Happiest Man In Congress Today: Mike Lawler (R-NY)
Blue America backed Mondaire Jones when he ran for Congress in 2020 and we always felt he did a very good job. Personally, however, I always felt there was something “off” with this guy. I had a good initial interview with him when we were considering endorsing him but after that he was extremely cold and weird. I never understood it but he voted well and messaged well when he was elected, backed Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal, and that’s what mattered, not a bizarre personality.
But then in 2022 he gave up his seat to corrupt conservative DCCC head Sean Patrick Maloney without a fight and moved to Brooklyn’s new 10th district, far from his Rockland County base. We were really disappointed, especially because Maloney, an interloper, wasn’t going to be able to hold the seat and, indeed, he lost to a nobody who Jones would have buried, Mike Lawler. Meanwhile, Jones didn’t survive the NY-10 primary, splitting the progressive vote with the more progressive— and Blue America endorsed— Yuh-Line Niou, preventing her from winning and throwing the election to an hereditary multimillionaire and Zionist shill, Dan Goldman:
What tragedy that was! But when Jones declared he would try to win back his old Rockland/Westchester County seat this year, we decided to endorse him again. After all, he had been an exceptionally good member for the two years he served and he was certainly the best bet to beat Lawler, his primary opponent being a garden variety corporate Democrat running an identity politics campaign (as a… wait for it— woman and sister of some minor Democratic politician from the Midwest).
But once Jones' outstanding campaign drove her to drop out and left him as the sole Democratic opponent to Lawler, Jones pivoted sharply to the right, happily accepting an endorsement from the corrupt corporate New Dems for example. But also messaging badly and moving in a decidedly un-progressive and then anti-progressive direction. We eventually, quietly, dropped him from our endorsed candidates list.
But I’m on the endorsement committees for several other organizations. One held a meeting with Jones to consider endorsing him. In a discussion of tax policy, I asked him how his relationship with the New Dems would impact his next term as a congressman. He flipped out and attacked me for "ruining" the Democratic Party over Israel and Gaza. I was stunned— and kind of confused. Israel and Gaza have nothing to do with this group and foreign policy never comes up in our discussions with candidates. Anyway, he fits the criteria for the group and I either abstained or voted for the endorsement; I considered both options and can’t remember which I did.
After his stab in the back of former colleague Jamaal Bowman on Monday— which he is now trying to exploit to win conservative votes for himself— I wish I had voted against the endorsement. But I’m really glad Blue America unendorsed him a few months ago!
On Tuesday, his campaign sent out a press release with the article they had fed to Nick Fandos at the NY Times. The press release reads: “I am proud to endorse George Latimer in his race against Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th Congressional District. I have a longstanding relationship with George, and we worked together on a number of important issues for Westchester County when I served in his administration in the County Attorney’s Office,” Mondaire Jones said. “I want to be clear: I am making this endorsement to stand up for my Jewish constituents because Rep. Bowman and I have very different views on Israel. I have been horrified by his recent acceptance of the DSA endorsement, his denial of the sexual assault of Israeli women by Hamas on October 7, and his embrace of Norman Finkelstein, a well-known antisemite. I know George Latimer will be a unifying force for our party, and I look forward to working with him in Washington to get things done on behalf of New Yorkers.”
And he does have a lot of Jewish constituents— not normal Jewish constituents either… but the kind who vote MAGA: Hasidics, ultra-Orthodox, all kind of crazy sects… kind of like the Jewish version of Tennessee Baptist snake-handlers. His district has ‘em all. And he’s always managed to deftly keep them on his side without selling out his values. Until now. I think AIPAC was fine with him and I know J Street was a 6-figure donor, but now AIPAC is supporting Lawler, and that's a real threat to Jones, especially if they decide to do any independent spending in the race.
So far none of the groups from AIPAC’s toxic pro-genocide network have done any independent expenditures in NY-17, nor would they have been expected to… yet. Jones, no doubt, endorsed their top candidate of the year, pro-genocide conservaDem George Latimer— and slammed Jamaal— to fend off AIPAC. We’ll see if it works, since it would probably be a death sentence for his campaign, especially now that he has alienating many of his progressive allies. Fandos: “Roughly four years ago, Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman made history together. Young, left-leaning Democrats, they won hard-fought primaries in neighboring districts to become the first Black men ever to represent New York’s Westchester County in Congress. Now, they find themselves deeply at odds over the [Israeli genocide against Gaza], a break so sharp that Jones vowed on Monday to help defeat Bowman in the Democratic primary on June 25 and endorse his opponent, George Latimer. It was the latest sign of how intensely the conflict in the Middle East has come to divide Democratic politics this election year. Latimer and Bowman have already spent months debating the conflict, and the race has been transformed by $10 million in outside spending by pro-Israel interest groups on Latimer’s behalf. Jones said in an interview that he could not sit by while Bowman positioned himself as a leading critic of Israel, saying that his former ally had sown ‘pain and anxiety’ among Jewish New Yorkers and had torn ‘at the fabric of our community and our civil rights coalition.’ But Jones also may be considering his own political self-interest. After losing his House seat in 2022, he is now running to unseat Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican, in a swing district just to the north. Creating some distance from Bowman may help win over Jewish voters, as well as other [conservative] voters. ‘As someone who is among the most popular Democrats in the Hudson Valley, it is my prerogative to play a dispositive role in ending this long, painful nightmare that we have been experiencing since Oct. 7,’ Jones said. He planned to formally make the endorsement at an event on Tuesday… Jones said he would let others draw their own conclusions about whether Bowman’s statements amounted to antisemitism. He also indicated he took no issue with spending in the race by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and affiliated pro-Israel groups that are also supporting Latimer.”
