"Real Pro-Israel President": Musk-Backed PAC's Closing Attack in Pennsylvania Lauds Harris in Fake Ad
Voters are tired and ready for the election to be over, as Prem discovered in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
First, a note from Team Zeteo on Election Day:
Mehdi is hosting live election coverage on YouTube, starting at 10pm ET, with an array of guests, including a progressive member of Congress, an Oscar-winning director, and an award-winning actress and activist. Prem also will join Mehdi to discuss what he’s seeing on the ground in Philadelphia.
TUNE IN HERE:
From 10pm to 11pm ET.
Then again from 11.30pm to midnight ET.
And then again from 12.30am to 1am ET.
PHILADELPHIA – Text messages, YouTube advertisements, TV blurbs, flyers, and flyers, and flyers. While many in the City of Brotherly Love attended Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing pitch rally against former President Donald Trump, some are also tired and ready to move on.
Given Pennsylvania’s pivotal status as not just a swing state, but also the tipping point in 2016 and 2020, both parties and allied groups flooded the zone with materials right up until polls closed at 8pm ET on Tuesday.
Outside the Germantown Jewish Centre polling site, 40-year-old Robert Kee told Zeteo that even during his past residency in the swing state of Georgia, he had not seen such a barrage of campaign ads. He called it all “unprecedented,” particularly how it came in every format.
Kee, who chose not to share how he voted, said there was “no correct or moral choice,” citing chiefly Israel’s genocide in Gaza but also noting frustrations with the sunsetting of pursuits like universal healthcare. “Democrats try to skate by,” relative to the dangers of Trump, he said.
Phil Eby, who moved from Michigan a decade ago, echoed Kee on the number of ads residents have had to contend with this election season, saying he’s “never seen the sheer amount of communications about the election at this level before.” Eby, who voted for Harris, said his focus was voting against Trump.
“That's just kind of, yeah, the way it's been working for the past few elections.”
Eby said he was primarily concerned with the fruition of big agenda items generally, including student loan forgiveness and then addressing the “broken status quo” of immigration. “Something has to happen.”
Another voter at the Germantown Jewish Centre polling location said the election has mainly gotten him to stop caring about politics, saying he was only voting because his wife wanted him to. “I don’t like Trump, I don’t like that so many people like him,” he said, adding protections for LGBTQ, abortion rights, and college affordability for his children were important to him. He said there were no issues of the past years under the current Democratic administration that stuck out to him, and yet expressed broader dread.
“I feel like in the history of the world, there's been hundreds of countries that are gone and gone, and most of them have had their turn at the top as the leader of their perceived world at the time,” he said. “So the United States is currently at the top…But it's not going to be on the top forever. That's just a fact. So is this that time that we're gonna fall?”
Anthony Tyler, a cab driver who supported Harris, said his interest was in, if nothing else, a “time for change.” Tyler, who has a daughter in college and another two younger children, said higher education affordability was a big concern for him.
“A lot of my community mentions Trump giving us money…if there wasn’t a pandemic, we wouldn’t have gotten any of that,” he quips, in reference to stimulus checks given during the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tyler noted that, nevertheless, people in his circle were on the same page as him.
Tyler did think that Trump could perhaps have a better handle on foreign wars, but otherwise was against Trump, additionally citing Project 2025. “They say Trump’s got nothing to do with it but his name is involved,” he said.
Outside the Masjidullah mosque polling site, mother-daughter combo Sam and Bri Morris felt empowered. Sam described how she wasn’t really politically engaged until Trump’s ascendance in 2016. She did not have a strong opinion right away, but more so wanted to simply take him at face value and “know what was going on” with him. Upon learning more, she was politicized and hasn’t looked back. “The country is not here for his benefit,” she said, remarking on the various scandals and crimes Trump is wrapped in and the tax favors he has pursued in favor of the rich.
Bri described a similar activation, having been a senior at Howard University during Trump’s election, and noted she certainly felt pressure as a woman in Pennsylvania, but she also empathized with women in Texas who may face even higher threats to their bodily autonomy.
Nearby Philadelphia nurse Badr Waheed, who was at the site to help a friend run security, said he described the election as “tiresome” — the influx of ads, corruption, and what he saw as “fear and emotion” characterizing much of the messaging on all sides.
He was concerned with finding a new politics concerned with “all the people” – legal or illegal – and one that sets an example for both the world and younger generations. On immigration, he expressed a basic frustration with the lack of clarity on both sides.
Waheed’s general distaste for both major parties left him still undecided hours before the polls were set to close.
Musk-Backed PAC Final Attack
Amid the mass communication, some voters in Pennsylvania reported receiving text messages emphasizing Harris as staunchly pro-Israel. Attached to the message was a video paid for by FC PAC – an Elon Musk-backed group that had previously targeted Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with ads accusing Harris of being pro-Palestinian and Arab voters in Michigan with ads lauding her for being pro-Israel. It was an apparent effort to undermine how Harris was seen by both groups.
The attached ad features a clip of Harris shaking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand and pledging to voters, “Together, we will put a real pro-Israel president in the White House.”
The PAC’s website shows several other ads, including one captioned “THIS IS A REAL KAMALA HARRIS AD,” which featured a self-identified “Jewish former Republican representative of the PA House of Reps” announcing his support for Harris, and another individual chiming in: "...I'm pro-Israel too and I was once chairman of the Kennedy Republican party, and I'm voting for Harris."
Another says Harris “stood with Israel over us,” in enabling violence overseas while Americans faced hardship and needed help.
One could argue Harris’s vacillation between standing firmly behind her boss’s support for Israel’s violence and hinting at doing “everything” in her power to stop it has left her vulnerable to such shenanigans. But, as several voters reminded Zeteo, while the world wonders where a possible President Harris may fall on the issue, bombs are still dropping.
Reem Abuelhaj, an organizer with No Ceasefire No Vote PA, said regardless of the outcome, she expects a “groundswell” of people speaking out, as people felt their hands were tied before the election. She said she’d spoken with a number of people in her life about how they chose to vote, some who voted for Harris, and some who felt they could not. The “people in my life who did cast their ballot for Harris felt physically sick. Some were in tears. Some told me that all they could see on the ballot was the faces of dead children. So I want to ask: what does it mean when you know people of conscience are going to the polls and, out of fear, voting in a state of such distress?”
“What does that say about our political system, and you know, what does that say about what needs to change?”
Kamala has proven herself to be firmly pro-Israel and a staunch supporter of Zionist agendas. She and her inept boss had the power to stop the ongoing genocide, yet chose not to act. There’s no reason to believe she’ll change her stance if given more power. She deserves a crushing, humiliating defeat tonight.
Thank you Medhi Hassan