Read more

Just as spineless progressives will say or do anything to get a pat on the head from Zohran Mamdani, Vice President JD Vance seems to be crafting his every utterance for the plaudits of Tucker Carlson and the Groyper Right—people primarily driven by their insatiable need to blame Jews for all the world’s ills. I don’t think Vance shares this viewpoint; his penchant for conversion suggests none of his beliefs are too closely held. But what the Vice President lacks in conviction, he more than makes up for in pandering, specifically to the conspiracy theorists of Twittersphere.

The latest evidence of the Vice President’s thirst for Groyper approval came during an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, where Vice President Vance implied that the criticism of the role he played as Appeaser in Chief to the Iranian Mullahs was bought and paid for by—you guessed it—Israel.

Vance was complaining about the opposition he faced for signing what many, including myself, saw as a humiliating deal that left the Iranians feeling like the winners of a war in which our military crushed theirs, a deal that, it bears mentioning, has already fallen apart because the Iranians are who the deal’s opponents said they were.

Rather than do any soul searching for the role he played in having the U.S. sign a ridiculously bad deal that was actually worse than the JCPOA that Vance himself spent years mocking, Vance blamed the push back on a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation” paid for by the Israeli government.

Read more

The poll also found El-Sayed trailing Stevens with Black voters by a whopping 46 points. Stevens is polling at 67% of Black voters to El-Sayed's 21%.

As I keep pointing out, it’s socialism by the rich for the rich.

And El-Sayed is rich.

He finally released his tax returns.

Read more

Read more

El Sayed has all the same views as the other socialist candidates, which is to say that he is running primarily on attacking AIPAC, Israel, and the Jews and non Jews who support it.

It’s his go-to move whenever he is asked about anything uncomfortable, whether it’s his former support for Defund the Police, his current lies about having supported it, or the fact that he is a millionaire who is refusing to release his tax returns so you don’t find out.

El Sayed has mentioned Israel and AIPAC in over half of his emails, according to The Argument, which is insane when you think about the fact that less than 2% of Democrats vote on foreign policy.

Surely Michigan voters have more important concerns than where pro-Israel American citizens donate their political contributions?

El Sayed also nominally supports Medicare for All—which is interesting because the Free Beacon reported this morning that his wife, a psychiatrist who owns real estate worth at least a million dollars overseas, does not take any insurance.

In a now deleted FAQ on her private practice’s website, a question about insurance was answered with a single word: “Do you accept my insurance? No.”

It’s just tremendous: While El Sayed is campaigning on taxpayers funding health care because the system is so expensive and difficult to access for low income Americans, his own wife literally will not take any insurance. You have to be able to fork over hundreds if not thousands of dollars for the privilege of seeing her. And this is a person who is already wealthy from real estate holdings overseas!

These “socialists” are the problem they pretend to abhor: rich elite gatekeepers.

They aren’t building a world in which everyone can achieve the massive wealth they have acquired but a world in which the peasants remain a serf class unable to even hope for home ownership.

It’s socialism by and for the rich.

And to distract you, they talk about Israel and Zionists and AIPAC—just as they once talked about Defund the Police or the climate or trans rights but no longer do because voters hate that stuff.

Read more

They finally found their line in the sand.

A Nazi tattoo they c…

Read more

Most interesting to me was that Ambassador Bolton says that according to his information, President Trump halted a plan to arm the Kurds to fight the IRGC after…

Read more

That’s what a new Pew Research Center study found.

Just let that sink in: Nearly half of all Muslim Americans like Hamas.

Read more

One thing that might damage him with voters: He’s so far refused to release his tax returns.

Why?

Well, because he’s a millionaire and hoping you won’t notice.

Read more

Over-educated rich nepo babies thought Graham P…

Read more

They finally found their line in the sand.

A Nazi tattoo they could forgive.

Roughing up his girlfriend? No problem—she is a Republican.

Mocking veterans and cheating on his wife with 12 women? Who wants a candidate brewed in a vat?!

Living off government benefits and his rich mommy and daddy while pretending to be working class? Pshaw! This is just the description of the average Democratic Socialist of America.

It was like a gameshow: How low will the Democrats go defending this guy’s scandals?

Subscribe now

But then Platner committed the gravest of sins to the Democrats: He started to slip in the polls—not with the kind of progressive educated elites and rich nepo babies who chose Platner in the first place, who voted in socialist candidates in New York and make up the base of the progressive movement; Platner was crushing his opponent, Republican Susan Collins, with the college educated. It was working class Mainers and men—the very people the effeminate elites had chosen Platner to bring back to the Democratic Party—who could smell that this guy was a scumbag from a mile away.

Over-educated rich nepo babies thought Graham Platner, a Nazi tattooed alleged rapist, would appeal to the working class, because that’s what they think the working class is. Meanwhile, all working-class Mainers saw was, well, a Nazi rapist.

