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Four years ago, Mike Schmidt handily won the election to be the top prosecutor in the Portland, Ore., area, expanding the ranks of progressives looking to remake the criminal justice system from the inside.

But he faces a daunting re-election bid from one of his deputies at the Multnomah County District Attorneys Office. His rival, Nathan Vasquez, a deputy district attorney, has blamed Mr. Schmidt for Portlands recent problems with drugs and crime.

Many residents have said they are fed up with the citys troubles a sentiment shared by big-city residents across the country since the pandemic, but one that is perhaps more acute in Portland. Homicides there hit record highs in 2021 and 2022. Businesses have fled the city center. Homelessness has soared. Opioid overdose deaths have tripled.

Mr. Vasquez has said that he wants to take on lawless behavior and prosecute even petty crimes. Mr. Schmidt, who campaigned in 2020 on making low-level crimes a lower priority, has responded to voter concerns by trying to burnish his law-and-order credentials. He supported a partial rollback of Oregons pioneering drug decriminalization law this year and dedicated more staff members to prosecuting violent crime. Car theft numbers have dropped rapidly in the past year, and he has touted that progress.

Voters across the West Coast have sent signals in the last few years that they want to see a crackdown on crime. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican as the citys lead prosecutor for low-level crimes. The next year, voters in San Francisco recalled that citys progressive prosecutor, Chesa Boudin.

Mr. Vasquez was previously registered as a Republican. The post under contest in Tuesdays primary is nonpartisan, with only two candidates on the ballot. Whoever gets more than 50 percent of the vote will lead the office next year.

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Progressive Prosecutor in Portland Faces Bitter Challenge From Co-Worker - The New York Times

Progressive New York Democrats on Capitol Hill are offering a stark warning to young voters, as polls show President Joe Bidens support from that voting bloc lagging compared to 2020.

They also have advice for the incumbent.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman told Spectrum News NY1 he understands young people's frustration. "I feel much of the same frustration, he said before invoking Donald Trump. The former president getting back in will be 10 times, 100 times worse than what we have right now.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in an interview, pointed to the legislative stakes in November, such as the future of climate change and affordable housing policy.

I just dont personally think we can afford to wait another four years for us to try to tackle these issues, she said.

In a Siena College/New York Times poll conducted in late April and early May, Biden beat Trump in a head-to-head matchup by just 4 percentage points among voters aged 18 to 29.

That is a significantly smaller margin than 2020. Siena College Research Institute Director Don Levy saidBiden won that age bracket by about 24 points.

According to Levy, part of the reason for the shift is the economy and inflation, which polling shows are the top issue for those voters.

By 33 points, right now, they trust Trump more than Biden as a steward of the economy, he said.

So what should Biden do?

For starters, after weeks of college protests over the Israel-Hamas war, both New York Squad members urged the president to heed the concerns ofprogressives and activists and try to bring stability to the region.

But they both were also eager to see the conversation turn back home.

It's making sure that we end this siege on Gaza and can focus on all the issues that matter to us, Ocasio-Cortez said.

We have to do something about affordability, childcare, utilities, housing - housing in particular - and that includes holding corporations accountable, Bowman said.

The progressives also offered some praise for Biden. Bowman noted that the president has been receptive when pushed on policy, citing rent stabilization as an example.

Ocasio-Cortez argued Biden has been effective on some major policy fronts, such as making historic investments in climate change and expanding the child tax credit. She also said such an observation can be true even if young voters are also concerned about Bidens foreign policy.

We can hold both of these things at the same time, she said.

She urged young voters to think of the big picture, saying November is about more than just one match-up.

It's about our actual legislative goals, right? she said. The only way we can do that is if Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn is Speaker, if Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn is the Senate Majority Leader, and if Joe Biden is President of the United States.

With summer just around the corner, Biden now has just five and a half months left to turn more young voters around.

