Humane Foreign Policy - Kat for Illinois
As with regard to Taiwan, the United States must continue to support Taiwan in the face of increasing Chinese aggression and attempts to undermine Taiwan’s internationally recognized status as a state of its own.
Kat Abughazaleh, Democratic candidate for Illinois 9th Congressional District - Chicago Sun-Times
I want to codify passive support to sell Taiwan weapons, and prevent the president from overruling it unilaterally. If China invades Taiwan, we need to step in militarily to defend Taiwan. We have to use all our assets in the region, to defend the island from illegal aggression. I envision a two-part credible deterrence plan that turns Taiwan into a “porcupine” too costly for the PRC to invade, by providing them with weapons to defend themselves and committing to actually defending the island if they do invade.
Drop Site (@DropSiteNews): "⭕️ LEAKED Email | XCancel
“interventionist,” foreign policy adviser says Kat Abughazaleh, a socialist Democratic candidate in Illinois’ 9th District and one of the only Palestinian-Americans seeking office in 2026, was described by her national security adviser as “firmly an interventionist” who “won’t stop until Russia is made to pay for its crimes,” in written responses detailing her foreign policy vision, obtained by Drop Site.
Ben Mermel wrote in an email to a Washington-based progressive foreign policy activist that Abughazaleh believes “the world is better off when America takes a leading role” and that the U.S. has “an obligation to support pro-democracy movements around the world, from Iran to Venezuela.” He added that “Kat wholly supports the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as its affiliated organizations (NDI, IRI, and the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center),” and said Congress should expand tools “from sanctions to NGO support” to advance those efforts without always resorting to “kinetic force.”
The DC-based activist had written to Mermel saying he had noticed unusually hawkish language on the campaign website related to Ukraine and Taiwan and was looking for clarification.
In his response, Mermel said that on Taiwan she would amend the Taiwan Relations Act by “dropping our strategic ambiguity” and make clear the U.S. would counter Chinese aggression “with force,” arguing the region now requires “a firmer hand.”
On Ukraine, Mermel wrote she would “hold the line,” support “funding the Ukrainian war effort to the hilt,” back long-range strikes on Russian strategic targets, deploy additional U.S. “air, naval, and ground assets” to NATO’s front line, and that “She supports the seizure and redistribution of Russian assets in Europe and the United States, for the purpose of financing the war effort.”
Abughazaleh did not respond to a request for comment, but a source close to the campaign told Drop Site that the adviser’s email did not accurately represent her views, saying, “Kat is committed to taking on authoritarianism but is vehemently against the military industrial complex and the continuation of failed US intervention approaches.” Abughazaleh has consistently argued against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and, at a recent forum, said she opposes U.S. strikes on Iran.
Mermel in 2024 attended a pro-Israel protest held to counter the encampment at George Washington University. He has been Abughazaleh’s National Security Adviser since July 2025, according to Legistorm.
Just for the record, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA organization:
National Endowment for Democracy - Wikipedia
In a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, NED founder Allen Weinstein said: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[24]
The People’s Forum is WHOLLY funded, staffed, and controlled by PSL, whose office is in the same building upstairs. (more below and in linked tweet)
For once there’s actually better resources on Reddit than here
u/wob_nobbler
"As a PSL organizer, I can say her imperialist views are [not] reflected in the PSL’s Party line
She was brought on the panel alongside other people too with varying views, and it consisted entirely of domestic policy discussion.
I agree she has terrible views on Taiwan and NATO more generally. But her advocacy for Palestine and (relative) popularity brought more viewership to the People’s forum. Ultimately their board decides who gets invited, even if they are propped up by the PSL."
u/odd_insurance_7140
"Being propped up by an org is not the same as being controlled by that org. TPF certainly relies a lot of the PSL, and vice versa. That’s how close partnerships are. But the TPF’s autonomy is not subordinated to the PSL. It’s like you ignored the part of their comment that said ”Ultimately the board decides who gets invited”.
