That period is over. Accordin…

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My argument is that if you’re less politically biased, especially for the Democratic Party which includes popular media, academic and cultural narratives, then you gain a superpower to analyze the world more clearly. I couched all of this within the Jewish experience of no longer being in the 20th century “Golden Era” of liberal acceptance. Now that Jews are not accepted by liberals, we can better navigate the world. Because we have to.

That’s a lot to bite off. Here’s a reprise of a standalone policy observation that no mainstream media sources will every discuss or analyze: high expenses are a policy decision. Which means they can be un-made if there’s political leadership to do so, like what we’ve seen in the Republican Party for decades. They always seek to deregulate and lower taxes, regardless of the administration.

Now that Democrats are rallying around #Affordability until they go onto their next slogan, I think you’d enjoy a quick take on how to actually make life affordable.

High Expenses Are a Decision

Unaffordability is caused by high prices. Many people on the Left don’t understand this. You won’t see any news articles about it. You won’t hear leftwing candidate discuss it. You won’t read economists analyzing it.

Blue states are expensive because policies in blue states make things cost too much. That’s it. That’s the entire explanation.

Why do they cost too much? Because politicians add expenses to otherwise affordable items, like tuition by subsidizing Federal student loans so colleges charge more because there’s more money out there for them to vacuum up. The more loans, the more the schools charge. There are other reasons for tuition inflation, but government loans are a key factor.

To be even more clear: why does gas cost more in California than anywhere else in the country? Taxes.

Why do Uber and Lyft rides cost more in NYC than any other city? Because Democrats have added multiple fees per ride, including for congestion pricing.

Whether or not you think this is a good idea reflects how much money you have.

Why does suburban housing in metro New York cost way more than similar housing in metro Atlanta? Because local property taxes and a thicket of environmental and labor regulations prohibit new construction, which drives up the cost of available housing stock.

These are decisions made by people, not laws of nature. Meanwhile, more people move to Georgia than New York, because people are smart.

• Red states are cheaper because they make things cost less

• Blue states are more expensive because they make things cost more

Government, at the state or federal level when Democrats are in charge, maintains and even subsidizes high costs, like how Obamacare insulates private insurance companies and ever consolidating healthcare “networks” from competition, or by increasing bureaucracy that add fees to the car share rides I mentioned, or to construction projects, small business operations and anything else you can list: food, labor, infrastructure, entertainment.

Democratic governments increase taxes, penalties, regulations and fees, they don’t reduce them. Why doesn’t this work? Because for some reason Democrats use expenses to fight for affordability, but it just makes things more expensive.

Think I’m making it up? Track the cost-of-living in blue states over the past forty years. Let me know how you like that hockey stick. There are no Democratic policies anywhere in America to lower fees and taxes. If there are, then they always want to increase taxes and fees on others. They can’t make do with less money, they only want more money, which make things more expensive.

In other states, Republicans reduce expenses by lowering costs and fees and by reducing regulations. This makes things cost less.

Affordability is a choice. Look at New Jersey. Maintaining tons of small municipalities with police and sanitation departments creates lots of tiny, duplicative bureaucracies that are expensive to maintain. This require more and more property taxes to fund. This isn’t the weather we’re talking about. Expenses are human decisions. Obviously they benefit some people, like government bureaucrats, municipal union members and others, but outside of funding the police and other vital services, the costs aren’t worth it.

Political leaders need to break norms and buck convention to solve deeply entrenched problems like unaffordability. As imperfect as it is, that’s the essence of MAGA. But there’s no equivalent positive movement on the Left. All they have is complaint and castigation. They’re “anti” this or that, but not “for” anything.

The only people with ideas on the Left are Progressives, but their ideas don’t work. As I mentioned above, they add expenses to reduce how expensive things are. Let me know how that goes for you.

Since liberals won’t evaluate conservative or alternative policies—they label them as fascist or racist or whatever insult they can sling—liberals lack the ability to examine their own policies. This creates governmental inertia that makes it impossible for them to reduce the high costs of living.

This is why Gavin Newsom is going to have a very hard time if he runs for president, because the California track record for affordability is terrible. And since California can’t build things, like high speed trains through deserts, Newsom has no way to demonstrate the value of high taxes and fees. In other words, living in California isn’t a good deal anymore. To anyone.

Just like in New York, more people move from California than to it.

Expense is a choice. If you want to make life affordable for middle class Americans, reduce costs. For some reason, no one on the left understands this, which is probably why there are fewer Americans on the left.

For many American Jews, 2024 was a watershed year. Almost every college campus in America erupted into profound anti-Jewish bigotry — abetted by complicit faculty, administrators, most media outlets, most left wing politicians, most celebrities and most arts institutions. Meanwhile, angry Americans wrapped themselves in keffiyehs and staged wild protests with graffiti and arrests all around me — blocks from my home — not to peacefully demonstrate for peace, but to “flood” Brooklyn, which is the same term Hamas used for its invasion of Israel: the Al Aqsa Flood.

Far left wing Americans adopted the actual language of terrorists who burned, maimed, raped and murdered civilians in Israel. One afternoon, a sudden, illegal protest sprang up around me while I was running errands on Flatbush Avenue, a main Brooklyn artery. Hundreds of people closed down traffic and marched up the street. I turned to them from my spot on the sidewalk and silently made the thumbs down sign. I said nothing. Within moments handfuls of men surrounded me, screaming at me that I was a Nazi if I didn’t support Palestine. A woman shouted at me that I was an example of white male privilege. I kept my thumb down, my back to the wall so they wouldn’t encircle me, my mouth shut. I was alone in the mob. My heart was like a jackhammer.

From that moment, I could no longer abide by the larger left wing movement that incubated this kind of baseless hatred, but on the phone the other day, my old friend told me I was wrong. He said I had been on a collision course with liberal thinking for many years.

He was right.

If you’re a reader of the Thacher Report, you know that I’ve used the evolving Jewish identification with Israel as a way to analyze failings with American, European, Australian and Canadian liberal thinking.

The short hand is that by now, Jews are all “semi-Israeli” as an identity. They’re loyal American or Canadian or Australian citizens, but now like all other immigrant groups, we have a place to hold onto and visit for vacation. We never had that before 1948. Yes, it’s different from Ireland or Mexico, but you get my point. We use Israel as a touchstone to revitalize us. This beats going to a Holocaust museum.

This is great, but it creates a divide. There is now a small group of very liberal, generally less Jewishly literate Jews who don’t think about Israel very often and don’t want it to be a factor in their lives. And there is now a very large group of more Jewishly literate Jews who have family in Israel, go to Israel, eat Israeli foods and think about Israel warmly, like how a Korean American or Italian American thinks of their ancestral lands warmly. While those warm feelings are old news for Koreans and Italians, it’s pretty new for American Jews.

The generalized liberal worldview, which liberals contend is mandatory or you’re a racist or a fascist or some other awful thing, has decided it has the insight to pick winners and losers in the Middle East, which has been having wars every few years since the end of World War I, mostly focused on Israel.

American liberals make their selection of heroes and villains in the wars by peering through the lens of the American Civil Rights movement. Celebrated, rich and otherwise very intelligent black intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates published a New York Times bestselling book with these claims. This kind of Global Jim Crow thinking is as preposterous as it is dangerous — but it’s growing, even if it’s totally irrelevant to the region of mega illiberal Islam vs tiny, more chill minorities like Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Yazidis and Berbers.

For example, how does Global Jim Crow work in Nigeria, Mali or Sudan, where black Muslims massacre black Christians, or more usually, each other?

Despite its defects, Global Jim Crow is required thinking for the entire Democratic Party. This is why even a centrist like Gavin Newsom uses terms like apartheid. (He later walked it back, but it’s hard to unring that bell.) This also means that liberal Americans now partner with illiberal Muslims, because liberals consider all Muslims to be like beleaguered black southerners in the 1950s. They don’t ask a lot of questions when illiberal Muslims slip into the country alongside hardworking normal Muslims.

This may sound like hairsplitting and borderline discriminatory thinking. That sensitivity fades when you’re killed by an illiberal Muslim.

Since 9/11, there have been a score of fatal attacks across the US by Muslim terrorists.

Significant Domestic Muslim Terror Attacks (2001–2025)

• Sept 11, 2001: NYC/DC/PA — 2,977 fatalities.

• July 2002: Los Angeles, CA — LAX El Al Counter Shooting — 2 fatalities.

• Oct 2002: DC/MD/VA — Beltway Sniper Attacks — 10 fatalities.

• July 2006: Seattle, WA — Jewish Federation Shooting — 1 fatality.

• June 2009: Little Rock, AR — Army Recruiting Office Shooting — 1 fatality.

• Nov 2009: Fort Hood, TX — Fort Hood Shooting — 13 fatalities.

• Apr 2013: Boston, MA — Boston Marathon Bombing — 3 fatalities.

• Apr–June 2014: WA / NJ — Cross-country killing spree — 4 fatalities.

• Sept 2014: Moore, OK — Vaughan Foods Beheading — 1 fatality.

• July 2015: Chattanooga, TN — Military Centers Shooting — 5 fatalities.

• Dec 2015: San Bernardino, CA — Inland Center Shooting — 14 fatalities.

• June 2016: Orlando, FL — Pulse Nightclub Shooting — 49 fatalities.

• Oct 2017: NYC — Lower Manhattan Truck Attack — 8 fatalities.

• Dec 2019: Pensacola, FL — Naval Air Station Shooting — 3 fatalities.

• Mar 2021: Boulder, CO — King Soopers Shooting — 10 fatalities.

• Mar 2022: Daytona Bch, FL — Stabbing of the Aultmans — 2 fatalities.

• Jan 1, 2025: New Orleans, LA — New Year’s Day Truck Attack — 14 fatalities.

• May 21, 2025: Washington, D.C. — Jewish Museum Shooting — 2 fatalities.

• June 1, 2025: Boulder, CO — Solidarity Walk Firebombing — 1 fatality.

There has also been roughly an equal amount of fatalities, excluding 9/11, by far right white male terrorists. Liberals can’t say both groups are bad. White right wing radicals are blamed for violence, justly so. Muslims get a pass, like for mourning their dead Hezbollah family members, in the case of the Michigan near-murderer, or you are branded an “Islamophobe” for correctly noting the perpetrators of violence.

I thanked my friend for the chance to reflect on this evolution. This is what good friends do — they act as landmarks and wayfinders, anchors and safe havens. I hope I’m able to reciprocate when he needs that from me.

Thinking back on this perspective — that my pivot from liberal frameworks has been building for years, gives me a chance to share a few lessons learned since then.

For what it’s worth, this slow-then-fast evolution has been pretty obvious to most American Jews and to all Israeli Americans. We’ve noted media bias against Israel since the first intifada in the 1980s. For those of us who have been out of college for decades, we were shocked on 10/7 to learn just how widespread that same anti-Israel bias has become in what passes as liberal arts pedagogy.

Again, it was not only idealistic college students demanding Palestinian extermination of Israel, it was their professors too. And administrators.

The students were just following orders.

Last addendum: working class people of all racial backgrounds have also noticed stark deficiencies in liberal thinking. They have likewise shifted their votes to achieve their interests, for decades.

Tradesmen aren’t necessarily tracking Middle Eastern geopolitics or enduring ethno-religious opprobrium, although white men perhaps sense the same ethnic discrimination Jews feel. Mostly, they're reacting to the Democratic Party selling them out with free trade policies that eviscerated manufacturing.

NAFTA turned America from middle class blue collar jobs into a growing service economy with race-to-the-bottom food and other related jobs, subsidized by welfare and health insurance coverage for very poor people. Now we have a large impoverished class of Americans who have just enough bread and circus to not riot. Republicans helped this too, but that all ended with MAGA. Democrats haven’t had their MAGA moment yet, if ever, so they continue the same tired thinking.

Democrats talked — and still talk — a good game about supporting unions, even as they continue to sell out working classes with free trade policies, like by being against tariffs and for lax immigration. But funny thing, while Democrats were making nice sounds with their mouths about unions, actual union membership has declined. Democrats have no answers or substitutes for empowering workers, so they blame Republicans and do zero for workers, outside of maintaining bottom-level welfare and Obamacare healthcare subsidies to keep them off the streets.

In other words, Democrats align with unions, but against workers.

This explains the Teamsters pivot from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and why it’s obvious to all Americans that blue collar people have skewed Republican for a long time, since way before Trump, while a handful of union elites are Democrats to maintain power.

Viva Democracy. Look at the voting patterns, don't listen to rhetoric.

Here’s a few lessons learned now that I’m politically homeless and free of the mandatory liberal bias. It honestly feels like a superpower.

Trump Always Barks, Rarely Bites

Trump has a very obvious and constantly-repeated playbook that the media is too blinkered and biased to understand. When Trump’s negotiating against anyone, he seeks maximum leverage. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

Don't take him literally, take him seriously. This blindingly obvious insight is missed by liberal thinkers, writers, politicians, pundits and academics. Why? It's not because they lack intelligence, it's because they prioritize their self-imposed mandate to liberate America as if they’re starring in a dramatic movie — they’re the scrappy rebel alliance, Republicans are Darth Vader — rather than acknowledging they’re actually not in a battle for their lives, they’re actually doing great. Instead they should appraise events as they happen.

Here are a few such events.

Trump was born on third base. He used inherited wealth to raise and lose fortunes during most of his adulthood, then he transferred that to media power and finally, to becoming the most powerful person on the planet. He's really, really good at using leverage to achieve his goals.

He has children who love him and work with him, he has healthy grandchildren, and he's happily married. He's a billionaire many times over in a variety of traditional and exotic currencies, in both liquid and hard assets.

He's not stupid. He's not a failure. He's an expert at gaining power.

Now, as a politician, he uses all of his current assets — American wealth, the US Armed Forces, all our soft and hard powers — and wields them as a very, very big stick. The biggest stick in the world. He threatens you with the stick until he gets what he wants. That’s all it is.

Most of the time he just points at the stick. Or he talks about the stick on social media. Rarely does he use it. And when he does, it’s dramatic, scary and brief.

He’s not going to nuke Iran. He’s not doing to get rid of elite universities, as much as I wish he would. He’s not going to make abortion illegal nationally. He’s not even going to empower ICE in sanctuary cities again.

He talks big, scares the crap out of his opponents, makes a few huge dramatic swoops, and more often than not, gets what he wants. Then he stops. He does this to Hamas, to Democrats, to recalcitrant Republican members of Congress, to Iranians, to Venezuela, to Columbia University.

It’s. Always. The. Same. Playbook.

Approximately 0% of the mainstream media understands this.

Racial Favoritism Begets Racism

Racial favoritism doesn’t end racism, it prolongs it. Likewise, liberal posturing that gives lots of coverage to all those brave and noble People of Color or Trans folk or Muslim immigrants is condescending and duplicitous.

News flash: opinions about if you’re oppressed or not don’t relieve people of moral obligations.

When the Muslim immigrant attacker of Temple Israel in Michigan is cast in a compassionate light by the media, not only do we miss what’s rotten in the American Muslim community and is a general threat to them, but we also ignore our responsibility to secure society at large.

Tolerating intolerance only breeds more intolerance. It doesn’t cure it. You can see the exact same patterns regarding Muslim immigration in Australia and all of Europe, which will keep being attacked by local Muslim terrorists until they change their immigration and policing priorities. Diversity is a great value, but only if it applies to people who celebrate diversity.

The lesson is not to have Muslim terrorists in your country. The Left insults this obvious conclusion as “Islamophobia” but it’s really the only way to save your skin. Better to be insulted than dead, as any Jew will attest for the past four thousand years.

This same thinking extends to racist policies that selectively promote people of color over people of non-color. Or women over men. Or Trans over Non-Trans.

It's obviously bad to pick and choose winners based on genitals and melanin concentration when you’re talking about a pool of equally qualified people. I’m talking about getting a job or promotion, casting a movie or matriculating to a university.

Why is it obviously bad to play favorites based on genetics?

First off, who exactly is a person of color? Is a fourth generation Chinese American in the same boat as a recently naturalized Haitian American? What about a white college educated female executive vs a working class rural mom? Do these people share the same interests, challenges and goals?

How do we decide if a rich very dark-skinned person, say a book author, deserves more promotion at a cultural event than a very poor white writer with an equally good book?

You can't answer these questions because these questions are retarded.

High Expenses Are a Decision

Unaffordability is caused by high prices. For some reason, many people on the Left don’t get this.

Blue states are expensive because things cost too much in blue states. That’s it. That’s the whole explanation.

Why do they cost too much? Because politicians decided to add expenses to otherwise affordable items.

Why does gas cost more in California than anywhere else in the country? State taxes.

Why does housing in Westchester, NY cost way more than the exact same housing in suburban Atlanta? Because of local property taxes and a thicket of environmental and labor regulations that prohibit new construction. These are decisions made by people.

Meanwhile, more people move to Georgia than to New York, because people are smart.

• Red states are cheaper because they make things cost less

• Blue states are more expensive because they make things cost more

Government, at the state or federal level when Democrats are in charge, maintains and even subsidizes high costs, like with Obamacare insulating private insurance companies and ever consolidating healthcare “networks” from competition, or by increasing bureaucracy that add fees to Uber rides, construction projects, small business operations and anything else you can list: food, labor, infrastructure, entertainment.

Democratic governments increase taxes, penalties and fees, they don’t reduce them. Why? Because they use expenses to fight for affordability, which makes things more expensive. Think I’m making it up? Track the cost-of-living in blue states over the past forty years. Let me know how you like that hockey stick.

In other states, Republicans reduce expenses by lowering costs and fees and reduce regulations. Sometimes this leads to awful things, like no zoning rules in Houston that led to epic flooding in 2017, but whatever the harms, it reduces cost.

Affordability is a choice. Look at New Jersey. Maintaining duplicative and overlapping municipalities with police and sanitation departments creates tons of tiny bureaucracies that are expensive. This require more and more property taxes to maintain. This isn’t the weather we’re talking about, these are human decisions.

Political leaders need to break norms and buck convention to solve deeply entrenched problems, like unaffordability. As imperfect as it is, that’s the essence of MAGA. Sadly, there’s no equivalent movement on the Left. All they have is complaint and castigation.

The only people with ideas on the Left are Progressives, but their ideas have been demonstrated not to work. As I mentioned above, they add expenses to fight how expensive things are. Let me know how that works out for you.

Since liberals won’t evaluate conservative or alternative policies—they label them as fascist or racist or whatever insult they can sling—they lack the ability to examine their own policies. This creates governmental inertia responsible for high costs of living. This is why Gavin Newsom is going to have a very hard time if he runs for president, because the California track record for affordability is terrible.

Just like in New York, more people move from California than to it. Expense is a choice.

Don’t Listen, Look

Last lesson learned, which I alluded to before: ignore rhetoric, view reality. Don’t listen to politicians, look around. See for yourself what’s happening.

Democrats now talk about #Affordability. What are they doing about it? Have your short and long costs decreased? What levers are they using to achieve this, and how long are they saying it will take? Are the people telling you things are unaffordable usually very rich, like Zohran Mamdani, Gavin Newsom or Bernie Sanders?

Likewise, Democrats say Republicans are fascists, authoritarians, racists and are anti-democracy. Trump fired Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem because they’re unpopular and offended Americans with terrible actions, particularly Noem. How does Trump’s sensitivity to public desires match Democratic claims that he’s a wannabe dictator? I’m not defending Trump or his cabinet members, I’m merely observing that he watches TV, wants to be popular, and does things to make him more popular.

Trump is highly adaptive to public sentiment and pivots all the time, more so than any president in my lifetime. This is the epitome of democracy. You won’t read words like these in the Atlantic, hear them on CNN or in a lecture hall at Princeton.

My point as a citizen whose vote is now up for grabs isn’t to substitute one ideology for another, or one political brand for another, it’s to transcend political biases by being loyal to the American project, trusting your eyes and asking questions.

Or as George Clinton of Funkadelic said, “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

Liberal politics have alienated American Jews — which is totally bewildering since we helped create liberal politics. It’s time for Jews and our allies to recognize the shift and become politically up-for-grabs.

How did we get here?

After black voters, Jews are the second-most entrenched voting group for Democrats. Blacks vote 80% Democratic, Jews vote 70%. We’ve been aligned like this since we started immigrating here by the millions circa 1900. The idea of an American Jew and an American Liberal have been closely intertwined for over a century.

But the Left has shifted in the past 20 years from broadening the American franchise as a pro-American project, like in the Civil Rights Movement, to becoming an incoherent, often violent, anti-Western ideology based on identity politics.

How can I tell? There’s been a huge, unprecedented spike in attacks on American Jews. The Left has abandoned 1960s-era non-violence in favor of militancy and censorship, like during BLM riots, the 2024 anti-Jewish campus uprisings and anti-authority instigations in Minnesota, including disrupting a church service. The Left’s shifts towards violent intolerance has made it impossible for Jews to be liberal.

In other words, what it means to be a liberal has changed. It’s now an angrier version of Civil Rights Movement activism, but since civil rights aren’t the actual battleground anymore, liberals use the fumes of that earlier era to fuel an angry sectarian movement grasping for power.

Liberals have pushed Jews out of the coalition.

Jews have been historically tied to the Democratic Party because, in the 20th century, we identified so closely with the struggles of black Americans. We joined the Civil Rights Movement in vast numbers compared to our tiny population.

Over time, the successful fight for civil rights broadened the definition of what it means to be an American. By the early 2000s, a “regular” American was no longer a white male hetero WASP. Now a “regular” American is anyone with citizenship. The definition of what’s normal transcends race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. This broadening the franchise by transcending racial categories did many great things. From a Jewish perspective, it let us successfully assimilate. We even created our own Reform religious movement to facilitate this.

It all worked wonderfully.

Until it didn’t.

In the 21st century, the Left has abandoned an inclusive, unifying vision of America in favor of ranking people by “oppressed” group identities—ultimately reclassifying Jews as “white settler-colonial supremacists.”

This ideological shift became stark after the October 7 attacks, when progressives — and ultimately all liberals — rallied behind illiberal, anti-gay, anti-women Muslim Palestinians instead of supporting Israel, a liberal Western nation under attack.

