#Resist!
📸 via Associated Press
Last night, Senator Cory Booker completed his record-breaking 25-hour “stand” against Trump. The Guardian declared it “a primal scream of resistance”. I’m sorry, were we watching the same speech? Resistance how? Recounting stories and declaiming end-of-times warnings to an echo chamber, with nothing on the line? Booker didn’t do anything, let alone #resist. He delivered an aesthetic showstopper, not a filibuster; no votes blocked, no legislation delayed, no material changes made.
Talk—however long, impassioned, charismatic, or decorous—is utterly cheap. It’s going to take a lot more than a 25-hour sermon from a longtime and staunch supporter of Israel to earn my vote. In fact, I found the speech wholly insulting, witnessing yet another hollow gesture from the Democrats to excite their base with a grand PR moment, as if a fucking football pep rally could ever be a suitable stand-in for grassroots organization and mass mobilization.
And what a colossal waste of time and energy, to spend 25 hours and 4 minutes critiquing Trump’s policies while managing not to call for a ceasefire or denounce the genocide in Gaza and the billions of taxpayer dollars by which the US is funding said genocide in the form of unrelenting bombs and artillery. How hateful and corrupt do you have to be? Meanwhile, 59 percent of all Americans want a ceasefire—more than half the country now. Once again, the Democratic machine has failed to read the room.
Believe you me, I want change. I want things to be better. And Palestine has everything to do with it—our freedom is inextricably linked. Perhaps you see the genocide as something quite separate from your day-to-day conditions. But realize that, in order to attain truly meaningful progress for Americans, initiatives around health, wellbeing, and safety must be pulled up to the forefront. This would mean deprioritizing and divesting from initiatives in service of violence, such as defense, police, and Israel.
Despite the overwhelming majority of Democrats in favor of a ceasefire (77 percent), despite continuous nationwide protests for a year-and-a-half, and despite Harris’s refusal to end the war on Gaza contributing to her loss in the 2024 Presidential election, the Democrats remain allied with Israel, perfectly at peace with Palestinian blood on their hands. When there’s money to be made, power to be gained and maintained, the people’s interests are inconsequential. Democrats, exactly like their Republican counterparts, will always fund violence. If only peace and dignity could be so lucrative.