NAACP Urges Biden to Reverse Course on Israel Before It’s Too Late

Joe Biden’s continued support of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza has crossed a line for the NAACP.

The civil rights organization on Thursday released a statement urging the Biden administration to end weapons shipments to Israel and calling for “an immediate and permanent ceasefire.”

“As the nation’s leading civil rights organization, it is our responsibility to speak out in the face of injustice and work to hold our elected officials accountable for the promises they’ve made,” said NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson. “Over the past months, we have been forced to bear witness to unspeakable violence, affecting innocent civilians, which is unacceptable.”

The statement cites Israel’s offensive in Rafah, where displaced Palestinians from across Gaza have been forced to flee, noting that over Memorial Day weekend, the Israeli military killed 45 Palestinians (with U.S.-made weapons) and injured over 200 people, many of whom were young children. Johnson also said in the statement America’s efforts were key to ending the conflict.

“The Middle East conflict will only be resolved when the U.S. government and international community take action, including limiting access to weapons used against civilians,” Johnson said. “The NAACP calls on President Biden to draw the red line and indefinitely end the shipment of weapons and artillery to the state of Israel and other states that supply weapons to Hamas and other terrorist organizations.”

“It is one thing to call for a ceasefire, it is another to take the measures necessary to work towards liberation for all.”

The statement is unexpected, especially since the organization has historically been on good terms with Democrats. Last month, Biden spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s sixty-ninth annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner, where he received a lifetime achievement award.

“My name’s Joe Biden, and I’m a lifetime member of the NAACP. Matter of fact, the first organization I ever joined was the NAACP,” Biden said at the event.

Will this statement sway Biden’s support for Israel’s war, though? The Biden administration has shown no sign of changing its policies, even though, as the war’s eighth month begins, Israel has killed nearly 37,000 Palestinians, including at least 15,000 children, with thousands more civilians missing.

The right thing to do now, as it has been for a long time, is what the NAACP, as well as the The New Republic’s, editors recommend: End weapons shipments to Israel.  

House Democratic candidate Mondaire Jones has united pretty much everyone against him after his petty endorsement of Westchester County executive George Latimer over progressive Representative Jamaal Bowman. Latimer is largely considered to be running a Republican-backed campaign solely to oust Bowman, and Jones’s endorsement of his campaign has rankled several progressive groups.

On Thursday, Jews for Jamaal—a coalition of Jewish constituents in NY-16 and supported by local progressive nonprofit Jews for Racial and Economic Justice— released a statement condemning Jones’s endorsement of Latimer and fiercely criticized Latimer’s prominently right-wing-backed campaign.

“As a diverse coalition of New York Jews, we reject continued use of Republican money to interfere with Democratic Party primaries with the aim of unseating a popular progressive Black Democrat,” the statement reads in part.

Also on Thursday, both New York’s Working Families Party and the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC rescinded their endorsements of Jones. The Working Families Party, which revoked financial support for Jones’s campaign, issued a statement saying Jones’s endorsement of Latimer made clear he “strayed from the values and principles that made us proud to support him in 2020.”

“Over the course of his campaign, Mondaire has strayed from the values and principles that made us proud to support him in 2020,” NYWFP co-directors Jasmine Gripper and Ana María Archila said in a statement to Gothamist. “His decision to back George Latimer, who uses racist dog whistles, rejects core parts of [President] Biden’s economic agenda, and shares donors with Mondaire’s own MAGA extremist opponent, runs counter to our values as a party.”

Jones, a former Bowman ally, endorsed Latimer on Tuesday, citing “Jewish residents in my district who feel anxiety, fear, and anger due to Representative Bowman’s words and actions in particular and an overall climate in this country.”

Bowman—a vocal critic of Israel’s deadly war on Gaza and Biden’s continued arms shipments to the country—has decried Latimer as a “Republican sock puppet” with his campaign’s significant support from MAGA conservatives, AIPAC, and pro-Israel opportunists hungry for the incumbent progressive’s ouster. Now Jones’s endorsement of Latimer threaten his own race against aggressively pro-Israel Republican incumbent Representative Mike Lawler, who represents a Biden district that Jones could have recaptured in November.

* This piece originally misstated that Latimer’s recent campaign video was not filmed in his district.

Bill Barr is back to defending Donald Trump, this time claiming that the Republican presidential nominee is going to have his felony hush-money conviction overturned.

“When people were talking about it, I said that the case was an abomination, and I didn’t think it was going to be brought at the end of the day because it was so vaporous,” the former U.S. attorney general under Trump told Jimmy Failla of Fox News Radio Wednesday.

