Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim on the Squad

Ryan Grim has a new book out called “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” This week on Deconstructed, Grim’s “Breaking Points” co-host Krystal Ball, a former MSNBC host, interviews him about his latest book. The conversation was held at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. Like we did earlier with our Naomi Klein interview, we’re running the conversation here as today’s episode. The event included a brief reading and a wide-ranging conversation that touched on the Squad’s relationship to Democratic leadership, criticism of its willingness to stand up to Democratic Party bosses, and the big-money operation launched by pro-Israel super PACs, organized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to oust members of the Squad and purge the party of Democrats who agree with them. You can preorder the book here.

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed.

My new book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” comes out next Tuesday, December 5th, and it traces the recent history of the progressive movement in America. This week, the D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose, held an event to launch it, moderated by political commentator Krystal Ball, my cohost over at the Breaking Points Network.

If you’re thinking about buying the book, the favor that I have to ask of you is this: please don’t procrastinate, because sales this week are the most important ones for the bestseller rankings. And, if it does well out of the gate, then it does exponentially better over the long haul, so a sale today is actually worth, like, 20 sales in a few weeks. I’ve already gotten paid for the book, but if it does well, that means I get to write another, and then another. So, if that’s an outcome you’d like, go ahead and get it soon.

Alright, I think that’s a hard enough sell for now.

For this episode of Deconstructed, we’ll be playing the audio of the conversation I had with Krystal.

I hope you enjoy it, and a big thank you to those of you who can help make the book a hit.

Krystal Ball: Please join me in welcoming Grim and Ball to the stage.

RG: Thank you, everybody. And thank you, Krystal, for doing this with me.

So, I moderated a Politics and Prose talk with Naomi Klein a couple months ago, some of you may have been there. And I played the role of Krystal, and so, I am stealing her format for how she did it, I thought it went very smoothly. Not a whole lot of reading, because if you want to read the book, you can press play, because I actually read this version of the audiobook. That was quite a trying experience, so I hope it’s worth it for you. It took nine days of just talking into this microphone nonstop.

So, therefore, I won’t sit here for nine days and read the entire book to you. I’m going to do a couple minutes, about five to six minutes at the top, and then Kristen and I are going to talk.

So, I’ll start here with chapter three, which is called Occupation.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez awoke in her room in the Omni Shoreham in Northwest Washington, a hotel that had played host to inaugural balls, presidents, and corporate conferences of every kind. It was now the temporary home of the 62-member freshman Democratic class of the 116th Congress. They had all been elected exactly one week earlier, on November 6th, 2018, in a wave that swept the party into power.

The class was here for freshman orientation, learning the ins and outs of federal lawmaking along with the basics of putting together a staff, what kind of budget was available — not much — the housing situation — not good — and the all-important lottery, at which incoming members would draw lots to determine who won the least bad freshman offices.

But Ocasio-Cortez had something bigger on her mind that morning, and she was wondering if she had the courage — or, perhaps, the stupidity — to go through with it. Her plan to occupy the office of the incoming Speaker of the House had not been put through much of a deliberative process, yet neither had much else, and here she was, weeks away from being sworn in as the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress, already an international rising star. So, why overthink it now?

The previous Friday, her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, had taken the idea of an occupation to Ocasio-Cortez. “Sunrise is doing this protest,” he told her. “It’s in Pelosi’s office, and they were just hoping that you could, like, tweet about it or something to support them. But, you know, maybe you could even join them. But I know that’d be kind of crazy.” And she was like, “What? Yeah, that sounds awesome.” And she was really into wanting to join them.

The radical activists were taken aback. “Are you guys sure?” Sunrise cofounder Varshini Prakash wondered when she had learned Ocasio-Cortez would be joining them. Chakrabarti told me, “Like anyone else, she had some moments where she wasn’t entirely sure. She was trying to figure out a way to do it that wasn’t just seeming like she’s yelling at Pelosi as her first action. I could tell she was sort of fading a little bit.”

So, Sunday, Corbyn and Zach and the Sunrise Kids were at a church doing this all-day rally, and Corbyn and Zach said, “You just need to bring AOC here, she’ll get so revved up.” And that’s exactly what happened.

At the church, AOC felt the pulsing energy of the young people — most of them younger than her — and her shaky resolve to go through with the occupation stiffened. That night, still revved up, Ocasio-Cortez saw the news that Amazon had completed the national sweepstakes it had been running to pick a home for its second headquarters. The most likely contenders were always going to be Washington, D.C. — where Jeff Bezos owned the local newspaper and needed friendly lawmakers on his side — and New York City. And Amazon announced that it would be splitting its so-called HQ2 between the two cities.

At 11:40pm, Ocasio-Cortez fired off a Twitter thread that would derail the project. Chakrabarti said, “She had not realized the AOC effect yet. The thing she actually tweeted was something much more qualified than what it got turned into.” She had written, “We’ve been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this. The community’s response? Outrage. Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need more investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.”

At 12:20am, as her tweet and its thread rocketed around the internet, she added that her complaints were not limited to Amazon, and that she wasn’t trying to pick a fight, but rather was just the messenger for her community. Lastly, she said, “This isn’t just about one company or one headquarters. It’s about cost of living, corporations paying their fair share, etc. It’s not about picking a fight, either. I was elected to advocate for our community’s interests, and they’ve requested clearly to voice their concerns.”

