MEMEING THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
DEBBIE DOWNER AND THE WET BLANKET OF GAZA
THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM OF BATMAN VILLAINS
The Democratic National Convention dominated the airwaves last week, pushing the marketing line that they are the party of joy while the Republicans are the party of weird. Liberal pundits hyping the event were fine with, even happy, with it being about vibes over substance. It was such a slog to sit through all the flashy graphics and dishonest speeches I wished for a supervillian to crash in and destroy the whole charade. This reminded me of the themes of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies with the Joker portrayed as an anarchist who wanted to see the world burn and Bane being a revolutionary socialist who wanted to destroy and replace Gotham’s police state government. Also in the satirical Harley Quinn animated series there is a plotline where the Joker runs for mayor of Gotham on a socialist platform and wins. This isn’t limited to Batman as leftist movie makers have always been trying to find ways of sneaking in economically progressive ideas into movies under the noses of the capitalist movie barons.
DEBBIE DOWNER AND THE WET BLANKET OF GAZA
The racist genocide of a native people by a colonial apartheid power is happening right now. And the Biden/Harris administration have been the worst stewards of Israel-Palestine in American history. Previous administrations have asserted their influence to reign Israel in when it became too aggressive in the persecution of the Palestinian people. But the Biden administration have given them carte blanche to massacre civilians in Gaza. They make public statements like “we’re having hard conversations with Israel behind closed doors . . . minimizing civilian casualties is a priority . . . we’re working tirelessly for a ceasefire but Hamas,” yet the results show these are lies. What they have to do — what they will never do — is stop sending arms.
Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of the world and have been condemned for war crimes by the United Nations; and the UN has put forth ceasefire resolutions that were blocked by the US and Israel. At the same time raids in the West Blank have been ramping up and more Palestinians are being moved from the homes. Israel are moving into the final solution phase of their occupation where they will kill or move all Palestinians in the region and completely occupy all lands. Protestors who stand up for justice against this are smeared by the establishment media, congress and the Biden administration as antisemitic.
The truth of the above paragraph, coupled with pictures and videos of the horrors of war -- babies with their heads blown off, children getting amputations without anesthesia, mass graves of entire communities murdered, doctors and nurses killed by sniper fire, people with camp sites near open sewage -- are heavy thoughts to have on the mind.
But you know what? It’s summertime and as an American you have a lot of events to choose from. After I saw Deadpool and Wolverine I realized the summer Olympics had begun and it was San Diego Comic Con that weekend, and the enthusiasm among Democrats for the Kamala Harris campaign was skyrocketing. Plus, global warming has made for some great beach weather and its music festival season. This reminded me of an old recurring SNL skit where a group of friends would be together doing a fun activity, but Debbie Downer would be there to mention some depressing item in the news and ruin the occasion, cue a horn would blaring WHAAA WHAAA! So now when I see a celebrity or a friend either ignore the issue of Gaza or voice their support for Biden/Harris I have a Debbie Downer in my head saying “what about Gaza? How can you be so superficial that you don’t care about the worst atrocity of our time?” And this thought colored my perception of every aspect of the Democratic convention.
AIPAC’S GRIP ON AMERICAN POLITICS
Running up to the convention Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington to address Congress. This is the same congress that recently approved huge aide packets to Israel and have passed anti-free speech resolutions classifying criticism of Israel on college campuses as antisemitic. Most members of congress and the senate have had their campaigns financed by Israel’s AIPAC lobby. And progressive members of congress who have spoken out against Israel are now facing AIPAC funded primary challenges. Recently Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who had been critical of Israel, lost their primaries to AIPAC funded challengers. Much ado was made about unproven election interference by Russia but here we have widespread meddling in our elections by a foreign power in broad daylight and everyone is fine with that. For a member of our government to criticize Israel is to risk their career.
A few chose not to attend out of protest, but most of our congress were there to provide huge applause breaks every time Netanyahu lied about his conduct prosecuting the genocide. America has always supported Israel without waver for its entire existence and this is a built-in evil in our system. Could it ever be broken by protest and boycotts the way America’s support for South African Apartheid was broken? So far the protests have made the Biden administration change their rhetoric on Gaza but not their policy.
