Is AIPAC astroturfing a 'Free Palestine' campaign against Jack Schlossberg in NY-12?

The money always goes somewhere.

With the massive influx to the coffers of State Assemblyman Micah Lasher’s campaign from Michael Bloomberg and to State Assemblyman Alex Bores’s campaign from major Trump donor and AI-booster Chris Larsen, it figured to be only a matter of time until the candidate with the polling lead for the House NY-12 seat, Jack Schlossberg, started to feel some heat.

Schlossberg’s signature issue is that, unlike the other leading contenders in the race, his campaign is running super PAC-free, on top of which he has announced several snappily framed initiatives, like making Donald Trump responsible for security costs to Trump-branded buildings paid for by the city of New York, with recovered funds going to “cops, teachers, and transit”; allowing renters to deduct their rent from taxes; and a Monthly Moms Bonus, aka restoration of the Child Tax Credit. Each of these initiatives’ passage into law under the current administration would be, at best, an uphill battle. All are worthy goals though, whose future hangs most of all on messaging and platform, which happen to be Schlossberg’s strength.

“How is he rose to the top? This is just an embarrassment.” Absolutely riveting commentary from Sam Seder (off-screen) followed by a broken attempt at cogency and backhanded plug for AIPAC’s preferred candidate Micah Lasher by a seemingly stoned Emma Vigeland. This is like a clip from an episode of Teletubbies: sense-wise, they’re just sort of bouncing off the walls and each other, falling backwards, kicking their legs in the air. None of them know anything about embarrassment, apparently. They must not be frequent viewers of their own show.

It’s enough to make the head spin. Taken in toto, the attacks are incoherent. According to these critics, Schlossberg’s a total idiot and a canny, deceptive plant; he’s too incompetent to win but also the frontrunner who must be reined in; he’s too independent of his campaign staff and at the same time, taking his marching orders from the establishment. The attacks aren’t really meant to make sense when folded together: they’re meant to find voters who are paying only selective attention and turn them off to his candidacy, without any sense of perspective as to outcomes—like, for example, enabling victory by AIPAC’s preferred NY-12 candidates, Micah Lasher or George Conway, or Silicon Valley and Trump-donor boosted Alex Bores, who has reiterated publicly his support for the continued funding of Israel’s military.

Social media, as most of us well know, tends to create cocoons of affinity around dedicated users; social media also happens to be Schlossberg’s strength in the race and potentially as a member of the House—he has a major audience and the devotion of voters inside and outside the district that he is running to represent.

Live by the ‘like’, die by the ‘like’ seems to be the gambit. The Free Palestine/anti-Zionist social media hive is a particularly active one at this moment in time, and understandably so. Despite good news from Hungary, fascism has gained ground globally over the past decade, and in particular, following decades of accusations that the State of Israel has enacted apartheid (hard to deny) and genocide (even as the Palestinian population grew year after year), Benjamin Netanyahu and his frothing rightwing government apparently decided, following October 7th, that the same tactics Vladimir Putin employed in Chechnya would be appropriate in Gaza, with the added bonus of AI-enabled drone surveillance and attacks.

‘War,’ Netanyahu called it, even as the death toll mounted in what, at best, could be called a slaughter whose casualty count is many orders of magnitude beyond the brutal terror inflicted on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7th, and a number that is still rising. If there ever was proportionality to the Israeli response, that has long-since been lost: What is being asserted, in Old Testament fashion by Netanyahu’s government, is supremacy, a tragically hammer-headed belief in Israeli supremacy, one that seems bound to complete the Jewish state’s transition from one-time darling of the American left to Book of Revelation-thumping zealot obsession to international pariah. Like Donald Trump, Netanyahu occupies the seat of power at a nation’s helm while attempting to evade accountability for alleged crimes. Netanyahu is also trying to escape his own complicity in the horrors of Oct. 7th, both his having steered funding to Hamas, in order to prop up his preferred election campaign boogeyman and by concentrating so much on the prospect of war with Hezbollah in Lebanon as to leave the border with Gaza vulnerable to incursion.

What in the world could this possibly have to do with the race for NY-12? Is one house seat in a closely contested and gerrymandered-to-hell US Congress under Donald Trump or J.D. Vance going to make or break outcomes for the Palestinian people?

No, probably not.

That’s the simple answer. In the offing, though, if you can get an active hive of selectively informed young people to stigmatize a competing candidate while remaining off-camera yourself, in the shadows, then, Hey, the theory must go, You’re more than halfway to winning this thing, and serving the establishment interests you are pledged to serve.

Because, in contrast to Schlossberg’s proposed plans and refusal of dark money, it will be much easier for Micah Lasher or George Conway to legislate support for Israel under the current administration; much easier, as well, for Alex Bores to legislate his preferred winner in the AI-race whose losers seem bound to be workers worldwide. Jack Schlossberg’s plans are bigger swings, and what’s more, by refusing PAC money, he is walking the walk on perhaps the defining issue of our time.

