The Left's Antisemitism Is In The House
Both sides may have an antisemitism problem but only one is putting it on the ballot.
Both sides of the American political spectrum have an antisemitism problem. That’s not a disclaimer. That’s just a fact. But it’s asymmetrical, and anyone who pretends otherwise is part of the problem.
The antisemitism of the right has been on-brand and easy to spot. Tiki torches, message boards, the kind of thing the left has spent the past decade happily pointing at, and now we are seeing some within the realms of the podcaster class and social media. But it's being called out, it’s being challenged.
The antisemitism of the left is different. It’s in the house. It dresses itself up in Marxist oppressor-versus-oppressed framing, which lets everyone skip the uncomfortable step of evaluating motive or morality. Once Israel gets slotted as the oppressor, anything done to it, or to the Jews who defend it, gets filed under justice. Motive no longer matters. Morality gets treated as a bourgeois concern. That’s how you end up with “resistance” covering October 7.
It’s moving into positions of governance, into university boards and Senate primaries, and the Democrats who should be stopping it are tiptoeing around it instead. They’re being weaklings about it, frankly, and weaklings let rot spread.
Start with Michigan because it is shaping up to be the epicenter.
At the state Democratic convention on Sunday, delegates ousted Jordan Acker, a Jewish incumbent on the University of Michigan Board of Regents, in favor of Amir Makled, a lawyer who has posted praising Hezbollah’s leaders and retweeted antisemitic content from Candace Owens. Acker’s offense: he backed discipline for campus protesters who assaulted police and intimidated Jewish students, and he voted against divesting university funds from Israel. His reward for that position was a home and car repeatedly vandalized with antisemitic graffiti and a family living under threat.
Michigan Democrats then rewarded his tormentors by replacing him. Acker’s non-Jewish ticketmate, Paul Brown, who held identical positions on the same votes, was renominated without incident.
Seems like they view being Jewish as the problem.
That’s not a fringe. That’s the state party.
In Michigan’s Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed is leading recent primary polls and campaigning alongside streamer Hasan Piker. You might know Piker — because I cannot shut up about him lately — as the guy who calls Hamas “a thousand times better than” Israel, said America “deserved 9/11,” calls Orthodox Jews “inbred,” and recently sat across from Obama’s old speechwriter Jon Favreau and confirmed that yes, he really does mean the Hamas part.
RNC Research @RNCResearch Obama’s former speechwriter, Jon Favreau, asks Democrat spokesperson Hasan Piker if he actually supports Hamas terrorists. FAVREAU: “When you say Hamas is a thousand times better, do you actually mean that?” PIKER: “I do mean it.”
El-Sayed isn’t just sharing a stage with him. On CNN this weekend, he told viewers the Israeli government is as evil as Hamas. On Fox News he compared Trump to the Ayatollah.
During a private campaign call leaked to the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed told staff he wouldn’t comment on the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad.”
Sad. About Khamenei. The man who oversaw the torture and murder of his own people and the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
That’s the position the guy currently leading Michigan’s Senate primary is taking. The party is like, “cool.”
Then there’s Maine, where Senate primary frontrunner Graham Platner is still rolling despite having a Nazi tattoo on his chest and a paper trail of 2014 Reddit posts cheering Hamas fighters who killed Israeli soldiers.
John Fetterman, who is rapidly becoming the last pro-Israel Democrat willing to speak into a hot mic, went on CNN Friday and said the quiet part plain:
“The guy that’s going to win the primary in Maine has a Nazi tattoo on his chest and now that’s no problem for a lot of voters. I don’t know why. That’s crazy.”
He wasn’t done. On El-Sayed: “They’re just palling around someone like Hasan Piker, you know the guy that, absolutely, I mean, he absolutely is proud to cheer for Hamas, loves Hamas… We have a serious problem with my party.”
Fetterman is correct. He’s also mostly alone.
Here’s the part the progressive TikTok set doesn’t want to sit with. Authoritarianism isn’t a right-wing gift. The French Revolution’s Reign of Terror was a left-wing project. So was 20th-century Communism. Franco and Mussolini came from the right. The Nazis were their own horseshoe, a movement that bent far-left and far-right tactics toward each other until the two extremes met in the middle and strangled it.
