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Coffee Break: The Political Blender Is Throwing Up Some Odd Alliances

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In 2025 we are witnessing a political blender: the collapse of old political alliances and the emergence of new coalitions.

The metaphor comes from John Michael Greer and its impact was dramatically enhanced by the synchronicity of my Twitter feed.

These are the posts I saw back-to-back:

I’ll explain who Jake Shields and Shaun King are and why they matter at the end of this piece, but first let’s look a little deeper at Greer’s analysis.

And before we do that, I need to mention that I’ll barely be discussing the collapse of the Western right because that has been manifested by Donald Trump’s destruction of the old center right G.O.P. in 2016, which was sealed in 2024, and in the utter collapse of the Tory party in the U.K. in the David Cameron-Theresa May-Boris Johnson-Liz Truss-Richie Sunak era.

Now it’s the Democrats’ (and Labours’) turn.

In his piece, “The Narrative Trap“, Greer sums up the strategic cul-de-sac faced by the American Democratic party specifically and all Western centrist parties more generally:

…the narrative that Democratic politicians and their sock puppets in the media use to interpret today’s politics. That narrative, as I’ve discussed before, insists that the sole source of all the world’s problems is that a Bad Person wants to change things. Whether you call the Bad Person Sauron or Voldemort or Palpatine or Donald Trump, it’s always the same narrative, as rigidly clichéd as the plot of a porn flick or a bodice-busting romance novel. It leads the people who believe it into the self-defeating notion that all they have to do is get rid of the Bad Person and nothing else has to change.

What the Democrats are refusing to deal with is that a substantial majority of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the results of what, until Trump’s rise, was a bipartisan policy consensus in American public life. They’re not flocking to Trump for no reason at all. They’re flocking to him because he’s the only figure in the political scene offering them an alternative to a state of affairs they find intolerable.

The abysmal failures of the Kamala Harris campaign in 2024 and Joe Biden’s presidential administration have left the Democrats as naked as any emperor who ever paid gold for magic robes.

And that rope might be invisible and intangible but somehow it’s been caught in a very real political blender.

I haven’t written my “Why People Hate Joe Biden: Three Genocides in Four Years” piece yet, but it’s coming. My basic outline is as such:

Even though the Western corporate media has done its level best to obscure the true significance of those death tolls, murder will out.

And mass murder will out in a big, big way.

The Democrats are being dragged into Greer’s political blender.

Despite the “COVID’s not a big deal, we overreacted” narrative taking hold as conventional wisdom.

Despite the “well actually, it’s the Russians who have lost a million casualties” claims of official Western sources.

Despite the endless genocide denials of mainstream pundits.

We can see the Democrats being dragged into the political blender via their plummeting voter registration numbers:

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.

Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.

That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.

We can see the Democrats being dragged into the political blender over the concern trolling of Democratic New York City Mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani by U.S. House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

CNN’s Dana Bash: You have yet to endorse Zoron Mdani, who of course your party (nominated) about two months ago to be the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. As a New Yorker, what does he need to do to secure your endorsement?

Rep. Jeffries: Well, we had a very candid and constructive and community centered conversation a few weeks ago before he went off to Africa. I’ve of course been on the road uh for the last several weeks dealing in part with the Republican effort to try to rig the midterm elections through their gerrymandering scheme. But Congresswoman Yvette Clark, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and myself are scheduled to sit down with him in the next few days. I look forward to that conversation.

Jeffries’ Hamlet act has resulted in a chorus of “What happened to ‘Vote Blue, No Matter Who?’ critiques from former Bernie Sanders supporters such as Emma Vigeland on MSNBC:

Jeffries seems to think he has more gravitational pull than the incredibly popular Mamdani, but Jeffries risks being dragged into the political blender.

As we see here with Jeffries being branded “AIPAC Shakur” by the immensely popular Black talk show host Charlamagne tha God:

The Democrats being dragged into the political blender can be seen in Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Party endorsing State Senator Omar Fateh’s candidacy for Minneapolis mayor only for the state DFL party to step in and rescind his endorsement.

As The Nation reported:

Initially, the Minneapolis DFL appeared to agree. In the final formal balloting at the July convention, more than 60 percent of delegates chose to back Fateh over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey, a DFLer who last year issued a record number of vetoes of measures approved by the progressive majority on the city council, including a Gaza ceasefire resolution.

In addition, just before the convention adjourned, and at a point when a number of Frey backers had departed, Fateh won a show-of-hands vote where delegates held up badges to indicate whom they supported.

Fateh began campaigning, accurately, as the “DFL-endorsed” candidate.

