The article describes a meeting of radical DSA educators in New York City, mostly connected with CUNY (The City University of New York):

“We need to overhaul the curriculum in a class consciousness frame. . . . The curriculum as a whole needs to be relooked at, revisioned and reframed,” the CUNY Kingsborough Community College professor [Maureen Fadem] said.

The meeting, titled “Planning for Socialist School Governance,” was led by NYC DSA Labor Working Group co-chair Nina Bruckenthal, a math teacher at NEST+m, a public science-oriented K-12 school on the Lower East Side, and Amanda Vender, an ESL teacher at the International High School of Sciences in Elmhurst, Queens. …

The DSA educators vowed to use their connections to fellow socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get their agenda through, and also conspired to use upcoming contract negotiations to realize their far-left goals. …

The UFT contract for Gotham teachers is set to expire Nov. 28, 2027 and the DSA has progressively been strengthening its grip on the union.

An especially chilling portion of the article quotes one of the teachers acknowledging that the idea of indoctrinating children in this way isn’t popular with the public. The solution? To further oppose school choice and charter schools and make such schools even more difficult to access. The New York City public school system is already shunned by parents who can afford to do so and to send their children to private or parochial schools. But for those less affluent, there is at least the possibility of securing a place for their children in charter schools. The rest – about 75% of the children in NYC – are in the public school system, and the statistics look like this:

In 2024-25, there were 906,248 students in the NYC school system, the largest school district in the United States. Of those students:

16.8 percent of students were English Language Learners
22.4 percent were students with disabilities
75.3 percent were economically disadvantaged
Race or ethnicity:
42.3 percent Hispanic
19.3 percent Black
18.7 percent Asian and Pacific Islander
16.1 percent White
2.0 percent Multi-Racial
1.2 percent Native American

Note the large number of students whose native language is not English and who need extra help with English (“English Language Learners”), the large number who are coded with disabilities, and the absolutely enormous number who are considered “economically disadvantaged.” The latter designation means the child is getting some sort of welfare and/or is in foster care. Note also that white students are among the smallest ethnic groups in the system.

Therefore it’s quite clear that, if these DSA teachers get their way, they’ll be ramming this far-left propaganda down the throats of the children who are very much in need of basic instruction in traditional school subjects, and who have little access to alternatives to the regular public schools. These children will be used as guinea pigs by teachers who could not care less what the children or their families actually need or actually want.

The post The DSA plan for NYC schools appeared first on The New Neo.

Watch for yourself – it’s only about seven minutes long:

She’s such a chipper, happy warrior. She’s got the answers, too: the reason people come here from other countries that are awful is that we have “destabilized” those countries. Once the DSA candidates are elected, we won’t be a destabilizing force in the world, and people won’t be motivated to flee their home countries and come here. She’s positing a kind of “end of history,” in which the DSA’s taking power would function as a sort of Second Coming, ushering an age in which the lion will lie down with the lamb and we won’t have to enforce our immigration laws because all places on earth will be fine – or at least, stable, their natural state before we intervened.

Oh, and as for criminals, it’s pretty much the same thing. With the DSA in charge and income inequality and all those other awful things corrected and all the various sorts of social justice achieved, the number of violent criminals will be almost nonexistent and we won’t need prisons as we know them anymore.

The cult aspects of leftism are very much in evidence here, including her calm and smiling demeanor.

NOTE: I was curious to learn how old Romer is, and a bit of her background. This site says she is supposedly forty-three years old, and that her background prior to her DSA involvement (which began in 2018) was as “a freelance writer covering music, arts, and travel, and … editor in chief and publisher at Arioso Press, a small independent publishing operation.” That seems about right.

The post The DSA lets us know its plans appeared first on The New Neo.

The Madison police officer who shot and killed Corey Ruiz should face criminal charges, civil rights attorney Ben Crump said Friday, after protests erupted in anger over videos of their struggle.

“They not only tackled him, not only tased him, not only kicked him, but you saw they shot him three times in his head and other parts of his body,” Crump said.

He spoke at an emotional news conference with Ruiz’s mother, siblings and 13-year-old daughter, Kah’liyah Aliomar.

Crump again.

What is left out? This:

Ruiz, 38, was killed on a busy city street Wednesday, just a couple of blocks away from his daughter’s home and along the route she walks to school. Police say Ruiz pulled a knife during a struggle with four officers, injuring one of them. That officer then fired the shots, according to police.

There is video, but it’s not from the police, it’s from a cellphone, and it does not show the incident from the police point of view. Madison is one of the few municipalities where the use of police videocams has been repeatedly blocked:

But unlike nearly every other similarly sized city, Madison doesn’t require its police to use body-worn cameras, so there is no footage from the officers’ perspective. Over the last decade city officials have repeatedly debated adopting the cameras — at times creating subcommittees and doing studies on the idea — but local officials have primarily blamed budget concerns and political inertia for the ongoing stalemate.

