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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.

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:

wow… Israel minister is thrown out of the hospital with people yelling: You've destroyed this country! https://t.co/waYrQeMofS

— Ruth Marks Eglash (@reglash) October 11, 2023

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.

The congressman who was seen cursing out Capitol pages had another outburst

It’s hard to know if this person is mentally unstable or if he’s just another infantile Republican trying to get attention:

Democrats are furious at GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden for a curse-laden outburst that interrupted a White House briefing on the Israel terrorist attack.

Multiple attendees described Van Orden (R-Wis.) as acting belligerent towards the Biden administration briefers when he asked questions. Several people said Van Orden cursed directly at the briefers, prompting loud boos in the room. One person in the room said Van Orden shouted that the briefers’ presentation was “pathetic.” Another attendee described it as “offensive and inappropriate.”

One member, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), shouted “shame on you” in response to Van Orden’s verbal affront — prompting Van Orden to drop an f-bomb toward the Minnesota Democrat, who is Jewish.

“He was rude and attacked the presenters. I thought they had very substantive things to say. But he just had this blanket attack saying that ‘this is the worst information I’ve ever had,’” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.). “And basically attacking them for being incompetent.”

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) followed Van Orden in the briefing, then apologized for his colleague’s conduct, telling the briefers, “I apologize for this guy,” the attendees said.

The incident was a topic of conversation in the closed-door House Democratic caucus meeting following the briefing too, as lawmakers on the left recounted the incident (and tried to identify Van Orden).

Van Orden’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Senate leaders in both parties spoke out against his behavior toward their chamber’s pages in July, when Van Orden used profanity toward a group of the young people.

This sort of thing has become more common as GOP voters have become enamored of angry performance artists who are choosing politics as their stage. If you watch any right wing TV you’ll see plenty of this type of behavior. And there’s Trump, of course.

Unfortunately, like him, they’retoo ignorant and emotionally stunted to know when to turn it off. This man apparently thought his act was even appropriate during a briefing on the war in Israel. But then look at Donald Trump:

And it doesn’t look as if they are getting any closer to pulling themselves together

As the whole world watches the events unfolding in Israel in slack jawed horror, I think most people are vastly relieved that the person who won the 2022 American presidential election was not Donald Trump. As Israel’s most powerful ally, President Joe Biden has been a steady hand at the wheel trying to ensure that the war doesn’t spread beyond Israel’s borders and reassuring everyone that the US is not going off the rails despite its ongoing political turmoil.

You can’t say the same for the putative Republican nominee for president in 2024, Donald Trump whose only contribution to the discourse has been to repeatedly assert on his Truth Social feed that this never would have happened if he were still president and proclaim “I KEPT ISRAEL SAFE! NOBODY ELSE WILL, NOBODY ELSE CAN, AND I KNOW ALL OF THE PLAYERS!!!” He has also taken the time to insult Forbes magazine, the NY Attorney General, Rosie O’Donnell and others and hold a raucous rally in New Hampshire where his brief comments about the war included a rousing recitation of “The Snake.” Let’s just say that he has never seemed more out of his depth.

In Washington the Republicans are hardly any more serious. In the senate, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville is still refusing to allow the promotions of 300 military officers unless they agree to change some rules about abortion that are more to his liking. We have a conflagration in the Middle East happening as we speak but his hobby horse still takes precedence. He obviously believes that he can wear the Democrats down and get his way but at some point the Democratic majority needs to step up and change the rule that allows him to continue with this silly tantrum. This has gone on long enough.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley galloped around on his hobby horse as well this week demanding that all Ukraine aid be immediately redirected to Israel. I don’t know how he’s going to break it to Marjorie Taylor Greene who has been demanding for months that the Ukraine aid be diverted to the southern border which she now claims is leaving Americans vulnerable to Hamas terrorists. She’s not alone in that. Her mentor Donald Trump posted this on Monday:

“The same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers. Are they planning an attack within our Country? Crooked Joe Biden and his BOSS, Barack Hussein Obama, did this to us!”

