"Well, we have to ask," Josh Shapiro recalls being told. No, you really didn't.
One of the greatest mysteries of the most disastrous 107 days in the Democrat Party gets a little more clarity in a new book from the Pennsylvania governor. Choosing Shapiro as a running mate should have been a slam-dunk decision for Kamala Harris. Democrats needed to hold the Keystone State, and Shapiro was and is a popular leader in his state. Shapiro could have appealed to other swing-state voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, at least, and would have lent his considerable political talent to an anointee who notably lacked them. Instead, Harris chose Tim Walz, who turned out to be even more inept than the anointee herself.
In his new book, the New York Times reports, it becomes clear that Shapiro made that choice rather than Harris. Shapiro also ensures that the reason for his choice is that the Democrats have allowed anti-Semitism to rise to the top ranks of its leadership:
In Mr. Shapiro’s book, “Where We Keep the Light,” the governor is measured in describing his interactions with Ms. Harris herself. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which Ms. Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so much so that at one point, he wrote, he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government.
“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing his incredulous response to a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”
“Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?” the questioner, Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, continued, according to Mr. Shapiro, who recounted, “If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?”
Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that Ms. Remus was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”
It certainly says something about Dana Remus. It also speaks volumes about former Attorney General Eric Holder, who ran the search committee to vet potential running mates for Kamala Harris. And that in turn speaks volumes about Holder's former boss Barack Obama, who kept trying to cut deals with Iran and repeatedly involved Rob Malley in those efforts, who had to quit Obama's initial campaign when his contacts with Hamas got exposed in early 2008.
It also has something to say about the progressives that control the Democrat Party of today. This query relies on an old and bigoted trope about Jews being inherently disloyal to their own countries, a claim that long predates the establishment of the state of Israel. In Germany, political leaders blamed Jews for the collapse in World War I that led to their defeat, using the same ugly claim, which got amplified and then industrialized by the Nazis. No one asks that question about being an Israeli double-agent out of the blue without having bought into that anti-Semitic mindset.
Shapiro lets Remus off the hook for "just doing her job," which may be too gracious by half. Shapiro doesn't need to target Remus; he's telling the story to expose Harris, Holder, and the rest of the anti-Semitic, radical progressive Left. That's understandable in terms of judicious target selection, and also to make sure readers don't miss the Kamala/progressive forest for the Remus trees, so to speak. But it's the Remuses that perform this kind of sanctioned bigotry for the Kamalas and the Holders, and she could have just as easily declined to ask this question and found work elsewhere.
The fact that she didn't makes it pretty clear that she was comfortable with this line of inquiry, in which she impugned the loyalty of Pennsylvania's governor for no other reason and on no other evidence than that he is a Jew. That speaks to the comfort level of this anti-Semitism all the way up the food chain in the Democrat Party. One has to wonder whether Remus and others of her ilk could find work within the Democrat Party without first being comfortable with assuming all Jews may be disloyal double agents ... while embracing the "free Palestine" activists that regurgitate Hamas' Islamist propaganda on college campuses and in the streets,
Shapiro strips the mask off the Left with this revealing episode in the saga of Kamala Of The 107 Days. Let's see whether the Protection Racket Media connects those dots, or simply refuses to acknowledge them. Kudos to the NYT for at least making it public.
Update: Joe Biden's White House advisor on anti-Semitism didn't mince words:
Aaron Keyak, the Biden WH deputy antisemitism envoy, out with a new statement on Kamala Harris 2024 vetting process: "That Governor Josh Shapiro wrote that he was asked if he was a double agent of the world’s only Jewish state is an antisemitic inquiry."
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) January 19, 2026
Strong words.
Neither did the Jerusalem Post:
Not: Have you ever lobbied for a foreign government? Not: Do you have undisclosed financial interests? Those are normal vetting questions.
This was different. This was: Are you secretly working for the Jewish state?
Shapiro writes about this moment in his new memoir, and the sentence lands like a tracer round. Because every Jew in America, whether they’ve been near a VP vetting room or not, recognizes the temperature of that moment. ...
Here’s what the question really says:
You can be Jewish, but only the right kind of Jewish. The private kind. The kind that doesn’t connect to anything outside yourself. You can have a religion. You can have a grandmother who makes brisket. You can even have opinions about Israeli policy.
But the moment your Jewishness links to a people, a history, a homeland, the moment it becomes something more than a personal quirk, we need to know: Are you loyal to us, or to them?
That's a question that speaks far more to the questioner than the questioned. The Left treats Christians in a similar manner, but not to the point of disloyalty to foreign governments. They reserve that treatment for the Jews, and this episode proves that comes from the highest levels of the progressive elite.
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