In the Weimar Republic, Communist paramilitaries and Nazi stormtroopers turned city streets into battlefields. Both sides hated the liberal center. Both sides made moderate democracy unworkable. When economic collapse arrived, middle-class voters and conservative elites handed Hitler the chancellorship in a desperate coalition to “stop the Communists.” The Nazis exploited that fear, blamed the crisis on “Judeo-Bolshevism,” and used the Reichstag Fire to suspend civil liberties. Once in power, they crushed the left and the center alike.
The chaos and terror generated by the far-left gave the Nazis their opening, and middle-class voters who tolerated Nazi antisemitism told themselves it was a price worth paying to get jobs back and stop the streets from burning. The ideology was ugly. The economy mattered more. That was the trade.
People told themselves they could manage it. They couldn’t.
Pull up TikTok or BlueSky any afternoon, and you’ll find someone citing a German cousin or a Spanish friend who says America is walking the same path Germany walked in 1932. Trump is the Hitler figure. Heather Cox Richardson has built a Substack empire, drawing parallels between Weimar and now. The schtick is always some flavor of “danger to democracy.”
It falls apart on contact.
Trump pushes hard against legal and institutional limits. So did Lincoln. So did FDR. Even Obama. Every president tests what he can get away with. The real question is what happens when the courts say no, and Trump, like the presidents before him, has followed rulings he didn’t want. That isn’t the trajectory of a regime collapse. That’s a strong-willed executive operating inside a functioning system.
He also doesn’t have an antisemitism problem. Whatever else you want to say about him, that isn’t even the charge. The current left-wing attack line is the opposite, that Israel controls him through the Iran operation. You can’t call a man a Nazi-in-waiting and an Israeli puppet in the same breath. The people doing it don’t appear to mind.
Look at where the actual political violence has been coming from. The summers that forced businesses to board up their windows weren’t responding to MAGA marches. Cities knew the riots would come from the left. Red cities don’t cover storefronts in plywood when conservatives protest. Blue cities do. That's a fact.
The parallel today isn’t identical. It rarely is. But the shape is familiar. Economic frustration mixed with cultural grievance, plus a loud far-left faction aggressive about Israel in ways that keep sliding into open antisemitism, plus a party establishment that keeps accommodating instead of confronting. Moderates tiptoe because they’re afraid of a primary challenge from their left. They’re afraid of being called insufficiently progressive. So they stay quiet while a Hezbollah supporter takes a Jewish regent’s seat, while a Nazi-tattooed candidate wins a Senate nomination, while the leading Michigan Senate candidate equates Israel with Hamas on national television.
Of course, people don't see it. They've been trained not to. The narrative built in academia and legacy media that insists authoritarianism only comes from the right has prepped a generation of voters to dismiss exactly this kind of warning when it points at their own side. If you’ve spent ten years absorbing the Heather Cox Richardson version of events, where the only danger to democracy wears a red hat, you literally don’t have a framework to see what’s happening in your own party. The narrative did its job. That was the job.
The training is also enforced. Try pointing any of this out as a Jew or a Christian and watch what happens. You’ll get called a racist. You’ll get called Islamophobic. The worldview runs on one axis, oppressor versus oppressed, and it hands out the labels before the conversation starts. Israel is the oppressor. So are the Jews who defend it. Christians, especially white ones, are filed as the domestic version. Radical Islam slides into the oppressed column even when the specific movement being discussed would happily kill everyone in this sentence. That isn’t analysis. That’s a flowchart.
Young people aren’t taught to see around it because they aren’t taught history anymore. They’re taught identity. Twitch and TikTok finish the job. Spend an hour on either platform, and you’ll catch the recurring lesson: Christians are oppressors, Jews are white-adjacent oppressors, and anyone defending either is complicit in whatever atrocity the algorithm is circulating that week. Actual history — which has a lot to say about what happens to religious minorities when Islamist movements take power — doesn’t fit the chart, so it doesn’t get taught.
