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The entrance to Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Mass., on Jan. 2, 2024.

Should Claudine Gay have resigned as president of Harvard? Are conservatives right that a rabidly pro-Hamas left has captured Harvard? Are liberals correct that the fascistic right has launched an all-out assault on academic freedom, at Harvard? The New York Times has explored these questions (about Harvard) over the course of almost 17,000 articles.

These are indeed fascinating topics. However, they ignore a key issue: That for anyone with a progressive perspective, Harvard should neither be reformed (to eliminate its wokeness) nor protected (from the forces of reaction). Rather, it should be razed to the ground.

Then, after Harvard has been razed, we must salt the earth, Carthage-style, so a new Harvard does not grow in its place. Next we have to destroy the rest of the Ivy League. Finally, anyone with enough energy left over should sail an emissions-free ship through the Panama Canal to California and obliterate Stanford.

Lets start with a story that explains why Im so personally committed to this cause. Then we can move on to a more rational explanation of why you should be too.

On January 16, 1991, I was a senior at Yale. That night at 9 p.m., George H.W. Bush, president of the United States and Yale alumnus, announced the commencement of the first Gulf War.

This was a time of such barbarism that there was no internet. Almost no students had a television in their room. So the only way I could find out what was happening was to go to my dorms common room, which did have a big TV.

When I got there that night, there was a single person there. She was not a Yale student, and she was not a Yale professor. She was a woman who worked in the dining hall. Anyone familiar with Yale and New Haven, Connecticut, will know this means she was likely either Italian American or African American; she was African American.

She was watching CNN with fervent concentration. I soon learned this was because her son was in the Marines and was stationed in Saudi Arabia on the border with Kuwait, and she was (she did not say this) terrified that he was about to die. I had never before seen a human being whose every atom was vibrating with fear.

It was impossible for me not to think about the debate about the coming war Id already had with Yale friends. Some supported it; some didnt. But we all wanted to talk about whether we would be willing to fight in it if the draft was reinstated. I finally said: This is all moot. If things go so badly that they have to draft people out of Yale, the U.S. government will wrap it up. The people who run America dont care about this so much that theyd risk their own children.

This sounds like a nice tale about how sensitive and wise I was as a young man. Theres more to it, though. As I watched Baghdad being bombed, and untold numbers of humans being converted into wet, red scraps of flesh, a tide of emotion swept over me unbidden. It was exultation.

I had no idea before that moment that this potential existed inside of me. I knew nothing at all of the history of the Middle East or the specifics of that war. So this didnt emerge from my cerebrum, the part of our brains that thinks. It was from my amygdala, the part of our brains that probably hasnt changed much since we were Homo erectus a million years ago. I had unknowingly absorbed a vague sense that there were these dusky foreigners out there, led by a two-bit dictator whod gotten too big for his britches, who thought that they could defy us, and were being taught that they could not.

The us part was key. Us didnt mean America, but rather the small group of people in charge of America. And I had unconsciously come to believe that, as a Yale student, I was a member of this groups junior varsity.

I find this excruciating to think about today. But Im glad I experienced it, because it gave me a visceral sense of how the world feels to the people who ultimately run places like Harvard and Yale.

So thats my personal animus. But it should be shared by everyone whod like the U.S. to be a real democracy.

Heres a measure of the stranglehold the Ivy League has over the commanding heights of the U.S. political system: From 1989 to 2021, a period covering 32 years, five presidents, and eight presidential terms, every U.S. president went to an Ivy League school as an undergraduate or graduate. Even more incredibly, for 28 straight years from 1989 to 2017,the president went to either Harvard or Yale or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. Then the Harvard/Yale streak was broken by Donald Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Joe Biden went to the non-Ivy University of Delaware.

Over this time, Americans rarely had the option to vote against the Ivy League. Its not just that all of the candidates who won the elections between 1988 and 2016 went to Ivy League schools: Six of the eight candidates who lost went to Harvard or Yale. The two exceptions were Bob Dole in 1996 (Washburn University) and John McCain in 2008 (U.S. Naval Academy).

Then look at the Supreme Court. Eight of the current nine justices went to law school at either Harvard or Yale. The one exception, Amy Coney Barrett, replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who went to Harvard Law.

