OPINION:
On Tuesday, voters in Bangor, Maine, elected Angela Walker as city councilor. Nearly a quarter century ago, Ms. Walker was convicted of killing a Canadian tourist by beating him and then pouring sand down his throat to suffocate him. Allegedly, the tourist had called Ms. Walker a racist name. She identifies as Indigenous.
Ms. Walker claimed her imprisonment will help her be a voice on the council for the city’s most “vulnerable” residents amid the intersecting homelessness and addiction crises, the Maine Wire reported, adding that Ms. Walker is in recovery from addiction herself.
Convicted of a felony, Ms. Walker can’t vote. However, she can be elected to office, and she was.
On Monday, The Washington Post editorial board acknowledged that the most suspenseful race in Virginia was for its attorney general, and decency was on the ballot.
In the weeks before the election, it was revealed that Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, had privately fantasized about murdering his political opponent along with his opponent’s children.
“If Jones rides [Democratic governor candidate Abigail] Spanberger’s coattails to victory, it would be a sad reflection of a discomfiting willingness among voters to prioritize partisanship over human decency,” The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote.
On Tuesday, Mr. Jones notched nearly a 6-point victory over Republican candidate Jason Miyares.
According to a Fox News exit poll, about 1 in 4 voters said Mr. Jones’ demonic texts were “concerning,” but another 1 in 4 said they weren’t concerned about the texts at all or hadn’t heard enough about them to alter their vote.
In New York City, voters turned to an antisemitic, socialist, radicalized Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, to run the city.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Mamdani began with a quote from a self-proclaimed Bolshevik and said his parents were his inspiration. Mr. Mamdani’s father has heralded suicide bombers as heroic and claimed that Abraham Lincoln inspired Adolf Hitler. Mr. Mamdani’s mother once described her son as “not an American at all.” Mr. Mamdani was born in Uganda and moved to America when he was 7. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 2018.
Mr. Mamdani couldn’t muster an answer on whether Hamas should disarm and has yet to condemn the antisemitic rant “Globalize the Intifada,” a widely known call for violence against the Jewish population.
A moral rot is infecting the Democratic Party. Rather than rejecting extremism, Democratic voters are rewarding it.
Julian Epstein, a longtime Democratic operative, lawyer and former chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News Digital that the “near unanimous rationalizations” from Democrats regarding political violence are driven by a “moral relativism that is a race to the bottom for any civilization.”
Mr. Epstein explained, “The collective shoulder shrug about a candidate who fantasizes about the assassination of his opponents and the death of his opponent’s children is of the same piece with the new era of violent rhetoric from the left and the data showing that nearly half of young progressives think that political violence can be justified. To look the other way on this because of political expedience is to lose the plot as to why one is in the public square in the first place.”
The Democratic Party is in dire need of a strong, moral leader who will reject the party’s festering decay, rather than those who embrace it or deny it exists in the first place.
Bill Clinton was such a leader. During the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, Democratic political activist Sister Souljah was quoted as saying, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill White people? … If you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a White person?”
Speaking to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition on the campaign trail, Mr. Clinton firmly rebuked the base’s extremism.
“If you took the words ‘White’ and ‘Black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” Mr. Clinton said.
Voters rewarded Mr. Clinton for his moral clarity.
Joan Didion, who covered Mr. Clinton’s campaign, wrote that Mr. Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment served as a call for “‘an end to division’ that had at once served to distance [Clinton] from Jackson and to demonstrate that he was ‘the guy in charge,’ capable of dominating, or ‘standing up to’ a kind of Black anger that many White voters prefer to see as the basis for this country’s racial division.”
Today, can anyone within the Democratic Party be as brave? And perhaps, more important, will Democratic voters reward it?
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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