Rahm Emanuel is a useful tell. He recently said he wants to cut off all U.S. military aid to Israel. Rahm Emanuel. Former AIPAC-friendly Democrat, fresh off an ambassadorship, now pandering to a base that wouldn't have recognized his old positions a decade ago. He can read a poll. Two-thirds of Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, up from 13 percent in 2013. The DNC is debating a resolution this month aimed squarely at AIPAC.
Check last week's roll call. 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block weapons sales to Israel, with only Schumer, Fetterman, Coons, Blumenthal, Gillibrand, Cortez Masto, and Rosen siding against the resolution. AOC has gone further publicly, saying she’ll vote against any future military aid, including the Iron Dome, the defensive system that intercepts incoming rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. Reasonable people can argue all day about how the U.S. spends money abroad. That’s a fair debate. But the Iron Dome used to be the easy vote, bipartisan, and unremarkable. Now it’s the dividing line. This is a sign of a clear shift and realignment within the Democratic Party.
When the president of a liberal Jewish think tank, Yehuda Kurtzer, tells American Jews to “embrace political homelessness,” that’s a man telling his own community their political home stopped being safe.
Some Democrats are pushing back. In 2024, Piker was credentialed to stream the Democratic National Convention as part of the Harris campaign’s “Creators for Kamala” initiative. A guy who calls Hamas “a thousand times better than” Israel, streaming from the convention floor with a campaign press pass. That was the baseline. He got kicked off on the last day for loudly protesting the lack of Palestinian delegates, but he didn’t get tossed for what he believed. He got tossed for saying it out loud at the wrong moment. Then, in March 2026, Third Way’s Jon Cowan and Lily Cohen ran a single op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Democrats Are Too Cozy with Hasan Piker.” Reporters who had profiled Piker gently for months — looking at you, NYT — suddenly started asking Democrats whether they agreed with him. Mallory McMorrow and Brad Schneider broke away. Within weeks, only three of fourteen prospective 2028 presidential candidates told Politico they’d appear on his stream.
That’s the encouraging column. Here’s the rest of it.
While a handful of moderates were backing away from Piker, Michigan Democrats ousted a Jewish regent in favor of a Hezbollah-praising lawyer. El-Sayed is still leading his Senate primary. Platner is still leading his. 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block arms sales to Israel. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” during his campaign, is now mayor of New York City. (Don’t even get me started on his wife.) Analilia Mejia just flipped a suburban New Jersey House seat running to AOC’s left. That’s the actual scoreboard.
The pushback isn’t winning. It’s getting outrun.
The problem is where the energy is. The party is chasing a youth vote raised on TikTok and Twitch, where anyone to the right of Bernie registers as a sellout. Party leaders decided the cure for losing young men was to find their own Joe Rogan. They ended up with Hasan Piker and a rally circuit of candidates who can’t say plainly that Hamas is bad. That isn’t a youth strategy. That’s managed decline.
The one check left is the hope that progressives winning primaries and House seats doesn’t scale to a presidential win. Maybe. But “maybe they’ll be unelectable nationally” is already being tested. Mamdani won the nation’s largest city. Mejia flipped a suburban district to AOC’s left. The ceiling keeps rising.
Moderates, Democrats, Jewish friends who still call yourselves progressive, it’s time to grab this problem by the horns. Republicans and people on the right have been calling out the antisemites associated with the right, Carlson, Owens, Fuentes and the mutuals around them. Also, we aren’t putting them on ballots; your antisemites and terrorist sympathizers are. But it doesn’t matter how loudly we say it. They'll never hear it from us. You're the only ones they'll listen to. So say it.
You either name it yourselves, the way Fetterman keeps trying, the way Cowan and Cohen did, or you watch your party get eaten from the inside while you swing at Fox News on the way out. Every moderate who stays quiet now is feeding the faction that will eventually run the party. And when voters punish that party for it, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourselves.
Every time a moderate Democrat tells themselves, “yeah, but the right is worse,” the faction already in the house takes another room.
Get it together. History doesn’t grade on a curve.