Or: How AIPAC Became The Gateway Drug, And Why Calling It That Makes You An Antisemite
Let me be upfront about something before we start.
I am Jewish. I am saying this not because it grants me some special authority on what follows, but because the argument you are about to encounter, the one that says criticizing a lobbying group is the same as hating Jewish people, works a lot better when the person saying it can also claim the same thing. Consider this a preemptive courtesy.
Now. Let’s talk about AIPAC.
The Machine
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has existed in some form since 1959. For most of that time, it operated the way most lobbying organizations operate, which is to say quietly, effectively, and with considerable deniability. It hosted conferences. It flew members of Congress to Israel on educational trips. It maintained relationships. It did not, until very recently, write checks directly to candidates.
That changed in 2021.
In late 2021, AIPAC formed its own political action committee and announced plans for a super PAC. In a letter explaining the move, AIPAC president Betsy Berns Korn said: “The DC political environment has been undergoing profound change.” [Wikipedia]
The change she was referring to was this: people had started noticing what they were doing and saying so out loud. The solution, as is often the case in American politics, was not to do less of it. The solution was to do more of it with a friendlier name.
The super PAC is called the United Democracy Project. It “works to help elect candidates that share our vision and will be strong supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship in Congress.” The name sounds like something a civics teacher put on a poster in 1987. It has nothing to do with democracy in any operational sense. It is a vehicle for spending unlimited sums of money to shape who represents you in Congress based on a single foreign policy consideration.
In the 2023 to 2024 election cycle, the United Democracy Project raised $87 million. Together, AIPAC PAC and the United Democracy Project spent roughly $126.9 million across the cycle. That is not a lobbying organization. That is an acquisition strategy.
The Moderate Democrat Problem
Here is how it works.
A moderate Democrat in a competitive district receives AIPAC support. The support comes with expectations, which are never stated explicitly because they do not need to be. Thomas Massie, one of the few Republicans willing to say this out loud, described it this way: “Everybody but me has an AIPAC person. It’s like your babysitter, your AIPAC babysitter, who’s always talking to you for AIPAC. They tend to be from your district, but they’re firmly part of AIPAC. When they come to DC, you have to go to lunch with them, and they’ve got your cell number.”
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a congressman describing, in plain language, how a lobbying organization maintains its influence over elected officials. The babysitter metaphor is his, and it is accurate, and he said it on a podcast because he is one of the few people in Congress who has decided he does not care what AIPAC thinks of him.
The moderate Democrat who receives this support and plays along gets reelected with outside money flowing into their race. The moderate Democrat who does not play along finds out what happens when you become a target of a $126 million operation. AIPAC’s United Democracy Project spent more than $5.2 million against Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri. She lost. It spent heavily against Jamaal Bowman. He lost. The message was received by everyone who was paying attention, which was everyone.
The result is a Democratic caucus where a significant portion of its members have a financial incentive to avoid one of the most consequential foreign policy questions of the last decade. Not because they necessarily agree with every decision made by the Israeli government. Because they need to get reelected, and the people who can make that harder have their cell phone numbers.
The Rebrand
AIPAC knows exactly how toxic it has become to Democratic Party voters. The organization is now retreating from public endorsements and election spending, at least visibly, confronting what one spokesperson for Justice Democrats called its brand problem: “Clearly, AIPAC knows exactly how toxic they are to Democratic Party voters who see them as a right-wing extremist lobby, championing a right-wing agenda, and funded by right-wing megadonors trying to buy our elections.”
The response to this toxicity is not reform. The response is more shell PACs with less identifiable names.
Today, through at least three shell PACs including the United Democracy Project, AIPAC is set to top $20 million just in the Chicago area House races ahead of Tuesday’s primaries. The name AIPAC appears on less of it. The money is the same money. The candidates being targeted are the same candidates. The favored candidate in one Illinois race has publicly distanced herself from AIPAC while benefiting from AIPAC-connected spending. This is the system working as designed.
Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the door to unlimited outside spending in elections, did not create this problem. It turbocharges it. The problem existed before Citizens United. The problem is that a foreign policy preference held by a small number of very wealthy donors has been systematically installed into the financial infrastructure of American democracy through legal mechanisms that make it nearly impossible to trace, challenge, or refuse without professional consequences.
Both parties use dark money. Both parties use super PACs. All of it corrodes the same thing. AIPAC is not unique in what it does. It is unusually transparent about what it does, which is the only reason we can have this conversation with named examples and dollar amounts.
The Antisemitism Card
Now we get to the part that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel would like you to focus on instead of everything above.
Nessel, who is Jewish, told CNN’s Jake Tapper this week: “Whether you’re talking about Republicans and Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes, whether you’re talking about people on the left who openly have just sort of replaced the word ‘Jew’ with ‘AIPAC’ or ‘Zionist’ and then as long as you do that, you’re free to say virtually anything that you want.”
This argument deserves a careful response, because it contains a real concern buried inside a bad-faith deployment of that concern.
The real concern is this: antisemitism exists, it is increasing, and some people do use criticism of Israel or AIPAC as a cover for genuinely antisemitic views. This is true. It is worth saying clearly and without qualification.
The bad-faith deployment is this: using the existence of that real concern to foreclose any criticism of a lobbying organization’s documented spending on American elections. These are not the same thing. A lobbying group that spent $126 million in a single election cycle, that endorsed 37 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election, that uses shell PACs to obscure its spending, that employs people to maintain personal relationships with members of Congress, is a lobbying group engaged in legally questionable but thoroughly American political activity. Criticizing that activity is not antisemitism. It is the minimum standard of civic attention.
I am Jewish. AIPAC does not speak for me. Neither does the argument that saying so makes me an antisemite.
The Republican Who Noticed
Thomas Massie is a libertarian-leaning Republican from Kentucky who votes against foreign aid to everyone, Israel included, on the grounds that he does not believe the United States government should be in the business of picking winners in other people’s conflicts. You do not have to agree with this position to appreciate what has happened to him as a result of holding it.
AIPAC spent more than $300,000 on ads against Massie in 2024, calling him an “anti-Israel radical.” He won his primary with 75 percent of the vote. Ahead of the 2026 primary, three pro-Israel billionaires, none of them from Kentucky, have funded a PAC that has already spent over $1.5 million in 38 days trying to unseat him. New York hedge fund manager Paul Singer gave $1 million. Fellow hedge fund manager John Paulson gave $250,000. Miriam Adelson’s political committee gave $750,000.
Trump has called Massie a “hater of Israel” and a “totally ineffective loser” and endorsed a primary challenger against him. The Republican Jewish Coalition has pledged that its campaign budget to defeat Massie, should he run for Senate, will be “unlimited.”
Massie’s response has been to make the out-of-state billionaire funding the centerpiece of his campaign. He launched a website called MAGAKYFRAUD.com. He raised $120,000 in the 24 hours after Trump’s first attack.
Here is the thing about Thomas Massie. He is not an ally on most things. His libertarian politics lead him to positions that would make most readers of this column grind their teeth. But on this specific question, the question of whether a lobbying organization should be able to deploy unlimited outside money to shape who represents you in Congress based on a single foreign policy consideration, he is saying the same thing that progressive Democrats have been saying, and he is being punished for it by the same people, and the consistency of that punishment across party lines is the most honest thing anyone has shown us about how this system actually works.
Where We Are
We are in a war with Iran that has been running for two weeks and has killed over 1,400 Iranian civilians. The United States entered that war with bipartisan congressional support, or more precisely, with the support of a Congress in which a significant portion of members have a financial relationship with the primary lobbying organization advocating for exactly this kind of military posture in the Middle East.
The moderate Democrats who took that money are not going to say this. They are going to say they support Israel’s right to defend itself, which is a position and not an argument, and they are going to say it at the appropriate volume, and their AIPAC babysitter is going to note that they said it, and the cycle will continue.
The least we can do is document it.
George Wicks writes the only column at the Post Meridiem Post. He is Jewish, he is not confused about what that means, and he did not get a call from his AIPAC babysitter before writing this because he does not have one.