See the rest here:
Progressives warn young voters, as Biden's polling lags - Spectrum News NY1

Opposition to the two-state solution was once the province of a small group of rightists who were ideologically opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state. Eventually they were joined by a more pragmatic and hawkish contingent alarmed by the rise and popularity of Hamas and other Iranian-controlled proxies. Those two groups then benefited from the deflation of the Oslo balloon, in which many who supported Palestinian self-governance in theory had become disillusioned by the terrorism that followed each Israeli concession.

Those two latter categories are persuadable. The pragmatists can be swayed by the defeat of Iranian terror gangs and the emergencehowever farfetched it might beof a homegrown Palestinian nationalist party that reflects the changes in the region and makes its peace with Israels existence. The disillusioned can be swayed, perhaps, by the same thing that made them disillusioned in the first place: a change in Palestinian culture and behavior.

Yet all of those disparate pockets of opposition to a two-state solution might pale in comparison to the one that has only recently shown its strengththat of the ideological left.

Historically, support for Palestinian self-determination was synonymous with two states for two peoples, a concept with enduring support on the political left. Support for a Palestinian state itself remains high among self-described Democrats in the U.S., but that has become disentangled from the two-state solution, primarily because many progressives have come to believe that a Palestinian state would be the only legitimate one. This trend has left Israeli liberals with no real support system abroad, because even Israelis who support Palestinian statehood tend not to support the dismantling and annihilation of their country, their people, and their family. Thats a sticking point that isnt going away.

The post-October 7 pro-Hamas protests were revelatory in this way. Those inclined to dismiss these demonstrations by waving them away as college silliness must understand that the campus portions of the response to the Gaza war are a later development, evidence of the bandwagon effect. Immediately upon the news of Hamass success in carrying out the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, progressive organizers were out in force. The protest movement did not rise in response to anything Israel said or did; it was a true out-of-the-woodwork moment for Hamas superfans. It was as if a hard-luck baseball team made the World Series for once: Everybody who wanted to see Hamas win but hadnt made their Hamas fandom much of a priority suddenly came to claim their share of the spoils. The Democratic Socialists of America held what was essentially a victory party in New York.

Soon these demonstrations took to the halls of Congress, where staffers openly sympathized (and even occasionally defected to) the pressure groups attacking their bosses. Eventually Democratic representatives, and then senators, began to capitulate. Democratic-aligned super-donors kept the pro-Hamas demonstrators flush with cash. Elite university presidents granted the tentifadas wish lists, ceding them power over the administrating of the campuses. President Biden, the last holdout, folded and let them influence his foreign policy.

It would be one thing if this entire movement were merely indifferent to the two-state solution. But in fact it is undergirded by hostility to any Jewish sovereignty at all. The larger progressive movement from which it sprang has long been of the opinion that the vital conflict in Israel is over what happened in 1948, not 1967that is, the existence of Israel, not the expansion of its borders or territory, is the original sin that must be rectified.

The ideological engine behind this is decolonization, an upside-down anti-Western and antidemocratic theory of which Israel is only a part. But its a large part, because anti-Semitism does not do portion control. The flat-earther idea that Jews arent native to Judea or that the people of Israel arent from the Land of Israel is silly on its face, but the combination of ideology and conspiracy theory makes it impervious to facts and evidence in the minds of its true believers.

You do not, as Bob Dylan sang, need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. But the Weathermen are the ones with that wind at their backs.

Sometimes the easiest way to see this is by paying attention to those whose professional lives depend on their ability to anticipate shifting orthodoxy. In an April interview with Politico, Patrick Gaspard, president and CEO of the influential Democratic think tank the Center for American Progress, suggested the two-state solution might be a dead end. He and his interviewer then had this exchange:

You dont see a two state solution as a plausible outcome?

I firmly believe Israel must exist as a state. But I also believe Palestinians if we are going to solve this problem need to exist in an Israel that is inclusive of their full rights.

