Adam Johnson

They're for the hundreds of other people to say, shut up, don't go there.

And so the intimidation and the smears, and again, they were bringing up Nicholas Kristof's father's history of what he was doing in the 1930s.

I mean, this ridiculous guilt by genetic association.

They're just desperate.

They're about intimidating people.

And this is something also documented in the book where we have these kind of visual anti-doxing campaigns, harassing people at work, harassing people's wives at work.

They're not formally affiliated with the Israeli government, but they're certainly funded like the Canary mission by these pro-Israel donors.

They're meant to chill everyone else into shutting up.

So clearly they would like to.

you know punish kristoff but that's almost it's something like the the the primaries where they where these pro-israel groups spend 15 20 million dollars on some obscure seed in kentucky or or new york or missouri it's less about the candidate itself it's more about saying that if you step out of line and existentially criticize israel it's going to cost you millions of dollars it's going to cost you litigation it's going to co so i don't think the loss the lawsuit which i is sort of a textbook lawsuit it's not not really serious

I don't think that's really going to go anywhere, but it's really about sending a message to anyone else in mainstream U.S.

media for covering things that are viewed as being subversive to the broader pro-Israel narrative.

Because again, so much of this has already been reported in Israeli media.

This is not like some forbidden secret.

Mass rapes of Palestinian prisoners and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners has been reported in Haaretz.

But what it's not supposed to do is it's not supposed to break containment.

It's not supposed to go to your kind of...

mainstream, very influential liberal outlets like The New York Times.

That's viewed as that's that's viewed as as as a step too far.

I think in key ways it is, but what I think is likely to emerge is a kind of PR off-ramp where you see this emerging narrative around what I call one bad man theory, that this was simply Netanyahu forcing everyone to do it both in Israel and stateside, or as you see this new talking point being peddled by J Street of,