On Sunday, the Atlantic published a long profile of Scott Wiener, a California Democrat running to replace former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Weiner is a Jewish progressive and a harsh critic of Israel, but “he does not characterize the bombing of Gaza as a genocide—a description that the San Francisco left insists upon.”
Publishing this sentence on January 11, 2026, seemed pretty safe. The wider war in Gaza has been over for months, even if hostilities relating to Hamas’s refusal to disarm continue in spurts. The libel of “genocide” has been unconditionally debunked. For all his cynical, opportunistic attacks on Israel, Wiener could at least be said to have resisted pressure to join in on the Big Lie of the war.
But that very same day, Wiener found his way to the statue of Baal and bent the knee.
“I want to clarify,” Wiener says solemnly in a confessional video posted to his social media on Sunday, “that I do believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.”
Now, at first glance, this may simply appear to be run-of-the-mill self-degradation in the service of political power. But it is actually so much worse than that, for a couple of reasons.
Let’s start with the wording of the video. Wiener explains that he hasn’t characterized Israel’s defensive war in Gaza as a genocide because the word was coined to refer to the Holocaust, “the industrial extermination of 6 million Jews.” Therefore, many Jews find the “Gaza Holocaust” lie to be “painful” and “traumatic.” Then he says this:
“But despite that pain and that trauma, we all have eyes, and we see the absolute devastation and catastrophic death toll in Gaza inflicted by the Israeli government. And we all have ears, and we hear the genocidal statements by certain senior members of the Israeli government. And to me, the Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out. And that qualifies as genocide.”
To be clear: Scott Wiener is suggesting that he has believed, for at least several months but perhaps more (the cease-fire was signed three months ago), that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. But he didn’t acknowledge it because to do so would have been painful.
That this will be used by anti-Semites—whose votes Wiener hoped to attract by recording the statement—to cast doubt on the honesty of every Jew and to send conspiracists to the rooftops claiming vindication seems inevitable now.
Wiener has not only joined the Big Lie but has done so in the most damaging possible way to the Jewish people.
That is further indicated by the timing of his flip flop. What made him suddenly reverse course this late in the game? On January 7, he participated in a candidates debate with Saikat Chakrabarti, the millionaire former chief of staff to the furiously anti-Zionist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a local official named Connie Chan. The moderator asked the candidates for a simple yes or no: Did Israel commit genocide in Gaza? Chakrabarti and Chan both said yes. Wiener said nothing.
The progressive backlash against Wiener was swift and harsh. So Wiener caved—not because the facts changed but because he was presented with clear evidence that if he did not participate in the left’s Holocaust distortion, he would not win his election. He decided that shivving the Jewish people was a fair price to pay for a chance to become a congressman.
Wiener’s confessional video makes for difficult viewing: It is never easy to watch a man’s soul leave his body. But it is instructive of our current moment, in which slandering the Jews amid an explosion in anti-Semitic violence is seen as the ticket to political power within the progressive coalition. After all, Brad Lander—the Zohran Mamdani superfan and longtime enabler of New York’s anti-Semitic left—is running the same play in his primary against Rep. Dan Goldman.
Are Wiener and Lander correct that tokenization is the only path to success? The truth is, no matter who wins these races, Americans of conscience have already lost.