It speaks volumes about the problem the Democrats have with the people who used to be their base—people who work with their hands for a living. Labor. Men. Those voters have abandoned the Left in droves because the things the Left now stands for disgust them: Abolish ICE. Defund the Police. Free Palestine. Free everything.

Working-class people don’t want free housing or free Palestine. They want good wages—which come from a respect for labor that is in direct opposition to the vanity morals of the elites.

Here’s a pro-tip for Democrats hoping to avoid this kind of mess in the future: The Nazi tattoo should have been enough. It really, really should have been enough.

Share

But it wasn’t just the politicians lining up behind this scumbag. The liberal media played a huge role in laundering his scandals. They called him an “oysterman” ad nauseam, though Platner lives off disability and his oystering is a hobby. They called him a working-class man of the people though he went to elite private schools and is the son of a rich lawyer and grandson of a famous designer. Perhaps worst of all, they went to great lengths to smear the victim of his physical abuse, Lyndsey Fifield, in a lengthy New York Times article that pretended to expose his abuse but in fact buried the worst allegations in misrepresentations and obfuscations. The authors repeatedly lied to Fifield about their intentions, and included just enough chum for the bottom feeders in politics and the media to character assassinate her—for the crime of being a Republican.

Believe all women?

Nah.

Believe all Democrats.

And not even all Democrats: Leftist media is now smearing Jenny Racicot, the progressive who accused Platner of raping her, who almost didn’t come forward because she agrees with his politics. They are literally pointing to a text message Racicot sent Platner the night she says he raped her in which she told him she needed a massage as evidence to discredit her and justify her rape.

It’s just beyond disgusting.

In the meantime, after prevaricating for two days and amidst reports that Platner was planning to take the Maine Democratic Party hostage and refuse to withdraw unless he could appoint his successor, Platner posted a video to social media in which he announced he will withdraw from the race.

In the video, which is 11 minutes long, Platner took absolutely no responsibility for his imploding campaign and blamed literally everyone else.

“Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign,” he said. “We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me. We are suspending campaign operations. This is incredibly difficult, because I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not. We’re not doing it because of the allegations, we’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.”

Platner has clearly learned nothing.

Will the Democrats?

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

It’s always the people you least expect!

But it wasn’t just that the Democrats ignored Platner’s obvious character flaws throughout his campaign. They were a big part of his appeal. His character flaws played a major role in building up the mythos progressives were creating around their “Maine oysterman,” that Platner was a real man, unlike these other “HR lady” approved candidates, unlike these other candidates grown “in a vat,” as his progressive defenders and handlers loved to say.

The people who hand-picked Graham Platner for Maine actually found some of his worst Reddit posts before enlisting him as a candidate. These included racist rants about Black people not tipping, telling women to take responsibility for being sexually assaulted, and mockery of veterans. Yet the activists told the WSJ they didn’t find them disqualifying.

“Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats. They want people who are real human beings,” socialist recruiter Daniel Moraff says.

Platner was to be the Democrats’ ticket back to men, back to the working class, out of the vat full of HR lady approved beta males; far from a dealbreaker, his Reddit posts, his nasty tattoo, his habit of throwing around his ex-girlfriend and cheating on his wife made the mythology around him even more compelling to progressives. To the college-educated elites leading progressive politics, these were signifiers of a traditional masculinity, their ticket back to the working class.

But while Nepo-baby elites and trust fund socialists were willing to forgive Platner a Nazi tattoo and roughing up his ex-girlfriend, actual working class voters were not.

Platner was polling ahead of Republican incumber Susan Collins by two points, but he’d absolutely cratered with working-class voters. Susan Collins had a 21 point lead against Platner with working-class voters last week. Platner was demolishing Collins with college-educated voters—by 34 points.

Working-class Mainers were also 20 points more likely to say that Graham Platner has a bad character than Mainers with a college degree. Men were 11 points more likely. Platner was cleaning Collins’ clock with women, leading her by eight points. So much for solidarity! As I noted when the poll came out, college-educated women, those very HR ladies the progressives were delighted had been vanquished, looked at Platner, who shoved and manhandled his ex girlfriend and locked her in a room and thought, “Me, too.”

Platner’s progressive male defenders, themselves closer on the masculinity spectrum to the HR ladies they so abhor than they are to the working class men they pretend to represent, were hoping that Platner’s working-class masquerade as a champion of the working man would work. But the only people who were convinced were the HR ladies.

This attempt to win back the working class by backing an absolute scumbag failed with the very people it was supposed to attract, while attracting the very people it was supposed to repudiate.

Subscribe now

Of course, Democrats are already patting themselves on the back for calling on him to resign, casting themselves as somehow better than Republicans because after defending accusations of physical abuse and a Nazi tattoo, they drew the line at rape.

I’m sorry, but no.

