Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro is perhaps the top contender to be Kamala Harris’s running mate. But Shapiro would be an awful selection, with a history of alienating and antagonizing core party constituencies and caving to pressure on major issues.
I gotta say, I didn’t know much about Shapiro before this so started, and frankly I still don’t.
But nothing is more suspicious than seeing someone go from limited mention to being called a zionist constantly, 0 to 100 like I’ve seen with Shapiro.
I think that’s a pretty natural consequence of:
Reports that he is the front-runner to be Harris’s vice-presidential pick (which pretty naturally takes someone from “who?” to the topic of national discussion); and
The Philadelphia Inquirer digging up an old op-ed where he says that the Palestinians are incapable of governing themselves.
I’m going to skip over everything else that has been reported about that op-ed and focus on that one line. Because that is bonkers.
I do believe people’s political opinions can change, and that’s why I’ll forgive most of the op-ed (my opinions have certainly changed since I was 20, and I’m not much younger than Shapiro). But that one line speaks to a bigoted, colonialist mindset that would have been more at home in the 1860s than the 1990s.
I honestly think it’s disqualifying. For someone to think like that at age 20 points to such a lack of empathy, it’s probably the sign of a sociopathic personality.