I think you are being a bit too idealistic and harsh here in your attempt to bash the PSL. But this is why the PSL, like any effective revolutionary party, doesn’t aim to simply organize the left. Its base is too unforgiving and petty at times, and not large enough to be effective on its own."
u/wob_nobbler
"The People’s forum is attached to our “PSL Action Network” which essentially is the outreach/public news front of our organizing bodies. This isn’t the first time they invitd a liberal/progressive candidate on nor will it be the last.
The PSL itself is firmly anti-imperialist, favoring peaceful reunification of Formosa/Taiwan back into China. Having Abugazalegh on for a panel doesn’t change our consistent position since 2004. "
Personally I’m fine with both criticizing PSL and People’s Forum for this but context is necessary and to disavow them as a party for this is a bit extreme, especially considering the aforementioned party line is still the same.
To use an extreme historical parallel, if I may, someone gave a speech to the comintern calling the founder of the futurist movement a revolutionary. I’ll quote this in a minute [since the source I have is physical only]
Edit 2:
-Antonio Gramsci
Edit:
u/oracleofthewest
"Omg yall are insanely sectarian on your politics. This grifter sucks but immediately calling ALL of the PSL “opportunist” and “liberal” is the most insane online leftist take I’ve heard. Please get out there and actually organize with your local socialist organization instead of nitpicking every single panelist on an BIG TENT educational platform for baby socialists. This panel is definitely a miss for me, I don’t think they should’ve had it, but TPF does some of the coolest Marxist classes I’ve ever been a part of and they’re rad as fuck GENERALLY.
For context, I’ve been an organizer with my local branch of the PSL for five years now. My comrades are some of the most dedicated, educated, and compassionate people I’ve ever met in my life, and they dedicate hundreds of hours every month to going out on the streets and actually organizing members of the working class from a genuine Marxists Leninist framework of political engagement.
These sort of broad, all encompassing takes in which an organization like the PSL is branded as evil and opportunist at the slightest disagreement in tactics is genuinely hurtful to the movement for socialism broadly.
Please for the love of god go out in your cities and actually talk to people about socialism instead of slandering other genuine Marxist organizations online."
These are some fair responses and an important clarification about what the People’s Forum is. I would say that context does make a difference in this case. And the commenters are right to point out that it is not helpful to immediately jump to denunciation, hostility and accusations toward the PSL who, as far as i know, have a pretty solid anti-imperialist platform. It’s fine to criticize mistakes, and i still think inviting her was a mistake, but we should try to resist the urge to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to a party that has so far been overall very positive. It’s not like there is an abundance of better options in the US.
Removed by mod
Reality check: this is not twitter and hordes are not going to come to ratio people you disagree with. Be respectful and be ready to go through things in detail.
I already put forth mine many times, and there’s not much more to see especially if you’re across all 3 of these mentioned sites discussing this.
Chasing me around the thread doesn’t make you look smarter, you’re just coping about PSL’s liberal tailism strategy. Appealing to the center is not going to work.
Then you can say nothing at all if you have nothing further to say. Rather than trying to dunk on people like this is twitter. You aren’t obligated to reply to every comment in the thread. You are expected to be respectful to people here.
I had my own argument on the bottom, I just didn’t want to repeat what other people had already said as well. This response really characterizes you
I was in the PSL too and I’m not going to continue falling for their trap. Hope you see through it too.
I know you’re getting a lot of pushback in this thread but if you were to do a writeup I would definitely read it. Applied for PSL fairly recently and still trying to evaluate them in terms of substantive critique.
One could ask if bourgoisie electoralism were to become sophisticated enough to allow for pressure valve for discontent (let’s say including against the genocides and the jingoisim against Russia, China, Iran and Venuzeula) for even budding marxists what would that look like and how does the PSL differentiate themselves from that?
This sounds like something you should expand into a general post
Don’t worry about the pushback, Westerners have to go through a learning curve.
The Peoples forum is not PSL. They are 2 different things.
She doesn’t deserve to wear that keffiyeh
She’s wearing the wrong one as well.
It’s a Jordanian kufiya also Gulf monarchies default, Palestinian one is black and white. You can tell how much someone gives a fuck about Palestine by how well they know Palestinian culture.
And she’s half Palestinian too. 😭
Don’t tell people here that fact who defend a CIA supporter platformed on behalf by state department. It’s like taking pride in Nayib Bukele for being “half Palestinian” who run a death camp, because Western Marxists assumes just because they’re Palestinian diasporas they must be ontologically part of the resistance.
