RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was a Chicago weekend filled with gay pride events, with friends and families cheering on the marchers. But a dark cloud loomed over one event. When some lesbians showed up at the “Dyke March” with banners that included a Star of David, they were booted out.

The Jewish symbol “made us feel unsafe,” the organizers said.

As the blues-rock singer Delbert McClinton once wrote, “If you can’t lie no better than that, you might as well tell the truth.”

Noxious in its own right, this incident highlights several problems that are now pervasive on the left and increasingly pollute the public sphere. They deserve exposure and censure.

There’s no mistaking the Star of David’s meaning. It’s the universal symbol for Judaism, one seen at every synagogue—and on every “Coexist” bumper sticker. It is the centerpiece of Israel’s flag, marking it as the Jewish state. It was pinned as the mark of Cain on Jews in ghettos and concentration camps.

When the organizers of Chicago’s “Dyke March” prohibited its display, they were saying, “Jews are not welcome here if they display any symbol of their faith or cultural history.”

The irony, of course, is that gays themselves were treated this way for years. They were told to keep their heads down and never say who they really are, much less display their orientation openly, proudly. They are still treated this way in many countries, the very ones embraced by the Dyke March organizers. It’s a bizarre contortion of “progressive ideology,” one they could test by marching through Ramallah or Gaza City.

The organizers were open about why they prohibited the Jewish symbol. They loathe Israel and love Palestinian opposition to it. Of course, you could hold those views and still let others march. But that wasn’t “progressive” enough for them.

Incidents like this are not confined to a few wackos. They occur regularly at leftist protests and on college campuses. For the first time since the 1950s, anti-Semitism is voiced openly, well beyond fringe groups and “restricted” country clubs.

This resurgence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has been growing in Europe for more than a decade. On the right, it’s a return to age-old hatreds in an age of globalization and dislocation. On the left, it’s a fashionable way to show solidarity with Muslim immigrants—without actually dealing with the serious (and increasingly lethal) problems of integrating them into modern European life.

Like so many bad ideas, this New Anti-Semitism jumped the pond, landing first in universities and spreading from there. On campus, the vanguard has been Muslim activists from the Middle East and North Africa, especially Palestinians, with little regard for free speech if it conflicts with their political aims. They show up to protest at virtually all pro-Israel events (okay), and routinely disrupt them (not okay).

They have many fellow travelers, as the Dyke March shows. What they share is contempt for the First Amendment. They think views that diverge from theirs should be suppressed. Of course, they alone are allowed to make those decisions.

The Dyke March incident reveals several other disturbing trends, as well. It shows how easily the disparagement of Israel, which is nearly universal on the left, spills over into denigration of all Jews.

Ah, you say, but aren’t many Jews active on the left? Yes, but too few have fought back against their comrades’ scorn of their religion or the Jewish state. Some don’t care because they are thoroughly secular. Judaism may have been their parents’ or grandparents’ religion, but it is not theirs. Others are aggressively anti-Israel. Their presence as Jews (which they highlight) gives political cover to others’ hatred. How could we be anti-Semitic if we welcome these Jews?

Dr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon and former Republican Rep. from Georgia District 6 is secretary of health and human services.

America faces an urgent crisis in its health-care system. Costs are skyrocketing and choices are disappearing on the individual and small-group markets. Many people now confront the real challenge of having no choice in their health coverage.

One of them is Doug Lake, an Iowa radiologist who came to the White House last week to share his story. His daughter, who suffers from a rare cardiac condition, is covered by an insurer that plans to pull out of ObamaCare’s exchange in their state next year. Only one insurer remains in their county, and that company has requested a 43% increase in premiums.

The situation is even worse elsewhere. As of this week, 49 counties across the country do not have a single insurer offering plans on the exchanges next year.

This year more than 1,000 counties had only one insurer in the ObamaCare market, meaning millions of Americans had no meaningful choice. Meanwhile, the insurers that did stay in the market increased premiums for their midlevel plans by an average of 25%. Premiums on the individual market are up about $3,000 since ObamaCare was implemented. Think about what else that money could buy!

It is too early to know how much premiums will rise next year, but reports so far indicate that double-digit increases again will be the norm.

These are not simply numbers on a page: They represent real people with real stories, facing real health-care and financial crises.

Dudley Bostic, a pharmacy owner in Tennessee, can no longer afford to provide health insurance for her employees because of ObamaCare’s mandates. Candace Fowler, a Missouri homemaker who was recently diagnosed with a serious neurological condition, lives in a county where there are slated to be no insurers selling ObamaCare plans next year. Tommie McClain, a student in Clinton, Mo., who suffers from chronic migraines, faces the possibility of zero choices in his county, too.

The good news is that Congress has the chance to help Doug, Dudley, Candace, Tommie and the millions of other Americans suffering under this law by undoing the damage done by ObamaCare and fulfilling the promises President Trump has made.

The bill recently introduced in the Senate would get rid of the individual mandate, which in 2015 alone caused 6.5 million Americans to pay $3 billion in penalties to the IRS because they did not want or could not afford a government-dictated health plan. It would directly repeal some of ObamaCare’s most costly regulations while giving states flexibility to waive others if they develop innovative ways to provide coverage and bring down costs.

The Senate’s plan also would repeal hundreds of billions of dollars in onerous taxes. It would put Medicaid on a sustainable spending path and give states a real chance to reform the program to make it work for the people who rely on it.

In the Sunday Washington Post’s 7,000-word account of what President Obama knew about Russian election meddling and what he did about it, one absence is notable. Nowhere in the Post’s lengthy tick-tock is Mr. Obama presented with evidence of, or described as worried about, Trump collusion with Russia.

Moscow intervened in the election eight ways from Sunday, but it’s clearer than ever that what’s occupied Americans for the past six months are baseless accusations about the Trump campaign.

Among the evidence on Mr. Obama’s desk was proof that Vladimir Putin was personally directing the Russian espionage effort. For a variety of sensible reasons, though, the White House and U.S. intelligence also concluded that Russia’s meddling was “unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election.”

President Obama made at least one inevitably political calculation: Hillary Clinton was going to win, so he would keep relatively mum on Russian interference to avoid provoking “escalation from Putin” or “potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph,” in the Post’s words.

Strangely missing from the Post account, however, is one Russian intervention, revealed by the paper’s own earlier reporting, that may really have, in farcical fashion, elected Donald Trump.

This was FBI Director James Comey’s ill-fated decision to clear Hillary Clinton publicly on intelligence-mishandling charges. His choice, it now appears, was partly shaped by a false intelligence document referring to a nonexistent Democratic email purporting to confirm that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had vowed to quash any Hillary charges.

On April 23, the New York Times first alluded to the document’s existence in an 8,000-word story about Mr. Comey’s intervention.

On May 24, the Post provided a detailed description of the document and revealed that many in the FBI considered it “bad intelligence,” possibly a Russian plant.

On May 26, CNN adumbrated that Mr. Comey “knew that a critical piece of information relating to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email was fake—created by Russian intelligence—but he feared that if it became public it would undermine the probe and the Justice Department itself.”

“In at least one classified session [before Congress],” CNN added, “Comey cited that intelligence as the primary reason he took the unusual step of publicly announcing the end of the Clinton email probe. . . . Comey did not even mention the other reason he gave in public testimony for acting independently of the Justice Department—that Lynch was compromised because Bill Clinton boarded her plane and spoke to her during the investigation.”

Why has this apparently well-documented, and eminently documentable, episode fallen down the memory hole, in favor of a theory for which there is no evidence, of collusion by the outsider Mr. Trump?

The alternative history is incalculable, but consider: If Mr. Comey had followed established practice, the Hillary investigation would have been closed without an announcement, or the conflicted Ms. Lynch or an underling would have cleared Mrs. Clinton. How would this have played with voters and the media? Would the investigation’s reopening in the race’s final days, with discovery of the Weiner laptop, have taken place? Would the reopening have become public knowledge? CONTINUE AT SITE

In one of the last decisions of its term, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a clear rebuke to politicized lower courts. The justices’ unanimous ruling in Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project upholds both the integrity of the judiciary and the Supreme Court’s own authority.

The case came to the justices from two federal appellate courts. They had upheld trial judges’ orders halting enforcement of President Trump’s “travel ban” executive order, which temporarily limits entry to the U.S. by nationals from six countries. The court will hear the appeal on the merits in October. On Tuesday it held unanimously that the executive order can be immediately enforced, with narrow exceptions, until they address the merits of these cases in the fall.

The challenges to the order claimed it violated the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom and exceeded the president’s authority under immigration law. Both the substance and tone of these decisions created an unmistakable impression that a portion of the judiciary has joined the anti-Trump “resistance.” Not only did the lower-court judges defy clear and binding Supreme Court precedent, they based much of their legal analysis, incredibly, on Candidate Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

The high court didn’t rule entirely in the administration’s favor. By a 6-3 vote, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissenting, it held that the individuals who originally challenged the order could continue to do so, as could a carefully defined class of “similarly situated” persons with “close familial” relationships to individuals in the United States, along with institutions that can show a “formal, documented, and formed in the ordinary course” relationship to a U.S. entity.