The pushback has always been that if you have a single state, you cant have a Jewish majority state that is democratic in Israel.

I think that taking out the possibility of coexistence is, in itself, really cynical and tragic.

Gaspard later tried to walk it back, so the finger-in-the-wind take is that Israels existence is at least still open to discussion on his side of the aisle. But the shift is pronounced and the forces driving that shift still have all the momentum.

See more here:
Will the Progressive Left Bury the Two-State Solution For Good? - Commentary Magazine

Across the nation, college administrators are cracking down on pro-Palestenian speech. In Texas, police violently broke up peaceful protests, and one college even reportedly told students that they couldn't use the phrases "Israel," "Zionism," or chant in Arabic. At Brandeis University, police shut down a pro-Palestine protest because its president said it had "devolved into the invocation of hate speech."

While progressives have tended to support campus censorship efforts in recent years, an article in Vox by writer Eric Levitz argues that the left should embrace free speechand that its push to censor speech in the name of inclusion and social justice was misguided.

"Should students concerned with social justice rethink their previous skepticism of free speech norms, for the sake of better protecting radical dissent? I think the answer is yes." wrote Levitz. "There is reason to believe that progressives would be better equipped to resist the present crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy had social justice activists not previously popularized an expansive conception of harmful speech."

Levitz's article also argues that rejecting censorship could lead the left to find more allies when their ideas are on the chopping block.

"In a world where right-of-center intellectuals had more cause for believing that their defense of leftists' free expression would be reciprocated," Levitz wrote, "it seems plausible that opposition to the Antisemitism Awareness Act might be a bit more widespread and its prospects for clearing the Senate somewhat dimmer."

While Levitz's piece is refreshing, its support for free speech isn't about adopting a new appreciation for the principles of free expression, regardless of political viewpoint. It's about adopting the best policies to protect left-wing ideas.

Save several paragraphs reminding progressives that debate is necessary for finding the truth and that "the more insulated any ideological orthodoxy is from critique, the more vulnerable it will be to persistent errors," Levitz's argument is pragmatic in nature. He spends most of the piececorrectlyarguing that if progressives had been willing to take a stand against censorship of right-wing beliefs, the current norms allowing for the censorship of pro-Palestine activists would not have been set in place.

However, if your reason to defend speech is purely practical and self-interested, it becomes much easier to indulge in exceptions to your free speech principles. Surely, allowing the censorship of the most offensive, unproductive viewpoints couldn't be used to justify the suppression of your own, much better, ideas, right?

Levitz even hints at such exceptions. "If adopting a permissive attitude toward campus speech entailed significant costs to progressive causes, then doing so might be unwise," he wrote, later adding, "Defending free speech and standing up for the disempowered may sometimes be competing objectives."

When your defense of free speech comes from a core, universal principle, calls for censorship are unthinkable. This is why, for example, it's so frustrating to see Levitz group the First Amendment nonprofit the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) with a long list of "conservatives" who have spoken out against censorship of pro-Palestinian activism.

FIREand everyone else smeared as "conservative" for standing up against censorshipdoesn't begrudgingly defend left-wing speech so that right-wing speech will stay protectedthey're a nonpartisan organization that defends First Amendment rights because they believe fiercely in the importance of free speech.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that Levitz's piece still doesn't make the core realization that there can be true, principled, defenders of free speechthose who truly think a nation with more ideas and more voices, even offensive ones, is better than one with fewer. Instead, he sees speech protections as a kind of truce, a decision from both the left and right to leave each other alone so they can both best further their political goals.

We would have a better, more functional world if more peopleleft or rightwere willing to passionately defend the free speech rights of those with whom they disagree. However, getting to that world requires that people let go of the idea that censorship is ever a good idea, not merely that it's impractical.

