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ISRAEL

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Why Hamas Rejected Witkoff’s Ceasefire Plan by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21666/hamas-witkoff-ceasefire

The leaders of the Iran-backed Hamas terror group do not seem to be in a rush to end the war with Israel: after all, they and their family members are not living in the Gaza Strip…

Hamas’s political leaders, billionaires funded by Iran’s mullahs and the rulers of Qatar, live in several Arab and Islamic countries, including Qatar, Turkey, Algeria and Lebanon. They and their family members lead luxurious lives in these countries and do not have to worry about lack of food or medicine.

Hamas leaders are in no rush to accept any deal because, unlike most of the residents of the Gaza Strip, they do not have to stand in line and risk being shot by Hamas terrorists for trying to receive food from a humanitarian organization.

Moreover, the Hamas leadership will never accept any ceasefire without prior permission from the Iranian regime. The mullahs in Tehran also appear in no rush to end the war against Israel. They want the war to continue: it distracts attention from Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.

For [Hamas’s leaders], the No. 1 priority is to make sure that Hamas remains in power the day after the war

For Hamas, “the end” (eliminating Israel) justifies “the means” (sacrificing Palestinians as “martyrs” in the jihad against Israel).

Hamas staying in power would be great news for the Iranian regime, jihadis, and Islamist terror groups who consider the US the “Great Satan,” and are committed to killing Americans, Christians, Jews and all other “infidels.”

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Doctoring the Truth About Gaza Gregory Rose and Lewi Stone

By on June 4th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/israel/doctoring-the-truth-about-gaza/

Last week hundreds of Australian doctors circulated a call to the Australian government for action against Israel. We want to believe that all were motivated by universal humanitarian concerns. But their call made minimal demands of Hamas and claimed that Palestinian terrorists held by Israel are hostages. The doctors’ repeated misinformation that has its sources in Hamas propaganda.

The Gaza Health Ministry information office, its data and its doctors are deeply complicit in the Hamas disinformation campaign. They are extensively supported in their spread of disinformation by Hamas-affiliated Gazan journalists who, in turn, are contracted by our own media. They accuse the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of atrocities by “targeting children, women, the elderly and civilians”. There is no such evidence concerning Gazan casualties in the armed conflict, as we have detailed in depth in a report for the Henry Jackson Society noted under this masthead.

A controlling presence of Hamas military command at Gazan hospitals reflects its control over health information and its misuse of civilians in a human-shield policy, which accounts for many civilian casualties. Their presence is also a Hamas crime against hospitals, which lose their status as sites protected for humanitarian functions when they are repurposed as military bases.

A pitched armed battle between Hamas and the IDF at Kamal Adwan Hospital that took place over the 2024/2025 new year resulted in the deaths of 19 identified terrorists and the arrests of 240 others. Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Ahmed Kahlot, and his successor, Hossam Abu Saffia, held ranks within Hamas of Lieutenant-Colonel and Colonel respectively.

Hamas’ control of the Kamal Adwan Hospital was confirmed by the account of a visiting Kurdish volunteer doctor, Baxtiya Baram, in May 2024. “I saw with my own eyes that hospitals were used to hide Hamas leaders,” he reported. “We saw them and even spoke with them.”

Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa in Gaza City, was a major Hamas military base and the scene of other pitched battles. It is also where Israeli hostages were held and where spaces were dedicated for military command, prisoners, interrogations, communications, and military transport (by ambulance).

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The media’s dangerous lies about Israel The world was told the IDF massacred starving Palestinians. Now the BBC admits it was ‘incorrect’. Brendan O’Neill

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/03/the-medias-dangerous-lies-about-israel/

1 June 2025. Make a note of that date. For there is a good chance it will be recorded as a day of infamy. As a day when the Jews were once again libelled as the slayers of innocents. As a day when the intellectual classes mimicked their benighted forebears of the medieval era and falsely accused the Jewish nation of spilling blood for sport. For many it was just an ordinary Sunday – but for those who will come to write the history of our times, it will stand out as a day of frenzied hearsay in which Jews were once again branded demons and bloodlusters.

Reports of a massacre in Gaza came early that day. It took place in Rafah, we were told, at one of the distribution centres overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the US-Israel group that’s providing aid to Gaza’s needy. With depthless cruelty, IDF troops opened fire on the half-starved Palestinians queuing for meals. Thirty-one souls were slaughtered in the ‘aid-centre attack’, as the BBC swiftly called it. A venomous fury spread through the internet. No one can deny it now, people cried: Israel is ‘replicating’ Nazi tactics. Just as the Nazis told Jews they were being put on trains for a better life, so the New Nazis promise Palestinians food as ‘a pretext for slaughter’.