Another common source of opposition, identified in a 2021 feasibility study, came from community groups worried the cameras would be used to surveil and criminalize marginalized groups. Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said Thursday that she expects the new budget that takes effect in January to include funding for body-worn cameras.

I wonder how the protestors address the fact that the police officer was stabbed. Perhaps they deny it happened. Or perhaps they think a little stab wound isn’t so much; police should just let themselves be knifed.

More:

Wisconsin court records show Ruiz had been in and out of jail over the past decade for mostly misdemeanor offenses including disorderly conduct, drug possession, auto theft, battery and invasion of privacy. He was also convicted of felonies including possession of cocaine and marijuana, robbery, strangulation, resisting an officer and causing bodily harm.

“People are saying he’s a criminal. So what? He had a family, he had me,” Aliomar said, breaking down into tears.

A person can be a dangerous criminal and also have a family. In fact, most criminals have families. The two things are unrelated.

More:

Police said they were at the street to investigate reports that someone was trying to enter parked cars, something Crump said amounted to only the suspicion of a low-level property crime.

Well then, no need for the police to be there at all, right?

And then you have this sort of thing:

Nearly 500 people marched from the intersection of Williamson Street and South Baldwin Street [in Madison] — where the 38-year-old was shot three times on Wednesday during a struggle with several police officers — to the Madison Police Department headquarters on Friday.

Video showed some demonstrators stopping traffic and confronting at a female motorist who insisted she was an “ally” during a streetside struggle session.

“You’re going to sit there and watch it all go by and you’re going to think about it, c–t!” one yelled at the helpless driver.

“I am 100 percent an ally of the community,” she pleaded with the protestors who surrounded her car.

“I have lived in this neighborhood for 27 years. F–k the cops. I wanted to join the protest!” she said. “This guy calling me a c–t doesn’t help anyone’s cause.”

She added: “I’m an ally. I wanted to join the protest. I want to be part of this.”

That may read like a Monty Python skit, but it’s very real.

Also this:

“White silence is violence!” protesters chanted at others sitting outside [at a restaurant] enjoying their dinner.

A few hours later, a pair of protesters hit a car window when the driver refused to stop for their procession.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation held signs reading “jail killer cop. Kiel Peterson. Justice for Corey Ruiz.” …

One woman held up a sign that read: “Corrupt cops deserve to die too!! …

“You’re gonna say the same thing you all say every time a black body gets shot down in this city!” [a] man, who identified himself as Carlos Jackson, shouted. Jackson then launched into a tirade about corruption, revolution and “Zionists.”

It all comes back to the Zionists, right?

I wonder who funds the so-called “Party for Socialism and Liberation.” Here’s the Wiki entry:

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a communist political party in the United States. PSL formed in 2004, when its members split from the Workers World Party.

PSL describes itself as a revolutionary socialist party in the Leninist tradition, because the party believes that only a revolution can end capitalism and establish socialism. PSL pursues this goal by participating in local protests, running candidates in elections, and conducting political education. …

PSL does not release membership numbers. In 2019, PSL reported branches in “some 90 cities” or “nearly 100 cities”. In 2022, PSL reported an “organized presence in over 100 cities”. In 2024, PSL reported being “in over 50 cities”.

PSL is a democratic centralist party, which means that “all members, including those who disagree, are duty bound to publicly defend and carry out” all PSL decisions.

So, “liberated” party members are not allowed to disagree with the Party of Liberation.

It’s no real surprise to learn that they are heavily involved in pro-Palestinian causes:

Since 2023, PSL has organized numerous rallies in favor of Palestinian liberation, including many of the Gaza war protests in the United States.

In 2024, PSL and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) organized a protest outside of Ohr Torah synagogue in Edison, New Jersey, in opposition to the synagogue holding auctions for property in illegal Israel settlements in the West Bank. A minor scuffle ensured. …

In May 2025, Elias Rodriguez killed two employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. Rodriguez was a former PSL member. PSL stated that they “do not support” the shooting. …

In May 2026, PSL campaigned with Hasan Piker on behalf of Cori Bush in Missouri. In June 2026, PSL campaigned for Seattle socialist Kshama Sawant.

This group seems to have its finger in a lot of pies. The group also unites with some of the “woke right” in blaming the US and NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It also supported Assad in Syria. More here on its campaign against Israel and Jews, which turns out not to be peripheral but rather central to its purposes:

[The party] incorporates virulent anti-Zionism as a core organizing principle.

PSL has been involved in anti-Israel organizing since its establishment in 2004, ramping up its activity significantly following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror massacre against Israel. In the first 18 months after Hamas’s attack, PSL sponsored or co-sponsored over 1,700 anti-Israel rallies around the U.S.; the majority of these rallies featured antisemitic rhetoric, as well as expressions of support for Hamas’s attack, belligerent calls to “smash Zionism,” and flags and other materials of U.S.-designated terror groups and more. Some PSL events also included on-the-ground harassment.

