On Oct. 27, 2023, the Israeli army released an animated video claiming to reveal what lay beneath Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It showed underground tunnels, bunkers, and a Hamas command room — all depicted through slick 3D graphics.

“That information is ironclad,” insisted Mark Regev, then-senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during an interview the same day on CNN. “It’s based on Israeli intelligence.”

[...]

But no such base was ever discovered. Moreover, the command room featured in the video was not unique; it had already appeared more than a year earlier in another animation published by the Israeli army, illustrating what it said was a tunnel beneath a UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school in Gaza. The surrounding streets in the “Al-Shifa” video, meanwhile, were populated with storefronts from a commercial 3D asset pack — replete with fictional establishments like “Fabio’s Pizzeria,” “Andre’s Bakery,” and “Revolution Bike Shop.”

The “Al-Shifa” animation would become one of the most notorious examples of Israel’s new wartime communication strategy. It also marked the beginning of an accelerated phase of production within the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Unit: having published only a handful of 3D visualizations before October 7, the unit has since released dozens of similar videos depicting supposed terror sites in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

[...]

A months-long investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call together with the research collective Viewfinder, the Swiss network SRF, and the Scottish outlet The Ferret analyzed 43 animations produced by the Israeli army since October 7 and found that many contain serious spatial inaccuracies or prefabricated assets — sourced not from classified intelligence but rather from commercial libraries, content creators, and cultural institutions.

Interviews with soldiers involved in the production of these videos further illuminate how the army prioritizes the aesthetic value of the animations over their accuracy, while animators routinely embellish in order to emphasize a supposed threat.

The outcome is a communications campaign that mimics the graphics of forensic reconstructions in pursuit of legitimizing military strikes on civilian infrastructure. And as most of the sites depicted in the army’s animations remain inaccessible to journalists and researchers, and many have been blown up or demolished, Israel’s illustrated allegations effectively defy verification.

[...]

In some cases, the “illustration” goes one step further, with fabricated environments replacing real places. In September 2024, the army published an animation depicting houses in southern Lebanon that it claimed were concealing missiles. Our investigation identified the area that the video zooms in on from a satellite image to be the outskirts of the village of Yater.

Yet a visit to the village last week found that no such buildings or streets exist in this area — and not because they were destroyed by the Israeli army, which bombed only a handful of sites in Yater. Indeed, the houses in the video are entirely fabricated, featuring antennas sourced from at least three unique models in Hubert’s “Antenna Kit” asset pack, which was published to his Patreon in March 2021.

The army published a similar 3D model at the start of its attack on Iran in June, depicting a uranium enrichment site in Natanz. As international media outlets rushed to cover the event, dozens republished the animation in part or in full, including the BBC, CNN, and Sky News. The interior of the facility depicted in the animation includes at least six of Hubert’s 3D assets, collectively replicated over 150 times.

[...]

Experts have compared the aesthetics of the army’s burgeoning animation campaign with the fields of visual and open-source investigations, which are becoming increasingly popular for covering areas where traditional reporting can be difficult.

“I think the visual lexicon of open-source investigation is something that the Israelis have co-opted as a way to try to delegitimize [those investigations] and confuse,” said Elizabeth Breiner, head of programmes at the Forensic Architecture research center at Goldsmiths University of London. “These visuals are open about their status as something in between the real and the imaginary, but the real harm is that they stick with people well beyond the point after which something may have been functionally disproven.”

It’s clear that the Democratic Party, and the Liberal-Left more broadly, is in total disarray. As the Trump administration continues to erode liberal norms, worker protections, due process, free speech, and civil liberties, there’s a broad consensus that the most impactful way to push back against Trump’s unprecedented power grab is at the ballot box in 2026 and 2028. The stakes for these elections couldn’t be higher, and thus the approach Democrats take to do so couldn’t be any more salient. Attempting to get ahead of this narrative, and steer the party away from anything with even the vaguest whiff stench of Left populism, are a recent constellation of think tanks, PACs, and “movements” designed to keep the fundamentally neoliberal, billionaire-approved Democratic Party fundamentally neoliberal and billionaire-approved.

But simply appealing to the status quo wouldn’t be credible after the Democratic Party has fallen to their lowest point in over 40 years (if not 100). So these factions are creating pseudo-worldviews and political frameworks that are meant to appear bold and forward-looking, but are ultimately just a rebranded defense of the party establishment. And we know this because, to the person, they are funded by the same billionaire donors that have shaped democratic politics for decades and are working in concert with party leaders looking to deflect blame for their own repeated failures.

[...]