On its face, our era of Ivy dominance is the sign of a society thats calcified. You need access to Americas networks of money and power to rise to the tippy top, and going to an Ivy League school is now a requirement for that access.

This gatekeeping would be bad enough if these schools or anyone could reliably measure some type of merit. People change all their lives, and we shouldnt have to rely on a cohort of 50-year-olds who fit through an incredibly narrow aperture when they were 18 or 22.

But of course Ivy League colleges dont actually admit students based on anything recognizable as merit. Anyone whos attended one knows they look for young people who are 1) extremely good at figuring out what the rules are and then faithfully following them, and 2) clubbable and ingenuous with their elders.

I dont agree with Reihan Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, about much. (Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist instrumental in bringing down Claudine Gay, is senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race there.) But Salam Harvard 01 once argued, Kids who attend elite schools are a mixed bag, and the vast majority are crashing bores. The admissions process tends to select for crashing bores. He was correct.

Harkness Tower stands on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn.

This doesnt mean progressives should join in the current conservative crusade against Harvard. The right opposes education in general, because they realize that people thinking for themselves is the only thing that could make their greatest fear a democratization of the U.S. come to pass. And they recognize that even at Ivy League schools there is a danger this kind of thinking can occasionally happen.

Progressives should not defend Harvard. We could defend the concept of academic insulation from donor pressure, but this is a concept much more than a reality. Harvards $50 billion-plus endowment makes it one of the 10 largest hedge funds in the U.S. Above all, we have to understand Harvard will never defend us; it will always be on the side of the money.

However, our program of destroying Harvard and its brethren should be in service to a larger, positive agenda. What we want is a country of education for everyone: high-quality public universities open to people of all ages and incomes, beautiful public schools for everyone before that, and enormous libraries in every American neighborhood.

If you went to an Ivy League school, you know enough to nod knowingly when anyone mentions this famous James Madison quote: Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

But whats not taught in class is that this was from a letter Madison wrote to a friend about the importance of public education of all forms everywhere, including in Kentucky specifically. Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty, he wrote. They multiply the educated individuals from among whom the people may elect a due portion of their public Agents of every description.

What Madison didnt say was, Lets just have a few colleges like the place I went, Princeton, and choose every president from them. We can recover Madisons vision, but first we need to bulldoze the institutions in its way.

See the original post:
Let's Seize This Opportunity to Destroy Harvard! - The Intercept

Tal Mitnick, an 18-year-old Israeli, has gone to jail for refusing to serve in the Israel Defence Forces due to his opposition to Israels war in Gaza. You might imagine that some hear this and wish hed serve, while othersin agreement with his stance or notadmire his commitment to his principles.

What you might not have seen comingwhat I, for one, did not expectwas how furious people are at Mitnick from the pro-Palestinian left. At first it seemed like what I was noticing was the hard-to-explain online phenomenon of a lot of people complaining about a weird take theyd seen, albeit one thats not representative of anything and easily dismissed. I dug a bit and here it seems like yeah people really are arguing this. Below, a smattering of the posts in question. (Note that IOF is what people who are not fans of the IDF sometimes call itoffence versus defence, get it, get it?)

I have a few theories about why the people youd least expect are mad at an Israeli teenager for refusing to serve.

1. Social media favours extreme stances. Whether its clout or money youre after, the more unhinged your take, the better its likely to fare. All publicity is good publicity for the hate-quote-tweeted. And yes, asking Israelis to go home to Brooklyn is unhinged. There is content similarly removed from its hinges on the pro-Israel side. If you want the clout-clicks, be sure to say you want all Palestinians moved to Sardinia. If you dont say this, then youre just a liberal bore who favours a two-state solution. (Hello from one such bore, by the way.)

2. The shifting of the Overton Window. If you say enough times that refusal to serve in the IDF is a moderate position, then Israel outright disbanding itself starts to seem like a thing a normal person could go around arguing for and expecting to happen. Because this isnt all about clout. There are people who genuinely do want Israel gone, and for whom a somewhat demilitarized Israel wouldnt suffice.

3. The obvious: antisemitism. Remember that thing? It is a thing. If you say that your opposition to Israel is rooted in your reactions to the death and destruction in Gaza, and then a young Israeli man refuses to do his mandatory military service in support of your cause, if he does so at great personal risk (aka not just posting his takes), and this isnt enough for you, it could very well be that your problem is less with Israeli policies or even Israels existence than with Jews.