Recognizing that sometimes you have to do more than one thing at a time, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has reportedly been working with a bipartisan group of senators and the White House to put together a spending package linking Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan aid. Since the Senate is marginally more functional than the House there’s a decent chance they can get it passed. Unfortunately the House is still in chaos so it’s still very much up in the air if anything will get done before the deadline to keep the government open is upon us.

There has not been a lot of progress on the quest for a new Speaker since Rep. Kevin McCarthy was ignominiously removed last week. They are set to vote today and it does not appear that anyone has the votes to win it. McCarthy announced that he would not run again last week and then re-opened the door to it earlier this week. He reportedly told members since then not to nominate him but it’s fairly clear that if duty calls he will be available.

The first meeting of the caucus after McCarthy’s ouster last week was apparently something of a free for all with some members almost coming to blows. And the anger and resentment against the eight members who voted to oust McCarthy is still raw today. One of them, the rather bizarre Nancy Mace of North Carolina posted this on twitter/X :

I don’t think she understands what “The Scarlet Letter ” was all about but she seems to think that she is being targeted in her caucus as a woman when in reality she’s been ostracized because she inexplicably threw in with Matt Gaetz and his band of rebels. It’s unlikely this sort of stunt will get her or any of the rest of them back into the caucus’s good graces.

After taking a few days to cool down the caucus met again this week to clear the air and set forth a plan. It doesn’t sound as if anything was resolved. There is much talk of reforming the rules to require that the vote not come to the floor unless someone can earn 217 votes from Republicans. I guess they don’t want any more public humiliations. You’d think they’d have already agreed to get rid of McCarthy’s suicidal agreement to allow one member to make a motion to vacate the chair but there’s no sign that’s happened yet or if it will. That means the new speaker will have the same sword hanging over his head that McCarthy had.

Some of the more centrist members are vowing to keep voting for McCarthy over and over again in protest over the other two choices Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Oh., and Rep. Steve Scalise,R-La., both of whom are hardline right wingers. Scalise appeals more to the more traditional far right conservatives and has experience in the leadership while Jordan is a MAGA standard bearer who has Donald Trump’s endorsement. (I’m a little suprised that hasn’t carried more weight in this contest since Trump is almost certain to win the presidential nomination.) It will be surprising if these centrists follow through but you never know.

Both Jordan and Scalise have promised to keep the impeachment of Joe Biden on track so at least we know they do share the top priority of the nation. Jordan had said that he would shut down the government but according to CNN he offered a plan in Tuesday night’s meeting for “a long-term, stopgap spending bill that would cut current spending levels by 1% in order to give them more time to pass individual spending bills.” This appealed to some of the alleged moderates which may be the kiss of death. We’ll just have to see if that marks him a RINO-squish in waiting or if his credibility as a MAGA warrior will keep the right wingers with him anyway.

At this point we have no idea if this can be resolved this week or even this month. There is no consensus and feelings are still running high. But one thing we do know is that whether it’s Scalise, Jordan, McCarthy or some dark horse we haven’t heard of yet, nothing is going to change. The dynamics that brought them to this place are exactly as they were last week. The Republican Party is still completely dysfunctional and they have no idea how to fix it. 

Update:

This morning they were unable to make the new rule requiring unanimity to bring a nomination to the floor. So, the vote was split between Scalise and Jordan (with Scalise winning 113 and Jordan 99.) So now Scalise is the “official” nominee but the vote has not been taken and Jordan has a ton of support, including from Donald Trump so it looks like we have another circus on our hands.

Naturally.

With any luck, this one won’t fly

This was not unexpected. When North Carolina Republicans are not creating secret police forces, they are conjuring new ways to make it harder for non-Republicans to vote. They’re creative that way. So when they passed SB 747 and their supremajorities (thanks, Tricia Cotham!) overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, I expected state Democrats and Marc Elias to jump right on that.