It's not just Jews who feel this alienation. The Left now disparages all whites as suspect and racist. A quick review of Hollywood villains, academic admission policies and even museum exhibitions points to whites, males and heterosexuals being disfavored in a bizarre inversion of 20th century segregation, sexism and homophobia.

While the Left became a racial- and gender-based sect that rejects Western values and even basic economics, Jewish identities have also transformed.

We moved from the narrative of escaping Old World trauma towards identifying with Israel — bolstered by programs like Birthright Israel. In a sense, in the past decades Jews have become “semi-Israeli” instead of a vanishing Old Country remnant.

Israel rejuvenated Jews and, not coincidentally, embracing Zionism has turbo-charged our embrace of Judeo-Christian Western values. Why? Actual Israelis and their “semi-Israeli” supporters have had a front row seat to the non-Western Muslim alternatives constantly attacking us, from Tel Aviv to Argentina to Michigan—to say nothing of 9/11 and ISIS.

As Israel became central to our identity, it simultaneously became the number one target of liberal animosity. My proof of this widespread liberal anti-Jewish bigotry is that even centrist Democrats now denounce AIPAC — but not Saudi or Qatari lobbyists with far deeper pockets. Democrats declare Israel is a genocidal or apartheid state.

Both are fanatical libels designed to eliminate the tiny Jewish nation and marginalize its supporters—the very Jews who almost entirely identify as liberal.

Where does this leave us?

Judaism and modern American Liberalism are now at irreconcilable odds. This is a forbidden thought in a Left wing movement with a long list of forbidden thoughts. To break free of their totalitarian worldview, ask questions about Democratic states:

• why are they so expensive?

• why don’t they have new infrastructure or housing?

• why do they increase taxes and reduce services?

• how is it moral to privilege people by skin color?

For me, asking these questions freed me from the Mandatory Liberal Consensus. I can now think independently. Asking hard questions makes you Politically Homeless—and far more empowered as voters.

I’m not just talking about Jews. I’m thinking of the 80% of black voters, everyone in the trades and service industries, and other minorities liberals don’t prefer, like Hindus and East Asians. And all people who agree that Judeo-Christian Western Values, while flawed, are the best options on the planet.

Join us.

I’m still trying to make sense of this bewildering political moment, which is only getting more disorienting with the US/Israel/Gulf/Ukraine vs Iran/Lebanon/Yemen/Russia/China/Spain war. Even grouping the participants is confusing.

For me, the disequilibrium started with the Gaza invasion of Israel on 10/7/23 — and the liberal reaction to Israel fighting an anti-Western opponent that celebrates death more than victory. Hamas had turned their entire territory into a military base. As awful as urban combat is, the IDF estimates they killed 40,000 civilians over 2 years — while eliminating 30,000 combatants. This could have been far, far uglier.

It was confusing that Israel was so vulnerable to attack. It was confusing that at first progressives, and then all liberals, rallied around Palestinians, who, like all Arab and Muslim political movements, are the most illiberal actors on the planet.

At the time, Biden was in charge. It became clear that Democratic support of Israel was conditional on them not fighting too hard, which is a head-scratcher — people wage war to defeat their opponent, not to come to a draw that results in more war.

It was also clear that progressives went from talking about Medicare-for-All to a symbolic and undefined goal of a “Free Palestine” — or they supported Hamas and Hezbollah, like Zohran Mamdani’s wife and I suspect her husband, the entire DSA and tens of thousands of university administrators, professors and students.

Queer activists weren’t supposed to champion violent Islamists who love murdering queer people. Democrats were supposed to support democracy and human rights, not Islamists who love murdering queer people. College campuses were supposed to teach critical thinking skills. They do this, I had thought, to foster open-minded inquiry to improve our country and planet, not to promote ideologies that champion violent Islamists — who love murdering every letter in the LGBTQIA+ BIPOC alphabet. And, ultimately, themselves.

That was confusing.

Then, after many confident polls and rosy media reports, $2 billion burned in the world’s largest dumpster fire, a milky way of star endorsements — and after a media and White House conspiracy to hide the sitting president’s incapacity — Donald Trump won.

This was both whiplash and a neon welcome sign to crazy town.

Reportedly, there was an emasculated “civil war” within the Democratic party, that is, until last week when the centrists surrendered. Gavin Newsom repeated the “Israel is Apartheid” libel — which progressives had been saying for two years. Why did he do this? Because aging centrists need to appeal to their base. Which is young and progressive, which is another way of saying emerging and anti-American.

See any progressives rooting for the US in the Iran war?

What I’m saying is that, by early spring 2026, the progressive base has swallowed the status quo. Everyone in the party is now singing from the same MSNOW NYT TikTok hymnal.

Asking Forbidden Questions

By December 2024, in the wake of the Trump victory and with the Gaza war still raging, I ventured outside the Blue Fortress by asking forbidden questions. Happily, I found a few others huddled outside the walls.

If you’re not here with us already, please ask a few questions.

• Why is disagreement — or even discussion about disagreement — forbidden by liberals? Is liberalism now a religion with unquestionable tenets?

• Why do we accept ranking people based on what we’re told are “oppressed” group identities — rather than evaluating people as individuals? What’s more important: content of character or color of skin?

• Why is being in an Democratic city like walking in the ruins of a once-great civilization? Where are the new tunnels, trains, airports, or housing you see in other countries? Can you imagine New York creating its vast commuter train system now, or even maintaining it properly?

• Why is everything so expensive?

In the waning years of a classic Western Canon college education, I was taught to think critically.

Today, thinking critically has been replaced by social justice activism. Yet my dinosaur self still asks questions in an era of religious obedience. Asking forbidden questions forces you out of the Mandatory Liberal Consensus. It doesn’t mean you’re MAGA; it means you’re untethered, and can judge politicians for yourself.

As crazy as it is to write this, liberals think this is bad.

Trust me, I deal with it all the time.

The 20th-Century Bargain

So how did we get here? Why is a Jewish guy ranting about the fall of the still very powerful Democratic party, all of legacy media, all universities, Hollywood, the recording industry and most museums?

I developed this perspective because I’m Jewish. You don’t have to be Jewish to see the problems within the Democratic Party and wider Liberal movement, but, for me, my identity has been a lever.

What it means to be Jewish has changed in the past few decades, and what it means to be a Democrat has also changed. These identities are now at irreconcilable differences. This paradox is interesting.

Jews are the second-most loyal Democratic voting bloc at 70%, bested only by blacks at 80%. The idea that it’s no longer possible for Jews to be Democrats is painful and controversial. For the record, I also don’t think blacks should be Democrats. They’re mostly working-class and the party hasn’t prioritized working-class people in decades.

Blacks have also been told that DEI is their answer, but it’s just saddled those college graduates and even more dropouts with tremendous debt. Had there been no Affirmative Action/DEI for the past many decades, black tradesmen would have far more wealth than indebted black professionals and therefore far much more power and home ownership rates. It’s not fair, but it’s true.

Gays, blacks, Jews, Asians and Hindus — and all working class whites, Latinos and mothers from all racial backgrounds — should be allies since we have common goals that aren’t represented by the Democrats, but now I’m really digressing.

The black and Jewish voting blocs are deeply linked. Why are they so partisan, and how can that change?

America was great for Jews in the 20th century. In many ways, Jewish immigrants helped create the sense of a post-WASP, post-racial American identity. When we arrived in massive numbers between the 1890s and 1910s, we were as foreign and hated as Irish Catholics had been.

But by the 1990s, we had assimilated so successfully we were considered white. Right along with the Irish. And Italians. And Polish. What were “white ethnics” became “white.” Yes, this all made up and utter nonsense, but welcome to identity politics.

Speaking of utter nonsense, as of today, the Jewish crowning achievement of the 21st century is that we’re now considered white settler-colonial supremacists.

Go team!

This transformation from foreign interloper to loathed white person happened because of Jews participating in the black Civil Rights Movement. Our involvement turbocharged the assimilation process — by changing America. I’m cribbing here from an Atlantic essay by Franklin Foer.

Recognizing the injustice of Jim Crow—because Jews were once slaves and then persecuted for millennia—meant that still fairly new mid 20th century Jews felt the black experience deep in our bones. This second generation of Jews remembered their parents struggles to leave a viciously racist Europe. They saw similar struggles with blacks pulverized by centuries of American slavery and bigotry. It all felt familiar.

A vast overrepresentation of Jews fought and died in the Civil Rights Movement to help black people, and, as a function of that, to expand the concept of what it means to be an American. Remember all those “Whites Only” signs from your textbooks about life pre 1960? They meant no blacks… and no Jews.

This partnership worked. Civil Rights debates broadened from “should black people be excluded?” to “everyone must be included, even Jews.” Immediately following the end of segregation, Jewish liberals, which is almost all American Jews if you’re following my logic, and their cohort focused on women’s rights. That also worked. They took the next major step in the civil rights march in 2015 with marriage equality. That took far too long, but finally it was “normal” to be gay, just as it had become “normal” to be black, Irish, Jewish or a female executive.

For 20th-century Jews, integration and expanding the sense of who gets to be considered an American was our lifeline and our mission.

Why did we care? Unlike the Irish, Mexicans, or Koreans, Jewish immigrants had nowhere to return to. The geography of our past had vanished, and that’s even before the Holocaust.

America was our refuge. By 1945, this refuge became the most powerful and righteous country on the planet. We had won the nation-state lottery.

We even created our own religious movement—Reform Judaism—to facilitate assimilation into this great country. Technically it was a pre-Holocaust German movement, but we recreated it in America. It’s the most successful offshoot movement from Judaism in a thousand years, perhaps since Christianity, or at least since Spinoza.

Reform Judaism, which is almost but not quite a separate religion and culture from traditional Judaism, reduced temple attendance from weekly to a few times a year. It removed cumbersome rules like not using cars on Shabbat and holidays—so you can now live in car-dependent suburbs with other whites. It substituted English for Hebrew, so you don’t have to teach your kids a language they won’t learn in public schools and which you never mastered.

Like the word indicates, Jews re-formed ourselves from a vanished old-world tradition into modern Americans, with now a tolerable amount of quirky traditions and foods. It was all very safe and Disney, which is wonderful. It means we don’t get killed.

That is, until yesterday, when a Muslim man loaded a car full of explosives and drove it into the country’s largest Reform temple.

Zion Beckons

So that’s the Jewish story of the 20th century. We have to be Democrats, they’re the ones who gave us the fast track to inclusion via the Civil Rights Movement.

But then Democrats changed the rules and became progressive, which is another way of saying anti-Western. Not all of them, not yet, there are a handful of holdouts, but that’s their direction.

Witness Newsom talking apartheid, James Talarico saying God is nonbinary, etc. There are no new moderates, but lots and lots and lots of new progressives. And old moderates converting to progressivism. I’ll go out on a limb and say progressives will do most of the talking at the 2028 Democratic National Convention.

Meanwhile, significant numbers of Jews have ditched Reform assimilation in favor of the fruits of Zionism, which is a factual way of saying “Israel.” Funnily enough, Israel and Zionism are the absolute boogeymen of the progressive anti-Westernism that’s taken over an entire political party, all of the academy and all of the entertainment industry.

I know, scary! Our timing is terrible.

So why did these two formerly intertwined movements, American Judaism and American Liberalism, diverge?

1. Israel. By the early 2000s, American Jews were distant from the agony of Europe, and, for the first time in thousands of years, we had a place to go. With the rise of a thriving Israel—that startup nation of tech, military and culinary excellence—we could buy a plane ticket home.

We also were seeing that decades of Reform assimilationism meant that more Jews than not were choosing to live non-Jewish lives by having non-Jewish children with non-Jewish partners. Our culture was disappearing. Non Jews shouldn’t care about this, but to Jews it’s a big deal.

Then a program called, I’m not kidding, “Birthright Israel” sent nearly a million Jewish young people to see the country firsthand. Those youngsters returned to America and told their parents and their friends that Israel is a place you can visit. Yes, it’s that simple. Most older Jews weren’t thinking much about Israel. It’s far and with Florida so close….

By the 2010s, the knock on effect of Birthright Israel spread into almost all of American Judaism, especially Jews born after 1990.

Now, nearly 20% of all American Jews have physically been to Israel thanks to the program, and all these people have friends and family. Still others go to Israel on other programs, like I did. At this point, according to the Pew Research Center, 82% of Jews view Israel as vital to their identity.

I can’t underscore how profound Israel is for Jews. It means your Jewishness is no longer based on stories from dead great-grandparents or in rituals conducted in an unintelligible language. Your identity is no longer rooted in a negative—vanished and painful Old Country death factories—but in a positive: the building of Jewish life in Israel, which has delicious food and very good looking people.

Your identity is no longer based on a desiccated fossil found in the Dead Jew Museum. Now you can go and touch and feast and study and pray. In the sunshine. With beach volleyball pickup games.

This new Jew is semi-Israeli. Not because he’s studied how 19th century Jews participated in European post-imperial nation building and called it Zionism, but because walking around Jerusalem beats rewatching Schindler’s List.

2. The Left Leaves the West. While Jews were emerging as post-Holocaust semi-Israelis, the Left reformed itself into something either very sinister or very incoherent, I still can’t decide.

A movement once focused on expanding the American Dream transformed into an anti-Western, sectarian crusade that has very odd goals. And very resilient policies of ranking people. Inclusion became Exclusion: Us vs. Them. Coastal vs. Flyover. Indigenous vs. Colonizer. Cancel Culture vs Free Speech. People of Color vs Whites. Queer vs Everyone Else.

What was once a project to perfect America became a dismissal of the West as a project of straight white male supremacism. The liberal narrative is that America is a nation of institutional racism that must be overturned. Right now! ASAP! Put on your keffiyeh and roll!

Centrist Democrats want to do this slowly, without the fussy headgear, because they’re old and rich. Progressives want to do this fast since they’re young and broke.

Where does that leave the 49.8% of Americans who voted for Trump in 2024? (Harris won 48.3%) According to the mainstream liberal media narratives, they are all racist fascists who hate democracy—even if they democratically elected a leader who obeys the courts, widened the electorate and will leave office when the rules tell him to. If Democrats enjoy success in the midterms, which is likely, then that’s a very weird way for Republicans to thwart democracy.

If the Left is no longer in favor of an America you or I would recognize—the very country that guaranteed Jews safe harbor—and if they invent stories that don’t track, from Queers for Palestine to Trump is Totalitarian, whom should Jews vote for now?

And… if the Left thinks Israel is far worse than Nazi Germany, and we as Jews are all now semi-Israelis, how can we vote for them? Consider the Maine Democratic Senatorial primary candidate who has a Nazi tattoo, but he calls Israel genocidal, which is the progressive way of saying Nazi.

It’s super confusing. Don’t vote for him.

This is why it’s a major betrayal (and I think a validation of what I’m been saying for two years) when a centrist politician like Gavin Newsom proudly declares he will “never” accept AIPAC money and that Israel is an apartheid state.

It’s time to join hands with others who agree with us, leave the entire liberal movement, and think for ourselves.

That may make us all politically homeless, but it’s good to enjoy fresh air.

If you’re new to him, ALK is a brilliant anthropologist who studies the phenomenon of leftwing antizionism. He started by focusing on academic antizionism, which has become axiomatic for elite liberal institutions — he went to Yale, the University of Chicago and McGill. He knows the terrain well.

Since then, Adam has expanded his critique to cover the wider phenomenon, again mostly on the left, of wanting to eradicate Israel.

Yes, antizionism means let’s eradicate Israel.

Who else in recent world history wanted to eradicate the (People of) Israel?

If Zionism is the 19th century term for Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, then being against it means No More Jewish Country! Since there are 10 million people living in that country who would prefer to stay… well, now you understand why Jews all over the world aren’t keen on it being eradicated. Again. The fact that the global left, from seemingly centrist Democratic Senators to fiery progressive activists all want the same thing prompts me to remind you of the old cliche:

Politics makes for strange bedfellows.

This sums up Adam Louis-Klein’s entire 2-hour talk. Antizionism is yet another hate movement designed to kill all Jews, and failing that, to at least murder most of them. The majority of Jews either live in Israel or support its existence. To be “antizio” is to exclude Jews based on the premise that they’re existence is wrong. Surely the logic follows that death is the desirable outcome.

For example, if you want to “Free Palestine,” and the leaders of the Palestinian people have advocated for killing Jews wherever they find them for the past 100 years, then you know what will happen when Palestine is “free.”

You don’t need to be a historian to know what happens each time local Arabs advocate for political control, just visit an Israeli cemetery.

The fact that cheery people like Zohran Mamdani share the same pathology as Adolph Hitler, most American university faculty and Tucker Carlson is a long story with intertwining narratives.

They all come to the same conclusion: hating Jews is good for business.

Normally I write long essays about how the left took a bad turn after the Civil Rights Movement. My thesis is that I can no longer support the left — at least in their current iteration as “social justice” advocates — because I believe they committed ideological suicide in the past forty or so years.

Democrats have few solutions to our pressing problems.

1. Democratic policies increase income inequality, restrict housing and can’t build infrastructure everywhere they rule, California and New York are prime examples — while raising taxes and fees.

   Progressives are simply a more refined version of mainstream status quo Democrats. Raising taxes, adding regulations and creating bureaucracies haven’t solve any problems, but this is the shared platform of centrists and progressives.

2. The Democratic party shifted from 1960s era of enfranchising all Americans, like fighting for black people to have the right to vote and for women to be legally protected from discrimination, to becoming an anti-Western movement. Traditional and popular beliefs about humans having two genders, that it’s bad to rank people based on skin color and victimhood stories, and that countries should control their borders are now negated by Democrats. It’s weird, but if you criticize them, you’re a fascist racist “-ophobe.”

You get it: Democrats have bad policy track records, anti-American beliefs and don’t allow discussion.

Likewise, Democratic states have stagnating infrastructure, insanely expensive housing and massive amounts of either very poor or very rich people.

Getting back to Adam Louis-Klein: he says that Antizionism is a hate movement that targets Jews. It’s not a courageous political stand by renegade freedom fighters at expensive colleges or Hollywood studios, it’s just another hate movement in the very, very, very long history of anti-Jewish hate movements.

In the medieval era, Europeans targeted Jews because of their beliefs — they wouldn’t accept Jesus as messiah. They must change that belief or die.

In the 19th century, when nation-states rose up, Europeans targeted Jews because they didn’t want them to join their new countries as equal citizens.

What had been about belief discrimination became racial discrimination. There was now no way for Jews to exist in the new political order. The tidy solution: eliminate the Jews.

In the current era, Europeans and their liberal American counterparts target Jews once again because of their beliefs — Jews want sovereignty in a state the size of New Jersey to celebrate their culture and to protect themselves. This is intolerable. The tidy solution: eliminate the Jewish state.

Jews who share the belief that Israel is bad are allowed, so like in the medieval era, some Jews are OK, but most Jews have to go.

How the Left got here is a slightly more complicated story. Adam has talked before about the Cold War, when the faltering Soviet Union targeted Jews who wanted to leave as “Zionists” and libeled them as racists or Nazis. They did this to deny Jewish people the freedom from leaving a crumbling empire which would have exposed just how crumbling it was, and to support relatively new Arab countries like Egypt as allies in the Communist vs West carving of the world.

These “antizionist” ideas caught on in the Arab and then the liberal American worlds, transmitted via scholars like Edward Said and many others.

This funny combination of Arab supremacy — that no one can have power in the entire Middle East except for Arab Muslims, not Jews, Kurds, Berbers, Christians, Yazidis, etc — dovetailed in the 1990s with the chic anti-Westernism of mostly wealthy white people. These wealthy white people leverage their alliance with mostly wealthy radical black and brown people — like AOC, Zohran Mamdani and BLM — to justify their bigotry.

The fact that this seems so obvious to me and many friends is deeply frustrating.

Adam Louis-Klein, like Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib before him, has a simple mandate.

Alkhatib wants to free Gaza from Hamas.

Louis-Klein wants people to understand that trying to destroy an entire country is hateful.

Yes, even Jews deserve the right to live in freedom. Criticizing the messiness inherent in sovereignty is fine, along as it’s done equally everywhere. Criticizing the specific sovereignty of one group is hateful.

Antizionists, who have long ago taken over elite academia, most of the DNC and all of the mainstream media, base their hatred on three libels — which is a fancy way of saying lies.

Lie #1 - Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Antizionists like Zohran Mamdani and others call this the “ongoing genocide” — even after the October 2025 ceasefire that ended the main war. Somehow Israel is still killing all Palestinians, or at least all Gazans. You can see evidence of this belief in NPR reporting that talks about Israeli strikes in the part of Gaza they don’t control, while the reporter omits mentioning Hamas attacking Israelis.

Claims of genocide are standard for leftwing politicians (like AOC in Munich the other week) and their media/academia/culture enablers. It is not true.

Depending on what you mean by the term Palestinian, Israel contains millions of Palestinian who enjoy life as democratically engaged citizens with full civil rights. There are no death camps, there are no sterilization programs, in fact, the Israeli Arab/Palestinian population is growing and has full representation in every level of Israeli society, like political parties, Supreme Court justices, sports stars and so on.

Like all democratic societies, there are richer and poorer people, often arranged by ethnic groups in unfair ways. It’s a problem endemic in the US, all of Europe and everywhere else on Earth.

Income inequality is bad, and few politicians in America — or anywhere else — seem capable of alleviating it. Republicans will likely lose midterms elections for this very reason. Is that genocide?

In Israel, way more Arabs than Jews are poor, per capita. This is obvious to any visitor to Israel who goes to an Arab village and an Israeli suburb, but then if you go to Jordan or Egypt, you’ll see that poverty is universal.

In other words, there are almost no middle class Arabs anywhere. Nearly everyone in every Arab country is profoundly poor. The Middle East is one of the poorest regions in the world.

What you notice is that many Israeli Arab villages share similarities with Arab villages across the region. Is that fair to Israeli Arabs? No. Is it reality? Yes. None of these inequities and trends have anything to do with genocide, apartheid or “white settler colonialism” which are the second and third lies.

