Democratic activist Brianna Wu has been a darling of the progressive left for the last decade, after a coordinated attack on the video game developer by Gamergate supporters sparked her activism in politics. 

Wu mounted two congressional bids in Massachusetts’ 8th Congressional District before cofounding Rebellion PAC in 2020. Her politics largely aligned with the progressive left, and she once referred to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) as “one of the best politicians in America.”

But on Oct. 7, 2023, she wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed last year, her “progressive fever started breaking” as she watched friends and colleagues deny and defend Hamas’ atrocities across southern Israel.

Since late 2023, Wu has become increasingly outspoken about antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the progressive left. Jewish Insider talked to her shortly after the discovery of mass graves containing the remains of upwards of 100,000 Syrians outside of Damascus — and the muted response to the atrocities — for a wide-ranging conversation that touched on the future of the progressive movement in Democratic politics, ideological shifts among the party’s movers and shakers, and how Israel could improve its public image.

Jewish Insider: I was talking to my colleagues, and we were noticing, after the recent reports of the mass grave that was discovered outside of Damascus, there was just radio silence from every corner of the internet and of the campus space and of the progressive movement that has been shouting, ‘Genocide, genocide, genocide’ at Israel for the past 14 months.

Brianna Wu: So I actually looked this up. And I was like, ‘OK, how many news stories happened about that big explosion in Syria, about the weapons depot [that took place the same week]. There was the concern trolling of Israel about that. I’m like, ‘OK, there’s a lot of that. How many major news sites reported about this mass grave?’ Well, it’s a much smaller list. And it’s comical at this point. I don’t know how people can’t see it.

JI: What’s the mindset? What are the mental gymnastics that go into labeling what’s happening in Gaza, which is objectively terrible, a genocide? I think any normal human can say what is happening in Gaza is all these awful things and still say it’s not a genocide.

BW: I don’t think anyone would minimize what the horrors of war are, but it’s also hard not to notice this insane double standard. … I don’t know what the thinking is, but the double standards are just insane and nonsensical, and it’s just absolutely … it’s just insane. I can’t even process it.

JI: I was with a friend earlier, and she mentioned a video posted by activist Masih Alinejad the other day, and it had a woman saying, in Farsi, that people care about what’s happening everywhere else [but Iran]. You’re a big name in the progressive movement, you have been for years. Presumably, you could kind of make sense, to some degree, of that mindset. 

BW: Well, I think the way the progressives see this is that Israel is a colonizing state and an aggressor. So when they’re thinking about who’s destabilizing the Middle East, it’s not Iran, it’s not [former Syrian President Bashar] Assad, it’s Israel. And when you have that flawed assumption, all these other flawed assumptions come from them. It’s so frustrating because you’re trying to point at the actual problems you need to solve, which in my view is primarily Iran, and it’s very hard to get people to reconsider what they know or think they know.

JI: How do you walk back this ideology?

BW: Well, I’ll give you the real, honest answer, and it’s politically incorrect, but inside the Democratic Party — I’m a Democratic operative, I’m paid to help Democrats win elections — after [President-elect Donald] Trump won, there have been a lot of private meetings about what our path is forward. And the thing I’m hearing over and over and over and over and over in these meetings is the progressives, these fringe progressives, they’ve hitched their wagon to “Free Palestine” and Jew-hating. There’s just an exhaustion with it and a sense that we have to marginalize [those voices] in the party to move forward. You know, [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] lost this seat on the House Oversight Committee, and you should very much read that as the Democrats looking at the Squad in that brand of progressivism and saying, ‘Is this what we want to be our standard-bearer moving forward? No,’ and deciding to keep her out of the limelight. So I think this problem is going to be self-correcting in the sense that the party is just done with this nonsense. And I think you’re going to see people that understand the value of our Jewish coalition. And I think you’re going to see them standing up more and kind of marginalizing these people. 

JI: You know, it’s interesting that you talk about the vote. It was 140-something for Connolly, 80-something for AOC. I wonder, in another two years or four years, is that going to be inverted? But you seem to think the opposite. You seem to think they’re going to tack back to the center.

BW: No. In fact, I think two years ago, AOC would have gotten many more votes from that. The Democratic Party is ultimately a strategic party, and as someone in fundraising, the message I’m getting over and over and over and over again is [that] a lot of the Jewish people that support our party are just not going to continue financially donating to us on this path. If you look at progressive organizations, they’re all broke, and a large part of that is the same Jews that stood with them for Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo, and trans rights have just gone, ‘Enough, if you don’t stand with us, we’re certainly not going to write you a check.’ So there is a real reckoning with this kind of messaging that came out of the election, which, just to be honest, was wildly antisemitic. So I think the Democratic Party understands this is just not tenable. Michigan, for all the hand-wringing we gave, certainly did not go our way. I think it’s time to dance with the people that brought us.

JI: How do you see the party being able to address these challenges, not just on college campuses. There was a recent poll about the United Healthcare CEO who was murdered, and it had a near-even split among 18- to 29-year-olds, 41% that the killing was good, 40% that it was bad. How do you change the mindset?

BW: I don’t see the Democratic Party structurally starting programs to change that mindset. Right now the approach is more [to] cut our losses and make sure our brand isn’t associated with that. Something the Democratic Party failed to do in this election is talk to younger voters, and Jesus knows that I tried to make that happen, but it’s just not a core competency of us. And I think there’s a sense that if younger voters are going to stand for murder, that we just can’t be associated with that kind of extremism any further.

JI: So going back to the “Israel vs. everywhere else in the Middle East double standard,” is there anything that can be done to shift that? Or is that the brokenness that exists in global society at this point? You look at Ireland, you look at South Africa. How are you ever going to, for example, restore Israel-Ireland relations after this?

BW: I’m gonna sound like a broken record to you but I’m going to keep saying this until someone does something about it. Israel is failing to tell a story about itself that is reaching anyone but Jews, and it’s just the truth. This is what I find so frustrating. I protested the Iraq War, big time. That’s what got me into progressive politics. I had friends die in the Iraq war, but every American seems to have taken the lesson from that that intervention in the world or dealing with these terrorists is always bad, and Israel has extremely disproven that assertion over the last few months. You see this with the fall of Hezbollah, and to an extent what’s happening in Syria right now. You see Iran on the back foot, finally, for the first time in a decade, and Israel is on a beautiful path forward that shows that when you’re strong and you engage the world’s threats, you actually can make the world more stable. And this is a message that America desperately needs to hear, particularly as Trump is going into office, and who the f**k is aware of this? Honest question, because I’m talking about it, but I don’t think this is on most Americans’ minds. So we desperately need Israel to do what it did in 1948, which was to be proactive, to help the rest of the world understand your values and what was at stake, and to get buy-in from your partners, and you’re just failing to do that.