But then the surprise came. Last week, a state DFL party committee revoked the endorsement after Frey and his allies complained that a “highly flawed and untested” electronic voting system produced a significant number of uncounted votes at the convention. Concerns were also raised about delays tied to slow Internet connections and a host of issues that frustrated backers of both leading endorsement contenders.

Frey celebrated the decision to revoke the endorsement, saying, “I am proud to be a member of a party that believes in correcting our mistakes.”

We can see the Democrats being dragged into the political blender with the embarrassing “dark woke” floundering of Gavin Newsom, even as he is still pandering to the worst of the Kamala Harris coterie.

We can see the Democrats being dragged into the political blender when U.S. Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer’s stubbornly insists on attempting to recruit a 77-year-old into a Maine Senate race where the Democrats have already fielded multiple, younger, more promising candidates.

And underlying all of the Democrats’ problems is their willful refusal to accept the overwhelming will of their voters and oppose the genocide in Gaza.

Despite it being ever more evident that backing Israel was a top cause of Harris losing the presidential election. From The Nation:

As one Harris campaign staffer explained to The Nation, a senior official in the Harris campaign informed voter engagement organizers at the beginning of October 2024 that they were to no longer to record voter feedback about Gaza in their internal systems.

This meant that the campaign simply stopped engaging with voters concerned about Gaza in the crucial final weeks leading up to the election, around the same time that Kamala Harris embraced Liz and Dick Cheney and sent Bill Clinton to Michigan, where he alienated the swing state’s Arab and Muslim voters by declaring that Israel had been “forced” to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “The thought process in the campaign with Muslim voters, young voters, with anybody who was concerned about Gaza was, OK, we’ll lose you, but we’ll pick up two somewhere else,” the staffer said. We all know what happened after that.

In a letter from March, these groups cite January polling by YouGov and the IMEU Policy Project that found “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the top concern (29 percent) of those who had voted for President Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024. It notes that this was the case for 38 percent of these voters in Arizona, 32 percent in Michigan, 32 percent in Wisconsin, and 36 percent of voters under 45.

The polling also indicates that 56 percent of Biden 2020 voters who did not vote for Harris say they would prefer to support a candidate who voted to withhold weapons from Israel, while just 16 percent would prefer a candidate who voted against withholding weapons.

But they just can’t bring themselves to change:

The Democratic Party’s divisions over Israel and the war in Gaza were on messy display at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday, as members weighed just how far to go in reprimanding Israel for its conduct on the battlefield.

Then, the party chairman abruptly abandoned his own proposal, kicking the subject to a task force in an acknowledgment of enduring intraparty tensions.

“There’s divide in our party on this issue,” Ken Martin, the D.N.C. chairman, said. “We have to find a path forward as a party and we have to stay unified.”

Mr. Martin’s unexpected move came during a morning session of the D.N.C. meeting in Minneapolis, where party activists had debated dueling resolutions about how to respond to the humanitarian crisis and war in Gaza.

The measures were almost entirely symbolic, yet laid bare the broader generational and establishment-versus-grass-roots fault lines shaping the party nearly two years after the war began.

One measure, backed by a number of younger D.N.C. members including the leaders of the College Democrats of America and High School Democrats of America, called on Democratic elected officials to endorse an arms embargo and the suspension of military aid to Israel, and to recognize Palestine as a nation.

The other, supported by Mr. Martin and his allies on the Resolutions Committee, sought to chart something of a middle course. Their resolution urged an influx of humanitarian aid to Gaza, an immediate cease-fire, the release of hostages taken captive from Israel during the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 and “a credible, negotiated pathway toward a two-state solution” for Israelis and Palestinians.

Enough about the doomed Democrats who refuse to pull their neckties and fingers out of the political blender.

Let’s talk about the new schisms that the political blender is producing on the MAGA right.

It’s most obviously visible in the emergence of MAGA queen Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a vocal and effective critic of Israel .

It’s one thing for a relative outlier like MTG to become a critic of Israel’s genocide, but she seems to have pulled along former Fox superstar talking head Megyn Kelly into serious criticisms of AIPAC:

Megyn Kelly: (MGT is) making headlines now over cracks in her support for some of (Trump’s) current stances—Ukraine, Israel, the Epstein files, just to name a few.
…
I’ve been very pro-Israel, and I’ve been very defensive of their right to defend themselves in this nightmare. And I’ve been very defensive of American Jews on campuses who are just being harassed, and it’s ridiculous, of course. But I have absolutely no skin whatsoever in defending any lobbyist group, including AIPAC.
I would love to know what they do to get the loyalty of politicians, because I will say I have had multiple reachouts to me, both from friends and from connected people in DC, begging me to go to Israel with them. And I have said no every time.
…
Lately it seems like it’s coming to be even more because I feel like there’s there’s a contingent of people who are worried that they’re losing me. I’ve said that I’m not on Hamas’s side. But…I’m looking at Israel in a different way right now than I was on 10/8. That’s for sure.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: Have you been invited by any other foreign country?

