Despite midterm victories, Dems still want to burn Haley Stevens at the stake

· New York Post

Haley Stevens is a dangerous woman.

Even after the Democrats’ big midterm win, that message is still echoing across the liberal landscape.

Only recently embraced as a top candidate for the Michigan Senate nomination, Stevens is now portrayed as an unstable, menacing traitor by her self-described friends.

Stevens now has the misfortune of being an object lesson for anyone who may stand against the far left.

They are going to “burn the witch” to deter anyone else from getting in the way of the mob.

She will not be alone.

As soon as the House flipped, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the expected chair of the House Oversight Committee, posted a two-word message: “Lawyer up.”

Rage politics leaves little room for dissent or compromise.

Indeed, Stevens seemed to spur the party into becoming a collection of Madame Defarges, knitting names into the list of the walking dead.

After she declared that she would split her ticket and vote for Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed, Democrats across the country declared Stevens mentally ill.

Some used the attack literally, feigning deep concern over her safety — the way you’d describe a friend found raving on the subway about being probed by aliens.

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Lawyer George Conway encouraged her to check into a mental facility immediately (he is, after all, a Juris Doctor).

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D- Md.) explained to CNN in the tone of an intervention, “I have been worried about her all last week. She’s a human being.”

Former Republican Bill Kristol said Stevens “seems to have had some kind of breakdown or something.”

Zeteo editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan called Stevens “a disturbed, deranged, dishonest woman.”

From Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump, the left has often falsely portrayed Republicans as being mentally ill, with liberal psychiatrists supplying the patina of medical authority.

Indeed, after Goldwater’s presidential run, the American Psychiatric Association adopted the “Goldwater Rule” to bar doctors from making such unethical diagnoses of individuals without evaluating them — a standard that later practitioners routinely violated.

It’s a tactic made infamous by the Soviets, who invented conditions such as “sluggish schizophrenia” to lock up dissidents in mental hospitals.

Nikita Khrushchev explained that mental illness was the only plausible explanation for anyone who opposed communism.

From the perspective of many politicians, Stevens must be mentally ill to risk everything for mere principle.

Establishment Democrats have caved to the far-left mob in promising to pack the Supreme Court and calling the defense of our constitutional institutions as mere “nostalgia” or dangerous “incrementalism.”

In such company, Stevens looks like an escapee from St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane.

Other Democrats are turning to sexist attacks, like strategist James Carville, who described her as a “used condom.”

Or they claim she’s simply under the influence of her fiancé, Jason Turkish: “All I can say is that any woman who abandons her friends when a new guy comes along is no friend at all,” wrote Susan Wild, a former Pennsylvania congresswoman.

Such sexism has long been denounced by liberals, but in this case they feel free to deploy it.

Stevens notably only made her decision after El-Sayed refused to reject an antisemitic commercial that supported his candidacy by arguing that Jews were taking money from Michigan families for food — a claim that El-Sayed himself echoed in his final campaign speech.

Whether Stevens is insane, or a brainless woman, or just a “traitor,” Democrats are calling for her expulsion from their party caucus.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) ominously suggested to Politico that action would be taken for “her terrible decision.”

Stevens, he said, “isolated herself from the House Democratic caucus. We will have a discussion about appropriate next steps upon our return.”

In higher education, this is all too familiar: Universities have long maintained a groupthink culture with little tolerance for dissent. 

The attacks on Stevens expose the sheer hypocrisy of the “big tent” claims of the Democratic Party.

Stevens challenged Democrats like Jeffries to tolerate her right to disagree with the party consensus.

He responded by suggesting that she may be formally expelled for the sin of opposing a candidate who holds what she believes to be antisemitic views.

The result is an entire party deranged by groupthink, a political version of “Lord of the Flies,” primed to chase down any member that’s deemed an outsider.

What’s missing is the single voice of “Simon”: “Maybe there is a beast . . . maybe it’s only us.”

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”