Attention to the Unseen

Ben Davis writes: Sometimes, a major electoral victory is a sign of a movement in retreat and a crumbling consensus. Take California’s gay marriage ban in 2008, at the time seen as a major defeat for gay rights advocates. But the victory of Prop 8 hid the underlying shift: the very fact that gay rights, unthinkable even a few years prior, was a polarized electoral issue showed that anti-gay rights forces were losing in the long term. The same is…

Read More Read More

In 2020, Peter Beinart wrote: In October, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who is seeking re-election in Georgia, released an ad called “Birds of Prey” attacking her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock. The title refers to a sermon Warnock gave during protests in the Gaza Strip in 2018, in which he accused the Israeli government of shooting “unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey.” In a statement accompanying the ad, Loeffler called Warnock “the most anti-Israel candidate anywhere in the country.” The next month, she unveiled a…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: President Biden and his Democratic allies have cast his reelection campaign as a battle for the country’s survival, warning that a second Donald Trump presidency would present an existential threat to American democracy. In speeches and campaign ads, Biden points to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his incitement of an angry mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the former president’s boasts that he will use the…

Read More Read More

  Tuesday is the culmination of the most expensive primary race in U.S. history in New York’s 16th Congressional District. Democratic Congressmember Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx middle school principal and one of the first to call for a ceasefire in Gaza in October, is being challenged by a former corporate executive, George Latimer, who was encouraged to run by the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. Outside spending in the race has topped $23 million, much of it from pro-Israel…

Read More Read More

The Associated Press reports: From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House. Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security….

Read More Read More

The Daily Beast reports: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s release from a British prison could not have made Russia’s top propagandists happier. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan led the pack early Tuesday with a statement on Telegram paying tribute to the “best journalist of our time.” Noting that she was “awfully happy” to finally see Assange win his freedom, she recalled a one-on-one covert chat she said she had with him once in the “woods outside London.” After asking him why he…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: [V]oters opposed to both candidates are not monolithic. Some mildly dislike both candidates, but have made peace with voting for the one they prefer. Others deeply disdain Biden and Trump, and seem incredulous that they find themselves choosing between “the lesser of two evils” — a phrase more than a half-dozen voters used in describing their Election Day calculus. And others plan to not vote or to opt for a third-party candidate, be it independent Robert…

Read More Read More