Air Date: 7-18-2026

Today we examine recent primary elections and how the political smear of crying 'socialism' has been dusted off and aimed at a new generation of candidates. What's changed is that the people being smeared are actually winning elections, and the more the establishment called them dangerous, the stronger their numbers got.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine recent primary elections and how the political smear of crying 'socialism' has been dusted off and aimed at a new generation of candidates. What's changed is that the people being smeared are actually winning elections, and the more the establishment called them dangerous, the stronger their numbers got.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today include

The Thom Hartmann Program

The PBS NewsHour

The Majority Report

The Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Red Menace

and Future Hindsight

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, Who They Are

Section B, What They Believe

Section C, Money, Power, and the Reckoning

And Section D, Critiques and the Path Forward

And now, on to the show.

Get this is an, these are act- this is an actual quote from a speech that Trump gave a couple of days ago at the Faith and Freedom Conference or what, this Christian Nationalist conference that he was speaking at.

He says, "The Democrats, they're horrible. They wanna resume the transgender mutilation of our children. They wanna restart the war on Christmas and churches. And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently, and they're communists, they're not social democrats, they wanna completely destroy the traditional American way of life.

You'll live in squalor. There will be no food. There will be no housing. There will be no military. There will be no law and order. There will be no nothing. There will be no nothing. You'll be a third world inhabitant in every way, and everyone will suffer or die. You'll suffer or die, that's what happens for thousands of years, 'cause it's been happening by different names.

The problem is, a couple of years go by, the whole place collapses, always does, always has. But I'm sorry to say, but assassinations of those who oppose them is a very important element of their ideology. Assassination is a big deal for them. They're animals. They're animals. They hate our country, and they hate our people."

And then he goes on to say, "These are not social democrats. These are hardcore, godless communists. They're godless communists. All communists are godless. They don't believe in God. That's the most serious threat to our country s- i- since its existence, in my opinion. 250 years ago, this is a major threat to our country."

Seriously, Donald Trump is calling you and me communists. he's talking about progressive Democrats. He's talking about Democratic socialists, whatever you wanna call it. Why would he do this? he's getting desperate. this is almost cartoonish. You go back... I wrote a book called The Last American President, came out last year, or maybe early this year, I forget which, but, it- it's my next to the last book.

And the first third of it is the history of Donald from his childhood through his time with Roy Cohn, and Roy Cohn was Joe McCarthy's right-hand man, destroying people for being communists, right? It was the Red Scare. It was lit- And Roy Cohn was Donald Trump's mentor, and he was the lawyer to all five mob families in New York City, and Donald and the Trump family.

And when Roy Cohn died, Trump went off in search of a new mentor, and he found Vladimir Putin, and I believe Putin's been his mentor ever since. But, um, and Putin does the same thing, only instead of calling people communists, he calls them Nazis 'cause, of course, the Soviet Union fought against the Nazis in World War II.

So Putin's whole rationalization for killing people in Ukraine is that they're all Nazis, and his rationalization for arresting people and going after, the people in Russia who might speak back to him, including Alexei Navalny, is call, is to call them Nazis. So it's the same thing, right? It's just desperation.

It's, and, and it doesn't work. As I mentioned when Congressman Pocan was on, on with us, communism is actually a form of, economics and government where the government owns the companies, the, what Karl Marx called the means of production and supply, right? And Trump has had the federal government buying companies.

That's what communists do, right? literally he's the first president ever to do this, outside of nationalization efforts during wartime. But, um, he's bought parts. He's talking about buying parts of OpenAI and Anthropic right now. He's got Westinghouse, NVIDIA, AMD, U.S. Steel, Trilogy Metals, Vulcan Elements, MP Materials, Korea Zinc, Lithium Americas, USA Rare Earths, Intel, Ax light, ReElement Tech.

it just... he's, we're, we are now, we, our gov- our government, you and me and our government now own large shares in these companies. Now, that's a long way from when Barack Obama gave Elon Musk $465 million to prevent Musk and Tesla from going bankrupt. That was a loan. We got that money back.

But, the whole, the most astonishing part of the whole thing is how our mainstream media is treating Trump's new Red-baiting as if it was just like, "Oh, Trump is calling Democrats communists now," rather than saying, "Trump is calling Democrats communists now, and it's a naked lie." There are no communists in the Democratic Party, for all practical purposes.

On this program, I'm forgetting his name. I think it was, like, Dave Witt or Dave Watt or something like that, but anyhow, I had the president, the chairman, or whatever his title is, of the Communist Party of the United States. Longtime listeners will remember this. This was back in the Air America days.

This is literally 15, 20 years ago. I had the head of the Communist Party of the United States on this program, and I said, "How's it going?" "How are you? How's your organization growing?" And he was like, "Oh, we're just doing great. We're up to, 2,000 or 3,000 members now." Forgive

me, I'm sneezing here. it's cold. And, i- it's c- American communists are a joke, right? there's... I remember, uh, I remember George Fish at SDS when I was growing up in, in Lansing, Michigan, or in, at, in East Lansing at MSU, and he was a, "I'm a proud Trotskyite."

Another sneeze, forgive me. and a- and I knew a few people who called themselves communists who were in SDS back in the day, but, it, I don't know anybody today who would literally call themselves a communist. the whole idea of communism has just been so discredited by its failures.

Although it's still going on down in Cuba, And, but the, and the Chinese Communist Party, they're really capitalists.

I'm s- forgive my, all my sneezing here. The, they got the AC on in the building. the real threat to today, to America today is not communism, it's fascism. as much as the, as much as the left has, quote, "moved left," in other words, the Democrats are saying, "Hey, maybe we should talk about healthcare for all, and free college for everybody, and, bringing back unionization," if you wanna call that moving left, I wouldn't.

Pardon me. that, that's just basically the Democratic Party moving back to the mainstream. the Democratic Party is going back to FDR and LBJ. That was the mainstream. The Republicans, on the other hand, are going full fascist. That is not mainstream. they're heading back to Joe McCarthy. Excuse me.

I will eventually stop sneezing here. I, I just find this insane. we're j- it's a scam. it's the... and it's a response, a reaction to this Reaganomics scam that we have been dealing with all this time And, yeah, in fact, here's, this is... I did some research on this, and this is what I found.

I'll just sh- share it with you, verbatim from my newsletter. In 1798, John Adams signed the Marine Hospital Act, which took 20 cents a month out of every sailor's pay and was our country's first federal payroll tax. It was used to build and run a government, a network of government-run and owned hospitals.

this was a permanent mandatory federally operated healthcare system by John Adams, our second president, in 1798. And it's the... This is the direct ancestor of today's Public Health Service. And Jefferson was the head of the Senate when this passed. he was Adams' vice president as well. The next year, Congress extended that to the Navy, and they added half-pay disability.

they had... They federalized lighthouses and navigation aids in 1789. They paid, invalid pensions to Revolutionary War veterans. They appropriated relief for refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution in 1794. Under James Madison, we set up a federal agency to get smallpox vaccine to ordinary people in 1813.

when they wrote the general welfare into the Preamble and Article One of the Constitution, they meant something. They meant literally taxing rich people and helping out the average person, building a middle class, and that's what we've been doing 

ever since. So when you hear this hysteria from Trump and the Republicans, "Oh, it's communists," this is, every election cycle, because basically the entire Republican Party is there for the billionaires and the big corporations, period.

They're not there for you and me and never have been, or at least not since Teddy Roosevelt. So instead of talking about issues, they've gotta come up with a new hysteria every election cycle. We had Willie Horton. We had swift boats. We had death panels. We had death taxes. We got critic- the war on Christmas, migrant caravans, critical race theory, groomers, trans athletes.

And now they're rolling out this BS about communism, and all it is they're basically admitting that they've got nothing for Americans unless you're really rich. if you make over a couple million dollars a year, Republicans are your party. If you're a billionaire, the Republicans are with you.

If you're CEO of a big corporation making, a million dollars every other week, that, that's your party. But otherwise, they got nothing, and that's why they come up with this hysterical BS. Communism? Give me a break.

So Democrats have this immediate challenge trying to replace Graham Platner in this critical Maine Senate race.

The larger question is why, these serious controversies increasingly fail to disqualify political candidates until the pressure becomes overwhelming. but Jonathan, starting with the practical question, what do Democrats need to do now? 

they need to get a nominee who can best go up against Susan Collins.

Now, with Graham Platner finally out of the race, I was happy to see that he submitted the papers to ful- you know, fully get out of the race, this afternoon. That is the first step that needed to happen. Now they have to have, the Democrats have to have the convention, and a bunch of people are gonna jump in, jump into that race and be a part of the process to become the nominee.

But again, no matter who the nominee is, they are going up against a formidable candidate in Susan Collins. We've talked about this many times before. How many elections have we seen her either down in the polls, potentially losing to the Democrat, but on election day she blows the doors off the election?

That scenario is still at work, so whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, whoever the Maine Democrats pick, they better pick the person and then circle the wagons around them to give that nominee the best possible shot, they can to defeat Susan Collins. 

And David, the fact that Graham Platner survived one controversy after another, his political support largely held until there was this allegation that was just so serious that it became impossible for the party to move on.

What does that say about how high the threshold for political shame has become? 

very high apparently. uh, everyone's a sinner, and we all have things that we're not proud of in our past, but he had so many red flags. and it was not only the tattoo and over a decade of Reddit posts, but as we've learned, when some guy's abusive to one woman, there are more.

There's a pattern of behavior all the time. And we learned from some reporting in The New York Times this week that three operatives from the Democratic National Party in DC went up to Maine and told him, "You're the guy. You're our hero. You're our messiah. You should run." And people in Maine who knew him was like, "You might still be in a fragile state.

Maybe this is not a good idea." And they turned out to be right. To me, the bigger picture is when you decide whether or not to vote some- for somebody, there should be three filters. First, do they have the moral character re- ready to do the job? Are they trustworthy? Do they tell the truth? The second filter should be do they have good judgment?

Can they read a situation and see here's what needs to be done here? And the third filter should be do they agree with me? Do they, are they on my political team? But what's happened in politics over the last I don't know how many years is those first two filters are gone And so people only ask, "Are they on my team?"

And that's obviously true on the Republican side with Trump, but it's also true of Bernie Sanders, who stuck to Platner like glue after a lot of these revelations were coming, 'cause he decided, he's a Democrat, therefore, I don't have to worry about character. I don't have to worry about judgment." But let's all learn the lesson.

Character actually is important, and if somebody doesn't have that, it doesn't matter if they're on your team. 

But what about that, Jonathan? Democrats for years had pointed at Donald Trump and made the argument that character matters. Does the fact that so many Democrats were willing to stick with Graham Platner, does that undercut the, their argument fundamentally?

N- no, it doesn't, because we're talking about one guy over a history of candidates where Democrats, didn't put those, the, the considerations they gave to Graham Platner, into work. I look at it, I look at it like this. D- what happened, what was, what should have happened, finally happened.

And when you look on the Republican side, and particularly with President Trump, who's had similar, accusations against him, including some court actions, and yet Republicans stuck by him. And so I wonder if a lot of Democrats looked and thought, "You know what? The guy in the Oval Office has got a lot of baggage.

This guy has a lot of baggage. We're gonna hang in there." Should they have done it? No, they shouldn't have. And the consequences of that, Maine and Maine Democrats are dealing with that now. But I hope that this is a lesson for candidates around the country. If you have skeletons in your closet, you better know what they are, and you better be truthful and forthcoming about what they are when people come to you and say you are the one.

Maybe you should be the person who says, "You know what? I'm not, and maybe you should go talk to someone else." 

July 4th Uh, Mamdani is apparently gonna be the guy for the Democratic Party who is going to provide another way of celebrating, I guess, uh, another vision of what America is at its 250th birthday.

He's gonna deliver a speech just before Trump does from George Washington's, uh, old desk, which is in, uh, I think it's New York City Hall. Mm-hmm. But also this week we should say just not, maybe not coincidentally, Kamala Harris is, it came out that she's been in extensive meetings with him, uh, the uncommitted, uh, folks.

Mm. Like, obviously on a reformation tour. Like, what can I do? Uh, what do you make of that? 

Well, master of timing, Kamala Harris once again. You know, this might have helped in, uh, uh, September of, uh, 2024, uh, when people like you and I were urging she do it. Uh, but it is an indication that, yeah, she can read the polls.

She can read these election results, you know. She knows if she's gonna have a future, but I don't think she's gonna be able to do it, but, you know, she's making the effort. Um, but no, Mamdani has become this, uh, political force nationally. I mean, it is very striking. Like, I w- you know, like we at The Nation had a 250th issue, and it's a very troubling thing to have Donald Trump as the president when you're celebrating the, uh, the birth of the country.

Like, however ambiguously one might feel about the American experiment, still one would like to have something to be proud of. Um, there is much to be proud of in the United States. I mean, uh, you know, like, uh, the, you guys gave the world LeBron and Martin Scorsese. Like, you know, that's, uh, you know, uh, the- Thank you

Jobs. Uh, so I, I say, you know, like, but there's that room- but you st- um, it's very important to have the sort of like, some sort of patriotic message both about what thing have, things have gone wrong, but like how you want a better country. Um, the pessimism about the country is all-time high, and like none of the 

Democrats can speak to that.

I mean, one would've thought. I mean, it's interesting that Obama's sort of silence on this, this moment. And- Yeah ... like, he's, like, producing, uh, a, the series with Larry David. Like, like, that's how, you know ... Like, and you know, like Obama, whatever you wanna feel about him, hugely important historical figure, um, can articulate, you know, much of what's best about the United States.

Like, it's curious that, like, all these, um, uh, uh, mainstream Democrats have gone silent and have, have created a vacuum for Mamdani. 

Yeah, I, you know, I ... 

It is fascinating that- The value of having someone who is a huge historical figure alive is that they can step in- 

Yes ... 

and do stuff. Now, uh, who knows what he's doing, uh, behind the scenes, uh, in between his wheeling and dealing in Hollywood, but it is pretty striking that he is offering really nothing.

Now, maybe his, maybe- Yeah, and, and Trump- Maybe he's thinking- ... 

like, he's like creating a travesty. Like, he's gonna like have a MAGA march on the, you know, July 4th. That, that is a travesty that no other president would've ever done. He's turned the White House into a laughing stock. He's like, you know, turning W- Washington DC into this like gaudy bordello.

Uh, you, you... This would be the time where you kind of have Bill Clinton speak because everyone knows, you know- Right ... Epstein Island. 

Right, right. 

So but at least Obama's there, you know? Like, whatever you wanna say, this guy knows how to deliver a speech. He knows how 

to, you know- But that's the thing too.

It's like- Oh ... I, I, I wouldn't want his politics to return- 

Yeah ... 

but his rhetoric, like you would imagine he, he would deploy it. Now, maybe there's some theory like it'll get Trump mad, or it'll awake the, the conservative movement, which again, I think is just absolutely silly. Uh- No, 

but there's a hunger for that.

I mean, that's why Mamdani is popular. Like, he's offering a positive vision of what America could be, you know? He has become the Obama figure. Like, it's such a hugely positive thing to have like a Muslim American mayor, uh, uh, th- as a, you know, uh, leading the largest, uh, city. This is represents the best of America.

And the Democrats, like it is, for whatever reason, Obama's silence, um, he's... I think he has chosen it because he does actually think it's his job to like le- step back and let the new generation rise. I, I think that's the most, uh, generous interpretation. Pardonable, 

yes. 

But- Well- ... you know, like his voice is really missing at this moment.

What do you think we're gonna see, uh, going forward, uh, in terms of these, um, uh, uh, I, I, I think it's quite likely we're going to see, uh, another- Maybe close to half dozen, maybe a little bit less, uh, incumbents lose their, uh, seats, um, to either, uh, DSA or progressive candidates. Um, it's really just gonna come down to, like, the ground game.

That's what it really s- it feels like. Yeah. These incumbents do not have volunteers. They just don't. 

No, no. Yeah, yeah. No, no, they, they, they don't, and w- uh, whatever, like, machine politics that once existed, you know, for the reason I indicated, no longer exist. Um, and you know, like, I mean, uh, the other side effect is, like, you

victory builds on victory, right? Yeah. Like, you know, the fact that the DSA has won these victories, now they're, like, growing larger than ever. If you could have, you know, DSA of the strength i- that's in New York in other parts of the country, it would become a real powerhouse within the party. 

You said the following, quote, "Our bigger problem," meaning the Democrats, "our bigger problem is not that we are perceived to be too woke, but that we're perceived to be too weak.

We need to stand up to pharmaceutical companies who are despised in rural America, stand up to data centers who are despised in rural America, stand up to tech bros who are despised in rural America," end quote. I might say they're also despised in urban America. So let's start with something that you've agreed with as well as some others, how the Democrats can put together an authentic, well-publicized, daily supported contract for America.

Newt Gingrich in nineteen ninety-four showed how that could be done as he defeated the Democrats with what he called the Contract for America, and we called it a contract on America. It was terrible. But people felt the GOP stood for something. And how many articles are we gonna have to read, Celinda, in the Times and the Post about how the Democratic Party's in disarray?

It doesn't know which way to go, here, there, and people have no confidence in it who despise Trump and the GOP. They have no confidence in the Democrats. So give us your take on very popular issues with names like raising the minimum wage that should be part of a compact for the American people, spearheaded in every way right down to the local activities of the Democratic Party in alliance with the labor union locals and civic groups. 

So I think this is a really, really important idea, and it's absolutely essential to winning. I think you have been suggesting this for a while, and I couldn't agree with you more. You suggested it in '24 as well. And it doesn't have to include everything we believe in, and it should include concrete economic proposals.

And it is noticeable that the two people who won governorships in 2025, Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Sherrill, both had contracts with their voters. And Abigail Spanberger took her 10-point plan around to 67 different cities in Virginia and said, "Here's what I'm gonna do. Hold me accountable if I don't do it.

Don't vote for me if I don't do it." And Mikey Sherrill said, "Day one, I'm gonna do these three things," and she interrupted her inaugural address and signed three executive orders, including capping utility prices. So this is absolutely essential. First of all is raising wages, and we all talk about the cost of living, the rising cost of living, bills, et cetera.

The biggest answer to getting affordability for American families is to get wages up. And of course, the federal minimum wage is just over $7 an hour. It's absolutely absurd. So we need to raise the wage. We should be talking about capping prescription drug prices or limiting prescription drug prices. The VA negotiates 399 prescription drugs.

We can't figure out how to get Medicare to negotiate 10? Adopt the VA price list. This is not rocket science. Capping utility prices, making sure that data centers cannot dump utility rate increases on their voters. The most bipartisan issue out there right now is data centers. So there, equal pay for men and women, still an issue for people.

Women still paid less, even though their families are relying on those two incomes 'cause nobody can make it on one income anymore, unless you're Musk. So there are a lot of proposals out there. Medicare for All testing off the charts. Healthcare been taken away from record numbers of voters, and we often say things like voters lose their healthcare.

People don't misplace their healthcare. They misplace their keys. They get their healthcare taken away from them, and that's what's happened here. So Democrats need to lay out 10 pr- concrete proposals and run on them We have the critique of what's going on. We understand what's happening to real people's lives.

The third leg of the stool is offering our alternative, and a concrete alternative that people can pass on to their friends and family, that people can hold us accountable for. And the last of the 10 proposals on the contract needs to be something about campaign finance reform. We have to get corporate money out of politics, or our system will continue to be rigged against us and rotting from the middle.

And I think that's a good part of the reason why Jeffries and Schumer are standing on the sidelines and not coming forward with a compact for the American people, as they see it as impairing all the floods of commercial PAC money that they hope to be pouring into the Democratic Party. The trouble with the Democratic Party leadership, Celinda, is they want to win elections on their own terms, which means you don't fight Wall Street, you don't take on the big PACs, you don't push for campaign finance reform, as you showed just now should be done, and they wanna appeal to the voter by saying they're not Trump.

They're not dictator Trump. They're not vicious, cruel, greedy, corrupt Trump. that's okay. that's gonna get you some votes. But people want to ask, "Whose side are you on? What are you doing for us? How do you care for us?" And they're not receiving coordinated and organized answers from the Democratic leadership, just from candidates around the country, but not from the National Democratic Party.

Now, here's an example, just to illustrate and extend what you just said, Celinda. 25 million workers would benefit from pushing the minimum wage up to $15, the federal minimum wage. 60 million elderly people would benefit from John Larson's bill, H.R.4583, which would Raise the Social Security taxes above the $180,000 income level today on the rich, and use that money to increase benefits for Social Security recipients that have been frozen since 1971.

Think of all the CEO salaries. Are they frozen since 1971? Et cetera. That's 60 million people who would get increased Social Security benefits paid by a more progressive Social Security tax on the wealthy in the country. 200 Democrats in 2022 voted for that bill by John Larson, but unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi didn't want it on the floor because she was concerned with the Blue Dog Democrats who were blocking.

this is a tremendous winning issue if you want to win elections. Another one is corporate crime, ripping off consumer savings and dollars constantly, irritating people constantly, whether it's the credit card companies, insurance companies denying benefits, the banks. Just all over the-- people are forced to sign these fine print contracts and enter into consumer servitude.