There was one problem with these breathless accounts of a wicked massacre: it seems no such thing took place. Last night, the BBC backtracked. It said it has now studied the ‘graphic video’ of the ‘aid-centre massacre’ and has ruled that it is ‘incorrect’. We were told the ‘massacre’ took place early in the morning, yet the ‘direction of the shadows’ in the clip point to an event that took place ‘after 7pm local time’. More devastatingly, the Beeb geolocated the clip and found that it was filmed in a part of Khan Younis that is 4.5km from the nearest aid-distribution centre. A journalist in Gaza confirmed it: the events in the viral clip are ‘unrelated to any aid-distribution site’.

If what the BBC is now saying is correct, then we have just witnessed something truly horrifying. We have watched as an untruth spread with uncommon speed to every corner of the Earth. We have seen a serious calumny be taken as good coin by newsmakers and influencers. Worse, we’ve witnessed an eruption of bigotry. Reports of an ‘aid-centre massacre’ unleashed untold Jew hatred. Across social media, the cry went up: they’re demons, they’re Nazis, they claim to be the ‘Chosen People’ and yet they use food to tempt innocents into the path of murder. All were in agreement: the Jewish nation is the most evil nation.

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Christopher F. Rufo On Israel-Palestine, You Don’t Need to Be an Expert to Pick a Side What the Gaza war reveals about America’s domestic politics

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/israel-palestine-gaza-war-hamas-domestic-politics

Intellectuals, rarely short on opinions, often fall back on a familiar dodge when confronted with a controversy they’d rather avoid: calling the issue “complex.”

The war in Gaza is one such case. To be sure, the tangled history, religion, and culture behind the Israel–Palestine conflict make it genuinely complicated. Partisans on both sides accuse their opponents of ignorance while promoting their own preferred narratives and facts to claim authority over the subject.

I should acknowledge that I’m no expert on Israel and Palestine. I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic. I haven’t visited either territory. For that reason, I’ve written little about the conflict and don’t claim to grasp all its intricacies.

But I do understand American domestic politics. And I can see the shadows the Gaza war has cast here at home. On one side stand Palestine’s domestic proxies: the decolonization theorists, keffiyeh-clad campus leftists, and, increasingly, the radicalized individuals now out for blood.

These elements are connected. The ideology is hatched at places like Harvard, where it trickles down to student activists who occupy campus buildings and make lithographs of Hamas paragliders. It then gets refracted on social media, flipping the switch within the minds of those predisposed to violence, giving them a rationale to lash out at Jews. Consider the recent spate of property bombings, the cold-blooded murder of two Israeli embassy employees, and the injuries inflicted by Molotov cocktails on a dozen people in Boulder, Colorado.

I don’t need to speak Hebrew or Arabic to recognize this domestic movement as an enemy. It’s enough to read its literature and observe its supporters’ actions to see that it embodies the forces of barbarism—forces that, if left unchecked, would tear down the pillars of civilization both abroad and at home.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Charles Fain Lehman This Is What an Intifada Looks Like The American anti-Israel movement has radicalized.

By on June 3rd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/terror-attack-boulder-colorado-mohamed-soliman

Since November 2023—“fairly regularly, sometimes weekly”—a group of Boulder, Colorado, residents have held marches advocating for the release of Hamas’s hostages in Gaza. The regularity of these marches likely contributed to Sunday’s targeted attack, in which a man named Mohamed Soliman allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at the marchers while yelling “end Zionists” and “Palestine is free.” The FBI is investigating the incident as an “act of terror;” the Department of Homeland Security has claimed Soliman was an illegally resident Egyptian national.

Soliman’s assault is the third high-profile anti-Israel and anti-Semitic terror attack in the U.S. in recent months. It follows the double murder outside of the Washington, D.C. Jewish Museum less than ten days ago and the attempted firebombing of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home in April. The increasing tempo of violence makes the pattern hard to ignore: the American anti-Israel movement has radicalized.

It is also hard not to draw a connection between the rhetoric used by radical protesters over the past two years and the recent wave of violence. “There is only one solution,” students and marchers have chanted, “Intifada! Revolution!” This—lighting humans on fire to advance your political goals—is what an Intifada looks like. And until we treat it as such, and respond with the full force of the law, it will continue to endanger lives.

