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GOP SCOTUS back in business

Published by digby on October 12, 2023

Gerrymandering is still on their menu. And it’s not going to go down well.

Ian Millhiser on the latest voting rights case before the Court:

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority spent Wednesday morning seemingly hunting for a reason to uphold a South Carolina congressional map that everyone agrees was gerrymandered to benefit the Republican Party.

The case is Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.

Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, federal courts are not allowed to hear lawsuits challenging partisan gerrymanders — that is, maps drawn to benefit one political party or the other. But federal courts may hear challenges to racial gerrymanders — maps drawn to minimize the political power of voters of a particular race. A lower court struck down the South Carolina map because it determined that while the state’s GOP-controlled legislature’s goal was to shore up Republican control over the state’s First Congressional District, the legislature did so by excluding Black voters from this district.

In South Carolina, about 90 percent of Black voters prefer Democrats to Republicans. So mapmakers could be quite sure that they were making the First District more Republican every time they removed a Black voter from it.

So, given the Court’s previous rulings, what happens when a legislative map is both a racial gerrymander and a partisan gerrymander, as the lower court found is the case in Alexander? The answer is supposed to be that the map is illegal. As the Supreme Court held in Cooper v. Harris (2017), “the sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics.”

The plaintiffs in Alexander should also benefit from another well-established legal rule. When a trial court determines that a legislative map is an impermissible racial gerrymander, the Court said in Cooper, the lower court’s “findings of fact — most notably, as to whether racial considerations predominated in drawing district lines — are subject to review only for clear error.”

The 2023-2024 SCOTUS term will feature a growing list of cases that could transform the US, its government, and our right to free speech and public safety. We’re tracking them here.

Ian has covered the Supreme Court extensively as a senior correspondent for Vox. Read more of his reporting here.

Appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, may correct a lower court that applies the wrong legal rule in a racial gerrymandering case. But the Supreme Court is supposed to defer to the trial court’s factual determinations regarding how and why a legislative map was drawn the way it was drawn.

Most of the justices, including several of the Court’s Republican appointees, acknowledged during Wednesday’s oral argument that the Supreme Court’s obligation to defer to a trial court’s factual findings places South Carolina in a bind. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, asked the very first question of John Gore, the former Trump administration lawyer defending South Carolina’s maps, and that question focused on the fact that the Court is supposed to “review this for clear error.”

But after Gore stepped away from the podium, all six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared determined to find some way to uphold South Carolina’s gerrymander.

The Court appears to be falling back into its normal, partisan pattern in voting rights cases

For years, the Court’s GOP-appointed majority was uniquely hostile toward voting rights plaintiffs — often fabricating new legal rules from nothing in order to weaken laws protecting the right to vote.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), for example, the Court’s Republican appointees declared a key provision of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional based on something called the “‘fundamental principle of equal sovereignty’ among the States” that cannot be found anywhere in the text of the Constitution. The GOP-appointed justices’ decision in Brnovich v. DNC (2021) simply made up a bunch of new limits on the Voting Rights Act, such as a presumption that voting restrictions that were commonplace in 1982 are valid, which also have no basis in any legal text.

Last June, however, the Supreme Court surprised pretty much everyone who follows voting rights litigation when it voted 5-4 to strike down a racially gerrymandered map in Alabama. The Court’s opinion in Allen v. Milligan, the Alabama case, was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, and joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, along with the Court’s three Democratic appointees.

But while Milligan suggested that the Court may be turning away from its hostility to voting rights claims, Wednesday’s argument in Alexander suggests that Milligan could be a one-off.

Many of the GOP-appointed justices spent that argument probing for flaws in the evidence the Alexander plaintiffs raised in the lower court — evidence which shows that race, and not just partisanship, shaped South Carolina’s gerrymandered maps.

While Leah Aden, the lawyer representing those plaintiffs, was at the podium, Justice Samuel Alito behaved like a lawyer for the Republican Party who was cross-examining a hostile witness. He peppered her with questions about whether her side’s expert witnesses used an airtight methodology, and whether the Court should impose new legal requirements on lawyers challenging racial gerrymanders.

Though no justice was as aggressive an advocate for the Republican gerrymander as Alito, he was joined in his questions by Kavanaugh, who repeatedly brought up a white Democratic area that was excluded from the First District, seemingly to suggest that race was not the driving force behind this gerrymander.

There are strong rebuttals to these attacks on the lower court’s factual findings. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, the evidence shows that Black Democrats were excluded from the First District at a higher rate than white Democrats. There was also evidence that South Carolina’s mapmakers had to rely on racial data to draw a Republican gerrymander, because it did not have sufficiently reliable data on voters’ partisan preferences to gerrymander the First District without using race as a proxy to identify Democrats.

And, under the clear error rule, it shouldn’t matter whether Alito or Kavanaugh can find flaws in the plaintiffs’ evidence. All that matters is whether the trial court, after looking at all of the evidence in the case, could “plausibly” conclude that the evidence on the plaintiffs’ side was stronger than the state’s evidence.

