I dunno if people really understand how bad what's happened to Gaza is. So here's a collection of stats (often conservative undercounts) that make clear how much worse this is than anything we've seen in recent history.🧵

1st, the death rate & proportion of civilians killed:
2nd, the extraordinary violence toward children, both statistically & anecdotally, and the famine we're now watching:

Musk gets all the attm, but what's unfolding rn is in line with the little-explored career-long vision of OMB director Russell Vought, an anti-govt radical who spent his life trying to unravel the post-New Deal state. He sees the Trump movement he infiltrated as his last chance🧵 Vought got his start under the GOP establishment Trump ran against. 1st, former Sen. Phil Gramm, one of the leading crusaders for radical deficit-cutting & deregulation - while Vought was at his office, Gramm wrote the repeal of Glass-Steagall that led to the 2008 financial crash

As with Azov in Ukraine, to get an accurate picture of HTS (which now rules Syria), you have to read reporting/analysis at pretty much any point before there was a geopolitical interest in supporting them - and which ofc is totally contrary to what we hear now . Some examples: CSIS, August 2023: HTS is "an authoritarian statelet" that uses "brutal measures," and there are signs its supposed moderation is just a smokescreen to gain more power.
csis.org/blogs/examinin…

United Healthcare has a decades-long history of working to limit and/or halt attempts at health care reform, from Hillarycare & Obama's effort, to Medicare for All in 2019, and whether the public option or more modest expansions of Medicare - all while enriching itself. A thread: UHC was among the big industry players who were pushing the Clintons' doomed "managed competition" model from the inside - they even provided Hillary's adviser on the effort, whom the admin admitted was a clear conflict of interest.

Overwhelming evidence is that this was, like '08, '20, or so many elections that came before, a wave election throwing the ruling party out & driven by economic unhappiness. It's what polls said going in and what exit polls reflected. Democrats didn't see it coming because...
...the media/commentators Dem officials listen to has been misleading them for years, telling them to focus on impressive topline figures at the expense of stats showing growing hardship under Biden + the impact of the pandemic-era safety net & its gradual disappearance.

Strangely little discussed is how Trump & his allies are v. explicitly planning and promising to use the immense repressive power of the fed govt to weaken & destroy the pro-Palestinian movement & the Left as a whole. Their aim is, literally and quite openly, a third Red Scare:

These are not the eccentric plans of a handful of obscure Trump allies, but something backed by the top of the ticket. Anti-socialist rhetoric has become central to Trumpworld's rhetoric & worldview the past 4 years:

Many things explain the last year of Biden & the Democrats' monstrous Gaza policy. An underdiscussed one is Morning Joe, the political show of choice for DC elites, Joe Biden first among them, as well as VP Harris & WH aides. I watched the first 6 months of its Gaza coverage:🧵 The show went out of its way to rationalise the destruction of Gaza any way it could. This was not subtle work. The horror of the Nagasaki atomic bombing was 1st invoked about Hamas' attack. Later, it was invoked in comparison to Israel, to argue its crimes were acceptable.

Six Israeli & US officials tell Politico that the White House encouraged Israel to invade Lebanon, that they had to be quiet about it for PR purposes (good work on that), and that this sparked opposition from within the Pentagon, State & intel agencies.
politico.com/news/2024/09/3… As Erik points out here, the actual president is barely mentioned in the decision-making on this, with two advisors - incl. ex-Bush official Brett McGurk, the chief figure behind Biden's awful Gaza policy - instead the ones reported as responsible.

https://x.com/ErikSperling/status/1840981496598818910

Where does Joe Biden's ruinous devotion to Israel come from? There is a broad consensus that he is simply uniquely emotionally invested in Israel. Biden himself has said it came from his father. Earlier this year I went to Delaware to try learn and found...a different story: Clue #1 is the mini-scandal in Biden's 1st Senate campaign, when a volunteer quit because Biden said he had to keep his real views on Israel-Palestine secret in the chase for donors, and that he would adopt for the rest of his career whatever position he took then.

NEW: An analysis of more than 500 donors to AIPAC Super PAC United Democracy Project shows nearly 60% are top-level execs, nearly half of whom work in the FIRE sector. The average donation was nearly $90k. Just one notable fact in the latest @inthesetimesmag cover story:



Of the donors who gave $200k or more, 26% are either GOP or Trump donors or both.

But in some ways, partisan affiliation is beside the point, because even UDP's blue donors are directly opposed - sometimes on a personal, financial level - to the progressive agenda...