More here:
'Vox' Wants Progressives To Support Free Speech For The Wrong Reasons - Reason

In college, Nellie Bowles looked up writers she saw on the front page of The New York Times to deconstruct their career paths to success; she repeated in front of the mirror: Hi, its Nellie Bowles, with The New York Times. She got the coveted job in 2017, writing stories about business and tech, and threw herself into the Times culture, going to happy hours with colleagues and working weekends. But around 2020, in the height of the pandemic, and in the aftermath of George Floyds murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, something started to shift.

In her new book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, Bowles documents that shift in her observations of the progressive left and its policies, which she believes went radically astray.

Its the New Progressive at the center of the movement she writes about. (The term woke is too laden with baggage now, she told me, and feels dated, stale, clumsy, and also too politicized.)

It was a new era, she writes. Liberals those weak, wishy-washy compromisers, the hemmers and hawers were out. Washing them away was the New Progressive.

In the book, Bowles tells the stories she wasnt allowed to tell at the Times: She writes, for example, about Seattles Capitol Hill neighborhood, which transformed into a police-free autonomous zone, or CHAZ, Antifa protests, and the experience of attending an anti-racism training called The Toxic Trends of Whiteness.

Bowles, 36, is a sarcastic and humorous observer, whose tone nods to the excesses and absurdity of these progressive efforts. The ideology that came shrieking in would go on to reshape America in some ways that are interesting and even good, and in other ways that are appalling, but mostly in ways that are I hate to say it funny, she writes in the book.

The New York Times reviewed the book, calling it sneering, and saying the journalist Nellie Bowles relies more on sarcasm than argument or ideas.

After leaving the Times in 2021, Bowles joined The Free Press, a new media company founded by Bari Weiss, who resigned from The New York Times in 2020 with a public letter, citing that she was the subject of constant bullying and was openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels. At The Free Press, Bowles is the head of strategy and writes a weekly humor column called TGIF.

Bowles, who is expecting her second child, spoke to Deseret from her home in Los Angeles. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Deseret News: When did you first start questioning your own views about the response to the events of 2020 and their aftermath?

Nellie Bowles: I never much questioned my place in the mainstream media. I was a successful young reporter at the Times. I was doing stories I really cared about and loved writing. I was having fun. I was doing send-ups of silly Silicon Valley trends, or cool Silicon Valley trends or political figures. It was all pretty natural how life was unfolding.

For me, as 2019 came, and then 2020, the areas of acceptable curiosity started to narrow. And suddenly a movement that had been kind of a fringe movement that you could ignore, or be part of without it taking over your life, announced itself all of a sudden very loudly. For instance, NPR put out a statement in 2020, saying that they were not covering the Hunter Biden laptop story, because its a non-story. Adolescent gender dysphoria or COVID origins some of the most interesting topics in America were other stories you were not supposed to report on or (you had to) align your reporting with the dominant narratives of the day.

The personality traits of a good journalist, like being suspicious, objective or the belief in the idea that the truth is hard they were off the table. Within the mainstream, many, many very interesting topics became out of bounds. Thats just really hard for any curious person. That was the shift that I managed to get in a lot of trouble with.

DN: How did the revolution and its ideas spread at The New York Times?

NB: I think the revolution thats happened in the mainstream American press has been bottom up, not top down. Its not that the bosses of the newspapers and the magazines sat down and said, Were going to clamp down on the curious reporters. It tended to be newer and younger staff who didnt come into journalism to do the traditional news stuff. They came to be a tool of the revolution and of social change; they were on a mission. We had situations at the Times where in all-company, 3000-person Slack rooms, a Wirecutter editor would go after a top political reporter. Thats how it entered the bloodstream.

This was happening with a lot of different publications, and this is whats happening now with American universities. I dont think the presidents of these universities are ideologues in general its a bottom-up revolution.

DN: In one of the chapters that stood out the most to me, you recount what happened in an anti-racism training course. What did you expect going into it and what surprised you?

