Platner’s sexting scandal joins many of his other questionable behaviors which have come out throughout the campaign, things like getting a Nazi tattoo 20 years ago and only covering it up with another tattoo this year, or insulting a Purple Heart, or writing on Reddit that victims of sexual assault should “just take some responsibility for themselves” and “act like an adult for f–cks sake.”

Faced this yet another scandal, Platner has chosen—once again—to deflect, lie, blame the media, and even blame a staffer. His campaign has started a smear campaign against a staffer who quit the campaign over the controversy of Platner’s Nazi tattoo. Platner insisted he didn’t know what the symbol meant, something others, including the departing staffer, disputed. You can see for yourself that in the photo he posted to Kik, his hand carefully covers the Nazi symbol—not something he bothered to do with any of his other, less controversial, tattoos.

You might think that the Democrats, the party that casts itself as the defenders of women, the avengers of the Epstein Class, the “Believe All Women” camp, would decide that maybe a man who treats women the way Graham Platner does would be a bridge too far.

You would be wrong. Most Democrats are standing by their man. The same people who demand Republicans put country over party are lining up behind this scumbag because they think he has a chance of winning a coveted Senate seat.

Apparently, Republican Senator Susan Collins—one of the most bipartisan people in the United States Senate, a woman who voted to impeach Donald Trump, to limit his war powers, who voted against confirming Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth—is a source of such evil that it’s worth voting for the Nazi tattoo guy who serially cheated via text on his wife and thinks women who get raped brought it on themselves.

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This entire election cycle is like a gameshow: Just how low will the Democrats go?

What, you may ask, is so special about this guy that despite disrespecting a Purple Heart and the way he talks about women and treats his wife, the Women’s Rights party is still backing him?

Platner was supposed to be the Democrats’ return to their working class roots. He was supposed to be their ticket back to men. He’s an oyster farmer, a man of the people; he looks natural in flannel, he’s beefy and tattooed like a real man, and he’s a veteran who did four combat deployments in the Middle East—wars Susan Collins sent him to fight in! he says whenever he gets the chance.

The only problem is, it’s all lies, from start to finish.

The Free Beacon revealed that Platner’s entire working class shtick is a hoax clothed in lies. He’s from a well to do family that bought his home for him (which he lied about). He went to fancy schools. His oyster farm is literally on an island owned by a rich friend, and sells to a single restaurant owned by Platner’s mother.

Platner, for example, said he relied on assistance from the Department of Veterans Affairs to purchase his home in Sullivan in 2017, but mortgage records show he borrowed $200,000 from his father, a prominent local attorney, to buy the house, the Free Beacon reported. Platner has also said he's "never been close to money and power," though he attended an elite Connecticut boarding school that costs upwards of $75,000 a year and is the grandson of a world-famous architect known for designing $20,000 chairs. And while Platner presents himself in campaign materials as a hardscrabble "oyster farmer," his business partner also attended an ultra-elite New England boarding school, graduated from Dartmouth, boasts of drinking "foraged spring water with Redmond sea salt," and is an owner of the secluded Maine island where Platner's oyster farm is based. The primary purchaser of Platner's oysters, meanwhile, is a "casual fine dining restaurant" owned by Platner's mother, financial disclosures show.

As for the wars, as Collins herself pointed out, Platner worked for the infamous private military contracting company Blackwater. “As long as I can remember I wanted to be a professional soldier,” Platner wrote on Reddit. “I had been waiting for my war since I was about 8, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss it becasue of school. I also wanted to fight soon.”

It’s completely obvious that if the Democrats were running against someone with Platner’s baggage, they would be crying bloody murder. Instead, they are determined to paint Susan Collins—Susan Collins!—as some sort of threat worthy of backing the Nazi tattoo guy who cheats on his wife, lies about his background, insults our vets, and thinks women deserve to be raped.

He’s not even the only Democratic candidate this week to fall afoul of what the Democrats would consider a massive crime against women if it was committed by a Republican. James Talarico, the Democrats’ Great White Hope to take back Texas, is dating a woman who was once his chief of staff, it turns out. Talarico has said his current girlfriend and he have been dating for four years, but she was still working for him as recently as 2023, raising questions about whether they began dating while she was working for him.

As the Texas Scorecard reported,

“Talarico’s campaign says the couple developed feelings while Menard worked as his chief of staff but did not begin dating until after she left his office. The campaign did not address questions about whether Talarico sees any concerns with lawmakers being in relationships with lobbyists.

Perhaps even more damning, the Texas Scorecard reported that “Talarico’s campaign did not answer whether this was the only romantic relationship the candidate has had with a staffer.”

Do you know how many men lost their jobs during the #MeToo hysteria to crimes such as these? Just a month ago, Tony Gonzalez was forced to resign from Congress for dating a staffer. Do you have any doubt that if Talarico were a Republican, Democrats would be demanding he end his campaign?

It’s been a banner week for Democrat hypocrisy when it comes to women’s issues. And it’s only Monday.

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As part of my quest to answer to these questions, I uncovered 300 years of forgotten Jewish American history. I discovered that from the moment they stepped foot on American soil, Jews were seen not as an oppressed minority or immigrant group but as cherished partners in the creation of this great nation. It’s as if the soil itself rejected the Jew hate that seeped out of every cobblestone of the Old Country. It’s my hope that once known, this history will create a paradigm shift.

I know there will be pushback.

Progressives will say the Left isn’t antisemitic, just anti-Israel.

Others will claim that our history here was one of an oppressed minority.

And of course, people will say the Right is where the real antisemitism is.

They are wrong on all three fronts.

Here are my answers to what I predict will be the most common objection to The Jew and the Left.

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The Left hasn’t turned on Jews—just Israel

One objection I expect to hear extensively to the argument I make in my book will come from progressives who insist that the Left hasn’t turned on the Jews—only Israel. They will say that Israel has committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, that Israel killed 70,000 women, children, and babies, and has thus forfeited its right to exist, if it ever had one. Certainly, Israel has forfeited its right to support from members in good standing on the Left, which believes in universal values like human rights. Leftists say Israel is a colonial apartheid rogue state that oppresses its neighbors and demands regional dominance. Zionism, they say, is racism. As proof that they are not opposed to Jews but only Israel, they insist that Jews who agree with them are welcome.

