July 14, 2025

ABE GREENWALD: In the Commentary newsletter, Greenwald explores “The Democrats’ Big Tentifada.”

Last week, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin went on PBS New Hour and explained that the Democrats’ “big tent” had plenty of room for anti-Semitism. When asked about Zohran Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” Martin offered the following, which I’ll quote in full for reasons explained below:

You know, there’s no candidate in this party that I agree 100 percent of the time with, to be honest with you. There’s things that I don’t agree with Mamdani that he said.

But at the end of the day, I always believe, as a Democratic Party chair in Minnesota for the last 14 years, and now the chair of the DNC, that you win through addition. You win by bringing people into your coalition. We have conservative Democrats. We have centrist Democrats. We have labor progressives like me. And we have this new brand of Democrat, which is the leftist.

And we win by bringing people into that coalition. And at the end of the day, for me, that’s the type of party we’re going to lead. We are a big-tent party. Yes, it leads to dissent and debate, and there’s differences of opinions on a whole host of issues. But we should celebrate that as a party and recognize, at the end of the day, we’re better because of it.*

The full answer is useful because it reveals both the fear and desperation of the Democratic Party. Forget that Martin is too scared to condemn Mamdani for not refuting intifada enthusiasts. Martin is too scared to even say that that’s one of the “things” he disagrees with Mamdani about.

No one who’s been monitoring the direction in which the Democrats have been heading should be surprised by Martin’s lack of interest in anti-Semitic incitement. All the energy is with the Squad types, who’ve been overtly and slimily anti-Israel for years.

To “celebrate” such incitement as a welcome voice in the conversation, however, is a bit striking. The truth is that Democrats are desperate for numbers. Martin says, you win through “addition” because polls show that the Dems have recently become masters at subtraction. They are intersectional losers, hemorrhaging voters among virtually every demographic group in the nation.

Whether they can make up for lost ground by inviting terrorist-sympathizers to join them is a bigger question for the country than for the Democrats. If one of the U.S.’s two major political parties makes a comeback with a platform that explicitly includes anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, that’s the end of the American experiment as far as I’m concerned.

* Plus ça change: 

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll