Gavin Newsom, the California governor and presidential aspirant, is a weathervane whose primary concern at the moment is making his left flank happy. So when he was asked whether he’d take money from AIPAC, he knew the “correct” answer. “Never have, never will,” he told a progressive activist.
It was a pretty easy one for Newsom, since AIPAC has always concentrated on federal officeholders, who actually have some effect on American foreign policy. But Newsom’s self-satisfied grin when answering the question betrayed his relief at the interviewer’s ignorance of the issue. The young activist described AIPAC and the oil and tobacco industries as “disproportionately powerful special interest groups that are hurting the American people.”
That’s the nightmare triumvirate to progressive activists: Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Jew.
It is tempting to laugh at someone who thinks AIPAC has the same influence on U.S. politics that the oil industry has. But when Gavin Newsom is so terrified of such people that he just bobbles his head and grins in agreement, it’s a stark reminder of how much of American politics is driven by conspiracist thinking.
Newsom is happy to yuk it up over paranoid fantasies of Jewish power because it’s the price of admission for Democratic officeholders, in the way it is becoming the price of admission for right-wing podcasters. A wild example just this week: A Democratic candidate for a congressional seat in Illinois said he would return a contribution from Michael Sacks, a Democratic donor in the state, because Sacks has donated to AIPAC.
The candidate, Anthony Driver Jr., said he didn’t know Sacks had donated to AIPAC, and why would he? Driver explained how he and Sacks crossed paths: “Michael Sacks has supported community violence intervention work in Chicago for years. I served nearly four years as President of the Chicago Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, helping advance real public safety reform.”
So Sacks does good and important work, according to the candidate returning Sacks’s donation. It’s just that in Democratic primaries, that’s not enough to accept a contribution; the contribution’s bloodline must be free of impurities.
This is next-level stuff. The fact that Democratic candidates must now hesitate to accept support from someone who has given to prominent Jewish causes—if you think this is just about one organization, you are a fool—is a massive escalation in the paranoid style in American politics.
How do we know where this is going? Because in other respects, we’re already there. Progressive “anti-Zionist” mobs are already going after synagogues. Jewish-owned restaurants are boycotted, vandalized, and shut down regularly. The Boston Mapping Project created an interactive doxxing engine to identify and target the area’s Jewish nonprofits. Hamasniks have whipped up a national campaign against campus Hillels.
The guilt-by-Jewish-association game is up and running. Jewish people support Jewish groups that support Jewish causes that include the Jewish state.
How far removed from Jews does one have to be to have a shot at winning a Democratic Party primary? We’re starting to find out.