That last part is true: Jews willing to bend the knee and denounce the vast majority of their fellow Jews, willing to denounce Zionism and the existence of the State of Israel, are indeed welcome on the Left. But everything else is simply false.

Israel did not commit a genocide; it waged a defensive war against a genocidal terror group that mass murdered, mass raped, kidnapped babies and the elderly, and sexually assaulted little girls in captivity. To claim that Israel’s attempt to eradicate the threat of another October 7 is “genocide” is simply Holocaust envy, a common plague on the Left. There weren’t 70,000 civilian casualties in Gaza, there were 70,000 total casualties, of which between one third and one half were Hamas terrorists. The achievement of the civilian to combatant ratio of Israel’s war in Gaza was unheard of in urban warfare. Of course, Israel isn’t a colonial enterprise, because Jews are indigenous to the land. And Israel’s desire for regional dominance is for defensive purposes, not expansionist ones, which you know because Israel has zero interest in occupying Jordan, or Iran, or Egypt.

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I and many other pro-Israel Americans (and Israelis!) certainly have our criticisms of Israel, how it waged the war against Hamas, and its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. I like many other pro-Israel people (including Benjamin Netanyahu himself!) don’t believe we should be giving military aid to Israel.

But those are not views that get you entré into the Left. To be a member in good standing on the Left, you have to believe things that are not true about the Jewish State, or at least, proclaim them loudly. You have to desire the elimination of the homeland of half of the world’s Jews, and desire that rather than live under their own sovereignty in a Jewish State, that they submit their fate to live under Muslim rule.

It’s not inherently antisemitic to have been convinced of lies about Israel or to think Jews should give Sharia law a chance. But it is antisemitic to demand that Jews—and Jews alone—cosign a lie about their fellow Jews if they are to be members in good standing on the Left. It is antisemitic to make blatant, easily disprovable lies about the world’s only Jewish state—and of that state alone—the price of entry. It is antisemitic to call people racist if they think that maybe the Jews won’t be so well off under Muslim rule, given how that went last time around.

It’s common to hear from anti-Israel Muslim politicians that they “revere” the Jewish faith—they just oppose Israel. But for the majority of American Jews, their Jewish faith is inseparable from their spiritual, ethnic, and historical connection to the land of Israel, its history, and its people. Most American Jews are not religious. What they have instead is a deep identification with their fellow Jews worldwide—which naturally includes Israelis. The vast majority of Jews—over 80%—are Zionists. They are proud that America and Israel are such good allies.

Making them abandon that spiritual attachment to belong to the Left—and making them alone do so—is in fact evidence that the Left does not want proud Jews in their ranks. Except, of course, those willing to humiliate themselves by denouncing pro-Israel Jews.

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American Jews were an oppressed minority who faced antisemitism throughout our history here

Another objection to my thesis that I anticipate is that Jews were an oppressed minority in America, an immigrant community that faced antisemitism, so it makes sense that they threw their lot in with the Left. This is a narrative many American Jews believe. But it’s not true.

The truth is, there has never been an America without Jews. We arrived here in 1654 and never left. We were viewed by the Founding Fathers as a core and integral part of the United States, founding partners in the creation of this great nation.

It’s true that there has been antisemitism in America, but it’s almost never been state sponsored; the opposite: It was easier to be a Jew than a Catholic or a Mormon. And it was never close to the racial animus Blacks faced. In a country with a racial binary of white vs. Black, Jews were seen by and large as white.

What antisemitism did exist was relegated to the elites. There were anti-Jewish quotas at top universities and in some professions. There were restricted country clubs and gated communities. But these were few and far between.

That’s what I uncovered while researching my book: Even the worst episodes of antisemitism in America were often mitigated by an outpouring of love for Jews from their Christian neighbors. In the weeks before Leo Frank was lynched, hundreds of thousands of letters poured in from across the nation begging the judge for leniency and deploring the conditions of his trial. Henry Ford had to apologize for his antisemitic publication, The Dearborn Independent, when he wanted to run for office, because it was well known that you couldn’t go full antisemite and expect to succeed politically in America. (When Ford’s candidacy failed, he went right back to publishing it.) Throughout the South, Jews were so precious to their Christian neighbors that when the Klan came for the Jews, the South turned on the Klan.

It’s this deep dive into American Jewish history that you will find in The Jews and the Left. It shocked me to learn how wrong our view of our history is.

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The real antisemitism is on the Right

Many, including many liberal Jews, will object to my thesis by insisting that it is the Right that is responsible for the worst antisemitism. As I was finishing The Jews and the Left, a small cadre of podcasters seemed intent on proving them right. These podcasters—people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Alex Jones—had previously been associated with the Right, yet they started to make increasingly anti-Israel and even antisemitic comments. The unabashed antisemite Nick Fuentes started making appearances on other Right-wing podcasts, including Carlson’s, and his ideas seemed to be spreading.

Sure, there are some folks on the Left who don’t like Israel, but have you seen the Right? I imagined people saying while reading my book.

But while a few outspoken antisemites certainly exist on the Right, there has been a massive effort by Republicans and conservatives to cleanse their ranks of these bottom feeders. These efforts have been totalizing, starting with the President of the United States. Trump himself basically kicked Carlson, Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie out of the party. When Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation came out in support of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, he faced a massive revolt from within his own organization, with mass resignations following soon after. On my NewsNation show “Batya!” I’ve had Republican congressmen, senators, and members of the President’s cabinet come out in full force against any and all efforts to mainstream antisemitism on the Right—naming and shaming the podcasters they find anathema.

It’s not just influencers. Since October 7, Republican voters have become more supportive of Israel—while support for Israel has cratered on the Left. The Right just has no appetite for this—while the Left has made it the main course.

On the Left, people hostile to Jews and Jewish interests are being embraced, campaigned with, and celebrated, even elevated to celebrity status. An antisemite like Hasan Piker is praised, mainstreamed, campaigned with, and sanitized. Someone who doesn’t believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state like Zohran Mamdani is lauded as the future of the Democratic Party. Accusing Israel of genocide has become the cost of entry. Being pro-Israel, as the vast majority of Jews are, is a non-starter on the Left. The word Zionist has become a slur.

How did we get here?

That’s the story The Jews and the Left tells. You can read all about it on June 2.

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I wanted Ben for this special segment because he is the answer to what I think will be the biggest objection to my book—that the real antisemitism is on the Right.

That’s just not true—thanks to people like Ben and President Trump, who drew a line in the sand. But it’s also not true because it’s just not tolerated by the American people.

We also talked about how and why the Left has gone way beyond just criticism of Israel, and why their anti-Zionism has bled into antisemitism.

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It’s the question I get asked most when I travel around the country by non-Jews.

Among other reasons, Jews gravitated to the Left because they saw themselves as an oppressed minority, an immigrant community like others in America. But we weren’t immigrants. And we were never oppressed here.

We were seen by the Founding Fathers and our Christian neighbors as founding partners in the creation of this great nation. There was never an America without Jews, who arrived on these shores in 1654 and never left.

And on the 250th anniversary of our homeland, we owe it to ourselves, our ancestors, and future generations to tell that story and reclaim that heritage.

That’s the story I tell in my book, which comes out on Tuesday.

I was honored to join The Daily Wire to discuss my book with Cabot Phillips. It got emotional, talking about the role The Daily Wire has played in drawing a line in the sand against antisemitism.

Pre-order The Jews and the Left here:

The Jews and the Left

“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” Galindo wrote on Instagram. “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

Galindo, who was ahead of her opposition in recent polls, lost her race by nearly 30 points. And this despite winning a much larger primary in March with 29% of the vote, beating Garcia, who had 27% and resulting in yesterday’s runoff.

Her views on Jews were not known during the primary, say insiders who followed it closely. “What I can tell from previous candidate forums, she talked about the 1%, she talked about going after Trump and ICE,” Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, told JTA. “None of the stuff on Zionism, from what I could tell, was ever mentioned.”

Yet between the primary in March and the runoff yesterday, Galindo promised to imprison Zionists, blamed Israel for ICE, said Jews control Hollywood and the media, said Israelis were trying to do a genocide in America, and said Johnny Garcia was controlled by Israel or Zionist interests.

Galindo of course claimed she was not antisemitic, only anti-Zionist. Like many anti-Israel Leftists, she insisted she was saving the real Jews from the Zionists.

Yet she was reviled by her own party. AOC called her out as a bigot, and James Talarico refused to campaign with her.

As a result of her antisemitism, she went from being the frontrunner to losing by 30 points.

This is obviously welcome news, and not just for the people of Texas. It proves one of my deepest held convictions: You can’t go full antisemite in America and win elections. And that’s apparently still true in Democratic primaries—at least, in Texas.

The American people have a deep-seated disgust for antisemitism. Despite its proliferation among the elites, average Americans pride themselves on feeling protective of their Jewish neighbors. Judaism consistently ranks at the top of the list when Americans rank their view of religious groups.

That’s not new. We were seen as founding partners by our Christian neighbors for the first 250 years of Jewish life in America, as I discovered while writing by new book, The Jews and the Left, which comes out next week. Even in the short periods of American history when it did crop up among the elites, at country clubs and in universities, antisemitism was rarely mainstream and never state sponsored.

Maureen Galindo is far from the first candidate to be shown the door by American voters for her views on Jews. Henry Ford is another good example: Like Maureen Galindo, he thought he could use antisemitism to win an election. He ended up having to renounce it to even be considered.

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Ford, an industrialist and magnate and founder of the Ford Motor Company, was a heroic figure in the American imagination and hero of working-class dignity. He invented the assembly line and standardized auto parts which made cars affordable for millions and millions of Americans.

But Ford was also a rank, outspoken, raging antisemite. He didn’t hire Jews if he could help it, and from 1919 through 1927, he published a weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which was nothing short of a “paper pogrom” as Ford biographer William C. Richards called it, for the outpouring of antisemitism it contained.

Ford was a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite, believing Jews were responsible for all the world’s woes and wars. As far back as 1914, Ford was blaming Jews for WWI. “I know who started this war—the German-Jewish bankers,” he told a Jewish friend, and slapped his coat pocket. “I have the evidence here—facts! I can’t give them out yet because I haven’t got them all. I’ll have them soon!”

Five years later, an executive at Ford’s tractor plant was making a dinner of a candy bar when Ford came into his office and perched on the edge of his desk.

“What’s up that you’re here at this hour?” Ford asked, reaching over and helping himself to a bite of the man’s candy. Ford chewed for a minute and then scowled.

“This stuff isn’t as good as it used to be, is it?” He said, dropping the chocolate back in its foil casing. “The Jews have taken hold of it,” he muttered, standing up. “They’re cheapening it to make more money out of it.” He went red in the face. “I know who makes wars. The International Jewish bankers arrange them so they can make money out of them. We’re going to tell the whole story one of these days and show them up!”

Thus was launched The Dearborn Independent. “The Talmud was translated. European and domestic sources were tapped for information. He came into possession of the Protocols of Zion. Everyone who ever had been done a real or imaginary injustice by a Jew wrote to tell him about it. Articles were brought from special investigators. The ensuing 91 articles were issued in book form, 200,000 words to an edition, and widely distributed. A special printing in leather was prepared for a key list,” Richards reported.

According to the paper’s editor, E. G. Pipp, the whole operation had a sinister cause: Ford wanted to be president and hoped to win votes by attacking the Jews. “When Ford first launched the attack on the Jews he was a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, firmly so in his own mind,” Pipp told the New York Times. “He figured that the prejudice in the small communities throughout the United States was so strong against the Jews that he would gain three, four or five votes there for every Jewish vote he would lose.”

But Ford was wrong about small town America. It turned out that the number of non-Jews who would vote for an unrepentant antisemite was even smaller than the number of Jews, and in 1921, Ford ordered a stop to the same anti-Jewish articles he thought would help him win the presidency.

Even in 1921, going full antisemite was political suicide. It’s not that there were enough Jews to tank an electoral bid; there were simply not enough antisemites in America to make up the difference. As soon as Ford was defeated, in 1924, the articles resumed at pace.

Ford’s exuberant publishing of antisemitic articles was finally put to rest by a defamation lawsuit, which settled when Ford issued an apology to the Jewish people and a retraction. Ford blamed his editor, a claim belied by his own lawyer; when informed of Ford’s apology, Ford’s lawyer said, “Harry, I have a feeling someone is spoofing you. I know Mr. Ford’s attitude pretty well.” American Jews apparently thought the whole thing was pretty funny and wrote ditties about it (“I was sad and I was blue, but now I’m just as good as you, since Henry Ford apologized to me, I’ve thrown away my little Chevrolet, and bought myself a Ford Coupe”).

