Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

In which Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene suggest some secret "creepiness" in the personal lives of Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson is the only explanation for them working with Democrats https://t.co/yEd2l1iQlU pic.twitter.com/HxnhQGFuIY

— Aidan McLaughlin (@aidnmclaughlin) April 3, 2024

Marge Greene appeared with Tucker Carlson on his twitter podcast thingy yesterday and speculated that Mike Johnson is being blackmailed because he has suggested that a deal might be possible to fund military assistance to Ukraine including the idea that the U.S. scould eize and sell Russian assets to help cover costs. This has her hoping mad:

GREENE: But now Mike Johnson has has made a complete departure of who he is, and what he stands for, and to the point where people are literally asking, is he blackmailed? What is wrong with him because he’s completely disconnected with what we want?

CARLSON: Do you think he is being blackmailed?

GREENE: I have no idea. I can’t comprehend, Tucker, what radically changes a man. I mean, if we break down the the second part of basically an omnibus. Let’s break that down. So Mike Johnson is pro-life. And the second part of the omnibus, just less than two weeks ago, he funded full term abortion clinics, full term abortion clinics. He funded the trans agenda on children. I mean, how does that even happen from a Christian conservative Republican speaker?

He did nothing for the southern border, did nothing to secure the border. And this comes on the heels of Laken Riley being brutally murdered. This came on the heels of a video that was running on loop on social media, where illegal aliens had rushed our border, ran over Texas National Guard, ran over Border Patrol agents in order to invade our country. These were military age men, by the way. He did nothing to secure our border. It’s the number one issue in the world.

He completely changed who he was, funded the FBI, gave them a brand new building, fully funded the Department of Justice that is persecuting everyone on the right and actually targeting presidential candidate for election this year. Literally trying to put him in jail the rest of his life. We don’t know who Mike Johnson is anymore. So there’s no I can’t comprehend it.

Tucker, being a full-fledged Putin acolyte at this point, agreed and added that there are probably a lot of Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, who are being blackmailed over their personal lives.

I don’t know if she’s about to pull the trigger on that motion to vacate but it sure sounds like she’s getting close.

WATCH: Bush vet Karl Rove condemns Jan. 6 felons in an interview with Ari Melber. pic.twitter.com/4beWIDzmf6

— The Beat with Ari Melber 📺 (@TheBeatWithAri) April 3, 2024

“And what those people did when they violently attacked the Capitol, in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the Electoral College, is a stain on our history. And every one of those sons a bitches who did that, we oughta find them, try them, and send them to jail.”

“And one of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon those people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not. They’re thugs. There were people—some of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping to be able to be called up,” Rove continued, describing the ensuing chaos as the rioters ransacked Congress, hunted Nancy Pelosi, and chanted “kill them all.”

“And so, why Trump has done this is beyond me. If he had said, ‘You know what? I trust our jury system, I trust law enforcement, anybody who assaulted the Capitol oughta be’—I mean, he said it once or twice, but now he’s appearing in a video with people who assaulted police officers with an intent to take the Capitol by force.”

He says Democrats should use it forcefully in the campaign:

“If they were smart, they’d take the January 6 and go hard at it. And they would say, ‘He wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’ I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the great examples of the strength of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution.”

Uhm. Karl Rove is right about all that. I’m dizzy.

I guess I should be suspicious that he’s actually trying to help Republicans but it wouldn’t make any sense. Of course Biden and the Democrats should go after trump for what he did. And I think they are. Unless he thinks they are so dumb that they’ll assume since Rove is saying it that they should do the opposite, I’m pretty sure he’s sincere here. Wow.

Speaking of Steve Bannon:

Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”.

“Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga.

“Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.”

Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.

[…]

Arnsdorf writes: “In his confidence that there were secretly millions of Democrats who were yearning to be Maga followers and just didn’t know it yet, Bannon was again taking inspiration from [Eric] Hoffer, who observed that true believers were prone to conversion from one cause to another since they were driven more by their need to identify with a mass movement than by any particular ideology.”

