What Maureen Galindo says about the Democratic Party

At what point in institutional degradation will we stop talking about isolated cases? The Democrats have a candidate for Congress who promises to turn a detention center into a "prison for American Zionists," with a castration annex for pedophiles who, she says, "will probably be the majority of Zionists." She is Maureen Galindo, Democratic candidate for Texas' 35th congressional district, who got 29.2% of the vote in the March primary..

This statistic alone should be enough to generate fierce self-criticism in the Democratic Party. It was not. Party leaders waited for Galindo to post her most grotesque threat on Instagram to finally come out and condemn it, as if her Judeophobic, conspiracy-mongering and openly totalitarian profile had not been enough of a signal. This was not a moral position, but a belated electoral calculation.

It is fair to say that Galindo's statements do not come from only one end of the ideological spectrum. That is precisely what makes them revealing. She loosely mixes the rhetoric of the identitarian left (colonialism, genocide) with the paranoia of the woke right: the "Zionist occupied government," the Jewish clique that controls the media, ICE as a tool of the Israeli occupation. She uses Al Jazeera as a documentary source, quotes the spokesman of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in her defense and calls for officials who have always acted in accordance with the law to be tried for treason.

There is no shortage of voices pointing out that Galindo parrots Nick Fuentes' libelous claims. As a Democratic candidate, this should not go unnoticed. Classic antisemitism has been recycled in a progressive ecosystem, and today it circulates fluidly in the Democratic Party, and Galindo is the least filtered version of that mix.

When she says that "Zionist Jews" are not real Jews, but "European colonizers," she is not making a political argument, but reproducing one of the oldest formulas of organized hatred, which was always presented as a reasoned distinction and never as what it was. The Nazis also insisted that they did not hate people, but a system.

The pertinent question is how she got to where she has, because Galindo did not appear out of nowhere. She won first place in a Democratic primary. That means thousands of citizens chose her as their first choice. It means that the party structures (its operatives, its donors, its grassroots activists) did not shy away from or find it necessary to prevent someone with this profile getting a leadership position. The DCCC supported her rival, Johnny García, but it did so late and with fewer resources than the mysterious Lead Left PAC invested in Galindo's campaign.

Democratic voices accuse Republicans of being behind the financial support for Galindo, but the "Republicans are sabotaging us" argument is precisely what the Democratic Party needs to avoid saying out loud, because its flip side is devastating: if it's enough for a phantom PAC to spend money to boost a nefarious candidate, the party has a grassroots problem that has nothing to do with Republican money.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that "this bigoted garbage and antisemitism should be nowhere near our politics" when Galindo was already piling up statement after statement, when it was already impossible to ignore her. ActBlue reacted in kind, after the promise to jail and castrate had circulated massively on social media.

The pattern has repeated itself in similar cases: the party tolerates extreme rhetoric until it becomes intolerably visible, and then condemnation appears. But condemnation is not a filter, rather damage control, mere public relations. A filter would have prevented Galindo from running in the first place, or at least would have generated an organized, early response from the party before her internment proposals went viral. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took too long, invested too little, and only did so when the external pressure was untenable.

It would be comfortable defining Galindo as the result of a well-funded campaign and an uninformed base. Part of that is true. But it would be dishonest to ignore that there is a growing segment of the progressive electorate for whom Galindo's positions sound not of extremism but of courageous dissent. Criticism of Israel has become normalized to the point where militant anti-Zionism is presented as the correct moral stance, and any objection is dismissed as Israel lobbying or complicity with genocide.

Galindo is not simply a Judeophobe. She is, in a broader sense, a candidate who hates the foundation on which America built its historical uniqueness. The First Amendment, the prohibition against states imprisoning people for their political beliefs, the principle that a law-abiding citizen cannot be made an enemy of the state because of his or her affiliations, the presumption of innocence, the separation between criminal law and ideological dissent: all of these disappear in Galindo's platform.

Proposing to criminalize a political affiliation is the same mechanism that totalitarian regimes of the 20th century used to build their apparatuses of repression. That it is presented with the language of social justice does not make it any less dangerous, quite the contrary. The United States became the most powerful country in the world thanks to its founding principles: protection of the individual against the State, equality before the law regardless of beliefs, freedom of conscience as an inalienable right. When a candidate for federal office proposes to turn those principles into a dead letter based on who the designated enemy is this week, the problem is not just that candidate. It is that there is a voting public willing to hear it, and a party willing to tolerate it unless it becomes a scandal.

The Democratic Party is facing an ideological crisis stemming from years of submission to the identitarian left and fusion with radical Islam. What does that tell you about its selection processes, about its internal culture, about the values that in practice are considered acceptable?

The honest answer is that Democrats have been tolerating a drift towards positions that erode the very values they claim to defend, as long as that erosion comes packaged in the right narrative. They have allowed anti-Zionism to be installed as a base position with the absurd and Manichean pretense of distinguishing it from antisemitism, when that distinction clearly does not exist and the ruse is impossible to sustain. The party has allowed anti-Israeli conspiracy-mongering to circulate freely in its activist networks without pointing it out for what it is. And when the product of that tolerance becomes too repugnant even for them, they react with condemnation that is unaccompanied by any structural change.

Beyond the results of the second round, Galindo as a symptom is an alarming factor, one that is so scandalous and corrosive that as a problem it will not disappear even with an electoral defeat.