It's... broadly accurate?
I...guess?
Let's summarize:
1. She knows people who live in New York. Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Alphonse D'Amato. She supported Hillary in the primary! She tried to get to know Michael Bloomberg but he did not like her!
I guess this is broadly accurate but it seems to be pretty clearly a smear.
2. When she represented a district in upstate New York she was not that progressive. Now that she represents all of New York she is much more progressive. She used to have pretty bad immigration positions.
This is, yet again, the debate between "politician as representative" and "politician as god-king." In reality all politicians are representatives, even progressive icon Bernie Sanders, so I still think this is mostly facile.
I think her previous immigration positions are very problematic if not disqualifying, so the whole article should just have been that, but then it would be an article in Jacobin that focused on social justice. But sure -- let's see what she does to prove that she has overcome her Trumpist past.
3. She supports Israel. Schumer and Clinton also support Israel. CONSPIRACY? YOU BE THE JUDGE. I'm genuinely uncomfortable with the conspiratorial tenor of the ending to this point. Jacobin should do better.
4. She raises money from people on Wall Street and meets with them. She opposed the Lincoln Amendment. This article does not really give very much information on the Lincoln Amendment but you're supposed to assume opposing it is bad because Goldman Sachs opposed it.
Again, sure. As a Senator from New York, Gillibrand met with people on Wall Street. Wall Street is in New York. It's literally her job to do this? Unless your default assumption is that everybody on Wall Street is always and everywhere evil, which does seem to be the assumption of a lot of leftists, this isn't enough information.
So, I mean, I guess it's broadly accurate, but I also agree with whyamihere that it's a poorly executed smear. It can be both! That's how smears work -- they present broadly accurate information with conspiratorial flourishes to make it seem sinister or dangerous. If you are a Bernie Sanders supporter who believed all of the dumbest things that Bernie Sanders supporters believe, this article will help you transplant those dumb ideas to Gillibrand. If you believed reasonable things, I feel like you would reasonably want more information than this article provides. It is mainly a tribal record so that people who consider themselves part of a movement can align their stated beliefs with the stated beliefs of the movement, rather than a document intended to convince others.
Honestly, the rest of the article makes me wonder whether their characterization of her immigration positions is accurate.
