Now They’re Just Making Things Up

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

 

At least you can say that Nancy Pelosi is fully aware of the Democratic Party’s biggest political liabilities. What you can’t say is that she’s remotely honest in her efforts to neutralize them. So far, Pelosi’s strategy doesn’t seem to be any more sophisticated than simply insisting that her party’s candidates don’t believe the things they’ve said they believe or exhibit any of the unlovely traits they’ve previously exhibited.

 

According to Punchbowl this morning, Pelosi is endorsing former one-term representative Mondaire Jones, who lost the seat he won in 2020 due to redistricting, to face first-term Republican congressman Mike Lawler next fall in New York’s 17th district. In her endorsement, the former House speaker praised Jones’s “pragmatic leadership,” adding that he is a “stalwart supporter of Israel and champion of funding for law enforcement.” By highlighting this improbable set of accolades, Pelosi only underscored Jones’s vulnerabilities.

 

Is Mondaire Jones a stalwart supporter of local police departments and their funding? Recently, yes. But that stance conflicts with the views he expressed in 2020 when the menace of “systemic racism” was so insidious that its solutions couldn’t “just be confined to individual instances of police officers killing unarmed black and brown people.” To put an end to institutional racial bias, Jones added, “We need to end mass incarceration and legalize cannabis and defund the police.” That wasn’t a one-off. Jones repeatedly advocated “defunding the police, cutting that funding and reallocating it to social workers, and youth employment” throughout the one and only year in which a critical mass of American voters didn’t summarily reject that lunatic proposition.

 

Jones has since changed his tune. But if the former congressman underwent a conversion to law enforcement’s cause, he has yet to fill us in on his conversion narrative. A more cynical observer could be forgiven for assuming Jones’s evolving views are informed more by the self-evidently suicidal politics of the “defund” movement rather than any principle.

 

When it comes to Israeli security, the safety of America’s Jewish population, and how those two issues intersect in American politics, Jones’s record is complicated. As a congressman from New York, he became a target of what far-Left outlets euphemistically deemed the “Palestinian rights movement.” Moreover, Jones advocated the provision of security assistance to Jewish non-profit organizations and fighting antisemitism by teaching lessons about the Holocaust in elementary and secondary schools. But Jones has found himself on the defense on this issue, too.

 

In his quest to rejoin Congress, Jones joined forces with Working Families Party-endorsed assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, and the duo savaged “conservative Democrat” Representative Dan Goldman over his failure to endorse packing the Supreme Court and creating a government monopoly on health insurance in the form of “Medicare for all.” But Jones’s alliance with Niou forced him to take some ownership of Niou’s support for the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement, which targets Israeli businesses with boycotts and whose members routinely liken the Jewish State to Nazi Germany. Jones may be critical of BDS himself, but he subordinated those concerns to his immediate political interests.

 

Then there was the tweet. “Well, this was a waste of everyone’s time,” Jones posted on social media on the day Kevin McCarthy was ousted by House Democrats and eight GOP defectors. The remark captioned an image of McCarthy and Lawler wearing kippahs while taking a meeting with a variety of visibly Jewish Hasidic community leaders in Rockland County. Initially, Jones defended the tweet and its bizarre implications. “As I stated in my tweet, Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly wasted the time of Hasidic leaders in the Lower Hudson Valley,” he maintained. But no one was buying it, including Jones’s fellow Democrats.

 

“This disgusting post is insulting to Jewish people and every person of faith,” said New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer. “It is never a waste of time to meet with religious leaders,” Florida representative Jared Moskowitz agreed. “This disgusting post is insulting to Jewish people and every person of faith.” Eventually, Jones felt compelled to take down the post and issue an apology. “I am proud of my record of combating antisemitism in Congress and after Congress,” the former congressman pleaded. “In a time of rising antisemitism, we must be crystal clear where we stand: I continue to be a strong ally of our diverse Jewish communities.”

 

Jones’s record demonstrates the tension between progressives and the vast majority of American voters. If Jones’s impulses are to oppose antisemitism wherever it emerges and to support law enforcement, he has found it within himself to stifle those instincts when he feels it’s necessary. The former congressman’s record reveals the extent to which appealing to modern progressives requires supplicating before a variety of antisocial views and politically toxic policy preferences. The Lower Hudson Valley can do better.