This would be a fair description of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, which saw Hillary Clinton and the party establishment successfully deploy woke 1.0 tropes against Bernie Sanders and his supporters. But I’m speaking of the party’s current Senate primary in Michigan, where the party establishment is … trying to do the exact same thing. And likewise in several other contests nationwide.

A decade ago, Clinton’s allies smeared Bernie Sanders’s movement as “Bernie Bros” — supposedly hyper-aggressive masculine activists bent on preventing the election of the first female president. The Clintonites also implied that Sanders was dismissive of black voters and their concerns. At one point, the lawmaker (and Clinton ally) John Lewis excoriated Bernie Sanders’s 1960s integration activism, stating: “I never saw him. I never met him.” (It would have been difficult to see him, as Sanders protested segregation in Chicago, not the American South, where Lewis took his historic stand.)

Clinton’s success in that primary — followed by her humiliating defeat by Donald Trump later that year — created a handbook of sorts for the Democratic establishment. If you’re facing a revolt within your party, don’t bother discussing the big ideas. Don’t compare policy plans or debate your vision. Just find ways to subtly or not so subtly insinuate that your opponent is racist and sexist, and then rely on the party’s core constituencies of women and minorities to put the rebels in their place.

The party establishment has dusted off just the handbook in Michigan, where Rep. Haley Stevens faces a Left uprising from former Detroit public-health officer Abdul El-Sayed. Stevens is backed by the party establishment, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But the bulk of her campaign spending is coming from outside groups, most generously the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

AIPAC’s ad spending in the state is as notable for what it says as what it doesn’t. None of the group’s ads even mention the Jewish state (El-Sayed is a critic of the US-Israel relationship, and Stevens a defender of it). Instead, AIPAC is running ads suggesting that El-Sayed has disrespected women, a misleading claim that’s already been torn apart by the local press.

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Shiloh Hendrix’s racial boomerang

By Zaid Jilani

Even judged against the rock-bottom standards of political advertising, the anti-Abdul campaign is astonishingly — and repellently — dishonest. It points to a December 2010 op-ed by El-Sayed, in which he addressed Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign as “commendable, if ineffectual.” AIPAC twists this to suggest that El-Sayed denigrated “Obama’s work with children” as “uninspired and ineffectual.”

Is it supposed to be disrespectful to women to merely disagree on the effectiveness of the then-first lady’s public-health campaign? Of course not, but implying that El-Sayed is sexist is key to polarizing Democratic and African-American women against him.

Meanwhile, other outside ads backing Stevens feature Barack Obama praising Stevens’s work on the Detroit auto bailout and suggesting that he has endorsed her — but the former president has made no endorsement in the race.

The takeaway from these ads is clear: El-Sayed has a problem with women, especially black women like Michelle Obama; and some voters have already been convinced that Stevens is actually Barack Obama’s pick for the race.

Michigan isn’t the only place where the woke 1.0 handbook is being redeployed. In New York City, the upstart Mayor Zohran Mamdani has found popularity and policy success. And his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America are picking up seats in the New York state legislature and winning congressional primaries (which effectively means they’re sweeping the seats).

The response from the local party establishment isn’t to engage in a dialog with these rebels — who clearly represent the future of the Democrats in Gotham — but to attack them for not winning the votes of some older black and Latino voters. Self-appointed “black and Latino leaders” have attacked the DSA as a group of outsiders, lacking roots in the community. This disregards the fact that they’re winning over solid majorities in highly diverse districts.

Farther north, in Maine, the exit of Graham Platner has brought with it the ascension of Troy Jackson, a logger, former Maine Senate president, and ally of Sanders. Jackson is all but certain to be nominated by the party thanks to his strong organizing. But the liberal media are already feasting on stories about his temper (he once threw a water bottle in the presence of a female lawmaker — gasp!).

Although there is no indication that Jackson has engaged in discrimination, sexual assault, or any kind of gendered abuse, a CNN piece on the incident uses the word “female” six times, clearly implying that Jackson has some kind of problem with women. 

Neera Tanden — a long-time Hillary Clinton aide and the head of the Center for American Progress (where, full disclosure, I used to work) — is perhaps the most ritualistic abuser of these gendered attacks. Tanden recently implied that El-Sayed may have some kind of Platner-like scandal in his background. She had no evidence, but since when does dirty politics demand that?

