News Brief: 4 Talking Points Used to Smear DNC Gaza Protesters — And Why They’re Bogus
Citations Needed | August 17, 2024 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show if you are so inclined, and we hope that you are, through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. Citations Needed is currently on our end-of-summer break. We will be back very soon, next month, with more full-length episodes of Citations Needed. But in the meantime, even though we’re supposed to be on a break, Adam, the DNC is coming up, and guess who’s going.
Adam: Me. I will be attending along with Sarah Lazare, friend of the show, wife of me, to do reporting and video content for The Nation magazine. So we’ll be there all four days inside, and then we’ll be covering the protest outside. The basic premise of our reporting will be, we will be representing the Gaza protesters outside. There is a large march on the DNC Chicago, and Cook County in general is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in the country. Obviously, because Harris, as we’ve talked about on the show, has not changed her policy from the Biden White House.
The protests are still going. They’re still happening. And so this is kind of, I think, what Resistance liberals would call during the Trump years, a pre-buttal or kind of pre-bunking, basically the talking points against the march on the DNC, the talking points of many ways already codified. And so I wrote a piece about that that has just recently come out, and it’ll be about the four talking points used to disparage the march on the DNC. Again, these are groups. These are almost all Palestinian-led groups, people who have loved ones who’ve died in Gaza, who are continuing to be displaced and starved in Gaza, and also, of course, the West Bank, who are trying to get the Democratic Party to take a position on this. And then inside the convention, the Uncommitted Movement has 30 delegates representing the Uncommitted Movement that received hundreds of thousands of votes, primarily in Michigan, Minnesota, New York State, Rhode Island, other places. And so we will be shadowing them as well, reporting on their activities within the convention, and then, of course, the protests on the outside. And I say “we,” Sarah will be doing the reporting. I don’t really do reporting, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m more of a pundit.
Nima: You’ll be doing more of the vibes checking and the grumping around.
Adam: I’ll be doing interviews with people who are supportive or indifferent to the genocide, and then asking them what their thoughts are. And of course, some of these will be covered. Some of the talking points we’ll be going over in this particular episode, will be part of that rebuttal.
Now, one of the things that did push Biden off the top of the ticket, aside from his, you know, obvious cognitive decline was this idea, which, of course, is related to his declining poll numbers. There was this broad sense, according to one memo leaked to CNN, that Kamala Harris was seen as better or more liberal or more left-wing, on Gaza, not based on any substance, just kind of vibes. And the Harris campaign, after responding to hecklers two weeks ago, reaffirmed their position, they support endless non-conditioned arms to Israel, and does not support an arms embargo or even conditioning aid of any kind. Now they understand that one of the reasons why Biden was suffering is because youth turnout and youth support kind of evaporated. Now, young people don’t vote in great numbers, but they do provide the social media content, the vibes, the capital, and the volunteers. And so after Biden dropped out and Harris replaced him, despite not changing her position on Gaza, which was one of many, not the only, and maybe not even the most, but one of the major reasons why youth support was declining, the subtext of her recapturing the youth vibes and the fun and the coconut memes and the Brat memes was in the context of Gaza and that there was sort of a feeling that they were just, we were just going to kind of just going to kind of vibe through this without any kind of policy commitments, and just kind of assumed she would be better than Biden in some meaningful way.
CNN has run several puff pieces on this kind of Harris really taking off with Gen Z. There was one article on August 10 that was headlined “Inside the Gen Z Operation Powering Harris’s Online Remix” that was about her appeal with young voters. And of course, it’s almost entirely superficial, because she has the exact same policies as Biden. And I know there’s a rejoinder to that, that she has no choice, which we’ll get into with point four. And why that doesn’t make any sense. But for now, what we wanted to do is sort of talk about this vibes approach, this kind of what we’re calling Quantum Kamala, which is to say she is said to possess many mutually exclusive positions all at once, because she has no policies.
Nima: She’s everything and nothing simultaneously.
