The talks in Gaza are stuck on a single question: when does Hamas disarm? Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal first. Israel wants the dismantling of Hamas’s military capacity. Gazans want Hamas to retain weapons. Every side is waiting and pointing.
So the sequence matters.
In Washington, the argument has hardened around pressure on Israel. Democratic senators like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Tim Kaine, and Chris Van Hollen have pushed versions of the same idea: use U.S. leverage to change Israeli behavior now. The assumption is clear. The U.S. can influence Israel. It cannot influence Hamas.
It is backed by far-left pro-Palestinian groups like J Street. It is juvenile, dangerous and devoid of critical strategic thinking.
J Street, once again, on the wrong side of history
If all the pressure is on Israel, Hamas learns the simplest lesson in negotiation: wait. Let outside actors squeeze your opponent. Hold your position. Time becomes leverage.
That is where the current approach sits and breaks. And everyone suffers.
A negotiation like this needs a visible incentive on both sides. Hamas has faced pressure only from Israel – military and economic – but almost no credible pathway that links its own actions to a reduction in the conflict.
That is the missing piece.
Set a clear rule: as Hamas verifiably disarms, Israel correspondingly reduces its military posture and need for resupply. Less threat, less armament.
Now the logic runs forward, and resets the debate in Washington. The current fight among Democrats—arm Israel or restrain it—misses the hinge. If Hamas is disarmed, Israel needs fewer arms. That is mechanics, not politics.
Using a pressure stick as the far-left senators are attempting, rewards the antisemitic genocidal terrorist group, ensuring the fighting never ends. Using a pressure carrot entices Hamas to give up its weapons, allowing the US to pull weaponry from Israel.
The world has long only thought of pressure as a stick with the only variable being to whom to apply it. It is time to imagine a pressure carrot, especially when the party with the greatest power believes it has no influence on the entity that blocks every path forward.
The United States is transfixed by the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.
Television panels speculate endlessly about “the list.” Politicians demand the release of files. Commentators hint darkly that powerful businessmen, politicians, and celebrities visited Epstein’s island. Careers tremble under suspicion. Executives resign after their names appear in documents that often contain little more than travel records or social introductions.
Whether many of those people committed any crime remains uncertain. Allegation alone is enough to ignite a media inferno.
Yet at the very same moment, a report in Rhode Island revealed something far more concrete and horrifying.
The pattern was systematic. Church leaders knew. The archdiocese moved priests from parish to parish. The abuse continued.
And the national reaction?
A shrug.
Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, which serves as the home church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, is seen Tuesday Feb. 24, 2026, in Providence, R.I. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
The report appeared in the news cycle and disappeared almost immediately. No nightly television countdown. No congressional hearings. No endless speculation panels demanding accountability from the powerful institutions involved.
Three hundred boys were abused. Seventy five priests participated. And church officials helped conceal it.
Yet the story barely registers in a culture obsessed with Epstein.
Why?
The contrast is staggering. The Epstein saga revolves largely around possible connections between elites and a predator. In Rhode Island, the perpetrators are known. The victims are documented. The institutional cover up is described in detail.
Still, outrage seems muted.
Perhaps the victims being boys rather than girls dulls the reaction. Society speaks often about protecting girls from predators. The suffering of boys receives far less attention. Their trauma rarely becomes a political cause.
Perhaps the alleged villains also matter.
Epstein’s story offers the intoxicating possibility of bringing down the rich and powerful. Gossip channels thrive on the suggestion that celebrities, billionaires, or politicians might be implicated. It carries the thrill of scandal and the promise of humiliation for elites.
The Rhode Island report offers none of that entertainment. The perpetrators are priests in small parishes. The victims were children in pews and classrooms decades ago. The institution involved is uncomfortable to confront directly.
So the response becomes a quiet “tsk tsk.”
In a functioning moral order, the consequences would be seismic.
An organization that knowingly allowed dozens of predators to operate for decades would face institutional collapse. Civil authorities would pursue accountability not just for the abusers but for the officials who enabled them. Legislators would demand sweeping reforms to protect children.
Instead, the archdiocese continues its work much as before.
The silence extends to politics as well. Members of Congress regularly hold press conferences about Epstein and demand investigations into wealthy acquaintances who might have attended a party or taken a flight.
