accountability, forgiveness, trust, gratitude, boundaries, hope
We reserve the right to still believe in peace and freedom! We reserve the right to still be against rape, torture, and murder! Against AI weapons, forever war, and Pentagon recklessness! Against apartheid, land theft, international war crimes and undermining international institutions! Against mass incarceration, mass deportation, mass surveillance, and an unaccountable, militarized police state! Against billionaires profiteering off of human conflict, sickness, injury, debt, and misery! Against AI data centers, fossil fuels and environmental catastrophe! We reserve the right to still vote and spend our money according to our consciences! We reserve it even if it means talking about it openly! Even if risks Democrats, Republicans, and corporate news not liking us!
Now that the mass murder of civilians is starting to fall out of favor again, large numbers of lives can hopefully still be saved from Israel’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for blood. But nothing can save the reputations of those who enabled and cheered on this genocide from the beginning: Western “liberal democracies,” led primarily by the US Democratic and Republican parties and US corporate news. They’re guilty, and have no one to blame but themselves. The worst offenders are those still at this late date exploiting their power and privilege to keep the Palestinian bodies piling up, a rogue’s gallery that includes the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, the leaders of the Democratic Party, Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker, and the leader of corporate news, the New York Times.
It’s a huge relief to see the growing numbers of people speak up against genocide itself, but it’s also futile to do so in sadness without calling out in anger the specific individuals and groups behind it, and the political corruption without which it could never have happened. Some have been pointing this out all along, when it took even more bravery than it does now, when the pro-Netanyahu propaganda campaign, groundless accusations of “anti-Semitism” and “terrorism” against non-violent protestors, and election-season silencing tactics were at their peak. Palestinians and their allies around the globe are the ones who’ve been accurately assessing and communicating reality this entire time, thus playing the key role not only in the maintenance of human sanity, but the survival of our species, which owes them a debt of gratitude.
Like so many, we have friends and family who identify as Zionists or devotees of this or that national-level US politician who’s been successfully bribed by AIPAC, which is most of them. But while we feel a bit sorry for anyone indoctrinated with the fairy-tales getting so roundly debunked now, as long as this political movement continues to be the cause of so much unnecessary mass death, pity can hardly be the focus. Every Democratic and Republican politician who broke domestic and international laws prohibiting the sending of weapons for war crimes, every Democratic or Republican or Netanyahu cheerleader who said that bringing up the topic of genocide was an unforgivable moral outrage, every news source that decided that the Israeli plans to starve Palestinians and annex their land that have been announced since October 2023 were not particularly newsworthy, deserves to be called out. While I believe individuals can be personally forgiven and even welcomed into the movement opposing genocide should they wish to join, and while I believe seeking Hollywood-style retribution only perpetuates an endless cycle of violence, anyone with a record of being pro-genocide until recently needs to be kept away from any positions of power that could affect the fates of large numbers of human beings. Certainly they can never again be trusted to hold public office or report unbiased news from Palestine, or potentially anywhere else.
Obviously one can’t honestly expect anything like forgiveness from radical Zionism’s millions of victims, at least for the next couple of generations. The compounded traumas inflicted during genocides and ethnic cleansings are not something the bereaved, the destitute, the orphaned, the homeless, or the amputated can simply brush off. Netanyahu, Biden, Harris, and Trump, satisfying nothing but their own infinite greed, racked up an inconceivable debt on humanity’s credit card, and payment is due. No easy task. First the genocide has to end, something those now in power are still refusing to allow. Once that’s achieved and we can get to the starting line, the rebuilding of trust will only come from genuine accountability: the absolute and consistently observed refusal of material aid to anyone committing genocide, or threatening genocide while in possession of the military power to carry it out; the total admission of guilt by the persons and groups who committed, supported, excused, or overlooked genocide with their policies, funds, rhetoric, or votes; the permanent removal from positions of power of anyone who took part; the cost of clean-up and reparations after the destructive equivalent of six nuclear bombs detonated in Gaza and all its resulting carbon emissions; and the permanent rejection of any form of Zionism, neo-Nazism, Trumpism, Bidenism, or any other political movement that mandates apartheid or genocide as part of its program.
