Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s willingness to stand against this evil tide is commendable.

As a matter of civic hygiene, you should feel obliged to watch this clip from the inexplicably popular Fresh and Fit show, a program that advertises itself as the “most toxic” podcast on the spectrum and was so committed to the bit that YouTube demonetized it in 2023.

Chilling stuff. It would be comforting to attribute these sorts of sentiments to the unremarkable pseudo-rebellious rejectionism that attracts young minds. But implicit in that assumption is that these are little more than expressions of youthful anxieties and ignorance that will work themselves out over time. Zohran Mamdani’s rise suggest otherwise: he was carried to victory on the backs of what the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam aptly deemed New York City’s youthful, highly educated, status-deprived “downwardly mobile elites.”

Few Democrats have been willing to say as much. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro deserves credit for his refusal to be counted among this cowardly cohort.

Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reported on Wednesday night that the Keystone State governor issued an unsparing rebuke of the figure most likely to serve as New York’s next mayor. Yes, Mamdani’s candidacy “excited New Yorkers,” Shapiro said. But he “also seemed to run a campaign where he left open far too much space for extremists to either use his words or for him to not condemn the words of extremists that said some blatantly antisemitic things.”

To judge from the above clip, Mamdani may be more a symptom of the normalization of antisemitism than its cause. Regardless, Shapiro’s willingness to call out proponents of this fashionable bigotry within his coalition is most welcome.

He continued:

I don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democratic leader or a democratic socialist leader. You have to speak and act with moral clarity, and when supporters of yours say things that are blatantly antisemitic, you can’t leave room for that to just sit there. You’ve got to condemn that.

Shapiro’s remarks to Deutch are worth reading in their entirety. The governor’s willingness to stand against this evil tide is commendable, if not remotely sufficient.