Indeed, it’s an exceedingly convenient narrative for the billionaires backing these factions. Post-2024 loss, if I’m a Democratic consultant or “strategist” wanting to hoover up money to “rebuild the party” and polish my personal brand, I won’t find much funding by telling wealthy liberal donors that the problem with the party is that it sold out the working class and didn’t do nearly enough during the Biden years to win them back, or that it needs to embrace bold redistributive policies like Medicare for All or stronger labor unions, or that it needs to embrace Sanders-Mamdani-style politics of class conflict, less hawkish foreign policy, and unapologetically progressive stances on “social issues.” Obviously, this would not only prevent me from getting millions to start my own “institute” or “movement” and being featured in glossy puff pieces in the New York Times, it would actively upset these donors and effectively ice me out of funding networks.

Thus, the buyer’s market for supposedly new “thinkers” and “movements” that will repackage the existing power structure as edgy, bold, and new is hotter than ever. Enter: these three projects.

In August and early September, I spoke with several of the 15 people who ultimately resigned from the Biden administration, having seen this disaster in the making. All described a whiplash akin to what Habash experienced as they watch their former superiors — people they say ignored them, refused to act, and lied — join the opposition to the war and attempt to convince the public that they are blameless. If those officials are successful, the resigners say, they will end up back in power.

Josh Paul, who worked for more than a decade in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, calls the recent statements “cynical repositioning.” He quit on October 18, 2023, when he realized his bosses expected him to approve arms transfers to Israel with zero oversight. It’s true, he says, that the situation in Gaza is “worse now than it has ever been,” but the road to this point was clear. He describes Israel’s “absolute disregard for civilian life” as undeniable from the start.

Paul’s first reaction to Sullivan’s change of heart “probably isn’t printable,” he tells me. “The tool kit to restrain Israel was always available when Sullivan was national security adviser.” Without any admission of wrongdoing, Sullivan and other newly vocal figures are engaging in “legacy burnishing.” “They don’t want to go down in history as the people who facilitated either a genocide or the pathway to a genocide,” he says; they want jobs in the next White House.

Hala Rharrit, a U.S. diplomat for 18 years, resigned from her role as an Arab-language spokesperson for the State Department after refusing to repeat what she calls Biden-administration lies about the war. Like Paul, she says top officials are trying to “rewrite history” and cautions that it would be a mistake to read their statements as a moral awakening: “It’s all been calculated the entire time, then and now. It’s all for their own political power and greed.”

Stacy Gilbert, who worked on humanitarian and refugee issues for the State Department for more than 20 years before resigning in May 2024, has bitter words for the revisionists. “Good for you, Jake Sullivan. But there’s actually no difference between what Israel is doing now and what they were doing when you had the power to do something about it — except time and about 20,000 more people who’ve died.”

These are the people liberals will tell you were trying everything to pressure Israel to not kill civilians and genocide Palestinians.

But supporting the government in power is a little different than saying we’re going to help this government try to survive.

We didn’t do that, Isaac. We never took a position one way or another on what the government should be. There were people in the government who thought we wanted it to fall. There were people outside of the government who thought we weren’t doing enough. We work to make policy with the government that’s in place. In the essay, you write, “Given the tensions within the government, it took active and consistent U.S. engagement to manage the internal Israeli political dynamics and maintain the adequate flow of assistance. The message to our interlocutors in the Israeli government was in essence, ‘If the politics are hard, blame the United States.’ Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today.” That makes it seem like you were trying to help the current government stay in power. No, I think you’re missing the point. The point I’m making is if your goal is to keep humanitarian aid flowing and you see obstacles that have to be overcome, you have to be realistic about what it takes to achieve the goal that you have. Our goal was to get the aid in. We wanted Israel to prevail in the war. What we’re saying in the essay is realistically there were limitations on how decisions would be taken and the coalition was concerned about not falling. It was their concern, not ours. I take issue with the characterization of our position being that we were trying to defend the coalition when we were trying to solve the immediate, urgent issue, which was getting humanitarian assistance in.

So when you say that, “Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today,” what do you mean? Netanyahu doesn’t want to piss off the super far-right ministers in his government by having it seem that Israel is delivering aid. So you’re saying that allowing Netanyahu to cite the need to satisfy U.S. demands is crucial to him remaining in power, correct?

You’re putting words in my mouth. I’m not going to let that happen. What I’m saying is in order to get a decision through his Cabinet, he needed to be armed with positions that he was able and willing to use. And what we would say is, “We need you to do this, and if that is a strategic concern then you do what we need.” I understand that you can see that as political cover, but it’s political cover to get a policy enacted, not to preserve a coalition. Our goal was to get aid in, and we were trying to help drive the decision-making process in a constructive way. I think that’s very different from taking political sides in a domestic context in another country.

If the goal was to get aid in, some people would say that keeping the current government afloat was a bad idea. Another possibility would have been to seriously threaten to stop arming them. How do you respond to that?

Look, I think President Biden was clear immediately after October 7th that he would support Israel in achieving the military objective of defeating Hamas. There was always a debate about what that meant, and we engaged diplomatically on the difference between defeating Hamas as a military and governing authority and eliminating the last Hamas fighter, which we didn’t believe at the beginning and I don’t believe today is possible. But our goal was to help Israel defend its people and its country. That was not something that we used as a general matter to say, If you don’t do other things we want, we’ll stop defending you. Part of it was that President Biden was so clear in his position that it wouldn’t have even been credible. Well, Biden still had the power to do it. I’m not saying he was going to, but he could have, right?