They can't bargain anymore. That's a big issue. Taxing the undertaxed super rich, that along with cracking down on corporate crooks, comes in at over 85% in the polls. That's a lot of conservative people. So a compact for the American people would get left-right votes, not just Democratic families, but Republican families who want the same thing: fair play, honesty, good public services, and above all, this is a winner, childcare and an authentic child tax credit.

That alone will get far more women out to vote, the mothers who have to engage in constant back and forth from work and very exorbitant childcare. Y- Western Europe, Canada, they've had this for years. What's our excuse? That's another winner. That's another part of the compact for the American people. So Linda, how do we get the leadership to champion this or step aside for some energetic leaders?

They can't just win the election in November. They have to win it convincingly so they don't have to worry about Blue Dog senators and Blue Dog House of Representatives members holding a sword of Damocles over the leadership. How do we get this leadership? We tried to visit the Democratic National Committee and send our petition.

The building's like a mausoleum. You couldn't even get anybody to come to the front door to receive the petition, and the only activity was the side doors where members of the Democratic Party sneak in and sit in their cubicles to dial for commercial dollars 

Yeah, totally. I think one of the things that I want to wrestle with a little bit first is, trying to, diagnose what are the conditions that are producing this, right?

Like, where is this sweep coming from? It's not like DSA is a brand-new organization. It's not like electoral organizing is new for them strategically. So I do think there's, an interesting question to try to wrestle with of, what is changing in the current conditions? And I think at the end of the day, there are a couple things that we need to wrestle with in order to determine our response as communists, honestly, and in order to understand how democratic socialism is slotting in in response to present conditions.

And so I think one of the things that I want to point out is that I do think there is a crisis in the ideological foundations of American imperialism right now. Which is to say that I think American imperial ambitions are increasingly unpopular with the populace inasmuch as even the right has moved towards a sort of anti-interventionist framing more and more, and obviously the left has that opposition to begin with.

And I think part of what we're seeing here is the reality of the fact that, and we've said this time and time again, when it comes to anti-imperialism, right-wing populism is not a viable option. The right-wing populists are not anti-imperialist. Their anti-interventionism is always rhetorical and is always willing to be dropped as soon as the economic interests of capital and the imperial ambitions of the state come back into play.

And so I think one of the reasons we may be seeing this sweep is that there has honestly been difficulty for the populist right in the United States to continue to maintain the idea that it is in some way opposed to American intervention overseas and American aggressiveness Ultimately, I think that it's just true that many of the people who are part of the populist right-wing base are upset with Trump and the MAGA movement around Iran.

They are upset around Israel. They are upset around Palestine. They are upset about the fact that what they were sold as a right-wing anti-interventionist, foreign policy simply is not that in actuality, and that for all the populism that you will hear, at the end of the day, the MAGA movement acts like neocons when it comes to foreign policy, regardless of what they say.

We've seen fractures on the right there that I think are very clear, and I think one of the things that has been really eye-opening for a lot of people in the US is the fact that between Biden and Trump, policy around Israel and Palestine has not really looked any different. Honestly, you can see a clear level of continuity there.

And I do think that after October seventh, we really did see a moral crisis in the United States, where people in the broader populace are changing their opinion on this question and are becoming more and more aware of just how fucked up and evil Israel is. And so I think there is a, this shift that is happening and this kind of, difficulty in constructing this ideological justification, and right-wing populism has let people down who do not want to see the US engage in aggressive overseas action.

And I really do think if you look at some of these wins in New York, it is AIPAC Democrats who are getting unseated, and I don't think that's incidental. I really do think that a large part of this is that Democratic socialists are willing to criticize the Democratic Party on these issues, are willing to position themselves, I don't think strongly enough in terms of pro-Palestinian national liberation, but at least as vocal critics of Israel in a way that appeals to broad parts of the population.

And the other thing that I think we need to wrestle with is that I do just think there has been a mass movement around immigration in this country that really has been more sizable and more mainstream than you might think, right? If you think about what has happened in Los Angeles, in, all of the parts of the country, honestly, where we saw these massive rapid response networks happening, where we saw people taking to the streets, that's gone beyond the traditional far-left organizing and become, again, something with more of a mass characteristic to it.

And I think that is creating this narrative where people are willing to criticize Democratic politicians who won't adequately stand up to ICE, who won't adequately critique Trump's immigration enforcement and the policies around it, and that's leaving room for these candidates to come in. So the reason that I think diagnosing those conditions matters is because I think it helps us understand that what is producing these electoral victories for the Democratic Socialists is a broader shift in politics within the United States that ought to be advantageous to those of us who are to their left and would consider ourselves more on the communist side of things.

They are taking victories based on a mass movement, and we ought to be able to determine how to do the same thing. Obviously, communists have been involved in that mass movement. I think everyone who listens to the show probably knows what that looks like on some level or another. But how do we transform the mass movement into victories for communism specifically and towards building a communist politics I think, the question.

The Democratic Socialists have the DSA, which is this massive organization with increasing levels of cohesion and organizational complexity, open factional debate internal to it where they hash these issues out, and that has positioned them very well to be able to respond to these mass changes that are occurring within the US.

And I do think that is really a big part of where we are seeing these successes for them, and it ought to point for communists to the necessity of that level of preparation and that level of organizational, proficiency and professionalism even in order for us to be able to respond as well. So I, I do wanna just start with that diagnosis because I think it really does paint a picture of what communists need to be doing to a certain degree or another.

A- and there is just a straightforward benefit to the success of the DSA more broadly, which is that it is bring... A- and the polls of the Democratic base show over and over again, the Democratic base, particularly those that are, under f- 50, under 60, certainly under 40, are shifting, towards the progressive, populist, democratic socialist wing of the party.

They're fed up with the corporate center of the party, and what that means for us is simply this: the more people that are willing and able to identify, with democratic socialism, with socialism more broadly, it opens up a funnel to, what I would argue and what Allison probably would agree with are, obviously we're Marxists, so I think the most principled, logical conclusion of anybody interested in socialist politics a- and that, that want to win over the long term and want to defend any gains over the long term, you have to turn towards, Marxism.

And there will be people who, are like liberal temperamentally a- and maybe they're not super intellectually curious, and they just want lower rent and access to he- healthcare who will stay within, the social democratic or democratic socialist milieu. There is a faction, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25%, who knows how high that can get, that once that is unlocked for them, and we saw this with the Bernie phenomena, once they're in that realm, once they're interested in that stuff, once they're starting to identify as a socialist, they will keep going, and they will find shows like this.

They will find other figures. They will find texts. They'll 

become curious about a broader critique of capitalism itself. They'll learn words like anti-imperialism, self-determination, the periphery and the imperial core. That will start to fill out the picture, particularly the more intellectually curious, a- and, deeper, deeper-thinking people that are, especially that are very young right now, that are still blossoming into their political consciousness.

They will move in our direction, and we have to not have that door shut prematurely. That door has to be open, and we have to see ourselves as not, teaming up with the DSA per se, but as certainly lending our support vociferously to two things, the left-wing communist factions and caucuses within the DSA.

We want them, to win out, and more broadly, we do genuinely want a- as far as the electoral terrain is one terrain of many to struggle on, yeah, we want to see the democratic socialists, beat the corporate centrists within the party. I would love for the Democratic Party to be even a flawed and limited social democratic or democratic socialist party, over a corporate-centered, AIPAC-dominated, party that we've known for our fucking entire lives.

That is a win. That does open up opportunities for us on the actual communist, Marxist, anti-imperialist left, and I think we could have a- I would argue perhaps a growing center of gravity within a broader, socialist, democratic socialist or br- broader socialist left politic as that continues to build.

now there's, th- this is, this terrain is fraught with problems. There's going to be opportunism. There's going to be co-optation. There's going to be infighting and people that gravitate towards the right wing of the DSA. There's going to be line struggles. we should not shy away from that whatsoever, but we also should not, I think, alienate ourselves completely from a movement that more and more people, especially young people, are getting into.

We should see it, and we should use it as an opportunity. and that actually, that bleeds in well to this next point I want to make, which is that this is, historical... this is not historically unprecedented in the United States. After, the Civil War, at the end of the 19th century, we saw this economic boom.

We, the Carnegies, the railroad systems. We saw this huge economic boom, this sort of industrial revolution that occurred within the United States after slavery was defeated, and there's obviously deep problems with that and reconstruction, and all of that was, all on the table.

But there's this huge economic boom, and the beneficiaries of that economic boom were a increasingly small group of people huge w- that would be billionaires in our time, that existed at that time. And there was, in reaction to not only the enormous explosion of wealth, but the massive wealth inequality that wealth was funneled into, there was a genuine grassroots reaction to that, that took many forms.

From the prairie populists out here on the Great Plains and the People's Party, the first People's Party, convention was in Omaha, Nebraska. I went-- I graduated from a high school called Bryan High, which is William Jennings Bryan High School, because he was a figure that was a progressive populist for, the economic working class at that time.

And again, plenty of contradictions with there. There's a settler colonial contradiction with there, and there's a racial contradiction within there. But, that gave rise to a sl- a slew of left-wing forces coming out of what is now looked back at as the Gilded Age. You had the Socialist Party. You had Eugene Debs, fighting on the electoral terrain at, at that point.

You had the Communist Party of the United States of America organizing, workers across the country and, and having an explosion of membership. You had the IWW, the Wobblies, in the '10s and the teens, 19-teens, doing militant and racially egalitarian, open class struggle at the level of labor organizing.

and you had all these movements that are reactions to the Gilded Age. and, and of course, that eventually culminates in the Progressive Era. it culminates in some ways economically. The Gilded Age itself culminates in the Great Depression. Then you have FDR and the New Deal, and you saw the disappearance Of a lot of those more militant forces, and that was a two-pronged approach.

There was a reds, there was wave and wave of Red Scares. There's the de-radicalization of unions, this reactionary attack on communism and socialism and anarchism writ large. But also you saw a lot of the, policies, a lot of the things that the Socialist Party, for example, were pushing get absorbed into the broader Democratic Party apparatus such that you had the New Deal.

Now, the New Deal, again, another compromise with settler colonialism, another compromise with racism that, we're not sugarcoating over that whatsoever, but that was the sort of culmination of, a historical set of circumstances that we're living again at a different level. We're living that, that historical process in the United States that happened 100 years ago.

So we have had many conversations about money in politics, and we've also discussed the influence of the media, but we have not yet had an expansive conversation about violence.

It's not that violence is new, as you point out in the book, but for sure the threat of violence today is both quantitatively and qualitatively different. 

Between Nancy Pelosi's husband being attacked in their home, the Minnesota state lawmakers being shot dead in their homes, and January 6th, there's no question that we live in dangerous times.

And you start the book actually with a death threat to former representative Eric Swalwell's office. Why did you start there? 

So I started, as you're mentioning, with actually a slew of death threats that were called in to former representative Eric Swalwell's office t- because I think that it is just an example of something that has become unfortunately all too normalized in American politics.

When I speak to representatives, as I did for the book, and we also know this from data from the US Capitol Police and other sources, the number of times that they're getting people calling in death threats, threatening them, threatening increasingly, unfortunately, their children, their spouses, their families, is just really shockingly high.

And so one of the themes, as you're mentioning, that the book talks about is h- not just the incidents of violence but how that's distorting lawmaking. What are the ramifications of, for our democracy of the fact that what happened to Eric Swalwell at the beginning of the book has just become all too frequent, in American politics?

And you listed a few incidents of actual physical violence, but for every incidence of physical violence, there are so many more instances of threats and harassments and insults that have become unfortunately all too frequent for politicians at all levels of government. 

Right, and it's not only Democrats who get- 100%

who get targeted. Even we recently had a conversation about how Senator Murkowski said basically that people are scared, Republicans are scared. Because of threats from the right? 

Definitely. It's a very bipartisan topic, and according to data from the US Capitol Police, members from both parties are receiving alarmingly high numbers of threats and incidents of violence.

Between 2018 and 2023, according to data from the US Capitol Police, the number of threats of violence and incidents of violence against members doubled. and then it's continued to rise since then. And in the book, there are quotes from folks like Liz Cheney saying that there are members who came to her and said, "I would have voted to impeach the president, but I was afraid for the safety of myself and my family."

we know that there have been countless attacks on folks like Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney, who are on the January 6th committee. So there's a lot of violence and threats, both from members of their own party in some instances, and people across the ideological spectrum. So again, it's definitely not isolated, not to one party, not to one demographic group increasingly.

It's really an epidemic that we have to reckon with, just as Americans, as citizens, and as people who want functional politics. 

it's definitely difficult to have functional politics when you're getting death threats and your family is being threatened, and you cannot vote on bills- ... that you think are the right bills to vote for.

Yeah, exactly. So my book talks about three ways in which this violence is distorting politics. you mentioned Nancy Pelosi's husband. The book actually quotes Nancy Pelosi's memoir, where she says that when she speaks to young, dynamic people thinking of running for Congress, what they tell her is that what happened to Paul Pelosi, the violent attack on her husband in their San Francisco home, that's their greatest fear.

That's the reason that they're not running for Congress. I interviewed Angie Craig, who was a representative who was assaulted in her building in 2023. She also told me that she thinks violence is the biggest deterrent to getting people into politics. So the attrition problem, I think, is something that we have to reckon with, and that's not just in Congress.

my colleagues and I at the Brennan Center did a study a few years ago where we looked at violence faced by local office holders. It was a survey of all 50 states, different kinds of state and local office holders. Among local office holders, women in local office, about 50% of them said that they were dissuaded from running for re-election or running for higher office because of violence.

So we have to think about the attrition problem, and particularly the disparate impact on women, on people of color, on young people, on people who we know violence has a disparate impact on. So we have to think about what does it mean to be in a democracy where members can't vote their conscience? 

Yes.

Where members can't vote to impeach the president if they want to because they're afraid for the safety of their families? That they would shy away from hot button issues because they were afraid of violence. So that is something that is distortive to democracy in general. And then the last thing that I'll mention is that members are constricting civic engagement, which is another core tenet of a functional democracy.

So one member told me, "I'm afraid to go to certain parts of my own district because I'm afraid for my safety or the safety of my staff," especially since for this member she said, most of her district staff were women. Other members- Like 

notably, for example, Gabby Giffords was shot basically- 

That's exactly what I 

was-

at a meet and greet with her 

constituents. Yeah. And that's exactly what I was going to say. One member, Representative Scanlon, told me, "How could I not have the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords at a Congress at your corner event in the back of my mind?" 

How can we not have that in the back of our mind when we do a congress at your corner event?

So- Yes ... we're seeing members cancel town halls, cancel engagement events. We saw Ilhan Omar, Representative Ilhan Omar recently attacked at a town hall. Yes. And I view democracy as a continuous conversation between representatives and their constituents, and that conversation is being constricted and diluted by this violence.

I want to pivot here a little bit to the way that you have organized your book- ... around three change making classes, the Watergate babies of 1974, the Contract with America in 1994 under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, and the blue wave class of 2018- ... which came about after the 2016 election of President Trump.

And I want to delve deeper on each, but broadly speaking- ... what do these three classes share in common? 

So- I wanted to write a book that spoke to how we got here, right? The title Stuck speaks to what a lot of us are feeling about our democracy in general and, certainly about Congress, which is that it is stuck, that in so many ways it is not delivering in the way that it was intended to do, not delivering for ordinary Americans.

And so it is an attempt to look backward in order to chart a course forward. It looks back 50 years in order to explain how we got here, and I firmly believe that you need to understand how we got here in order to understand how we can move forward. 

Totally agree. 

And so it's a book about change-making, and in writing a book about change-making, I wanted to look at the times that the Congress is the most changeable.

And as a Congressional scholar, I think that that's when there's waves of new people coming to Congress. And so these three moments in time, the class of 1974, the class of 1994, and the class of 2018, are three of the largest groups of new members who've come to the House of Representatives over the past 50 years.

And so I wanted to anchor the book in these wave elections, these moments of change for the institution to see what we can learn. And the other thing that these three classes have in common that I think is really important right now and why I chose them is that they speak to Congress's relationship with the executive.

They're inflection points in terms of Congress's relationship with the executive branch. All three of these classes are tied to impeachment proceedings in different ways. And given the rampant executive abuse of power and the ways in which we're seeing a Congress that is supine right now, a Congress that needs to understand how to stand up to the president, I wanted to understand again how these moments in time, these key inflection points in Congress's relationship with the president can help us understand how Congress can strengthen itself vis-a-vis the executive once again.

We've just heard clips starting with

The Thom Hartmann Program unpacking Trump's claim at the Faith and Freedom Conference that Democrats are "hardcore godless communists" by tracing the red-baiting playbook back through Roy Cohn to Joe McCarthy.

The PBS NewsHour reviewed the collapse of Graham Platner's Maine Senate campaign and warned that team loyalty had replaced character vetting as the primary filter Democrats and Republicans use to evaluate candidates.

The Majority Report discussed Obama's puzzling silence at America's 250th birthday moment and how Mamdani has stepped into that void with a positive patriotic vision.

The Ralph Nader Radio Hour outlined a strategy for Democrats to win elections by committing to specific policies, from raising the federal minimum wage to capping prescription drug prices, rather than running only against Trump.

Red Menace traced DSA's wins over AIPAC-backed Democrats to growing public opposition to Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, alongside a mass grassroots movement against ICE.

And Future Hindsight examined how political violence against lawmakers is distorting democracy by silencing votes, driving away candidates, and shrinking civic engagement.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, as you may have heard by now, the show is going through some financial troubles. We've taken a big hit on ad dollars drying up since the beginning of the year, and, much like the world in general, things have not improved. We've had to cut expenses dramatically and I'm refocusing on building the core podcast and I'm experimenting with the idea of launching a newsletter to attract newsletter readers who may never consider listening to a long-form podcast, just like how you may never consider reading long-form newsletters. The point is, you can't tell from the outside right now but there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes here.

So, to our members supporting the show, you're the main thing getting us through right now and we appreciate your patience while we work on building everything that we hope will get us back on solid financial footing.

If you haven't signed up yet but are thinking about it, just know that the emergency hasn't passed and we could still really use your help.

So, if you get value out of the show - and think others would too! - and want to get it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

Slowly but surely, we're also working on reincorporating audience feedback into the show. If you want to encourage others to leave messages, start by becoming the change you want to see in the world.

To spark ideas, here's today's question.

The democratic socialists are making gains this election cycle and their whole point is that government has the power to make people's lives better. Tell us the last time you actually felt the government impact your daily life, for better or worse. A policy change with direct impacts, a program that saved you or failed you. Something you could feel, not just read about.

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

As for today's topic,

the reckoning headed for the Democratic Party has been a long time coming. They've been on a predictably disastrous path for decades now, but it wasn't until the wake of the 2008 housing collapse that it became clear to anyone willing to look.

Both parties were impacted by the great recession in their own ways and have been in pitched internal battles ever since. The Republicans were roiled first by the libertarian-leaning Tea Party and later by the faux populism of MAGA, while the Democrats have been busy fending off critiques from the left in the shapes of Occupy Wall Street and then later Bernie Sanders' two presidential runs.

Recessions in particular and economic precarity in general function as drivers of demands for change. The base of the right, always anxious to find a dark-skinned minority to blame their fears on, shifted their focus from Muslims in the post-9/11 era to immigrants of all stripes in the post-recession era. Meanwhile, the base of the left understood the recession to be a wake-up call that the Democratic Party had strayed too far from its pro-labor roots, and escalated demands that people, rather than money, be put back at the center of Democratic policy objectives.

The abandonment of working people had begun decades earlier. Neoliberalism was in, Democrats had lost three presidential elections in a row, and the same pro-market centrism that Bill Clinton rode to the White House got infused into the party itself. People-powered organizing was swapped for big money now available from banks, thanks to the party's new pro-banking policies and embrace of financial deregulation. All that money could buy TV ads, the thinking went, which meant they didn't need as many volunteers, and specialized consultants could be brought in to craft and place all those ads. This turned election campaigns into a for-profit business, with the incentive to do what was most lucrative for the consultants rather than what was the most effective election strategy.

There were always rationales for these moves, sometimes ideological and sometimes out of expediency. But with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that, at best, they were optimizing for the short term at the cost of the long-term viability of the party, because you can draw multiple direct lines from that series of decisions. Embracing big money from corporations put the party at odds with its working-class base. Embracing big business and deregulating the financial industry helped create the conditions for the 2008 financial collapse. And when people called for heads to roll, the party was in no position to meet the moment that called for an adversarial stance against Wall Street.

There was a brief window of hope in the years just before the crash. Howard Dean ran a failed presidential campaign in 2004. You might remember him from his scream. That campaign didn't go far, but he did end up as chair of the DNC, where he implemented a 50-state strategy which was instrumental in Democrats winning back the House and Senate in 2006 and helped create the momentum that Obama's presidential campaign stepped into in 2008.

Dean's strategy, pushing the message of the Democratic Party everywhere and not writing off any potential voters, was explicitly at odds with the established, consultant-led approach. That's likely why he was shut out of an Obama administration staffed by corporate Democrats, and why his successful 50-state strategy was quickly abandoned by the party.

Campaigner Obama went in that same people-centric direction, and it inspired millions of active organizers and volunteers rather than depending on TV ads alone. They built a list of thirteen million email addresses from real people. When the campaign surveyed that list after the election, more than half a million answered, and fifty thousand of them said they personally wanted to run for office.