Meanwhile, some other GOP-appointed justices suggested ways to change the law so that South Carolina will win. Alito and Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, both suggested that the voting rights plaintiffs should have to produce “alternative maps” that achieve the state legislature’s partisan goal without engaging in racial gerrymandering — effectively requiring the plaintiffs to draw a partisan gerrymander. That would mean that, even if these plaintiffs prevail, Alito and Gorsuch’s Republican Party will retain control of the First District’s US House seat.

Roberts, meanwhile, complained that the lower court relied on “circumstantial evidence,” such as the fact that so many Black voters were moved out of the First District, and the fact that the state did not have reliable partisan voter data, rather than “direct evidence” such as a lawmaker’s admission that the maps were drawn with racist intent. Roberts even suggested that allowing someone to challenge a gerrymander without direct evidence “would be breaking new ground in our voting rights jurisprudence.”

So it sure looks bad for the Alexander plaintiffs, and for voting rights advocates more broadly. It is still possible that the Court will surprise observers in the same way it surprised us in the Milligan case. But, for the GOP-appointed justices, the biggest question in Alexander appears to be whether they should toss out the lower court’s factual findings, or whether they should announce a new legal rule that will permanently hobble all future plaintiffs’ ability to challenge racial gerrymanders.

It also appears that the brief ray of hope the Court gave voting rights advocates in Milligan could soon be extinguished.

Did anyone think they had had a change of heart? I didn’t.

The once and future leader of the free world blabs again

Published by digby on October 12, 2023

Thank goodness Biden refused him the privilege of getting classified information in the post-presidency

Once again, he shows his casual disregard about classified information. He doesn’t seem to know if he’s sharing it or, more importantly, care. And he thinks that a good time to air his personal grievances with Netanyahu is when Israel is at war and the entire Middle East is on tender hooks.

Bill Sher has the back story:

On Wednesday  Donald Trump held a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida. Considering Palm Beach County has one of the highest concentrations of Jewish people in America, the typical person at a Trump rally is quite conservative, and Israel is now responding to one of deadliest attacks on its soil in history, I think it’s safe to assume many people in the crowd were supportive of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet Trump picked this rally, at this moment, to publicly upbraid Netanyahu.

After saying, “We will stand with Israel 100 percent,” he digressed: “I did have a bad experience with Israel, though, when we took out [Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General Qasem] Soleimani” on January 3, 2020.

As he told the story, he said, “I don’t think this has ever been told. They’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s classified information.’ Well, maybe it is, but I don’t think so.”

He said Israel and the U.S. government were “working together” on plans to kill Soleimani before he could launch attacks on American military installations. (In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser report that Trump “gave shifting explanations” for the assassination, and that claims of imminent “attacks of four American embassies” were not “backed up in briefings with congressional leaders” by military and intelligence officials.)

But “the night before it happened,” according to Trump, “I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack … I said, I don’t like that, that’s not good.”

Trump said he ordered the American military to proceed without Israel. “We did it, but I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down, that was a very terrible thing … We did the job ourself [sic] and it was absolute precision—magnificent, beautiful job. And then Bibi tried to take credit for it … That didn’t make me feel too good.”

This is not the first time Trump has aired his beef with Netanyahu. In an interview conducted by Axios’s Barak Ravid for his book Trump’s Peace, Trump complained that Netanyahu quickly accepted the results of the 2020 election and publicly congratulated Joe Biden: “The first person who congratulated Joe Biden, because this was an election in dispute, it’s still in dispute. The first person who congratulated me was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with…Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake … I haven’t spoken to him since. Fuck him.”

The relationship was strained before the election. In January 2020, after the Soleimani operation, the two announced a “peace” offer to the Palestinians at the White House, involving $50 billion in commercial investment in a new Palestinian state. Netanyahu was eager to burnish his political standing as Israeli elections loomed, so, according to The Divider, he turned the White House ceremony “into a campaign event, speaking from the podium for a full twenty minutes.”

That wasn’t in the script. “Trump did not like anyone stealing his thunder, especially in his own house,” wrote Baker and Glasser.

“’What the hell was that?’ he demanded of his aides afterward. Trump was doing him a favor, the latest of a whole slew of favors, the president told others, and Netanyahu had upstaged him.”

I haven’t seen a lot of commentary on his rally last night so far today but he went over the line I would have even expected him to to observe. It’s one of the few things I’d have thought might shake some of his cult loose but it doesn’t look as though they’ll ever hear about it.

The NY Times had a few more details of where Trump has been on this. I hadn’t heard him say this before:

He then criticized Israeli intelligence, pointing in part to failures to anticipate and stop Hamas, the Islamic militant group, from executing such a large-scale and devastating attack. “They’ve got to straighten it out,” Mr. Trump said. […]

“If the election wasn’t rigged,” he said, “there would be nobody even thinking about going into Israel.”

[…]

Mr. Trump also criticized Mr. Netanyahu in a Fox News Radio interview that is expected to air on Thursday. In a clip from that interview that aired on television on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that Mr. Netanyahu “was not prepared and Israel was not prepared.”

He again suggested Israeli intelligence had been deficient, saying, “Thousands of people knew about it and they let this slip by. ”

He’s not wrong. But to go into Florida and say it at this moment, even as he’s complimenting Hezbollah for being very smart (just like Putin, Xi, Kim and all the other despots he admires so greatly) is bizarre, even for him.

