Respectability for Radicals

By Abe Greenwald

One elected politician is quickly becoming my least favorite political figure in the country, and, given the lay of the land, it might not be who you think it is.

Consider the competition this person is beating out: There are all those militantly anti-Semitic Communists, such as Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier. She waited a full day after October 7 before joining a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square. And it recently came to light that her deleted Twitter feed included posts and retweets celebrating the genius of Marx and Lenin and castigating men of color for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.”

Many others are cut from roughly the same cloth, and they don’t rest either. There’s Melat Kiros, the socialist congressional candidate in Colorado, who recently declined to say that last year’s deadly firebombing attack on Jews in Boulder was anti-Semitic. There’s Graham Platner and his accidental Nazi tattoo, Zohran Mamdani calling AIPAC “monsters,” and the former al-Qaeda front-group volunteer Adam Hamaway. And that’s just as many as I can stand to recount.

At this point, I could fill up half a newsletter—at least—with nothing but the names of candidates and elected officials who overtly detest America and the Jews and unapologetically embrace the enemies of both. 

But for my money, Ro Khanna, the U.S. representative from California's 17th district, is worse. My reasoning is related to a famous line of Martin Luther King Jr.’s. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people,” he said, “but the silence over that by the good people.” Don’t worry, I know the idea needs some tinkering in this case because Khanna is neither silent nor good. He facilitates the oppression and cruelty by translating the florid war cries of radicals into establishment shorthand. Here’s what he posted on X in response to the trans activists who ganged up on Scott Wiener on Friday for being a Jew:

There is no place for harrasment or physical violence in our democracy. I am a strong supporter of protest, dissent, & free expression. But not of intimidation. What happened to @Scott_Wiener was simply wrong. Let's focus on passing @RepThomasMassie amendment to zero aid to Israel. Hold elected officials accountable. But do so in the spirit of building a politics of conviction and dignity, not insult and aggression.

In other words, if you want to go after the Jews, don’t waste your time with a bunch of ranting freaks. Invest in me. I may not know how to spell harassment, but I know how to take down the Jews using the power of the federal government. 

Khanna is no socialist—he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And there was a time, not long ago, when he claimed to support Zionism. I don’t know whether he’s been asked about that lately, but he should be. Because once it became clear that anti-Semitism was gaining unprecedented traction in our politics, he decided to go all in—shamelessly. He now rushes to support Jew-haters left and right.

Khanna is worse than the outspoken and earnestly revolutionary Jew-haters because he—along with others—handed them the keys to the kingdom. Raging anti-Semites were always out there, mostly on the fringes. They’re actually not the ones who represent a new and frightening phenomenon. It’s humdrum opportunists like Ro Khanna who are now doing something both novel and ruinous. They’re hoping to trade away the country’s defining virtues for a shot at continued relevance. Khanna has discovered an uncharted depth of political prostitution, and his success threatens to drag us all down there with him. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.