Kelly:: No.

Greene: We have tons of lobbyists (from) foreign countries that come to Washington D.C. Pretty much every country has some sort of representative. They have an ambassador they send to Washington. It’s naturally in their interest. We can understand that. They also are required to register under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act). It’s a law. They have to register as a foreign agent, a foreign lobbyist. That is required. It’s extremely important.

Here’s the here’s the difference with AIPAC. AIPAC is not registered under FARA that requires anyone coming to lobby a member of Congress or a senator or department of the government and the federal government on behalf of another country.

So AIPAC argues, oh but we’re Americans. Yes, they are Americans, but they are coming to Congress and to the federal government asking on behalf of the country of Israel. And I fully agree with you, Megan. We are not against Israel.

We are all for their right to defend themselves. …However, Israel is the only country I know of that has some sort of incredible influence and control over nearly every single one of my colleagues.

This is a conversation on Kelly’s Sirius Radio show which is also streamed on YouTube, reaching over a quarter of a million views. These are numbers that are very competitive with the audiences drawn by Kelly’s old employer Fox News and blow past MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

Now let’s get to the extremely odd emerging alliance I referenced at the top of this post. This is truly a political blender in action.

Jake Shields is a retired Mixed Martial Artist who once fought for a UFC title. He has over 800,000 followers on Elon Musk’s X.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has accused Shields of “spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories, male supremacist bigotry and white nationalist beliefs.”

I’m well aware of the SPLC’s dystopian “disinformation” turn under Margaret Huang, but I have to agree with their charges against Shields, whom I have followed closely for years in my work as a sports writer.

Shaun King is an activist who rose to prominence in the Black Lives Matter era. He has over 900,000 followers on X.

King has been dogged by controversy over his actual ethnicity, his fundraising practices, and his claims to have worked with Hamas to secure the release of Israeli-American hostages.

Despite all this, King has held on to a very large audience and has remained an advocate for African-Americans on numerous issues.

Shields and King have been online enemies for years.

And now?

While neither man is someone I would ever consider endorsing, or even take seriously as a pundit or thinker, I do take their influence over their respective mass audiences very seriously.

Shields has also allied with Jewish anti-Zionist comedian Dave Smith to oppose the genocide as seen in this inadvertently hilarious tweet:

Forgive me a chuckle at Shields’ waving away of his and Smith’s divergent views on a certain German dictator in a parenthesis.

Smith recently debated British Zionist Douglas Murray on the Joe Rogan Experience in a confrontation that has been viewed nearly 5 million times.

I scored that discussion as a big public loss for the Zionist cause. And the hand-wringing and meta-discussions of wokespertise vs expertise by establishment right pundits at Quillette, UnHerd, and others only made me more certain that Rogan and Smith picked up Murray and his attempts to obfuscate genocide and threw them into the political blender.

Currently, Smith, Shields, and King are all three are working to expose Israeli government official Tom Alexandrovich, who might have escaped prosecution in the U.S., but he can’t escape the political blender.

Some background on that case via The Guardian:

An Israeli government official charged with soliciting a minor believed he was meeting a 15-year-old girl for “sexual contact”, according to police – and brought a condom to the planned rendezvous in Las Vegas.

Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, a division head at the Israel National Cyber Directorate, was arrested in a police sting operation aimed at online users seeking to sexually prey on children. The Las Vegas outlet 8NewsNow reported that Alexandrovich chatted with an officer posing as a teenager online before being arrested.

“The sexual contact included bringing a condom and taking the decoy to ‘Cirque du Soleil’,” which stages elaborate shows along the Las Vegas Strip, said police documents seen by 8NewsNow.

Details of the arrest came as the state department denied the US government played any role in releasing the Israeli official – after Alexanderovich was able to return to Israel once he had bonded out of jail in connection with the felony charge.

A swarm of commentary online, propelled in part by Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, speculated that Alexanderovich had been shielded by the government at a time when the Trump administration has been struggling to contain criticism over unfulfilled promises to release all files related to the prosecution of the late, disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
…
A post on Israel’s government website from November describes Alexandrovich as the “head of the Technological Defense Division at the INCD [Israel National Cyber Directorate]”. A screenshot on Alexanderovich’s LinkedIn page, first reported by Mediaite, describes him as the same. A post on Alexandrovich’s page alluded to his having been in Las Vegas earlier in August for the Black Hat Briefings, a yearly meeting of cybersecurity professionals.