The New Republican Establishment

Published by digby on October 12, 2023

…is the Trump Cult

I think this has been true for years actually but it fully formed once the smoke cleared after January 6th and Trump remained standing as the Dear Leader. It’s been solidifying its power ever since. Nate Cohn in the NY Times:

In the final account, the rise and fall of Kevin McCarthy might read like the familiar tale of a Republican congressional leader toppled by a small but uncompromising right-wing faction.

But even if the story ultimately ends like any other Republican congressional drama in Washington over the last decade, something different and important has already happened: The right wing didn’t just bring down a House speaker — its members also made a credible bid at claiming the gavel for themselves.

A founder of the House Freedom Caucus, Jim Jordan, won 99 votes in the House Republican conference vote Wednesday, good for about 45 percent of congressional Republicans. It wasn’t enough to defeat Steve Scalise, the conservative congressman from Louisiana who still faces a daunting path to the post, but it’s a serious showing — especially for someone whom John Boehner once called a “legislative terrorist.”

For all of the quotes about “inmates running the asylum” in the press over the last decade, the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party has never won anything like actual power. In January, Andy Biggs won a mere 14 percent of Republicans against Mr. McCarthy in the House Republican conference vote. That’s enough to make life miserable for a speaker with a five-vote majority, but it’s nowhere near leading the caucus. Getting up to 45 percent, on the other hand, starts to make the gavel appear tantalizingly close.

The swelling congressional support for Mr. Jordan didn’t make him speaker, but it might nonetheless herald the emergence of a new, alternative Trumpist governing elite — one authentically loyal to Donald J. Trump’s pugilistic brand of politics, and one that would pose a fundamental challenge to what remains of the beleaguered Republican “establishment.”

As recently as the beginning of the year, this establishment — the party’s traditional Washington governing elite of political leaders, business interests, donors, journalists and so on — looked as if it had almost managed to survive the Trump era. Yes, it was in tatters. Yes, it had to kowtow to Mr. Trump. But by bending the knee, the establishment still held nearly all of the significant — if hardly dominant — positions of power in Washington. Mitch McConnell and Mr. McCarthy still reigned in Congress. The likes of William P. Barr and Elaine Chao still staffed the Trump administration. Donor money continued to flow to mainstream candidates, even if it wasn’t worth as much as a Trump endorsement.

It’s hard to remember now, but there was even a moment earlier this year when Republican politics almost seemed reminiscent of the Obama era. Mr. McCarthy’s fight with the Freedom Caucus over budgetary tactics certainly read like an Obama-era tale. And the likes of Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis seemed to earn the kind of broad praise from activists and donors that made it seem as if post-Trump Republicans had cracked the code to unifying the base and the establishment.

Apparently not. Mr. Trump’s continued dominance of Republican politics has dashed any establishment hopes of a return to the way things were. Instead, his strength has started to pose a more lasting threat to what remains of the old elite, by promoting a group of loyalist outsiders who might soon have the numbers to defeat the insiders at their own game.

Mr. Jordan’s bid for speaker is perhaps the most visible indication of this growing counter-establishment, especially since Mr. Trump’s endorsement may have been a major reason for his strength — but it’s not the only one. There’s the reporting that a second Trump administration would be staffed by conservatives with personal loyalty to Mr. Trump — something that was essentially impossible eight years ago. There’s the transformation of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation into MAGA hotbeds. And there’s also the endorsement race in the presidential primary. With so many Trump loyalists now in the Republican ranks, Mr. Trump almost looks like an establishment candidate. He has an overwhelming lead in endorsements; his rivals have virtually no endorsements at all.

It’s hard to imagine calling someone like Mr. Trump or Mr. Jordan the “establishment,” and they certainly aren’t the actual establishment quite yet. To the extent they threaten to win power, it mainly appears attributable to Mr. Trump. That’s not a sustainable basis for rule in Washington. The usual connection to big donors and business interests isn’t yet so evident, either.

But if Mr. Jordan and Mr. Trump still aren’t the establishment, they’re not mere outsiders anymore. As they build and cement power in Washington, Trumpism’s grip on the Republican Party will only tighten.

I think they’re already there. They just have to and off the rough edges a tiny bit for the low tax, low regulation Big Money Boys to make peace with them. (Their “populism” is all about culture not economics and rich people don’t care about that because they live in their own bubble.) Trumpism now defines the party and the remaining rump of semi-normal Republicans are swiftly becoming the Republicans of the Democratic Neo-conservative movement of the 60s and 70s.

You know you’re in trouble when….

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 12, 2023

A lunatic is the leading GOP candidate for president

I’ve said it before: Donald J. Trump is one grain alcohol and rain water away from pulling a Browning machine gun out of his golf bag.

And his fans want more:

I’m trying to heed Obama’s advice. “This country’s seen darker moments before”:

Not saying it’s easy.

Do your best to cope.

Are you angry enough or too much?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 12, 2023

Emotional policing is again in vogue

Have you condemned Hamas vigorously enough for [insert viral unconfirmed atrocity here]?

