This must be one of those dog "foghorns" Biden was talking about last week.

Now, I want to be careful here. Just because Governor Cuomo, who leads a state with the highest percentage of Jewish people in the country and who probably more than most has some passing familiarity with the anti-Semitic slur that Jews are motivated primarily by money, just suggested that the way to motivate Jews to cooperate with his Covid restrictions is to use money, doesn't mean he's anti-Semitic.

To make that serious a charge you better have some rock-solid evidence behind you.

So that we better understand what is needed to support such claims, we should examine the kinds of the evidence progressives have used against President Trump.

It's not like they just started calling Trump a racist by making things up. I'm sure they can cite specific instances of his use of dog whistles with documentation to support their contentions.

For example, there was the time Trump called Hillary Clinton, "America's Merkel."

According to "Think Progress," that is a

"…dog whistle to the ultranationalists who so love him — and to his supporters in Europe. Merkel is widely vilified by ultranationalist movements there — particularly by Generation Identity, which released a video called "A Declaration of War" against Merkel and other European leaders trying to find homes for Syrian refugees."

How could anyone NOT draw that conclusion? It's so obvious that he's not talking about Clinton being similar to a typical quasi-socialist European internationalist it's embarrassing to suggest otherwise. What he is clearly doing is trying to appeal to tiny fringe groups obsessed with internal German politics.

It's politics 101.

Another clear and obvious example of a racist dog whistle was Trump's use of the phrase, "America first."

You know who else put those two words together in the very same order at various times?

No doubt there are literally hundreds of aging Klansmen who remember that the KKK used the slogan intermittently. Along with Presidents Wilson, Coolidge, Harding, and McKinley, to illustrate various foreign policy stances over the years.

Clearly a racist dog whistle.

Now that we better understand the evidentiary standard used to identify dog whistles, let's return to Cuomo and his discussion of withholding funds from Jewish Yeshivahs, or schools.

"I guarantee if a Yeshiva gets closed down and they're not going to get state funding you will see compliance"

"Hopefully that will motivate them. Nothing else I have done has motivated them."

I'm not seeing it. There's just no evidence beyond what he explicitly said. You're going to need more than just the words that came out of someone's mouth if you're going to charge them with being anti-Semitic. He's probably talking about something else here and surely did not mean to cast any aspersions on the Jewish community.

After all, he's one of the good guys, right?

In other news, most Americans think Republicans are anti-Semitic.