For more original Jewish culture commentary from Phoebe Maltz Bovy subscribe to the freeBonjour Chainewsletter on Substack.

The CJNs senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at[emailprotected], not to mention@phoebebovyon Bluesky,and@bovymaltzon the website formerly known as Twitter. She also holds forth on The CJNs weekly podcastBonjour Chai.

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Is nothing good enough? Phoebe Maltz Bovy on why some progressives are mad at the young Israeli refusing to serve ... - The Canadian Jewish News

I am a progressive rabbi. I believe God stands with the oppressed not the oppressor, and so my faith commits me to ease human suffering. I believe God tempers judgement with compassion, and so I construct my rabbinate to support people through lifes struggles. Even so, my Judaism proclaims a distinction between right and wrong, and calls me to uphold and teach it.

As a composite of political, religious, and educational movements, American progressivism emerged at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in response to an industrial boom benefiting a relative few, leaving the poor and the working class behind. As a political ideology, progressivism championed equity and shared responsibility to the collective good.

The social gospel of religious progressives preached every human being as created in the divine image and brought faiths teachings to bear on societys pressing needs through a commitment to social justice. Progressive educators similarly prioritized the application of knowledge to lived experience.

Thus progressivism inspired in politics, religion and education alike greater attention to societys vulnerable, and focused theory and principle on real-world problems. I have always been proud to call myself progressive.

But progressivism has suffered a breakdown over Israel and Jews. Though originally a sophisticated ideology grounded in the philosophies of John Dewey and Walter Rauschenbusch among others, many adherents today view progressivism as the facile sorting of peoples and nations into two boxes: oppressor or oppressed. And many of them place Israel and Jews in the first.

Natan Sharansky, a former refusenik who understands oppression well, recently noted: Above all, because progressives see Israel as an oppressor and Jews as members of the privileged class, they believe that we are necessarily on the wrong side of history.

Like all nations, Israel is imperfect. I do not deny the injustice of its settlements on lands that should one day belong to a Palestinian state, or the hardships and suffering of the Palestinian people. I have travelled into the West Bank to shield Palestinian olive growers from Israeli settlers who sought to chop down their trees. I mourn the deaths of so many innocents in Gaza killed by the IDF. And I know that Israels 1948 War of Independence resulted in the expulsion of many Palestinians from their homes. But history is more than those snapshots. Israel did not start that war, and ever since has spent its existence fighting for survival. It should not be labeled an aggressor just because it exercises the power to fight back.

As for Jews being privileged, despite a legacy of discrimination and exclusion from education, business, housing, and other opportunities, the Jewish community today enjoys success in every field of endeavor. And many Jews have achieved enviable financial security. But it is also true that one in three Holocaust survivors live in poverty and one in four American Jews struggle to make ends meet. And since when is it a privilege to fear for ones physical safety, or to fear wearing a head covering or Star of David in public? Jewish institutions invest millions of dollars in security that Christian institutions fortunately need not. Where is the progressive critique of this inequity?

Ironically, progressivisms Israel-Jewish problem is manifest in certain Jewish organizations opposed to Israels efforts to incapacitate Hamas. By prioritizing Israels responsibility to protect innocent Palestinians over its responsibility to protect innocent Israelis, they deny Israels government the right to fulfill its most basic duty to its own peoples safety. Israel must do all it can to shield noncombatants in harms way. But to dismiss Israels need to defend its land and people is immoral. The Hamas threat renders a large swath of a small country uninhabitable. What other nation would tolerate on its border a terrorist regime committed to its destruction? What other nation would be asked to?

On campus and in the academy, progressivisms educational failures around Israel and Jews have long been evident. Many students, who consider themselves progressive, arrive at college knowing little Mideast history. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict becomes, for them, a spectator sport for which to choose a side. To the apparent underdog they give their sympathy and support. Further, Israels campus detractors often conflate the conflict with other liberation struggles, implicating Israels supporters in those societal injustices, excluding Jews from efforts to address them.

Inside the lecture halls, too, intellectual dishonesty and political motivations often have colored the teaching of history. Israel has been judged by double standards, demonized as a purely colonial enterprise, and delegitimized as the historic homeland of the Jewish people whose presence there stretches back at least three thousand years.

