President Trump. Again. And: The Amsterdam Pogrom. Again.

Congratulations, antisemites. You did it. An entire year of slandering the POTUS and Veep as “genocide supporters”, and this is the result. You get President Trump. Guess who doesn’t give a single capital-S-H-I-T about the Palestinians? Your (old) new President. The f——g hubris. The arrogance to think your coalition of deplorables could get away with it and still get what you secretly wanted: a Harris presidency. Now you get nothing. Let me serenade you with the sweet sounds of “I told you so”.

Jill Stein and the Greens, Cornel West with his (In)Justice for All party, and the immensely disappointing Libertarian Party all united in hate for the Jewish nation. They took the votes you desperately tried to pander to, Dems. The ones that even showed up to the polls. When you play ball with antisemites, you lose the moment you take the field.

Of course I’m not naive or self-centered enough to think a nation the size of New Jersey halfway across the world was the primary reason people voted for Trump. “It’s the economy, stupid” is just as true now as it was 30 years ago. Rightly or wrongly, the incumbent takes the blame for the economy. As someone who is currently absolutely broke, I can certainly see the appeal. Everything but Arizona Iced Tea and the Costco hotdog has increased in price dramatically. So the people voted for a coercive strongman that plans to reduce prices and inflation with…tariffs. Oh boy, it’s going to be a long four years.

Rather, the question I want to address is why exactly people didn’t vote for Kamala.

I voted for Kamala. I know I’ll catch flak for telling you, but I don’t care. I have largely avoided domestic politics the past year. There are bigger issues at stake, like the one I have dedicated my life to. The fight against antisemitism has been a long, lonely road. And it does not appear to be getting any closer to the end. There’s one reason right there: the abject failure of leadership across the societal board in addressing antisemitism. It has literally been up to random people like me to fight back against our descent into the darkest chapters of history. I don’t even want to think about where we’d be right now if the ADL didn’t exist.

As a consequence of my public advocacy, I have been uniquely situated for this trainwreck. Like Ritchie Torres, I am someone of the liberal-progressive side of the spectrum. Classic case of “socially progressive fiscally moderate”. I have had to watch as the coalition that was supposed to “save abortion” and “democracy” and all that utterly collapsed and devolved into a mania of “freeing Palestine” (from who or what, exactly?) versus sanity; and the coalition of people that were in the Biden administration tent collapsed. Kamala was left to pick up the pieces and ended up some millions of votes less than Biden in 2020.

I’ll be honest: I’m angry right now. I am angry that for an entire year of my life I have been essentially shouting into the void, ignored by everyone and everything I used to care about. I hold liberal values. I believe in a woman’s right to control her own body. Do you know what happens when you push people like me out of your tent?

President Trump. That’s what you get, and that’s what you deserve.

The fact that Governor Josh Shapiro was passed up for Kamala’s Veep pick probably due to pressure over Israel is unforgivable. That alone could have handed the Dems PA, but pandering to the antisemitic vote was just too important. Governor Tim Walz was a good pick, to be sure. But not good enough, and far underutilized. He didn’t even flip neighboring swing state Wisconsin when his state was reliably Democratic from the get-go. Whereas with PA’s 19 electoral votes…that alone is pretty close to victory. Hindsight 20/20, etc. It would have been quite ironic if the Dems managed to flip the Electoral College while behind significantly in the popular vote.

One fact apparently remains constant throughout many layers of society: Jews are being systematically excluded from public life, as I have written about over. And over. And over again. Ironically all in the name of “progressivism”, which has embraced the masked antisemitism known as “anti-Zionism”. Any “progressive” that doesn’t understand the importance of Israel to the Jewish diaspora and people is lacking in fundamental cultural knowledge. You cannot stroll blindly into cultural subjects to which you have no real idea about. Or how are you better than the people you criticize for behaving rashly around others’ identities?

I know history. I am someone that understands at least the basics; namely, the centrality of Israel to the Jewish people. If we were to start at square one for Judaism, the ‘Hope of Two Thousand Years’ is it. To my knowledge, every synagogue around the world built in the last two thousand years (after the exodus forced by the Romans) faces Jerusalem. There are Jewish holidays based on the agricultural seasons of Eretz Yisrael. Jews have maintained a continual presence in the land of Israel for thousands of years. It is their indigenous land, period. Even the most extreme of religious fundamentalist “anti-Zionists” like Neturei Karta don’t disagree that Israel is central to Judaism—they just believe that the LITERAL MESSIAH has to establish the return of Israel to the land (and don’t ask them what happens after).

Which, obviously, is absurd. Seven million sovereign Jews already live in Israel. Where, exactly, are they supposed to go? They’re just supposed to give up their self-determination for your feelings or beliefs?

