Thank you for this brilliant quote from Lander: “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights. And I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job,”
I just read this article by Milbank and find it poorly written. The attitude that she carries through this is toxic. And do not misunderstand. I like progressive values and the truth is - if everyone actually understood them - they would all agree to at least 90% of them.
Dana is doing what most reporters or commentators have done since Reagan ended the Fairness Doc: pretending that "both parties are the same". THEY ARE NOT. The legitimate GOP party was last led by Eisenhower. Nixon/Agnew were crooked, corrupt and should have been impeached. Gerald Ford may have been a nice guy, but he was really a place holder.
If you look at Biden's policies and actions as well as Ike's and FDR's you will find many similarities. You will learn that the Heritage Society fought against FDR's regs and SS. They were NOT happy with Ike - especially since he believed in unions and workers' rights. Ike and Biden both used an Infrastructure Project to get our economy going again. FDR, Ike and Biden would be opposed to every step the GOP has followed since Reagan. None of them would have accepted P2025 as a blueprint for their administration. The current GOP/MAGA party is a fascist party.
I know there are people who are trying to say that the Dems are becoming a socialist party but then THEY have no idea what Socialism is.
First and foremost, the way that T has been acting as president is NOT something that most people want to see when a Dem is elected. We want facts, not lies; plans that have a positive impact on middle and lower income people and level the playing field with the richest among us paying their fair share. That fair share in the future will be paying for all the corruption and damage to the economy by their support of the dictator. It should include reparations to every immigrant that spent even just one day in jail without receiving their rights.
IT IS LONG PAST TIME FOR PEOPLE TO RECOGNIZE THAT (WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS) OUR NEWS MEDIA/REPORTERS HAVE BEEN IN THE POCKETS OF THE GOP USING OPINIONS & BELIEFS INSTEAD OF FACTS & EVIDENCE.
Of Dan Goldman's defeat Jen wrote of, "...the toxic image AIPAC has acquired."
It's not just an image. AIPAC's lobbying on behalf of today's Israel is toxic! It's not an image, it's AIPAC's reality. It's not the only toxic lobbying group, for sure. But Israel's war against Palestine has become so horrific that any lobbying group supporting the state of Israel, given its current governing regime, must be rejected.
It is very hard for the older members to do this. They SAW colleagues or wannabe colleagues who lost elections because of the demands of AIPAC. Obama voiced the issues at one point - saying that AIPAC - has directly impacted politicians negatively simply on the basis of whether or not a candidate has done what the government of Israel wanted. That's what convinced me that AIPAC was as bad as any billionaire who puts his money on the candidates who will not stop him from doing what he wants to do. AIPAC IS NOT JUST ONE organization. It has multiple pacs and the money they wield is staggering.
Donna Woodward, it would be useful to lay out a paragraph on "today's israel" which I suspect is Netanyahu et al. Can there really be widespread support in Israel for a military opration which kills tens of thousands of civilians? Or here for that matter?
Maybe Jennifer could do a column on AIPAC, who it reprtesents and who it doesn't?
The people of Israel are like the people of the US. There are far right Jews who support the criminal head of their country who has been committing crimes for decades. Men in their sect dominate. And like our billionaires, they are not the ones who go to battle.
Racism, misogyny, self-absorption and Christian Nationalism are the reasons people voted for T, did not vote or voted for a 3rd party candidate who could not win. Obviously, religion and hate play a part in Israel's elections.
AIPAC is like all of the people & groups in the US who use money to control the narrative. Sadly we have 90% of our media/journalists who have been doing the bidding of the GOP since Reagan ended the Fairness Doc.
Genocide is wrong no matter who does it. The US & Israel have been guilty of both. Do you see the concentration camps in the US? Do you know the cruelty happening there?
Yes. We in the US are guilty of some of the same things Israelis are. Our government has committed war crimes against persons in small boats in the Caribbean Sea and in the Pacific Ocean. In our conduct of the Iran War we're implicated in war crimes. And our opposition to our government's immoral and illegal conduct is being oppressed. Our government has funded the genocide in Gaza. We are guilty. But we've been a powerful force in the world (once upon a time a force for good) militarily and economicallly, and so we seem exempt from accountability. God heal us and save us, or save the world from us.
What would you do if your neighbors attacked you constantly? What if they burned your children alive in front of you? What if they raped and mutilated your daughter. I could go on.
I've followed your posts for a while. Why you have it in for Israel is beyond me. Do you know the history of Israel and all that it has endured? Do you know how many times Palestinians have refused a state next to Israel because they want to rule Israel in its entirety?
Oh, and genocide. You never blame Hamas for their murder of Gazans that goes constantly. Any Gazan who dares to disagree with Hamas goes bye-bye. I suppose if you repeat a genocide lie enough, people will start to believe it.
Have YOU never learned that "two wrongs never make a right"? Of course, those actions are abominable. But they are NOT excuses for what N has done in Gaza and Lebanon. STARVING children and destroying their homes is every bit as wrong as what Hamas has done.
Hamas IS horrific. That is why we have always backed Israel. STILL, that is no excuse for N's actions. Of course, I know that Hamas murders anyone that is in their way. It's more proof that Gazans are not responsible for what HAMAS does. Yet N is killing them.
In NO way do I support T and his ICE army. Nations are shunning him and refused to allow our warplanes to land on their airports for us to be able to easily destroy IRAN. I am very glad that they did this. I am happy to see him ostracized. What my government is doing inside and outside of the US is horrendous. We have innocent men women & children being cruelly treated in prisons around our nation. They have done nothing wrong and they are being held without having had any proper legal hearing. I see what is happening and know it is wrong even if I am not the one that at least now will not be harmed. Why is it impossible for you to see or say that your government is doing something wrong to innocent people? We have international laws and Netanyahu has been determined to be a war criminal.
Hamas and Hezbollah are not just horrific. They and they alone are to blame to what has happened to Gazan and Lebanese children and Gazan and Lebanese homes.
What would you have done if you were in the PM's position? Would you have said "Two wrongs don't make a right" and forgiven Hamas.
I am not sure about that,. all the polls I have seen show a solid majority of Israelis are mad at Netanyahu for not fighting hard enough.Polls also show these same respondents support the invasion and occupation of Lebanon.
Same in Gaza - once the Israeli hostages were returned, polls I have seen show majorities of Israelis are supportive of the occupation and continuing carnage there.
And many people there are hopping mad about Trump's 'deal'.
Far right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir said in response to the news of a deal: “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!”
“In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint - you need to go berserk. To obliterate.”
Maybe wishful thinking on my part, or reading too much into reports I've read. I know many Israelis are horrified by the Iran "deal." Sooner or later the US and Israel will need to take Iran's sovereignty seriously, even if we don't like their human rights records. I don't like ours, either. Or Israel's.
This is a recent example - people polled here are mad that Netanyahu lost the war in their opinion, and want the war to continue. A plurality also wants to continue bombing Lebanon even despite the current 'ceasefire' (as if Israel ever actually maintained any 'ceasefire' in Lebanon at any moment in the last nearly 4 years,but whatever) https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-92-of-israelis-believe-iran-emerged-as-winner-after-war-and-deal-with-us/
For the record, I do not mean to overlook the small but vocal minority of Israeli citizens (outside the Arab citizens of Israel,who of course are very opposed to all of this) that have called out Israel's genocide and apartheid, like B'TSelem, Physicians for Peace, some scholars and journalists at Haaretz, and some regular civilians too.
One thing driving my comments on this, that is a consistent flaw in The Contrarian's coverage, is putting all the blame solely on Netanyahu. It is not just him. It is a large majority in the Knesset, who recently voted to allow the death penalty for Palestinians while many representatives wore noose pins...it's much of the Israeli media, which is often so racist and pro-violence it would make Newmax blush, it's the IDF top to bottom....its a structural problem far deeper than any one prime minister.
And, Netanyahu-only critics ignore that he is the longest serving prime minister in Israel's history, who has been quite popular for most of that time. It's a bit like Trump here, but worse...Trump and Netanyahu are both causes of and results of deeper problems.
Being someone who comments here often, you have probably noticed I have really soured on Rubin lately, and I am not sure that I even trust her intentions. The coverage here (or just as importantly, non-coverage) of the US/Israeli assault Iran and Lebanon, all while the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank go on, has really brought this to the forefront for me.
It just baffles me that Contrarian readers can be ok with Rubin virtually ignoring what Israel is doing in Lebanon, or making repeated critical comments like 'Republicans excoriated Obama for his Iran nuclear deal' as if she was not one of the loudest critics herself, without even a hint of acknowledgement anywhere in print that this was the case. Responders have said ad nauseam that she can simply change her mind, which is a deeply flawed argument in itself IMO but what Rubin has been doing lately is far beyond that. It's totally dishonest. Other Never Trumpers have been honest about their past view. Not Rubin...and it has never been more painfully obvious then when she talks about JCPOA
Anyway, I keep my subscription because there occasionally are interesting comments here (although the majority are not IMO) and I do like what Eisen is doing in court. But if I want actual insightful, unvarnished commentary on anything related at all to Israel, Iran or the Occupied Territories, or the US relation to any of that, I look elsewhere.
I agree with you. The fact that Ms Rubin has not once admitted that she aided the GOP for decades has disturbed me. I've not been able to forgive the Lincoln Project members yet but at least they owned what they did and admitted to being blind at what was happening. I read Rubin's opinions in WaPo, they were always biased for the GOP no matter how far they marched toward fascism. For anyone to not see the fascism or the genocides that are happening or the concentration camps right here in the US is unacceptable. After Eisenhower saw a concentration camp, he told the nearby Germans who claimed that 'they didn't know' that they were lying and walked away in anger. I stay for the same reasons and to blunt her inaccurate statements.
What do you think of Qatar doling out millions, if not billions of dollars, in support of Jew hatred? Why isn't Qatar toxic given its current support of terrorist groups such as Hamas?
PM Netanyahoo asked Qatar to give Gaza that money, which was used to shore up Hamas against the PA so the PA wouldn't have strength, because the PA supported a two-state solution, which has been anathema to Netanyahoo.
So ask Qatar about that money, Marilyn. Or better yet, ask the Israeli PM.
I'm not talking about Israel. I know about the Israeli stuff. I wrote specifically about the United States and Jew hatred. Why is AIPAC but not Qatar toxic?
What in the world does Qatar nave to do with a discussion on AIPAC? Getting into a what-aboutism discussion seems unproductive and probably endless, if you're going to bring up every lobbying group.
Why are you so obsessed with AIPAC and not other PACs? Why only AIPAC? An obsessing about AIPAC is not whataboutism. Give me a break.
I bring up Qatar because you and others leave out the enormous amount of influence a non US entity, Qatar, has on our elections. Why is AIPAC your focus and not Qatar?
Marilyn, why don't you do us all a favor and move to Israel? I most certainly don't want a penny of my tax money going to support Israel. Be advised I've studied International Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva, Switzerland. There, we are trained to RESPECT reality and the International Court at The Hague.
The same toxicity has been reported in Chicago, a city where I spent the middle half of my 84 years, and was strongly affecting races in neighborhoods where I lived and frequented. Israel's government is just as toxic as ours, and has been for much longer.
I'm not sure Israel's govt. has been toxic for longer than ours has been. Our toxicity toward Native Americans and other non-whites can be traced to our earliest days on this continent, whereas Israel has only existed for 78 years.
Our toxicity toward Native Americans and other non-whites can be traced to our earliest days on this continent, whereas Israel has only existed for 78 years.
Lander does say the “g” word. So does Mamdani and so do the other candidates he endorsed. Rubin just doesn’t mention it.
Lander’s calling out of Israel’s genocide is probably part of what Rubin refers to when she writes of his “sometimes vicious tone about Israel”.
Instead, Rubin focuses on Lander’s criticism of AIPAC, which she agrees with, when the larger issue pulling Dem voters away from officials like Goldman is establishment Dem’s support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid generally. AIPAC is just one facet of this.
Here is just one example that shows why so many Democratic voters are outraged, still..AIPAC is only a part of it, and not the most important part.
This reported today by Drop Site News:
'The latest Israeli attacks on children came a day after a UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry released a report that concluded, “Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip.” The UN inquiry said that during the first two years of the Israeli assault, over 20,000 children were killed and more than 44,000 injured.
Since the so-called ceasefire went into effect in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 265 children and wounded hundreds more in Gaza, according to findings released last week by the UN children’s agency UNICEF. “During a period supposedly defined by restraint and protection, a child has been killed, on average, every single day for more than eight months,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said in a statement. “That is an absurd and devastating figure.”'
It’s amazing to me that a person can’t be pro-Palestine human rights and pro-Jewish human rights at the same time. They do go hand in hand. No one group of people should face genocide. I’m happy for the ‘new’ democrats!
Rubin’s framing is exactly right, and the distinctions she draws matter. Lander and Lasher represent something the Democratic Party badly needs right now: politicians who have demonstrated, through actual conduct under pressure, that they can hold complexity — fighting MAGA without abandoning either Jewish or Palestinian concerns, and doing so with the kind of earned credibility that no amount of messaging can manufacture. Lander’s line on election night — “those are not two different jobs, they are the same job” — is the formulation serious Democrats should be memorizing.
But Tuesday’s results carried a third signal that deserves scrutiny alongside the celebration. Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, Columbia-formed, SJP-affiliated, encampment-veteran, just unseated a five-term incumbent in upper Manhattan. She did not win despite her views on Israel. She won with them. The distinction matters. Lander arrived at his positions through engagement, friction, and political reckoning. Chevalier arrived at hers through a theoretical framework assembled before the facts — one coherent enough that October 7th, Jewish indigeneity, and the Mizrahi dimension (more than half of Israeli Jews are refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab and Muslim lands) are not refuted by it. They are invisible to it. She is not extreme in the way that word implies recklessness. She is formed. And she represents not an outlier but a leading edge.
The party can hold Lander and Chevalier simultaneously. The question is which model it chooses to build on.
There are GOP groups, some pretending to be dem backed PACS who are purposefully supporting candidates like Chevaliar, because they believe that their GOP candidate will easily beat them.
That’s a real dynamic and worth naming. But I’d argue the more consequential threat isn’t the GOP’s cynical bet — it’s that the bet may be wrong. Chevalier isn’t an artificially elevated outlier. She’s the visible tip of something that has been forming for a decade in elite universities and progressive organizing spaces. An entire cohort of educated millennials came of age without the historical anchors — the existential wars of 1967 and 1973, the trauma of the Second Intifada, and the political significance of the 2005 Gaza disengagement — and were handed instead a ready-made framework: colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, a racial architecture that connects Ferguson to Gaza because the theory demands it. Saturated with the genuine tragedy of Gaza, they received the images after the interpretive lens was already in place. That’s not manipulation. That’s formation. And it’s durable. The GOP may think they’re elevating a weak candidate. What they may actually be doing is mistaking a leading edge for a fringe.
Well I believe you may have an even stronger point than I realized. Chevalier appears to be much more, shall we say “fringe”.
Check out this commentary:
“earlier this month, Avila Chevalier sat down with the New York Editorial Board, a collection of veteran city journalists of various ideological stripes. Here’s what Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute asked her: “What should happen to somebody who has killed somebody else? I mean, I went to a sentencing last week, a man killed another man, didn’t know the person, just sitting on a stoop, got a[n] 18-year prison sentence. Should that person not go to prison? And what should happen instead?”
