight of incontrovertible evidence into admission of possible complicity. Partnering with the London-based group Forensic Architecture, Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq launched the most comprehensive investigation into her death. On the morning of August 18, at least nine armored Israeli vehicles approached the group’s headquarters in Ramallah and broke their way in, ransacking it and later welding shut its doors. An attempt by the Israeli government, headed by Mellman ally Yair Lapid, to label it a terrorist organization was rejected by the EU, which reviewed the evidence Israel provided and found it not remotely convincing.

On August 23, voters went to the polls in Orlando and cast their ballots. Frost won 35 percent of the votes, Bracy pulled in 25, and Grayson — who’d taken to calling Frost “Maxwell Fraud” by the end of the campaign — took in 15 percent. In the end, neither DMFI, AIPAC, nor Hoffman’s group had to spend a penny in the race. Bracy lost, but they had won. “That’s the goal,” observed a source close to AIPAC after the election. “That’s the whole point.”

Lee agreed. I asked if the amount of spending had gotten into her head and influenced the way she approached the issue. “Yes, absolutely, and not just with me, I see it with other people. I see people who are running for office or thinking of running for office in the future and they feel deterred because this is a topic that they know will bury them,” she said. “There’s absolutely a chilling effect. … I’ve heard it from other folks who will say, you know, we agree with this, but I’ll never support it, and I’ll never say it out loud.”

More broadly, though, it makes building a movement that much more difficult, Lee said: “It’s very hard to survive as a progressive, Black, working-class-background candidate when you are facing millions and millions of dollars, but what it also does is then it deters other people from ever wanting to get into it. If you’re somebody who sat through my race as a supporter or not, someone in our district, who’s witnessing the movement that we’ve been a part of, they will look at the onslaught, they will look at what they said about me and how they conducted those campaigns, and then they would say, ‘I would never want to run myself.’ So then it has the effect of ensuring that the Black community broadly, the other marginalized communities, are just no longer centered in our politics.

“It’s a way of maintaining that status quo,” she said. “But also it’s just disingenuous when we say that we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the issues. No, we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the resources.”

With the primaries over, Bankfried-Fried’s PAC, AIPAC, and DMFI have mostly stopped spending to help Democrats. In September, the Democratic National Committee refused to allow a vote on a resolution, pushed by Democratic National Committee member Nina Turner and other progressives, to ban big outside money in primaries. Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, said it was absurd that Democrats continued to allow outside groups to manipulate Democratic primaries even though they clearly have little interest in seeing the party itself succeed. Their goal is to shape what the party looks like — whether it’s in the minority or majority is beside the point. “For a group called Democratic Majority for Israel they don’t seem to be putting much effort into winning a Democratic majority,” Greenberg said. Dmitri Mehlhorn said Mainstream Democrats, for its part, remains invested in the party, and is focusing on swing-state governor’s races, adding “we’ve moved quite a bit to Pelosi’s team.”

Not so much for AIPAC. Though Rep. Elaine Luria, a Democratic of Virginia whose race is listed as “key” by AIPAC, has been one of the organization’s most outspoken and loyal allies since her 2018 election, United Democracy Project has declined to help her so far. Instead, its only foray so far into the general election has been to spend in a Democrat-on-Democrat race in the top-two state of California. According to Jewish Insider, “a board member of DMFI expressed reservations over [David] Canepa’s Middle East foreign policy approach, pointing to at least one social media post viewed by local pro-Israel advocates as dismissive of Israeli security concerns.” The allegedly dismissive message, posted on May 13, 202, as the Gaza War raged, read: “Peace for Palestine.”

The ad was about abortion. Both candidates, of course, support abortion rights. Only one called for peace.

The post A People-Powered Insurgency Threatened to Reshape the Democratic Party. Then Came AIPAC and Its Allied Super PAC, Democratic Majority for Israel. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Executives at a major broadcasting company stepped in this week to block the airing of a segment on Hill TV that defended Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., amid an ongoing controversy inside the Democratic Party.

Tlaib had been attacked by colleagues for saying, “I want you all to know that among progressives, it becomes clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government.”

As a co-host of the Hill TV morning show “Rising,” presenter Katie Halper on Monday made the controversy the subject of her Radar: the name “Rising” uses to brand its monologues. Each show includes two Radars, one from a left perspective and one from a right perspective, and as a former co-host of the show, I’ve recorded more than 150 of them. There is no approval process: A co-host files a script, which is loaded into a teleprompter. The monologue is then recorded, with a back-and-forth discussion and debate with the other co-host following it. The segment is then uploaded to a variety of platforms along with the rest of the show.

But Halper — who spoke publicly about the censorship Thursday evening on her livestream — said that Monday’s process was different. After the taping of the segment, producers asked co-host Robby Soave to do what’s known as a “pick up,” a fairly standard editorial addition to a segment. In this case, Soave was asked to repeat something that had already been included, namely the perspective of Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt that stood in opposition to Tlaib. Later, Halper was told the segment was being reviewed and held up. Later in the week, she was told it wouldn’t run. When she asked if she could discuss the subject in her next appearance on Hill TV, she was told her invitation had been rescinded, according to an email from an executive with Nexstar Media Group, which owns Hill TV, along with scores of local news channels and the cable channel NewsNation, which recently hired former CNN presenter Chris Cuomo.

Halper’s monologue examined Tlaib’s claim that Israel has the characteristics of an apartheid state by exploring the definition of apartheid and quoting from human rights organizations such as Israel-based B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. She quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak saying that Israel could become an apartheid state if it didn’t change course, and so on.

Halper also made reference to Israeli laws that bar Palestinians from traveling freely or living in Israel proper even if they are married to an Israeli, as well as to laws that grant or exclude entry into the country specifically on the basis of religion or ethnicity.

The decision of whether to post the segment was kicked from “Rising” producers to The Hill’s editor-in-chief Bob Cusack. In a call with Halper on Wednesday, he framed Halper’s segment as similar to an op-ed submission, telling her that The Hill accepts some submissions and rejects other submissions, and that this right extends to Hill TV journalism as well.

Producers told Halper that perhaps a standard segment would work, but when Halper proposed to a Nexstar executive that she use her next appearance for such a segment, she was told her services would no longer be needed.

