Speaking at a conference in Washington, DC, late last year, former Barack Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz complained about the difficulty of having a “sane conversation with younger Jews” about Gaza. In attempting to “give data and information and facts and arguments,” she had found that she couldn’t get through to them because TikTok was “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

The comment was deeply illuminating. In essence, Hurwitz was arguing that direct documentary footage from Gaza did not count as “information” or “data,” and that the Left was so consumed by the irrational feelings these videos produced that it was incapable of seeing the real facts of the case — leaving the pro-Israel Democratic Party centrists like herself as the sole stewards of sober facthood amid a broader political descent into hysterical fantasy.

Hurwitz is hardly alone in accusing the Left of prioritizing feelings over facts. When the New York Times editorial board issued its anti-endorsement of then-mayoral-candidate Zohran Mamdani, it characterized him as someone who “ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance” — that is, refuses to face the facts of power and economics. When Ezra Klein argued for softening the Democrats’ commitment to abortion for electoral reasons, he chided the Left for lacking the “willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.” Across the board, centrist Democrats make reference to hard facts to dismiss dissent from the Left, who are supposedly incapable of internalizing the ironclad economics of housing, the political realities of governing, or the considerations fueling an ongoing genocide.