Here’s Avila Chevalier’s response:
So, you know, for prison abolitionists, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what that vision of the world actually is. And it is one that actually centers this question of harm. At the heart of what we’re asking is: What, why is it that there is so much harm in our society?
And how do we, A) prevent it, and B) deal with it when it happens. And as someone who has worked with folks who have been incarcerated, who have felt ostracized, for lack of a better term, by so many facets of our society—for being poor, for being black, for being Latino. I work at a public defender’s office where most of our clients are incredibly poor black and brown New Yorkers. And for so many, the crimes that they’re being indicted for are crimes of poverty, or the effects of poverty.
And when I think about this question of harm, I think how do we create a society where people feel so safe that they don’t need to pick up the phone and call the police. And when harm does happen, how do we actually create repair? Because what we have right now is a system in whenever harm happens, there’s more harm being perpetrated, not only on the folks who engaged in the harm, but also on the victims of the harm. I’m someone who has actually been the victim of crimes, of violence, and gone to the police as a young person thinking, doing the thing that society told me to do, and all that did was traumatize me more.
Did you follow that? Her answer was so long you may have forgotten what the question was in the first place. So let me remind you: She was asked what she thinks should happen to a guy who kills another guy. Here’s her final attempt:
Well, this is what I’m saying is that when that happens, and as someone who has sat in so many courtrooms, to me, all of that is tragic. The fact that the murder happened is tragic. The fact that there was a circumstance in which that could even come to pass is tragic, and all of that is a reflection of systems that allowed that circumstance to be possible. And so, you know, I have always focused my attention on how do we create systems where that’s not even the possibility.
Okay! So there will be no more prisons because there will be no more murder. Got it. Right this way to the House floor, Congresswoman!
It all comes down to what you think about human nature. She sounds very naive to me thinking that if everyone had all their basic needs met there would be no crime and therefore no need for police. How do you then explain wealthy people that also rape, murder and steal?
Thank you for both of your comments. I appreciate thoughtful replies and replies showing a person has done more research. This excerpt shows clearly that she avoids direct questions. A person who does this (like all GOP) does not want to answer the question, is not really confident in their beliefs or has never looked at the big picture and its complications. I did "follow" what she said because I recognize this pattern. My skill to be able to read and see the intent behind what someone says has been honed since I started noticing the impact of Reagan ending the Fairness Doc. The people running the current admin are incompetent. The GOP MOC are racists & liars. But there are still people in the organization who would know how to identify a weak Dem candidate that they could use as a pawn in an election. It's democratic voters - particularly dem socialists who I worry about NOT seeing this possibility - which is why I've been posting about it.
Thank you for this — and your pattern recognition on evasion is spot on. A candidate who can’t answer direct questions directly is telling you something important about the coherence of the underlying framework.
On Chevalier: I share your concern, and I hope the pessimists are wrong. What I’d say is this — even if no GOP PAC ever touched her race, she represents a genuine challenge for Democrats who want to hold together a coalition that includes liberal Zionists, Jewish voters, and people of good faith who take both Palestinian suffering and Israeli security seriously. Her views aren’t just a general election liability. They reflect a worldview that leaves very little room for that coalition to exist. That’s the longer game worth watching.
For some time now, polling has shown that support for Israel has declined sharply among all voters, starting with the war in Gaza and even more precipitously since the Iran war. So, while it's true that Democratic support has fallen, that's only part of the picture: A majority of independents and even a third of republican voters think U.S. support for Israel is too high. AIPAC's strident and often ugly attacks on people who voice criticism of Israeli policies has made its brand toxic to many voters, not just Dems. I think it's important to make that clear. Israel's part in the Iran war has split even MAGA republicans.
It's still early days, but Mayor Mamdani has already demonstrated the political savvy and strength of someone twice his age and vastly more experience. That Rep Dan Goldman wouldn't reach out to his city's mayor and mend fences proved costly.
I see the rise of Mamdani and his group as the storming of the Bastille. The peasants are tired of the elites taking everything, and I think it is great and just what America needs to survive.
Possibly. It's a little early to draw definitive conclusions about it means, IMO. It's just as possible this is the political pendulum swing back the other way. Time will tell.
Sorry, Jen, but Lander is a catastrophe for Jewish New Yorkers and the rest of the community nationwide. Mamdani is a snake. After his Brooklyn speech analogizing Jews to monsters he deserves the metaphor. And Lander will do his bidding.
The mayor didn't 'analogize Jews to monsters', he was specifically talking about AIPAC and its support for the status quo [which includes the murder of children, a position that UNICEF also reported], not Jews in general. It's important to be accurate about what people actually said.
It’s also important to understand the genealogy of the discourse and its rhetorical function. Talking about the importance of accuracy, AIPAC does not support the murder of children. The very suggestion is antisemitic, full stop. You (and I) might not like AIPAC’s political stances, but “the murder of children” is one of the oldest anti-Jewish tropes on record. The mayor’s AIPAC hook is a subterfuge, for the purpose of deniability. And I guess the bloviation works, at least it did on you. But I know, as a scholar, the deep historical background of “Jews and monsters.” Mamdani has a staff, he has resources, he is an educated person. Yet he invoked historically loaded associations. The only conclusion is that he intended to be offensive to Jews, or that he didn’t care at all if he was. That speech was unpardonable. Moreover, Mamdani’s only reason for ousting Goldman and Espaillat, both stalwart progressives, was to insert an antizionist contingent in Congress. And Mamdani betrayed Espaillat specifically, for the mayor had promised his support and then reneged. Mamdani’s slate belies the simplistic notion that the mayor of NYC is a local office without major repercussions on the international stage and in US foreign policy. Mamdani’s slate was all about his antizionist ideological commitments; it had nothing to do with benefits to NYC.
I'm going to stop you with the first straw man argument: I never said that AIPAC supports the murder of children. FULL STOP. Don't put words in my mouth and expect to get away with it. If you start out by making a bad faith argument, I'm not going to engage any further.
Then why even raise the specter of the murder of children at all? What was the point of resorting to rank demonization? Progressive discourse thinks it can get away with assaulting and criminalizing Jewish identity because progressives imagine they are on the “right side of history”. But anti-Judaism is always, always framed as virtuous and redemptive. Just because MAGA, Trump, and Vance are odious does not mean I’m going to give the DSA a pass. With all my breath and with my “pen” I will expose their abhorrent anti-Jewish racism.
But men, women and children ARE being killed in Gaza and Lebanon by Israelis because of orders from Netanyahu. Just as Iranians and immigrants here have been cruelly treated or killed by US citizens because of T.
No one should support N or T. That includes our billionaires and our far right groups. If AIPAC is supporting N, then we should not be supporting it.
The problem is NOT "progressive discourse"which implies that every person who speaks of progressive ideas is antisemitic.
Misleading comparison. Are you saying that Hamas is not operating in Gaza? That Hamas is not regrouping and getting ready for the next Oct 7? But maybe in so-called progressive circles Israeli children don’t count as human. Btw, I have news for you, Hamas is right now murdering dissenting Gazans. The UN had a special report on it. So Israel is in a war for the survival of its citizens. No comparison to immigrant detentions here. That is just bs words.
AIPAC does not support N. The organization supports every Israeli governing body. You, as a taxpayer, do not support AIPAC. It is supported by those who donate to it.
Do you know that Hezbullah has lobbed thousands of rockets into Israel recently?
Much here to agree with, and you’ve named something important about the genealogy of the discourse that too few people are willing to say plainly.
A word on “genocide” — not your word, but it’s running through this thread and it deserves a challenge. Palestinian suffering is real, documented, and demands serious moral accounting. But genocide has a specific legal and historical meaning, one that requires demonstrated intent to destroy a people as such. Deploying it as a synonym for “terrible and unjust” doesn’t honor Palestinian suffering — it instrumentalizes it, while foreclosing the precise moral reasoning the moment demands. Accuracy is not callousness. It is the precondition for credibility.