“We wanted to let you know that we will not be needing you to appear on Rising tomorrow am,” a Nexstar executive told Halper Wednesday in an email she provided to The Intercept, asking for the executive’s name to be kept private. “Please feel free to submit any unpaid invoices for your work on Rising. We wish you all the best.”

Gary Weitman, the chief communications officer for Nexstar, declined to comment.

Her monologue is below:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib has been condemned by some over comments she made about Israel. Here’s CNN’s Jake Tapper reporting on what the Michigan Democrat said and the response it prompted.

I’m not a Jewish colleague of Tlaib, but I am a Jew and I am outraged. Not by Tlaib, but by the attacks on Tlaib. Rashida Tlaib is saying that Israel is an apartheid state and that people who claim to have progressive values cannot support an apartheid state. No matter how loose a definition of progressive we use, it certainly excludes supporting a racist apartheid system.

What’s outrageous is that Tlaib would be pilloried over her comments. What’s outrageous is that the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt would claim that Israel is not an apartheid government. What’s outrageous is that Jake Tapper would accept Greenblatt’s judgment as the truth and not propaganda that needed to be pushed back against.

I understand that Greenblatt and perhaps Tapper “feel” like Israel is not an apartheid state but unfortunately for them, apartheid isn’t about your feelings. It’s about facts. 

So let’s look at the facts on the ground. 

First of all, what is apartheid? 

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word that means apartness. It was the official policy in South Africa from 1948 and 1994, allowing white South Africans, in the minority, to rule over and discriminate against the vast majority of Black South Africans. 

But apartheid doesn’t just apply to South Africa. In 1973, the U.N. defined “the crime of apartheid” as including “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in Southern Africa,” as well as any “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined apartheid as “inhumane acts of a character” that are “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

These inhuman acts include, among others “infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups. … Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including … the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. … Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.”

Israel’s own laws certainly fit this definition of apartheid.

Look at the Law of Return of 1950 and tell me it’s not apartheid. The law allows any Jew, which means anyone with one Jewish grandparent, the right to move to Israel and automatically become citizens of Israel. It gives their spouses that right too, even if they’re not Jewish. Palestinians, of course, lack that right. 

Lest you had any doubts about that, the Israeli Citizenship Law of 1952 deprived Palestinian refugees and their descendants of legal status, the right to return and all other rights in their homeland. It also defined Palestinians present in Israel as “Israeli citizens” without a nationality and group rights.

These laws together obviously fit into the International Criminal Court’s apartheid criteria: The Israeli laws prohibit “members of a racial group” “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence.”

The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law of 2003, which was reauthorized in March of this year, makes people who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip ineligible for the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship and residency permits that are usually available through marriage to an Israeli citizen. Not only can non-Israeli Jews not get Israeli citizenship through their Israeli spouses, but in some cases they can’t live with them in Israel. 

More recently, the controversial Nation State Law established that “The fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” It also stipulated, “The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.” It cancels the status of Arabic as an official language, and omits all mention of Israel as a democracy, the equality of its citizens, and the existence of the Palestinian population.

This legal obliteration of Palestinians clearly fulfills the U.N.’s definition of apartheid, dividing “the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups.”

These are just some of the reasons that human rights organizations have declared Israel an apartheid state. Of course it should come as no surprise that Palestinian human rights organizations have been calling Israel’s government an apartheid one for decades. Al Haq, Al Mezan’s Center for Human Rights, Adalah: the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association have documented Israeli apartheid.

More recently, organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also conceded that Israel enacts apartheid policies.

Israel’s own human rights organization B’Tselem has declared, “The Israeli regime enacts … an apartheid regime. B’Tselem reached the conclusion that the bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met after considering the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to entrench its control over Palestinians.” B’Tselem divides the way Israeli apartheid works into four areas:

“Land – Israel works to Judaize the entire area, treating land as a resource chiefly meant to benefit the Jewish population. Since 1948, Israel has taken over 90% of the land within the Green Line and built hundreds of communities for the Jewish population. Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this policy in the West Bank, building more than 280 settlements for some 600,000 Jewish Israeli citizens. Israel has not built a single community for the Palestinian population in the entire area stretching from the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (with the exception of several communities built to concentrate the Bedouin population after dispossessing them of most of their property rights).

Citizenship – Jews living anywhere in the world, their children and grandchildren – and their spouses – are entitled to Israeli citizenship. In contrast, Palestinians cannot immigrate to Israeli-controlled areas, even if they, their parents or their grandparents were born and lived there. Israel makes it difficult for Palestinians who live in one of the units it controls to obtain status in another, and has enacted legislation that prohibits granting Palestinians who marry Israelis status within the Green Line.

Freedom of movement – Israeli citizens enjoy freedom of movement in the entire area controlled by Israel (with the exception of the Gaza Strip) and may enter and leave the country freely. Palestinian subjects, on the other hand, require a special Israeli-issued permit to travel between the units (and sometimes inside them), and exit abroad also requires Israeli approval.

Political participation – Palestinian citizens of Israel may vote and run for office, but leading politicians consistently undermine the legitimacy of Palestinian political representatives. The roughly five million Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, cannot participate in the political system that governs their lives and determines their future. They are denied other political rights as well, including freedom of speech and association.”

Israeli officials and politicians, too, have described their own country as an apartheid state.

Former attorney general Michael Ben-Yair wrote in 2002, “we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”

Zehava Galon, former chair of Israel’s Meretz party, said in 2006, Israel was “relegated” to “the level of an apartheid state.”

In 2007, Israel’s former education minister Shulamit Aloni wrote, “the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population.”

In 2008, former environment minister Yossi Sarid said, “what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid.”

Even Israel’s prime ministers have used the A word. In a recently published 1976 interview, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said, “if we don’t want to get to apartheid … I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state.”

In 2007 yet another prime minister, Ehud Olmert, warned, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.” Well, Israel isn’t finished, but they do face a “South African-style struggle.”

Prime Minister Ehud Barak said in 2010, “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Surely South African leaders who suffered, struggled, and finally destroyed apartheid in their nation understood what apartheid is. And the great South African leaders Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu saw Israel policies as apartheid. In 1997 Mandela said, “The U.N. took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

In 2013, Desmond Tutu recalled being struck by the similarities between what he experienced in apartheid South Africa and what he observed in Israel. 

