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Over the weekend Hakeem Jeffries was asked if he endorsed the agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America. He said no.
“I don’t support the DSA agenda, as has been articulated by the DSA itself,” Jeffries said. This makes sense. Jeffries is a Democrat, not a member of the DSA. If he endorsed the entire DSA agenda, then he’s be a member of the DSA.
As you might expect, this made some people on the internet mad.
But you know what? They can suck it. Because the DSA—by which I mean the official organ that controls the infrastructure of the Democratic Socialists of America—is forking nuts. So nuts that if you told me that the DSA was a false flag operation run by the Heritage Foundation in order to discredit the Democratic party, it would make sense.
Individual DSA politicians might be closet normies (like Mamdani) but the organization itself? Guys, buckle up. We’re going on a tour of crazy.
Last week the DSA issued a statement celebrating Fidel Castro and claiming that Marco Rubio was doing a “genocide” against Cuba.
Today is the centenary of Fidel Castro, and the Democratic Socialists of America recognize the historic significance of both this day and the man. Fidel was an organizer, a fighter, and endures as a stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination for the Global South. DSA has a long history of solidarity with the Cuban people, their revolution, and their self-determination. We choose this historic day to recommit ourselves to acting in solidarity with the Cuban people and to starkly opposing Marco Rubio’s genocidal war against the Cuban people and US imperialism writ large.
If you look at Fidel and think the first relevant thing about him was his work as an “organizer” then you’re a tankie. Castro was a revolutionary who became a dictator. He ruled Cuba for almost half a century. He executed thousands of Cubans without any regard for due process or the rule of law. He ran a campaign of terror against political opponents and dissenters, imprisoning and torturing those he didn’t execute.
And yeah, he threw big dinner parties and built a system of free healthcare for the people he didn’t imprison. Great.
All you need to know about the Castro regime is that for fifty years ordinary Cubans were so desperate to escape him that they built make-shift rafts and tried to float to Miami, risking not just their own lives, but the lives of their children. That’s not something that happens under a liberal regime.
The DSA celebrates this monster? Don’t take my word for it. Even the Castro-curious folks at Amnesty International make sure to point out how deeply-flawed he was.
As for Rubio’s “genocide” against Cuba, this is nonsense. The United States is running an economic embargo against Cuba in which it threatens tariffs against any country importing oil to the island. The result has been a massive humanitarian crisis.1
Maybe you think this policy is good and wise; maybe you think it is wicked and foolish. One thing it is not is “genocide.”
Unless “genocide” now means “thing I do not like.”
And even if you did think the blockade was genocide, ultimate responsibility lies with the American president, not the secretary of state. These DSA idiots write their “official statements” like they’re 22-year-old bloggers.
Anyway, when I saw that DSA statement I got to wondering what else the DSA has said in its official communiques. And holy shit.
Let’s pause for a moment and make sure you understand that we’re not talking about something a DSA member said on a podcast. These aren’t slips of the tongue, or poorly thought-out freelancing by one guy. These are official statements, written down, edited, approved, and issued, unsigned, in the institutional voice by the organization itself.
Here, for instance, is the DSA’s official statement after Joe Biden pulled out of the 2024 campaign:
Joe Biden has long been a warmonger and a perpetrator of genocide, a shill for corporations, an enemy of immigrants and the environment, and a failure to the working class. He has earned a disgraceful end to his career.
Now maybe you think Biden’s presidency was a failure. But I’d ask you this: Rank the last ten presidential administrations. Go ahead. I’ll wait. You put them in order from best to worst.
Where is Biden’s? Is he any lower than #5? I doubt it.2
Was Biden a “warmonger”? He didn’t start any wars! He executed the pullout from Afghanistan!
Did Biden “perpetrate” genocide? No! At absolute worst you could argue that he enabled a genocide being perpetrated by another state. “Enabling” and “perpetrating” are different words with different meanings.
After Biden withdrew, the DSA claimed that Kamala Harris was just as bad as Donald Trump and said that it would be perfectly reasonable for members to either not vote or vote third party.
When Trump won, the DSA blamed . . . the Democratic party.
Make no mistake: Donald Trump was elected president because of the Democratic Party establishment’s failure to present a credible alternative to the right wing. For decades they have bowed to billionaires, waged war, ripped millions of immigrants from their families, and shown a complete lack of conviction to deliver a better quality of life for working people.
Yes, yes. It’s not the fault of Republicans. Or voters. Trump 2024 was the fault of “decades” of Democratic party failure. Sure, Jan.
2. Children
The DSA, like much of the media, believes that only Democrats have agency. Republicans move through the imagination of the DSA like NPCs while it’s always Democrats who are choosing and failing. Here they are in February 2025:
The Democratic Party is divided in its response, and its leaders, like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, have failed to meet the moment and mount a credible defense against Trump. This is no surprise from the party that handed the White House to the Republicans, campaigning on a failed status quo instead of fighting to raise wages and stop price gouging. To beat fascism, we need socialism.
From the vantage point of February 2025, what were Schumer and Jeffries supposed to have done to mount a “credible defense” when they controlled precisely zero (0) branches of government?
You can argue that socialism is good, or socialism is bad, but the idea that fascism can only be defeated by socialism is ahistorical nonsense disproven by the entirety of the twentieth century.
Last year the DSA marked the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It was beyond parody:
Hurricane Katrina was able to intensify as quickly as it did because of “unusually warm” waters in the Loop Current in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. While we may not be able to attribute these unusually warm waters directly to capitalist-driven climate change, we know that sea-surface temperatures have continued to rise year after year due to extractive industries and the capitalist death cult. . . .