The murderous rampage by Hamas last weekend against Israeli civilians of all ages and how Israel responds will reverberate for years to come. Israel’s 9/11. In the wake of terrorist attacks here two decades ago, some pundit asked: Would America keep its head? I wrote later:

We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.

Did America keep its head? Uh, no.

It is happening again. Pro-Israel protesters in New York City think Gaza should be flattened to a parking lot. Wipe out all the Palestinians. There are calls for revenge, for collective punishment. War fever is on the rise again.

Someone on Bluesky last night posted that “every single Israeli child will one day be an active member of the IDF.” Thus, none are innocent. Thus, targets for Hamas. Col. John Chivington, a Methodist minister, used that reasoning in 1864 to direct the slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapaho children at Sand Creek in the Colorado territory. (The post has since been deleted.)

Responses to the Hamas attack recall not just 9/11 but the earlier Challenger disaster in 1986. Celebrated schoolteacher and payload specialist Christa McAuliffe died in the shuttle explosion along with six other crewmates. Network TV brought on therapists to tell children how they should process their feelings. Today, we see Americans policing others’ feelings about the Hamas attacks. They make moral judgments based on the strength of others’ outrage or, more likely, direct condemnation at those who cannot find the words. Join them in calling for blood or you are with the terrorists.

No doubt people who rail against language policing they’ve only ever heard about on Fox News are among those now insisting how others should feel.

Worse, some on the left in grotesque fits of performative anti-colonialism celebrate the slaughter. Or else “gussy up their ardor for war crimes in layers of impenetrable jargon,” as Eric Levitz observed. “All this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt,” he continued. Not to mention, he explains, an abandonment of progressive principles.

On Tuesday, Michelle Goldberg spoke with Israel-born Misha Shulman, rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue. Congregants who had lost loved ones and young Jews he’d spoken with were “‘completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,’ who were either justifying Hamas’s atrocities or celebrating them outright.” Some of those supposed progressives lean Chivington.

Goldberg writes:

Victimization and dispossession are not alibis for barbarism. The distinction between civilians and combatants must be respected. No cause, righteous or otherwise, excuses the killing of children.

[…]

“At the strategic level, it would be much more helpful if there was a large group of American leftists who had the moral credibility to say, ‘We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not to commit atrocities in Gaza,’” said Leifer.

There are, of course, leaders making exactly that argument. “Right now, the international community must focus on reducing humanitarian suffering and protecting innocent people on both sides of this conflict,” read a statement by Bernie Sanders. “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” That message is undermined when a loud part of the left insists that when it comes to Israelis, there is no such thing as civilians.

On the right, of course, not issuing loud public condemnations of Hamas that bolster support for indiscriminate killing in Gaza means you “are with the terrorists” whether one is, as Goldberg writes, the type to “relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty” or else too shell-shocked and depressed to make a public show of one’s revulsion.

Has Miss Manners issued guidelines, or did I miss them? Don’t worry, Fox News will.

Update (also added image): Paul Waldman offers a column on the same condemnation competition and blowback I’ve observed. Anyone wrestling with the complexity of what comes next is condemned for not possessing moral clarity:

You know who does have moral clarity? Hamas has moral clarity. The protesters in Sydney celebrating the Hamas attack with chants of “Gas the Jews” have moral clarity. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government have always had moral clarity, and it didn’t protect his nation’s people, so now they prepare to lay waste to Gaza. “We are fighting human animals,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as he announced that Israel would cut off electricity, water and food to the area as the bombing begins.

Hamas’s barbarism … is already producing a boiling desire for revenge. No one has a good answer to the question of what happens next, but even asking it will be seen as a violation of moral clarity.

Wrapping your mind around the complexity

Published by digby on October 11, 2023

The left must hang on to its moral authority

This piece by Eric Levitz brilliantly examines all the complexities I imagine many of you are feeling about the war in Israel. I know I am. It’s very difficult and social media has made it almost impossible to express any nuance about any of it. (I’m reeling from being buffeting in all directions.)

Anyway, this is the most honest, most mature analysis of how we should be thinking about this if we have a conscience:

This weekend in Israel, a far-right Islamist group perpetrated the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, murdering entire families, including babies, in their beds and slaughtering 260 concertgoers. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed in all, and over 100 others taken hostage.

Israel’s far-right government predictably responded by choking off all food, electricity, and fuel to Gaza’s 2 million residents and then preparing a military assault more untempered by concern for civilian casualties than ever before. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, made the brutality of what is to come plain on Monday, saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”

And no small number of supposed leftists found in all this cause for celebration. Others, meanwhile, loudly refused to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, insisting it was not their place to decry the “military strategy” or “violent resistance” of oppressed Palestinians.

In my view, these responses constitute a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values. Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects or one doesn’t. What’s more, cheering (or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn) the murder of children isn’t just morally grotesque but also politically self-defeating.