Right, but when he was Vice-President, Joe Biden was famous for saying great powers can’t bluff. It was something that is deep inside him—his commitment to supporting Israel in a legitimate, just fight was clear, and that had to coexist with pressing them on these humanitarian issues.

This is a war that a former defense minister to Netanyahu has referred to as ethnic cleansing. Whether you agree with this characterization or not, there is a certain point at which the U.S. could choose to stop helping Israel. Your answer is almost tautological, right? Biden wasn’t going to do this, so he couldn’t do this.**

Isaac, I think you have to put things in the perspective of the time frame. We’re talking about late 2023, early 2024, up until 2025. We engaged with Israel on military tactics in a very direct way. Take the decision to proceed in Rafah in May of 2024. [More than one million Palestinians, many of whom had congregated in Rafah in the first months of the war, fled the city during the offensive.] The Israeli military plan that was originally designed and the one that was executed were very different. If you look at the way they fought in Rafah, the reason we didn’t criticize it is that they took the advice that we had given them and they modified their military plans to be consistent with targeted intelligence-driven attacks. So we were engaging not just on humanitarian assistance; we were engaging on the conduct of the war. I’m not saying that everything went the way we would’ve advised, and I’m not saying we didn’t call them in the middle of the night many times saying, What on earth happened just now? When you would call them in the middle of the night and say, “What on earth happened?,” what was usually the answer?

The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places. Sorry, what did you just say?

In many cases, the original number of casualties—

No, I meant the thing about who the children were.

They were often the children of the fighters themselves.

And therefore what follows from that?

What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.

Hold on, Mr. Secretary. That’s not, in fact, correct, right? Whether it’s a legitimate target has to do with all kinds of things like proportionality. It doesn’t matter if the kids are the kids of—

If you’re in a command-and-control center, that’s different than if it’s a school that’s emptied out and innocent civilians are taking shelter there. If you’re the commander of a Hamas unit and you bring your family to a military site, that’s different. I’m not saying everything fits into that, and I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy.

It may shine a very poor light on Hamas, but who the kids are does not make a difference in terms of international law.

It is not the simple question that it originally appears to be when the initial report makes it sound like the target was just an empty school that families took cover in. In some cases, I’m not aware of the full explanations, because when I left we were still asking questions to get more detail, and saying to them that they have to be able to explain these things. And I’m not going to say that none of them fall outside of the bounds of things where there should be disciplinary action against some of the officers involved. I don’t know the answer to that.

Also, very obviously stupid and insufficient idea that Israel only offered as a figleaf to cover for their genocidal intent was totally intended to work, we couldn't have known how stupid it was:

Reading your piece, I was shocked to learn that the Biden Administration’s floating aid pier was an Israeli idea. This was the floating pier that Biden talked about in the State of the Union, and was operational in the spring of 2024 briefly before stormy weather made it inoperable. It was embarrassing, and people made fun of the Administration for it. Now it seems like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was also an Israeli idea. Both of them have been P.R. disasters, and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been a humanitarian disaster. The Israeli-American dynamic just seems very strange.

When the decision on the pier was made, it was supposed to work in a better way. It wasn’t supposed to get ripped apart by waves in the Mediterranean. So the things that were ridiculed were something that turned out to be something we’re going to have to deal with when we try to use that technology in another place. I never saw a risk assessment that predicted it was going to have such a difficult engineering challenge. With that said, almost half a million meals came across it and it became a very important diplomatic moment. I think diplomatically it accomplished quite a lot. It fed a lot of people. [The total aid delivered by the pier in its nearly three weeks of operation added up to approximately six hundred truckloads—about the same amount that entered Gaza on an average day prior to the war.] I’m not happy that the pictures are of waves knocking down a U.S. floating pier. But that’s not on the government of Israel. ♦

Unfortunately, the Democratic elite—which has played a crucial role in enabling and perpetuating the slaughter in Gaza—is still clinging to the status quo. And nowhere is that more evident than in how Ken Martin, the recently installed chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is handling the issue.

As chair of the organization that oversees the Democratic Party’s national fundraising and election efforts, Martin is an important and visible party leader. His statements and committee decisions shape national perceptions of the party and influence which candidates and voters are valued come election time. But it seems that he is siding with the old guard when it comes to Israel.

In early August, The Intercept reported Martin’s aides pressured 26-year-old pro-Palestine DNC delegate Alice Minnerly to water down a symbolic resolution calling for the party to support an immediate ceasefire and an arms embargo, to suspend military aid and recognize Palestine as a state.