Where are the congressional speeches about protecting boys from predatory clergy?
Where are the national commissions examining institutional abuse in religious organizations when 1,000 boys were found to have been abused by 300 priests in Pennsylvania a few years ago?
They do not exist.
The indictment therefore extends beyond the church. It reaches into the culture itself.
Our society claims to be obsessed with protecting children. Yet when hundreds of boys are abused inside “respected” institutions over generations, the outrage fades quickly.
The spectacle of scandal against powerful figures excites us, while the slow, ugly reality of abused children at the hands of clergy demands difficult moral confrontation.
So the culture chooses spectacle.
Three hundred boys in Rhode Island testify to something deeply uncomfortable: the nation is less interested in protecting children than in watching powerful people fall.
Seventy five Jeffrey Epsteins operated in plain sight and almost no one seems to care.
The outrage over the U.S. offering passport services in Efrat, in Area C east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) as “normalizing annexation” is manufactured.
For many decades, the United States operated a consular office in the western part of Jerusalem on 18 Agron Street, providing passport and visa services to Palestinian Arabs. It was situated in the area that Israel assumed control of in 1949, not 1967 when the “West Bank”/E49AL came under Israeli authority in the country’s defensive war against Transjordan. Still, some countries considered western Jerusalem “disputed” and subject to future negotiations.
Yet when the U.S. ran consular services there, it was treated as routine diplomacy.
Former U.S. office for Palestinian Arabs located in “Western Jerusalem” which has been part of Israel since the end of the 1948-9 War
Now the U.S. offers passport services in Efrat and suddenly it’s a diplomatic crisis.
Why? Because the issue is not passports. It is Jews living beyond the 1967 lines.
The U.S. action is “a dangerous precedent and a blatant alignment with the enemy’s Judaization plans… a practical recognition of the legitimacy of settlements and the enemy’s control over the West Bank.” – HAMAS, a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization regarding the passport office in Efrat
Disputed means disputed. It cannot mean “routine” when Palestinians receive services in western Jerusalem but “provocation” when Jews receive services in Area C.
Efrat sits in Area C under the Oslo Accords, territory left for final-status negotiations. It was not designated sovereign Palestinian land, and was a Jewish community before the regional Arabs launched a war to destroy Israel at its founding in 1948. In multiple Israeli peace offers, the Gush Etzion bloc – including Efrat – was to be incorporated fully into Israel through land swaps.
Passport services mean nothing about recognizing sovereignty. The hysteria reveals a double standard: Jewish civilian life in contested areas must remain politically radioactive, even when identical administrative acts for Arabs elsewhere pass without comment.
The U.S. decision is “a clear violation of international law” and “participation in the crime of silent annexation.” – Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization
The controversy is not about diplomacy. It is about delegitimizing the presence of Jews.
And demanding that Jews be barred from living somewhere – anywhere, let alone in their holy land – is plainly antisemitic.
Nations don’t usually come into the world naked. They inherit laws, customs, monarchs, churches, debts, grudges, and centuries of someone else’s decisions.
The thirteen colonies wore all of Britain’s garments in 1775: the crown’s authority wrapped around their necks, a state church stitched onto their backs, mercantilist restrictions cinched tight around their waists. It was a wardrobe designed to keep them subjects, not citizens.
And then, in 1776, America stripped.
The Declaration of Independence wasn’t merely a break. It was an undressing – the deliberate peeling away of everything the colonists decided was corrosive, constricting, or corrupt. They shed monarchy because no free people should bow to a single man by accident of birth. They cast off the established church because faith coerced by government is faith without meaning. They tore away the idea that rights were permissions, handed down by Parliament or king, and claimed instead that rights are natural, woven into the human condition by something greater than government.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence (1776)
This was America’s birthday suit: liberty, natural rights, self-government, and pluralism.
Britain offered representation, but only inside the structure it controlled. America answered with a more radical proposition: the people themselves are sovereign, and governments exist only with their consent. Britain offered subjects. America offered citizens.
Even the revolutionaries understood the irony — they were fighting the mother country by returning to the mother truth: all people are created equal, and legitimate power grows only from their permission. Strip away the titles, the aristocratic robes, the bishops’ vestments, and what remains is the basic dignity of the individual. The founders held that up like a newborn being lifted into the world — raw, unadorned, unmistakably human.