The West’s apologists for Palestinian war crimes have far less power than its apologists for Israel’s brutal domination of the Palestinian territories and discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. But precisely because left-wing critics of Israeli apartheid lack power, we must not forfeit our moral authority. For decades, the Israeli government’s knee-jerk defenders have sought to equate opposition to the occupation with contempt for the security of Jewish Israelis. Now, a loud minority of Palestine’s self-styled champions are blithely affirming this smear, insisting that solidarity with Palestine requires callous indifference toward (or, at the very least, silence about) the mass murder of Jews. In so doing, they are making it easier for their adversaries to discredit and marginalize the broader cause of Palestinian liberation.

And that cause has never been more vital. It is therefore imperative for progressives to disavow all apologia for Hamas’s atrocities and for the broader public to understand that the left’s analysis of the conflict’s origins, and its prescriptions for its resolution, are wholly extricable from the blood lust of a loud minority of pseudo-radicals.

It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities. The national leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine declared the weekend’s events a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” touting Hamas’s success in “catching the enemy completely by surprise.” The Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauded the Palestinian resistance’s “unprecedented anti-colonial struggle,” pledged its solidarity to that struggle, and vowed, “No peace on stolen land!” At a rally co-sponsored by socialist organizations in New York City, one speaker spoke approvingly of the mass murder of Israeli teenagers, saying, “There was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”

Some left-wing intellectuals, meanwhile, chose to gussy up their ardor for war crimes in layers of impenetrable jargon. Speaking plainly would have required such thinkers to acknowledge that they were endorsing the mass murder of children, and thus to assume the extraordinary burden of justifying this stance; which is to say, the burden of explaining why we should believe that Palestinian liberation can be achieved through the killing of Jewish children and only through the killing of Jewish children. It’s understandable, then, that instead of forthrightly making this case, many chose to convey the sentiment “Oppressed people have a right to commit mass murder” with as much opacity and pseudo-profundity as their hard-won vocabularies would allow. These remarks from an editor of The Drift, a socialist magazine, are exemplary:

to search for an analogue seems almost inappropriate to Palestinians’ world-historical(!) audacity to seize the components of self-determination for themselves, if only because the idiom of liberation invents itself anew with each instance that the yoke of bondage is sloughed off

a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude — these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia. the thrum of history as it develops is one of force; its inertia and advance require some momentum

In this intellectual’s telling, the killings of entire families in their beds are not atrocities that contradict the left’s fundamental commitment to the inherent worth of every human life; they are “drastic actions in need of no apologia.” Such sentiments were not altogether aberrant among left-wing public intellectuals. A Marxist professor at Birkbeck University of London declared that the murder of 260 Israelis at a rave was a “consequence” for “partying on stolen land.” Other academics, and a wide variety of campus student organizations, issued statements pointedly refusing to criticize “Palestinian resistance.”

Meanwhile, social media was replete with claims that Hamas’s atrocities constituted heroic progress toward decolonization and that Jewish Israeli civilians were fair targets for violence as they are settlers occupying stolen lands.

All this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt. From my vantage, it looks as though a few leftists were eager to demonstrate their superlative moral clarity by fighting with liberals about the legitimacy of a Palestinian uprising aimed squarely at the IDF and conducted in the name of democratic equality; so eager that they would not be deterred by the fact that the weekend’s events bore scant resemblance to that scenario.

What we actually witnessed was not “the Palestinians” mounting a violent struggle for justice but a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood-and-soil nationalism. Hamas’s project is antithetical to the left’s foundational values of secularism, universalism, and egalitarianism. And it is also completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation. Western radicals’ predominant prescription for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is a “one-state solution,” in which Israelis and Palestinians all enjoy democratic equality in a single binational state. Hamas’s atrocities have not advanced this ideal but set it back, lending credence to those who insist a one-state solution is a recipe for ceaseless civil war. This weekend was not a triumph for the left’s project in Palestine but a disaster.

Meanwhile, although many aspects of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians can be justifiably described as neocolonial, analogies between the conflict and paradigmatic anti-colonial struggles can be misleading. This is not Algeria, and the Israelis aren’t the pied-noirs. Much of Israel’s Jewish population descends from people who were expelled from other Middle Eastern countries; which is to say, people who suffered the same sort of dispossession endured by the Palestinians. These people did not have anywhere else to seek refuge. And their grandchildren do not have any metropole to return to. The idea that they deserve to be shot to death while dancing because they were born in Israel, or for the crimes of a government many actively opposed, is hateful.

More broadly, the notion that an ethnic group can boast the exclusive right to occupy any stretch of land is not a left-wing one. Virtually all land is “stolen land” if one rolls the tape back far enough. Individuals who were dispossessed of property as a result of their ethnicity have a right of return and reparation. But ethnic groups do not have a right to cleanse any geographic area of outgroup members, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.

For these reasons, it is a moral imperative for progressives to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, affirm the human rights of Jewish Israelis, and reject the ethno-nationalist claim that Palestinians have a unique right to reside in the region. And it is also a political imperative for them to do so.