You can’t go full antisemite and win elections in America.

There was another audience for the Dearborn Independent, though. Ford would go on to be a big player in the Third Reich. Hitler himself expressed his admiration for “Heinrich Ford” to a reporter in 1923. “We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian fascist platform,” Hitler went on. “We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany.”

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Well, that’s half true. There are antisemites on the Right—but everyone with power on the Right abhors them, starting with President Trump himself, who has made a habit of kicking them out of the party and the MAGA movement.

Who better to discuss this with than Lara Trump!

Lara is a Fox News host and daughter-in-law of the President. We had a wonderful conversation and touched on so many things, starting with Trump’s (largely unacknowledged!) friendship to the Jews.

We also talked about the war in Iran lasting longer than anyone thought, the price of gas, how to help struggling Americans and farmers, the anti-weaponization fund that many Republicans have taken issue with, antisemitism on the Right, and more.

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The latest example has been the response to Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss saying that Nazi tattoos should be a dealbreaker for becoming a United States senator. Auchincloss made the comments on CNN in a discussion about Graham Platner, the Democrats’ senate candidate for Maine, who has a giant Nazi tattoo on his chest. He’s had it for 20 years, and only covered it up with another tattoo a few months ago when photos of the tattoo leaked to the press.

And yet, the Democratic establishment has rallied around Platner, Nazi tattoo and all, and he will now face off against Republican Susan Collins in the race to represent Maine. Platner is being paraded around as the future of the Democratic Party—the same party that called every Republican a Nazi for 10 years. Now that party is trying to send a man who had an actual Nazi tattoo to represent them in the Senate.

It’s appalling. Yet almost no Democrats have been willing to speak out against it.

One emerged this weekend: Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss.

“I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying. I hope Maine voters agree with me,” Rep. Auchincloss said.

Seems like a pretty normal view: Out of 350 million Americans, could we have one of the ones without a Nazi tattoo for Senator?

But the Left went absolutely bonkers. For daring to suggest that a Nazi tattoo is a dealbreaker, Rep. Auchincloss is now facing a massive backlash from progressives, who insist that Auchincloss is the one with the problem and should be kicked out of the Democratic Party—for the crime of choosing his principles over mindlessly endorsing the guy withe the Nazi tattoo.

Progressive Twitch Streamer Hasan Piker was especially appalled at the idea of opposing the guy with the Nazi tattoo.

“straight up israel first democrats holy shit,” he wrote.

Did you catch that?

It’s “Israel First” to object to Nazi symbols. Only people who put Israel ahead of America have a problem with «checks notes» Nazis.

Notice how Auchincloss didn’t say a word about Israel. He simply stated that a Nazi tattoo should be disqualifying—for which Piker smeared him as putting Israel above America.

Apparently it’s America First to defend Nazi symbols and those who inscribe them on their bodies for 20 years!

What’s actually happening here is that Auchincloss, a Marine Corps officer who served his country honorably and bravely, is also Jewish, so he is guilty of dual loyalties to someone like Piker, whose anti-Zionism is the thinnest veil for actual antisemitism.

When Auchincloss says Nazi tattoos are a dealbreaker, Hasan Piker hears a Jew undermining America on behalf of Israel.

That’s textbook antisemitism, folks.

How did we get here, where a Jewish Marine and Democratic Congressman is being accused of dual loyalties by his own party for refusing to defend Nazi symbols?

My new book, The Jews and the Left, tells this sad and sordid tale of love and betrayal.

It’s about why Jews became Democrats and why the Left turned on them. And it comes out in one week!

I’d be so honored if you pick up a copy.

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The history of Jews in America began 250 years before the alliance of Jews and the Left, in 1654, with the arrival of a ragtag group of 23 refugees who had been through quite an ordeal by the time they docked in what was then New Amsterdam, a booming Dutch port town on the Hudson. These Jewish Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers were named as four men, their wives, and children. Among them was Jewish Founding Father Asser Levy.

These 23 refugees had been fleeing Recife, Brazil, which had been retaken from the Dutch by the Spanish. Spain was in the throes of the Inquisition and and gave the Jews three months to get lost. 15 ships full of Jews sailed from Recife back to Amsterdam, and 14 made it safely. But it was the fifteenth that would change the course of history, when it was blown off course, beset upon by pirates, rescued by a French captain, and taken where he was headed—to New Amsterdam.

Their problems were just beginning. When the Jews arrived in New Amsterdam, the French captain refused to relinquish their belongings, insisting that the Jewish refugees owed him money for their rescue. The courts were conflicted: The policy of New Amsterdam was to welcome immigrants, but they felt the captain could not just be ignored. It was decided that the Jews’ property would be sold at auction to pay their fare.

How surprised those Jewish refugees must have been when “a group of New Netherlanders who had been defending the Jews arrived early, began buying up items at nominal prices, and then handed them over to their original owners,” as one historian tells it, in “one of the earliest recorded examples of what might be called Christian charity in America.”

It wasn’t all Christian charity all the time. The Jewish pilgrims faced open bigotry from New Amsterdam’s governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who wrote to the headquarters of the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam asking for permission to expel the Jews from the colony. To Stuyvesant’s dismay, the Company told him the Jews must be allowed to stay; it seems the Jews of Holland had written to remind the Company “that many of the Jewish Nation are principal shareholders of the West India Company.”

It would not be the last time Stuyvesant would learn just how much of a thorn the Jews could be in his side—one Jew especially: Asser Levy.

When Stuyvesant got orders to attack the Swedes on the Delaware, he enlisted all the adults in the New Amsterdam colony to stand guard—but not the Jews. Them Stuyvesant excluded “owing to the disgust and unwillingness of the trainbands to be fellow soldiers with the aforesaid nation, and to be on guard with the same at the guard house,” as he put it in a pure projection of his own antisemitism. Instead, he decided that the Jews should be forced to pay a monthly fine in lieu of guard duty.

And to this, Asser Levy simply said no. He would not pay. He would serve guard duty like everyone else.

In his “no,” in even considering refusing the benignly bigoted standard that was imposed on him, Asser Levy drew a line in the sand. He would not accept being told he was a second-class citizen. He would not accept a different standard for himself based on his faith. He would not allow an antisemite to define him, or convince him that he was loathed or less than. He would not pay that tax. He would serve as a guardsman like everyone else.

