{Originally posted to the author’s blog}
The tension in U.S. politics has grown progressively worse over the past few years. The center began to crumble several years ago when centrist Democrats felt like there was no room for them in a party lurching leftward (goodbye Evan Bayh (IN) and Joe Lieberman (CT)) and the moderate wing of the Republican party took a whipping with John McCain’s failed run for president in 2008. By 2016, outsiders began to take over each party, when Bernie Sanders (VT), an Independent on the far left extreme had a real shot at being the Democrat’s nominee, and a political novice who spent virtually his entire life as a Democrat named Donald Trump ran through the establishment Republican candidates.
The far left-wing of the Democratic Party was livid with the way Sanders was treated by the party establishment and even more that Trump became president. They organized themselves as “Justice Democrats” and pushed to elect socialists into congress and to rewrite the Democratic platform. They had success in 2018 with the election of a few of their favorites including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (nicknamed “AOC”) and three other women including Rashida Tlaib (MI), Ilhan Omar (MN) and Alyssa Pressley (MA), a group which became known as “The Squad”. These individuals would normally have only been found running on the Working Family’s Party or the Green Party with no shot at winning a seat in a system dominated by two-parties. But they have pushed their way in and are transforming the Democratic Party in a very toxic way, much the way Trump has in the Republican party.
The Justice Democrats are targeting additional seats long held by centrist Democrats in 2020. Two are in lower New York State, including Eliot Engel (NY-16) and the seat vacated by retiring Nita Lowey (NY-17). Their candidates are every bit as extremist as the Squad but with more up-to-date woke initiatives, and will push jobs and people out of the region and add fuel to the budding civil war in the United States.
Adam Schleifer versus Mondaire Jones
There are eight Democrats running for Nita Lowey’s seat, and Jones is currently in the lead according to polls. His vision for America is more radical than AOC, Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, all of whom endorsed him. His goal is best described as give everything away for free and let corporations and the rich pay for it. The fact that the numbers don’t add is irrelevant.
Behind Jones in the polls is Evelyn Farkas and Adam Schleifer. Voting for Farkas is equivalent to voting for former Secretary of State John Kerry (who endorsed her). She is well versed in foreign affairs but that doesn’t mean she has good ideas or capabilities to effectuate good US policies. Adam Schleifer is tied with her for second. He is so mainstream that the New York Times refused to mention his name even while profiling the other seven candidates.
New York Times endorsement of all alt-left candidates, refuses to even mention Adam Schleifer’s name
If you want to avoid being represented by an even worse-AOC or a John Kerry-clone, vote for Schleifer.
Eliot Engel versus Jamaal Bowman
Like Jones, Jamal Bowman is endorsed by the alt-left fringe. His pedigree as a middle school principal makes him as qualified for congress as Trump was for the presidency.
His platform includes:
- Defunding the police
- Abolishing the immigration department
- Quick release bail reform
- Medicare-for-all
- Cancelling student debt
- Free college
- A full green new deal
- Pouring additional tens of billions of dollars into the failed public school system rather than restructuring it completely the way he has proposed for the police
- Expanding labor unions
- Taxing the rich
- Making tax payers spend $638 billion to bail out under-funded luxurious union pension funds
- Paying people to have babies
- Pushing programs to get the poor to own homes (like the initiatives that created the housing and market collapse in 2008).
- Using financial pressure on Israel to end the “occupation of the Palestinian people“
- Re-entering the Iranian nuclear deal which gave the leading state sponsor of terrorism a legal pathway to nuclear weapons.
In the same breath as stating support for Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations, he wrote that the US must “stand up to this far-right authoritarian movement that’s taking place across the world, not cozy up to them, whether that’s in Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Brazil, India, Israel.” Not Iran. Not North Korea. Not China or Venezuela. Israel.
New York voters have a chance to turn the tide against the growing cleft in America by rejecting the extremists running for office and push aggressively to get the vote out for Adam Schleifer (NY-17) and Eliot Engel (NY-16). Primary is June 23.
Adam Schleifer running for Congress
Related First One Through articles:
Please Don’t Vote for a Democratic Socialist
Bernie Sanders’ Antisemitic and Anti-Zionist Friends
Adam Schleifer Shares His Positions on Israel
The Left Wing’s Accelerating Assault on the Holocaust
As Ilhan Omar Clearly Demonstrates, Not Every “First” is Jackie Robinson