Those who approve or condone Hamas’s atrocities constitute a small minority of the left. Yet since algorithmic social media favors incendiary speech, from the vantage of many X and Instagram users, the left’s response to last weekend’s events is characterized by bloodlust. In the face of that response, multiple progressive-leaning people in my life have expressed a sense of estrangement from leftists and newfound doubts about their worldview. Seeing an ideological group embrace a position that one knows to be intellectually bankrupt and morally odious will naturally lead one to view that group’s other claims — especially those concerning matters one knows little about, such as the intricacies of the Israel-Palestine conflict — with greater skepticism. It’s important, therefore, to ensure that the majority of progressives who abhor all war crimes makes itself as visible as possible. In the present context, pointedly refusing to condemn Hamas’s atrocities might help a leftist to perform a more radical solidarity than squishy liberals can muster and thus win some points in a subcultural status game. But doing so will make it harder for them to actually advance their ostensible aims.

The political necessity of criticizing Israel on universalist grounds, rather than ethno-nationalist ones, is similarly urgent. In defending their apologias for war crimes, leftists tend to cite the gross power imbalance between the Palestinians and Israelis as somehow exculpatory. But precisely because Palestinians cannot hope to prevail in a contest of brute force, it is incumbent on their champions to make the case for their liberation in terms that honor the basic rights of Israelis. If we posit that some ethnic groups have a unique claim to specific stretches of land, and that they also have the right to commit war crimes so as to secure this heritage, then we will do the Israeli far-right’s ideological work for it. When supposed leftists embrace calls for the expulsion of all Jewish “settlers” from “the river to the sea,” they pit one group’s account of why its historical victimization gives it carte blanche to commit ethnic cleansing against another group’s account of the same. In a contest between competing visions of ethno-nationalist domination, the Palestinians cannot win. Their primary strength is the moral force of egalitarian universalism; in other words, of the idea that all people are entitled to security, self-government, and equality under the law. The moment that Palestine’s western supporters treat this idea as negotiable, they kick the legs out from under their own movement.

And that movement is needed now more than ever. The current Israeli government is the most far-right in its history and has been working to de-facto annex the West Bank and entrench Jewish supremacy in that occupied Palestinian territory. Israeli settlers in that region have been carrying out attacks that even Israeli officials recognize as “pogroms.” Meanwhile, last year, Israeli troops in the West Bank killed a record number of Palestinians. And even before the present war, they were on pace to set a new one in 2023.

Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is an open anti-Arab racist who has called for the mass expulsion of disloyal Arab Israelis and whose sympathies for Jewish terrorists prevented him from serving in the Israeli army. The nation’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for wiping out Palestinian villages. This is a government that needed no provocation to demonstrate its contempt for Palestinian life. Now, Hamas has given it the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

Israel has responded by promising that its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza will be unconstrained by concern for the lives of the 2 million civilians who are tightly packed into a strip of land twice the size of Washington, D.C. On Tuesday morning, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari announced that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on Gaza and noted that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

A member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party in Israel’s parliament tweeted in response to the attacks, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.” This is a reference to the original ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel.

At present, Israel’s allies in the West are giving it little incentive to temper its thirst for vengeance with concern for, say, the majority of Gazans who are under 18 years old. In his remarks on the attacks, Joe Biden offered the unqualified support of the U.S. for Israel’s response while lamenting Hamas’s use of Palestinian civilians as “human shields.” This is a real practice, but it also serves as an alibi for Israel to pursue aerial campaigns that emphasize “damage” over “accuracy.”

A precondition for a durable peace in Israel-Palestine is an Israeli government that honors its commitments under international law, ends its occupation of the West Bank, and forswears collective punishment as a tool of war against Hamas. To assert this is not to pretend that Hamas is an eager partner for peace. But that organization owes much of its popular legitimacy (and power) to Israel’s crimes.

The Israeli government will not honor the legal and moral rights of Palestinians absent concerted international pressure. And mounting such pressure requires a progressive movement with the moral authority to challenge popular narratives about the conflict that elide the crimes of the Israeli state.

Admittedly, the prospects for success on that front in the near term look bleak, irrespective of whether progressives denounce Hamas’s atrocities or justify them. But a left that refuses to condemn mass murder will ensure (and deserve) its own political irrelevance. To celebrate the slaughter of Jewish children as “decolonial” struggle, or to refuse to condemn the “military strategy” of far-right war criminals, is to place the performance of radicalism above the demands of moral integrity and political efficacy.

His points are clear. If those of us on the left have any hope that the we can continue to have a positive influence on this situation it’s vitally important that we hold fast to our principles and cling to our morals. His analysis of where this has gone astray in some quarters is valuable.

I’m reminded of the endless fatuous accusations from some that support for Ukraine is hypocritical when one was against the war in Iraq. My principles hold that I was against the invasion by the US and against the invasion by Russia. It’s not really complicated. Likewise, I find terrorism directed at civilians abhorrant and I don’t support it no matter who is doing it. That’s not really complicated either even though we have witnessed an inimaginable horror already from one side and can expect to see more of it from the other in reaction.

What’s happening in Israel makes it’s hard to stop yourself from throwing up your hands in despair. It’s all so awful. Cheering any of it from either side is grotesque. Levitz does a good job of breaking it down and helping to illuminate the problem.