The party legitimized Hamas’s attack in an October 7, 2023, statement as a “bold counter-offensive,” said “the actions of the resistance” were a “morally and legally legitimate response to occupation” and called to cut off all U.S. aid to Israel.

One of the group’s members is Jodi Dean, who is still a professor at Hobart teaching courses such as Feminist Theory as well as Communism. Shortly after 10/7 she wrote this:

The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating. Here were moments of freedom, that defeated Zionist expectations of submission to occupation and siege…The paragliders who flew into Israel on October 7 continue the revolutionary association of liberation and flight.

Helping to shape young minds.

But the reason I went to that ADL link was to find out about funding of the group. This is all I discovered:

PSL offers little organizational transparency and does not release membership numbers. …

PSL’s funding sources are also unclear. The group claims not to take money from foundations or corporate sources. Members are expected to contribute to PSL’s major annual fundraiser, the National Fund Drive.

The article discusses the funding of an affiliated group, The People’s Forum (there are many many affiliated groups; it’s really a huge web):

The PSL-affiliated group is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that receives funding from various sources. In 2022 and 2021, for example, The People’s Forum received $21,539 from the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation and $8,350 from CodePink, a virulently anti-Zionist group, respectively. In 2018, The People’s Forum received $3,015,000 from the United Community Fund (UCF), a grantmaking body primarily associated with Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman who has been accused of having associations with the Chinese Communist Party.

UCF has given most of its grants to The People’s Forum and the left-wing research institute Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. The People’s Forum’s Manolo de los Santos is also a researcher at Tricontinental.

In the fiscal year ending 2022, The People’s Forum had revenue of $4,428,869, significantly more than 2021’s $486,926. …

In 2023, the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ) granted The People’s Forum $26,894. AFGJ is an Arizona-based organization that serves as a fiscal sponsor to several progressive and anti-Israel initiatives, including Samidoun, which is labeled as the international fundraiser of the U.S.-designated terror group the PFLP, and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

And this utterance by a speaker at one of the many meetings organized by the group says a lot about their point of view on the relationship between capitalism and Israel:

As far as organizational activity, The People’s Forum convenes numerous panels, protests, events, and other “educational” experiences, many of which are virulently anti-Israel.

At one such event, De Los Santos said: “When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”

Whether or not that has any logic isn’t especially relevant. It has logic to a large group of very dedicated leftists.

When I began this post I did not expect it to end up with anything to do with Israel. And yet here we are. To the left, these things are all related – or at least can be described as related to a mostly ignorant and willing group of mostly young people.

The post And now there’s Corey Ruiz (or, do all leftist roads lead to Israel-hatred?) appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s the video interview between Coleman Hughes and Rothman:

Here’s a part that especially caught my attention. It’s about six minutes long. The subject is the heyday of anarchist attacks a hundred or so years ago. Most if not all of us have heard of Sacco and Vanzetti and the disagreements about whether they were innocent or guilty, and that’s such a huge topic I’m not going to tackle it here. Suffice to say that two things are known: they were anarchists, and it was a time of violence in the US by anarchists who were mostly Italian:

My curiosity was piqued by this. Now, Italian anarchists of the early 20th century are not closely analogous to Islamic terrorists or leftist terrorists of the 1960s-1970s or the present day (despite the echoes in the name “Luigi Mangione”), but they share some characteristics such as the desire to destroy the current order through violence. How did the US actually deal with the problem a hundred years ago? Well, there was what’s known as the First Red Scare:

The First Red Scare in the United States, occurring from 1917 to 1920, was a period of intense public fear and anxiety regarding the perceived rise of communist and socialist ideologies. This era was marked by increased labor activism, immigration, and industrialization. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which saw the overthrow of the tsar and the rise of the Bolsheviks, fueled fears of a similar uprising in the U.S. A. Mitchell Palmer, the U.S. Attorney General, initiated a series of raids, known as the Palmer Raids, targeting foreign-born individuals suspected of radical leftist sympathies. These raids, often criticized for their questionable legality and brutality, failed to uncover evidence of a widespread conspiracy, and public concern waned by 1920 when predicted revolutionary actions did not materialize.