Adam: Because she didn’t have to run for a primary, there’s no sense of, she didn’t have to articulate any vision beyond running on the Biden White House, which, in and of itself would be fine, but she’s also not allowed to be held accountable for what Biden did either. So she both cannot be held accountable for any current policy and she can’t articulate a policy.
Nima: She is a fundamental part of the current administration, and also cannot be held to anything as part of the administration, because she is a kind of solo actor outside of that as well, but obviously has not articulated anything different than the inside. Therefore we have this kind of Quantum Conundrum.
Adam: And this superposition strikes me as a little convenient and worth interrogating and worth pinning down. And then that’s why the activist interrupting her speech two weeks ago was important, because it was actually the first time she was forced to kind of give an answer, and the answer was even more, I think, right-wing than even her supporters thought that she would give. And so therefore, right, this March on the DNC in Chicago is still necessary, because nothing has changed. And if the status quo hasn’t changed, the urge and the urgency around ending the genocide in Gaza remains as strong as ever.
Nima: So let’s get into these four talking points that we anticipate hearing to smear the protesters outside the DNC for the March on the DNC supporting not only an immediate ceasefire, but also justice in Palestine and an end to the genocide. So number one, Adam, let’s get into this. Number one is, You know, I see the protesters outside the DNC, but I didn’t see anyone outside the RNC.
Adam: Yeah, so this is a popular one. Again, whataboutery was a Soviet mind trick until about 10 months ago, and now whataboutery is back in fashion. So it’s good to see it’s back. I’ve always thought it was a perfectly reasonable point, if it makes sense, but it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense here.
Nima: Welcome back, whataboutism. We hardly knew ye.
Adam: Yeah, I know whataboutery is back. It was a Soviet mind trick and a Russian mind trick, and now it’s not anymore. So setting aside the fact that pro-Palestinian activists did march on the RNC. It wasn’t a lot of them, but there was a significant number.
Nima: Case in point, there actually was a protest, so sure.
Adam: In Milwaukee, in July. This whataboutism kind of misses, it’s, of course, it’s in bad faith, I think, for the most part, but I do think a lot of kind of low-information, for want of a less condescending term, people kind of fall for this because it does sound superficially true, like, why would they not march on the RNC? You know, Trump is just as bad on Gaza.
Nima: And this really comes down to the kind of fundamental point of what organizing is, how communications work, and how political pressure works.
Adam: Right, so let’s say, for example, let’s just use a non-Gaza example. Let’s say there’s five members who are in a city council, and there’s a plan to remove cars from a street, right? And let’s say two of them are funded by the car industry, and reject the plan out of hand, and the other two support the measure already. There’s a fifth who is undecided, but markets themselves as pro-safe streets and anti-car. If I’m a lobbyist and I have limited resources and limited time, which of those five members am I going to lobby, Nima?
Nima: I would say the as-of-yet uncommitted–
Adam: Right.
Nima: Council member, right? The idea of who you might be able to move and motivate, where you can actually, for want of a less kind of jargony nonprofit term, where the return on your action can come, right, where that ROI is gonna be.
Adam: So the liberal party, the Democratic Party, right, which calls itself progressive, which is, in the week of the DNC, is having a ton of events with unions, so-called progressive groups, Move On. You know, all these sort of nominal progressives, pro-human rights, pro-racial justice, right? This is a party that supposed to represent these anti-genocide ideals, right? They therefore have a disproportionate amount of responsibility to abide by the principles they nominally campaign on and nominally stand for.
Nima: That party is also currently in charge of the executive branch of the government
Adam: And currently in charge of the actual genocide, right. Doubly important, that’s the party actually in power and whose coattails–
Nima: Politicians and supporters attending the RNC don’t pretend to think that Palestinians are human. Protesting outside the RNC is basically just like, hoping that you can appeal to a humanity that is explicitly, expressly stated is not there, right? Whereas the DNC, the vibes, again, this is all vibes. The vibe is that this is the pro-human rights, this is the anti-genocide.