Let’s look at Gaza in particular. Why, after over two years since Gazans attacked Israel in a truly genocidal bid to kill all Jews, especially young women and babies, is their population at 2.1 million while Israel has one of the most advanced militaries in the world?

Is Israel bad at genocide or is there no genocide?

Wait a second, didn’t like a hundred million Gazans die in the war? Isn’t the IDF more ruthless that other armies and tries to kill all Palestinian civilians as ethnic cleansing war crimes?

The total number of civilian deaths in unknowable since Hamas’ reported numbers aren’t verifiable and they are incentivized to publish shocking, fake numbers to win global left wing sympathy, which has worked wonders.

That’s why white young women with liberal arts degrees wear keffiyehs as a virtue signaling accessory, why a handful of low income European countries like Spain recognize Palestinian statehood despite the absence of a state called Palestine, and why progressive American politicians leverage liberal outrage at supposed Israeli perfidy to win elections.

(A recent DNC report shows that Kamala Harris lost votes by not wholly supporting Palestinians in the recent conflict. Had she denounced Israel and supported whatever is meant by “Free Palestine,” she most likely wouldn’t have lost every swing state, especially Michigan where Arab American voters broke for Trump. Remember, hating Jews is good for business.)

Here’s what the latest research says: Israel and Hamas now both agree that around 70,000 total Gazans died in the Israel/Gaza war. Where they disagree is the number of civilians vs. combatants.

Since I trust a liberal democracy with a free press more than a theocratic terror group, which apparently distinguishes me from every mainstream media outlet and academic association in America, I feel more comfortable going with the Israeli assessment that around 30,000 men were killed, meaning that there was around a 1:1.3 death ratio, meaning, for every 1 combatant killed, 1.3 civilians die.

While absolutely horrific, that is lower than most conflicts and… not a genocide. To prove the point, if Gaza hadn’t invaded Israel, those people would be alive.

No one calls what’s happening in Ukraine a genocide. While most of the deaths — over 2 million so far — are soldiers, roughly “tens of thousands” of civilians have died since Russia invaded Ukraine. Twice.

Why are Democratic political groups alleging genocide for Israel but nowhere else?

Genocide is a lie designed to attack the existence of Israel. It’s the foundational creed of modern day antizionism.

The second and third lies — what Adam Louis-Klein calls libels — are that Israel is an apartheid state, which is the Afrikaans term for South African extreme racial segregation that ended in the ‘90s. And that Israelis are “white settler colonialists,” either like the British in America or the Belgians in the Congo, it’s never explained.

These lies are easily debunked. Arab Israelis, like Jewish Israelis, enjoy full civil rights and participation, even though there are persistent ethnic inequities.

In America, most black people are poorer than white people per capita. Black people hold fewer mortgages and are under represented in the white collar economy. While this is an ongoing problem few politicians seem able to resolve on either side of the aisle, it’s not apartheid. In a very, very different context and region, you see similar dynamics in Israel and in every European country, across Asia and so on.

As for white settler colonists, a casual visit to Israel will reveal that half the population are “brown” since about half of Israelis are Middle Eastern Jews.

Middle Eastern Jews call themselves “Easterners” if you directly translate the Hebrew term “Mizrachi.” Like the vast majority of American Jews who came here from Eastern Europe, I’m from the other main ethnic group called Ashkenazi, which is an ancient way of saying “Northerner.”

The point is that calling Israel, or the IDF, an example of the American concept of whiteness requires a profound ignorance of the country and its people. Literally half of Israeli Jews are from the Middle East with lineages stretching back millennia.

Not for nothing, there’s a growing “black” Ethiopian Jewish population with a relatively high birth rate. Would an Ethiopian Israeli enjoy DEI privileges at Harvard? Or would her being a “white settler-colonialist” cancel that out?

This is why I’m against DEI. It involves ranking people on crazy and arbitrary measures, which is bad. All people are equal.

As for colonialism, again, a casual glimpse at the Bible will reveal that Jewish people have lived in the Land of Israel since Abrahamic times and that yes, the Bible was written in Hebrew — the language of the Jewish people. Jews haven’t always had sovereignty in the land, but they’re the “indigenous” people, to use a favorite phrase of the Left.

As we know, all indigenous people are superior, noble victims who demand their stolen land back by any means necessary.

The more vexing question, which Adam Louis-Klein alluded to, is what should Americans do who agree with his conclusion that antizionism is a growing hate movement supported almost entirely by one of our two political parties?

Stay tuned.

I’ll recap our discussion soon. For now, here’s a fresh introduction.

I’m Zachary Thacher, a guy living in New York who loves his son. When I’m not changing diapers, I run a boutique marketing agency. We’re a team of experts who develop digital strategies and websites for corporations and non-profits.

At Thacher Report, I write and podcast about politics and culture with the following perspective: Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. We’re not a religion like Christians or Muslims. We’re more like Native Americans, who blend geography, belief, language, ethnicity, culture and history into a collective identity.

This is our story.

A long, long time ago we were a family of nonconformists from northern Iraq who settled in Canaan. Soon we moved to Egypt due to #climatechange. We had lots and lots of babies, formed 12 tribes… then the ancient Egyptians enslaved us.

We emerged from Egypt as hundreds of thousands of people. Where did we go? Back to Canaan! On the way, our leader wrote the Torah. Did Moses invent it or did God dictate it? Your call. It’s like the Constitution, but with stories mixed in with laws such as the Ten Commandments.

Now we’re a people with a purpose. We took over Canaan and forged the Empire of Israel. It was tiny but with great food and cool innovations, like the alphabet, weekends and monotheism.

Monotheism is particularly cool because knowing there’s one God means all people are equal. If there is one supreme God, then no one can be like this one supreme God. All people are equally not God. You can’t be half God or part God, you’re just a person.

As a twist, since we believe humans are created in God’s image, that means all people are almost sacred. Doesn’t matter where you were born, how much money you have, what you look like, or even what your ideas are. You are important.

This innovative God-idea is a lever that lifts you past a world of subjective and arbitrary gods and rulers who claim special rights that, funnily enough, only serve their own interests. No longer can someone say, “I’m better than you” and subjugate you. God means we must treat all humans as equal — and ensure those rights with the Rule of Law.

There is no divine right of kings or aristocracies allowed. Poor people deserve as many rights as rich people. That’s what Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a Tooth means. The wealthy can’t buy their way out of trouble, all eyes and teeth are equal. Please don’t poke or pull them.

The biggest idea is that freedom is our default setting.

Two thousand years later, and after much killing of Jews for no reason, Europe caught on to these great ideas. Unfortunately they removed the God part — but they embraced the benefits of equality and liberalism.

Can political values last without God? Not sure, but the American and French Revolutions were a good start.

Back to Ancient Israel: the empire had epic agricultural parties at a very big temple — but there were devastating setbacks from Assyrians, Babylonians and Greeks who attacked the tiny, non expansionist Land of Israel for no reason. (Seeing a pattern?) Even with the occasional loss of political control, we soldiered on in our small corner of mostly inland territory. We had milk, honey, you name it.

Then the Roman Empire ended our roughly 1,500 years of sovereignty in 70 AD.

Millennia later, during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, some European Jews decided to reclaim Israel. It took them a hundred years of backbreaking agricultural work. While they were doing this, Europeans decided to murder all Jews.

In a little over 10 years, in a coordinated and often voluntary effort, they killed 6 million Jews in specially-built death factories. There were 9.5 million European Jews before they started. To this day, the global Jewish population (around 15 million, that’s it!) is still recovering.

Europeans also killed millions of other people they didn’t like, but they paid special attention to massacring Jews. Eventually, and it took a while with many sacrifices, Americans stopped the Europeans.

This takes us to 1948. By then, empires with royal families were cliché — and Ancient Jews weren’t totally sold on the idea of kings in the first place — so all those reclaiming Jews decided to make Israel a socialist democratic country.

Remember the good ideas Europeans adapted late in the game? They came in handy.

Now that the World Wars had ended all the empires, including the Ottomans, German, British, and Japanese, many other countries were created or became independent: India, Bangladesh, later Pakistan, every Arab country and many African and Asian countries.

During these formative years, ethnic populations swapped places with each other as people made new borders and territories. It was brutal, painful and global.

In India and Pakistan, Muslims went north, Hindus went South. Middle Eastern Jews from places like Libya and Iraq went to Israel, many local Arab Muslims moved out.

Isn’t the name confusing? Is it Israel or Palestine? It started as Canaan, became Israel around 1,500 BC, then the Romans fought the local Jews, won several wars, and renamed it Syria Palestine. This is a little after the time of Jesus. Why Syria Palestine? Why not Rome Southeast?

The Romans wanted to deny Jewish claims to the land because the Jews, even though they lost the wars, kept fighting them. Romans picked a name of a long vanished tribe of Philistines, and used the name of their northern territory which is still called Syria. Philistines were an ancient Greek people who had lived in the Gaza area. They disappeared around 600 BC. The word “Palestine” is the Roman Latin way of saying Philistine, which is… Hebrew! We’ve been there a loooong time.

Syria Palestine is a nasty bit of Roman propaganda, but winners get to decide these things, and they get to use their own language. It’s happened in every place on Earth for all of human history.

So what about the Israel name? And who are Palestinians now?

When Jews reclaimed the territory in 1948, they went back to Israel as our indigenous homeland name. Israel refers to our biblical forefather, Jacob. It’s like America is called America after the guy Amerigo who realized this hemisphere wasn’t in fact India.

Sixteen years later, in 1964, local Arabs claimed the name Palestine. Why do Syrians and Jordanians and Egyptians get to have all the fun names? Local Arabs wanted a name too! The meaning behind the name, which has nothing to do with Arabs or Islam, is that they’re saying they don’t want Israel, give us back the old times, just no Romans please.

Within a few years, slightly more Jews who had been in Arab countries moved to Israel, while slightly fewer Arabs who had been in Israel moved out. Many of these people were forced to do this. They gave up property, houses and careers. Like I said, not a fun process.

After that, many Arab nations (and eventually Iran) waged non-stop wars against Israel for no reason. The outcome is that Israel emerged as a local, and then a regional military superpower. To this day, Arab countries remain poor and illiberal, with a handful of rich and illiberal exceptions. Despite their military successes, Israel remains a tiny non-expansionist country, just like old times.

Wait, why all the wars are why do they still continue? Isn’t all the drama from the World Wars a long time ago? Turns out Muslim nations aren’t keen on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Middle East — unless they lose many wars to Jews.

Ironically, people in the West who celebrate diversity and advocate for equal treatment eventually decided they aren’t keen on Israel existing. It’s a strange situation that makes me wonder if the Godless values from those American and French Revolutions need an update.

Since those people are long dead, I can only talk about it to liberals today.

This is where the Thacher Report begins.

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Like many of us, and maybe I’m projecting here, the hosts are upset about the endless controversy around the Jewish people and the brutality of warfare waged against us.

Since earning the ability to fight back for the past 78 years, it makes the continual anti-Jewish violence that much more confounding. We’re supposed to be soulful nerds who prioritize studying, praying and raising children — whom we instruct to study, pray and raise children. That’s how Judaism has worked for the past 4,000 years.

How do we make sense of a world where others continually try to kill us, and when we fight back and win, how do we process all the bloodshed?

The fact that this an agonizing moral situation in a way is a privilege — in earlier millennia we’d simply be wiped out or become refugees — but it’s still a messy affair, to say nothing of the terrible loss of life for innocents.

The couple who invited us to their home are earnest and involved. They want to figure out this conundrum of our survival-via-violence like it’s an impossible puzzle, but one we can’t stop trying to solve.

I suspect Jews have been hosting discussions like this for a very, very long time.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is a public policy think tank kind of person. How these people earn a living has always been a mystery to me. I run a small business. We makes websites in exchange for dollars. That’s about as sophisticated as my mind can handle.

A little digging shows that Ahmed is a Senior Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council, which earns him around $200,000 a year. He’s basically a freelance academic. Ahmed writes, talks, travels and runs his own non-profit. He’s prolific and tireless — he went from our talk of well over an hour to give yet another talk at a large Reform institution nearby.

Funnily enough, he’ll be the least liberal person in the room.

Ahmed — he’s very casual and insisted on using his first name — was born in Saudi Arabia to a Gazan family, who returned to Gaza when he was 10. His teen years were harrowing — two friends were killed in an IDF attack on Hamas and he lost the hearing in his right ear.

In 2005, at age 15, he left Gaza for Northern California. There was a brief window for Gazans to leave the enclave when Israel withdrew from the territory and the US State Department program extended some visas.

Fast forward to 2026. Ahmed drops slang like the American millennial he is. He holds a cherished dark blue passport. To me at least, he also has the emphatic directness typical of Israelis. He’s warm and sunny like a Californian; he’s also very direct.

Ahmed advocates for Gaza. He’s deeply plugged into life there and he wants to share what he thinks are the daily issues, desires and needs for Gazans — mostly because those issues, desires and needs are hopelessly distorted by the mainstream media, “Pro Palestine” (his air quotes) progressives and Hamas-sympathizers in the Arab American NGO work, like CAIR. He didn’t talk about the Democratic Party or anything domestic, but he implies they’ve been less than helpful to Palestinians by abetting the Hamas regime for the past 17 years.

Ahmed was a breath of fresh air. I felt very validated to hear his perspective, which I’ve been articulating for at least the past two years. To hear a knowledgeable Palestinian academic point out the same problems with press narratives and NGO actions was refreshing — and ultimately frustrating because these are manmade problems easily corrected. From my perspective, thankfully the Trump administration is taking a very different tack from prior Democratic and Republican governments.

Not only does Ahmed have deep relationships in Gaza, he also leads Realign for Palestine. Among other things, they use social media listening tools to capture Gazan sentiment. According to his deputy director Melanie Robbins, they find Facebook and Telegram content by Gazans who express themselves beyond the reach of Hamas censors — or the censors of the mainstream press, which Ahmed implies are almost as bad. In other words, they make a convincing argument that they know far more about sentiment in Gaza than other sources. Millennials with digital tools for the win.

But none of this is complicated. Ahmed advocates for Gaza. He’s passionately anti-Hamas, and, here’s the news hook: he blames Hamas for the endless atrocities and subjugation.

This is what (sadly) makes him so radical. His perspective is not what you see reflected almost anywhere in the liberal media/academia/Democratic Party. In a nutshell, they skirt blaming Hamas for anything and focus their ire on Israel, Zionism and preach a “Free Palestine” message that fails to address the big question of “how” can Palestine be free. They never tackle the question: how can Palestinians live free lives with such awful leadership?

To this day, in the press you read endless stories and op-eds about the perfidy of Bibi Netanyahu (a convenient synecdoche for indigenous Jewish sovereignty) and genocide, but almost nothing about the ceaseless violence caused by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, et al.

What’s so refreshing is that Ahmed articulates the true situation, which necessitates a complete inversion of the press, party and pedagogy narratives that have fed liberal Americans for the past several decades.

Tragically, Ahmed lost 30 family members in IDF strikes in the recent war. Like I said, he has hearing loss in his right ear due to an IDF strike when he was a teen.

I can’t imaging he’s a fan of Jewish sovereignty, but he’s smart enough to realize the source of culpability for his and his people’s suffering. He said he sometimes aligns with IDF narratives assigning blame to Hamas.

That’s remarkable. Terrible for him and for his family, but a remarkable admission of the reality of the situation.

We read in the press, and hear in august lecture halls and at the Academy Awards podium that the IDF are white settler colonialist Nazis who hunt Palestinians for sport.

Ahmed has another perspective.

Here’s an exegetical example of Ahmed’s point:

• Egypt stopped attacking Israel in 1978

• Israel hasn’t attacked Egypt since

• Egyptians now live in peace

Ahmed is calling for the same thing for Palestinians. Stop the fighting, enjoy quiet.

Ahmed describes Gazans as living in a mafia state run by religious extremists with guns. The experiment in Gaza sovereignty, which started in 2005, has failed.

He says Hamas squandered the most amount of aid any populace in the world has ever received in recent history.

I’ve been saying the same thing for years — the trillions of dollars spent in Palestinian territories, which come from governments and NGOs, has been worse than a complete waste of money — it’s enabled mass murder, to say nothing of the terrorist oppression of Palestinians themselves.

Ahmed is here to say lots about the terrorist oppression of Palestinians themselves.

If you’re not familiar with the history: Israel won control of Gaza from Egypt after the 1967 Six Day War. Eventually, Israel built thriving agricultural settlements, and then in the tattered remains of Oslo-related diplomacy, completely withdrew in 2005.

Two years later, Hamas staged a violent coup against the PLO. It’s ruled Gaza ever since.

As we’ve learned in the latest war, Hamas stole billions of aid dollars and goods over the past 17 years and turned the territory into a massive military installation with the most extensive tunnel infrastructure in the world. Yep, all those good-hearted NGO and foreign dollars created weapons and military conduits to kill people. Few Gazans received the aid.

As of this writing, Hamas rules 47% of the territory. Israel commands the larger half. Talks of moving to a second phase of rebuilding require Hamas to disarm. That’s like asking a UFC fighter to become a doula.

The end game, as Ahmed sees it, is a two-state solution. I think that is laughably impossible, but if politics is the art of the impossible, then he’s the kind of man who can do it — the catch is that only MAGA Republicans have the perspective of a Gulf-like rebuilding. Democrats are still talking about “the resistance” and colonialism. Last I checked, noblesse oblige doesn’t build housing.

How do I know Ahmed is the man for the job of Palestinian leadership? Because he fearlessly tells the truth. He eschews pieties and is unafraid to mock the conventional wisdom — that same wisdom that has guaranteed Palestinian suffering since December 8th 1949 with the founding of UNRWA.

I’m editorializing, Ahmed didn’t get into Palestinian history and the misery the UN has wrought in the region, but he took aim at both the liberal and progressive consensus and was unsparing in his criticism.

He mocks the BBC and New York Times coverage of the war — and while The Atlantic has published him, the New York Times won’t talk to him. Why?

Because he says things pro-Western types like Bari Weis, myself, and many others have noted but get branded as MAGA lunatics for simply observing:

• Hamas is directly funded by foreign aid to Palestinians — any claims of mass hunger are due to Hamas theft, not Israeli “genocide”

• Likewise, most NGOs are useful idiots for Hamas, or they’re willing enablers

• I’m editorializing a bit here, but I think he’d agree that the mainstream media has invented an activist narrative of noble Palestinian resistance against evil Israeli bloodlust — instead of reporting what’s actually happening: a theocratic death cult causes misery

• The “Pro-Palestine” community in the USA, and most Arab advocacy groups like CAIR, are Hamas apologists (globalize the intifada, from the river to the see, #resistance) which is actually anti-Palestinian

He’s virulently anti-BDS, unlike our bigoted mayor, and he thinks claims of Islamophobia are a canard.

His final point, which was the new information I’m glad to have received, is that most Gazans are anti-Hamas but are cowed into subjugation because Hamas has weapons.

“One Kalashnikov can control 100 people,” he said. “With a few more Kalashnikovs, you can control thousands.”

These are observations Israelis have been making for years and years, especially Michael Oren.

What’s crazy to me is that none of this is reported in the mainstream media. Just as elite universities have dropped the Western canon and critical thinking to create a fantasy comic book story about fighting colonialism, the Democratic establishment and their media enablers simply refuse to understand reality. This has wrought great harm on American institutions, explains the rise of MAGA and, tragically, prolongs misery for Palestinians.

In other words, the status quo is bad.

That’s my biggest takeaway from meeting this great man: he has the courage to describe a picture too few are willing to see.

(1) Who elected anti-ICE protestors to impede federal agents?

While I deplore the loss of life in Minneapolis and think the masked ICE agents are a gross overreach, elections have consequences. The left and liberals hop up and down about democracy and the rule of law, but funnily enough, not when it’s in their interest to force their will on others and foment violence.

What I’ve been observing since the mass pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests on college campuses in 2024 still holds for what we’re seeing in Minnesota and other blue states in 2026. These are not the peaceful, patchouli-scented hippy “Give Peace a Chance” protests from the 1960s. Nor are they the proud and selfless Civil Rights Movement nonviolent civil disobedience protests. The only word I can come up with are militias like what we saw on January 6th and in Charlottesville, but now they’re on the left.

If you believe in democracy, and Trump won fair-and-square in 2024 after having been narrowly defeated by a questionably fit-for-office Biden in 2020, then it’s no surprise he has a profoundly different immigration agenda than his political opponents. I’m not a fan of any federal agent being masked and kicking down doors for nonviolent immigrant scofflaws, but driving cars to impede their actions, and bringing a loaded weapon to a protest seems….. unwise, at best, and insurrectionist at worst.

My sense is that while the mainstream media, the academic elite and the hardened blue pockets of wealthy Democratic votes are up in arms about ICE in Minneapolis, your average, less-politicized voter isn’t necessarily sympathetic to quasi-violent protesters disturbing the peace, storming into churches and breaking into hotels.

It’s a mess in aisle 5, but only one side of the aisle is going to do anything about it. Trump is the most politically sensitive president of my lifetime regarding public sentiment. He’s rightfully pivoting away from Kristi Noem while Tim Walz and the Democratic party compare ICE to Nazis and themselves to Anne Frank.

Trump has an escape hatch while Democrats double-down on serving red meat to their hardcore base. I doubt anyone else outside of Berkley, Cambridge and Brooklyn want anti-ICE rioters in their neighborhoods, but alas, Democrats have cast themselves as the Star Wars rebel alliance, which makes everyone else a target for their light sabers.

Voters deserve better.

(2) Israel won Gaza… but Hamas defeated the Democrats

Yesterday Israel retrieved the last remaining hostage, a 24-year-old police officer killed in the Gaza invasion of Israel on 10/7/2023. It’s a profound moment of redemption from a period of unspeakable evil.

The IDF now controls more than half of Gaza, Lebanon is semi-liberated from Hezbollah, Syria has new Turkish-sponsored Sunni leadership that vanquished the Assad regime, Jordan defended Israel from ballistic missiles, and Iran convulses in a near civil war after having lost its nuclear capacity and air defenses.