When all of society is literally underwater, taking lifesaving goods from behind the walls of capitalist strongholds like Walmart is not looting, it is liberation. . . . [bold in the original]
In the absence of support from the state and federal government and collapse of local governments, people turned to one another for support, gathering whatever supplies to live in whatever facilities could safely hold them. This communal survival was a threat to capital, which responded with disproportionate violence from state and private violence.
This isn’t a meditation on the failures of the federal government so much as Commie Mad Libs—so of course the DSA ties Katrina to Israel.
It is hard to look at the devastation of Gaza today and not see echoes of Katrina’s “you loot, we shoot” free-fire zones. It is hard not to look at Katrina and see echoes of the Nakba itself, as people were forcibly removed from New Orleans under mandatory evacuation orders in the weeks following the storm, many shipped off to faraway cities with zero support services or connections. Many of them now live on the streets in cities hundreds of miles away from home.
There are even more direct ties between the Zionist colonization of Palestine and the occupation of New Orleans in 2005, as mercenaries from Israeli “private security” firm ISI patrolled the gated neighborhoods of the owning class in Audubon Place.
The DSA is absolutely obsessed Israel. They issue official statements about Israel constantly by which I mean all the time. And not just on the Netanyahu-directed ethnic cleansing in Gaza—they are deep into the historical record.
The world is full of injustice and yet practically the only injustice the DSA ever seems to care about outside of America is Israeli injustice. Make of that what you will.
Russia has perpetrated a fair amount of injustice over the last [gestures broadly] forever. And yet Russia hardly ever shows up in the DSA’s official statements. The only official statement from the DSA I could find that mentioned Russia was this “condemnation” of the invasion of Ukraine:
The Democratic Socialists of America condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demands immediate diplomacy and de-escalation to resolve this crisis. We stand in solidarity with the working classes of Ukraine and Russia who will undoubtedly bear the brunt of this war, and with antiwar protestors in both countries and around the world who are calling for a diplomatic resolution.
Already you can sense that things aren’t great here, what with the concern for the Russian working class and the call for “de-escalation.” It got worse, fast.
This extreme and asymmetrical escalation is an illegal act under the United Nations Charter and severely threatens the livelihoods and well-being of working-class peoples in Ukraine, Russia, and across the region.
Hold on, now. The DSA thinks that Russia’s invasion wasn’t an act of aggression, but of escalation? In response to what? To American imperialism, obvi:
DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict. We call on antiwar activists in the US and across the world to oppose violent escalations, demand a lasting diplomatic solution, and stress the crucial need to accept any and all refugees resulting from this crisis. Much of the next ten years are coming into view through this attack. While the failures of neoliberal order are clear to everyone, the ruling class is trying to build a new world, through a dystopic transition grounded in militarism, imperialism, and war. Socialists have a duty to build an alternative.
No war but class war.
That’s right. It was NATO that set the Russian invasion in motion.3 Invading Ukraine was extreme and asymmetrical on the part of Vladimir Putin, sure. But have some sympathy: The guy was only responding to America’s imperialist expansion.4
You want to know why Hakeem Jeffries won’t say that he supports the DSA agenda?
Well there’s your answer.
Don’t tell me that you should judge the DSA only by its good ideas. That’s not how parties work.5 When you sign up with a party, you’re on the hook for its most pernicious ideas, too.
As I said a couple weeks ago, our political system could use some social democrats. That is not what the DSA is pushing.
3. A Patriot’s Story
This Julia Curlee essay is amazing. And once again Mike Pence—seriously—comes out pretty well.
[O]ne morning, my boss walked in, a wide smile on her face. She had a new job for me.
“Julia, what would you think about briefing the vice president?”
“This vice president?”
Days later, I stood in his driveway at the Naval Observatory. I must be insane, I thought. Mike Pence had built his career on public opposition to marriages like mine—to people like me. But for all our differences, he was the vice president. He needed the best intel support possible, and this was my country too.
“Mr. Vice President,” I said, “it’s an honor to meet you. My name is Julia”—like I’d practiced a thousand times.
“You’re abandoning me with her?” Pence teased his outgoing briefer, with a line I’d heard he used with other people. He turned to me. “Okay, Julia, tell me something I don’t know.”
“Sir, did you know that a third of Purdue’s computer-science grad students are Chinese nationals?”
He nodded once. “Get in the car.” . . .
For the next year, I briefed him nearly every morning. As soon as the coffee was hot, Pence was ready to work. He ripped through the briefing book, firing questions at me, scribbling in the margins.
Down the hall, the president was using his phone to light up Twitter. The vice president preferred to use our multibillion-dollar intel apparatus to save lives. Some mornings he would push back on an assessment, but I would hold the line, explaining how the conclusions had been reached. That was the job. When my tour was almost up, he asked me to extend it. . . .
When my tour finally ended, Pence invited my family to the White House. In his office, he took my mother’s hand and smiled: “You must be very proud of your daughter.”
Years before, my mother had told me that in her grief, she’d felt that—somehow—I’d killed her son. Now I’d done the impossible: lived both dreams, becoming an intelligence officer and a woman. Now the vice president was holding my mother’s hand.
No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence. On my last day, I gave him a letter. I wrote: “I’m a transgender CIA officer, a wife and mother—and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.” I told him many people at the CIA hadn’t believed that a trans officer like me could serve someone like him.
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad I passed the test.” . . .
After January 6, 2021, the vice president invited his former PDB briefers for a farewell picture in the West Wing. The place was quieter than I’d ever heard it. As we said our goodbyes, my voice shook.
“Sir,” I said, “what you did last week—I’ve never been prouder to have worked for you.”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”
We shook hands. The mob at the Capitol had chanted for his hanging. He’d done his duty to the country, certifying the vote. I’d done mine to him. That was the bargain. Service before politics. Country before self.
Read the whole thing. It’s an extraordinary piece from an extraordinary woman.