Even the mea culpas are just more justifications. In the New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg writes,

“If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to hear. Many Democrats, disgusted by their party’s failure to contain Donald Trump, want representatives as furious as they are, and they no longer trust their leaders to tell them who is electable. That opens space up for outsider candidates who wouldn’t have had a chance a few years ago. It also makes it easier for unfit characters to escape proper vetting.”

What are they so angry about that justifies electing a Nazi? That justifies backing a physically abusive man?

What are these college-educated women so angry about that they were willing to throw #MeToo to the wind—literally arguing that Republican women cannot be victims of abuse?

The whole point of progressive politics is supposed to be about the working class, yet it is educated, well off voters who are so angry at our current political moment they were willing to forgive a Nazi tattoo—while working class Mainers felt Platner’s character failings unforgivable.

That is the real lesson here: Progressives still have no idea what working class Americans want.

Subscribe now

Jenny Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.

“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”

Politico for some reason is calling this a “sexual assault” allegation. It’s not. Racicot is accusing Platner of raping her.

Platner denies the accusation, though he also posted a video in which he said his campaign is “taking time to reflect on the best path forward.”

The rape accusation joins a host of other scandals plaguing Platner.

He once wrote on Reddit that women need to “take responsibility” for being sexually assaulted. Oh the irony! He wrote racist things about Black people, and mocked veterans. He has a Nazi tattoo on his chest, which he had for 18 years and only covered with another tattoo when it was revealed during the campaign. The New York Times reported the story of another ex-girlfriend who accused Platner of roughing her up and leaving bruises, even locking her in a bedroom. That ex-girlfriend was dismissed because she’s a Republican. The new accuser, though, “was torn over coming forward in part because she agrees with Platner politically.” Thanks to these Left-wing bonafides, some Democrats have begun rescinding their endorsements of Platner.

Obviously, it’s better for the Democrats to drop an alleged rapist than stand by him. But it also only underscores just how long they were willing to defend him, just how much they were willing to forgive.

I joked that Graham Platner’s campaign was like a gameshow: How low will the Democrats go? They defended him from accusations of physical abuse. They defended him from mocking veterans. They defended him blaming women for their own sexual assaults. Worst of all, they defended his Nazi tattoo.

The Nazi tattoo really should have been a dealbreaker. There is just no coming back from defending a Nazi tattoo. And yet, for the country’s top Democrats, it just wasn’t.

Subscribe now

Platner denied that he knew it was a Nazi symbol, but that claim was disputed by two ex-girlfriends and his ex-campaign manager, all of whom confirmed that Platner knew exactly what it was.

And Democrats still defended him.

The list of those who ran defense is long: Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren. Ruben Gallego. The Pod Same America Obama Bros. Ro Khanna flew to Maine to cut an ad for Platner after the physical abuse story dropped.

Will there be any soul searching?

Let me put an end to the suspense: There will not.

Some Democrats are rescinding their endorsements of Platner. But there will be no deeper discussion about how they got here, and how they got this so wrong.

Because a party that will defend a man with a Nazi tattoo—after spending a decade calling its political opposition Nazis—has no standards.

Subscribe now

As someone who just wrote a book explaining how opposing Jews, Zionism, and Jewish interests became the single most important litmus test for the Left, I predicted the rise of the DSA candidate running pretty much exclusively on their antipathy for Israel. “Free Palestine” has become what land acknowledgements were in 2018 or antiracist claptrap was in 2020 or climate activism in 2022: a virtue signal to disguise the fact that the Left had become the home not of labor but of over-credentialed elites, the kinds of people DSA candidates have been winning with.

But many still find it difficult to admit what they are seeing with their own eyes. It’s difficult, after all, to admit you backed the wrong pony. So instead of admitting that their side has a problem with hating Jews, they both sides it. They insist that this isn’t a problem with the Left but rather with America in 2026. There are also antisemites on the Right, they insist: But what about Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens? The Right is turning on Jews and Israel, too! I saw a video of a college student asking about the USS Liberty so both sides are antisemitic!

This is just wrong. There may be antisemites who were once on the Right, but they are no longer Republicans. Nick Fuentes came out as a Democrat. Tucker Carlson has removed himself from the Republican Party—after Trump basically kicked him out. Thomas Massie—gone!

People who turn bashing Israel into their whole personality only have one party to cleave to, and it’s the Democratic Party. As I have said here again and again, there is just no appetite for antisemitism or anti-Israel sentiment on the Right.

And a new poll from the Free Beacon and Echelon Insights confirms it.

Subscribe now

Here are some of the highlights from a June 2026 poll of 1,121 likely Republican primary voters, nationally:

• 57% support ending the sale of weapons to other countries and 69% support ending the discounted sale of weapons to other countries, but just 28% support ending military aid to Israel.

• 64% have a favorable view of Israel, vs. just 22% who have an unfavorable view. It’s the highest approval rating of all the countries on the list, which includes the UK and Ukraine. 59% have a favorable view of the IDF, while just 17% have a favorable view of the Palestinians.

