GlacialTurtle

Someone who claims to be a holocaust historian btw, says they basically agree with Trumps deportations, repeatedly cannot meaningfully answer the obvious question of why would these people genuinely care about antisemitism when they're hanging with white nationalists, invokes "Trump Derangement Syndrome" when talking about deportation without due process...it just goes on.

Liberals, shut the fuck up about how Democrats are "better". These are the people within the admin who were listened to.

https://archive.is/BqZaa

Are you pleased that the Trump Administration is talking so much about antisemitism?

I’m pleased that they’re addressing it, because that’s what I did for the past three years, which was to really push the Biden Administration to seriously address it. So I am very, very pleased that it’s on their agenda.

And what do you see that agenda as being?

Well, I guess I’ve gone through a transition. Let me step back for a minute and say that from my first day in office, one of the things that I called for was for institutions—such as governments, universities, and the media—to take antisemitism seriously. I talk about antisemitism as a multi-tiered threat. One is the threat to Jews and Jewish institutions. But it’s also a threat to democracy. And I know that’s a very easy thing to throw around. People will say food insecurity is a threat to democracy. Which is true. But there’s a very direct link in terms of antisemitism. And that direct link is the fact that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory, in contrast to any other form of discrimination. Its distinctive characteristic is as a conspiracy theory.

What do you think the Trump Administration is doing to fight antisemitism and, in that sense, uphold democracy?

It’s calling universities to account. And, if you look at the first demands it made of Columbia, what’s striking about those things, like an end to encampments and masks—those were things that Columbia students have been asking for for a very long time. So I was pleased by that because they were asking the university to live up to its own standards. I’ve been told by people who are close to university presidents and administrators that many of them felt those were legitimate demands that should have been seen to earlier. So I didn’t have any gripe with those.

You are a smart person. Do you seriously believe that the Trump Administration cares about antisemitism? I’m a little confused here.

Yeah, I don’t . . . I don’t know. They haven’t spoken to me, they haven’t consulted with me. So all I can judge is by—

But Deborah, your entire career has been judging people for antisemitism, in some cases very effectively. The President hosted white supremacists for dinner. Elon Musk made what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Surely you can look into their souls here.

I have called that out.

O.K., but more broadly can you make some sort of judgment?

Yes, no, there’s been . . . there certainly has been a disturbing tendency, whether it’s whatever Elon Musk was doing with his arm, or when he appeared on video at a campaign event for the far right in Germany. There are a lot of examples. They’re disturbing and they’re bothersome.

[...]

Well, that right there makes me wonder. I’m just a little confused why people who care about antisemitism are friends with Donald Trump.

It is confusing. It is confusing, you know, but I can’t . . . In speaking to him, my sense is, with the little I know about him, which is very little, that he truly is concerned about fighting antisemitism. I also think there are many Jews, and some non-Jews, too, but many Jews who are disappointed by how universities have behaved since October 7th, and they see a strong—to use Passover terminology—a strong hand being used. Now, whether that hand is being used properly or not raises certain questions about what’s happening. To answer your question, a lot of people were relieved to see this forceful approach. I think, in many respects, it’s going too far.

You said some nice things about Secretary of State Marco Rubio. What has your reading been of him?

As a senator, he had a very strong track record on fighting antisemitism. I know there are many people, including Democrats in Florida, who appreciated his stance. What’s happening now is, I think, you know, I can’t judge, you know, but let me put it this way: I would hope that he would continue to maintain the strong stance he took while he was a senator.

You can judge him about, say, tweeting happily about people being sent to a horrific prison in El Salvador, right?

Look, there’s no reason . . . Look, when you take someone off the street who’s not supposed to be taken off the street, and you deport them, you make a mistake. I come from a tradition and a personal belief that when you make a mistake, you say, I made a mistake, and we’re gonna fix it. And that’s disturbing.

They may not care that they made a mistake. That’s the issue. Off the record and not for quotation: [Goes off record.]

Is there a reason you don’t want to say that on the record? Yeah, I don’t, because I’m still, you know . . . I don’t want to give people the chance. You know, there’s some people I know, including good friends of mine, who suffer from what the Republicans would call, what is it, “Trump Derangement Syndrome”? You know, anything he does is bad. Look, he moved the Embassy to Jerusalem. So I give him credit for that. I do give him credit for that. I’m not gonna say just because it’s the Trump Administration it’s bad.

I wasn’t asking you to say just because it was the Trump Administration that it was bad. I was just pointing out that they’re sending people without any sort of due process to a horrible prison in El Salvador.

