The Ballad of Zohran’s Surrender: Why New York’s Radical Mayor Had to Kiss the Ring Before He Even Got It

by damagecollateral

Zohran and Alex Soros after the win. Reassurance!

There’s a beautiful irony in Zohran Mamdani’s victory that should make every American pause and wonder what democracy actually means anymore. Here’s a guy who just won the New York City mayoral race on the back of 40,000 small-dollar donors, who explicitly ran against the billionaire class, who faced a coordinated $40 million assault from plutocrats like Bill Ackman and Dan Loeb—and won anyway. A real David-versus-Goliath story, right?

Wrong. Because, no matter how many lefties cry “sell out”, the political reality is this: even after slaying Goliath, David still has to go meet with Goliath’s family in their Rockefeller Center offices and promise to play nice. A mayor is not a congressman whose job is to speak and write laws; a mayor is an executive position, and you need so many people to cooperate after you win if you’re going to pull off the mayor thing.

Welcome to 21st-century American politics, where you can win every vote that matters and still lose the only war that counts.

The Surrender Meetings

In mid-July, before he’d even formally secured his general election victory, Mamdani found himself sitting in a conference room organized by the Partnership for New York City—a glorified billionaires’ club masquerading as a civic organization—facing roughly 100 CEOs. These weren’t just any business leaders. These were representatives of the same financial titans who’d spent record amounts trying to destroy him.

What happened in that room tells you everything you need to know about the limits of electoral democracy in America.

According to reports, Mamdani softened his stance on “globalizing the intifada”—a phrase he’d previously defended on free speech grounds—telling the assembled executives he would now “discourage” its use. The man who’d built his entire brand on not backing down from principle was now carefully walking back positions to appease people who literally bankrolled his opposition.

But here’s the thing: He had no choice.

The Invisible Veto

Most Americans think the mayor of New York City is powerful. They’re right—sort of. The mayor controls a $100 billion budget, commands the nation’s largest police force, and oversees services for 8 million people. On paper, it’s one of the most consequential elected positions in America.

In practice? The mayor is a middle manager answering to landlords, developers, financiers, and CEOs who can’t be voted out.

Consider the arsenal of weapons New York’s wealthy have at their disposal:

Economic Terrorism: Real estate developers can simply stop building. Financial firms can threaten to relocate (and some already are—Florida business leaders are literally preparing welcome packets). When you’re sitting on billions in capital, you have the power to make elected officials suffer for policies you don’t like. One real estate lender already put New York projects on hold until after the election. That’s not business—that’s blackmail with a McKinsey presentation deck.

Legal Warfare: The rich don’t just have lawyers; they have entire law firms on retainer. They can tie up every initiative Mamdani proposes in litigation for years. Want to freeze rents? See you in court for the next five years while landlords bleed the city dry. Want to raise taxes? Better hope you enjoy depositions.

Media Capture: The New York Times—that bastion of liberal journalism—ran an editorial board piece essentially telling voters not to rank Mamdani. They later published a story using hacked documents from a self-described race scientist to question Mamdani’s college application from 15 years ago. The Post called him a “menace.” When the city’s major papers are working overtime to delegitimize you, you’re not just fighting an opponent—you’re fighting an entire apparatus.

Political Gatekeeping: After Mamdani won the primary, watch what happened: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held off endorsing. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stayed silent. Governor Kathy Hochul—who he’d need to pass any tax increases—waited. These aren’t personal slights. They’re institutional reminders of who really runs things.

The State Legislature Choke Point: Here’s the kicker that seals the deal: Nearly every major policy Mamdani wants to enact—taxing the wealthy, raising corporate rates, freezing rents—requires approval from Albany. The city council can’t just pass these things. The mayor can’t decree them. They need the state legislature and the governor to sign off.

Guess who has more influence with state legislators than a freshman mayor? The same business interests now demanding meetings.

The Realpolitik of Revolution

So why did Mamdani take those meetings? Why soften his language? Why tell business leaders he wants “partnership”?

Because he understands something that armchair revolutionaries on Twitter don’t: Martyrdom is cheap, governing is expensive.

Imagine Mamdani had refused to meet with business leaders. Imagine he’d doubled down on every position, told the CEOs to pound sand, and tried to govern as a pure ideologue. Here’s what would happen:

Year One: Every major development project gets canceled or moved. Real estate investment in the city plummets. Tax revenue drops. The budget crisis that exists becomes a budget catastrophe.

Year Two: Hochul and the state legislature—under intense pressure from business lobbyists—refuse to pass any of Mamdani’s tax proposals. They might even pass laws limiting what the city can do. The city council, seeing which way the wind blows, starts defecting from his agenda.

Year Three: The media narrative becomes “Mamdani’s Failed Experiment.” Every pothole, every delayed subway, every closed business gets blamed on the socialist mayor who scared away job creators. Fox News runs segments daily. The Times publishes concerned long-reads about the flight of talent and capital.

Year Four: A well-funded challenger emerges. Someone “reasonable.” Someone who “understands business.” The same billionaires who couldn’t beat Mamdani in 2025 spend $100 million to beat him in 2029. And they win.