• 73% said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who supports a strong U.S.-Israel relationship

• 68% say the U.S. should support Israel

• 68% support Israel over the Palestinians, with just 10% supporting the Palestinians over Israel.

• 67% say the U.S. and Israel’s geopolitical interests are usually aligned—compared to just 15% who said they aren’t.

• 73% are more likely to vote for a Republican who supports a strong U.S.-Israel relationship—as opposed to just 16% who want a Republican opposed to Israel.

• 69% want a candidate who denounces antisemitism and says it has no place in the conservative movement—vs. just 17% who don’t.

• 62% said they'd be less likely to vote for a candidate who calls Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal—vs. 19% who said they’d be more likely.

• Just 28% said they’d vote for a candidate who votes against Congressional resolutions condemning antisemitism

• 68% are less likely to vote for someone who describes visits to the Western Wall in Jerusalem as “kissing a stupid wall”

• 74% approve of how Trump is handling the U.S./Israel relationship

• 75% support Trump on Iran

• 76% approve of military operations against Iran

• 84% approve of Trump

• 79% approve of Trump on foreign policy, vs. just 18% who disapprove.

It is a despicable canard on the United States of America to say that antisemitism has infested both parties.

Here’s the truth: The Left is deeply hostile to Jews—while the Right is hostile to those hostile to Jews.

Antisemitism, anti-Zionism, obsessive opposition to Israel, and in general a suspicious attitude towards Jewish power, are not problems equally shared between the two parties.

One party may have a few antisemites, but it’s doing a marvelous job at policing them and their ideas out of the party—and now you know why: Their voters want nothing to do with it.

Subscribe now

You might think that immigrants, people we chose to allow to join our sovereign nation out of the goodness of our hearts, might be even more blissed out, even more grateful, even more celebratory, even more willing to thank America and God for the great privilege of belonging to the only nation to exist in the history humanity that’s built on the idea that our rights are not a gift of government but a covenant with God that may never be broken.

In the case of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, you would be wrong.

Subscribe now

Mamdani decided to give an Independence Day address from behind George Washington’s desk in City Hall (a City Hall that was obviously cooler than the 78 degrees he told the rest of the city to suffer through during this heat wave).

Surrounded by a host of grim, unsmiling immigrants like himself, “new Americans who came to this country,” as he called them, Mamdani did not celebrate the U.S. on our 250th birthday. Instead, he went to great pains to point out everything wrong with it, to paint a dark picture of what he sees as all our flaws, and to insist that it was the job of immigrants to fix America and reshape it in their image. And they must do this over the protestations of special interests and racists.

For Mamdani, America isn’t the greatest, freest nation on earth. “At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another,” he said. In today’s America, children go hungry and “undocumented neighbors” are spirited away in unmarked vans. New arrivals didn’t find access to the American Dream but “nativism.”

And yet, “That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extends to them, too, is no relic of the past. It carried millions of Black Americans north during the Great Migration; it drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War; it invited countless others from the West Indies, and South Asia, and West Africa, and across the world.”

It’s notable that Black Americans are barely mentioned in Mamdani’s speech, except as one example of many types of immigrants who faced exclusion and oppression. Yet they were not immigrants. Comparing Black Americans coming north during the Great Migration to immigrants from Africa is an erasure of Black history; the only real White Supremacy that existed in America was exercised against them—native born citizens. But this offensive erasure is the price you pay when you want to make immigrants the true oppressed—and the true saviors of America, as Mamdani went on to do.

The villains of his talk were all the usual suspects that he and his fellow socialists like to demonize: the rich, “masked agents terrorizing our streets,” wealth concentrated “in the soft hands of a precious few,” the “oligarchs who buy elections”—an ironic reference given the fact that over the last two weeks, his own endorsed candidates won four elections by securing the votes of wealthy voters.

Subscribe now

To the powerful, Mamdani said, America “is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.”

This is a caricature of why people find him so offensive. It’s not based on skin color or accent that they oppose his program, but based on the fact that as this very speech makes clear, he is blind to the values and culture that make this the greatest country on earth, and intent on casting the United States in the most relentlessly negative light.

“The work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel—the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power: The power to determine what America means.”

For Mamdani, it is immigrants who will determine America’s future, America’s values, America’s nature. They hold a “special power . . . to determine what America means.”

This right here is the great divide in America today:

Should immigrants redefine America in their image—or should they assimilate into this great nation that is already great, and has been since its founding?

Is America, founded on freedom and liberty, a nation with values, a people, and a culture worth protecting—or is it merely a strip of land for any enterprising individual who manages to cross our border to reshape in the image of the culture they just fled?

Are you here to join a great nation or merely to take advantage of its gifts while changing it into a place like the one you came from—less perfect, less free, less American?