You know, that is something that I find disturbing and I would hope that, you know, that they would, they would recognize that, because that’s not what this country is all about.

So we have all these horrific things with immigration, with DOGE dismantling the federal bureaucracy, with Trump basically destroying the Atlantic alliance. But we also have, on the other side of the ledger, moving the Embassy to Jerusalem in the first term. It shouldn’t be all black and white.

No, it’s not all black and white. It’s not all black and white. And, if you paint it only black, here’s what happens: then I have to wonder which of your criticisms are valid and which aren’t. That doesn’t mean you should go look for white when there isn’t any. But I think there are some places where, and that’s why initially I said, you know, there are some things that I applaud. But you can’t, you know, you can’t just ignore our laws. We’re a nation of laws. It wasn’t tolerance that allowed Jews to thrive here. Jews have flourished in this country because it is a nation of laws. When students feel they have no place to bring their grievances, or that when they bring their grievances, nobody cares, then you open up the door for this kind of action. So much of what’s going on could have been avoided had the universities really cared and taken antisemitism seriously.

In March, after blowing up Democrats’ unified opposition to the GOP’s government funding bill, which handed President Trump and Elon Musk expanded powers over federal spending, Chuck Schumer appeared on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes to defend his vote. In the interview, the Senate minority leader said he didn’t yet think that our democracy was at risk but made clear what his red line would be: “If Trump doesn’t obey the Supreme Court.” That, he stated, would be “different than anything else. It’s a quantum leap different, because our democracy is then—248 years of American democracy, the Magna Carta is out the window, and we will all have to take extraordinary action.”

This “quantum leap” did not take long to arrive. Last Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the Trump administration to help bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. Abrego Garcia is an immigrant married to a U.S. citizen, with three U.S. citizen children, who has lived in this country for 14 years without being charged with any crimes—just an unsubstantiated claim of gang affiliation. A federal court ruled in 2019 that Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador, as he faced a risk of death there. The Trump administration brazenly violated this order in March, putting Abrego Garcia on a plane to what is effectively a concentration camp. This act was so “illegal,” in the Supreme Court’s words, that all nine justices agreed the administration must “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia and “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”

But Trump won’t do it. The administration argues that only El Salvador has the ability to send Abrego Garcia back. “DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation,” Joseph Mazzara, acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a court filing on Monday. El Salvador’s president, who visited Trump on Monday, also claimed powerlessness. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” he told reporters, cruelly mischaracterizing Abrego Garcia. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” (This is all laughable given the recent repatriation of alleged rapists and MAGA diehards Andrew and Tristan Tate from Romania.)

[...]

It’s been a shameful abdication of leadership by Democratic elites. But there was still an opportunity for redemption. Schumer said that if Trump defied a Supreme Court order, then there’d be no choice but to “take extraordinary action.” Presumably he has been preparing for this possibility—not doing so would be almost inconceivable Democratic malpractice.

But when I reached out to Schumer’s office late Monday, the senator hadn’t even posted a response to the news yet. Eventually his office put out a boilerplate statement, which they emailed to me: “The law is clear, due process was grossly violated, and the Supreme Court has clearly spoken that the Trump administration must facilitate and effectuate the return of Abrego Garcia. He should be returned to the U.S. immediately. Due process and the rule of law are cornerstones of American society for citizens and noncitizens alike and not to follow that is dangerous and outrageous. A threat to one is a threat to all.” In reply, I referenced Schumer’s statement that “we will all have to take extraordinary action” if Trump defied the court, and asked if he had any additional comments about the kind of action needed right now. His office has not responded.

This failure of leadership is particularly maddening from the leader of the opposition party in the Senate, because the upper chamber remains an institution that, as Mitch McConnell demonstrated, provides incredibly powerful tools to the minority party. We know what Senate Democrats could be doing if they decided “to take extraordinary action.” Just a few weeks ago we saw just one senator, Cory Booker, grind the chamber to a standstill for over 24 hours—an impressive effort, though arbitrary and undirected. Can you imagine how much more powerful it would be if Senate Democrats came together to organize a filibuster relay team that could continuously gum up the Senate until Trump agreed to follow the Supreme Court’s order?

Elon and DOGE almost certainly siphoning what is otherwise meant to be confidential information from the NLRB, including very likely union members/organisers.

An employee who was trying to investigate had threats involving pictures of them walking their dog being posted to their door.

