AIPAC Strikes Back
Andrew Perez on the pro-Israel lobby's victories in the Illinois Democratic primaries last night. Plus, a democracy watchdog says the US isn't a democracy anymore.
On this day in 1969, the Nixon administration began carpet bombing Cambodia. Today, our president is once again a madman and drops bombs “just for fun.”
Good morning! Andrew here, taking stock of what happened in last night’s congressional primary races in Illinois. Money might not automatically buy elections – but, boy, are Democratic voters gonna get conned if they listen to any of AIPAC’s super PACs about which candidates are big-time supporters of Medicare for All and which left-wing candidates are actually secret Republicans.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Tuesday’s elections showcase America’s acute democracy crisis, Israel knows protesters in Iran will be “slaughtered” if they listen to Israel and rise up, Graham Platner faces his first attack ad, and Chief Justice John Roberts wishes he could tell the fascist he made president to stop criticizing the Supreme Court – but is it really safe to upset him?
What We’re Up Against
The week began with an NBC News poll finding that 67% of Democrats say their sympathies lie with Palestinians more than Israelis – a giant shift from 2013, when only 18% said the same.
Public opinion is no small matter. It’s not necessarily what decides elections, though, in an era of unprecedented, unlimited dark money and super PAC spending. To be sure, US policymaking has had no correlation with what Americans want for years, at least – the seminal study showing this was published back in 2014. But America’s democracy crisis is only getting more acute, as the ultra-rich and well-heeled interest groups have been given the greenest light, legally speaking, to mess with our elections.
Today, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the US pro-Israel lobby, can drop $22 million into four congressional primaries, as it did in Illinois, presenting fake and misleading political arguments to voters, and cynically attacking disfavored candidates from the left, while choosing to talk exclusively about topics that have zero relation to the primary issue that AIPAC and its donors care about: Israel.
AIPAC and its allies, through a series of anodyne-named super PACs, spent $22 million on four Illinois congressional primaries, and won two of them. And while AIPAC’s preferred candidate lost in Illinois’s 9th congressional district, the group still managed to block out the strongly pro-Palestine and Palestinian-American candidate Kat Abughazaleh.
In its campaign against Abughazaleh, who wants to end weapons sales to Israel, an AIPAC-aligned super PAC ran ads saying she “supported Marco Rubio for president, said she was to the right of Donald Trump on Social Security, and her campaign is bankrolled by right-wing donors to Trump and Republicans. Who is the real Kat Abughazaleh? We don’t really know.”
Keep in mind: AIPAC is funded by right-wing Trump donors – and if Abughazaleh, a progressive influencer and former Zeteo contributor, thought any of those things today, or was taking right-wing donor money, AIPAC would not have spent money against her.
But this is the power of the super PAC: add money and you can scream whatever bullshit you want through Americans’ TVs, computers, and iPhones. Your budget for trolling is limited only by the size of your donors’ trusts.