Although I try not to attack National Review’s editor excessively (despite the persistent temptation), Rich Lowry has recently churned out a tirade against the University of Michigan Board of Regents that requires a firm, critical response. According to Lowry, the UMich board is now overrun by pro-Hamas activists, typified by Amir Makled, whom the Democratic Party, which controls such matters, just nominated to the Board of Regents.

Furthermore, Lowry opines,

it is telling that the Democratic incumbent on the Board of Regents that Amir Makled defeated, Jordan Acker, is a Jewish former Obama official who saw his office and his home vandalized in pro-Hamas agitation.

Lowry bewails the forces that are allegedly behind this inhumanity, namely

the rise of the Dearborn Democrats, not in the literal sense, but in the same sense that Jeane Kirkpatrick coined the phrase ‘San Francisco Democrats’ in the 1980s.

 I also notice that throughout his commentary, Lowry drips with sympathy for Obama Democrats like Acker, who, it would seem, represent traditional moral norms and high constitutional principles. Really! Please check former President Obama’s positions on LGBTQ issues, Middle Eastern politics, and just about any other relevant political issue. Obama’s expressed views align quite nicely with those of Ilhan Omar, Mayor Mamdani, and AOC. The notion that Obama Democrats are “moderates” impels me to ask, “In comparison to whom?”

How exactly did the Democratic Party veer so far left? Presumably, “Obama Democrats” like Acker played a key role in getting it there. Lowry’s nostalgia for these presumably “moderate” Democrats recalls the equally questionable glorification of Stalin’s Communist “victims,” that is, the Marxist-Leninist zealots who were complicit in Stalin’s crimes before he turned on them in the 1930s. Supposedly, we should treat with sympathy those who made the present radicalization of the Democratic Party possible by advocating the steps that led to it. Lowry seems to be suggesting that these out-radicalized leftists have nothing to do with the pro-Hamas Democrats, as if they were not historically linked.

Undoubtedly, Acker suffered some unpleasantness for his past Zionist stands, but the board also turned against him because of his sexually inappropriate behavior, including lewd, shocking email messages and tasteless jokes about co-eds at Michigan.  Acker’s moral suitability for the Board of Regents was vigorously challenged by, among others, a Jewish (presumably Democratic) colleague, Mark Bernstein, who then headed the Board of Regents. For the sake of accurate reporting, Lowry should have pointed out these widely publicized scandals. Instead, he leaves out of his account what seems to be a consequential reason for Acker’s rejection to focus exclusively on anti-Zionist actors. One needn’t feel any sympathy for the “Dearborn Democrats” to notice that Acker had something to do with his own deserved downfall.

Lowry makes a big deal out of the fact that, like the “Dearborn Democrats,” some people on the unauthorized right, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, have expressed anti-Israeli views. This, we are told, indicates that “we live in the age of the horseshoe.”  “Extremes on the left and the right meet on common ground from different directions; the foremost wild-eyed left-right consensus is that Israel is a malign entity with untoward power in U.S. domestic politics” Apparently, these right-left nutjobs (who are supposedly more or less indistinguishable) “will leave many Jewish Democrats feeling politically homeless.”

Allow me to ask two tactless questions: “Why exactly should anyone on the American right care if pro-Israeli leftists have been replaced by anti-Israeli leftists?” What’s wrong with these leftists is chiefly their devotion to the woke, anti-Western left, not their stance on Israel.  But let’s not forget that Jewish leftists collaborated vigorously in the anti-Western, anti-Christian radicalization of the United States, which ironically has led to their alienation from the Democratic Party. It couldn’t have happened to more deserving fools.

Also, is it really the case that “left and right come together in a horseshoe?” This, I would submit, is a self-serving assertion that self-important would-be centrists (including Lowry) pull out to damn those on their right as well as those on the far left. Somehow, I doubt that anyone would confuse Chronicles magazine for The Nation any more than they would for National Review. This seems to be an extension of the “woke right” smear that James Lindsay popularized. It’s a variation of the tactic used for decades to gatekeep against anyone to the right of Conservatism Inc., on the grounds that these dissenters inhabit “fever swamps” together with their soulmates on the radical left.

I don’t know anyone on the traditional right who is enamored of Hamas. If Candace Owens has expressed such sympathy, then it should be noted that she, Tucker Carlson, and I don’t move in the same circles. In any case, neither of these figures speaks for everyone in the spacious ideological territory located to Lowry’s right.  Yes, I do know paleoconservatives who think AIPAC is a mischievous lobby that defames any public figure who criticizes the Israeli government. I also suspect Con Inc. publicists receive megabucks from neocon donors to write silly stuff on their pet subject. Either that’s the case, or else Lowry’s writing has slipped into partisan gibberish.