On AIPAC and children — you’re exactly right. The charge that Jewish institutional power is complicit in the murder of children has a thousand-year history, and educated people with staffs and resources do not invoke it accidentally. Mamdani either knew what he was doing or didn’t care. Neither is pardonable.
And here is my complicated position on Mamdani: there is genuine energy, intellect, and real municipal innovation to admire. But the slate is the tell. It was an antizionist ideological project dressed as local politics. Ousting Goldman and Espaillat — both stalwart progressives — served no New York City interest. The Espaillat betrayal in particular, a promised endorsement simply reneged, reveals how Mamdani subordinates loyalty to ideological commitment when the stakes are ideological. The mayoralty of New York is not a local office when wielded this way. It is a platform. And he knows it.
Ms. Rubin I am a generation ahead of you and have lived in NYC and its suburbs for most of my life. In politics what is currently au currant tends to fade almost as rapidly as youth. Today's messiah is tomorrow's insider with plenty to lose.
I have witnessed the rise and fall of many politicians who for reasons known best to themselves evolve in ways which run contrary to the current nature of things or don't evolve while the voters merely move on to the next shiny object. So, I wouldn't take too much stock in these election results as an accurate predictor of what the future may hold when the people who are elected in November and going forward become the rubber which will have to meet the road with an electorate pushing the accelerator to the floor thinking that speed alone will get them to their desired destination faster.
The Poetica Coffee Shop incident, referred to tangentially in this article, was a symptom of a spirit that has risen on the left. There is something repulsive and smug and cheaply self-congratulatory about the treatment of Dan Goldman.
From the linked New York Times article, one reads that shortly after Goldman and his seven year old daughter had stopped at Poetica, the shop's owners "posted a photo on Instagram of him at the store, along with a message that the coffee shop does not “serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers or anyone in between.” The post added, “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
Anyone who sees this sneering public shunning as a legitimate act of protest or a legitimate assertion of virtue has lost touch with both the nature of protest and the meaning of virtue.
It was just mean; self-righteous and mean. That's all it was.
While the owner of Poetica is a different story--he has an ugly social media history-- Goldman himself has gone out of his way to say the barista who served him, a woman wearing the hijab, couldn't have been kinder.
He has also asked the Trump DOJ to stand down from its threats to investigate Poetica, saying, “I would rather they spend their time and resources investigating antisemitism against people who do not have a platform that I do, who are not elected officials, who do not, in some ways, ask for this,” he said. “I mean, I don’t ask for the antisemitism, but I’m a public figure, and I can accept the criticism.”
Some interesting observations. I would like to add another comment.The Democratic party has a branding problem. Mamdani brands himself as a Democratic Socialist. No-one knows what that means. If you look up the meaning of socialist, it looks a lot like Communist. If you dive deeper its roots you find at the core the redistribution of wealth to benefit the citizens rather than capitalism that stresses profits. Either one taken to extreme is bad. We are seeing now, capitalism raging out of control. As proof I offer all of the corporate CEO's making 10's of millions of dollars a year. Who is that benefitting? The corporate CEO's of course. Let's not forget the investors who are mostly institutional and whose CEO's fall into the same category as the corporate CEOs. Socialism, at its root, advocates for government ownership of all means of production for the benefit of all the citizens. This is where the communist movement got a bad name. They found out that this simply didn't work.
The problem? Most people equate socialism with communism and for good reason. Somehow, the Democratic party needs to define its brand if they are going to use the term democratic socialist if they are going to accept this as a party moniker. Somewhere between pure socialism and pure capitalism is the right answer. This is what the Democratic party needs to define, refine and educate the population about before the Republican party defines it for them.
Mamdani, Sanders, and the rest wouldn't be outliers in Europe, where the term "democratic socialism" is widely understood to mean something entirely different than communism. You seem to assume Americans can't be educated to understand that. Sadly, there are good grounds for that assumption.
You misunderstood what I was saying about educating the citizenry. It can happen but needs to happen quickly before the term is defined for us. Your point about Europe is a good one and we can learn from their definition and how it is implemented over there. Good comment, thanks.
I mistakenly took for granted that your pessimism matched my own, apologies. I am, however, pessimistic about rebranding democratic socialism here through educating the citizenry, as we seem to be a muleheaded bunch. Or perhaps I should say that rebranding, if possible, will be accomplished through deeds, not words, which could be what you have in mind. Thanks for your comment.
We have just demonstrated how misinterpretations and disagreement should be handled. Comment - clarification-adjust if necessary. Keep the comments coming.
My 101 year old mother who grew up in the Netherlands during WWII talks about a Socialist party that were Nazi sympathizers. She associates Socialists with Nazi sympathizers and doesn’t understand why the Democratic Socialists would want to call themselves Socialists.
Perspective is everything. The generations leading today do not have your grandmother's perspective. They may look at socialism as not a dirty word, but one that should be considered in our political decision making.
That is true. We are the wealthiest and most innovative country in the world. I find it difficult to understand why the U.S. government can't get the best and brightest minds together on certain topics like universal health care and ending hunger. I'll be these folks could come up with some interesting solutions and not necessarily have them funded by the federal government. Even Democrats won't do this.
Dems are no longer monoliths, but neither are Republicans. Especially in congress. There’s MAGA, and there’s the Freedom Caucus who are far right conservatives and the Tuesday group or whatever they are called. Many have fallen in line with Trump are like fascists.
The so-called Freedom Caucus and MAGA are one and the same. The few remaining not-openly MAGA Rs are being driven out in republican primaries. Any republican who bucks Trump, not matter how long ago, is toast. Even republicans who vote with Trump 98% of the time aren't considered sufficiently loyal for Trump or MAGA. Just ask Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn.
The GOP march in lockstep saluting and saying "Heil Hitler". This was a purposeful change that started with Reagan and was aided by Gingrich and the Koch brothers (freedom caucus) who threatened any GOP with losing their seat if they did not vote as told. You saw what happened to Massie and Cornyn. NONE of them are good people defending our democracy. Stop pretending. If we fail to gain the majority in november by voting for whatever dem can win in your area, we will be a dictatorship and data centers will destroy our planet.
Brilliant Jen❣️And hopeful and standing proud for the young fighters rising up in the Democrat party. I am independent and doing what I can to erase the orange stain from our midst here in CA. These candidates give me hope for our future.
This will be my last comment on this topic. Some of us do focus on AIPAC because for decades they have been successful lobbyists instrumental in gaining a great deal of Congressional support for Israel's military. And what Israel has done with US funds is support illegal settlements in the West Bank and conduct a genocidal war in Gaza. Israel is not the only bad actor on the world stage; so is the US. And many of us are as opposed to US foreign policy as we are to Israel's foreign policy. This is not at all a matter of "Jew hatred," Marilyn.
Thank you for this brilliant quote from Lander: “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights. And I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job,”
WOW WOW WOW!
This is the best column I've read since Trump took office.
How the Dems can flip his power grabs and bypass Congress to make a better nation.
From the former WaPo columnist Dana MIlbank.
Worth paying to get behind the paywall.
Extraordinary, and FULL of good policy ideas.
I hope Ms. Rubin will read it and provide her always-valuable analysis.
https://www.notus.org/perspectives/dana-milbank-democrats-are-drafting-plans-to-govern-like-trump-in-2029
I just read this article by Milbank and find it poorly written. The attitude that she carries through this is toxic. And do not misunderstand. I like progressive values and the truth is - if everyone actually understood them - they would all agree to at least 90% of them.
Dana is doing what most reporters or commentators have done since Reagan ended the Fairness Doc: pretending that "both parties are the same". THEY ARE NOT. The legitimate GOP party was last led by Eisenhower. Nixon/Agnew were crooked, corrupt and should have been impeached. Gerald Ford may have been a nice guy, but he was really a place holder.