The Middle Eastern map has been redrawn due to Netanyahu’s tenacious and adaptive military leadership and due to the replacement of a “both sideism” Biden administration with an emphatically pro-Western Trump presidency. They’ve created a new, if shaky, status quo.

Israel’s success is stunning — it went from being invaded and losing thousands of lives to themselves destabilizing multiple dictatorships across the region and clarifying for everyone, from Gaza to Tehran, the extent of its military dominance. It was 27 months of hell but also a relatively short period of time to completely change the map. The war will be studied in West Point for years to come while European countries line up to buy the latest Israeli weapons.

Meanwhile in Brooklyn, I walk by white people with dyed hair wearing keffiyehs. Our first-time Muslim DSA mayor literally embodies the fusion of Islamist colonialism with left wing idealism as synagogues quintuple their security budgets and concepts like rent freezes become gag lines on Fallon’s Late Night.

The hate movement that is antizionism, which was once an obscure theology of the far left, is now enshrined as a matter of course for the entire Democratic party. Sure there are exceptions like Josh Shapiro and Rahm Emanuel, but they pale in comparison to the political and media potency of Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani and AOC — oddly, all New Yorkers.

I don’t know which way the midterms will go, but being pathologically against the existence of Israel is now par for the course for young liberals. It’s an incredible victory for Hamas, Iran and other Islamist theocracies that will redound in their favor for years to come. Wait for the massive reconstruction packages of Gaza, 99% of which will go to financing the latest in terror technology and infrastructure.

Iran is too close to call, but when the left stays silent after the IRGC massacres tens of thousands of civilians and can only talk about not ordering Israeli salads at lunch, you know the Islamists have acquitted themselves masterfully. It’s akin to Soviet propaganda during the Civil Rights Movement, or more directly, to the Soviet claims that “Zionism is Racism” while they oppressed millions of Jews within their borders and armed Arab dictators.

Another proof point is Democratic politicians diluting the Holocaust by comparing the Trump to Hitler — before taking his calls. The left robs the world of the lesson of the worst atrocity of the 20th century. If you compare almost anything to the Nazis and the Holocaust, then after a while, there is nothing truly remarkable about the mass slaughter of Jews and millions of others in death camps.

This cheapening of the Holocaust then strengthens the demand to deny 10 million Israelis the right to their hard fought sovereignty. If the Holocaust is everything and nothing, then why should stateless Jews have a right to a homeland?

Funny how liberal logic works.

(3) The Thacher Report is hosting an evening with Adam Louis-Klein

Adam Louis-Klein is a young academic championing the idea that antizionism is a hate movement. It’s really that simple. He’s far more articulate than I am about the subject, but ask yourself if Navajos can have reservations with some forms of sovereignty, if Japan can be a sovereign state for Japanese people, if South Africa rightly belongs to the majority of its citizens, why can’t Jewish people enjoy a state in their indigenous land?

The politics of antizionism is to single out one state on the planet that just so happens to be Jewish, and demand its dismantling. This is like how racist segregationists singled out black people from voting, or homophobes turned gay people into targets. It’s about hate. That’s the only way to describe the pathology of the libels and double-standards deployed by academics, school teachers, journalists, Hollywood stars and Democratic politicians seeking to destroy the Medinat Yehudi, the Jewish State. It’s a sickness, it’s everywhere, and it’s mostly a feature of the left.

Adam Louis-Klein has graciously accepted an invitation to speak at my home in February. For more information, please join the new Thacher Report WhatsApp group.

Stay warm.

For some context: In Iran there’s a new protest movement against the regime led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the longest serving head of state in the Middle East. What’s new this time, versus the failed revolution during Obama’s tenure and other mass protests, is that Iranian citizens are no longer demanding that their vote count, this time they’re telling the mullahs to leave. And, unlike in earlier years, this protest started with the Bazari business class. It’s growing across the country of 90 million people.

Why now? Israel and the USA’s 12 day war in 2025 proved to regular Iranians that their regime is so off course as to revoke its legitimacy. Prioritizing antizionism (the pastime of NYC’s mayor and the growing cri de coeur of his political party) has steered their country into a dark place. Nuclear research in a country awash with oil, and sending money to Hezbollah, the Houthis and more when Iranian schools can’t afford heat in winter, adds no luster to Iranian governance.

Democrats awarded Iranian jingoism in the Obama and Biden administrations, but Trump has taken a different tack. Twice. He pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018, and he reimposed sanctions after the Biden administration freed up billions for Iran. What many on the ideological left decried as disastrous moves has now enabled democratic street movements in Tehran. What also lends them support was Netanyahu’s devastation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad’s rule in Syria.

Change can happen.

With an Iranian regime unable to control it’s own airspace, and with a plummeting rial and hastening economic decline, it’s hard to square an Islamic Shia renaissance with the reality of it’s many failures. The people demand change because (a) they can’t afford basic goods and (b) the regime has been weakened by Republican and Likud leadership in the USA and Israel.

Funny how the common foes of the liberal west are the ones spreading actually liberal governance.

The piece de resistance was Trump’s recent warning to the mullahs that the US will defend Iranian protesters from state violence. It’s a refreshing change from Democratic foreign policy which tried to balance liberal PC and woke orthodoxies while limply giving lip service to American interests. Obama prolonged two awful wars, Biden abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban and presided over the invasion of Ukraine and Israel.

Onto Venezuela. The dizzying events there speak loudly in the Middle East. The Trump administration seems to have learned the lesson from the first Persian Gulf War and the Bush-era failures in the Middle East: The US Armed Forces are the best in the world at quickly defeating enemies and achieving tactical goals.

We can push Iraq out of Kuwait, assassinate or depose world leaders at will, and pulverize Iranian nuclear facilities with zero loss of American life or even equipment.

What we can’t do is occupy a country and effect a top-down transformation. I’m not sure any country can do that anywhere, the bigger lesson seems to be that outside of actual colonialism or annexation, you can’t transform a foreign territory. Just ask Noah Feldman about the Iraqi constitution he wrote. Shia Iraqis left it in the suggestion box, hanged Saddam Hussein and become a client of Shia Iran.

Trump’s insight: “attack yes, occupy no.” Reportedly, this now has Iranian mullahs contemplating apartment floor plans in Moscow. Not kidding.

The last part of the new year blunderbuss is Tim Walz’s bowing out of a campaign for a third term as Minnesota governor. I’ve been railing for months about the weak underbelly of Democratic governance. Their party and its supporters, the mainstream media and almost every university and cultural institution in America, rarely ask about the efficacy of Democratic legislative or regulatory policies.

Have welfare programs helped those in need? Have decades of Affirmative Action and DEI programs advanced the interests of the groups targeted for preferential treatment?

What I hadn’t thought to ask is, what about the corruption?

Forget about the immigration status of the Minnesota fraudsters, the bigger question is — why was anyone in the state able to commit such massive fraud in the first place?

The Democratic response is that you’re a racist if you ask the question. You’re a racist for wondering if there’s a connection between decades of liberal welfare programs and the steep decline of a black two-parent household. You’re a racist for wanting to end NYCHA and similar municipal housing projects which seem to only promote intergenerational black urban poverty. You’re a racist for doubting that promoting people based on skin color or gender, instead of race-blind merit (itself a flexible measure), detracts from the institutions who are their supposed promoters, and perhaps psychologically devalues the intended supporters in the noblesse oblige that is DEI paternalism.

Since we can’t ask the question — do Democratic laws and spending actually work? — we’ve set up conditions rife for waste. And fraud.

The scale is now too massive for Tim Walz to soldier on in a mid-term election year. I wonder what real journalists will uncover in other wealthy, Democratic states like California, Oregon, Massachusetts and New York?

The mainstream press is too ideologically-hampered to do the legwork. We’ll have to look to less reputable and more idiosyncratic sources.

This isn’t to compare Tim Walz with truly awful actors like the Iranian and Maduro/Chavez regimes. But it should shows the evolution of those lacking responsibility to finally being called out for what they are: enablers of failed governance.

Trump has punished Iranian totalitarianism which sets up the conditions for Iranian domestic transformation. He’s removed a far left dictator in Venezuela which can hopefully enable a South American revival decoupled from China and Iran.

While Trump can’t take credit for Walz’s inability to govern and his party’s refusal to measure outcomes, Trump’s focus on accountability creates conditions for a more fair shake for taxpayers in Minnesota and beyond. This is how democracy is supposed to function.

Next stop: examining theft in the rest of the Blue Fortress. Meanwhile, I hope all journalists apply the same forensics to Trump family crypto cash grabs and development projects. For democracy to thrive, we need robust and impartial journalism. We also need leaders who learn from the past to respond to current crises.

I’m lucky to have a large, loving family and close friends, but now that I’ve shifted my political worldview from the Mandatory Liberal Consensus to Iconoclastic Critical Thinking (which, not coincidentally, is required by classic liberalism), there’s friction instead of harmony.

Another way of saying this: it's strange to have some topics turn stormy while others—about kids, food, entertainment—act as safe harbors.

It’s my fault. I’m the one who’s changed.

The terms are fuzzy, but I now consider myself post-liberal or non-liberal, in the sense that I can never return to the contemporary liberal/leftist way I once navigated the world: reading the establishment press and clucking at the maliciousness and ignorance of Republicans while hoping that [insert minority] will run for office, ideally coming from the Ivy League+ and obviously only being in the Democratic party.

This person will pass large spending bills, raise taxes and increase fees to resolve problems for specific groups categorized as marginal, with new agencies, new laws, new bureaucracies and new regulations. It’s about building government, promoting certain people over others, and increasing revenue to pay for it all.

Since Republicans are malicious—or ignorant or racist—it’s pointless to consider alternative views.

One example of a forbidden alternative view: have decades of liberal legislation empirically assisted those defined as marginal? Their laws have made life more expensive, blue state taxes never go down, but how about better?

More to the point: is this how a democracy functions? You only have one choice for a political party, and within that party, you only have two sub-choices: an establishment or a vanguard. Anyone who disagrees with both doesn’t merit consideration. They’re wrong and you’re right. About everything.

Is this a good way to be a person? Personhood is key for classical liberalism. To add a moral dimension, being a good person means being a good citizen. Good citizens vote for good governance. If this nation is successful, it’s because it’s liberal in that it enables the freedom and vitality of all its citizens. This is a terrific idea. Happy 250th!

It seems so basic to want to support this, but how can you do that if you discount half the citizens when they vote in ways you don’t like? If you say those who disagree with you are in a cult, you’ve anointed yourself in a way that doesn’t comport with democracy.

In other words, are the cries of “fascism” actually fascistic statements in and of themselves?

A few years ago, I never asked these questions. Life was good as a Democrat.

While I’ve recognized that progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders—because of their, um, non-Western “liberation,” “justice” and “diversity” beliefs—disregard the geopolitical context of the Middle East, which can be summed up as the violent march of Islam from Arabia to the rest of the world, like what we saw on 9/11 with Al Qaeda, and with ISIS, the IRGC, Boko Haram, Hamas, Al Shabaab, the Houthis, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and more, I was OK ignoring progressive anti-Israel activism in favor of most of the Democratic party.

Progressives were just silly idealists who thought brownish Islamists were victimized black people from the Civil Rights Movement. It’s an honest, if weird, mistake.

Outside of fringe activists, there was a coherent Democratic Party/Mainstream Media/Academic trifecta that not only understood the world, it was honestly the only way to live.

Here’s an example. The correct person reads the New York Times and if they’re more intellectual, they also read the New Yorker or the Atlantic. If they’re not a reader, that’s OK, they can follow three broadcast news sources, NPR, MSNBC or CNN. That’s it.

He or she aspires to go to a highly selective college—there are about 50 in the US. That’s about 500,000 students. In America we have about 30 million college-age adults. So that means less than 2% of the country make the cut. This winnowing of humans through the selective college gauntlet forms an educated aristocracy.

The vast majority of these people will form an allegiance to the media sources that told them their schools are selective in the first place. Meanwhile, their education instructs them to vote for the Democratic party, which relies on the media as its key communication channel. Naturally, the selectively educated make up the majority of the reporters, editors and news producers. They also become faculty members and administrators from K-12 all the way through graduate school.

It’s a tidy, self-reinforcing system.

In the end, you’ve graduated into the only sensible way to be. There are no options. Your choices are dark blue or light blue. Have a great life.

In other words, we may call it a democracy where people are encouraged to share differing ideas, but sotto voce, there are no options.

This remains the contemporary liberal worldview which I encounter in New York, California and Massachusetts. It functions like a religious orthodoxy. Only the chosen know The Truth. Anyone who disagrees is ripe for conversion or subjugation—which is honestly in their best interest, because wrong people shouldn’t have power, they’ll only hurt themselves.

Sounds extreme, but now that I’ve left the fold, I’m frequently criticized for heresy.

Despite the evidence that this orthodoxy has yielded some very big problems, like a Covid response that harmed children for two years or a transgender response that often harms mentally ill children, and which few other Western countries condone, or that liberal legislation causes massive income inequality while prohibiting housing starts, new infrastructure, in-country manufacturing and affordable healthcare—none of that matters.

Factual evidence doesn’t gains traction against religious belief, they’re totally different ways of thinking. One is rational, the other is spiritual.

You need both thoughts and feelings to navigate the world, one isn’t better than the other, but you get my point: Question faith, leave church.

Why this Party/Press/Pedagogy trifecta works so beautifully as a pseudo-religious identity is that it’s inherently resistant to critique.

I deal with this all the time.

Anyone who disagrees with the current liberal consensus is wrong. I had this conversation yesterday with an articulate, generous, educated person. They used the word “wrong” to describe those they disagrees with. Why would a rational person listen to wrong people? There’s nothing to learn, nothing to absorb.

It’s us or them—now even more so with MAGA.

As a digression, why is there no Democratic version of MAGA? The Democratic party is a looser, less defined coalition of establishment centrists, social media progressives and various very well-funded ethnic, gender, environmental and labor sects. You get it, like in a religion.

Since big tent Democrats can’t function like the top down policy branding of the GOP, they make up for their lack of unity with (1) slogans and (2) intimidation. This worked surprisingly well until 2024 and will most likely work well in 2026. 2028 is a toss up.

The slogans come and go. They’re driven by polls or by the small-yet-powerful sects. As of last month, Democrats talk about Affordability, after they made life wildly expensive by driving up the costs of tuition, housing, groceries, cars, taxes, and health insurance for decades—yesterday it was prioritizing Diversity (which means there are winners and losers) and the supposed Climate Emergency.

Tomorrow it’ll be something else, depends what the polls and groups say.

Because slogans are intellectually thin and have a short shelf-life, like “Hope and Change,” Democrats also need intimidation. A common enemy. Yesterday it was Big Business. Today it’s MAGA. Yesterday it was the libel that Republicans are racist trans/islamo/homophobes, now it’s that Republicans are racist fascists. No Kings! Democracy is in danger!

My favorite new line of attack: Democrats hop up and down that Republicans are “classic” antisemites while Dems just happen to hate the one tiny country on the planet that is Jewish and want it gone. Huge difference!

If you have an electron microscope and a few months to read up on anti-Jewish pathology from the medieval era, I’m sure you can spot the differences. Since I’m short on time, I’ll just say that a few right-wing podcasters discriminate against Jews in a kind of pre-1948 racial way which they’ve disguised with America First excuses, while the entire Democratic party, from local municipalities to almost all universities, the entire mainstream press, and most of Congress, has tilted against the one Jewish country on the planet.

You tell me which has a bigger impact.

As a lame duck president who continues to leach power into the midterms, the no kings talk seems less compelling. Not a problem. Liberals will develop new scary frames for their political opposition. I can’t wait for the talk of monsters and goblins.

This whole dynamic of mutable slogans and intimidation creates some funny paradoxes. For maybe eleven more months you’ll have Democrats rallying around the Affordability slogan after decades of high tax, high regulation, high spending, poor outcomes and therefore, very high expenses. Meanwhile, they continue to declare that a majority of Americans support fascists—because they didn’t vote for Democrats.

A political party that relies on polls and powerful sects for slogans—while castigating those who disagree with them, doesn’t seem very attractive to independents.

“Let’s just see what sticks” is anemic politics, but with the media, pop culture and the academy in your pocket, the show lumbers on.

Liberals often acknowledge they live in a “blue bubble.”

I think it’s more like a fortress.

It’s big enough you never have to leave. This explains the jokey term “flyover states.” The fact that most of America resides outside the fortress in these states doesn’t cause any introspection. Because Minnesota!

During the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats championed enfranchising all Americans for the vote.

Later, they decided the vote was conditional. That sums up my problem with liberalism.

According to Democrats, in 2024 a third of the Bronx voted for Trump because these mostly impoverished “low information” voters were (a) deluded and (b) because Harris, although she checked three marginalized identity boxes which is super important to genetically-focused Democrats, she just happened to be a lousy candidate. Total coincidence.

Rarely did Democrats concede that poor black voters are capable of selecting their own least worst outcome. Which is how every person in every democracy always functions. Nope. Black voters were suckers for a sexy con in a year with a less shiny Democratic product.

If you look at the world like you’re standing on fortress walls, everyone outside is a either a threat—or dumb. Remember what I said earlier: liberalism means you’re right and everyone else is wrong. No exceptions. No democracy either, but hey, who’s counting?

Within the fortress is a very rewarding system. The hitch is you have to belong to one of two castes: very wealthy people or aristocratically-educated people. These often overlap.

As a bonus, hopefully you won’t be white, straight or male, but if tragically you are, it’s important to be mindful of your privilege. This privilege scoring isn’t quantifiable or measurable in anyway and requires a lot of vibes and racist and self-congratulatory interior monologues, so do your best.

Or just feel terrible about the genetics your parents thoughtlessly passed onto you in a fit of passion.

About the castes. I love how they work and reinforce each other. For example, we’re told Barack Obama is remarkable for joining the aristocratically-educated class because he went to Harvard, but what about the fact that he also went to an elite prep school in Honolulu? Like his children, and his children’s children, and their children, he’s never set foot in a public school. He joined the aristocracy because his grandmother was a bank VP who clawed her way to the top and made plenty of sacrifices—as do all parents.

The point is that Obama is no rags-to-riches story. Liberals are focused on skin color so they created a Hollywood narrative for him: he triumphed despite all the evil forces against him! It’s remarkable!

In truth, a prep school kid went to a highly selective university, like almost all prep school kids. This got him a book contract when he was 28-years-old and propelled his political career.

Obama then used his power to make America less affordable while he and his cohort lined their pockets. Remember those jails full of bankers after 2008 and how he balanced the budget and ended those wars? Neither do I.

The story of triumphing despite adversity is true for all adults. Details will vary, but no one enjoys a life without devastating roadblocks they must overcome in heroic acts of transformation.

Zohran Mamdani is treated similarly. Is he a charming and noble survivor of Islamophobia who rise to the pinnacle of New York City politics despite racist headwinds against him, or is he a member of a wealthy elite who continues to gain power for himself and his allies?

Trump is all these things too of course—wealthy and correctly-educated—except the media disfavors his genetics so his truly remarkable life story is rarely mentioned.

Hilariously, this explains Mamdani and Trump’s friendship.

I’m from the aristocratically-educated caste. I did well enough in public schools to finally go to a highly-selective private school, phew. This means I’m now an obscure member of the educated elite.

Why am I biting the hand? I’ve made it reasonably close to the upper tiers. Sure, they’re far, far above me, but at least I’m way higher up than the non-selectively educated masses. It’s a great life.

For me, the problem is that I was shoved out the portcullis. Yep, this essay is all sour grapes. I can wave my own fancy diploma as much as I like, reminisce about beaches in wealthy enclaves on both coasts, brag about my urban composting skills and tout out as many gay friends as I like. None of that matters.

Why? What did I do so wrong? Sure, liberal vibes started to drift away from me in the 2000s with their focus on genes and gender rankings (short version: I ranked low, which is hard for an academic-aristocrat to stomach), but by 2024, for merely breathing, I violated the fortress HOA rules.

My crime, as you know, is that I’m Jewish in a way the fortress doesn’t accept their Jews. I’m in favor of Jewish sovereignty in the indigenous Jewish homeland. It’s not a big ask, I want about 10 million people in a state the size of New Jersey to be free of attack. That’s it. The planet has over 7 billion people. Some countries are nearly the size of continents.

Give me New Jersey, in a slightly different location, albeit with some of the same people.

Zionism seems trifling and frankly, irrelevant to American life. I don’t see many people getting worked up about Iceland or Slovenia, which are similarly sized, but there you have it. I don’t make the fortress rules.

Sure, it’s a bit more nuanced. I also don’t agree with the shifting gender and skin-color rankings Democrats frame as a two-dimensional privilege scale that defies all measurement, or the anti-Western liberation narratives that involve land acknowledgments and backing of “freedom” or “liberation” or “resistance” movements without them having the pesky consequences of moral behavior.

• Remember the Arab Spring?

• Is Islamist terrorism justified in Tel Aviv but deplorable in Paris? Who decides?

Being Jewish in a way the fortress doesn’t approve was, for me, the camel backbreaking straw.

What would you do if members of a growing and popular movement called Progressives, few of whom have been to the Middle East or are familiar with the history of 20th century Islamic nationalism, or for that matter 20th Jewish military history—I’ll sum it up: one big loss followed by several wins—what if they dedicated themselves to the destruction of the one tiny New Jersey you find special?

Imagine if a political movement lavished with attention by the mainstream press and anointed by the country’s best universities as the only way to think, decided that Italy was a pariah state and sorry to say, it has to go. No more Italy! End the pasta-colonial hegemony! Carbs Are Genocide! Free Etruscans!

It’s fair to say that Italian Americans would quickly seek different politics, read different media outlets and wonder if the schools they’ve told are so essential to their lives are in fact naked little emperors wearing invisible little mortarboards.

I’m not you. You’ll have different reasons to exit the fortress. Maybe you have a white son and don’t like ranking him at the bottom of the imaginary privilege totem pole. Maybe you have a black daughter and want her to have political choices and even playing fields.

