The Ricochet Podcast - The Radicals Are Here

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Underneath the "cuddly" rhetoric of the Democatic Socialists there lurks admirers of some of the most evil men in history. And, says our guest Tal Fortgang of the Manhattan Institute, they are also poised to take control of the whole of the Democratic Party. There's also some hockey talk (USA! USA! USA!), the State of the Union and Gavin Newsom's SAT scores.

This is all about our country right now. I love the USA. I love my teammates. It's unbelievable. The USA Hockey Brotherhood is so strong. Isn't that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself.

It's the Rickashay podcast. I'm James Lilex. Stephen Hayward is here, and we're going to talk to Tal Fortgang about the Democratic Socialists of America. Can't wait. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody.

It's the Rickashay podcast number 778. I'm James Lilloch here in Minneapolis. Calm, it seems, for the moment. And I'm joined by Stephen Hayward in California, I presume. Charles is still out and about. We hope to get him back soon. He's not entered the pantheon of hosts who've come and gone. He will be with us again.

But it's just us here to do today with our guests to come, which would be fun. And I got to say, USA, right? USA! So it was like a replay. of the old Olympics, you know, where we beat the hated Ruskis, except now apparently we've got the hated Canadians. And I heard a term the other day that just absolutely put me on the floor referring to the Canadians as Surupians. I had not heard that one. That's good. Not bad. Not bad.

I, for one, don't like a state of amity and discord between our, I mean, they're right up there. They're close. I've been living close to Canada all my days when I was a kid. I used to get in a bus when I won a contest at the Fargo Forum delivery boys and would go up to Winnipeg, which was sort of like this mirror image of Minneapolis up there. I love the whole civilization out in the outskirts, the prairies and the plains and the wind-swept world. I've been to Canada on the west coast and seen their monumental architecture and marveled at what they did. I like them.

But here we are, I guess, where they don't like us. We'll show you. We're not going to go to vacation in Florida. We're going to go to Puerto Vallarta. Anyway, so the problem, Stephen, as you may have known, is that some people were moved to jingoistic displays, scoundrel-like refuge in patriotism. And if you felt bothered by that, said the Hoff Post,

you're not alone. Well, where do you start? It is a curious, well, it's not curious. To me, this is quite obvious and not surprising that the efflorescence of American patriotism over the, I think, unexpected win of our hockey team over Canada in a really revereal performance, right? Especially that goalie, who, you know, only let one shot through. But I'm not surprised that the left is upset about this because, well, the latest finding out from the Gallup poll people, which, again, does not surprise me.

But if you go back to 2001, that's the poll gallop did. 2001 to the present, and it's, do you have pride in America? And even before 9-11, but in years after that, Republicans, Democrats were about two or three points apart, all around 90 to 95 percent with pride in America. Well, guess where Democrats are today? 36 percent, down from, you know, 88 percent, 20, 25 years ago. And whereas Republicans haven't moved at all. You could balance a glass of water on the poll line of the time series from 2001 to now. including when Obama was president. In other words, liberals lost their mind when Trump became president and they haven't gotten it back and they're not going to get it back.

Whereas Republicans who didn't like Obama worth a darn, they did not abandon their pride in the country at all. They didn't make their patriotism contingent on whether they liked the president. So, okay, that's just another description too long, of course, of Trump derangement syndrome. But I don't remember. Yep. To be fair, do you think that they have,

if asked that they would have empirical, cited, sourced reasons for not being proud of America anymore. What do you presume would be their responses to that? Oh, well, the whole bunch of things. I mean, let's leave aside the clichés about fascism, but let's take note of the fact that, and I'll assert this, that the patriotism of most liberals, many liberals, has been superficial because, and the way to betray this is think about the countries they always say they admire more and wish we were more like. Well, the Scandinavian countries, of course, but also Canada, because they have single-payer health care and gun control, and they're all nice up there, supposedly.

They're not actually nice at all the way they suppress speech and dissent, as we saw the last several years. So there's always been this envy of liberals of someplace stelt is better than us. That's also pretty darn white. Pretty darn white. BDW. Well, I'd be two or three more things. I mean, I don't really want to dump on Canada. And let's stipulate that Trump was over the top with about making Canada the 51st state and all the rest of that.

