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.
Is Harris even supporting the genocide? From what I’ve read, she’s at least no Biden, and certainly no Trump.
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.