For me, it was a decade of creeping doubts about promoting some people over others. Add to that the rising income inequality and incredible expenses in blue states, and the perfect storm of the teachers unions, mainstream media and Democratic governance in Covid which victimized children and teens for two years, that made me wonder if the Democrats, and their media, cultural and academic handlers, had been pointing us in the wrong direction.

Thankfully, the kids were alright in Covid. It was the adults who erred.

Then 10/7/2023 happened. Starting on 10/8, the mainstream liberals debated for a month or two until they selected their good guys and bad guys along the familiar skin-color and privilege lines they’ve relied on since the early 2000s. (Proof point: mainstream Democratic Senators and Congresspeople singled out Israel to limit arms, while it’s under attacks from all sides, but not, say to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.)

It didn’t matter what I thought anymore, I was picked up by both arms and tossed out the liberal door.

Once outside, I saw where I had been: it was large but crumbling fortress. I don’t envy life inside its walls, it’s the view outside that excites me.

An antisemitic progressive in my hometown doesn’t thrill me either. One way to encapsulate the Mamdani win is to imagine the security concerns at synagogues. Left wing people don’t seem to care about violence, witness their track record with ending stop-and-frisk/broken-windows policing and their support of cashless bail and other reforms that spike crime, and of course assassinations.

I hope more neutral readers recognize that when a minority group has to beef up security after a charismatic politician wins their race, it’s only a matter of time before others are targeted too. You don’t need a PhD in Holocaust Studies to recognize that the cloaking of Mamdani’s win with claims of Islamophobia simply give him and his supporters a pass for atrocious bigotry. But the New York Times tells us Islamophobia caused 9/11, so there’s not much of a debate about what’s really happening on the ground: Mamdani created two common enemies for his voters, Trump and The Jews, and it worked.

But…

Yesterday was good news at a larger level. Voters are smart. While I may not agree with their choices individually, there are two positive takeaways.

First — voters recognize what the media and whoever the ruling party happens to be at the moment won’t admit: we’re in a recession and we need help. It’s that simple. We’ve had a lopsided economy favoring the finance and tech elites for decades, blue states raise taxes and refuse to build housing or new infrastructure which makes daily life punishingly expensive, and now add AI to the mix. This creates a genuinely scary scenario where both the working and middle classes are screwed. Since they get more votes than a wealthy sliver of the population, their voices are being heard at the ballot box. Make. America. Affordable.

I’m glad Republicans at the national level got pushback across the board, albeit in four blue states (CA, NY, NJ, VA) that were most likely going to stay blue. Why am I glad? Don’t I support Republicans more than Democrats?

The decisive election results—there were no close calls—means that MAGA must go back to its roots to survive: level the economic playing field. Make people wealthier. If they don’t, then I won’t support them and can only hope for new solutions. As long as the person isn’t a racist like progressives, then I’ll support them. I could care less about the color of their lapel pin.

This is James Carville from 1992 — “it’s the economy, stupid” — and it should be the absolute focus of whomever is in charge, be it a rules-bending, think-out-of-the-box real estate celebrity or a poor Democrat victim of trans-islamophobia who, like a superhero, somehow rose against Jewish white male oppression to defeat the Empire.

A good friend yesterday told me that he wished voters would be neutral. He’s a particularly independent thinker, and I like his sentiment: party loyalty only reduces your power.

The big picture is that the elections once again defied polling and were clear wins in four blue states. Trump I think is a uniquely talented politician and many MAGA followers have done well in down ballot races, like Elise Stefanik. I think they’re smart enough to learn from voter sentiment.

These elections should put pressure on Republicans to refocus on the economy. Tax cuts are nice, massive deficits are bad. Lower interest rates are great, lack of housing supply is bad. AI chatbots so you don’t have to click around for simple answers are nice, losing your job to one is bad.

A president has limited control over the economy — as we’re reminded each time a Democrat wins the Oval Office, but he or she still has a bully pulpit and of course Trump enjoys slim majorities in the House, Senate and a wider advantage in the Supreme Court. An empowered Republican party has exactly 12 months to make their case to the public that they can boost the economy for all.

Political competition is good. The majority of Americans don’t care about crypto or NASDAQ or even the GDP, these are all false measures of the economy. What they care about, after their physical safety, is affording:

1. A roof

2. Food

3. Health

4. A way to get around

5. Education

To clarify my point, consider the reverse scenario: imagine Republicans had swept in the four states. What message would that send to the White House and House and Senate leadership? They would have been smug and complacent.

We’re in terrible, terrible economic troubles from the upper-middle-classes on down. We need our voices heard.

Second — voters turned out in large numbers in an off-year election. That’s heartening to America lovers. The whole point of our country is that we’re independent of the British monarchy, which means that each of us has to take responsibility to choose our government. Voters did that in large measure yesterday. I can make cranky and sarcastic observations about Democratic hysteria about the “end of democracy,” but now I’ll just celebrate the continued hardiness of our citizens. Propagandists on the left are too silly to merit much attention, and here’s further proof: voters in a few states were motivated in an off year to take time out of their busy lives to vote. That’s awesome. America is awesome.

That’s the good news on the national level. If you’re Jewish in New York or don’t enjoy even higher taxes and crime, if you’re lower middle class in New Jersey or Virginia, or if you’re an independent voter in California, I wish you luck.

A few closing words about Mamdani. He did a brilliant job and he had incredible luck: there was no incumbent in the race, Cuomo isn’t popular and Sliwa was a stunt candidate. Also, the ballot was skewed to Mamdani. His name was listed twice up top, there was a thicket of names of people not actually running, like Adams and Wilson, and then Cuomo was further down. You don’t need to be an iPhone designer to know bad UX, and this was it. Mamdani isn’t to blame, but he’s the beneficiary of lots of good luck.

Had there been a credible opponent to Mamdani I’m not sure he would have won, but there wasn’t and he did. The only lesson to be drawn, since no one can replicate luck, is to follow Mamdani’s strengths — he focused on what New Yorkers care about most, which is affordability, and while we’re told he’s good at social media, which he and all successful politicians have to be adept at, he also was endorsed by the New York Times, NPR and the rest of the mainstream media.

Why him and not Cuomo? The left is focused on identity politics — meaning, you either have the Correct or Incorrect identity. As a darker-skinned Muslim immigrant who can campaign in Urdu, Arabic and Spanish, he won the liberal jackpot.

This didn’t apply to the black female gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Earle-Sears, who ran a bad campaign. She had the incorrect identity as a Republican. In the zero-sum-game of liberal human-rankings, party is the only thing that beats skin color.

What this legacy and social-media dominance did is give Mamdani a broad base of voters across the age spectrum. Read what you like about his youth, what I’ll tell you as a person living in a very blue borough is that he had strong turnout from Boomers along with broke young whites and of course his ethnic supporters of South Asians and Muslims.

In other words, social media alone doesn’t do the trick. That’s now table stakes for a politician of any party. It’s combining social with legacy media that puts you over the top.

In marketing terms, earned media is better than paid. Just ask Trump.

They use “Trump” as a synecdoche for Republicans or even all working class people, whom they call often describe as “Trumpy” to convey their foreignness. (Left-wingers call this “othering” or using “dehumanizing language.” They don’t seem to mind doing it themselves.)

They also say “us” or “we” when they mean Democrats, who only hold power in a handful of wealthy coastal states plus Minnesota and Illinois.

Essentially, Democrats are now in a shrinking blue bubble. Most Democrats I encounter have never had sustained social contact with working class or Republican voters. They tend to denigrate Republican voters as being in a cult, stupid, gullible, racist or all of the above.

This does two things. It implicates the Democrat’s superiority, and it makes Republican voters undeserving of empathy or curiosity — they’re just the enemy. When they’re assassinated, no big deal. When they garner more votes than Democrats, there’s no lesson about how to appeal to more voters, it’s a harbinger of the End Times.

My favorite Democratic explanation for why Trump won is that it’s confirmation that Democratic voters are smarter than Republicans. The RNC are master manipulators of racist rural voters—because, by definition, they didn’t go to “good” colleges, if at all.

This is why many so Democrats say education is the key to future victories. It’s a fancy way of saying people who don’t vote for them are dumb.

If we don’t value and respect voters, we won’t have a democracy, but this is an insight forbidden by Democrats, perhaps because it involves compassion and self-awareness.

(My psychotherapist mother taught me that when a person yells someone else is a monster, they’re usually describing themselves.)

More directly, Democrats insist Democracy is their most sacred value—but only when voters agree with them.

Where left-aligned people always land in what passes for political analysis, but is really sports-fandom, is that all Republicans are moments away from donning ICE masks and marching in goose step to Hitler.

This is the entire basis of their critique: No Kings! End Oligarchy—Unless We Hopefully Become Oligarchs!

It’s not a politically interesting analysis because there are no ideas, and, to me at least, it’s hilarious to watch wealthy whites march in the streets to demand more power.

Let me offer a different perspective.

While we don’t have kings, we do have an aristocracy minted by our Ivy + universities. These graduates go on to lead academics, cultural institutions, the media, technology, finance and both sides of the political aisle. If Democrats insisted on an end to the Ivy League aristocracy, which most of the country sees as pitiful victims of their own victim-identity frameworks who are only out for themselves, then I’ll rejoin their ranks.

The disclaimer is that I attended one of these institutions for grad school courtesy of a scholarship. It was otherworldly to experience country club academics after a lifetime in public schools. The academics were similar but the facilities, some of the peers and the brand recognition were top notch. I’m proud I improved my career prospects. I only wish there were more ways for Americans to accumulate wealth beyond a few ivory towers.

This is the kind of dialogue Democrats don’t discuss.

What Democrats also rarely ask, and which I think indicates why they will be national losers for the several voting cycles, is this:

After running Congress and the White House on-and-off for 30 years, and with monopolies in powerful states like California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York, does the Democratic Party have a track record of helping Americans?

To be fair, there are some Democrats asking this. They’re on the far left. These are the progressive Bernie Sanders/AOC/Mamdani folks. They’re a rising force within the blue bubble but unpopular with most voters.

While they have an economic critique that’s painfully relevant, they discredit themselves by adopting fringe ideas promoted exclusively by those same ivory towers. These are required ideas like promoting surgery, perverse identities and permanently-damaging pharmaceuticals for mentally-ill children—in the name of gender equity. Or by selectively vilifying Israel, and by extension, American Jews, in favor of a hard-to-measure Islamophobia and fantasies about Palestinian freedom—in a region where 500 million Muslims oppress themselves—when they're not violently attacking Jews, Christians, Druze, Gays, Children, Women, Africans, Europeans and Americans.

Lastly, and this is what I think mostly dooms the progressive movement for voters, is they insist on ranking people based on skin color. They ignore behavior, capability or what a famous person with lots of melanin once said is “the content of their character.”

Most Americans don’t like racism. We’re told Trump voters are racist, which therefore makes Democrats the enlightened, non-racist few. They are only out of power because, sadly, most voters are too stupid and bigoted to recognize Democrats’ superior non-racists views that… preach racial preferences.

It’s a perverse and paradoxical argument a majority of voters see through, but this is what Democrats tell themselves.

For example, at a recent lecture, I was told by a prominent educational leader that Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, wasn’t a diversity hire.

I’ll just note the qualifier to her title.

DEI, or less loaded terms like diversity and multiculturalism, are measured by the left purely on the basis of race.

Happily, the Supreme Court and the majority of Americans, even in California, think skin-color preferences are bad. But try telling that to a Mamdani voter who bravely resists the scourge of Islamophobia by casting a vote for a wealthy, secular graduate of Bowdoin college with famous parents.

OK, there’s one more reason why progressives don’t perform well with voters: their solutions to income inequality are higher taxes and more government, modeled after Western Europe.

Unfortunately, no on told progressives that socialisme is French for surrender. Which, to be fair, is how most French words are translated. One sign of this that the EU response to being invaded is to have a conference. Just ask the next Muslim terrorist or the entire Russian military why, when they think of Europe, their next thought is “yum.”

Most American voters also recognize the economic and intellectual stagnation of the EU. No matter how you measure innovation — electric cars, all software, the biggest movies, pop music, emerging media platforms, AI, clever-to-a-fault financial instruments, robotic manufacturing techniques — all these new things come from the USA and China, not France, Germany and.. Spain?

Democratic Socialists point to Europe while the rest of world drools after Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Beijing and Guangzhou.

If blue states voters asked three questions, which they refuse to do, I think they’d improve their party.

Try reading the bold faced questions first.

• Did the Affordable Care Act make care more affordable?

  • Obamacare subsidies go to private insurers, not you. Since the ACA, insurers have jacked up rates and consolidating hospital networks have raised fees.

  • The Democratic answer to this is, “If you criticize Obama, you’re a racist.”

  • Progressives say, “If you think taxes are high now, imagine Medicare for All.”

• Do high-tax states have world-class infrastructure and public safety?

  • There are two, count ‘em, two, Democratic spokesmen (i.e., journalists) who wrote a book this year called Abundance that calls for fewer regulations. No one remembers who wrote it.

  • Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of End Oligarchy and Mamdani fans demand freebies and suggest financial NIMBYism to pay for it — don’t tax us, tax others! Luckily, those others are wealthy, patriarchal, pro-Israel, straight, white male supremacists, so it’s OK.

• Do Democrats have ideas for tackling utility rates, transportation and housing costs, less-biased pedagogy and secure borders?

  • Bill Gates now says Climate Change isn’t killing us. Why are Democrats increasing utility costs by throttling diverse power sources?

  • Affordability helped Trump win in 2024. Outside of the DSA’s tax-and-bureaucracy approach, where is Gavin Newsom on this? Right, he's in California, where a 2-bedroom bungalow costs $2 million and when it burns down, it can't be rebuilt.

  • Public schools have terrible performance in all blue cities despite massive investments. Meanwhile, college-level liberal arts educations have become an unfunny joke about a queer pro-Palestinian vegan solving climate change with a land acknowledgement before screaming at Jews.

  • Immigration is an easy one. Democrats either have no solution, or demand open borders. Voters reject both.

• Bonus Question: If democracy means leaders are accountable to the voters, who was accountable when Biden wasn’t capable?

If the Democratic party ask these questions, I think they’ll attract more votes. If they double down on transislamophobia and taxes, they should buy brooms. They’ll come in handy at the dustbin of history.

If you’re with me that critical thinking is a key to a functioning democracy, keep going. Ask if the most famous media entities report events objectively so you can make informed decisions, or do they reflect a narrow ideological bias that elevates confirmation over elucidation?

If Trump is authoritarian, does that mean regular Democrats enjoy more freedoms? As a sort-of-religious, Jewish, heterosexual, white male in Brooklyn, I’m policed for sharing my thoughts on trans, DEI, Israel, Islam and taxation. That’s freedom?

There’s no intellectual curiosity in Democratic circles or tolerance for dissent. “Us” or “Them” are the only binaries allowed.

Until Democratic voters are ready to take responsibility for their party, college grads can chant No Kings at Columbia University and elect Mamdani for mayor, but the school’s janitors and cafeteria workers will be voting for Governor Elise Stefanik.

Dems are a narrow party in a wide country.

There are 400 million sovereign Arab Muslims in dictatorships or monarchies, and 7 million Israeli Jews in a democracy constantly attacked by Muslims.

Imagine the dais at the DNC convention in 2028. Will there be more or fewer voices castigating Israel beyond any other country on earth?

Will you see more or fewer keffiyehs and Palestinian flags?

I think it’s reasonable to look at attendees at the many No Kings rallies and anti-ICE demonstrations to see how the left continues to accessorize.

Has the recent Israel/Gaza ceasefire altered left-wing behavior?

How about after the Charlie Kirk assassination?

Four thoughtful, well-spoken public intellectuals held a formal debate, with the audience voting before and after to measure sentiment and persuasion. Spoiler: liberals consistently held a slim majority of the room of mostly older Jewish New Yorkers, yet more of them moved from their initial liberal position to the conservative conclusion: Zionism has no future on the left. In small numbers the conservatives won the night.

While I think it’s fundamentally uninteresting to hear the left opine about current affairs, it’s more wish-casting than analysis, it’ll be interesting to see a similar vote a year from now.

Is the era of Jews as liberals — a social, cultural and political movement Jewish immigrants helped lead in this country as we demanded civil rights, which we parlayed to other minorities on our multifaceted, multicultural journey to American equality — coming to a close?

I think the answer is: you bet it’s over!

And, by extension, Zionism on the left has long past expired.

You can date the end Jews-as-liberals the moment the left stopped framing universal civil enfranchisement and human betterment as twin goals, as articulated by Dr Martin Luther King. He called for racial equality and workers’ rights as values rooted in the Hebrew Bible—that all people are created in God’s image, and therefore demand equal social treatment and financial opportunity. This is the kind of clear, rooted, unassailably moral thinking that became the narrative of liberals and most of the country. For about twenty years.

Since the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of mostly European avant-garde political science, with a helpful dollop from Edward Said, and with dramatically increased Islamic immigration to Europe and later, to America, the left now frames the world as waging a global struggle between wholly blameless gender/sexual identity/immigrant/racial/disabled/Muslim victims, and entirely culpable white, straight, cis-male, able-bodied, Judeo-Christian, citizen oppressors. They call this settler/colonialism while speaking in English in North America. Gotta love it.

It’s black vs white, good vs evil, Star Wars Rebel Alliance vs Darth Vader’s Empire, victim vs oppressor, liberation movement vs hegemonic power. There is no terrorism, assassination, hate speech, violence, street crime or discrimination on the left — those are simply the only available tools of empowerment and liberation available to blameless minorities. This explains no cash bail for violent offenders, ACAB/decarceration/defund the police/violence interrupters in progressive cities; and musicians, other celebrities and Zohran Mamdani’s DSA lauding Hamas and Hezbollah as resistance fighters.

This is why young non-Arabs wore keffiyehs and in my neighborhood, still do, ideally with a mask. (Not kidding.) It shows they’re on the side of the superheroes.

Let’s be honest, it’s a cape.

This also explains why the left doesn’t celebrate the current ceasefire in Israel and Gaza. Peace has never been their goal. What they want is domination. From racially pure Arab Islamists controlling the Levant, to a black man murdering a white woman in North Carolina as a call for help, or to shooting a politically unfavorable speaker at a college campus as a fair response to supposed hate speech. Add also throwing a molotov cocktail at Governor Josh Shapiro’s house, lighting elderly Jews on fire in Colorado or attempting to kill Donald Trump. Twice.

Justice man. They had it coming!

This is the point media personality Batya Ungar-Sargon underscored last night, which, to me, was the most insightful analysis I’ve heard in a long time. She said the left in the 2020s is no longer the left of the 1960s—they now champion power dynamics over Dr Martin Luther King’s Judeo Christian values. Jews are powerful, ergo, we are bad.

This observation went unrefuted and unmentioned by her peers to the left: a dissembling Ivy-league educated Yehuda Kurtzer from the Shalom Hartman Institute, and a clear-eyed but outdated 68-year-old former North Carolina congresswoman Kathy Manning.

(On the right, along with Batya, sat journalist Jamie Kirchick. He was so aligned with Batya that I’ll lump them together.)

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens moderated. I like to imagine he dines alone at the Times cafeteria while his colleagues bravely report on the latest gender and racial identity triumph over white male oppression, which is their only framing of world events, except when they're writing about the Hamptons.

Stephens is a secular Jewish, Center-Right non-Trumper media elite (University of Chicago alumnus, Pulitzer-prize-winner) and, outside of the janitors, the only pro-Israel voice in the Times skyscraper. Reading Times’ subscriber comments on his essays is a sobering lesson in how slavish thinking (the same slavishness those readers attribute to MAGA followers) translates into synagogue attacks, assassinations and what liberal thinkers swear is First Amendment speech, which others note is so anti-Jewish as to exclude students, professors, filmmakers, authors, journalists, politicians and artists from participating in civil society, let alone physical safety, that perhaps free hate is a better term.

One of the oddities of growing old is that you suddenly find yourself describing everyone by their age. It’s like you teleported into a white party while wearing all gray.

My young friend next to me has also been on a journey, from what I call the Cultural Left to a less-partisan, more neutral political centrism and, I suspect, a new-found distaste of surety at either end of the political spectrum.

Before I continue, forgive me for projecting my values and experiences onto her. I’m mostly using her as an avatar for what I’ve been thinking as an illustration of shifting political and cultural identities. (I hope she excuses me now that I’ve included her amazing Shabbat Drop substack link. Read it. It’s great.)

Like me, she was forced out of left conventional wisdom and social circles because she’s Jewish. She’s curious about her Judaism as someone who wasn’t raised Orthodox, meaning she didn’t have her heritage, language and literature handed to her with the care and tenacity of knowledgeable Orthodox parents. Instead, as a young adult, she discovered that by going to Israel, learning about Israel, loving Israel and by feeling a powerful sense of belonging, that this Israeliness functions as a lever to become a more realized, more informed, more empowered Jew anywhere, not just Tel Aviv.

In other words, to ascend the Jewish elevator, visit the Kotel.

It's better to describe myself than keep projecting onto my friend, but it’s tempting because we come from such similar worlds. As a blue state, highly-educated Jewish liberal who grew up with zero Orthodox content, I’ve long relied on Israel to inform an adult Jewishness that was denied me as a secularist raised to praise party more than parsha (Torah chapter).

I will always treasure my college year in Jerusalem as cultivating my Judaism. But now, relying on, and being grateful for, Israel on a deeply personal level, to say nothing of the narrative of liberation and homecoming after 2,000 years of diaspora, Holocaust and discrimination, is forbidden. By the left. Because of social justice.

I mean, how much poorly-executed genocide and undocumented famine must you wage to feel good about yourself?

Rather than having a sports-fan, emotionally-charged “my side is always right, your side is always wrong” perspective dominating the mass liberal media, I feel more dispassionate and skeptical, of pretty much everything, but especially of the legacy media. As for my friend, I suspect it’s not only her relative youth that inclines her towards substacks and podcasts, it’s also her experience with the mass media that disinclines her from their narratives. (A point I made in an earlier post about legacy media and legacy politics.)

The Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, all the broadcast networks (pre CBS Bari Weiss) and countless other news sources cling to a never-Trump, he’s-a-fascist, all minority-victims-are-noble perspective despite the fact that at least half the country voted for Trump (and hundreds of other MAGA Republicans for a bicameral congressional majority) three times in a row over the past 10 years — in a democracy.

Meanwhile, we were never told the preceding president wasn’t full-time compos mentis but when he was, he pursued Trump via DOJ investigations that went nowhere.

Merrick Garland, one of the most august law enforcement people in the country since his successful prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombers, got nothing on Trump after four years as Attorney General. Perhaps because there was nothing?

If journalism means articulating current events in a clear and coherent manner so American citizens can make informed decisions about their lives, then whatever the media is doing isn’t reportage. It’s something else. You can call it propaganda, or editorializing in the newsroom, or selective bias, or social justice activism to liberate minority victims from straight male oppressors; whatever the term, “news” isn’t it.

We listened to two smart leftists, Manning and Kurtzer, try to convince us that the left isn’t really anti-Zionist or if they are, they will grow out of it once they leave college and become, I don’t know, politicians like AOC or Jasmine Crockett or the heads of cultural institutions or Hollywood studios. It was kind of silly.

I walked into the room knowing the answer to the question: is there a future for Zionism in the American left. I was also in the room to hear various sides and see if I could be convinced otherwise. I grew up in the world of leftwing critique and optimism for change.

Instead, what I got was leftwing spin and gas-lighting, and short bursts of profound insight into our culture, demographics, the differences between party and non-state institutions, and foreign policy, solely from the non-Left intellectuals. The retired congressman and the educational non-profit leader were long on hope and false equivalencies, but they had nothing new to say about our country, why it's changing and what it means for our future.

Forget about politics. Imagine you’re a bored teenager, the purist arbiter of all things relevant. Like Kurt Cobain said, “here we are now, entertain us.”

If you’re looking for something, anything, to keep you interested that speaks to your experience of the world, and your sense of wonder and curiosity, listening to liberals explain that what you’re experiencing isn’t really happening or if it is, it's temporary and unimportant, you’ll stay for a moment to see if they're kidding, then change the channel.

Because it is happening, and saying it’s not is worse than wrong, it’s boring.

Meanwhile, AOC stays in luxury hotels and flies first class on her Fighting Oligarchy tour, Ilhan Omar is worth up to $30 million, and the "African American" child of Oscar-nominee Mira Nair, Zohran Mamdani, campaigns against the very income inequality that's enabled his entire life. Despite his personal and familial wealth, he now lives in a rent-stabilized apartment.

That's the Young Progressive side of the party. They’re the rapidly growing slice within a slowly collapsing pie. They thrive in expensive, crumbling cities across America and in the House of Representatives. Soon they may be in the Senate and governors’ offices, at least in a few of the Democratic super blue states like California and Massachusetts.

On the other side of the party are Old Centrists who want to preserve the status quo, which a majority of Americans have rejected by voting for MAGA Republicans or for those young progressive Dems. Centrists are the vanishing slice of the shrinking party pie.

From my perspective, as a lifelong Democrat who’s only lived in coastal blue states, but who now possesses the wrong ethnic identity for the party, I'll do my own division.

I’m a Jewish Zionist, which is a redundant term since Judaism is the indigenous religion of Israel, but it needs to be specified for liberal audiences who divide us into good and bad Jews, according to their understanding of a region they don’t visit and a history they can’t study, because their academies, news sources and cultural centers are activist, not intellectual.

There are now only two kinds of Democratic voters left:

True Blue Believers — despite evidence of a shrinking DNC, they don't see anything profoundly wrong with the party​. To them, the few stories about their irrelevance are noise not signal. Keffiyeh queers are on the fringe and AOC is more cute than critical.

They're as excited about Gavin Newsom's pompadour, I mean, podcast, as they are about the obvious and clear and easily-documented and imminent Nazification of our country​. It's happening this very minute, at a rate as fast and observable and deadly as #ClimateChange. Their tactic to resist this growing tide of fascism has been to shame the majority of Americans who disagree with them. Since that doesn’t seem to be working, it’s now time to break out the Covid boosters for the new school year and have calm talks about their kids’ future gender identities.

It’s an extreme and nasty business perhaps, maybe even unscientific and objectively harmful to children, but these are the end-times for America.

“Protect Trans Kids” t-shirts are everywhere, and I can only imagine back-to-school anxieties for outdoor maskers.

True Blue Believers are in the #Insistence. They refuse analysis or inquiry of party failings—first of all, it’s socially improper to waver from The Consensus We All Must Share. Even worse, it misses the point of the Nazis or fascists or I don't know, people-who-disagree-with-liberals, who are taking over our streets this very minute! Or maybe the next very minute! Or tomorrow? Or in November 2028? Or perhaps January 2029? Don't ask when! That's not acceptable behavior. Trust that it's happening and it's an emergency because they’re telling us so on legacy media.

BLM, fighting transislamophobia, advocating for illegal immigrants, ranking humans on scales of victimhood based on their “lived experiences” (what are un-lived experiences?) and denying crime are their organizing principles.

Are these perhaps obsolete ideals that are also unrelatable to most Americans? Don’t ask questions! They’re in a battle for their very lives. And, truthfully, they’re fighting for all of us. They're just ahead of a curve we can't see yet. They're pioneers of the truth. They’re alone on the vast plains of America, er, former Native lands. Only they can see the future.

It's as exhilarating as the third act in a superhero movie. The doubters have been proved wrong and the plucky heroes are finally united. Next step: save the universe.

Meanwhile, they peruse real estate listings in Portugal or Quebec because by lunch America will be the Fourth Reich. They also will only Zelle their nannies, landscape crew, cleaning ladies, pool staff and Instacart servants—who bothers with cash when you’re worth millions?

Post Democrats—this is the second group, I think they’re a growing, transparty faction as the True Blues circle their PHEVs to resist the redskins red voters. Post Democrats are themselves divided into two camps. They have either stepped outside the party circle with one foot, or two feet. Meaning, they’ve either partially or entirely abandoned the party—in vibes, in actual registrations or more saliently, by whom they will vote for in whatever election comes next, if they have a choice, which many won’t in deep blue states with closed primaries in off year elections designed to suppress turnout.

That’s a mouthful, but I think you get it: Post Democrats have been driven mad by the party and they’re self-ejecting. That’s why they’re transparty instead of True Blue nothing-to-see-here-please-move-along loyalists.

The Posts are hard to measure statistically since they’re new, so let’s try qualitative measures. The fact that The Free Press is being sold for $200 million is a reasonable indicator, as well as every poll, the observation that alternative new media is rising while online newspapers form ever tighter, self-reinforcing concentric circles based on identity values, and the evidence that there are no young centrists in the party. Old Centrists, yes. New Centrists?

Let’s take a moment of silence for them.

You can also look at Post Democrats skepticism of the academic elite via shifting college admissions and rising trade school enrollment. They get that the Ivies and selective liberal arts colleges are less important in (1) the era of AI, (2) after decades of tuition inflation and (3) because elite academies have become social justice freedom centers celebrating hopefully disabled QTBIPOC vegans instead of, you know, places of knowledge to advance Western Civilization. What I wrote is probably racist and phobic of someone, I’m not sure who, but I bet they’ll tell me.

Within this Post Democrat group, like I mentioned, there are those who cling to hope that the Democrats will shake off progressive zealots (via a peaceful intifada, perhaps?) and revert to status quo centrists like the Gen-X classic Rahm Emanuel or Maryland governor Wes Moore (he’s black!) to patch their ship of a thousand self-bored holes.

Others check themselves in the mirror and wonder if this is what a Republican looks like.

Either way, all Post Democrats tear what’s left of their hair​ out as they silently mock NPR but can’t yet stomach Fox News. They don't fit in anywhere. They're culturally left, they’ve never been to a Trump rally and won’t wear a MAGA hat, but they’re also hardworking and pragmatic. They recognize that the blue hysteria of Covid was vicious to children, Biden was never fit to be president, and Palestinian freedom in the most illiberal and violent region on Earth is not their number one priority.

Post Dems are emotionally allergic to ranking humans, they know meat is delicious and they wonder why Americans are so fat and diseased despite monthly insurance payments that go up each year.

They notice that the Trump administration, and MAGA in general, prioritizes Outcomes over Process. They don’t always agree with the priorities driving those outcomes, like rounding up non-violent illegal immigrants, but they know efficacy when they see it. They also note that tariffs haven’t destroyed the global economy and encourage factory building in America.

These two Democratic groups, the True Blues and the Post Dems, are pushing and prodding each other as recently as ​t​he other week when the DNC failed to come up with a position on the ​latest Islamic war against Israel. Mostly though, the True Blues have the media megaphone while Post Dems burrow into niche podcasts and social media The former take comfort in their azure fortresses after having long pulled up the drawbridge over the moats. The latter crew, the Post Dems, wander the fields outside the castle walls, in a daze.

As an aside, it's amusing, as a Middle East armchair historian and American, to watch earnest​ liberals decry the dehumanizing language used against Palestinians while they tell me I'm a racist apartheid advocate who believes in starving Palestinian children because I’m a colonist.

Despite being from one of the original 13 colonies in Massachusetts, this is a very, very mean thing to say to a person. Is their castigation of me meant to be less than humanizing? The horrific bout of left wing violence seems to confirm that once you dehumanize your fellow citizens, shooting and lighting them on fire are the logical next steps.

But this is an emergency! Who has time for moral consistency! Or morals at all!

From a Post Liberal perspective, the blue divide spells disaster for Democrats. They’ll lose more and more elections as more and more Americans stop identifying with Democratic quasi-religious identity beliefs—and note that when Democrats are in power, they prioritize Process over Outcomes. (And since now most Dems are elite college educated whites, they won’t notice the lack of outcomes, since they’re rich.)

I see this in Brooklyn with some liberal communities that have shed, voluntarily, non-liberal members. The groups are resilient, but they’re only becoming weirder—more insular, more inbred with self reinforcing political identities, more ritualistic with various signifier clothing, slogans and vocabulary, and, ultimately, not very cool.

Put another way: Zohran Mamdani will win locally in a blue city with the full support of legacy media, legacy academics, legacy cultural institutions and legacy liberal communities, but statewide he’ll flop, especially after voters evaluate his policies.

Others think I’m wrong. I’m blind to the jackbooted thugs marching down the streets everywhere. OK not marching now now, but now soon. Very soon. Sometime. Eventually.

They’re in the emergency camp. The sky may seem far away, but it’s actually falling! While they acknowledge Trump won the latest election, and I think would have beat Biden in 2020 had voters known Biden’s true health status, they know the imminent (yet very hard-to-detect) fascist coup outweighs all other considerations of policy failures and unpopularity of the Democratic party.

To me, this fascism tale is a tough sell to (A) Americans who already voted for Trump and (B) to middle and working-class blue state voters who ask why education, healthcare, housing, transportation, phones, wifi, electricity, food, cars and entertainment cost so much.

If the answer to their question is they shouldn’t ask the question because it’s an emergency, as defined by a shrinking elite who can afford everything I listed, then I think I won’t be the only one chuckling along to JD Vance’s podcast zingers about cats in his 2032 re-election campaign.

My father is a man of English descent from rural New Hampshire. He volunteered for the Black Panthers in Oakland after returning from the Vietnam War. As I write this, I look at a poster made by Emory Douglas which his wife gave to my father.

My single Jewish mother raised me on a diet of kasha varnishkas and feminism. At our Passover seders, Dr MLKjr and Mahatma Gandhi argued at the table with Elijah and Moses.

My family and neighbors imparted lasting values—all people are created equal and deserve dignity. Recognize government failures and strive to make America better by paying attention, voting and marching in the streets when necessary.

Stand up for eternal and universal human values, not for temporary and selfish exigencies. It's a great legacy.

Now rocket to 2025. Israel is at war against genocidal Middle Eastern Islamists who only stop fighting when pagers blow off their hands, a superpower smashes their nuclear facilities and a militarized enclave is reduced to rubble.

Antisemitism rises faster than the weeds in Brooklyn’s broken sidewalks.

Our new mayoral candidate has a revolutionary zeal that alienates the city as much as it electrifies a young, white, college-educated base.

It’s a weird time. Every show on NPR features an identity—a woman umpire, a Muslim candidate, a trans artist, a black writer. It’s never about America and interconnection, it’s about specific identities with narrow narratives of triumph over adversity, like rebels in a sci-fi movie against the evil empire—despite the observation that all people struggle, and all people triumph and fail, over and over again.

Does laughing at NPR make me a Conservative? I don’t own a gun. I diligently follow New York’s recycling program of paper, plastic & metal, landfill and compost. Yes, four bins!

I love it. I’m a huge composting geek. Does that make me a Liberal?

Every chance I get I spend time at a friend’s organic farm in Massachusetts. I’ve been an active spectator of, and occasional wobbly tractor driver for, his food revolution. This farmer has fed hundreds of thousands of people over the decades with locally-grown produce using ancient techniques, new technologies and zero pesticides. Is his passion, and my vicarious farmer cosplay, Liberal or Conservative?

I live in a diverse neighborhood in the inner city—which is what liberals call urban black people. For nearly thirty years I’ve thrived in the truly diverse world of New York where Jews aren’t a vestigial and assimilated minority, and every cultural and ethnic group on the planet shares the same space, comfortably jostling, feeding and joking around with each other.

If the American suburbs were a post-WWII car-based experiment in racial purity and small town nostalgia, New York’s urbanity is an ancient, pedestrian system for human collaboration and advancement.

It’s hard to imagine giving this up for traffic in echo chamber suburbs. Is that instinct Liberal or Conservative?

While I’ve never lived among Conservative culture, I’m alienated by what Liberal culture has become since the Obama administration, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize for being black. Meanwhile, he presided over the worst income inequality in my lifetime.

Obama didn't ask for the Nobel, I’m sure he saw through that as thinly-veiled virtue signaling, but his financial stewardship of the ultra wealthy, and his self aggrandizement while appointing the next generation of failed Democratic leaders, seems more Trump than Johnson, more Nixon than Roosevelt.

(Honestly, that’s not fair to either Republican, considering Reagan succeeded Nixon and laid the groundwork to peacefully resolve the Cold War, and Trump handed the baton to popular, younger politicians like JD Vance.)

Liberals insist that we look at the world as a competition between the “marginalized” and the “privileged” in a zero-sum game of preferences and handicapping.

Is this a good way to govern or think about people?

How is privilege qualitatively or quantitatively measured?

White college-educated Liberals in the media and in my neighborhood tell me to look at skin color. Zohran Mamdani, who’s skin is darker than mine, and with infinitely more wealth, power and prestige due to his parents’ achievements, and due to his carefully-curated, almost entirely private education, ranks higher than I do. Because of his melanin content and, to a lesser but still powerful extent, his religion as a Shia Muslim.

Being Christian or Jewish or Hindu is frowned upon by Liberals. It’s not acceptable for Liberals to be church/synagogue/temple-going, but for some reason, Islam and a co-opted version of Buddhism are celebrated.

To decide winners and losers, look at genetics and a preferred religion. That way of thinking doesn’t end well in society. It’s also been rejected by American voters, and I'm not taking about Trump.

Obama wasn’t elected because he’s half African, half white and identifies as black. Sure, he was elected in part due to his novel identity, but mostly because he signalled a major shift after the disaster of George W Bush, who presided over global economic collapse and unwinnable wars.

Many of the same Obama voters support Trump for similar reasons—he represents a bold break from past failures. Ironically, those are Obama’s then Biden’s failures.

Is that a Liberal or Conservative observation?

The answer is that ranking victims against oppressors, people-of-color against people-of no-color, are exclusively Liberal tropes.

Republicans are now the multiracial, multireligious working-class coalition that gleefully transcends identity politics.

I know in my bones all people are created equal and deserve lives of maximum freedom—within the guardrails of Western civil society. Give me a moment and I’ll explain why this shouldn’t be politicized.

Earlier I mentioned the Passover seder, which tells the story of God freeing enslaved Jews from Egyptian oppression. After you clean the dishes and sweep the matzo crumbs, the story continues. The freed slaves want to go back to Egypt. They only can stay free when they agree to live by the Rule of Law, which God bestows via Moses. (Twice! First attempt was a bust.)

This is the essential argument of the Jewish Bible. Fleeing oppression is great, but society must ascend to a higher plane to be truly free. Otherwise, freed slaves will just create another equally oppressive regime with them on top by enslaving others.

Freedom necessitates liberation and ascent.

Does this value system, which I was raised in in the 1980s with its origins in the Jewish Bible from circa 1,500 BC, and which not-coincidentally formed the basis for Dr. Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement, and which is now rejected by Liberal culture with its “us or them” narratives, make me a Conservative or a Liberal?

Where do people who ask questions and buck conventional thinking fit within today’s political binaries?

The greatest Civil Rights accomplishment in my lifetime is the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage. I didn’t grow up with racial segregation or women not being allowed to have credit cards. I came to maturity in a homophobic world where boys called each other fags and homos. No one in my public high school was out of the closet. AIDS only amplified the anti-gay hysteria.

Then, in 1998, a few men brutally murdered Matthew Shepard. On a national level this revealed the horrifying consequences of homophobia.

Twenty-seven years later, the Republican Treasury Secretary is a gay married man and father of two via surrogacy. He’s as MAGA as it gets.

The fact that his politics are decoupled from his sexual identity, and that he’s achieved such a powerful job, is the greatest hallmark of gay equality I can imagine.

Does celebrating his, and all gay people's ascension, make me Liberal or Conservative?

It’s obviously the wrong question. People like me, like us, are not left or right. We’re something new. It doesn’t have a snappy name or tangible definition. I’m calling it Post Liberal until things come into focus.

We are neither the oppressed and the enslaved, nor are we the oppressors and the slavers. We’re rising somewhere new.

What does being Post Liberal look like? I’m not sure, but I can tell you what it doesn’t look like.

I can’t imagine voting Democrat again. What they’ve presided over in my lifetime hasn’t worked out well—their states are insanely expensive; their infrastructure is failing; their foreign policy, from the Oslo Accords to impotency in Ukraine, Iran, China, North Korea, Venezuela and beyond is catastrophic.

Democrats fixed health care—for private insurers. Just as they fixed the economy—for themselves.

Now, the party is represented by a new generation of young, media savvy anti-Jewish sovereignty progressives. If you lament the inefficacy and self-dealing of Centrist Democrats, contemplate their highly-motivated Democratic Socialist successors.

They believe in defunding the police, raising taxes, increasing bureaucracy and enforcing skin color and gender preferences. Still. In 2025.

The political lessons of the past years, with the excesses of BLM, Covid, Biden’s unfitness, inflationary economics and gender ideology backlash have not been learned by the new Democratic vanguard.

Instead, they’ve doubled down on the very forces that helped usher in a new Republican party and a new Republican majority.

The new Democratic party, similar to the old Democratic party, has no record of policy success anywhere they’ve ruled. Don’t believe me? Take a walk in the ripped up streets of Burlington, VT while dodging homeless drug addicts. Try building a house in burned up Pacific Palisades, or anywhere else in California. Try renting an apartment in any blue coastal city. Never mind affording healthcare and education, try buying a car.

Ask why warm weather Republican states have fewer homeless than warm weather Democratic states.

Unfortunately I’ve endured—and I’m sure helped cause—strained friendships and Jewish community agita because I’m curious about Trump’s multiracial working class coalition. I’m open to new policy approaches that depart from what the ruling elites, in both parties, have manifested.

I like the idea of reshoring manufacturing, securing our cities, cutting red tape, streamlining bureaucracies and ending human ranking policies. Most importantly, I want government to function more, talk less.

As an example, remember Biden’s pledge to roll back convenience fees? Or to do anything else? He was all talk, as was Obama.

To express interest in our current leaders, and to wonder how they’re ruling, means you will be exiled from Liberal circles. Remember, you’re not allowed to contemplate “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Questioning dogma, thinking critically and showing curiosity are forbidden and shunned. Just shut up and follow.

I’d rather question and lead.

Jews have been at war since October 2023. Fighting accelerates reality: new enemies and new alliances emerge. Combatants develop new methods and new technologies. Same with ideas. Deeply held thoughts vanish in a snap. New ideas rush in.

If they don’t, that’s fine, but you and everyone you love will die.

Sounds dramatic, then let me tell you about family and friends in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv cowering in bomb shelters last month, including a single mom from San Diego touring the country with her young daughter.

Ideas matter. Appraising reality matters. The stakes couldn’t be higher in war. No one has time for a social justice media story when missiles rain down. You need to know where the bomb shelter is.

Here in America, the stakes are also high. We’re not dealing with missiles thankfully, but we’re struggling against crushing inflation of housing, healthcare, education and transportation—which is tightly bound to our decaying infrastructure and false narratives that tell us that preferring people by their skin color, gender and national origin is more important than providing opportunity and safety for all.

While Israelis, Ukrainians and soon, Taiwanese, need reliable information to survive the night, Americans need reliable information to make political decisions to improve our lives by day. And with our shift from legacy to new media forms, like social feeds and podcasts, we also need new politics to respond to our needs. This is why Republicans have changed and are ascendant while Democrats haven’t and aren’t.

Media and politics are tightly bound. Same with technology and ideology.

To explain the why people first shifted from CDs to $10 iTunes downloads, and now $12 monthly Spotify subscriptions, look at the emergence of new tools on the one hand, and the intransigence of record companies who kept charging $18 for a CD.

Sure, technological innovation seems inevitable, but Google hasn’t destroyed libraries or book publishing, it’s just changed them. You can imagine a world where people at home have tidy Blu-Ray collections of their favorite artists, with liner notes, lyrics and photos (one Blu-Ray disc = twelve vinyl LPs) and then enjoy streaming algorithms to discover new music when they’re on the go.

Google and ChatGPT have transformed how we access information, yet last year book publishing increased 6.5%. Nimble organizations can respond to change. Ideologically orthodox groups can’t.