But look, I'll assert this. Canada only works, and especially its health care system only works, and that is badly, because they're a free rider in the United States. I mean, just on health care, if you're an upper middle class Canadian and you have to endure a year-long waiting list for a routine but important procedure, you come to the United States. We're their safety valve. And it's only, you know, it's a tiny country. the entire population could fit inside California with lots of room to spare.

I mean, we're bigger than, what, twice the size of Canada almost in California. So it's this big split-out country of just a few cities where most of the population lives. But then the other finding out recently, and James, maybe you saw this, is GDP per capita in Canada is now lower than GDP per capita in Alabama. And this is really causing some embarrassment. Well, the Globe and Mail went, did that strong. And apparently, Alabama in the national imagination of Canada consists of just a bunch of hicks sitting around with Billy Beard cans in a trailer park somewhere. Or dispossessed, disenfranchised African Americans toiling in fields. And when they went there, they actually discovered something else.

I remember somebody talking, there was some rocket company. I don't even know if it was X or somebody else that was saying, you know, we're thinking of opening up some operations in Alabama. And the people on Twitter were just laughing at them, Alabama, Alabama, like there's rocket scientists. in Alabama. Well, yes, quite a few. And when the global. You heard of NASA Huntsville, right? Yeah.

Right. And when the Globe and Mail went to Alabama, it came back with us with a picture of a place that was self-confident that was not that was actually inhabiting the 21st century that had restaurants that had, you know, hospitals and stuff. People weren't all living in double wides, single wines. And they had to tell people, you know, we are kind of wrong about this. And maybe some national self-examination should be going on. No, no, no, no, no.

Let's elbows up, whatever that means. Well, so let's throw in Mississippi in the comparisons, too. We've known now for several months when the national educational assessments came out that Mississippi has been crushing it. I mean, they have the biggest improvement in reading scores, including among their minority children, African Americans. And I forget now who it was, but there was some liberal. It might have been a politician or at least one of their leading pundits said,

you know, we ought to pay attention to Mississippi. Well, you can imagine a reaction on blue sky, right? I don't need to tell listeners how that went. And the other thing is back to Canada. But again, I have to stop you. Why is Mississippi doing better? What did Mississippi do that made all of a sudden their educational metrics improve? Well, higher standards and accountability, right?

And a basic curriculum. Back to phonics to teach me. Phonics. Right. I feel like I'm mad. Absolutely. Well, no, phonics doesn't work. What we have to do is a whole word teaching where they look at the whole word and attuit and context.

No, phonics. But, you know, get hooked on that. and apparently that's the trick. That's the one weird trick you expect to see like an internet ad. The one weird trick to make your kids actually read. It's genius. Anyway, so your next point on Canada. Well, so, you know, the talking point for our country now,

at least since Trump came along, as we're heading for a civil war, the country's going to fall apart, we're going to break up. But meanwhile, those fuzzy, warm, social democratic Canadians, they look more likely to break up than we are. And there's the paradox theory that I think is explainable. But for years, you know, the Henri French-speaking Quebecwa have wanted to secede. And they had a referendum 20 years ago that narrowly failed.

But now Alberta, which is the Texas of Canada, right? It's the one province that would surely vote Republican if it were in America. They're having a referendum sometime soon about whether they should separate from Canada. So I don't know if it'll pass or not. I'm not really in touch with Albertan politics beyond what I can read in the papers, which means I don't know anything. But if that passes, I'll bet the people over in Quebec and maybe the Maritimes are going to say, hey, wait a minute. And then let's see what happens after that.

It could be interesting because I don't think this Mark Carney guy, you know, who won kind of a flu with an unintended assist from Trump, I don't think he's all that popular. I think he's heading for Kier-Starmor territory in the fullness of time with Canadians. And so I think they've got a much bigger problem than we do. I think so, too. You have to ask yourself what defines Canada as a nation? What is it? Well, it's this fusion of, I wouldn't say it's a fusion of French and English culture. It's just, it's two different territories that got welded together into one country.