Bowman has firmly rejected accusations of antisemitism, saying he is pro-peace, not anti-Israel or anti-Jewish. He has called Hamas’s attack a war crime, but argues it does not justify an Israel counteroffensive that has killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including many women and children, according to heath authorities there.
Jones joins a growing list of current and former public officials to back Mr. Latimer, 70. They include [AIPAC puppet] Eliot Engel, the longtime congressman whom Bowman defeated in 2020; numerous state lawmakers; and almost every local Democratic Party committee in the district.
Bowman still has the support of some powerful labor unions, left-leaning lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez and the top members of House Democratic leadership, who routinely back incumbents.
Latimer, who is white, said he hoped Jones’s endorsement would help put to bed charges that he has used racist tropes as he seeks to cast Bowman as an attention-seeking distraction in Congress.
“The argument about me running a racist campaign falls flat on its face when people who are African American, Latino and Asian are supporting me,” he said in an interview.
…[Bowmn] recently cast the growing list of political figures behind Latimer as a sign that Westchester’s Democratic establishment was circling the wagons to try to put one of its own back into office.
“I was never their guy,” he said. “To me, what my opponent represents is an acquiescing to the wealthy, elite corporate interests and special interests, especially as it relates to AIPAC and Israel.”
You can contribute to Jamaal Bowman’s campaign here or, if you're hard-core, here. On Monday the Jewish Insider reported that Jones told them that “This is about me standing up for the Jewish community. I want to be very clear about that… I will always stand up for my Jewish constituents. It’s just critically important we rebuke the extremists that some would have take over the Democratic Party.” Take over? I don’t think so. If anyone is trying to “take over” the Democratic Party, it was clearly exposed in the NY Times yesterday: Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers With Influence Campaign on Gaza War. Sheera Frenkel reported from Tel Aviv that “Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation. The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents. The campaign began in October and remains active on the Twitter. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military.”
They used ChatGPT to generate the posts and spread their lies and misinformation about the situation on the ground. “The secretive campaign,” wrote Frenkel, “signals the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza,” largely because most Americans— unlike the political elite of both parties— are anti-genocide. It’s no different from the Russian digital disinformation campaigns but Democrats will be unlikely to denounce it because… AIPAC.
The operation began just weeks into the war in October, according to Israeli officials and the documents on the effort. Dozens of Israeli tech start-ups received emails and WhatsApp messages that month inviting them to join urgent meetings to become “digital soldiers” for Israel during the war, according to messages viewed by The Times. Some of the emails and messages were sent from Israeli government officials, while others came from tech start-ups and incubators.
The first meeting was held in Tel Aviv in mid-October. It appeared to be an informal gathering where Israelis could volunteer their technical skills to help the country’s war effort, three attendees said. Members of several government ministries also took part, they said.
Participants were told that they could be “warriors for Israel” and that “digital campaigns” could be run on behalf of the country, according to recordings of the meetings.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs commissioned a campaign aimed at the United States, the Israeli officials said. A budget of about $2 million was set, according to one message viewed by The Times.
Stoic was hired to run the campaign. On its website and on LinkedIn, Stoic says it was founded in 2017 by a team of political and business strategists and calls itself a political marketing and business intelligence firm. Other companies may have been hired to run additional campaigns, one Israeli official said.
Many of the campaign’s fake accounts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook posed as fictional American students, concerned citizens and local constituents. The accounts shared articles and statistics that backed Israel’s position in the war.
The operation focused on more than a dozen members of Congress, many of whom are Black and Democrats, according to an analysis by FakeReporter. Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York who is outspoken about his pro-Israel view [and one of Congress’ most servile AIPAC puppets], was targeted in addition to Jeffries [another career-long AIPAC goon] and Warnock.
Some of the fake accounts responded to posts by Torres on Twitter by commenting on antisemitism on college campuses and in major U.S. cities. In response to a Dec. 8 post on Twitter by Torres about fire safety, one fake account replied, “Hamas is perpetrating the conflict,” referring to the Islamist militant group. The post included a hashtag that said Jews were being persecuted.
On Facebook, the fake accounts posted on Jeffries’s public page by asking if he had seen a report about the United Nations’ employing members of Hamas in Gaza.
…Last week, Meta and OpenAI published reports attributing the influence campaign to Stoic. Meta said it had removed 510 Facebook accounts, 11 Facebook pages, 32 Instagram accounts and one Facebook group tied to the operation. OpenAI said Stoic had created fictional personas and biographies meant to stand in for real people on social media services used in Israel, Canada and the United States to post anti-Islamic messages. Many of the posts remain on Twitter [of course].
This morning, Politico reported that “Lefties are livid at Mondaire Jones… feeling angry and betrayed.” Jones likely just handed the seat to Lawler for another term. Cori Bush (D-MO) told them that Jones “positioned himself as Squad-adjacent during his time in Congress. And then now, when it is beneficial to him, he will go against someone who actually was there for him.”
UPDATE: CPC Rescinds Endorsement
This morning the CPC un-endorsed Jones, a unanimous decision of the PAC board after Jones stabbed Bowman in the back. Earlier in the week, Pramila told NBC News, “Honestly, I'm just so disgusted by it. This is a former colleague of his, an incumbent member who is a top priority candidate for us, an incumbent for us in the Progressive Caucus.” She also called it “horrific” and “politically expedient.” Jones is just so desperate to get back into Congress that he would probably do anything at all. At this point, I wouldn't even vote for him against Lawler!