The Democrats know exactly what they're doing and it's terrible.

In the past few weeks, Democrats have taken a series of steps that have flummoxed observers. They’re on the brink of losing Michigan because of enraged Arab and Muslim voters. So. This giggling dummy pairs up with Liz Cheney. They use Richie Torres as a campaign surrogate. Torres, for people who are not terminally on Twitter, is terminally on Twitter neglecting his constituents in the Bronx to suck up AIPAC money by smearing pro-Palestine activists. The mummy of Bill Clinton scolds young people in Michigan and babbles about the Caananites or something to make a case for Harris.

OK no one can be that dumb. So I have a darker explanation. I think they are banking on the Islamophia that’d baked into U.S. society, including among liberal voters, dressed up, say, as concern for women’s rights. Islamophobia has always coursed in the West but it was stoked to psychotic, dizzying heights during the War on Terror in the US.

Remember the War on Terror? We had to justify starting wars, bloody power grabs machinated by Liz Cheney’s Dad. We were sending US soldiers. So we had to go into overdrive generating random, weird, insane cliches, flattening the Arab and Muslim world into one giant Taliban shooting Malala in the head for daring to dream of an education.¹

It was Republicans who owned the Sharia law debacles and who owned the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So liberals could position themselves as enlightened, while also engaging in soft-core Islamophobia. Remember when the New Yorker ran a cartoon about negotiations with Iran and depicted the Iranian diplomats in like Boudin attire?

Before the genocide in Gaza did you know women there had extremely high rates of advanced degrees? I didn’t. And why was it surprising to me? It’s a common feature in oppressive systems for education to be not just valued but worshipped. It was a feature in Communist Bulgaria for Grannies to trudge in from the villages with bagfuls of fruit with which to bribe the teachers in the hope their grandkids would get advanced degrees they wanted but were deprived of when they were young. (I was doubly screwed, because my Great-Aunt was a Principal and so had extra clout with which to extract information from teachers about what I was and was not doing: “She knows but doesn’t raise her hand enough” was one assessment I was sternly talked to about).

Yet Benjamin Netenyahu—in his typical English-language address clearly intended for an American audience—felt comfortable chiding young feminists for siding with a society that treats women “like chattel.” I don’t know, I don’t think I’d want a surgeon that’s chattel operating on me.

I have a ton of Arab and Muslim friends in New York. They are like me (except they throw better parties) in politics, outlook, culture. But, I guess I always assumed they weren’t super conservative because they’d been Westernized (“Amherst sex parties were wild!” my Lebanese friend says). Then I started hanging out with current Syrian refugees. They’re working class. Most of them didn’t finish school, because school stopped existing. As I often mention, rich people sent their kids to Europe and the US when shit hit the fan in Syria. These young guys recently had to cross through the mountains into Bulgaria and are often the primary breadwinners for family at home.

But Christ they are as addicted to TikTok as your average college aged US zellenial and they are doing their best to grow used to the customs of their new homes, with the exception for alcohol, which, good on them. Yesterday I met with Rajad, a 25-year-old from Aleppo. Despite working full time in what he describes as a “cave,” which I assume is a mistranslation for “exploitive underpaid construction job” he’s working his ass off learning English. “I just want people to think well of us,” he plaintively tells me.

I have to make the case for like 15 minutes for why he should let me buy him a 50 cent espresso since I have a tab open. He agrees, finally, but his red line is a slice of cake.

“I’ve been taking care of myself since I was 11. I want to make sure I work for everything and not take.”

What is this shit, a Horatio Alger book? I don’t tell him that if he wants to be a modern young “Western man” he should get addicted to online porn, rail against feminism, and never leave his basement.

The point of this anecdote is not to be like, “Hey! Arabs who didn’t go to Amherst sex parties are also like us!” The point is that the Democrats’ strategy is to play off of lingering—yet very, very strong—Islamophobia to cinch the election.

And, well, fuck them.

I’m working on a story right now about Trump’s (or Stephen Miller’s) mass deportation plans. I do not want Trump to win. If Trump wins he will definitely carry out mass deportations, and this time the lower courts he stacked in his first time are unlikely to stop him. He will definitely reinstitute the Muslim travel ban which will make my Syrian friends’ dreams of seeing New York and Los Angeles DOA.

At the same time, the current iteration of the Democratic Party, mummified in the 1990s, needs to die. Does anyone know how to get rid of a pesky, murderous mummy?

1. This is not a rag on Malala, a brilliant person and extraordinary successful activist.