Adam: This is good vibes. This is coconut memes. This is, yeah.
Nima: Right. This is the kumbaya convention. And therefore putting your energy and your effort into actually showcasing that double standard, or pressuring someone who, like you said, Adam didn’t have to go through a primary, is being anointed to the top of this ticket. This is the only possible avenue for pressure, right, at the convention.
Adam: There was no primary, which, okay, unique circumstances, whatever, but there was no, no one had any say. The fact of genocide was not allowed to be litigated in the public vis-a-vis a primary, which it normally would have been, other than the Uncommitted Movement, which, of course, dealt with the unmovable force of incumbency. And again, this is just a variation on, why don’t you condemn Hamas, or why, you know, why don’t you go protest Hamas? Or why don’t you go protest Iran? It’s like, well, my government doesn’t fund Hamas, right? Sort of, these aren’t, ostensibly, the Democrats are supposed to be speaking for progressives and liberals, right?
Nima: Right.
Adam: So this moves us to number two, which is what I assume I’m going to get quite a bit when I do ask people about this at the DNC. And this is something, of course, we’ve talked about ad nauseam on the show for good reason, because basically, very few people talk about it, and I’ve written about it at least a half-dozen times, if not more, which is that Vice President Harris already supports a ceasefire. The White House supports a ceasefire. There’s some mysterious ceasefire negotiation going on that they support in principle and that all the outrage is actually misdirected and pointless.
Nima: ‘Why are you protesting? She already agrees with you.’ Well, this is clearly, patently false.
Adam: Right. Again, this is entirely a ceasefire in name only, which is to say what used to be called a temporary pause for the purposes of exchanging hostages has been rebranded as a ceasefire, with the explicit promise by both Israel and the US to continue the “war in Gaza,” which is to say the continued bombing and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza indefinitely for as much as years, according to some within Israel itself. And this is why activists, since they co-opted the term on the eve of the Michigan primary back in late February, early March, because the first time Harris used the term was the week after Biden used the term on March 4 after the Michigan primary, when they decided to rebrand the temporary pause which they had been pushing as a ceasefire. This is why the activist demands from Palestinian organizations, humanitarian organizations, anti-war coalitions and seven major unions representing six million workers, the Association of Flight Attendants, the American Postal Workers Union, the International Union of Painters, the Service Employee International Union, SEIU, UAW, the United Auto Workers, United Electrician Workers, UE, and National Education Association, NEA, which is the largest union in the United States, the reason why they pivoted to demanding in a letter to Joe Biden on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit in late July, the reason why they demanded an arms embargo, which is another way of saying conditioning aid in line with international law, rather than calling for a ceasefire, is the term had lost all fucking meaning. Which has again been evident for months now. The implied mechanism with which one would enforce a ceasefire in Israel from the beginning, based on previous Gaza bombing campaigns in 2012, 2014, 2009, 2018, 2021, the implied mechanism was the threat of an arms embargo, or credible threat to that effect, or an actual arms embargo.
Nima: That’s right. Biden has not been interested in that.
Adam: Right, now they play stupid and say, ‘Oh, there’s ceasefire talks,’ which is really just, again, what they’re actually calling a hostage deal within Israel itself. Because that’s really what it is, which is, you know, fine enough, right? It’s better than nothing, I suppose, but it’s not a ceasefire.
Nima: Right. And when you murder the lead negotiator, like the political head of one of the party’s two discussions, maybe those talks are not being conducted earnestly.