If you look at Biden's policies and actions as well as Ike's and FDR's you will find many similarities. You will learn that the Heritage Society fought against FDR's regs and SS. They were NOT happy with Ike - especially since he believed in unions and workers' rights. Ike and Biden both used an Infrastructure Project to get our economy going again. FDR, Ike and Biden would be opposed to every step the GOP has followed since Reagan. None of them would have accepted P2025 as a blueprint for their administration. The current GOP/MAGA party is a fascist party.
I know there are people who are trying to say that the Dems are becoming a socialist party but then THEY have no idea what Socialism is.
First and foremost, the way that T has been acting as president is NOT something that most people want to see when a Dem is elected. We want facts, not lies; plans that have a positive impact on middle and lower income people and level the playing field with the richest among us paying their fair share. That fair share in the future will be paying for all the corruption and damage to the economy by their support of the dictator. It should include reparations to every immigrant that spent even just one day in jail without receiving their rights.
IT IS LONG PAST TIME FOR PEOPLE TO RECOGNIZE THAT (WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS) OUR NEWS MEDIA/REPORTERS HAVE BEEN IN THE POCKETS OF THE GOP USING OPINIONS & BELIEFS INSTEAD OF FACTS & EVIDENCE.
Of Dan Goldman's defeat Jen wrote of, "...the toxic image AIPAC has acquired."
It's not just an image. AIPAC's lobbying on behalf of today's Israel is toxic! It's not an image, it's AIPAC's reality. It's not the only toxic lobbying group, for sure. But Israel's war against Palestine has become so horrific that any lobbying group supporting the state of Israel, given its current governing regime, must be rejected.
..and anyone accepting support from that group. It should not be difficult to draw a line at supporting genocide and apartheid.
It is very hard for the older members to do this. They SAW colleagues or wannabe colleagues who lost elections because of the demands of AIPAC. Obama voiced the issues at one point - saying that AIPAC - has directly impacted politicians negatively simply on the basis of whether or not a candidate has done what the government of Israel wanted. That's what convinced me that AIPAC was as bad as any billionaire who puts his money on the candidates who will not stop him from doing what he wants to do. AIPAC IS NOT JUST ONE organization. It has multiple pacs and the money they wield is staggering.
Donna Woodward, it would be useful to lay out a paragraph on "today's israel" which I suspect is Netanyahu et al. Can there really be widespread support in Israel for a military opration which kills tens of thousands of civilians? Or here for that matter?
Maybe Jennifer could do a column on AIPAC, who it reprtesents and who it doesn't?
And withal, I'm going to miss Dan Goldman.
The people of Israel are like the people of the US. There are far right Jews who support the criminal head of their country who has been committing crimes for decades. Men in their sect dominate. And like our billionaires, they are not the ones who go to battle.
Racism, misogyny, self-absorption and Christian Nationalism are the reasons people voted for T, did not vote or voted for a 3rd party candidate who could not win. Obviously, religion and hate play a part in Israel's elections.
AIPAC is like all of the people & groups in the US who use money to control the narrative. Sadly we have 90% of our media/journalists who have been doing the bidding of the GOP since Reagan ended the Fairness Doc.
Genocide is wrong no matter who does it. The US & Israel have been guilty of both. Do you see the concentration camps in the US? Do you know the cruelty happening there?
Yes. We in the US are guilty of some of the same things Israelis are. Our government has committed war crimes against persons in small boats in the Caribbean Sea and in the Pacific Ocean. In our conduct of the Iran War we're implicated in war crimes. And our opposition to our government's immoral and illegal conduct is being oppressed. Our government has funded the genocide in Gaza. We are guilty. But we've been a powerful force in the world (once upon a time a force for good) militarily and economicallly, and so we seem exempt from accountability. God heal us and save us, or save the world from us.
John, it seems as if the support in Israel for Netanyahoo's wars is waning. And also, as in the US, being stifled.
What would you do if your neighbors attacked you constantly? What if they burned your children alive in front of you? What if they raped and mutilated your daughter. I could go on.
I've followed your posts for a while. Why you have it in for Israel is beyond me. Do you know the history of Israel and all that it has endured? Do you know how many times Palestinians have refused a state next to Israel because they want to rule Israel in its entirety?
Oh, and genocide. You never blame Hamas for their murder of Gazans that goes constantly. Any Gazan who dares to disagree with Hamas goes bye-bye. I suppose if you repeat a genocide lie enough, people will start to believe it.
Have YOU never learned that "two wrongs never make a right"? Of course, those actions are abominable. But they are NOT excuses for what N has done in Gaza and Lebanon. STARVING children and destroying their homes is every bit as wrong as what Hamas has done.
Hamas IS horrific. That is why we have always backed Israel. STILL, that is no excuse for N's actions. Of course, I know that Hamas murders anyone that is in their way. It's more proof that Gazans are not responsible for what HAMAS does. Yet N is killing them.
In NO way do I support T and his ICE army. Nations are shunning him and refused to allow our warplanes to land on their airports for us to be able to easily destroy IRAN. I am very glad that they did this. I am happy to see him ostracized. What my government is doing inside and outside of the US is horrendous. We have innocent men women & children being cruelly treated in prisons around our nation. They have done nothing wrong and they are being held without having had any proper legal hearing. I see what is happening and know it is wrong even if I am not the one that at least now will not be harmed. Why is it impossible for you to see or say that your government is doing something wrong to innocent people? We have international laws and Netanyahu has been determined to be a war criminal.
Hamas and Hezbollah are not just horrific. They and they alone are to blame to what has happened to Gazan and Lebanese children and Gazan and Lebanese homes.
What would you have done if you were in the PM's position? Would you have said "Two wrongs don't make a right" and forgiven Hamas.
Your statements are absolutely false. To say that Hamas and Hezbollah are to blame for Gaza? You are as deluded as the president is.
I am not sure about that,. all the polls I have seen show a solid majority of Israelis are mad at Netanyahu for not fighting hard enough.Polls also show these same respondents support the invasion and occupation of Lebanon.
Same in Gaza - once the Israeli hostages were returned, polls I have seen show majorities of Israelis are supportive of the occupation and continuing carnage there.
And many people there are hopping mad about Trump's 'deal'.
Far right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir said in response to the news of a deal: “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!”
“In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint - you need to go berserk. To obliterate.”
Maybe wishful thinking on my part, or reading too much into reports I've read. I know many Israelis are horrified by the Iran "deal." Sooner or later the US and Israel will need to take Iran's sovereignty seriously, even if we don't like their human rights records. I don't like ours, either. Or Israel's.
This is a recent example - people polled here are mad that Netanyahu lost the war in their opinion, and want the war to continue. A plurality also wants to continue bombing Lebanon even despite the current 'ceasefire' (as if Israel ever actually maintained any 'ceasefire' in Lebanon at any moment in the last nearly 4 years,but whatever) https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-92-of-israelis-believe-iran-emerged-as-winner-after-war-and-deal-with-us/
For the record, I do not mean to overlook the small but vocal minority of Israeli citizens (outside the Arab citizens of Israel,who of course are very opposed to all of this) that have called out Israel's genocide and apartheid, like B'TSelem, Physicians for Peace, some scholars and journalists at Haaretz, and some regular civilians too.
One thing driving my comments on this, that is a consistent flaw in The Contrarian's coverage, is putting all the blame solely on Netanyahu. It is not just him. It is a large majority in the Knesset, who recently voted to allow the death penalty for Palestinians while many representatives wore noose pins...it's much of the Israeli media, which is often so racist and pro-violence it would make Newmax blush, it's the IDF top to bottom....its a structural problem far deeper than any one prime minister.
And, Netanyahu-only critics ignore that he is the longest serving prime minister in Israel's history, who has been quite popular for most of that time. It's a bit like Trump here, but worse...Trump and Netanyahu are both causes of and results of deeper problems.
