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Generational Political War in a Hypernormalized Context

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The hypernormalized state of 2025 America is dramatically impacting political campaigns in the U.S. as the empire rapidly loses hegemony.

This post is a grab-bag to follow up on my previous posts this week: “Zionism’s Pyrrhic Victory Drives Dystopian High Tech Drive for Control” and “Who’s Delusional, Who’s Drugged, Who’s Disinformed? It’s Hard to Tell.”

I’m trying to chronicle the crazy and there are a lot of narrative threads to carry if we’re going to keep up.

The Stupid Burns Bright Among Billionaires

Important reminder to start our post from Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs:

Bill Ackman is a billionaire Zionist who came up previously in my “Influencer Apocalypse” post on the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Tucker Carlson used Ackman as a punching bag and a punch line in his fateful Turning Point USA appearance shortly before Kirk’s death.

Now Ackman is putting his stupid directly into the NYC Mayoral campaign which we’ve been covering since before the primary:

Ackman’s ally in hasbara, Elon Musk also came forward to represent Nathan Robinson’s point by posting complete bullshit and getting caught by his X’s community notes (a pathetically frequent occurrence), but this was a good one:

The Completely Corrupted America Political Process

The United States 2025 isn’t just ridiculously hypernormalized because our billionaires are in charge, but because they’ve managed to completely rig the political process.

I sometimes handwring about the relevance of political campaigns when we’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover that might render them moot, but they’re a big part of the distraction spectacle if nothing else.

David Sirota has a new book out (based on the podcast) “Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America” so he’s been tweeting some things about how we got here, that relate to current themes.

I’m sharing two for context:

It’s classic that the recently indicted Trump 1.0 official turned target of the regime, John Bolton, was involved with a key of the early step in legalizing bribery in American politics:

Sirota also points out that the ruling by the post-legal Trump Supreme Court fits in with my recent themes of derangement and delusion and the battle for narrative control:

AIPAC Goes Plata O Oro on the CBC

And since AIPAC can’t keep itself out of the news lately, I guess it’s fitting to discuss their use of one of legendary Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s favorite strategies: plata o plomo (silver or lead/bribes or bullets), which I’ve inelegantly adapted to a campaign context dominated by money to plata o oro (silver or gold).

Take the money or we’ll take you out with massively funded media campaigns (although I’ll talk about the increasing kinetic element of hasbara further down).

There’s an important piece at The Nation called AIPAC and the Congressional Black Congress that details how that strategy has been deployed very effectively against a key element of Democratic congressional power:

The CBC’s silence isn’t accidental: More than half of its current 61 members have been endorsed or funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful US lobbying arm for Israel’s agenda. In the 2023–24 election cycle alone, AIPAC endorsed 26 of the caucus’s members, raising $4.6 million for them and another $3.5 million for Black Democratic candidates.

So that covers the silver, now let’s look at the gold AIPAC threw around to beat multiple CBC members in the last cycle:

AIPAC’s targeting of Black lawmakers such as Cori Bush of Missouri, who lost her seat in 2024, for speaking out against Israel’s crimes against humanity.
…
The group also targeted … Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee, who spoke out against Israel… (Lee survived that AIPAC offensive, but now, like other congressional critics of Israel, she has to be prepared for AIPAC-funded primary challenges each time she runs for reelection.)
…
What has rendered the Democratic Party such an impotent voice in combating the Gaza genocide, in other words, is a matter of fundraising math. A single-issue lobby reliant on strong financial backing from GOP donors has successfully managed to keep Democratic critics of Israel out of Congress.

…look at what happened to Jamaal Bowman. In May 2023, while serving as a Democratic representative from New York, Bowman cosponsored a resolution seeking to ensure that US funds to Israel would not be used to harm Palestinian children. This would seem an uncontroversial aim—but not for AIPAC and its allied PACs.

…Bowman learned the cost of speaking truth to the spending power of AIPAC. “When you go against one of their pieces of legislation, depending on what it is, they will e-mail you, relentlessly call you, relentlessly protest outside of your office, and stop you from even being able to do your job,” he continued.