“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else,” the Mayor said. “The truth, my friends is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”

What makes America great, according to Mamdani, and the only thing that makes it great, is that it can be fundamentally changed by people like him.

He accuses the bad “supremacists” on the other side of believing that “America . . . becomes less the more people it welcomes,” and yet, he is literally seeking to make America less American: less free, more socialist, less invested in free enterprise, less proud of our history, less attached to each other, and more blind to our achievements.

Subscribe now

“Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived, a nation striving each day to better itself,” says Mamdani. “Therein lies the work of America: the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection.” The implication seems clear: Just one more immigrant becoming mayor of a great American city and reshaping it into a socialist city like where they came from and we might be perfect!

This is the kind of talk that makes normie Americans see red. Americans are extremely generous people, but they draw the line when someone has been granted the gift of joining us and the immense privileges of American citizenship and an American education, and then turns around and from the supreme status that netted them, throws that gift back in our faces by insisting that America on its own is trash—and it now needs them to reshape us in the image of the place they left to come here in order for us to achieve our destiny.

And on our 250th birthday, no less!

Just, no.

But the Mayor was not even the most disgraceful Mamdani on Independence Day.

Mrs. Mamdani, Rama Duwaji, fled the United States completely—for a Muslim retreat on flowers in Spain.

She literally could not stand to be in the United States for this great milestone.

Share

It’s led good-hearted Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, to a state of panic. I am frequently asked by people worried about the future of Jews or of this great nation how to fight antisemitism.

My answer is always the same: Stop “fighting antisemitism.” Recommit to this great nation, which has always loved and protected its Jews.

Because here’s the truth that anyone with any knowledge of American history knows: Antisemitism is not just a betrayal of Jews. It’s a betrayal of America—of its founding values and the vision of our Founding Fathers. Which means you don’t fight it by talking about Jews as a separate, oppressed minority, but rather, as the Founding Fathers did: as a cherished, integral, inseparable part of what makes America so utterly unique, what makes America America.

Subscribe now

The United States of America has always had a unique relationship with Jews. In 1790, President George Washington wrote a famous letter to the “children of the stock of Abraham” of Newport, Rhode Island, promising that here, bigotry would be given no sanction, persecution no assistance. In the letter, he explained that Jews, as all other Americans, would be treated as equals, though not due to the tolerance of their neighbors, tolerant though they were; instead, their equal rights would be due to the religious freedoms imbued in us by our Creator. In his explanation, the President was laying out the template for the extraordinary freedom Jewish Americans would be granted here, pretty much from Day 1. The distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom would come to define how America would treat its Jews—but also how it would define what it means to be an American. It means zealously protecting our rights as a gift of God rather than the result of the sufferance of our neighbors or government.

While the distinction between religious tolerance and religious liberty was not invented for Jews, it takes a person of a different faith to even arrive at such an idea, and Jews would become a symbol for the ideals this country was founded on. In how they promised to and did treat their Jews, Americans would legally, morally, and spiritually ratify the vision of the Founding Fathers. Jews would become the mirror their Christian neighbors held up to themselves as proof of concept—proof they were in good standing with their God.

But it went beyond that. There was always the feeling that the very idea of freedom, rights, and equality before the law were ideas that came from what Christians would call the Hebrew Bible, and Jews were the People of the Book, the living, breathing embodiment of the eternal persistence of such divinely inspired thoughts. We had as Jews preceded ourselves here, and it is as the inheritors of the Bible, the stewards of the civilization it contains in its pages, that Jews would be welcomed and cherished in their new home.

Though deeply committed to the separation of church and state, that did not mean the Founding Fathers were not themselves religious. They viewed the hand of God in the freedoms they ratified, which they saw as a sacred covenant; the source of the freedoms they ratified was not human but divine. The Federalist Papers are full of references to “the hand of God” or “the finger of the Almighty,” references to the Bible.

It was personal, too. The Founding Fathers knew Jews, and they liked them.

Even prior, America’s colonial history is littered with stories of Jews who became precious to their neighbors, like the Jewish Founding Father Asser Levy, one of the first Jews to step foot on American soil in New Amsterdam in 1654, who quickly became known as the most litigious person in the colony—and yet was universally loved and respected. “Though a litigant is not an amiable character to contemplate, in Levy’s case this characteristic certainly had a good effect,” notes one 19^th-century historian. “His honest opposition to imposition and insult, his constant jealousy of his rights, his sterling honesty and integrity, seem to have gained for him the respect and friendship of his Christian fellows.”

Just six years before Asser Levy arrived in America, Ukrainian Cossacks had killed 50,000 Jews in mass pogroms. Now, Asser Levy was suing officials for insulting him, or for failing to perform their jobs well.

From its earliest days, Jewish life in America was destined to be different, and Jews viewed America as the Promised Land where they could fulfill their dream coming home after millennia of being a hated, persecuted minority.