Amazon would soon pull out of New York with Ocasio-Cortez’s opposition cited by many observers as the proximate cause.

The next morning, on less sleep than she’d like to have gotten, Ocasio-Cortez was most definitely not sure about the Green New Deal protest anymore. In fact, she felt like she might vomit. What if she took the momentum that millions of people had built collectively, and squandered it all for nothing? It felt like too much responsibility. The very fate of the planet was at stake, and she was running late.

About five miles away, outside the Cannon House Office Building, about 200 climate activists — many of them high school and college students — had been split into two groups, had gone through security, and were waiting in the building’s basement for the signal to march on the office of the Speaker.

That morning, they’d gathered at Spirit of Justice Park, a green roof constructed on top of a congressional parking garage across the street from Cannon, where they were met by Rashida Tlaib, soon to be sworn in to represent Detroit. Tlaib handed out Jolly Ranchers and rallied the crowd, telling the story of her own civil disobedience, which had led to the locking up of a corrupt Detroit billionaire. From there, she headed off to orientation, wishing the activists strength. 

Corbyn, Trent, and Alexandra Rojas — founders of Justice Democrats — were on the sidewalk outside. Trent had nothing but contempt for the orientation process Congress was pushing new members through. “If I were going to be an asshole, I’d say she’s providing them with an orientation,” he told me as I loitered with him and Rojas.

He, Rojas, and Chakrabarti had all devoted themselves full time to Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign in the homestretch. Trent doing communications, Rojas covering field organizing and door knocking, and Chakrabarti overseeing the whole thing. They knew AOC well. Trent quipped, “She’s looking in the mirror saying, ‘come on Alex, you can do this,’” by way of explaining Ocasio-Cortez’s tardiness.

“Would she do it?” I asked.

“She’ll be here,” he promised.

I want to read one very brief section, also from late 2018 / early 2019, from another portion of “The Squad.” This is chapter seven, The Benjamins.

Not long after Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were sworn into Congress, they began hearing from their new colleagues that one member of the House Democratic Caucus named Josh Gottheimer, had particularly strong views about each of them. Many of his colleagues had particularly strong views about Gottheimer but, as far as they knew, he was just another member of the Democratic Caucus. They would soon learn there was much more to him.

Gottheimer had an intense hostility to the left wing of the party. He dubbed them “the herbal tea party,” and he considered the progressive movement generally to be poisoned by antisemitism, but he had particular animosity toward Tlaib and Omar. The pair were far too rough to Israel in their rhetoric, he complained, taking his beef to majority leader Hoyer on the House floor.

Hoyer told Gottheimer to work out his problems with the two members directly, which Gottheimer took as a blessing from the party leadership to go to war with them. When Gottheimer reached out to meet with Tlaib, she was eager to take the meeting, hoping that a personal connection would help bridge their differences.

On the day of the meeting, February 6th, 2019, Gottheimer arrived with a colleague — freshman Elaine Luria from Virginia — and a white binder. Luria began by saying that she had met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu six weeks earlier.

Tlaib tried to break the ice with a joke. “How’s the two-state solution going?” She asked. Netanyahu had recently been making it explicit that he was never serious about a two-state solution, and that his real aim was to stall for time while Israel gradually annexed Palestinian land. The joke fell flat.

Gottheimer pulled out the binder, opening it to show Tlaib the contents. It was a collection of printed out articles with quotes from her and other lines highlighted. He began going through it line by line, occasionally misattributing quotes by Omar or other activists to Tlaib. Tlaib tried to reach Gottheimer on a personal level, telling him about her grandmother who lives in occupied Ramallah. He wasn’t interested.

He was using a very stern tone, like a father to a child. “At that moment, I realized he’s a bully,” Tlaib later told me. “He had a goal of breaking me down. I left feeling exactly that way.”

Walking out, she pulled out her phone and found the contact for Ilhan Omar. When Omar picked up, she could tell that Tlaib had tears streaming down her face as she recounted the meetings blow by blow. Tlaib warned her, “If he asks you to meet, don’t do it. Don’t do it.”

Four days later, Israeli media reported that Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, had promised, quote, “action against Tlaib and Omar for their criticism of Israel.” My colleague at the time, Glenn Greenwald, posted the news on Twitter, adding, quote, “GOP leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for Omar and Tlaib over their criticism of Israel. It’s stunning how much time U.S. political leaders spend defending a foreign nation, even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.”

Omar then shared Greenwald’s post on her timeline, adding the commentary, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” a reference to the hip hop song of that name. Asked to clarify whose Benjamins she was claiming had influenced McCarthy, she responded, “AIPAC.” All hell broke loose.

[Audience claps.]

KB: Ryan, I think those two excerpts were a perfect way to jump off this conversation, because you start with the beginning of AOCs political arc, which you track with incredible insider reporting throughout the book, and also a recurring nemesis, you might say; Josh Gottheimer, and also the influence of AIPAC, and some of the affiliated groups.

So, it’s a great place to start. Thank you so much for letting me be involved in this conversation. Congratulations on the book, which is fantastic, which I read cover to cover, and I encourage all of you all to do as well.

