Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS JUL 19, 2026

Good morning, loyal C&C supporters, it’s Sunday! Let’s get right into it; the Democrat Party is cracking up in real time, the DSA is pushing a platform so radical it makes Lenin look like a moderate, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is finally treating far-left extremists like the international terror threat they are. An special edition roundup.

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Yesterday, more cracks appeared in the fracturing Democrat Party. Very public ones, in fact. Two main events seem to have provoked the latest round of tardy introspection. One was an interview earlier this week on Fox. Martha MacCallum interviewed the NYC Democratic Socialists’ co-chair, a soft-spoken Peruvian-American named Gustavo Gordillo. Here’s a clip where Martha cleverly asks him: What, if any, profit margin should a landlord be ‘allowed’ to make?

CLIP: Modern-day socialist revolutionary explains rights to returns on investments (1:15).

The answer, though Gustavo sagely refused to commit, was nevertheless: none. No profits. How this incentive-destroying theory was supposed to address the housing crisis remained an open question.

You could write these folks off as a nonserious group of cranks and kooks— except that they now control New York City and its Godzilla-like $110 billion annual budget. (For more, here’s Gordilla explaining why his parents fledcommunism in Peru, if it was so wonderful. Spoiler: it was the US’s fault.)

Last week’s second big development was that, astonishingly, amidst all the recent controversy, the DSA confidently published its 2026 political platform— a mini-platform within the Democrat platform writ large. They didn’t even try to hide their radical, extreme, revolutionary goals. Just the opposite.

🔥 In short: the DSA doubled down. On Wednesday, the Washington Times reported, “Democratic Socialists of America’s new platform calls for abolishing ICE and the U.S. Senate.”

If anything, the WaTimes’s headline soft-sold it. The platform insisted that “the country’s political institutions must be rebuilt from the ground up.” If that’s not a call for a revolution, then I don’t know what that word means.

Their platform also calls for abolishing the Supreme Court, nationalizing big corporations, blanket amnesty, “queer liberation” (whatever that means), “feminism for all” (ditto), and abolishing what the platform euphemistically calls “the carceral state,” meaning incarceration, and yes, they actually want to abolish jail.

They also want to eliminate the U.S. Senate, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with a president and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. Because nothing screams “democracy” like a single, massive, unchecked legislative body ruling over everyone.

“We push these demands to their furthest extent today,” the platform said, “so we can fight for their fullest realization in a socialist future.”

This, my friends, is how the Democrats made their own bed. Now they must lie in it. The DSA “crime” platform is the logical endpoint of “defund the police.” Like, completely defund them. The Democrats have run for years against ICE and local police (think George Floyd). The DSA is now telling Democrat voters, “yeah! C’mon, guys! Let’s just throw out the whole rotten system and start over!”

See the problem? It’s true that, once murder rates spiked after defunding cops, many Democrats gingerly walked “defund the police” back. But they never reset the Overton Window by admitting it had been a mistake. In other words, Democrats never put the ball away. They just left the ball on the field for the DSA to pick up and run with.

The socialists are outsmarting the Democrats. The DSA is tapping into the many rich veins of irrational BS that democrats have carefully nurtured. First, they are mainlining TDS. “Everybody sees that Trump is super evil,” said Frances Gill, a National Political Committee member from DSA Los Angeles who presented the platform at the recent national conference. “I mean, everypresident since the founding of the country has been super evil, but somehow we have one that is even more evil, and people get that,” she told DSA members.

🔥 The reactions by “moderate Democrats” to the Fox interview were swift and strong. First, here’s former Clinton official and Democrat influencer Jamie Metzel (80K followers) explicitly rejecting the DSA on Twitter, in an appalled response to Gustavo’s calm but revolutionary words.

I don’t disagree with Jamie, but note his first concern. “The DSA represents a fundamental threat to our party,” he said, before (correctly) noting the DSA’s threat to the country itself. There’s a good reason for his priorities. Long before posing a threat to the country writ large, the DSA will first marginalize the Democrat Party and banish it to the political wilderness for a generation. (A possibility I’ve predicted many times before.)

It’s a classic historical pattern. In the 1980s, the UK Labour Party was nearly destroyed from within by a Trotskyist entryist faction called the Militant Tendency. It took them years to purge the radicals and become electable again. The DSA is the American Militant Tendency, and the Democrats are just noticing the infection.

So the DSA poses an immediate threat to Democrats, more so than to the US writ large. Of course, it’s like monkeypox. Once it takes root, socialism tends to spread quickly and in the most painful and embarrassing spots.