The DOGE employees, who are effectively led by White House adviser and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, appeared to have their sights set on accessing the NLRB's internal systems. They've said their unit's overall mission is to review agency data for compliance with the new administration's policies and to cut costs and maximize efficiency.

But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.

Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do

[...]

NxGen is an internal system that was designed specifically for the NLRB in-house, according to several of the engineers who created the tool and who all spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation or adverse consequences for any future government work.

The engineers explained that while many of the NLRB's records are eventually made public, the NxGen case management system hosts proprietary data from corporate competitors, personal information about union members or employees voting to join a union, and witness testimony in ongoing cases. Access to that data is protected by numerous federal laws, including the Privacy Act.

Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.

"If he didn't know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it's a nation-state attack from China or Russia," said Braun, the former White House cyber official.

[...]

For cybersecurity experts, that spike in data leaving the system is a key indicator of a breach, Berulis explained.

"We are under assault right now," he remembered thinking.

When Berulis asked his IT colleagues whether they knew why the data was exfiltrated or whether anyone else had been using containers to run code on the system in recent weeks, no one knew anything about it or the other unusual activities on the network, according to his disclosure. In fact, when they looked into the spike, they found that logs that were used to monitor outbound traffic from the system were absent. Some actions taken on the network, including data exfiltration, had no attribution — except to a "deleted account," he continued. "Nobody knows who deleted the logs or how they could have gone missing," Berulis said.

The IT team met to discuss insider threats — namely, the DOGE engineers, whose activities it had little insight into or control over. "We had no idea what they did," he explained. Those conversations are reflected in his official disclosure.

They eventually launched a formal breach investigation, according to the disclosure, and prepared a request for assistance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). However, those efforts were disrupted without an explanation, Berulis said. That was deeply troubling to Berulis, who felt he needed help to try to get to the bottom of what happened and determine what new vulnerabilities might be exploited as a result.

In the days after Berulis and his colleagues prepared a request for CISA's help investigating the breach, Berulis found a printed letter in an envelope taped to his door, which included threatening language, sensitive personal information and overhead pictures of him walking his dog, according to the cover letter attached to his official disclosure. It's unclear who sent it, but the letter made specific reference to his decision to report the breach. Law enforcement is investigating the letter.

"If the underlying disclosure wasn't concerning enough, the targeted, physical intimidation and surveillance of my client is. If this is happening to Mr. Berulis, it is likely happening to others and brings our nation more in line with authoritarian regimes than with open and free democracies," wrote Bakaj, his attorney, in a statement sent to NPR. "It is time for everyone – and Congress in particular – to acknowledge the facts and stop our democracy, freedom, and liberties from slipping away, something that will take generations to repair."

In part because of the stymied internal investigation and the attempts to silence him, Berulis decided to come forward publicly.

Democrats playing footsy with fascist Charlie Kirk over hating trans people. This is the party that's supposed to be the great defenders of LGBT people?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a pioneer for LGBTQ+ rights who decades ago upset leaders in his own party when he defied state law and issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples, suggested Democrats were in the wrong in allowing transgender athletes to participate in female college and youth sports.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair,” Newsom said in his debut podcast episode of “This is Gavin Newsom.” “I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.”

Newsom’s comments on the issue roiling political debates nationwide came in a conversation with influential MAGA-world figure Charlie Kirk, the campus culture warrior who leads the organization Turning Point USA and is a close ally of President Donald Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr.

Newsom also agreed that the most politically destructive attack ads from Trump’s campaign featured Kamala Harris’ support for providing taxpayer-funded gender transition-related medical care for detained immigrants and federal prisoners.

“She didn’t even react to it, which was even more devastating,” Newsom said, suggesting upward of 90 percent of Americans disagreed with Harris’ position. “Then you had the video [of Harris] as a validator. Brutal,” Newsom added. “It was a great ad.”

Kirk challenged Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential hopeful, to speak out against AB Hernandez, a transgender high school track star from California whose triple jump event in the women’s competition is drawing fierce backlash from the right. Newsom said he has four children of his own — including two daughters — and noted that both he and his wife participated in college-level sports, she in soccer and he in baseball.

“I revere sports, so the issue of fairness is completely legit,” Newsom said. “And I saw that — the last couple years, boy did I [see] how you guys were able to weaponize that issue at another level.”

Kirk challenged Newsom over his use of the word “weaponize,” and Newsom replaced it with “highlight.”

The video is yet another case of Democrats resenting their base for expecting them to stand up for anything.

In a leaked recording, State Senator Elena Parent (D-42) said she’d vote for Republican transgender healthcare bans because trans rights are too “unpopular."