That was the seed of what could have been an ongoing organizing powerhouse. Obama for America eventually rebranded as Organizing for America and, after some negotiation, was folded directly into the DNC, where their organizing tools were dismantled and that list of organizers and volunteers was turned into a fundraising funnel begging for donations and selling coffee mugs. Twice the party rejected the people-focused style of organizing that had just proven itself successful.

The problem was that the party had already forgotten how to manage and benefit from people. They knew that Obama's list and organization was valuable, but couldn't metabolize it as anything other than a revenue stream, because they had long ago reorganized into that mindset.

By contrast, the DSA understands that they'd never be able to build power and influence by leaning on fundraising and online activism. They've explicitly gone the other direction, tapping into the people power of enthusiastic supporters. Rather than selling mugs, they host events, lectures, and dances. There's a lot about the DSA that echoes the old Organizing for America, but the fundamental difference is that there's no risk of the DSA being absorbed into the Democratic Party and dismantled. Democrats won't be able to diffuse and redirect that people power into fundraising emails. The DSA holds the connection to people power that money can't buy, and they're not going to trade that away.

The bargain the Democrats struck decades ago, trading their working-class base for their big donors on Wall Street, was always destined to be a temporary arrangement because they positioned themselves in no man's land. Not business-friendly enough to keep the corporate cash flowing indefinitely, and not worker-friendly enough to keep their voters enthusiastic about supporting them.

The most generous interpretation of the people who made that bargain is that it seemed like the best thing to do at the time, though the rise of the consulting class and the revolving door between government and consulting, helping everyone cash in on the deal certainly had an impact. Regardless of their reasons, they were walking the country into a trap where, eventually, neither party would be set up to fight for the needs of the working class. That's the exact gap that Donald Trump and his counterfeit populism exploited.

What gives me hope is that the Democrats' turn toward big money can only last as long as it gets passable results, and that time has clearly come to an end. It was expedient and defensible until it no longer was. The clear-eyed view is that the party used to benefit to some degree from that infusion of corporate money, but now it's being dragged down by the moderately-consentual stranglehold corporations have on the party.

So if the corporate cash grab was adopted out of expediency, it can be dropped for the same reason. This is what the grassroots Left has been calling for, for decades. The party couldn't quit its addiction to big-dollar donors because they had nothing to fill the gap. What DSA is demonstrating right now is the institutional knowledge of how to organize people power, and it isn't just infrastructure for candidates running under their label. It's the replacement for big money that has to exist before the party can let go.

They're already experiencing the diminishing returns of trying to depend on massive election war chests. Kamala Harris proved that by outspending and still losing to the most hated president of the modern era. Eventually corporate Democrats will have run out of excuses and understand that they have no choice but to recalculate and reorient and that day arrives faster the more real the alternative is. So it's our job to keep pushing and, if you're able to join in, keep showing what real political organizing looks like by joining organizations like DSA or, in a slightly different flavor, the Working Families Party. Howard Dean, President Campaigner Obama and now these outside parties punching above their weights have been pointing in the right direction, back toward people-powered campaigns that leave no one behind, for two decades.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, Who They Are

Followed by Section B, What They Believe

Section C, Money, Power, and the Reckoning

And Section D, Critiques and the Path Forward

For months, the populous progressive energy inside the Democratic Party has been concentrated in blue cities. But now that movement is testing something bigger. Can a Democratic socialist win over voters in one of America's most competitive swing states? Does the energy in New York, LA, DC, and Denver translate in the Midwest?

Progressive Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan certainly thinks so, and in Wisconsin, Democratic Socialist Assemblywoman Francesca Hong is now leading the polls in the state's Democratic primary for governor. Assemblywoman Hong joins me now. It is great to see you this morning and to have you on.

I, I wanna start our conversation, just digging in a little bit into your background 'cause it's different than the backgrounds of a lot of the politicians that we speak to. You're the child of Korean immigrants. at one point you had to drop out of college to work, and you were sued last year over credit card debts that you've since paid off, but that's something that many Americans can actually relate to, but maybe not too many, governors or lawmakers.

So tell me a bit about how your personal upbringing has informed your politics. 

first of all, thank you so much, Antonio, for having me. And being a service industry worker means that, I am a hustler, and I know what it means to work hard like so many Wisconsinites across the state. And my lived experiences in the service industry as a restaurant owner and, five years now in the state legislature, I think it gives me an opportunity to connect with voters in many different ways.

Tell me about those connections because as I've watched your campaign from afar, you're not just going out there and talking to Democrats. You are- ... crossing through your state, trying to talk to more conservative, residents in Wisconsin. And I'm curious how it goes when you connect with them, and then they hear that word socialist, which in so many of our media ecosystems is, something that they're told to be very afraid of.

I love talking to everyone and anyone, literally sometimes stopping folks in the streets. And what we hear so often is that people are stressed, they're tired, and they're ready for change as opposed to this chaos. I think that, when folks hear socialism, they may be taken aback, but I bring it back to po- potholes and the Packers and public education and, issues that have broad bipartisan support and broad bipartisan opposition like data centers and then support for our public schools and universal childcare, lowering working class people's taxes by taxing the wealthiest few and mega corporations.

These are issues and conversations that I'm having with folks in every corner of our state. 

I wanna talk to you and dig in a bit more on data centers because that's a huge issue, not just in Wisconsin, but around the country. And I know that there are some voters, and some who are not Democrats considering you because of your stance on AI data centers.

You've called for a moratorium on their construction. Your state already has dozens of them, though. And I'm wondering what you think you can really deliver for voters with a moratorium, and if there's any risk of Wisconsin losing out if construction continues all across the country. 

These dozens of data centers across Wisconsin are exempt from sales and use tax.

And the construction of more hyperscale AI data centers, the response has been that communities want community control, not NDAs and promises of jobs, but real concrete, measures that will put regulations that preserve our natural resources, protect ratepayers from skyrocketing utility costs, and that we are thinking about our shared future for our kids where there's clean water, lower cost, and we're not- taxpayers aren't on the hook for what could happen when these data centers are no longer in use.

I wanna talk to you a bit about some of the debates and controversies that have also been a part of this race. because while we talked about socialism and sort of the labels coming from the right, the reality is that there are criticisms that have come on the left as well. You appeared on two controversial livestreams, one with Hasan Piker, another with a guy called Mike from Pennsylvania.

Former Democratic Wisconsin elections commissioner Ann Jacobs said of your appearances this: "When you decide these are the sort of people you wanna hang out with in order to raise money, you have made clear that you either, one, agree with them, or two, can be bought, or three, both. Fran Hong appears to be all.

She is willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin for a few bucks." And I wanna give you the opportunity to respond to that. 

I condemn hatred, discrimination, antisemitism, and Islamophobia, any sort of dehumanizing of communities. Being on these, streams, it's important that we get our message out in places where, campaigns struggle to reach voters.

Just because I am on a platform certainly does not mean that I endorse everything that has been said by either the hosts or other people who have gone on. And if candidates and elected officials who are speaking with more controversial hosts, if we are to be responsible for everything that they have ever said, I would point to the fact that Tom Tiffany, the Republican likely nominee, has been on a radio show that has called for the execution of the governor of Minnesota.

So I think it's important to recognize that when we are campaigning in areas where, folks may not have already heard our message, it's important to let them know that we are a campaign that is fighting for working class people, and it's important that folks are staying engaged on our elections here in Wisconsin.

I wanna ask you about how Israel and Gaza have also reshaped this race. It's reshaped the Democratic Party all across the country. it's not just the case in Wisconsin. you have made very clear, you've said that you believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and there's also been this debate in your state over an incident from 2023 in which you called the police twice to report an anti-Israel protest display of some kind on behalf of constituents who told you at that time that they believed that it was antisemitic.

You've since apologized for doing that. Can you explain why? 

I was unaware that this was an act of protest. I did not see the words, "Ceasefire now," and I was responding to community members and my constituents that had expressed deep concern over that, display. And so I was responding to people's fear and pain, and I always will choose to make sure that communities feel safe.

And as a Democratic socialist, it means that my values are rooted in democracy, fairness, and human rights. And whether it's here or across the, across, different parts of the country or across the world, it's important that we denounce genocide and call it for what it is and, vow to protect communities and ensure that everyone feels safe in practicing their faith.

With our final seconds here, can you just tell me a bit about how you plan to build on the legacy of Tony Evers in the state, as someone that many Democrats still have immense affection for there, and maybe wondering how your policies, your process may build on his? 

We will carry forward the governor's passion for public education, ensuring that we are fully funding our public schools and public universities, that our governor has been forced to govern by defense.

And Democrats now have an opportunity to win back the trifecta and ensure that we are delivering for Wisconsinites on healthcare, on public schools, on environmentalism. Our Wisconsin progressive roots run deep, and this is a state where so many progressive ideals and policies have come from, and we're ready to move those forward and deliver for Wisconsinites.

As AP leads today, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani waded into Democratic US House primaries to boost three progressive last week over establishment-backed candidates. All of them won On Tuesday, defeating two incumbent Democrats and essentially ensuring that two self-described Democratic socialists will be elected to Congress in their deep blue districts.

The mayor said it was a question of electing, quote, "Better Democrats who would put working people back at the heart of politics." The approach, as AP describes it, consternated some in the Democratic leadership, but the outcome showcased Mamdani's rising influence, and it certainly did. In New York's 10th Congressional District, Mamdani enor- endorsed Brad Lander, his competitor in last year's New York City mayoral race, defeated incumbent Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman in a race pitting two Jewish elected officials against each other, with Lander making the case that Goldman was too supportive of Israel and their assault on Gaza, among other things.

And this race was not even close. Lander defeated the incumbent Goldman by more than 30 points. 

Wow. 

66 to 34 right now, with 90% of the vote in. In the state's 7th US House District, located in Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, Mamdani endorsed Claire Valdes, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated longtime Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for the seat being vacated by retiring Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, who had, backed Reynoso for that seat.

Also extraordinary, by more than 20 points. Valdes, for the record, worked at Taco Bell and Trader Joe's before organizing a union and then going on to seek office. In New York's 13th Congressional District, Mamdani endorsed Democratic Socialist Daraliza- Darializa, Avila Chevalier appears to have ousted longtime New York City pol and incumbent Democratic Dominican-American Congress member Adriano Espaillat in, Harlem and the Bronx.

Mamdani endorsed Chevalier just weeks ago. A March poll conducted for her campaign showed her losing to Espaillat, 42 to 28. But now, just a few weeks later, with Mamdani's clearly powerful support, she appears to be heading to Congress, having unseated a five-term incumbent, though only by about five points, with 88% of the vote in.

Nonetheless, AP and others have called it for Chevalier. Another remarkable moment with Democrats unseating two of their own incumbents In New York City, the first two cases of incumbents being unseated by challengers in this primary cycle anywhere. In all, not just a signal of Mamdani's power right now, but of the Democratic Socialist movement, arguably, at least in those seats.

elsewhere in, a very crowded Democratic primary in the New York City, 12th Congressional District, Democratic State Assembly member Micah Lasher, former aide to Governor Kathy Hochul, won the primary to fill the congressional seat being vacated by Lasher's political mentor, 17-term Congressman Jerry Nadler, who backed Lasher in a brutal race.

Millions, were spent in super PAC spending from the AI industry and others, but particularly in the AI industry. The seven-person race also included John F. Kennedy's grandson, Jack Schlossberg, who came in a distant third, and George Conway, the former once very Republican attorney, a former husband to Trump loyalist and one-time campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.

He placed an even more distant fifth in this seven-person Democratic race in a district that represents Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, parts of Greenwich Village. Mamdani did not endorse in that case. the AI industry made an enormous investment in this race to take out State Assembly member Alex Bores, who finished, in second place, four points behind Lasher.

But as The American Prospect observes today, in his victory speech, Lasher, who himself co-sponsored the AI safety bill that turned the industry against Boris, directly confronted the oligarchs. He noted, quote, "I have some news for the two, two big AI companies who have taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat.

I won't be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs, and our environment." So Democratic socialists, were also, said to be sweeping pow-- into power in the, New York State Assembly, several seats there as well on Tuesday in what the movement was absolutely celebrating, as they should.

that said, I think, the worst news here is for, as I see it, Republicans. it's possible that this is New York and New York City, explicitly, doing something that can't be done anywhere else in the country. But, they're just in the mood to vote for progressive candidates this year.

But there's another way to look at this which jumps out to me, which is that if Democratic voters are willing to toss out their own incumbents How do you suspect the electorate all over the country feels about the incumbent Republican Party right now under Donald Trump, w- who have failed so spectacularly?

We'll see if New York serves as any kind of harbinger for what is to come, but it sure seems to me like much of this nation, may end up in a throw-the-bums-out mood by November. 

Melat Kiros defeated Diana DeGette.Melat was a phenomenal candidate this cycle.

I interviewed her quite a bit because I just really believed in her candidacy. She hits on some like... S- she's a former lawyer, so she can argue in that way, but she's also DSA and was fired from, her law firm, and then became a barista after that because she wrote a post criticizing, the suppression of speech of, of, uh, students who were protesting the genocide.

So she has just so many different I think, skills and talents as a politician. and she was on Chris Hayes' show last night, and Hayes asked her about why she decided to run against Diana DeGette. Now, there were a lot of Democrats, establishment Democrats, waiting in the wings for Diana DeGette to just retire.

Melat Kiros said, "I'm not waiting. I'm gonna primary her." And Hayes is asking why she chose to do and this is what Kouros said, last night on MSNBC. 

You talked about the, the money that had, flow- flowed into, the incumbent, Diana DeGette. one thing that I noted, and I've covered her for a long time.

She's been in Congress. she voted against the Iraq War. She was a member of the Progressive Caucus. She's not, I wouldn't cons- she's not really a conservative Democrat. She's been a pretty progressive Democrat, you look at her voting record. th- w- what was it about her record that I think some people, and I think she herself probably looked at and said, "Hey, I'm a pretty progressive member of Congress," that, that you found so intolerable you wanted to unseat her?

it, it's not the congresswoman herself. It's the campaign finance system that has incentivized members of Congress like Diana DeGette to take millions of dollars from big pharma, big energy and oil, defense contractors. At the end of the day, the reason why we are not seeing legislation like Medicare For All and universal childcare and an arms embargo on Israel pass despite a super majority of support from the voters of this party is because when don- when corporations and special interests donate to campaigns, it's not that they're gonna get an immediate return with legislation that is favored for them.

Sometimes the return that they get is stalling on legislation that would actually make a meaningful difference for families. And so at the end of the day, the only way we can trust that the Congress members are actually fighting for that kind of legislation is to not be taking money from the very corporations and special interests that do not want to see that kind of legislation from passing.

In fact, the National Nurses United policy director said as much about the congresswoman's co-sponsorship of Medicare For All while also taking money from the very health insurance companies that would be legislated out of existence. we can't trust that kind of, donations coming in for Congress members isn't going to result in some kind of return, and sometimes that return is that we're not actually gonna get anything done.

That was a perfect answer, and the way she framed it about... It's absolutely accurate. There are so many co-sponsors of Medicare for All. in the Senate, Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor of Medicare for All, but she doesn't support Medicare for All. It's a way to have, a, a cheap win on your resume or even your voting record.

It's also about the absence of what you're, l- of a lack of fight on a variety of different issues that she mentions there. I found Chris's use of the word intolerable to be a little odd because anybody has the right to run if they choose to, and the voters in Denver decided that, yeah, she was a lot more tolerable than Diana DeGette, who frankly, from my understanding, David, yeah, she has...

She's in the member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She voted against the Iraq War, but l- the issue has larg- more largely been about her kind of relying on seniority and not being a very active member of Congress at all. 

Yeah, look, I... The, to understand Diana DeGette's political formula, it was very simple, very straightforward, and it worked for 30 years.

And her formula was to not be all that present in the community, to rely on the power of incumbency to get reelected, and more specifically, to vote a relatively progressive line, uh, and in, with the assurance that it would be difficult for any candidate, any prospective challenger, to get to her proverbial left, to, to grab onto an issue and say, "You voted the wrong way on this.

I'm running my whole campaign against this." We have seen ca- campaigns like that where a candidate... I worked for Ned Lamont when he ran against Joe Lieberman, and the centerpiece of that campaign was Joe Lieberman's explicit votes for the Iraq War. and Ned Lamont won his primary. Joe Lieberman ended up running as an independent.

The point being that we've gotten used to campaigns where a candidate casts a set of bad votes, and the campaigns become about those votes. DeGette, I think, for a long time, deftly avoided that trap by having a decent voting record. But I think what Melat said is also true, that the lack of presence in the community, the lack of a perception that the votes are followed by actual f- a, an actual effort, actual fighting for the stated ideals, that perception, I think, became, is real.

it became powerful in Denver, in our community here. and but I also think, w- We can get it one level simpler here. There is a generational change element to this that just it's not a very sexy topic. It's not a very hard-to-understand topic. it's hard to ah, pontificate about it 'cause it's so simple.

But, Diana DeGette had been there for 30 years- ... which is essentially, it- it's pretty ridiculous. Ah, and at a time of generational demands for change and a generation, ah, younger generations feeling completely underrepresented, all of these things came together, ah, to deliver the results that Denver delivered.

And remember when David Hogg was kicked out of the DNC because he wanted to address this very core question about gerontocracy and seniority? It was mostly about that. It was less ideological. I'm sure it was about corporate money, too. They wish they were having that fight right now. They wish that they were having the fight with what on David Hogg's terms.

It's now on DSA's terms, bitch. 

That's right. That's right. that's right. And I, and I- Yeah ... and I, and look, I think the, th- again, the, the generational Wave here is really important. and I should mention Diana DeGette, I think when she finally woke up to the fact that this was gonna be a race, she made exactly the most out of touch, wrong last-minute decision.

Yeah. Which her final pitch to voters here was, "I've been in Congress so long, I'm going to be the chairperson of the relevant committee that deals with Medicare for All, and so don't vote me out." Which underneath that argument is, "I've been here for so long, and I haven't done the thing that I promise I now will do," which is underscoring the idea that she'd been there too long.

let's, I know you wanna talk about Iowa. Iowa is really intriguing. s- but let's start with what we know about California. I'm gonna start with the congressional races, because we have two very important swing, races here, two seats that we must flip. one is the former Darrell Issa-held seat in CA-48, and we do have a candidate in that race, which I did not think would happen on the eve.

But Marni von Wilpert advanced to the top two, and she will be our candidate. she is a great, candidate. Speaking of Pride Month, she is, LGBT, member of the community. and, she w- is a council member and, just a really awesome candidate, and, I think she's got a really s- really strong shot of flipping that seat.

We must do it. It's one of our must-win seats. And then- Absolutely ... in seat 20- Yeah. 

can I... I just wanna throw in about that. Yeah. Yeah, that is a, that's a district that includes Palm Springs- ... crucially, and that's, the seat from which we can really flip that district, although everywhere, it's a long north-south district that goes down to, inland of almost San Diego, almost that far south.

and, when you- It's 

almost like it's been gerrymandered in a weird way. Yeah. 

Yeah. Hey, they forced us. We were not gonna unilaterally disarm. That's right. And thank God, Gavin Newsom fought back and did that to even out what Texas Stole, but Yeah ... or is trying to steal. but yes, I do this math every time there's a primary, just add up the votes for all the Democrats and compare it to all the votes for Republicans and you get to see just a little bit of a preview of what might happen in the general.

with the caveat that usually more Republicans vote in primaries. we're seeing exceptions to that right now- Yeah ... with the incredible enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Yeah. So I added those two up And al- also, far less than 100% of the vote had come in. I think it was, like, 57% so this needs to be done again.

these results- ... are far from definitive. But, what I saw was the Republicans, in total, in that district, had something like 1,000 votes more than total Democrats. right there. it's a true toss-up. So we can absolutely win it, and it's gonna take effort, CA-48. 

Thank you for breaking down that math a little bit, because it's true, it is a toss-up district.

It's... It leans Democrat now because of redistricting. I will say that, the red mirage is even stronger this time around than it usually is because of, a lot of people holding onto their ballots to vote for the top-polling governor, Democratic governor. That means that a lot more Democrats were holding out until the last weekend to vote.

So, you know, um, we expect to see a lot more Democratic votes coming in, um, and, uh, you know, we'll see kind of where those break. But, um, you know, uh, it, it's... 48 is, is a winnable seat for us, uh, but we have to go out and win it. We have to, you know, fight. Um, same for CA-22, which, uh, you know, that has been a tough one.

David Valadao has been really tough to unseat, and, um, and we don't know who our candidate is there, as we're recording this. I have to say that because m- a lot more ballots are gonna come in, this could easily, flip-flop. But Randy Villegas is leading Dr. Jasmeet Bains right now. two very different candidates, so it'll be interesting to see who makes it out of this one.

DCCC really, stepped in to back, Dr. Bains in this campaign. of course, Blue Wave, we're s- stayed out of it and will support whoever makes it through. But, she's a... has a compelling story. She's a doctor, community doctor there. she's more conservative. Randy is more progressive, is a school board member, and has the endorsement of Dolores Huerta, among others.

it's gonna be a tough one. No matter who makes it through that's... it's gonna be a fight in CA-22, so we all need to really, do what we can to help either of those candidates win there. 

That's absolutely right, and I did the same math for that with the same caveat- Let's hear it ... that there's lots of votes to still come in Yeah But, total Democratic votes were more than...