I warned the GOP, I don’t bluff.
Now, we will win.https://t.co/Q2dWScgaMu https://t.co/y4bS5I3INB

— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) October 11, 2023

Democracy Docket provides the outlines:

On Tuesday, Oct. 10, Voto Latino, the Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force, Down Home North Carolina and two individual voters filed a federal lawsuit challenging part of North Carolina’s newly enacted voter suppression law, Senate Bill 747. 

The new lawsuit ensued just minutes after the Republican-controlled North Carolina Legislature overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) veto of S.B. 747.

The lawsuit specifically challenges S.B. 747’s new “Undeliverable Mail Provision,” which the plaintiffs contend will arbitrarily disenfranchise North Carolina’s same-day voters, those who register to vote on the same day they cast their ballots during the state’s early voting period. 

The provision at issue requires election officials to send a single address verification notice to same-day voters via the mail. If the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) returns the address verification notice as “undeliverable” before the canvassing of ballots, election officials are prohibited from registering the same-day voter and are required to exclude their ballot from the official vote count. In turn, the plaintiffs argue that “a single piece of undeliverable mail” can result in the disenfranchisement of “fully eligible voters.” 

Under the new law, the voter receives no notice of the cancellation of their ballot and registration and is given no opportunity to contest it. The plaintiffs assert that the provision “undermines North Carolina’s long-standing same-day registration process,” which was utilized by 104,336 voters in the 2022 general election. 

Prior to S.B. 747, a same-day voter who completed and fulfilled all other registration requirements could not be denied the right to vote unless the USPS returned two undeliverable address notices to the applicant. Furthermore, North Carolina law previously guaranteed that if either of the two address notices were returned as undeliverable “after a person has already voted in an election,” then “the county board shall treat the person as a registered voter.” North Carolina voters also previously had an opportunity to “defend their registration and ballots from rejection” at a hearing before the county board of elections. 

This new provision will automatically disenfranchise North Carolinians through no fault of their own. As the complaint explains: “[S]tudies have shown that up to 23% of all undeliverable mail is the result of USPS error rather than a faulty address. Compounding the problem, poll workers often complete registration applications for same-day registrants and may make mistakes in recording the voter’s address.” 

According to the complaint, Black, Latinx, and young North Carolinians are more likely to have mail returned as undeliverable due to housing insecurity, having a college campus address or living in multi-generational households. The complaint also notes that these groups — “who have historically been excluded from voting” — disproportionately utilize same-day voter registration.    

S.B. 747 “represents the General Assembly’s most recent unjustifiable attack on same-day [voter] registration,” the complaint states. The pro-voting groups allege that the Undeliverable Mail Provision violates the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment and places an undue burden on the right to vote in violation of the First and 14th Amendments. The lawsuit requests that a federal court declare the provision unconstitutional and prevent its enforcement.

Read the complaint here.

Learn more about the case here.

Learn more about S.B. 747 here.

Instead of legislative street theater, Republicans could be directing their limited creative juices to solving human misery, to improving public schools, to preventing rural hospitals from closing, to preventing gun violence, and more. But what the party devotes itself to with a passion is monkeywrenching elections with whatever tool is at hand: the census, redistricting, and tweaking elections laws and underfunding boards of election. They’ve been hard at it here for a decade.

Today, @TheDemocrats & @NCDemParty filed a lawsuit against SB-747 after the NCGOP’s override of Governor Cooper’s veto. This bill is a wide-ranging voter suppression law that will restrict access to early voting across NC & make it harder to vote. 🧵https://t.co/7t60bV3Brb

— Anderson Clayton☀️ (@abreezeclayton) October 11, 2023

Or maybe they just like losing in court. But give Republicans this: They are relentless.

“We are heading for a wider war”

We who watched Iraq invade Kuwait in 1990 and the Trade Towers fall in 2001 have seen war fever take hold. The fever is not just a product of justified outrage nor of the “fog” of sketchy information, but also of active propaganda. Google: Nayirah and Office of Special Plans. Approach with caution.