It’s not considered biased to say we have a Legacy media anymore. It’s reality. The Web, apps, wifi and smartphones have transformed news publishing, broadcasts and cable.

What’s more interesting to observe is that the ideological choices of the Legacy media—much like the ideological rigidity of record companies in the 2000s to keep CD prices high—has accelerated the shift.

Almost all Legacy media outlets, from Reuters to the New York Times to NPR to CNN, have adopted ideological missions to change society according to their values—instead of maintaining a ruthless dedication to objectivity, even if that’s an asymptote.

The WSJ and Bloomberg seem like exceptions, but when you realize they report market information to stay in business, it makes sense that they haven’t become as mission-driven as their non-financial publishing peers.

People consume podcasts, substacks and social feeds not only because they can, but because they must. If you can remember the early 2000s, people moved to iTunes because Steve Jobs only charged $10 an album. They soon realized they could now consume even more music than before because digital also means portability and fungibility—from laptops at home to iPods outdoors.

Similarly, democratic citizens, who need good information to make optimal political decisions, have fled the identity politics of Legacy media to new media forms with new messages. What seemed like an innovation—posting vacation pics on Facebook—ten years later become an information necessity on Twitter.

It’s not just that viewing a short form video on your phone is easier than sitting through an hour-long news broadcast with advertisements, which requires an expensive monthly cable subscription and an expensive one-way monitor. An Instagram reel can also offer qualitatively more relevant information than establishment narratives. These legacy narratives focus on perceived social justice values rather than as-objective-as-possible information about, say, Covid transmission, a president’s acuity, Middle East wars, trans risks, public safety and real inflation, to name a few.

Liberals educated at highly-selective colleges dominate establishment media. They took the Civil Rights Movement and Sexual Revolution from the 20th century and, in the early 21st century, developed an extremely narrow and I think bizarre value system focused on ranking people on an unquantifiable spectrum of victimhood to privilege, based on skin color and gender.

This distorted moral vision of victims in need of promotion over others, with a side helping of Islamist anti-Westernism, tainted our universities starting in the 1990s—with the rise of niche ethnic and Women’s Studies departments. That soon tainted our media, as elite college grads became elite professionals. Meanwhile, both media and the academy infiltrated arts institutions and the Democratic party.

Questioning this ideology was punished. Universities required highly curated diversity pledges and axed professors who were perceived to be non-compliant. Museums selectively promoted artists based on identity over relevance or accomplishment. The New York Times fired James Bennet for publishing a Republican senator opinion piece in 2020.

Since media and politics are as intertwined as ideology is with technology, let’s take the next step and ask how this impacts politics.

What happens when a smaller, less trusted, more ideological media adheres to a single political party?

The voting majority answered the question last fall. That’s why Republican candidates won across the board. It’s why their party has improved year-after-year in every county in America except for a handful of high net worth locales. It’s why even left wing statisticians observe that had a different MAGA Republican run instead of Trump, he or she might have won by a landslide.

It’s also why the trend away from legacy news means our next elected officials will be social media stars, from Zohran Mamdani to JD Vance. Meanwhile, editorial boards endorsements have evanesced—not because their editorial boards don’t matter, but because their entire organizations are self-obsoleting. In the name of justice! For a few people! Who need the elites to tell them they need elite help!

As Democrats compress into a more refined and more pure form of identity preferences—what they call being progressive—I think it’s reasonable to predict the party will become more shrill and more shrunken. Just like the legacy media.

The one exception to this legacy moment is economics. Progressive Democrats have zero record of municipal performance on any measure of infrastructure development, public safety, educational achievement, new housing or any other success metric. But they are excellent at mentioning what the prior generation of Centrists ignored: affordability.

We’ll see if Republicans, as the only relevant party, can deliver. Either way, for now, we have one party in charge, and another party relegated to legacy and lore. And soon, it’ll be footnoted and forgotten.

Iran down. Zohran up.

First off, you now have permission to stop talking about the Centrist vs Progressive struggle within the Democratic Party. There’s no centrist youth movement, there’s only DSA progressives, and they’ve won.

The Democratic Party now believes:

• We fight against white supremacist settler-colonialism

• We know there’s no gender binary. TransAm may have been a toxic masculine car, but it’s awesome ideology for this country

• We demand government intervention and higher taxes

DEI or die baby!

Oh wait, I meant "DEI or die" as a joke! I didn't realize they were actually going to off themselves in the biggest media market in the country. That’s what we witnessed last week: the seppuku of an entire political party.

Zohran Mamdani will go down in history as the figure symbolizing the electoral death of his party. Certainly on a state and national level. He'll most likely win at the municipal level, much like progressives had been winning in West Coast cities like Portland, LA and San Francisco. How’s that going for them? Yes, SF recently got a new centrist (and Jewish) billionaire mayor, but there’s not a national movement coalescing around him. Like John Fetterman, Josh Shapiro and Ritchie Torres, Daniel Lurie is an outlier.

You can't mourn a suicide if you're Catholic or Jewish, but a loss is a loss.​ RIP folx. It couldn't have happened to a nicer party. If it’s not too soon to ask, can I have your PHEV​? It’ll help me drive to your vacation properties I’ll also be inheriting. I’m thinking Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard or somewhere near the water in Malibu. I solemnly swear to dispose of your keffiyehs with eco-friendly upcycling.

OK, good times. So how does this relate to Iran?

Imagine this: I'm at an Anne Frank exhibition where you shockingly walk through a reproduction of the little annex the family lived in for two year. It's claustrophobic and oppressive. Soon almost all of them were murdered. Rage rose within in me until all I could think about was buying as many weapons as possible to make sure the Holocaust never happens again.

Then I walk outside in a city with the most profoundly anti-Jewish mayoral primary winner in history. The hits keep coming with this guy. He doesn’t just demand killing Jews in New York, i.e., localize the intifada, he also wants to double the $100 billion municipal budget, which he’ll finance with more taxes. Based on how New York spends the first $100 billion, what could possibly go wrong?

I need to pause for a moment to analyze his — and his party’s — bigotry. It’s a new form of anti-Judaism that’s a bit hard to follow because it’s not like classic right wing antisemitism that hates Jews regardless of Israel. Left wing racism has some nuance to it that a thousand editorials can’t understand.

It goes like this: we don’t hate weak Jews. A lot of them are in America and consider bagels and latkes the extent of their ethnic identity. They’re harmless. We hate the Jews with sovereignty. And we hate the Jews who enjoy the benefits of that sovereignty. Those are the bad Jews.

Problematically, you can’t tell if a Jew cares about Israel by looking at him, so clearly the, um, ultimate solution for the Democratic Party is to make Jews take a test. If they say they like Israel, then let’s take that intifada and bring it on home. If they say they don’t like Israel, and a handful of prominent Jews in the media and politics do say this, then they get a pass.

You don't have to walk through an exhibition of a cramped annex space to know where sorting Jews gets you.

What we've also seen recently is the failure of Iran. Before 10/7/2023, it was a terrifying regional powerhouse.

This changed when Trump delivered the B-2 coup de grace after Israel had wiped out most of Iran's air defenses and military infrastructure—with very few civilian deaths (627). Why so few deaths by the IDF? Because the IRGC, unlike Hamas, uses military bases instead of elementary schools for staging grounds.

Within 20 months Iran went from feared to failed.

The fact that the mullahs remain in control is a masterstroke by Israel and the USA. Better to have a weak state ruled by people you know, than a military dictatorship led by younger, possibly more effective people you don't.

This will relate back to Mamdani shortly. For now, let’s observe that Israel, the only western power in an otherwise Islamic region of over a billion people—the contiguous Islamic world spanning from the Atlantic Ocean in West Africa all the way to the western border of China—has demonstrated, alongside America, the vitality of the West vs Islamic rule. It can be either Arab Sunni or Iranian Shia. Both are empirical losers.

The American cost? A few months of planning. A few billion dollars of equipment. Israel bore the harsher costs with nearly two years of combat to destroy Iranian henchmen in the region, and it suffered nearly 30 deaths in ballistic missile attacks. As awful as any death is, it’s a pretty low expense considering US and Israel devastated Iran for decades. Even if they do magically conjure up a new nuclear program, our men in Missouri are just a flight away.

I hear you get better with practice.

​This relates to the new Democratic Party because progressives are anti-western. They have two main philosophies, one is social, the other is economic. Their social philosophy is rooted in a heroic narrative of rebels fighting an evil white supremacist settler-colonial empire. It’s a quasi religious way of looking at the world: the lonely true believers versus the massed hordes of oppressors.

They further blend this Star Wars/comic book movie with gender identity and sexuality, since white supremacy is somehow also straight, male and cis. So now we’re freedom fighters and we’re queer. That’s why Mamdani once said defunding the police is queer liberation, or why his friends trot out “Queers for Palestine” signs at Columbia, where his father teaches something called “postcolonial studies.”

For a mere $100k a year, you too can get a Columbia degree! It comes with a lifetime of debt and the added benefit of no career prospects! But it’s elite so people in the Hamptons and Vail will definitely let you valet park their car.

Let’s take it one step further. The Democratic Party mythical narrative never explicitly says it’s anti-Christian, but in spirit, tone and practice, that's exactly what it is. They’re overt about being anti-Jewish but, for now, their anti-Christianity remains covert. It’s easy to see through their reticence because Christendom has significant overlaps with the West. Progressive are anti-West. Ergo...

Anti-westernism is the ideological core of the new Democratic Party. I can’t imagine this doing very well in the ballot box, but this is their movement, not mine. These people learn anti-western ideologies in universities. As noted above, these are the same universities who saddle them with debt and provide educations that don’t lead to high paying jobs.

Why it’s important to focus on this is because Zohran Mamdani may change his economic policies, but he will always be anti-Israel. And that steadfastness betrays his ideological rigidity that will ignore reality in favor of a compelling narrative, even if it’s false. Does that make a good leader?

To support Israel would undermine his and his party’s entire social and moral philosophy. Being anti-Israel means they’re brave freedom fighters. Since it's too late to fight the evil empire in America or in Europe, they can only raise hell in Israel. Again, this is why Mamdani said he'll happily abandon some of his municipal prescriptions if they don't work, but he will never drop his social, kind of mystical theory of anti-colonialism, which is another way of saying antisemitism, which is another way of saying anti-westernism, because without it, he’s just another careerist seeking power. This emperor is clothed in social justice. But really underneath is just a naked grab for dominance.

We've just seen those anti-Western fantasists fail in the Middle East. A tiny western power of 10 million took out armies that controlled hundreds of millions of Arab and Iranians. Yes, Israel had help from the USA at the very end, and I’ll note that the USA is the only other western power in the world that counts right now. Proof points: Europe alone won’t defeat Russia. Neither will Australia, South Korean and Japan stop China.

The new Democratic Party, the DSA Mamdani AOC Bernie Sanders save-democracy-by-rioting party, has been chanting the same message that Tehranis chant in Palestine Square. In Iran they yell “Death to Israel,” here they say “Free, Free Palestine.” It all means the same thing.

But now I want you to lean in. If you listen real closely to Democratic arguments about lots of genders, and how you must correct the indignities of racism by ranking and selectively promoting some people over others, and how “late stage capitalism” will usher in a new social order with expanded government control, you’ll also hear a whisper of what Iranians blast on loudspeakers: “Death to America.”

We’ve just seen the West triumph in the Middle East. Now we’re seeing the anti-west triumph in Midtown East.

How long will the Democrats be out of power? Can you count the years on one hand, or both, or should you also add your toes?

Israel has now taken the fight to their feudal lord. I’ll tell you what this war means for the narratives disseminated by the mainstream media, academies and the Democratic party, and what you can do about it.

I’ll strive to show how their reliance on narratives helps explain this political moment: Democrats are in disarray while Trump’s Republicanism is impervious to, or perhaps even strengthened by, rallies and endless liberal criticism and dismissal.

But first, war. In part, this is a very big deal because Israel isn't fighting terrorists. For the first time in 52 years they’re ​c​ombating a ​n​ation. It was way back in 1973 when nations like Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon attacked Israel. For no reason.

I think it's important to underscore the dynamics in these Israel vs Everyone Else wars because, oddly, no one seems to mention them. As many immoral acts Israel may or may not commit in the Palestinian territories, the offensive wars by Egypt and Syria back when I was born, or fifty two years later by Iran, are not about West Bank settlements.

They’re not about that Palestinians in Jenin can't vote in Israeli elections.

Or that Jenin presumably has worse sewage systems than a similarly-sized town in Israel, although the only source to report this disparity is from far left wing Israeli NGO. For argument’s sake, we’ll say it’s true.

Either way, the plight of Palestinians isn’t what Iran and even Hamas care about. It never has been.

What they care about is eliminating Israel and, inshallah, taking out America.

They're clear about this with their media statements, and Israel has likewise been clear about not agreeing to its demise. Much like how Ukraine is clear about not caving in to Russia. Media narratives never discuss this crucial fact of the conflicts—that Islamists want to eradicate Israel, while Israel wants to live in freedom within secure borders that will never stretch beyond the Jordan river, the Golan range or the Negev desert. (It’s a land mass the size of New Jersey.)

Here’s an additional fun fact the media doesn’t mention: want to solve the Palestinian territory problem that no leftwing politician can solve? Have a peaceful Middle East where Israel knows, for sure, that it lives alongside neighbors not dedicated to its destruction. Like how Portugal knows, for sure, that not only will Spain never invade, France won’t hire terrorists to hide in Spain and attack, either.

If those conditions are met, then some form of Palestinian sovereignty is no longer a threat to Israel. Problem solved.

The big picture with this current conflict is, we hope, that the Iranian people throw off their regime and create a better nation that's less oppressive and bloodthirsty—for its own people, never mind for places like Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and Yemen.

Since a classically liberal democracy isn't possible in Muslim nations except for Indonesia (which became a democracy only in 1998), it's hard to imagine a good outcome for Iranians.

Why the pessimism? Or is it realism? There are 23 countries with Islam as their state religion. That's 1.5 billion souls. Indonesia is one of these states, they have 284 million people. That means 1.21 billion people in Muslim states live in un-free conditions with no voting, no civil rights, no vegan snacks and no all gender bathrooms, which should be called bathrooms regardless of gender since few people enjoy being all the genders, but I digress.

I've said for a long time that it's hard to imagine Palestinians bucking the trend of illiberal Muslim sovereignty. I don’t think Palestine will become like a Scandinavian country. It seems fair to say Iranians won't be eating Swedish meatballs soon either.

It's odd to me that the passionate denizens of transwokistan USA, who take over campuses, school boards and political parties, don't try to overthrow the Iranian regime themselves. If the regime murders women for not wearing a headscarf correctly, it's ugly to imagine how they treat gay people, ethnic or religious minorities. But no, progressive street fighters and college professors focus on eliminating Israel, which makes them odd bedfellows with the very Islamists dedicated to their elimination.

How do you understand this seeming contradiction, of LGBTQIA+ advocates wanting to destroy Israel which has an amazing track record of LGBTQIA+ rights, vs, say, every Muslim country including Indonesia?

It's easy. First, discount all talk of values and morals. Second, view the LGBTQIA+ progressive movement as an unarmed militia in a zero-sum struggle for dominance.

Insert cautionary note here—I'm not saying all LGBTQIA+ people want to kill Israelis. But I am observing that lesbian Pride organizers, today, in America, excluded Zionists from attending their events this summer. No Jewish ladies allowed—unless they answer your questions correctly.

Also, as far as I can tell, 99% of trans people seek to destroy Israel. They are in coalition with others for sure, like democratic-socialists, but it's a striking observation that if you're a Jewish lesbian who wants to celebrate Pride, you're forbidden, and if you're trans, which is supposedly a mental health or physical condition, you will necessarily have extreme politics which have nothing to do with gender.

Hmmmm... makes me wonder if being trans is mostly make believe.

What if we ask: is trans perhaps a mechanism for white elites to benefit from the same DEI priorities they’ve reserved for black people, by self marginalizing and claiming that—poof!—believing they're trans guarantees their status as an oppressed person? Trans is the new black.

Remember, progressives invert superiority dynamics. The more oppressed you claim to be, the more power you claim over others. Only progressives get to decide the rankings. Jews are out, disabled gay Muslims with autism are in.

This is why Greta Thunberg, who is white and straight, claims autism and several other mental conditions as proof points for her victimhood—and therefore, her power. I know she’s straight because if she were gay, she would claim it as a disadvantage to give her even more rights.

Since, as Greta has undoubtedly learned, you can’t fake being gay, it’s easier to say you’re trans (or in her case, suffering from multiple mental health disorders that are more correctly diagnosed as egomania), since “trans” is a meaningless term outside of the very tiny fraction of humanity suffering from genital defects.

Trans is the express lane for non-gay whites to claim marginalized status. And they’re sure as heck going for it.

OK, Mr Smarty Pants, what about black or Latino trans people? Doesn’t that ruin my whole set up!? I think there’s a different tactic at play. What I’m noticing is that black/brown trans identity confers special preferences that more and more non-trans black people and Latinos reject for themselves.

DEI seems more popular among wealthy whites than working class blacks and browns, but if you’re black or brown trans, then trans is your workaround to retain this privileged DEI status that your own people have been rejecting for years now. It’s your last gasp for power. It also means you can feel safe in your pigeonhole of being a proud Democrat, while more and more of your black or brown family members vote Republican.

This is my conclusion about left wing politics and culture since 10/7, the revelation of Biden’s infirmities and the medicalization of children with harmful anti-Covid and gender interventions. Values and science left the stage a long time ago. These folks are partisans angling for advantage and supremacy. They win, everyone else loses.

Happily, for now, they're losing most elections.

Progressives values are domination, not “social justice,” “diversity” and “human rights.” Those are sheaths, power is the sword.

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​Let's get back to media narratives vs. reality. Something that occurred to me with this new Israel-Iran war is our inherited narrative from the media, Democratic politicians, universities and Hollywood—and how they are no longer capable of offering insights into current events.

Worse, they seem unconcerned with reality.

Yet, they persist. They push a dramatic tale of beleaguered rebels waging a heroic battle against evil imperial overlords. It's Star Wars. It's the Avengers. It's not real, but it's potent and has a great narrative hook.

They apply this framework to almost any struggle:

• Trans vs. males and females

• Gay vs. straight

• The made up idea of "people of color" vs. whites—which, if you uppercase it, means you're racist, but, for some reason, Black is mandatory

• Women vs. men

• Palestinian terrorists vs. Israeli senior-citizen peace activists

Or my current favorite, the Democratic defenders of democracy vs. the fascist, pre-Nazi, definitely racist and patriarchal Donald Trump—and the 77 million cult-worshippers who voted for him. Another word for them is “neighbors” and “family members.”

This is all so distant from reality and empiricism as to be laughable, if it wasn't so destructive for our country.

The challenges of our time are lack of housing, decaying infrastructure, violence and unaffordability. These very important issues don’t even get a subplot during storytime.

They also raise the question: why, in the face of dwindling electoral strength and fewer and fewer readers and NPR subscribers, is it important for the storytellers to tell themselves these stories?

To tell the ending first, it’s because they have to tell these stories. It’s all they have left. But now it’s story time:

They tell stories like: skin-color, gender and sexuality-based diversity are primary goals that all private and public institutions must conform to under the full weight of the US government.

Likewise, economic, religious and perspective-based diversity must be ignored. Or better yet, unmentioned.

A two-state solution for Israel and Palestine is a stable, desired and necessary geopolitical outcome.

For men and women to be equal, they must behave, think and act identically to each other. Ideally, they should dress alike too. Any diversion by males from these patterns must be derided with insults like "toxic" and “patriarchy.” Males must be reminded they have the disqualifying gender for diversity. The only hope is if they're gay, then their deficiencies are somewhat mitigated.

We must especially handicap boys, ideally with medication and discipline, otherwise, in this dramatic story, not only will all girls lose, but all women will be subjugated to men forever. It will be Games of Thrones in one generation.

While this is certainly true in the Arab Muslim world, it seems like a quaint observation in America, where girls outpace boys in almost every qualitative measure.

The other story is that, since all people are created equal (a religious-political belief originating in ancient Judaism), and since men and women must behave and look exactly the same way, we must also celebrate all minority ethnicities, non-binarians and those with mental illness. Why? Because they’re different. Being different is good. Unless you’re talking about gender, then being different is bad.

If you think this is confusing and contradictory, you’re in the right place.

More germane to this essay, the other great story we’re told is that Israel is a white supremacist settler-colonial country perpetuating the same white supremacist settler-colonial crimes that America did during slavery and against Native Americans, except you can actually do something about it! No, silly, you don’t need a time machine. You can fight American slavery and every injustice of the Western world right now, today!

Eliminate Israel. Problem solved.

This explains the “Queers for Palestine” head scratcher, or why black writers like Ta-Nehesi Coates spent a week in Israel to write a popularly-received diatribe about Jim Crow in Ramallah, while never asking what happened to the segregated Jewish populations in Baghdad or, say, Berlin. Or what will happen to Jews in America if people like him ascend to political office.

Zohran Mamdani, the most anti-Jewish candidate in many lifetimes, may become New York’s next mayor. New York has the largest population of Jews outside of Israel.

----

​I’ll wrap up with a less extreme version of these Tall Tales. The center-left's Israel narrative goes like this: it’s mostly OK for Israel to defend itself after 10/7. War is an ugly fact of life.

But not anymore! At some point, we don’t know when, Netanyahu went too far. He, I mean, the IDF, is wantonly killing a criminally disproportionate amount of civilians.

What informs this are Hamas statistics of Palestinian civilian deaths. The media quotes these stats. They never say they're from Hamas, we’re told they’re from the Gaza Health Ministry.

Apparently this is one man with a Twitter account. Is he even in Gaza?

Where is the GHM’s office? Do they have clinics? Where do their numbers come from? How can they report them while missiles are being fired? Are there really no natural deaths in Gaza since 10/8 because 100% of them are attributed to Israel?

How come no mainstream journalist asks these questions?

This is the same news media that ignored Biden's dementia so they can keep him in office, but whoops, Biden announced his condition to the world all by himself.