And it defines itself by not being American. And in some instances, you know, television must contain 10% Canadian content or radio stations must have 10%. I mean, I get the sense of not wanting to be overwhelmed by the big, bumptuous neighbor to the South, especially when you're more well-mannered in your own mind and you're kinder and you're more civilized and all the rest of that. But is that enough to hold a country together? It is if you hold to the old values. If you see yourself as part of an inheritor of what we always talk about, the Western civilization tradition, if you see yourself in that as a different offshoot of the themes that made America, America,

and Mexico, Mexico, for that matter, you have a really interesting North American continent with Mexico, Canada, the United States, three different takes on Western Civ and two of them quite similar. But if you don't have... have that and you have a rootless sort of political philosophy unmoored from any of that and going towards the usual prog utopianism, then you really don't have much to hold the country together. You just have an idea of yourself as being, well, what it means to be Canadian is to be tolerant and generous and empathetic. And those things usually just end up in graft failed institutions,

open borders and, you know, diluting of your own civilization. So good luck with that. I mean, I don't want to live long enough to see Canada split up. I think that would be. be really weird. I don't know how it would work. Alberta is its own country. The middle part kind of becomes America. Quebec becomes a separate French enclave and the maritime provinces also become America. I guess it's no longer something that's ridiculous to even consider. Well, it could be. If Trump were, and I don't mean this is an insult of Trump like it will sound, But if Trump were more historically facile, I'll put it that way, he probably revived the old 54-40-year fight slogan from the middle of the 19th century, right? I always love that 54-40-year fight. That's a great one. Tipa-Kanoon and Tyler, too.

You grew up knowing these things thinking, I'm old, I'm a rotary phone old. Well, we had a state of the union speech, which dialed it up, but didn't dial it up in the way that people might have thought. It was, some people said it was more disciplined, that it didn't have the sort of wobbly, meandering middle that Trump does, that it was focused and that it had an intention. And that was to create a lot of television ads for the upcoming midterms. And I assume you listen to every single minute of it. Give us your version of the highlights and perhaps the low lights. Yeah. Amazingly, I did watch the whole thing.

And I'm on record for a long time of hating State of the Union speeches and wishing we'd get rid of them. I mean, listeners should know that what we're used to our entire adult lifetime is something that was really brought back by Woodrow Wilson. He had a deliberate purpose, which was to, I won't say, humiliate Congress, but try to overall Congress by saying, I'm the boss, the president's the leader of the country, not the Congress in Article 1. because all presidents, I think maybe Jefferson gave one speech to Congress, but all presidents in the 19th century sent letters. Letters. And by the way, the article two says the president shall from time to time submit information on the state of the union. It doesn't say every year. Most of them did the annual message to Congress.

But I wish we'd go back to that. That said, and I did write something about how Reagan, he had relatively short state of the unions. He, one of the state of the unions was only 38 minutes long. And he delivered them crisply. And even with all the applause and eruption. And they started getting longer under George H.W. Bush. And then under Clinton, they became almost Castro-esque. And yes.

Well, my joke about Trump the other night is that if we measure this on the Castro scale, that speech was a half Castro. A half Castro. I like that. Well, the part that people are getting upset about is the part about how we have to close the borders that illegal immigrants are coming here to take the jobs of people. They're straining the medical system. They're straining the schools.

And we have to do something about this right now. Oh, wait a minute. That was Clinton in 96. People were playing back and forth versions of that. It just shows you how much the landscape has shifted. So, yeah, I'm with you. Shorter, if you have to do it at all, a letter would be nice. Maybe put it on a postcard.

I want a federal government. You can drown in a bathtub in a state of the union. You can put on a postcard. Yeah. Well, sure. Go ahead. No, go. I mean, it had, but it.

Well, I was going to say, you know, normally when I hear these laundry lists, you know, well, by the way, you mentioned Clinton. One of my favorite Clinton moments was the famous state of the union where he said, after the Democrats had got humbled in the 94 election, the era of big government is over. And then we had an hour of 95 new ways to the government bigger and do more things for you. But most state of the unions are laundry list speeches.

And, you know, the occasional nod to a person in the gallery. Instead, this was the work of art, a work of showmanship. I found it riveting as I, as I. They say, you know, I hate these things. And the way Trump paced out throughout the entire speech, signaling out someone in the audience and giving him award or recognition, that kept your interest. Because every time the speech was about to flag into a laundry list, he had another spectacle with a person. And you could tell at the beginning this was going to be different. When the hockey team, they weren't sitting there.

He announced them and the doors opened and they came down the steps. I mean, as spectacle, and you'd expect this from the guy who got the top ratings with The Apprentice for so many years. And, you know, he called out all the Democrats' worst behavior. And for Trump, that was a fairly disciplined speech, oddly enough, right? I mean, here and there he ad libbed it did his usual things. But I thought it was masterful. I couldn't believe it. Oh, one more footnote to that.

