One of my closest friends said it to me over the phone. She has voted for Democrats her whole life. Her parents did before her. She told me she does not know how she can vote for them anymore.
She is Jewish. She named the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. She named the party’s turn against AIPAC. She named the increasing calls to stop arming Israel. She asked why the left embraces Palestinians but has abandoned Jewish Americans. She said the Democratic party she has belonged to since she was old enough to vote no longer feels like she belongs.
I did not argue with her. The feeling is real, and it deserves to be honored, not corrected. I want to be careful here, because I feel the pull of it too, and because the people running this divisive play are counting on me to argue with her instead of listening to her.
Listen to what she is actually saying. She is not saying she has become a Republican. She is saying she feels evicted. And there is a difference between a person leaving a home and a person being made to feel there is no longer a place for her in it.
That difference is the whole subject of this piece. This is not the only line being drawn through the American electorate. It is the newest, and it is the one that called me on the phone.
The feeling is hers. Her conclusion is being manufactured. Someone is standing beside her, and beside millions like her, whispering that the feeling means the Democratic party and the left have turned against her, that a fight over a lobbying organization is a verdict on her belonging, that a recent election result is a door slamming shut on Jewish Americans.
The rise in violent hatred against Jewish Americans is real and well documented. [1] Her fear is not the manufactured thing. The manufactured thing is the conclusion she has been handed: that the danger comes from inside her own political party, and that she is no longer welcome.
Sources:
Anti-Defamation League, Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. https://www.adl.org/resources/report/audit-antisemitic-incidents
Before exploring further, let us reflect on an older wedge, where the manipulation is safely in the past and no one has to defend a side.
In 2003, the country was marched into two wars. Many Americans dissented. I was one of them. We gathered, marched, wrote, and questioned. And the answer we received was not an argument. The answer was simple: to question the President in wartime was to dishonor the troops.
You remember how it worked. Long before the right made “cancel culture” its rallying cry, it canceled the Dixie Chicks for one sentence their singer spoke from a stage in London. [2] In an important act of patriotism, American restaurants renamed their potatoes. [3] When we asked whether the war was necessary, we were told we fight them there so we do not have to fight them here.
When we pointed out that neither country had attacked us, that question was treated as betrayal. The tactic was not to debate the dissent. The tactic was to make dissent shameful. The citizen who asked questions was recast as a traitor giving the enemy aid and comfort.
They used our concern for the troops as the dividing wedge.
“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” — George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001 [4]
Sources:
2. Associated Press and contemporaneous coverage of the March 2003 Dixie Chicks boycott, following Natalie Maines’s remarks in London.
3. United States House of Representatives cafeteria menu change, March 2003.
4. George W. Bush, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, September 20, 2001. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PPP-2001-book2/pdf/PPP-2001-book2-doc-pg1140.pdf
Here is the oldest and most important line in a democracy, and it is being erased on purpose.
A leader is not a country. A government is not a people. The Russian conscript is not Putin. The Israeli parent is not Netanyahu. The American voter is not Trump.
The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Vladimir Putin. [5] I do not hate Russia. The Russian conscript and his parents are not my enemy. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. [6] I do not hate Israel. Israeli parents trying to raise a family in safety are not my enemy. And the Palestinian under the bombs, sifting through rubble, is not my enemy either. A person can hold every one of these truths at once, because a leader is not a country and a government is not a people.
The people of Israel and the state of Israel have a right to exist in peace. So do their neighbors, and all of them are owed the same safety, the same sovereignty, and the same dignity.
A person can believe Israel must be secure and also believe that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has pursued a war that Amnesty International has concluded meets the legal definition of genocide, [7] and that is now the subject of a case before the International Court of Justice. [8] That same person can believe that settlers in the West Bank have seized land and committed acts that human rights organizations have documented and the government has failed to prosecute. [9] Believing all of that does not require hating anyone. It requires only reviewing the evidence.
And the evidence runs both directions. When Hamas killed roughly twelve hundred people on October 7 and took two hundred fifty-one hostages, that was a heinous crime. The ICC prosecutor sought arrest warrants for its leaders, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, and in the same filing for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. The applications against Sinwar and Haniyeh were withdrawn after their deaths were confirmed. Warrants were issued for Deif, Netanyahu, and Gallant. [6] The same court. The same standard. Applied to both sides.
This is the manufactured divide. To criticize the Israeli government, to question the continued supply of American offensive weapons, to object to a specific war policy, is now labeled antisemitism.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. [10] The rising violence against Jewish Americans is exactly such an injustice, and it should alarm everyone who claims to stand against hatred, not only Jews. Antisemitism is real. It has risen. Threats against Jewish Americans are climbing. Nothing in this piece asks anyone to pretend otherwise. That reality is exactly why the conflation is so cruel. It takes a genuine and rising danger and spends it as a political weapon. The word that should protect Jewish people is instead used to shut down debate, while the United States keeps shipping missiles and bombs to a government whose leader the ICC has charged with war crimes.