"You can go right to heck. I don’t think I will lose re-election based on you screaming at me"

The insane flipping back and forth in the video of declaring yourself pro-lgbt whilst signalling you'll vote for anti-trans legislation, to then attack the person asking them obvious questions by declaring that the question implies because Republicans are in charge that they should adopt opposite positions and they're not going to vote for things that are "unpopular".

The democratic politician distilled: You need to vote for me because I support you and I'm not as bad as Republicans, but when it comes down to it I will throw you under the bus and get mad at you for asking me about it and implying I might not be a good person.

But swearing is a no-no so I'll say Heck as I support you being oppressed by the state.

This is at the same time as Israel has been stopping entry of all goods and supplies into Gaza. The deputy speaker of Israeli parliament is also calling for the bombing of food stocks in Gaza by the way.

The EU condemns the refusal of Hamas to accept the extension of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza. Israel's subsequent decision to block the entry of all humanitarian aid into Gaza could potentially result in humanitarian consequences.

The EU calls for a rapid resumption of negotiations on the second phase of the ceasefire, and expresses its strong support to the mediators.

A permanent ceasefire would contribute to the release of all remaining Israeli hostages while ensuring the necessary conditions for recovery and reconstruction in Gaza to begin. All parties have a political responsibility to make this a reality.

The EU reiterates its calls for full, rapid, safe and unhindered access to humanitarian aid at scale for Palestinians in need and for allowing and facilitating humanitarian workers and international organisations to operate effectively and safely inside Gaza.

The EU civilian Border Assistance Mission for the Rafah Crossing Point (EUBAM Rafah) is ready to continue its work if requested by the parties. Thanks to its presence, nearly 3,000 people have so far crossed the border into Egypt since 1 February.

Meanwhile:

The deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament and a leading member of Netanyahu’s party calling for the bombing of food stocks in Gaza just a few hours ago.

You won’t see this mentioned by any European or American leaders, or by most western media.

https://bsky.app/profile/mehdirhasan.bsky.social/post/3ljfehifmrc2e

Israel claims it's a US plan but has not confirmed it.

Matt Duss, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera that he had “very good reason to disbelieve” what Netanyahu had said about US support for Israel’s unilateral decision to not proceed to the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal.

Netanyahu had called the proposal for the extension of the first phase of the deal the “Witkoff plan”, in reference to the US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, but Duss said that “as far as I’ve been able to tell, this is in fact the Netanyahu plan”.

Duss said that it was uncertain how much support Netanyahu had from Trump, but that if the US administration was backing Israel in reneging on the terms of the ceasefire deal, it would be a continuation of US policy under Trump’s predecessor President Joe Biden, where US officials would insist that Hamas was the party not agreeing to a ceasefire, even when the opposite was true.

“I very much hope that Netanyahu is not telling the truth, because the terms of the deal are that phase one would continue as negotiations for phase two are worked out,” Duss said, before adding that Witkoff’s next moves would shed more light on the US position.

https://aje.io/86m0jg?update=3549731

Outrage as Israel cuts off Gaza aid to pressure Hamas to accept new ceasefire proposal

Also I had to log on to reddit and see a photo op of Euro leaders on the front page with the caption "leaders of the free world" and people glazing Keir Starmer I guess because Ukraine.

Yet more Democrats doubling down on "we have to be more racist", "we need to have less principles", "it's actually the lefts fault somehow".

Reminder that here in reality, Democrats ran republican campaign messaging during the election whilst Kamala failed to distance herself from literal fucking genocide in response to the bases concerns nor did they provide any meaningful economic policies as answers.

When several dozen Democratic political operatives and elected officials gathered at a tony resort off the Potomac River last month, frustration boiled over at the left wing of their party.

Democrats had become too obsessed with “ideological purity tests” and should push back “against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,” according to a document of takeaways from the gathering produced by the center-left group Third Way and obtained by POLITICO.

The group of moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials and party leaders who gathered in Loudoun County, Virginia for a day-and-a-half retreat, where they plotted their party’s comeback, searched for why the party lost in November — and what to do about it. Much of what they focused their ire on centered on the kind of identity politics that they believed lost them races up and down the ballot.

One of the key ways to win back the trust of the working class, some gathered there argued, was to “reduce far-left influence and infrastructure” on the party, according to the takeaways document. That included building a more moderate campaign infrastructure and talent pipeline, pushing “back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,” and refusing to participate in “far-left candidate questionnaires” and “forums that create ideological purity tests.”