Following his visit with congress Netanyahu met with both presidential candidates to ensure their support. Both candidates have promised unconditional aide to Israel. The only difference is how they talk about it. The Biden administration make statements about how bad they feel about the loss of innocent life and have leaked negative information to the press about Netanyahu, signaling they would prefer to deal with a more centrist leader. Trump has uglier rhetoric saying, “You’ve got to finish the problem.”
HARRIS MAKES POPULIST ECONOMIC PROPOSALS. “LIBERALS” LOSE THEIR MINDS.
Harris made a speech on the economy that actually had good ideas in it and the supposedly liberal newspaper the Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, tore it apart. In the speech she said she would do something about greedflation. This is a phenomenon that started in 2020 when prices had to be raised on products due to supply chain shortages. But when the supply shortages ended prices did not go down and in fact, they have continued to rise ever since. Now inflation has risen to a point where it is crippling working class Americans who must take multiple jobs and do gig work to survive. Sky rocketing rents have contributed to a rise in homelessness over the past four years. All the while corporate profits have soared. The Fed printing trillions of dollars to compensate for the COVID shutdowns and subsidize the military industrial complex is a major contributing factor to inflation; but corporations holding prices artificially high is the main culprit.
Surprisingly Harris identified real things that could help ordinary Americans like price caps, rent controls and assistance with making home down-payments.
Journalism used to be a working-class profession where people would work their way up from the mail room to city hall reporter. Now newspapers only hire from prestigious universities, meaning those journalists are from the same socioeconomic class as the Goldman Sachs people. They must defend the interests of the ruling class and make the argument for why helping ordinary Americans is against the interests of the economy. Corporate media has been telling its audiences for a while now that the economy is actually doing great according to their inflated metrics and people shouldn’t believe their lying eyes when they look at the grocery bill. Their claim that price caps would cause shortages is totally false -- it would only cut into unprecedented corporate profits. Conservative outlets like FOX news rolled with the Post story because it would help their ridiculous narrative that a neoliberal like Kamala Harris is a socialist.
It does beg the question, if the Biden administration knows about greedflation then why doesn’t it do something about it now? The answer is that she is making empty campaign promises. Once elected she will make a feeble attempt to pass a bill and as soon as Republicans raise an objection they will fold and drop it, just like student loan debt relief and many other empty promises made by the Democrats.
THE POST-APOCALYPTIC DOOM OF PROJECT 2025
The Democrats don’t have a lot to run on — mostly just abortion. But they do have something to run against: Trump. However, the hysteria over the Trump threat needs an enhancement. What if there was a right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the government and install a fascist dictatorship? That sounds like an extension to what they have been saying about Trump all along and is the fearmongering that was pushed at the Democratic convention all week: BEWARE PROJECT 2025 WILL DOOM AMERICA! Project 2025 is a proposal by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation who for decades have put together proposals for Republican policy. Republican politicians historically have gone with some of their proposals and ignored the ones that are politically unrealistic. Trump’s public statements distancing himself from a lot of Project 2025’s ideas is the latest example. It’s not a take-all deal at all. If the president could suddenly decide the executive branch is all powerful than why didn’t Trump do it when he was president before? I do like the idea in the proposal that they will get rid of all the people who work for CIA/FBI/NSA, but I don’t trust that the Trumpers they would put in their place would be any better. And we know from the way the intelligence agencies persecuted and undermined Trump when he was in office that they are more powerful than the president.
I’m not endorsing Project 2025, I’m just pointing out fear mongering where I see it.
SHIT ON A MIC
Tom Green had a hilarious bit on his show in the 90s where he put shit on his microphone, then with a dead pan expression and a professional TV crew behind him, did man on the street interviews. The people would squirm at the smell of shit but they would answer the questions because he seemed like a legitimate TV guy. It came back to my mind recently and I realized it would make a great meme format where you have people saying how much they love things the media has brainwashed them to accept. In this case it is the two-party system where Americans are taught to love one terrible candidate and hate the other. The idea that there could be a third option has been erased from their minds: third parties are spoilers, bad.