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Asser Levy’s refusal was a defining moment for America’s Jews about what it meant to be a Jew on American soil. But it went beyond that. It got to the heart of what it meant to be an American.

Asser Levy’s refusal to accept bigotry from the state signified a new standard for all, a standard whereby a man committed to his faith could make such a demand—and be heard; after an initial rejection (Stuyvesant told Levy that “if he was not satisfied with the law, he might go elsewhere if he liked,” something Asser Levy had absolutely no intention of doing), Levy appealed to Holland, which once again informed Stuyvesant that he’d better stop risking the investments of the shareholders of the West India Company.

That settled it: Asser Levy would stand for guard duty.

It was a major victory for the fledgling Jewish community—but it was not enough for Levy. Having been granted the responsibility of standing guard, he went right back to court and immediately demanded the citizens’ rights that accompanied guard duty for the Christian citizens of the colony.

“The Jew claims that such ought not to be refused him as he keeps watch and ward like other burghers or citizens, showing a burgher certificate from the city of Amsterdam that the Jew is burgher there,” the court recorded.

Once again, the request went back and forth to Holland, and on April 21, 1657, the Jews were given rights as burghers in New Amsterdam.

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This zealousness for his rights, for the equal status that was owed him by the state despite worshipping differently, because this was America, dammit, became his signature move, as an American and as a Jew, for the rest of his life. Asser Levy petitioned, again successfully, to become one of just six people licensed as a butcher in the whole settlement, one of the most important jobs of the colony and a job granted only to those deemed to have the finest character. He also became the first Jewish real estate owner in America, and it was in Asser Levy’s synagogue that the first Torah scroll in America would be read from.

But it was primarily as a litigant that Levy came to be known. Again and again, he would apply to the courts to stand up for his rights, whether he was suing the local government or his fellow citizens. The name Asser Levy appears in New Amsterdam court documents more prominently than that of any other citizen. His suits covered a range of topics, from arrests to building contracts to apprenticeships. More than once, he secured the reprimand of an official who had insulted him, or the punishment of a court officer who had failed to do his job well.

Just six years before Asser Levy arrived in America, Ukrainian Cossacks killed 50,000 Jews in mass pogroms. Now, Asser Levy was suing the most powerful officials in the colony for insulting him. From its earliest days, Jewish life in America was destined to be different.

What’s truly amazing is that New Amsterdam’s most litigious citizen 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 19th-century historian Leon Hühner. “It taught his opponents that he was at all times ready to defend his rights.” And in New Amsterdam, this was a precious, even enviable quality. “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.” Levy was frequently asked to be the executor of the wills of his Christian neighbors and was trusted to watch over a defendant’s goods until court decisions came in. He intervened on behalf of Jews in other states and succeeded in having court-imposed fines reduced, “as a token of [the court’s] respect to the said Mr. Asser Levy.”

The impact Asser Levy had on the colony was immense. It was Asser Levy, a litigious Jew, who taught his fellow burghers not only what it meant to be a citizen, what it meant to have rights, but what it meant to hold them dear, to fight for them, to accept nothing less than the fullest respect from the authorities—for it was not the authorities who granted freedom but God. It was something the people who lived here seemed to understand intuitively.

It was its own revolution. For the previous 2 millennia, Jews had existed as a tiny and hated minority throughout Christendom. They were only allowed to live in specific places, work in specific industries, and even marry under specific conditions and auspices. They were subject to conspiracy theories which regularly led to mass murder—that they poisoned the wells, that they murdered Christian children and baked their blood into matzas, that they had killed Jesus Christ, that they manipulated currencies for their own nefarious ends.

Yet from Day 1, Jewish life in America was destined to be different. It’s as if the soil itself, even before there was a Bill of Rights or a Constitution or a First Amendment, rejected the Jew hatred that seeped out of every cobblestone and pillar of Europe, where the very land cried out with the blood of Jews.

On this land, the soil would not cry out. On this land, Jewish blood would not be spilt. No one here would die as a Jew, and if they did, their murderers would be hunted down and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

The more dignified, sensitive Jewish souls who came ashore with Asser Levy may have been content to exist without the malicious antisemitism of the Inquisition they escaped. But it was Asser Levy—gregarious, litigious, obstinate, uncompromising, zealous of his rights and willing to go to court every damn day to have them protected—who prevailed upon a hostile governor to give up the fight against equal rights for Jews in New Amsterdam, and in so doing, taught his Christian neighbors what it means to be an American.

This essay is excerpted from The Jews and the Left, which comes out next week. Order a copy here.

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Why did Jews become Democrats?

And why did the Left turn on them?

My new book answers those questions—and it’s out in just one week.

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You had Tucker Carlson invite a Holocaust revisionist onto his show—not once but twice—and then follow that up with a cozy interview with avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes. You had Marjorie Taylor Greene start accusing Israel of buying our politics and committing genocide. You had Candace Owens go full antisemite. These people also became obsessed with Jeffery Epstein, painting him as a Mossad agent running an international pedophile ring, a conspiracy theory the Epstein files debunked, and they started devoting huge amounts of their content to bashing Israel. When Trump went to war with Iran, they called it “Israel’s war” and broke with Trump, calling him a puppet bought by the Jewish State.

It was distressing. I started to wonder if I was wrong that antisemitism was a much bigger problem on the Left than on the Right. If major Right-wing influencers had turned on the Jews in such a blatant way, didn’t this mean that the problem was truly one shared by both sides?

This is what I imagine will be the biggest objection to my book: Sure, there are unsavory characters on the Left, but isn’t the Right worse?

Actually, no.

Because while antisemites exist on both sides, there has been a massive effort underway on the Right to cleanse their ranks of these bottom feeders, while on the Left, people hostile to Jews and Jewish interests are being embraced, campaigned with, and celebrated, even elevated to celebrity status.

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Today’s biggest headline is the latest example of this.

Congressman Thomas Massie was absolutely trounced in his Kentucky race against Trump-backed retired Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, losing by a humiliating nine points when the final tally came in. It’s true that Gallrein had secured Trump’s endorsement, but it wasn’t new for Massie to run against a Trump-backed candidate, and last time he won handily.

What was new was that Massie built his entire campaign around antisemitic dogwhistles—even bullhorns—about Jewish money undermining American interests. He went on the podcasts mentioned above, as well as many Leftist ones, to promote his anti-Israel message. He made an obsession with Epstein his entire personality and his only legislative goal, stymying the President’s agenda whenever he could. He campaigned with actual Nazis, and he accused American Jews who are pro-Israel of having dual loyalties and undermining American interests.