The Democratic establishment has made clear that it is incapable of arguing ideas or electability. After all, these people lost to Trump — twice. Who in the world is looking to them for advice on how to persuade the American people?

But the Democratic primary process does not include the masses of American voters. These primaries are typically decided by relatively small coteries of Democratic activists, largely women and minorities. The presidential primary, for instance, has served as a sort of graveyard for populists after they were smeared as sexist and anti-black. The Democratic establishment knows that fear tactics can work on these groups.

Yet the strategy may be reaching its limits of effectiveness. In a number of different states, Left-populists and socialists have managed to break through in primaries in which the Democratic establishment deployed all the usual sectarian attacks.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, an upstart socialist candidate, won her congressional primary in New York City against longtime incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. In the run-up to the vote, one of Espaillat’s senior advisers accused her ally Mamdani of trying to change the demography of Washington Heights by overrunning it with Muslims and Haitians. Voters rejected that race card. He narrowly lost his race.

Yet it should be said that Chevalier has an advantage that many Democratic populists don’t: she’s a Hispanic woman. This makes it more difficult for the Democratic establishment to use gendered and racial attacks against her. Other candidates may not be so lucky.

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Abdul El-Sayed: Democratic bro whisperer

By Sohrab Ahmari

El-Sayed, for instance, seemed to concede the validity of charges of sexism against his movement recently when he tweeted that “it’s become impossible to ignore the way that people online make fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics. It’s unkind and unhelpful. If you support me, please stop.”

Can you imagine Trump or JD Vance ever tweeting anything like this? There’s a reason Left-wing populism hasn’t enjoyed the same success as the Right-wing variety. Right-wing populists are simply willing to fight much harder against negative attacks, whether they’re smears or the truth.

Left-wing populists can’t win without changing their approach to the party establishment. Rather than conceding bad-faith racial and gender attacks, they should turn them to their advantage. When Sanders was endlessly attacked for the behavior of his supporters online, he validated those attacks. “I don’t want that support,” he said of his supposedly sexist backers online.

But a better approach would have been for the Vermont senator to say something like this: “Yes, some people online say rude things. That’s true for my supporters, that’s true for Secretary Clinton’s supporters. But if you go to my rally, you see thousands of women who are volunteering for me, donating for me, and working towards an America where everyone has a shot at the American dream. Smearing those people as sexist is not just wrong, it is offensive. And I think the reason they’re doing it is because they want to smear a movement that is capable of taking them on and transforming this country.”

Think of it as the Left-wing version of Trump’s “they’re not after me, they’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in the way.”

As the nation approaches another presidential election where these attacks are likely to once again be deployed, Left-wing populists have to understand that the stakes are much higher than simply winning a Democratic primary.

For years, the party has badly alienated white men, the majority of whom now vote Republican. Imagine what these people are thinking when they watch progressive populists crumble before false accusations of racism and sexism. If even Sanders and El-Sayed can be defamed as sexists, what room is there for a conservative or even moderate white male in the Democratic Party? Defeating these bad-faith tactics, then, is essential to the health of populism, the Democratic Party, and American politics.

In the past week, a viral video emerged of Hendrix’s verbal altercation about an African-American child at a Minnesota playground. Hendrix, holding her own infant, is in an argument with a man recording her — asking her why she referred to the black child using the N-word. She defends using the slur to the man and repeats it, arguing that she’s justified because the black child tried to take her child’s things.

The exact timeline of events is not clear. What’s beyond doubt is that she is enraged — and unapologetic about her use of the epithet. The episode thus marks a turning point in America’s video-and-race wars. Not just Hendrix, but her legions of online supporters have dug into their tribal trenches. It’s a reaction to the excesses of racial progressivism in recent years, though no less discomfiting for what it reveals: the evaporation of American liberal universalism.

We’ve all witnessed at least one iteration of this cycle over the past decade: someone, usually a white person, gets caught being racially offensive. Online outrage erupts, followed by some kind of real-world consequence for the offender: losing a job or even facing personal threats.

Hendrix has flipped the script. “My name is Shiloh, and I have been put into a very dire situation”, she begins her fundraising appeal. “I recently had a kid steal from my 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at a park. I called the kid out for what he was.” She then complains of online abuse and solicits financial support: “Anything will help! We cannot, and will not live in fear!”