The Democratic response by Abigail Spanberger, and by the way, Trump going on so long, meant she was on after 11 o'clock Eastern Time, so nobody watched it. But I've noticed that some of the, well, two people in particular, Rick Pearlstein, a very far-left historian, and Corey Robin, and even further, further left celebrity on the intellectual left, they hated her speech. And they both wrote pieces dumping on it. And they thought it was not strong enough.

It wasn't wimpy. They didn't yell at Donald Trump enough. And I thought, I think they're on the pulse of the party, which is they want, you know, red meat that's still bleeding, still attached to the cow. I don't know what metaphor you'd use. But they didn't like it. And I thought, oh, that doesn't occur well for Democrats heading into 2028.

because they're going to want people just, you know, all this pent up anger at Trump for more than 10 years now, they're going to want that. And I think the serious moderate candidates, if there are any, are not going to want to do a lot of that. And it's going to be an interesting problem for them. Oh, yeah. But I still think that immigration moment was the best. You could sum it all down to that. That's the one thing that no matter where I look, people seem to have taken away, if either to defend it or to point out exactly what it meant. because it is, it's not, I mean, you want to talk about authoritarianism and fascism when discussing the tariffs.

I mean, Trump said that it was a, you know, regrettable ruling, sad ruling or whatever he said, but he's going to abide by it. It's not as if he says how many legions of the Supreme Court have. But it was the, it was the, it's the job to defend the citizens of the United States before over and not illegal aliens. And if you sit on your hands for that, you've made a very very, very. very, very clear statement as to your priorities and the priorities of your party movement. There's no, there's no, well, I, I agree with what he, I think one of the, they said, somebody they interviewed afterwards. Well, you know, I agree in principle, but it's how we do the defending.

It's the way that it's, it's what's behind it. It's the racism of this. No, no, you can't, you can't parse your way out of that. You can't. Hi, I'm Ben Sass. And I'm Chris Stierwalt. And this is not dead yet. we're all dying, but some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.

However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to live a good life. One with meaning, love, and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that. Now available for download and streaming at ricochet.com. Rikoshae! Join the conversation. So, we will not go to our guest. Tal Fortgang.

Hope I got that right. If not, we'll hear. Legal Policy Fellow and Advisor to the President at the Manhattan Institute. You can find his writings of the pages of City Journal, National Review, yay, commentary, law and liberty, and the Wall Street Journal. Tell, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Can I just say that I am a regular listener to the Rickettsay podcast. It's part of my Friday afternoon pre-Sabbath routine.

My job is to do the dishes in our house to make sure that everything is perfectly, clean for the beginning of the Sabbath and the Ruricey podcast is an integral part of that ritual. I told you, I told you Tau would be a great guest and now suitable listening for getting ready for Shabbat or whatever. That's fantastic. Well, and as a fellow National Review guy, we're all good friends here, so let's just have an RG itself. Congratulations and agree with each other in an amiable fashion. No, thanks so much for listening. We appreciate it. And people should say, well, what's this guy written recently? And the piece is radicals are at the door.

That's a piece you've got in the piece you have in the latest National Review. And we talk about the Democrat socialists of America. They're cuddly and cute, right? I mean, you got that charming guy in New York. That's a very human face for socialism. I want more of that kind of cuddly socialism. You have a nice smile. He cares about people.

Ah. The DSA that we have here in the Twin Cities in Minneapolis where I live are not a happy, cuddly bunch of people, and they're insane. But I'll let you tell me about these radicals who are not just at the door. Got one foot in it in some places. And other places are sitting by the fire, you know, lighting up a pipe and looking at what trinkets they might take from your mantelpiece. Yeah, I haven't tried to cuddle with any DSA members recently or ever. But I do think that most Americans are under the impression that the DSA is little more than the left-most

faction of the Democratic Party, which might make them extreme or radical in their ideology, but within the bounds, perhaps pushing the bounds of regular, acceptable, if radical politics. But when you look at what the DSA actually says and does, what its institutional messages are, what its leadership says regularly, And in fact, the kinds of things that you say if you want to be promoted within the ranks of the DSA, it's actually, it's not a left-wing flank of the Democratic Party itself. It is aiming to take over the Democratic Party in a hostile fashion and replace it with a truly revolutionary anti-American group. And I don't say those words lightly. and I know that sounds like some kind of neo-McCarthiest scare tactic,