And just this past week, South Africa’s Minister for International Relations, Naledi Pandor, addressed the United Nations General Assembly and said the following:

“To my friends in the Democratic party who want to support Israel AND who who want be progressives, it is important to listen to what international law, Israeli politicians and South Africans leaders and apartheid survivors say about the apartheid system in Israel. But we would all do well to look at what South Africa did with its apartheid system. Simply put, it left apartheid behind.” 

So the question we should be asking ourselves as progressives and Americans and some of us as Jews is not how to excoriate Rashida Tlaib for pointing out the obvious, or how to turn all criticisms of Israel as challenges to Israel’s right to exist or as expressions of anti-Semitism. Rather, the question to ask is how an apartheid-free Israel would look.

The post Broadcaster Censors Hill TV Segment on Rashida Tlaib’s Description of Israel as “Apartheid Government” appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The hallmark of our contemporary social media era is the penchant for misinformation to circulate rapidly through political discourse, be endorsed by authority figures, and adopted unquestioningly by swathes of people before fact-checkers are able to ascertain the credibility of the claims.

On Monday, the Anti-Defamation League issued a serious allegation against a Democratic member of Congress that was immediately picked up by news outlets and high-profile political figures. It warrants a thorough examination.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, made the following claims on Twitter in reference to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.: “In one sentence, [Tlaib] simultaneously tells American Jews that they need to pass an anti-Zionist litmus test to participate in progressive spaces even as she doubles down on her #antisemitism by slandering Israel as an apartheid state.”

In one sentence, @RepRashida simultaneously tells American Jews that they need to pass an anti-Zionist litmus test to participate in progressive spaces even as she doubles down on her #antisemitism by slandering Israel as an apartheid state. 1/2 https://t.co/9AIEnA6i5t

— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) September 21, 2022

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., among others, piled on, elaborating on the claim: “I fundamentally reject the notion that one cannot support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state and be a progressive.”

I fundamentally reject the notion that one cannot support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state and be a progressive. https://t.co/nb9ZkODUOk

— Rep. Nadler (@RepJerryNadler) September 21, 2022

Other members of Congress — Reps. Ted Deutch, Haley Stevens, and Juan Vargas, among them — have made similar public comments.

We take these claims in two parts.

First, did Tlaib — who is Palestinian American — say that progressives must pass “an anti-Zionist litmus test to participate in progressive spaces”? And did she say that “one cannot support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state and be a progressive”?

To test these claims, The Intercept identified and reviewed the comments in question. According to a video of Tlaib’s remarks at a Palestine Advocacy Day event, she made the following assertion: “I want you all to know that among progressives, it becomes clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel‘s apartheid government.”

Tlaib does not say that in order to hold progressive values one must oppose Zionism or assert that Israel has no right to exist. The Intercept reached out to Greenblatt and Nadler for additional information that would support their claims but did not receive any.

Notably, Greenblatt refers to “one sentence,” which indicates that the entirety of Greenblatt’s claim ought to be supported by the sentence in question.

Tlaib explicitly refers to “Israel’s apartheid government” in her remarks, making clear that it is the apartheid nature of the government that she stands in opposition to, not the idea of an Israeli state.

In order for Greenblatt’s or Nadler’s claims to be accurate, they would have to assume that the only conceivable Israeli system of government is an apartheid government, and therefore rejection of apartheid is equal to the rejection of any Israeli government. Neither Greenblatt nor Nadler have made such a claim and, indeed, such a claim would be absurd. It is entirely conceivable that Israel could organize itself as a Jewish democratic state that offers equal rights to all its residents. A system of apartheid is not the only available option.

We therefore rate the claim that she established a litmus test over the existence of the state of Israel, or support of Zionism, as false.

Such misinformation easily circulates in Washington. On Wednesday afternoon, a reporter at the U.S. Capitol asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to respond to a claim of Tlaib’s that one cannot both support Israel and be progressive, while leaving out the critical detail of the apartheid government. Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment, finding the reporter’s phrasing suspect. It turned out the question had indeed distorted Tlaib’s claim.

Now let’s examine Greenblatt’s second claim, that Tlaib “slander[ed] Israel as an apartheid state.” To test Greenblatt’s claim, we examined reviews conducted by human rights organizations with a proven track record of analyzing such questions.

In order to ascertain whether Israel’s government is of an apartheid nature, it is first incumbent to describe such a system. Amnesty International concludes:

The term “apartheid” was originally used to refer to a political system in South Africa which explicitly enforced racial segregation, and the domination and oppression of one racial group by another. It has since been adopted by the international community to condemn and criminalize such systems and practices wherever they occur in the world.

The crime against humanity of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention, the Rome Statute and customary international law is committed when any inhuman or inhumane act (essentially a serious human rights violation) is perpetrated in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.

Apartheid can best be understood as a system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group.

Such a description applies to Israel’s current government, according to Amnesty International. “Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT” — Occupied Palestinian Territory — “and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law. Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity,” the report concludes. “This is apartheid.”

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, has come to the same conclusion. “The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime,” its report found. “B’Tselem reached the conclusion that the bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met after considering the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to entrench its control over Palestinians.”

According to B’Tselem, Israel systematically denies a host of rights to Palestinian subjects for the purpose of maintaining an unequal system, which makes the system apartheid by definition. B’Tselem’s report finds that Israel “pursues this organizing principle in four major areas,” namely:

• Land – Israel works to Judaize the entire area, treating land as a resource chiefly meant to benefit the Jewish population. Since 1948, Israel has taken over 90% of the land within the Green Line and built hundreds of communities for the Jewish population. Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this policy in the West Bank, building more than 280 settlements for some 600,000 Jewish Israeli citizens. Israel has not built a single community for the Palestinian population in the entire area stretching from the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (with the exception of several communities built to concentrate the Bedouin population after dispossessing them of most of their property rights).

• Citizenship – Jews living anywhere in the world, their children and grandchildren — and their spouses — are entitled to Israeli citizenship. In contrast, Palestinians cannot immigrate to Israeli-controlled areas, even if they, their parents or their grandparents were born and lived there. Israel makes it difficult for Palestinians who live in one of the units it controls to obtain status in another, and has enacted legislation that prohibits granting Palestinians who marry Israelis status within the Green Line.