That, the court specifically cautioned, is not an invitation for evasion by immigration advocates: “For example, a nonprofit group devoted to immigration issues may not contact foreign nationals from the designated countries, add them to client lists, and then secure their entry by claiming injury from their exclusion.”

That exception, Justice Thomas noted for the dissenters, was a “compromise”—most likely the product of Chief Justice John Roberts’s effort to achieve a unanimous decision. Given the circumstances, this was a good outcome. It lends the imprimatur of the full court to the rebuke of the lower courts, and avoids the kind of partisan split that prevailed in both the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals. All nine justices are also now on record supporting the proposition that the vast majority of foreign nationals cannot claim a constitutional right to enter the United States.

When the court reviews the merits of the case in the fall, however, such considerations will be out of place. While courts can adjudicate cases involving immigration and other foreign affairs issues, judicial engagement in this space is fundamentally different than in domestic affairs. In an area of decision-making that involves both institutional knowledge of international affairs and continuous access to classified information, great deference is in order from the courts. If the courts wade into this area, they would undermine both national security and respect for the judiciary. The perception that judging is swayed by political or ideological considerations would be particularly calamitous in this area. Better a 5-4 decision articulating this view clearly than a unanimous but equivocal one.

The odds of a clear outcome are good. As Justice Thomas pointed out, his colleagues’ “implicit conclusion” is that the administration is likely to prevail on the merits. The high court’s own precedent in this area is clear. Nonresident aliens have no constitutional right to enter the U.S. When denying entry, the president need only provide a “facially legitimate and bona fide” justification. As the court held in Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), once that justification is established, there is no further inquiry or balancing for the courts to make. CONTINUE AT SITE

This weekend, at a lesbian march in Chicago, three women carrying Jewish pride flags — rainbow flags embossed with a Star of David — were kicked out of the celebration on the grounds that their flags were a “trigger.” An organizer of the Dyke March told the Windy City Times that the fabric “made people feel unsafe” and that she and the other members of the Dyke March collective didn’t want anything “that can inadvertently or advertently express Zionism” at the event.

Laurel Grauer, one of the women who was ejected, said she’d been carrying that Jewish pride flag in the march, held on the Saturday before the city’s official Pride Parade, for more than a decade. It “celebrates my queer, Jewish identity,” she explained. This year, however, she lost track of the number of people who harassed her for carrying it.

I’m sorry for the women, like Ms. Grauer, who found themselves under genuine threat for carrying a colorful cloth falsely accused of being pernicious.

But I am also grateful.

Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of “intersectionality” than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March

Intersectionality is the big idea of today’s progressive left. In theory, it’s the benign notion that every form of social oppression is linked to every other social oppression. This observation — coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw — sounds like just another way of rephrasing a slogan from a poster I had in college: My liberation is bound up with yours. That is, the fight for women’s rights is tied up with the fight for gay rights and civil rights and so forth. Who would dissent from the seductive notion of a global sisterhood?

Well, in practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.

Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.

One of the women who was asked to leave the Dyke March, Eleanor Shoshany Anderson, couldn’t understand why she was kicked out of an event that billed itself as intersectional. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional,” she said. “I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I felt that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”

She isn’t. Because though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.

That’s why the march organizers and their sympathizers are now trying to smear Ms. Grauer as some sort of right-wing provocateur. Their evidence: She works at an organization called A Wider Bridge, which connects the L.G.B.T.Q. Jewish community in America with the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Israel. The organizers are also making the spurious claim that the Jewish star is necessarily a symbol of Zionist oppression — a breathtaking claim to anyone who has ever seen a picture of a Jew forced to wear a yellow one under the Nazis.

No, the truth is that it was no more and no less than anti-Semitism. Just read Ms. Shoshany Anderson’s account of her experience, which she posted on Facebook after being kicked out of the march.

“I wanted to be in public as a gay Jew of Persian and German heritage. Nothing more, nothing less. So I made a shirt that said ‘Proud Jewish Dyke’ and hoisted a big Jewish Pride flag — a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the center, the centuries-old symbol of the Jewish people,” she wrote. “During the picnic in the park, organizers in their official t-shirts began whispering and pointing at me and soon, a delegation came over, announcing they’d been sent by the organizers. They told me my choices were to roll up my Jewish Pride flag or leave. The Star of David makes it look too much like the Israeli flag, they said, and it triggers people and makes them feel unsafe. This was their complaint.”