Hannity turns on his favorite Democrat

Published by digby on October 11, 2023

Now that Bobby Jr has decided to run as an independent the Republicans don’t like him so much

Philip Bump reports on RFK Jr’s latest interview with Hannity now that he’s announced he’s running thrid party. It looks like the Trumpers have some regret about the monster they’ve helped nurture over the past several months:

Once upon a time, it seemed that Sean Hannity was excited about no presidential candidate more than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In June, the Fox News host marveled that Kennedy was “surging in the Democratic primary,” potentially meaning that President Biden’s bid for renomination was in jeopardy. Kennedy wasn’t surging in the polls — at least not among Democrats — but Hannity seemed perfectly happy to try to will such a surge into existence.

In late July, he turned over a full hour of his program to Kennedy, the sort of campaign contribution that he normally reserved for Republican candidates (as he did so often before last year’s midterm elections). Kennedy was running against a Democrat, and that was good enough for Hannity. So he welcomed Kennedy to a “town hall” in front of a live audience — though the only one asking questions was Sean Hannity.

Those questions were no less pointed than the ones 2022 Republican candidates faced. Kennedy’s challenge to Biden was framed in near heroic terms, positioning the conspiracy theory enthusiast as the sole person brave enough to challenge the Democratic establishment.

“Many of his fellow Democrats and others in the media mob, make no mistake, they are right now furious with RFK Jr.,” Hannity said as he was introducing his guest. “They seem to loathe his stance on medical freedom and privacy” — a sanitization of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance. “They are angry he does not toe the party line on the war in Ukraine and former president Donald Trump. They can’t seem to stand that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a free thinker with classic liberal principles. And today, well, today’s Democratic Party is about compliance. It’s about going along. It’s about groupthink.”

So Hannity was happy to provide a soapbox.

About 2.2 million people tuned in to Hannity’s program that night, about in line with Hannity’s regular weeknight audience. They heard Hannity tee up a number of issues on which he could express agreement, from economic insecurity to the effort to sideline hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19.

Hannity made clear his welcoming intent at the outset.

“We definitely don’t agree on everything,” he said, “but that’s not my role here tonight. We’re not going to shut down Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” He noted that some people wanted to “deplatform” Kennedy — because he regularly spreads misinformation about vaccine safety, though Hannity didn’t mention that. “I actually believe in freedom and freedom of speech and the freedom of the American people to hear things that they may disagree with and ascertain and determine for themselves whether they agree or don’t agree, Hannity solemnly stated.

Then Kennedy announced that he would run not as a Democrat against Biden but as an independent — against both Biden and whoever wins the Republican nomination for president. That almost certainly means running against Hannity’s friend Donald Trump. It also may mean pulling more support from Trump than from Biden, which is very much not what Hannity or other Republicans would like to see.

So, when Kennedy again joined Hannity on Tuesday night, he earned a much briefer and colder reception.

“Everybody is now trying to analyze, you know, whether it there’s a three-way race with you, Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” Hannity said as he began his interview. “You know, who would you more likely draw from? So I hope you don’t mind, but I did a little research on you.”

“You’re pretty liberal,” he continued. “You’ve called for curbing logging, oil drilling, fracking. You wanted to eliminate it and call it a ‘victory for democracy.’ You want to curb U.S. fossil fuel extraction, keep it in the ground. You once tweeted you want a ban on fossil fuel extraction, a ban on fracking. You called the NRA once a terror group. You supported over the years Democrats [Al] Gore, [John] Kerry, [Barack] Obama, Hillary [Clinton]. You praised Bernie Sanders multiple times. You support affirmative action. So why is this party of yours, why didn’t they even allow you to compete? Because that’s as pretty liberal of a record as anybody I know!”

Kennedy responded to this unsubtle line of questioning with a chuckle, noting that Hannity didn’t really ask any question.

“Do you want to talk about my positions, Sean,” he asked, “or do you want to read talking points from the Trump campaign?”

“Excuse me,” Hannity replied. “These are called ‘Hannity points.’ I do my own research.”

This is certainly possible in theory. But it is true that, on Tuesday, the Republican National Committee published a list of Kennedy’s positions intended to frame him as unacceptably liberal. The list included most of the assertions Hannity presented in introducing his guest. It’s also the case that Kennedy’s announcement had already triggered Republican condemnation. Last week, Semafor reported on the Trump campaign’s preparations to undercut the independent. Kennedy can be forgiven for drawing that line.

At times, Hannity’s prosecution of Kennedy on Tuesday was almost revelatory, a glimpse of what might be possible in a world where Hannity didn’t dedicate his show night after night to aiding Trump or Trump’s party.

“Do you still believe the NRA is a terror group?” Hannity asked, for example.

“I support the Second Amendment,” Kennedy replied, “like I do all the amendments in the Constitution …”

“I didn’t ask you if you support the Second Amendment,” Hannity firmly interjected. “In 2018, you said Parkland students are right, the NRA’s a terror group. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t consider the NRA a terror group,” Kennedy replied, seemingly chastened.

The segment ended with Hannity and Kennedy sparring over the feasibility of replacing fossil fuels, with Hannity insisting that Kennedy’s claims weren’t true — something that it’s hard to imagine him saying during a Trump interview. But, then, Hannity’s interviews are focused on helping Trump, not hurting him.

