@shplane@lemmy.world @sunzu2@thebrainbin.org I can’t see sunzu’s posts, presumably because they’re instance-banned for propaganda or something, but shplane asked a question about “when did AOC sell out to Israel” that has a really important answer, and so being unable to post a direct reply I’m just making it at top level.

So, what happened was that a while back MTG introduced an amendment to one of those big horrifying money-for-war bills that every so often passes through the US congress and unleashes a really unfathomable amount of tangible suffering on the world, without much more than a few hours’ attention being paid to it at all either inside or outside congress. MTG’s amendment would have removed a small amount of funding for Israel including a grant which is used among other things for some of their “defensive” weapons for civilian areas, while leaving intact the waterfall of money for their offensive weaponry. AOC voted no on that amendment, along with practically everyone else, and then said some dumb shit about why she did.

Of course, later on, she voted no for the massive funding bill which spent $830 billion on various types of killing, including $6 billion for Israel for offensive weapons.

Some people seized on that single vote and claimed that it overshadowed her no vote on the main bill, her protests in favor of Palestine, her attempts to block funding for Israel in ways that were a lot less stupid than MTG’s amendment (to the point that at one point Biden got mad at her personally and they had a meeting about it or something, because she was materially gumming up the works), basically all of her support for Palestine which is super rare in the US congress. They’re still talking about how bad she betrayed Palestine. It becomes a whole narrative, where she’s now pro-genocide irrevocably forever, and if you challenge them on it, they can run and hide behind the fact that she did, in fact, vote against that amendment, and so it’s proved now. She’s bad. Don’t vote for her.

For some reason, this only happens to the left-est of left politicians. You will never heard someone randomly start cursing about how big an asshole Joe Manchin was when he did absolutely incalculable damage to the planet by blocking the first iteration of the IRA. No, you will only hear these kind of neatly-packaged reasons not to support a left politician deployed and repeated (there are only like 10-20 of them, you start to see them repeat after a while if you pay attention) against the leftest of the bunch.

Wonder why.