Look: You HAVE to Ask Josh Shapiro if He’s Ever Feasted on Palestinian Flesh
You've GOT to
Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro recently wrote that when the Harris campaign was vetting him for Vice President, he was asked if he had ever been an Israeli agent. This was part of a vetting process that Shapiro — who is Jewish — describes as being heavily focused on Israel. When Shapiro bristled at being asked if he was an Israeli spy, he says that the Harris staffer who posed the question replied: “Well, we have to ask.”
And that’s a fair point: You have to ask the governor of Pennsylvania, who was born in Missouri to a Navy veteran, if he’s spying for a foreign government. That is a totally normal question. And also an effective one, because if you ask a spy whether they’re a spy, they typically say “Aw nuts — ya got me!” Because if they didn’t, they’d be liars.
A responsible vetting process has to ask Shapiro provocative questions. After all: Shapiro is Jewish. He’s been to Israel. His glasses are very Jewish. So, the Harris campaign has to ask questions like: “Are you loyal to the US or Israel?” “Are you part of an international banking conspiracy?” “How will you feel if President Harris’ policies conflict with the Jewish plot for world domination?” And, of course: “If I open your freezer right now, how many dismembered non-Jewish children am I going to find in there?”
Consider how irresponsible it would be for the Harris team to not ask these totally standard questions. Imagine if a week before the election, Shapiro was talking to reporters on the campaign bus, he takes out his lunch, and — whuh oh! — it’s a human hand between two slices of bread. Shapiro casually munches on the goyish appendage while reporters watch in horror. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for Harris to turn to her staff and say: “DIDN’T YOU ASK IF JOSH SHAPIRO ENGAGES IN BLOOD LIBEL???” I think so — you don’t want to be blindsided by that sort of thing.
You have to trust that the Harris camp knew what they were doing. After all: This is the group that ended up recommending Tim Walz, and that pick was an upper-fucking-deck home run. I’m sure that Harris’ staff asked Walz if he was spying for Ireland or Sweden. In fact, Walz probably faced all manner of probing questions, just not the question: “Do you think the massive fraud scandal in your state that is already being investigated will end up being a problem?” You have to put any possible VP under a microscope, and that’s what Harris’ team did with Shapiro. It’s just unfortunate that when the microscope was turned on Walz, it failed to detect the multi-billion dollar scandal that at that point had already produced dozens of indictments and multiple convictions.
Democrats are famously chill about people questioning the loyalty of ethnic minorities. Remember when some people claimed that Obama wasn’t born in the US, and everyone on the left agreed that it was totally fine to spin wild conspiracy theories about his birthplace? Same with Ilhan Omar; Trump repeatedly suggests that she’s less than fully American because she was born in Somalia, and the left is united in saying “That is a fine and reasonable thing to wonder about.” We all remember the extensive vetting process that Democrats demanded Biden submit to on account of his Catholicism — if we hadn’t done that, how could we know that he wasn’t taking orders from Rome? We ask these questions all the time, and Democrats universally agree that treating any non-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant as a possible Manchurian Candidate is just common sense.
Shapiro has strange views on Israel. He supports a two-state solution. He’s expressed support for the free speech rights of pro-Palestine protesters on college campuses but also thinks that some of their rhetoric went too far. He’s been critical of the Israeli government, but also defends Israel’s right to exist. So, yeah…the guy is nutso. Two states? Israel is neither infallible nor pure evil? This man should be locked in a padded room somewhere. He can’t be vice president if he can’t see the obvious truth in the Middle East, which any Harris staffer will tell you is that Israel is and hundred times worse than Voldemort and has committed seven to ten genocides in Gaza.
Harris’ team was just performing due diligence. And if Josh Shapiro thinks there’s something weird about asking a lifelong American citizen if he’s an agent for a foreign government — and not any government, but one specific government — he’s being a snowflake. Vice president is not a summer job at an ice cream parlor, Josh — the interview is going to take more than 20 minutes. And there will be tough questions, including but not limited to: “Are you in regular contact with the Elder of Zion?” “Are you, in fact, a Mossad agent known internationally as The Blue Phantom?” And “If you become vice president, will you call your Jew friends in Hollywood and tell them to fix the Marvel franchise?” The real scandal here would be if the Harris campaign had done anything less.
Early in my ROTC program, we had to fill out a security and background questionnaire. It asked whether I was an agent of any foreign government (though not a specific one prompted by my ethnicity).
It also asked a ridiculous choose-your-own-adventure of a question about substance abuse. It went something like: “Have you ever bought, trafficked, abused, injected, inhaled, [twelve other verbs…] alcohol, illegal drugs, non-prescription medications, household cleaners, glue, [eighteen other nouns]?” One of my fellow cadets said he had to answer “yes”, because one of the possible instantiations of the sentence was, “Have you ever bought glue?”
I think the funniest thing about all this was that the only people who would consider Shapiro's views on Israel to be a non-starter were the people already calling her "Holocaust Harris" and saying they wouldn't vote for her.
It's not even that the Democrats cave to progressives. It's that they've tried to cave to ones who clearly don't like them (and live in deep blue areas for the most part), sometimes at the expense of votes that could actually be won.