Revolution without power is just performance art. Mamdani gets this.

The Trap Within the Trap

But here’s where it gets really insidious. By forcing Mamdani to moderate before he even takes office, the wealthy elite accomplishes something more valuable than just defeating him: They prove the system works.

Think about it. When a democratic socialist with massive grassroots support, funded by small donors, running explicitly against billionaire power, wins an election—and then immediately has to start negotiating with and placating the same billionaires he ran against—what message does that send?

It tells every future progressive candidate: You can win, but winning the most votes is not enough to translate your vision into reality.

It tells voters: Your vote matters, but only within parameters set by people you never get to vote on.

It tells the billionaire class: You’re safe. The system is safe. Democracy is just a pressure valve, not a threat.

This is the genius of modern American oligarchy. It doesn’t need to cancel elections or jail dissidents. It just needs to make clear that elections only determine who manages the empire, not whether the empire continues to exist.

The Impossible Position

So what was Mamdani supposed to do?

He could have refused to moderate, stuck to every principle, and watch his mayoralty collapse under the weight of economic sabotage and political isolation. He’d go down in history as a brave failure, memorialized in folk songs and graduate seminars about the limits of municipal socialism.

Or he could do what he’s doing: Take the meetings. Soften the language. Build relationships with people who hate what he represents. Work within the system he hoped to change. Try to deliver whatever incremental improvements he can while the billionaires hold a gun to the city’s economy.

It’s not a choice between revolution and surrender. It’s a choice between different flavors of defeat.

The real question isn’t why Mamdani was meeting with CEOs and moderating his message. The real question is why we have a system where someone who just won a democratic election had to negotiate the terms of his surrender with people who were never on the ballot.

The Lesson

Mamdani’s victory proves something important: You can beat the billionaires at the ballot box. The $40 million they spent against him failed. The media campaigns failed. The smears failed. Democracy, in the narrow sense of counting votes, actually worked.

But his randezvous with the powerful proves something more important: Beating them at the ballot box isn’t enough.

The real power in America doesn’t stand for election. It doesn’t need your vote. It just needs you to need something it controls—capital, credit, jobs, investment, development, tax approval. And if you want access to any of that, you’ll come to the table and negotiate.

Zohran Mamdani won the race for mayor of New York City. But he’s discovering what every democratic socialist before him has learned: In America, you can win the election.

You just can’t win.

The Great Credulity Shift: How Israel Lost the Information War

by damagecollateral

A funny thing happened on the way to another mass grave

The Israelis just dumped another load of Palestinian bodies into Gaza—bodies bearing what I can hear Western media outlets delicately calling “signs of mistreatment,” which in non-euphemistic English means torture marks and bullet holes in the back of the head. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Why do Israelis publicize their crimes like this, you ask? To scare Palestinians and neighboring Arabs. As for the risk of upsetting Western audiences, well, Israelis think they simply won’t believe it.

That’s right. For decades, Israel has operated on a simple principle: commit atrocities so outlandish that Western audiences literally can’t process them. Evacuating entire cities like Yaffa and Haifa? Poisoning water supplies with typhus in Akko and Lyddia? It sounds like the fever dream of a conspiracy theorist, especially when it’s being reported by brown people with accents who pray five times a day. Surely it must be more complicated than simple ethnic cleansing, right? There must be context we’re missing. Both sides, you know.

This was the formula, and it was bulletproof. The sheer audacity of the crimes, combined with good old-fashioned Western racism and the assumption that Palestinians were inherently unreliable narrators, created a perfect shield. The reports were too crazy to believe, and the reporters were too foreign to trust. And our Zionist-controlled, government-subservient media is right there to discredit Palestinians at every turn.

But something broke.

The Gaza genocide—let’s be honest and call it what South Africa called it at The Hague—changed the equation. Seventeen months of high-definition horror, posted in real-time by Palestinians themselves, fundamentally altered the credibility calculation in the Western mind. People started believing Palestinians. Worse, from Israel’s perspective, they started going back through the archive, re-evaluating decades of Palestinian testimony with fresh eyes. The Nakba? Maybe that actually happened the way they said it did. Deir Yassin? Jenin? The prisoner abuse? All of it suddenly crackling with an electric charge of plausibility it never had before.

Even better: the credibility transfer went both ways. The same audiences who stopped reflexively doubting Palestinians started reflexively doubting Israelis. Why exactly should we assume Mustafa Barghouti is biased but take Mark Levin at face value? Why are Palestinian casualty figures “claims” while Israeli statements are just… reported? Why does the Muslim guy in the keffiyeh need three sources while the IDF spokesman with the better PowerPoint gets printed verbatim?

The Israelis don’t seem to understand this shift has happened. They’re still playing by the old rules, broadcasting their brutality to intimidate Arabs while assuming Westerners won’t believe the reports anyway. They’re advertising their crimes on the assumption that the audience will remain incredulous.

This is why you see the increasingly frantic attempts to keep this old paradigm alive. “Pallywood!” they shriek, trying to paint Palestinians as Hollywood-level fabulists. The starvation reports are exaggerated! The genocide numbers are inflated! It’s all fake! The desperation is obvious: they’re trying to claw back the credibility gap, to restore the comfortable old arrangement where Israelis were presumed truthful and Palestinians presumed lying.