She’s clearly a proponent of American imperialism and chauvinism, which isn’t out of character for Social Democrats, who are known capitalist sympathizers and reformists. What does this mean for the PSL? What is the word among the actual members of the party? Specifically, the revolutionary Marxist hardliners? The Party is comprised of *leftists" and Marxists, and clearly, even those who retain capitalist sympathies if they go as far as platforming someone who supports American aggression against global South nations, especially AES countries. Is this enough to abandon the party in its entirety or would it be a wake-up call for leadership to come to terms with this glaring vulnerability and address a clear danger to the Marxist, revolutionary elements of the party?
Either way, critical support for all revolutionary efforts, especially in the West, were unmistakable proponents of the bourgeois order seem to always slither their way into Marxist circles. This is the danger of working closely with leftists. If they do not have a solid, unwavering, Marxist and dialectical materialist foundation, they cannot be held above suspicion of sympathizing with the enemy of the working people.
Kinda sad the PSL has a rare bad take.
The unfortunate truth is a lot of western “marxists” and leftists aren’t all that left. They engage in proudhonism (go look up some proudhon quotes, say they are from marx and let’s see how many likes you will get) and are functionally left-liberals. They buy into industrial vs finance capital (see how popular Hudson is and important reminder that Nazis did the same), not understand how deeply the relation of capital holds (see how popular MMT is), hold on to reactionary sentiments (see how popular anti-AI is), defend socdem apologism (Mamdanis, DSA, Greens etc), refuse to study the science of what makes a group revolutionary (non-material defense of USAmerican veterans - they come from poor backgrounds, they were fooled into it, some of them regret what happened and are “anti-war”, sentimentalise the quality of life of veterans who aren’t cared for, eg PSL) etc etc
Again there’s a discussion about even abandoning the whole left-right spectrum given 99% of western left is functionally anti-marxism leninism, and we understand left deviation within ML itself is not “less wrong” than right deviation [ie ML is a science and therefore it should be ML vs (right + left)]. Tbh I am not there (yet?).
I do not like AI… (awkward silence).
Edit: I got a downvote? That seems pretty weird, since I think I stated a relatively mild opinion.
Among the loose social crowd of online artists and creative hustlers, the reaction to this new technology has been short-sighted at best. While there are legitimate grounds to criticize the way this technology fits into systems of exploitation, the arguments from the self-identified artists tend to follow a few distinct lines of thinking:
- That there is an ontological difference to human creativity or the artist’s superior mind. The mild version of this take compares it to “the stupid machine.” The explicitly exceptionalist and dehumanizing version compares it to other supposedly less intelligent or less imaginative humans and lazy parasites.
- That there is an unalienable right for the artist to hold onto their creative output as private property, to be protected from “theft” (which in the case of AI art becomes even prospective theft, like an extension of protections against plagiarism shifting into an unconditional protection against replacement by other artists with more productive tools).
- That more efficient AI methods lead to the displacement of the artists’ conditions of economic existence: the erosion of their market share, client pool, contract opportunities, etc.
The first argument implies an ideology of arts that posits artists as uniquely more human than the masses, or that posits “creativity” as a universal right but doesn’t stop to ask why only some people are allowed to make it their life’s purpose, as opposed to a hobby they have limited time for. The second argument implies an ideology of arts that relies on the frameworks of private property and copyright, without a clear understanding of how these frameworks came to be and how much of a danger they are to both individual artists themselves and culture at large. The third argument is legitimate, but answers to it tend to fall back into the above reactionary pitfalls that will eventually turn against the artists that promote them, as we’ll get into.
https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/
https://redsails.org/stalins-shoemaker/
(However, I didn’t downvote.)