Eric Hoffer, Arnsdorf writes, was “the ‘longshoreman philosopher’, so called because he had worked as a stevedore on the San Francisco docks while writing his first book, The True Believer [which] caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, becoming a manual for comprehending the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.”

Bannon, Arnsdorf writes, “was not, like a typical political strategist, trying to tinker around the edges of the existing party coalitions in the hope of eking out 50% plus one. Bannon already told you: he wanted to bring everything crashing down.

“He wanted to completely dismantle and redefine the parties. He wanted a showdown between a globalist, elite party, called the Democrats, and a populist, Maga party, called the Republicans. In that match-up, he was sure, the Republicans would win every time.”

Isn’t he supposed to be in jail?

I know that Bannon realizes that Trump is a loser. He’s not stupid. He knows that he eked out a win in 2016 and couldn’t even rally the country to his side during a once in a century crisis. But It’s hard to know how much of this nonsense is part of his megalomania and how much is sheer grift. He’s making a lot of money from rubes who watch his podcasts. But he’s also got the ear of plenty of powerful Republicans who take him seriously so who knows?

But if you want to see a true Trumpworld fascist, this is your guy. He’s talkijng about a thousand year reich fergawdsakes. Do we need to hear any more?

*Back in the day I wrote about Bannon and his intellectual mentor Julius Evola, a real old-school fascist. This is is a real thing:

According to Joshua Green, who wrote “Devil’s Bargain,” the recent book about Bannon, Trump and the 2016 election, Bannon claims to believe that the world is entering a very dark phase which was caused by the Enlightenment and can only be averted by adoption of a belief system called “primordial Traditionalism,” one of the progenitors of fascism. Evola thought it was a pretty darned good system:

There are positive and valuable aspects. Those which I could value are the reconstruction of the authority of the state and the idea of overcoming class conflict toward a hierarchical and corporative formation, to some extent, of a military and disciplined style within the nation, in addition to some of their anti-bourgeois proposals. To me, all of that is positive.

Green says:

[Bannon] is trying to not only take over American politics, but look at what he’s doing in places like the European Union. He’s trying to destroy what he would call these globalist edifices, which he believes [are] a manifestation of the rise of modernity and something that needs to be destroyed to pull us back to a pre-Enlightenment era.

Not that he’s ambitious, mind you.

Is this really ok?

I guess there’s no law against a private citizen having discussions with foreign leaders. But doing that while he’s running for president, is under indictment, has big financial problems and has proven he’s willing to sell out the country for personal gain (and was impeached for it)… well, it seems just a bit problematic:

Former President Donald J. Trump spoke recently with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, their first publicly disclosed conversation since Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, according to two people briefed on the discussion who were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

It was unclear what the two men discussed and whether it was their only conversation since Mr. Trump’s departure from the White House. Neither representatives for Mr. Trump nor an official of the Saudi government responded to requests for comment.

But news of their discussion comes at a time when the Biden administration is engaged in delicate negotiations with the Saudis aimed at establishing a lasting peace in the Middle East, building on diplomatic ties between Israel and a number of Arab states forged through the work of the Trump administration.

If President Biden manages to clinch a trilateral megadeal — which would probably include a Saudi-Israeli peace agreement, an Israeli commitment to a two-state solution, a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty and U.S.-Saudi understandings on a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia — he will need support from two-thirds of senators to ratify the U.S.-Saudi treaty. Mr. Trump, as the presumptive Republican nominee in firm command of his party, could potentially either block any deal or greenlight it for congressional Republicans.

Mr. Trump has other reasons to maintain warm relations with Prince Mohammed. The former president and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and former senior White House adviser, established close ties with the crown prince while in office and have capitalized on that good will in their private businesses since leaving government.

Saudi Arabia was the first stop on Mr. Trump’s first foreign trip as president — a sign of the value Mr. Trump placed on the relationship. Mr. Trump pursued major deals with the Saudis, including arms sales, and he defended Prince Mohammed at his moment of greatest international pressure, after the C.I.A. concluded that the crown prince had ordered the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Nine months after the killing, Mr. Trump called Prince Mohammed “a friend of mine” and praised the “spectacular job” he had done in liberalizing Saudi Arabia’s laws, including allowing women to drive. While still in office, Mr. Trump told the journalist Bob Woodward that “I saved his ass” when Prince Mohammed was under intense criticism from officials in the U.S. Congress.