It’s not going to work, and here’s why: Palestinians got good at this. Decades of having every single claim scrutinized, picked apart, and dismissed made them into obsessive documentarians. They know they’ll be doubted, so they film everything, source everything, archive everything. The result is that their reporting has become ironclad in ways that make the IDF’s increasingly preposterous explanations—she was shot by Hamas, the hospital bombed itself, the aid workers were terrorists, the journalists were combatants—sound like the propaganda they are.

Meanwhile, independent media outlets have proliferated, places willing to apply the same skepticism to both sides. These outlets aren’t bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson’s heirs or dependent on access to Israeli officials, which means they can ask uncomfortable questions. And audiences, particularly younger ones, trust them more than the legacy outlets with their suspiciously shiny production values and their weird reluctance to use the word “killing” when Israelis are doing it.

The “antisemitism” card isn’t working anymore either. People have figured out it’s a mute button, a way to end conversations rather than have them. The spell is broken.

It must be a strange relief for Palestinians, finally being believed after howling into the void for a century. But the mainstream media? They’re going to keep playing the old hits, keep soft-pedaling Israeli crimes and interrogating Palestinian testimony, because they’re locked into the worldview of their donors and their access-based business model. They’re too compromised to adapt, which means they’ll be left behind, still insisting we can’t really know what happened while everyone else watches the videos.

The great credulity shift is complete. The Israelis are still acting like it’s 1982. The world has moved on.

“`

Dear Americans: Let Gaza Do Its Job and Unite You, For God’s Sake

by damagecollateral

Someone sent me a Nick Fuentes clip. Not the algorithm – my algorithm knows not to recommend him.

Fuentes was riffing on Trump’s plan to empty Gaza and turn it into a luxury real estate project, complete with all the usual apocalyptic development porn that makes Jared Kushner salivate.

I can’t stand Fuentes. His anti-Semitism is repulsive and just plain dishonest. His scapegoating of “blacks” marks him, in my view, as just another tool of the same Deep State machinery he claims to oppose. The overworked persona, the rehearsed radio voice, the calculated provocations. I see as much of a fraud in him as I see in Kamala Harris. He doesn’t sound human. He sounds like a project. Project Nick.

But something strange happens in the clip.

After Project Nick lays out the whole Trump scheme for Gaza – the murder, the dispossession, the techno-beach-port-whatever land grab – he stops. His head sinks. He looks up and to the left, like he’s searching for words somewhere in the air above him. Then, in a completely different voice – softer, more genuine, as if talking to his own self – he says:

“What, what even is this? Like, we live in Hell.”

I replayed those two sentences over and over. Not because they’re particularly eloquent, but because of everything surrounding them. The build-up. The tone shift. The fact that they’re coming from someone whose entire brand is being hard, rude, and deliberately un-humanitarian.

It was a crack in the armor.

And what cracked it? Gaza. What else could punch through all those fake layers of Project Nick, grab hold of his buried humanity, and drag it to the surface for us to behold? It’s like watching someone have a moment with their therapist.

He continues, still in that lower register: “What can you even say about this plan? You know these are human beings, like, these are human beings with lives. Like you and I. They were born there; we were born here. We were born here and so we get to go to school and ride the school bus and have Christmas parties and go to Disney World. They were born there so they know nothing other than hunger and thirst and death and explosions and airstrikes and being shot in the face and disabled.”

I’m thinking: Who is this person?

“And this administration is making it into a, basically a joke. We’re gonna turn it into a gameshow? Now the beleaguered people that are officially being starved to death and genocided – 107 people dead in the past 24 hours from hunger – we’re gonna give them digital tokens on the blockchain in exchange for their territory? And then we’re gonna kick’em out and send them to Somalia? What the fuck is this? This is evil.”

He had to reassure his audience later that he wasn’t going woke. But here’s the point: everyone has a human side, and Gaza is trying – with the actual, irreplaceable lives of its people – to remind us of that.

Marjorie Taylor Greene recently said things about healthcare and immigration that most Democrats in Congress don’t have the guts to say. Candace Owens started using phrases like “This isn’t a Right or Left issue” and “I don’t care if you’re Liberal or Conservative” and – this floored me – “We need to all come together.”

We sure do.

Credit to the Left: they got there first on Palestine. Most progressives were willing to overlook the fact that Palestinian society doesn’t exactly align with progressive values on LGBT rights, for example. They didn’t let that stop them from being fully sympathetic to people going through the holocaust of our time. Conservatives have been slower (aren’t they always?) to let basic humanity override their talking points, but they’re mostly there now.

But most Americans are still dug into their separate blue and red trenches. The mirage of division maintained by corporate media and the Deep State is too convincing for too many. Too many conservatives think uniting with liberals is impossible, even on basic human issues like genocide, healthcare, and free speech. We see rallies for one side or the other, seldom together. Right and Left will literally say the same thing, but from separate stages. It’s like the whole nation is made of divorced couples who both want what’s best for the kids but refuse to admit the other one does too.