The gathering resulted in five pages of takeaways, a document POLITICO obtained from one of the participants. (Not all attendees endorsed each point, and the document — and Third Way — kept the identities of participants private.)

[...]

Those gathered then laid out 20 solutions for how Democrats can regain working-class trust and reconnect with them culturally.

Among their takeaways:

• The party should “embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery.”

• Candidates should “get out of elite circles and into real communities (e.g., tailgates, gun shows, local restaurants, churches).”

• The party needs to “own the failures of Democratic governance in large cities and commit to improving local government.”

The party, many of those gathered also argued, needs to “develop a stronger, more relatable Democratic media presence (podcasts, social media, sports broadcasting).”

Bennett said that, with the meeting coming just three months after the election, “we didn’t expect to have a lot of answers about exactly what the Democratic offer to the working class on the economy ought to be going forward. We were still kind of picking through the rubble here.”

Certain Democrats remain inexplicably in denial about Biden and his brain leaking out of his ears during a live debate and even internal polling showing repeatedly he was almost certainly going to lose badly.

Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lambasted Democratic leadership for attacking Joe Biden like a “firing squad” at a Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics forum Wednesday, saying the party should have united behind the former president.

“I have never seen anything like that,” she said. “It was truly, truly unfortunate. And I think it hurt us more than folks realized to have done that.”

Jean-Pierre attended a discussion with spring IOP fellow Brittany Shepherd and Anoushka Chander ’25 — her first public event since leaving the White House in January.

Jean-Pierre stood by Biden’s achievements, his cognitive fitness, and his decision to run for re-election during the talk. She echoed statements from Michael C. Donilon — a senior advisor to Biden and a current IOP fellow — who defended the former president on the same stage just two weeks ago.

“I believe in what we were trying to get done,” Jean-Pierre said. “I would not have come back into the administration, I don’t think, for anybody else.”

And from Donilon's talk:

Michael C. Donilon, the chief strategist behind Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, said Democratic leadership “lost its mind” when they ousted Biden from the party’s ticket, arguing he was their best chance at keeping the White House.

“The Democratic primary voters chose Joe Biden to be the nominee of the Democratic Party,” said Donilon, a spring fellow at the Institute of Politics. “The Democratic party leadership, and the biggest funders in America, didn’t.”

In a wide-ranging post mortem at the IOP Thursday evening, Donilon remained adamant that the former president would “still be the best” for the job – despite his poor performance in a June debate.

“Lots of people have terrible debates,” he said. “Usually, the party doesn’t lose its mind. But that’s what happened — it just melted down.”

Donilon, a member of Biden’s inner circle for over 40 years, denounced claims that the president’s acuity and judgment declined as an “impression” perpetuated by the media.

“It was getting written as this fact, ‘Oh, Biden was mentally impaired,’” Donilon said. “I don’t know how much time any of those people spent with him — I know how much time I spent with him. I know what I saw.”

Reminder the White House spent his second term limiting access to Biden, not showing him negative polling and negative stories, and denying there were any problems until he turned a question on abortion into incoherent mumbling about immigrants murdering women.

Remember when Labour claimed "This isn’t factional. We just aren’t insulting voters with piss poor candidates anymore."

WhatsApp group chat has been exposed with Labour MP's and Councillors often posting abusive, ableist, sexist and derogatory comments.

Several MP's, including Health Minister Andrew Gwynne, whose office caseworker had setup the chat, have now been suspended.

Unsurprisingly, the group chat contains lots of ire for the left wing of party (what's left of it anyway...), including the usual thing of naming everyone even marginally to the left of them as "trots" ( short for Trotskyists). Although this is just inline with what was already exposed in the leaked report intended to investigate the handling of antisemitism complaints, before also finding internal emails and WhatsApp group chats that exposed the same sort of racist, sexist, and highly factional abuse from the right wing of the labour party. A literal conspiracy within Labour to deliberately undermine the complaints process, to then use against Corbyn in the media, which included people who had presented themselves as "whistleblowers" against Labours supposed antisemitism.

Gwynne, 50, had managed to dodge most controversies during his near 20-year stint in parliament, although rose to brief fame for calling Boris Johnson a “pillock” on live television in 2017.

The real political danger, it seems, came not from Westminster but from his constituency 200 miles away on the edge of Manchester, where long-simmering Labour party divisions have now burst into the open.

The WhatsApp group where Labour figures posted racist, sexist and homophobic comments was centred on Gwynne’s power base in the town of Denton in Tameside, where he was elected as a local councillor almost 30 years ago at the age of 21.