Being someone who comments here often, you have probably noticed I have really soured on Rubin lately, and I am not sure that I even trust her intentions. The coverage here (or just as importantly, non-coverage) of the US/Israeli assault Iran and Lebanon, all while the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank go on, has really brought this to the forefront for me.
It just baffles me that Contrarian readers can be ok with Rubin virtually ignoring what Israel is doing in Lebanon, or making repeated critical comments like 'Republicans excoriated Obama for his Iran nuclear deal' as if she was not one of the loudest critics herself, without even a hint of acknowledgement anywhere in print that this was the case. Responders have said ad nauseam that she can simply change her mind, which is a deeply flawed argument in itself IMO but what Rubin has been doing lately is far beyond that. It's totally dishonest. Other Never Trumpers have been honest about their past view. Not Rubin...and it has never been more painfully obvious then when she talks about JCPOA
Anyway, I keep my subscription because there occasionally are interesting comments here (although the majority are not IMO) and I do like what Eisen is doing in court. But if I want actual insightful, unvarnished commentary on anything related at all to Israel, Iran or the Occupied Territories, or the US relation to any of that, I look elsewhere.
I agree with you. The fact that Ms Rubin has not once admitted that she aided the GOP for decades has disturbed me. I've not been able to forgive the Lincoln Project members yet but at least they owned what they did and admitted to being blind at what was happening. I read Rubin's opinions in WaPo, they were always biased for the GOP no matter how far they marched toward fascism. For anyone to not see the fascism or the genocides that are happening or the concentration camps right here in the US is unacceptable. After Eisenhower saw a concentration camp, he told the nearby Germans who claimed that 'they didn't know' that they were lying and walked away in anger. I stay for the same reasons and to blunt her inaccurate statements.
What do you think of Qatar doling out millions, if not billions of dollars, in support of Jew hatred? Why isn't Qatar toxic given its current support of terrorist groups such as Hamas?
PM Netanyahoo asked Qatar to give Gaza that money, which was used to shore up Hamas against the PA so the PA wouldn't have strength, because the PA supported a two-state solution, which has been anathema to Netanyahoo.
So ask Qatar about that money, Marilyn. Or better yet, ask the Israeli PM.
I'm not talking about Israel. I know about the Israeli stuff. I wrote specifically about the United States and Jew hatred. Why is AIPAC but not Qatar toxic?
What in the world does Qatar nave to do with a discussion on AIPAC? Getting into a what-aboutism discussion seems unproductive and probably endless, if you're going to bring up every lobbying group.
Why are you so obsessed with AIPAC and not other PACs? Why only AIPAC? An obsessing about AIPAC is not whataboutism. Give me a break.
I bring up Qatar because you and others leave out the enormous amount of influence a non US entity, Qatar, has on our elections. Why is AIPAC your focus and not Qatar?
Marilyn, why don't you do us all a favor and move to Israel? I most certainly don't want a penny of my tax money going to support Israel. Be advised I've studied International Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva, Switzerland. There, we are trained to RESPECT reality and the International Court at The Hague.
The same toxicity has been reported in Chicago, a city where I spent the middle half of my 84 years, and was strongly affecting races in neighborhoods where I lived and frequented. Israel's government is just as toxic as ours, and has been for much longer.
I'm not sure Israel's govt. has been toxic for longer than ours has been. Our toxicity toward Native Americans and other non-whites can be traced to our earliest days on this continent, whereas Israel has only existed for 78 years.
No argument there -- was thinking of modern times. And then there's slavery.
Aren you saying that Israel has been toxic for 78 years?
Please read the post. It didn't say that.
Our toxicity toward Native Americans and other non-whites can be traced to our earliest days on this continent, whereas Israel has only existed for 78 years.
If it doesn't say that, what does it say?
Palestinian human rights to not be genocided? With our tax dollars, even? It's okay to say it.
Lander does say the “g” word. So does Mamdani and so do the other candidates he endorsed. Rubin just doesn’t mention it.
Lander’s calling out of Israel’s genocide is probably part of what Rubin refers to when she writes of his “sometimes vicious tone about Israel”.
Instead, Rubin focuses on Lander’s criticism of AIPAC, which she agrees with, when the larger issue pulling Dem voters away from officials like Goldman is establishment Dem’s support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid generally. AIPAC is just one facet of this.
Here is just one example that shows why so many Democratic voters are outraged, still..AIPAC is only a part of it, and not the most important part.
This reported today by Drop Site News:
'The latest Israeli attacks on children came a day after a UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry released a report that concluded, “Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip.” The UN inquiry said that during the first two years of the Israeli assault, over 20,000 children were killed and more than 44,000 injured.
Since the so-called ceasefire went into effect in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 265 children and wounded hundreds more in Gaza, according to findings released last week by the UN children’s agency UNICEF. “During a period supposedly defined by restraint and protection, a child has been killed, on average, every single day for more than eight months,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said in a statement. “That is an absurd and devastating figure.”'
It’s amazing to me that a person can’t be pro-Palestine human rights and pro-Jewish human rights at the same time. They do go hand in hand. No one group of people should face genocide. I’m happy for the ‘new’ democrats!
Rubin’s framing is exactly right, and the distinctions she draws matter. Lander and Lasher represent something the Democratic Party badly needs right now: politicians who have demonstrated, through actual conduct under pressure, that they can hold complexity — fighting MAGA without abandoning either Jewish or Palestinian concerns, and doing so with the kind of earned credibility that no amount of messaging can manufacture. Lander’s line on election night — “those are not two different jobs, they are the same job” — is the formulation serious Democrats should be memorizing.
But Tuesday’s results carried a third signal that deserves scrutiny alongside the celebration. Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, Columbia-formed, SJP-affiliated, encampment-veteran, just unseated a five-term incumbent in upper Manhattan. She did not win despite her views on Israel. She won with them. The distinction matters. Lander arrived at his positions through engagement, friction, and political reckoning. Chevalier arrived at hers through a theoretical framework assembled before the facts — one coherent enough that October 7th, Jewish indigeneity, and the Mizrahi dimension (more than half of Israeli Jews are refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab and Muslim lands) are not refuted by it. They are invisible to it. She is not extreme in the way that word implies recklessness. She is formed. And she represents not an outlier but a leading edge.
The party can hold Lander and Chevalier simultaneously. The question is which model it chooses to build on.
The other point she made in this article about Upper West Side voters is also worth noting: matching the candidate to the district matters.
There are GOP groups, some pretending to be dem backed PACS who are purposefully supporting candidates like Chevaliar, because they believe that their GOP candidate will easily beat them.
That’s a real dynamic and worth naming. But I’d argue the more consequential threat isn’t the GOP’s cynical bet — it’s that the bet may be wrong. Chevalier isn’t an artificially elevated outlier. She’s the visible tip of something that has been forming for a decade in elite universities and progressive organizing spaces. An entire cohort of educated millennials came of age without the historical anchors — the existential wars of 1967 and 1973, the trauma of the Second Intifada, and the political significance of the 2005 Gaza disengagement — and were handed instead a ready-made framework: colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, a racial architecture that connects Ferguson to Gaza because the theory demands it. Saturated with the genuine tragedy of Gaza, they received the images after the interpretive lens was already in place. That’s not manipulation. That’s formation. And it’s durable. The GOP may think they’re elevating a weak candidate. What they may actually be doing is mistaking a leading edge for a fringe.
Well I believe you may have an even stronger point than I realized. Chevalier appears to be much more, shall we say “fringe”.
Check out this commentary:
“earlier this month, Avila Chevalier sat down with the New York Editorial Board, a collection of veteran city journalists of various ideological stripes. Here’s what Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute asked her: “What should happen to somebody who has killed somebody else? I mean, I went to a sentencing last week, a man killed another man, didn’t know the person, just sitting on a stoop, got a[n] 18-year prison sentence. Should that person not go to prison? And what should happen instead?”