NB: Going into it, I knew some of the rhetoric I was going to see, but I was surprised by what I saw and how much it impacted me. In the book, I try to trace how anti-racist work went from being something that happens externally something that happens by doing activism to change laws to something that happens internally. It becomes more of a therapeutic anti-racism, where its all about dismantling whiteness inside yourself, dismantling your white traits, and those are defined as things such as perfectionism and urgency. To some extent, its anti-action. It says, dont try to improve tangible things like laws and impose your white values on society.

When I dove into this therapeutic work, I was surprised how deeply I felt it all as an outsider, who went in skeptical. I dont know if the result is good or bad or if it improves the lives for people of color in America, but it was powerful there is a reason why Robin DiAngelos book White Fragility was so popular. The therapeutic model of anti-racism tells you that the most important thing that you can do to fight racism in America is to fight your own perfectionism and to stop trying so hard.

Thats a really different way of thinking about improving the world. And I dont totally believe that. I think we can actually make quite a lot of change through the old-world style of activism and the old liberal values-type activism.

DN: You write about the failure of San Francisco, where you grew up. How did San Francisco contribute to your disillusionment with progressive policies?

NB: Being at The New York Times definitely opened my eyes to this movement, but it was really seeing San Francisco and being a local there that made me see that sometimes beautiful ideas can have results that are the opposite of what you intended. Being a San Franciscan over the last decade has been a humbling experience. It made me less sure of my politics and my belief system.

You see the city and you realize, maybe harm-reduction approaches dont work, because youre walking past someone whos dying on the sidewalk. How is it that this beautiful philosophy is not connected to a beautiful end result? Dont get me wrong the city itself is gorgeous, but the soaring fentanyl deaths make you have to wrestle with reality if youre living in San Francisco. And there is no one to blame but your own ideas. Everyone in San Francisco is a progressive, so there is no outsider you can point to and say, They did this.

I find that the best way to start a conversation with people who disagree with you politically; there is debate on how to achieve the outcome, how to achieve less racist policing and fewer people dying on the streets of fentanyl. There is debate on how to get there, but we all want the same thing. But in the last couple of years, there is much more of a consensus actually in San Francisco. I would say the moderates have won.

DN: Some would say the progressive movement has peaked. What do you think this movement might look like in the future?

NB: The book is called The Morning After the Revolution because I think the heat of the moment, the heat of the revolution has passed. Even though there is unrest on college campuses, its not the tens of thousands of people you saw marching before. I think (the progressive ideology) basically became institutionalized, the values of the moment are now woven into corporate America, theyre woven into academic America, theyre woven into our institutions. So it doesnt need to be as loud, it doesnt need to announce itself with screams and fire. Its just taken for granted now.

Thats the shift the movement won. The book grapples with what it is that won exactly, and also why? I hope and try in the book to show the appeal of a lot of these moments, the appeal of the anti-racism training, the appeal of even a group like Antifa, the group that introduces elements of violence into protests. I dont think you can understand our current moment without acknowledging that these things were appealing for a reason.

DN: Is there a future for free-thinking journalists in the mainstream media?

NB: Im optimistic. There are various new media companies that are cropping up now, like The Free Press, that are trying to fill this new void. I also think through the creation of new institutions and their success the old institutions will start to course-correct. There is an appetite and hunger. Most Americans dont have really perfectly aligned politics with one party or another. Most Americans are kind of messy and believe a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Most people dont want to be shoved in a little partisan box, and thats really a good thing about Americans. And it says a lot about our miserable partisan boxes and how constrained they are.

I mean, people also like red meat and their op-eds about how Donald Trump is the end of the world for the thousandth time. But there is interest in complexity. It turns out that there are a lot of people who want something thats between the NPR and the Daily Wire, and that offers a little more surprise and that offers a little more complexity to the world than those two places. Thats been heartening and exciting.

Read more:
Nellie Bowles book: Who are the 'New Progressives'? - Deseret News