As the horrors and screams of Palestinians in Gaza grow fainter in the liberal mind and the genocide remains at a simmer of disease, starvation, intermittent bombing, and encirclement, it’s clear the Democrats’ plan is to downplay, obscure, co-opt, feign concern about, but ultimately run out the clock on the salience of the issue.
The arch-zionist Democratic leadership of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer will evidently not be changing anytime soon. Jeffries, the largest recipient of money from pro-Israel donors in 2024 (they gave him 11 times more than his second largest donor, Apollo Global Management) and Chuck Schumer (the only remaining Democrat in the Senate who opposed Obama’s 2015 Iran deal and told the New York Times last year his “job is keeping the left pro-Israel), will remain in charge of the ostensibly liberal party—as progressives offer public support for Jeffries with all the enthusiasm and warmth of a hostage video. Despite them running through the motions of appearing opposed to ending the war on Iran, Jeffries and Schumer continue to not support and demagogue against the June MOU, the key plausible pathway to actually ending it. This way, per a plan detailed by DropSite News last February, they can do the US security state and Israel’s bidding by disciplining Iran without having to absorb the political consequences of the deeply unpopular war. After all, in early 2025 Jeffries declared, in front of an audience of Israel supporters, “we can’t take our foot off the gas pedal until Iran is brought to its knees.” And it’s unclear how else Jeffries thinks Iran would be brought to its knees if not via GBU-57A/B MOPs.
Meanwhile, the deck for the 2028 primary—where the 75%+ of Democratic voters who oppose Israel should, at least in theory, matter—is being stacked. The first state in the primary has been moved from Iowa/New Hampshire to South Carolina, ostensibly to boost Black political power, but really it’s because South Carolina is the most pro-Israel, and more rightwing in general, primary state on offer due to its population skewing older and more conservative. An August IMEU poll of Democrats found that opposition to Israel in South Carolina was, by amazing coincidence, significantly less than the other possible states, Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, New Mexico, and Virginia.
Liberal zionists, which is to say zionists, who affirm all the axioms of Palestinian dispossession and killing but with better humanitarian ornamentation, like Beshear, Talarico, Ossoff and Buttigieg are getting the obligatory 2028 hype with the assumption that—in combination with the aforementioned fading of the horrors and screams—their more polished sympathy-speak on Gaza will sufficiently paper over the contradictions.
Leading progressives in Congress are refusing to heighten said contradictions, confront party leaders or really talk about Gaza unless prompted. And when they do, like Ro Khanna, they continue to peddle J-Street approved liberal zionist busywork that will do nothing to end the siege and genocide. Khanna refuses to endorse a full arms embargo (the only thing that would actually alter Israel’s behavior), and continues to advance the basic premise of the genocide that “Hamas” are uniquely evil “terrorists” that exist outside of history and must, axiomatically, be removed. Israel, he concedes, is committing genocide, but he also insists US lawmakers shouldn’t ban “defensive” weapons sales so Israel can defend itself while carrying out, what Khanna himself acknowledges, is genocide. Indeed, it’s the first genocide in history where nominal allies calling it a genocide also think the genocidal party ought to have “defensive” weapons lest they suffer any consequence or pushback from said genocide. None of it makes any sense, but it’s not really supposed to. It’s supposed to gesture toward freedom and dignity for Palestinians without the risk of combating the brainless Washington taboos justifying their perpetual murder and subjugation.
Even those with decent lines, who are genuinely anti-zionist or anti-zionist lite, like Senator-Elect Abdul El-Sayed, are content laundering the reputations of those who lied and incited against the Palestinians of Gaza on the altar of electability. Which, they justify as a necessary condition of winning power, but, in the aggregate, definitely signals the ante to not have the full weight of the party crash down on you is to normalize and help progressive-wash the genocide’s biggest champions. The incentives, even for people relatively good on the subject, are to get along, be a good party soldier, and ultimately move on from what the Biden-Harris administration, and the Democrats more broadly, did to the people of Palestine in late 2023 and 2024.
Leading potential progressives for the White House—Reps. Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen—refuse to commit to not hiring genocidal Biden White House officials, dodging messages from the DropTheGenocide20 campaign that I am involved in. They don’t even need to endorse our list. The ask is that they endorse some list, or give any comment at all about how they would, in the event they won the nomination, seek to hold Biden officials responsible for genocide accountable. Rep Rashida Tlaib and Rep-Elect Chris Rabb have thrown their support behind the effort, but those with their eyes on the big prize are avoiding any discussion of accountability. Why? One reason could be that, unlike Tlaib and Rabb, Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez have accused Israel of genocide but, very cleverly and without much notice, have never accused the Biden White House of genocide or even complicity in genocide despite this distinction making no sense. But when your progressive politics must stop at the partisan water’s edge, one has to avoid being too critical of one’s party, lest the full force of party leadership, liberal media, and the Israel lobby be visited upon you. Better to split the difference, signal a kind of vague author-less outrage, then pivot to much safer topics of “affordability” and Medicare for All. These compromises, we are told, are not surrenders but strategic retreats. But—and this is probably the most important lesson in progressive politics—strategic retreats turn into surrenders long before the person doing the surrendering notices it happening.