The appeal became as viral as the initial video. As of this writing, she has raised more than $683,000. Provided she doesn’t have any extraordinary debt, this makes Hendrix many times richer than the median American. Thus we have the first case, maybe in American history, of a woman quickly getting rich as a result of publicly using the N-word.

To Hendrix’s defenders, that’s a blinkered explanation. They aren’t celebrating a racist tirade or trying to turn an ugly moment into a stranger’s good fortune. Rather, they believe they’re turning the tables on years of Left-wing social repression that destroyed people for even minor social transgressions. They have a point.

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How cancel culture lost its power

By Geoff Shullenberger

During the “racial reckoning”, proportionality was discarded. If someone committed the sin of racism, their life was forfeited. They didn’t deserve a job, friendships, or a moment of peace. They had to be un-personed. This included even those who were merely misperceived as racists, such as the University of Southern California professor suspended for using a Mandarin filler word which sounds like the N-word (but which has nothing to do with it).

I remember how, in 2020, The New York Times turned a brief verbal altercation in Central Park between a black birdwatcher named Christian Cooper and a white dog walker named Amy Cooper (no relation) into a national referendum about racial tensions in the United States.

Christian wanted Amy to make sure her dog was leashed — unleashed canines being a pet peeve of his. Amy refused to do so, and this resulted in a war of words between the two. Eventually, Christian tried to get Amy’s dog to come to him with some treats, resulting in Amy calling the police on him. Speaking to the emergency dispatcher, a clearly distressed Amy made sure to mention that Christian is black.

All of this was recorded by Christian, who uploaded the video and made it go viral. The nation’s news networks and newspapers all jumped on it, tsk-tsking that this was what America had come to: Central Park Karen calling down a police assassination on an African-American man who had inconvenienced her.

Amy ended up going into hiding after losing her job and receiving a mountain of online hate. As far as I can tell, she still lives in hiding today. Christian, by contrast, became a national celebrity. A couple of years ago, he even wrote a bestselling memoir, published by Random House. For much of the progressive Left, this was a perfectly reasonable set of outcomes. A “racist” white lady was shunned into oblivion; her “victim” was rewarded by a karmic load of riches and fame.

But over time, the nuances of the story became more apparent (not least thanks to a podcast feature produced by the African-American journal Kmele Foster). Amy had suffered sexual assault in the past and was clearly triggered by the interaction with Christian, who, it turns out, had a bit of a reputation for accosting people. Was Amy right to cite Christian’s race in the phone call with the police? Maybe not.

But it was also the kind of thing she thought she could say in that moment that would get him to back off. Remember, in 2020, much of liberal America believed that police were systematically murdering black men. If two liberal New Yorkers ran into each other in Central Park, chances were that they shared some variation of that belief. If her assault trauma was triggered, then, she would say anything to get away from the man drawing her dog away from her.

Yet the era of Left-wing racialism didn’t allow for these nuances. It told a simple story of racist white people persecuting minorities. And when you have such a simple story guiding your morality — you can expect a simple response. Maybe a brutally simple one.

All of this cut strongly against how I thought about these issues growing up in a diverse corner of Georgia in the Nineties. My social circle was white and black, Indian and Latino, and it was common to see arguments over race and culture spill over from private to public. People got into heated disputes, then made up the following day; sometimes, they just agreed to disagree. We were making our own way towards a more tolerant world without having every moment judged in a digital Thunderdome.

The viral video ended all that. And what is happening with Hendrix is a sort of middle finger to what came before. It’s a dialectical boomerang, slamming back to the hand that cast it — or the face that forgot it.

Hendrix is telling the world that she won’t be broken. In that sense, you can understand why so many conservatives and white people have been rushing to her side. I agree with her defenders that she shouldn’t be subjected to social death. People screw up, and calling a child a racial slur is a big screw-up, even if he did take something that wasn’t his. But people should also be mature and figure out ways to work through screw-ups without inciting a mob to bludgeon the offender into social oblivion.

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That said, Hendrix’s boosters have also learned the wrong lesson from the years of progressive racialism. Many of her backers have compared her case to that of Karmelo Anthony, a black teen who allegedly stabbed a white teen to death in Texas. Anthony’s family has raised more than half a million dollars not just for legal fees, but to support themselves. If Anthony’s family can raise money, why can’t Hendrix’s?