“I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop,” Mr. Trump added.

It’s not as if he tries to hide what he’s doing.

There’s more today on Trump interference in foreign policy:

Is the White House aware that Jared Kushner had a private meeting in Tel Aviv with Netanyahu on December 21, 2023?

Is he still operating as the Middle East Envoy for his father-in-law? https://t.co/GNUM8Oo4A5

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) April 4, 2024

Kushner and Trump both had top security clearances and had access to all of America’s secrets. They have personal financial agendas in the region that do not necessarily comport with America’s interests. Apparently, Trump and his extended family of grifters and con artists can travel the world making secret deals with foreign leaders, almost certainly in exchange for money and election interference help and it gets a little one day story and that’s it.

Trump has flooded the zone with shit, just as Steve Bannon prescribed, and it’s overwhelmed the system to the point that nothing he does anymore really matters.

They are not meeting the moment

Dan Froomkin is back from vacation and he’s not happy:

The nation stands on the edge of a precipice, and our political media is so addicted to neutrality that it is casting both choices — survival or cataclysm — as equally plausible.

It’s sickening.

We are one election away from becoming a Christian nationalist state, losing our democracy as we know it, and putting the fate of our country in the hands of a corrupt madman filled with fever dreams of retribution.  And yet political journalists seem to think this is just fine. Fun, even.

I barely surfed the web while I was gone, but I did open a few emails here and there. And there was one I found particularly enlightening – in a very troubling way.

Being the lead writer for the New York Time’s signature On Politics newsletter is one of the most influential jobs in the industry these days, and the email that popped up in my inbox announcing the latest hire for that job – a Boston Globe reporter named Jess Bidgood who had previously worked for the Times — made it painfully clear that she is absolutely clueless about the topic she is now covering, and intentionally so.

Offered an opportunity to explain what she found particularly compelling about the coming election, Bidgood didn’t talk about how the Republican Party has succumbed to the extreme Christian far-right. She didn’t talk about how Trump was a hateful, dangerous demagogue. She didn’t even mention the fate of democracy or the rule of law.

Let me be very clear here: Whether or not the country succumbs to fascism is a helluva political story no matter how you feel about it. A Trump victory would profoundly change how government and justice are practiced. If you don’t understand that, you are a wildly incompetent political reporter.

You can choose to cover a race like that in different ways, but to deny what is going on is the act of a moron or a loon – or someone paid a lot of money to look the other way.

Instead of a probing analysis of the stakes, what Bidgood gave us in her welcoming remarks was just more of the generic political-journalist pablum about finding interesting stories and covering both sides and — yes — having fun.

The introductory email in question was written by the newsletter’s founding editor, Lisa Lerer, and grandiosely headlined: “Welcome to the Jess Bidgood Era.” (That is how seriously the Times takes itself.)

Here is what Bidgood said are her “favorite things” about covering politics:

Politics give us a window into this country — what’s shaping it, who’s shaping it, how people feel. When you cover politics, you’re covering people. You’re covering voters. You’re covering political figures, people bursting with ego and ambition as they fight for power. You’re covering the change people want and what kind of country we’re going to be. I love that.

And what an adventure it is! I’ve taken that special nighttime flight from Iowa to New Hampshire right after the Iowa caucuses, when a candidate stands on the tarmac in the dark and insists her big moment is still coming. (Oftentimes, it is not.) I’ve held in my hand a fake slate of electors that a swing state’s secretary of state received from Trump supporters in 2020 and decided to ignore. I’ve listened to L.G.B.T.Q. teens tell their school board who they are, and watched a community sick of high taxes disband its local government altogether. These are important political stories, big and small, and I can’t wait to bring them to On Politics.

It’s an adventure! Oh goodie. (For the rest of us, it’s a nightmare.)