They absolutely beat total Republican votes by a few thousand. still very close. Wow. But, but- Interesting ... I think it was 5,000 or more, it looks good. It looked... I was like, "Oh, yeah, we're gonna get rid of Valadao this time." I think the story of all of this is, we are riding, the terrible disapproval rating that Trump has.

the horrible job that he's doing on the economy, the, ripping away people's health cares. All those kitchen table issues are really important to highlight, not to mention, the egregious and horrific stuff with ICE and, and what we continue to see. We talked about Delaney Hall last week.

we need to keep our eyes on that still and make sure that they shut that down. But, so these elections are becoming what we know that they're going to b- be about repudiation of Trump and his policies, but they also have to be about where we go next, what vision we have to make people's lives better.

Because as we've seen, they're just tired of voting against somebody. They wanna vote for somebody. that is reflected in what we have seen in Iowa. That was my big segue to Yeah ... shift to Iowa, because we have a shifting rating in that Senate race. So do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

Ooh, I wanna vote for somebody. For somebody who loves me. Yeah. Iowa Cook Political Rating just shifted it from- Love, love the Whitney ... likely- 

That was... I was like- ... the Whit- did Whitney Houston- 

Is she- ... 

is she alive? ... alive again? Did she just come back for our podcast? 

It's uncanny, I know. I'm a shape-shifter.

So Cook just switched the, their rating for the Iowa Senate race from likely Republican to lean Republican since last night. We have a candidate, Josh Durek will now be the, i- is now the Democratic candidate for US Senate. and very strong candidate. He was a US Paralympian playing wheelchair basketball, competing for the US in Europe, as recently as 2021.

The next year after that, he, won election to a State House seat in Iowa, in a red state leg' district that W- Trump had won. So he points to that as proof that he can win over Republicans and independents. he is in a wheelchair. He is super, super inspiring. he posted one of his campaign videos, showed him Going door to door, knocking on doors- Yeah

that's not easy for so- and I- it showed him actually, pulling himself out of his chair to, climb upstairs and knock on a door. When you, I don't care what political party you are, like, I just got chills thinking about that, right? When you a- answer that door, you're voting for him, right? Yeah.

You talk to him, you're probably gonna be voting for him, because that, something like that has probably never happened to you in your life, meeting someone like that, with that level of conviction. He won't let anything stop him. really beautiful, really, powerful candidate, and Iowa has been out of reach for a long time.

It's- It has ... it's trended really red. Since Obama, 

yeah. Obama- Since Obama 

won it ... was the last 

one to win statewide in Iowa, a Democrat to win statewide in Ioma- Iowa. 

Exactly, right, in these crazy times, where we are seeing electoral swings to the left of, on average, 14 points, something around there- be- between 8 and 25, with outliers up to 31, 37 points sometimes. Iowa is on the table. Iowa is absolutely a target. We need to swing that Senate seat. the path to the Senate runs through- North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska. We need to flip those four, and we need to hold Georgia and Michigan.

Iowa is a stretch goal, but it is absolutely doable, if we put the work in, if we put the work in. Yeah. So we absolutely need to keep looking at Iowa. 

let's turn then to Gonzales versus Hickenlooper. She gave him a bit of a scare. Now, Gonzales was a former DSA member. She left DSA prior to challenging, Hickenlooper and, that meant that she had to build her name recognition up from the ground up without a more, an organizing infrastructure behind her.

She made the calculation that having the DSA back her statewide would be more of a negative for her because it's not just in Denver, a really core blue, deep blue area like Melat, where Ma- Melat was running. It's gonna maybe be a little bit touchy outside of the, of, of urban centers. But she got really close without that, and you have to wonder if she had some infrastructure behind her, if that would've been able to put her over the top.

what's your assessment about that race and how it, Hickenlooper got a bit of a scare here? 

So my assessment is actually, a little different. M- my view is that John Hickenlooper was the weakest Democratic Senate nominee in the United States, the most easy, to defeat. and I think a lot of people spent a lot of time, looking, and trying to encourage, people to get into that race.

Colorado has an extremely, extraordinarily really, top-down, wait your turn, rule following, norms following Democratic Party culture. and voters have for a very long time, up until perhaps now, have rewarded that. And so- A candidate was not, did not emerge. and Julie Gonzales got in. In my view, I'm glad she ran.

she's a great legislator. She's a great, person. But I think she got in a little too late. she was... And in, in getting in so late, she wasn't able to raise enough resources quickly enough to allow the campaign to, to simmer and reach the boiling point. If there had been another few weeks, another month, this might have been a completely different race.

And- 

Mala's been running for over a year, for example, right? 

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so John Hickenlooper was the most vulnerable member of Con- s- of the Senate, based on their state's voting electorate, how Democratic our state is.

And John Hickenlooper is now the most lucky, Democratic nominee in the United States. I wanna be very clear. It is a complete and total embarrassment for the state of Colorado and for the Democratic electorate to have re-nominated this person, who has basically nothing to offer, campaigns on basically nothing, has Democrat in a r- in a similar state.

It is an embarrassment to the political class of this state. It is a huge missed opportunity, and it is the kind of missed opportunity that everyone in progressive and Democratic politics in this state should feel somewhat ashamed of 

th- there's gonna be another opportunity in 2028 though, right?

when Bennet's term i- ends. so I guess that's also a way to tie in Michael Bennet's historic loss to Weiser for, i- in the primary for governor. i- w- how do you... This, these pair of, this pair of senators in Colorado just, got a pretty resounding rebuke. even though Hickenlooper is gonna be the nominee, he had a real scare, and Bennet was just rejected in a primary.

He still has two m- a year and a half left in his term, but rejected in the primary for governor. 

Yeah, so that, that was t- to my mind, uh, the other marquee race in this state, Phil Weiser versus Michael Bennet. And Phil Weiser ran a genuinely, anti-establishment campaign. I wanna be clear, I do- I...

Phil Weiser is a, i- is progressive. Phil Weiser is, I wouldn't call him a Bernie style progressive populist, but he is a progressive, and he certainly was cast and, a- and in the progressive, anti-establishment lane in that race against Michael Bennet. I also wanna be clear that I think Michael Bennet, to distinguish him from John Hickenlooper, is a, i- is, at least talks about, the issues like healthcare, economic inequality, as distinct from John Hickenlooper.

they're, they're not exactly the same. I, but I do think Michael, the rejection of Michael Bennet is a big deal, especially in Colorado where these kinds of things almost never happen. Michael Bennet has, was an appointed senator, was promising to appoint his, successors. it was a su- a campaign essentially run out of a big money super PAC with out-of-state billionaires.

so he ran an incredibly, establishment a- aligned campaign, and Phil Weiser, I think, maximized his candidacy as the anti-establishment choice. And I think a lot of voters, I said this, uh, on so- social media. This was, I think, less or as much a rejection or maybe even less a rejection of one particular senator than an entire way of doing politics, than a rejection of the entire elite system of how politics works in this state.

and I think Phil Weiser on election night claiming the mandate, this is very important, claiming an election mandate of saying essent- saying ex- explicitly, "The future of Colorado will not be decided by out-of-state billionaires." What's great about that is to, is for the gubernatorial nominee to frame the election as a rejection of oligarchy, and I think that's what it was.

And what happens to Michael Bennet in the future if he runs for Senate again? I, I very much expect a primary challenge to him if he runs again. I think the race has essentially upended. That race, Phil Weiser winning, has upended the entire state of, of the, of politics at the statewide level in Colorado.

And that begs the question, how much of this is not just a na- a rejection that we're seeing nationally of the Democratic establishment? How much of it is a rejection of, yes, that, but also Jared Polis? 

Oh, I think that was absolutely a part of this. A- and to be clear, Michael, both Michael Bennet and Phil Weiser, seriously criticized, the governor, for that decision.

at one point, Michael Bennet was saying, 'cause Michael Bennet was saying he's gonna appoint the senator, if he won the gubernatorial race. I, if I remember correctly, Michael Bennet was like, "There's one person who I'm not appointing." Yeah. "It's Jared Polis," right? So Jared Polis is essentially politically persona non grata here, out of step completely with the state.

and I wanna go back to this point, which is that I think, I have lived in Colorado for 20 years, 19 plus, technically 20 very soon. I have never seen the state- The electorate of this state so resoundingly reject the top-down, wait your turn, establishment politics of this state's Democratic Party.

I just, I can't overstate how much of a contrast this is. and clearly it's part of a national wave. but the thing is, what I'm getting at is if it's happening in a place like Colorado, where voters have so consistently voted to fortify, the Democratic Party establishment and have taken orders from the Democratic Party establishment, if it's happening here, it is a sign that it can happen absolutely anywhere.

Oh, that is, that would be a great segue to our next guest, because we're gonna have Oliver Larkin on from Florida, but I did have one more question for you. Please. Because when you talk about the wait your turn politics, part of why Melat Kiros was able to win this primary was because of, as you say, her accurately framing Diana DeGette as not being very present in the district as well as with all of this outside money coming in, including AIPAC shell money or s- pro-Israel money, including pro-big, or big tech money that was spending on her behalf.

How much of DeGette's lack of presence, and perhaps you could extend this to both Hickenlooper and Bennet here, per- may- maybe that's not fair. Maybe... We'll just keep it on DeGette. How much of DeGette's lack of presence in the community do you think also informs her inability to keep up with, the wave of- we don't want this blood money from the genocide anymore.

And also data centers are unanimously, unpopular acro- cross-partisan. People are pissed off. How much of that was her not being in her district and just not knowing what her own voters wanted? 

Yeah, and I would extend that to John Hickenlooper as well, so you're right. Sure. the ... 

Yeah. 

you can't le- the money, the establishment power, and the lack of presence all go together.

Essentially, people, like them, they get comfortable n- assuming that they can simply buy their way out of whatever political problems are happening at home, not worrying that if they get out of step on this or that issue, that they won't simply be a- able to just overwhelm an election with money. and honestly, in the past, that hasn't been an illogical bet.

Like- Yeah ... it's an immoral bet, but it's not, illogical, right? I think now what we're seeing is that the anger ama- and I want... Let's be specific here and precise. We have never, in my lifetime at least, if you look at polls, we have never lived through a period in which the Democratic electorate, the average liberal voter, is this explicitly angry, not just at the Republicans, but at their own party's leaders.

So this is a totally new reality that we're in, where the old formulas do not work. So yes, if you're relying on the old formula, "Hey, I'll just be able to get my donors to give me a ton of money and buy the election for me if I ever get in trouble back at home-" Yeah. Okay, if, i- if that no longer works, then suddenly being out of step with your district on this or that issue, you can't just cure that with money, because people are tuned in, and they are pissed off, and they are motivated.

But for now, speaking of elections, some reported results from a few very selective primaries and primary runoffs held on Tuesday this week in four states. Let's start with, the more boring ones first, and go from there up to the most interesting. in, the great beautiful Beehive State of Utah, the most interesting race there, perhaps of the night in the otherwise very Republican state was the Democratic primary for the court-ordered brand-new US House District 1 in the state, a solidly Democratic district centered smack dab in Salt Lake City, which Republicans had previously cracked into four separate pieces, four different districts back in 2021 to prevent, a Democrat from ever winning there again and taking all of the state's four congressional seats for themselves ever since, until now.

With the Utah State Supreme Court finally knocking down that unlawful gerrymandering scheme in the state, former Congressman Ben McAdams won the Democratic nomination handily on Tuesday in Utah and is almost certain to win back a Democratic House seat in the state this November. He previously served in Congress back in, from 2018 to 2020, I believe.

McAdams will be running against Republican Riley Owen, who ran uncontested in his party's primary in what Cook Political Report characterizes now as a solidly Democratic race in Utah's first congressional district. Only somewhat less boring, the great old line state of Maryland for governor, the popular Democratic incumbent Wes Moore easily defeated a single challenger for his party's nomination.

No surprise there for Moore, who many consider to be of presidential timber someday. he appears to have won by about 88% to 12% last I checked this afternoon. 

I would say that's decisive. 

only 67% of the vote has been tallied, 

So you're saying there's a chance. 

You never know. as you never know.

Moore will almost certainly run against Republican former state legislator Dan Cox in what has become a very Democratic state, though they have elected a number of moderate Republican governors in recent years. Cox, however is not one of them. He has, made false claims about the 2020 election. He went on to, lose by a huge margin, yes, to Wes Moore back in the 2022 governor's race there.

So apparently Republicans have decided to put him up again in what Cook Political Report describes as a solidly Democratic race this year. In Maryland's 5th Congressional District, Adrian Co- uh, Boffo, who was backed by pro-Israel and pro-crypto spending, won a crowded Democratic primary to replace the retiring 23-term congressman, Steny Hoyer.

Boffo was endorsed by Hoyer and easily won the 24-person race in this solidly Democratic district. Among the many defeated by Boffo on Tuesday was Harry Dunn. He's one of the Capitol Police officers from Trump's January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Dunn has been an outspoken critic of Trump and the attack at the Capitol.

Boffo, will run in November against Chris Chaffee, Republican, who, pretty easily won his party's nomination on Tuesday, though, as mentioned, it is a very Democratic district in Maryland. Moving to primary runoffs now in the great Palmetto State of South Carolina in the Republican gubernatorial runoff election, on Tuesday that we reported a bit on, yesterday's show.

Republican State Attorney General Alan Wilson easily defeated the Trump-endorsed lieutenant governor, Pamela Evette, in the state's GOP primary runoff, for governor, which in the solidly Republican state, as Cook Political Report describes it, that means that Wilson will almost certainly be the state's next governor.

As we discussed yesterday, however, Trump Seeing that his candidate, Evette, who barely eked out a 28-point plurality win in the initial primary earlier in June, seeing that she was about to lose just days before the runoff, he decided to also endorse Wilson- ... to avoid being labeled a loser again after two of his previous gubernatorial endorsements over the past two weeks or so in Iowa and Georgia also went down in flames.

Trump's power to get folks elected in Republican primaries is definitely waning, which, means that, or maybe I'm just wish-casting here, but it means that his power to bend congressional Republicans to his will is also waning with it, or it should be. That should be good news, and we're already seeing signs of exactly that in, in Congress.

In case Trump tries to take credit for Wilson's win on Tuesday because, of course, he will, w- we noted yesterday that a poll-- that a polling in this race, a poll released on, Monday of this week, taken at least in part from before Trump's extra second double endorsement- ... showed his preferred candidate actually losing 61 to 29%, which kind of seemed impossible for the winner of the initial primary to lose by such a huge margin.

But in fact, on Tuesday night, results with, more than 95% of the votes in, Wilson is said to be defeating Evette by 69% to 31%. 

Wow. 

Not far from that brutal poll released on Monday, but with, Wilson picking up a few more of the previously undecided votes, in that poll following D- Trump's double can't lose endorsement.

Wilson will now run against Democratic nominee Jermaine Johnson, who won his party's nomination outright back on June 9 in a state which has only elected Republican gov- has Republican governors since 2003. But who knows? Who knows what a blue tsunami could bring if one happens to develop between here and November? Also of note on Tuesday in South Carolina's First Congressional District, Democratic r- runoff there, A- Admiral Nancy Lacore Who was fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth because, or so he claimed, he believed she was not implementing the administration's directives fast enough and was, resisting political pressure, especially on personnel and training policy.

Nancy Lacore, Admiral Nancy Lacore, won the Democratic US House primary in South Carolina's first congressional district on the coast. She will now run against the winner of the Republican runoff on Tuesday, Jenny Costa Honeycutt, for the seat currently occupied by outgoing Congresswoman Nancy Mace- who ran for governor in the state, only to come in fifth in that race earlier this month in the GOP primary. we'll see what happens.

this is the sort of unstated story that I don't think...

you never get because the mainstream media doesn't wanna talk about it. But one reason why I think Trump did well in 2024, and did especially well with, untraditional Republicans, working class people of color, is that, like under COVID that's, he had, the, one of the greatest, welfare programs in American history with the sort of, the sort of COVID checks.

and, yeah, like Biden, uh, didn't even keep the promise to like, keep those up. I, and so Trump got both the, so people's memory of the 2019 economy and then COVID happens and, the, general sense was, this is beyond anyone's control." But we did get the, those a lot of, for working class Americans, a lot of their financial position actually improved in 2020.

Oh, 

dramatically. we cut- Yeah ... child poverty in half. Yeah. And then we decided- And then it goes away ... nah, that was an interesting experiment. Yeah. But we'll go back to, increasing child poverty. Yeah. 

Yeah. no. I'd, yeah, no, so, so unfortunately, this actually gained, the whole way everything rolled out gave Trump a lot of credit, w- with working class people.

Whereas like this guy actually did something, and that Biden was the guy who was like taking stuff away. no, he was, but, but the overall picture is of a party that is discredited. And as you mentioned, like you had all these f- people who should have resigned in addition to Biden, who were kept around because of the staffers, and the staffers, could hold onto their stuff.

And I really think, like you said, what's the ideology and what is the thinking here? And we have to pay tribute to one of the greatest living Americans who like celebrated, his 100th birthday and who's one of your colleagues, which is Mel Brooks, in Blazing Saddles. where the, uh, the people who work for the governor said, "We have to preserve..."

Or Mel Brooks, playing the governor of the state, says, "Gentlemen, we have to protect our phony baloney jobs, harumph." That is the ideology here, right? th- that is what- Yeah ... James Carville and Neera Tanden believe in their heart of hearts. We have to protect our phony baloney jobs. 

and what I find interesting is that the insurgence that we're seeing, for lack of a better term, is, v- very much driven in some areas by, DSA- Mm-hmm

uh, by self-proclaimed, uh, social democrats. In other areas, not so much, but there ... W- w- but you raise a really g- good point about the Tea Party comparison, and I think this gets, is gets lost in a lot of the analysis of what's going on. Um, and, and Emma made this point, in regards to Julia Sanchez, who n- you know, came within striking difference, distance- Yeah

of Hickenlooper. She was former DSA, but she gets lumped in. And the, the difference here is, and that we also had in, in Colorado, Bennet, who was not the incumbent, but he was, he was a senator, sitting senator running for governor- yeah ... and loses. Very, 

junior establishment figure, yeah.

One would imagine that he would have had a, a machine that would've gotten him in or some- goodwill that would've gotten him in. Apparently not. But the interesting dynamic here is that- The, what people forget about the Tea Party, like you say, it started as a, maybe grassroots, but really, not exactly.

Yeah. It was- 

No, the grassroots was enormously helped by the huge, you know- 

the Tea Party- Millions ... the first Tea Party- Yeah ... was actually, Ron Paul's people. 

Yeah. 

And when he died out, the Koch brothers, who are big funders of Ron Paul, they expanded it. And so there was definitely, anger- Yeah

without a doubt. But people forget the Koch brothers at that time had bought, essentially, the entire voter list. They had a more sophisticated voter data analysis program than the Republican National Committee did. Yeah. and so you saw the success of these Tea Party people because they're going up against the establishment figures, but they have- An arsenal- 

that rivals who they're going up against. On the Democratic side, it's much more difficult because there is no outside Koch brothers who are providing that infrastructure except for the DSA- Yeah ... who come with an infrastructure. So Julian Sanchez, loses by just a handful, but she did not have ... people think the endorsement is just, a, a, an imprimatur.

No, the endorsement comes with an entire sort of Yeah ... we're gonna give you- And you, you- ... people on the streets ... infrastructure. People organizing- We're gonna give you organizations. Yeah. We're gonna give you phone trees. We're gonna give you, media. it comes with a huge toolkit.

Yeah. And that's what's been the difference in those races. I don't know if it's ideological. I'm curious as to your perspective on that. Okay. uh, but it's also a function of you've got a real operation here. 

Yeah. no, I think the way to think about this is in terms of the sort of hollowing out of the parties, that the American parties are these kinda like big brands, but they can be

You can leverage a takeover of them. and w- was what Trump did with the Republican Party. Yeah. He basically, took this hollowed out party w- discredited by the Bush, administration, um, and, uh, the, with, losing campaigns, and then, used his celebrity to lever- take it over.

And DSA is doing something similar, except that their leverage is not celebrity or Trump's type of money, but the organizing thing. And there's been a sort of general hollowing out of, organizing. And I think that partially because both political parties depend a lot on consultants, and then you, you use, the money that you have to hire people to do things.

uh, and in pretty good New York City, the sort of, old machines ... people talk about political machines, but, the old machines of, that existed back to Tammany Hall into the '70s and '80s, those were like an entire life world. you would have clubs that you would go to.

And if you needed a job, people there could help you, and you had dances. People, met their life partner there, right? the, they had social events. There's an entire social world, But starting with the sort of, like rise of social media, all that social world has disappeared.

and it, a lot of the other institutions that, function with the machines, like the Black churches, what you've seen is, like among younger Black people, especially among young men, they're much unchurched. So th- those are, like become more uh, freelance voters, and some of those went over to Trump, but could also go over to Mamdani.

what the DSA has is that they have actually built the only real machine that we've seen in the 21st century. Yep. And like where like people who are in that DSA world, like they, they, they hold events, they hold lectures, you, you have dances, you have... This is like where you get, and they are actually people that can go out, and, talk to voters, and you have not people who are like paid 25 bucks an hour to spread the message, but people are like actually believe in this, and like that is invaluable, right?

and so the hollowing out of the parties has made them, susceptible to takeover, and in the case of the Democrats, I think that the establishment Democrats have a big problem in the sense that like they don't know how to organize. they, they know how to, buy ads, they know how to b- and in the presidential elections, they can actually get volunteers for phone banks 'cause people hate Trump and so- Right

don't want the Republicans. But still, they don't have that sort of like actual, functioning political machine. 