Labour insiders said the local party’s “toxic” fallouts were well known in the region. They were not surprised that Gwynne’s inner circle was the subject of the highly damaging leaks, which first emerged in the Mail on Sunday.

“You would turn up at an event and they would be slagging off the other side,” said one senior Labour figure in Greater Manchester. “Any time we were in a party setting with Andrew Gwynne and some of those people, they would just be slagging off the people they didn’t like.

“You get a bit of that in politics but they were probably the worst at it in terms of the Greater Manchester scene.”

The Guardian has seen more than 1,000 pages of WhatsApp messages, spanning 2019 to 2022, in which the sacked minister joked about the death of an elderly voter and a cycling campaigner, who he hoped would be “mown down” by a lorry.

He also said someone “sounds too Jewish” and “too militaristic”, apparently from their name alone.

In newly disclosed messages, Gwynne described a constituent as “an illiterate removed” and a fellow councillor as a “fat middle-aged useless thicket”. He called neighbouring MP Navendu Mishra, a “splitter” for forming a group of leftwing Labour MPs in 2022.

The group, named Trigger Me Timbers, was set up by Gwynne’s office caseworker Claire Reid in January 2019. At its height it had 44 members, most of whom were local councillors and activists.

The forum was initially set up to discuss routine party business, such as local events and campaign literature. But it soon turned “nasty”, according to one Labour figure.

The group’s ire was reserved for leftwing Labour activists, whom they refer to more than 100 times as “trots”.

When Christian Wakeford defected from the Conservatives to Labour in January 2022, Ryan – then a local councillor – joked about “all the trots exploding on socials”.

Gwynne said “the nutty wing” of a local party “is going bonkers that we’ve let a Tory have the Labour whip and not Jezza” – a reference to Jeremy Corbyn, who was suspended by the party.

Reid, now a senior official on Labour’s national policy forum, said of the party’s leftwing membership: “Aside from anything else today it’s very good for the internal Party! Hopefully they’ll all leave”, to which Gwynne replied: “Yep.”

While Gwynne and Ryan are the most high profile to be suspended by Labour, Reid and two other senior councillors – George Newton and Jack Naylor – have stepped down from their cabinet positions on Tameside council amid an investigation by party HQ.

Gwynne’s wife, Allison Gwynne, who posted in the group about local children who have “always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage”, is understood to remain in her role as chair of the council’s overview panel – a position she is believed to have been awarded by Labour HQ.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/10/vile-labourwhatsapp-group-exposes-toxic-divisions-in-andrew-gwynnes-power-base

As first revealed by the Mail On Sunday, Gwynne was accused of posting messages containing racist and sexist comments. The cache of thousands of messages spans a period from 2019 to 2022.

Gwynne is also alleged to have sent messages suggesting a local cycling campaigner should be “mown down” by a lorry, and hoping a pensioner who didn’t vote Labour “croaks it” before an election.

[...]

One senior member of the Tameside Labour group said the party was “in chaos” and some were “fuming” at being suspended.

“I know from talking to councillors some of them are fuming because they’re being associated with those vile posts. Just by their suspension it looks like they’ve been involved but they’ve never posted anything on that group,” they said.

“Tameside Labour is in chaos now. We’ve got to consider the position of the leader because she appointed those people [Gwynne’s allies] to cabinet positions just a few months ago, with the blessing of the national party. This is completely untenable.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/11/labour-suspends-12-members-who-joined-offensive-whatsapp-group

The Democrats are gonna try a brand new strategy they've never done before: cosying up to oligarchs and moving to the """centre""" (read: becoming more right wing than they were already getting)

Excerpts:

In Northern California, Jeffries and Rep. Sam Liccardo, the freshman Democrat who represents part of Silicon Valley, were working to stem further defections and to rally Democratic-leaning donors to their side. To the crowd, which included several major Democratic bundlers, as well as California Reps. Jimmy Panetta, Mike Levin and George Whitesides, Jeffries described his party’s efforts to push back on Trump and outlined their campaign to retake the House in 2026, according to four people who attended the event and were granted anonymity to describe a private meeting.

“The singular focus was — how do we ensure Silicon Valley remains with Democrats,” said one of the people who participated, “because, right now, Silicon Valley is feeling very purple.”

Jeffries’ appearance was the Democratic leader’s first Silicon Valley swing after the 2024 election and in the run-up to the midterm elections — an early overture at a meeting where no donation was required to attend. And it was no accident he trekked to the nation’s tech capital. In Washington, Democrats in recent days have been lacing into Musk as he wreaks havoc on the federal government, viewing him as a more polarizing — and less popular — foil than Trump. But the moneyed tech world that Musk hails from is critical to Democrats’ fortunes in 2026.