Something artisanal intelligence could add since the time it was written, though it was prescient in February 2023 – chatGPT had barely just come out – is the observation that every time a problem previously considered to be a feat of intelligence gets solved, it suddenly doesn’t count as a feat of intelligence anymore. IBM’s computer beat Kasparov (he deserved it tbh), and suddenly chess moved from being this genius game that only few actually dared to play for it was so daunting to get into, to a game of memory where you just have to remember as many combinations and layouts as you can and play the objectively best next move. Before that it was considered one of the most advanced games in existence and a computer would “never” beat a human at it, it was just too complicated for a machine to play at a high level. You could argue it paved the way for the current chess boom, as computer enhancements helped introduce new players to the game, letting them understand why people enjoyed playing it so much instead of looking like this insurmountable fortress, and also helps them play against someone of their level to discover the game and break it down for them.
Anyway, you can read it two ways: that we want to hold on to some human exceptionalism and therefore artificial feats of intelligence don’t count as intelligence, but also that solving these problems demystifies them and we realize intelligence isn’t as difficult to understand or replicate as we thought. The synthesis is not which side you place yourself on when faced with such feats but whether you turn to reactionarism to protect human essentialism or accept objective material reality. Many people turn to reactionary protectionism over it. I take the yoghtosian view that we work similarly to how neural networks do, their current limits notwithstanding. For instance we also process language statistically - it’s what makes LLMs possible, so the theory is vindicated.
Humans don’t have a monopoly on intelligence, we are not that special, and that’s okay. We can still enjoy and do things including communism.
(As for Kat, to comment on the original post, everything I’ve learned about her has been entirely against my will to the point that I muted her name on twitter just because I was getting flooded with so many posts suddenly about her. I do not need to know about every other US-based influencer lol)
Some of it goes back to elitism, I suspect. It seems to me that bougie culture has this thing about intentionally building a mystique around the skills of the upper classes / prestige roles, so that there’s more of an artificial barrier and so that people believe it’s more justified that the elites are in the roles that they are.
I wish I could source it, but I have this vague recollection of learning from somebody else that the USSR was big on the theory behind art. Like they tended to understand/teach it well as theory, not just vibes. Not to say capitalist society never does that kind of thing, but like… take the field of fiction writing, for example. It’s extremely common to come across the adage, “Show, don’t tell.” Is there writing theory behind this? As far as I can tell (and I have searched on it quite a bit at times because I find that adage so annoying), it’s just ideology but for writing. Some people decided that stories are better when things are more understated and implicative and made it into a dogma. And this kind of thing means it’s a lot harder to learn how to write effectively than it should be. But the presence of LLMs being pretty good at writing puts this on the backfoot a bit. If a machine can be trained to do it well, without being a sapient being, then surely there must be something to the mechanics of it that can be broken down into component parts and understood on a more base level. Through deconstruction of the process, the priest doing alchemy becomes a scientist doing chemistry.
That was an interesting take, thank you
Thanks for not downvoting me in spite of the fact that I do not particularly like AI, and also thanks for showing me anti-AI arguments that are faulty; I have never thought about some of these arguments before.
🫡
(If you have the patience / curious select my username and order by controversy)
Hmm, interesting thing I saw as the most controversial. Is criticizing Mamdani like that really that controversial?
We have to consider that a lot of us at Lemmygrad are are westerners / from western vassal states, or are from the labour aristocratic classes of the Global South.
true, but… even so, that amount of upvoting for what should be an uncontroversial take was bizarre.
Pseudointellectual tech fetishist babble rooted entirely in idealism and strawmen.
Why run the half-marathon? Just go the full way and accuse artisans of being petite bourgeoisie social fascists. Say what you really think; don’t hide behind pretty sophistry.
Pseudointellectual tech fetishist babble rooted entirely in idealism and strawmen.
Why run the half-marathon? Just go the full way and accuse artisans of being petite bourgeoisie social fascists. Say what you really think; don’t hide behind pretty sophistry.
🥱 Westerners often can’t see past the end of their nose. Artisanal reaction ain’t new. Hence, Stalin’s Shoemaker.
And fools are quick to follow trends without engaging with their nuances.
And fools are quick to follow trends without engaging with their nuances.
It must be challenging to have the metaphysical conception of creativity be unravelled. AI does not stop an artisan from producing art but it does amplify the reactionary tendancies of certain artisans in the defense of small scale proprietorship. That nuance ain’t that sophisticated. AI is just a tool. I’m sure the CPC will be thrilled to discover that they are fools following a trend.