Next, Section B, What They Believe

I keep hearing it's DSA summer- ... which seems to be the trend, at least online. And yeah, DSA's coming off Tuesday night, which was maybe their biggest kind of win of the primary season so far with Melat Kiros, knocking off a nearly 30-year incumbent in, DeGette.

Denver voters of all ages, of all races, of all religions sent a clear message: We

will not wait. But it's been, like, a string of victories we've seen over the past few months where starting a few months ago where Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania had a big win, and then that kind of transitioned into, a week ago where these candidates, in New York kind of shocking the world and really putting the stamp on the primary season for Democrats, ousting even incumbents.

Tonight we haven't just won an election, we have declared that this movement is durable. 

No longer will we accept the politics that throws scraps at us and act as if we should be grateful for them. 

Really showing the power of what the left flank of the party is looking to flex in this primary season.

And I think the question is moving forward was how far outside of kind of, places like New York City can this leftist insurgent, how much success can they actually have? At least in Denver, a huge showing where, like I said, a 30-year incumbent was just, kicked out of Congress. 

What does the DSA want?

What is their platform? What do they believe? What are the, what are their main talking points? 

Yeah. I think their platform in terms of policy, is maybe not gonna surprise folks. These are Democratic socialists, so they want Medicare for all. They really push for strong, unions and labor rights.

They push for affordable housing. But I think one thing that's really resonating with folks that I talk to is their stance, their pro-Palestinian rights stance, their opposition to US military aid to Israel. 

I will continue to call for Palestinian liberation.

We will stand up to the genocide, we refuse to abide by apartheid, and we will use our money to improve lives here instead of destroy them abroad. 

And no, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine.

I think those are the big platforms, and also just, like I said, a larger affordability. When you talk to DSA candidates or members, a lot of what you hear is they want to put the working class forward. 

No longer will we accept anything less than respect and a seat at the table that our labor built.

We know that no matter where you live, working people are struggling with the cost of living crisis. And in each of these campaigns, in each of these candidacies, I see champions who would not only be partners of our affordability agenda in Washington, but also help to lead our party in a new direction where we understand that at the heart of everything we do must be the dignity of working-class people that for too long have been in the rear view mirror of the Democratic Party.

And I think it's not only just a policy, but it's also the way it's wrapped in this anti-establishment fighter brand. 

How ideological is the DSA? We keep hearing this term sewer socialism- Right ... and I think that suggests something about the things that they want to get done maybe versus the things that they believe.

But, how ideological is this group? 

If you talk to them, I think they're very ideological, very policy-forward. They want to get these, not only do they wanna get these policies enacted, but I think they believe in the long game when you talk to them. They understand that it's about moving the Overton window.

in terms of are they ideological, they also know that they are working with a little bit of house money now because of how disliked and in the gutter the Democratic brand largely is right now. And I think while you see folks, on the right using the fact that these are DSA candidates, and it's socialism, and, using that as thinking it's gonna, hurt them- 

They use the word social Democrat 'cause it sounds so nice, but it's really communism you're talking about 

Okay, here's just a sample of what they're about.

They put this on paper. They're saying the quiet things out loud. Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. 

In a primary, I think they wear that as a badge of honor. They get to point at the establishment Democrats and say, "Yeah, I'm not with Hakeem Jeffries.

I'm not an establishment Democrat." And, that helps them. It gives them a little bit of street cred, at least in a primary. We'll have to see how that plays out in a general election, obviously, in some of these closer battleground states. But right now, it is a brand that's both policy and the fact that it's, running against the Democratic brand, which is in the gutter for a lot of folks.

I think that's what they see as a plus. You're next. You're next. You're next What I think you're going to see is while you might not see Den- DSA candidates in places like, purple or especially red states, I think you're gonna see a lot of candidates mimicking that fighter, anti-establishment style as much as possible- which is clearly there's so much hunger, at least in the Democratic primary, for that. 

Yeah, we heard this week, or we saw some reporting this week, that Kamala Harris has reached out to Zohran Mamdani, indicating that, she at least is interested in what he and his have going on. But it's still notable that some of these DSA candidates are being criticized by both mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

James Carville said the other day, more or less, he doesn't want them in his tent, and I think that came down to some tweets from the New York, winner, Darielisa Avila 

Chevalier. She has attacked interracial relationships and the American flag. Lady, I ain't in the same party as you. I'm sorry.

There, just, it, there, I just not. And I actually do think it's time for Democrats to talk the S-word, schism. I really do. 

What do you make of their ability to polarize? 

In a primary, I think they like that. I think they- ... want to polarize people that, especially the old guard of folks that had been telling especially younger voters for so long, "Wait your turn.

Don't be so loud. Don't go so far as Medicare for All," I think they, number one, 

that's part of what they wanna do. They wanna, fight back against those kinds of folks. they look at the Kamala Harris campaign, and when I'm talking to these kinds of candidates and these kinds of voters and folks on the ground and surrogates, they were completely turned off by the Kamala Harris campaign, the Kamala Harris campaign that embraced Liz Cheney, that embraced, a lot of folks that for the left flank of the base would never wanna be associated with.

In order to broaden the tent, sure. that's what they were doing to try to win the election. But for them, I think they felt like they weren't getting, Kamala Harris's ear and the Democratic Party's ear in terms of major issues like Israel or Medicare for All or really wanting to push her to the left.

And so I think right now they wanna throw a Molotov cocktail into the party and just say, "We're blowing this up, and so if it's gonna ruffle feathers, so be it." I think a big test for this movement is going to be Michigan, the Michigan Senate race with Abdul El-Sayed. I think that is going to be a huge test for where this insurgent energy can go.

We need Democrats who are willing to take the fight to Donald Trump, who are willing to take a fight to the system that created Donald Trump, and are willing-

Yeah, uh, I'd like to go back to, uh, Sheikh Sadiq for a, a moment. Uh, uh, you mentioned earlier this, uh, uh, uh, socialists getting elected throughout the country and eventually moving to a transition to... from capitalism to socialism. Uh, I, I have a hard time trying to understand how the, uh, elite of the most powerful capitalist country in the world are going to accept, uh, a demo- a transition from capitalism to socialism.

Can you, uh, talk a little bit more about that? If you were successful, uh, w- what example, uh, in the world do you have of, of capitalists relinquishing, uh, their power? 

It, it can't happen without a lot of struggle and without having millions of people, eventually a majority of the population, who wants these changes, who wants to make choices democratically about how we run our society and how we control our own lives, uh, together and make decisions together instead of the, the most powerful people in the world making these choices, uh, r- right now for, for their own profits.

So it, it, it's not just about electing people on, on a good platform and then hoping for the best. It, it's about organizing our collective power together. Um, and that start, uh, elected office is an important part of that. But even more important for us is organizing people in our workplaces to rebuild the labor movement in the United States, which is the backbone of, of all the major movement gains over the past century, all of the major expansions of people's rights, um, things like Social Security and Medicare that were won, um, almo- al- uh, almost a century ago.

Um, but in other countries that, uh, got more expansive things like universal healthcare, um, it happened with a, with the class struggle a- and that, that's with organized workers, uh, with majorities of the population. Yeah

So, so p- p- power is not conceded without, without struggle, and that means people have to organize, um, in our, in our own interests to, to win these things 

And Alexandra, could you talk about y- your focus on, uh, providing infrastructure for, uh, Democratic, uh, can- for progressive Democratic candidates, how important that is?

Absolutely. It's critical, and I think one thing that is important to remember, although these victories have been hard fought over the past year to get here, it's also been a project, you know, for over 10 years in the making. You know, we specifically work with working class people to run for Congress, the federal level, which is very different from local and state.

And from emotional labor to, uh, helping them build out their initial email list, to recruiting them, uh, in concert with local organizations on the ground, to, uh, making sure that they have a team of, uh, local expertise and folks like ourselves that have experience going up against the tens of millions of dollars, uh, that AIPAC, crypto, the AI industry have funneled into our elections.

Uh, people power, uh, beats organized money

every single time. And also, we have, as a movement, alongside, uh, the Democratic Socialists of America and so many others that I could, list at the national and local level, have built infrastructure to be able to support from a field, from a staffing level. But also on the independent expenditure level, where even though we can't combe- compete with tens of millions of dollars, we can put together, um, you know, you know, our own set of volunteers, donors, and organizers who are willing to throw a punch back and not let our candidates be totally left out to dry like we saw, unfortunately, last cycle.

So the infrastructure that we're building to compete against over 35 million in opposition spending this cycle, and obviously even more than that over the history of the organization, really, really matters. It matters in moments, uh, like these where elections are tools for our ability to build class consciousness, public consciousness, and organize our communities win, win or lose.

But they're critical, uh, to laying the groundwork if we want to see more and more, uh, victories like this at every level, uh, local and federal. I want... So, uh, supporting the organizations and the organizers that, that are deep in this work is critical. 

The DSA has had big primary wins in New York, in Colorado just last night, we're speaking on Wednesday, in the mayoral race in Washington, DC. Mm-hmm. That's where I live. Why do you think DSA candidates are doing so well in elections right now?

I think there's both the kind of rage that people have about, um, about seeing any remnants of our safety net, social safety net be dismantled. I think they see their wages stagnating while inflation continues to go up and cost of living continues to go up. Um, and I, I think that has people really on edge.

But I also think that they're looking for, um, for answers and for solutions and for things that are actually gonna change their lives for the better. When we talk about expanding childcare for all or Medicare for all, childcare debt and medical debt, those are, those are very real issues to real people.

So I think they're excited to see someone not just saying, the other guy's worse," um, but really saying, "Look, we're gonna rethink some of these things and come up with solutions together." 

Your economic message definitely seems to have caught fire for Americans who really do feel like life is too expensive.

But the DSA's positions on some domestic issues like borders, like, uh, policing, open you up to claims that the DSA is just too extreme- Mm-hmm ... for regular Americans. Mm-hmm. I know that you're aware of this charge. How do you respond to that? 

Yeah, so a lot of the charges coming from, um, uh, sort of documents or, or, or sometimes panels where they're, they're clipping people and talking about it, um, that are really sort of expressing this long-term view.

'Cause we're trying to-- We're not just trying to, like, fix little problems. We're trying to really get to the root of these societal problems and think about what life could look like and what society could look like if we change them. So things uh, abolishing the carceral state as we know it, right?

Um, people say, "Well, you're just gonna fire all the police?" Like, well, no. The goal is free childcare, free healthcare, free college. These sort of things that will actually make there be less crime. We know crime is inextricably linked to poverty. We're not saying like, "Yes, let murderers run free in the streets."

We're saying, "If we have eliminated, in this, this long-term vision, a lot of these crimes of poverty, crimes of, of desperation, what can the system look like?" And, you know, it will have to be different. 

It's hard to convince people on that score, too- Sure ... because even in a much better world, people will still murder other people.

Mm-hmm. This is an unfortunate fact. Sure. And voters hear abolish the carceral state, whether it's next week or 50 years from now, and they sense that you are unrealistic. Mm-hmm. They sense that you are not where they are. Working class voters in the last election moved toward Donald Trump in part because, as we understand it from polling, many people felt like the Democrats were just, had just gotten too pie in the sky, right?

Mm-hmm. They were too extreme on cultural issues. And so I wonder whether the DSA considers that the economic platform is very appealing. Abolish the carceral state simply isn't. 

Um, we think it's important to connect those two things, right? So the reason you do something matters, too, right? So they say, "Well, you want to abolish the police."

It's well, we, we're not doing that right now, but we have invested in Care, Not Cops programs because the long-term goal is to stop prosecuting people for crimes of poverty. Um, it's not to make you less safe, it's to make you more safe. Because right now the system as it works does not make us more safe.

There are real concerns about some candidates who are affiliated with the DSA. Daria Liza Avila-Chevalier just won a big election in New York City. Mm. She said in tweets at one point that she wiped her dirty hands on an American flag because she didn't have napkins. She suggested that white people shouldn't be in interracial relationships.

There's a lot more. Um- Mm ... she has apologized, and independently she deleted her Twitter account. Um, she told my colleague, Astead Herndon, she finds it better to not spend too much time online. But I wonder if you are, if you are working with anti-establishment candidates, right? There is a level of vetting that just, it just isn't gonna be the same as with establishment- Mm

candidates. Do you think you're gonna have difficulty finding candidates who are strong on your economic message, but don't have to issue these embarrassing apologies? 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's kind of the, that, that is an interesting spot we're in. Um, we're not forming our candidates in a lab, right?

We're not , we're not, like, raising perfect model UN children and sending them to- Oh, come on- ... to poli 

sci ... perfect, perfect model UN children. 

I know. They- 

I actually- White people, white people shouldn't be in interracial relationships? 

I, no- That's, uh- ... I, I agree. No, that is, that is way out there. No, what I'm saying is, is, like, we are dealing with imperfect, messy people, for sure.

And I, you know, w- we're not, uh, oh, like, I don't know why she tweeted that. I, I'm imagining there was, like, like, she had a bad breakup and was just tweeting too close to the sun or some, some terrible thing. Um, yeah, that, that's a, that's a bad tweet. She apologized for it. Trump did bad tweets this morning, right?

we're just like, "Oh, God." But yeah, you know, that, that is gonna be, that is gonna be the reality of running candidates who did not- come into adult life thinking they were ever gonna be a candidate. 

I wanna ask you about an issue that's become very sensitive over the past few years. The DSA's focus on Israel- Mm

strikes some people as obsessive, possibly even tipping into anti-Semitic. So let me give you a couple of examples that I see cited frequently. On October 7th, after Hamas attacked Israel, the DSA released a statement expressing solidarity with Palestine. It did condemn the killing of all civilians, but it added this was not unprovoked.

Mayor Mamdani recently set some Jewish leaders on edge when he referred to AIPAC as monsters. He said he was quoting, uh, the philosopher Antonio Gramsci. A DSA candidate in Colorado who had a big win last night, um, Melat Kiros, she was recently asked by a reporter whether a firebombing attack on a peaceful Jewish gathering in Boulder was an act of anti-Semitism, and she said, "I don't know what's in the perpetrator's heart."

Now, there's an argument that these types of things taken together illustrate that there is anti-Semitism within the DSA. There's also a more nuanced argument that says the DSA isn't anti-Semitic, but you're fostering a culture that allows your members to talk in ways that are. What do you say to American Jews who think the way that DSA-affiliated politicians talk about Israel goes beyond taking issue with foreign policy and into something darker?

Yeah, I mean, that, that is something that, that I think we think a lot about, but the, what we see is that, that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. Um, people are mad when they, uh, and should be mad. It's a genocide. Um, we, we don't equivocate on that definition or on that, um, understanding of the events. Um, we see an apartheid state.

We see people being in an open air concentration camp, essentially, in the Gaza Strip. Um, so people are mad, and sometimes, yeah, people are mad and they're gonna not, not nuance their words as much as they should. Um, I do think it's very important, obviously, that we stand against anti-Semitism in all its forms.

Um, but I do not see the state of Israel as, uh, something that, that, that I, uh, like I'm, I, I don't think we should be defending it on any grounds. It's, it's a genocidal apartheid state, and I'm not apologizing for that. 

In 2024, the DSA rescinded an endorsement of AOC. AOC, of course, is a fierce critic of Israel.

After she attended a panel with Jewish leaders on anti-Semitism, a lot of people looked at that and said, "You have a fierce critic of I- Israel who attended a panel on anti-Semitism, and the DSA rescinded their endorsement of her." you can see the math here. You can sort of see where the brain goes from here.

Why did the DSA rescind its endorsement of AOC? 

Yeah, so that was actually a complicated process. We didn't actually rescind our endorsement of AOC in that way. So what we did was we made a, an endorsement that came with some strings attached, which was kind of the first time we'd ever done that. And we said, "We want you to pledge to not fund Israeli military anything, not, not defense, not offense, no weapons for Israel.

We want you to not sign on to any of that." Which, which she had voted, I think she voted present on the Iron Dome. She had- she, she, um... Basically we want her in line, in the, in the same voting line as Rashida Tlaib. If Rashida Tlaib votes for it, who is one of the most, you know, fearless defenders of Palestine and the Palestinian people, um, in Congress.

So AOC had voted present on some, and she had equivocated on some. And, um, and so we said, "Okay, you can't do that anymore." AOC has since pledged to vote no on all funding of any kind for Israeli military. 

So ultimately she came around to your point of view. Mm-hmm, yeah. The pressure worked. 

Yeah. Yeah, so. 

Hmm.

The DSA, we're told, and you can confirm it, wants to run a presidential primary candidate in 2028. Tell me what that means about your ambitions. 

We would love... You know, the, the Bernie Sanders campaign, it kind of changed the face of the American left a bit. He was the first person who went out there on stage and said, "I am a Democratic socialist."

And, um, it kind of felt like it gave a lot of people, they felt like they had permission to, to say it out loud. It kind of broke the dam a little bit on, on using that, that big, scary S word. Um, so if we run a presidential candidate, we can at least make sure that there's a voice in the primary holding people to account.

I think when Bernie was in the primary, he, him standing strong for Medicare for All got a bunch of the other candidates to sign a Medicare for All pledge. Like, those things are good. And so it, it... We would love to win the presidency. We would also at the very least love to move the needle by having an actual Democratic socialist voice in the debates, um, fighting for working families, fighting for labor unions, fighting for healthcare for everybody, and fighting against the, um, military industrial complex.

My reason for hope is Democratic socialists winning in Congress, and I can tell you why, but do you wanna do yours first or you want me to go first?

go ahead. 

All right. I think that this is good news because it looks like we're gonna have eight Democratic socialist identifying, affiliated, adjacent congresspeople, in November if everything goes how it looks. Bernie, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, they're in Congress. You're gonna... They're gonna be joined by a bevy of people from New York City, Brad Lander, Chris Rabb, and now Melat Kiros from Colorado, who is an Ethiopian, uh, American immigrant, former refugee, so on and so forth.

I did some digging for my daily brief this morning, and of the eight, everybody is either Native American, person of color, or Jewish. There are Christians in the form of AOC. There are Muslims. There are Jews represented in those eight. My takeaway, Dan, is that you have Americans who see the future of this country as one that has to work for everybody.

Oligarchy cannot stand. Income inequality in the form that we have it does not work. We have to provide healthcare. We have to provide responses to the climate crisis. We have to give power back to the people. Paul Krugman wrote a great piece on Substack outlining that democratic socialism is not nationalist socialism, and most Americans don't want anything like nationalist socialism.

But democratic socialism is what most of our peer countries do. It means a social safety net for everybody. It means healthcare for everybody. It means a response to the climate crisis that works. It means getting corporate money out of our elections and of our politics. That sounds really good, and Fox News is freaking out because 53% of Americans under 30 see a move towards socialism as a good idea.

And what Krugman says, and I agree with him, is that's, that really means a democratic socialism more in line with the UK or France or Germany than it does anything recalling the horrors of the 20th century. I think this is good news because for most people under 40, democracy is an empty signifier. Most people do not see it as something that works for them.

So- 

Yeah, that's my thought. I don't know if you want to respond to that or just give us your reason for hope. 

Yeah, so just briefly, I would say, we've talked about this before, we can get super technical. I-- The only thing I wish they would do is rebrand a bit to social democracy. Sure. 

Yeah.

I prefer the term social democracy because I think it captures that, right? It's an idea- Yeah ... of taking democratic norms into broader segments of social life- Yeah ... healthcare- I like that ... like education and so forth, and helps just dispel that specter. But anyway, if they want to reach out to me, they can.

Now, Section C, Money, Power, and the Reckoning

I think you're absolutely right, and if I can just make two minor amendments to your contract and then answer your question.

Americans aren't even at $15 an hour anymore. They're at $25 an hour. You can't keep up today on $15 an hour, and cert- you're going bankrupt in two days on $7 an hour. It's outrageous. And then childcare, and I'm so glad you mentioned it, and thank you for always being a champion of it. We need help with elder care too.

We're the sandwich generation now, where people are responsible for kids, and these kids coming back home, and they're responsible for aging parents and aging relatives. The caregiving economy has absolutely collapsed, and people have incredible financial and time responsibilities now caring for family members of all ages. I don't think that Washington is gonna lead on the contract for America. I think the individual candidates have to be the one to lead, and I think, I hope as a product of this radio program, I would love you to issue a contract with America, and I think every one of our listeners should take this to candidates.

The candidates will adopt it out there. The change won't come from Washington. It's got to come from outside Washington. And when candidates run on these issues, as you said, we will win votes, and we will get people to turn out to vote. People say that people have no choice, and we can just be negative on Trump.

No, you can't beat something with nothing. We have to offer something if we're gonna get people out of their very busy lives to go vote for us 

Yeah, childcare, paid family leave, like in Western Europe, and an authentic child tax credit benefits 61 million children in this country. It'll cut child poverty in half, and that's a lot of conservative family children, not just liberal family children- 

That's 

right

which the Democrats don't seem to understand. So how do we get to the local candidates? You can't go through the Democratic National Committee or the DCCC and their counterpart in the House and Senate. They're all dialing for dollars with strings attached, unfortunately. How do we get to the candidates?

