It has been a long week.

I say that, but it has only been four days since President Biden dropped out the race for President. Four days of endless coconut memes; Kamala is brat; cope that manifested itself as hope and, somehow, it came out that JD Vance fucked a couch — a detail that was long-ignored because practically no one who bought Hillbilly Elegy actually read it.

It has been a long week and, Lemon, it's Thursday.

If you're like me and spend far too much of your free time scrolling through TikTok, you're probably feeling the length of that week right now. Shifting from being unburdened to hefting the weight of every liberal who took the first opportunity to treat your skepticism of Kamala as racism, or literally anything else they could conjure up to feel morally superior in the moment. These people who have the audacity to ignore material truth only to say, “Maybe you need to go back to Civics class.”

These liberals need that feeling of self-assured superiority; how else do you attempt to compare to a literal genocide happening in real time in front of all of our eyes? Excuse me while mine roll out of my head and all the way into the fucking sun.

It is exhausting to be put into a position of having to field the same questions liberals asked about us not supporting Biden. These questions are never asked in good faith. The answers are unimportant because they will not be heard. They only exist to mark the passage of time the liberals need to formulate the next question whose answer will also fall on deaf ears.

I’m not writing this for them. In truth, I’m not entirely sure who I’m writing this for. However, I’m going to do my best to articulate my views in a more distilled format than I can in the useless space that is the TikTok comments section.

At the time of writing, I have not changed my position when it comes to the top of the ticket in November. I wasn’t going to vote for Biden. After Kamala’s statement regarding protestors standing is solidarity with Palestinian Liberation, I won’t be voting for her either.

I applaud the bravery of the protestors who showed up in defiance against Israel’s Prime Butcher when he came to deliver an address to Congress. Unfortunately, Kamala — in her first public press release after becoming the presumptive Democratic Nominee — does not share my view of the protestors. She echoed the language that Netanyahu used in Congress to call the protestors unpatriotic, and claimed they were motivated by antisemitism.

The same tired lie that has been trotted out by Zionists like Biden: antizionism == antisemitism.

We know this to be false, but it continues to be used as a cudgel, often against American Jews like myself who dare to oppose the settler colonial project that is occupation of Palestinian land. She and Netanyahu both conflated American protestors who cannot abide a literal genocide as collaborators with Hamas. They call us terrorists for standing up to the systematic destruction of Palestinian lives, culture, art and land.

This was a massive L for Kamala to take as her first official statement since taking over for Biden.

These statements aren’t going to win any favors for her, nor will they win her votes. This isn’t something that is exclusive to people actively agitating from the left, but also includes many voters who remain mostly politically ambivalent, but have connections — whether that be through family ties or communal connection to those suffering in Palestine. Kamala aligning herself with Netanyahu alienates those communities, and will potentially cost her dearly in swing states like Michigan.

I do genuinely believe that Kamala can win many voters over if she course corrects now. If she makes a firm commitment to end funding to Israel, at the very least until a permanent ceasefire is achieved and Israel ends its belligerence towards the Palestinian people.

If Kamala commits to place sanctions on Israel for their gross violations of human rights in occupied Palestine, I know that I would not only vote for her; I would donate my time and labor to her campaign.

Do I believe Kamala will actually just leave those votes on the table to be either uncommitted or spent on a third party rather than make a winning move here? Absolutely. Do I have some semblance of hope that she will actually do the right thing here? The hope is faint, but it does exist. If it didn’t I wouldn’t have written over 700 words of this diatribe. (Editor’s note: it was only at 700 words here in the first draft.)

My best advice going forward is to ignore the liberals as best you can. They do not care about any of the things that they claim to, they’re merely doing their once-every-four-year exercise of shaming those who are actually politically engaged with radical hope for a better world. Use this time to try your best to leverage your undecided vote and don’t cow to arguments that things will only be worse if the Orange Man wins again.

We only have a few months left until the election. That can seem both unimaginably close and far away, especially after weeks like this.

It’s normal to feel tired after all this. It has been a long week.

Need I remind you, Lemon? It’s only Thursday.