Here is CNN’s tumbnail sketch of where things stand this morning:

At least 1,200 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’ October 7 onslaught when armed militants poured over the border into Israel, raiding homes, rampaging through communities and taking as many as 150 hostages back to Gaza. In retaliation for the atrocities, Israeli jets have been pounding Gaza — the densely inhabited coastal strip that Hamas controls — with hundreds of airstrikes, reducing neighborhoods to rubble. Officials say a “complete siege” has trapped residents, cutting them off from food, electricity and resources. Many survivors are in critical condition and struggling with an overwhelming emotional toll as a humanitarian crisis swiftly unfolds in the region.

When wars break out anywhere in this world, innocents die. If we cannot muster the compassion for the foreign dead and their families or restrain the urge for collective punishment, remember this: When wars break out anywhere in this world, Americans die too. Wherever the lines of battle are drawn, Americans find themselves trapped on both sides of them. That fact is also lost in the fog.

Post by @cnn

View on Threads

We mourn for the slaughtered. We pray for the survivors. We call for justice. And people lose their minds. Watching that happen in real time just down the street is almost as horrifying as the carnage in Israel. And in Gaza.

Kat Abu of Media Matters responds to Americans in New York City calling for razing Gaza:

I’ve been seeing straight-up calls for Palestinian genocide on my TL for the past 48 hours.

If you’re someone who carries this view, join me on a livestream so you can describe exactly how my family and I should be annihilated to my face.

She apparently found takers.

This will get worse. Body bags will be in short supply in both Israel and in Gaza.

“Pure panic everywhere you look.”

Inside the Gaza siege – a resident’s eyewitness report by Yousef Hammash. pic.twitter.com/NLhKHPWa0X

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) October 10, 2023

Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent tweets, “I just wept reading the beautiful words of a rabbi mourning the dead of both his Israeli family and the Palestinians. A brief respite from the past few days, so fkng soul crushing, reeling from the sheer brutality against innocents. I’m horrified that the worst is yet to come.”

“We are heading for a wider war,” NBC’s Richard Engel reports.

“We are now preparing for a ground war here.”

NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel reports from near the Gaza border in Israel. pic.twitter.com/fSfpnup0dt

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 11, 2023

No one gets out of this with their hands undirtied.

This conflict for me has always been about morality.

Morally, you cannot justify the killing of Palestinian civilians, even if you say it’s fighting terrorism.

But morally, you also cannot justify the killing of Israeli civilians, even if you say you’re fighting occupation.

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) October 8, 2023

The “rules-based world order” is on the verge of breaking down, Anne Applebaum warns. “Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.”

When Israelis can catch their breath they are going to have to grapple with this reality

They are still in the midst of their horrific trauma. But it won’t be long before they are going to be looking at how this massive failure happened. This from Gidi Weitz in Haaretz shines a light on one of the major reasons:

How depressing and upsetting it is today to recall Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrogance under interrogation about Case 2000, one of the three corruption cases against the prime minister. “This is classified, don’t let it leak, okay?” he said, flattering the police investigators with the magic lure of security secrets. And then he explained his doctrine regarding Hamas and Hezbollah.

“We have neighbors,” he said, “who are our bitter enemies … I send them messages all the time … these days, right now … I mislead them, destabilize them, mock them, and them hit them over the head.” The suspect then continued his lecture: “It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them … Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”

This arrogant worldview, so disconnected from reality, isn’t the only thing that blew up in Netanyahu’s face, and ours, on Saturday morning. The other “concept” that collapsed was one many good people warned about: the idea that the leadership of the state could be entrusted to a criminal defendant.

History will judge everyone who lent a hand to this moral distortion – first and foremost the defendant himself and his fanatic supporters, party colleagues, and partners in the governing coalition, but also the media personalities and jurists who mobilized to kosher this abomination.

It will also presumably cast an unflattering light on the 11 Supreme Court justices who refrained from putting their fingers in the dike on the grounds that they lacked the power to do so, while shutting their eyes to the disastrous consequences of their passivism.