In recent election cycles, we have already seen ripe examples of AIPAC’s sophistication in obscuring their involvement in various races, by going under deceptive names such as Chicago Progressive Partnership, Voters for Responsive Government, and Mainstream Democrats PAC. These guys aren’t chumps; they understand that their support is publicly stigmatized in the current Democratic political environment, and candidates such as would-be Senator of Michigan Mallory McMorrow have sought to hide their receipt of AIPAC donations, or to conceal the source by shell-game sleight of hand.

It is not such a wild conjecture, then, to imagine that beyond the realm of campaign-giving or super PAC support, dark money would be channeled to internet trolls who do what they do primarily for clicks and for donations, or straight-up into generating AI-slop accounts to drive a certain style of messaging.

Following Jack Schlossberg’s No Kings-day encounter with one such social media personality by the moniker of “@Crackheadbarneynfriends,” during which the all-out there questioner tried bullying him into saying “Fuck Israel” on a day dedicated to protesting Donald Trump’s corruption and would-be American Caesar status—the command to donate by Venmo to CrackheadBarney is superimposed right there on the screen—a downright deluge of Instagram performativity came a-crashing down.

Does CrackheadBarney have any integrity as far as where the money is coming from? (LOL.) Does CrackheadBarney even have to know that the money is coming from, say, Mike Bloomberg’s massive donation to Micah Lasher, or Chris Larsen’s to Alex Bores, in order to continue driving anti-Schlossberg messaging? (Again, definitely not.)

As with most social media smear campaigns that now have the power to decide elections at the margins, engagement is driven by a combination of calculation and naïvety: the calculating actors drive the messaging and the naive act as multipliers in buying what the original poster is selling. Our current president, for one, is like a pig in a mud-bath in this sense (and probably several others, too… and yes, sorry, I know that’s an insult to pigs.)

In the quoted IG post, davidsaysstuff plays what seems to be a habituated part of snapping fingers on social media to say, Fuck Israel, for likes. An exercise in personal branding and audience-boosting on an ultra-capitalistic platform with the perhaps naive belief that what’s being served is the goal of a Free Palestine.

So, the Schlossberg pile-ons which go much to the effect of ‘Your campaign is over, Zionist’ and ‘Schlossberg, ew, thought he was great but now blah, so done with him’ are driven by the original posters, by brand-builders, but also, apparently, AI bots or zombie messaging accounts, as in the following exchange I had on Instagram.

The account I was interacting with here had about fifteen followers and a private setting so that no ‘hi I’m actually a person’ photographs could be viewed. Most tellingly, the profile picture, which I’ve blacked out to abide by the general ethic of not putting unknowns on potential blast, appeared to be AI-generated, but in the style of a fake person (and not, like, manga or a cartoon or another sort of pop culture avatar).

The money always goes somewhere.

Whether AIPAC money, Bloomberg money, or Chris Larsen money, the advantage of this brand of astroturfing is that it’s completely deniable: what weak public campaign donation reporting we have in the U.S. does not apply as far as dollars sent to Instagram personalities or profiles generated to troll. The dead giveaway, though, is how the argument being driven against Schlossberg makes no sense insofar as the real world outcome of dragging down his campaign would mean victory for Lasher, or Conway, or Bores, all of whom support military aid to Israel.

I’m sympathetic to criticism set on pulling a candidate toward a more progressive position, and have seen at least one of the instigating accounts, trishetalks, pause from a finger-waving academic key-term style speech (e.g. “intersectionality”)—the kind that voters tend to hate because the not-so-implicit message reads as You Are Stoopid Let Me Educate You—to note that Schlossberg voiced support for Bernie Sanders’ proposed ban of offensive weapons to Israel.

Have any of the other leading candidates in NY-12 voiced such support? No. Has there been a subsequent froth of online posters praising Schlossberg’s statement? Take a guess. (A: Not yet!)

Given the district, among the wealthiest in the country, and with one of the greatest concentrations of Jewish-Americans in the country, it takes no genius to discern that there are many voters who are unabashedly pro-Israel. At the same time, there are many Jewish-Americans (including, perhaps, the one-third in New York City who voted Zohran Mamdani for mayor) who are critical of Israel or outright done with it in the fashion of davidsaysstuff, or what’s probably better and more practically applicable to positive outcomes, Jewish Voice for Peace, whose slogan, righteously, is “Not in Our Name.”

The intention of a troll campaign smearing Schlossberg as a “Zionist” would be to get him into a double-bind, where he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

Imagine, for a moment, if during the No Kings Day march, Schlossberg had turned to CrackheadBarney and cheerfully declared, ‘Fuck Israel! Free Palestine!’

I mean, really, stop and imagine that for a moment.

What would have happened, as a result, for the Palestinians?

And would saying that have helped Schlossberg win the seat in NY-12 in order to guide policy?

Or would it have won a froth of posters in his comments akin to Beto O’Rourke’s 2019 declaration that he was coming for Texans’ guns?

This little soapbox moment of Ana Kasparian’s during her crossbranding exercise with Megyn Kelly as they gloat over the tough New York Times coverage of Schlossberg (Megyn Kelly now loves the NYT, OK? That’s totally a real thing she sincerely believes, like really, really) is kind of telling in that regard.

