In a Facebook video from last fall, Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist and housing activist running for Congress as a Democrat in Texas, warned about the Jews working with Christian Zionists trying to bring about the Rapture. Speaking of the movie version of the Christian End Times thriller “Left Behind,” she said, “All of the Jews who own Hollywood, they use books and movies to create realities.” She urged her viewers to turn toward the authentic, radical Jesus, “who was fighting this church of Satan 2,000 years ago that still exists.”
Online, Galindo combines progressive populism, vaguely New Age therapeutic jargon and a conspiratorial mind-set; she seems like the left-wing version of the wellness influencers who turned to QAnon during the pandemic. In March she shocked local politicos by finishing first in a four-way primary in a new congressional district in southeastern San Antonio, seemingly buoyed by the anti-establishment fury motivating Democrats nationwide. This month she’ll face Johnny Garcia, a moderate sheriff’s deputy backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in a runoff. I was shown an internal poll conducted in April by a group supporting Garcia that had her ahead.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Galindo is getting some unexpected help. A shadowy new PAC called Lead Left spent $43,000 on mailers promising that Galindo would dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement, create “public health care options for all” and have President Trump arrested and impeached.
As Punchbowl reported, Lead Left was registered only on April 24, and its address is listed as a Staples in Tallahassee, Fla. While Democrats don’t know who’s running it, Punchbowl found WinRed, a Republican fund-raising platform, in the metadata on the group’s website. When Punchbowl’s Ally Mutnick asked a spokesman for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, if the group was behind Lead Left, he didn’t deny it. Instead, he gloated, “We hate to see these Democrat primaries devolve into the wokelympics, but the office popcorn machine has been going nonstop.”
It’s pretty obvious why Republicans would prefer to run against Galindo. Voters in the redrawn district, which is majority Latino, supported Trump by 10 percentage points in 2024, but many of them have since become disillusioned. With the right candidate, Democrats think they can win it. With Galindo, a white woman who once inveighed against “tokenass puppet sellout Hispanics” while complaining online about a bakery, they probably cannot.
“It was jaw-dropping to see how a suspected Republican PAC is meddling in this election,” Garcia told me. “It goes to show how they feel very threatened and are desperate.”
If conservatives are indeed behind Lead Left, which is also spending in Democratic primaries in Nebraska and Pennsylvania, they should be condemned for cynically helping an apparent antisemite. But the right didn’t make anyone vote for Galindo. It didn’t make the third- and fourth-place finishers in the Democratic primary endorse her. Galindo’s rise demonstrates how, without the right leadership, even justified rage and despair can curdle into hateful paranoia.
I often write about bad-faith accusations of antisemitism that are meant to silence criticism of Israel, particularly when it comes to the annihilation of Gaza. But just because not all anti-Zionism is antisemitic doesn’t mean none of it is.
Galindo often gestures toward a conspiracy theory, common in the Nation of Islam, that the people who identify as Jews today are not the Jews of the Bible but impostors. In response to two questions I emailed her, she pointed me to Revelation 3:9: “Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie.” In Congress, she said, she would write legislation decreeing “that any support of Zionism is antisemitic, since it’s the Zionists literally killing the Semites of the Middle East.”
At a moment when progressives are becoming increasingly disgusted with Israel and when pro-Israel groups are aligning against progressive candidates, it’s not surprising to see antisemitism cropping up on the left. But it is alarming, and not just for Jews. It’s not clear who first said, in the 19th century, that antisemitism is the socialism of fools, but he or she was correct. Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories deflect popular anger from unjust systems toward supernatural fantasies about demonic cabals. Such conspiracy theories are not just deadly but deranging. When Galindo claims that the Department of Homeland Security is secretly based in Tel Aviv, she sounds like Alex Jones or Candace Owens, not Zohran Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Endorsing Galindo, John Lira, who came in fourth in the primary, said, “People are not demanding moderation. They’re demanding immediate change.” He is right about the growing radicalization of part of the Democratic electorate. Many Americans are terrified and enraged by what’s become of their country, discombobulated by a ceaseless series of shocks, struggling to get their footing in a world turned unstable and surreal. They’ve lost faith in mainstream leaders who have failed to protect them.
But it will be a disaster if this energy gets diverted into crankish irrationality. Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene, seeing that Trumpism has reached a dead end, have lately been calling for an alliance of the populist left and right. Galindo would fit easily into such a coalition, which would be ominous for Jews and a boon to conservatives eager to divide the left. I’m all for a Democratic iteration of the Tea Party. The last thing we need, however, is a Democratic version of Infowars.
