On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) argued that President Joe Biden has been one-sided on the Israel-Hamas conflict because he hasn’t called for a ceasefire without any hostage releases as a precondition like Bowman has.
Bowman stated that Biden improving his standing with young voters is “going to be tough, and it is tough, because young voters were already upset over a variety of things, including how he’s handled the climate issue. He’s done some good things, and he’s kind of playing a yo-yo with them, he’s done some good things and they come in, and then he does something else that pushes them away. And the response to the Israel-Gaza conflict, again, the one-sidedness of it has really turned young people away and the BIPOC community away as well. And so — and it’s not just the President, it’s Congress, for the most part, I’m in a small minority calling for a ceasefire. It’s growing a little bit, it started as like six or eight, but now it’s up to 30, which is really good, but the President hasn’t done that. And young people, they want peace. They want justice. They want a diplomatic response to what’s going on. They want us to spend more money on education and jobs and climate and keeping people out of prison and health care than we spend on war. And this President, at the moment, is not showing the capacity to do that, and the party, and the Congress — not just the party, all of Congress — isn’t showing the capacity to do that. And so, I think it’s a combination of all these things that’s turning young people off.”
He continued, “And people of color have been turned off for a while because of lack of comprehensive immigration reform, if you’re talking about the Latino community, and no conversation at all about reparations, if you’re talking about the black community. But we’re…spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on weapons and war, but we can’t even have a conversation about reparations? Those are the things that are happening right now.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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