In the 2023–24 election cycle, AIPAC (made) an unprecedented outlay of $15 million in a single House race by the group in its successful primary challenge against Bowman. He was replaced on the Democratic ticket by the AIPAC-endorsed former Westchester County executive George Latimer, a white candidate with a record of racist remarks.

Pro-Israel groups spent millions to defeat other Black members of Congress, including Bush and Lee as well as Maryland Representative Donna Edwards. … Lee is the only CBC member in that cohort of Israel critics who’s still in office.
…
The 2024 purge represented a dramatic upsurge in the group’s battle against Black progressives. Records indicate that AIPAC did not spend any money against Bush or Bowman during the 2022 elections. After Bush sponsored a resolution in October 2023 that called for de-escalation and a ceasefire in Gaza, AIPAC spent $8.6 million to replace her on the Democratic ticket with Wesley Bell, who abandoned his bid to become Missouri’s first Black senator in order to supplant Bush in the House.

…spending against Bush in 2022 only reached $170,602—which means that AIPAC boosted anti-Bush and pro-opposition spending by nearly 5,000 percent in the 2024 cycle. AIPAC’s anti-Bush and pro-Bell cash offensive also worked out to four times the $2 million that the progressive PAC Justice Democrats contributed to Bush’s primary campaign and anti-Bell efforts.

AIPAC Aipac Lying Low Because Opps Are Fundraising off Their Opposition

Fortunately, brutal politics like that triggers a reaction and thanks to groups like Track AIPAC the political action committee is becoming too toxic to follow standard operating practice.

One of the clearest signs is when U.S. Senate candidates are bragging that they refuse AIPAC money, not something often seen before October 7, 2023. This is from Illinois:

Let’s beat AIPAC, one sticker sale at a time.
Thanks for the idea, @mehdirhasan.bsky.social !

Get yours here: www.rayguncustom.com/collections/…

[image or embed]

— Kat Abughazaleh (@katmabu.bsky.social) Oct 21, 2025 at 2:27 PM

And it works:

Rolling Stone covered the launch of Abughazaleh’s campaign, when she challenged the 80-year-old incumbent Jan Schakowsky in March, running so strong she forced Schakowsky to announce she wouldn’t run by May:

Illinois 9th District has only been represented by two people since 1965, and there hasn’t been a competitive primary since the race Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, the district’s current representative, won in November 1998. “I wouldn’t be born for another four months,” deadpans Kat Abughazaleh, the TikTok-famous political commentator now running to represent the district.

Abughazaleh is transparent about the fact that she is not what anyone thinks of as shoe-in for Congress: a 26-year-old narcoleptic freelance social media creator who doesn’t live in the district and has only lived in the state for less than a year, challenging a Democratic Party leader who has represented this part of Illinois for more than a quarter of a century.

That’s kind of the point: She is a normal person — with a rental lease she can’t break before it’s up, financial pressure bearing down on her, and prescription medication that she needs to function properly and that has been challenging to obtain since Elon Musk went after her employer, and she and many of her colleagues were laid off.
…
“We are in an emergency,” Abughazaleh says. “Right now, the answer to authoritarianism isn’t to be quiet. It’s not matching pink outfits at a state address. It’s not throwing trans people under the bus. It’s not refusing to look at the party at all and see where it could be better. The answer is to very publicly, very loudly, very boldly, stand up. The only way to fight fascism, and this has been proven over and over and over again, is loudly, proudly, and every single day.”

Even if Abughazaleh doesn’t win the seat, simply forcing gerontocrat Schakowsky to step down is a worthwhile accomplishment.

Now there are about 20 Democrats in the primary, including Daniel Biss, the Mayor of Evanston who has served in the U.S. Congress and ran a losing race for Governor in 2018, but Abughazaleh is still leading the money race — a huge feat for a first-time netroots candidate.

AIPAC’s response has been to pour stealth money into the race, supporting a fairly obscure GOP candidate. Matthew Eadie reports from Illinois:

Over 270 donors, many of whom have backed dozens of Republican politicians and the nation’s largest pro-Israel lobbying group, donated over $319,000 to State Sen. Laura Fine’s congressional campaign since May, campaign records show.

Hundreds of Fine’s donors who drove almost half of her campaign fundraising had previously supported several candidates, both Republican and Democratic, through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, including Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.).

One donor, a physician from Fort Myers, Florida, donated $500 to Fine’s campaign on Sept. 18, just three days after a fundraising email from AIPAC calling her opponents, Kat Abughazaleh and Daniel Biss “dangerous detractors” from AIPAC’s mission. The donor had previously donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republicans, including over $20,000 to two of Donald Trump’s largest super PACs in 2024.

Of the over 740 individual donations Fine received since launching her campaign, over 270 came from donors with strong links to AIPAC, which has often been criticized for targeting critics of the Jewish state, previously supported candidates directly through AIPAC, Evanston Now’s analysis of hundreds of records shows.

Fine’s donations, as listed in both her July and October FEC filings, were not earmarked as being made through AIPAC and are displayed as individual donations. Evanston Now crosschecked hundreds of the donors and their donation histories, compiling a list of candidates her donors had previously supported.

Matthew Eadie does a lot of supplemental work on X.com

AIPAC vs Thomas Massie
Here’s a tweet from a mysteriously popular seemingly AI infused anonymous account trafficking in conspiracy theory, but as we’ve learned from Dr. Aaron Good, zionists are pulling so many conspiracies that even anti-Semitic right-wingers are doing some good work:

Then there’s how AIPAC handles maverick Republicans like Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, a principled libertarian in the Ron and Rand Paul mode. Now, I could go on for hours about how wrong all those principles are, but I respect the man for having an ethos and sticking to it.

As Dr. Good told BettBeat Media:

Dr. Aaron Good: Zionism is something unique and powerful and important to grapple with and that we are kind of ill-suited to do so because of indoctrination about anti-semitism and what it is and is what it is and is not acceptable to say about Israel.

Ultimately, I am not on the side of the right-wing conspiracists who don’t really have a problem with capitalism or imperialism per se, but but focus on the conspiratorial uh activity of Zionists, which is, and some of these people will do good work because there are so much terrible conspiratorial things that (zionists) are doing. But I think it’s a mistake to just try to to fixate on that and not recognize that it’s the system that kind of created this Game of Thrones environment for oligarchic factions to act the way that they act.

But enough clarifying why I’m not exactly on Team Massie but support him in his fight with Trump and AIPAC.

Another fascinating “political blender” case is Mel The Villge Crazy Lady who does the Lord’s work battling Zionists on X, despite being all kinds of sus in other regards. Here she is fighting the good fight for Massie:

Politico had a good piece this summer explaining Massie’s district and why it will be a tough one to dislodge him from:

in Rep. Thomas Massie’s fourth Congressional district, there are a few other pillars to know about: Cincinnati chili, served over spaghetti with Greek spices; a life-size Noah’s Ark; and a political culture that, in the words of Northern Kentucky’s political class, is a good fit for Massie’s libertarian conservatism — even if it means facing the wrath of President Donald Trump.

“Yes, we’re conservatives, but we also have independent thinking,” said Republican state Rep. TJ Roberts, a protege of Massie’s in Frankfort. “We have a consistent track record of having a very different taste, especially when we talk about foreign affairs.”
…
“I am consequential here in Washington, D.C. In between launching B-2 bombers to the other side of the planet, the president spends some portion of his attention worried about what I’m going to do next,” said Massie, a 54-year-old, MIT-educated entrepreneur who founded a haptics company before moving back to his family home of Lewis County in the early 2000s.
…
Kentucky Republicans have been needling Trump like it’s a part-time job ever since his return to the White House — from Sen. Mitch McConnell’s long feud with Trump, to Sen. Rand Paul’s vote against the “big, beautiful bill” and support for a Democrat-led measure to end Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
…
His confidence is based on the particular contours of the electorate in his district, which is focused around Cincinnati’s Northern Kentucky suburbs with a healthy bite of Appalachia and exurban Louisville. Local political professionals know Massie’s fief to be a quizzical mixture of many right-leaning factions that don’t always get along: suburbanites who identify with Ohio; Appalachians who are deeply skeptical about all forms of federal control; and a strong Catholic tradition that contrasts with the state’s Bible-thumping stereotype.

Now Trump has recruited a Navy seal to run against Massie, per Politico:

Trump hailed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL captain who ran unsuccessfully for state Senate last year, as a “WINNER WHO WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN” in a Truth Social post last week. He also said Massie “must be thrown out of office, ASAP.”

Massie is dismissing Gallrein as a threat, casting his opponent to POLITICO last week as a “failed candidate and establishment hack.” He later took to X to post vote totals showing he outran Gallrein in the counties they overlapped last year. And he recently posted the biggest fundraising quarter of his career, hauling in $768,000 from July to September and entering October with more than $2 million in cash on hand.

The president has been searching for a challenger to Massie since the Kentuckian voted against the “big, beautiful bill.” Trump’s political operation launched a super PAC aimed at unseating Massie in June, as the representative pushed to reassert congressional authority over Trump’s military actions in Iran. The group, MAGA KY, has spent $1.8 million on independent expenditures so far.

But there are reasons to be skeptical of Massie:

This will be a race I’ll be following for Naked Capitalism.

Influencer Apocolypse: The Sequel?

And to change subjects again, an alarming development in terms of hasbara manifesting in kinetic form against media, right here in the USA.

When I covered Kirk’s death I quoted Yasha Levine and he seems unfortunately prophetic:

The hit did something I haven’t seen before. It spooked the political influencers. They are scared. Many of them spent last night issuing lengthy, serious statements on X about the gravity of the situation. Some of them are calling it a 9/11 event — a 9/11 for the influencer class.

Political assassinations are one thing. Killing a president, however horrible, was seen as within the rules of “the game.” But influencers? Political commentators? They were supposed to be a protected class. Their free speech was supposed to matter. It was supposed to be protected by “the rules.” Many of them see themselves in Charlie Kirk. And they are clearly afraid for their lives. The world — their world — has turned upside down. Nothing will be the same to them. And it’s not just the influencers on Charlie Kirk’s team. The liberal and left wings of the influencer class are panicking, too. If a righty influencer can be whacked, so can they. The rules have changed.

Now it’s Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks in the barrell:

This is how Canary Mission kicked off their attacks on Kasparian:

Hopefully she stays safe.

I’ll have more on the Democrats’ generational war on today’s Coffee Break. Chuck Schumer is going all out to stop Bernie Sanders’ choice in the Maine Senate primary. And by all out, I mean he’s drafted a 77 year old to run for the U.S. Senate.

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4 comments

      1. The Rev Kev

        As the Chinese curse goes, ‘may you live in interesting times.’ As far as I can see, it is going to take decades to un*** American politics but I am not sure that it is possible. Years ago a Princeton study found that America is effectively an oligarchy which ex-president Carter confirmed. Excuse the long quote here-

        ‘Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful industries. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.

        If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.

        Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel—an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly, which I analyze in detail below. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy. So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising. But that can’t last indefinitely; Americans are getting angry, and even when they’re misguided or poorly informed, people have a deep, visceral sense that they’re being screwed.

        The real challenge is figuring out how the United States can regain control of its future from its new oligarchy and restore its position as a prosperous, fair, well-educated nation. For if we don’t, the current pattern of great concentration of wealth and power will worsen, and we may face the steady immiseration of most of the American population.’

        Charles Ferguson – “Predator Nation” 2012

        Reply ↓
        1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

          Ferguson was prophetic. I remember the Princeton study. Seems like it’s finally becoming conventional wisdom.

          This part from Ferguson really hit the basket in pre-describing 2025 from 13 years out:

          an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.

          Reply ↓

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