The good news from Texas on Tuesday night was that Maureen Galindo, the antisemitic candidate running in a Democratic primary to represent San Antonio in Congress, was handily defeated.
The bad news is that she still won 36% of the vote.
That means that 7,291 people cast their ballots for a woman who said American Zionists should be castrated and imprisoned, and who trafficked in conspiratorial rhetoric about Israel bringing “genocide” to American soil.
The party’s leadership, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, condemned her rhetoric, and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has had a role in mainstreaming anti-Israel rhetoric that bleeds into antisemitism, did the same.
The larger story is not Galindo herself. Fringe figures exist in every political movement. Hopefully, she will not be heard from again.
But the more important question is what kind of political climate allows someone trafficking in openly antisemitic rhetoric to win more than a third of the vote in a congressional primary.
And the answer is that rhetoric once considered beyond the pale is no longer treated that way.
“Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable now, it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy. It’s the new Che Guevara T-shirt,” the comedian Bill Maher said in a monologue on his Real Time with Bill Maher show earlier this month.
“And Democrats, where are you? If any other minority group was being talked about this way, you’d break out the kente cloth and have 10 benefit concerts. But because you see that so many of your brainwashed-by-TikTok constituents now have an unfavorable view of Israel, you indulge them when you should be correcting them.”
Maher said that the party should be telling “your woke idiots” that “Israel isn’t a colonizer or an apartheid state or committing genocide.”
Precisely.
Too often, only Jews condemn antisemitism
What was notable about Maher’s comment was that he does not identify as a Jew. His mother was Jewish, but – as he said in a 2002 CNN interview – he was raised as a Roman Catholic, his father's faith, and did not even know his mother was Jewish until his teens.
Why does that matter?
Because in the face of antisemitic screeds being spread by both the Left and the Right – by the likes of Galindo, Hasan Piker, and Nicholas Kristof on the Left, and Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Dan Bilzerian on the Right – too often the loudest voices of censure are coming from Jews.
For years, Jewish organizations invested heavily in interfaith and intercommunal alliances, showing up loudly and visibly against all forms of racism – against blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, and other minorities.
But alliances ultimately have to work both ways.
It is one thing when congressmen like Josh Gottheimer or Jared Moskowitz complain about antisemitism inside the Democratic Party; it is another thing when James Carville, the fabled Democratic strategist, does the same. It just has more resonance.
Carville, in a podcast last week, said that anti-Israel activists aligned with his party could hurt the party politically.
“This antisemitic stuff, it’s sickening, man! It’s a real problem,” Carville said. “It’s not a made-up problem. It’s a real, real, real definite problem, and it’s getting worse.”
“I don’t want to be part of a political party that tolerates hatred, or sometimes encourages it,” Carville added.
Voices like this matter politically precisely because they cannot easily be dismissed as reflexively defending their own tribe. Jews slamming antisemites is a non-story; it is expected. But when non-Jews do so, it has more resonance.
Democratic candidate with Nazi tattoo may win senator seat
The Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, had a Nazi tattoo emblazoned on his chest. He claimed he did not know it was a Nazi tattoo, and then, after the uproar it caused, covered it up with something else. He very well may replace Maine’s sitting senator and is strident in his anti-Israel rhetoric.
Jake Auchincloss, a congressman from Massachusetts who is Jewish, refused to support Platner – a member of his own party – because of this, and triggered intense blowback.
“I’ve been clear about Graham Platner. I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying,” Auchincloss said in an interview. “I hope Maine voters agree with me. I think it would be a mistake for the Democratic Party to think that Graham Platner’s brand of the Democratic Party is what wins us durable majorities throughout this country.”
Where are the rest? Where is the outrage? Imagine if a senatorial hopeful had a Ku Klux Klan symbol tattooed on his chest and then denied he knew what the symbol stood for. What would his political chances be?
As Sen. John Fetterman, who is not Jewish, put it: “Democrats used to describe someone with a Nazi tattoo as a Nazi sympathizer.”
Antisemitism, and antisemitic rhetoric – often disguised as criticism of Israel or of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government – is being normalized.
It is being normalized because people who should know better hesitate to criticize it, out of concern for alienating activist constituencies. But that hesitance carries consequences.
When antisemitic rhetoric is treated as merely overheated anti-Israel criticism rather than prejudice, it gradually becomes legitimized. And once this rhetoric is legitimized, its impact on the political process naturally follows.
A candidate winning 36% of the vote while trafficking openly and loudly in antisemitic tropes is not the beginning of that process; it is evidence that the process is already underway. And that should be a wake-up call for non-Jews as much as for Jews.
Or, as Bill O’Reilly, who once had the Fox News slot that Carlson took over for many years, said in one of his recent podcasts: “If you’re not Jewish, why should you care [about antisemitism]? Because this is bad for the USA. You shouldn’t have this.”