• Freedom of movement – Israeli citizens enjoy freedom of movement in the entire area controlled by Israel (with the exception of the Gaza Strip) and may enter and leave the country freely. Palestinian subjects, on the other hand, require a special Israeli-issued permit to travel between the units (and sometimes inside them), and exit abroad also requires Israeli approval.

• Political participation – Palestinian citizens of Israel may vote and run for office, but leading politicians consistently undermine the legitimacy of Palestinian political representatives. The roughly five million Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, cannot participate in the political system that governs their lives and determines their future. They are denied other political rights as well, including freedom of speech and association.

Human Rights Watch, another international human rights organization, produced similar findings:

Across [Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory] and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

We therefore rate Greenblatt’s claim that it is slanderous to refer to Israel’s government as an apartheid state as false.

The post Fact Check: Rep. Rashida Tlaib Said Progressives Must Oppose Israeli Apartheid appeared first on The Intercept.

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Republicans plan to launch a variety of investigations into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many of its largest member corporations if they retake the majority in the House of Representatives this November. The probes, said a GOP member of Congress and multiple Republican operatives who requested anonymity to discuss plans that have yet to be made public, will marry Republicans’ newly formed hostility to the Chamber with the party’s mission to undermine the growth of the ESG investment sector.

The power of ESG — which stands for environmental, social, and governance — criteria to shape company valuations and behavior has become a major source of consternation among conservatives, who argue that companies that follow it are breaking with their fiduciary duty to maximize profits for investors.

The Chamber has infuriated Republicans by endorsing ESG criteria. “Today, for many companies, climate change and carbon emissions impact long-term value, thereby becoming a factor that retirement fund managers should take into consideration,” wrote a Chamber vice president in a typical statement in July 2020.

The congressman highlighted what he saw as the downfalls of that approach. Republicans accuse ESG advocates of using ESG criteria to punish American energy companies, only to then give an advantage to large, foreign energy companies over which the U.S. has little oversight anyways.

“How is it again that you can discourage investment in American energy when you own, or when you’re controlling board seats, of an American energy company, but you’re pushing it offshore to a Chinese energy company? Tell me you didn’t violate your fiduciary duty somehow,” said the congressman. “Then you throw that over into Judiciary [Committee hearings] and say, how do you reconcile this from an antitrust perspective? How can somebody actually be duty-of-care to the shareholders of one entity when you’re duty-of-care to the Chinese Communist Party’s-controlled energy company?”

“There is not going to be much to investigate,” said a Chamber spokesperson. “The Chamber is at the forefront of fighting the SEC climate, human capital and similar disclosures and believes fiduciaries must focus on maximizing return.” House Republicans, though, think the Chamber is having it both ways, criticizing the Securities and Exchange Commission rule but supporting the principle. “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports climate policy that includes the disclosure of material information for investors to use,” reads the Chamber’s comment on the SEC’s proposed rule changes that would increase disclosure requirements for ESG funds.

The growth of the ESG industry has led to some counterintuitive results, as companies have learned to game the metrics: Some private prison companies, for instance, score well on the criteria.

On Thursday, 14 state treasurers issued a joint statement condemning Republican efforts to combat investor advocacy, which has led multiple states, including West Virginia, Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida, to restrict state treasurers from doing business with funds that deploy ESG screens.

“Disclosure, transparency, and accountability make companies more resilient by sharpening how they manage, ensuring that they are appropriately planning for the future. Our work, alongside those of other investors, employees, and customers have caused many companies to evolve their business models and their internal processes, better addressing the long term material risks that threaten their performance,” the statement reads. “The evolving divide suggests that there will be two kinds of states moving forward: states focused on short term gains and states focused on long term beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders.”

The Chamber announced recently it would devote $3 million toward the election of Mehmet Oz — who goes by Dr. Oz — in Pennsylvania, and funneled it through the Senate Leadership Fund. The move was generally seen as an olive branch to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is linked to the super PAC. They have so far made no similar contribution to the House Republican super PAC.

Today’s GOP war on the Chamber of Commerce represents a stunning turnaround from just a few years ago, when House Republicans and the Chamber were aligned on just about everything. And it comes in the wake of the collapse of the National Rifle Association, leaving two of the GOP’s most powerful outside armies largely disarmed. But as the Republican Party and the Chamber have polarized to opposite sides of the conservative movement, a deeper disagreement between the two — dating back to the movement that formed around Barry Goldwater in the 1950s and ’60s — has been reawakened.

At the height of the New Deal era after World War II, Democrats and liberal Republicans were united in the belief that cooperation between big business, big labor, and government was the secret to the era’s economic boom. John Kenneth Galbraith, the nation’s most famous economist and later President John F. Kennedy’s adviser, dubbed it “The Affluent Society” in a 1958 book that was both a cultural and a political sensation.

Arrayed against this coalition was an aggrieved and increasingly well-organized network of small and medium-sized businesses that felt they were getting squeezed by the big guys. What was good for General Motors, they said, was not necessarily good for them.

Big Labor and the New Deal coalition thought that they were living in a time of peace between capital and labor, but capital always knew that they were engaged in a strategic ceasefire, having been crushed by the Depression and unable to compete against the rising strength of the modern government.

But there was no real peace, and big business launched its counterattack on both labor and government in the 1970s, ushering in the neoliberal era. The Chamber, this time allied with small and medium-sized businesses, played a major role in the counterattack, with the heir to the Goldwater movement, Ronald Reagan, enacting a wish list of big business policies, deregulation, and tax cuts.

Jamie Galbraith, who followed his father into the economics profession, served as an aide to the Joint Tax Committee in Congress and recalled the Chamber at the time as an “ultra supply-side, ultra Reagan revolution organization with essentially no compromisers. … The Chamber was just down-the-line for the lowest possible taxes and most complete deregulation and privatization.”

But the Chamber started drifting back to the center in the early part of the Clinton years, endorsing the administration’s health care proposal known as “Hillarycare,” for the first lady. “All of a sudden, the Chamber just became something wholly different than whatever I perceived them to be. And I know we were very upset about it,” said former Texas Rep. Dick Armey, the No. 3 Republican at the time.