Conservatives can’t seem to grasp that being anti-woke doesn’t mean being a heartless jerk about everything. Just because woke people oppose genocide doesn’t make genocide okay, especially when you know they’re right. What better symptom of our division than being afraid to stand against freaking genocide because the other side does? Want to make a conservative pro-human sacrifice? Tell them the woke crowd is against it.

On the Left, so many non-left causes have been glommed onto leftism by the liberal managerial class that the core of real leftism – working class struggle – has become secondary to issues like abortion, feminism, and LGBT rights.

And the dehumanization between us is staggering. Ponder this: why would anyone be surprised that Tucker Carlson opposes genocide? Is he not a human being? Does he not have children? Why do I keep hearing people on the left say, “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Candace Owens. I need to take a shower.” Calm down, Mehdi Hassan. Candace speaking out against wanton murder is actually the normal thing. What should shock us is when Lindsey Graham cheers for mass murder, not when Theo Von speaks out against it – unless we’ve dehumanized each other so completely that basic decency registers as a plot twist.

The tragedy is there’s so much to unite around: the sanctity of human life, free speech, government surveillance, corporate greed, congressional corruption, foreign lobby interference, the military-industrial complex, our abysmal healthcare system, rising inequality, money going abroad instead of helping Americans at home, endless wars, billionaires running the country, and – oh yeah – not wanting our tax dollars to blow people into pieces.

When will Gaza be allowed to do its job and bring us together? Palestinians have paid the ultimate price to wake us up, to show us our common humanity. When do we let that sacrifice mean something? When do the cries of grieving mothers drown out the manufactured shrieks of division from our decadent elites? When do images of actual death take priority over the fake fault lines that Fox and MSNBC spend billions widening? Palestinians are building bridges between us with their own bloodied body parts. Can’t we, if only as a token of appreciation, perhaps see what it’s like to join hands?

We have Palestinians trying to unite us on the one hand, and oligarchs and elites trying to divide us on the other. Will we stop choosing the latter and embrace the former?

Buying the Media Won’t Buy Back the Fear: The Zionist Media Takeover That Won’t Work

by damagecollateral

So the checks are flying. Larry Ellison’s buying up TikTok, CBS, Paramount – the whole lot – with the stated mission of getting Americans back on the Israel train. The New York Times got caught running what amounted to an internal Hasbara department, complete with Zionist mentors shepherding reporters toward the proper editorial line (and when exposed, the Times basically shrugged and said “Yeah, so?”). Netanyahu’s office dropped $45 million on Google. They’re tweaking ChatGPT algorithms. It’s a full-court press, a shock-and-awe campaign of narrative control that would make any tin-pot ministry of information blush with envy.

The working theory here seems to be that the problem is purely one of PR – that the recent surge in anti-Zionist sentiment is basically a marketing failure caused by all those nasty images coming out of Gaza. Fix the image, control the message, and presto: Americans will go back to seeing Israel as the plucky little democracy in the desert.

There’s just one problem with this theory. It’s completely wrong.

Here’s what the Zionist donor class and their bought-and-paid-for media consultants don’t seem to understand: most people – including most Westerners – have always known the basic story of Israel and Palestine. They know Israel was established through ethnic cleansing. They know Palestinians are refugees because they were driven from their homes. They know who’s David and who’s Goliath in this fight. This isn’t new information that suddenly appeared on TikTok in October 2023. What the genocide in Gaza did was coax people into researching the matter in a way that would clear out the noise that Zionists created to detract from the incriminating core of the issue: that Zionism is a settler colonial project just like any other project based on supremacism and ethnic cleansing.

(Obviously I’m not talking about the subset of the population that’s fine with ethnic cleansing – the folks who think what happened to Native Americans was just the natural order of things. But that’s not most people, despite what you might think from reading the comments section.)

So if people have always basically known the score, why has pro-Palestinian sentiment been relatively muted until recently?

Two words: fear and guilt.

The West’s post-Holocaust guilt toward Jews, combined with the weaponized accusation of antisemitism, kept a lid on this thing for decades. People knew the Palestinians got screwed, but they were terrified of saying so out loud. The social cost was too high. Career-ending. Friendship-ending. The scarlet letter of our time.

But here’s the thing about fear as a control mechanism: once it breaks, it doesn’t come back. And it’s broken now. The spell is lifted. Everyone from college kids to their grandparents has figured out that criticizing Israel’s government isn’t the same thing as hating Jews, and no amount of oligarch money is going to put that genie back in the bottle.

Think about it: When exactly was American media ever pro-Palestinian? Did CNN ever run a Free Gaza telethon? Was MSNBC – liberal, NPR-tote-bag-carrying MSNBC – ever anything but Zionist, just with better table manners about it? The entire mainstream media apparatus has been owned by either Christian Zionists or Jewish Zionists for as long as any of us can remember. And yet here we are, with public opinion on Israel cratering despite complete media saturation.

Why? Because the underlying knowledge was always there. People always knew the basic historical facts – they just weren’t allowed to say them. Once that prohibition lifted, the emperor’s-new-clothes moment was inevitable.