Here are the front pages of various major US outlets on the day that the count of bodies discovered in mass graves in Gaza hospitals nears 400, some showing signs they were buried alive. Here's the New York Times. The "Israel-Hamas" war only makes it in further down (see pic 2), and then only to mention the US & allies calling on Hamas to release hostages + memorial to slain aid workers. A snapshot from the morning (pic 3) focuses entirely on campus protests.

People who spent 21 mths talking about Ukr. agency & doing whatever "Ukrainians" want are silent at new evidence the US/UK scuttled early peace talks. That's cause throughout the war, these lefty buzzwords have exclusively been deployed only in service of war. A thread: From the start, it's been clear a considerable no. of Ukrainians didn't fit the image we were sold of happy warriors who'd fight forever & pay any cost to win. Many Ukrainians, incl. leftists, backed negotiations. The pro-"agency" crowd simply pretended they didn't exist.

I remember vividly 2011's Libyan intervention, how quickly it was declared a success, and how just 5 years later it was such a disaster everyone responsible disowned it. As the Niger crisis shows, even 12 years later we live with its unintended consequences. A brief history: The intervention was 1st made possible by an overwhelming media & political narrative that painted an over-simplistic picture of what was happening and threw around charges of impending genocide, comparisons to Rwanda etc. Only years later was it challenged and disproven.

Is it true that after 5 years of the Squad in Congress, the Left has nothing to show for it? That AOC et al are no different to establishment Democrats?

I did something novel and did reporting, actually talking to advocacy orgs, unions, activists. They painted a diff picture: Like Sanders, AOC has had success attaching successful amendments to larger bills - her repeal of the Clinton-era Faircloth Amendment passed the House, for e.g. The Squad also played a leading role in a 2019-20 win against mass surveillance.

Why does the "failing bank" exception - the loophole JPMorgan just used to get dangerously bigger, which lets already too-big banks get even bigger as long as they do it by buying collapsing banks - even exist? The official rationale is, regulators view it as a public service: Of course, this ignores the public interest in *not* letting banks get dangerously huge, and the costs of subsequent bailouts for unstable institutions, as critics pointed out at the time. But no matter.

Since the invasion, the Zelensky govt's repression of the Ukrainian Left, anti-war voices, and other dissidents has ramped up dramatically, along w/ centralising power & "de-Russification." And it's being directly enabled by its US & European partners. A thread: To start with, a few major figures who have been targeted w/ prosecution for what are now considered dissident views, starting with Volodymyr Chemerys, a famed leftist dissident who's played a leading role in just about every major recent protest movement in the country.

This piece on how law, human rights standards, and what we regard as basic democratic principles are at odds with Ukraine's security is a good e.g. of the country's authoritarian lurch since the war. See the next tweet for who funded this.
visegradinsight.eu/how-pro-russia… Yes, the fellowship program under which the above was written gets 70% of its funding from the ironically named NED. Moscow's invasion is, sadly and as is often the case, only one part of the story of the political misfortune this country's been put through.

Fascinating interview with ex-Israeli PM Naftali Bennett about Rus-Ukr peace talks early in the war. Arguably the biggest tidbit is he says outright that NATO govts blocked a ceasefire that both Putin & Zelensky wanted. A lot else in there too...
Firstly, here is the timestamp where he says the West blocked it. Note that in Bennett's view, them doing so was "legitimate" & maybe a good thing, for the usual reason that you hear: to send a message to other aggressors around the world.

Some select passages from the new report from RAND, a DoD-funded think tank, about how a long war in Ukraine isn't good for anyone. You'll note many of these points are/have been dismissed by Western commentators, often by calling them Kremlin propaganda: Russian nuclear use is not a mere bluff, as evidenced by the high costs Putin has been willing to pay for Ukraine - which it notes has a special place in Russian FP thinking. A Russian nuke could also easily spark wider nuclear war.

Western hypocrisy on foreign policy is not just "whataboutism," nor irrelevant. It turns out there's a real, tangible cost - for both hard-headed US interests & for earnest believers in a just world order - to years of it. Let me summarise in a thread:
currentaffairs.org/2023/01/us-hyp… First, let me outline the various hypocrisies and double standards - not in the distant past, but happening right now - that make a mockery of Western rhetoric & policy on Rus & Urk. First among them is the steadfast Western backing of the Saudi autocracy's war on Yemen:

A little more info on Zients' role as cost-cutter-in-chief under Obama and what it looked like in practice: mandating arbitrary cuts from agencies, relentless performance reviews meant to decide if something was "waste" or not. It also... ...involved an entirely pointless fire-sale on federal real estate - which was to save very little money in the long run and the CBO estimated would actually *add* to the deficit - and, v. relevant to today, permitting reform that would get projects through enviro. review quicker