Some of the information you can find online ascribes fear of Italian anarchists to xenophobia and bigotry and glosses over the very real and radical destructive goals of the anarchists (see this Boston Public Library site for an example). Why did anarchy take such root among Italians? Here’s a short summary:

From the last third of the 19th century until soon after the turn of the 20th century, Italy (with the exception of Spain) was the site of Europe’s largest anarchist movement. Mikhail Bakunin, the progenitor of modern anarchism, first found widespread support in Italy, and, while there, from 1863 to 1867, he published his seminal writings, which remain the framework for anti-organizational, libertarian anarchism. Italian intellectuals, notably Carlo Pisacane and Errico Malatesta, contributed to the development of anarchist theory. In the United States, anarchism persisted longer and had more effect in the Italian immigrant community than elsewhere. Most significantly, it challenged (for a time successfully) Fascist hegemony in the multitudinous Little Italys where the vast majority of Italian Americans resided.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a largely Italian community, and by then there wasn’t a trace – to be seen by me, anyway – of either anarchism or Fascism. But earlier, apparently, things were different. More here:

Galleanists [anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani] were primary suspects in a campaign of bombings between 1914 and 1920. Instances included mail bombs to business and government officials and the 1920 Wall Street bombing, which killed 38 people. In effect, however, none of the Galleanisti bombs hit their targets: capitalists, police, or judges. Their casualties were themselves and bystanders. Their bombing methods borrowed from the Italian Black Hand extortion rackets, in which the attacker would write a threat of future violence and place bombs in doorways. These extortionists adapted fireworks, a popular Italian industry, with shrapnel or stolen dynamite from construction jobs. Anarchists, however, lacked the community experience with high explosives and thus overestimated their ability to create working bombs and underestimated their own risk.

New York City Galleanisti formed the Bresci Circle in honor of Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist assassin of Umberto I of Italy. By 1914, almost 600 members met regularly at a rundown house in East Harlem. A plot to bomb the Rockefellers increased police interest in the group.

Several months after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre that had incensed Galleanisti, a group of anarchists carried a bomb to the Tarrytown estate of the Ludlow coal mine owner, John D. Rockefeller, in July 1914. They miscalculated, both in failing to trigger the device and since Rockefeller was then out of town. A member of the Circle was arrested[8] and the bomb, which they carried to an East Harlem tenement near the Circle’s headquarters, exploded, demolishing half of the building and killing three anarchists.

That’s just the tip of a pretty large iceberg; also don’t forget that in 1901 President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, although not an Italian one:

[The assassin] Czolgosz had lost his job during the economic Panic of 1893 and turned to anarchism, a political philosophy adhered to by contemporary assassins of foreign leaders. He regarded McKinley as a symbol of oppression and was convinced that it was his duty as an anarchist to kill him. He was unable to get near the president during an earlier visit, but he shot him twice as McKinley reached to shake his hand in the reception line …

Another event in the series was this:

On June 2, 1919, a militant anarchist named Carlo Valdinoci blew up the front of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C.—and himself up in the process when the bomb exploded too early.

A young Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived across the street, were also shaken by the blast.

The bombing was just one in a series of coordinated attacks that day on judges, politicians, law enforcement officials, and others in eight cities nationwide.

About a month earlier, radicals had also mailed bombs to the mayor of Seattle and a U.S. Senator, blowing the hands off the senator’s domestic worker. The next day, a postal worker in New York City intercepted 16 more packages addressed to political and business leaders, including John D. Rockefeller.

One way the US dealt with the problem was mass roundups and deportation:

[Attorney General] Palmer created a small division to gather intelligence on the radical threat and placed a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Hoover collected and organized every scrap of intelligence gathered by the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) and by other agencies to identify anarchists most likely involved in violent activity. …

…[T]he Department of Justice began arresting, under recently passed laws like the Sedition Act, suspected radicals and foreigners identified by Hoover’s group, including well-known leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. In December, with much public fanfare, a number of radicals were put on a ship dubbed the “Red Ark” or “Soviet Ark” by the press and deported to Russia.

At this point, though, politics, inexperience, and overreaction got the better of Attorney General Palmer and his department. Hoover—with the encouragement of Palmer and the help of the Department of Labor—started planning a massive roundup of radicals.

By early January 1920, the plans were ready. The department organized simultaneous raids in major cities, with local police called on to arrest thousands of suspected anarchists. But the ensuing “Palmer Raids” turned into a nightmare, marked by poor communications, planning, and intelligence about who should be targeted and how many arrest warrants would be needed. The constitutionality of the entire operation was questioned, and Palmer and Hoover were roundly criticized for the plan and for their overzealous domestic security efforts.

You can find a longer discussion here with a lot more details. The most important part, I think, is this:

The people who were arrested during the Palmer Raids were picked up not because of anything they had done but because of what they might do. In fact, many of those arrested and held for deportation did not believe in violence. The Union of Russian Workers had declared its belief in revolution when it was founded in 1907, but by 1919 it had largely become a social club whose members were unaware of its founding principles. The Department of Labor later canceled thousands of deportation orders issued to members of the Communist Labor Party on the grounds that it, too, was not a truly revolutionary party. In the end, the government succeeded in deporting only eight hundred of the more than four thousand people it had arrested.

Another thing that happened was a change in immigration policies. The Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 (after McKinley’s assassination) prohibited anarchists from entering, although it doesn’t seem to have been all that effective. In 1924 far more restrictive immigration quotas were implemented and made it more difficult for newer populations such as Italians to come here.

