Iran and the disestablishmentarians

Radical progressives love Iran because Iran hates the republic.

"Zohran Mamdani Speaking at a DSA 101 Meeting at the Church of the Village in NYC" by Bingjiefu He is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

“Gentiles don’t know how to worry,” Stanley Kubrick once said, perhaps unfairly. Nonetheless, there’s some truth in it. There is even more truth in its counterpart: Jews don’t know how to take good news.

I’m no exception, unfortunately. Over the weekend, the United States removed the most serious existential threat to Israel’s future. With it, by definition, went the most serious existential threat to the Jewish people’s future. I remain glum about the fact that I ought to be euphoric.

Of course, I am immensely grateful, with all due credit given to President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. It is a great thing and a great moment.

Yet all I can think of are the worst-case scenarios. I can’t stop asking myself: How will Iran retaliate? Did we get all the nuclear materials? Will the missile attacks on Israel finally cease? Will there be regime change? What’s the end game? And so on and so forth. All of it quite pointless.

Nonetheless, I think I have some reason for believing that this is not over yet. In particular, the political fallout in the United States has been profoundly disturbing. Following the Iran strikes, as the classic line from I, Claudius put it, all the poisons lurking in the mud hatched out.

Put simply, we saw most of the Democratic Party go, for lack of a better word, insane. Scores of leading Democrats expressed outrage not at Iran’s genocidal regime but at Trump and Israel. Chuck Schumer continued his betrayal of the Jewish community he claims to protect by denouncing the strikes. AOC and other professional antisemites demanded Trump’s impeachment. Red-Green Alliance (RGA) progressive and Islamic activists took to the streets in hopes of mayhem.

The spectacle was of the most disturbing nature: An entire political party, with some noble exceptions, sold its soul to the devil.

It seems clear that Iran is becoming the new Gaza, the RGA’s new all-consuming cause, and thus, increasingly, the Democrats’ new all-consuming cause.

Many people have pointed out the paradoxical madness of this fact, but the spectacle of an ostensibly progressive party fetishizing the most reactionary and tyrannical force imaginable is hardly new. It happened with the Soviet Union and is now happening with the Palestinians. In the case of Iran, it is no less humorous in its dissonance and likely stems from the same cause.

In the end, the RGA and radical progressives in general are partisans of disestablishment. Like the heretics of old, they see the old dispensation as irredeemably corrupt and evil. They believe it must be overthrown and reconstructed as of old, emerging from the ruins in a renewed purity, closer to God and to man.

In this case, however, the church to be disestablished is the American republic. And what nation is more dedicated to the disestablishment of the American republic than Iran, with its constant raving about the hideous machinations of the “Great Satan”?

In short, as Christopher Hitchens put it, radical progressives have come to see radical Islam as “some kind of f***ing liberation theology” and Iran as a redemptive force. Given this calculated derangement, how could they not fight for Iran with everything they have?

The implications of this, needless to say, are horrifying. For example, there are now indications that, riding the wave of RGA outrage, New York City will soon have an openly antisemitic mayor. Thanks to ranked choice voting shenanigans, Zohran Mamdani, with his “globalize the intifada” apologetics and impeccable RGA credentials, may soon reign over one of the largest Jewish communities in the world.

If he succeeds, then that community is doomed.

The likely results of Mamdani’s election are obvious: The RGA will have total impunity. The universities will be conquered by antisemites without resistance. The streets will flood with progromists. Antisemitic riots will break out and nothing will be done to stop them. Eventually, most New York Jews will leave. Their history, which goes back long before the founding of the republic, will come to an end.

Nor can we ignore the danger presented by AOC. With the Democrats having finally secured the (hopefully temporary) release of antisemitic campus thug Mahmoud Khalil, AOC feted the swine as if he were a strange amalgam of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus.

The beatific smile on her face was horrifying, like the countenance of the Joker after a particularly satisfying evening in a slaughterhouse. Knowing that AOC is almost certain to run for president in 2028 and at least win the nomination, the implications are chilling.

Put simply, AOC would do on the national level what Mamdani would pioneer on the municipal level. She would become, in other words, the one thing the RGA has yet to find: its Hitler. If this is the case, then the American Jewish community has no future, and will have to go to a place where they do have a future. That will be, thanks to Trump and Netanyahu, Israel.

In the end, however, expelling the Jews will annihilate all of AOC and Mamdani’s most demonic ambitions. It will bring Israel millions of new citizens. Those new citizens will often be highly educated and talented, and thus a boon to Israel’s economy and military prowess. They will also be very, very angry; disabused of all their progressive illusions. They will be highly unlikely to capitulate to, let alone collaborate with hostile foreign politicians.

The irony, then, is terrible. Trump has helped secure Israel’s immediate future. AOC and Mamdani, through their demonic efforts, could well secure its eternal future. Out of their petty and demented hatreds, they will realize the Zionist dream of a total end to the exile. The process will be hideously painful for all involved, but in the end, Israel will emerge stronger and more powerful than it has ever been. As for AOC and Mamdani, they will, like all politicians, pass from the scene—and we will still be here.

This is not something any of us should hope for. A strong Diaspora is a good thing. The fight for Jewish civil rights in America should be as ferocious as possible, and Israel should help. Nonetheless, just as one worst-case scenario has just been averted, we can take some comfort in the fact that another would end not just in disaster but also in a resurrectionary triumph.