Youth-led progressive organizations have warned for months that Biden had a problem with young voters, pleading with the president to work more closely with them to refocus on the issues most important to younger generations or risk losing their votes. With Biden out of the race, many of these young leaders are now hoping Harris can overcome his faltering support among Gen Z and harness a new explosion of energy among young voters.
While she is better than Biden, her condemnation of student protestors still rubbed lots of gen Z the wrong way, myself included. It won’t stop me from voting, but it does dispel the delusion that Kamala is anything more than another corporate liberal.
What condemnations were you concerned with? Most of her statements seem to have been generally non-committal on policy but supportive of protest. The only big negative statement I’m aware of recently was about the protest with “Hamas is coming” graffiti. Which like, yeah, that’s something that a politician should condemn. I feel kind of weird about her saying burning flags is super wrong, but I’m not that bothered by it.
Yesterday, at Union Station in Washington, D.C. we saw despicable acts by unpatriotic protestors and dangerous hate-fueled rhetoric. I condemn any individuals associating with the brutal terrorist organization Hamas, which has vowed to annihilate the State of Israel and kill Jews. Pro-Hamas graffiti and rhetoric is abhorrent and we must not tolerate it in our nation. I condemn the burning of the American flag. That flag is a symbol of our highest ideals as a nation and represents the promise of America. It should never be desecrated in that way. I support the right to peacefully protest, but let’s be clear: Antisemitism, hate and violence of any kind have no place in our nation.
Her statement on the protests frames them as pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic, unpatriotic, and violent by focusing entirely on a few bad-faith actors. Spending the entire statement condemning the minority of protestors and saying nothing of the majority who were there simply to protest genocide is disingenuous.
To take a page out of her book,
You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you
The condemnation of Hamas and anti-Semitism isn’t the issue, it’s the context in which it is done, absent of support for the protest as a whole. The best we get is
I support the right to peacefully protest, but
As a qualifier at the end of the statement. If she were truly committed to justice for Palestinians she would have pushed back against the framing of those who defend them as anti-semitic and pro-Hamas.
It isn’t so much what she said, but what she didn’t.
But like, the graffiti was pro-Hamas. I’m down with fighting the good fight to not cede pro-liberation slogans like “from the river to the sea” as antisemitic, but I think actively trying to bring Hamas itself into the protests is bad. And she’s been, maybe not supportive, but understanding, previously.
“[Pro-Palestine protesters] are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points,” she said, potentially referring to widely circulated but debunked narratives of widespread antisemitism within the protests. “But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
The interview comes after reporting from March, when MSNBC, citing four former and current U.S. officials, revealed that the White House specifically watered down comments criticizing Israel from a speech Harris delivered on the need for a ceasefire. Officials said that she was initially supposed to call out Israel for blocking humanitarian aid into the region and demand that more aid be let into Gaza, but these portions were removed.
https://truthout.org/articles/harris-says-she-understands-gaza-protesters-as-biden-question-lingers/
It’s not like she’s going to don a keffiyah and join the protests, but that’s a fair sight better than Biden has been and at least a potential starting point for dialogue.