In the wake of the endorsement, recalled one Republican operative, a member of House Republican leadership asked to meet with the Chamber’s board. Instead of delivering a standard political speech, he began by asking all the staff to leave the room. “He just ripped them a new asshole,” said the operative. “How could you possibly go down this anti-free enterprise, left-wing trail,” the GOP leader demanded. (The operative recalled it was Armey, but Armey said it may have been Tom DeLay. I couldn’t track down DeLay in time for this story.)

The dressing down worked. Richard Lesher had run the organization since 1975, but after Republicans took power in 1995 after the Gingrich Revolution in 1995, Lesher was eased out. “When we took the majority, of course, they came over, reminding us that we were the best friends we ever had — yakety yak,” Armey said. “When you come into the majority, you have no shortage of newfound friends.” The Chamber was a reliable Republican ally for the next roughly 20 years, up until just the last few.

(DeLay later launched what he dubbed the K Street Project, which was an effort to bring all of Washington’s lobbying industry under Republican authority, dictating that firms fire Democratic lobbyists or lose access to the GOP. “That was a boneheaded idea, and you can quote me if you like. I mean, who in the hell did he think he was, telling people who they can hire and who they can’t?” said Armey. “I objected to it in a leadership meeting. And my objections were not well received.”)

The tensions between big and little businesses never fully subsided, and the same network of smaller businesses that aligned themselves with Goldwater, forming the more conservative wing of the GOP, organizing behind Donald Trump in 2016 and beyond. The small and medium-sized businesses, particularly manufacturers, have also long been opposed to free-trade policies, as they lack the capacity to offshore their own production and can’t compete with cheaper products from overseas.

The conservative Republican member of Congress said that he didn’t begin as an active opponent of the Chamber, but didn’t see them as a natural ally either. “Frankly, as a business guy, I couldn’t join some of the efforts nationally, because they were at odds with small companies,” he said. “They were really pushing for a long time this pro-China trade policy, which was great for General Motors, but it was bad for everyone in the supply chain. And it was really gutting domestic manufacturing. And it was the same with NAM” — the National Association of Manufacturers — “a lot of their members had had an organization that was working against their interests. And the biggest, biggest members have certainly benefited from a lot of this stuff. And I think that’s a big part of why Trump was so well received by the small and medium business community.”

The Chamber is among the biggest spenders on lobbying activities in the country, but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and leading Senate Republicans like John Cornyn of Texas regularly take public shots at them. The Chamber’s top lobbying job, typically one of Washington’s plummest K Street assignments, sat open for several months until it was filled by two-term, back-bench former Rep. Evan Jenkins, who, like many Republicans from West Virginia, began his career as a Democrat. He was most recently a judge in West Virginia, having left the House to pursue an unsuccessful run for Senate in 2018.

In 2020, the Chamber endorsed 23 House Democrats in swing districts, a sharp break from the past practice of endorsing a nearly exclusive slate of Republicans, with one or two Democrats thrown on the list for a patina of bipartisan perception. The pivot came after the Chamber had been unsuccessful in stopping Trump from getting the 2016 GOP nomination — with a top Chamber lobbyist even endorsing Hillary Clinton and speaking at the Democratic National Convention. The business group delighted in Trump’s tax cut, largely written by Chamber ally Speaker Paul Ryan, but once Democrats took control in 2018, the Chamber began hedging its political bets by backing moderate Democrats.

“There isn’t a group that has less influence over Republican members of Congress at this point than the Chamber of Commerce.”

“The Chamber of Commerce, after what they did in 2020, they basically became persona non grata in the conservative movement,” said one well-connected Republican operative. “There was already a split in the conservative movement, who were never fans of the Chamber, but you had more moderate members and even those Republicans, particularly the ones in the House, have had enough of the Chamber.”

“There isn’t a group that has less influence over Republican members of Congress at this point than the Chamber of Commerce,” the operative, who asked for anonymity due to their work on political campaigns in which the Chamber gets involved, added. “That certainly wasn’t the case a few years ago.”

That the Chamber feels at home in the Democratic Party ought to be cause for concern for the party’s progressive wing, Galbraith said. “The extirpation of any old line liberalism in the Democratic Party may have opened up space for them,” he said.

The post House Republicans Plan to Investigate Chamber of Commerce if They Take the Majority appeared first on The Intercept.

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Federal investigators are probing the origin of twin allegations against then-Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, according to five sources who’ve been interviewed by the FBI.

In February 2019, Fairfax was accused of sexual assault by two women the same week that the state’s governor, Ralph Northam, was in the press for a yearbook photo possibly showing him in blackface or in a Klan outfit. The allegations against Fairfax came at a crucial and chaotic moment, when Northam was being pressured to resign, and political power looked up for grabs. Ultimately, the series of events that unfolded cleared the way for Terry McAuliffe to run for Virginia governor in 2021, a race he lost to current Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

Fairfax has vehemently disputed the allegations since the beginning, calling for a criminal investigation soon after they became public. In late 2019, he filed a defamation lawsuit against CBS News for their interviews with the two alleged victims, Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson. In it, Fairfax makes the case that the allegations against him have several inconsistencies and accuses his political rivals of trying to orchestrate the wide dissemination of the womens’ stories.

I’ve served both as a federal prosecutor & a defense attorney. I’ve passed two @FBI background checks & received a Top Secret security clearance.

For @TerryMcAuliffe @LevarStoney @nancyerikasmith @DebraKatzKMB to orchestrate false criminal allegations against me is ridiculous.

— Justin Fairfax (@FairfaxJustin) April 16, 2020

The women have also stood by their stories, which have not been definitively disproved. Fairfax’s defamation suit was ultimately dismissed by a judge, but the FBI, tasked with investigating public corruption, is now investigating some of the same material.

Fairfax told The Intercept that he was interviewed in early June for nearly three hours with no attorney present. According to Fairfax and the four other sources, who requested anonymity to speak openly about an ongoing investigation, the FBI is asking questions about whether money or other benefits were offered to either of the women around the time of the allegations and whether their accounts were inconsistent. Investigators, the sources said, including Fairfax, are showing a particular interest in the role of Richmond, Virginia, Mayor Levar Stoney’s political network in the dissemination of the allegations. Stoney has close links to McAuliffe.