And here’s the kicker: they can’t rewrite history. The origins of Israel, the Nakba, the refugee crisis, the occupation – this is all documented in every serious historical text. It’s not contested among actual scholars. Are they going to memory-hole the entire academic record? Good luck with that.

So what’s left in the playbook? Make Israel look good (tough sell when you’re actively committing what much of the world calls genocide) and make Palestinians look bad (equally tough when the images coming out of Gaza look like something from the Book of Revelation). Resurrect Western guilt toward Jews? Well, they’re not exactly going to stage another Auschwitz, so that well’s run dry. They might pick up a few converts with this stuff, sure. They might also piss off just as many people who resent being propagandized.

I can’t see how this works. I really can’t.

But here’s what I can see it doing: generating despair. And I think that might be the point, especially with how loudly they’re announcing all these media acquisitions. The message isn’t “We’re going to change your mind.” The message is “Resistance is futile. We own everything.”

Don’t buy it. The money’s real, but the power it can purchase is more limited than they want you to think. You can’t buy back people’s fear once they’ve lost it. And you definitely can’t buy back history.

If Dems Will Ever Earn My Vote, The First Step Is To STFU

by damagecollateral
Winning…

There’s a particular genre of political masochism I’ve been watching lately that deserves its own category in the DSM. Call it Electoral Tourette’s Syndrome, or maybe just advanced Brand Damage Fetishism. Whatever the clinical term, the Democratic Party has it. Bad.

Look, I get it. The party establishment’s position on Gaza has been, to put it mildly, positively atrocious. Senator Cory Booker—who someone brilliantly nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur” and the universe it still laughing about that—is hardly alone. The whole apparatus has been galactically, catastrophically wrong on this issue, in ways that make their base want to claw their eyes out.

But here’s the thing that really gets me: it’s not just that they’re wrong. It’s that they can’t stop yapping to world how wrong they are, at precisely the moments when shutting up would be the politically savvy move. It’s like watching someone methodically shoot themselves in each foot, then reload and go for the kneecaps.

Take Hillary Clinton. Back in May 2024—when Biden was still the candidate and the party desperately needed to contain the Gaza backlash—Hillary decided to go on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and deliver a lecture to student protesters.

“They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or, frankly, about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country,” she told Joe Scarborough. She claimed that under her husband’s administration, “an offer was made to the Palestinians for a state on 96% of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians with 4% of Israel to be given to reach 100% of the amount of territory that was hoped for.”

“If Yasser Arafat had accepted it, there would have been a Palestinian state now for about 24 years,” she insisted, calling it “one of the great tragedies of history.”

Never mind that this narrative has been thoroughly debunked by actual negotiators who were in the room—including Robert Malley from Clinton’s own administration. As Professor Osamah F. Khalil of Syracuse University noted, “For Clinton to say this is really disingenuous.” He pointed out that Arafat had warned Bill Clinton before Camp David “that the two sides were not ready.” To lay blame squarely on the Palestinians was unfair, he added. “Diplomacy is not a one-time mattress sale.”

The real question is: why say this now? Campus protests were erupting across the country. The party’s position on Gaza was already hemorrhaging votes. You’ve got students getting brutalized by police for protesting a genocide your party is funding.

What was the strategic thinking? “You know what will help? If I remind everyone that our party’s foreign policy blob has the same tired talking points they’ve had since Camp David!” Brilliant. Chef’s kiss. Really winning hearts and minds.

The response was swift. Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, which has a substantial Arab and Muslim population, said the city’s “young people” were not taking kindly to being lectured.

But wait—it gets better.

Fast forward to late October. Kamala’s now the candidate, desperately trying to hold Michigan—a swing state with the largest Arab-American population in the country. She’s already hemorrhaging support because of Gaza. The campaign knows this. Everyone knows this.

So Bill Clinton emerges from whatever Epstein-memorial crypt he’s been hiding in, and Good Lord. The man goes full Zionist-ideologue mode, so extreme that he doesn’t just torpedo Kamala—he retroactively destroys his own legacy. Suddenly everyone’s remembering that the Oslo Accords were overseen by this guy, this ghoul who apparently thinks Palestinians deserve whatever happens to them. The “peace process” is revealed as the sham it always was, because of course it was—look who was running it!

“The hardest issue here in Michigan is the Middle East,” Clinton, 78, shakily told the crowd at a “Souls to the Polls” event. “I understand why young Palestinians and Arab Americans here in Michigan think too many people have died. I get that.”

But of course, there’s always a “but.”

“Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself,” Clinton blurted.

Clinton wasn’t done. He decided to deploy the ultimate historical argument: “I got news for [Hamas]—[Israelis] were there first, before their faith existed,” The Times of Israel he said, referring to Islam. You know, just casually erasing the entire existence of Palestinians as a people who’ve lived on that land for thousands of years.

The reaction was swift and brutal. Palestinian American comedian Amer Zahr said it is “baffling” how out of touch the Harris campaign is. “It’s hard to imagine anything more insulting than what Bill Clinton said about us. He invoked the oldest Zionist tropes in some bizarre effort to convince us to vote for Kamala Harris.”

Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn—the US’s first Arab-majority city—told Al Jazeera: “When you see the remarks of former President Bill Clinton, talking about how Israel is forced to kill civilians … it gets extremely frustrating.” As one analysis put it, Clinton “appeared to suggest that they’re wrong to be outraged by the catastrophic death toll from Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Social media erupted, with journalist Sana Saeed calling it “one of the most horrific genocidal diatribes a U.S. leader has gone on in decades.”

Xavier Abu Eid, a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, wrote: “Clinton is concluding what he started in Camp David, July 2000, where he adopted Israeli positions and blamed Palestinians for not accepting them. Don’t know what he had in mind, but this isn’t going to help the Harris campaign add a single vote from Arab Americans.”

And again: why? This was one week before the election. In Michigan. Speaking to Arab Americans. People were desperately searching for reasons to believe Democrats weren’t as monstrous on Gaza as they appeared. He could have lied! Many would have believed him! But nope—he had to make it crystal clear that when it comes to Palestine, Democrats are just Republicans with pronouns.

The pattern was everywhere. Pro-Palestine voices banned from the DNC. A Muslim delegate literally kicked out of a campaign event—not for protesting, just for.. existing while Muslim, I guess? And then—and then—Kamala skips Dearborn, Michigan entirely. The largest Arab-American city in the country. In a swing state. During a razor-thin election.

The message couldn’t be clearer: “We dare you not to vote for us. We’re actively testing how little self-respect you have.” So when pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a Harris rally in Detroit by simply stating they “won’t vote for genocide,” she shut them up with her catchphrase, “I’m speaking”. Even with polling data showing “growing support for Trump among Arab American voters in Michigan, with many citing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s stance on Middle Eastern conflicts as a primary factor”, the Democrats saw it coming and just… kept going.

So Trump wins, and—wouldn’t you guess? The post-election discourse from the Democratic establishment wasn’t much better. We’re talking photo-ops with Netanyahu, several visits to Israel by Congressmen, the hilariously names “50 States, One Israel” event where 250 states legislators went to Israel, many of whom were Democrats. Not only that, but to ensure not being outdone by future political flubs, freaking Pete Buttigieg decides to repeat atrocity propaganda about October 7th “babies in ovens”—lies that were debunked over and over for two whole years, even by Israeli media itself. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they’re trying to be funny.

I’ve covered a lot of political self-destruction over the years. I’ve seen parties implode, candidates crater, movements eat themselves alive. But this? This suicide-by-megaphone routine the Democrats are running on Gaza? I’ve never seen anything quite like this shutting up handicap.

Someone please explain what I’m missing. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like a party that would rather lose elections than stop telling pro-Palestine voters to go fondle themselves.

And they wonder why people won’t vote for them.

The Gaza Pause That Isn’t

by damagecollateral

They’re calling it a breakthrough. A triumph of diplomacy. The latest example of American leadership bringing peace to the Middle East, or some such hogwash.

Let’s cut through the victory-lap fog: this ceasefire isn’t about ending anything. It’s about managing the optics of a 77-year-old project that’s been running on autopilot since the Nakba. The deal everyone’s celebrating is really just a calibration—turning down the volume on ethnic cleansing from a scream to a whisper, dialing back to the pre-October 7th simmer that didn’t make quite so many people uncomfortable at brunch.

What’s actually changed on the ground? Let me count the ways: nothing, nothing, and nothing.

Gaza remains an open-air prison. The West Bank is still a patchwork of checkpoints and settlements where armed zealots terrorize families with impunity. Palestinians live under a surveillance state that makes the Stasi look like mall security. And Israeli officials keep saying, out loud, with cameras rolling, that there will never be a Palestinian state—a detail that somehow never makes it into the “path to peace” coverage.

Oh, and Gaza? It’s rubble. Flattened. Block after block of what used to be homes, hospitals, schools—gone.

But sure, let’s pop the champagne.

The kicker? Israel’s already violating the agreement. Five Palestinians dead today. Aid trucks stopped at the border. The usual script. While Gazans understandably grab any respite they can get from the nightmare, the rest of us have zero reason to pretend this represents progress.

Don’t believe the hype. This isn’t Washington riding in on a white horse to save Palestinians from Israeli bombs. This is the U.S. and Europe throwing themselves in front of a runaway train – one they built, fueled, and waved goodbye to as it left the station.

The real story? Israel was about to become ungovernable for its Western sponsors.

In recent weeks, the global backlash hit critical mass. Hundreds of thousands were flooding European streets every weekend, not in scattered protests but in coordinated eruptions of rage. In Italy, the government was staring down the barrel of an actual political crisis. These weren’t your standard-issue marches-that-change-nothing. People were done.

Meanwhile, aid flotillas kept multiplying in the Mediterranean, each one a floating middle finger to the official narrative, magnetic poles for thousands of people who’d had enough of doom-scrolling genocide from their living rooms. The couch-to-action pipeline was real, and it was accelerating.

The imperial brain trust looked at the board and realized Israel had painted itself into a corner so tight that the whole regional chessboard was about to flip. That’s what this “peace deal” is actually about – damage control for the alliance, not mercy for the dead.