Please, take it away, Ana. Give us a performance for the ages.

Now.

There may be no name more synonymous in the history of this country with ‘public service’ than Kennedy. USAID, which the current administration sought to destroy on taking office, was a legislated accomplishment of President John F. Kennedy. The entire notion of an international order—for better or for worse—and the USA’s responsibility for maintaining it on a nuclear-armed planet, took root during the Kennedy administration through such pioneering global public service programs as the Peace Corps.

As the two content-creators, Kelly and Kasparian, on their exciting cross-branding expedition, ask each other “serious” questions, and despair of how the country became so idiotic, while staring straight-faced into their ring lights (incredible commitment to the bit!), I’ve really got to scratch my head.

Yeah……………… home economics. Back to the kitchen, OK? 😉 👍

This stuff, which is contingent on cult-like audience capture, and has Americans turning to it again and again as to a lunch-hour interlocutor who isn’t there—that sensible, engaged American glad to discuss the issues with us in the public square—is just, viewed objectively, as from a great distance, so, so incredibly vacuous. Kelly and Kasparian have trained their voices into rhythms to fill the space inside the hour of their listeners’ time, but they’re saying nothing save for playing on feelings of disgust and attempting to direct such feelings away from themselves (Stuck Here in the Middle…. with You? I mean, with YOU?) and toward a candidate running for office in NY-12 who happens to be descended from a former president whom, in fact, he never got the opportunity to know. Because of? Yes. A life given to public service.

Although it would be rude of him to say, I’m going to hazard that Jack Schlossberg knows more about public service, the history thereof and the ghosts of such better angels, than Megyn Kelly will even begin to understand until the day (or night?) that she dies and reunites with the collective unconscious.

The Kennedy family, the one that first broke into American consciousness during the first half of the 20th century (parents Joseph and Rose, children Joseph Jr., John, Rose, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert, Jean, and Edward) were, per Michael O’ Brien’s biography of JFK, one of the first in the United States to have a home theater. Growing up with the movies close at hand gave Jack Kennedy a charming, witty self-awareness about public image that was ahead its time, of the sort that the Beatles then perfected, and The Simpsons eventually consecrated in comedy as a hallmark of American consciousness, the sine qua non of modern being.

An apt student, Jack Schlossberg grew up with social media, and is a native practitioner in a disarmingly self-aware, winking style.

Schlossberg risks clowning.

Schlossberg risks cringe.

Schlossberg risks vulnerability.

All to draw people from their silos. To stir feeling. Behind the antics is a guy who, given his rarified upbringing, is more humble and with a greater sense of integrity than anyone has reason to expect—someone who does well in one-on-one conversation. Against the charge of entitlement with respect to the House seat—as if Schlossberg weren’t actively running for the seat but instead sitting in a five-star restaurant with a silk napkin tucked into his shirt waiting for it to be served to him—all that needs be said is, for someone as privileged as he is, there are surely much easier rows to hoe than seeking public approval to be his home district’s rep in DC. Has anyone looked lately at the condition of the House of Representatives, and the likes of who is repping us, countrywide? Embarrassment, generally speaking, doesn’t begin to describe it, and integrity is in scarce supply.

As a member of the House, Jack Schlossberg would carry potential to champion progressive reform to the finish-line and into law. Considering the district he seeks to represent, electing him is the clear choice, and any progressive organization that wants to build bridges has the opportunity, while his campaign’s outcome is not certain, to forge a relationship with a future ally.

We live in an era when entertainment and politics are all tangled up together, and the results for the American people, of course, (much less the world) have been mainly disastrous. Per NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, “Ronald Reagan famously said, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ I disagree. Nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day, and can’t feed my family.’”

Schlossberg represents a fusion of the entertainment and buttoned-down political threads, someone with a born and bred political savvy, who cares passionately about the future of Democratic politics, meeting people where they are, and redeeming a party that has seemingly lost its bearings. His sense of decorum is innate, qualities he does not have to aspire to; when he goes on social media he pushes boundaries to capture attention through dramatic irony toward an intrinsic set of values.

The goal is not, contra the New York Times article, to restore some backward-looking “Camelot” but to take first steps toward something new: a marriage of yesterday and tomorrow, more equitable outcomes, more progressive understanding, fulfilled promise.

In that he refuses super PAC money, a common retort to Schlossberg’s stance is something to the effect of ‘C’mon, he doesn’t need it cuz he’s rich!’

But Schlossberg’s campaign isn’t funded by his own money. It’s funded by donors, inside and outside the NY-12 district, who believe in him. It’s funded by Americans for whom the Kennedy name retains positive meaning. And it’s funded with the cross-party intent of getting money out of politics, which, along with a Voters Rights Act abolishing gerrymandering, ought to be the overriding goal for those who believe in democracy.

A world in which Israel and the Netanyahu government will be held accountable for war crimes, or even genocide as decreed by international governing bodies, only stands a chance once the tides of fascism have receded, especially in the United States. So long as Trump and his inheritors are in power, despairing about Gaza will be contained to social media, and marshaled by those willing to exploit such feelings to dubious ends that perpetuate, not alleviate, the suffering of the people.