Thus, the immediate threat died down. But the threat had been very real. And there remain lingering echoes of anarchism in today’s political violence. Are Antifa anarchists, for example? Some most definitely are, although today’s radical leftist terrorists are more of a mixed bag in terms of their philosophy. But although history doesn’t repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.

ADDENDUM: Recently Rubio gave a speech on the subject of left-wing terrorism. Here it is:

The post The history of violent leftist anarchists in the US appeared first on The New Neo.

Apparently the DSA thinks they’re on the ascendent right now, and they’re prepared to swing for the fences. Ironically, they are damaging their relationship with the Democratic part in doing so, and (as Neo points out), their numbers are too small to be a real national party. If they swing and miss they will damage not only their own brand, but that of the Democrats too. My question now is, how long will it take Democrats to see this and tell them to get lost, as people like John Fetterman is doing already?

I suppose it depends at least partly on what is meant by “swing and miss.” On the local level of city government in very blue cities, or representation in state legislatures from certain very blue districts, they seem to be batting over 500. As long as they choose their battles carefully and limit them to such places, they will win.

It’s when it gets to the state and national level that the results are unknown. So far, it’s instructive to note the campaign of Michigan’s El-Sayed for the US Senate seat. The approach is that, although he clearly is simpatico with the DSA’s goals, he is not a member and they have not endorsed him. That is a case of obfuscation, because they are invested in his win and support it:

DSA officials have “already shifted organizers, volunteers and resources” into Michigan as El-Sayed squares off against the more moderate congresswoman Haley Stevens in a bruising Democratic primary, Politico reported. El-Sayed’s campaign has also held discussions with the DSA about holding rallies in the state with left-wing officials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), who recently endorsed El-Sayed, according to Politico.

“It’s DSA summer. We can’t stop racking up wins,” left-wing media host Emma Vigeland told the outlet. “We’re seeing the culmination of 10 years of democratic socialism becoming more mainstream.”

The DSA’s organizing in Michigan is notable given that El-Sayed is not officially a DSA member—and that he’s running for Senate in a swing state that narrowly backed President Donald Trump in 2024. Socialist candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York City and Melat Kiros in Denver, by contrast, won primary elections in deep-blue districts that are almost guaranteed to send them to Congress come November.

“Abdul El-Sayed is not DSA affiliated, but he’s a progressive fighter,” anti-American streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with El-Sayed in April, told Politico.

“Everybody in the coalition is on the same page, whether it be Justice Dems, whether it be [the Working Families Party], whether it be DSA,” added left-wing consultant Vincent Vertuccio, who said that Michigan is “absolutely the next focus of this national movement.”

Michigan also happens to have one of the larger Muslim population percentages in the US: it is fifth, according to a chart that can be found here, after Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. The would also help El-Sayed in the primary.

I think the general Michigan approach, which is to run a candidate for statewide office who is definitely aligned with DSA goals but not officially DSA, is the way it will go in the future in many states for state-level campaigns. I don’t know whether El-Sayed will win; it’s still early, but at the moment (now that a third candidate has dropped out) he is trailing his Democrat opponent Stevens.

So Michigan may not be ready for El-Sayed just yet. But one thing to remember about the left is that they take the long view and are extraordinarily patient. They have been preparing the ground for many decades, in particular through their outsize influence on our system of education, and it has borne fruit these days.

So, why don’t more people speak out a la Fetterman? For one thing, Fetterman is sui generis. For another, they are afraid of being primaried, and the far left is a very significant part of the Democrat base these days. I believe very many Democrat members of Congress, and governors, feel it’s in their personal interest (if they wish to get re-elected) to lay low on this issue and to inch closer to the far left agenda in order to keep as many voters as possible in their own camp. It’s a tricky balancing act for many, especially is blue areas. In purple ones, there is more to be gained by condemning DSA positions – and then voting for them in Congress when they are told to do so.

The post Will Democrats ever take a stand against DSA candidates? appeared first on The New Neo.

You might be surprised by the fact that, at least measured by official membership, the Democratic Socialists of America is a small group: 95,000 members. And yet in recent years they’ve certainly had a much greater influence on American politics than that would suggest.

The DSA has been around for close to fifty years, however, and before that elements existed that merged in 1982 to become the DSA. Socialists are famous for splitting and splintering, but these groups were able to merge.

By the way, a little digression here for levity’s sake:

Back to the DSA and its history. Note the later prominence of Bernie Sanders, whose leadership around 2015 marked a turning point for the organization:

Given that DSA’s modern rebirth is owed to the two presidential campaigns of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, it’s fitting that DSA is directly descended from the Socialist Party of America, the party line on which Eugene Debs received nearly a million votes in two of his campaigns for president … DSA was formed in 1982 as a merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). DSOC was a faction led by Michael Harrington that had split off from the Socialist Party of America, and NAM was founded in 1971 as a non-vanguardist socialist-feminist organization. At DSA’s At DSA’s founding convention in Detroit, it had 6,000 members.