Stoney and Fairfax have long been political rivals, and it was widely known that both McAuliffe and Stoney were contemplating future runs for governor, with McAuliffe in particular eyeing a second run for governor in 2021. Virginia limits governors to a single term, which makes the lieutenant governor the frontrunner for the nomination the day of their swearing in. Had Fairfax ascended to governor in 2019, replacing Northam, he would have been the prohibitive favorite for the nomination in 2021, cutting out McAuliffe and Stoney.

Asked about the FBI investigation, Stoney spokesperson Kevin Zeithaml said the mayor was not aware of the allegations against Fairfax before they were made public. “Mayor Stoney had never heard of the sexual assault allegations against Justin Fairfax until the story broke in the news in February 2019.” In response to Fairfax’s claims, Zeithaml added, “As the mayor has said repeatedly, there is absolutely no truth whatsoever to this ridiculous accusation against him.” McAuliffe spokesperson Jake Rubenstein declined to comment.

Adria Scharf — the wife of Thad Williamson, a top adviser to Stoney and a longtime associate of Vanessa Tyson — reached out to Tyson after she made her allegation. “Friend,” she wrote on Facebook messenger to Tyson, “northam may be forced to resign tomorrow. Thad and I think your story should get to the local press TODAY, rather than later. Do you want me to share screen shot and your contact info (tell me what to share) with a few local respected journalists.…or alternatively give you their info? Hugs. You are pure truth love and courage.” The screenshots were turned over to Fairfax — and subsequently to the FBI — by Tyson’s attorney, Debra Katz.

Tyson wrote back, “You can share the screenshot with whomever.” An attorney representing Scharf and Williamson denied that the offer to disseminate Tyson’s allegations was politically motivated, and also stated that the couple has not been contacted by the FBI.

In the suit, Fairfax also claims he had previously been warned in October 2018 that if Fairfax moved to run for governor, Stoney, adviser Thad Williamson, and his wife, Adria Scharf “intended to promote a supposedly damaging, uncorroborated accusation against Fairfax involving Tyson in an attempt to harm Fairfax personally and professionally and to derail his political future,” according to the filing. Fairfax said a City Hall employee relayed the warning in a phone call on October 4 and provided the corroborating phone records to The Intercept and to the FBI. The call began at 12:21 p.m., according to the phone records, and lasted for 29 minutes. (The employee, who still uses the number in the records, flatly denied speaking to Fairfax.)

Nancy Erika Smith, an attorney for Meredith Watson, said that she had not heard from the FBI.

“If it is true that the FBI is actually investigating two victims of Justin Fairfax, shame on the FBI,” she said in a statement. “This latest abuse is obviously at the urging of Fairfax and his political benefactors and PR team. I remind them all that Martha Stewart went to prison for lying to the FBI. It is a federal crime. Anyone who says my client concocted a story about Fairfax in 2019, or got paid to reveal her statement that she was raped by Justin Fairfax when they were students at Duke, is a liar. Fairfax’s defamation suit against CBS over the Gayle King interview of my client was dismissed. His constant harassment of my client is disgusting. Numerous people have corroborated Ms. Watson’s fresh complaints of rape immediately afterward and over the years. In fact, several newspapers printed an email she sent to Duke alumni before Fairfax was Lt. Governor. Enough is enough.”

The Accusations and the Aftermath

On February 1, 2019 — the first day of Black History Month — a conservative news outlet published a page from Northam’s medical school yearbook dedicated to him; it showed a few photos of Northam and one of a man wearing a Klan outfit standing next to another man in blackface. The men in the photos aren’t identifiable, but one of them was purported to be Northam. The governor quickly apologized for the photo, and party figures at both the national and local level called for his resignation, which was widely expected.

That night, Vanessa Tyson, an associate professor of politics at Scripps College, posted an allegation on Facebook that Fairfax — the state’s lieutenant governor, now in line to become governor — had forced her to perform oral sex in his hotel room at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Some reporters, it turned out, were already aware of the allegation, as she had made a version of it to the Washington Post in fall 2017.

The next day, a Saturday, Northam backtracked, saying that he didn’t remember being in the photo and suggesting instead that it may have been added to his yearbook page by mistake. He remained under intense pressure after a bizarre press conference that included an apparent aborted attempt at a moonwalk and an admission to having worn blackface in order to impersonate Michael Jackson.

It was during this weekend that Scharf, Williamson’s wife, told Tyson that she and Williamson wanted to circulate her allegation to local journalists. On Sunday night, the same conservative outlet that published the blackface and Klan photo ran an item on Tyson’s allegation, citing the Facebook post. On Monday morning, Fairfax issued a public denial of Tyson’s allegation as pressure on Northam to step down continued.

The Post used the denial as a hook to run their own story, leading with Fairfax’s statement, laying out Tyson’s allegation, and explaining why the paper hadn’t published previously. “The Post, in phone calls to people who knew Fairfax from college, law school and through political circles, found no similar complaints of sexual misconduct against him. Without that, or the ability to corroborate the woman’s account — in part because she had not told anyone what happened — The Post did not run a story,” the paper reported. “She said she never told anyone about what happened at the time or in the years that followed until shortly before she approached The Post.”

That Wednesday, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who had called on Northam to resign, admitted he had worn blackface in college. The same day, Tyson issued an official statement, saying she and Fairfax had met at the convention on July 26, 2004, and that two days later he had assaulted her. Fairfax says in the complaint he was not at the convention on July 26, as he was traveling with the vice presidential nominee, John Edwards, and that their encounter two days later was consensual.

With both Fairfax and Herring facing trouble, Northam’s own prospects improved; because the second and third-ranking statewide officials were damaged, it was easier for him to stay on.

On Friday, a second Fairfax accuser, Meredith Watson, came forward to say that Fairfax had raped her while they were students together at Duke University in 2000. Fairfax first learned of the allegation in an email from her attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, shortly before 1 p.m. “My client would like to avoid media attention about this tragic event,” Smith wrote. The way to spare her client that attention, Smith suggested, was for Fairfax to resign. “She is motivated by her strong sense of civic duty to ensure that those seeking or serving in public office are of high character,” Smith explained. “Mr. Fairfax’s past behavior is obviously disqualifying for any public office. We hope that he reaches the same conclusion.”

He didn’t, and the news was circulating on social media after 4:30 p.m., with Fairfax’s spokesperson getting her first call at 4:39 p.m. At 5:00, her phone blew up as a statement went out from Watson’s attorney. McAuliffe’s response came out quicker than even Fairfax’s, calling for Fairfax’s immediate resignation at 5:03.

The allegations against Justin Fairfax are serious and credible. It is clear to me that he can no longer effectively serve the people of Virginia as Lieutenant Governor. I call for his immediate resignation.

— Terry McAuliffe (@TerryMcAuliffe) February 8, 2019

Fairfax responded forcefully, saying the charge was “demonstrably false.”

“I demand a full investigation into these unsubstantiated and false allegations,” Fairfax said in a statement at the time. “Such an investigation will confirm my account because I am telling the truth.” Watson had claimed the assault happened in the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity house and that she left afterward. Fairfax would later say publicly that another student, Dhamian Blue, was also present for the encounter, that it was consensual among the three of them, and that Fairfax left the two of them in the room together. Additionally, Fairfax did not live in that house, and said that the encounter happened in the room of Blue, who did live in the house. In a 2019 interview with CBS News’s Gayle King, Watson said she left the room after the encounter with Fairfax, and did not mention a third person being present. Watson did not respond to a request for comment, and has not commented on Fairfax’s claim of an additional witness since he first made it years ago.

In dismissing Fairfax’s lawsuit, the court argued that Fairfax had not provided the court with enough facts to demonstrate “actual malice” in their coverage.

Fairfax told The Intercept he provided the name of the alleged witness, Blue, to the FBI. He has also shared the name publicly, in a letter to Duke University, included it in court documents, and provided it to multiple media outlets, starting during the first week of the allegations. Blue, a North Carolina attorney, did not respond to a request for comment, and has remained silent in the years since the allegation has become public.

On February 8, Watson also alleged that a Duke University basketball star had raped her, and that she had told an unnamed dean about the assault, and the dean had discouraged her from reporting the alleged crime. The dean has yet to be named. R. Stanton Jones, a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., grew up with Watson and said that she told him in the summer of 2001 that she had been raped twice at Duke. Kaneedreck Adams, a classmate of Watson and Fairfax, told media outlets Watson told her she was raped the day after it allegedly happened, and named Fairfax.

Fairfax also disputed Tyson’s allegations, publicly and in the eventual defamation suit, claiming the encounter was consensual and pointing out inconsistencies. She said that they had met two days earlier and that he suggested they swing by his nearby hotel room for “fresh air” and to pick up documents. Fairfax’s travel records show he wasn’t in Boston the day she claims they met, according to his defamation suit and backed up by contemporaneous reporting on the travel schedule of John Edwards, and in fact met the second evening of the convention, and then again the next afternoon in the lobby of his hotel. He said they flirted in the lobby, held hands, and collectively agreed to go up to his hotel room for privacy — not to a nearby hotel and not to pick up documents. He said that her claim that they began kissing consensually in the room is accurate, and that the encounter lasted 15 minutes and was entirely consensual. And while Tyson said she never reached out to Fairfax after the encounter, Fairfax disputes this.

The FBI Investigation

Fairfax, whose political career has taken a hit since the allegations were made public, has been vocal in his pursuit of a criminal investigation. He told The Intercept that he began sending information to the FBI “on an ongoing basis” starting in February 2019, when the allegations first became public. He said he was not aware of the full scope of the investigation or whether the FBI had spoken with anyone else prior to his interview. “They did not tell me whether they had interviewed anyone else and they did not tell me the full scope of their investigation,” Fairfax told The Intercept.

Another source, who asked for anonymity to speak about his interaction with the FBI, said that a federal investigator called him in early July with a question about whether they had any knowledge of a $16,000 payment allegedly made by Stoney’s political operation to one of the two accusers. The source had no firsthand knowledge of it, and told the FBI as much. Three other sources who spoke with the FBI on June 22 said that the agents inquired about money from Stoney’s operation being directed toward one or both of the women, but the sources also had no firsthand knowledge.

The FBI is also probing what role Stoney’s political operation played in the scandal, according to Fairfax, and the others interviewed by the FBI who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. Stoney is close to McAuliffe, serving in his cabinet during McAuliffe’s term as governor, from 2014 to 2016. Stoney was the deputy campaign manager for McAuliffe’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign and was previously executive director of the Virginia Democratic Party. In 2016, the Virginia Pilot observed, “Politicos who want to solve a problem or get Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s attention go to [Stoney].” Stoney was McAuliffe’s campaign co-chair in 2021.

An FBI agent involved in discussions with Fairfax did not respond to a request for comment.

Fairfax told The Intercept that there was nothing in either encounter with Watson or Tyson that could have been interpreted by the other party as nonconsensual. Tyson did not respond to a request for comment.

The post The FBI Is Investigating a Potential Political Motivation Linked to Justin Fairfax Allegations appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The imminent overturn of Roe v. Wade, coming on top of decades of what many activists consider to be an overly cautious abortion rights movement, is having ripple effects in reproductive rights organizations and clinics, according to Emily Likins-Ehlers, who’s with the group ReproJobs, a worker empowerment center recently highlighted by The Intercept. “People are just trying to grab control where they can,” Likins-Ehlers said. “Making sure that they have a severance when they lose their job in two weeks or whatever has been on the forefront of most workers’ minds that I’ve spoken with. They just want to pay their bills after Roe falls.”

ReproJobs is a nonprofit run by two anonymous organizers who work in the reproductive rights field, as well as Likins-Ehlers. The group has widely followed and influential Instagram and Twitter accounts focused on workplace organizing and discontent inside reproductive rights workplaces. Likins-Ehlers offered to do an interview about the group and its role, which was mentioned in our story on the implosion of the progressive nonprofit world in Washington, D.C., adding that the two co-founders are continuing to remain anonymous.