“In America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” – Thomas Paine in Common Sense (1776)
And while the young nation failed to live up to those ideals for far too long – enslaved people left unclothed in humanity, women denied their place in public life, Native nations pushed aside – the principles themselves remained America’s original outfit. They were the measure by which future generations would challenge, correct, and expand the promise of 1776.
As the United States approaches its 250th birthday and on the birthday of its first president, it’s worth remembering what it chose to wear on day one. Not imperial gowns. Not inherited privilege. Not a state religion. Not the pomp of monarchs or the chains of decrees.
“Religion… can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion.” – George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
Just the simple fabric of freedom: liberty stitched to equality, rights fastened to responsibility, self-government woven into every seam.
And if we want to honor that inheritance, we should strip off our own modern costumes – the red and blue jerseys, the tribal uniforms of outrage, the ideological armor we sharpen every election season. Beneath all of that, we were born the same way this country was born: in the common belief that people can govern themselves, worship freely, speak openly, and live without bending the knee to any king.
That is America’s true birthday suit — the shared principles that clothed us at the beginning, and the only garments sturdy enough to hold us together now.
Venezuela has arrived in New York City in two forms.
One arrives carrying the wreckage of a socialist system that hollowed out a country by redefining private property as moral corruption and state control as virtue. That experiment ended in scarcity, corruption, and mass flight. Its leaders now face judgment far from home, a coda to a long collapse.
The other arrival is quieter, bureaucratic, and far more consequential. It moves through City Hall.
Words That Become Policy
“Private property — especially homeownership — is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as wealth-building public policy.”
Those words were written by Cea Weaver, who now holds authority inside New York City government over housing regulation, landlord enforcement, and real estate policy.
This is a moral judgment about ownership itself. Homeownership is framed as harm. Property is recast as a moral hazard. The implication is straightforward: what has long been treated as legitimate must be dismantled.
Knowing full well her position about private real estate and home ownership, Weaver was elevated into a role designed to shape housing outcomes by Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Real Estate as the Lever
Because housing is where ideology becomes operational.
Weaver’s portfolio centers on real estate because real estate concentrates independence, savings, and permanence. It is immobile, heavily regulated, and politically sensitive. Those traits make housing the easiest sector in which to normalize forced redistribution through regulation rather than spectacle.
Within Democratic Socialist thought, housing functions as the primary front for structural change. The stated objective is “decommodification” — removing housing from private markets through eminent domain and insulating it permanently from profit. Achieving that objective requires stripping ownership of legitimacy and transferring control to the state or state-backed collectives.
Jacobin Makes the Case Explicit
That program is reinforced repeatedly in Jacobin, the flagship publication of democratic socialism. Its housing coverage goes well beyond expanding public housing or strengthening tenant protections. It openly endorses removing homes from private ownership.
Jacobin has praised campaigns such as Berlin’s Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen, which was approved by voters in 2021, calling for the expropriation of privately owned residential housing and its transfer to public control. It regularly argues that landlord property rights must yield to collective ownership if housing justice is to be achieved.
The logic is consistent: justice requires taking housing out of private hands.
Venezuela’s Sequence Is Familiar
Venezuela followed this same sequence.
Ownership was recast as exploitation. Returns were constrained. Controls expanded. Maintenance collapsed. Scarcity spread.
By the time property was openly seized, the groundwork had already been laid. Confiscation felt justified because ownership had already been condemned. Language prepared the public long before policy completed the transfer.
History records this pattern with grim consistency.
Ideological Alignment at City Hall
Zohran Mamdani placed Weaver precisely where her beliefs carry consequence.
“Impoverish the “white” middle class. Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” – Cea Weaver
Democratic Socialists today debate pace and scope more than premise. Housing is the testing ground because it touches wealth, stability, and autonomy simultaneously. Alter the rules of ownership there, and broader economic control becomes easier to assert.
Donald Trump Begins to Align with Democratic Socialists on housing
And it seems that President Donald Trump is getting on board.
Trump just announced that he will ban institutional investors from buying single family homes. The goal is to keep the housing market acting rationally based on normal individual demand, rather than bowing to the force of massive realtors controlling rent prices.