The American foreign policy establishment is engaged in a grotesque, self-fellating victory lap, pumping out grandiose “peace” announcements like a pharmaceutical company distributing free samples of Xanax. This isn’t celebration—it’s sedation. It’s a calculated dose of institutional Valium, mainlined directly into the cerebral cortex of an global public that was getting dangerously close to giving a damn.

The game here is transparent if you squint even a little: they need us to exhale, high-five each other about “getting the win,” and then zombie-walk back to our regularly scheduled programming. The pressure worked—actual, real pressure from normal human beings who briefly remembered they’re supposed to have opinions about whether we incinerate strangers on the other side of the planet. So naturally, the Blob is betting we’ll do what we always do: declare victory and go home, precisely at the moment when not going home actually matters.

It’s the oldest trick in the Washington playbook. Give the plebes just enough of a “win” to shut them up, then resume operations while they’re still drunk on their own sense of accomplishment.

Don’t take the bait.

The names of American mercenaries in Gaza must be disclosed

by damagecollateral

– “I think you hit one.”

– “Hell yeah, boy!”

The above is from a recorded exchange between two American mercenaries working with the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (HRF) as they shot live ammunition at unarmed hungry Palestinians seeking aid.

No; I’m not merely talking about Israeli soldiers. I’m talking about American mercenaries, many of whom are gentile, who have so far killed a significant portion, if not all, of the 800 unarmed hungry Palestinians murdered for sport as they came to receive flour.

These mercenaries are eventually coming home, and we need to be ready to bring them right to court. In fact, we should be taking legal action now against the GHF and working to incarcerate its Christian Ziosupremacist CEO Johnnie Moore. Human life isn’t something humanity can just brush off as some kind of incident in a conflict. If the death penalty came into existence for a reason, setting up a flour trap for hungry unarmed people that you helped starve then picking them off from the safety of a tower above is exactly that reason.

Of note, these mercenaries do not enjoy the legal protections offered by being active service members. Also, many of them signed up specifically so they can kill people with ease. This is evident by the fact that they shoot humans even as they’re leaving aid distribution sites. They know, and have been promised by their handlers, that they will not be fighting Hamas. They would not have signed up otherwise.

Yes, there’s a reason why the word mercenary is a dirty word.

You probably think I’m exaggerating, but if you’ve been in a conflict zone you’d know it’s a magnet for psychopaths from all corners of the globe. It’s one of the things no one writes about in war. Many snipers working in Syria, for example, were neither Syrian nor ideologically aligned with the side they were killing for. Locals working to scout out and hunt down such snipers have gotten used to the unsavory discovery that the sniper they’ve been pursuing for weeks is actually some suburban white dude from Europe or North America who is only there for the “thrill”. He’s bored of a life without murder. There’s a hole in his heart that can only be filled by seeing human heads exploding through a rifle scope. This is a very real and pervasive thing in war.

And the GHF makes it all “legit”. No need to smuggle yourself solo into a conflict zone and have to learn the terrain the hard way. Apply online and you get to satisfy your thirst for blood and act out your hatred toward “Muzlums” all at once! And if you have a chronic case of butt hurt from what happened to you or your comrades in Iraq or Afghanistan, you get to enjoy the illusion of reclaiming part of your lost manhood, too, by offing some brown people who speak the same language as those who gave you said butt hurt. Not only that, but you get to make a boat load of tax payer money to boot! Apply now!

The reason for the existence of the GHF is to upend the well organized, fair, dignified methods of distribution already established in Gaza by the UN and other humanitarian organizations and replace them with one chaotic, Darwinian scheme in order to humiliate Palestinians and spread chaos to weaken the resolve of Gazans. Many of the GHF’s mercenaries, and certainly all of its management, are fully aware of this and have signed up knowing that this is their goal. Surely some of them, such as the whistleblowers behind the AP report linked above, signed up genuinely thinking they’d be helping Palestinians, but the murder toll so far is too great and the reports too damning to give the GHF or the majority of its mercenaries any benefit of the doubt.

Enough is enough. These f*ckers need to be put on trial. I don’t want one of them to be my neighbor when they come back, and I’m sure most Americans share my sentiment.

To My Dear Conservative Friends

by damagecollateral
Conservatism. The fake kind.

I share your conservatism. Heck, I’m more conservative than half of you on the stuff you supposedly care about. My conservatism actually informs my worldview, which apparently makes me some kind of radical. Because when my conservatism sees over 12,000 children transformed into hamburger in Gaza, it doesn’t shrug and change the channel. It doesn’t wait for permission from a think tank to feel something. My conservatism—the actual, functioning version—makes me want to do something about it right friggin’ now.

My conservatism also tells me that if someone shows up at my door claiming they own my house because their great-great-great-grandfather’s cousin’s neighbor maybe lived here three millennia ago, I’m not handing over the keys. I’m reaching for the gun you people won’t shut up about. And if they start “mowing the lawn”—that’s the term, by the way, that’s what they call it—slaughtering my family and turning me into a refugee, you bet your bum I’m using violence.