Even before October 7, a concern existed at many colleges and universities for the safety of Jewish students. We already knew that a hateful obsession with Israel often descends into hatred of Jews.

But what we have witnessed since that day is shocking and alarming: not just the defense of Hamas as freedom fighters, but a rejoicing in their atrocities and a rallying to their side, with hateful rhetoric defended on the grounds of free speech and free academic inquiry, as if the intimidation and fear felt by Jews did not undermine those very freedoms.

The testimony of the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania culminated two months of repeated failures by university leadership around the country to differentiate right from wrong with the safety of their own students at stake. To hem and haw about First Amendment nuance without first acknowledging the perils of a call for genocide is not just tone-deaf; it is negligent.

It also betrays a failure of many diversity, equity and inclusion programs to treat anti-Jewish bias with the same seriousness as other biases. Because Jews are perceived as privileged, we are often deemed beyond the reach of prejudice, and the attention rightly paid to microaggressions against other minorities is not paid to microaggressions against Jews.

Tension between particularism and universalism is common to most liberal religious faiths and denominations. Religious progressives, like me, believe their particular traditions should guide them to act for the betterment of all humanity. Nonetheless, as a Jew, I maintain the particularist right to defend myself and my people. And as a human being whose people are enduring hatred, intimidation, and violence, I expect other progressives to answer their universalist calling and extend to Jews and to Israel the same concern they rightly give to all peoples and nations who are oppressed.

Continued here:
Progressivism's Breakdown over Israel and Jews | Joshua Davidson | The Blogs - The Times of Israel

Facing the threat from right-wing populism at Junes Euro-elections, Austria offers lessons for progressives.

Although the mainstreaming of the far right is often presented as European democracies main contemporary challenge, in Austria this is neither new nor does it any longer surprise. Despite the countrys nationalist-socialist past and its role in the Third Reich, which led most Austrian parties at the outset to place a cordon sanitaire against the Freiheitliche Partei sterreichs (FP), the far-right party has nonetheless repeatedly been included in governing coalitions with the centre-right and effectively normalised over the years.

And ahead of this years parliamentary elections, the FP is surging in the polls. There is a real chance of an FP-led government under the hardliner Herbert Kicklencapsulating how far the far right and its policy positions have been accommodated in the Austrian public sphere and political system.

The FP is the successor to the Verband der Unabhngigen (Union of Independents), founded by former Nazi functionaries and SS officers in 1949 when former Nazis regained their right to vote. In 1956, after Austria had reclaimed its independence, the FP emerged.

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Despite the partys Nazi roots, and its strain of pan-German-national, anti-Semitic and xenophobic thought, time and again it enjoyed high popularity over subsequent decades. The FP even served as a coalition partner in 1983-87 with the centre-left Sozialdemokratische Partei sterreichs (SP), before Jrg Haiderson of former Nazistook over and the party gained notoriety.

Haider however made radical right-wing politics socially acceptable once again. In the 1999 elections, the FP pipped the centre-right sterreichische Volkspartei (VP) and the two parties entered coalition. The first time since the second world war that a western democratic government had incorporated an explicitly extreme-right party (albeit Haider elected not to join it personally), in 2000 Austria thus set a precedent. An international outcry followed, European Union sanctions politically isolating the Alpine republic.

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Diplomatic quarantine of Austria in response to its ambivalent approach to extremist politics was however not unprecedented. In 1986, after the election of the former United Nations secretary-general Kurt Waldheim as president, on an VP ticket, Austria faced isolation, given Waldheims attempts to cover up his membership of a Nazi organisation and involvement in war crimes. And although this led to Austrias reckoning with its role as a collaborator in the Third Reich, it did not prevent the resurgence of the far right over the following decades.

Today, such international reaction to the inclusion of a far-right party in government would be unthinkable, given the intervening success of the far right, not just in Austria but in Europe more generally. In 2017, when the VP was led by Sebastian Kurz into a second coalition with the FPits distinctions on most issues from the FP by now almost indiscerniblefew even batted an eyelid.