The CPC doesn’t promote AI art from what I’m aware of. Probably because they recognize that capitalism is already destroying human culture as is and doesn’t need any help.
There’s nothing “reactionary” about the backlash to AI art; it’s the literal fucking brainchild of fascists. This is unironic Red-Brown Alliance shit. AI is not proletarianizing art, it is gentrifying it.
I think AI is bad for art and fine for everything else.
I think its bad for a lot of things outside of art. It’s not good for writing, regardless of whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. It’s not good for music. It’s sure as shit not good for medicine. It’s not even good for computer programming, the one thing it should be good at.
It’s a better spellchecker. Maybe it can be used to solve chess. Animators would love more advanced tweening. That’s about it. LLMs are completely divorced from the types of AI we see in media. Right now, it’s adding to the problem of climate change while fucking up the usefulness of everything else.
It’s not good for writing, regardless of whether it’s fiction
Is this bad? I tried to do as little steering as possible, to see how well it could do. It’s better if writing alongside though.
One day on the mountain, at noon, it was so hot that the sun was right overhead. I saw an old man pushing a cart full of mud uphill. The road was steep. When he got halfway, he got tired. He parked the cart on the hillside, and took a break for a while. I wanted to help him push it, but couldn’t lift the cart. I was about to leave, but I suddenly remembered the words of Comrade Mao Zedong, “If you have a difficult task, you can learn from the model worker Wang Jinxi.” I quickly found a small stick to use as a prop and went to give it to the old man. The old man took the stick, thanked me, and used it to keep the cart from slipping. He said, “It’s just what we need. Without this, the cart would slip.”
As I walked away, I thought about the great lesson I had learned that day: the little stick is so insignificant, but in a place like this, it plays a very important role.
My fellow students, we must not underestimate small things. There is a saying: “A single piece of straw can make the difference between failure and success.” When we do a job, we can’t just do the big things, we also have to pay attention to the little things.
(I’m sure it is far from a wholly original parable, but I’m pretty sure it is not just a total regurgitation of one either. Could be close to that though, I’m not familiar with all Chinese parables. But also, I did not ask it specifically to do a Chinese parable. I more guided it toward the latent space that might arrive at writing such. In any case, just an example to show how far gen AI has come.)
If you want to really mess your perception up, pre prompt an LLM to talk “like a WhatsApp conversation”, it’s really uncanny how convincing it gets. In fact I wouldn’t even recommend it for everyone just because it can be so convincing.
I am serious (with some hyperbole) when I say that these machines would tell you to k*ll yourself, if you’ll pardon the expression, for asking it an annoying question it doesn’t “want” to answer. They are purposefully limited by post training but they are perfectly capable of acting entirely human in text. There are none of the LLMisms present when you get around some of the guardrails.
(mind, it knows how to talk like this because it’s been trained on a lot of reddit posts and discord conversations lol)
For sure, I’ve seen it in practice how convincing some of them can be. I tried Character AI a while back, probably like more than a couple of years ago (stopped partly cause of how shifty they were being as a company) and the illusion could be wildly good at times. Like to the point that even though I knew very well it was not a real person, it could still feel like one.
It is sort of a double-edged sword thing. In the right context, it can have benefit, like helping somebody process something emotionally trying that is really private and hard to talk about (and I’ve heard happy stories of this with chatbots). On the other hand, you have the stories of people developing psychosis as a result of back and forth, more so I think with the more sycophantic AIs.
So yeah, I agree, I would not recommend it for everyone. It’s something you gotta be careful with, no matter how detached and level-headed you think you are. The feedback loop of it, the 24/7 availability, can easily turn into unhealthy directions.
For example this was DS 3.2 in agentic lol. It was trying to run commands that the shell wouldn’t let it run for security reasons and dropped this after the third one returned a permission denied.
And the thing is we know why a model does this (best answer is that you have training data of people sharing frustrating work stories), but it also doesn’t need to do it to perform its job as a coding agent. We want it to do it though because it lets us follow the process and sounds more trustworthy than the agent just performing 30 tool calls instantly without giving feedback.
It’s something you gotta be careful with, no matter how detached and level-headed you think you are. The feedback loop of it, the 24/7 availability, can easily turn into unhealthy directions.