She tried to explain that the star is the “ubiquitous symbol of Judaism,” and that she simply wanted “to be Jewish in public.” Then, she “tried using their language,” explaining “this is my intersection. I’m supposed to be able to celebrate it here.”

It didn’t work. Ms. Shoshany Anderson left sobbing. “I was thrown out of Dyke March for being Jewish,” she said. Just so.

For progressive American Jews, intersectionality forces a choice: Which side of your identity do you keep, and which side do you discard and revile? Do you side with the oppressed or with the oppressor?

That kind of choice would have been familiar to previous generations of left-wing Jews, particularly those in Europe, who felt the tug between their ethnic heritage and their “internationalist” ideological sympathies. But this is the United States. Here, progressives are supposed to be comfortable with the idea of hyphenated identities and overlapping ethnic, sexual and political affinities. Since when did a politics that celebrates choice — and choices — devolve into a requirement of being forced to choose?

Jews on the left, particularly in recent years, have attempted to square this growing discomfort by becoming more anti-Israel. But if history has taught the Jews anything it’s that this kind of contortion never ends well.

It may be wrong to read too much into an ugly incident at a single march, but Jews should take what happened in Chicago as a lesson that they might not be as welcome among progressives as they might imagine. That’s a warning for which to be grateful, even as it is a reminder that anti-Semitism remains as much a problem on the far-left as it is on the alt-right.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor in The Times opinion section.

It’s not anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Zionism. It just happens to be completely and totally indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

One marcher, Laurel Grauer, said she was harassed by other Dyke March attendees before being told she needed to leave with her flag.

“It was a flag from my congregation which celebrates my queer, Jewish identity which I have done for over a decade marching in the Dyke March with the same flag,” she told Windy City Times.

“They were telling me to leave because my flag was a trigger to people that they found offensive,” she added. “Prior to this [march] I had never been harassed or asked to leave and I had always carried the flag with me.”

The organizers of the march told the Times the event was a pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist one and that the flags made people feel unsafe.

One Dyke March collective member, asked by Windy City Times for a response, said the women were told to leave because the flags “made people feel unsafe,” that the march was “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Palestinian.”

“They were telling me to leave because my flag was a trigger to people that they found offensive,” Grauer said. “Prior to this [march] I had never been harassed or asked to leave and I had always carried the flag with me.”

Another of those individuals asked to leave was an Iranian Jew Eleanor Shoshany-Anderson.

“I was here as a proud Jew in all of my identities,” Shoshany-Anderson asserted. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional. I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I fell that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”

Jews are not welcome in the left. Unless they make war on other Jews. And even then, they eventually get gulaged.

Here’s an issue on which liberals and conservatives agree: policing the mentally ill. The two sides may have arrived at that position through different underlying beliefs, but they got there. Here’s a problem: In Texas, a conservative legislature passed, and a conservative governor just signed, the Sandra Bland Act, a law that sets a high, national bar for policies and procedures in mental health and criminal justice, and progressives haven’t yet noticed just how much this bill advances their cause. In fact, they’re complaining.

That’s not a surprise. Progressives (especially in the Northeast and California) often look down on Texas. It’s not that Texas doesn’t sometimes deserve it. A few recent bills in the state legislature rode one stop too far on the crazy train, using conservative language to describe laws that would have vastly expanded government in the service of dodgy goals.

But on the whole, the laws that Texas passes laws on police reform, limited government, and open records are remarkable and serve as models for “progressive states” like California, whose open-records and police-transparency laws are vastly inferior.

Conservative Texans support law and order, and their expectations are high. This support is deep, so when a cop goes bad, Texans are not forgiving. Brian T. Encinia, the Texas state trooper who was so unnecessarily rude to Sandra Bland, over so little, and who later lied about the encounter in which he arrested her, was told exactly why his performance was unacceptable, charged with perjury, and then unceremoniously sacked. That wasn’t because the media were watching.

It was because that’s how Texas troopers roll.

Bland’s death in a Waller County jail cell, three days after her arrest, was ruled to have been a suicide. Yet nationally, in nearly every debate about policing, activists raise Sandra Bland’s case to demonstrate just how untenable the system is.

Regardless of why or how she was arrested, Bland was incarcerated for three days in conditions wholly inappropriate for her detention. I believe she would be alive today had someone brought her for a psychiatric evaluation after Bland told them, as she was admitted to the jail, that she had recently attempted suicide.

That’s part of what the Sandra Bland Act, signed by Governor Abbott this month, does. It requires managers in jails to determine whether inmates suffer from mental illness, and it diverts those who do to a mental-health facility. The law goes further: It also calls for all Texas peace officers to undergo every two years training in de-escalation, crisis intervention, and means of evaluating whether they are dealing with someone with mental illness. This will ensure that officers have the tools to divert people to treatment before they’re arrested. Finally, the law calls for steps to ensure that jail cells are properly inspected and requires that all jail deaths be investigated independently.