What should people expect in the Jess Bidgood era?

This election is going to be strange, messy and deeply consequential, and every day this newsletter comes out, I’ll bring readers one idea, one story or one interview that will illuminate this country’s political morass.

And it will be fun. Really. I promise.

Yes, she actually said that. It will be fun.

She added a bit of bothsidesing, for good measure:

You won’t agree with everybody whose voice you hear, but you might understand them a little better.

And while my dream newsletter would be a primer on fascism, Bidgood’s would be something else altogether:

LL: So what would be your dream newsletter?

JB: My dream dream? That would be an interview with Taylor Swift, whose rain-drenched show I attended in Foxborough last year.

Fun!

He points out that the editors said that she understands the politics of the moment are “deeply consequential” but there is nothing to indicate that she knows or cares about that. It’s Fun!

He then directs his readers to that exceptional Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial (which I wrote about earlier) as an example of what journalism should be. If you haven’t read it, it’s well worth your time.

I’m depressed about this too. Journalism is better in many ways than it was 10 years ago. It’s less sycophantic toward the right to be sure. But it still hasn’t accepted what the stakes really are in our politics in the age of MAGA and they are failing.

These people are just plain nuts

SOLAR ECLIPSES, LIKE the upcoming one on April 8, are a well-documented scientific phenomenon. As early as 763 BCE, ancient Assyrians were charting the process by which the path of the moon temporarily obstructs the sun, and astronomers have continued to do so for thousands of years since. Our knowledge of eclipses predates our knowledge of gravity, algebra, and toilet paper. We are well aware of their existence, and we are well aware of what causes them. (I mean, I personally am not, but other people ostensibly are.)

What the ancient Assyrians could not have possibly predicted, however, was the singular stupidity of the current incarnation of the American right. Unconvinced by thousands of years of scientific inquiry, as well as driven by a general sense of apocalyptic bloodlust, many on the right are trading conspiracy theories about the upcoming eclipse, ranging from the belief that it signals the End Times to the idea that the Biden administration is using it as an opportunity to shut down cell phone service or bring in the National Guard in an effort to make beautiful blond children who play sports transgender.

This latest onslaught of misinformation began, as it often does, with InfoWars host Alex Jones, who has spent the past few weeks ranting on X about the upcoming eclipse. Last week, he posted a clip with the caption: “Major Events Surrounding The April 8th Solar Eclipse[.] Masonic rituals planned worldwide to usher in New World Order.”

The post, which has more than 3000 retweets and one million views, illustrates how the trajectory of the most recent solar eclipse viewable in the United States, as well as the trajectory of the upcoming eclipse, form an “Aleph” and “Tav,” which (as anyone who was forced to go to Hebrew school instead of staying home and using cheat codes to make your Sims woo-hoo naked knows), are the first and last letters in the Hebrew language, signaling the beginning and end times.

In another eclipse tweet posted on March 26, which has 3.8 million views, Jones included a video of a man speculating that various Texas and Oklahoma counties had declared a state of emergency in order to usher in a billionaire-led new world order.

Those counties just issued advisories because they expected traffic congestion from people travelling to view the eclipse. That hasn’t stopped these weirdoes from pushing conspiracy theories asserting that “there will be rituals performed during the April 8th Eclipse,” during which “Masonic, Satanic, Esoteric, Gnostic, Brotherhood of the Snake and other occult-like groups will be performing.” I’m not kidding.

This is idiotic but then these are people who eagerly believe every crackpot notion that that grifters like Alex Jones and Donald Trump throw out there so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

If you haven’t seen the new documentary on Alex Jones and the Sandyhook case, I highly recommend it. it’s heartbreaking and infuriating, particularly since we know that he has millions and millions of avid followers.

Update:

At Kari Lake’s fundraising event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Roseanne Barr told young people to “drop out of college” while pushing QAnon conspiracies:

“It isn’t nothing but devil worshipping, baby blood drinking, Democrat donors.” pic.twitter.com/WP9Br1X1DQ

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) April 4, 2024

The MAGA minority means to impose its will

ICYMI, the effort in Nebraska to change the state’s electoral vote allocation to winner-take-all failed last night.