It’s understandable that Kennedy would want to do Hannity’s show, given the uphill task he faces in winning the presidency. But it’s surprising that he wouldn’t have been prepared for a very different reception from Hannity now that he’ll probably be running against Trump

I don’t think there were very many Fox viewers who were ever going to vote for Kennedy one way or the other. The danger will come from the fringe right (of which there are many millions) who have gone down the AntiVaxx-conspiracy rabbit hole and that’s centered on the internet. Hannity and Steve Bannon helped lift Kennedy into the conversation on the right in general but it’s taken on a life of its own now.

The main problem for Kennedy will be getting on the ballot. Both parties are going to try to stop him from doing that but it will only take him succeeding in a couple of the swing states to sabotage the election. The only question is who his sabotage will benefit. Democrats have been here before in 2000 and it didn’t work out to well for them. But at least they didn’t help boost the third party candidate because of a trollish desire to own the other side. If Kennedy manages to help defeat Trump the Republicans have only themselves to blame. Frankly, I don’t think it will be necessary but I’m an optimist.

Terrorism spares no one

Published by digby on October 11, 2023

That’s the point. And it’s grotesque.

There are so many horrifying accounbts about last Saturday’s terrorist attack coming out of Israel that I’m starting to feel numb in spite of my efforts not to look away. And I’m equally horrified as I contemplate what’s to come. There’s so much carnage that it’s overwhelming.

There are some stories that are so poignant and speak so clearly to the total insanity of terrorism and war that they just break my heart. This is one of them:

On the Israeli side of the Gaza border lie a number of residential collectives whose members tend to be left of center and supportive of peace initiatives and Palestinian rights. Many of those residents were among the missing or dead after Hamas’s assault on Saturday.

Vivian Silver, 74, a member of Kibbutz Be’eri, near the northern end of Gaza, was still missing on Monday night and presumed to have been taken hostage. Ms. Silver, a native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, was among the leaders of Women Wage Peace, a large grass-roots movement founded in the aftermath of the Gaza War of 2014 to promote a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

She served for many years on the board of directors of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that said Israel was an apartheid state. She made visits to the occupied territories to express solidarity with Palestinians and volunteered with an organization that drove sick Palestinians from Gaza into Israel for medical treatment. She is the executive director of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development and co-founded the Arab Jewish Center for Equality Empowerment and Cooperation.

One of her sons, Yonatan Zeigen, told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he last communicated with her on Saturday morning, when she said she was hiding in a closet in a safe room on the kibbutz. They started to text rather than speak as the sound of shooting got closer, but there was no communication from her after 11:07 a.m., he said.

Ms. Silver is “probably worried sick about the Palestinian contacts in her phone, a friend wrote on Facebook. “She probably thinks of the danger they will now face for being seen as collaborators with the enemy.”

That peace-oriented Israelis were among Hamas’s targets has fueled further resentment of the Netanyahu government, which was caught by surprise on Saturday when Hamas fighters from the Gaza Strip streamed into Israel on Saturday, meeting little resistance.

Some Israelis said that, by contrast, the country’s military forces had been beefed up to protect settlers in the West Bank, who have clashed repeatedly with Palestinian residents.

Rachel Gur, an Israeli involved in the search for the missing, said that many of the residents of the collectives near Gaza had similar politics. “These are kibbutzniks, the people who vote for the left, who support coexistence,” she said. “You’re talking about the old time secular leftists, who want peace, who are against annexation.”

Another peace activist, Hayim Katsman, was initially believed to have been taken hostage on Saturday but was found killed in his home on Kibbutz Holit, near the southern end of Gaza. He had studied conservative trends and radicalism within the Zionist religious community, and played bass guitar and worked as a D.J. playing Arabic music.

He did gardening and landscaping at Kibbutz Holit, his mother, Hannah Wacholder Katsman, said. He had also worked as a mechanic, and taught at various colleges and pre-army programs. On her Facebook page, she mourned him as “beautiful, generous and talented.” He was also “very industrious and independent,” she said in a text message on Monday.

Mr. Katsman recently completed his doctorate at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he won an award for the best graduate paper in the Association for Israel Studies. During his time there, he served as co-coordinator of the Israel-Palestine research group at the university.

His doctorate was titled, “Religious nationalism in Israel/Palestine.” It is unusual for Israelis to refer to the region in that way, rather than simply as “Israel,” or “Israel and the occupied territories.”

Bilha and Yakovi Inon, who were peace activists and the parents of a prominent activist, Maoz Inon, were also killed on Saturday. The couple were killed in their farming collective, of Netiv Ha’Asara, which lies just north of Gaza.

It’s a terrible irony that the southern region of Israel is where many of the anti-Netanyau and Likud members were centered. Certainly it’s much less right wing than Netanyahu’s base among the far right settlers in the West Bank where he centered so many troops, leaving the south largely unprotected.

Terrorism seeks to demoralize the civilian population and creating a sense of futility among those who have good intentions is one consequence of it. Terrorists are all-or-nothing political actors. Netanyahu’s “strategy” gave them the opening they needed.

Update:

They are right to be overwhelmingly angry at the Netanyahu government. The entire premise for allowing the corrupt authoritarian monster to stay in office has been blown to smithereens.