I actually thought a good place to start was one of the questions that we got from you all, sort of a philosophical question about the book itself, which is: is The Squad a brand or a moment? Is it something that can be nurtured and cultivated, or is it more of a progressive click?

In other words, what even is The Squad?

RG: So, I think the context for that, the answer would be that, I think all we have now are moments. In the sense that we have these bursts of activity that has its own life in the real world, and then it has a second life kind of on social media, which then shapes it back in the real world, and then also shapes how people understand it.

We could start with… Occupy Wall Street was a moment, but it was also something that changed everything that came after it. The Occupy moment is over, but — and as I write about in the book — you probably don’t get Bernie Sanders without the Occupy moment. But you also wouldn’t have either of them if the material conditions were not there to ripen both of those things. And so, Black Lives Matter, again, the moment, but the moments that we live in after that are shaped by that moment.

So, I think on a political electoral scale, they are a moment. The arc of the book is kind of like mid-2015s, Bernie Sanders launching his campaign up through the 2022 midterms. And that’s kind of the moment; I think you could kind of see it cresting in 2020, and breaking. And then, after that moment, something new is born from it that is different for it having happened.

Ilhan Omar told me, as I was reporting this book, she’s like, “You know, there is no such thing as The Squad.” Like, “Yeah, I know that. But also, there is.”

So, there’s no regular meetings, there’s no criteria for membership. If people remember the Onion article from 2019 I forget which 85-year-old New Jersey lawmaker The Onion said was appealing for membership in The Squad. And they then jokingly said, you’re in, you’re in, sure, you’re in.

As Ilhan Omar has put it, it’s a media creation, and it was created by an Instagram caption. AOC posted a picture of the four of them and just wrote “squad” in the caption, and it took off from there. So, that’s where it comes from. So, it is a media creation; it’s also a creation of the political moment.

But then, as its adversaries identify it, they forge it into a thing. And so, now it’s a thing, whether it wants to be a thing or not. 

KB: Interesting. I mean, a lot of the book, there’s several different narratives that are running, but one of them is this journey of AOC, from what she thinks she is and what people project on her going in. And then, faced with both the reality of the job, and also the reality of some of her own personality traits.

So, talk about how she views the job in that moment where you were just reading the book, where she’s occupying Speaker Pelosi’s office, and she’s there with the activists, etc., to the moment where we find her now. More focused on building relationships and trying to play the more traditional political inside game. 

RG: And what I like about that moment where she occupies the office and, later in that excerpt, I quote from her actual speech while she’s in the office, because I think it epitomizes everything so perfectly. Her whole speech while she’s there is about how great Nancy Pelosi is, and how much all of the climate activists are there to support Nancy Pelosi in her pursuit of her climate agenda.

So, she really does want to be there, potentially even getting arrested occupying her office, but also as the person there supporting her. And part of her, really, it’s genuine. I contrasted a little bit with Obama, who people wanted to be able to put whatever they wanted onto Obama, whereas I think AOC genuinely feels like she can do that. Like, she wants to lead a political revolution by just persuading everyone that it’s the right thing to do. She’s like, well, of course, Nancy Pelosi has been for a strong climate agenda for decades. Like, all we’re doing is supporting her here. But, at the same time, she also knows she also doesn’t want me occupying her office. So there’s this tension throughout.

And she talks about, her staffers will also talk about how there was a kind of marriage of convenience that you couldn’t see from the outside, and both she and some of the people from Justice Democrat use that kind of same phrase. That, in order to become a member of Congress, our system is not set up where a bartender can just win without any help from anybody else.

And so, there was this organization, Justice Democrat… And, also, nobody else could challenge Joe Crowley. Like, nobody within New York politics could challenge Joe Crowley, and this is a point that she would make. Because if they tried, their career would absolutely be over. That’s what it means to have a machine.

KB: Right.

RG: So it had to be someone from outside the machine. But if you’re outside the machine. 

KB: Somebody who didn’t have a career. Had to be someone who had nothing to lose, basically.

RG: Nothing to lose. Yeah. And this organization Justice Democrats had launched… Kyle Kulinski actually helped launch them.

KB: I was aware of that, actually.

RG: They flew out of and grew out of Brand New Congress, which had tried to elect 435 populists to Congress. That was their goal. By the end of the year, they realized they’re on the brink of electing zero. And, in the meantime, they had split into Justice Democrats, which worked on the Democratic side, and Brand New Congress, which stuck with the original thing of doing candidates in every primary, regardless of the party. And so, when they realize that they might get zero, they then put all their resources into AOC.

So, when she then wins, the people that she knows are the people that supported her. She beat Joe Crowley. Going to work for her at that point in the Democratic Party would have been career suicide, and so, it was very hard for her to find people from inside the party, so that brings them together. But, from the outside, it looked like it was this kind of revolutionary vanguard that had been well organized and kind of powered its way through when, in fact, the four members didn’t really know each other, and it was a coincidence that they all arrived on the same themes at the same time.

And then they’re expected to work together as this media creation, and then immediately they’re hit, starting in January, with the constant question, are you antisemitic for not condemning Ilhan Omar, or for the Benjamin situation. The first six months were just consumed by attacks from AIPAC and its allied organizations.