And that’s the real kicker. Attacking the right of Israel to exist is antisemitic because no other people in the world are subjected to such impossible litmus tests just to prove they have the right to exist as free people with self-determination. No one is demanding of the Republic of Ireland—the sovereign country of the Irish people—to fold back into the United Kingdom and give up their sovereignty because the Scots-Irish IN NORTHERN IRELAND (i.e. the United Kingdom) feel “oppressed”. Obviously not a perfect comparison, but I think it gets the point across. Take your Jew hate and shove it. We’ve seen it all before, and it’s just as gross and deplorable as every other time in history.

And right-wing antisemitism is a danger too. It always has been, just under the surface. Never forget the “dinner party” Trump had with Kanye West and the outspoken white supremacist Nick Fuentes. ‘Christian nationalism’ is just as dangerous to the Jewish people as Islamic fundamentalism. We are a nation of laws, not of gods or men. If you want to live in a ‘Christian nation’, go bend a knee to England’s crown again. The United Kingdom is literally a Christian nation, with the Church of England enshrined by law. This—is America. ‘Christian nationalists’ can take their religious fundamentalism and shove it. I suspect the danger of a theocracy will only grow as those elements schmooze the world’s largest narcissist over the next four years.

Now tell me I don’t sound like an angry liberal. For anyone I may have upset, come on. You know what this is. You know who I am. This is ‘A Dose of Sanity’, not ‘A Dose of Massaging Your Gigantic Egos After a Landslide Election Win’. The late Jewish Senator Joe Lieberman understood that bipartisanship is something that needs to be worked at every day. If you’re willing to put in the effort, then so am I. It is up to you all on the other side of the political aisle to fight and contain the extremists on your side, just as I have done for mine.

And I do not understand my fellow Kamala voters who are lashing out over Trump’s win—at regular, everyday Trump supporters. It’s like kicking the person sitting next to you at a football stadium in the shins because they had the audacity to cheer for their (winning) team. Did they contribute to their team’s success? Probably only minutely if at all. Same for blaming Trump himself and the Trump campaign. There is nothing productive to be gained by “raging against the machine” that produced President Trump. Twice.

No, what needs to happen is a postmortem analysis of what our own team did wrong. Where they should have zigged instead of zagged. Or don’t you want to roll back some of the ridiculous things Trump is about to do after 2026 and 2028?

I didn’t vote for Kamala because I liked her as a candidate or even as a person. I voted for Kamala because she represented the status quo, however imperfect it was. I voted for a world I predicted would get worse before it gets better. You can ridicule me for that if you want. I thought we could do it.

Now, the train is off the tracks. I have no idea what comes next. Because Trump is chaos personified. No one in the entire world knows what’s going to happen come January. But I do know that our democracy is strong. We will survive four more years of Richard Nixon’s even more crooked twin.

So, progressives—those of us that can still call ourselves ‘progressive’—we need a paradigm shift. ‘Intersectionality’ and identity politics lead straight to Jew hate. Because they are ideologies built on grievance, both real and imagined. All throughout history, whenever someone needs an easy scapegoat for something they often land on the Jewish people simply for convenience. No more of that.

Instead, we need to focus on the future. I am a futurist first and foremost. My timeline is in centuries and millennia. We need to consider what kind of world we want brought about for untold generations of humanity. I don’t know about you all, but in my idealized future the least important characteristic about someone is the color of their skin. And personal identity is personal. It doesn’t need to be that everyone knows everything about everyone else so that they can precisely label and categorize their Intersectionality Score?.

Frankly, I have always had this disdain. Long before I joined any progressive movement. And I never gained this I guess ‘sixth sense’ for these things that others seem to have. When I voted Bernie in the 2016 primary, I couldn’t even tell you if I knew at the time that he was Jewish. It does not seem ‘progressive’ to me to care so deeply about others’ identities that it becomes the most important aspect of their personhood. Only if it is relevant to the matter at hand does it need consideration. Otherwise, they’re just a person. Treat them…like a person.

When despicable bigots like 2023 Antisemite of the Year Rashida Tlaib are STILL sitting members of the “progressive party”, the party that I just voted for—yeah, I have some cognitive dissonance over that. But Joe Biden has done pretty well in letting Israel do what they need to do to win their wars for survival against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Khamenei regime. All things considered, I’m not too upset with Biden’s foreign policy. He is far too soft on Iran, which will hopefully change when Trump takes over. Domestically, his unwillingness to confront antisemitism in America and specifically within the Democratic Party has been aggravating to say the very least. But again, these are known problems that I could see a path to fixing, albeit with a literal mountain of hard work, time, and a bit of luck.

And that’s ultimately why I voted for the Veep: because although Kamala and the Biden administration have many, many faults, they are a known quantity. I have literally no idea what to expect when Trump takes office again. Anyone who says they do is lying. Everyone loud is either aggrandizing or catastrophizing…but they always do.

I am more worried about what happens when it gets quiet. That is exactly when chaos happens with Trump. You all were there. We get four more years of pandemonium now…but when you least expect it. War with North Korea? Love letters from Kim Jong Un? Drinking bleach to cure viral infections? Buffalo headdress-wearing hooligans in the Capitol building, maybe this time with visitor passes. Oh boy. Here we go again.

I think it’ll be exactly what it was all over again, times two or three. I don’t think it’s the end of the world. I think we are about to see ‘Trumpist’ policies institutionalized. In Trump’s first term (sidenote, but we are going to have to use ‘Trump’s first term’ and ‘Trump’s second term’ now. Ugh.) lots of random crazy stuff, and then COVID, seemed to sidetrack him before he really left many legislative or administrative institutional changes of a lasting nature. But it’s entirely possible the narcissist didn’t think he could lose in the first place.

The Supreme Court was his primary victory in his first term. And now he has their backing, and the Senate, and possibly the House. For the next two years at least. Yeah, things are going to change now that weren’t being talked about before. Like entire administrative departments could be just gone by the end of this. Legislation as “set in stone” as Roe v Wade was in SCOTUS precedent could be walked back. Instead of codified Roe, we may get codified anti-Roe.

Again, I have no idea what to expect, but it will be big. And there’s probably more than one of them. I don’t trust Trump as far as I can throw him; and though I have been working manual labor since June, I probably can’t throw that mass very far. Obviously not every change will be wholly bad. I have zero trust though that they will ultimately serve the best interests of the American people. Can you really tell me with a straight face that there’s zero chance Trump jacks up the economy more than Biden/Harris?

And as for foreign policy…

I worry for Ukraine. They are holding back Russia as Israel is holding back Iran. If they fall…it will not be good for the world. And I worry for Israel and the Jewish people across the world. Antisemites never miss a chance to misunderstand Israeli politics. They think Bibi is some sort of genocidal dictator and not just really good at building coalitions—ya know, like you do in a democracy. He’s no Golda Meir, but he’s the wartime leader they’ve got. And to his credit, Israeli operations especially recently have been incredible. But the simple fact that he and Trump get along pretty well will only serve the worst of conspiracy theories the antisemites put out. I just hope the Saudis don’t go wildcard and try to pressure Israel into unfavorable conditions via their connections with Trump.

Look, the ‘Pax Americana’ has created the most prosperous period of human flourishing in history. By every conceivable metric the world is in a better place for the security and stability America provides across the globe. We sacrifice that for isolationism at our great peril. Remember, Donald Trump bowing out to Putin in Syria is one of the reasons it is still bleeding today. We don’t need to fight every war ever for freedom in the world. But can’t we at least send weapons to the actual freedom fighters? It’s an investment in their future and ours. And they’ll probably pay us for them.

At the end of the day, this is democracy. This is (figuratively and probably literally with the popular vote) what the people chose. We all have to live with the consequences of it. I don’t think this is the end of our story. I think it’s a tunnel with a light at the end.

To wrap up this section, Ritchie Torres for President 2028. We absolutely must make this happen. He fights Jew haters like it’s his day job. We need someone who is willing to fight for what is right, consequences be damned.

And then, there is the Amsterdam Pogrom. Not from the 1940s. Today. A frenzy of violence targeting Jews and Israelis in Amsterdam that to my knowledge is still going on even as I type these words. Many Israelis were evacuated from Amsterdam by the government of Israel via emergency planes. Can you imagine a more powerful justification for the existence of the Jewish state?

I sent out a flurry of posts on the subject a few days ago. On and around the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a pogrom was organized in advance of the Maccabi Tel Aviv-Amsterdamsche Ajax football match to target Jews across the city. Jews were chased and hunted in the streets of Amsterdam, beaten, run over by cars, and thrown in the river. Once people started to realize what was happening, the Israeli government issued dire warnings to cover up symbols of Judaism and Israel in Amsterdam. Let me repeat that: the city of Anne Frank and the Secret Annex is no longer safe to be openly Jewish in. Again.

I am so angry. So angry. We must rage at injustice or we lose what it means to be human. I have nowhere to put my rage at this patent injustice against the Jewish people except in my writing.

The participants in the pogrom demanded of their victims to say “free Palestine”. Shocking but not surprising to see their hate escalate to violence. You realize what the next few steps in their plans are, right? How could ANYONE NOT???

If you have not read Anne Frank’s diary in a while, perhaps now is the time for a reread. For those who like to multitask I recommend the audiobook narrated by Susan Adams. We must never forget the suffering they endured, the sheer humiliation that built for years before the worst. And you should watch a walkthrough of Bergen-Belsen. Look at the mounds of human bodies. In one of them lies Anne, and possibly with her Margot. If you don’t end up bawling at the sights I would be shocked.

The fact that I am even typing these words about ANNE FRANK is beyond surreal. How could the world forget so easily?

To tie back in the beginning of what has already been an immensely long newsletter: You want politicians like Geert Wilders to not come to power, progressives? Don’t let things like Amsterdam happen. Reject Jew hate, or reject humanity. Your choice.

Thank you for reading. Am Yisrael Chai ????