Are you seriously telling me you wouldn’t? You, with your Gadsden flags and your Toby Keith ringtones and your entire personality built around the Second Amendment, you’re going to lecture me about “peaceful resistance” while your kids are getting vaporized? Please. Spare me the performance.

My conservatism puts me on the side of people who don’t surrender their homes to satisfy someone else’s delusional sense of divine real estate entitlement. My conservatism tells me I don’t owe reparations for some Bronze Age exodus that may or may not have happened when people were still figuring out the wheel. That’s conservatism. Or it used to be.

My conservatism makes my blood pressure spike when I watch foreign lobbies actively work to abolish my First Amendment rights—making it literally illegal to boycott a country or criticize an ideology. They’re doing this right now, in state legislatures, in Congress, attaching it to highway bills like a tumor. How’s your conservatism handling that? Or does it only activate when someone says “Happy Holidays”?

My conservatism believes in fiscal responsibility, which is apparently now a fringe position. So when we’re shoveling tens of billions to a government conducting a livestreamed genocide while Americans can’t afford insulin and cops are working second jobs at Walmart, my conservatism gets twitchy. Does yours? Or is yours only concerned with deficits when a Democrat’s in office?

So here’s my question: when does your conservatism kick in? What’s the activation code? Do you need Tucker Carlson to say it’s okay first? Or did you buy some premium version of conservatism that only works when it’s convenient, that somehow malfunctions every time it might cost you something real? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re running a demo version that only boots up when the TV tells it to.

How you know Israel is doomed

by damagecollateral

You know it by the renewed reminders of Israel’s origins. Every time the Palestinian strife is in the news, a lot of the online educational content among Palestine supporters (which is most people around the world and most social media influencers) is about what happened in 1948 and about how Zionism began in the 1800s.

That is to say, the historical examination does not stop at how Israel has been illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. No, it almost unfailingly goes back to Israel’s establishing. In other words, the very legality of the existence of Israel is always being subjected to scrutiny.

This is profound. Consider over 7 decades of complete Western acceptance of Israel, journalistic complicity and endorsement, billions spent to prop up and maintain Israel, countless tours for Westerners hosted by Israel, military and intelligence complete integration with the West, thorough corporate endorsement.. All of that, and yet Israel’s very right to exist keeps being reevaluated.

By now, it’s safe to say that this reevaluation will never go away so long as Israel is in existence.

If I were a philosopher, I would be fascinated by this. It is a strong example of the universality and permanence of certain moral values. Despite all efforts, time lapsed, and all attempts at revising history by erasing all mention of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-1948, the establishment of Israel never became right, Israel remains an uneasy anomaly and the truth about Israel’s founding could never be concealed. The validity of Israel’s founding is always being questioned and even lamented among large swaths of intellectuals in the West.

To be fair, though, there are factors without which this renewed examination of Israel’s establishing may not take place. If, for hypothetical example, there were no Palestinian resistance, if said resistance were too meager to be of much significance, if Palestinians were not as numerous, if Palestinians were not relatively homogenous culturally, if Palestinians were not relatively universally oppressed, the balance may have tipped in favor of Israel being an easy fit into the collective conscience of the world.

Regardless of the causes and factors, the end result is the same. Israel’s right to exist is always in question despite all efforts, and that’s astonishing and damning at the same time.

American foreign policy strategists should start to envision a future without Israel

by damagecollateral

It should have never made sense. A country created by importing foreigners to steal the lands of the locals and ethnically cleanse them, and in the heart of the Muslim world? On one of Muslims’ main holy places?

Just thinking about the idea feels exhaustingly anti laws of nature. Whoever thought it would work for long cannot have been thinking clearly. If I had to guess, I’d say it was power drunkenness. What we’ve been seeing since 10/7 (and for most of the year in the West Bank) is not some glitch in the code. It’s not an anomalous breakaway event that needs to be corrected so we can go back to the same old program. Rather, what we’re witnessing is the only possible natural consequence for this unnatural project called Israel.

Israel is the way we chose to treat Muslims in the East Mediterranean. The question I keep asking myself is: why did we in America choose to treat Muslims based on a European narrative? Why did we have to transfer Europe’s Crusader baggage into our mindset? After all, it was Muslims in Morocco who were the first to recognize the US after its independence. In fact, Muslim sentiments were in favor of the US since Americans revolted against, and gained independence from, an enemy of Muslims called Britain. Muslims loved the American ideal of freedom from oppression and, after our independence, welcomed our convoys and embassies with open arms.

So why, then, did we decide that we need to stick this thing called Israel as our colonial outpost in the heart of the Muslim world to keep Muslims under our boots? Which brilliant think tank came up with that one?

It could have been much different. We could have chosen to have the whole Muslim world be our friends. Things could have been much more peaceful even without us losing our power or influence in the world. But instead we chose to create an entity that would upend world peace for decades, spend billions to preserve it, and have the planet witness so many wars and conflicts because of it.

Why?

To what end? That is the question that needs to be on the minds of American foreign policy makers. How did the idea that Israel is good for us come to be and how is it actually good for us? It’s ok to rethink basic questions like that every now and then, and for us, it’s about time we do so.