but they're quite open about it. They're quite open in saying we support America's enemies against it. We think that America is a terrible and bad thing, and we're here to take over the Democratic Party as our vehicle to execute upon that revolution. It's not normal politics. I expect almost that one of them will come out someday and say, What we have is a shining path for America's future. So can we draw a direct line between weathermen,

radicals of the 60s and the 70s and whatnot, who eventually sort of cleaned up their act, sort of put on a nice disguise and strolled on the long march through the institutions? Is there a direct line back to the 60s radicals ideologically? Or do they have different ideological wellsprings? Or does it not matter? Because at the end of the day, they're all, we got to get rid of the America with three Ks and replace it with the people's

wisdom and power. Well, the weathermen, as, as you know, were weird. They had weird ideas about, about politics, about sex, about all kinds of things. Okay, okay, then not those weirdos. How about the Symbionese Liberation Army? Oh, wait a minute. Well, well, look. the DSA is weird too, perhaps in its own way.

And I would say that the biggest difference between the weather underground, which never really went away, some of its leadership obviously suffered legal consequences very briefly and then went on to distinguished academic careers. But the animating ideology of the DSA kind of just retreated to campus for a few decades. The DSA takes on part of that. Obviously, they seem to be okay with revolutionary violence if directed against disfavored classes of people. So you have members of the DSA quite openly celebrating the murder of two Israeli embassy employees last year. There's a pretty regular utterance in DSA circles is Free Elias Rodriguez.

That's the name of the guy who just murdered two young people in cold blood because they worked at the Israeli embassy. And within the DSA, it's a perfectly normal thing to say, like, well, that's a direct action against the illegitimate Zionist enterprise. Like, who's to say that that kind of violence is unjust? That kind of thinking, I think, can fairly be traced to an intellectual tradition that might be a little bit too generous. generous, but an ideological tradition that the weathermen belong to. With that said, the current DSA also has quite a bit of open Marxist, Leninist, and often Maoist language. I'm not familiar with the weathermen being particularly inspired by Mao. Perhaps I'm wrong about that. But that is a major influence among DSA rising stars. The other is Islamism, is that the DSA has very apparently

strong Islamist ties. They seem to be really concerned with what's going to happen with Iran, particularly if the United States exercises its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere and cuts off the flow of oil between Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. That really raises hackles in DSA circles. And occasionally they'll just send people over to Iran to hobnob with the mullahs there and explore the ways in which their interests are aligned in fighting the Great Satan. That's awesome. I'll throw this to Steve in a second.

I promise and then I'll shut up and I just have to say, do they not understand the Islamist strain that they are aligned? that they are relying themselves with is profoundly illiberal in all of the ways that they hate. If they don't like America because it's patriarchal, it's racist, it's homophobic, it's transphobic, it's it's it wants to impose a religious theocracy. And yet they turn around and make common cause simply because they have the oppressor oppressed matrix going on in their head. Can they not think one step beyond that and say we are getting in bed with the people who

will kill us at the earliest possible opportunity? It seems absurd. And I think the, the key and, trying to dimension the challenge, the problem, the threat that DSA represents is to try to take their way of viewing the world seriously, which is not just to say that they're like absurd or idiots, but what is it that they could possibly be thinking? Is it that their hatred of America is just their number one animating principle and whatever follows from that, whatever Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

have to be signed to affect that outcome, they'll take it. Maybe it's that. Maybe they have these beliefs that you and I and reasonable people will recognize as Kakamemi that if Iran is simply liberated from the shackles of

Western colonial influence, that they'll become progressive paracons. I mean, it's like, it's laughable. I'm literally laughing, talking about it. But I think we have to try to get inside their heads and think seriously about what's going on. Boy, I really don't want to be inside their heads. I know what you mean. But look, I mean, I think there's two parts to it.

One is I think that the left doesn't take religion seriously when they're not hostile to it, right? So I think they don't believe that the Islamists really do believe the Koran and all the rest of that. That's one possibility. The other one is to take off something James said is. I sometimes half joke, but only half, that every one of these revolutionary cycles that we see are just replays of the Spanish Civil War from the 30s, in which the perceptive people like Orwell and Arthur Kessler and Wilmer, a whole bunch of people you can think of who went to Spain, wanting to fight on the side of revolution and discovered, oh, we're going to be the first people the communist kill if they actually get power, right? This has been seen over and over again, and they never seem to learn that lesson. And they don't realize that they will be the first people, the Islamists will kill if they actually got power here or anywhere else. But so there's a naivete there, but I think you put your finger on it.