Here’s Avila Chevalier’s response:
So, you know, for prison abolitionists, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what that vision of the world actually is. And it is one that actually centers this question of harm. At the heart of what we’re asking is: What, why is it that there is so much harm in our society?
And how do we, A) prevent it, and B) deal with it when it happens. And as someone who has worked with folks who have been incarcerated, who have felt ostracized, for lack of a better term, by so many facets of our society—for being poor, for being black, for being Latino. I work at a public defender’s office where most of our clients are incredibly poor black and brown New Yorkers. And for so many, the crimes that they’re being indicted for are crimes of poverty, or the effects of poverty.
And when I think about this question of harm, I think how do we create a society where people feel so safe that they don’t need to pick up the phone and call the police. And when harm does happen, how do we actually create repair? Because what we have right now is a system in whenever harm happens, there’s more harm being perpetrated, not only on the folks who engaged in the harm, but also on the victims of the harm. I’m someone who has actually been the victim of crimes, of violence, and gone to the police as a young person thinking, doing the thing that society told me to do, and all that did was traumatize me more.
Did you follow that? Her answer was so long you may have forgotten what the question was in the first place. So let me remind you: She was asked what she thinks should happen to a guy who kills another guy. Here’s her final attempt:
Well, this is what I’m saying is that when that happens, and as someone who has sat in so many courtrooms, to me, all of that is tragic. The fact that the murder happened is tragic. The fact that there was a circumstance in which that could even come to pass is tragic, and all of that is a reflection of systems that allowed that circumstance to be possible. And so, you know, I have always focused my attention on how do we create systems where that’s not even the possibility.
Okay! So there will be no more prisons because there will be no more murder. Got it. Right this way to the House floor, Congresswoman!
This excerpt from
https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-this-is-why-i-cant-have-friends?r=dv6bg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Not a reader of the Free Press but I couldn’t resist this one,
It all comes down to what you think about human nature. She sounds very naive to me thinking that if everyone had all their basic needs met there would be no crime and therefore no need for police. How do you then explain wealthy people that also rape, murder and steal?
Thank you for both of your comments. I appreciate thoughtful replies and replies showing a person has done more research. This excerpt shows clearly that she avoids direct questions. A person who does this (like all GOP) does not want to answer the question, is not really confident in their beliefs or has never looked at the big picture and its complications. I did "follow" what she said because I recognize this pattern. My skill to be able to read and see the intent behind what someone says has been honed since I started noticing the impact of Reagan ending the Fairness Doc. The people running the current admin are incompetent. The GOP MOC are racists & liars. But there are still people in the organization who would know how to identify a weak Dem candidate that they could use as a pawn in an election. It's democratic voters - particularly dem socialists who I worry about NOT seeing this possibility - which is why I've been posting about it.
Thank you for this — and your pattern recognition on evasion is spot on. A candidate who can’t answer direct questions directly is telling you something important about the coherence of the underlying framework.
On Chevalier: I share your concern, and I hope the pessimists are wrong. What I’d say is this — even if no GOP PAC ever touched her race, she represents a genuine challenge for Democrats who want to hold together a coalition that includes liberal Zionists, Jewish voters, and people of good faith who take both Palestinian suffering and Israeli security seriously. Her views aren’t just a general election liability. They reflect a worldview that leaves very little room for that coalition to exist. That’s the longer game worth watching.
Small correction: Schlossberg is JFK's grandson. He would have been JFK Jr.'s nephew.
For some time now, polling has shown that support for Israel has declined sharply among all voters, starting with the war in Gaza and even more precipitously since the Iran war. So, while it's true that Democratic support has fallen, that's only part of the picture: A majority of independents and even a third of republican voters think U.S. support for Israel is too high. AIPAC's strident and often ugly attacks on people who voice criticism of Israeli policies has made its brand toxic to many voters, not just Dems. I think it's important to make that clear. Israel's part in the Iran war has split even MAGA republicans.
It's still early days, but Mayor Mamdani has already demonstrated the political savvy and strength of someone twice his age and vastly more experience. That Rep Dan Goldman wouldn't reach out to his city's mayor and mend fences proved costly.
I see the rise of Mamdani and his group as the storming of the Bastille. The peasants are tired of the elites taking everything, and I think it is great and just what America needs to survive.
Possibly. It's a little early to draw definitive conclusions about it means, IMO. It's just as possible this is the political pendulum swing back the other way. Time will tell.
Please separate Road f. Kill, Jr from the rest of the Kennedys. They have.
Sorry, Jen, but Lander is a catastrophe for Jewish New Yorkers and the rest of the community nationwide. Mamdani is a snake. After his Brooklyn speech analogizing Jews to monsters he deserves the metaphor. And Lander will do his bidding.
The mayor didn't 'analogize Jews to monsters', he was specifically talking about AIPAC and its support for the status quo [which includes the murder of children, a position that UNICEF also reported], not Jews in general. It's important to be accurate about what people actually said.
It’s also important to understand the genealogy of the discourse and its rhetorical function. Talking about the importance of accuracy, AIPAC does not support the murder of children. The very suggestion is antisemitic, full stop. You (and I) might not like AIPAC’s political stances, but “the murder of children” is one of the oldest anti-Jewish tropes on record. The mayor’s AIPAC hook is a subterfuge, for the purpose of deniability. And I guess the bloviation works, at least it did on you. But I know, as a scholar, the deep historical background of “Jews and monsters.” Mamdani has a staff, he has resources, he is an educated person. Yet he invoked historically loaded associations. The only conclusion is that he intended to be offensive to Jews, or that he didn’t care at all if he was. That speech was unpardonable. Moreover, Mamdani’s only reason for ousting Goldman and Espaillat, both stalwart progressives, was to insert an antizionist contingent in Congress. And Mamdani betrayed Espaillat specifically, for the mayor had promised his support and then reneged. Mamdani’s slate belies the simplistic notion that the mayor of NYC is a local office without major repercussions on the international stage and in US foreign policy. Mamdani’s slate was all about his antizionist ideological commitments; it had nothing to do with benefits to NYC.
I'm going to stop you with the first straw man argument: I never said that AIPAC supports the murder of children. FULL STOP. Don't put words in my mouth and expect to get away with it. If you start out by making a bad faith argument, I'm not going to engage any further.
Then why even raise the specter of the murder of children at all? What was the point of resorting to rank demonization? Progressive discourse thinks it can get away with assaulting and criminalizing Jewish identity because progressives imagine they are on the “right side of history”. But anti-Judaism is always, always framed as virtuous and redemptive. Just because MAGA, Trump, and Vance are odious does not mean I’m going to give the DSA a pass. With all my breath and with my “pen” I will expose their abhorrent anti-Jewish racism.
But men, women and children ARE being killed in Gaza and Lebanon by Israelis because of orders from Netanyahu. Just as Iranians and immigrants here have been cruelly treated or killed by US citizens because of T.
No one should support N or T. That includes our billionaires and our far right groups. If AIPAC is supporting N, then we should not be supporting it.
The problem is NOT "progressive discourse"which implies that every person who speaks of progressive ideas is antisemitic.
Misleading comparison. Are you saying that Hamas is not operating in Gaza? That Hamas is not regrouping and getting ready for the next Oct 7? But maybe in so-called progressive circles Israeli children don’t count as human. Btw, I have news for you, Hamas is right now murdering dissenting Gazans. The UN had a special report on it. So Israel is in a war for the survival of its citizens. No comparison to immigrant detentions here. That is just bs words.
AIPAC does not support N. The organization supports every Israeli governing body. You, as a taxpayer, do not support AIPAC. It is supported by those who donate to it.
Do you know that Hezbullah has lobbed thousands of rockets into Israel recently?
If you start out by making a bad faith argument, I'm not going to engage any further.