It is more evidence that the GOP is pulling out all the stops in seeking ways to tip the presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor, even for a single electoral vote.

But do not lose sight of other places (and other 2024 races) where the MAGA GOP is hoping to place heavy thumbs on the scales. Pay attention (Bolts):

The Texas supreme court closed out 2023 by blocking an abortion during a medical emergency, forcing a woman to flee the state. Just days before Christmas, Wisconsin justices struck down the state’s GOP-drawn gerrymanders. So far this year, Montana’s supreme court has stepped in to protect voting rights, while a decision in Alabama threatened in vitro fertilization treatments. 

In each of these states, unlike at the federal level, voters chose who sits on the bench and which judges get to dictate such profound consequences. And the 2024 elections may now reshape who holds power on supreme courts across the country.

Thirty-three states have elections for their high courts this year; some have as many as five or six seats on the ballot. In total, 82 seats are up for voters to decide. 

These races to decide the composition of state courts could potentially shift the outcome in high-stakes cases that are already in the legal pipeline on everything from the rules of direct democracy to the fate of reproductive rights.

Michigan and Ohio are the two states where a supreme court’s partisan majority could flip outright. Democrats are defending a narrow edge in Michigan; the GOP is doing the same in Ohio. 

Heather Cox Richardson cautions:

Finally, in an illustration of extremists aiming not to moderate their stances but to impose the will of the minority on the majority, Republicans are putting in place rules to make it easier for individuals to challenge voters, removing them from the voter rolls before the 2024 election.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted today that states and local governments have regular programs to keep voter registration accurate, while right-wing activists are operating on a different agenda. In one 70,000-person town in Michigan, a single activist challenged more than a thousand voters, Elias reported, and in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, right-wing activists have already challenged 16,000 voters and intend to challenge another 10,000.

One group boasted that their system “can and will change elections in America forever.” 

Rather like the election of 2000.

Developing situational awareness isn’t just for policemen and soldiers.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

A “multipronged assault”

Last week, I questioned the sufficiency of the “comically long” list of MAGA “nightmare scenarios” the Biden campaign is planning for that could arise leading up to and in the aftermath of the November election. We witnessed live on Jan. 6 the lengths to which MAGA Republicans would go to maintain power. Even then it took many months of investigation to uncover the plotting Trump’s confederates did not put on public display. It’s likely that people without criminal minds are not devious enough to anticipate all the ways Insurrection 2.0 might unfold.

This time, the prospect of jail time if he loses increases Trump’s incentives for instigating mayhem. As with stochastic terrorism, his followers don’t require explicit orders from the chief to know what he wants.

From Daily Beast (via Yahoo Finance):

Maria Bartiromo didn’t even bother to wait for the 2024 election to pass before suggesting it could be stolen.

During an on-air conversation Wednesday morning with Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, the MAGA loyalist Fox Business Network host suggested President Joe Biden can’t reasonably expect to win the 2024 election when his policies don’t seem to resonate with voters. She highlighted Wall Street Journal poll that found Donald Trump leading Biden in multiple swing states, using the question as a set-up to boost a new conspiracy theory about Democrats being forced to manipulate the election in order to help the president win re-election.

“How does Biden win?” Bartiromo asked the RNC chairman. “Republicans are talking about the potential of an election that is tampered with. Republicans are warning there is a Biden order—executive order—which allows illegal immigrants and felons to vote.”

Bullshit, of course. The executive order Bartiromo references means to remove “significant obstacles” to voting many Americans face. Especially nonwhite Americans.

The order makes no mention of undocumented immigrants nor does it expand the right to vote to any groups previously unable to do so. The president does not have any authority to extend the right to vote to undocumented immigrants, and a 1996 federal law expressly prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections.

Sarah Posner, author of “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind,” writes Trump is “is dangerously priming his voters for a repeat of his multipronged assault on the 2020 election results and the peaceful transfer of power.”