Why do they do this? I think it’s because they need these kind of stories much more than they need to uphold supposed values like objective journalism.

These stories keep them in power. It’s impossible to discard these stories because an objective tete-a-tete with reality threatens their cultural and economic dominance. So let’s gather ‘round the campfire, keep telling tales and hope no one notices there’s no more wood left.

That’s the answer to my question: why do these storytellers feel the need to tell these stories to themselves, especially when it seems that fewer and fewer people are listening to them? They do it because they have to. Truth is not the issue, it’s about power, faith and fantasy, to crib the title of Michael Oren’s book.

I like focusing on the narrow issue of Israel because it's a great fulcrum for understanding the many problems with the left wing—and why they're more and more unpopular across the world.

Another way of saying this is Jews are canaries in the coal mine of Western Civilization. Not because we’re smart, it’s because we’re both minorities and white. That gives us a rare perspective.

The storytellers keep it up because they have to, or at least, that’s what they think. Meanwhile, more people vote for Republicans. And more people use podcasts, substacks and social media instead of radio, print and cable news.

My argument is that these things are closely-related. People turn to better voices so they can better understand reality. This, in turn, clarifies how to vote. That’s why Trump has risen in the age of media turnover.

It’s also because, after so many decades of hearing about the vital relevance of the Civil Rights Movement, our country has declined economically and physically. Perhaps even spiritually.

But the only way you can understand this negative trajectory is by going elsewhere for the news, since “the news” tells you a story about noble heroes of color and their trans allies fighting scary white male monsters, both here and in Israel. This distraction keeps the storytellers in power while you drift further and further into the abyss of wage stagnation, criminality, bad food, harmful pharmaceuticals and unaffordability.

Why does the media do this? Because it enriches their faction in society. How can I prove this? I’ll ask you to do it for me. Point out me how many blue collar workers are journalists or academics.

The center left says Israel is bloodthirsty and must be stopped, either by restricting arms sales or by restricting Trump from attacking Iran. But since they don’t hate all Jews, they select Benjamin Netanyahu to blame for the wanton loss of life as reported by a terrorist with a Twitter account that’s amplified by the largest media organizations in the world.

Bibi’s the culprit! Get rid of him. Problem solved.

First, let’s ask the obvious question: what would the center-left critique be if another politician took his place and he or she also wanted to defend Israel by removing Hamas from power? Which is what any Israeli politician must do to protect his or her role, since Israelis won’t vote for someone who doesn’t protect them.

They also miss the next obvious observation. Benjamin Netanyahu is the greatest liberator of Arabs, and soon perhaps Persians, in world history.

Millions upon millions of Arab Muslims in Lebanon and Syria now have a shot for freedom, as ahistoric it is for Arab Muslims to be free, due to Netanyahu. His leadership may soon expand (bitter, to be sure) freedoms to Gaza, the West Bank and like I said, Iran. That’s 130 million people.

Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th century Ottoman sultan, was one of Islam’s greatest political leaders and a significant reformer. He ruled over 25 million souls.

This clear truth—that millions of Arabs owe their freedoms to Israel’s military—can’t be reflected by left wing narratives, or even centrist narratives. They’ve told us all a different story, and since that story can’t change if they’re to remain in power, they’re sticking to it.

If even center leftists can't observe that more Arabs are free because of Netanyahu, then their stories of Netanyahu’s endless perfidy shouldn’t be taken seriously. They shouldn’t be disseminated by every mainstream news outlet in the English-speaking world. Now consider how this relates to their descriptions of Trump.

Thankfully, your average American see through all this. That’s why he ignores the press and sticks in his earbuds to listen to a podcast.

Let’s take it one step further. While he’s listening to the podcast, he can now also shift his political loyalties from a party that tells him he can only be on the side of history if they follow their instructions, and towards himself, his family, his workplace, his place of worship and his country.

That’s freedom.

In recent years, reformers have made New York Democrats, who enjoy closed primaries that limit voter participation on off year elections that attract few people who cope with shifting poll locations, to use something called Ranked-Choice Voting.

Who’s worse for voting, Republicans or Democrats? Yes.

RCV is a fascinating technical idea that is super confusing and not working as intended. It’s basically a Ponzi scheme that funnels votes from more popular candidates to less popular candidates. It was designed by Bernie Madoff. Just kidding about that last part.

2021 was the first NYC Democratic mayoral primary to use RCV. It’s a way of conducting instant run-off votes. It took eight rounds to get to Eric Adams “winning” vote. I use quotes, because many people ranked him low on their list and wound up with him getting their vote, even if he was not their first, second, third or even fourth choice.

The vast majority of New Yorkers consider Eric Adams our worst mayor in a very long time. If the political winds blew a slightly different way, he’d be in prison for corruption.

In 2025, another off year with throttled and shifting voting procedures in New York, progressives have captured the instant-runoff process by flooding the field. Additionally, progressives leverage flaws in RCV by cross-endorsing each other, which is another way of saying two unpopular candidates team up to take down a single prominent candidate whom more voters prefer. It’s a manipulation that detracts from the will of the plurality of the voters.

We’re told this is good for democracy.

Since primaries are closed in our (formerly) deep blue city, extremist candidates are unaccountable to the majority. Republicans and Independents can’t vote for mayor in New York because the Democratic primary winner almost always wins in November.

On the plus side, New York now has early voting. This means you have a week to vote before election day. But guess what? Your early voting booth isn’t in the same place as your election day voting booth. And… if you request a mail-in ballot and don’t use it, or screw it up, like I did once when I messed up the placement of the double envelopes, you can’t vote in person. I called the local voting board. Twice. Didn’t answer.

We have a terrible system that has nothing to do with Republicans. Since Democrats look outwards to cast blame and refuse to ask themselves how, or even if, they should reform, we’re stuck with limited and biased voting.

This election is particularly meaningful because:

1. NYC is huge and always a big deal

2. It’s a prominent Democratic election after Trump’s 2020 2024 win

3. Most candidates are so extreme they’re a credible security threat for, you guessed it, the Jews!

Yes, Jews are my favorite subject, but perhaps Jews facing attack will cause others to wonder if they’re next. Men and working class people already know they are.

Progressives hate Jews first, that’s clear. They sort us into two categories—the Jewish majority who are stoked Israel exists because it’s our historic homeland finally realized after the Holocaust, and a very small Jewish minority who aren’t stoked. Those minor Jews are OK. The problem is, it’s hard to tell us apart. Maybe try armbands?

Since progressives are inclusive when it comes to ranking humans, even if Jews admittedly get the top slot, you too get to participate in their human lottery. For example, pretty much anyone else can aspire to be an ableist racist Islamophobe, which is how progressives call white people. Or maybe they mean working class people of all backgrounds? Or just all men? Or women who aren’t trans? It's a wide net.

First, this RCV primary election is a key issue because the winner will likely be the next mayor of our nation's largest city, which plays a national role and even influences economic and foreign policy. Many good and many bad things happen in NYC that echo around the world. 9/11. The start of Covid in America. Wall Street. The UN. The Media. Broadway. Hip Hop, which went from the Bronx to take over the entire world of pop music. We have an enormous immigrant population. We’re the richest municipality with the largest school district and the biggest police department.

Sixty million visitors from every corner of the world come to NYC each year. We have over 8 million residents, which makes NewYork’s population larger than Ireland, Norway or Denmark. Our political leaders ran for president twice in recent years. They are weather vanes for national politics.

For example, the alarm bells are still ringing at DNC HQ after more and more black voters in the Bronx and Queens went Republican in 2024. Not coincidentally, these black voters are almost all working- or lower middle-class and many didn’t go to college.

In response to their defecting from the party that apparently they have to vote for because of their genetics—again, democracy in action on the left!—Democrats are running around with their hair on fire while throwing money at podcasters. It’s unlikely to win votes, but it burns calories, reduces haircuts and subsidizes young males… before they vote Republican.

The fact that Dems actually pay consultants to tell them to do this is as hilarious as it is sorrowful. Political oblivion couldn’t happen to a nicer party.

Second, the RCV election is a big deal because the NYC Democratic primary battle is the Democratic party battle of the nation, especially before the 2026 midterms.

Will the party lean into an older establishment centrist who doesn’t care for identity preferences and supports the private sector? Or will the party be taken over by younger identity-supremacists with progressive populist economic, criminal justice and housing policies that are red meat for their blue base, despite having no track record of success when they’ve been implemented in other cities?

Meet the centrists: Andrew Cuomo, Scott Stringer and Whitney Tilson, ranked by popularity. They are white, straight men who identify as white, straight men and are perceived as white, straight men. You don’t need to read their email signatures to know their pronouns, you can just guess.

In the height of the #MeToo era, the first two were accused of relatively minor sexual harassment, which they deny. All charges were either not filed or dropped.

Six candidates—double the centrists which gives them a huge advantage in RCV—are progressive: Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, Adrienne Adams, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos and Michael Blake, ranked by popularity. These candidates are Muslim Indian, Jewish white, Christian black (Adams, Myrie, Blake) and Christian Latina. They skew younger and are suspicious of the private sector.

They’re not all poor though. Mamdani’s mom is the famous, and I think absolutely amazing film director, Mira Nair. He went to private schools his entire life except for a stint at an elite public high school, and, dollars to donuts, Mamdani venmoes a working class ethnic guy to maintain his luxury condo in Queens. Wonder how that guy votes?

Now that we know what the stakes are: big important city, a political party struggling to find a path, we’ll soon talk about how to actually vote. Yes, this takes a ton of work in New York, a supposed laboratory of democracy.

While this is about New York, ranked choice voting is used more and more across the country in both blue and red states, for a variety of elections. It's also been rejected in many places. There are many smart advocates for the process since it tries to solve the problem of run-off elections where almost no one shows up, and to make people feel that even if the guy or gal who won wasn’t your first choice, you maybe sorta, kinda voted for them as a third or fourth choice, so it feels like you had a say in who will be your temporary ruler, despite their unpopularity. It’s contorted but you can kind of argue that it makes sense.

The problem is RCV is vulnerable to capture by an unpopular mob, which is what’s happening next week.

We're told that RCV, also called instant run-off voting, is more democratic because the winner of a crowded field needs at least 50% of the total vote of everyone who participated. What the advocates don't tell you is that if you have one centrist running against five knuckleheads, in RCV you are forced to vote for four of those five knuckleheads. Otherwise, your vote has a chance of not counting at all.

It's a huge flaw that guess what, goes unremarked in the media. Today, right now, extreme progressives are manipulating the new fangled method to take down Andrew Cuomo, the centrist front runner. And, like I said earlier, since the primary election blocks Independents and Republicans, far left Democrats tilt the field in their favor. They both stack the decks and conspire, publicly, to band together to shift votes. This is called cross-endorsing.

Our city is now at risk of an extremist, Zohran Mamdani, taking over the nation's biggest city with a $100 billion budget and the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, and millions of other vulnerable people. This extremist is Muslim, rich, teaches at the now world famous Columbia University, refuses to condemn the Holocaust, and is very opposed to 7 million Jews being able to live in peace 6,000 miles away from New York in a region of 450 million Arabs.

That’s his hill, but according to the polls and RCV, he won’t have to die on it.

More perplexing to your humble author, many far left Jews will vote for him, despite the bigotry. You’ll remember that many Jews backed Bolshevism. A few years later and a few countries to the west, most Jews felt totally secure with their German-Jewish identities.

Are these people to blame for others’ hatred? Not at all. By why enable it?

In this election, there are nearly a dozen Democratic primary candidates. You can rank up to five of them on your ballot. It looks like a grid. If you don't rank five, it's very likely your vote will be diluted by someone else who did, and your vote could be tossed. Yes, in NYC, this means you're going to have to apply a molecular analysis of each knucklehead running to see who is least likely to physically sacrifice you on their altar of social justice.

As a Jewish voter in a city with a blue DA who won’t prosecute anti-Jewish rioters, who are now putting their money where their globalize the intifada mouth is with firebombs and shootings, physical attack by Democratic-aligned terrorists is a reasonable concern.

You can assume that the the NYPD Intelligence Bureau and the Jewish Security Community Network will be on high alert during the election. January 6th was bad, absolutely. Now imagine a pogrom in New York City that pits progressives and Islamists against the police and Jews.

Sounds like race war to me. Not a Republican in sight.

Think I sound crazy? The second-most popular candidate who is now endorsed by AOC, Zohran Mamdani, is a member of the DSA—the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re a political organization inspired by Bernie Sanders’ call for “democratic socialism” as a cure for income inequality, and policies to support or to suppress people based on their race, gender identity or sexuality.

On October 8th 2023, a day after the Palestinian invasion of Israel, the official DSA-NYC chapter marched in Times Square to praise the Palestinian attackers and to blame Israelis for being murdered, raped and kidnapped. Most of the Israeli victims were peace activists living on the Israel/Gaza border, or young people partying for “Peace, Love and Infinite Freedom,” or women raped and then murdered.

Religious fundamentalists murdering peace activists didn’t spark support on the left, or a #MeToo rally in defense of female victims of sexual violence. Instead, the DSA-NYC fomented a national campaign at college campuses to call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and its American Jewish supporters.

Yes, college students and faculty advocated for missile strikes and other physical attacks on Americans. That’s what the green headbands, red triangles and calls for intifada mean. Only a few foreigner advocates of terror have been held for deportation by the Trump administration, and were immediately heroicized by the left as martyrs. No American citizens have been incarcerated for inciting violence.

Think that’s old news from 2024? I’m just a curmudgeon muttering about past slights, right? A few weeks ago, another large DSA group announced their support for the killing of a Jew and Israeli in Washington DC. Yes, they support the killing. Undoubtedly they're cheering the torching of elderly Jews in Boulder last week, and the fire bombing of a Jewish governor.

Zohran Mamdani is a member of the DSA. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just endorsed him.

Now you see why I'm concerned.

If we didn't have RCV voting, a pack of extremist, pro-terror bigots who aren't polling well would immediately lose the election and be forgotten.

Not with RCV. Now they get a promotion.

OK, what!? How could this voting scenario happen in America’s most diverse city, and why on earth am I so afraid of people who want to raise taxes for new bureaucracies focused on public safety, healthcare and housing?

Quick history recap for why progressives, or leftists, or whatever you call these new liberals, should be discarded on the historic ash heap of other bad ideas, like Communism and Nazism.

Remember, those Russians and Germans didn’t think they were the bad guys. They were idealists with total certainty they had a political and personal identity solution to improve their countries. If you didn’t agree with them, you were the enemy of progress and on the wrong side of history. Most likely, you also had the wrong identity in their rankings of humans. Sound familiar?

Here’s the recap: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf inspired Arab Islamist nationalism a 100 years ago as they forged a new political identity. The Arab world was shaking off the Ottoman Empire and creating the Arab states we know today like Egypt, Syria, Iraq and so on. This ideology of “pure” Arab Islamic rule has strengthened over time in what is now, outside of a few Gulf states, the poorest region in the world. (The Gulf is about 10% of the Arab world. The other 90% are impoverished.)

Speaking of percentages, the Arab world is now 100% controlled by Arab Muslims of varying degrees of religiosity. Minorities like Kurds, Berbers, Yazidis, Druze and Arab Christians have zero power in any country. The only exception is Israel, with 7 million Jews enjoying sovereignty in their historic homeland. It’s the smallest country in the region. It’s been subject to genocidal wars from “pure” Arab Muslims since before its founding.

In the late 20th century and early 21st century, American college faculty and students chose Arab Islamist nationalism as their cri de coeur for social justice, instead of say, peace, love and understanding as they had in Vietnam War era.

They chose Arab Islamism because they believe that the many perceived injustices of America, like colonization, slavery and Jim Crow, can no longer be reversed anywhere on earth—except in one place!

Yep, the fix to the perceived troubles of the West is to erase the one Jewish state. Then all will be well. This brings American liberals in tight alignment with Arab Islamists. And remember, Arab Islamists were directly inspired by Adolf Hitler.

The insane race theories of the Nazis are now the insane race theories of the progressives, who are growing in power within the Democratic party, at every university and in the media. Nothing to worry about!

Concerned about promoting certain people based on their gender or race, creating conditions for economic fairness, or even protecting basic civic freedoms are eclipsed by the progressive desire to remove Israel, which even casual observers will notice requires war.

Sovereign people aren’t in the habit of suicide when attacked, they tend to arm themselves to the teeth and bite back hard, like in say, Ukraine.

Take my word for it that Arab Islamism is very bad and the left wing, like in the Bolshevik era and the later Nazi era, has fallen into a rabbit hole of idealism that, when combined with antisemitism, justifies terrorism. We’re seeing this now in America on an almost weekly basis.

Many sarcastic observers note that Arab Islamists would happily execute their genderqueer allies in America instead of watching Netflix, but that’s not really the threat. It’s more likely that Arab Islamists will simply convert their progressive friends to become terrorists, like the Washington DC shooter Elias Rodriguez or Columbia students hospitalizing janitors who get in their way.

ISIS is well known for inspiring lone-wolf suicide attacks across North America and Europe. This is what’s happening now, just substitute calls for “Free, Free Palestine” from ISIS to spot the trend.

These are the same calls at Zohran Mamdani gatherings. He himself founded Students for Justice Palestine at Bowdoin College. It’s $91,500 a year to attend.

How this all relates to Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in New York is a short story. By any measure—participation rates, youth engagement, media support, influencers, crowd-funded donations, the many young politicians running in primaries against older, centrist incumbents—the progressive movement in the Democratic party is ascendant. This is particularly true here in New York.

The most two prominent progressives in America either come from, or currently live in, New York City: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They’re followed by a long and growing list of backers across the arts, entertainment, the media, and at all levels of politics.

California’s Bay Area doesn’t hold a candle to New York progressives.

This is all to say that when Democrats now run for office in New York, they are disproportionately progressive, despite their growing unpopularity as measured by polls and primary defeats, like Jamaal Bowman’s loss. By concentrating their power—disallowing non-Democrats to vote—and by rigging elections—using novel voting tactics like RCV—progressives seize power far beyond any definition of small-d democracy.

Trump took over his party over a ten year period, as measured by primaries and Presidential elections. Had the public been aware of Biden’s health in 2020, it’s likely Trump would have also won that election. Republicans are now very, very different from the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney years.

Politics, like Newton’s third law of motion, has equal and opposite reactions. Years after Trump’s ascension in the 2015 Republican primaries, the Democratic party is at long last transforming in response to both MAGA Republicanism and to their many losses.

What’s different is that the Democratic party uses the underhanded, illiberal tactics consistent with the left’s behavior of the past several decades. Trump just won more votes. My argument is that RCV, a liberal voting concept, is now enabling more of this left-wing illiberal behaior. The fact that this is happening by design or by hostile takeover is besides the point.

Let me prove my observation about illiberal left-wing tactics. These are well documented and are perhaps beginning to recede now that Republicans control every branch of government.

The left has been responsible for free speech crackdowns, censorship, news coverups and public shaming. This has been well reported by respected left-wing thinkers like Jonathan Chait and many others. “Wokeness” centered on what not to do, what not to say and what not to think.

The vanguard of progressive thinking and mandates offered a negative policy framework rather than a positive vision for the future. Microaggresions, dead-naming, misgendering, dehumanizing, de-platforming, antiracism and canceling are negative prescriptions. These are unique to the left. They also demonstrate how progressives continue to behave politically to this day.

In the New York election, progressives outnumber centrist candidates but they’re far less popular.

The problem is that RCV, also called instant run-off voting, means that a swarm of opponents overwhelms the lead candidate by design. Remember, the lead candidate is in the lead because more people like him. RCV inverts your vote by forcing you to pick candidates you don’t want.

Wait, couldn’t you just not choose 5 candidates and only focus on one or two politicians you can stomach? While you can, technically, not complete your ballot and still have your vote tallied, to do so dilutes your vote and gives an advantage to your neighbor who fills out all five. It disadvantages you to incomplete the form.

In a later post I may get into the mechanics of how RCV works, but, for now, please accept the premise that RCV requires total participation to work. It’s not binary voting—yes or no per candidate. It requires ranking of candidates. In this particular election that’s for five people.

To make ranking work correctly, voters have to rank all five. This facilitates the instant run-off rounds. Again, your vote will technically count if you don’t complete the ballot, but if the election moves to run-off rounds, which it will, and if your top one or two choices aren’t in later run-off rounds, then your vote is tossed out.

Since it’s impossible to predict what the results will be, especially in an era of discredited polling and ideologically-biased media, it’s in each voter’s best interest to complete their ballot. Trust me on this.

You’re supposed to vote five times. If you don’t and someone else does, it’s likely you will lose.

This year, in New York, there are 9 top candidates out of 11 total contenders.

Out of the nine, there are three centrists, only one of whom is popular—Cuomo. They are running against six progressives. Of those six, also only one is popular—Mamdani—but less popular than Cuomo. Since Mamdani has more fellow progressives running, and since it’s very rare in a crowded field for a candidate to immediately get more than 50% of the vote, it’s certain we’ll see instant run-off rounds.

In 2021, the first time RCV was used, Eric Adams won after a total of 8 runoff rounds. Eight rounds! That's how unpopular all of the candidates were.

Just like this election, 2021 was also a crowded field with no Democratic incumbent. (Eric Adams is running as an independent so isn’t in the Democratic primary.) It’s reasonable to predict that we’ll see a similar dynamic this year with many runoff rounds.

Remember, Eric Adams won the RCV primary, which, in blue New York, guaranteed his eventual win in the November general election.

Adams was indicted for federal crimes under the Biden administration that were later dropped by the Trump administration. He has the worst polling in thirty years of tracking the New York mayor’s office according to the Quinnipiac Poll.

Why this is likely to happen again, but substitute the word terrorism for corruption, is why you should advocate for change and definitely not believe anything you hear from Democratic sources.

Until then, if you’re a registered Democratic voter in NYC and can figure out where and how to vote, I suggest ranking the top three centrists. I wish you luck as you’re forced to vote for another two candidates, all of whom believe bigotry solves racism and who ignore the antisemitism rampaging across our country. Maybe choose Cuomo / Stringer / Tilson / Blake / Lander. Definitely pray.