“There is a significant fear that these tech folks, who have been with us for a long time, will say, ‘fuck it, we’re going with the other guys,’” said Alex Hoffman, a Democratic donor adviser who works with donors across the country but did not attend the event. “These donors are also pissed, watching former and current colleagues have unlimited, unchecked power, and getting richer off of this and they’re not.”

Democrats are “trying to mend fences and they’re also trying to keep them in the tent,” Hoffman added.

[...]

High-dollar donor frustration — and the problem it presents for Democrats — isn’t limited to California. Across the country, “the mood is tense” among Democratic donors, said another top Democratic fundraiser, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly.

Democrats are on their heels as Trump steamrolls the government, seemingly unchecked. “Everyone wants to know: What can you do about what I just saw Trump do on TV, and why did we end up here?” the fundraiser said.

In Silicon Valley, Jeffries did not independently raise tech issues, despite facing a room anxious to hear how Democrats might approach AI and crypto policies in the next Congress, several people who attended said. A second person who attended the event said they were frustrated that much of Jeffries’ comments focused on Trump.

“When will we move off this posture of complaining and moaning about Trump,” the person said. “What positive ideas will Democrats offer to people to bring people back in?”

That person said Jeffries has time to assuage Democratic-leaning tech leaders and “reestablish strong ties with the tech community.” However, the attendee said, “there’s work that needs to be done, and that begins with an acknowledgement that this last campaign was not their best work.”

[...]

The group included several top tech executives, including DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar and Cooper Teboe, a major Democratic donor adviser in Silicon Valley. Robert Klein and Danielle Guttman Klein, major Democratic donors, hosted it at their home in Los Altos Hills.

In his remarks, Jeffries concentrated on how Democrats planned to retake the House in 2026. He said Democrats were reaching toward the center, while Trump will swing harder right, according to the first attendee, who took notes on the presentation. Jeffries also highlighted how California Democrats helped the party net two more House seats in 2024, as well as the role the state will play in their efforts to flip the House, according to the fourth person who was in the room.

He also told the crowd that Democrats needed to pick their fights. It’s a mantra Jeffries has invoked before, comparing the party’s strategy to the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge, who is “not going to swing at every pitch,” the Democratic leader said.

Also notable that even rich donors have more willingness to suggest Democrats ran a bad campaign than your average r/politics or .world user.

Excerpts:

The Israeli army intensively bombarded residential areas in Gaza when it lacked intelligence on the exact location of Hamas commanders hiding underground, and intentionally weaponized toxic byproducts of bombs to suffocate militants in their tunnels, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call can reveal.

The investigation, based on conversations with 15 Israeli Military Intelligence and Shin Bet officers who have been involved in tunnel-targeting operations since October 7, exposes how this strategy aimed to compensate for the army’s inability to pinpoint targets in Hamas’ subterranean tunnel network. When targeting senior commanders in the group, the Israeli military authorized the killing of “triple-digit numbers” of Palestinian civilians as “collateral damage,” and maintained close real-time coordination with U.S. officials regarding the expected casualty figures.

Some of these strikes, which were the deadliest in the war and often used American bombs, are known to have killed Israeli hostages despite concerns raised ahead of time by military officers. Moreover, the lack of precise intelligence meant that in at least three major strikes, the army dropped several 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs that killed scores of civilians — part of a strategy known as “tiling” — without succeeding in killing the intended target.

“Pinpointing a target inside a tunnel is hard, so you attack a [wide] radius,” a Military Intelligence source told +972 and Local Call. Given that the army would have only a vague approximation of the target’s location, the source explained, this radius would be as large as “tens and sometimes hundreds of meters,” meaning these bombing operations collapsed multiple apartment buildings on their occupants without warning. “Suddenly you see how someone in the IDF really behaves when given the opportunity to wipe out an entire residential block — and they do it,” the source added.

[...]

In January 2024, a spokesperson for the Israeli army told +972 and Local Call in response to a previous investigation that it “has never used and does not currently use byproducts of bomb deployment to harm its targets, and there is no such ‘technique’ in the IDF.” Yet our new investigation reveals that the Air Force conducted physio-chemical research on the effect of the gas in enclosed spaces, and the military has deliberated over the method’s ethical implications.