It is not stripping individuals of their homes the way Weaver desires, but a first step in meeting the mission part way.
Naming the Mechanism
When government redefines private assets as illegitimate and reallocates them through enforcement, penalties, and regulatory attrition, the economic effect remains consistent regardless of branding.
Control shifts away from owners. Value erodes. Decision-making migrates to the state.
“As landlords exit the market, using state action to acquire properties and leverage divestment to convert thousands of homes into publicly and democratically controlled land/housing.” – Cea Weaver
“The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal [of seizing Greenland], and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.” – Trump’s White House
Language about equity or justice does not change outcomes for families whose homes become conditional assets rather than protected property. Redistribution through regulation or seizure is theft.
People think of Donald Trump as a true Conservative; he is not. He spent years as a Democratic real estate developer in New York City. Owning, controlling and licensing property is in his bloodstream.
We are entering a dangerous moment when government leaders of the right and left are converging on the thesis that the state is the arbiter of private property, including your house.
The Question That Matters
A society either treats private property as legitimate or places it at the discretion of the state.
Once ownership depends on ideological approval, it no longer functions as a right. Capital withdraws. Investment slows. Stability erodes. Liberty disappears.
Venezuela already supplied the answer.
History rarely announces itself as collapse. It usually arrives disguised as compassion, long before the consequences become unavoidable.
Since 2022, the United States has funded two wars at historic scale.
~$65–70 billion in direct U.S. military aid to Ukraine
~$21–22 billion in U.S. wartime military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023
Ukraine’s funding is more than three times larger, delivered faster and sustained longer. Israel’s is smaller, largely defensive, and focused on interception and resupply.
Yet only one of these aid streams has been treated as morally illegitimate.
The Moral Divergence
Aid to Ukraine is framed as defending democracy. Aid to Israel is framed as complicity.
Both wars involve urban combat. Both involve civilian casualties. Both rely on U.S. weapons.
But only Israel’s aid is placed under moral indictment.
The Political Record
Progressive politicians aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America have been consistent in drawing this distinction.
Bernie Sanders voted for massive Ukraine aid packages while introducing resolutions to block or condition arms transfers to Israel.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported Ukraine military assistance as solidarity, while opposing emergency funding for Israel as morally disqualifying.
Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a defining cause—calling for halts and embargoes—without mounting a comparable campaign against the much larger Ukraine funding stream.
“This is not only the Israeli government’s genocide, Mr. Speaker. this is our government’s genocide.” – Rep. Rashida Tlaib
No similar moral test was applied to Ukraine.
The erosion of support in long wars
As the wars in Ukraine and Israel dragged on, Americans began to tire of spending so much money abroad in both wars. In September 2025, a Pew Research poll found that one-third of Americans thought that the US was providing too much military aid to Israel, while 23% thought the figure was about right and only 8% said it was not enough.
The figures were about the same for Ukraine in a February 2025 poll – 30% said too much aid, 23% about the right amount, but a significantly different figure – 22% (versus 8%) said there was not enough aid going to Ukraine. The gap is likely due to the visuals of a totally devasted Gaza and the elimination of most of the Hamas leadership.
A deeper dive shows a significant divide between Republicans and Democrats, especially over time. Republicans moved from 9% feeling there was too much aid and 49% not enough aid in 2022, to 47% feeling there was too much aid and 10% not enough aid in 2025. While Democrats did change their views over time, it was not as dramatic as the Republican shift.
At least for Ukraine.
The Ideology Behind the Distinction
This asymmetry between Ukraine and Israel is not about budgets or battlefield conduct. It is ideological.
Within DSA thinking, Israel is not merely a state that acts wrongly; it is framed as an illegal colonial project. The claim rests on a core assertion: that Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel and therefore have no legitimate sovereign claim to it.
That assertion is historically false — and morally bankrupt.
It denies Jewish history, identity, and continuity in their ancestral homeland. It treats Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate. And it transforms Israeli self-defense from a security question into a moral offense.
Ukraine, by contrast, is granted full legitimacy. Its sovereignty is assumed. Its right to fight is unquestioned.
Further, the far left is trapped in an empathy swamp, with the destroyed pictures of Gaza trumping the immorality of the Hamas death cult.
The Conclusion
A war funded at $70 billion is treated as a cause. A war funded at $22 billion is treated as a crime.