As Jan-Werner Mller writes in his latest book, Democracy Rules, there is no western democracy where a right-wing, authoritarian-populist party has come to power without the help of established conservative elites. This is particularly true of Austria, where the VP repeatedly elevated the FP to governing positions while taking over some of its ideas, particularly on immigration. Other parties did pursue a policy of exclusion, trying to minimise the appeal of the FP, but with limited successfar-right ideas and policy positions having been shamelessly normalised, as Ruth Wodak puts it, especially under Kurz.

Now any attempt by the VP to demonise the far right would seem rather dishonest. As a paper by Reinhard Heinisch and Fabian Habersack demonstrates, trends in public opinion now tend to favour far-right positions and the two parties share essentially the same voter base. This further motivates the VP to align its policy positions with those of the FP, routinising far-right politics and rhetoric.

With each passing week, it seems more and more likely that the FP will take first place in the parliamentary elections in Austria. Were this to be so, for the first time in the countrys history the party would be able to name the chancellor and be tasked with forming a government.

This is concerning not just because of the FPs links to the neo-Nazi milieu but also its record of racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobiaswatted away as isolated cases. A 2024 FP victory would most likely lead to another coalition with the VP, although there is a slim chance that the left and mainstream parties would try themselves to form a government with the VP to keep the far right out.

A rerun FP-VP coalition would seriously harm Austrian democracy. As the party has previously demonstrated, it rejects fundamental liberal values, such as the rights of members of minorities and LGBT+ individuals, and seeks to curtail basic freedoms. Recently, the FP threatened to teach the media how to behave.

The far right leaves no doubt about the direction in which it would take the country if it were to lead the government. The FP already showcases it in regional coalitionslatterly with the VP in Lower Austria, where the FP deputy governor is Udo Landbauer, also a member of the extreme-right fraternity Germania.

The regional government there aims to ban gender-inclusive usages in German (such as Lehrer*innen to refer to teachers, male and female) and, in truly nativist fashion, forbid languages other than German being spoken in school playgrounds. It also favours bonuses for restaurants that provide traditional, national cuisine.

Given the unabated rise of the far-right, the question for democratic parties remains how to stem it. That question applies too at the European level, as European Parliament elections loom in June and opinion data suggest a surge in support for the far right.

Another radical-right, Eurosceptic government in Austria would in itself further strain European unity and strength, already challenged by demagogues such as Hungarys Viktor Orbn, who undermines the EU at every opportunity and defies the image of a geopolitical bloc able to speak with one voice. More crucially, the rise of the far right across Europe comes amid pressing international challenges, posed from the outside, which call for more unity among statesnot a return to nationalism and ignorance.

There is no panacea. But there are a number of strategems the liberal left could adopt to mobilise its base and maximise its vote share.

First, as Lonie de Jonge and Anna-Sophie Heinze contend, one must understand what drives support for the far right. The FPs involvement in large-scale corruption under its former leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, led to the break-up of the coalition with the VP in 2019 and its plummeting in the polls. The partys resurgence can be read as a product of the serial crises of recent years: the pandemic, inflation and economic hardship, the downfall of Wunderkind Kurz undermining voters trust in the VP and Russias invasion of Ukraine with its attendant economic insecurities. While citizens became increasingly dissatisfied with the handling of these crises by the VP-Greens governing coalition, Kickl, Straches successor, successfully portrayed immigrants and elites as scapegoats for all ills.

Unable to compete with the far rights unstoppable force, the political mainstream has focused on shunning it. Of course, one must clearly affirm the threat posed by the far right and highlight the contradictions among its rhetorical tricks. But to centre on ostracising far-right parties and by implication their voters, portraying them as irrational, makes them feel misunderstood and disdainedfeeding into the populists narrative of political elites who ignore everyday people and their interests. With FP support currently around 30 per cent, one cannot dismiss almost one-third of the voting population in this way.

Yet progressives should equally avoid appropriating issues from the far right and trying to win over voters by moving further to the right themselves. In so doing, they risk alienating their own votersthe issue of people movement being a case in point. As the recent Dutch elections have shown, the centre taking over such right-wing topics can strengthen support for the far right, not weaken it: voters tend to go for the original, not the copy, as the former French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen liked to say.

The far right complains loudly about the status quo and winds up public outrage. Yet in so doing it oversimplifies complex issues, to which its populist discourse offers no viable solutions. Progressives should tap into this specific weakness. They should demonstrate that they are capable of providing effective answers to the most pressing public concerns, actively addressing the issues which otherwise underlie far-right support with convincing arguments.