When Minnerly refused, Martin publicly backed a competing resolution that maintains a Biden-era commitment to advancing Israel’s “qualitative military edge.” This resolution was crafted with the input of Democratic Majority for Israel, a group whose super PAC worked to oust former representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. The countermeasure reportedly has the support of the entire DNC leadership in advance of a vote at the upcoming meeting.

[...]

As one Harris campaign staffer explained to The Nation, a senior official in the Harris campaign informed voter engagement organizers at the beginning of October 2024 that they were to no longer to record voter feedback about Gaza in their internal systems.

This meant that the campaign simply stopped engaging with voters concerned about Gaza in the crucial final weeks leading up to the election, around the same time that Kamala Harris embraced Liz and Dick Cheney and sent Bill Clinton to Michigan, where he alienated the swing state’s Arab and Muslim voters by declaring that Israel had been “forced” to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “The thought process in the campaign with Muslim voters, young voters, with anybody who was concerned about Gaza was, OK, we’ll lose you, but we’ll pick up two somewhere else,” the staffer said. We all know what happened after that.

[...]

In May, Martin declared that support for Israel is a foundational Democratic Party value, telling the Jewish Democratic Council of America conference, “It is so important right now for our party to stand up with the Jewish community, to continue to stand up for Israel, to continue to stand up for humanity and to not forget who we are as Americans.”

This is consistent with his record on Israel while chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, particularly in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.

On October 9, 2023, for example, Martin condemned the Twin Cities DSA’s statement of solidarity with Palestine as “disgusting” for its inclusion of the phrase “from the river to the sea” (calling it “a chant used by extremists to support the destruction of Israel”) and for failing to reference the murders of Israeli and American civilians. An hour later, he returned to X to describe it as a “garbage antisemitic statement.”

A few months later, Martin encouraged pro-Israel activists to get involved in local precinct politics to offset “the extreme voices in our party” who were then organizing for a ceasefire resolution to be passed by the Minneapolis City Council. Martin and his state GOP counterpart joined a January 2024 Zoom call held by the Minnesota and the Dakotas Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC)—which calls itself the “public affairs voice of the Jewish community” and had vigorously opposed the resolution. The JCRC has opposed the description of Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide, claiming that it inverts both history and reality and leads to the demonization of Jews around the world. The JCRC has also declared that Israel cannot be an apartheid state because minorities live within its borders.

“‘He’s a madman’: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes,” Axios’s Barak Ravid breathlessly reported on July 20. “Trump was agitated all around…in a call with Bibi,” alleged Sohrab Ahmari, citing “sources in and near the administration.”

“Trump’s frustration with the devastation in Gaza is real,” Semafor insists. “After angry call from Trump, PM says Israel deeply regrets mistaken shelling of Gaza church,” The Times of Israel claimed on July 18. “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26.

If this particular genre of reportage looks familiar it’s because it’s a pared-down version of a PR campaign pushed out by former President Biden, his aides, and pro-Israel media allies. I wrote about the trope—Fuming/Helpless Biden—in both TRNN, and, in greater detail, for the Nation the following year. Now that it’s spanned party and administration we can simply call it Fuming/Helpless President. Put simply: it’s any report, analysis, or opinion that describes the president as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the genocide overall or, relatedly, any reporting that gives readers the impression that not only is the president helpless, but is very upset/angry/sad at not being able to change Israel’s behavior. It’s an essential media convention because it allows the president to continue all material support to Israel—the endless flow of bombs, military and intelligence support, vetoes at the United Nations—while distancing themselves from the deep unpopularity of Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate bombing and mass starvation.

The primary conduit for Fuming/Helpless President nonstories is Axios’s Ravid, who, as I noted in the Nation last year, had written 25 different examples of this genre up to that point for then-President Biden, quoting either US officials directly or a string of anonymous “US officials”—often as alleged scoops—claiming that Biden and White House officials were some variation of “breaking with Netanyahu,” “increasingly frustrated,” “running out of patience,” or “deeply concerned” about civilian casualties. Ravid, a former member of Unit 8200, Israel’s “secretive cyber warfare unit,” was awarded for his endless Fuming/Deeply Concerned reports with the White House Correspondents’ Association’s award for journalistic excellence in April 2024.

[...]

So why did so many mainstream outlets rush to distance Trump from the horrific images of starving children coming out of Gaza of starving children? Because preservation of American Innocence is an ideological force greater than common sense and “mounting tensions” between US Presidents and Netanyahu is a genre of reportage requiring little evidence and even less effort.

Another recent masterclass in Fuming/Helpless President stenography is a front page story in the Wall Street Journal, “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” by Shayndi Raice and Alexander Ward. The article is littered with every cliche of the genre: Fuming Behind Closed Doors (“The Trump administration in recent days has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza”), Trump Forced to Do Israel’s Bidding Against His Will (“So far, they see Netanyahu leading Trump to act against his instincts”), and Out of the Loop (“The White House said this past week that Trump was “caught off guard” by the bombing in Syria and the strike that hit the Catholic church.”)