One by one? 

I think, as you say, we've only got, 140 days left. We don't have time to get to them one by one. I think that we should publish a Contract with America. I think it can be... Candidates can alter it, and I think that it's very important to show the power that this concept has. The Contract with America tests off the charts.

People love the idea, and it doesn't have to be everything we stand for. Just 10 proposals that every candidate's gonna commit to, and that we're gonna take to the floor of the Congress day one when we're elected, to our state legislatures day one when we're elected, to our governors' mansions, to our AGs offices, and create a real movement here, not just another set of campaigns with $300 million in television ads with meaningless content 

Yeah, they couldn't have a better antagonist than Donald Trump.

what other politician in your long career, Celinda, have you heard say, "I don't care about Americans' financial situation," or, "I like inflation"? These are his two latest ridiculous statements that are driving the GOP up the wall. So it's all in our hands, people. It is in our hands. The Constitution starts, "We the people."

It doesn't start, "We the Congress," it doesn't start, "We the corporation." It's all in our hands. You gotta vote, but more important, you gotta put a cutting edge on your vote so that when you meet the politicians coming August in their huge recess from Congress to shake your hands and sweet talk you, you can tell them what your vote is demanding.

Isn't that a winner, Celinda? 

Absolutely, and all these members of Congress are going back between August 9th and August 11th to campaign in their districts, and I think we should run off the contract, and we should hand it to every candidate we can find, and we should demand, "Are you taking corporate dollars?

Because if you're taking corporate dollars, you're not gonna follow through on this contract." Demand that our candidates do not take corporate contributions, and have them sign the contract or publish their own contract. Again, let's commit to 10 things that can make a difference in real people's lives that we can pass in the first three months of Congress, and let's filibuster or let's sit in until they happen, and let's not vote for anybody who won't commit to signing a contract with the American people to make these changes happen.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has issued such a contract. You're issuing a contract. Several candidates have their own contract, and it doesn't really matter. The basics are all the same. It doesn't make any sense where we're at right now. It doesn't make any sense that in Social Security taxes there's a special loophole for the wealthy that they're not taxed all the way up.

The rest of us are taxed all the way up, but wealthy people don't have to pay their Social Security taxes all the way up. That makes no sense, and nobody real even knows that loophole exists. So I think we need to get this out. I think it needs to be a relentless drum beat. I think we will increase turnout, and I think we will gain votes, and we have to win big.

The stakes are very high. We have to win the House and the Senate, and we can't just limp along and win it by a few seats. We need to win by big margins and with lots of seats so we have a mandate to stop what's going on. 

That's the key word, the mandate. The election not only has to be won handily, it has to be won with a mandate which comprises the contract for the American people.

the Democratic Party dug its own pit here when they years ago wrote off half the country and created the red state, blue state phenomena, and they were always on the defensive after that, Celinda. The year when they started, the Democrats started dialing for commercial dollars, 1979, that's when they started to exclude the participation of progressives, citizen groups, progressive labor groups, who earlier cooperating with the Democrats passed all the great legislation of consumer, environmental, worker safety, Freedom of Information Act, and others in the 1960s and early '70s.

So we know who's standing in the way, and the key here, the gorilla in the room, is the corporate conflicted consultants that the Democratic Party has essentially contracted campaigns out to, and they have to be exposed as well. What do you have to say about these consultants? 

I am a consultant, so of course I'm a little cross-pressured here, but frankly, I agree with you about the consulting class.

I think the consulting class is very conservative. I think it's way too tied to corporate America. We're the only Democratic firm that doesn't work for pharma. We work against pharma in terms of pollsters, and I could go on. We work against data centers. We work against big utilities. we work against the military industrial complex.

The consulting class is really way, way too dependent on corporate contributions, and until we get corporate money out of politics, we are not going to get the consulting class out of politics. But individual candidates, what's really exciting right now is there are so many candidates who know who they are.

Our candidates don't take their positions from polling data. You don't tell AOC what to believe from polling data, or Abdul El-Sayed or any number of other candidates. These candidates know what they stand for. They know who they're fighting for, and that's who we gotta go vote for 

What do you think of taking these, say, 10 issues, so on the Contract for the American people, and embodying them in actual legislative bills so that you campaign around the country, and you say, "We're for a higher federal minimum wage, and here's the bill.

We introduced it. This is not just rhetoric. We're not just sweet-talking you. Here is the bill, and you can get a copy of it on X website and spread it around." So the Contract for America is in these bills. What do you think of that approach? 

I really like it, but I also think one of the things that I love about your show, and one of the things I love about when you talk, you make things very simple.

Let's not make it A 25-page bill to raise the minimum wage. Let's make it a one-line bill. The minimum wage is going up from $7 and whatever it is, 25 cents, to $25 an hour, period. That's it. It's not complicated. We're gonna extend Social Security tax all the way up on your income. We're not gonna stop at whatever it stops at now, which is one of the greatest loopholes that people don't even know about.

These are one-sentence bills. They don't have to be complicated, and that allows people to take them to office holders and say, "No fine print, sign the bill. Sign the contract." 

In this case, we're talking about NSPM-7 and the Trump administration's new counterterrorism, memorandum, which don't change the law. They're simply an expression of prosecutorial priorities, and they instruct prosecutors to go after- Antifa to go after far left groups, people who they view as anti-American, whatever that means, people with extreme gender ideologies.

No idea what that one means. I've never heard of any sort of trans supremacy movement that wants to lock up cisgender people. So presumably they're just talking about people who believe that trans people should have rights, and now they're on the same plane as terrorists, as ISIS, according to this administration.

It's all pretty absurd, but at the end of the day, we have a constitution that prohibits people from being locked up for what they think, write, or read as long as they are not inciting imminent violence. So hopefully the appellate courts will reverse these convictions, but the law is only as good as the people who enforce it.

So if the judiciary isn't up to the task, if the judiciary is compromised And lawmakers are unwilling to step in. And of course, at the end of the day, the president has pardon and clemency power, but we know who's president, so that's not something you can rely on. Then, yeah, the law's not as good as the paper it's written on.

So that's the situation we're in. And if the appellate courts don't correct this egregious error that the trial courts have committed, we'll be in a really scary place. remember in Georgia, they tried something very similar with the Stop Cop City protesters. Very similar situation. They indicted sixty-one people who were part of the Stop Cop City movement because a few of those individuals had allegedly committed criminal acts, arson, vandalizing police cars, whatnot.

There was no indication that all sixty-one of those people had anything to do with those isolated criminal acts, but they were looped into a RICO conspiracy solely because they, again, read the same zines, shared the same ideologies, were part of the same movement, had the same alleged belief system. That case fell apart, as it should have, after putting all sixty of those people through a whole lot of headache and expense, but still, it ultimately fell apart.

And it was easy to dismiss at the time as though these are-- this is just some local prosecutor who had an awful idea and made a fool of themselves. Now it's the federal government doing it. And you mentioned January 6th. The sentences here were far more severe than any sentences against anyone involved in January 6th.

That issue was raised with the judge, who said, this case was charged differently. This case was charged as terrorism." So essentially incentivizing prosecutors going forward, if they wanna get headline grabbing sentences and make themselves look effective, to overcharge, to continue charging defendants as terrorism despite the lack of any evidence of them being terrorists, being affiliated with a terrorist group, or having any terrorist intentions.

So we should expect to see more of this. Hopefully other trial judges will do their jobs and not leave it up to the appellate courts to clean up the mess. 

I think language is playing a role here. I have said repeatedly that when news media took war on terror out of quotes, we lost something.

A, a brain wrinkle got smoothed, so now we can just say terrorism. I don't know actually what it is, but I know it's the very worst thing in the world, And I don't need to ask any further questions. and we're now at that situation with Antifa. w- what the actual heck?

now Antifa is being legally identified as a organized thing. what is meaningful? What changes when you allow folks to say, "Hey, we made up a name for everybody who thinks a certain way, and now you're a group and you're conspiring terrorism"? 

I certainly agree the...

even before the Trump administration, the idea of terrorism had lost its meaning. But I think one assumption that everybody for the most part had, was that to be labeled a terrorist, you have to have engaged in or collaborated with others who engaged in violence. And that you had to have some foreknowledge of that violence.

And to get to a point where people are being convicted of terrorism for merely going to a protest where the prosecution didn't even bother trying to prove that they had any intention to commit an act of violence, that they had any foreknowledge that one of them might pick up a gun and shoot at a cop, is really quite alarming because terrorism becomes less of an action and more of an ideology that people like Donald Trump can define as synonymous with dissent.

Anyone whose beliefs are inconvenient To him or that interferes with his agenda becomes a terrorist. Anti-Trump and anti-American become interchangeable in the views of the administration and the, and judges apparently who are sympathetic to them. So it's quite scary to have this kind of power to, uh, abuse the word terrorism, particularly in a domestic context.

In the international context, we've long had the problem of prosecutors and judges and politicians characterizing things as national security threats with no basis to do Going back to the Pentagon Papers, where the truth about the Vietnam War was almost censored because the administration at the time called it a national security threat for the American people to know the truth.

Fortunately, the judiciary back then rejected that. Reporters are threatened with prosecution under, for example, the Espionage Act because their reporting supposedly poses a national security threat when, in fact, it merely is inconvenient to those in power. We see that, for example, in the case involving Hannah Natanson, the Washington Post reporter whose home newsroom was raided.

That's long been an issue in the context of national security in matters of war, international issues. But now you've got any local dissident, any activist, any person in any of the fifty states who opposes the president's agenda being treated the same way, being treated as a national security threat.

The line between First Amendment protected dissent and terrorism is just entirely blurred by this administration. And again, the judges have the power to set it straight. Whether they will or not is to be determined. 

I will say I spoke with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard in 2017 about arrests after the first Trump inauguration, where police were saying if you were somewhere near an act of property damage, I think it was a car being set on fire, if you were near it, it's the same as you committing it.

If you were wearing black, forget about it. You are obviously part of it. At the time, a Washington Post poll was saying that one out of every three DC residents were saying they'd taken part in a protest against Trump since his first inauguration, and that was half of the district's white residents, half of people making more than $100,000 a year, and a fifth of respondents over the age of 65.

So what I want to say, and what I think you're wanting to say also, is you're not safe from this. the idea that you're not gonna do anything wrong Is not gonna protect you in this case. We're seeing the straight up criminalizing of resistance per se. And so I guess I'd ask you, what can we do? What can we be doing in the face of this? 

That is important to remember because it is easy for people to look at this and say, I am not an anarchist. I don't read these zines. I don't go to these kinds of protests. My protests are organized or permitted." 

"

I'm not at risk." But, I've mentioned, Sanchez, who was convicted solely for transporting a box of zines.

Think about the Don Lemon and Georgia Fort cases. They were arrested, of course, while covering a protest at a church in Minneapolis against immigration enforcement there. I don't think anyone would characterize Don Lemon as a far left anarchist type. You can like him or not like him, but that's not something that he is.

But the Trump administration sought a warrant that would have allowed it to gather from YouTube a list of subscribers to both Lemon and Fort's YouTube channels. Now, that warrant was fortunately rejected by a judge, but think about it. What possible evidence could a subscriber to Lemon and Fort's YouTube channels have that would assist the Trump administration in prosecuting its frivolous case against those journalists?

All they saw was what was publicly broadcast. The prosecution already has that. This is clearly an attempt by the Trump administration to gather information about who is in possession, who is accessing news that it does not like. So just as Daniel Sanchez, Dez Sanchez was prosecuted for his box of zines, those who watch Don Lemon and Georgia Fort's show may have faced danger or risk down the road.

Why else would prosecutors want their information? It has nothing to do with their case. So it's certainly a mistake to believe that this is a problem that is limited to, quote-unquote, Antifa or people on the political fringes. Stephen Miller has said the entire Democratic Party is a terrorist organization.

Donald Trump has called the press enemies of the people, has called his critics the enemy within. He is not only talking about anarchists when he says that.

So we are in a time similar to the incoming class of 1974, which was elected in part as a response to the Vietnam War, to the arrogation of power by the executive, of Nixon resigning in August of that year.

There are calls from many corners of this country, as I mentioned, for Congress to step up and reclaim its place as a co-equal branch of government alongside the executive. And if members had the appetite to actually do that, to step up, which it currently doesn't, clearly, under the leadership of Speaker Johnson, where should it start?

So a number of things I think would help Congress to stand up to the executive. Firstly, I mentioned that Congress self-lobotomized itself in the '90s. Yeah. Again, we know from legislative studies in general that legislatures and legislators need independent expertise, they need independent information if they're gonna actually be able to conduct oversight of an executive branch as they are meant to do.

And so dramatically increasing staffing, that includes nonpartisan staff An agency staff that also includes lifting the cap on personal staff that members can hire. They've had the same cap on personal staff that they can hire since 1975. 

Oh, wow. 

So they're only allowed to hire up to 18 staff members.

That includes their district staff and their policy staff in Congress. And for- And how 

many do they actually need, you think? 

the issue isn't how much they need. The, the other issue is they also don't have very large budgets. 

Right. 

And so actually, most of them don't end up hiring 18 staff, but I think we need to increase their budget and increase their staffing, and I think that they would need more than 18 staff.

That includes, their constituent services, their policy experts. They're representing nearly a million people. So if you want them to be able to both respond to constituent requests and understand how to legislate on AI, you need brainpower behind that. You need, desperately, Congress to not just increase its staffing, but retool itself to meet the moment.

It hasn't reorganized its committee jurisdictions since the '70s, again. So when we think about an issue like AI, Congress doesn't have a tech committee to deal with it, because it hasn't reorganized committees since the internet existed. 

I see. 

this is not just specific to the executive. This is how Congress can stand up as a branch.

Yes. The other thing that Congress needs to do when it comes to standing up to the executive in particular, in addition to just resourcing itself, making sure it has the tools and the organizations that it needs, is to understand where there are opportunities to build bipartisan support and to stand up together.

When we look at congressional history, moments when Congress is changeable tend to be moments where there's more new people in Congress. Moments where Congress stands up to the executive tend to be after the president has overstepped, and that's when Congress gets its, house in order. So if you look at, for example, the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act, that was after World War II, after Congress thought that the president overstepped in World War II.

If we look at what happened in the 1970s with the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, with the 1973 War Powers Resolution, that was after Nixon impounded $50 billion, which is to say that he refused to spend congressionally authorized money after he overstepped in the Vietnam War in terms of presidential power.

We're at a moment where Congress could do that, and historically, when we look at things like war powers and we look at movements around, for example, the repeal of the authorization of the use of military force bill, which was something passed after 9/11, which gave George Bush even more war powers, that was pretty bipartisan.

So I think looking for, even in this hyperpolarized space, there are moments like this, especially with the conflict in Iran, spaces where Congress can band together To stand up against the executive. and I think war powers could be one of them, and I certainly think power of the purse is another.

That's really important, I think, to think about because historically there's some urgency for it to stand up when the president has overstepped, and there can be some space for bipartisan cooperation when it comes to congressional power. So looking for opportunities to do that and leaning into it, I think is really important.

I think at this point it looks only likely if there is a wave election- 

... 

this year in 2026, and that Republicans will lose the majority- ... in Congress. But I don't know if that's really gonna happen. I feel like it looks very likely, but I don't know. I feel like it's so difficult, actually, to predict because so many things- Very-

can happen between now and then. 

Yeah. 

the White House is so erratic, and who knows what is going to happen with the war in Iran. we think that it's going to stay isolated, but if it becomes something much larger, I think we're looking at a very different kind of election than we are thinking about in this moment.

What we know about elections is that things can change very quickly. So as you're saying, it's impossible to foresee what will happen. a lot of people that I know are focused a lot on the election, getting people elected, and then thinking that when they are elected, and we believe in their vision, whatever that might be, that then things will magically change.

We need to start thinking about the day after the election. We need to start thinking about how we can fix Congress as an institution and make sure that it has the resources and the tools that it needs as an institution. Because right now the reality is if you elect someone and, they're in a really hierarchical system where, as I mentioned, party leaders are just writing legislation.

They're in a system in which they have to spend all day dialing for dollars instead of legislating, and they're in a system where they're afraid to vote their conscience because of fear of violence, then that's not a system in which they can make change even if we elect them. 

Yes. 

So I think that that's something for us to reckon with regardless of the fact that we can't really know yet what will happen with the election.

What we do know is that these problems that I'm talking about, unfortunately, are probably not gonna go away by November. 

Definitely not. some of these problems are so- So entrenched for decades. So we are clearly not in a direct democracy where everyone votes on the bills directly. 

We elect representatives, members of Congress, senators to represent us, and we hope that the person we elect really will come close to the way we would vote ourselves. And in the process of writing this book, how has your thinking evolved around our system of democracy? 

that's a great question.

I've dedicated my entire career to making democracy work better for the people it is meant to serve, and I think that our democracy works best when it is as engaged as possible with the voices of ordinary Americans. I was committed to all sorts of civic engagement innovations before, but I think writing this book made me even more committed to them.

We need to be pushing for a representative democracy where members can actually engage with constituents. one of the things that I think we need to change structurally, among many things, is that when Congress was first created, members represented 30,000 constituents. That's a different kind of representative democracy than when you represent nearly a million constituents.

So I still believe in representative democracy as a system that works, but we need to actually make sure that our representatives can represent their constituents. That's far too many people to be representing. We need to expand the House. The other thing that I am more committed to than ever is ending Citizens United and getting the horrible influences of big money in politics out of politics.

That is tremendously distortive, and one of the things that the book speaks to is the fact that this, hasn't always been the case. Just 50 years ago, things were dramatically different. And so again, we want a representative democracy that works. That's a representative democracy in which all American voices need to be heard, and we have a system right now when you are reliant on a handful of donors, and when you are dialing for dollars all day long instead of legislating, you can't represent your constituents in the way true representative democracy is supposed to work.

So representative democracy, I think is something we should be working towards, but it- it's not working right now in the way that the framers intended it to.

And Finally, Section D, Critiques and the Path Forward

We're gonna start out talking Graham Platner a little bit because he's a great framing tool for everything I wanna get off my chest.

I wanna be really clear, I'm gonna say that a lot in this video. I don't like this dude. He feels like a seasonal villain from a prestige political drama like House of Cards or Scandal or something. I'm not saying he's a Nazi, but he's at least, Hydra or Order of the Cyclops for those of you that watched Watchmen all those years ago.

He just is that guy, and it's incredibly obvious to anyone who isn't some of y'all. And this isn't just taking issue with his military service. I don't have a purity politic toward anything, really, if you know me, but definitely not ex-military people on the left. I am anti-American military. I don't wanna misconstrue that.

But there are also Black Panthers who were ex-military. The American military spends billions of dollars marketing and propagandizing young people across this country, so I try to hold a nuanced position for how that works. But I wouldn't apply this to Platner. Four tours and Blackwater and a Nazi tattoo is a lot, and I know that's not a hot take.

I know even more moderate folks would agree with that, so I have to wonder, why and how is Platner being pushed so hard by the establishment and the online left in general? Platner is the latest project out of the Fight Agency. The Fight Agency is a political consultancy that was started by some ex-Bernie Sanders, ex-John Fetterman folks.

And in recent years, they've been behind the success of Zohran Mamdani, as well as people like Dan Osborne, Bob Brooks, et cetera. And aside from Zohran Mamdani, you kinda see what's happening here. All we're missing is Hank Hill. the main mostly valid argument that I will give about Platner is that he's one of the few folks amongst the Democrats that vows to pull military support from Israel.

Not a single taxpayer dollar should be spent on arming and defending a country that commits a genocide. 

And that is extremely important for Palestinian liberation. But I do have to ask, why are we being asked to not just tolerate Platner for that reason, but to see him almost as the future of the Democratic Party, and maybe even the left?

Why has he become the darling of the online predominantly white left in this timeframe? Why did the Fight Agency scout him in the first place? It's because the Fight Agency knows that this image of white American exceptionalism, and especially masculinity, is still highly valued amongst the white masses.

He's doing a reskin of the Marlboro Man, or better yet, like Don Draper, Joel Miller from The Last of Us. Literally, he looks like Walter White. And I want you to remember, all of these characters were villains, and historically, it's always straight white men that fail to realize that fact about those characters.

And when you're not a straight white male, you always take note of those types of fans. They may not be the worst people in the world, but they're people to observe. But the left falling for the same trick like this is not surprising when you realize that white leftists in America have never consistently had a halfway decently developed racial analysis, and this is just a historical pattern at this point.

Again, shout out to a book I've been reading from Bryan Quobah, Hubert Harrison: The Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism. Hubert Harrison was a lesser-known Black socialist who worked and wrote in the same eras as Booker T. Washington, Du Bois, and Garvey, and was to the left of all of them during that time, in- including Du Bois.

But in this, he also found himself confounded by the challenge of organizing with white socialists, who at the time could not see past their anti-Blackness to form effective solidarity and build a functional coalition. And this pattern has never stopped repeating, which is illustrated by this excerpt from Eugene Debs that's in the book.

"In capitalism, the Negro question is a grave one, and will grow more threatening as the contradictions and complications of capitalist society multiply," Debs allowed. "But this need not worry us. Let them settle the Negro question in their way if they can. We have nothing to do with it, for that is their fight."