The Intifada, after all, was never a peaceful movement. Literally meaning “uprising,” the first Intifada (1987–1990) and second (2000–2005) were marked by frequent violence, with the second resulting in nearly 1,000 Israels killed or injured. Any Israeli who lived through the second Intifada will tell you that they still think twice about where to sit on a bus, remembering the ever-present risk of suicide bombings.

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US envoy Mike Huckabee suggests France “carve” Palestinian state out of Riviera

By on June 2nd, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-envoy-mike-huckabee-suggests-france-carve-palestinian-state-out-of-riviera/ar-AA1F

The US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has lashed out at France’s advocacy for recognition of a Palestinian state, saying that if it supported such an outcome it could “carve out a piece of the French Riviera” and create one.

France is co-chairing with Saudi Arabia this month an international conference at the United Nations aimed at resurrecting the idea of a two-state solution, which the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes.

Paris has also said it could recognize a Palestinian state itself this year.

In an interview with Fox News published on Saturday, Huckabee called the initiative at the UN “incredibly inappropriate when Israel is in the midst of a war.”

“October 7 changed a lot of things,” he said, referring to the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.

“If France is really so determined to see a Palestinian state, I’ve got a suggestion for them – carve out a piece of the French Riviera and create a Palestinian state. They are welcome to do that, but they are not welcome to impose that kind of pressure on a sovereign nation.”

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POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on June 1st, 2025

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

Despite the genocidal chants “From the river to the sea” from Israel’s ignorant antagonists, and behind the screeching and biased libels in the media, Israeli scientists and researchers work 24/7 to battle the scourges of famine, drought, and natural disasters.
They also advance state of the art defense technology that is critical in defending all democracies.
Michael Ordman’s weekly accounts of the triumphs in Israel dispel the gloom that the terrorism and blood curdling threats to Israel and America from Middle East tyrants create. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
The first lasers to combat drones. During the Swords of Iron War, the IDF successfully intercepted dozens of drones using new laser interception systems operated by air defense personnel. Israel is the first country in the world to field high-powered, operational laser systems at scale. Rafael’s Iron Beam should be ready end-2025.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-defense-ministry-drones-intercepted-by-laser-systems-during-war-1001511661
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rkq073ezge#google_vignette
https://ats.org/ats-news/rafael-gears-up-for-iron-beam-launch/
 
Israel invention saves wounded Israeli. Surgeons at Hadassah Medical Center saved a young Israeli whose heart artery was torn by terrorist shrapnel. The surgeons used Israel’s unique HemaShock tourniquet (see here previously) to squeeze his blood just to his vital organs. His heart restarted while surgeons repaired the artery.
https://www.israel21c.org/a-simple-lifesaver-for-hemorrhagic-shock-or-cardiac-arrest/
 
The first Hassidic pre-army academy. Netzah Yehuda, the organization behind the founding of the Haredi Nahal unit, is set to launch a unique pre-military program designed for Chabad Hasidim. The new initiative will combine Torah study and Hasidic philosophy with preparation for meaningful military service.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/15/hasidic-movement-launchs-pre-military-academy-for-the-first-time-in-israel/
 
IDF office has Bar Mitzvah in Gaza. Reservists of the Israel Defense Forces’ 8110th “Yoav” Infantry Battalion recently celebrated the bar mitzvah of their commander in Rafah, Gaza. The commander, who had got engaged a few days earlier, had never celebrated his bar mitzvah, so his troops decided to surprise him.
https://www.jns.org/idf-officer-marks-bar-mitzvah-in-rafah-synagogue/
 
Over 1100 new immigrants enlisted. (TY Yanky) During the 2025 Spring recruitment, 1113 new immigrants enlisted in the IDF. It compares to 883 in Spring 2024 and 799 in 2023. Most of the recruits came from the US, Russia and Ethiopia. Over 700 lone soldiers joined the IDF this year – most of them new immigrants.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/they-came-to-serve-the-lone-soldiers-defending-israel-after-oct-7/ 
 
Finland buys Israeli tank protection. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Trophy’s active armored defense system has saved the lives of many Israeli soldiers during the war. Finland’s majority government-owned Patria group will now integrate it onto its vehicles to protect them from anti-tank missiles, UAVs, and other threats.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-finland-to-buy-rafaels-trophy-defense-system-1001510475
 