But even before that history is written, the state commission of inquiry that will have to be formed once the fires die down will have to delve into the prime minister’s priorities and agenda. It will have to examine how many hours he devoted this year to his dangerous justice minister, to the court’s reasonableness standard and to the Judicial Appointments Committee, compared to how many he devoted to his defense minister and the army’s chief of staff; it will have to examine how much attention he paid to the head of Military Intelligence compared to how much attention he paid to his lawyers and PR people.

It’s infuriating to recall that just a few months ago, Netanyahu found time to appear in the Jerusalem District Court to deter a frightened witness, the businessman Arnon Milchan, while Israel’s own deterrence was eroding. Or to recall his refusal to meet with IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi, who sought to warn him about the destructive consequences of abolishing the reasonableness standard, on the day the law doing so was passed.

It’s impossible to close your eyes to the reality. There’s a clear connection between the corruption trial, the government’s judicial overhaul, and the greatest failure since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, perhaps even since the establishment of the state.

Admittedly, the intelligence agencies failed inconceivably at foreseeing the actual attack. But they warned Netanyahu time and again in recent months that Israel’s enemies had identified a historic weakness, making the likelihood of war higher than it has been since the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

Yet instead of quelling Justice Minister Yariv Levin, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich due to this danger, Netanyahu prioritized ensuring his personal survival and the integrity of his coalition at the price of capitulating to insane, messianic racists. To this end, he turned his domestic rivals into enemies and systematically destroyed the connective tissue that, with great difficulty, held Israel society together.

He and his partners in this criminal organization forgot that Israel isn’t Poland or Hungary, but first and foremost a country deeply embroiled in a national conflict. Consequently, it doesn’t have the privilege of entertaining itself with dictatorial games.

Hamas as partner

Effectively, Netanyahu’s entire worldview collapsed over the course of a single day. He was convinced that he could make deals with corrupt Arab tyrants while ignoring the cornerstone of the Arab-Jewish conflict, the Palestinians. His life’s work was to turn the ship of state from the course steered by his predecessors, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Olmert, and make the two-state solution impossible. En route to this goal, he found a partner in Hamas.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The worst terror attack in Israel’s history also strips Netanyahu of his title as “the terrorism expert,” a source of pride ever since he established the Jonathan Institute in memory of his brother Yoni, who was killed during the Entebbe hostage rescue. With its help, he marketed himself for years and eventually reached the Prime Minister’s Office.

Netanyahu learned the lesson of his predecessors Menachem Begin and Olmert and for years, maneuvered skillfully to avoid getting embroiled in a war in which hundreds would die, since he knew that would likely be the end of his road as a politician. But the vertigo of his current term, during which he sacrificed everything for the sake of clinging to power, resulted in “his nightmare scenario coming true,” to quote a man who knows him well.

He has been prime minister for most of the last 16 years, yet what he will be remembered for after he goes is this last devastating year. In a single day, under his reckless leadership, Israel paid a much higher price in blood than it did during the Second Lebanon War, and similar to what it paid during the first Lebanon War in the early 1980s.

Olmert will be credited with destroying Syria’s nuclear reactor and striving to end the conflict with the Palestinians. Begin will be remembered for bombing Iraq’s nuclear reactor and, of course, making peace with Egypt. Netanyahu’s portfolio of achievements is pretty thin, with all due respect to the Abraham Accords.

Not long ago, we marked the 40th anniversary of the cabinet meeting at which Begin announced that he couldn’t go on any longer. Israel was bogged down in the Lebanese quagmire, with fatalities mounting every day, and this overcame him.

“The reason is that with every fiber of my being, I can’t go on,” Begin told his partners in Likud and the governing coalition, who begged him to reconsider. “There are times like that … If I had even a shadow of a doubt that I could go on, I would do so. But it’s not in my power to do so. What does a man need to do if it’s not in his power? … Allow me to go to the president [to resign] this very day. Forgive me, pardon me, grant me atonement. I can’t do it anymore.”