Michael Harrington was a well-known professor, author, and leftist activist, and I recall his book on poverty in the US, The Other America, quite well. I was required to read it either in high school or college. No mention whatsoever was made at the time of the fact that he was a socialist. As Democratic Socialists go today, though, he was more mild and old-fashioned. Harrington hated Communism and really did think socialism could be accomplished without all the totalitarianism – or at least, had that hope. He supported Israel, too; how quaint!

But Harrington was responsible for promoting one idea that turns out to have been quite inspired: not to run as socialist (or Socialists), but to run as Democrats:

Although Harrington identified personally with the socialism of Thomas and Eugene Debs, the most consistent thread running through his life and his work was a “left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party.”

That seed came from the failure of Socialists like Norman Thomas to achieve much at all in elections. Running as Democrats despite actually being socialists was the idea behind the name of the group, with the word “Democratic” coming first. The DSA also did not call itself a party even though it could have done so. It was not going to make Thomas’ mistake; it was going to back candidates but they would not be running as DSA members for the most part, and certainly not as Socialist Party members:

Harrington said that socialists had to go through the Democratic Party to enact their policies, reasoning that the socialist vote had declined from a peak of approximately one million in the years around World War I to a few thousand by the 1950s. He considered running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980 against President Jimmy Carter, but decided against it after Senator Ted Kennedy announced his campaign. He later endorsed Kennedy and said, “if Kennedy loses or is driven out of this campaign, it will be a loss for the left”.

Some examples of early DSA members who got elected were the following:

Several elected officials were also members of DSA, like Congressman Major Owens, Congressman Ron Dellums, and NYC Mayor David Dinkins.

Dinkins was the NYC mayor who ran NY into the ground during the early 1990s. Who knew he was a DSA member? Not I. And, going to this Wiki page that purports to list prominent DSA members just from New York, I find – in addition to the obvious, like AOC and Mamdani and Darializa Avila Chevalier – people such as Jerry Nadler, Jamaal Bowman, Linda Sarsour, and actor Wallace Shawn.

During the 1980s, the DSA backed Israel and Zionists. As you might expect, that is certainly no longer the case. They also supported leftist groups in Latin America, such as the Sandinistas.

The 1990s were difficult years for the DSA, due to Harrington’s death in 1989 and the fall of the USSR in 1991. A younger group kept the movement alive, but barely – and of course leftism worked its way through academia, preparing the ground. It was during the Obama administration that the DSA had its resurgence (my guess is that there was an influx of money at that point, as well):

This period saw the emergence of several forceful popular movements: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011, Fight for $15 in 2012, and Black Lives Matter in 2013. Occupy in particular was instrumental in using class-conscious framing (“We are the 99%”) to legitimize social democratic policy demands like taxing the rich. The socialist movement was also gaining steam outside of DSA. Jacobin magazine had just been founded by Bhaskar Sunkara in 2010, which organized local reading groups and helped popularize socialist analysis to the left of DSA’s realignment model. Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013, representing the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative and serving as a modern model of a socialist politician-as-organizer.

The formation of the Left Caucus in 2014 created the space for more left-wing ideas that challenged some of DSA’s longstanding assumptions. The Left Caucus was an internal group of DSA members who advocated for running candidates as explicit socialists, adhering to a standard program, and leaving the neoliberal Socialist International. They were also friendly to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but explicit anti-Zionism was at that point still difficult to talk about in DSA.

Those were the years when the modern DSA was coming of age. Then, with Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy in 2015-2016, it burst forth from its semi-cocoon. According to the way the DSA tells the story (at least, according to the DSA member writing the piece I’m quoting), it was the DSA pushing Sanders rather than the other way around:

In early 2015, DSA began a campaign to draft Bernie Sanders to run for President called “Run, Bernie, Run.” Across several cities, small groups of DSA members tabled outside events where Bernie spoke and flyered the crowd. …

That summer, Bernie’s popularity skyrocketed, and DSA membership began to grow steadily. Over the next two years, Jacobin reading groups turned into DSA chapters. Online leftist figures like the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast (which started in March 2016), Twitter personality “Larry Website,” and Jacobin writers encouraged their followers to join DSA.

As we watched Bernie dare to speak the truth about the billionaire class and then suffer lies and slander from the liberal power-brokers, many left-leaning millennials like me underwent a total paradigm shift. His platform — particularly Medicare for All, free college, and opposition to the finance, war, and fossil fuel industries — raised expectations where Obama had brought them to the floor. Politics became fundamentally re-polarized: it was Bernie against the wealthy elite, and we knew what side we were on.

I assume you know much of the rest of the story – for example, the election of the Squad, and recent victories such as that of Mamdani (some of that is in Part I). Nearly all these people ran as Democrats, with AOC’s defeat of an entrenched and powerful Democrat incumbent being an especially important turning point moment that showed the DSA the sort of victory that was now possible.