The problem is that both Hendrix and Anthony have been turned into avatars of racial grievance. We have to support “our side” — meaning, white people or black people — even if they happened to be in the wrong in the given case. The co-founder of GiveSendGo, which hosts both fundraisers, had to disable comments on both of them owing to the deluge of racist remarks.

While these currents in American society are marginal for now, we shouldn’t underestimate the anti-American ideology pulsing through them. Contrary to the narratives told by the critical-theory Left and the race-fixated weird Right, America isn’t a country founded for the purpose of defending one race, religion, or creed. It’s not a country based on blood or soil.

Encouraging people to bestow loyalty based on skin or ancestry never ends well in this country, or any other. Both Shiloh Hendrix and Karmelo Anthony are Americans first and foremost, and they should be judged based on their adherence to the law and norms that we all have to abide by.

We should demand the best behavior from anyone, black or white. We should extend grace and mercy, regardless of race, when people fail to meet the standard. What we shouldn’t do is start celebrating and rewarding bad behavior out of some sense of racial revenge. That way lies national perdition.

He was able to announce his resignation on his terms, free from the dozens of leaks and catty backhanded insults his party had directed his way over the past few weeks. Their attempt to force him out was ultimately successful, but he alone will get to define the last few months of his presidency.

Regardless of who the Democrats choose to replace him — his Vice President Kamala Harris is his favoured choice but hardly polls any better than he does — it is likely that we will see Donald Trump return to the Oval Office next year. Will that end up being Biden’s legacy in office: returning the twice-impeached convicted felon to the halls of power?

Those of us who are frustrated by politics being consumed by the horse race may have a different takeaway. The stubborn Biden was, after all, the President who was able to put his foot down and actually withdraw America from the war in Afghanistan, ending 20 years of involvement in that country’s morass. His appointments across the federal government marked a shift away from neoliberalism — from installing Big Tech critic Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission to maintaining and even expanding many of Trump’s protectionist trade policies. By overseeing the passage of large-scale infrastructure and climate investment bills, he has helped rejuvenate American manufacturing.

Yet his legacy will also be defined by America’s continued entanglement with wars overseas. The war in Ukraine drags on with no apparent end in sight, taking the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians alike. But at least in that conflict, America can operate under the pretence that it is preventing a permanent Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine.

With Israel’s war in Gaza, America’s allies in Jerusalem have made clear they have no endgame in sight and appear fine with a permanent occupation of Palestinian soil — something that will only serve to harden the growing international feeling that Israel’s future is as an apartheid state. To many young Americans, Biden’s refusal to end his financial and military support for Netanyahu’s operations makes him persona non grata.

Biden, whatever his legacy, remains famously stubborn right to the very end. His effective removal by a coterie of party donors and elites — executed skillfully within the span of a few weeks — suggests that even the most determined men cannot withstand a combined party assault.

But perhaps unburdened by the task of having to run for office in the coming months, the President will surprise us with what he can achieve with his precious little time left in the White House. Even if he is not the right candidate for the future, he can still make a difference in the present.

Following his death, I interviewed one of Ansari’s friends, who said that small business owners along the Boardwalk had spent weeks begging for more police protection to no avail. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time reporting on violent crime in America has heard a version of this story. Contrary to the claims of “police abolitionists”, residents of poor communities often want more and better policing.

This is partly because they happen to live under a far greater threat of violent crime than other communities do: organised criminal networks have a much easier time taking root in low-income neighbourhoods than anywhere else. But this also because residents of low-income communities don’t have nearly as many resources to defend themselves as upper-income communities do.

If Ansari had been rich, he could have simply hired private security to protect himself and his family business. But most Americans aren’t wealthy enough to do that — and, according to a recent paper published in the American Journal of Public Health this inequality is getting worse.

The authors examined violent crime across 13 cities in the United States between March and July in the years 2018, 2019, and 2020. They found that not only was violence much higher in poorer neighbourhoods, but that the gap between low-income and high-income areas in the prevalence of gun violence, aggravated assault, and homicide grew between 2019 and 2020.

One way to address this phenomenon would be to refer to it as “violence inequality”. Just as we track inequality on axes like income, wealth, and health care, we should acknowledge and measure the gap in public safety between the most and least dangerous neighbourhoods.