The piece even doubles as a means for ex-Biden officials Amos Hochstein and Phil Gordon to wash their hands of Gaza and insist they, too, were powerless, helping Trump officials and allies paint a picture of a White House getting run over by an increasingly powerful and willful ally. Kamala Harris foreign policy adviser Phil Gordon, who, on the eve of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, explicitly promised to never condition aid to Israel, wants WSJ readers to know that Trump is unable to do anything to “rein in” Israel for the same reason Biden was

For anyone hoping Kamala Harris’s disastrous 2024 loss would make the Democratic Party drastically change direction, the bad news can be summed up in two words: Project 2029.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Democrats are planning their own version of the right-wing policy blueprint that is the driving engine of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they’ll roll out piecemeal each quarter for the next two years in one of the party’s intellectual organs, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The man leading the effort is also that journal’s founder and coeditor: Andrei Cherny, a New Democrat wunderkind and (briefly) former Arizona Democratic party chair, who claims to have put together a team that’s “the Avengers of public policy.”

[...]

That starts at the very top with Cherny himself, whose most recent project before this was a scandal-ridden corporate venture. For nine years, Cherny was the chief executive of celebrity-backed fintech firm Aspiration, which claimed to be democratizing investing by making it affordable for ordinary people and, in the process, being “in the business of fighting the climate crisis.”

In reality, as a series of exposés from ProPublica and others made clear, the firm sold itself through pathological deception: it boasted that it had planted thirty-five million trees, but counted twenty-three million that hadn’t actually been planted; it claimed that it had five million customers, but the actual number was a little less than six hundred thousand; it let customers round each purchase up to pay for planting a tree, but often pocketed many of the proceeds; it rewarded purchases from companies it deemed sustainable, but were in reality often pollutive; it trumpeted the chance to pay no fee on its investment fund, but actually charged a higher fee than many better performing funds; and far from being “one hundred percent fossil-fuel free,” that fund invested least in renewable energy while owning shares in a number of dirty companies.

[...]

The details of a lawsuit lay bare the less-than-sustainable reality of the industry into which Cherny had steered the firm. In order to ink a lucrative deal with oil-soaked Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup — which was itself a tour de force of greenwashing — Aspiration needed a pile of carbon credits quickly, leading it to do what one executive called “a light version” of the due diligence it would have normally done on a deal that big. Perhaps as a result, the seller never delivered on the $30 million worth of credits they had agreed to.

All of this is a grim prelude to understanding Cherny’s political work, the cause of his life until the nine-year break he took for this ill-fated business venture. Cherny is a loud and proud evangelist for, and former member of, the Bill Clinton administration that laid much of the groundwork for the rise of Trump and the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, as well as an alum of the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council, which was maybe best known for its enthusiasm for privatizing Social Security.

Cherny first showed up on Clinton’s radar as a Harvard senior, when he wrote that the United States needed “government humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us but strong enough to give us the tools to solve our problems for ourselves.” Clinton loved the line so much, he made his entire Cabinet read it, put it in one of his speeches, and hired Cherny as a speechwriter. He was a perfect fit for an administration that had embarked on its own Democratic version of Trump’s DOGE initiative, called “Reinventing Government,” which boasted of firing three hundred fifty-one thousand federal workers and eliminating hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and regulations. (Some of those Clinton-era powers for carrying out this cull are now being used by Russell Vought to dismantle the federal government at Trump’s behest.)

Cherny cheered on all of it, rejoicing that Clinton had become his “true self”: not “a wild-eyed liberal mad with desire to insert the shadowy hand of the federal government into every nook and cranny of American life,” but a “raging centrist” who purged progressives, pushed budget cuts, and collaborated with Republicans. His “best period as president,” Cherny wrote, came “with Reinventing Government and the extraordinary passage of NAFTA,” and he celebrated that Clinton had cut the deficit, “eliminated scores of government programs,” and made the government “the smallest it has been since John F. Kennedy was president,” insisting that “centrist politics” is “what Americans want now” and “what they have always wanted.”

[...]

In what may be a sign of Cherny’s role in Project 2029, he wrote the Democrats’ losing 2000 platform in a process that was praised for its lack of debate and input from the dreaded “groups,” and its resulting centrist direction, full of “positions that easily could have come from Republican platforms of a generation ago,” as the Los Angeles Times put it. That included support for the death penalty and “open trade,” a boast that Democrats had “ended the era of big government,” and a vow to eliminate the national debt in twelve years.

Cherny beamed with pride that the document’s hawkishness showed “the shift in the party on national security” and that “the old siren songs no longer have a place.” Later, as the country faced whiplash from George W. Bush’s disastrous series of Middle East invasions, Cherny took the side of rabid war-hawk Joe Lieberman, who complained that Democrats were no longer talking about expanding the size of the military, but pulling out of Iraq. There was “a large grain of truth” in what Lieberman was saying, said Cherny, and he predicted that the eventual Democratic nominee would return to themes like “expanding democracy around the world and using force to advance American values.”

