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January 14, 2024

When it comes to Democrats, Bill Ackman still doesn’t get it

By Andrea Widburg

When hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman saw Claudine Gay and other presidents of prestigious (on the left) colleges say that whether a call for Jewish genocide was a bad thing required a nuanced contextual understanding, he knew there was a problem. That understanding escalated when academia went after his wife. However, proving that he’s still mired in darkness, he just endorsed a Democrat for president. Ackman highlights the problem that sees many Jews, no matter how ostensibly “logical,” operating from emotion, not reason.

Long before October 7 but especially since October 7, college campuses, at both the faculty and the student level, have revealed themselves to be virulently antisemitic (often dressed up in the guise of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and/or pro-Palestinian sentiment).

Another trend on campuses is a monolithic political alignment. Data from the last election show that college and university employees donate overwhelmingly to the Democrat party. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

When it comes to that party, it is now home to openly antisemitic politicians: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Mark Pocan, etc. Although they, too, try to hide between anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and/or pro-Palestinian rhetoric, their embrace of the side that has as its motto “from the river to the sea,” an openly genocidal demand, gives the game away.

Long before October 7, there was already a shift in Democrat politicians’ support for Israel, as evidenced by analyses in 2021 from The New York Times and the BBC. The rank and file have shifted, too. The AP noted a 2021 poll showing that 51% of Democrat voters, members of a party that used to support Israel, support the Gazastinians and West Bankians over Israel. A year after that (and still one year before October 7), Democrat support for those with genocidal aspirations toward Israel had increased even more obviously.

Image: Bill Ackman (edited) by Senate Democrats. CC BY 2.0.

Those trends have only continued. According to a recent poll of California voters from the Berkeley Institution of Governmental Studies, Democrat voters overwhelmingly side with Gazastinians and West Bankians when compared to Republican voters.

In other words, while most Democrat politicians still toe the pro-Israel line, the outspokenly antisemitic/anti-Israel politicians represent the leading edge of the Democrat party. Antisemitism is the direction in which the Democrat party is heading.

And if you don’t believe it, the Biden administration and the media certainly do. That’s why the administration and the media are copacetic with the violent pro-Hamas protests taking place across America, including in front of the White House. They understand in which direction the Democrat party wind is blowing:

Those are facts, and logic says that the rot of antisemitism lies deep within the Democrat party thanks to the leftist takeover that began in the sixties and is reaching its apex now.  

But most people, no matter how logical they pretend to be, are, in fact, driven by emotion. This explains a lifelong conservative friend of mine who despises Trump so much—a purely visceral feeling—that he now sees Biden as an avatar of goodness, light, harmony, and unity and discounts all evidence of Biden’s corruption, racism, and hard left governance. Emotion has overridden reason.

For Democrat Jews—which means secular or reform Jews whose lives are not informed by the precepts of the Torah—the Democrat party is their spiritual home. It is a refuge from the Republican party’s old-style antisemitism (e.g., Harvard’s “don’t come to our school,” Wall Street’s “don’t work for our bank,” the country club’s “don’t golf on our course,” and Main Street’s “don’t marry my daughter”).

Now that Jews have breached every one of those barricades through the medium of the Democrat party, they feel safe. They are incapable of recognizing that, through ascendant leftism, an infinitely more virulent form of antisemitism has invaded their party. This one doesn’t seek to exclude them from the country club. It seeks to kill them, for it has aligned itself with people like this:

And with that long lead-in, here’s Bill Ackman, warrior against the academics who attacked his wife, endorsing…a Democrat. No, it’s not Biden, it’s Dean Phillips. Phillips, by the way, is also Jewish, which just goes to show that both are too much in denial to recognize that their pro-Israel party is dead and gone and that they’re now helping the Democrats build the cattle cars:

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