That sounds like a lot of regulation and government — why should conservatives be happy?

Because if it is done right, the law will result in less police involvement in situations with the mentally ill, and fewer mentally ill people will get caught up in the criminal-justice system. This will save taxpayers money. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reckons that jailing a mentally ill person can be three times more expensive than hospitalization. But — and it’s not often we get to say this — that’s not even the best part.

By 1968, voters had tired of the failed Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. Four year later, the 1972 Nixon reelection re-emphasized that a doubled-down McGovern liberalism was even less of a viable agenda.

In that context, in 1974, obsessing on Watergate and a demonized Nixon were wise liberal alternatives to running on a positive left-wing vision, given the growing conservative backlash of the 1970s.

After Watergate and the Ford pardon, Jimmy Carter squeaked to a close victory and a one-term presidency — before the country tired of his strident liberalism poorly cloaked in conservative clothing. Bill Clinton’s third-way centrism eventually was a winning Democratic alternative to regain the presidency — albeit with help from two Ross Perot third-party candidacies. Given these historical reminders, the current efforts at Trump character assassination may be the best — or only — progressive pathway back to political power.

In the last few days, the Democratic party lost its fourth special House election; most of the four were billed in advance as likely negative referenda on the contentious first six months of the Trump presidency. Post facto, the uniformly unwelcomed results were written off as idiosyncratic outliers of no importance.

Shortly before the Georgia election, a hard-left-wing killer attacked the players at a congressional baseball practice, intent on the assassination of Republican legislators, whom he had targeted on his hit list. The shooter was foiled, but not before seriously wounding Steve Scalise, the current Republican majority whip in the House.

The two events in saner times might have prompted introspection about why the Democrats keep losing elections and why a hard-core progressive supporter would seek to assassinate key Republican leaders. Indeed, for a brief moment, there were calls on both sides of the aisle to scale back inflammatory rhetoric that in theory might push such politicized would-be shooters over the edge. One might have hoped that self-reflective Democrats could begin to grasp why voters distrusted them more than they feared Trump.

Such moments quickly vanished. Progressives saw any remedies to identity politics as worse than the disease of electoral defeat. Elizabeth Warren, with her trademark rancor, was once again talking about Republican “blood money” — as if her opponents in the Congress were legislative assassins rather than the recent targets of such. An increasingly addled Hillary Clinton (she had loudly joined the “Resistance”) accused the GOP of becoming the “death party,” reminding the country why progressive fanatics such as James Hodgkinson might think rifle fire is the only answer to conservatives who traffic in blood.

Meanwhile, another day, another Hollywood celebrity dreaming of, or advocating, the assassination of Donald Trump: This time a disturbed Johnny Depp (playing the role of Kathy Griffin or Snoop Dogg) mused out loud about repeating a John Wilkes Booth–style shooting. Since January, left-wing pundits and celebrities have alluded that Trump might be decapitated, stabbed by a mob, shot, punched, hit with a bat, blown up, strung up, and flipped off. Incineration and drowning are about the last modes of Trump mayhem left unsaid.

Barack Obama, amid the assassination chic and the obscenity of key Democrats such as Kamala Harris, Tom Perez, and Kirsten Gillibrand, recently remonstrated about the evils of inequality and the need for more diversity — at $10,000 a minute to largely white, Wall Street audiences, while wining about the ongoing recalibration of his failed Obamacare project. That is what passes for 21st-century progressive community organizing.

Left unsaid was that Obama had virtually destroyed the Democratic party, which during his tenure lost more than 1,000 state and local elections and both the House and the Senate. Obama left a personal legacy of a party agenda that had no popular support, an incoming Republican presidency, a conservative Supreme Court, a tenure to be systematically overturned, and a one-time progressive electoral paradigm that could work only for himself while imploding almost any other candidate foolish enough to try to replicate it.

And progressives oddly loved him for all that.

It is said that Democrats are in an existential crisis because of their obsessions with Donald Trump — suing over the election, trying to subvert the Electoral College, dreaming of impeachment and the 25th Amendment, filing briefs under the emoluments clause of the Constitution, stalling appointments, relying on deep-state insurrectionary bureaucrats, cherry-picking liberal judges for obstructive passes, and going from one conspiracy theory to the next as collusion begat obstruction that begat witness tampering. More outsider advice is for Democrats to focus instead on their agenda.