Michael Roberts provides an overview of various topics discussed at this years AHE conference, bringing together heterodox (non-mainstream, critical of neoclassical econ) economists from a variety of backgrounds (marxist, keynesian, MMT, etc.).

The conference paper sessions were divided into various streams, one of which was entitled Imperialism and Dependency in the 21st century. I made a presentation in one of these session, called Catching up of falling behind? in which I tried to answer the question: were the poor peripheral countries of the Global South catching up and closing the gap in living standards with the rich imperialist countries of the Global North? I tried to answer that question using three different measures: per capita incomes; levels of labour productivity; and indexes of ‘human development’. On all three measures, I show that the Global South is not closing the gap, with the possible exception of China.

[...]

My main conclusion was that the countries of the Global South (6bn people) are not ‘catching up’ with the Global North (2bn people) because wealth (value) is being persistently transferred from the South to the North AND falling profitability in the Global South is reducing labour productivity growth. China may be the exception because its investment growth is less determined by profitability than in any other major Global South economy.

Conrad Herold from Hofstra University, Long Island presented an insightful summary of Marxist approaches to explaining imperialist exploitation over the last 100 years since Lenin, starting with Henryk Grossman in 1929 and then Bettelheim and Emmanuel, going onto so-called dependency theory mainly coming from Ruy Marini in South America. Conrad rejected the structuralist theories of such as Pereira that the Global South did not develop because of ‘premature industrialisation’, thus turning the Global South into commodity producers under a regime of currency exchange rates that benefited the North. In summary, Herold said, there is more work to be done on developing a robust Marxist theory of imperialist exploitation.

In that session, there was some debate about whether the transfer of profit, rent and income through international trade and capital proceeds was mainly the result of higher rates of surplus value (due to lower wages) in the Global South or mainly due to higher rates of technological superiority in the companies of the Global North. Previous Marxist theorists like Emmanuel looked to higher rates of surplus value; while Bettelheim looked to higher levels of capital composition. For me, both are relevant and in work done jointly with Guglielmo Carchedi, we found that differing rates of organic composition of capital and surplus value both contributed to the transfer of value from South to North.

[...]

That brings me to the panel session on the new book, Radical Political Economy: Principles, Perspectives and Postcapitalist Futures edited by Mona Ali and Ann Davis, to which I and many others contributed chapters.

One of the authors in that book was Ramaa Vasudevan in which she makes it clear that “financialization is not simply the expansion of finance but the generalized subordination of economic interactions and inter- relations to the abstract logic of interest- bearing capital that has fundamentally restructured the way economic activities are organized “ quoting Professor Ben Fine from 2013. According to Vasudevan, the dominance of finance is seen to have engineered “a fundamental transformation of the economy – marking an epochal shift”. My reply to that can be summed by the critiques of the financialisation hypothesis, both theoretically (Mavroudeas and Papadatos 2018) and empirically (Turan Subasat and Stavros Mavroudeas 2023).

Also in the book is a chapter by Paolo dos Santos who attended the panel that I missed. In the book, Dos Santos emphasises that political economy can only be effective in explaining the world if it rests on historical materialism. Economic analysis is a lynchpin of social and historical inquiry because it can cast light on how relations of production and distribution shape the social, political, institutional, and cultural realities that condition the nature and historical development of human groups. “Stubborn patterns of underdevelopment and differences in labor productivity, living standards, and political power across national economies, have persisted across the history of capitalist development. For radical political economy, those differences are a feature of global capitalism, not a “bug” due to the idiosyncrasies of developing economies.”

[...]

The struggle against the ideology and theories of the mainstream continues and the AHE makes an important contribution. Let me quote Ann Davis, the co-editor of Radical Political Economy book. “Radical Political Economy will make clear the political choices, while mainstream economics will claim that there are none. Whatever the outcome, proponents of both sides will defend their respective positions and seek to attract adherents to their views.”

Today in Lutris discord which I happen to lurk occasionally, I saw some lovely people were commenting in the offtopic channel about how they support Ethan Kleins lawsuit against Youtubers who criticised him, GamerGate bs, defending streamer sex pests and some other stuff. One person offhandedly mentions how they get their information from Asmongold.

If you're not very online, Asmongold is a reactionary streamer who at one point declared he thinks Palestinians should be genocided because of their "inferior culture". Ethan Klein is a somewhat well known youtuber/podcaster who has also spent the last year or so having a very public meltdown over Israel and his own fundamentally contradictory set of positions he's tried to triangulate between.

Seeing this, I made a brief comment about Asmongolds stance mentioned above and why anyone would listen to him. I got racist responses claiming "Palestinians have been kicked out of every culture they've been in" and deflecting to "Look at Egypts border".