Debs here exemplified the way in which even radical white people who called for a working class revolution against capitalism could simultaneously distance themselves from the specific challenges facing the most oppressed segment of the working class. I'm bringing this up because I wanna show that this is an infinite loop at this point.

White leftists with little to no racial analytical frame can't help but censor their sensibilities, even in the face of obvious red flags or clearly better options if they don't appeal to their aesthetics and need to censor themselves. Why have we centered Graham Platner when we have Chris Rabb, who, from what I understand, is the furthest left candidate the Democrats have ever had in any political race?

And he low-key still fits the gruff leftist daddy kink that so many of y'all seem to like. Another face that I haven't seen on my feed at all and I had to get from somebody else is Charles Booker. Booker has as progressive an agenda as you can have in mainstream politics, and is in a very vulnerable red state that could use a lot more attention and support from the online left And it's not there.

Booker's not just anti sending weapons to Israel, he's Medicare for all, he's for universal basic income, stopping data centers, decriminalizing poverty, and reparations. It's everything you can want from a mainstream politician, but he's invisible compared to Platner. I don't follow elections much unless it's local, but I have seen Platner's face a million times more than either Rob or Booker.

Rob did spend some time with Hasan. Booker, he's got nothing as far as I can tell. Meanwhile, Platner has tons of interviews, Majority Report, Mehdi Hasan, New York Times. Why is this happening? Why is that viable? From my perspective and experience, a lot of white leftists understand that it's bad to be racist, but they don't actually understand why racism is bad or how it works.

The absence of a critical understanding of how whiteness works is why a lot of them fall for the same trick over and over, to the point where the fight agency clearly has this type built out just for y'all. If you wanna vote for Platner as an odious candidate that will help end military support to Israel, go ahead, but it should be treated as a tainted compromise for the sake of a free Palestine, not a vision for the future of the left.

He should not be in our faces as much as he is. He should not have the defenders that he has that I know will show up in his comment section. He should be the online left's sneaky link that you never see in the light of day and never talk about in public. And the fact that so many white leftists don't feel this is sadly par for the course.

Yeah, no. I think I agree with a lot of what you had to say. I think the historical parallels are interesting.

For me, often, I think, and this comes more from coming from, the Maoist inflection point, I tend to view the New Deal as honestly, the counter-revolution, social fascist response to the progressive developments rather than maybe, a progressive integration of the demands of a budding socialist movement in the United States- I agree with that

or, the social fascist attempt to crush it in some way. But I think regardless of how one understands that framing, the historical parallel is quite clear, and I think that we are definitely in a time where the conditions in the United States are moving towards shockingly high levels of disparity, and that parallel seems very obvious to me.

I think you're right to focus on the techno-oligarchic angle of it, and I do think, increasingly, people are going to find themselves in further economic distress as a result of AI, as a result of all of these other technological forces that are at play. And so I do think the parallels are very clear, and the question is just how we move forward.

I think for me, the thing that I, want to wrestle with a little bit is, I think you're right. The wins that we are seeing are ultimately good for communists. I think some of these DSA candidates actually have been impressed. I think it was, I don't know how you actually pronounce her last name, but Chevalier is how I'm gonna pronounce it, who when she was asked, "Are you a communist?"

Instead of denouncing communism, basically said, "I'm not gonna answer that question. Why are we fear-mongering about this?" ... that to me is awesome, and that is actually exactly what we need to see from candidates like this who are not willing to throw those further to their left under the bus in order to sanitize their own position.

If we see those kind of developments, then I do think we will benefit positively from this. But I think I also want to caution that in my mind, imperialism is not the only site of contradiction that exists with some of these candidates, and I think that it's worth wrestling with a little bit. I organize in Los Angeles in the Tenants Union.

I think it's probably, one of the largest mass organizations in this city, and that means that we have experiences with DSA electeds in Los Angeles that are, not straightforward, right? There are times in the fights that we're engaged in where they do act as allies to us, and there are times when they do act as oppositional forces who are getting in the way of what we are trying to build and the demands that we are making.

And the contradictions, I think, at that micro level within, city politics, for example, when you are doing mass organizing, do go beyond just, whether or not they are getting questions of imperialism incorrect. I think here in Los Angeles, which is really the only place I can speak to as an on-the-ground organizer One of the big contradictions that we're seeing, and I, have heard from comrades in New York that this is an issue there, is that Democratic socialism in Los Angeles is increasingly associating itself with a pro-development perspective or what people call YIMBYism, Yes In My Backyard.

and obviously that is really at odds with what those of us who are doing mass organizing in the sphere of tenants unionism are trying to push for. Development in cities like LA and New York by and large is based on displacing people, and often, in fact, the very communities that we are coming in and defending and organizing in fights are people who are facing eviction because of the YIMBY development agenda and the attempt to tear down historic housing in order to build higher-density housing that will have some level of affordability safeguards that is always on a time limit and never permanent.

and so there is this real contradiction there. I think you've seen that when Zohran actually started to pick some of the people who were going to surround him in positions of power, putting some tenant people in place, but also pro-development positions and speaking to that. In Los Angeles, Nithya Raman has been this very complicated figure in DSA politics.

She's been endorsed by the DSA for city council. She's been censured by them for her positions on Palestine. those of us doing tenants unioncy- unionism have had some pretty serious issues with her around issues of development and housing. And DSA LA did not endorse her in the primary for the governor, but did recommend her over, Ray, who was a less pro-development candidate.

And in a lot of ways, a lot of the Democratic socialists in the city that I know prefer Nithya because of her pro-development position. And when you're doing concrete organizing, trying to stop people from getting evicted as a result of those development processes, these contradictions become not abstract, but very grounded day-to-day realities for socialists who've decided to integrate into mass organizations and do the work there.

And so I think, the contradictions will go beyond ultimately simply the question of imperialism. They are gonna come down to brass tacks and concrete politics at the city, the state, and federal level in ways that are gonna create potentially oppositional scenarios there. And I think one of the things that's going to come down to is that I think socialists need to build mass organizations so big that when they denounce that opportunism on these issues, when they push back against those contradictions, it's taken seriously, right?

Where DSA candidates feel like they not only need to worry about censure from the DSA chapter in a city in which they've been elected, but also from the mass organizations and the broader movement itself being willing to push back and that having weight. I think that's what's starting to be built in places like Los Angeles and New York, again, the only two contexts in which I have a fair amount of knowledge of on-the-ground tenant organizing.

But those contradictions become real as soon as you start to organize in cities where there is a democratic socialist presence. And that doesn't mean that we just say, "Fuck these candidates. We want nothing to do with them. We're never going to engage with them in any way." You have to have, in mass organizing, a complicated back-and-forth relationship that adjusts to the changing conditions of the contradictions.

But I do think we have to acknowledge that just as often as we find ourselves in alignment with them, we do also find ourselves in contradiction with them around concrete, practical realities. And I know, at least in the tenant organizing that I've done in the part of the city that I live in, it's a conversation that we have with tenants of, yeah, there are times we are gonna make demands of politicians, but we also understand that politicians ultimately are generally not on our side, that the people that we organize who can't vote often because of their immigration status, who are not a part of the electoral bloc, are not who the, actual-- even the DSA politicians are accountable to in any concrete mechanism.

And so that will create these tensions there. So I do think it is just important to wrestle a little bit with once you get into the micro level organizing, the way that these relationships become very complicated. And again, we shouldn't think too black and white and too totalizing about it. But we do have to recognize, I think increasingly around tenant organizing and development, that this is a growing contradiction within that movement that you even see play out internally in DSA within their own factional debates.

And so for me, and I'm probably biased 'cause this is the type of organizing that I do, this is one of the other key contradictions that I'm just, really keeping my eye on as democratic socialism grows in popularity right now.

And I'm gonna reiterate again. Now, some people don't like it when I say this, but I'm gonna say it again. If you don't like it, I'm, I guess you're just not gonna like it Maine Democrats, if you want to win, you should replace Graham Platner with somebody who's equally progressive.

You don't want a chance that the people who voted for Graham Platner feel disrespected because you replace him with a Schumer moderate. If you do that, you're doing that at your own risk because the reality is the voters of Maine were very clear that they want change. And we're Democrats, I'm saying this with love, 'cause you guys act up.

You need to actually show your base that you don't just want the gavels, that you intend to change things. Because if you just switch the brand of the, House and Senate, and now it's the Democratic brand, but nothing happens to change people's lives, watch it flip right back to Republicans in two years.

Because people just want change, and I don't think people are as married to the parties as you are. You're in the party, so you care a lot about the party label. The party label's meaningful to you. It used to be meaningful to me. Growing up, Democrat was part of my identity. As I've gotten older and wiser, it's not as much a part of my identity.

My identity is more I'm trying to survive in this country as an African American woman, as a Black woman, as a daughter of immigrants, as a citizen, as a person who cares about the community, who cares about vulnerable communities. That's my... My identity is that I'm a humanist that cares about 

people.

And so the party identity is less a part of my brand now because I don't have to... I don't owe the Democratic Party anything. The Democratic Party owes me. And if you're in the base, the Democratic Party's supposed to work for you, not the other way around. But sometimes, unfortunately, I think the Democratic Party treats its voters as if they are employees, and they're just required to pull the lever regardless of who is being presented to us.

But that is not the case. You work for the people, you work for the people, not the other way around. So it's not on the people to obe- obey you and vote for people who they feel are less than worthy of their vote or people who aren't gonna change any damn thing. people weren't in love with Graham Platner because they loved his freaking tattoo.

They thought his tattoo was stupid But they liked the ideas, and they wanted change. And he was saying, "I'm a working-class guy who cares about working-class people, and I'm gonna literally change things for you." That's all. It's a transaction. We want the transaction. You need to say, incredibly, that you're gonna change things, not that you're just gonna say, "Donald Trump is bad.

Now I'm a Democrat. Here I am. I'm not Trump." Saying, "Here I am, I'm not Trump, and I'm changing the brand of the House and Senate to Democrat," that is not gonna be enough. People want actual change. You have to give them something to vote for. You have to present real, credible change in their material lives.

That is why Mamdani is popular. Everybody's looking for the se- It's not some secret. He's popular because he's 

changing people's lives for the better. That's all people want in a pol- people would like to not think about politics. People would like to just go watch the Michael Jackson movie and get on with their lives and do their favorite dance and watch, People just wanna e- enjoy. I would love to have this show be fun and do, and talk to, our favorite celebrities and do fun shit. We don't wanna ha- I used to be able to go to Star Trek Con when I was doing TV. We used to go to Star Trek Con, y'all. We used to have a great time. We used to have so much fun on our weekend show on AMjo.

We had fu- And we stopped being able to have fun. The fun has been ripped out of the American life. We can't even have fun, 'cause every minute we're worried that there's another war, or there's another economic crisis, or we look in the bank account and it's "Oh, man, my money's not gonna stretch anymore because they've raised the prices.

The price of gas is five..." People are exhausted. And Democrats, you think just changing the brand to D is gonna make people happy and that'll be enough. You're just offering peace but not change. You're offering calm but not change. So the reality is, if that's all you're offering is, "Look, we're gonna put a D there," but what if that D is still sending our money to bomb Gazans instead of giving us healthcare?

A- and here's the connection. The reason we care so much about Gaza is because we're human beings. We care about Sudan, and Gaza, and Congo 'cause we're human. That's why we're Democrats generally, or liberals. We care about these people, but we also actually would like that money spent on us. We actually would like that money spent so that our roads aren't crap while Japan has beautiful, incredible roads and railroads that come on time and are beautiful and clean, and ours are crap.

And it looks like you're driving through a, a f- a country that is a barely developing country when you drive through most of our cities. Our roads are bad. Our hospitals are barely staffed. We don't have enough nurses. And then when the immigrant nurses come in, you don't want them 'cause they don't s- their primary language isn't English, or they have an accent.

You get pissed off. But y- we can't afford to become nurses in this country. It's too expensive. We have all these doctors from Pakistan and In- because they're the ones who can afford to go to medical school. Our people can't even afford to go. People are exhausted. They wanna be able to pay their bills and actually have a little left over to go out to eat.

They want a little left over to be able to go to a movie and not feel like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna break myself financially if I go to dinner and a movie. I can't afford it." Young people wanna go on a date, Jason. We have kids that are trying to date. it's... They have to scramble together the money for dinner and a 

movie.

Hey, Dad, you got, 'cause, this one, I get it, girl. It wasn't like that when we was younger. And they're like, "No." 

We were like... Th- then they're like, "Why are they having kids?" Come on. They're having kids, they don't have any money. They ain't got no money for kids. They're broke. And then if they do have kids, they can't even get a good OBGYN.

They might die on the table 'cause y'all done run all the OBGYNs out of red states because you want an abortion ban. So now they have to risk their life to have kids. Why? That they can't even afford to feed. What are we doing? We have terrible healthcare, and they're like, "These immigrants wanna come here for our welfare."

Why do you think so many people are on we- why do you think so many people are on welfare? People are on welfare because y'all economy suck Nobody's trying to c- they're trying to go to Canada for healthcare. They're trying to go to Europe for healthcare. People are literally crossing the border into Mexico to buy drugs there 'cause they're cheaper there.

They're not cheaper here. No one's sneaking into the United States to get our cheap prescription drugs. The cheap prescription drugs are on the other side of the border. When people had COVID here, when COVID broke, where were people going? Mexico. To the point where Mexico had to say, "Slow down, buddies.

You gotta stop invading our cities. You're making shit too expensive. Get out." They had to kick us out because we're all T- Cancun cruise. Everybody's running down there 'cause it was better to be there, 'cause it's cleaner. They, the air was fresher. We got smog, we got these AI factories making the water poisonous.

W- and y'all got- More 

roommates than righteousness ... 

people got eight roommates just to live in a- ... a little crappy, tiny apartment. This is terrible, y'all. This is te- you know why people are like, why do people stay in Mississippi?" You know why? 'Cause even if you're broke, at least you can afford to have a little house on some land.

You go into the cities, people are literally choking. And so people like Mamdani are easing the pressure and making it fun to be in New York again. You know the happiest city right now is New York City. New York is the happiest city. It's the happy, every- the vibe is happy. It's cleaner. You go there, you can see the difference.

This dude is making change. That's all people want from politics. They just want people who will do what he's doing, and you don't have to call yourself a Democratic socialist to do it, but if you do, we don't care. actually, the whole socialism thing doesn't bother us any- No one cares. I used to be the one to say that, it was gonna be tough for a Bernie Sanders to be- become president, and my whole theory as to why, even though I thought his positions were better, was because you're a socialist. You call yourself a socialist, you're gonna lose Florida. That was my opinion. But I have grown since then to realize that, my generation, Gen Xers care, but I promise you, them Ys and Alpha, they don't give a damn.

They don't care about that. You call people a socialist, they don't care what you call yourself. They're just like, "What are you gonna do for me?" They're smart. They're actually smarter. They're super transactional. They're like, "What are you gonna literally do for me? Are you gonna raise my wages? Are you gonna make the rent cheaper?

Are you gonna make me be able to get a mortgage, make me be able to afford college, make me not have to drown in student loans?" Pay this car debt. Make me be able to pay my debt. Pay this debt so I can get 

to work. Let 

me... Let me have a... All people want is- If I have a job ... all over the world, is to wake up in the morning Stretch their arms, try to do something they're passionate about, feel good about whatever they're doing with their day, make enough money doing it so that they can actually breathe, pay their bills and not be drowning in bills, and then have a little fun with their friends and 

family.

Now see, that's a message that a Democrat should be selling. They 

don't do that. But they don't do that. And you know who did? they basic- Graham Platner. There you go. And you can hate him. He may be a terrible human being- ... but that is why he was resonating. It's not because people are like, "Ooh, that tattoo's cute."

No, they didn't care about that. They just want their lives back, and they're like, "If I gotta vote for this shitty guy to get my life back, I'm gonna do it," and they were gonna do it. So if you're the main Democratic Party, and I'm, again, I know some people don't like hearing this, if you don't give those voters that same Graham Platner energy and that lady gets six more years, don't blame Joy Reid, blame yourselves.

If you give them a tepid, namby-pamby, Chuck Schumer approved, no offense to Chuck personally, but he likes the moderates, give them a moderate, boring candidate that cannot beat that woman, then she gets six more years, and she in there till she 90. That's not my fault. That's your fault. 'Cause people are not gonna be excited.

They want the change. They want the change. 

Platner is popular because he's bread tube personified. He is the former edge lord rehabilitated into hero for oppressed people to make up for his past sins. And mind you, every piece of anti-colonial liberation theory that you will ever read will tell you that the colonized must free themselves, but don't tell that to your favorite bread tuber or favorite bread tube fan, 'cause they'll swear that it's them that's the key to liberation for insert other group here.

But further, Platner shows the failure of the American left presenting a principled anti-Zionist stance to a larger general public. I've noticed in my personal life and online that there's been a rise in what I'm gonna describe as America first anti-Zionism. And normally when I make up a new term, I, want credit for it, but, please, do not repeat.

I'm positive there is somebody more worthy, some actual Palestinian scholar that is saying the exact same thing I'm saying. find them and give them credit for that term. But Platner's a perfect example of what that is, 'cause while he does claim to want to stop aid from Israel, he also wants to improve military recruitment, so he is not against American imperialism like you might think, which undermines any anti-Israeli stance he holds, and that's typical of pretty much all the Democrats right now The sad reality is that the Democratic Party and the alleged progressive leaders in America have allowed themselves to be outmaneuvered on Zionism by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who unlike anti-Zionists on the left, are in fact obvious antisemites.

Tucker Carlson is a crypto white supremacist who has spent years trying to normalize the great replacement theory, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is a former QAnon adherent who brought us Jewish space lasers and believes in blood libel, yet both are being mainstreamed in a way that I wouldn't have thought possible just a few years ago.

People like Carlson and Greene have infinitely more reach and influence than any of your favorite bread tubers, and thus they have been able to frontline this American first anti-Zionism, and it's become a popular position. It feels like for the first time ever, and this is a good thing, and I'll explain why in a second, anti-Zionism is a popular sentiment to hold.

But anti-Zionism that is America first is letting America off the hook for its role in that genocide. I've had a lot of people, both online and in my encounters in real life, smart people, say something along the lines of, "Israel is controlling America." And no, the tail does not wag the dog. Israel is a settler colonial project built on genocide and mass murder.

America is a settler colonial project built on genocide and mass murder, among other things. Game recognize game. There are of course Zionists in American government and plenty of Zionists who are at the helm of powerful American institutions. And our current president does seem uniquely compromised in his ability to not be influenced, not just by Israel, but everyone.

it's, everybody gets a piece of our president. But please believe that confluence of power between Israel and Zionists in America is not some secret, like mystical thing. That's just how power and capitalists have always worked. One example of this America first anti-Zionism is, people often say America was forced or tricked into a war with Iran due to Israel, but this ignores the history of hostility America has had with Iran.

Iran, as a sovereign strong nation, has been able to withstand American influence and thus impedes on America's dominance of that region and the resources that Iran controls, even with Israel sitting at Iran's doorstep. And Israel, because of its Zionist nature, has always wanted to attack Iran, along with everyone else in that region for years.

But for the longest, America has not allowed them to because most American presidents fully understood that we probably can't win a war with Iran, which, if you're paying attention, is clearly correct. But that doesn't mean that we didn't desire to do the exact same thing Israel did. This is why you see so many other American politicians wanting more action from America in Iran, low-key on both sides of the aisle.

America has not just allowed, but has encouraged Israel to be exactly what it is for decades at this point. It's just that this time around, Palestinians were able to show the world what is happening to them. And I wanna be clear, Palestinians do not care and should not care how they get free or who in America is going to bring them to that point.

If they get free because of a right-wing regime ushered in by Tucker Carlson decides to act on their innate hatred of Jewish people and pull support from Israel, that's an us problem. That's not a them problem. There's a great short essay from Laith Marouf. Again, I apologize if I got that wrong. Where he's responding to a recent interview where Norm Finkelstein basically says exactly what I'm saying here.

But Marouf comes back to reiterate that none of that is a Palestinian's concern. Marouf says literally, "Why is it so hard to believe that America first could actually be Israel last?" So if the left, and by that I don't just mean us here on YouTube, although we are somewhat to blame. If the left can't present a crystal clear principle stance against Zionism to combat the nationalistic and ultimately fascist version that's taken a hold everywhere, including somewhat on the left, then we're fucked and we deserve it So again, shout out to Chris Rabb and Charles Booker,I'll leave some links on how to support them in the description. But the bottom line is, how we get anti-Zionism into our government is our business. If it takes hold in a way that is not good for Black people, gay people, Muslims, et cetera, is only good for these white folks that like to act like Nazis online, at the end of the day, that's our problem, not Palestinians, and I agree with that wholeheartedly.

What I wanna make clear is that if you pin all the atrocities Israel is right now on them secretly controlling America to help them out, then you miss the fact that Israel and America's imperial interests are one and the same 99% of the even seeing that as advocating for a free Palestine is shortsighted because while Zionism couldn't function effectively without American aid, they would still be there in that region doing something horrible to those people, the same way America is doing horrible things to people all over the world right now, not just in Palestine, but in Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, the Congo, all of these places where there are global calamities going on, comes back to us in some form or fashion.