Much here to agree with, and you’ve named something important about the genealogy of the discourse that too few people are willing to say plainly.
A word on “genocide” — not your word, but it’s running through this thread and it deserves a challenge. Palestinian suffering is real, documented, and demands serious moral accounting. But genocide has a specific legal and historical meaning, one that requires demonstrated intent to destroy a people as such. Deploying it as a synonym for “terrible and unjust” doesn’t honor Palestinian suffering — it instrumentalizes it, while foreclosing the precise moral reasoning the moment demands. Accuracy is not callousness. It is the precondition for credibility.
On AIPAC and children — you’re exactly right. The charge that Jewish institutional power is complicit in the murder of children has a thousand-year history, and educated people with staffs and resources do not invoke it accidentally. Mamdani either knew what he was doing or didn’t care. Neither is pardonable.
And here is my complicated position on Mamdani: there is genuine energy, intellect, and real municipal innovation to admire. But the slate is the tell. It was an antizionist ideological project dressed as local politics. Ousting Goldman and Espaillat — both stalwart progressives — served no New York City interest. The Espaillat betrayal in particular, a promised endorsement simply reneged, reveals how Mamdani subordinates loyalty to ideological commitment when the stakes are ideological. The mayoralty of New York is not a local office when wielded this way. It is a platform. And he knows it.
Well said!!
That is total BS.
Thank you, Marcia. I feel like a voice in the wilderness.
Ms. Rubin I am a generation ahead of you and have lived in NYC and its suburbs for most of my life. In politics what is currently au currant tends to fade almost as rapidly as youth. Today's messiah is tomorrow's insider with plenty to lose.
I have witnessed the rise and fall of many politicians who for reasons known best to themselves evolve in ways which run contrary to the current nature of things or don't evolve while the voters merely move on to the next shiny object. So, I wouldn't take too much stock in these election results as an accurate predictor of what the future may hold when the people who are elected in November and going forward become the rubber which will have to meet the road with an electorate pushing the accelerator to the floor thinking that speed alone will get them to their desired destination faster.
The Poetica Coffee Shop incident, referred to tangentially in this article, was a symptom of a spirit that has risen on the left. There is something repulsive and smug and cheaply self-congratulatory about the treatment of Dan Goldman.
From the linked New York Times article, one reads that shortly after Goldman and his seven year old daughter had stopped at Poetica, the shop's owners "posted a photo on Instagram of him at the store, along with a message that the coffee shop does not “serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers or anyone in between.” The post added, “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
Anyone who sees this sneering public shunning as a legitimate act of protest or a legitimate assertion of virtue has lost touch with both the nature of protest and the meaning of virtue.
It was just mean; self-righteous and mean. That's all it was.
It wasn't just mean. It was atrociously anti semitic.
Also, clearly Jew haters.
While the owner of Poetica is a different story--he has an ugly social media history-- Goldman himself has gone out of his way to say the barista who served him, a woman wearing the hijab, couldn't have been kinder.
He has also asked the Trump DOJ to stand down from its threats to investigate Poetica, saying, “I would rather they spend their time and resources investigating antisemitism against people who do not have a platform that I do, who are not elected officials, who do not, in some ways, ask for this,” he said. “I mean, I don’t ask for the antisemitism, but I’m a public figure, and I can accept the criticism.”
Some interesting observations. I would like to add another comment.The Democratic party has a branding problem. Mamdani brands himself as a Democratic Socialist. No-one knows what that means. If you look up the meaning of socialist, it looks a lot like Communist. If you dive deeper its roots you find at the core the redistribution of wealth to benefit the citizens rather than capitalism that stresses profits. Either one taken to extreme is bad. We are seeing now, capitalism raging out of control. As proof I offer all of the corporate CEO's making 10's of millions of dollars a year. Who is that benefitting? The corporate CEO's of course. Let's not forget the investors who are mostly institutional and whose CEO's fall into the same category as the corporate CEOs. Socialism, at its root, advocates for government ownership of all means of production for the benefit of all the citizens. This is where the communist movement got a bad name. They found out that this simply didn't work.
The problem? Most people equate socialism with communism and for good reason. Somehow, the Democratic party needs to define its brand if they are going to use the term democratic socialist if they are going to accept this as a party moniker. Somewhere between pure socialism and pure capitalism is the right answer. This is what the Democratic party needs to define, refine and educate the population about before the Republican party defines it for them.
Mamdani, Sanders, and the rest wouldn't be outliers in Europe, where the term "democratic socialism" is widely understood to mean something entirely different than communism. You seem to assume Americans can't be educated to understand that. Sadly, there are good grounds for that assumption.
You misunderstood what I was saying about educating the citizenry. It can happen but needs to happen quickly before the term is defined for us. Your point about Europe is a good one and we can learn from their definition and how it is implemented over there. Good comment, thanks.
I mistakenly took for granted that your pessimism matched my own, apologies. I am, however, pessimistic about rebranding democratic socialism here through educating the citizenry, as we seem to be a muleheaded bunch. Or perhaps I should say that rebranding, if possible, will be accomplished through deeds, not words, which could be what you have in mind. Thanks for your comment.
We have just demonstrated how misinterpretations and disagreement should be handled. Comment - clarification-adjust if necessary. Keep the comments coming.
That was my first thought before analyzing the content of your back and forth! Nice job, Steven and Ed. So refreshing.
My 101 year old mother who grew up in the Netherlands during WWII talks about a Socialist party that were Nazi sympathizers. She associates Socialists with Nazi sympathizers and doesn’t understand why the Democratic Socialists would want to call themselves Socialists.
Perspective is everything. The generations leading today do not have your grandmother's perspective. They may look at socialism as not a dirty word, but one that should be considered in our political decision making.
Europe has health care
That is true. We are the wealthiest and most innovative country in the world. I find it difficult to understand why the U.S. government can't get the best and brightest minds together on certain topics like universal health care and ending hunger. I'll be these folks could come up with some interesting solutions and not necessarily have them funded by the federal government. Even Democrats won't do this.
Dems are no longer monoliths, but neither are Republicans. Especially in congress. There’s MAGA, and there’s the Freedom Caucus who are far right conservatives and the Tuesday group or whatever they are called. Many have fallen in line with Trump are like fascists.
And they all vote in lockstep to back Trump most of the time. They even had a do-over last night of the Iran vote because Dear Leader had a hissy fit.
The so-called Freedom Caucus and MAGA are one and the same. The few remaining not-openly MAGA Rs are being driven out in republican primaries. Any republican who bucks Trump, not matter how long ago, is toast. Even republicans who vote with Trump 98% of the time aren't considered sufficiently loyal for Trump or MAGA. Just ask Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn.
The GOP march in lockstep saluting and saying "Heil Hitler". This was a purposeful change that started with Reagan and was aided by Gingrich and the Koch brothers (freedom caucus) who threatened any GOP with losing their seat if they did not vote as told. You saw what happened to Massie and Cornyn. NONE of them are good people defending our democracy. Stop pretending. If we fail to gain the majority in november by voting for whatever dem can win in your area, we will be a dictatorship and data centers will destroy our planet.
This may finally be the year that the 'Young Guns' send the party's aging and tired leaders to a well deserved retirement....
Brilliant Jen❣️And hopeful and standing proud for the young fighters rising up in the Democrat party. I am independent and doing what I can to erase the orange stain from our midst here in CA. These candidates give me hope for our future.
PS: Missing you at Coffee💖
This will be my last comment on this topic. Some of us do focus on AIPAC because for decades they have been successful lobbyists instrumental in gaining a great deal of Congressional support for Israel's military. And what Israel has done with US funds is support illegal settlements in the West Bank and conduct a genocidal war in Gaza. Israel is not the only bad actor on the world stage; so is the US. And many of us are as opposed to US foreign policy as we are to Israel's foreign policy. This is not at all a matter of "Jew hatred," Marilyn.