Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) published an essay this week making a direct accusation about his own party: that it is being 'overrun by antisemitism.' The occasion was Abdul El-Sayed's win in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary — a race Gottheimer says was run not on kitchen-table economics but on hostility toward Israel.
According to Gottheimer's account, El-Sayed spent the final days of his campaign alongside Hasan Piker, an online streamer who, Gottheimer writes, 'has praised Hamas, referred to Orthodox Jews as "inbred," and blamed America for 9/11.' The congressman says El-Sayed 'repeatedly question[ed] Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state' throughout the campaign.
Gottheimer does not stop at one primary. He points to a Democratic Senate nominee in Maine who, he writes, had a Nazi tattoo and 'dropped out of his race for other reasons.' He also names Tucker Carlson alongside Piker as figures on opposite ends of the political spectrum who 'repackage age-old antisemitic conspiracies and tropes as edgy commentary' to audiences of millions.
'Hate is being normalized in plain sight,' Gottheimer writes, 'and not just online. It has now manifested not only in elections, but also outside synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses.'
His conclusion is blunt: 'These sentiments are anti-American.'
Gottheimer is a founder and vice chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His willingness to publish this critique under his own name — and in his own voice, not through a spokesperson — is itself a data point worth noting.
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What Gottheimer is describing is not a fringe complaint. A sitting congressman, writing in his own name, is saying that a major American political party has a primary process capable of producing nominees who campaign on questioning a democratic ally's right to exist and who share a stage with figures who have praised a designated terrorist organization. That is a serious institutional claim, and it deserves to be treated as one.
The free-market, ordered-liberty tradition has always understood that political culture precedes policy. When the Overton window inside a party shifts — when the incentive structure rewards this kind of campaigning — the downstream consequences reach well beyond any single election. Gottheimer's warning is, at its core, a warning about institutions: that the mechanisms meant to filter out extremism are failing. Whether his party listens is, plainly, the question that matters.