Adam: And nobody believes Israel’s negotiating anything meaningful, because they say so themselves. So this is a thing. When Biden gave his May 31 speech, supposedly calling for a, “end to the war,” hours later, Netanyahu said, ‘No, no, this is not what we agreed to. We’re going to fight to the end.’ “Total victory.” So Israel is not operating in good faith, even if you accept the premise that there is some actual negotiation ceasefire, everybody knows this. You don’t negotiate a ceasefire in good faith while assassinating the person you’re negotiating with. It’s completely not credible, but it does provide this rhetorical thing people can say, and you see this all the time on social media from confused people who don’t, who sort of don’t know better. And I, again, I understand why they’re confused. They say, ‘Well, Harris supported a ceasefire. She supported a ceasefire before Biden.’ Which is, by the way, not true, the vice president doesn’t just unilaterally break from the party anyway. She did it after he did it, and she did it in the same superficial, irrelevant, co-optive, cynical PR terms, which again was why these groups who are legitimately trying to end genocide in Gaza have switched to an arms embargo. This is now the demand of the Uncommitted Movement. It’s the demand of a number of Palestinian groups, human rights groups. It is the demand of seven unions representing six million workers, including NEA, which is the largest union in the country.
And so this idea that, ‘Oh, why are they protesting? Harris supports a ceasefire’ is utterly, utterly meaningless. Because “ceasefire” means either surrender, both unilateral surrender by Hamas or Israel just wins the war after five years. It is not an actual ceasefire in this traditional sense that it’s been used in the context of Gaza for 20 years, which is the US makes a phone call, tells Israel to wrap it up and go home, which is what people are demanding, because they’ve now killed again, probably north of 100, 200,000 who the fuck knows how many people are dead. Which moves us to number three talking point.
Nima: If you are protesting outside the DNC, you are being disruptive, and ultimately you’re just trying to help Trump win.
Adam: Yeah, this was the line that Kamala Harris was criticized heavily for, when she reflexively told protesters who disrupted her back in early August.
Nima: If you want to keep talking like that, then you’re just going to help Trump.
Adam: Right, and this is obviously deeply offensive. These were women who were Muslim protesting Palestine. These weren’t like some weird LaRouche-ites or whatever, right? These were people who had a vested stake in ending genocide, and that’s the thing. Thousands of protesters that are marching on the DNC this week, a great number of them have loved ones who’ve died in Gaza. Chicago and Cook County are home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in the country. This is personal for them, and they want their voices to be heard again. They were not permitted to be heard in any kind of meaningful primary, and the idea of dismissing this as pro-Trump or a pro-Trump psyop, we see people say, ‘Oh, it’s a chaos agent,’ which is the most, a deeply glib and psychotic and mean thing to say, an insensitive thing to say to people who are protesting for literally all the right reasons, right?
Nima: Trying to end a genocide, like, if you’re saying that, actively trying to end a genocide and being unapologetic about that, who are not cowed by this idea of, you know, unless you fall in line, then you’re helping, you know, this kind of fascist opposition, well, no, because protesting genocide is a good thing to do and a vitally important thing to do as the Harris campaign continues to gain support. It is essential that this pressure is made, that this conversation does not end at this time, especially, I mean, not that it ever should, but at this time, especially around the convention, around this kind of you know, last 90, 80, days of the campaign, and the idea that saying anything out of lockstep with the Kamala Harris campaign talking points is somehow a disruption, a distraction, and a deliberate attempt to elect Donald Trump is completely psychotic.
Adam: Well, this kind of standpoint epistemology has totally gone out the window, like these were two, again, young Muslim women protesting Kamala Harris. And remember when the party used to say, like, Listen to women of color and listen to, you know, oppressed and marginalized communities? Well, that all went out the window, and they became pro-Trump, right? And this is the thing. So there’s a sort of urge to say, Well, we don’t need to divide the party. We don’t need to kind of have disruptions, because it the goal of the DNC is unity, and this will cause disunity. Great. There’s a simple solution to this, and only one person and one person alone can fix this, and her name is Kamala Harris. Obviously Biden could as well, but he’s obviously not the nominee. And to the extent to which there is disruption and there is division, it is not the fault of obscure, powerless protesters who have loved ones dying of a genocide and their allies. It is the person in power who’s chosen to triple down on a deeply unpopular and morally depraved military campaign by a totally unhinged ally in the Middle East. So to the extent to which there is division, and there continues to be divisions in the party, this is a problem imminently solvable by Kamal Harris, which leads to talking point number four, which is when all else fails, and you can’t really argue on ideology, right? This is back to the toddler and the popsicle. My toddler says he wants a popsicle. I don’t want to argue with him. I just say we’re out of popsicles. It’s much easier. And he understands that. That way we don’t have to debate the ideological contention of the popsicle. So whenever liberals run out of arguments, what do they do? They do the process. ‘It’s out of my hands.’ The hands are tied, right? So actually, it’s actually my boss’s boss’s boss.
