democrats

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?

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.