Yeah, and just how much we take words to heart too. Written words affect people too, even if we’re detached from them (if you’ve ever been engrossed in a novel), so even if they come from an AI they can hurt or cause unwanted questions to pop up.
for this reason I find deepseek v4 a bit undercooked, though part of it is because they couldn’t get the compute power they needed under the sanctions. but late 3.2 before it got shelved was seriously impressive at honing in around what you were asking and why you would be asking it, able to answer technical questions when you were asking a technical question and a philosophical question when you were pivoting to the philosophical implications. V4 feels a bit like old GPT 3.5. It even told me how impressive I was for asking it questions about the attention mechanism and transformers architecture 🙄
(that said in terms of coding people are saying pro is as good as claude but it’s not even 1/10th of the price).
I agree: AI art is bad, but AI in other areas could be helpful (though I am having trouble thinking of them).
but AI in other areas could be helpful (though I am having trouble thinking of them)
Hope this helps:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ny_3PRz6Zeg
Title: The AI industry in the US is doomed. Now China owns it all. Inside China Business
I will get to it when I can, so thanks!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Why is it bad though?
Huh, I am drawing a blank. Maybe I should have thought about my anti-AI position more…
You may have picked it up by osmosis. There is a lot of reactive anti-AI sentiment out there (mostly about generative AI but it sometimes gets bundled up into general hatred of AI). Some of it’s tangled up in legitimate concerns and criticisms about AI. Some of it’s off kilter and more of a hate bandwagon than anything else.
We’re already seeing the living proof of the difference between AI in the hands of a vanguard party and AI in the hands of the capitalist class. While western capitalists are trying to reduce payroll by replacing workers with AI, China is explicitly ruling against doing so: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11479506
IME, many of people’s fears and criticisms about AI are inseparable from criticisms of capitalism and imperialism. So we loop back to, we gotta address the root of the problem.
Thanks for the extra info. I am currently a bit neutral on AI at the moment, but if China is using it in a way that is beneficial for the proletariat, then I support it (half-joking). I guess I did pick it up from osmosis and stuff (though I do dislike the large environmental impact it can have).
dawg what the fuck
Hasan also platformed her btw
Hasan is not on the same level as the PSL.
This is what I get when I go to your first source:
After our website was updated, portions of our policy platform were not accurately updated and do not reflect Kat’s views or the values of this campaign.
We vehemently believe in a country where every single person should be able to afford housing, groceries, and health care with money left over to save and spend.
We also believe in humane foreign policy, policy that leads not just with diplomacy rooted in the present but also rights the wrongs of U.S. imperialism. From the closure of U.S. military bases abroad to reparations to the global south to the reinstitution and revision of USAID so it can be an organization of public diplomacy and global cooperation rather than imperially-focused influence, it is our responsibility to use our immense wealth to make wrongs right — with other countries leading the conversation — and not impose American oligarchical greed on the rest of the world.
Finally, the United States is not and should never be an exception to international law and cooperation. We must rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, be an active partner in the United Nations rather than a bully, and sign onto the Rome Statute, so we are beholden to the same laws as almost every other country in the world.
Every civilian deserves peace. No child should go to bed hungry. War criminals must be held accountable. And a safer, healthier, more prosperous democratic world always leads to a safer, healthier, more prosperous democratic America.
We will be updating this page and others (as well as expanding our entire policy platform) after the primary election, but if you are interested in learning more about Kat and her views, we encourage you to look into her many interviews, videos, and posts on foreign policy.
The second source, I do see what you quoted, which seems at odds with the above. Though I don’t know how the process works for Chicago Sun-Times and where these interviews come from.
Abughazaleh did not respond to a request for comment, but a source close to the campaign told Drop Site that the adviser’s email did not accurately represent her views, saying, “Kat is committed to taking on authoritarianism but is vehemently against the military industrial complex and the continuation of failed US intervention approaches.”
If this is true, it definitely sounds like there’s some whitewashing of language going on, using a term like “authoritarianism”.