🔥 Next up was Van Jones, a former Clinton/Obama official, political advisor, influencer, and now (suddenly) a moderate Democrat. (We didn’t realize there was any moderate position remaining. Obviously, we were all wrong.) Jones has complained about the DSA before, but this time he went all-out.

CLIP: Polished, high-production-value anti-DSA advisory from Democrat Van Jones (4:13).

“A quick message to my friends on the far left,” Jones began, in the polished, well-produced clip. “I am tired, tired, tired of people on the very far left in the Democratic Party, my party, telling us that we now have to believe and support ideas that are completely nuts.” He was about as clear as he could be: “Quit pooping in the Kool-Aid bowl and telling us that the turds are ice cubes.”

Jones is smart. To preserve the illusion of “moderation,” he carefully avoided 80/20 topics like men in girls’ sports or voter ID requirements. Which suggests his message wasn’t for us, Republicans, or even the public at large. He was talking to fellow Democrats.

Even veteran Democrat strategist James Carville has been sounding the alarm. “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: schism,” he said on his podcast recently, adding that he’s “not in the same f***ing political party” with the DSA.

In other words, Jones, Metzl, and Carville all seem to believe that Democrats need to be warned against or talked out of siding with the DSA wing.

🔥 The Republicans, meanwhile, are not sitting around playing tiddly-winks. A full, public campaign against communism is now rolling out piece by piece. (Long overdue, in my opinion.) Thursday, Reuters reported, “US will focus counterterrorism efforts on left-wing groups, Rubio says”

CLIP: Full Rubio anti-communism speech (20:15).

In a rousing major address that everyone should watch, Secretary of State Marco Rubio also took the gloves off. “Rubio told officials from more than 60 countries on Thursday that the US would seek to refocus international counterterrorism efforts on what he called ‘far-left terror’,” the paper reported, “arguing that left-wing violence had long been overlooked.”

“Under President Trump, for the first time,” Rubio told delegates, the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror.”

“Last November,” the Secretary explained, “the State Department designated four violent far-left extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations, and there will be more designations soon.”

Those four groups —Antifa Ost, the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, Armed Proletarian Justice, and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense— are all European, which tells you something important: this isn’t just a domestic political grudge match.

This new initiative —announced with conspicuously good timing to the DSA infection outbreak— described a worldwide infrastructure, and the administration is mapping it all out, which is why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also spoke.

The reward for information on the groups’ financing? Up to $10 million per group.

As I said, this was long overdue. “None of this that I’ve just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day modern novelty. Between 1970 and 1980, 93% of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left,” Rubio explained. He then delivered one of the strongest and most rousing condemnations of communism in recent memory, which earned its own panel:

Watch the whole thing. Or, if you prefer, I have attached a transcript at the bottom of today’s post, with my subtitles for easier navigation.

Naturally, Democrats are complaining that this focus on left-wing groups is “politically partisan.” Because to a modern Democrat, arresting a communist for firebombing a pregnancy center is an unconstitutional partisan attack, while arresting a grandmother for praying outside an abortion clinic is just good old police work.

🔥 All in all, what we are watching unfold is a curious historical inflection point. As even Democrats like Jamie Metzl and Van Jones now admit, the Democrat Party has long nursed a viper at its breast.

In recent tweets, I have argued that the DSA outbreak is less a sign of rising socialist sentiment and more of a symptom. It’s a symptom of Democrat party weakness. The party’s immune system is compromised. It has long kept a lid on the radicals in the party; it appears unable or unwilling to do so now.

And it’s happening now— with just over three months to go before the midterm elections. Convenient timing, no?

The combination of DSA influence, incomplete Democratic corrections, failures like Graham Platner, extreme candidates like James Talerico, and visible governance missteps —the polycrisis— has handed Republicans a clearer, more coherent electoral narrative than they’ve had in most recent cycles.

As Rubio’s speech eloquently illustrated, the Republicans are running against the DSA. And they are doing more than just talking.

Democrats recognize the risk; Metzl and Jones’ public critiques should be seen more as strategic distancing than true ideological distinctions. But Democrats need three things they don’t have in order to beat the DSA in a compressed timeline before November.

They need a strong bench, a strong leader, and a war chest. They lack all three. In the compressed pre-midterm window, these shortfalls compound. It’s a self-reinforcing doom loop —a “polycrisis”— where the mechanisms of correction themselves have been compromised.

As Margaret Thatcher famously observed, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” The Democrats are currently discovering the political corollary: The problem with pandering to socialists is that you eventually run out of the public’s patience.

Have a blessed and rewarding Sunday! Don’t miss tomorrow’s terrific post, as we kick off a brand new week of essential news and commentary.

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