Liberal-left parties should also present themselves as approachable and genuinely concerned with peoples worries. The new SP leader, Andreas Babler, serves as a great example. Babler acquired currency with his personality and closeness to the base. With his passion and progressive programme, speaking to public concerns, he started a movement which helped the party regain some of its popularity among those who had long given up on it, disenchanted by the factionalism and lack of direction.

Rather than paint immigrants as scapegoats for social hardship, he pointed to the powerful economic elites and those who got rich at the expense of the workers. Thus he addressed the concerns of voters and demonstrated that he understoodwithout dipping into the far-right political toolbox. Moreover, as the mayor of Traiskirchen, a small Austrian town famous for sustaining the countrys largest refugee centre, he serves as a paradigm of how to manage people movement successfully, retaining popularity while demonstrating humanity and refraining from demonising immigrants.

Those opposing the far right in June across Europe should focus on emphasising and protecting the liberal-democratic values for which they stand and present a compelling programme to address voters concerns. In the end, exhibiting a passion for politics and the citizenry while demonstrating competence and a hands-on approach to the challenges of the day will be a more successful way to regain support than copying and further normalising far-right ideas.

Progressives would do well to remind voters that the huge global challenges of today will not be resolved by the politics of the far right, with its embittered inward turn to isolationism and nativism. That, history tells us, has never been a solution.

This is part of our series on a manifesto for the June 2024 Euro-elections

Gabriela Greilinger is an Austrian-Hungarian political scientist and co-founder of the youth platform Quo Vademus. She regularly writes about EU politics, international affairs, democracy and populism, with a regional focus on Europe and in particular central and eastern Europe.

See the article here:
Normalising the far right: a warning from Austria - Social Europe

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Im Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzlez.

Its 2024. As we move into this election year, we look now at how the powerful lobby group AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is set to spend more than $100 million against progressive congressmembers critical of Israeli human rights violations in Palestine. The goal is to remove members of The Squad from Congress this year, including Congressmembers Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee and the only Palestinian American member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib. This comes as a Data for Progress poll found two-thirds of U.S. voters support a ceasefire in Gaza, including 80% of Democrats.

For more, were joined by Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. His book is just out. Its titled The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.

Ryan, why dont you lay out your revelations in this book? And perhaps you can start with AOC and what happened when she was elected. I want to play for you a clip. You write in your book about how a representative of AIPAC approached Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs team with an offer of $100,000 in July of 2018 to, quote, start the conversation about her views on Israel. This is the then-candidate Ocasio-Cortez being interviewed on PBS in 2018, before she was reportedly contacted by AIPAC.

MARGARET HOOVER: You, in the campaign, made one tweet, or made one statement, that referred to a killing by Israeli soldiers of civilians in Gaza and called it a massacre, which became a little bit controversial. But I havent seen anywhere: What is your position on Israel?

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, I believe absolutely in Israels right to exist. I am a proponent of a two-state solution. And for me, its not this is not a referendum, I think, on the state of Israel. For me, the lens through which I saw this incident, as an activist, as an organizer, if 60 people were killed in Ferguson, Missouri, if 60 people were killed in the South Bronx, unarmed, if 60 people were killed in Puerto Rico I just looked at that incident more through through just, as an incident. And to me, it would just be completely unacceptable if that happened on our shores.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, before she was first elected, one of the four members of whats known as The Squad, which is also the title of your book, Ryan Grim. Can you take it from there, what you reveal in this book?

RYAN GRIM: Yeah. So, and later in that interview, the interviewer, Hoover, really starts to parse a lot of her words. You know, You said the word 'occupation.' You said the word 'Palestine.' What do you mean by this? And you can see her growing even more kind of visibly kind of uncomfortable about where the conversation is heading. And she finally just taps out at the end and says, Look, Im not a geopolitical expert on this issue. This wasnt something that we talked about at my dinner table, you know, among Puerto Rican families in the Bronx. And she just moves on from there, and actually stops doing interviews for a little while after that, after she had been kind of, from the time of her win in June until then, just kind of dominating and getting bigger and bigger interview requests, you know, eventually even doing like late-night shows.