In this leadership void, fueled by a combination of cowardice, careerism and liberal zionist counter-insurgency—in this malaise of mushy, nominally pro-Palestine electeds who refuse to challenge their own party’s leadership, to complicate “Hamas must go” conventional wisdom, who refuse to acknowledge, much less lead on, accountability for ex-Biden officials—a right-wing populist demagogue, in my estimation, waits to fill this void.
This demagogue, I fear, will be Tucker Carlson. J.D. Vance is currently soft launching a version of this angle post mid-term but he has neither the organic base of support nor the verisimilitude of conviction to pull it off. Tucker has a large online following, and his compelling brand of Slopulism on the topic perfectly exploits the moral outrage of Gaza and the deep frustration with the role of the Israel lobby (made all the more salient with spiking gas prices caused by the Israel-pushed war on Iran) in a neat, ethnonationalist package. Brainless Jew-baiting is much easier than sophisticated left anti-imperialist critiques. Pandering to nationalist egos that Israel is wagging the dog, tales of neocons manipulating an otherwise peace-seeking Trump, play to the cheap seats and—unlike a genuine commitment to humanism and anti-imperialism—will invite financial support from accelerationist antisemites like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
We know this angle can work because he has, in a sense, pulled it off twice before. Carlson successfully helped sheepdog Trump’s entirely fake antiwar brand in 2016 and 2024, convincing millions of war-weary voters that the Republican nominee was secretly going to end wars and take on the deep state, despite raking in hundreds of millions from war profiteers and zionists. It was an angle that only worked because the Democrats nominated the staunchly pro-war, pro-Israel Hillary Clinton and the genocide-defending Kamala Harris. Carlson, in the event he attempts a third-party run, is smart enough to join with an ostensibly progressive name, possibly a Cenk Uygur who has long peddled alliances with fascists and shown a willingness to lend credibility to the antiwar bonafides of Trump’s dipshit sons.
To be clear: I do not think a Carlson administration would, in any way, be good for Palestine for many reasons, but the most obvious one is that Carlson has played the double game before. In addition to electioneering for the arch-zionist Trump three times, Carlson claimed to be a major champion of US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the second Biden actually pulled out in August 2021, Carlson proceeded to Benghazi Biden over the withdrawal from the neocon Right for years on end. Tucker Carlson is concerned with one thing: sheep dogging Alex Jones-types into voting for Republicans or, in the event, himself. And he’s very good at this schtick.
It’s unclear how a Carlson run would play out, of course, but he’s smart enough to see there’s a large, disproportionately online cohort of voters who are disgusted by the “uniparty’s” manifest support for perma-war and Israel, who see the images of dead children and seemingly endless money for leveling schools and hospitals while schools and hospitals stateside fall apart and no one is articulating this frustration. Democratic progressives refusing to call out the complicity of party leaders, of Biden’s role in the past three years of endless war and death, reads, to this very persuadable cohort, as dishonest and venal. The refusal to take the anti-establishment posture, to name names within their own party, signals a lack of credibility, a lack of urgency. This leaves a lane wide open for a fascist, either as an independent or in the Republican party primary, to take the issue, and those related to it (Iran, high gas prices, inflation) and turn it into a stew of raw, bigoted demagoguery and ethno-nationalism. Democratic leadership, whose ideological and financial commitments to zionism are the highest priority of the party, will not budge (and indeed, in key ways, they would much prefer shadow boxing “antiwar” fascists than Left anti-imperialists). The only way this toxic dynamic changes in a constructive way is for those ostensibly running within the Democratic Party to “change the US’s relationship with Israel,” stop playing nice with Jeffries and the New York Times, stop laundering the reputations of war criminals, stop indulging fake “antisemitism” zionist crybully tactics, heighten contradictions and refuse to let Gaza fade into the background as some “mistake” we all need to get over for the sake of Party Unity. Absent this, absent leadership on the issue, absent a clear moral line in the sand and a willingness to confront Party Leaders, a dangerous and potentially successful Tucker 2028 run seems, at least in my estimation, all but inevitable.