Called out the racism and genocide apologia, the only person who was warned was me for not being civil. I replied "racism and genocide apologia is not civil", referred to the fact the Lutris logo on discord has an LGBTQ flag, and was called a nutcase and banned.

tl:dr Lutris discord moderation is OK with racism and genocide, but you're a "nutcase" if you call a spade a spade.

UPDATE: I was responded to on Mastodon and was accused of being the one making antisemtic comments. Others explained in the thread below there were some who made antisemitic comments after I was banned. I sincerely hope that's a misunderstanding, but I don't have much faith the moderator in question would be telling the truth about the events.

These people are genuinely conspiracy brained morons.

“Places like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,” New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said at WelcomeFest, held at a downtown Washington hotel and billed as a forum to help the party find more electable candidates and messages.

Seconds after Torres’ shot at “the groups” that have become intra-Democratic shorthand for excessive left-wing influence, protesters from … the group Climate Defiance charged on stage with signs reading “GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE” and “GENOCIDE RITCHIE,” attacking his support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

As the activists were yanked out of the room, conference organizers played Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain on the loudspeakers in the room.

The mockery was part of the point. Welcome PAC, the main organizer of the conference and one of several outfits that have emerged in recent months to try to reverse the party’s post-Obama losses, was happy to be accused of embracing a pro-growth “Abundance” agenda or attacking progressive urban policies.

“Any time someone is against something like ‘abundance,’ it means that they’re afraid of something. They’re afraid of losing power,” said Welcome PAC’s Lauren Harper Pope, a former Beto O’Rourke adviser. “If the left feels threatened by what we’re doing, then I say: ‘You’re still welcome in our coalition.’”

[...]

“If you can financially afford to go to a protest every day, you are a different person than most people in my community,” said Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, defending her vote for House GOP legislation that would require proof of citizenship from every voter.

Asked about recent polling from the progressive group Demand Progress that found pro-business “abundance” ideas faring worse than anti-corporate “populism,” WelcomeFest speakers scoffed.

“It’s what happens when you test an economic textbook for the Democratic Party against a romance novel,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass. “It’s such a bad poll.”

Shadowy """groups""" who are supposedly coordinating every protest, protestors are all on payroll or rich or unemployed so therefore they don't count, activists and """groups""" are never part of or representative of even a section of the public, and all polling showing their framing and ideas being unpopular are just bad polls. This is conspiratorial thinking, 1:1 with what conservatives and Republicans have been saying for decades.

And they're repeadedly wrong on the polling they claim to love so much.

All because people got mad at the and demanded they do their jobs, demanded they actually stand up for people who are literally being picked up and deported for no reason besides not liking Trump or having an accent when they speak.

WelcomeFest’s less single-issue enemies have highlighted the Republican and pharmaceutical-industry pasts of some of the conference’s donors, arguing that it’s naive to think billionaire donors could save the Democrats.

The Revolving Door Project, which has campaigned to keep Democrats with corporate ties out of powerful positions, called the whole project a “self-serving crusade” against popular politics.

“A billionaire-funded movement to keep billionaires happy with Democrats by wielding only poll-tested language that billionaires are okay with is a sure path toward a President Vance,” said the project’s executive director, Jeff Hauser.

Dan Cohen, the strategist who conducted Demand Progress’ abundance-or-populism poll, said that the party wasn’t facing a binary choice and could incorporate some more pro-growth “abundance” ideas into a successful populist campaign.

“That kind of conflict is unhelpful because it’s just wrong,” Cohen said, calling for a broader focus on “strengthening a Democratic Party that’s trying to get its sh*t together again.”

If you’re an American, it should make you angry that the many people who knew better stayed silent about, even actively conspired to hide, the fact that Biden wasn’t actually capable of executing his responsibilities as president, handing untold amounts of power to a cabal of advisors you never voted for.

And if you’re a Democratic voter, it should make you angry that a party that spent years promising they would, at very least, stop Donald Trump (and maybe not do much more), and that their blocking his reelection justified asking for your money and demanding your votes, ended up putting Trump in the White House again, in large part by installing and then keeping in power a man they knew was unfit for office.

Questions about Biden’s ill health, and who knew what about it and when, have been reignited in recent weeks, thanks to the release of two complementary books that have added new, scandalous details to the already scandalous litany of details about Biden’s condition that erupted after his disturbing June 2024 debate performance. One is Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight, the third in a trilogy of Trump-era behind-the-scenes campaign accounts by the pair that dropped last month; the other, which has been dominating political coverage the past couple of weeks, is Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s Original Sin, an autopsy of how Biden’s condition was hidden from the public for so long.