Three Israeli hostages — Nik Beizer, Ron Sherman, and Elia Toledano — were definitively killed by asphyxiation as a result of a Nov. 10, 2023, bombing that targeted Ahmed Ghandour, a Hamas brigade commander in northern Gaza. The army told their families that, at the time of the bombing, it was unaware that hostages were being held near Ghandour. However, three sources with knowledge of the strike, which was led by the Shin Bet, told +972 and Local Call there was “ambiguous” intelligence indicating that hostages might be in the vicinity, yet the attack was still authorized.

According to six sources, this was not an isolated case but one of “dozens” of Israeli airstrikes that likely endangered or killed hostages. They described how the military command greenlighted attacks on the homes of suspected kidnappers and the tunnels from which senior Hamas figures were directing the fighting.

While attacks were aborted when there was specific, definitive intelligence indicating the presence of a hostage, the army routinely authorized strikes when the intelligence picture was murky and there was a “general” likelihood that hostages were present in the vicinity of a target. “Mistakes definitely happened, and we bombed hostages,” one intelligence source said.

Israel’s efforts to maximize the chances of killing senior militants hiding underground also included attempts to crush parts of a tunnel network and trap the targets inside. Sources described incidents where vehicles fleeing an attack site were bombed without specific intelligence about who was inside, based on the assumption that a senior Hamas figure might be trying to escape.

“The entire region felt and heard the explosions,” Abdel Hadi Okal, a Palestinian journalist from Jabalia who witnessed several major Israeli bombing operations — which Palestinians often refer to as “fire belts” — during the early weeks of the war, told +972 and Local Call. “Entire residential blocks were targeted with heavy missiles, causing buildings to collapse and fall on top of each other. Ambulances and Civil Defense vehicles were unable to contend with the scale of the bombardment, so people had to use their hands and some light equipment to pull bodies from under the rubble of houses. There was no possibility for anyone to survive.”

To get around pay wall: https://archive.is/RHuUy

Excerpts:

While Palestinians are officially prohibited from entering, the reality is more severe than a simple exclusion zone. "It's military whitewashing," explains a senior officer in Division 252, who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza. "The division commander designated this area as a 'kill zone.' Anyone who enters is shot."

A recently discharged Division 252 officer describes the arbitrary nature of this boundary: "For the division, the kill zone extends as far as a sniper can see." But the issue goes beyond geography. "We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists," he says. "The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200."

These accounts of indiscriminate killing and the routine classification of civilian casualties as terrorists emerged repeatedly in Haaretz's conversations with recent Gaza veterans.

[...]

Haaretz has gathered testimonies from active-duty soldiers, career officers, and reservists that reveal the unprecedented authority given to commanders. As the IDF operates across multiple fronts, division commanders have received expanded powers. Previously, bombing buildings or launching airstrikes required approval from the IDF chief of staff. Now, such decisions can be made by lower-ranking officers.

"Division commanders now have almost unlimited firepower authority in combat zones," explains a veteran officer in Division 252. "A battalion commander can order drone strikes, and a division commander can launch conquest operations." Some sources describe IDF units operating like independent militias, unrestricted by standard military protocols.

'We took him to the cage'

The chaotic reality has repeatedly forced commanders and fighters to face severe moral dilemmas. "The order was clear: 'Anyone crossing the bridge into the [Netzarim] corridor gets a bullet in the head,'" recalls a veteran fighter from Division 252.

"One time, guards spotted someone approaching from the south. We responded as if it was a large militant raid. We took positions and just opened fire. I'm talking about dozens of bullets, maybe more. For about a minute or two, we just kept shooting at the body. People around me were shooting and laughing."

But the incident didn't end there. "We approached the blood-covered body, photographed it, and took the phone. He was just a boy, maybe 16." An intelligence officer collected the items, and hours later, the fighters learned the boy wasn't a Hamas operative – but just a civilian.

"That evening, our battalion commander congratulated us for killing a terrorist, saying he hoped we'd kill ten more tomorrow," the fighter adds. "When someone pointed out he was unarmed and looked like a civilian, everyone shouted him down. The commander said: 'Anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians. Everyone's a terrorist.' This deeply troubled me – did I leave my home to sleep in a mouse-infested building for this? To shoot unarmed people?"

Similar incidents continue to surface. An officer in Division 252's command recalls when the IDF spokesperson announced their forces had killed over 200 militants. "Standard procedure requires photographing bodies and collecting details when possible, then sending evidence to intelligence to verify militant status or at least confirm they were killed by the IDF," he explains. "Of those 200 casualties, only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives. Yet no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants."