What happened to the red line? Biden is costing himself the election

It's not his critics that make him seem weak and feeble.

Welcome to a Tuesday morning edition of Progress Report.

I hope that you had a pleasant and relaxing Memorial Day weekend… unless you’re Richard Dreyfuss.

I spent the weekend taking care of the world’s sneeziest and most determined toddler, and working on a few features for the newsletter during naps and after bedtime. They’re almost complete, but recent events have compelled me to put out an additional edition of the newsletter.

Reminder: With election season now underway, I want to make this work as accessible as possible. So, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one, but I care most about people having access to all the info possible.

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1️⃣ These people are freaks: Everything is bigger in Texas, including both the bigotry and the political power of the deranged.

Case in point: In the time it took for me to write up the lead story in Saturday’s newsletter, about the Texas GOP choosing a Ken Paxton toadie and domestic abuser as the party’s new chairman, Republicans in the Lone Star State went and upped the ante by voting on a Neolithic party platform.

Here are a few of the more disturbing provisions that were voted on:

• Requiring public schools to provide “instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance.”

• Declaring abortion to be homicide

• Add gold and silver standards to the national currency

• Returning schools and landmarks to names that honored Confederate war heroes.

We’ll find out whether Texas Republicans voted to approve those planks.

2️⃣ These people are freaks: Leonard Leo is back to flying the religious insurrectionist flag in apparent solidarity with fellow far-right legal crank Samuel Alito. He’s being a real pedantic asshole about it, too.

3️⃣ These people are freaks: The Guardian ran a profile of these ultra-horny eugenicists from Pennsylvania. One of them is running for the legislature in Pennsylvania.

4️⃣ Driving the narrative: The NY Times ran a story this weekend about why unions, largely the Teamsters, have struggled to organize the shipping and logistics injury beyond UPS. Maybe it’s because it was written by a business reporter instead of a labor beat regular, but it takes nearly the entire piece to mention the actual reasons: laws that stack the deck against unionizing and unfair business practices by companies like Amazon that use subcontractors and break contracts whenever there’s a whiff of unionizing.

5️⃣ Charged up: It’s an unequivocally positive development that renewables are beginning to supplant fossil fuels as the predominant source of energy on some states’ power grids, but even globe-saving technology comes with questions of equity, impact, and trade-offs.

In California, as alternatives like solar and wind energy take hold, there is a growing need for storage facilities to house the batteries that store the excess power produced during the daytime. Just who will handle the privilege and/or burden of hosting those massive structures is a major source of debate, and increasingly invoking three of California’s other major renewable resources: NIMBYism, tax debates, and ballot initiatives.

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Where’s the red line?

A Palestinian child plays with the rubble after Israel bombs Palestinians’ tents and shelters in Rafah, Gaza on May 27, 2024.

An Israeli military attack set off a massive fire at a tent city refugee camp in the ruins of the Palestinian city of Rafah late Sunday, killing at least 45 people, most of whom were reportedly women and children. It was an act of brutality so egregious and inhumane that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent weeks defiantly overseeing the city’s dismantling, called it a tragic mistake (though not a big enough of a mistake to stop him from promising more strikes on Rafah).

Canada, France, and other western nations forcefully condemned the attack and called for an immediate ceasefire, echoing an order issued by the International Court of Justice last week. President Joe Biden, who not long ago said that an Israeli invasion of Rafah would cross a red line, has not commented on either this massacre or the ceasefire order, but last week, he forcefully rejected the suggestion that Israel was committing a genocide and condemned the International Criminal Court’s application for arrest warrants.

Many liberal commentators continue to focus their ire on the growing number of dissenting and disaffected Democratic voters who have become sharply critical of Biden’s unceasing support for Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza, reasoning that such criticism will hurt him in November’s election. I understand the jitteriness with Trumpism on the horizon, but would encourage them to recognize the moral depravity and logical incoherence of warning people that they may help elect a fascist if they don’t comply with orders to stop protesting a genocide.

While the White House must consider a broad array of complicated and contradictory inputs, continuing to support a genocide is still ultimately a choice, and silencing some criticism is not going to alter events or change the way that people perceive such dramatic and heartbreaking events. By shrinking from what was a long overdue ultimatum to Netanyahu and instead continuing to take the heat for atrocities committed by a man who so blatantly disrespects him, Biden is projecting both feebleness and deceitfulness, two of the major perceptions that he’s already battling in this election.

Think of it this way: Democratic insiders are now freaking out that Biden is going to lose in November, and the longer he seems hapless and weak, the more likely he is to be doomed. Pretending these aren’t issues isn’t going to change anything.

For all the pressure that he’s undoubtedly receiving from long-time donors and influential contemporaries, Biden needs to understand that at this point, the vast number of Americans who most ardently support the Israeli government — and they are a distinct minority overall — are never going to vote for him. By and large, they’re not even Jewish, but instead fanatical Evangelical Christians with their own weird motivations.

It’s possible that the administration is concerned with suffering the same kind of negative media coverage and political blowback that Biden received when it withdrew from Afghanistan, but this is a very different scenario.

Yes, pulling back from supplying Israel with the bombs that have killed tens of thousands of innocent people will garner criticism, but without US troops on the ground and no chance of seeing Israel’s government collapse, it’s not likely to produce scenes that make Americans feel like failures or as if they were failed. Really, other than inevitably biased media coverage and astroturf political ads, the backlash will mostly come from the same people and institutions that would criticize Biden for anything.

You can imagine the uproar inside the DC bubble and in some elite liberal circles being daunting, but that should be nothing compared to being associated with the charring of children and the international outrage and public dismay that will only continue to engulf them.

There is a distinct entitlement and self-righteousness to people who still support this genocide, who boorishly accuse critics of antisemitism and seem unable to even consider the possibility that Israel is responsible for its actions. As a Jew myself, I can’t help but feel some shame over the hysterical demand of fealty to a relentless revenge mission that has long since shed any pretense of necessity and revealed itself to be an exercise in blood thirst and tribalism.

After eight months of slaughter, the coalition’s compromise needs some fundamental reorganization. Biden should end his support for this genocide, and those Democrats who don’t like it should be encouraged to keep their criticism to themselves and vote for him anyway.

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