“Two things you can’t escape at Black Hat 2025: the relentless buzz of generative [artificial intelligence] and the sound of Hebrew … in every corridor,” Alexandrovich wrote in part in an accompanying post. Invoking an abbreviation for large language models and referring to one of Israel’s largest cities, the post continued: “The key takeaway? The future of cybersecurity is being written in code, and it seems a significant part of it is being authored in #TelAviv and powered by LLMs. An exciting time to be in the field!”

King has revealed that Alexanderovich, by his own admission, plays a major role in online censorship:

Figures like Greene, Shields, King, and Smith might be well outside the pale of political respectability as most of us have understood it in previous decades, but the political blender is spitting up some unlikely leaders in the political vacuum produced by the utter corruption of mainstream politics.

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9 comments

  1. ThatGuy

    Let’s talk money. The blender is being caused in part by money and attention. Democrats are accustomed to having much more money, and both a higher quantity and more favorable media coverage. Donors have not provided nearly as much money, in part because Dems are out of power, and in part because Kamala wasted over a billion.

    We now have Democratic politicians and pundits trying things out to get attention or money. Cursing was a short term trend. Gavin has gotten attention with redistricting. However, that isn’t a long term theme, nor a national one.

    People at the edges may stumble upon the future issues the Democratic Party will get mileage from. It will no doubt include suggestions no one cares about and ideas that attract negative attention.

    Reply ↓
    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      That’s an excellent point and I had a whole roster of links on the Dems’ pathetic fundraising I could have thrown in there but it was already overlong.

      Although I do want to push back with two caveats:
      1) money doesn’t go as far as it used to. Paid advertising is anything but the persuasion ultimate weapon it was as recently as 2012, and
      2) I’m a big believer that something like a coalition-destroying political blender has to be driven by political fundamentals like genocide and economic collapse. They can only put so much lipstick on these pigs.

      For reference links on Dems’ anemic fundraising:
      GOP leading in congressional fundraising
      DNC’s money problems
      Trump’s political operation has stockpiled a massive amount of cash ahead of the midterms

      But meanwhile individual Dem candidates are raising huge money:

      Ossoff raises record-breaking $11M for Senate reelect
      How AOC built a Democratic fundraising juggernaut

      Reply ↓
  3. Adam1

    “They’re not flocking to Trump for no reason at all. They’re flocking to him because he’s the only figure in the political scene offering them an alternative to a state of affairs they find intolerable.”

    True! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… Trump is the Republican Obama. Obama promised “Hope and Change” and Trump promised MAGA.

    Now I will admit that Trump 2.0 has probably done a better job optically of delivering on his promises as of today; but we’re barely 8 months in and nothing has fully shaken out.

    Those who voted for Trump who are… A) average Americans & B) have not been happy with the political scene… are likely going to find that they too have been left out of Trump’s America.

    The elite are robbing us blind and doing their damnest to convince us that it’s other Average Americans who are responsible for it. It’s the old divide and conquer strategy. Rinse and repeat.

    When both parties implode, which they will, we’ll be onto the next phase of things.

    Reply ↓
  5. Jason Boxman

    But what really becomes of the Democrat Party? With rigged districts, I don’t think there’s much possibility of Democrats substantially wiping out. The party would need to effectively collapse from within, and breakup or otherwise be replaced by some other entity, and you’d need to wrest the ballot lines away from the Democrats.

    There’s a recipe here for deeper apathy, but no roadmap to transformative change in a meaningfully positive direction. And so the ping-pong game shall continue.

    Reply ↓
  6. Cian

    The key political divide today is a generational one. The divide seems to be around 45. And that more than anything will determine your views on healthcare, Israel, capitalism.

    This even affects young Americans with ‘good’ jobs. An acquaintance was recently horrified to discover that her son with a good job didn’t get healthcare from his company, despite it being a good professional job. I know of lots of 30 somethings who want a second child, but have to pay off their debt from the first child first.

    Older Americans are only really aware of these realities (which they didn’t experience), if they have adult kids and they’re still on speaking terms with those kids.

    As the ‘young’ continue to age out (are you still ‘young’ as you appropach 50? Apparently if some pollsters are to be believed), the lack of representation for a large chunk of the electorate is going to become a political crisis. And grifters like Shaun will make out like bandits.

    Reply ↓

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