Subscribe now

During the Revolution, the Jewish community experienced loss, rape, destruction, and exile along with their fellow countrymen. And they fought hard for victory. South Carolina boasted 34 Jewish Revolutionary War veterans. Francis Salvador, a wealthy Jewish immigrant from England, was the first Jew to serve in an American legislature. He fought bravely, and when he was ambushed by Tories and scalped by Indians, he became the first Jew to die in defense of the new United States.

Mordechai Sheftall, born in Savannah, became head of the Parochial Committee of Christ Church Parish and enforced the boycott of British goods, then assumed the rank of colonel during the war and served as commissary general for Georgia’s militia and Continental troops. Sheftall and his son were taken prisoner, and the British tried to force them to eat pork. “Pork for dinner,” recounts the minister of Savannah, Rev. Moses Allen, who was taken prisoner with the Sheftalls, in his diary. “The Jews Mr. Sheftall & son refused to eat their pieces, & their knives and forks were ordered to be greased with it ... It is a happiness that Mr. Sheftall is a fellow sufferer. He bears it with such fortitude as is an example to me.”

Isaac Franks enlisted at 17. Soon after, he was captured and imprisoned by the British. He managed a daring escape and rejoined the American forces, which he served until 1782, eventually achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Pennsylvania militia. He went on to become a successful businessman and bought the Deshler House in Germantown, a former British army headquarters, which he rented for a season to President Washington in 1793.

But more important than the Jewish military contributions were the Jewish merchants who did business with the states and with Congress, selling goods on credit to the army, serving as quartermasters and purchasing agents, buying bonds, accepting certificates of indebtedness, and serving as moneylenders, blockade runners, even privateers, without whom the Revolutionaries would have starved. And unlike in Europe, they were never resented for playing this critical role. Instead, they were lauded, respected, and even loved. Often, they were not paid back for their loans.

Haym Salomon was perhaps the most famous case, known as the “Financier of the Revolution.” Born in Lissa, Poland, in 1740, by the time he arrived penniless on these shores 35 years later, he had been a wanderer for decades. He managed to pick up a host of languages and skills in finance—as well as the politics of a Revolutionary.

One year after his arrival, Salomon was selling goods to the army on the Canadian frontier when he was arrested in New York by the British and imprisoned. He would have died in jail had he not been released by German mercenaries hired by the British, who needed English speakers to help them procure supplies. So Salomon went to work for the British as a commissionair for the officers. They did not know that he was a spy for the Whigs, persuading Germans to desert and helping imprisoned American and French officers to escape.

When he was betrayed, he fled to Philadelphia, where he established himself as a shopkeeper, bill broker, and moneylender, and due to his ability to speak French, the resident French diplomat and French army paymasters became his clients, which led to him being hired by Robert Morris, Superintendent of the Office of Finance.

The first time Salomon is mentioned in Morris’s diary, it is as “the Jew broker.” But every subsequent time, it is as “Mr. Salomon.” The stigma of making and lending money had bedeviled the Jews in the most violent ways in Europe, something Salomon must have experienced firsthand as an observant Jew in the Continent. Well, no one told the Americans. Here, it was a good thing to lend people money. Here, it was a good thing to make money! It was as if the land itself were asserting itself to reject the mores of the Old World. Jews like Haym Salomon provided a proof of concept that this time, things would truly be different.

As the war began to turn in favor of the Revolutionaries, the finances of the government got more and more desperate, and Salomon became more and more helpful. “At times Salomon’s credit was better than that of the new republic’s,” notes one historian. “This man was something of an alchemist; he could turn paper into gold.” These were the kinds of epithets that made the Jews hated in Europe. In America, it made them cherished. Salomon was called in to resolve crisis after crisis and worked tirelessly to establish and maintain the credit of the nascent nation. It brought him to the attention of James Madison, who turned to a number of Jewish moneylenders in the early 1780s.

As Madison wrote to a friend in August of 1782, “I have for some time past been a pensioner on the favor of Haym Salomon, a Jew broker.” By September, Madison had a new epithet for Salomon: “The kindness of our little friend in Front Street (Salomon) near the coffee-house is a fund which will preserve me from extremities, but I never resort to it without great mortification as he obstinately rejects all recompense.”

For the Jews, the peace that descended after the war in 1783 “seemed like nothing short of redemption,” writes the eminent historian of the Jews Jonathan Sarna. Congress proclaimed the end of the war just before the start of Passover, the holiday of freedom, and the Jews of America were proud of their achievements, their “zealous attachment to the sacred cause of America in the late war with Great Britain,” as the Jews of New York put it to the governor upon returning with the Sefer Torah they had taken with them into exile in Stratford when the British occupied New York. Before the war, members of the Synagogue Shearith Israel had the custom of standing for the prayer for the government. After the Revolution, they sat for the prayer, “to symbolize the American Revolution’s abolition of subservience,” explains Sarna.