We’ll probably always have to cope with some Democratic and Republican dead-enders in permanent denial that their beloved parties long ago became structurally inseparable from AIPAC. But for the vast majority, the political movement advanced by this lobbying group has been exposed for what it is: an update of Hitlerism, with substitute Semites cast in the role of the sub-humans marked for extermination. It’s got the ruthlessness, the propaganda, the warlordism, the nihilism, the sadism, the declaration of racial superiority, the lebensraum. It’s got the claim of the God-given right to deploy concentration camps, death camps, torture camps, slavery, human experiments, apartheid, land and property theft, forced relocation, war crimes, new technologies of death, military conquests, and worst of all, genocide. And against its “own people,” it’s got the militarized police state, the clampdown on dissent, the abductions, the mass surveillance, the shutting down of free speech, and the anti-democratic diversion of taxpayer money to an economy of war.
Democrats and Republicans, already on shaky ground with the public, committed political suicide the moment they agreed to make AIPAC bribes all-important to their existence. Tying individual political careers as well as entire party platforms “unshakably” to defending the government of Israel in perpetuity no matter what atrocities it commits, was unlikely to end well. The result has exposed the Democratic and Republican parties for what they truly are: dictatorial, payola-hungry power concentrations claiming the absolute right to exterminate entire populations for having the wrong skin tone, religion, income, or address. And they’ve demonstrated that they’re perfectly comfortable doing so. This understandably disgusts most people. No surprise that breezily posing for photos with Netanyahu hasn’t helped.
Going forward the Democratic and Republican parties may each still be capable of winning elections, but both are too morally repugnant to most Americans to ever again become a bona fide popular movement. If these now failed political experiments are allowed to limp along, they’ll do so as absolutely legitimate targets of scorn and mockery, their approval ratings forever hovering in the 20s or teens. The huge KICK ME sign they placed on their own backs will prevent them from ever accomplishing much in the future halls of power, beyond those policies the two parties do actually agree on: rape, torture, and murder; support of AI weapons, forever war, and Pentagon recklessness; support of apartheid, land theft, international war crimes and undermining international institutions; support of mass incarceration, mass deportation, mass surveillance, and an unaccountable, militarized police state; support of billionaires profiteering off of human conflict, sickness, injury, debt, and misery; support of AI data centers, fossil fuels, and environmental catastrophe.
For anyone still fretting over whether the Democratic Party may still possess some secret heart of gold, here are a few handy facts to keep in mind: It was entirely in Biden’s power to stop Netanyahu’s genocide before it even began. Once Israel announced in October 2023 their intention to deprive Gaza of food and started dropping the bombs, Biden and Harris had an entire year in the White House during which they could’ve intervened. If they’d bothered to listen to voters and turn off the faucet of genocide money instead of cranking it higher, they would’ve prevented Trump from winning the election. Even after failing this, there were two months after Election Day when they could’ve ended the genocide, and Netanyahu’s career, in time for Trump to take the reins and potentially make good on threats the Dems had been using for their interminable fundraising fodder. Instead they intentionally kept that murder faucet flowing. So there you go. The Democratic Party is devoted to genocide. Their visions of scrubbing Palestinians off the face of the Earth and their stories from the pages of history were higher priorities than preventing what was, in their own words, the fascist takeover of America.
The tortured logic of the diehard Democratic cheerleader maintains that Harris would’ve ended the genocide eventually. She never said that. Even religious people base their faith on promises their gods actually make. Not so for Harris fanatics, apparently. Decades ago public unwillingness to engage in such partisan inanity helped birth a convenient marketing brainstorm, the ideological trick known as “centrism.” For several decades this fusion of Republican values with Democratic Party voting and fundraising tendencies was able to successfully masquerade as a way to avoid any embarrassing loyalties to either party. But as a strategy, as a philosophy, as a movement, and as a path to human survival, centrism is now dead. Everyone has seen the hellscape to which it led.