Disagreeing with AIPAC is not hating Jewish Americans. Opposing a specific war policy is not hating Jewish Americans. Protesting the sale or transfer of offensive weapons is not hating Jewish Americans. When someone blurs those lines on purpose, they are not protecting anyone from hatred. They are defending a war, the power the war confers, and the leaders who need the war to retain power and avoid criminal proceedings.
Sources:
5. International Criminal Court, “Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova,” March 17, 2023. https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and
6. International Criminal Court, Pre-Trial Chamber I, warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, and Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri (Deif), November 21, 2024. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/icc-arrest-warrant-netanyahu-21nov24/ 7. Amnesty International, “’You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” December 5, 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/
8. International Court of Justice, South Africa v. Israel, provisional measures beginning January 26, 2024.
9. Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem reporting on West Bank settler violence and the absence of prosecution. 10. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 1963.
There is a way to test whether the people who wield the charge of antisemitism actually care about it. Watch who invokes the charge. Then watch who they appoint, and who they invite to dine at Mar-a-Lago.
On the night of August 11, 2017, men marched through Charlottesville carrying torches and chanting that Jews would not replace them. The next day, at the Unite the Right rally, organized and led by neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, a man who had marched with them drove his car into a crowd and killed Heather Heyer. He later pleaded guilty to twenty-nine federal hate crimes and was sentenced to life in prison. [11] Trump, in his first term, said there were very fine people on both sides. Pressed, he condemned the neo-Nazis by name, then returned to blaming both sides. David Duke, the former Klan leader, thanked Trump for his honesty and courage. [12]
In 2022, Donald Trump hosted two men at Mar-a-Lago. One was Kanye West, who weeks earlier had threatened Jewish people in a public post: “when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” The other was Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who claims that immigrants and “organized Jewry” are plotting to eliminate the white race. [13]
Inside the Pentagon, a senior press official named Kingsley Wilson has publicly revived the case against Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched by a mob in 1915, echoing a narrative kept alive for a century in neo-Nazi circles. She has promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy, whose extremist versions name Jews as the hidden engineers. After those posts became public, she was promoted from Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary to Pentagon Press Secretary. The twenty-one members of the House Jewish Caucus then wrote to the Secretary of Defense about her. She remained in the job. [14]
Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, withdrew after private messages surfaced in which he wrote that he had a Nazi streak in him from time to time. [15]
These are the people, and the movement, now telling a Jewish American that the Democratic party and the left have turned against her.
Both cannot be true. Either the administration cares about antisemitism, in which case it has a great deal to explain about the neo-Nazis and white supremacists it has appointed to senior positions and seated at its own table, or it is using the word antisemitism as a tool. A tool to keep us divided, because a divided people is easier to continue to conquer.
Sources:
11. United States Department of Justice, “Ohio Man Pleads Guilty to 29 Federal Hate Crimes for August 2017 Car Attack at Rally in Charlottesville,” March 27, 2019. https://justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/ohio-man-pleads-guilty-29-federal-hate-crimes-august-2017-car-attack-rally-charlottesville
12. Associated Press and contemporaneous coverage of President Trump’s August 12, 14, and 15, 2017 remarks and David Duke’s response.
13. Axios, “Trump talks with white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago dinner,” November 25, 2022. https://www.axios.com/2022/11/25/trump-nick-fuentes-ye-kanye 14. NPR, “A Pentagon press secretary has history of pushing antisemitic, extremist theories,” March 6, 2025 https://www.npr.org/2025/03/06/nx-s1-5319995/kingsley-wilson-antisemitic-comments-defense-department-pentagon ; Jewish Insider, “House Jewish Caucus presses Hegseth over press secretary Kingsley Wilson,” June 24, 2025. 15. Reuters and contemporaneous coverage of the withdrawal of Paul Ingrassia’s nomination, October 2025.
There is a second blade, and my friend named it too. Zohran Mamdani. Democratic socialist.
Notice that the reaction arrives before any policy does. The label does the frightening, so that no one has to examine what the label actually contains. The word carries a century of Cold War freight, and the freight is the point. Say the word and the argument is over before it begins.
Walk past the word, socialist, and look at the policies the reaction obscures, the ones that supposedly frighten people once they are named out loud. A wage a family can live on. Rent that does not consume a paycheck. Health care that does not end in bankruptcy. Child care working parents can afford. These are not the specifics of a revolution. In poll after poll, taken one policy at a time, most Americans want them. [16] Socialist is the warning label, and the label is there to cause a backlash so the underlying meaning remains unexamined.
I am not asking anyone to embrace a candidate or a movement. I am asking only for a fair hearing. Go deeper and judge the platform, not the label. Ask who profits from keeping the word frightening. Because as long as the label does the arguing, no one has to defend why a living wage, health care, and affordable higher education stay out of reach, and no one has to ask who benefits from keeping them there.
A Brief Note about Social Democracies -
What Americans are taught to fear as socialism is, in practice, usually something milder: social democracy. These are capitalist economies. They keep private markets and private business, and they regulate them for fairness. They reduce inequality through tax policy and labor rights, and they use the proceeds to fund free higher education and universal health care.