So, then, like you said, a week later, her team gets a call from somebody who says theyre with AIPAC and that they saw the interview and that theyre willing to help, you know, educate her on the issue, start the conversation. And to start that conversation, theyve already gotten commitments of up to $100,000 and that there would be a lot more money where that came from.

Now, she didnt even consider the offer. She had plenty of campaign cash coming in, wasnt even about the campaign cash. But it did open a window for her team and for her about what Congress is like for so many rank-and-file members of Congress who didnt have her profile at that point, because now not only are you being offered $100,000 just to start, and theres a lot more where that came from, it comes with an implicit threat and I think thats what you want to get into later if you dont take the money, that money will still be spent, but it will be spent against you instead.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And, Ryan, could you talk about and you do so in the book AIPACs role in purging the Democratic Party of any potential candidates or officeholders who dont toe the line when it comes to Israel?

RYAN GRIM: So, the same month that the Squad was sworn in to office that included Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, it was January 2019 the super PAC Democratic Majority for Israel was stood up with this splashy New York Times profile. It was kind of it was affiliated with AIPAC. It was founded by Mark Mellman, who is an AIPAC adviser, who had led AIPACs effort to undo Barack Obamas Iran deal. Hes also or, he was at the time a consultant to Yair Lapid, who, as you know, is the head of the Yesh Atid party, eventually actually became, while he was Mellmans client, prime minister of Israel, so hes wearing multiple hats. So, he founds this super PAC, DMFI, which then kind of does AIPACs work in the 2020 and 2020 in the 2020 cycle.

And theye built, basically, explicitly to stop the expansion of this faction within the Democratic Party that feels willing to criticize Israel. In May 2021, the last time there was a major war on Gaza, the Squad and a number of other House Democrats went to the House floor denouncing Israels attack on Gaza, and that was sort of an alarm bell for AIPAC. And so, AIPAC itself then, after that, launched its own super PAC, after DMFI had spent millions itself, and in that cycle, the 2021-'22 cycle, spent more than $30 million. Now they're looking to spend significantly more this cycle.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And you also say that the rise of the Squad and the rise of the counterrevolutionary forces has been simultaneous. Could you elaborate on that? Because, obviously, Donald Trump never tires of criticizing the Squad as if they are in charge of the Democratic Party.

RYAN GRIM: Yeah, it was really remarkable to go back and kind of rereport this story, the arc of kind of starting with, say, the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015-16 up through today, to see just how central this question of Israel-Palestine has been to the kind of pushback and the reaction to the rise of the Squad the entire time.

You know, the Democrats, in 2018, if you remember, they ran against they ran against Trump. They ran against his wall, his xenophobia, his Muslim ban. And much of the first six months of the Democratic majority in 2019 was spent with Democrats sometimes joined by Trump, sometimes not coming after Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib for various transgressions in tweets or speeches or otherwise. And it really kind of dictated and determined what the entire kind of progressive wing was doing.

And so, oftentimes youll have the organization Justice Democrats or members of the Squad say, you know, Why are you spending so much time focusing on Israel-Palestine? And the answer would be: Theyre not. Its actually its actually the reaction. Theyre kind of forced to. And so, the amount of spending that was done against them, and that continues to be done against them, kind of forged them into a cohesive political formation that might not actually have existed otherwise.

But so, in the 2022 cycle, like you said, thats when they spent millions against not just Nina Turner, the most high-profile example that they kept out of Congress, but also across the country going after progressives who were critical of Israel, but also were progressive, because, you know, the same kind of hedge fund, private equity executives, baseball team owners that are funding AIPAC and DMFI also have the same kind of interests as any major business owner would. So, the same agenda, you know, that is that forms kind of the Squads criticism of Israel, also their support of a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, you know, closing tax loopholes for the wealthy so its kind of a bonus that you kind of can align your class interests with this fight against Palestinian rights.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk more, Ryan Grim, about this election year, about the $100 million, whos involved with that, about the targeting of the Squad, the Squad-plus you know, more people who are allied with the Squad have been elected since then and also the role of Mark Penn and Burson-Marsteller?

