Yeah I was gonna say, if the thing that sticks out to you the most is literally the opposite of the truth, and been thoroughly explained by Brace, the shitload of other volunteers, and the government itself. Unless every US volunteer fighter is a fed, but somehow NOT the UK ones who did get arrested entering back into the country as the YPG is on their list, then it makes no sense to assume Brace is CIA.

To the people talking about airstrikes, pretty sure his unit didn’t call it in, but more than that, the Kurds had been openly coordinating with the US. That’s like saying Stalin was CIA, because he got trucks shipped to him by FDR, and got intel from allied nations. This was during the liberation of Raqqa, the big setpiece of the war. It is not some shady or suspect thing for the YPG, part of a coalition force, to get air support from the US during a joint attack. Or should the Kurds have refused air support for this offensive as to keep their purity in our debates?

I am not saying this applies to you specifically, but i think a lot of leftists go extra in critiquing Rojava, while valid and I have plenty of critiques of my own, because they see this direct militant action occurring, with fellow leftists going over and fighting and dying in what feels almost like a fantasy and they need to excuse themselves. There is nothing wrong with not volunteering, but i think people do have some level of an inferiority complex over the volunteers. It is where I think “purity politics” actually does exist, not in condemnation or critique of party decisions, but in distrusting individuals from the get-go on some level due to self-doubt. I catch myself feeling like this with DSA a bunch, we on some level want the more extraordinary examples to be adventurism, because even if we know there is no shame in not doing the same as them, part of us does resent them. We need a narrative to not just accept what we did or did not do, but to justify ourselves as the truer and better leftists.

Criticize Brace all you want, I just think from my own weaknesses, that we easily project a lot onto people.

Ok nvm then