That gap has nothing to do with the weapons. It has everything to do with an ideology that denies Jewish indigeneity — and therefore Jewish legitimacy, and a perverted view of right and wrong seen through the lens of empathy rather than morality.
This is not a debate about military aid. Ukraine gets much more than Israel. As does NATO. This about the Jewish State overwinning and the depravity of antisemites who want to end the Jewish State.
Federal authorities charged members of a group calling itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front with planning coordinated bomb attacks in Southern California. Investigators described discussions of explosives, targets, and timing. The plan was operational, deliberate, and aimed at creating fear and mass harm.
The group’s own words revealed how its members understood their actions. Posters and social media tied to the suspects declared “death to America,” hostility toward federal institutions, and solidarity with “Palestine” framed as “liberation.” The suspects did not describe their plans as criminal. They viewed them as morally required.
That distinction is critical. It explains why violence felt justified rather than transgressive. And why young people can cheer the assassinations of healthcare executives and the massacres by Hamas terrorists, rather than ponder the moral swamp that has taken over their minds.
A World Reduced to Moral Absolutes
At the core of this twisted ideology is a belief that America, Israel, and capitalism are systems of permanent oppression. They are described as forces that keep a foot on the throat of the common man—extracting labor, denying dignity, enforcing hierarchy through violence.
Within this framework, reform loses meaning. Coexistence is treated as betrayal. Opposition becomes a duty. Violence becomes resistance.
Once that moral threshold is crossed, escalation is no longer radical. It is faithful.
How Far-Left Activism Removed the Guardrails
This worldview is not confined to clandestine cells. Its language has circulated for years inside far-left activist spaces, including factions associated with the Democratic Socialists of America.
DSA-linked rallies, resolutions, and affiliated campus groups have repeatedly adopted language that frames politics as existential struggle rather than democratic contest. Israel is described as a settler-colonial project that must be dismantled. Zionism is labeled racism. Capitalism is defined as violence. America is cast as an imperial force whose institutions lack legitimacy.
The phrasing matters. Calls for “by any means necessary,” “intifada revolution,” and declarations that there can be “no peace on stolen land” are not metaphors. They are moral instructions. They announce that outcomes justify methods and that limits no longer apply.
The rhetoric has infiltrated American schools, both K-12 and universities. Young people are being taught that they have a moral duty to dismantle systems of oppression and that the oppressors are capitalism, the American government, and powerful Jews. Stealing from stores is no longer a crime but means of reparations. Shooting up a kosher store is a form of “restorative justice.”
And the DSA rhetoric and candidates have infiltrated the Democratic Party. It began in 2017 and has accelerated. Rashida Tlaib is the most noxious example, but incoming mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani may become the most visible, leading the largest American city, the center of American capitalism, and the city with the largest number of Jews outside of Israel.
Movements are shaped by the permissions they grant. When activists normalize the idea that destruction is justice, someone eventually decides to carry it out literally.
Why Israel and Jews Become the Inevitable Focus
Israel occupies a singular place in this ideological ecosystem. It represents sovereignty, national identity, military power, economic success, and Jewish self-determination. For movements defined by opposition to perceived power, Israel becomes the ultimate symbol.
Criticism shifts from policy to existence. Zionism is no longer debated; it is pathologized. Jewish presence becomes suspect. Exclusion is reframed as moral clarity.
And this is not just aired on TikTok but taught at leading American schools, often funded by Islamic regimes.
This pattern is familiar. When a people are defined as embodying the system itself, harm against them begins to feel righteous. Antisemitism thrives wherever absolutist ideologies divide humanity into victims and irredeemable oppressors.
Iran’s Revolutionary Language, Recycled
The structure of this worldview is not new.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution articulated it decades ago. America was cast as the Great Satan. Israel as the Little Satan. Zionism as a cancer that must be removed. These were not rhetorical excesses. They were moral justifications for perpetual violence.
Over time, the religious vocabulary faded, but the framework endured. Imperialism replaced heresy. Capitalism replaced idolatry. “Liberation” replaced salvation. The certainty remained intact in a secularized lexicon. It was internalized as faith for the common man.
What once animated clerical revolution now circulates through Western classrooms and social media feeds, stripped of theology but retaining its absolutism.