KB: I want to pick up more on that piece in a moment, because one of the things that you and I have talked about is how much that theme runs through the book, and how influential those organizations, and the funding of those organizations, and the funding in primaries ended up shaping the Democratic caucus, and their response to what’s happening right now in Gaza. So, I want to come back to that.

But I thought this was a really good question, as well, that gets to some of the heart of the critique that the left has had of The Squad. The question here is: why haven’t the progressives hijacked the Democratic Party in the manner of the Freedom Caucus? Especially considering the comparably slim majorities of the 117th and 118th Congresses. That’s Jonathan.

RG: Well, partly, Democrats are just different, and they’re always going to be different. If you tell the Freedom Caucus, look, if you don’t support this thing, the government’s going to shut down. Or, if you don’t support this thing, we’re going to have a global financial crisis, and we’re going to default on the debt. Their claim of being OK with that is quite credible. Like, alright, fine, go ahead. Do it without me then. So, Democrats have always had some of that problem. Because you can always come back and say, well, alright, here, we’re giving you this, and it’s so easy to whittle them away. So, that’s one structural problem that they have.

But then, if you think about the timing when they came in, Donald Trump is president. And so, it’s not as if they’re going to kind of hold up legislation and get a Democratic president to sign it into office. That only comes later. And so, their first six months, they’re really in this kind of two-front war. One with AIPAC, which is keeping them on their heels and kind of making it harder for them to organize an offensive forward-thinking strategy, because every single week they’re playing defense. But then, also, this constant battle with Nancy Pelosi, which breaks out in the press, and ultimately ends with a couple of the staffers being pushed out of the office and things really shifting around.

So then, soon after that, the presidential campaign picks up. And so, at that point, The Squad, three of whom endorsed Bernie Sanders… Ayanna Pressley with her eye on Massachusetts politics, and a potential Senate seat, she’s like, oh, Elizabeth Warren getting a nomination, a Senate seat opening up? Yes, I endorse Elizabeth Warren.

So, three of them endorse Bernie Sanders, and they really believe that he can win the nomination, and he comes within a hair’s breadth of winning that nomination. Democratic primary voters are much more affectionate toward the Democratic Party than Republican primary voters are. If you watch Republican primary ads, they’re all kind of running against the Republican Party. To them, the Republican Party is just as bad as the other elites, whereas the Democratic Party, if you’re considered not a good Democrat — like what happened to Nina Turner and her special election — then a lot of normal Democratic primary voters are going to reject you.

So, Bernie Sanders running as an independent democratic socialist who caucuses with Democrats had that uphill climb. And so, you had [him] and The Squad constantly trying to assure Democratic primary voters, like, “we’re not radical.” And, you know, he gave that speech, “I’m just running on the legacy of FDR.”

And so, If you’re trying to convince the Democratic Party that you’re good Democrats, you’re just a lot more democratic socialist, and you just want a higher minimum wage, you want Medicare for all, you want a Green New Deal, but you’re a Democrat, then that makes it harder at that point.

Then, that’s where you hear some of the stuff that she’ll get criticized for. I think she called Pelosi “Mama Bear” at one point, people have never forgiven her for that . That was while it looked like Bernie might win the nomination, and she’s trying to win the normie Democrats over into the camp, to say, no, no, the water’s fine. We’re not threatening, we’re not dangerous…

KB: We love Nancy Pelosi, too!

RG: And then, of course, within three days, there’s that massive turnaround, and it all collapses.

Then 2021 becomes their opportunity — and I have some interesting examples of it in the book, particularly around the American rescue plan — there was so much outside pressure and anger about, particularly, the $15 minimum wage not being kept in the legislation, that when Manchin came back and tried to pull a lot of the unemployment benefits out, Schumer went over to the House and said, look, Manchin’s not with us unless we do these massive cuts to unemployment benefits. And Pramila Jayapal, the Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair, was able to tell Schumer, if he does that, I’m fine with it … I mean, I’m not fine with it. But, you know, don’t worry about me, I’m still with you, but you’re going to lose The Squad, and it’s going to go down. And because there was so much outside pressure and anger, that was a credible threat, and Manchin caved on it, and hundreds of billions in unemployment benefits went through.

So, there were moments where it could happen, but it was never done in a way that made the outside folks happy. Because they still didn’t get the $15 minimum wage. So, from the outside, people were still frustrated about it. 

KB: What does AOC think of these critiques?

RG: That’s a good question. She’s answered some of them in some interviews. I think she thinks a lot of them are unfair, that a lot of them are people who are making bad faith arguments to feed algorithms for clicks, basically. I think she thinks some people just don’t understand what she’s dealing with on the inside, what it’s like to be an inside legislator. But I think, also, she thinks some of it is fair.

But there also is no coordinating mechanism, and she has talked about this as well. That, say, back in the 1960s, you had major mass organizations that had steering committees that were in contact with each other, that were setting ambitious strategies and tactics, and then executing them, and [they] had the manpower to do it, they had the grassroots mobilization to do it.

That doesn’t exist now. What has replaced that is, basically, Twitter, and Twitter is reactive. So, Twitter usually can give feedback to legislators after it’s too late.

KB: After they’ve done something that people are unhappy about.

RG: And wouldn’t have known. “Why did you do this thing?” Now, at that point, it’s too late. Yeah.

