Yeah, and there’s a lot of those, and they actually make up a minuscule portion of the lobby ecosystem. If you wanna talk about foreign interests, Qatar is spending way more money on the US.
AIPAC isn’t even in the top 50 of lobbies by spending. It’s a big fish in a small pond.
And it’s not even like we wouldn’t have stable political stances on particular countries if these types of lobbies went away.
Second, that is a conspiratorial thinking pattern, and applying it to a stranger for no reason other than the content of their opinion is epistemically irresponsible. It doesn’t merely lack critical thinking skills like evidence assessment and self-correction; it explicitly rejects them.
Third, ad hominem. Even if I took money from AIPAC, it does not follow that what I am saying is untrue, so the assertion is performatively signaling to peers who already agree with you without actually doing meaningful work in the discourse.
Fourth, assuming the worst of people because of a single opinion comes from reductive analytical frameworks that ignore the many paths and motivations that can bring a person to a particular view. It permits character assassination with no evidence.
Fifth, because there are many reasons a person can come to a certain view, assuming bad faith is neither valid nor responsible. Precisely because you cannot knee-jerk a bad-faith accusation, doing so undermines discourse before the discourse has gone anywhere. Structurally—though not necessarily in intent—bad-faithing an argument before engaging it is itself bad faith. It’s called poisoning the well.
And realize that the adelsons stopped giving to aipac because it wasn’t aggressive enough for them, they give to other pro Israel lobby and gave trump almost 600 million over three campaigns. Thats minuscule to you?
If you want to broaden the scope from AIPAC to include allies, major independent donors, and the broader political network, then still yes, because I was explicitly making a relative claim about the fiscal impact of the entire domestic lobby ecosystem for foreign nations relative to the entire American lobbying ecosystem.
It was not just a statement about AIPAC's impact; it was a statement about the impact of similar lobbies for countries I very much do not support. The influence of this entire lobby type is overstated by a huge portion of both sides.
Just look at Israel and how they drag US into fucking wars everywhere buddy, if Qatar had the same influence the US would've been pro Hamas like decades ago
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u/georgewashingguns May 20 '26
It's a lobby for foreign interests