Is Scott Wiener Still Queer?

By Rich Lowry

Monday, June 29, 2026

 

Scott Wiener is in the uncomfortable position of being an enemy of the people.

 

The ludicrously progressive California state senator running for Nancy Pelosi’s House seat is being harassed in public for insufficient alacrity in condemning Israel for supposed genocide in Gaza.

 

It’s not as though Wiener, who is gay and Jewish, is a Likudnik. He declined to characterize the Israeli war in Gaza as a genocide at a debate forum, then quickly backtracked and released a video saying that, sure enough, it is a genocide.

 

For this, he’s been subjected to the worst struggle-session-style public humiliations since those of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

 

Wiener, who has been accosted at a bar and at a trans march, doesn’t respond to the harassment.

 

Instead, he stays silent and looks at his assailants with sad eyes.

 

Wiener clearly knows that his interlocutors are lunatics but realizes he can’t make a wrong move or say the wrong thing in reply, lest he put his career at risk.

 

 

 

The vibe is a little like that of an office worker who’s hoping to avoid eye contact with an aggressive mentally ill panhandler while walking down a city street.

 

The vitriol directed at Wiener is another sign that the issue of Gaza has now taken a place at the ideological core of the left. Demurring from using the word “genocide” is tantamount to saying that the police were okay during the Black Lives Matter protests, or saying that boys can’t be girls.

 

That Wiener, a radical on gender issues, is a target for such abuse puts the new status of Gaza in stark relief. This is the guy who championed the push to make California a “refuge” for transgender youth and promoted sundry other boundary-pushing items on the trans agenda.

 

If Wiener thought this record would shield him from being denounced and intimidated in public by his own side, he was sadly mistaken.

 

In the latest incident, Wiener was swarmed by people shouting at him about Gaza as he was trying to attend, true to form, a trans-led “Pride Shabbat” service in connection with a San Francisco trans march.

 

One of his harassers notably brayed at him, “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of sh**.”

 

Superficially, this statement doesn’t scan; it’s the equivalent of telling someone he stopped being straight when he opposed the U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

 

The connection between queerness and Palestine would seem attenuated or even perverse given that — as is often pointed out — Hamas is not famously supportive of LGBTQIA+ rights.

 

But Wiener’s tormentors surely conceive of queerness as a revolt against an oppressive order and think of Hamas the same way. In this schema, Israel is Western, white, and settler-colonialist, making it as bad as the gender binary.

 

For the left now, it makes as much sense to be woke and pro-Israel as it does being woke and pro-apartheid-era South Africa.

 

Moreover, implicit in the verbal assault against Wiener is that he may no longer be queer, but he is assuredly still a Jew, a suspect status owing to its association with the morally abhorrent State of Israel.

 

This reflects a change in the valence of Jewishness in the left-wing worldview. It no longer betokens outsider and victim but rather insider and oppressor; it’s no longer an identity at the outskirts of Western civilization but at the very center of it, representing its worst colonizing and racist tendencies.

 

All of this means that Wiener is an appropriate target for the full mob treatment. (Back in 2024, by the way, pro-Palestinian protesters showed up at his annual Halloween pumpkin-carving event for kids.)

 

One of the people yelling at Wiener at the march implored him to redeem himself by saying something on the spot to denounce Israel. (The guy who shouted at him at the bar did the same thing.) This is typical of left-wing mobs, which tend to demand ritual acts of obeisance, whether it’s taking a knee during the BLM riots or wearing a cockade during the French Revolution.

 

Someone also asked how Wiener could have done this to San Francisco, as though his  political crime of not condemning the Jewish state in lurid enough terms had done concrete harm to a city that is 7,500 miles from the Gaza war.

 

Wiener put out a statement appropriately calling out his treatment. In his rapid change of opinion on the question of genocide in Gaza after the primary debate, though, Wiener tried to appease the mob. As a Jew with a suspect record on a litmus test issue for the left, he’s going to have to pander more or surely face continued bullying and intimidation.