If you want to read the type of propaganda the DSA puts out at its website to woo prospective supporters, see this:

Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.

We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.

We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish not just survive and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all. We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation. We want the multiracial working class united in solidarity instead of divided by fear. We want to win “radical” reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life.

We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control.

Join DSA to further the cause of democratic socialism in your town and across the nation.

You can see the appeal.

The post DSA history: Part II appeared first on The New Neo.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former terrorist leaders of the Weathermen and the Chicago power couple who spotted Obama and moved him up the political ladder getting third row seats to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center spoke more eloquently about what Obama represented than any of the hollow political speeches and media press releases. …

But what [Obama] actually stood for was sitting in the third row and wearing the Communist star. The media didn’t even believe that Obama’s mentor getting a front row seat to the opening of his presidential center while wearing the symbol of a movement responsible for the mass murder of millions mattered.

Bill Ayers was pretty clear about what Obama represented. “The people who tried to say that Obama palled around with terrorists, that he had Palestinian friends, that he had a black nationalist minister, none of that s___ worked,” Ayers told the one reporter who stopped him to chat.

Some of us – actually, many of us – were quite aware of what Obama stood for even back in 2008. The media and the left (but I repeat myself) were devoted to covering it up. But apparently there’s no need to cover it up any more.

Those of us of a certain age can remember the 60s quite well:

The Weathermen were a murderous Marxist terrorist organization dedicated to bringing down the United States. After they realized that planting bombs wouldn’t work, they turned to politics.

And the radicals accomplished with politics what they never managed to do with explosives.

“We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men,” Prairie Fire, a book co-authored by Ayers, Dohrn and other radicals declared. “Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.”

Barack Obama may have seated his two terrorist mentors in the front rows, but he made no direct reference to them, except for having “found my community here, friendships that would last a lifetime.”

Ah, but remember that Obama claimed back during his first campaign that Ayers was someone he hardly knew, just “a guy” who lived “in the neighborhood.” I wrote this post about the Obama-Ayers connection in 2008 prior to Obama’s first election, and I was hardly alone. But the media was engaged in covering it up, and they succeeded.

So here we are. Ayers is 81 years old now, and retired. But he has managed to have an outsized influence on politics by going into academia and focusing on the field of teaching teachers to teach. That’s how he has shaped the beliefs of several generations of students. He must be very very proud:

Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education. His interests include teaching for social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues. …

Ayers was elected vice president for curriculum studies by the American Educational Research Association in 2008.[48] William H. Schubert, a fellow professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote that his election was “a testimony of [Ayers’s] stature and [the] high esteem he holds in the field of education locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally”. Writer Sol Stern, a conservative opponent of progressive education policies, has criticized Ayers as having a virulent “hatred of America”, and said, “Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer.” …

In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist … [Laughs] Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs]

Funny stuff.

The post Back to the future: Ayers and other 60s leftist radicals appeared first on The New Neo.

Another conundrum trying to understand the mind of leftists. I know…an impossible task. But someone explain to me why the ones I know enthusiastically cheer every drone strike the Ukrainians make on Russia? Why is that such a just war? I’m not saying it isn’t, but their hypocrisy in not supporting the US getting rid of the 50 year threat of Iran having a nuke. Ukraine good, US bad.

The answer has several elements to it. The first is that the Ukraine War, and our position of helping Ukraine, began during the Biden administration. Had Trump been president and done the exact same thing as the Biden crew in taking Ukraine’s side, the reaction from the left probably would have been much less supportive of Ukraine. In fact, the left might have been against it. On the other hand, Trump’s war against Iran obviously must be condemned by the left, much like everything Trump does.

That’s not all, though. Another factor is that Putin is still connected in their minds to Trump, either by a continuing belief in Russiagate, or just by the idea that they’re both dictators and birds of a feather. Therefore of course the left will support Ukraine rather than Putin in the war (and by the way, I also support Ukraine, but for reasons which I’ve aired before).

Then there’s Israel. The left has come to uniformly hate and demonize Israel, and Israel is a major beneficiary of and military partner in the current war against Iran. Therefore the majority of the left must be on Iran’s side, just as it is mostly on Hamas’ side and on the Palestinians’ side.

So the whole thing is not hypocrisy or even inconsistency if you understand that the left’s guiding principles go like this: Trump bad, Israel bad.

The post Leftists, Ukraine, and Iran appeared first on The New Neo.

Wisconsin is a purple state, and that’s a statewide office. So the Democrats are understandably nervous about her:

Most political observers assume Democratic insiders are trying to stop Francesca Hong because they fear she would lose a general election. Given Hong’s support for abolishing police, abolishing prisons, and other positions well to the left of most Wisconsin voters, many Democrats worry she could squander what they believe is a favorable political environment in 2026 while dragging down legislative candidates and jeopardizing hopes of a Democratic trifecta.

There is certainly some truth to that.

But the deeper fear has far less to do with November than it does with what happens afterward.

