ON PICKING OUR ALLIES WISELY
Once upon a time, there were millions of hard-working Americans suffering from economic anxiety. There were millions of God-fearing Americans who didn't want their kids having to share sports or restrooms or showers with people who "felt like" they were the same gender but had been born the other one. There were millions of Americans who didn't want the economy sacrificed on the altar of environmentalism. Let's set aside, for the moment, whether these fears actually made sense: reasonable people can and will disagree on that--but each can be felt and argued in good faith: I know, because as a conservative, I have some sympathy for them.
Along came Donald Trump, making sympathetic noises and promising that "he alone" could and would DO something about them. They scarcely noticed the racists and misogynists and antisemites and anti-vax nutcases and democracy-hating billionaires and LITERAL RUSSIAN AGENTS who were following in his wake. And then one day they woke up and found they were in bed with the people who had actually manufactured the very problems they'd been concerned about. People who wanted not just to exercise THEIR rights to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness according to their OWN beliefs, but TO DENY THOSE RIGHTS to their neighbors who saw those issues differently.
I mention this because I just saw the below in a post on LinkedIn FROM my connection Peter Hotez--and it clicked with the above AND with an issue I've been talking about with my friends, colleagues, and family members protesting #IsraelAtWarCrimes, decrying our perennial role as #GenocidesBodyguards, and demanding #JusticeForPalestine.
Because once upon a time, there were millions of people sharing each of these concerns, who hold them in good faith. I know this, because I'm ONE OF THEM. And when #KingBibiAntipas buried warnings from my friends & classmates running Egyptian intelligence so he could use the 7 October attacks to turbocharge the century-old #EthnicCleansing of Palestine into a full-blown #genocide, we found ourselves with people falling over themselves to be our allies. And we scarcely noticed that among them were also small but vocal & energetic numbers who were there because they were funded by Iranian intelligence, or who were there because they were antisemites who JUST HATED JEWS, or who were there because they thought America was the source of all evil in the world, or who just wanted to get us fighting each other.
And it just hit me that in BOTH of these cases, on the political right AND left, there's a common thread--and we need to wake up to it before we find ourselves protesting weakly that we did #nazi it coming....
