Over the weekend, a member of Congress suggested his correspondents read the Ryan Grim post, Primary Occupation, in The Intercept. By way of introduction, he noted that Grim’s piece is “thorough and discouraging” and that he (the congressman) had assumed that after 2016 “the future was ours because the reform wing had an energetic grassroots base and the establishment wing just had money and ultimately people would prevail over money. After 2020 I thought the same if we could just coalesce around one candidate and not piss all over each other’s shoes.” Speaking about many of his longtime colleagues, he continued that “There was and is little intellectual energy in the establishment. The establishment wing’s platform was technocratic management of a generally satisfactory status quo, a thin gruel. What inspires the KHive to get up in the morning and hate the Sanders/Warren wing all day? Is that going to continue for year after year?”
It certainly is while Hakeem Jefferies— 50% owned and operated by Wall Street and 50% owned and operated by AIPAC— has anything to say about it. And AIPAC and its satellites are determined to crown Jefferies Pelosi’s successor. He and Mark Mellman worked tirelessly with AIPAC’s United Democracy Project, Democratic Majority for Israel, conservative billionaire Reid Hoffman’s Mainstream Democrats PAC and conservative cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried to defeat progressives and deliver Democratic Party nominations to corrupt conservative puppets. They spent tens of millions on the primaries but nothing since.
Mellman, and through him Jeffries, did all the targeting for the well coordinated anti-progressive jihad this cycle. While his own organization, DMFI, wrote Grim, “is ostensibly organized around the politics of Israel, in practice, it has become a weapon wielded by the party’s centrist faction against its progressive wing. In fact, DMFI, Mainstream Democrats PAC, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have spent so much money that the question of Israel-Palestine now dominates Democratic primaries. Across the country, progressive candidates who a cycle earlier had been loudly vying for national attention with bold ideas to attract small donors were instead keeping their heads down, hoping to stay under the radar of DMFI and AIPAC… [This] counter-insurgency, funded heavily by hedge fund executives, private equity barons, professional sports team owners, and other billionaires and multimillionaires, many of them organized under a ‘pro-Israel’ banner,” more or less controls the Democratic Party now. They bought it; it’s theirs.
Logan Bayroff, director of communications for J Street, which describes itself as a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization, told Grim that “It’s been a radical transformation in the politics of Israel-Palestine and the politics of Democratic primaries… Mellman, in an interview with HuffPost, acknowledged that his goals extended beyond the politics of Israel and Palestine. ‘The anti-Biden folks and the anti-Israel folks look to [Nina Turner] as a leader,’ Mellman said. ‘So she really is a threat to both of our goals.’”
DMFI spent $3,082,699 smearing Turner and bolstering conservative puppet candidate Shontel Brown. AIPAC spent $282,04, Mainstream Democrats put in another $151,585 and Jeffries got Bankman-Friend to spend $1,010,178 against Turner. On top of that corporately-funded Third Way put in $505,000. It was just the beginning of a primary-long war against progressive candidates from coast to coast.
Now that Hakeem Jeffries’ coalition of corrupt conservatives has guaranteed there are no progressives in over a dozen races, they’ve backed away from the campaigns— basically no general election giving. “With the primaries over,” wrote Grim,” Bankman-Fried’s PAC, AIPAC, and DMFI have mostly stopped spending to help Democrats. In September, the Democratic National Committee refused to allow a vote on a resolution, pushed by Democratic National Committee member Nina Turner and other progressives, to ban big outside money in primaries. Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, said it was absurd that Democrats continued to allow outside groups to manipulate Democratic primaries even though they clearly have little interest in seeing the party itself succeed. Their goal is to shape what the party looks like— whether it’s in the minority or majority is beside the point. “For a group called Democratic Majority for Israel they don’t seem to be putting much effort into winning a Democratic majority,” Greenberg said… Elaine Luria, a Democratic of Virginia whose race is listed as ‘key’ by AIPAC, has been one of the organization’s most outspoken and loyal allies since her 2018 election, United Democracy Project has declined to help her so far. Instead, its only foray so far into the general election has been to spend in a Democrat-on-Democrat race in the top-two state of California. According to Jewish Insider, ‘a board member of DMFI expressed reservations over [David] Canepa’s Middle East foreign policy approach, pointing to at least one social media post viewed by local pro-Israel advocates as dismissive of Israeli security concerns.’ The allegedly dismissive message, posted on May 13, 202, as the Gaza War raged, read: ‘Peace for Palestine.’ The ad was about abortion. Both candidates, of course, support abortion rights. Only one called for peace.”