NEW: In 2016, Peter Thiel said he wanted to avoid the Middle East like the plague. Ten years later, his firms are helping Israel and the US, first, carry out genocide in Gaza, and now, destroy Iran.

What happened? For one, their mutual friend Jeffrey Epstein:🧵 According to DoJ emails, Epstein tried at least 6 times to connect the two, and they met at least 2-3 times. Barak told Thiel he was involved in the "Israeli hi tech scene" and that they'd have "a lot of areas of common interest." They discussed assassination squads at one point:

Lot of knee-jerk & dumb criticisms of AOC, but the debate over her Munich talk is not it. There are legitimate concerns here. Let's start with the politics: both Trump and Biden won by vowing, however dishonestly, that they would not take the country into new wars. This is... ...a broadly compelling pitch that speaks to both war-weary voters & more ideological critics of US foreign policy. Read that again: it's not "no dumb wars"; it's not "no genocides"; it's not "wars but only for nice reasons."

It's no more wars. And more to the point...

NEW: Ehud Barak had 60+ in-person meetings w/ Jeffrey Epstein from Sept 2010 to March 2019. At least seven happened while he was Minister of Defense of Israel under Netanyahu.

Among the latest revelations about the two men's close friendship from the DoJ release:🧵 In one text exchange from when Barak was Israeli MoD, Barak appears to acknowledge that he had used Epstein's advice for some official business he was working on related to Davos. Suggests Epstein had ability to influence Israeli govt policy through his relationship w/ Barak.

The "woman in pink" tells CNN she went to where Pretti was eventually murdered because she had downtime before a job and heard whistles. Says she was going to drive through but saw the chaos ahead - agents attacking people, cars - and thought of Renee Good, so stopped. Says... ...Pretti directed her to a parking spot. She saw him filming and directing traffic and decided to start filming as well, to back him up. But she didn't think she was capturing anything until the agent first shoved the other woman into the pavement whose side he came to. She...

I found more than two-dozen instances in the past year of fed. immigration agents drawing their guns on or otherwise threatening deadly force against people they didn't arrest. Most were US citizens, usually people protesting ICE. Many mirrored the Renee Good killing.🧵: Many were in CA:
- A policeman stops, seeing a man pointing a gun at a woman - he's an ICE agent mad she followed him.
- A masked agent points a gun at demonstrators at a raid.
- An agent points a gun at a pastor at a church.

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.