Friends and Constituents,
I hope this finds you well. I'm sending this email and newsletter a day late, because I got invited last second to go to Conner Prairie for their fall festival by a friend with extra tickets. The crisp fall air was excellent last night, and it invigorated me for this newsletter and video.
Early this summer, with a couple thousand of my fellow elected Delegates to the Indiana Democratic Party convention, I looked with alarm at the platform in front of me. Despite opinion polls showing supermajorities of Democrats and even Independents strongly opposing data center construction, supporting Medicare for All, and strongly opposing the Iran war, we delegates were presented with a milquetoast, weak, and uninspiring platform that barely even mentioned any of the above. Delegates fought tooth and nail to pass a convention resolution supporting Medicare for All - but party leadership has buried this resolution on the website and has not called on elected officials or candidates to honor it.
Why would a political party not do what its activist base, its committed delegates, asked it to do?
Watch this week's video and then keep reading:
Beau Bayh’s father, Evan Bayh, is a very well-connected guy. He works for the same company that issued this extremely convincing statement about their lack of ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He sits on the boards of lots of upstanding corporations, like Marathon Petroleum and Fifth Third Bancorp. He also sits on a number of advisory boards: Partnership for a Secure America, the CIA (including under President Trump), and a little organization known as the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee: AIPAC.
Evan Bayh helped take the lead on an AIPAC advisory committee specifically formed to sabotage the peace process with Iran and undermine Barack Obama. Bayh had long spoken about Muslims in a way that Donald Trump does today. His coworkers (and donors to his son’s campaign) serve on Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace right next to Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Marco Rubio.
Bayh literally makes money and gains power when the United States burns a bunch of oil engaging in a war overseas and spends money investing in Israel.
Surely Democrats could offer critiques of that state of affairs! And yet to this day, you’d be very hard-pressed to find an elected Indiana Democrat who has said a word about the top donor to their state party in quite some time. That’s because they have remained totally tied to the Israel lobby even as the genocide in Gaza and wars in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran have turned Hoosiers away from supporting zionism.
So what billionaires want is taking precedence over what Hoosiers want - and even worse, we aren’t even allowed to talk about it.
On social media, posts mentioning Israeli war crimes, Palestinian rights, or any discussion of words like “genocide”, “AIPAC”, or “Israel” have all been suppressed via both manual censorship and algorithmic suppression. This tactic has been expanded to suppress Americans’ visibility into the Iran war, Americans’ discussion about ICE activity, and more.
Worse, with the advent of AI-powered bot swarms, artificial intelligence agents can coordinate with each other to push disinformation narratives online without humans needing to give them direction. On Facebook alone, hundreds of millions of users that posted regularly were bots even before the massive expansion of AI. And researchers think these bot armies are being deployed not only by foreign governments, but by domestic organizations as well.
Who is paying for all of this propaganda?
Well, it’s always smart to look at cui bono. The BBC shows that the organizations cashing in on the genocide and the war are the same type that Evan Bayh supports: Oil companies, big banks, and the defense industry. The organizations cashing in on the broken healthcare system in this country are insurance companies and other administrators that leech money from the system. The organizations cashing in on the broken education system in this country are the charter manager networks and the administrators, and certainly not the children.
And the people in charge of the propaganda are pushing to remake society in the image of their choice - to give them even more power and even more wealth.
Data center construction in the United States is now the largest financial bet in US History. Surveillance technology usage by the government has exploded - both for immigration enforcement and for “public safety” tools like Flock Automatic Licence Plate Reader cameras.
The federal government is building Big Brother and using this new technology system to control what we think, what we read, and what we can say. And the billionaires that have captured the Democratic Party in this state refuse to take a stand against it.
Coumba Kebe, the Democratic candidate for Indiana Treasurer, posted this excellent video eleven months ago. The video states that universal healthcare is the obviously correct solution, and states that it’s propaganda that has programmed us all into disliking it. She showed that Israel - a recipient of the MOST United States military aid of all contries on earth - offers universal healthcare, unlike the United States’s. Yet Israel pays $3500 per person for their excellent healthcare system, whereas we in the United States pay over $14,000 despite having people with massive medical debt and people still unensured. 7-8% of Israel’s economy’s GDP goes towards healthcare. In the United States, it’s 18%.
Kebe is now running for a position that is directly impacted by Indiana’s direct aid to and investments in Israel, aid that she criticized 11 months ago. Yet outside of a comment to the Indiana Daily Student, she hasn’t brought up the massive amount of money that the State Treasurer she’s running against has chosen to invest in Israel.
When AIPAC-linked billionaires control the policy agenda of our candidates at every level in this state, the Democratic Party cannot and will not become the party of the grassroots working-class Hoosiers that it needs to be in order to defeat MAGA and Trump. And we desperately need to defeat MAGA and Trump if our children and grandchildren have any chance at a good life in this country.
So my call to action to you today is this:
Reach out to every single person wanting your vote, and ask them how they are challenging the billionaires’ control over our society. It’s not enough to remain neutral or passive; while billionaires are buying elections and buying control of the narrative, we need unbought and unbossed tribunes of the people to keep putting pressure on the billionaires and organizing constituents for power.
Let me know what answers you receive from the candidates you reach out to! And if you’re not getting the answers you want to hear, let me know how I can support you running for office to replace the folks not up to the challenge.
In love and solidarity,
Jesse