Mikie Sherrill’s defenders are now doubling down on her Naval Academy issue. It isn’t enough for them to say that what she did was wrong, but a long time ago, which might be sufficient. They need to double down because they perceive, correctly, that something larger is at stake. They’re right, but not in the way they think.

Their defense of her is that she suspected but didn’t know that the exam the midshipmen were to take was stolen; that she herself didn’t cheat; that she is to be lauded because she didn’t snitch on the cheaters (until she did); and that no one can truly understand the pressures involved but a member of the US military, which most of her critics are not.

This defense is isomorphic to the rationalization being employed by most of the US Government, Democrat or Republican, for arming and supporting the Gaza genocide. They can’t be sure it is a genocide, and they feel a sense of loyalty, not just to an ally, but to the metaphysical construct of The Jewish People. To call the genocide by that name would be snitching of a metaphysical order. Therefore it cannot be done. On this view, Americans have no choice but to facilitate a genocide, then affect agnosticism about what’s happening, then profess helpless heartbreak about the whole regrettably distant, irrelevant affair. Anyway, no one can truly understand life in “Israel,” from Tel Aviv to Gush Etzion, but its Zionist overlords.

This is somewhere between complicity and playing a role in the complex division of labor of primary wrongdoing. It’s culpable. Sorry. The Democrats need to defend it because, to their credit, they grasp that complicity requires a rationalization of some kind. The Republicans are too blind to have figured even that much out. They just see a short-term electoral gain in Sherrill’s travail. It doesn’t matter. These people all belong in Hell.

As for “pressure,” I can think of a group of people under more severe pressure than virtually anyone in the US military. The group in question? Its victims.

Also the victims of the US government generally, including the migrants on the receiving end of ICE, who are to be abandoned by Sherrill’s rejection of the ITA and her refusal to back the ITD. How else are they to be arrested, detained, and deported but through snitching?

Or the victims of IHRA-based defamation, slandered as anti-Semites for opposing a genocidal, apartheid-based ethno-state. How does the IHRA work, except through snitching?

Snitching is fine for migrants and anti-Zionists in both Mikie Sherrill’s and Jack Ciattarelli’s world. So is destroying peoples’ lives over legalistic technicalities concerning events buried in the distant past.

If she wanted our sympathy, she should have acted to deserve it. She didn’t. People like Sherrill have, despite the support people like me gave her, abandoned us. Well, this is how the helicopter crashes, lady. Put on your life vest and start swimming. Because it’s a long way down.