Thanks for having me, Sam. So, if memory serves, I wrote you a fairly plaintive email not that long ago, just more or less crying out to the universe who is going to write an article that reveals just how awful the DSA is and how this emerging suicide pact of embracer from the Democratic Party is just completely dysfunctional and yet it seems to be in the making. And you have written that article over at the Atlantic where you now are. You used to be at the New York Times. I think we want to talk about how you made well how and why you made this transition. But over at the Atlantic, people can read your article which is currently titled the DSA is a parasite. The left-wing faction is hijacking the Democratic Party. So I want to get into that. I want to link it up with our concerns we share about the state of American politics. But I'll just, you know, I'll save you a little time by just quickly summarizing these facts that the DSA platform calls for abolishing the presidency, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Pentagon, the police, prisons, border enforcement, all debt, capitalism, and private property itself. So, I guess the big picture question, which I don't know if you have an answer to but I would like us to never lose sight of it. How is it that mainstream Democrats, but literally every mainstream Democrat hasn't recognized that this group and their consultation, their approval, any input from them at all should be treated like plutonium.
Yeah. So, I think this has been a problem on the left really for a century. If you go back to the cold war, right, there were many people on the left who refused to see the danger of communism. There was the progressive party which was basically controlled by the communist party and they ran a presidential candidate Henry Wallace who had been the vice president of FDR and then served as agricultural secretary as well. And that party was basically it wasn't an openly pro-communist party because there was a communist party in the United States but it was a party of fellow travelers which is the term that sort of came up in that time to describe people who were ideologically sympathetic to communism but weren't communists themselves. And there was this other sort of term that came up of how liberals might describe communists, which is were they were liberals in a hurry, right? Which is that we basically share the same outcomes, the same fundamental beliefs, but it's just that they want to get there a little faster. They want to break a few more eggs before we get there. And I still think there is this sort of residual sympathy among people on the left in the United States for people on the extreme left. There's even some sense a sense of admiration for them, right? That we're not as courageous as they are. I wish I could be as courageous as Zoran Mani and can't come out and say the things that he's saying, but I'm kind of stuck here in my political reality where I have to do the day-to-day, you know, give and take with the Republicans. There are Democrats who have spoken out very clearly against this. I want to make that absolutely clear. You know, Josh Godheimer who's a congressman, Jared Moscowitz, who's a congressman, Tom Suis, these are all moderate Democrats and obviously John Federman who's been probably the most vocal of them all. But there is this fear and I think among the kind of intellectual class, you know, like sort of journalist types, the Ezra Klein, if you will, it's a fear of not being seen as cool, right? Because the DSA is cool. They are the cool kids at the cool kids table. And there's a lot of pressure if you are a center-left or left or you know left liberal commentator. There's a lot of pressure not to make fun of the cool kids because then the cool kids are going to come and steal your lunch money. And that's just been a factor I think of American intellectual life for a very long time. And I think people on the left need to understand that you know if you're a liberal Democrat you really do not share anything in common with the DSA. Okay. Because they are not democratic. And that is ultimately the most important element of what we should all be able to agree to in the United States, left or right, wherever you are in the political spectrum, that we believe in democratic processes, right, and the rule of law, very basic things, okay, that should not be politicized. The DSA does not believe in those things. And Sam, you only mentioned half their platform. If you look at their foreign policy, that to me is almost even more revealing because they endorse and support and offer solidarity to a wide range of the most despicable communist dictatorships on earth. Okay? From North Korea to the Cuban dictatorship. So, it's very they have no ground on which to call themselves democratic socialists. They really are sort of in between that and I would say just outright communists. Most of them at this point. The party is controlled. If you look at the actual, you know, pilot bureau, if you will, right, it's actually composed of most of the people on that are openly declared Marxists. And so I think it really is not McCarthy red baiting to refer to them as a communist or communist aligned political organization.
Yeah. They're also a fountain of anti-semitism at this point. And there's this alliance which is not even covert between Islamists and the far left and this you know this so-called red green alliance which has been a century in the making and we perhaps we can talk about that but I just want to focus on the communist piece or the Marxist piece. This word socialism gets is sort of deliberately ambiguous and many people have it in their heads that when any representative of this side of our politics uses the term, they're signaling their support for some of the policies you see in Western Europe and just a more general concern about the social welfare state, the extent to which wealth inequality in the limit is going to obviously make politics in you know not just in America but in any western democracy unworkable. I mean there's a certain genie coefficient that no democracy can tolerate and with the advent of AI and this obviously corrupt if not kleptocratic alliance between the billionaire class and the Trump administration we're seeing just a very ugly side of capitalism and democracy now. And it's understandable that some people would say, "Well, this is all so awful. There's so much self-dealing. It's so cynical. Wealth inequality is such a problem. Something like western European socialism has to be on our menu as Democrats." And yet what's astonishing is that if you just look at the DSA website, right? I mean, you have that, you know, the poster boy for, you know, young charismatic energy in the Democratic party is Zoran Mandani, the mayor of New York, you know, claiming to be a proud DSA member, right? And you just go to the website and you are pitched into unapologetic communist manifesto, right? And so, but my concern here is that leaving aside, you know, the Islamism of it all, the anti-semitism of it all, the insanity of having a New York mayor who spends half his time talking about Israel and Apac and and I mean, perhaps we'll get into all of that, but if you just take this fact that the Democrats seem poised to promote people who can be credibly treated as communists at the national level, right? And that just seems like that is the path that fascism will take in America because I think if you give the American people a choice between communism and fascism, they will take the latter every time. And that's what happened in Weimar Germany. Yeah. In other societies at the time. Yeah. But I mean somehow especially in America that seems where we will default. And if you know a fear about you know a fascist a truly fascist takeover of America seems far-fetched to you then we can dumb it down perhaps considerably and just ask yourself what would it take for one of these cartoon characters out of Trumpistan to become president in 2028? I mean how would the Democrats have to misplay their hand such that we get Donald Trump Jr. or Matt Gate, you know, President Matt Gates or President Mr. Pillow or some other, you know, just golem from right-wing populism. This is how you do it, right? You run someone who can be credibly who can't figure out what's wrong with being allied with a platform that explicitly says we are going to abolish capitalism and abolish private property.