And this is not to say that Zionism doesn't have its own specific interests, or that it doesn't have nukes, or that it was not still doing Zionism before it had America's help, but understand the relationship between Israel and America is one of mutual benefit, not some type of mind control that's happening from afar.

And the reason why I connect that conspiratorial framing of Zionism back to a lot of white folks, white liberals, white leftists, is because it allows them to remain virtuous and not reflect on America's own history of genocide and how they fit into it. It's a framing to allow them to still be the heroes of the day, even when they're literally the villains.

It allows them, like a grant partner, to say, "Hey, 

I might've been part of the problem, but now I'm gonna be part of the solution." 

And all this other shit, just ignore it. Just pay no attention to the other things that clearly say that this is not the case. In short, this is white savior shit. A lot of it. Not all of it, not everyone, but a lot of it, and I'm tired of it, and I regret the fact that it took me to submit myself to racial abuse from a bunch of crack- one thing I said years ago before any of this was serious, is that once you've been around the block with white allies, you recognize that they often don't care about you as much as they say they do. Again, word to Hubert Harrison. They just care that you represent a proxy for their fight against each other most of the time.

They will use the premise that they're fighting for a good cause to troll other, usually white, people that they don't like on Twitter. They'll literally act like Nazis, and then when people reasonably say, "Hey, stop that bullshit," they'll cry that they're being tone policed. And y'all are so unserious, and it's my fault for allowing that unseriousness to put me in this position, to have to be like, "All right."

I'm good. And just one last thing, get it off my chest. White leftists, I like y'all. Sometimes I love y'all, but I'm not one of y'all, and I've never been, and I've never been unclear about this. I don't have a white guilt savior complex. I didn't come to these politics through college. I came to them through life.

I don't seek out strong, fatherly male figures in my political outlook. I don't have the challenge of processing and unpacking whiteness in the imperial core like y'all do, but don't actually do the work to do. I'm not scared of losing y'all as an audience or losing access to any future or current opportunities because of any political positions I hold.

so, so let's try and understand some of the broader causes here, right? Because when you see the decline of the center left, and by the way, also on the center right, which is interesting, right? We used to talk just about the story of decline of social democrats, but when you look at Christian democratic parties around the world, whether or not, held up by two party, two-party systems, they're also doing very badly.

But when we're seeing this happen in all of these different countries at the same time, you must think that there's some kind of common cause. So let me throw out a few potential long-term causes and see w- what you both think about this, right? One is it's just about social media, right? You just can't win- As a moderate in the age of social media, it just, favors polarization and a move to the extremes, right?

The second is, the center-left always won when, it was trying to complete and build the welfare state. and in a way, the center-left has become a victim of its own success because as the welfare state has become more and more complete in most countries, with a perhaps interesting footnote of United States, there's just less to fight for.

The third is, the rise of a highly educated cosmopolitan, uh, middle class. historically, the left claims to fight for the simple man, the man in the street, the person without the fancy education, but when you look today in virtually every one of the countries we've discussed, it is actually being highly educated and having a high income which predicts voting for center-left parties, which is the exact inverse of its historical patterns.

which of these three things is going on? Did I miss something? Is it something totally different? 

I'd probably add a fourth. but I think they've all got a contribution to make, in my view. I think the third hits on something which is more fundamental, which is that I think that our societies have completely changed and are constantly changing in terms of, their social class structure and how people relate to politics as a result of that, because the jobs that they do that have changed, the lives that they lived have changed.

In Britain, the big change has been we had a two-party system, which basically reflected our kind of old British class system. And as class has changed over the past really forty years or so, as the economy has been transformed, due in our case to the loss of major manufacturing, it changed class dynamics, but the parties didn't really change with it, and now they are just hurtling to catch up.

Meanwhile, we have new dynamics coming in of, as you say, the attitudes and values of younger people turbocharged by, social media and technological advance. fundamentally, to me, it's about a kind of economic change in our societies that is, causing a lot of this fragmentation, because essentially our economies look different.

Politics has been painfully slow to catch up with any of that, and in British politics, where you ought to have two-party system, that's our whole system is really predicated that you can win on whatever. We had a thirty-four percent vote share in the UK and Britain, at the last election, but we won a huge majority in parliament.

We just saw in our local elections the equivalent of, our midterms. really, it was like a five-party election. That's what the voting produced, because this fragmentation that's happening everywhere is only beaten by the center-left when you're able to, build a coalition that is big enough to beat your rival, usually the center-right party, which is what we did in twenty twenty-four, but which we are losing, in power.

So I always think it's interesting to look at exceptional cases and try to see what's different there, right? So in, in Canada, they have social media, they have a rising educated middle class, they have, increasing salience of different kind of issue set. but there you have a center left that's doing very well lately, and that, not only won an election, but is gaining steam in office.

And I think the big difference there is that, some of Donald Trump's decisions turned, the Liberal Party of Canada into the, the National Party of Canada, into a, a- 

and a few months before the election, looked very likely the Liberals were going to lose- Yes ... and it's only because Trump picked a very stupid fight with Canada that- and, and, 

and it seemed like they were gonna lose in exactly the way that every other center left regime was going to lose, that people were mad about the carbon tax, they were mad about immigration, et cetera.

And so Carney, he made moves on policy, right? he made moves to the center on immigration and energy issues, but he didn't suffer massive defections from the left because standing up to Trump was seen as standing up for the kinds of cosmopolitan values that younger, left-wing, more educated people care about.

But then he was also embracing Canadian patriotism, Canadian national identity, and he was embracing, frankly, democracy, which was just like people wanted less immigration after there had been a lot of immigration, so he turned the dials down. And, they had a bad GDP number yesterday, and he said, one reason for this is we had fewer immigrants," which is true.

But, he was... He's doing what people want, and but, cosmopolitan-minded progressives want him to win because they hate Donald Trump. 

so cool story, but is there any lesson to be learned from this if you don't happen to have the misfortune and perhaps the electoral fortune of being the, small, beleaguered northern neighbor of Donald Trump?

I, I do think that, one lesson is that it is always important to think about national identity and patriotism and how do you play into that. That, one thing that we have on the internet, especially educated people, speak English, we have this global community of ideas, we can come to a conference and talk about our common problems, but there's this sort of like transnational, educated, progressive, cultural identity that many people have gotten very invested in, but that puts i- i-- members of that culture at odds with the majority of the people in their own countries, right?

And so what it will mean in any given place to be rooted in national identity and patriotism, I think varies, but you can see that's actually a very powerful mechanism. people, particularly, a center left party is going to be, in some sense, like a party of the state, right?

And you can't have a party of the state that's not a party of the nation. 

When Build Back Better was on the table, and I went on this and the Democrats got mad at me when I was at the artist formerly known as MSNBC, and I kept questioning how it is that you had Build Back Better that was supposed to not just have bridges and roads that were gonna go mostly to big contractors and subcontractors who were already government contractors and already rich.

The second half of that was supposed to be money for free preschool, for, subsidized childcare, for things that women and children needed to make ordinary people's lives a little bit easier. That all got cut out, and the progressives, the squad who y'all get so mad at, they were ordered to vote for that shit, and if they didn't vote for it, they were demonized for not voting for it because they separated it because Joe Manchin...

Let's remember the history. Joe Manchin said, "I won't vote for that half. Just give me the infrastructure. I just will vote for infrastructure." They separated- 

And then what was the response? "Okay, let's vote for this one first, and then we'll go for that one after- They said they were 

gonna do 

it in two

'cause the Republicans said we'll do, they'll run with us. And, oh, okay. 

They 

lied. 

And once they separated it, the Build Back Better piece was already dead. The minute you separated it, and this was the warning that the progressive caucus gave to the main caucus. The progressives said, "If you separate Build Back Better away from big infrastructure will pass because Republicans can check that box off, go home and take credit for the bridges."

But the other piece, the piece for the women and children, for the young people, for Head Start, for Meals on Wheels, for old people, the stuff that was actually gonna enrich people's lives and make being in America a little easier, that shit got left by the side of the road. And who were the bad guys? The progressives for saying no.

Who got demonized? The progressives for saying, "That's not good enough for my people. I can't vote for the bill one without bill two. Put them back together." They were literally ordered to vote for it. They wanted obedience from those people, but those people weren't saying... Their job wasn't to be obedient.

Their job was to do the right thing for their constituents. They got demonized for it. When those people in the little progressive caucus, the Summer Lee and the, and the AOCs and the, and the, what's the brother in, in New York City, and, and Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman, they said, "Can we just not spend this money on bombs, bombing little Brown kids and little Black and Brown, and little, little tan kids in Israel?

Can we just not spend that? Can we not spend that money and keep that money here so we can feed our people? We come from some of the poorest districts where people are needy. Can we just take that 3 billion and not give it to Israel for bombs, and take that money and cull it back and do America first?"

And they were called almost demonic, and Apex said, "Take them out." And the, the, the leadership said, "You know what?" we can help you a little. they weren't that excited to help them stay in 'cause they're not obedient. You know what a progressive is? A disobedient Democrat. It's Al Green.

he said he's a liberated Democrat? I'm a liberated Democrat, 'cause liberated Democrats are not obedient to the li- W- the leadership's supposed to be obedient to the people, not the other way around. Y'all want obedience. You don't want our passion, you want our obedience. You want us to obey you.

We should not obey, and I'm gonna say the last thing before I get to Moment of Joy. As voters, we have to stop being obedient, and we have to start being powerful, because the only way that elected officials stay in office is us. We're the voters. We have the power. We can't just lope into the, the midterms sad and obedient and saying, "Fine, we'll vote for the Democrats.

We know they're not gonna do anything. We know nothing will change, but at least they're not Trump. At least they're not Trump. Trump, Trump. Trump is bad." I, we didn't even play Trump talking in this show, and you heard all the horrible... Look at all the horrible... He's, he also is horrible. He's horrible, but he is a cog in the wheel.

The bad guys are the people who are operating Trump like a puppet. He is the puppet that they're letting have money and crypto wealth and billions and a stupid plane and letting him tinker with the White House, and now he's doing the columns, and he's destroying Washington, DC. He's like a child running through DC, destroying it, and they're letting him do that while the bad guys are running the country.

The truly evil people, as Ibram X. Kendi tried to say, are tricking white working-class people into working against their own economic interests so they can keep 10 Brown people out of Walmart and keep, four little trans kids around the country who they'll never meet from kicking a freaking soccer ball.

And they've got them so mesmerized by that, and they're all watching Fox like zombies, worried that, "Oh my God, a trans girl is gonna kick a soccer ball. I've gotta stop her. She's in another state. I'll never meet her, but I gotta stop her." And they're so mesmerized and hypnotized by anti-Black racism and hypnotized by women are out of control and misogyny and bullshit that's not even helping them.

And then you go and you look at your life, and your life ain't shit. Your life looks like the reflecting pool. It's shi- i- it's swampy. It's a mess. And Trump is getting rich, and you're getting poor. And some people are waking up, and they're so afraid of that, that they're like, "We gotta pass the Save America Act to make it impossible for these people to vote," 'cause these people are catching on to what we doing.

They're catching on to the scam. Where are my scamming ass at? In Washington, DC. That's where your scamming ass are at. The scammers are in DC. And people are waking up and being like, "Ew, maybe that song is an anthem." They're like, "Oh my God, the scammers are scamming me, and then I'm so busy worried about, Black people or Brown people or immigrants, I'm getting scammed."

And so Democrats, don't think that, that playing into complacency and just telling us, "Put on the blue jersey and shut the hell up," that's gonna help you win. No, you need passion on your side. You need people who say, "I'm passionate about changing the leadership in the House and Senate to people who are gonna change my life.

I'm changing the leadership not to put a blue jersey on, but to literally change my life. I want my life to materially change. Promise me change, something real. What's gonna happen when you get the gavels? What are you gonna do? Who's going to jail, Mitch? Who's getting thrown in that jail if they don't come testify?

Who's getting subpoenaed? At least give me that. Give me what you're gonna do to these people. We need it to stop. We want the pain to stop." All right? so we're not saying we don't want the Democrats to take... Of course we do. We don't want these idiots keeping control. They are morons, and they're literally simps for Trump, and they're simps for not even the boss.

How pathetic do you have to be that you are simps for the un- You're not e- He's not even the boss. Peter Thiel is the boss. Palantir is the boss. Elon's the boss. What'd you say? Literally, the boss lives in Argentina. They're think... Trump isn't the bo- Y'all think Trump the boss? Is Steven Miller the boss? No.

Donald Trump, they're letting him play in traffic and take money while they're literally rinsing this country dry. They're literally, they're selling it for parts. They're selling America for parts, and while you guys are so distracted by Trump's latest idiotic thing he's saying or the other stupid pronouncement he makes, we're gonna be in a forever war in Iran that's literally enriching a small group of people, including Palantir, who want forever war.

It's their business. They've said it. Their business is war. They love Israel 'cause Israel's always at war. Why do you think they love Israel? Because they like Jewish people? No. They like Israel 'cause they're always at war. They can test their m- their war shit on them. They can let the war shit be used on people they really don't care about, Palestinians.

they're just literally fodder to drop bombs on so we can see what the bombs do, like what we did to Japan in World War II. We're gonna see what the bombs will do. Let's drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one cares about them. And so they're still doing that. We're get- We're suckers.

We're all being suckered. Okay, I'm gonna stop. They're be- we're being suckered every minute, and I do mean MAGA too, and some of them are figuring out. Not all of them are getting suckered. Some of them are figuring it out. I'm getting suckered, too. They stealing from me as well. The worst thing that could ha- You know why they killed Fred Hampton?

'Cause Fred Hampton went over to them racist white people and said, "Guess what? Y'all broke like me." And then he went over to them, them Chicanos, and he said, "Guess what? Oh, yeah, y'all broke, too." And all the white racist people and the Chicano people looked at that Black man and said, "You know what? We should team up."

And they were like, "Yeah, he gotta die." "Yeah, he's gotta die." Nightmare. Is the working class all rising up against the super rich? Point, yeah, the working class includes, pretty much, doctors and lawyers that are also broke. everyone's broke, and they've taken all the money, and they've run away with it.

They've run away with it. Oh, no, they already got y'all. So you think that they got all your names. They are about to do full surveillance. Palantir has your Social Security number, all of your data. They are watching you in the street. They are watching you through your phone. They've already got the secret surveillance state.

It is established and set up. Next, they're gonna merge our military with Israel's military so they can start using the IDF's tactics on our streets, which they're already doing. They killed that poor man in Houston for driving a van. They killed Priti and Good for walking in the street or driving.

They're gonna k- they're g- they, they're busting in people's houses. They killing at will. They got the men walking around in masks, the new Klan that are probably all gonna be working at your Social Security office. They're gonna be at your VA. They're gonna take off them little masks, and they're gonna take them diapers off their faces and suddenly be administered in the federal government.

Y'all gonna be like, "What happened to my check?" That's what happened to your check, a bunch of incompetent racists are in charge. And if the Democrats sit there and say, "What we're gonna do about that is, we're gonna try to get 60 votes in the Senate, and, if we can get 60 votes, then maybe we can pass a, a bill to study, what's happening."

Stop. "And then, see, after that, we're gonna, we're gonna really, methodically try to do a bipartisan bill." 

Mm, yeah. We gotta get the Republican support on this. 

Yeah, and we're gonna, we're gonna see if we can get some of our friends on the other side of the 

aisle too. Yeah, 'cause we, we have to make their peoples happy.

I mean- Yeah. 

Yeah. 

You 

know, we wanna try to get back the working classes. Yeah. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna s- 

We're gonna basically go back to what we've been doing since 1970. Yeah. We're trying to win back the... 

we got- A strongly worded letter. Ooh, I see that. yes. Melinda's got an excellent idea, Jason.

Yeah. She said we ought to write a strongly worded- Yeah. And see the letter is gonna be written in all caps so they really know that we're serious. 

And then we need to go get, $50 billion for some consultants to, Photoshop it and, see if it- Some politics 

ASMR. 

literally it's And if y'all d- And you can do that. and look, honestly, it's not my party. I'm not in charge. If that's what you wanna do it. But if you don't win that way, don't blame, don't... 'Cause what I'm saying is what people want is s- they want, they... Graham Platner, obviously a, not a great guy, okay?

But what he was doing on that stump is he was speaking into people's soul and their need. And people want that same energy. They want the passion. They want somebody who's just "I don't give a boop. I'ma go up there and fight like a junkyard dog for the working man." 

l-l-let's try and bring a little bit of optimism into this conversation towards the end. I don't want you all to go into lunch too depressed.

what are three things that we can learn from center-left parties, center-left movements, center-left candidates around the world? what are things that the Labour Party or the Democrats should do, perhaps that they already do, perhaps that they don't do, that can be, differences in how they present themselves.

It can be particular policies. It can be how they govern. why don't we start with you, Claire? 

Yeah, I think, to, to Matt's point, like being not the other is not enough, and not the other is not just your opponent, but not just distancing yourself from the sort of leftist parts that are not electable.

having a positive offer on the economy is the fundamental thing that the parties need to do, and there's a bunch of other things they need to do. But if they can do one thing, and it has got to be of and speak for your average working American. And, for us it might have been like the energy rebates, the, tax on the oil and gas giants for an energy rebate.

your cost of living, your sort of totemic policy will be, for you. But it cannot be just the amount you spend or an output or a process. It has got to be something which, gives people, when they have the feeling of wanting to be open to voting for the Democrats again, they have a feeling that is the sort of thing that works for them.

It's not transactional. It's more an emotional, representation that you get their lives, you get what's important, and this is a thing you can do. And actually, you've got candidates who are talking, and representatives all through the day who are giving you examples, like that, so taking some inspiration from those local state, representatives into, the next election.

So just tell me a little bit more about what that positive offer on the economy might be, because one form of it is an offer of welfare spending, right? Which w-what often center-left parties have done, but I don't know that manages to bring in new voters. The other kind of thing is just, "We're gonna make the economy grow," right?

W-we're just gonna be a lot better than that. Now, perhaps that's easy when you run against a somewhat dysfunctional government, but people will probably mistrust that as well. so how do you thread the needle between we're just gonna spend more money, which I don't think has always been a winning message for left-wing parties- Yeah

and, I promise you that things magically are gonna be better, that voters might disbelieve? 

Yeah, and it might be a tax cut that is funded through... it, it doesn't have to be just about spending money. It can also be-- But it has to be absolutely focused on the economic circumstances, the, we'd call them the kind of kitchen table or pocketbook issues.

yeah, we used to call it free microwaves. You don't always give tho- wanna give th-the stuff away. Australians were in a better position to do that. But I think the, those are the sorts of examples, whether it's a tax cut for workers, even if it's, a tax raise elsewhere to pay. It's something of where people are feeling that pressure point for...

Yeah, for us it might have been on energy bills. for the Australians actually it was about solar panels 'cause that's something they can do because, it- it's thinking creatively- Sun. Yeah, the sun. Exactly. It's thinking creatively about how you can use the power of the state with a lot of the time it has to be kinda pro-market solutions, but, ultimately not overcomplicating it.

listen to what it is people want and have something that speaks to them about it. The Aussies also had, urgent care centers, so that was something that was being roll out, rolled out. government is doing stuff all the time. It's spending money all the time. It's not always about additional spending, but it is articulating that in a way that actually says to people, "We can't do everything as government, but here are some things that we can do."

Matt, if one of the 37 people thinking for running for the Democratic nomination 2028 came to you, and I'm sure about 21 of them have, to ask their advice about the three top things that they should do, what would those three top things be? 

you just gotta come to Welcome Fest all the time.

No, I think to, really decisively say, to commit to the idea that you are going to prioritize people's material wellbeing in your policymaking, which doesn't mean that you need to do, a giant socialist program. It means that on questions that are tangential to the economy, you need to ask yourself, is this thing people are asking me to do, i- is that in the material interest of working-class Americans?"

And a lot of times, it's gonna mean doing less, or just doing things that are like, y- if we didn't have all the stuff at the CVS locked up because we locked up criminals instead, that would make people better off, right? And then, the Australia case, I think a fascinating thing about the way Albanese has managed that is a lot of his initiatives are relatively modest in scale.

But they just learned, as a communications discipline, to make a big deal out of them, right? you don't need to spend a trillion dollars to have people pay attention to the thing that you're doing. You should come up with some ideas that are good to do and then make a big deal out of them, right? it doesn't need to be, like, earth-shattering.

We have all these sort of blah governors who are super-duper popular because they're, like, competent, and they show up at disaster relief, and they pave the roads and stuff. people's expectations of government are, in some ways, very low, and, we can just try to exceed them. 

I- is part of this that Democrats just have to become more comfortable expressing anger at things that we all think are dysfunctional, but that might be somewhat right-coded?

I can see that if you advise the Democratic presidential candidate that they should just express anger at the fact that everything is locked up at CVS, they might think, "I don't know. that kind of sounds like a right-wing thing to do. I'm not gonna do it." 

But, I, I think, successful-- Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, right?

you don't wanna exactly repeat the formulas that people used in the '90s, but it's you can just agree with conservatives about certain things. that's okay. right? And then, see, it gives definition to what it is we're talking about. If we're saying, we're on the side of working people," that's how we differ from these right-wing parties that only care about billionaires or whatever.

So that means you could just agree with them about something that's completely tangential, to those core aspects of economic conflict. 

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

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