Massie was always anti-war, but his criticism of Trump’s foreign policy took on a nasty tone that went much further than legitimate critique, as evidenced by the company he kept.

And for his pains, Kentucky vomited him out of public office.

Never a man burdened by the accusation that he possesses an abundance of class, Massie took one last antisemitic swipe on his way out. “I had to call my opponent to concede, and it took a while to find him in Tel Aviv,” Massie said in his concession speech.

It wasn’t only about Jews, of course. Trump effectively campaigned against Massie because, in a district that went for Trump by 30 points, in which Trump is still 10 points above water in his approval ratings, Massie was a thorn in Trump’s side and a spoke in the wheel of Trump’s agenda. As one woman told me on my NewsNation podcast, she stopped voting for Massie because she expected her Congresspeople to help the President she elected, not hurt him.

But it’s not an accident that the same people who have turned on Trump have turned on Israel and the Jews that support it. In both instances, they have turned against their voters, the MAGA base, instead following the clarion call of clicks and online engagement, forming their views to suit the demands of the YouTube comments section, and misreading them for the views of middle America.

Massie’s ouster proved the lengths the Right will go to repudiate gross views on Jews. But it also proved once again how divorced the Podcastariat is from the MAGA voter. They are influencers without influence—not least because of their anti-Trump and anti-Jewish sentiments.

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Make no mistake about it: Massie’s humiliating ouster was no one off.

When Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation came out in support of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, he faced a massive revolt from within his own organization, with mass resignations following soon after. On my NewsNation show “Batya!” I’ve had Republican congressmen, senators, and members of the President’s cabinet come out in full force against Carlson and the efforts to mainstream antisemitism on the Right. Trump himself basically kicked Carlson, Owens, MTG, and others out of the party in a series of social media posts calling them “Low IQ” among other insults.

Meanwhile, on the Left, an antisemite like Hasan Piker is praised, mainstreamed, campaigned with, and sanitized. Someone who doesn’t believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state like Zohran Mamdani is lauded as the future. Accusing Israel of genocide is the cost of entry, and the word Zionist has become a slur. Being pro-Israel, as the vast majority of Jews are, is a non-starter.

The two sides are not the same. The Right may have antisemites—but the party is easily and eagerly purging itself of them. The Left is plagued by antisemitism—because it is embracing its antisemites.

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The problem is, there’s a big cost, and it’s being born by the hardest working Americans. Thanks to the conflict, the cost of gas is up by a dollar a gallon. The cost of diesel, which our truckers and farmers rely on, is up $2 dollars.

Farmers across the Midwest are growing desperate amid rising energy and fertilizer prices.

So, how do farmers and truckers feel about this? Is the trade off worth it?

I spoke to John Boyd, founder of the National Black Farmers Association, and Gord Magill, a truck driver and author of the book End of the Road.

John Boyd told me that when all is said and done, farmers are facing an extra cost of about $100,000 due to gas and fertilizer inflation, and it’s just crushing them.

One thing the Trump administration can do today: Stop farm foreclosures today.

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I usually hate to join a pile on when a person has made a mistake of this kind. But the gaffe didn’t just reveal a shocking level of ignorance; it combined that ignorance seamlessly with the sneering contempt that characterizes today’s Left. After all, the thought the host found so worthy of snide mockery is literally the belief that underwrites the entire American project.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” reads the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. This was the most fundamental belief from which every other freedom stemmed: Our Founding Fathers believed our rights were granted by God and thus inalienable. It was the government’s job to protect those sacred rights, not grant them.

This idea is also crucial to the story of the Jews in America, as I explore at great length in my new book The Jews and the Left, which comes out in a few weeks. In President George Washington’s famous letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790, the President invokes this fundamental concept to make sure Jews understood that things would be different here.

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Washington’s famous letter was written after a trip he made to Rhode Island, which had been the last of the 13 states to ratify the Constitution. “Now that Rhode Island had reknit the old ties, he would go there, meet the leaders, see the people and make it plain that he no longer kept in his heart the resentments the petty spokesman of the little State had aroused,” writes Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman.

At his arrival, the President was greeted by the town clergy, among them Moses Seixas, president of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, who would later become the cashier of the Bank of Rhode Island. Along with the other members of the local clergy, Seixas had written a letter to the President, and the letters were read aloud at a ceremonial breakfast. (Also read to the President was a letter written by another local Jew, one Mr. Jacob Isaacks, who claimed to be able to distill “by a very simple apparatus” sweet water from ocean water. Alas, he could not.)

When the President returned to Philadelphia, he sat down to reply to three of the addresses, among them Seixas’s. Both Seixas’s letter and the President’s were published in the newspaper.

“Sir,” began Seixas’s address, “Permit the children of the stock of Abraham, to approach you, with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits—and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.”

“Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the almighty disposer of all events) behold a government erected by the MAJESTY OF THE PEOPLE—a government, which to bigotry gives no sanction—to persecution no assistance; but generously affording to ALL liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship: Deeming every one of whatever nation, tongue or language, equal parts of the great governmental machine,” wrote Seixas.

Seixas was laying out the contract that the fledgling country had made with its citizens, including those belonging to religious minorities. With words that would become famous when the President repeated them back in his own letter, Seixas offered up to the President a summary of the unique compact America had granted its Jews: to give “bigotry no sanction—persecution no assistance.”

Yet Seixas ended his letter thanking not the President but God, who imbued us with the rights that the United States government would commit to protecting.

The federal union is “the work of the great God, who ruleth in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth,” wrote Seixas, and thus, “For all the blessings of civil and religious liberty, which we enjoy under an equal and benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the ancient of days, the great preserver of men, beseeching him that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised land, may graciously conduct you thro all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life.”

Seixas’ message was clear: The government of the United States didn’t create equal rights—God did.

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Seixas didn’t invent this distinction, of course; he was referencing that central organizing principle written in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson.

That’s why some believe that it was Jefferson who actually wrote Washington’s response to the Jews of Newport, or at least he added a significant line to it.

Washington’s letter quotes Seixas’s verbatim, expanding on the theme Seixas laid out—most crucially, the distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom: “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. “For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

This distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom was critical. It was the difference between rights given by government (tolerance) and rights granted by God (freedom). And it defined 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.