Expanding defense tech production. Israeli defense giant Elbit Systems has raised $512 million on Nasdaq to help expand its production of military systems. On 31st March, Elbit had a record $23.1 billion backlog of orders. The new cash will be used to establish more infrastructure and invest more in R&D.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-elbit-systems-raises-512m-on-nasdaq-for-production-expansion-1001511132
 
Collapsible drone. (TY Yanky) Flying Production, a subsidiary of Israel’s Elbit Systems, has begun serial production of its new X-Intra combat drone that can carry loads up to 30kg. Stored disassembled, it fits into a padded bag that one soldier can carry, and can be deployed and operational within just two minutes.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/ubpzksl3m  https://flying-production.com/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
First Israeli artificial heart implantation. A medical team at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center saved the life of a 63-year-old Israeli man with the first-ever implantation in Israel of an artificial heart. The man’s heart was replaced with a unique artificial organ made of titanium, animal-derived tissues and advanced sensors.
https://www.jns.org/medical-breakthrough-in-israel-artificial-heart-implanted-at-hadassah-ein-kerem/
 
Teen MDA trainee saves father’s life. 15-year-old Lana, from Tel Aviv, used skills from her MDA youth training to identify a life-threatening condition in her father’s brain and urged immediate hospital care.  Doctors diagnosed and treated a severe bacterial infection in his brain and said that Lana’s actions had saved his life.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/408721
 
Lone soldier saves Massachusetts doctor. Maya Ben Yitzhak, a lone IDF soldier from Chicago, saved the life of a 64-year-old Massachusetts doctor after she donated her bone marrow through Ezer Mizion. Dr. Rothenberg has been battling multiple forms of cancer since she was first diagnosed with the disease in 2014.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-855688 
 
ECG AI for doctors. Using AI to interpret ECG readings saves time and can find things the doctor might miss. But it’s hard to stop false positives. Scientists at Israel’s Technion have developed a new AI interpretability tool, designed for photographed ECG images, that explains to the doctors the “alerts” and what can be ignored.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-ai-doctor-language-tool-ecg.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-01467-8
 
300+ at Medex France. More than 300 doctors and medical students from France, Belgium, and Switzerland attended the MedEx conference in Paris. Since the start of 2024, approximately 650 doctors have made Aliyah, with an additional 130 already arriving in 2025.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-855474

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Springtime for Sinwar Notes on the pro-Hamas Left and its antecedents. Jeffrey Herf

By on June 1st, 2025

https://quillette.com/2024/05/02/springtime-for-sinwar-hamas-israel-gaza-campus-protests/

EXCERPTS: FROM QUILLETTE AN AUSTRALIAN PUBLICATION

The Hamas Charter of 1988 represented a sharp turn away from these efforts to distinguish antisemitism from anti-Zionism. The revised Statement of 2017 adopts the language of secular, leftist anti-Zionism but reaffirms Hamas’s determination to eliminate the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” As justification for its genocidal campaign against world Jewry, Hamas’s foundational Charter invoked the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion along with Nazi propaganda that blamed the Jews for the French Revolution, World War I, World War II, and global unrest in general. The Charter is not just an expression of raw Jew-hatred; by defining its war against Israel as a war of religion, it has become one of the most important texts of reactionary ideology in world politics since the defeat of Nazism. It remains the defining statement of Hamas ideology and policy. 

I. Pre-Modern Hatred in Modern Drag

On the evening of 29 April 2024, demonstrators occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and refused to move until Columbia agreed to divest its endowment funds from Israel. A video published by the Free Press shows a masked person using a hammer to smash the glass in the building’s doors, before using what appears to be a bike lock to secure them. Other masked protesters build a makeshift barricade out of chairs. That evening, protesters outside the occupied building cheered its “liberation” and denounced Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide.” One young woman can be seen in a sweatshirt from Choate Rosemary Hall—one of the most expensive and exclusive private boarding schools in the United States. It is a feeder school to the Ivy League, and the alma mater of President John F. Kennedy (among other members of the American establishment). 

In unaccented American English, the supporting crowd chants that “Israel will fall! Brick by brick, wall by wall! We want all of it! Settlers, settlers go back home! Palestine is ours alone!” These young Americans at Columbia university and at other demonstrations this spring are openly—and proudly—calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. Though they have no claim to use the word “ours alone” regarding any territory in the Middle East, in the name of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, they support the “martyrs” of Hamas who aim to create an ethnically and religiously cleansed “Palestine” free of Jews.