A Warning, Not a Theory
The Turtle Island arrests are not an anomaly. They, the election of DSA candidate Zohran Mamdani, and the Luigi Magione fandom are an American signal flare that has been brewing for years for the Jewish community. They mark the moment when revolutionary language stops being symbolic and becomes operational against Americans on a mass scale.
Harvard students rally to Hamas in the aftermath of the brutal slaughter of 1,200 people in Israel
Societies do not collapse because extremists speak. They collapse when eliminationist ideas are normalized, when calls for destruction are treated as moral expression, and when institutions charged with defending pluralism hesitate to draw lines.
Once a culture accepts the premise that entire nations, peoples, or systems deserve to be erased, violence is no longer a question of if. It is a question of when.
A liberal democracy begins with a belief in pluralism—that a society can remain open even when its people profoundly disagree.
It assumes citizens will hold incompatible views about religion, morality, identity, and history, and that the state’s role is not to arbitrate truth but to preserve space. Speech is therefore protected broadly, even when it is crude, offensive, or deeply wrong. A liberal democracy does not require enlightenment. It requires freedom.
That freedom extends even to haters. But it is not unlimited.
Pluralism does not mean surrender. A society can protect speech while still drawing firm lines against coercion. The distinction is simple and essential: ideas are free; intimidation is not.
This is why liberal democracy depends on strong law enforcement. Courts, police, and prosecutors are the infrastructure of freedom. Without enforcement, rights exist only for those willing to defend themselves physically.
The law must intervene before intimidation hardens into violence. Waiting for broken windows or spilled blood is not neutrality—it is negligence. Fear does its work quietly. People leave long before they are injured.
This is not theoretical.
Across the West today, Jews are being harassed in public spaces, on campuses, and in neighborhoods—not for what they say or do, but for who they are. They are told their presence is a provocation. That they should leave “for their own safety.” That public space belongs to others now.
Jewish man in Montreal Canada out shopping with his family told to leave area because his physical presence was a provocation to anti-Israel protestors in November 2024
This is a flashing warning sign.
When Jews are asked to disappear so that others may feel comfortable, liberal democracy is already failing. When the burden shifts from the intimidator to the target—when minorities are told to lower their profile, avoid certain areas, or conceal their identity—the law has retreated.
President Biden’s Jewish liaison, Aaron Keyak, tells Jewish Americans to hide their religion in May 2021
The logic is dangerous: if you weren’t here, there wouldn’t be trouble.
That logic ends pluralism.
A liberal democracy does not require Jews—or any minority—to justify their presence. It does not ask them to trade visibility for safety. It does not treat their normal lives as inflammatory acts.
When intimidation succeeds, speech becomes theoretical and freedom selective. The public square shrinks until only the loudest remain, and those vicious groups with whom the government aligns. Elections may continue, courts may still issue rulings, but the civic bargain is broken.
The test of a liberal democracy is therefore how it responds when minorities are told to leave, either directly by government officials or with their tacit approval. If the state allows harassment to drive people out—quietly, gradually, without intervention—it has abandoned its most basic duty.
Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City who is comfortable with the phrase “globalize the Intifada,” will be in charge of law enforcement in the city with the greatest number of Jews.
How will he respond when Baruch College at the City University of New York suggests Jews cancel holiday events because antisemites have the run of the school and the institution cannot (will not) assure their safety?
What will he do when Jewish students at New York University cannot enjoy the school’s facilities because of gross failures to protect students?
Who will send in the police when Columbia University Jewish students are forced to walk a tight direct line between classrooms with an escort, because the university cannot secure the campus for everyone?
Where will the courts and law enforcement be when Jewish students and faculty at CUNY Hunter College are forced to cancel or not attend classes because of widespread harassment and intimidation?
Students at Cooper Union in downtown NYC lock themselves in a library while anti-Israel protestors threaten them outside
A successful liberal democracy welcomes immigrants and may elect a Ugandan born mayor. Yet it fails to be a liberal democracy when Jews are forced to flee the streets because governmental officials give a free pass to harassment, intimidation and discrimination.
The West is on the cusp of learning whether it remains a liberal democracy. And whether it cares.