Of course, it takes a person of a different faith to even arrive at such an idea, and while the distinction was not invented for the Jews, Jews would become a symbol for the high ideals this country was founded on.

Putting a bow on the idea, Washington wrote the words that came to symbolize what so many Jews had come to hope for since setting foot on American shores some 100 years earlier, that this was to be our promised land, after millennia of persecution. The words Washington wrote never fail to bring tears to my eyes as I read them: “May the children of the stock of Abraham”—again, borrowing from Seixas—”who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

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How did this happen? How did the Left appropriate the Right’s antisemitic hatred? So shocking is this reversal that if you stop most American Jews on the street in America and ask them where the threat of violence to Jews comes from, most will still tell you that it comes from the Right. Our history of belonging to the Left and fearing the Right is so deeply ingrained that many are simply not able to assimilate this information—that now it’s Republicans that denounce antisemitism and Democrats who cover for it, enable it, promote it.

But what if our historical understanding was wrong too?

That’s what I learned while researching my new book, The Jews and the Left: Even the worst episodes of antisemitism in America were often mitigated by an outpouring of love for Jews from their Christian neighbors. In the weeks before Leo Frank was lynched, hundreds of thousands of letters poured in from across the nation begging the judge for leniency and deploring the conditions of his trial. Henry Ford had to apologize for his antisemitic publication, The Dearborn Independent, when he wanted to run for office, because it was well known that you couldn’t go full antisemite and expect to succeed politically in America. (When Ford’s candidacy failed, he went right back to publishing it.) And when the Klan came for the Jews, the South turned on the Klan.

This is one of the lost pieces of Jewish American history that most surprised me when I first read about it while researching my book. On at least three occasions, the firebombing of synagogues across the South so shocked and angered white Southerners that it resulted in a more general shift in favor of the Civil Rights Movement.

Rabbi Perry Nussbaum of Jackson, Mississippi was active in the Civil Rights Movement. He would visit the Freedom Riders in prison (he was astonished to find the prisons filled with Jews), and he almost died for his activism, twice: Once when the Klan firebombed his synagogue and later when they firebombed his home in the late 1960s.

But the horrific violence against one of their Jewish neighbors, and a Jewish member of the clergy at that, had an interesting impact on white Mississippians: It backfired on the Klan, bringing out deeply protective emotions from the white community—so much so that it affected how they viewed the Civil Rights Movement in the name of which Rabbi Nussbaum was attacked.

After the synagogue bombing, a local paper printed a column attacking the “coward who had terrorized blacks and finally resorted to violence against Jews.” “This is Mississippi and we’ve had enough,” read the Clarion-Ledger. “We’ll get you and all the rest of your gutless friends.”

Mississippi’s Christian clergy, who hadn’t had much to say while Blacks were terrorized, came out to express outrage—even guilt. “We are guilty of having allowed a climate to be created about us which lends itself to the propagation of prejudice,” read an editorial in the Methodist Advocate. “We have been silent in the face of obvious injustice and murderers walk the streets of our state because no jury had the courage to convict them. We have been afraid to get involved in anything that might be the least bit disturbing to the established power structure. Just as long as good men of all faiths remain silent and inert, so long will this violence continue. Just as long as one house of worship is unsafe, so long will all houses of worship be the next target.”

Four days after Rabbi Nussbaum’s home was bombed, the Jackson Clergy Alliance held a bi-racial “walk of penance.” It took courage: Out of fear that they would suffer violent opposition, they made sure to secure armed police escorts to accompany their march. But in the end, they didn’t need them. Jackson had closed ranks around its Jews.

And then, an amazing thing happened: On October 20, exactly one month after the synagogue bombing, a Mississippi jury found members of the Klan guilty for the first time—convicting them for crimes against two Jewish activists, Andy Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, and Black activist James Cheney. The three had been lynched by the Klan for registering Black Americans to vote in 1964.

It was evidence of how deeply impacted the community had been by the violence against their Jewish neighbors.

But this was not the only time this happened. In 1958, the Atlanta synagogue was firebombed by the Klan, shocking the entire city, which always thought of itself as superior to the terrorism of white supremacists. The antisemitic Nazis who bombed the synagogue miscalculated. “They misread the attitudes of the community in which they lived,” Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild of Atlanta later explained in an interview that was part of a collection of interviews with Southern rabbi that was later compiled into a book: To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis in the Civil Rights Movement. “Because the bombing of the temple created a reaction, a response of such horror, of such outrage, that it backfired, and as a result of the bombing of the temple, it now, for perhaps the first time in Atlanta, became possible to speak out. I’m firmly convinced that it was this episode that prevented Atlanta from becoming the same kind of closed society that Birmingham became or Mississippi became … the mayor, the very morning of the bombing, said over TV, ‘This is the harvest reaped by our politicians and elected officials who have encouraged this kind of action.’ Now once you say this then you make it possible for anyone to speak. So the bombing really was quite valuable in the ongoing story of Atlanta and the whole civil rights movement.”

It’s one of the most remarkable untold aspects of American history: The horror that Southern Christians felt at acts of antisemitism done in their name opened the doorway for the integration of Black Americans.

So beloved were Jews in their communities, that when the Klan came for the Jews, the South turned on the Klan.

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Rabbi William B. Silverman of Nashville was another example. For preaching the value of equality before the law from the pulpit, he was beaten up by five men in a Methodist church in April of 1957 after giving a speech. He got calls to the house threatening his children: “We are not going to kill them; we are going to mutilate them. To show people what happens to the kids of a n****-loving rabbi.” But Rabbi Silverman refused to cave. Instead of keeping his kids home from school, he bought a gun. He went on television with his .38 and pulled it out and said, “I couldn’t kill a bird, but I’m going to take my boys to school. I will shoot first and ask questions later.”

His neighbors started calling him the Pistol-Packing Rabbi, and he became something of a cause célèbre in the community. His white Christian neighbors rallied to his defense against those who would dare threaten a rabbi. When White Supremacists threatened to firebomb the Jewish community center, the board of trustees asked the rabbi to call off services, but he refused, and amid a heavy police presence, the community—Jewish and not—filled the pews.

The Klan painted swastikas all over the synagogue, his car, and his house. And in 1958, they made good on their threats and firebombed the Jewish community center. It proved a pivotal moment—not for the Jewish community but for their Christian neighbors.