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By Joel Kotkin

Violence inequality exists virtually everywhere in the United States, but it is particularly dramatic in some areas. The Chicago Sun Times recently analysed violent crime data across the city, describing what it calls the “safety gap”. The article notes that West Garfield Park, a predominantly black neighbourhood located in the West Side of Chicago, “has experienced a per capita rate of shootings nearly 20 times higher than downtown”. The gap in homicide rates is even more jaw-dropping. In 2021 so far, “the murder rate in the seven most dangerous police districts rose to a three-decade high of nearly 100 homicides per 100,000 residents — 30 times higher than the rate in the safest seven districts, where the rate fell to fewer than four per 100,000.”

Put differently, poor and minority neighbourhoods are reverting to historically high rates of violent crime at the same time as affluent white areas are becoming safer. The gaps are even worse now than they were in the early Nineties, long considered the nadir of America’s violent-crime problem. As criminologist Aaron Chalfin recently noted, in 1991, the least-safe communities in Chicago had rates of gun violence 13 times higher than those of the safest communities; in 2020, gun violence in the least-safe neighbourhoods was 25 times higher.

Violence inequality appears particularly pronounced when you break down the statistics by race. Homicide has long been one of the the leading causes of death for African American young men, topping unintentional injuries, suicide, and heart disease. The Violence Policy Center estimates that the ‘black homicide victimisation rate’ is six times as high as the overall ‘white homicide victimisation rate’. And yet this form of inequality is barely mentioned by the media, despite their obsession with nearly every other type of racial disparity. Why is that?

One explanation is that ordinary neighbourhood violence doesn’t fit neatly into the prevailing narrative, in which the primary problems faced by minorities are the result of systemic racism and white supremacy. Outside of the conservative media, it’s practically taboo to discuss the levels of violence that exist in parts of the United States without lengthy throat-clearing about how the real culprit is racism, capitalism or the police.

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But that’s not the way people who live in these communities describe their own lives. Last summer, as progressive activists waged a sustained campaign to delegitimise the police, Gallup polling found that most African Americans wanted to either maintain current levels of police presence in their communities or expand it.

Still, the fact that addressing violence inequality is one of the most important things that the Democratic Party could do for underprivileged people must be a bitter pill for progressives to swallow (and it is almost certainly the Democratic Party’s job, as the GOP doesn’t look like winning elections in violence-plagued cities anytime soon). Addressing it would almost certainly involve more policing and tougher sentencing for people who have committed violent crimes, many of whom will likely be minorities. This would cut against the progressive project of ending “mass incarceration” and promoting alternatives to policing, and would no doubt feel to many progressives like doubling down on a racist and authoritarian system.

But tackling violence inequality can bring meaningful change to the lives of the people progressives say they care the most about. A March 2019 study published in Demography soberly noted that while homicide remains a leading cause of death for young black men, the dramatic decline in homicide rates that started in the Nineties “led to a 0.80-year increase in life expectancy at birth for African American males, and reduced years of potential life lost by 1,156 years for every 100,000 African American males”. According to the study, the drop in homicide accounted for “17% of the reduction in the life expectancy gap between white and African American males” between 1991 and 2014. In other words, tackling violent crime saved a lot of black lives.

The main obstacle to Democrats getting tough on crime is political. Much of the national media remains fixated on the drawbacks of incarceration and policing; influential political donors are now spending huge amounts of money to elect prosecutors who promise softer sentencing. Joe Biden may have written the 1994 crime bill, but he barely talks about the historic increase in homicides that took place in 2020, perhaps out of fear of alienating his base and playing into the hands of Republicans.

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Will California ever be safe?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Yet there are signs that political reality is changing. During the November elections, voters in Buffalo, New York rejected the self-described police abolitionist who won the Democratic primary for mayor, voting instead for the incumbent mayor, who was forced to run as a write-in candidate. Similarly, voters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ground zero for much of 2020’s police reform movement, shot down a referendum that would have abolished and replaced their police department. The mayor-elect of New York City is a former NYPD officer who campaigned on getting tougher on crime.

And in San Francisco, one of the most progressive cities in America, Mayor London Breed recently struck a different tone following a series of high-profile crimes. “It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it come to an end,” she said. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to more aggressive with law enforcement. More aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

It is too early to say whether these developments represent a turning point in policy. But one thing is clear: it’s almost impossible to address a problem we can’t even admit exists. Those who profess to care about the disadvantaged should acknowledge that violence inequality is a deep and growing problem. We shouldn’t forget those Americans who fall asleep to the sound of gunfire.