These disgraceful scenes are one result of the emergence, over the last decade or so, of a pro-Hamas Left among the faculty and students in America’s universities. 

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Unholy Alliance Douglas Murray’s new book looks at the dangers posed by the burgeoning coalition of radical leftists and Islamists in the wake of 7 October.Michael M. Rosen

By on June 1st, 2025

https://quillette.com/2025/05/27/unholy-alliance-on-democracies-and-death-cults-douglas-murray-review/

A review of On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization by Douglas Murray, 240 pages, Broadside Books (April 2025)

On 21 May, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were shot dead in Washington, DC, less than a mile from the US Capitol, apparently by a radical anti-Israel activist. They were attending an event for young Jewish professionals at the Capital Jewish Museum when they were murdered by a thirty-year-old assailant subsequently identified as Elias Rodriguez by DC police.

The museum event, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, featured a multi-faith umbrella of nonprofit organisations working to respond to humanitarian crises in the Middle East and North Africa. A member of an avowedly Marxist-Leninist outfit called the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Rodriguez was heard shouting, “Free, Free Palestine!” upon his arrest. He seems to have killed his victims despite—or perhaps because of—the anodyne mission of the event they were attending. And, apparently, because he thought they were both Jews (Milgrim was Jewish, and Lischinsky was born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother).

Since Hamas’s savage invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023, radical progressives around the world have made common cause with Islamists—not only against the Jewish state, but also against ordinary Jews. Why is this happening? And what can we do about it? In his latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, the British journalist Douglas Murray approaches these challenging questions without an ethnic or religious dog in the fight. That does not make him a dispassionate observer, however, because he is committed to the defence of the free world, of which the State of Israel is a part.

Murray is therefore a longstanding supporter of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and an interview he gave to Rita Panahi on Sky News Australia about proportionality in war briefly went viral on social media in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack. Murray then made his way to the so-called Gaza Envelope to bear witness to the otherworldly carnage that followed, which he documents in his new book with frank accuracy and intensity.

Even worse, perhaps, than the grievous wound Israel suffered on 7 October is what the massacre portends for the rest of the free world. Murray believes that Israel is merely an appetizer on the menu from which global jihadists have been feasting for decades—the United States and Europe are the main dish. “[W]hat Israel stared into that day,” he writes, “is a reality we might all stare into again at some point soon—and that some of us have already glimpsed.”

Murray summarises his argument in a thesis statement that gives his book its title: “The story of the suffering and the heroism of October 7 and its aftermath,” he reckons, “is one that spells not just the divide between good and evil, peace and war, but between democracies and death cults.”

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ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Arc of History Bends Toward Thoughtcrime By Seth Barron

By on May 31st, 2025

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-arc-of-history-bends-toward-thoughtcrime/

Before spilled blood had dried following the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, advocates for the Palestinians had preemptively designated the anticipated Israeli response a genocide. Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro chimed in on October 10 with concern for “the genocide that has begun against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” On that same day, American consumer watchdog Ralph Nader posted that Israel’s “genocidal bombing attack on Gaza’s defenseless civilian population is underway. Once again.”

Innumerable voices have warned that future generations will look back at our silence with shame and disapproval. Bernie Sanders warns that “History will never forget that we enabled this atrocity.” Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis says that “future generations” will grapple with the blood debt we are accruing today. Irish rock band Kneecap explained that they support Palestine because they “just want to make sure we’re on the right side of history.”

Appeals to history as justification for heinous political action are nothing new. At his 1953 terrorism trial, Fidel Castro famously declared, “History will absolve me,” conveniently excusing every abuse he had committed and would continue to commit when he became leader of Cuba. The Left appeals to History as a kind of god, and anything done in its name is sanctified.

Here in America we are told constantly that we had better do such-and-such in order to remain on the “right side of history.” A few days after George Floyd died, the Des Moines chapter of Black Lives Matter erected a billboard asking, “Which side of history will you be on?” Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo vowed not to repeat Derek Chauvin’s name, and averred that “history is being written now, and I’m determined to make sure we are on the right side of history.”

History will also frown at us for the weather. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is fond of this trope. In 2020 she asked the World Economic Forum at Davos, “I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing the climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them?”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went a step further, narrating an animated film called “A Message from the Future.” In the video, the AOC of the future speaks to us from a clean energy bullet train about how successfully the Green New Deal saved America. “By committing to universal rights like health care and meaningful work for all, we stopped being so scared of the future…and we found our shared purpose.”

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