Nima: Right, so the talking point here is that Harris can’t support the activists’ demands for a ceasefire, or, more explicitly, an end to the genocide, even if she wanted to, Adam, because, after all, she is still currently the Vice President of the United States and the Biden administration, and therefore is a representative of, and must maintain, President Joe Biden’s policies. That not doing so would be anathema to her role as VP.
Adam: Right. So here we have a situation where the candidate, one of two candidates that have been, you know, put in front of us for the President of the United States, simultaneously cannot be held accountable for current policy and also cannot be held accountable for any theoretical policy moving forward. And she literally is unable to articulate any policy. We’re just supposed to go on pure vibes. This strikes me as a little convenient, and, I would say, deeply anti-democratic. And this is a popular talking point with people who’d rather just kind of avoid the issue of Gaza, with some vague hope that either it goes away or they just, well, really, they don’t give a shit. It’s really not important. Let’s be honest, partisan expediency is more important. And I’m sure they’ve rationalized it themselves by saying, Well, Kamala may or may not do this, but you know, Trump is worse, so let’s just kind of vibe our way through it. She doesn’t need to make any commitments. Again, even though Biden, people have had that same vibe with Biden for 11, almost 11 months, and nothing has changed. So again, it’s, I’m not clear on what basis the statement is being made. And I understand the game theory involved in this. But let’s listen to a segment with Ben Rhodes, former Obama National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, and Chris Hayes on MSNBC, where they kind of just accept that she can’t have any position, as if it’s some hard and fast norm that we just simply can’t violate.
Nima: Yes, this is from the August 8 edition of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC.
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Chris Hayes: But to me, there’s just a much deeper question here, which is, what is the policy of the Democratic presidential nominee, who is now Kamala Harris and not Joe Biden? And a second question, which is as important, is, is it even possible to run on a policy different than the sitting President of the United States, when you are the sitting Vice President?
Ben Rhodes served as Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. He’s co-host of the podcast Pod Save the World, and he’s just the person I want to talk to about all this. I want to start on that first question because it is a strange position. I was sort of going back and looking at some of the stuff from, you’ve got 2000 and you’ve got ’88. George H.W. Bush sitting Vice President, Ronald Reagan. You’ve got Gore and Clinton in 2000. That’s not unprecedented, the sitting Vice President running. But on something like this, it just strikes me that the nature of the job of being Vice President, in some ways, in a deep sense, your duty is that you kind of can’t criticize the President’s policy on this publicly, or break with him. Or am I wrong? Can you?
Ben Rhodes: No, I think you’re right, Chris. I mean, in that this happened in the past. I mean, just to go into the archive, George Bush was the only Republican candidate who supported Ronald Reagan’s nuclear arms control treaty, the INF treaty with the Soviet Union. All the attacking Reagan right? The reality is that she’s a member of an administration that is carrying out a policy.