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland are social democracies. They also rank, year after year, at the very top of global surveys of citizen happiness and quality of life. [17]
The 2003 machine made dissent shameful so the war could proceed unquestioned. This machine makes a label frightening so the policies can be dismissed, unexamined. The tactic never changes. Make the questioner ashamed, or make the idea frightening, and the debate is over before it starts. Divide and conquer.
Sources:
16. Pew Research Center and Gallup polling on minimum wage, health care costs, housing affordability, and child care.
17. World Happiness Report, annual rankings. https://worldhappiness.report
My friend is not the only one being told she no longer belongs. Everyone is being told. Only the shape of the wound changes.
The union worker in the Rust Belt was told the Democrats abandoned him, and he was not entirely wrong. Both parties signed the trade deals that hollowed out his town. [18] The anger is righteous, and some of it landed true. But he was handed a story in which only one party did this to him, so he punished the Democrats and rewarded Republicans who signed the same deals and then cut taxes for the people who shipped his job overseas. [19]
The Black voter is told the party takes them for granted, courts them in every election cycle, and forgets them when the polls close. There is truth in that. Black voters have carried this coalition for generations and are still asked to wait for a return that never arrives. The wedge aimed at them is not a lie. It is a true grievance, weaponized in an attempt to convince the most loyal voters in the country to finally stop showing up.
The woman watched the Roberts Court eliminate a constitutional right her mother had her whole adult life. [20] She is now told her body is a bargaining chip, and she has already seen it happen. The gun owner is told they are coming for his guns, and that single fear is made loud enough to bury everything else that matters to him. And the worker whose wages never rise is told to blame the immigrant beside him, never the CEO or the private equity firm.
Every one of these is real. None is imagined. The anger of those wronged is righteous. It has simply been aimed away from the people who caused the harm.
Sources:
18. North American Free Trade Agreement, signed 1993; Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, 2000.
19. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
20. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).
So let me connect the dots as I see them.
None of these divisions is an accident, and none of it requires a single architect designing the whole scheme. It does not work that way, and it does not need to. It needs only aligned interests. Political operatives who win by splitting coalitions. Media that profits because outrage and fear hold an audience. Algorithms that reward the post that enrages over the post that informs. Each pursues its own profit. Together they manufacture the same result: a public taught to fear and distrust each other cannot unite against any of it.
And that is the whole design, because look at what the division reliably delivers. Every time we are split, we elect the people who exacerbate the divide, and those people do the same four things. They concentrate wealth. They concentrate power. They turn the country inward and against the world. And they keep the fear burning, because a frightened public will accept the hardliners who feed on it. A frightened public can be told that cruelty is strength, that thinking is elitism, and that empathy is weakness. Enough of them will believe it.
That is the objective. The wedge is only the method. The Jewish American voter made to feel evicted, the moderate who flinches at a label, the progressive who is finished with a lobby, the Eisenhower Republican who no longer recognizes his own party. Every one of them is being pushed from a different side toward the same cliff. And while we push each other, the same small circle walks off with the wealth and power, while the rest of us argue about who pushed first.
If we allow ourselves to be divided, we will elect people who continue the pattern. More wealth in fewer hands. More power in fewer offices. More nationalism, more isolation, more war.
Here is the light, and it is the same light as always, because there is only one. We do not have to agree on Gaza. We do not have to agree on socialism. We do not have to resolve a single one of the fights they have handed us. We have to notice only one thing. We are being divided by people who profit from it, and their candidates are on the ballot.
We know this can be done, because it has been done, in the other direction. In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the Chamber of Commerce. He argued that the American free enterprise system was under attack and had to organize to defend itself. Not in one election. Over decades. Fund the think tanks. Build the legal foundations. Coordinate the message across a hundred institutions that never shared a single office. Two months later he was nominated to the Supreme Court, and the memo became their blueprint. [21] They followed it patiently for fifty years, and much of what this series has documented is the result.
We do not have to agree on everything. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the coalitions that won these victories did not agree on everything. Labor and students and scientists and veterans and civil rights activists and feminists did not share a platform or a church or a party. They shared a direction. Forward. And in a single decade, the pressure they built together forced a divided government to act. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. Medicare and Medicaid. Clean air and clean water. [22] None of it happened in isolation. All of it happened because people who were told they had nothing in common rejected the lie. They had one thing in common after all. A better America, built on justice, equality, and democracy. And they voted like it.
They are counting on us arriving divided, or not arriving at all. The whole machine is built for it. But it has been beaten before, by the very people it was built to keep apart. It can be beaten again.
That is the answer to the wedge. Not agreement. Convergence. We do not have to become one thing.
We only have to do one thing together.
Vote.
Sources:
21. Lewis F. Powell Jr., “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” confidential memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 23, 1971. https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/
22. Civil Rights Act of 1964; Voting Rights Act of 1965; Social Security Amendments of 1965 establishing Medicare and Medicaid; Clean Air Act of 1970; Clean Water Act of 1972.
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