Kat Abughazaleh's far left problem

Initial leak

Kat Abughazaleh is a very progressive Democrat currently running for Congress in Illinois. Recently, an email from her foreign policy advisor was leaked by Drop Site News. The email stated that Kat was in favor of continuing support for Ukraine and directly getting involved militarily if China invades Taiwan.

There were two types of responses. Those that doubled down on their support for Kat or endorsed the positions, and those that immediately resorted to dropping her and accused her of a variety of negative things.

I want to look into what exactly the negative responses say and what this shows about the socialist-adjacent political movement.

Examples of immediate responses

• Example 1: (Responding to the Drop Site news tweet where her positions are listed): "So a fascist"
• Example 2: "Is she sure she is a democrat?"
• Example 3: "Disappointing. I saw her on Bad Hasbara and thought she was one of the good guys."
• Example 4: "They said the left should stop calling themselves progressive because it is too big of a term... Maybe people who are not progressive should stop calling themselves progressive!"
• Example 5: "So basically the exact opposite of how she promotes herself? This is both confusing and super disappointing [...] Either her and her team are on entirely different wavelengths or were being fettermaned"
• Example 6: "This is extremely disappointing to see and I’m not sure what the strategy behind it is. Is this “leak” to appeal to moderates that find her too radical? She should know if she’s really a progressive that she can’t talk out of both sides of her mouth. She needs to clarify"
• Example 7: "Not accepting corporate PAC money but being pro-war is kinda wild. Babes is just doing it for the love of the game, no cash."
• If you think that this is just random Twitter people, you’re also mistaken, as we can see from Max Blumenthal, a high-profile media figure:

Clarifying statement

In response, she released a 2 part statement, where she clarified that the foreign policy advisor misrepresented her opinions, that they had fired him, and clarified what her positions actually were (essentially inoffensive commitments to national self-determination and international law, with military force as the last resort).

This time, the responses were more balanced in Kat’s favor (which can probably be explained by it being posted on her own account), but still split in the two ways I described above (though not as extreme). There were also some accounts claiming it was AIPAC or moderate sabotage.

Examples

• 1: "She is not an anti-war candidate at all. She's a liberal globalist interventionalist. She's playing with words and definitions of "intervention" and "diplomacy" and co-opting the language of the anti-war movement. She just lies by manipulating words. Her staff's email is absolutely correct."

• 2: "This is not a serious foreign policy position. The whole "rules based order" stuff with the United States at the helm is dead and that comes with uncomfortable decisions. The empire is rotting—will you fight a world war to maintain its position, or will you make the tough choices peace requires?"

• 3:"She’s full of it."

• 4: We even have someone posting a screenshot of the Blumenthal tweet.

• Sabotage:

  • 1: "I think AIPAC hired a sabateur! Be safe—who knows how far they’ll go!"
  • 2: "You had a saboteur on your staff. Someone must deem you a threat. Interesting timing with Dropsite's reporting. Thanks for clearing it up, getting rid of them. Go get 'em, Kat."
  • 3:"I noticed those messages too. I felt it was just AIPAC doing what AIPAC does best, spreading disinformation. You don’t seem like the type to support that. You’ve clearly been focused on ending genocide, ending imperialism, and your policies are people centered."

What this means

This essentially confirms my previous analysis of socialists being really bad allies in the public sphere. What you have here is an almost perfect candidate for them. It’s a candidate that goes hard on Democrats, goes against AIPAC, supports super-progressive policies, and even clears the Israel–Palestine obstacle.

As such, she attracts both them and liberals on the very progressive side of things. She has everything going for her and is running for Congress. They should rally around her and hope that their politics will finally gain real political power.

But as soon as one policy that the radicals disagree with gets supposedly leaked, she gets thrown under the bus by them, disavowed, and branded as the enemy. And even those who disagree with that characterization don’t seem to muster the courage to actually confront the people trying to sabotage their political movement, and instead accuse AIPAC (and her foreign policy advisor) of causing the damage.

Even Kat herself doesn’t call out the people who attacked her character and principles, and instead tries to strike a conciliatory tone and clear away “misunderstandings.”

This is a losing strategy. You can’t be on a team with someone who will seize upon every opportunity to make your team fail, especially when you can’t bring yourself to admit that this saboteur is there.