Jordan A. Brunner 🇺🇦

Atty & AZ Civil Rights Advisory Brd Mmbr; China, cyber & sanctions. @ASUCollegeofLaw @BarrettHonors & @BrookingsInst alum. RT≠endorsement. Views are my own.

[Jordan A. Brunner 🇺🇦 @JABrunner88]

Nuanced take by me and @emily_sw1 on the strategic/legal implications of Biden's China sanctions. https://t.co/psnUL9UlMR

[Ilan Goldenberg @ilangoldenberg]

Social media has accelerated the trend, but let’s be clear: the collapse of Israel’s standing in the United States didn’t just “happen” to Israel. It was the direct result of a series of catastrophic political decisions by Benjamin Netanyahu over the past decade.

1. Netanyahu chose to drag Israel directly into partisan American politics.
Opposing the JCPOA was not itself unique. The Gulf states also disagreed with the deal. But Netanyahu went far beyond policy disagreement. He organized a speech before Congress behind the back of the sitting American president in order to directly confront Barack Obama and align Israel with one side of America’s political divide. That moment, ten years ago, was the beginning of the end of bipartisan consensus around the US-Israel relationship. It planted the seeds for Israel becoming a partisan issue in American politics.

2. Netanyahu chose to empower extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in order to maintain power. He helped engineer alliances with them, brought them into the center of Israeli politics, and handed them real authority over national security and settlement policy. The images Americans now see almost daily on social media — violent settler attacks in the West Bank, Ben-Gvir celebrating with a noose cake, a Palestinian journalist emerging from prison emaciated and abused under systems overseen by Ben Gvir’s ministry and being interviewed on CNN. All of that has done enormous damage to Israel’s image.

Those outcomes were not inevitable. They were the direct consequence of Netanyahu’s political choices.

3. Netanyahu chose to prolong and prosecute the Gaza war in a way that maximized devastation.

After October 7, there was overwhelming sympathy for Israel in the United States. Americans broadly agreed Israel had the right to respond to Hamas’ atrocities.
But the war did not need to continue for so long, nor did it need to be prosecuted this way.

A year before it ended, most Israelis were prepared to support ending the war in exchange for the hostages. Netanyahu repeatedly extended it because ending the war threatened his coalition and his political survival. At the same time, he refused to seriously empower or work with alternative Palestinian leadership that could replace Hamas. So Israel fought a devastating war while ensuring Hamas would still remain part of Gaza’s future afterward.

The images coming out of Gaza more than anything else have transformed global and American opinion. Had the war ended earlier after Israel had achieved what military objectives it realistically could, Israel would not be facing anything close to this level of backlash today.

4. Netanyahu played a major role in pushing the United States toward war with Iran.

That war is deeply unpopular in the United States. It directly cuts against what Donald Trump promised much of his own political base, namely, avoiding getting bogged down in another Middle East war with no clear strategic rationale and no plan for how to win. It has dramatically driven up oil prices, and will have long term direct economic impacts that Americans will feel every day.

And now, just as the JCPOA fight a decade ago began the fracturing of Democrats on Israel, this Iran war is beginning to fracturing of conservatives. It will take time but you already see it. 

So no — this is not fundamentally about social media. It is not simply a mysterious surge of antisemitism, a lack of hasbara, or genius social media of Iran and Qatar. And it is not primarily the result of advocacy groups or messaging campaigns.

At its core, what we are witnessing is the cumulative consequence of a series of disastrous decisions by Benjamin Netanyahu — decisions that have been bad for Israelis, bad for Palestinians, bad for the United States, and bad for the broader Middle East.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Rob Freund @RobertFreundLaw]

BREAKING: No you can’t.

[Matt Margolis @ItsMattsLaw]

was this article written by a lawsuit

[Scott Oliver @SAOliver_Atty]

Ahem....

One space after periods. It's official.

[Jordan A. Brunner 🇺🇦 @JABrunner88]

An excellent analysis of America's naval posture and critical next steps by James Holmes w/ @TheNatlInterest

https://t.co/XqJDQlP6YJ

[Jake Broe @RealJakeBroe]

Okay, people are genuinely confused why members of the US army can't actually march in unison like the Russians or the North Koreans.

The reason why is because all these soldiers have real jobs in the military and nobody (beyond ceremonial units) ever does any marching once out of basic training and their tech school.

These soldiers spend their days doing important work to defend our nation. They don't ever practice marching. Trump demanded they all stop being productive at their jobs to waste time and taxpayer money to march in a parade for his amusement.

[AZ Attorney General Kris Mayes @AZAGMayes]

Tackling and detaining a US Senator is an outrageous and violent abuse of power. It is unacceptable in the United States of America. This administration's unlawful and unconstitutional behavior is out of control.

[Gabe Fleisher @WakeUp2Politics]

I’ve been frustrated by both parties peddling half-truths about the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.

It felt like there wasn’t one place that had all the facts — no matter whose narrative it helped.

So I wrote one. Here are 25 facts about Kilmar Abrego Garcia: https://t.co/YpBLIMvyLi

[Jordan A. Brunner 🇺🇦 @JABrunner88]

@ItsMattsLaw Arizona. Civil and appellate litigation.

[Robert Lyman 🇺🇦 @robert_lyman]

We need more historians

[Jordan A. Brunner 🇺🇦 @JABrunner88]

@ShannaH8242000 @RonFilipkowski @BadLegalTakes

[Bonnie Glaser / 葛來儀 @BonnieGlaser]

“When I suggested to a senior European policymaker last week that the EU might now consider warming up to China once again, she responded: ‘Believe me, that conversation is already taking place.’”
https://t.co/Ykvq2ozAxm

[Keeks 🦋 @DietCoke_Esq]

Why do clients think we can just force the other party to negotiate/settle? I’m an attorney, not Tony Soprano

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

I actually want to make a correction here. Birthright citizenship PREDATES the 14th Amendment. That was just when we wrote it into the Constitution to make sure.

Birthright citizenship has always been the law of this nation. It was the law even before there was a United States.

[DBG @drawbygrok]

@ReddCinema Goodbye TikTok

[Jordan A. Brunner 🇺🇦 @JABrunner88]

Except Tibet, Xinjiang, Vietnam, India, Korea, and Mongolia. Not to mention their activities in the South China Sea.

[Jordan A. Brunner 🇺🇦 @JABrunner88]

Thankfully, the whack-a-mole approach isn't an issue with these Chinese companies based on how Congress drafted the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

Now we just need to fix the sanctions on Chinese mil companies.

https://t.co/SSmTsbHJuP

[Matt Margolis @ItsMattsLaw]

The Corporate Transparency Act

[Johanna Nyman @JohannaNyman5]

Never gets old 🇫🇮