KB: We got a couple questions in this regard, but you track how AOC gets elected. I remember watching [her], she was then on Morning Joe, and suddenly everyone’s like, oh my God, who is this person? And she’s an instant media star and getting all of this interest in social media followers, and the mainstream press is really excited about her, and she’s kind of knocking it out of the park, interview after interview.

And then she sits down for one interview and gets asked about Israel and Palestine. And that’s your jumping off point to talk about the way that that conflict has both been a difficulty, a challenge for members of The Squad and The Squad-adjacent members as well. But also how, strangely, because there was so much organization on the other side trying to enforce unanimity on the topic, it actually strengthened their spine in terms of their position.

Talk a little bit about that, starting with that moment with AOC, which is incredible.

RG: Yeah. So, it started, really, with The Great March of Return. A lot of people missed it happening in real time, but now, with the war going on currently, people have looked back and said, oh, that was an interesting development.

If you don’t know what the Great March of Return was, that was a civil society-led initiative in Gaza that came from the grassroots, where people would say, every Friday, we’re going to go near the fence, and we’re going to picnic. It’s going to be a joyous thing. And then we’re going to march nonviolently to the fence, and we’re just going to do this every Friday, and we’re going to look out at the places where our parents and grandparents used to live. This will be a fun community event, but also symbolic of our hope that one day there will be peace and we can return. And the Israeli troops started shooting.

And so, every Friday, they’d start shooting, and it became this kind of infamous thing since then, where eventually they started aiming for legs. And so, they shot out so many people’s legs that, in Gaza, it just became a very regular thing to see people going around missing one or both legs. The U.N. has the numbers, but they’re astronomical. 

And so, after one of these mass shootings, I think 60 people were killed. And these are nonviolent. There’s some stone throwing and, but, generally, this are not Hamas-led actions. Hamas eventually reluctantly supported them, but there was nothing armed about them.

And so, AOC responded on Twitter saying, it’s appalling that 60 nonviolent protesters were killed in this Gaza demonstration and it’s appalling that there’s so much silence from so many here in New York City about that. And that created a lot of interest in this congressional candidate from The Bronx, from Queens, who’s standing up for the rights of Palestinians, it was so unusual.

And so, she then gets asked about that question in this interview, and she’s been nailing interview after interview. And initially it seemed like the biggest event, that the night that she won her primary was Joe Crowley losing. It very quickly became clear as she was nailing all these interviews that the biggest event was actually her winning, and that Joe Crowley would be somebody that was, like, a trivia question a couple years later.

Does anybody know what he’s doing? He’s a lobbyist.

KB: Lobbyist, right? Had to be.

RG: Yes, yes, he’s a lobbyist.

And so, she’s doing great in all of these interviews, and then she gets hit with this question. And Margaret Carlson says, “You used the word ‘Palestine.’ What do you mean by that?” And you can see her whole demeanor change. Where she’s sort of like, I know that there are third rails everywhere on this issue, and I might have touched one, but I don’t know if I did or not.

And she sort of tries to explain, she’s just saying that she sees that, if 60 people were killed at a protest in Puerto Rico, or 60 people were killed at a protest in Ferguson, I would stand up for that, and so, I should stand up for it when it happens in Gaza as well. And she’s like, “Yes, but you used the word ‘occupation.’ What do you mean by that?” And, again, you see like, oh god, what’s happening here? And finally she says, look, I’m not a geopolitical expert, this wasn’t something that we talked about a lot at my Bronx dinner table growing up. Summer Lee later told me the same thing, growing up in Pittsburgh, it’s not an issue that you’re steeped in, if you’re growing up in the African American community in Pittsburgh.

And so, at that point, they kind of pull her off the trail, and she realized, I need to learn more about this. Because, clearly, this is going to be a very big issue. And I think once you’re kind of pressed to look into the history and to look into the reality, you’re probably going to get pushed in the direction of saying that this is wrong.

Jamal Bowman did an interesting interview recently — who became either the fifth or sixth Squad member — who talked about his experience of visiting the West Bank. And, bizarrely, there are people on the left who are angry that he even took that trip. But everybody who takes that trip and sees the West Bank in person kind of comes back changed. Because there are streets that you can’t walk down if you’re Palestinian, there are front doors of Palestinian homes that are sealed shut, they have to go out their back door only, they can’t go out through this street. Different streets are blocked off for people with different license plates, and you see this up front. You’re like, this is wrong, it just feels wrong.

And so, I think that, over the years, as they’ve learned more about the issue — now, obviously Omar and Tlaib didn’t need that education — but also, they realized that, this is going to be much bigger than I thought it was.

Kyle would vouch for this, too: Waleed Shahid, who also helped launch Justice Democrats, has said that he always gets asked, “Why do you guys focus on Israel-Palestine so much?” He’s like, we don’t. We’re just always getting hit on it, so we have to respond.

KB: One of the questions that we got from the audience was, in your opinion, what is the reason that the Israel lobbying infrastructure has been so successful at enforcing narrative discipline?

And, I might add as a corollary. What happened to John Fetterman?

RG: Yeah, yeah. So, the John Fetterman story is in the book, and this is kind of an answer to the question. So, in 2019, in direct response to Omar and Tlaib getting sworn in, the group Democratic Majority for Israel gets founded, and they’re pretty explicit that that was the thing that they were founded to push back against. The first money they spent was later that year against Bernie Sanders in the presidential campaign. That was their kind of foray into it.