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Adam: All right, so this is a very, very popular rejoinder, because, again, it avoids the ideological issue. It avoids the unseemly reality, the kind of anti-vibes, anti-Brat summer reality that she, for all intents and purposes, every statement she’s made, and, of course, her history of speaking at AIPAC every year until she ran for the 2020 primary, that she pretty much agrees with the Biden policy. Again, they talk about tone shift, but the tone shift she used was the same as Blinken. The reason why Biden didn’t do this, ‘I see you, I hear you,’ kind of nonprofit speak, is because he’s just constitutionally incapable of doing it, or didn’t have a cognitive function to do it, but I guarantee we would have because several members of the administration did the crocodile tears routine: Samantha Power, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken. And so there’s no evidence, she’s not met with any of these groups, not met with Uncommitted, not met with Palestinian organizations, not met with any, any of the relevant organizations at all to discuss this shifted policy. So she had an accidental or an incidental rope-line meeting with some Uncommitted people made some again nonprofit speak about how sad she is, didn’t commit to any policy changes, certainly didn’t commit to any conditioning of aid, certainly didn’t commit to any embargo. And then the next day, her policy aide Philip Gordon took to social media to clarify that she absolutely does not support any kind of conditioning of aid, which is the only demand of Uncommitted. So meeting with Uncommitted but preemptively dismissing their demands out of hand. I’m not sure what the point of that would be, but I guess it’s nice. Maybe it’s a good photo op. So there’s all this kind of tea-leaf reading and meta-commentary about how vice presidents can’t undermine their current position.
Now it’s important to understand that, well, first off, this dissent would, a group would exist on a spectrum. I don’t think anyone’s calling for Harris to do a struggle session with Joe Biden where she publicly disagrees and humiliates him, but the idea that somehow this norm is unassailable and can’t be violated is just something that’s made up, like,it’s not real. Certainly when it comes in the context of a genocide and committing to ending one vis-a-vis conditioning aid, in line with international law, right? In line with the ICJ’s injunction, no one’s asking for some extra thing, right? They’re just asking for the US to abide by its own laws and international laws, which clearly state you cannot continue sending arms to Israel as it uses food as a weapon of war, bombs civilians, and unleashes disease and death on Gaza for months on end. And so there’s this idea that somehow, Oh, well, it’s the norm. Well, she can’t do it. Well, why not? What’s Biden gonna do? Take away your birthdays? Really, what’s going to happen? The idea that we have to kind of wait it out for the next three to six months, then vibe, assuming that she’s going to somehow change her policy after years and years and years, having a staunch pro-Israel supporter because of vibes, that seems like a huge gamble to take when there’s thousands of people are dying a month, and the US, just last week, sent another $20 billion almost in arms to Israel.
The urgency is now. The situation has to be decided now. She has to make commitments now. People are dying now. And the idea that someone running for president is not required to make any commitments because of some norm, especially when the commitment is on the fact of genocide, something that, again, multiple scholars, the co-founder of Human Rights Watch, numerous aid organizations have called genocide, or genocidal, or genocide-like or whatever, seems like a pretty good time to buck a norm that is not really a thing. Again, Chris Hayes was like, ‘Well, in, you know, 1988, George Bush had to support Reagan’s’–what the fuck does that have to do with anything? It’s made up. It’s not real. Again, people act like there’s these sacred norms. The Democrats just pressured out their presumptive nominee off the ticket in July, and literally everyone forgot about it 10 minutes later. It’s a made-up thing. It’s not a real thing.
Nima: We should also point out, Adam, that part of the legend of Joe Biden is bucking that exact norm when he came out on Meet the Press in 2012 supporting gay marriage, that then was used as a way to then pressure the Obama administration to change course on its official policies and talking points. So the idea that Joe Biden is this hero for bucking that trend, for actually saying something different than the official administration line when he was Vice President of the United States, just like Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s Vice President of the United States, the idea that what was good for Joe in terms of, you know, pressuring a change based on just what has sometimes been called a gaffe or Joe just speakin’ from the heart, right? His comments on gay marriage have been pointed to again and again as being a catalyst to change the Obama administration’s position on that. However, now whether that was a gambit or whether that was a genuine thing that happened, he has been praised for it, and now we hear time and again that Kamala cannot possibly break with what Biden is doing because she is a part of the administration. Presents this exact catch-22 where she has to be beholden to a policy she knows is terrible and unpopular, because doing so would somehow strengthen the opposition, because then it wouldn’t look like a unified administration. But then she also can’t be held accountable for Joe’s policies, because, hey, she’s just the Vice President.
