The Blind Spot of the ‘Moral’ Movement

There is a film from 1995 called The Last Supper. It is a dark comedy, almost too strange to explain without making it sound ridiculous. A group of liberal graduate students invite people they consider dangerous, hateful, or bigoted to dinner. They talk with them, test them, poison them, and bury them in the backyard when the guests fail the moral test.

The first killing begins as something close to self-defense. A man threatens them, the situation breaks open, and panic takes over. Then comes the turn that matters. They stop treating the killing as a terrible event and begin treating it as an idea. They convince themselves they have found a moral duty. Dangerous people can harm the world, so removing them begins to feel like service. History might forgive it. Good people might have to do ugly things for the greater good. The movie understands how easily disgust can dress itself as courage.

People rarely become dangerous while telling themselves the truth about what they are becoming. Most believe they are becoming brave. Their certainty becomes permission, and their disgust starts to feel like moral clarity. The film stayed with me because it shows a truth people prefer to see only in their enemies.

I thought about it again while watching what is happening in New York City. In the June 23, 2026, New York Democratic primaries, candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won major congressional races in the city, including Brad Lander in NY-10, Claire Valdez in NY-7, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in NY-13. Many people will see those results as a clean political story about the left rising, the establishment weakening, and voters reacting to affordability, housing, power, corruption, and the old order. There is truth in that reading, because New Yorkers are under pressure and a city that becomes too expensive for normal working people creates its own rebellion.

I am not interested in writing this as a party argument. I live here. I built a business here. I raise children here. I have watched people work hard and still feel squeezed. I understand why voters are angry. The concern is what kind of leadership grows out of that anger.

There is a kind of leader who builds people up by giving them responsibility. There is another kind that gathers people around a common enemy. The second kind can sound powerful at first because resentment creates fast unity. People who feel unseen suddenly feel named. People who feel powerless suddenly feel morally important. The danger comes when the movement needs the enemy to stay alive.

That is the part New York should watch carefully. A leader who depends on blame will always need someone to blame. The landlord, the rich, the police, the Zionist, the capitalist, the colonizer, the old establishment, the wrong kind of Democrat, the wrong kind of Jew. The names change, but the structure remains the same. The movement becomes less interested in solving problems and more invested in preserving the emotional fuel that brought it power.

This is where hypocrisy enters. The same people who speak constantly about hate can become careless with hatred when it points in the approved direction. The same people who warn about dehumanization can reduce whole groups to symbols. The same people who claim to defend the vulnerable can ignore vulnerable people who complicate their story. Jews are often the first to notice this because antisemitism has a strange ability to travel through every political language available.

The deeper problem with woke politics is how narrowly it asks why. It looks at crime, antisemitism, radical Islam, school failure, poverty, policing, speech, and identity through one small window. Power, oppression, and victimhood become the preferred explanations before the facts have been fully examined. Those forces can be real, and sometimes they matter deeply. The failure is what gets pushed out of the frame. Culture, religion, personal responsibility, tribal hatred, and bad ideas are treated as secondary details when they may be central to the problem.

That narrow view explains the strange alliance between woke politics and Islam. The values do not fit together. Traditional Islam often collides directly with progressive claims about gender equality, gay rights, free expression, secular government, and criticism of religion. Radical Islam collides with those values violently. Yet many progressives lower their voices when those contradictions appear, because Muslims in the West have been placed inside the oppressed category.

That category cannot carry the whole truth. Muslims are a local minority in America, and as individuals they deserve the same rights, safety, and dignity as anyone else. Islam as a world force is much larger than a vulnerable minority identity inside American politics. There are about two billion Muslims in the world and many countries where Islam is the majority faith. Islam has states, laws, armies, institutions, political movements, clerics, parties, and courts. Any analysis that treats Islam only as a protected minority identity is too small for reality.

This is where moral reasoning breaks. If a conservative Christian says homosexuality is sinful, progressives usually know exactly what to say. If a conservative Muslim says the same thing, or something harsher, the response often becomes careful, contextual, or silent. The idea did not change. The category of the speaker changed. A moral standard that changes according to the speaker is no longer a standard.

The same problem appears with antisemitism. When hatred comes from the far right, many people recognize it quickly. When it comes wrapped in anti-Israel language, anti-colonial language, activist language, or religious grievance, too many people suddenly ask for more context. Context matters when it helps us understand reality. It becomes an excuse when it protects a preferred group from responsibility. A serious person can ask why someone became radical, angry, violent, or antisemitic, and that question should make judgment sharper.

The Last Supper works because the students are intelligent enough to sound convincing. They know the right words. They care about racism, cruelty, violence, and social harm. Many of the people they invite to dinner are genuinely awful. The movie does not ask us to pretend all opinions are harmless. It shows how disgust at real ugliness can become a license to punish.

Once the students decide they can identify who is too dangerous to remain in society, their education becomes a weapon. Their intelligence helps them rationalize. Their language helps them hide from themselves. Politics becomes permission. At first, they punish people who are easy to condemn. Then the line moves because people who believe their goodness protects them from corruption are usually the last to notice when they become corrupt.

New York needs to see the warning before it becomes normal. The biggest threats to a movement often come from within: the excuses it makes, the hatred it permits, the double standards it protects, and the people it refuses to criticize because they belong to the right category. A city cannot survive on moral theater. Slogans do not govern. Public life cannot become a contest over who can condemn harder, accuse faster, or speak with more ideological purity.

Every movement claims to care about the vulnerable. The real test comes when power arrives. Ordinary people who disagree still need protection. Jews need to be defended when hatred comes from fashionable places. Small business owners, police officers, immigrants who fled socialism, parents who want order, and students who want safety cannot be treated as disposable because their concerns do not fit the approved script.

Moral certainty becomes dangerous when people disappear inside labels. Once a person is reduced to a political category, listening feels like weakness, fairness looks like betrayal, and cruelty can be described as accountability. A society can move from disagreement into dehumanization while still congratulating itself for being decent.

The point is limited and serious. An election result is not murder. The film gives us a useful warning about the psychology of people who believe their goodness protects them from becoming harmful. Politics does not need poison at a dinner table to become destructive. It can damage trust, punish dissent, excuse antisemitism when it comes wrapped in fashionable language, turn public safety into an ideological game, and make people afraid to say what they see with their own eyes.

The students in The Last Supper believed they were protecting the future. That belief made them terrifying. They acted from purified conviction and believed they had moved beyond ordinary morality into a higher responsibility. Politics has used that excuse for a very long time, and New York needs seriousness now before more people mistake self-righteousness for justice.

Seriousness means judging ideas by what they do in real life. Hatred does not become harmless because the person expressing it has the right slogan. Public safety, Jewish life, civil order, compassion, and judgment all have to stay connected to reality. When moral feeling breaks away from facts, people get hurt.

The film leaves us with a hard question. How much damage can people do while convinced they are saving the world? That question belongs in New York right now. It belongs in campaign offices, classrooms, synagogues, subway cars, and dinner tables where people still have the courage to speak honestly. Good intentions and moral certainty will not save this city if New Yorkers lose the ability to tell the difference between justice and self-righteousness before the line moves again.

Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh