Humane Foreign Policy - Kat for Illinois
As with regard to Taiwan, the United States must continue to support Taiwan in the face of increasing Chinese aggression and attempts to undermine Taiwan’s internationally recognized status as a state of its own.
Kat Abughazaleh, Democratic candidate for Illinois 9th Congressional District - Chicago Sun-Times
I want to codify passive support to sell Taiwan weapons, and prevent the president from overruling it unilaterally. If China invades Taiwan, we need to step in militarily to defend Taiwan. We have to use all our assets in the region, to defend the island from illegal aggression. I envision a two-part credible deterrence plan that turns Taiwan into a “porcupine” too costly for the PRC to invade, by providing them with weapons to defend themselves and committing to actually defending the island if they do invade.
Drop Site (@DropSiteNews): "⭕️ LEAKED Email | XCancel
“interventionist,” foreign policy adviser says Kat Abughazaleh, a socialist Democratic candidate in Illinois’ 9th District and one of the only Palestinian-Americans seeking office in 2026, was described by her national security adviser as “firmly an interventionist” who “won’t stop until Russia is made to pay for its crimes,” in written responses detailing her foreign policy vision, obtained by Drop Site.
Ben Mermel wrote in an email to a Washington-based progressive foreign policy activist that Abughazaleh believes “the world is better off when America takes a leading role” and that the U.S. has “an obligation to support pro-democracy movements around the world, from Iran to Venezuela.” He added that “Kat wholly supports the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as its affiliated organizations (NDI, IRI, and the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center),” and said Congress should expand tools “from sanctions to NGO support” to advance those efforts without always resorting to “kinetic force.”
The DC-based activist had written to Mermel saying he had noticed unusually hawkish language on the campaign website related to Ukraine and Taiwan and was looking for clarification.
In his response, Mermel said that on Taiwan she would amend the Taiwan Relations Act by “dropping our strategic ambiguity” and make clear the U.S. would counter Chinese aggression “with force,” arguing the region now requires “a firmer hand.”
On Ukraine, Mermel wrote she would “hold the line,” support “funding the Ukrainian war effort to the hilt,” back long-range strikes on Russian strategic targets, deploy additional U.S. “air, naval, and ground assets” to NATO’s front line, and that “She supports the seizure and redistribution of Russian assets in Europe and the United States, for the purpose of financing the war effort.”
Abughazaleh did not respond to a request for comment, but a source close to the campaign told Drop Site that the adviser’s email did not accurately represent her views, saying, “Kat is committed to taking on authoritarianism but is vehemently against the military industrial complex and the continuation of failed US intervention approaches.” Abughazaleh has consistently argued against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and, at a recent forum, said she opposes U.S. strikes on Iran.
Mermel in 2024 attended a pro-Israel protest held to counter the encampment at George Washington University. He has been Abughazaleh’s National Security Adviser since July 2025, according to Legistorm.
Just for the record, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA organization:
National Endowment for Democracy - Wikipedia
In a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, NED founder Allen Weinstein said: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."[24]
The People’s Forum is WHOLLY funded, staffed, and controlled by PSL, whose office is in the same building upstairs. (more below and in linked tweet)
Something artisanal intelligence could add since the time it was written, though it was prescient in February 2023 -- chatGPT had barely just come out -- is the observation that every time a problem previously considered to be a feat of intelligence gets solved, it suddenly doesn't count as a feat of intelligence anymore. IBM's computer beat Kasparov (he deserved it tbh), and suddenly chess moved from being this genius game that only few actually dared to play for it was so daunting to get into, to a game of memory where you just have to remember as many combinations and layouts as you can and play the objectively best next move. Before that it was considered one of the most advanced games in existence and a computer would "never" beat a human at it, it was just too complicated for a machine to play at a high level. You could argue it paved the way for the current chess boom, as computer enhancements helped introduce new players to the game, letting them understand why people enjoyed playing it so much instead of looking like this insurmountable fortress, and also helps them play against someone of their level to discover the game and break it down for them.
Anyway, you can read it two ways: that we want to hold on to some human exceptionalism and therefore artificial feats of intelligence don't count as intelligence, but also that solving these problems demystifies them and we realize intelligence isn't as difficult to understand or replicate as we thought. The synthesis is not which side you place yourself on when faced with such feats but whether you turn to reactionarism to protect human essentialism or accept objective material reality. Many people turn to reactionary protectionism over it. I take the yoghtosian view that we work similarly to how neural networks do, their current limits notwithstanding. For instance we also process language statistically - it's what makes LLMs possible, so the theory is vindicated.
Humans don't have a monopoly on intelligence, we are not that special, and that's okay. We can still enjoy and do things including communism.
(As for Kat, to comment on the original post, everything I've learned about her has been entirely against my will to the point that I muted her name on twitter just because I was getting flooded with so many posts suddenly about her. I do not need to know about every other US-based influencer lol)
Some of it goes back to elitism, I suspect. It seems to me that bougie culture has this thing about intentionally building a mystique around the skills of the upper classes / prestige roles, so that there's more of an artificial barrier and so that people believe it's more justified that the elites are in the roles that they are.
I wish I could source it, but I have this vague recollection of learning from somebody else that the USSR was big on the theory behind art. Like they tended to understand/teach it well as theory, not just vibes. Not to say capitalist society never does that kind of thing, but like... take the field of fiction writing, for example. It's extremely common to come across the adage, "Show, don't tell." Is there writing theory behind this? As far as I can tell (and I have searched on it quite a bit at times because I find that adage so annoying), it's just ideology but for writing. Some people decided that stories are better when things are more understated and implicative and made it into a dogma. And this kind of thing means it's a lot harder to learn how to write effectively than it should be. But the presence of LLMs being pretty good at writing puts this on the backfoot a bit. If a machine can be trained to do it well, without being a sapient being, then surely there must be something to the mechanics of it that can be broken down into component parts and understood on a more base level. Through deconstruction of the process, the priest doing alchemy becomes a scientist doing chemistry.
That was an interesting take, thank you