The ratification of the Constitution was one of the most important events in the history of Diaspora Jewry, as one historian called it, making American Jews “the modern world’s first free Jewry.” And yet, it went both ways. Did not the Jews make the rest of the United States free? Were they not the proof of concept of freedom itself, the proof to Christian Americans that they meant what they said? For how could their Christian neighbors know they really meant it, that this country would protect the rights of non-Christians, without some non-Christians to test it out on? Indeed, there would be much higher barriers to Catholic and Mormon equality for much of the history of the United States than there would ever be for Jews.

In the very act of treating them like everyone else, the new United States skirted the pitfalls of European Enlightenment efforts at Jewish emancipation, which always demanded Jews abandon their Jewishness in order to achieve those equal rights. “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals,” Count Clermont-Tommerre infamously said in France in 1789.

This was never the case in America. Here, people were not granted freedom on any condition; freedom was a gift from God, who wanted His children to worship him in many forms, it turned out. A country that sought His blessing would have to protect the children of the stock of Abraham. Finally, in 1791, this idea was ratified as the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It was a promise that, as Jonathan Sarna puts it, the federal government would never again favor one religion over another. The government would protect Jews from legal discrimination, rather than enforcing it upon them. The Jews were in the country not due to the tolerance of their neighbors, but by the grace of God.

We needed a religious country to become free—and it needed us to enshrine those freedoms for all. This, in the end, is the source of America’s exemplary treatment of the Jews: As a result of the mirror the Jews held up to them, which cast them in the light of protectors of God’s bounty, American Christians developed a deep identification with their Jewish neighbors.

Opposing Jews—their heritage or their existence—meant opposing America. Antisemitism in America was always, critically in opposition to the entire project, because the very freedoms that define what it means to be an American were deeply associated with its Jewish citizens.

It was because the early Americans believed they had a covenant with God to protect the rights—God-given—of every person, that Jewish American history is a tale of freedom. Jews helped the new country understand what it was about. Americans would be litigious, like Asser Levy. They would take pride in success and making money, like Haym Salomon. They would protect the religious liberty of their neighbors—and they would not take credit for that, as though liberty were a gift they were bestowing. They would aver. They would credit the Creator for that gift and cast themselves as its protector.

That’s what it means to be an American.

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” wrote President Washington to the Jews of Newport. And indeed, “tolerance” would always be too weak a word to describe America’s relationship with its Jews.

Stop trying to “fight antisemitism.” Recommit to our history—the fact that we are an inseparable part of what it means to be an American. The obsessive attempt to fight antisemitism is a betrayal of that history in that it seeks to separate us out from the story and the soil from which we have emerged as a community.

That is my prayer for our 250th birthday: that as Americans and as Jews, we reclaim this precious inheritance.

This essay is adapted from my new book The Jews and the Left. You can buy a copy here.

The socialists want you to believe these victories are the result of working-class people flocking to their candidates. They want you to believe they are “fighting the oligarchy!” and taking on the billionaires and special interests and bringing back an agenda focused on the multi-racial working class.

Alas, this is a load of malarky.

Subscribe now

A Thomas Edsall noted in the New York Times, a 2021 survey of DSA members found that 85 percent were white. Just 9 percent were Hispanic and just 4 percent Black. Even Trump got 25 percent of Black men to vote for him, and he won Hispanic men outright.

As for a working-class organization, just four percent of DSA members had blue-collar jobs, while six in 10 had professional jobs and the remainder were unemployed or students. Over 80 percent had a college degree.

Of course, not everyone who votes for the DSA is a member. But the people voting for these candidates have a similar profile.

In Maine, Republican Susan Collins is polling 21 points ahead of democratic socialist Graham Platner. 21 points! So why is Platner ahead of her by two points overall? Because he is cleaning Collins’s clock with the college educated—by 34 points.

In New York, Darializa Chevalier, the DSA candidate who ousted a two-term incumbent, lost the Hispanic vote by 16 points. She lost the Bronx by 30 points, while winning the more affluent areas of Manhattan.

The DSA’s Claire Valdez crushed Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso by beating him 62 to 28 in the district’s high-income neighborhoods, while Reynoso carried low income areas 63 to 31.

The DSA is running and winning with over-credentialed college elites, over the candidates chosen by the working class they pretend to represent, whose views are often diametrically opposed to those of the DSA.

The socialists support abolishing ICE, while 60% of working-class Americans support building a wall.

The socialists support allowing trans athletes to compete against women, while 72% of working class Americans oppose it.

The socialists routinely smear America, while Americans without a college degree are deeply patriotic.

It’s true that working-class people of all political persuasions support Medicare for All.

But so do the incumbents ousted by the DSA! If your real goal is Medicare for All, why are you spending all this money ousting candidates who support it?

It’s all so fake.

These candidates don’t care about Medicare for All. The bulk of their campaigns are devoted the things that make the college educated feel morally superior: Free Palestine and Abolish ICE.