Centrism was never anything but a cynical ploy to maintain the corrupt and homicidal politico-economic status quo. Centrism’s most obvious victims were the Democratic Party, its values, and its voters. There was a time when Democrats occasionally stood for things like civil rights, ending poverty, raising minimum wage, and reducing militarism. Those days are long gone. Its core values were abandoned, which is another way of saying its core voters were abandoned. All it has left is a few tattered, sentimental memories and a party platform that’s “not as bad as Hitler.” Their downfall was already inevitable the moment Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, in an early 90s effort to garner votes by appealing to fans of Ronald Reagan, sold their souls and forced millions of voters to do the same. Centrism abandoned the idea of solving social problems, in favor of solving marketing and voter demographic issues, and so paved the way for a demagogue like Trump to call them out for this hypocrisy with the greatest of ease.
Centrism is dead with good reason. It represented the neutral ground where outright fascists seeking to rid the Earth of non-white races could rub shoulders with the one class of the super-rich that could always be counted on to underwrite Democratic campaigns: the entertainment industry. To be a centrist holdout in 2025 means splitting the difference between Adolph Hitler and Walt Disney. Obviously most Americans, and most humans, don’t find either of these boundaries of acceptable discourse to meet their definitions of either the words “acceptable” or “discourse,” nor do they wish to be trapped within the narrow confines between them. Centrism has come to epitomize the embarrassment it was designed to solve. But while we celebrate centrism’s popular demise, we acknowledge that it’s still very much alive as a scheme for garnering network ratings and lobbyist money from pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, fossil fuel giants, and AIPAC.
A historical irony of so-called centrist politicians and media making AIPAC and radical Zionism cornerstones of their profitability is that it made centrism not actually centrist anymore. Centrism is now just a wing of the extreme-right. Centrists will claim that their particular variant of racial hatred, over-militarization, and genocidal fascism doesn’t really count, because the targets are mere Palestinians, whom centrists consider a low-value ethnicity. But for all the hay centrism makes of casting itself as Trump’s mortal enemy, recent history tells a different story. For centrism Trump was a godsend that extended its life a little longer. He became centrism’s entire fundraising source. To return the favor, centrism became Trump’s friend and enabler. It imitated and collaborated with his policies, philosophies, tactics, and racism. It singled him out as its favorite, and some cases only, topic of discussion, giving him a decade of free publicity he’d never have had otherwise. This bill was always going to come due and indeed now the world is paying it.
There is no longer any point in strategizing about how to appeal to the centrist. The oligarch-owned media that represents this philosophy has shown, with its misrepresentation and mistreatment of the pro-Palestine movement as with so many others, that it’ll never accept any framing or rewording of an issue as long as that issue threatens their profits. The last thing people of conscience need to spend time worrying about is finding suitable slogans that won’t offend centrists. We don’t need centrists. Their population is small enough now that revolution can easily be achieved without their participation. In fact, if one is not actively offending major media tycoons and corporate-sponsored politicians, it’s a red flag that whatever revolutionary idea one is proposing, backing, or enacting is not a substantive enough threat to the capitalists destroying the planet.
Now that centrism has been eliminated as a popular movement, what remains is a choice between the right and the left. The “right” keeps shrinking as it moves further and further away from anything resembling human decency or common sense, in an effort to distinguish its branding from centrism, which has been repeatedly, stupidly chasing after it. On the other hand, what the mainstream now calls the “left” is so vast as to include literally anyone lacking enthusiasm for genocide. Thus the moral battle being waged in 2025 pits a tiny minority of racist, homicidal tax-dodgers who want the planet destroyed, against something close to the entirety of our species. And yet, of the two, it’s the first who is winning.