Their first huge effort was trying to stop Jamal Bowman from unseating the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Elliot Engel, one of the most hawkish, unapologetic defenders of Israel in Congress. And the idea that he could be beaten by a former principal, a nobody, backed by Justice Democrats, was unthinkable.

And so, DMFI spent $2 million-plus dollars in this primary, but he still ended up losing. Even lost in heavily Jewish precincts. It ended up being a blowout, something like 15 points. And, in the wake of that, DMFI — which was kind of an offshoot of AIPAC — and AIPAC realized, OK, this $2 million is not going to cut it. Like, we need to come in here with some serious money.

And so, in the next cycle, the 2022 cycle, DMFI again came up with something like $10 million to spend, some affiliated groups came up with another couple million, but AIPAC launched its own super PAC, which was new in its history; it had always been purely a grassroots organization, with chapters and subchapters all over the country. And they launched The United Democracy Project super PAC, which they put more than $30 million into, and put almost every penny of it into democratic primaries, trying to knock out progressive incumbents or to stop progressive challengers from winning primaries. And that’s just an absolutely enormous amount of money.

The organization J Street, which was set up to be a counter to AIPAC, told me that they had seen what happened in 2020, and so then they organized their own super PAC to try to defend progressive candidates who they felt were strong on Israel. They felt the argument that AIPAC is pro-Israel is a misnomer, that AIPAC is actually leading Israel in a direction that’s not only going to be harmful for the Palestinians, but also for Israel. And so, J Street was able to raise about $2 million.

So, they thought, DMFI will have 10 million, we’ll have 2 million. DMFI’s positions are extremely unpopular, and so they have to spend much more money in primaries to overcome that. So, at a five-to-one disadvantage, we can hold our own.

Then, when AIPAC comes in with 30 or 40 million, they’re just able to annihilate people. There may be some former constituents of Donna Edwards here. They spent, I think, $7 million to make sure that Donna Edwards did not get back in the Congress. She had, like, a 30-point lead, a popular former Democrat. They didn’t like what particular vote she took in 2008 on the war in Gaza.

KB: Wow. Wow.

RG: And $7 million later, she was beaten. Nida Allam, her good friends … I don’t know if people remember, there was this horrific [incident], and it became a national story, a hate crime in Chapel Hill or Durham, in that area, where three Muslim students were killed. She was good friends with them. She became the first Muslim county commissioner in Durham. She was running for Congress and was expected to win, was popular with a lot of the Democratic voters in the area. They spent something like five or six million to stop her from winning.

Candidates around the country started seeing this. And so, there would be consultant calls, they’d say, OK, how do we stop this money from coming in? We can’t raise enough to compete against it, but how do we stop it? Well, one direct way to stop it is just to ask them how we can stop it.

And so, that’s what Fetterman did. Fetterman’s campaign reached out to DMFI. At the time, Fetterman was running against a conservative Democrat named Conor Lamb; his campaign was openly sending out memos saying, if we get Super PAC support, here is how we can beat John Fetterman, if we do not get Super PAC support, we will lose, and Democrats are going to lose this seat, and it’s going to be a disaster. Like, they were very explicitly making this point, going on TV, and circulating the memos to the meeting. “We need Super PAC money, we can’t beat him without Super PAC money.” And the Super PAC money they were talking about was DMFI, for the most part. And Mainstream Democrats, and the Mainstream Democrats PAC is allied, funded by Reid Hoffman, but allied with DMFI.

So, they go directly to DMFI and say, what does our Israel-Palestine position need to be, basically? And Mark Mellman, the head of DMFI, later said on the record that the meeting went very well, that Fetterman’s staff then sent over their Israel-Palestine platform. It was pretty good, not quite there, so they made some edits, kicked it back to the campaign. The campaign checked, [said], this is good, posted it, this is our position. And Conor Lamb, out of luck, we’re not going to support you, because this guy’s good enough.

And you saw that happen in a lot of different races, that candidates who hoped they were going to get AIPAC support to beat a progressive didn’t, because the progressive was able to persuade AIPAC and DMFI that they had sufficiently switched their position on the issue. 

KB: Wow. And you also have the story of Summer Lee, who had sent out some pretty mild tweets, but knew she was going to be a target, and just sort of accepted it. And was able, narrowly, to still win her race.

There are two reports of candidates who are running right now in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, both of whom were reportedly — according to them — offered $20 million to drop out of the Senate race to primary Rashida Tlaib. I mean, that’s as naked as it gets. A donor calling you up — this is not even legal, by the way, to do — but a donor calling you up and saying, hey, I’ll give you $20 million dollars in your primary campaign against Rashida Tlaib if you drop out here.

Based on your reporting and your knowledge of how all of this has gone down in the past, are you surprised by the brazen nature of that?

RG: Not really, because it has taken Citizens United some time to kind of blossom into what it really could become, and what people could see that it could become from the beginning, which is just the floodgates completely open.