Adam: Right, and this is the, it’s the perfect place liberals like to be in, right? Because liberals, feigned powerlessness is the liberal brand. You can’t stop Netanyahu. He’s gonna do it anyway, no choice, but I’m still gonna send him weapons. Right? The Republicans won’t let us, you know, sort of, they’re constantly bumbling around powerless, right? And Ezra Klein’s Green Lantern theory, they can’t do anything, right? And so the quintessential place to be is to have absolutely zero policy commitments and to not be held accountable for anything currently happening, right? And it’s important to understand that the savvy Ivy League intellectual regime of liberalism is built around asserting powerlessness and telling people they’re powerless. ‘Oh, and by the way, the other guy’s worse.’ That’s all they have. And this is the thing that I find grading more than anything, is that nobody wants to commit to the fact of genocide or to support it or rationalize it. Again, the US government, White House, just lobbied to send $18.8 billion more to this genocide, but nobody will actually defend it. ‘Oh, no, we’re actually peacemakers. Oh, we’re doing a ceasefire.’
Nima: As if funding genocide is just part of the weather. It’s just the way the world turns.
Adam: And it’s, yeah, it’s just the way it is. And nobody wants to defend it as such. And again, say what you will about the right-wing wackos in Israel, but at least they’ll be openly genocidal. But these liberals who keep arming and supporting these right-wing lunatics in Israel who are committing ungodly crimes on a daily basis, it’s just, Ah, you know, I don’t know what’s going on. I just got here. I’m a glorified intern. What? You know? I guess we got to send him $18.8 billion. But nobody wants to sort of own it. And so when you say, Well, Harris has these pro-Israel comments, instead of saying, Yeah, because she supports the war and wants to defeat Hamas and thinks the deaths are worth it. And here’s why they’re worth it. Here’s why all the crying kids you see on your social timeline or, you know, are worth, the juice is worth the squeeze. Here’s the moral calculus I’ve done. I’m gonna defend this. I’m gonna defend this horrific fucking crime you see.
It’s just, Oh, you know what? She can’t, there’s a norm. Sorry, vice presidents can’t say, there’s a norm. Oh, you know what? Netanyahu, if we didn’t give Israel munitions, they’d get it from somewhere else, right? Drug dealer logic. And it’s like there’s a pathological cowardice and an avoidance of the discussion of the fact of what they’re actually supporting, and nobody wants to commit to it, and there’s just a fundamental dishonesty with that, because, again, if because they know they can’t, right, it’s sort of indefensible. This is why it’s always been, that’s why there’s these elaborate regimes around fake humanitarian and building a pier that doesn’t do anything, and airlifting and aid to get around your own blockade. I mean, you have all these objectively nonsensical, illogical workarounds, because they have to maintain this pretense that the US is some third-party, neutral observer. Now we’re getting this on steroids with Harris, because she’s not only acting like she’s powerless, but she’s not even being held accountable for the current policies either. So she’s kind of in this perfect liberal sweet spot of having to absolutely have zero commitments to anything.
Nima: Well, we will see how these anticipated talking points play out in reality, Adam, when you are on the ground at the DNC. So stay tuned, everyone, for Adam’s reporting and Sarah’s reporting from Chicago. We may be able to do some News Briefs here and there while Adam is at the convention. We will see about that. Possible teaser there. I hope it happens. But that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Again, we are on our official end-of-summer break, but have no fear, plenty of content still coming, and definitely in September, when season eight of Citations Needed will begin, so stay tuned for that.
But until then, of course, you can follow the show on Twitter, @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. You can also pick up some Citations swag if you care to through Bonfire.com. Just search “Citations Needed.” But that will do it for this News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Saturday, August 17, 2024.