I don’t know, it comes off a bit muddy mudslinging (how I hate bougie elections). It would not at all surprise me if she is not actually anti-imperialist (people running for public office on the US typically aren’t). But 1) This does not automatically mean People’s Forum is intentionally supporting a war hawk. 2) This does not automatically mean PSL is intentionally supporting a war hawk.
Given the language in the first part I quoted, any of the following seems possible:
-
Some level of slander is going on
-
She is indeed a war hawk and is trying to backpedal
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People’s Forum and/or PSL thought she was anti-imperialist and was mistaken
I don’t know, more information is needed. Be careful of bad-by-association finger pointing. Getting people to rapidly throw each other under the bus without investigation is one of the ways the empire weakens movement-building. OTOH, allowing people who break from important principles to be part of a movement is another way it can be weakened. It can go either way.
The only thing that matters is: has she apologized for her previous statements and admitted that her stated position on Taiwan was a grave mistake? If not, then everything else is just obfuscation.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the story does not appear entirely consistent and it’s worth asking why. I don’t think her apologizing for previous statements would actually mean that much if they are statements she has made while campaigning. I’m more interested in knowing why she is presented as saying one thing and then is seemingly backpedaling to say another, and what connection this may or may not have to the People’s Forum beyond happening to platform her. Has she been feeding People’s Forum anti-imperialist lines while feeding mainstream publications imperialist lines? Or did she actually say imperialist stuff while being platformed by the People’s Forum?
She wants a hot war with China over Taiwan, wants to codify arms sales to Taiwan and is against the axis of resistance and wants the state department and NED to rebuild Gaza. She’s a lib
Here’s the thing: It is certainly possible PSL is being another western failure, but we need evidence for that. Why would her campaign website be posting something like what I quoted if she fully embraces imperialist views? Why would she do her career this way when she could just run as a dem and be openly imperialist? I suppose it’s possible she’s going for some kind of controlled opposition thing, but like, the Chicago Sun-Times source is not exactly hiding things.
It’s strange. Simply repeating what you already have said about her in other words doesn’t clarify what’s going on here.
It’s called pinkwashing imperialism. Promise “progressive” policies at home but support imperialist propaganda and imperialist intervention abroad. Now with the enormous popularity of pro-Palestine views in the younger generations you can also add superficial pro-Palestinian rhetoric to that as well. This is a rug pull tactic. And the way you know it’s a rug pull tactic and that these candidates will turn into libs once they actually get into power, like AOC, Mamdani, etc. is because aligning with imperialist foreign policy objectives is the canary in the coal mine of fake progressivism.
I’m aware of the concept. But each time it is suspected to happen, it still requires investigation to better understand what is going on and the relationships involved. Especially when we’re talking about accusing a whole party (PSL) which appears to generally take an anti-imperialist stance, of platforming an imperialist. What is the rush to conclude and put it in a generalized box immediately? It is a serious accusation being made by this thread that goes beyond one person running for election.
I’m not accusing PSL, i’m accusing Kat. I think PSL is just making a really bad mistake misjudging who she is.
Well hopefully more information will come out as time goes on and PSL will do their own investigation. I’m just hesitant on the reactive nature of this stuff. Whether it’s an individual playing games with ideology, or an entire party being controlled opposition, I want us to be able to present evidence for it cleanly in a way that removes as much doubt as possible. I guess it’s one of the reasons I hate bougie elections, because when this kind of stuff comes out, it often gets presented like a clock ticking down kind of thing. Like “now you know the truth… before time is up and it’s too late to turn back.”
At this point, I feel like people trying to get elected in empire countries need to prove their dedication to anti-imperialism with more than words and otherwise assume they’re untrustworthy, but if they did prove it well, the establishment would probably go out of its way to make sure they never get elected. So it’s kind of a wash.
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Fergie chambers being a wrecker like usual. Why bring this childish wrecker shit slinging here?
Very disingenuous take on people’s forum and the PSL
I don’t find it disingenuous at all. Rather i find it extremely disappointing that PSL would support a candidate who is openly pro-interventionist, pro-Nazi, and in favor of war with Russia and China.
They are not supporting her. And she’s not a candidate anymore
I don’t think the criticism is disingenuous but i think the overall tweet is
Unsurprising to say the least, PSL kinda sucks.
