The Way It Iz

Because of the big election news here in New York this year, you would not be blamed for missing out on the major news out of Baltimore this past Election Day, which could be quite embarrassing for the Jewish community. Without going into too much detail, it seems there were two candidates for the Baltimore City Council: one a Jewish candidate and one the incumbent, who was not Jewish. The source of the rift was that the Jewish candidate was apparently not sufficiently pro-Israel, a stance that tends not to matter in local politics. However, it seems that this divide caused a rift in the Jewish community, which made up about 20% of the electorate, and ended up swinging the election for the incumbent, who tapped into the pro-Israel side and got enough of the Jewish vote to keep him in office.

There have been plenty of political pundits telling you what they think Zohran Mamdani’s election as the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor means for the overall Democratic Party. The prevailing narrative is that the mainstream Democratic Party is losing ground to the Bernie Sanders wing, and that within a few years, the party will be fully run by its far-left flank. I don’t believe that’s true. In fact, Mamdani’s win doesn’t say much about the party’s future – it only reflects the here and now.

In the wake of the death of George Floyd, support for the BLM movement was at an all-time high. People started to believe that police were mowing down Black people with reckless abandon, that applicants with Black-sounding names were far less likely to get a job, and that we were one election away from a return to Jim Crow. However, as time went on, we learned that many of these assumptions were wrong. In fact, there was a tremendous backlash to the BLM movement, spurred on by the rise in crime that resulted from many of the policies put forward by its champions, including defunding the police. At a certain point, the general public became bored with constantly being told about the victimization of Black people, and they moved on.

On June 15, 2021, then–Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered remarks pointing to White Supremacy as the nation’s top domestic terror threat. At the time, we knew this was not true. However, the Biden Administration, as well as their allies like the Anti-Defamation League, insisted that White Supremacy indeed posed the largest domestic terrorist threat in the country. The ADL went so far as to keep a running count of right-wing extremist terrorism in the United States because, presumably, either left-wing terrorism does not exist, or the ADL is okay with it.

These days, we hear a lot about privilege: white privilege, pretty privilege, skinny privilege. However, there is one actual class of privilege that exists in society that we all benefit from: the privilege of the present.

Since Joe Biden has left the White House, we have seen a steady stream of politicians and media pundits who had previously denied Biden’s mental health decline—at best—come to the realization that they had been duped, and at worst, now have to answer for a cover-up. Of course, any sane person who had seen Biden speak over the course of his presidency, and certainly over the last year and a half of it, could tell that the man was not the same mentally. There was a reason he never spoke to the press. There was a reason he was done working every day by 6 p.m. There was a reason he looked horrible during his debate with Donald Trump. And obviously, this wasn’t because he had a bad night. It was because he was having a bad four years.