The first cycle, 2012, there were a couple Senate candidates that got involved with Super PACs, but very few. It only started drifting into House races a couple cycles after that. But 2022 and AIPAC’s spending of $30+ million really changed, I think, the calculation. Because that is, on the one hand, so much money that it can reshape how the party positions itself on Israel Palestine. It can purge an entire faction of critics from the party. But it’s also not much money. There is a small number of donors. The super PAC … Now, a lot of AIPAC’s money is dark money that goes for general operations, but the super PAC money is public, and you can see, this person gave 5 million, this person gave 1 million, this person gave 1 million.

And then you’ll see, on a single day — you can look at the FEC reports on it — on a single day, 30 different people gave 100,000. So you’re like, oh, there must have been a nice fundraiser somewhere. And so, it only takes a few people spending a small amount of money, to them, a rounding error to them. And once you can see you can have an impact, then you’re like, oh, well, let’s do this again.

And I think one mistake they feel like they made is they did not spend heavily against Ilhan Omar. They felt like she was comfortably ahead in the race and that it was going to be a waste of money. And also that — I get into this in the book — she and Pelosi had a very close relationship, which might surprise a lot of people. And so, they would have been going against Pelosi to go after Omar.

She ended up only winning by a couple points. And so, now she’s facing the same person, and I don’t think they’ll make that mistake again. We could go race by race, but they feel like there’s enough shot at winning, and it’s cheap enough that, why not? 

KB: That they may as well give it their best.

One of the questions we got from the audience is, with The Squad members vocally calling for a ceasefire and really leading the charge on that, and challenging Democratic leadership. Does this prove that electing progressives inside the Democratic Party is not a fool’s errand? I don’t have to tell you that there’s a lot of progressive and lefty disenchantment with electoral politics, disappointments with The Squad’s unwillingness and inability at times to challenge Democratic leadership directly. I have never seen them be as forceful in critique of Democratic leadership, and especially President Biden, as they have been in this moment with Israel’s all-out war being waged on Gaza.

So, what do you think of this person’s question? Do you think it proves that this was worthwhile? And what are some of the factors that led them to be so strong on this particular issue?

RG: The structure that made it so difficult for so many years for progressives to get into office was just the lack of resources. And Bernie Sander — well, Elizabeth Warren, kind of in her 2012 Senate campaign… You can read my last book for this one, Howard Dean with his first presidential campaign really kind of bringing small donors into the game. Obama showing that you can do it on a national scale in 2008 with small donors, obviously combining it with a lot of Wall Street and other big donor money. That opens up the possibility for outsiders without money to then come in and challenge. 

Since then, you’ve seen some coopting of that by the Democratic Party more broadly. I’m sure everybody here has their inbox completely carpet bombed with messages saying that the world’s going to end. Those are the nicest ones. The others kind of look like phone bills or something.

So, taking something that ought to be a beautiful thing — democratizing the process, bringing people in, and then allowing candidates to take positions based on what people want, rather than what their donors are demanding — gets then contorted by consultants who then own the big emailing firms who then blast your inbox. So, that, coupled with the fact that you can’t really scale The Squad, in the sense that, one reason that AOC can raise $10 million every cycle is that she’s AOC.

But she’s AOC because other people aren’t. You can’t have 250 people like that. There is a limited amount of stardom, that’s the definition of stardom.

But, it has built, in collaboration with the Sanders ecosystem, at least an ecosystem that is there and can be triggered when the moments arise. And so, this moment is an example of that where, if you didn’t have them in office now, where would the pressure have come from within the Democratic Party?

And so, I don’t think it’s ever worth giving up, but there are the challenges. This system is very adaptable, and the challenges are just going to keep replicating.

KB: One of the things that you document in this book as well is, obviously, if you’re going to accomplish change, you need allies who have power, like The Squad. And you also need outside groups that are going to put pressure on those in power, and be in the right place when legislation is being crafted.

However, just at the moment when you had a Democratic trifecta and progressives really needed to be flexing their muscles, a lot of these organizations were eaten up by internal turmoil. And I’ve got a quote from you from the book about what was going on within these organizations?

You say, “A sense of powerlessness on the left had nudged the focus away from structural or wide reaching change, which felt hopelessly beyond reach, and replaced it with an internal target that was more achievable. One former executive director of a major nonprofit advocacy group told me he saw those in his organizations turn inward out of desperation. ‘Maybe I can’t end racism myself, but I can get my manager fired, or I can get so-and-so removed, or I can hold somebody accountable,’ he relayed. People found power where they could, and often that’s where you work, sometimes where you live, or where you study, but someplace close to home.”

How did this dynamic play out over the years that you’re covering here, and how did it intersect with progressive goals getting accomplished through the House, and with this White House? 

RG: One interesting example that I have in the book is, actually, the Sunrise Movement itself. The Sunrise Movement is one of the few organizations that endorsed AOC, and I think every member of The Squad. They were an obscure group at that point. They were an obscure group when they occupied Pelosi’s office, but that moment was so electric that it allowed them to eclipse every other green group in Washington and become these stars.

And you then had almost every Democratic presidential candidate endorse a Green New Deal. Even Joe Biden’s climate platform was arguably to the left of Bernie’s from 2016. Like, that’s how far things had gone. Varshini, the head of Sunrise, was put with AOC on the six-person task force assigned to John Kerry, to design the Biden climate agenda. And Sunrise had this direct line to Ron Klain, who’s the White House Chief of Staff, who very much believed that, for better or for worse, and whether it’s right or wrong, that Sunrise represented a real youth movement, and that their input was important, and that winning them over meant keeping together the coalition that would be needed to pass legislation, to hold the House and Senate, to win reelection.