The other reason the issue has exploded yet again — just as the former president has stepped back into the public eye, while he gets ready to release his own, self-exculpatory book — is because we’ve just found out Biden has prostate cancer, and a particularly “aggressive” one at that, which has spread to his bones. Despite his spokesperson’s insistence that this was the first anyone knew about it, speculation has swirled that there may have been an effort to hide the diagnosis while he was president, fueled by the fact that Biden is the only president going back to Bill Clinton at least not to be tested for prostate cancer, that an oncologist who served as his own COVID advisor has called this “a little strange,” and this 2022 clip features Biden casually saying he has cancer.

Whether or not you buy into this speculation, at this point it’s a legitimate line of inquiry. It’s legitimate, because as both Fight and Original Sin show, Biden’s four years as president were defined by a vast, concerted effort by both the people closest to him and a constellation of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to, generously, keep what they knew about his deteriorating health from the public.

Time and again in Original Sin, the same story is told and retold: one of Biden’s advisors, allies, old friends, or donors interacts with him face to face; they are either alarmed by his frail and confused physical appearance, by the fact that he doesn’t know who they are, or by the fact that he’s seemingly unable to speak off the cuff without serious assistance; and they proceed to say and do nothing about it, or even double down in their public insistence that he’s never been better.

[...]

It wasn’t always cowardice. The reporting by both pairs of authors establishes that the insular team of the president’s closest advisors — both longtime Biden loyalists and family members, all of whom became unhealthily enamored with the trappings of power — went to great lengths to disguise Biden’s decline. They made sure he was well made-up, had events scheduled only during certain hours, always had clear visual aids to help him walk from point A to B, was furnished with notes, teleprompters, and other assistance to help him speak, or that events where he was meant to interact with others, like cabinet meetings, were scripted in advance — though even that was not always enough.

In hindsight, many of the most cynical theories about what was going on in the Biden White House turned out to be true. Biden’s advisors closed ranks around him (“You can’t talk about this stuff. We’re backing Biden,” one alarmed Democrat was told), and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) abruptly rearranged the 2024 primary schedule, which nonsensically put South Carolina first, for the exact reason everyone said at the time: purely to put Biden in the best position of beating any challenger. And they worked to aggressively shut down any attempt to ask questions about, investigate, or expose his decline.

Thompson and Tapper report that Biden’s team enlisted a coalition of influencers, Democratic operatives, and loyalist media to publicly shame anyone looking into Biden’s condition and create a “disincentive structure” for them to do so, gave out talking points that were then dutifully used by allies, and at one point threatened to deny a Wall Street Journal reporter’s story on the matter to scare her away from going forward with it. Meanwhile, they kept Biden isolated from his colleagues, to the point that cabinet members went months without seeing him.

While Biden’s decline seems to have become markedly worse and more rapid over the course of 2023 and 2024, both books make clear, as other reporting has, that it started much earlier. Each recounts a disastrous late 2021 meeting that was meant to offer Biden a chance to persuade the Democratic caucus to pass his infrastructure bill, but saw the president instead ramble endlessly and leave the room without ever making the ask.

But Original Sin dates the start of it much earlier, with insiders noticing changes around the time his eldest son was dying in 2015. Biden’s brain “seemed to dissolve,” a senior White House official told the authors, while another insider said the death “aged him significantly.” He struggled to remember his longtime aide Mike Donilon’s name in 2019. And he was so bad in 2020 that the conversations with ordinary voters he filmed for that year’s Democratic convention required heavy, “creative” editing, with those who watched the raw footage left alarmed and convinced he couldn’t serve as president.

[...]

Common to both books is a broad, behind-the-scenes consensus within the party that Kamala Harris, the most likely person to replace Biden on the ticket, was, even with her youth and full health, nearly as much of a disaster as her addled boss. Harris’s weaknesses as a politician are well known now after being put in the harsh glare of the 2024 campaign, but the reporting gives us new details: her need to prepare for everything to the point that her staff did a mock simulation of an upcoming off-the-record dinner with socialites, according to Thompson and Tapper; or the fact that, according to Parnes and Allen, Harris wasn’t able to come up with a bold economic vision to campaign on in part because she struggled to grasp economic issues — “Wall Street jargon hit her ears like a foreign language,” they write. The party had such little confidence in her, her candidacy was repeatedly used as a potent threat to ward off efforts to roll Biden.

[...]

But maybe most important was the party’s ironically undemocratic nature, and its willingness to use that to stop a leftward shift. The true original sin of the entire, cascading crisis around Biden — his infirmity, the crisis of confidence in the party it caused, his saddling of the party with a weak successor, his final, fatal extraction from her to promise not to break from him — wasn’t really Biden’s decision to run again. It had been the Democratic establishment’s desperation to stop Bernie Sanders and his movement from taking over the party in 2020, something they could only do by saddling themselves with a man whose political abilities many of them had little faith in.

But it was worth it: Several high-profile Democrats have since come out and openly admitted they had gone with Biden only as a last-minute play to stop Sanders, and as Parnes and Allen had reported four years ago, for many of the party’s establishment centrists, “their fears of losing their party to socialism competed with their fears of Trump winning a second term.”