There was a time when AIPAC didn’t need attack ads or super PACs.

If you were in DC0., you just knew the choreography: show up to the conference, clap on cue, sign the letters, and avoid the word “occupation” like it’s a homeless veteran. Money appears. Committee spots open and quickly close. Nobody said the quiet part out loud.

That era’s over. AIPAC is still rich, still dangerous, and still getting people tossed out of office - but for the first time in its existence, it’s “doing it with the lights on.” And people are starting to look around and ask “Who the hell farmed out our foreign policy to a belligerent state with a long history of human rights abuses?”

For most of its history, AIPAC preferred the soft-touch approach. It didn’t technically write the checks; it just bundled the donors, filled the banquet halls, and made sure you understood which way the wind was blowing.

Then, in the 2020s, subtlety got forcibly retired.

AIPAC rolled out its own PAC and super PAC, and suddenly there were explicit AIPAC-branded piles of cash in Democratic primaries - millions of dollars dropped on races most of the country will never hear about, all to make examples out of a handful of outspoken critics of Israel’s U.S.-funded brutality in Gaza.

Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman weren’t just random incumbents who “lost a tough race.” They were message-board warnings: talk too loudly about ceasefire, U.S. aid, or Palestinian rights, and a truckload of money will show up to convince your constituents that you personally cause inflation, crime, and cloudy weather.

On paper? Effective. In practice? It turned AIPAC from “that big foreign policy group” into what it really is: an enforcement arm for permanent war.

This is where we need to be precise.

The issue isn’t “Jewish influence” or any of the gross, recycled garbage the far-right loves to smuggle in under a Palestinian flag. The issue is billionaire influence - right now some K-rocked tech bro who had one good idea decades before there was really competition in the tech sector has his hands firmly ahold of the levers of power; if you know how volatile ketamine can make a person, you likely got goosebumps just thinking about it.

AIPAC works the same way the fossil fuel lobby, Big Pharma, and the health insurance industry do:

1. Gobble up cash from people who will never have to choose between rent and groceries.

2. Spend it putting anyone who threatens the status quo on blast for a week.

3. Lecture the rest of us about “pragmatism” and “incremental change.”

The only twist is that this lobby operates on hyper-charged terrain: occupation, apartheid, and U.S. complicity. So when it goes after progressive candidates, the smear isn’t just “soft on crime” or “too far left” - it’s “antisemite,” even when the candidate’s actual position is “stop bombing civilians” and “maybe don’t fund war crimes please.”

That’s why more and more Jewish leftists, Palestinian organizers, and just plain disgusted voters are saying the same thing in different languages: this isn’t about “protecting Israel”; it’s about protecting a tiny cadre of donors and contractors who stand to profit from endless war.

Gaza broke something that was already under strain.

For years, young people watched the U.S. political class write blank checks for Israeli policy while talking about “shared values.” Then social media started doing what legacy media wouldn’t: live-streaming war crimes into people’s feeds.

Now you’ve got:

Drop AIPAC into that environment and it looks less like a “pro-Israel lobby” and more like a geriatric supervillain: still powerful, still dangerous, but increasingly out of step with anyone under 40 whose politics didn’t fossilize in the Oslo era.

When AIPAC spends millions to knock out a Cori Bush or a Jamaal Bowman, they don’t just remove a critic. They also tattoo their own brand onto the win: this race was bought by AIPAC. The name has become synonymous with corruption and institutional decay.

That’s not a great long-term growth strategy given the aforementioned shift in perception.

The “fall” here isn’t a sudden collapse. AIPAC is not going to vanish between now and the next election. More like a hang glider with two parachutes- on the way down but guaranteed a soft landing. But three big things have changed:

AIPAC can still win races and lose legitimacy at the same time. You can stay powerful for a long, long time while your reputation rots out from under you if you’re propped up by enough blood money (just ask the arms industry).

AIPAC’s stumble doesn’t automatically produce better politics. A weakened lobby doesn’t by itself create a just foreign policy any more than banning one predatory lender fixes capitalism.

What it does create is space. Space for:

That’s where we come in.

The job of the left isn’t just to cheer when a lobby overplays its hand. It’s to build enough organized power that no candidate has to weigh “participate in genocide” against “get doxxed by a billionaire-funded muckraker’s smear campaign.”

AIPAC’s fall won’t look like a sudden crater on the map. It’ll look like exactly what we’re already seeing: more people naming the problem, more candidates refusing the check, more races where “backed by AIPAC” reads more like “bought by AIPAC.”

Once a machine like that becomes visible as just another cog within an oligarchy, it doesn’t go back to being invisible. It either changes - or it gets replaced.

Dear Chairman Mao,

My congressperson used to at least pretend to be progressive. Not Che, but they could say “human rights” without bursting into flames.

Then Gaza lit up again and, like clockwork, they:

AIPAC is openly bragging about how many “pro-Israel” candidates they helped elect, and my rep is on the list like it’s an honor roll. I feel like I’m being represented by a rewards program.

How do you fight something with that much money and that much access without it feeling completely pointless?

