Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday singled out AIPAC as a ‘special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda,’ starting a new debate about the pro-Israel organization’s involvement in the party

The debate has been simmering since AIPAC’s United Democracy Project super PAC spent unprecedented sums to unseat two progressive Democrats in their respective primaries over the summer – largely, but not exclusively, bankrolled by donations from Republican megadonors in an election year that was far and away the most expensive in history.

As internal Democratic debate over the party’s ills and its future reached fever pitch in recent days, AIPAC was once again catapulted to the center of the matter.

“Weird to have a whole discourse about ‘special interest groups’ that completely leaves out corporate and industry lobbies – by far the most influential ‘groups’ in the Democratic Party,” Jeremy Slevin, a senior adviser to AIPAC foe Sen. Bernie Sanders, wrote on Sunday.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most nationally prominent AIPAC critic despite, ironically, being attacked from the left as an apologist for the group earlier this summer, singled out the pro-Israel organization while echoing Slevin’s point. “If people want to talk about members of Congress being overly influenced by a special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that pushes voters away from Democrats then they should be discussing AIPAC,” she tweeted in response.

  • TheFriar@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    I’m with you on the whole reality being much more boring bit, but simple? I don’t think so.

    All of our problems are interconnected. I find it hard to talk about any issue without having to work backwards up the cascading flowchart of money to corruption to capitalism to heirarchy and the deep indoctrination into these systems of control.

    And I don’t mean in a conspiratorial way, I mean in the way that any issue you point out has larger, macro issues the feed into these more specific micro issues. In short: the fruit is poisoned because the tree is poisoned because the seeds were poisoned because the farmer was poisoned and the soil itself has taken on the poison and spreads to every other tree.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      Maybe a better word for simple would have been straight forward. It’s a complex web of tit for tat, but the underlying motivation and how it’s actually accomplished is fairly straightforward.

      There is no reason to believe that there is a need to create a secret society of liberal ngo that hand pick the future president. Pacs and political think tanks are completely legal, and have no real fear of operating in the daylight.