And so, Sunrise found itself in this unique and surprising position to them, where they were constantly able to shape legislation as it was being crafted, before it was even sent over to the Senate or House. Which is, in many ways, a more important place to be in the beginning, because the product that starts, it goes over to Congress, and then people push it to the left or push it to the right. But where it starts dictates 90 percent of where it’s going to end up.

And so, they’re right there in the beginning, shaping it. And, right at that point, the organization just implodes over internal strife. It was maybe [the] sixth near-implosion; there had been tussles, mostly over wages and white supremacy, would be the buckets, and they’d be tossed in together. But they had been suppressed first by, we’re doing the Green New Deal, we’re doing Bernie Sanders, we’re pushing this agenda.

But, once Biden gets into office — and this became true for a lot of other progressive organizations — there was a lack of faith in a direction, and so, those pressures that had been suppressed before kind of burst through.

And so, I talked to the political director of Sunrise, who had said that, right at this moment of maximal influence, it turned out 50 percent or more of his time instead was directed towards Zoom meetings, sorting out all the different issues that they were having back in Sunrise. And, as he put it, if I’m not there either, the Biden White House is just writing its own agenda; you don’t necessarily want to leave them to that. Or some big Green groups are in there, or oil and gas groups are in there.

And so, that’s one example, but there are others in the way that the thing just kind of falls apart.

KB: Yeah. We did get a really important question about your performance in the Eastern Shore boat docking competition, but I will put that one to the side, I’ll let you comment on that separately. 

RG: That’s a 4th of July event in Rock Hall, Maryland. So, whoever asked that can ask it afterwards, while I’m signing their book.

KB: One quick question for you. There’s a lot of Joe Manchin in the book, and there’s a lot of No Labels — speaking of big money and the influence on politics and all of that — also in the book. And obviously Joe Manchin just announced he’s not running for Senate again, and there’s a lot of speculation that he might try to run for president on the No Labels ticket

Do you have any insight into whether that is real?

RG: It has been surreal to watch all of the threads of this book kind of burst into full public view. Like, I thought, when I was writing it, are people going to think I’m crazy for focusing this much on AIPAC’s influence on The Squad and those around them? Are people going to think I’m crazy for chapters on the money behind No Labels, and Joe Manchin, and Josh Gottheimer as basically the founder of No Labels?

Because covering this stuff every single day, I saw how determinative this money was. Not just influential; just completely driving things. And so, even though this isn’t the thing that gets into the news, I was like, these have to be major themes of the book.

And now, sure enough, yeah. Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penn are looking to raise, what? They claim they have raised $70 million to get Joe Manchin or whoever they can convince to be on their ticket, in an effort that would … The only way you can put it is, it would help Trump get reelected. Like, there’s no other way to see that. Some of the weird ones like RFK are like, I don’t know how that plays out. But No Labels, that’s pretty clear. That’s purely a play that’s going to hurt Democrats and help Republicans, and that Gottheimer and Manchin are able to participate in that so actively, yet be held up as these paragons of democratic virtue, while folks like The Squad, who are constantly bending over backwards against the wishes, sometimes, of their own base, to support the Democratic Party, are constantly being told that they’re not good enough Democrats, is kind of the contradiction that runs through the book.

KB: Yeah, absolutely.

Well, the last question for you, and we’ll wrap things up on this one.

We started off talking about The Squad as a moment. Is that moment over? And what do you think it looks like going forward, and what do you think the state of the progressive movement is at this time?

RG: I think the moment is over in the sense that, that’s what it was. But we’re in the kind of post-Bernie post-Squad moment now, that is still being shaped. I think it will be significantly shaped by the Democratic Party’s response to the war in Gaza, and that is ongoing. And I fear that we’re looking at the beginning, that, as horrible as it is, we might be only at the beginning. Because the disease has set in, but hasn’t taken over.

When you have destroyed not just the healthcare system, but the sewage treatment system… People talked about how awful Fyre Festival was, because they didn’t have sewage treatment for like, two days or something. And this is endless. And so, I think some of it will be shaped by that.

But I do think the new generation of voters is kind of structurally different than previous ones. People have always thought that young people are to the left, but if you go back and look, young people supported Reagan. There’s some debate over whether or not they supported Nixon, but it was very close. There was not, by no means, a blowout for Democrats. It’s just that the media likes to talk about the left-wing ones a lot more, and so, it always seemed like generations were left-wing.

These people under 30, 35 today really genuinely are much more progressive. And so, that is going to mean that they’re going to see the politics of The Squad as just normal, like, this is how politics ought to be. They’re not going to see that as radical at all.

And I finish toward the end of the book with this wild poll that came out in January in New Hampshire, where they asked New Hampshire voters, who’s the Democrat that you like the most? And you would not have expected it in 2018, but the answer was Ocasio-Cortez. And I asked her if she’d seen that poll and she was like, I did see that. I don’t believe it, but I did see it. So, that’s an interesting place that this goes.

KB: Yeah. Thank you, Ryan.

RG: Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. This episode was produced by José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal Review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief. And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of the Intercept.

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