AIPAC spends a fortune to crush a black radical Congressman

In recent decades, the Democrats (with the help of their allies in the media and academia) have increasingly positioned themselves as the party of the growing ranks of the Diverse, leaving the GOP with little alternative but to respond by counter-positioning themselves as the party for people who identify primarily as Americans.

This has, on the whole worked well for Democrats, but the downside has always been, obviously, that trying to hold together a Coalition of the Fringes of American society with little in common other than a tendency to resent Core Americans can easily fall apart, as we are seeing in New York’s 16th Congressional District (southern Westchester County just north of the Bronx), where deep-pocketed Jewish donors are out to destroy the bumptious black leftist incumbent Democrat Jamaal Bowman for being anti-Israel.

From the New York Times news section:

AIPAC Unleashes a Record $14.5 Million Bid to Defeat a Critic of Israel

The deluge in outside spending, which also includes another $1 million from another pro-Israel group, threatens to sink Representative Jamaal Bowman.

By Nicholas Fandos

June 20, 2024

Pro-Israel political groups have transformed a Democratic primary on the outskirts of New York City, overwhelming the race with record-shattering outside spending to take down one of Israel’s most outspoken detractors, Representative Jamaal Bowman.

The onslaught by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and allied groups has made good on a warning delivered to lawmakers like Mr. Bowman after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack: Moderate your views or face a deluge of political attacks.

Now, in barely a month, an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC has spent $14.5 million — up to $17,000 an hour — on the race, filling television screens, stuffing mailboxes and clogging phone lines with caustic attacks. With days to go, the expenditures have already eclipsed what any interest group has ever spent on a single House race.

Pro-Israel groups are using the same approach elsewhere, most notably in an August primary in St. Louis. AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, has already spent $1.5 million there to take out Representative Cori Bush, who is a Black member of the House’s left-wing “squad” like Mr. Bowman.

The paid messages almost never mention Israel. In Mr. Bowman’s race, they have favored attacks aimed at the party’s base portraying the congressman as a pariah who “keeps attacking President Biden” and courts “controversy, chaos and conspiracy.”

The approach has infuriated Mr. Bowman, an ally of the president, who argues that he is being punished for standing by a moral conviction against the Israel-Hamas war, while his more moderate opponent, George Latimer, wavers on key Biden priorities like raising taxes.

Latimer appears to be well ahead in the polls of the embarrassing Bowman, who recently pled guilty to falsely pulling a fire alarm in the House, which caused the lower legislature to have to evacuate the building during a rush to pass legislation.

The 70-year-old Latimer, the chief executive of Westchester County, is basically Joe Biden if he had lived in a big, competitive state rather than a tiny one (and thus got elected to the US Senate at age 29): a glad-handing white Catholic suburban centrist Democrat career politician. The Democrats used to have lots of Bidens and Latimers to reassuringly run for office, but now they are in short supply.

You are not supposed to talk about this, but Jews tend on the whole to be rich and generous, so a huge fraction of the biggest political donors are Jewish, while nonwhites seldom write big checks to campaigns. A half decade ago, after Nancy Pelosi got mad at impolite Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadiush) for saying that Democratic support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins” (i.e., $100 bills), I looked up the 50 biggest donors in the 2018 election cycle. And sure enough:

Of the $675 million the top 50 contributors gave, according to OpenSecrets 53 percent of the money went to Democratic candidates or to liberal causes, 44 percent to Republicans or conservatives, and 3 percent to independent or bipartisan concerns. …

Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile. Individuals who identify as Jewish are usually estimated to make up perhaps 2.2 percent of the population.

Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34 percent from gentiles.

Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50 donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals.

Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from Jewish givers. …

it’s likely that this ethnic gap isn’t so disproportionate once you get into smaller contributors than the top 50. There are just a lot more not-rich gentiles than not-rich Jews.

None of the top 50 donor in 2018 would have been counted as nonwhite by the Census Bureau, although one GOP supporter, an Iranian advisor to the late Shah, might be nowhite under Biden’s new Middle Eastern and North African race.

Back in 2019,

When the feisty Muslim failed to submit, Pelosi demanded a House resolution condemning Omar’s “anti-Semitism.” Many Democrats, however, rebelled. After all, Omar, being black, Muslim, and a refugee, possesses more intersectional privilege than the white and Catholic Pelosi.

In response, the Democrats altered their resolution to instead reunite around blaming white Christian Americans for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and basically everything bad that has ever happened in the United States, including the Dreyfus Affair (which you probably were under the impression occurred in France). White gentile Americans should just be happy that the House of Representatives didn’t also officially blame them for the Spanish Inquisition, I guess.

The conventional consensus is that Nobody Should Ever Mention any of this.

Personally, I’m of the opposite view. It’s unhealthy to not talk about the basic trade-offs facing the Democratic Party. I think people would be better off being honest about each others’ motivations. But frankness is considered a radically extremist point of view.