MSNBC:

At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Donald Trump decried President Biden for issuing a White House proclamation of March 31 as the annual Trans Day of Visibility, which this year happened to fall on Easter. “What the h— was Biden thinking when he declared Easter Sunday to be trans visibility day?” Trump complained, to loud boos from the audience. “Such total disrespect to Christians.”

The former president omitted that Biden has observed Trans Day of Visibility on the same day every year of his presidency, and the overlap with Easter was purely coincidental. Instead, Trump turned from stoking fears of Christian persecution to another campaign trail favorite: predicting his election victory. “November 5th is going to be called something else,” he said. “Christian visibility day, when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before.” The crowd reacted, of course, with raucous applause.

As with Bartiromo, the former huckster-in-chief is selling what they’re buying. He’s feeding their persecution complex. Writes Posner, “After all, in the minds of Trump loyalists, if Christians (that is, Trump’s loyal base of white evangelical Christians) show up on Election Day in unprecedented numbers, how could he lose?” They cannot unless the election is stolen by THEM.

Most Christians do not share evangelicals’ paranoia, Posner explains. For the others, Trump is signaling “that they make themselves available to defend him against a possible loss.” 

The tenor of his speeches of late, especially those delivered to evangelical audiences, are built around a claim that Christian America has fallen into an apocalyptic hellscape, and only Trump can rescue it.

With their help. In Jesus’ name.

Trump’s declaration of Election Day as “Christian Visibility Day” is more than a get-out-the-vote technique. It’s a blaring alarm warning us that he could use his base’s persecution complex about the “radical left” and their messianic zeal for him to claim that any election loss must have been “rigged” not only against him but against them, too. As Jan. 6 showed, that zeal can easily turn into terrible consequences for the country.

I can’t help linking evangelicals’ persecution complex to a regional insecurity complex that lingers among many southerners (especially the less educated) a century and a half after the defeat of the Confederacy. The South and Jesus will rise again.

By any means necessary.

Update: Regarding Trump’s unscrupulousness and his MAGA followers’ “How could we lose?” hubris, it occurs to me that Pickett’s Charge was Lee’s folly because he thought his southern boys were invincible. Via the American Battlefield Trust: “Pickett was asked years following the war what caused the assault to fail. He responded rhetorically, ‘I’ve always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.’”

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Trump’s leadership killed so many people

Trump announces the CDC is now recommending people wear face coverings to stop spread of coronavirus, but then immediately says "I don't think I'm going to be doing it." pic.twitter.com/GRDLrNNJMD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 3, 2020

REPORTER: Why are you opposed to wearing a mask?

TRUMP: "I just don't want to wear one myself … I'm feeling good. I just don't want to be doing– somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk. The great Resolute Desk … I don't see it for myself." pic.twitter.com/7dWmQQY3Aw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 3, 2020

.@chrislhayes: Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago on April 3, 2020? pic.twitter.com/yTtZZMUNcq

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) April 4, 2024

Jose Andres in the NY Times today:

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.

In the worst conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up. You cannot save the hostages by bombing every building in Gaza. You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.

We welcome the government’s promise of an investigation into how and why members of our World Central Kitchen family were killed. That investigation needs to start at the top, not just the bottom.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said of the Israeli killings of our team, “It happens in war.” It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.

It was also the direct result of a policy that squeezed humanitarian aid to desperate levels. Our team was en route from a delivery of almost 400 tons of aid by sea — our second shipment, funded by the United Arab Emirates, supported by Cyprus and with clearance from the Israel Defense Forces.

The team members put their lives at risk precisely because this food aid is so rare and desperately needed. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, half the population of Gaza — 1.1. million people — faces the imminent risk of famine. The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.

The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality — of our shared hope for a better tomorrow.

There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures.

I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves.

It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.

This man’s humanity, decency and compassion are inspirations to us all. Everything he says is correct and if the Israeli government hasn’t completely given up on being regarded as a civilized 21st century nation it will listen to what he says and recognize that this is a watershed moment that will determine whether it is.