“Free Palestine” is the new land acknowledgment—a virtue signal one throws out to avoid being called racist and curry favor with a youth radicalized at fancy universities.

If they were being honest, they would just admit that they don’t care about the working class. They care about being seen as more anti-Israel than the other guy, just as in 2020, they cared about being seen as more anti-racist, and in 2022, they cared about being seen as more worried about climate change, and in 2024, more worried about trans rights.

This isn’t a working-class agenda. It’s trust-fund socialism.

Subscribe now

“So I think what the president has told us to do is use this MOU to sort of refill the world’s oil economy, to refill s…

Read more

Not infrequently, one catches sight of him standing in front of a group of women gazing up at him adoringly—despite all the heinous things he’s said about women and done to women.

Graham Platner is a “rebuke of HR lady politics”! we’re told by the DSA punditry class who are so down with the youth!

But it turns out, it’s HR ladies who are voting for him—and if he wins, it will be despite the working class voting against him, not because they chose him.

Subscribe now

Progressives want you to believe socialism is on the march because working-class people have had enough. They want you to believe they are “fighting the oligarchy!” and they are taking on the billionaires and the “Epstein class” and bringing back an agenda focused on labor. But it’s all nonsense.

You know how I know?

Because it’s rich people who vote for them, and working people voting for their opponents.

This was wildly apparent in the New York elections last week, in which rich, over-credentialed gentrifiers voted out candidates preferred by working-class New Yorkers, as I explained in a piece called “Stop Calling Them ‘Socialists.’ They’re Over-Credentialed White Gentrifiers Driven by Resentment Ousting Working-Class Candidates.”

But the latest evidence of progressives and socialists pretending to fight for the little guy while actually winning with the credentialed caste at the expense of the desires of working-class voters comes out of Maine.

Platner is polling ahead of Republican incumber Susan Collins by two points. But he has absolutely cratered with working-class voters.

Susan Collins has a 21 point lead against Platner with working-class voters.

So how is Platner winning?

With college educated voters!

Platner is demolishing Collins with college-educated voters—by 34 points.

51% of working-class white voters say that Platner is “too far to the Left”—while 61% of working-class white voters say that Collins is “not too fair either way.”

Platner is also cleaning Collins’ clock with women, leading her by eight points.

So much for solidarity! College-educated women, those very HR ladies the pundits were delighted had been vanquished, looked at Graham Platner, who shoved and manhandled his ex girlfriend and locked her in a room, according to the New York Times, and thought, “Me, too.”

Platner’s handlers and supporters sold him as a working-class hero, an “oysterman” and veteran with rough edges who has tattoos and wasn’t developed “in a vat.” This, like all their socialist frippery, turned out to be cosplay: The oyster farm is fake, a vanity hobby that makes no money apart from $6,000 Platner’s mom gives him to sell the oysters at her restaurant. His VA loan turned out to be fake; his dad bought him his house for $200,000. He went to a fancy prep school. His farm is on a private island owned by a friend.

This working-class cosplay was just enough to convince college-educated women that he was a real man—though not, it seems, good enough to convince working-class men, who can smell a faker a mile away. As my friend Ryan Girdursky aptly put it, “Graham is what a college educated person thinks a working-class person is supposed to act like and working-class people can see he's a fraud.”

Progressives look at Graham Platner and see a “real man.” These are the struggles of working-class men! They tell themselves.

Meanwhile, real, working-class men just see a scumbag.

Subscribe now

This kind of fake class warfare is common in the progressive world. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a Nepo baby and child of privilege, and like the other “socialists” who won in New York, his victory came from transplants—particularly college educated women and Muslim immigrants.

Congressman Ro Khanna, who has vowed to “Fight the Epstein Class” and made chanting against billionaires the cornerstone of his social media commentary, is himself worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

As the Free Beacon reported this morning,

Khanna lives in a $6 million luxury home with a four-story elevator and so much high-end marble that even the home’s two laundry rooms have marble countertops. But he’s moving on up to a nearly $10 million home near the exclusive Virginia private school that his two young children attend. The Khanna kids have large ownership shares in three private golf clubs and a significant stake in a $65 billion wealth management firm focused on distressed debt. Khanna’s wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover—and was so displeased with it that she sued the dealer, alleging that the car was irreparable, records show.

This is the man trying to replace AOC as the standard bearer of the progressive, anti-oligarch Left.

It’s all so fake.

It would be less offensive if, in the name of fighting for a “working-class centered politics,” they focused on policy that working-class voters actually wanted, and managed to secure the votes of voters without a college degree.

But they do neither of these things: They pay lip service here and there to ideas like Medicare for All, but the bulk of their campaigns are about the things that make the college educated feel like heroes: Free Palestine and Abolish ICE.

Neither of these is going to improve the health care of working class Americans, and they know it.

Share