“I don’t envy anyone who has to manage an organization right now, particularly, but I think they would find that they could actually find more resources if they were willing to ally themselves with the union, by accepting the union into their space,” Likins-Ehlers said, though they agreed with the executive directors cited in The Intercept article that a generational divide and a culture that encourages callouts have made organizations more difficult to manage. Turmoil in progressive organizations generally, and reproductive rights groups specifically, isn’t explained by the presence of a union drive. Some organizations going through upheaval have been unionized for decades, such as NARAL Pro-Choice America or the Sierra Club, while others, like the Guttmacher Institute and Groundswell Fund, are seeing fresh union drives.

There’s a fear, Likins-Ehlers said, that many organizations will soon shut down and blame the union. “That’s what a lot of these reproductive justice orgs will do,” Likins-Ehlers said, referring to a previous organization they had worked with that did just that. “They’ll say, ‘Roe fell, and this became too hard. And I’m too scared of getting arrested. And I guess the union was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and now we have to close.’”

At the same time, Likins-Ehlers said, things have not been going well under the current and former executive directors. “If the managers feel like the conditions are becoming unworkable, that means that the workers are doing a good job disrupting the system. And I think that most of these workers right now know that it’s toast. We’re fucked. Roe is going to fall any day now. And we are going to have to set up bail funds.”

Likins-Ehlers said they work as a part-time contractor for ReproJobs. The two anonymous founders go by the pseudonyms Hermione and Luna. The budget for the operation, ReproJobs said, is around $275,000 this year, and the major funding began around 2019. “If they feel like they can’t rise to this challenge,” Likins-Ehlers said of the managers at nonprofits, “they can get out of the way and let somebody else rise to this challenge. Because there is a generational gap, and more people are unionizing now than ever before.”

“If the managers feel like the conditions are becoming unworkable, that means that the workers are doing a good job disrupting the system.”

Likins-Ehlers said that they had recently been in a webinar with one of their movement heroes, Loretta Ross, an author, activist, and reproductive justice pioneer. Ross, who was featured in The Intercept’s article, has been publicly advocating against callout culture in progressive organizations for several years.

“I really respect Loretta Ross and everything she has to say, and she sort of gave me the business during a webinar a few weeks ago, where she told me that when she was a young organizer, you were lucky to have a sleeping bag on the floor of a church when you went to a protest. Things were different. There weren’t jobs in the movement 50 years ago; this is a new industry that is just forming,” they said.

“Loretta has a book coming out that sort of disrupts callout culture in a really powerful way, and so I think that there’s been a lot of calling out that’s happened in the organizing efforts — specific executive directors have been targeted and have been ousted from their positions of power — and when I speak to workers, I don’t encourage that kind of calling out because I don’t feel like it builds collective power. I feel like it will simply give you a new figurehead to the same dynamic. So when we create a union, we’re simply trying to disrupt the power dynamic in and of itself and say, ‘This isn’t about you, as a leader, or you as a person necessarily. This is about a system, a structure.’”

Likins-Ehlers said that there are indeed examples of employees who lean too heavily into callouts of management over issues that should be handled differently, but that it’s important to separate those instances from the worthy goal of improving workplaces generally. “Loretta Ross said to me that she had an employee that called her out because the employee’s cat died, and she wanted time off to mourn her cat, and Loretta was unwilling to give her time off to mourn her cat or something like this. And that was Loretta’s example of the kinds of conflicts that are happening with the unions, and I had to kind of shrug because I was like, yeah, if a worker came to me with that story, I would tell them to deal with it personally. That’s not what we’re talking about. We are talking about living wages, we’re talking about parental leave. We are talking about the right to have a real job and not a temporary job that can be pulled out from underneath you at any moment. We’re talking about the right to work-life balance.”

Likins-Ehlers added that there were also cultural issues at work, recalling a previous boss of theirs who behaved transphobically. “Our executive director would deadname people,” they said, adding:

So just because you are the director of an abortion clinic doesn’t mean that you are respectful of transgender people. So I’m not saying that Loretta is wrong or that any of these leaders are wrong. They’re right also. But why don’t they just join us? They really aren’t the boss, they are employed by a board of directors. All of these executive directors are just an employee, just like us. Just like the rest of the workers who are trying to unionize, they have a boss, but their boss is a volunteer board of directors instead of an individual. So it’s harder to target. But that is really who runs these nonprofits. It’s not the EDs. The boards are the ones, and these are often people who are wealthy or work in other industries or are high-powered lawyers — like Planned Parenthood has these, like, super high-powered, amazing lawyers who could be spending their time strengthening the movement but instead spend their time fighting the unions, when really the only thing that anybody wants is just a formal contract.

Most of these employees, when they come to me, they’re like: “I don’t want my clinic to shut down. I don’t want my organization to be burdened. I’m not looking for a raise.” They literally just want a formal employment contract. Because we all feel so insecure in this job economy, like you said. So I don’t know. There’s just, I think, cognitive dissonance because, like, I’m holding Loretta Ross’s book, right here, “An Introduction To Reproductive Justice.” And she says, specifically, quote, “Reproductive justice explains that indeed, poverty creates poor conditions for mothering, because it shortens lifespans and increases rates of infant and child mortality and lower birth weights.” So if we’re talking about poverty wages, that’s what a lot of these reproductive justice workers are making in their cities: poverty wages. I made way more money as a busser at a pizza place than I made at the clinic. So for them to question our loyalty to the movement feels really rude.

The cautious politics of many of the leading abortion rights groups, Likins-Ehlers said, also helped bring about the catastrophe the movement is now facing. “When I started in the abortion movement back in 2012, they told me that I wasn’t allowed to use the word abortion as I advocated, that we could only say ‘a woman’s right to choose’ — that saying the word abortion was too radical and too leftist. And I got put on a list, like, ‘Emily’s not allowed to talk to people because she’s too radical about what she says.’ So I’ve always been a disrupter, everywhere I’ve gone. You can ask anyone who’s worked with me, I’m a pain in the fucking ass,” they said. “I felt this moment coming for so many years. And I feel like the movement has — we have been failed.”

The post ReproJobs’ Emily Likins-Ehlers: Overly Cautious Organizations and Imminent Roe Overturn Are Driving Staff Dissent appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.