Ratfuck

So apparently on October 11 2023, five days after the Hamas massacre of Jewish Israelis east of the Gaza border,  the self-denominated leftwing activist Cenk Uygur announced that he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, under the slogan "Cenk for America", although he was born in Istanbul and thus unable to hold the office; his actual aim was to pressure President Biden into withdrawing his support for Israel's war on Gaza, an aim with which I would have had a lot of sympathy, if I had heard about this at the time, which I certainly didn't, but I would have advised him that this was probably not the most effective way to go about achieving it, if only because Biden might not ever find out about it. Like the pressure you might feel if a butterfly was to land on your head and nobody was around to tell you about it; you wouldn't even know it was happening. Unless you were bald and it briefly tickled you.

But Cenk persisted for quite a while, and his fundraising outfit, Rebellion PAC, released at least one campaign ad before the campaign folded that March. 

New Cenk Uygur ad features a couple in the grocery store bemoaning the fact that they can’t afford eggs because the US government needs to the money to “kill Palestinians.” https://t.co/ZrcUbGMY2A

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 16, 2024

So one thing worth saying about that was that it was totally wrong. You couldn't afford eggs because of the bird flu epidemic, which seemed to have reached a peak in January 2024 (in fact it was going to get much worse the following January before retreating to some kind of normal where it more or less remains today). 

However ill-advised the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 may have been, it had no impact on grocery prices at all. Inflation rates, and inflation in grocery prices in particular were slowing. The Biden administration did manage to pause a shipment of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs in May out of concern for mass civilian casualties as IDF threatened densely populated Rafah, which surely saved some lives in Gaza, as IDF didn't get those bombs until Trump's 2025 assumption of office, when they lifted the pause on that famous "Day One" when they were supposedly going to lower consumer prices and bring peace to Ukraine. Now the Trump administration is adding to that; 40,000 MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs) and 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads built to target hardened or underground structures, which have surely made things worse for Gaza and Lebanon and Syria. (And if I'm not mistaken, far from costing the US money that we could have been spending on healthcare and housing and food assistance for Americans, it's paid for by Israel to Trump's arms manufacturer friends, who probably don't even pay taxes).

I don't suppose you can blame Cenk's strategy of putting pressure on Biden for that outcome—he's far too insignificant a person to have had that kind of influence on anything—but he sure didn't help.

But he did apparently decide to recycle the ad in the 2026 midterms, in Michigan, not for a campaign of his own, but in "support" of Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed, as reported in The Times on October 26, that's last Monday Scare quotes because it can't have helped el-Sayed's campaign much, its message being more idiotic than ever: virtually everybody in the United States now knows that higher consumer prices in the U.S, have nothing to do with the Gaza war, because they are directly caused by Trump's stupid war on Iran and stupid trade wars on everybody (You could blame that on Israel, and particularly on Binyamin Netanyahu, since he's evidently the one who talked Trump into the thing, in service of his own political interests, but those are not mentioned in the ad).  And egg prices are nearly back to normal, too; it's beef and Halloween candy, and tankersful of fossil fuels stuck in Hormuz and the Arabian Sea, that are in crisis now.

Which is not to say the ad hasn't had an effect. But not in favor of El-Sayed. What it seems to have done is spooked El-Sayed's erstwhile Democratic primary rival, Haley Stevens, out of her mind. A few weeks after the primary, she acquired a fiancé called Jason Turkish (but no relation to the Young Turks, I assume), the grandchild of Holocaust refugees (no longer living per Detroit News, may their memories be a blessing), who supports the Republican in the contest, Trumpy Mike Rogers, on what sound to me like Islamophobic grounds, and has been very public about it. That was awkward enough, but the Rebellion PAC has made it much worse. El-Sayed disavowed it immediately, of course, 

Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign emphasized that the ad, created by a left-wing political action committee called Rebellion PAC, was “not affiliated in any way” with him or his candidacy.

Abdul is focused on pushing back against Trump’s agenda that is raising prices for Michiganders,” the campaign said in a statement on Monday. “No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.”

and Stevens insisted that she still supported him herself, as all three major Democratic candidates had agreed to do with whoever won during the campaign, but then she began asking him to disavow some more: to apologize for Uygur's words and to take down an ad of his own in which antisemite and racist Tucker Carlson appeared, as "conditions" for her attendance with El-Sayed and Rep. Jim Clyburn at services at Detroit's Northend Church of God in Christ this morning, El-Sayed in turn suggested he was "disinviting" her from the service, and today she has shown up at Perfecting Church on the East Side with Republican candidate Rogers, whom she now appears to have endorsed, after 1,459,825 mail-in ballots have been submitted (out of about 8 million registered):

"I do not belong in Abdul’s campaign," Stevens said in the social media video. "I do not stand with Hasan Piker, who gets trafficked on our college campuses."

(It also seems that the controversial Twitch streamer is Cenk Uygur's nephew.)

I swear this is some kind of joint effort between AIPAC and Elon Musk, and perhaps Uygur as well, is all I can really say at the moment. Unquestionably meant to benefit Republicans, and indirectly to harm Michigan Jews, Arabs, and African Americans alike by exalting the white nationalist party. It's terrible, but also one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. Shame on whomever.