RYAN GRIM: Right. So, 2022 was the first time in its history that AIPAC did its own super PAC. Previously, it had given directly to campaigns, or its members had given directly to campaigns, and DMFI had done a super PAC kind of affiliated with AIPAC but not straight from them. 2022 was the first time they did that, and they came through with, like I said, more than $30 million, in some races, you know, spending more than $5 million. They spent millions against Summer Lee in the Pittsburgh race in the last month of the campaign, but there was enough kind of pushback from an organized group of progressive super PACs and also small donors that she was able to just barely that she was able to just barely hang on.

And so, in 2022, they really tried to kind of constrain the growth of the Squad and Squad-aligned factions within the party. This cycle, theyre realy trying to shrink them. Like you said, theres been reporting that, you know, there have been offers of $20 million to two different candidates to try to run against Rashida Tlaib. Theyve successfully recruited candidates to run against Jamaal Bowman. Cori Bush has a challenge. Ilhan Omar has a challenge. So now theyre coming kind of directly at them.

Now, Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobson are also kind of main characters in this book, as well, along with Mark Penns protg, Josh Gottheimer, whos a congressman from North Jersey whos sort of like the chief antagonist of the Squad. And they have raised tens of millions of dollars over the years for this organization No Labels, also from hedge fund executives, you know, private equity folks, football team owners, Home Depot CEOs, that kind of crowd. They try to present themselves as this kind of nonaligned, centrist organization. Nancy Jacobson has said, you know, AIPAC is one of her one of the organizations that she works most closely with. And, of course, famously, now theyre trying to recruit a Joe Manchin-type figure to run as a, quote-unquote, independent in the presidential campaign, which presumably would be to the benefit of Trump.

JUAN GONZLEZ: You mentioned Josh Gottheimer, the congressman from New Jersey. Could you talk about his history before he got into Congress?

RYAN GRIM: Yeah. It is an interesting history, because not only does he have this kind of standard kind of pro-Israel activism, but he worked with Mark Penn for many years, and Mark Penn did a lot of his business with Saudi Arabia. And that gets to kind of a creation of a political alliance in Washington that didnt get a lot of publicity over the years, which is kind of the teaming up of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Those two countries still dont even recognize Israel, but in Washington, the three of them were spending enormously, basically to counter Iran, and to counter Iran, they and also, of course, to push back on kind of any climate agenda that might get in the way of where their fossil fuel interests lay, and that often meant targeting kind of the left flank of the Democratic Party.

And so, Josh Gottheimer kind of became the kind of lead antagonist against particularly Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, you know, just repeatedly pushing for censure resolutions, going on cable news regularly to denounce his colleagues and encouraging other Democrats to then also denounce them, teaming up with Hakeem Jeffries to do a kind of a super PAC that was aimed at kind of going after them and going after kind of Squad-aligned candidates, as well. So, thats really the kind of nexus of this civil war thats going on inside the House Democrats.

AMY GOODMAN: We have about two minutes to go, Ryan, and Im wondering if you can talk about what most shocked you in the research for your book, The Squad.

RYAN GRIM: I think it was the sheer amount of money that was involved and just how dominant it had been, because we can say the numbers over and over again $30 million, $40 million, $100 million but what doesnt quite come through is how that influences not just the races where money is spent, but also where its not spent.

And so, I heard of so many different conversations that would be held among consultants in campaigns that were worried that AIPAC or DMFI was going to start spending millions of dollars in their race. And they would meet, theyd have a conference call, and theyd figure out, OK, how do we stave this off? And so, this is without AIPAC even spending a dime. And they would say, Well, lets you know, the easiest thing we can do is, lets just post 'I stand with Israel.' And some candidates would just do that. And then, others would reach out to DMFI John Fetterman, his campaign did this; others did it, as well and say, What do we need to do? Like, what kind of policy positions do we need to publicly have so that youre going to stay out of this race? Not that youre going to fund us, but that youre not going to fund our opponents? And that, really, to a shocking degree, constrained what Democratic candidates were willing to say when it came to criticizing Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grim, we want to thank you so much for being with us, D.C. bureau chief for The Intercept. Ryans new book is called The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. And well also link to your articles at The Intercept, as you continue to cover this issue.

For those who didnt get to see Democracy Now! on January 1st, you can go to democracynow.org and see the Belmarsh Tribunal, excerpts of it, looking at the case of Julian Assange, whose final appeal goes before a London court on February 20th and 21st.

Democracy Now! produced with Rene Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, Mara Taracena. Im Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzlez, for the first edition of Democracy Now!

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