What we need now is for Netanyahu to follow in the footsteps of Likud’s first leader. But you can’t expect any soul-searching from him, and certainly not self-flagellation or shutting himself up at home à la Begin. Soon, any moment now, he’ll be blaming everyone except himself. The poison machine has already started to work.

Here’s the Times of Israel with a similar editorial.

Twitter/X is now a nightmare of disinformation

Twitter/X is a terrible source right now and it’s really not worth looking at if you want information about the Israel Hamas situation. There is so much disinformation floating around and even some people you follow may be disseminating it without realizing it. At times like these, wityh emptions running so high, you really need social media to be well curated and have safety measures in place to ensure that disinformation and misinformation are restrained as much as possiblke. That isn’t happening at all on twitter even though they have very belatedly admitted the problem:

The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, declared late Monday that it would limit the spread of misinformation regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict. “A cross-company leadership group has assessed this moment as a crisis requiring the highest level of response,” the Trust and Safety team’s statement read. But according to Wired, the team has no leader following the resignation of Ella Irwin in June. The team later added that it had “removed newly created Hamas-affiliated accounts” and others that were “attempting to manipulate trending topics.” However, Elon Musk’s posts over the weekend worsened the situation. He shared two accounts that he deemed fit for “following the war in real-time,” and promoted a QAnon supporter and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. But users uncovered that both accounts had posted a fake AI image of an explosion at the Pentagon and that one of them had posted antisemitic comments. Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigative news outlet Bellingcat, said that sharing false information was beneficial for X Premium subscribers because they receive money for engagement, regardless of accuracy.

Musk is one of the primary sources for disinformation and I highly doubt he’s going to stop. Here’s a rundown from WIRED on what’s been happening On Twitter, the incentives have now been skewed so much that disinformation is its actual model:

IN THE WAKE of Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israel this weekend—and the Israeli military’s response—journalists, researchers, open source intelligence (OSINT) experts, and fact-checkers rushed to verify the deluge of raw video footage and images being shared online by people on the ground. But users of X (formerly Twitter) seeking information on the conflict faced a flood of disinformation.

While all major world events are now accompanied almost instantly by a deluge of disinformation aimed at controlling the narrative, the scale and speed at which disinformation was being seeded about the Israel-Hamas conflict is unprecedented—particularly on X.

“For many reasons, this is the hardest time I’ve ever had covering a crisis on here,” Justin Peden, an OSINT researcher from Alabama known online as the Intel Crab, posted on X. “Credible links are now photos. On the ground news outlets struggle to reach audiences without an expensive blue check mark. Xenophobic goons are boosted by the platform’s CEO. End times, folks.”

When Peden covered the escalation in Gaza in 2021, the sources he was seeing in his feed were from people on the ground or credible news agencies. This weekend, he says, verified content or primary sources were virtually impossible to find on X.

“It’s getting incredibly hard to find people that actually live in Palestine or in southern Israel,” Peden tells WIRED. “It’s been incredibly hard to find their preliminary information and share their videos and photos. You have this perfect storm where on the ground, preliminary sources are not being amplified, especially those that maybe don’t speak English, which is a large majority of users in that area.”

Boosted by the algorithm that promotes users willing to pay X $8 a month for a premium subscription, posts from those with a blue checkmark shot to the top of news feeds for people seeking information about the conflict.

Rather than being shown verified and fact-checked information, X users were presented with video game footage passed off as footage of a Hamas attack and images of firework celebrations in Algeria presented as Israeli strikes on Hamas. There were faked pictures of soccer superstar Ronaldo holding the Palestinian flag, while a three-year-old video from the Syrian civil war repurposed to look like it was taken this weekend.

As a result, Peden says that he and his fellow OSINT researchers have to spend their time debunking years-old content rather than verifying and sharing real footage from the conflict.