The enormous budgets of the Democrats, Republicans, and corporate media, and the decades of refinement of their propaganda techniques, conspired to provide to the untrained eye the illusion of a lively debate between reasonable but opposed philosophies. This deception had an extraordinarily effective run, especially for those who consumed a lot of oligarch-owned media and not much of anything else. But in the current crisis of centrism, the billionaires who own half the world’s wealth, control its resources, make or break political campaigns, and buy up media as their propaganda arm, have done what billionaires always do: back whoever cuts their taxes. Suddenly we all see their desperation to impede the left at all costs, even if it means publicly lining up behind fascism and posing for photos at Trump’s inauguration. Suddenly we even see supposed liberals or centrists in government and media systematically normalize, legitimize, praise, collaborate with, give in to, or talk endlessly about extreme-right godheads like Trump, Cheney, and Netanyahu, while systematically ignoring, slandering, or outright crushing the left. This can lead to such utter absurdities as the Democratic Party sabotaging their own candidates if they get too popular and aren’t capitalist or radical-Zionist. See the NYC mayor’s race.
Just because the extreme right is the loudest voice in today’s discourse doesn’t make it the most popular. There’s a growing hatred of its many forms, from Trumpism to genocide to ICE to oligarchy to forever war to police brutality. Despite every effort by the Democratic and Republican parties and oligarch-owned media to dismiss so much of this valid outrage as the lunatic ravings of “the left,” always for them a term of abuse, this groundswell of opposition has the undeniable advantage of actually being popular, something that cannot be said of centrism or the extreme right. Although centrists hoping for a last-minute laundering of their image would now like to take credit for being against genocide, this is ludicrous. The history has already been written, and is irrefutable: The centrists of the Democratic and Republican parties and oligarch-owned media made every sacrifice to their own credibility, as well as to the American taxpayer’s money, to ensure that this genocide was prolonged till the last possible moment, and that the maximum number of Palestinians would die.
One thing the Democratic and Republican parties and oligarch-owned media do still have is a massive marketing infrastructure, unprecedented in human history, devoted to making its consumers believe that these two parties are Americans’ only options. This shabby trick, showing obvious signs of wear, deserves to be debunked every day. The ethics, beliefs, movements, parties, and candidates routinely dismissed by this propaganda machine for being “too far left” have turned out to be the only ones in touch with reality for the past 22 months. They’ve been calling the genocide what it was from day one. One could do oneself a favor by listening to the left from the beginning, instead of waiting till it becomes trendy after hundreds of thousands of people have died unnecessarily. Trust the left and you will never be late to the party.
Logic dictates that you can’t stamp out fascism by empowering fascists. Calling out those who’ve been enabling and cheering for genocide, war crimes, police states, and other hallmarks of fascism, whether they happen to be Democrats, Republicans, or oligarch-owned media, is not merely praiseworthy, but obligatory. Failing to do so opens an opportunity for these paid actors to make all kinds of fuss pretending to be against what the record clearly shows they are for. Politicians, parties, and media that favor and enact fascism except when it becomes politically convenient to appear to be against it may fool their biggest fans, but are extremely vulnerable to attack. The fascist movement knows this and can be counted on to exploit this obvious weakness every election season.
The way out of the trap laid by the Democrat-Republican good-cop-bad-cop routine is to form an expansive, inclusive coalition of anyone whose sympathies do not lie with the billionaires and genocidaires. We hereby reserve the right to believe in and participate in removing billionaires and genocidaires from power and influence. Those disillusioned by those corrupted parties and media who now admit the error of their ways should be welcomed to join. This means sharing the information and viewpoints that oligarch-owned media censor. It means supporting and participating in movements, strikes, boycotts, and lawsuits to disempower those profiting from war and destroying the planet. It means supporting those third party candidates, or when possible those Democratic candidates, who overtly reject the standard Democrat-Republican platform of rape, torture, and murder; AI weapons, forever war, and Pentagon recklessness; apartheid, land theft, international war crimes and undermining international institutions; mass incarceration, mass deportation, mass surveillance, and an unaccountable, militarized police state; billionaires profiteering off of human conflict, sickness, injury, debt, and misery; AI data centers, fossil fuels, and environmental catastrophe.