If Hong wins the Democratic primary, she instantly becomes the face of Wisconsin Democrats. Whether she wins or loses in November almost becomes secondary. She would emerge as the standard bearer for the Democratic Party, and an influential voice who can fundamentally re-shape Democrat politics in the state. …

Establishment Democrats see the direction their party is heading—both in Wisconsin and across the country. And many are increasingly fearful that Democratic Socialism is no longer a fringe movement, but the future of the Democratic Party. And they are terrified that they will lose their position of power in this new-look Socialist Party.

Yes, but I’m more worried that, as in New York, these DSA candidates will win elections. I suppose it’s likely that Wisconsin isn’t ready for Hong. But in a few years it may be.

The article goes on to discuss a host of more local races in Wisconsin in which ultra-leftists are challenging more moderate Democrats and even conventionally “progressive” candidates. It’s become very apparent that this DSA takeover attempt is an extremely well-organized national movement.

Here’s some background on Hong, who is from deep-blue Madison:

Hong was born on November 4, 1988, in Madison, Wisconsin, to Korean American immigrant parents

During the 2024 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Hong backed the Uncommitted National Movement to protest President Joe Biden’s policies towards the Gaza war, and drafted a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Hong also joined the State Assembly’s Socialist Caucus in 2024. …

Hong has described herself as the “wild card” in the race, running as a progressive outsider. During her campaign, she was compared to fellow democratic socialist and then-mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Hong has drawn inspiration from Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in running her own gubernatorial campaign.

Hong is the Democrats’ frontrunner in a recent poll, and she also leads the GOP frontrunner although her advantage is well within the margin of error and the number of undecided voters is large.

About Wisconsin’s history with socialist candidates:

Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that Hong’s style, message and organization approach are working well in the primary, but her style of politics is “less tested in a general election environment.”

“Socialist and populist messages have had resonance in Wisconsin at various times, from the reforms of Robert La Follette a century ago, to several socialist mayors in Milwaukee, to a strong showing by both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the last decade,” he said. “There are more conventional Democratic candidates in the field who fare just fine in a general election but could also fail to fully rally the progressive base.”

The post And then there’s Wisconsin and Francesca Hong appeared first on The New Neo.

And much of the left in this country is still with them. For example:

Tehran flew in hundreds of foreign social media influencers to participate in the regime’s orchestrated display of anti-Western hate. The Jerusalem Post, citing Iranian state media, reported “that around 400 foreign bloggers and influencers were brought in” by the regime to witness Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral.

Leading the pack were Jackson Hinkle and Max Blumenthal. Hinkle, who built his fan base by supporting Putin and bashing Israel, took the stage at a gathering in Tehran to lead the chants of “Down with the USA.” Standing on the stage, he waved a reg flag, symbol of jihad and vengeance in Shia Islam. …

Not to be outdone, self-styled journalist Blumenthal was literally seen drumming for the regime, flanked by the flags of the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah.

By the way, although some on the left try to disown Hinkle and say he’s on the far-right, it’s pretty clear that he’s on the left – if he’s anywhere other than a grifting click-seeker. After all, he’s the founder of something called the American Communist Party and has described himself as an “American Conservative Marxist-Leninist” – that is, socially conservative, and an admirer of Stalin and Bernie Sanders. As for Blumenthal, he’s written for leftist media and is the son of Sidney Blumenthal, a highly Clinton-partisan writer. Son Max is also an extremely anti-Zionist ethnic Jew, not the first and not the last.

What unites Islamists and the left nowadays? It’s really pretty simple, and it’s the same principle it was in Iran in 1979. Back then they wanted to destroy the Shah and take power, and now in the US they want to destroy the 2-party system and the US government as we know it, they want to take power and block the ability of others to take power away from them, and they also want to destroy Israel and anyone who supports it (which would include most Jews, as well as most evangelical Christians and many other Christians as well). Many people sum it all up as the desire to destroy Western Civilization, or at least its basic principles of human rights, liberty, and the pursuit of truth.

The things that divide Islamists and the left are very small potatoes compared to the things that unite them. If they ever were to succeed in their goals, however, one would try to crush the other, as in Iran. Hopefully it won’t get that far. But they are growing more powerful, and the Tuckerite wing of what used to be the right – and now is a sort of hybrid – is in there with them.

Here’s Professor Jacobson on the subject:

This is a unique combination that I’ve never seen before. We know about what’s called the Red-Green Alliance, which is the Marxists and the Islamists coming together to hate Jews and to hate Israel. What people need to understand is that this is not really about Israel and Jews. This is about the United States. This is an attempt to destroy our country from inside.

And we now have a third element that was not seen until recently, which are some podcasters and influencers on the right who are Israel obsessed and spreading all sorts of conspiracy theories.

There is a real unity right now among these people, although they’re not united on every topic. But they’ll gladly work together for their common goals.

The post On the expansion of the red-green alliance appeared first on The New Neo.