“But you think about, how are the American people going to react, in a very close election, if Trump loses and this case is overturned—which it will be,” Barr added. “This case will be overturned.”

Trump was convicted last week on 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree, in paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair before the 2016 election. Since the news, several Republicans have rushed to attack the trial and to make absurd defenses of the president.

Barr has already endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential election, but it hasn’t done him many favors in the convicted felon’s eyes: Trump still insulted Barr on Truth Social upon hearing about the endorsement, calling him “gutless.”  

That’s because in the past Barr was a frequent Trump critic. Barr revealed that Trump would often remark about executing people during his time in the White House. He called the former president a “consummate narcissist” whose second term would be “chaos” and a “horror show.” One year ago, he said, “Should we be putting someone like this forward as the leader of the country, leader of the free world?”

But Barr’s political views, specifically his belief in Christian hegemony being essential to American democracy, inform his support of conservatism, of which Trump is the standard-bearer in today’s Republican Party. As Michael Tomasky wrote for The New Republic, “Barr hates disorder and all the rest of it. But he hates something else more: liberalism.”

Conservatives launched into melodramatic meltdown mode after a judge sentenced Steve Bannon to four months in prison for defying a congressional subpoena from the January 6 committee.

Representative Matt Gaetz wrote, presumably as he collapsed in slow motion onto a fainting couch, “It is with great sadness and anger that we observe the death of the judicial system in America.”

“And they’re sending him to prison—not just to torture him but to torture us,” Gaetz added, presumably under the impression the American public will be in shambles without Bannon spewing white nationalist hate while wearing 17 layers of shirts.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was similarly superficially apoplectic, decrying the January 6 committee as “FAKE” and announcing, “The DOJ is completely corrupt!!”

Droning British giant—and former deputy assistant to Trump—Seb Gorka groaned to a camera while on a leisurely drive that Bannon was sentenced to prison as part of a “conspiracy to disrupt Trump’s campaign.”

“The deep state is not the deep state anymore,” Gorka announced at the news of Bannon facing the normal consequences of defying a congressional subpoena. “It’s the in-your-face, we don’t care, we run America, and who you choose for president is utterly irrelevant,” he added before pivoting to boilerplate conservative sound bites and pitching his web streaming show.

Bannon was found guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress in 2022 but delayed sentencing by appealing the decision. That appeal was rejected, and he was sentenced Thursday to report to prison on July 1. Bannon can still appeal the ruling to report to prison.

The judicial system, which Gaetz declared is dead, typically sentences people held in contempt of court to prison time: Per the U.S. Penal Code, penalties for contempt of Congress include a jail term of a minimum of one month and a maximum 12 months per violation. Whistleblower Chelsea Manning served a two-month sentence for refusing to testify in a federal case investigating military secrets she handed to WikiLeaks in 2010. The judicial system, it seems, has continued operating as it always has when people refuse to testify. But if the meltdown helps the grift, might as well treat the codified consequences of refusing to testify as a sign of democracy collapsing.

Representative Nancy Mace’s congressional spending is still the talk of the town. On this week’s agenda: her $1.6 million D.C. townhouse.

The South Carolina Republican was accused of “secretly fleecing taxpayers,” in an ethics complaint filed earlier this week alleging she sought higher monthly lodging reimbursements than what was actually warranted by her expenses.

“Representative Mace has violated House Ethics Rules by repeatedly seeking reimbursement for lodging in excess of the actual monthly expense of maintaining her co-owned townhouse in  Washington, D.C., resulting in a misuse of taxpayer funds for purposes unrelated to her official duties,” read a copy of the complaint obtained by Punchbowl News.

Mace’s requests violate two key rules of a congressional reimbursement program, according to the complaint: Lawmakers cannot be repaid for interest or principal on their mortgage payments, and they cannot ask to be repaid for more than their actual expenses.

The complaint came on the heels of a lengthy investigation by The Washington Post into Mace’s spending habits. Two former staffers told the Post that Mace repeatedly directed her team to file for reimbursements to the tune of $2,000 a month, despite being informed by people involved in her office finances that she could not justify claiming more than $1,726 a month. During some months of the year, she filed to be reimbursed upward of $3,000—nearly double what her team had calculated.

“This allegation alone deserves further investigation as well as interviews of former staff,” the complaint said. “If true, then this is a flagrant abuse of House Rules and a clear example of a Member secretly fleecing taxpayers.”

“Money is fungible, so the thousands of excess dollars received by [Representative] Mace could conceivably have been put towards any use,” the complaint alleged, noting that if the anecdotes offered by her former staffers were true, she would have twice violated the program’s statutes.