“What I think the bombing did was that it compelled people to choose sides,” Rabbi Silverman later said. “Before it was just a matter of, ‘Oh, let’s be quiet and let’s not have any outsiders tell us what to do. We can handle our own problems.’ And, ‘Let’s scuttle into caves of silence and be quiet and everything will pass over and be forgotten.’ But they soon saw that it wasn’t going to pass over and the people had to take action, and I was surprised by the number of people that I never felt would take action who did.”

There was indignation, and rage, and it went beyond the Jewish community; the integration of the schools went much smoother after the Jewish Community Center was bombed.

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Contrary to the narrative we’re always told, Jews were not seen as an oppressed minority in America, and what antisemitism existed was by and large relegated to the elites. One sociologist studying the U.S. between 1939 and 1962 found that Southern whites were the least antisemitic of all Americans. Jews weren’t seen as a minority ethnic group but rather one-third of a community of “three great faiths,” and their clergy were afforded a deep respect. From 1945 to 1970, there were at least 27 Jewish mayors across the South, 38 Jewish state legislators, and 66 Jewish city councilmen.

The Southern rabbis invoked the Bible to insist on the compact the United States had made with its citizens in the name of God, and in so doing, they were reprising the role Jews had played for the Founding Fathers—as founding partners in the creation of this great nation.

Fast forward to today: Can you even imagine a group of Democrats organizing a “March of Penance” to stand by Jews and apologize for the way their cowardice enabled the violence, harassment, and murder of Jews last year?

To read the full story of why Jewish Americans felt so deeply connected to the Civil Rights Movement, why they became Democrats in the first place, and why the Left has turned on the Jews, order my book “The Jews and the Left” here. It comes out on June 2.

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Yup. You heard that right: The New York Times, the onetime paper of record, the definitive legacy newspaper of this country, published an outright fabrication—that Israelis had somehow overcome the laws of nature and taught dogs to rape Palestinians.

It’s astonishing that this needs to be said, but “Jews trained dogs to rape prisoners” is an IQ test, and if you believe that, you just failed.

What’s worse is the piece preempted by a day the publication of the most comprehensive report of the sexual crimes that Hamas committed against Israeli men, women, and children on October 7 and after. They gang raped men and women before dismembering them. They sexually tortured the hostages they took, including the little girls. They committed crimes too horrific to repeat here.

Yet the day before this report came out—a report of actual crimes by Palestinians against Israeli Jews—the Times went with a fabricated report of Jewish crimes against Palestinians.

It’s atrocity inversion. It’s victimhood envy. And it’s the purest form of antisemitism.

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How did we get here? How did we arrive at a situation where the New York Times is publishing outright libels against the Jewish State?

That’s what my new book, The Jews and the Left, is all about. It tells the story of why Jews became Democrats in the first place, what made being a liberal so central to the identity of American Jews, and why the Left turned on the Jews.

Of course, it’s not just the Left. This week, Senator Rand Paul’s adult son accosted Congressman Mike Lawler in a bar and hurled a series of antisemitic invective at him. But there is widespread condemnation of antisemitism on the right. Not so on the Left, where it’s seeped into the very bones. Being anti-Israel has become the price of entry to the Left.

And yet, amazingly, most American Jews remain staunch Democrats.

I think it’s because they see themselves as an oppressed minority and identify with other immigrant groups.

But this is a fundamental misreading of Jewish American history. We were never guests here. And we were never oppressed. We were founding partners in the creation of this great nation, and on the 250th anniversary of its birth, we owe it to ourselves to remember that history.

That’s the story I tell in The Jews and the Left, a tale of love and betrayal that begins in 1654 and ends in the here and now.

It’s out in two weeks, and if this sounds intriguing, I hope you’ll pick up a copy.

And in the meantime: Jews, stop reading the New York Times!

The state combines America’s largest cultural and tech hubs with a staggering economy. At 4 trillion dollars, California isn’t just the largest economy in the nation, but the fourth largest economy in the world- larger than the economies of Japan, the UK, and India.

And yet, California is also emblematic of a unique form of blue-state decline. It leads the nation in income inequality. California also has the nation’s largest homeless population—187,000 people representing 24% of homeless Americans live in California, and it ranks among the top states for drug addiction.

Gas and electricity are much more expensive due to environmental restrictions, and huge numbers of Californians are living in “energy poverty”—meaning they pay over 25% of their income toward energy. They are overwhelmingly people of color.

And housing is astronomically expensive and hard to come by thanks to further environmental restrictions about where and how you can build.

It’s a microcosm of what’s gone wrong in blue America: Unbelievably rich, white Californians are living the American Dream- while everyone else is struggling to make ends meet, thanks to the vanity morals of the rich, who don’t have to live with the consequences of their terrible policies. Those consequences are borne by the working class.

But could a shift be afoot?

In California’s race to replace Gavin Newsom, whose term limits as governor are up, two Republicans—Steve Hilton and Sheriff Chad Bianco—have surged to the front lines of the primary, which allows Republicans and Democrats to compete against each other in what’s called a jungle primary.

Meanwhile, in the race for Mayor of L-A, Republican Spencer Pratt is creeping up on his Democratic opponents, driven by rage at the handling of the LA wildfires that left so many without homes.

Could a Republican take L.A. and California? And if so, would the nation follow?

Sheriff Chad Bianco joined me to discuss.

We talked about his views on immigration, how he would convince Democrats to vote for him, why he thinks Republicans are surging, and how he would get down costs in California.

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Some of the fraud has been tied to Somali immigrants, as in Minnesota.

But one program seems to be producing fraudsters at an alarming rate: up to 10,000 were identified by the Fraud Task Force from the Optional Practical Training Program, a visa program that allows international students to work in the U.S. for up to 12 months. The program also allows students to transition to an H-1B visa.

Are there any plans for the Trump administration to scrap the program, given how much fraud it’s engendered?

Dr. Oz joined me to discuss. We also talked about why FDA chief Marty Makary stepped down, and his new initiative to simplify prior authorizations.

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Here’s the full episode of my weekend NewsNation show, for your viewing pleasure!

I spoke to Dan Halloway and Giaccomo Prandelli about the economy, the Trump agenda, and Iran.

Corbin Trent and Harrison Fields debated the antisemitic shift on the Left, Mamdani’s trolling of Ken Griffin and Ken Griffin’s response, and that Mark Hamill twe…

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