Signed,
Confused in a Captured District

Dear Confused in a Captured District,

Let’s start with the basic clarification that apparently half of Congress still can’t manage:

AIPAC is not “the Jews.”

It’s a hard-right lobbying machine that speaks fluently on behalf of weapons manufacturers, Christian Zionists, and politicians whose moral compass depends on whatever their biggest donor whispers in their ears last night.

Your rep didn’t “evolve.” They didn’t “wrestle with a complex issue.” They got bought like bulk office chairs.

Here’s how the AIPAC courtship usually goes:

You’re not going to outbid that with a GoFundMe. The goal isn’t to beat AIPAC at AIPAC’s game. The goal is to make their money buy less.

The depressing truth: your rep probably isn’t coming back from this. Once they’ve decided they’d rather be “AIPAC-approved” than accountable to the people who actually live in their district, that’s who they are.

AIPAC can buy ads. It can buy influencers. It can buy a fresh batch of amoral cowards every election cycle.

What it can’t buy is your consent, your solidarity, or your memory. Just because they’ve moved to the wrong side of the scales doesn’t mean anyone else has to go with them, but it does mean we need to counterbalance the shift it creates.

Door-knock for someone who believes in self-determination, organize your workplace, school, or other public-facing entity to sign a BDS pledge, or collect donations for boots-on-the-ground Gazan relief efforts. Whatever is within our power to do should be done, as our brothers and sisters in Gaza suffer needlessly day after day after day. But be sure to care for yourself, and do not shoulder all the world’s burdens by yourself.

Solidarity,
Chairman Mao

World on alert as the Trump administration ratchets up tensions with their long-time rival.

Dawn over the Caribbean. A fiberglass hull is already shredded, fuel and blood slicking the water. Survivors cling to wreckage, waving at the sky for help. Instead, the U.S. aircraft that just blew up their boat circles back and fires again. That’s not a gut-wrenching scene from a Scorsese-directed Top Gun sequel. That’s the September strike on a vessel that left Venezuela, likely empty handed. The strike is now being picked apart by practically every lawyer and investigator with a pulse.

This week, the White House finally ‘fessed up: there was a second strike, aimed at people in the water. The administration says Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’se pronouns are “80 Proof” and “40% ABV,” authorized the mission, while Admiral Frank “Mitch” (read: “Little Bitch”) Bradley gave the order for the follow-up shot. Trump, ever the “brave” commander, is now insisting he wouldn’t have wanted a second strike at all - after mean-mugging for the cameras about blowing up “bad hombres” at sea.

This wasn’t a one-off. It’s part of Operation Southern Spear, an ongoing campaign of airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Since September, U.S. forces have destroyed roughly a couple dozen suspected “drug boats,” killing at dozens of people. The official line is that they were all narco-terrorists heading for U.S. shores. Proof? Classified, because of course it is. What we do know is that most of these strikes happened far from any U.S. coastline, have interdicted practically no narcotics (choosing instead to blow up any potential for evaluating the veracity of their intiial claims), with almost no public information about who was actually on those boats.

Legally, this is where the hull starts to crack wide open. Under the laws of war and basic human rights, people who are shipwrecked or incapacitated are supposed to be off-limits. You’re not allowed to treat someone clinging to a busted plank as sharks circle hungrily like they’re in the middle of a firefight. Even U.S. military manuals spell that out. Lawyers who usually twist themselves into pretzels to defend American targeting decisions are, for once, not doing that; they’re calling this what it looks like: the kind of thing that winds up in front of the Hague.

The White House spin is that the attack was “self-defense” and “within the law of armed conflict.” In their telling, the second strike was needed to “neutralize an ongoing threat.” Translation: two injured people floating in open water are apparently such a menace that the world’s biggest military had no choice but to blow them apart too. The logic here is simple and nauseating: declare an “armed conflict” with cartels, slap the label “narco-terrorist” on any given boat’s hull, and suddenly everyone on board is fair game.

Even someone with Hegsethian double-vision could see we’re intentionally inching toward open war with Venezuela. Operation Southern Spear now comes with a floating palisade of U.S. nautical hardware parked off Venezuela’s coast and very public chatter in Washington about “putting Maduro in the crosshairs.” You don’t park a small navy off someone’s shoreline because of one coked up speedboat. You do it to rattle sabres at a government you’d like to topple, and to see how much killing you can get away with under the banner of “drug interdiction.”

And this isn’t just about one blown-up boat. If the U.S. can normalize blowing up suspected smugglers at sea and then hitting the survivors, that doctrine won’t stay offshore for long. We’re setting a precedent that says some people are so disposable you can kill them twice and call it security policy.

Empire always tests its ugliest ideas on people it assumes no one will defend: poor, brown, coastal, stateless, moving across the map in vessels no one important will ever ride in. If we shrug this off as just another “drug war” story, we’re not neutral. We’re giving a quiet green light for what comes next. And we’re beginning to see what shape that might soon take: green fatigues and combat boots atop Venezeulan soil.

If you’re ready to start fighting back, here’s where you can find me:
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