The Democratic Socialists of America won big in New York’s Democratic primaries last Tuesday. By the time the ballots were tallied, conservative media had identified a scapegoat: white people.

Specifically, “overeducated, useless white people,” in the words of the Daily Wire podcaster Ben Shapiro.

Batya Ungar-Sargon—a pro-Trump leftist—wrote a Substack essay with this imperious headline: “Stop Calling Them ‘Socialists.’ They’re Over-Credentialed White Gentrifiers Driven by Resentment Ousting Working-Class Candidates.”

For those not in the know: “White gentrification” is when white people move into an area and make it nicer, “white flight” is when they move away, making it worse, and both phenomena prove how evil white people are.

Ungar-Sargon has some expertise in the evils of white people, having authored a PhD dissertation at U.C. Berkeley that examined “how rape and colonialism contributed to the development of modern English fiction,” according to Wikipedia. So, next time your mom’s snuggled up with a book by Jane Austen, let her know that rapey colonialism made the reading experience possible.

The New York Post also did some white-bashing after the shock elections. “The Young and the Clueless,” blared the cover headline on Thursday, above a photograph of triumphant-looking young people with fists in the air. The subheadline: “Just 7% of voters, mostly white and under 30, pick Israel-hating radicals to represent Dems.”

I’m trying to imagine Shapiro calling out “useless Hispanics,” Ungar-Sargon lamenting “Jewish gentrifiers,” or the Post doing a cover story on “mostly black” street criminals.

I can easily imagine Shapiro hating on Muslims. In fact, I don’t need to imagine. “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage,” Shapiro once wrote on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter.

It’s pretty rich of Shapiro to blame white people for DSA victories. Any sentient being can see that the Democrats and hard left benefit from the country’s ongoing demographic transformation, i.e., from its becoming less white. Well, anyone but Shapiro can see that. “I don’t give a good damn about the so-called ‘browning of America,’” he wrote in 2017. “Color doesn’t matter. Ideology does.”

At least, that’s how Shapiro conceived of the relationship—or in his view, non-relationship—between ethnicity and nationhood in America. For Israel, things are different. “If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper,” Shapiro wrote two decades ago. “It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution.”

Some might even call it the final solution.

While Shapiro’s rhetoric about Muslims may have softened, his views don’t seem to have changed. “I think Israel should have gone harder and faster in Gaza,” Shapiro told Vanity Fair in a profile of him published this week. Should have gone harder and faster in Gaza. Those repulsive words should disqualify Shapiro from ever again opining on U.S. foreign policy.

In sum: Shapiro supports the forcible displacement of non-Jews from Greater Israel, even as he welcomes the dilution of America’s European stock via mass migration. Set aside your own views on those matters: Does this not seem a rather bewildering instance of moral incoherence?

The browning of America about which Shapiro doesn’t give a “good damn” is well apparent in New York City, which was 90 percent white in 1950 and is under 30 percent white today. That Gotham’s immigrant newcomers hail mostly from places outside Europe probably pleases Shapiro, given his views on the superlative importance of ideology. He’s a big booster of David Harsanyi’s book Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. 

Unfortunately, since color and ideology are more tightly correlated than Shapiro’s past comments would suggest, and not remotely in the direction he seems to believe, conservative candidates no longer stand a chance in the Big Apple.

In last year’s mayoral election, the moderate Gov. Andrew Cuomo won a majority of whites, yet the Ugandan-born, Indian-American DSA candidate Zohran Mamdani dominated the election thanks to overwhelming support from foreign-born residents, who make up around 37 percent of the city’s population.

From his new throne at Gracie Mansion, Mamdani played kingmaker in last week’s elections, as did the Turkish-American influencer Hasan Piker. They had endorsed the DSA candidates who unseated Democratic incumbents in the U.S. House: Darializa Avila Chevalier, a black Latina, and Claire Valdez, who describes herself as “a dual citizen of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Nation and the United States.” Brad Lander, a former DSA leader backed by the mayor, also won; he’s Jewish. Mamdani and Piker supported candidates down-ballot as well, such as Aber Kawas, a Palestinian-American.

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Sorry, why should white people be scapegoated for all this, exactly?

It would make more sense to blame Israel, since its assault on Gaza and out-of-control bellicosity across the Middle East has become a wedge issue within the Democratic Party, to the advantage of upstart socialists taking on an out-of-touch establishment. Given Israel’s plummeting favorability ratings among Americans, left-wing candidates may ride anti-Israel sentiment to more congressional seats and even the White House in the coming years. 

Socialism really is on the rise in America, in part due to changing demographics, but in part due also to Israel’s unseemly belligerence. That’s hardly a surprise, though Ben Shapiro never had the foresight to give a good damn. If he’d gotten his way, socialism might have risen only harder and faster.