David AIPACman and the Problem with the American Left
Why Zionism and Liberal Dark Money cannot Coexist with Progressivism
Credit: David Pakman Show (YouTube Channel)
Political commentator David Pakman was caught up in Wired’s Chorus exposé, written by investigative journalist Taylor Lorenz. In the article, Lorenz details how a liberal dark money group, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, offered contracts to Democratic political influencers—some as high as $8,000 per month.
“[Dozens of Democratic influencers] were being offered $8,000 per month to take part in a secretive program aimed at bolstering Democratic messaging on the internet…the contract sent to them from Chorus, the nonprofit arm of a liberal influencer marketing platform, came with some strings…it mandated extensive secrecy about disclosing their payments and had restrictions on what sort of political content the creators could produce.” —Taylor Lorenz, Wired
Among the influencers named in the article was David Pakman, a liberal political commentator and host of The David Pakman Show. Pakman has never been a radical. He is progressive enough to build trust with the Left but obedient enough to stay inside the lines. He clings to capitalism, defends the establishment, and, until recently, was openly Zionist.
Chorus reveals the infrastructure behind liberal media’s soft power. It is a tool for controlling discourse and manufacturing “acceptable” dissent that never threatens power. By aligning influencers under a single set of approved talking points, it turns independent creators into de facto PR arms of the party. Pakman illustrates just how effective that strategy can be. His audience trusts him to be critical, so when he downplays atrocities like Israel’s assault on Gaza or mischaracterizes Palestinian resistance, it blunts outrage. When the establishment needs to launder its talking points, people like Pakman deliver them—whether out of conviction or compliance—including on issues where silence and equivocation mean mass death, like Palestine. This is the quiet violence of censorship and complacency, the slow normalization of centrist framing that makes genocide appear nuanced.
In fairness, Pakman is a progressive liberal by U.S. political standards. He is a queer ally, supports strong social safety nets, and advocates for a single-payer healthcare system. He has occasionally criticized the establishment and opposed U.S. imperialism poisoning the Middle East. But his record on Palestine exposes the limits of his progressivism: while he is willing to challenge American wars abroad, he consistently excuses Israel’s violence against Palestinians, parroting many of the same establishment lines he claims to resist.
After October 7, Pakman initially downplayed Israel’s onslaught against the Palestinian people in Gaza. He recycled Pallywood-style narratives to cast doubt on Palestinian suffering, framing Israel as the victim, even while admitting the siege was inhumane. As late as March 2024, he went so far as to question a video showing drone strikes on Palestinian civilians:
“I am aware that over the last ten days, there was a video floating around purporting to show drone strikes on random Palestinian civilians…the idea that Israel would take the time and incur the cost to randomly target four civilians just walking down the road doesn’t comport with anything we know about how the Israeli military operates. I struggle to think that they are going to, quite frankly, waste ordinance on four random civilians walking down a road.” — David Pakman, The David Pakman Show, March 29, 2024
In 2025, as the genocide became undeniable to the global public, Pakman largely went quiet. When he did speak, it was only to emphasize that he was “pro-peace” or to pin blame exclusively on Netanyahu, while still rejecting the reality of Israel as an apartheid state.
David Pakman is a prime example of what’s holding the Left back. He seeks to improve the existing system but refuses to reckon with the systemic power disparities established by the racist, misogynist, cishet, rich white men who intentionally designed it to always benefit themselves over everyone else. He is either unwilling or unable to accept that capitalism cannot continue indefinitely without immense suffering for the working class. He has explicitly stated multiple times that he is not a socialist and has openly opposed the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), calling them a “disgusting group” and accusing them of minimizing the October 7 attack. He is not for change, he is for kinder oppression.
This goes beyond Pakman, and the Chorus exposé offered a glimpse into just how aggressive this problem has become for the Left. Chorus and the Sixteen Thirty Fund represent the Democratic Party’s attempt to mimic the right-wing propaganda industrial complex. They are designed to function as a firewall, built to keep the Left from radicalizing too far, too fast, while presenting corporate-backed establishment Democrats as a sufficient opposition to the fascist right.
In that way, Pakman serves as a gateway into a rabbit hole of neoliberal propaganda, normalizing establishment positions for his predominantly left-leaning audience. Skilled centrist orators, such as Pakman’s affiliate Brian Tyler Cohen, can then more easily present themselves as further left-of-center than they actually are and advance the “de-radicalization” of the Left.
Credit: Jaber Jehad Badwan, Wikimedia Commons
But nowhere is this propaganda’s influence more corrosive than on the issue of Palestine. To be clear: what Israel is doing to Gaza is a genocide. There is no way around that. The United Nations defines genocide as such:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” — United Nations, UN.org
Israel is undeniably slaughtering a group of people on the basis of their national identity. This campaign is carried out with the explicit intent of wiping out the vast majority of them in order to seize and colonize more stolen land.
More than that, the world’s foremost experts on genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, has stated that what is happening in Gaza meets the definition of genocide. So have Amnesty International, Genocide Watch, Doctors Without Borders, the Lemkin Institute, Doctors Against Genocide, and the International Federation for Human Rights. Even Israeli human rights watchdogs B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel now recognize it as genocide. It’s no longer up for debate. Frankly, it never should have been.
That said, the silence and feigned ignorance from David Pakman is dangerous. Even worse is the downright outrageous propaganda his liberal Zionist peers have been spreading in defense of Israel. Participating in the blurring of truth is objectively wrong, but in this case, it will have grave, real world impacts.
This modern-day Holocaust is being uploaded online for the world to see. Videos of death, suffering, and wanton destruction have flooded social media for years. It is becoming increasingly undeniable that Israel’s actions are indefensible. As the Palestinian liberation movement grows, so too does the pressure on all complicit governments. It remains unclear when or how this genocide — and Israel’s existence as an apartheid ethnostate — will end. What is clear is that everyday people need to unite and put their foot down on this issue before most governments will act.
Every second until then, lives will be lost in Gaza. Pakman’s refusal to get on board, along with the muddying of the waters by him and his associates at Chorus, slows the progress toward ending this 80-year tragedy. That refusal will cost lives that they could have helped save. And it will continue to impede the push towards liberation until the Left fully rejects Zionism.
It will be hard, but the excommunication of Zionist ideology is inevitable. It cannot last forever. There is already significant pushback against liberal Zionism on the Left, and that distaste for pro-Israeli pandering in the midst of Israel’s genocide of innocent Palestinians will continue to grow until it becomes unavoidable outrage. The establishment, desperate to maintain its grip on power, will eventually abandon its allegiance to Israel and support an end to the killing. Influencers who take billionaire dark money to stay quiet about the genocide will have to choose: get on board or lose their relevance. The shift is coming. Every voice that refuses to stay silent brings the world one step closer to ending this nightmare. Stay strong. Support BDS. Make your voices heard.
Free Palestine.