Obama’s warning has become the Democratic nightmare in New York City
When Barack Obama commented in 2016 that Democrats were seen as “coastal, liberal, latte-sipping, politically correct, out-of-touch folks,” it was a wink to the party’s reputation — cultured, ironic, and comfortably detached. He meant it as a warning. But nine years later, the call about paying attention to Middle America has become prophecy about the edges. The latte-sippers have soured and radicalized on the coasts.
In New York City, the same college-educated progressives who once debated justice over cold brew now chant “Globalize the Intifada.” State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, leads the charge. What began as a movement which could generously be described as advocating inclusion and equity has evolved into a campaign to dismantle the American order itself. Mamdani and his allies call for the end of “empire” — by which they mean capitalism, policing, private property, and even the current structure of education and governance.
Obama’s gentle caricature of the latte class — earnest but insulated — has given way to something angrier and openly revolutionary. The Democratic Socialists’ worldview is not about reforming the system; it’s about replacing it. They seek a complete redistribution of wealth and power — not by persuasion, but by restructuring society’s foundations. Police are rebranded as “colonial enforcers.” Public schools become “sites of decolonization.” Private ownership itself is treated as moral corruption. It demands a “new economic order,” “new international solidarity,” “new moral vision,” “new global governance,” “new global organizations,” and a “new political era.”
This is not the politics of compassion, but of confrontation. The privileged class that once signaled virtue with hashtags and slogans now preaches a theology of resentment. They speak of liberation but demand obedience; they denounce power while pursuing it ruthlessly through intimidation and ideology. In the name of justice, they aim to burn down the very structures that made justice possible.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the 2025 New York City mayoral race, where Mamdani and the DSA have moved from campus protests to the ballot box. Their platform is sweeping: defund and “reimagine” the police, end merit-based education, socialize housing, and impose vast new public ownership schemes. It is a manifesto for the redistribution not just of wealth, but of control — from elected institutions to activist networks.
The symbolism is staggering. The city that once embodied liberal ambition — the energy of Wall Street, the art of Broadway, the immigrant striving that defined America — now flirts with an ideology that condemns its own success. From Columbia’s lecture halls to Brooklyn’s activist collectives, the heirs of Obama’s “latte-sipping liberals” now view the American dream as a capitalist fraud.
If Mamdani’s movement captures City Hall, it won’t just transform New York’s politics; it will mark the moment when the Democratic Party’s indulgence of its radical wing becomes surrender. The centrism of Obama and Clinton — built on pragmatism and incremental reform — is being replaced by the revolutionary certainties of those who see compromise as corruption.
Obama once teased his party for sipping lattes on the coasts, detached from ordinary life. Today, those same hands are clenched into fists. The mugs are gone, replaced by megaphones and manifestos. The “latte-sippers” have become the street revolutionaries — no longer content to mock the system, but determined to overthrow it.
As New York teeters between order and upheaval, the rest of the country would do well to take heed — and look right.
ACTION ITEMS
Register as a Democrat – regardless of your politics – in deeply blue cities and towns
Vote – and get out the vote – in the Democratic primaries for moderate candidates. Do not let the DSA take over your town
Vote Republican in the general November election. Keep your city and town from one party rule
Enlist popular moderate politicians to run who will keep the race between two individuals – extremists win in elections with numerous candidates
Local grassroots organization is key. It starts now, not weeks before elections
There are signs on the streets of London that read “LOOK RIGHT.” They are painted boldly on the pavement to protect visitors—especially Americans—who are used to glancing left before stepping into the street. In the U.K., traffic comes from the opposite direction, and those who rely on old instincts can find themselves in sudden danger.
So it is now with American Jews.
For generations, they have turned instinctively to the Democratic Party—to the left—out of habit, heritage, and a deep belief that liberal ideals best protected minorities. But the political landscape has shifted beneath their feet. The party that once championed freedom, tolerance, and support for Israel has been co-opted by radicals: anti-Israel voices, socialists, and anarchists who now wield growing influence in its ranks.
These are not the Democrats of old. They are activists who view capitalism as oppression, who denounce Israel as colonial, and who see Jews not as a vulnerable minority but as part of a power structure to be dismantled. They are coming for capitalism—and for the Jews who helped build and sustain it.
This election, American Jews must recognize that the public square is not what it used to be. The political traffic now comes from the right direction—but the danger comes from the left.
First One Through 