ARE YOU DEMS SURE YOU ARE ANTI-RACIST?
The party that has touted its inclusivity of minorities and LGBTQ+ doesn’t want to hear it about racist genocide. The Uncommitted movement, which is a Democrat group of Arabic Americans that uses the leverage of withholding its vote in order to change Biden’s Gaza policy, was willing to commit to Kamala Harris if only the DNC would allow a speaker to make a short speech, but the event organizers would not have it. They have made the calculation that the protestors will vote with them in the end and having such a speech would anger AIPAC too much. Just like Republicans, mainstream Democrats have internalized the argument that Muslim and Arab countries are more primitive and violent than ours, and a more civilized country like Israel needs to be protected from the Arabic Hordes. Gaza doesn’t even have any gay bars, why should it be allowed to exist?
This is from a clip that went viral that showed DNC attendees covering their ears as the names of murdered Palestinian children were being read from protestors. One person even mocking the idea of the dead children. These are the selfish scum that identify as anti-racist “liberals.”
DNC CO-OPTS TikTok
A bipartisan bill passed the house to ban the platform of TikTok just months ago. That app had stepped over the line by posting too much pro-Palestinian content and had to go. The Democrats, who had been instructing social media sites about who and what to censor for years (but denying it), finally decided to come out and openly throat-stomp people’s freedom of speech. The Republicans, who for years and been yelling about how mad they were about censorship, had an about-face and said they were cool with censorship now because Isreal good and China bad.
But now the Democrats have a better idea. How about they co-opt TikTok instead? Why not pay TikTok’s biggest influencers to come and make viral videos that hype the event? This way they won’t have to deal with the pesky problem of journalists asking questions about policy. The TikTokers got their own booth and space to make videos as well as unlimited time on the floor. Aside from the cable networks, actual journalists were limited to half an hour on the floor.
The rise of pro-Palestinian protestors around the nation has been heartening in that it shows that Gen-Z have political purpose and care about more than just their careers. But that isn’t all Gen-Z. You also have the cynical and greedy conformists who you can’t call sell-outs because they never had integrity to begin with. These are the kind of people who skip over the rebellious period of their youth and go straight to careerism – the ones you used to think would become Republicans, but these days become Democrats.
These influencers were paid to do this by SuperPACs and political campaigns, according to a recent report by journalist Lee Fang. Fang reports the Harris campaign paid 1.9 million to the Village Marketing Agency, a major firm for booking social media influencers who have paid 5,000 social media influencers to push the Harris campaign. “The SuperPAC PrioritiesUSA, founded as Obama’s SuperPAC in 2012 has shifted to digital advocacy,” wrote Fang. The SuperPAC is paying influencers to post pro-Harris content.
This is a brilliant marketing ploy to build excitement in a completely vacuous way. It’s one that will be effective because Gen-Z are more likely to buy products if they are sold to them by an influencer who seems genuine.
OUR NEOCON DUOPOLY
Harris’s acceptance speech made neoconservatives very happy. It was a return to the hawkishness of the Bush administration. Over the years neoconservatives who led us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated to the Democratic party where they are getting us into wars with Russia, Iran and (they hope) China. This is why an old-school neocon like Lindsay Graham loves Biden’s policies in Isreal and Ukraine. In her speech Harris identified the countries that are America’s enemies and promised US military strength. This was a speech that could have been given by George Bush. The war in Ukraine, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties and decimated a generation of Ukrainian men, will continue indefinitely even though there is no chance of victory. The suffering could have been ended by peace talks two months into the conflict, but this was stopped by the Biden administration. This coupled with what is happening in Isreal has left Biden with so much blood on his hands. Blood that will soon be on Harris’s hands.
Take that jagged black pill and swallow it down.
The horn blares WHAAA! WHAAA!
‘Nuff Said.
Great article!