Many of these videos and images racked up hundreds of thousands of views and engagements. While some later featured a note from X’s decimated community fact-checking system, many more remained untouched. And as Elon Musk has repeatedly done in recent incidents, the platform’s CEO made the situation much worse.

“For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors & @sentdefender are good,” Musk wrote in a post to his 150 million followers on Sunday morning. Both the accounts Musk referenced are well-known spreaders of disinformation. For example, both accounts spread the lie that there had been an explosion near the White House in May, a story that made the US stock market briefly plummet before it was debunked.

Many users also pointed out that the @WarMonitors account had a history of posting antisemitic comments on X. Last year, the account replied to a post from Ye (formerly Kanye West) thanking the rapper and adding: “The overwhelming majority of people in the media and banks are zi0nists” while telling another X user in June to “go worship a jew lil bro.”

The first account recommended by Elon Musk is well-known for highly questionable posts about Jewish people, and the second is one of the worst "osint" accounts when it comes to posting misleading and unsourced content. pic.twitter.com/F2TZMb3wUH

— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) October 8, 2023

Musk deleted his recommendation soon after posting it, but not before it was viewed over 11 million times. Later on Sunday, Musk wrote: “As always, please try to stay as close to the truth as possible, even for stuff you don’t like.”

Experts believe that the proliferation of disinformation on X around the Israel-Hamas conflict this weekend is largely the result of changes Musk has made to the platform over the past year, including his decision to fire most of the people responsible for tackling disinformation.

“Elon Musk’s changes to the platform work entirely to the benefit of terrorists and war propagandists,” Emerson Brooking, a researcher at the Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, tells WIRED. “Changes in profit and incentive structure mean that there’s a lot more tendency for people to share at high volume information which may not be true because they are trying to maximize view counts. Anyone can buy one of those little blue checks and change their profile picture to something that’s seemingly a media outlet. It takes quite a bit of work to vet who’s telling the truth and who’s not.”

X, which eliminated its entire PR team last year, responded to WIRED’s request for comment on the proliferation of disinformation on its platform with the automated message: “Busy now, please check back later.”

Peden says the Twitter algorithm has been designed to boost content that gets the most engagement, which incentivizes bad actors to share disinformation.

“The videos and images that you’re seeing of air strikes, they’re very prolific,” Peden says. “They’re very hard-hitting, and unfortunately that means engagement does incredibly, incredibly well. These images are horrible and dramatic, and they perform well. So there is an incentive by others, especially those trying to push a narrative to share an old video from years ago, just because people love looking at the stuff.”

In an echo of what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, much of the primary footage emerging from the Israel-Hamas conflict over the weekend was posted first on the encrypted message platform Telegram. From there, it was taken and reshared on other platforms, but in most cases the footage was not fact-checked first or it was taken out of context to suit the narrative being pushed by the poster.

“There’s an immense amount of primary content that was first posted in Telegram groups in one form or another, but there’s essentially no way to vet that information. Then that primary information hits others platforms, notably Twitter, where there’s an immense battle of spin and narrative taking place,” Brooking says. “You have artisans on every side, as well as sympathizers from one group or another, who are also joining this [battle].”

The situation is so bad on X right now that even seasoned OSINT researchers are being duped by fake accounts, including one that shared a false claim about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu being hospitalized over the weekend.

“Any sort of ground truth, which was always hard to get on Twitter, is now entirely out of reach,” Brooking says.

I’m not sure where I’ll land. I’m on all the alternatives but I’m not very active at any of them so you won’t see much from me, at least for a while. But I’ll try to bring you whatever verifiable information I have on other subjects wherever I find it. And I’ll be relying on the mainstream media for news on Israel, mostly Haaretz and the NY Times and Washington Post. The cable news isn’t very good at the moment but it’s all we’ve got.

And he certainly “bumped up” the valuations. The man is obsessed with his net worth and it’s never enough!

And I’m also sure that Junior and Eric shared them with daddy and came back with his embellishments. There is no way that he just let those two bumblers take the reins.