The enemy, my enemy is my friend. Their hatred for America is qualifications number one through 10, and that's why they ally with them. And it's pretty perverse. But I do, well, back to your article, though. My one sentence summary is that essentially the case you make is that what we used to think of was a wing of the Democratic Party is rapid. becoming its torso, right? It's, it's no longer going to be a wing. It's going to be the mainstream of the party.

And that's on purpose. I think back to the students for Democratic Society, the poor here on statement, you know, their first idea was, let's take over the universities and make that our power base. And, you know, that pretty much succeeded in that. And so the next step would be the part of the Democratic Party. You know why? Because that's where the chicks were. Anyway, well, okay.

Oh, I have so many friends, you know, a little older than me from the 60s or 60s. The only reason they went to anti-war rallies was to meet girls. Yeah. Okay. Those people are all conservatives now. But here's the point. Tau is the question. Sorry, I'm rambling too long, is the party is, seems to be rolling over pretty fast without putting up much resistance.

Say more about that. I mean, the Democratic Party appears to be ideologically defenseless against the DSA. Right? There are really two possibilities here that, uh, that, uh, that we're seeing. playing play out as mainstream figures like President Obama, Governor Kathy Hokel in New York, various others have just rolled over and conceded all the DSA's premises and welcomed them almost as liberators, which is kind of a funny phrase to appropriate for this instance. But they'll say things that really just ease the blow of the DSA taking over.

Like, well, you know, they're just they're just four. more community control of our means of production, right? We will frame them as more moderate than they really are because, frankly, we can't fight. They're going to steamroll us. And the reason for that is either that they see that that's where the political winds are blowing. The Democrats have simply lost younger voters and ideologues, and anyone who's going to be left of center is going to go full de-fell.

and there just aren't any more Kathy Hockels out there. That's one possibility. The other is that ideologically, they really see very little difference between their own position and the position of the DSA, perhaps rhetorically and strategically. They make different choices. But ultimately, they're really two wings of the same torso. I don't know if that physiological metaphor holds, but we'll strain it. Right.

Now, I'm so old that I can remember. remember sort of the leading figures, I think within the DSA back in the 60s, or at least they were adjacent. And that was Michael Harrington, the famous author of the Other America that was so influential with the beginning of the war on poverty. And then a little later, Howard Lowenstein in New York, who was very far left, but friends with William F. Buckley, those were different times, right? Both of them managed to get themselves elected to Congress. But they were both, I think you'd say serious people with an intellectual quotient. And I look now at the DSA, and I don't see people of their stature. What I see are, you know, crazy people like Naomi Klein and

they all seem to be named Naomi, or half of them do, right? So I don't, who are the, do you see any sort of significant intellectual leadership on the DSA or is it all just crazy people? Within the DSA, I don't see serious intellectual anything. Leadership, promulgation of ideas, nothing is serious. They have tons of publications. I mean, it is a treasure trove to just sift through the national DSA's archives, the many, many chapters, many of which have their own zines. You've got to love a good revolutionary zine. And it's an absolute goldmine in there. All of it is a total pseudo-academic babble.

And no, there are no individuals within the organization who are setting the pace ideologically. there are external publications that will try to run cover for DSA in its kind of ideological program. Some of those, I'd say the most prominent of those are actually

sham news sites, like DropSite news, right, which is a partially George Soros-funded operation that seems to have suspiciously close ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, manages to get exclusive interviews with their leadership all the time, which is kind of interesting,

but they will put out what appear to be news articles that really push the boundaries of analysis towards a framing that is very friendly to basically everything that DSA stands

for, extremely hostile towards the United States, oddly obsessed with revolutionary violence, the redemptive, Femnonian, colonized defeats colonizer with a healthy dose of Cuban and Venezuelan sympathy is thrown in there for good measure. Hi, this is Anne Coulter. Welcome to my Rikoshae podcast. Anne Coulter. Every week on Rikosha, you're home to center-right conversation.

Hey, that was pretty good. It's so unattractive, though. The whole Cuban-Venezuelan mojo is so unattractive. attractive to people in this country. I mean, when you dress it up in a nice suit and a big grin and you say, we're going to have free buses for everybody. A lot of people are, okay, whatever. But when you start that hardcore revolutionary talk, there is something in the American spirit that just instinctively turns away from it, except for the one or two or three percent

who just absolutely love it because they get to see the right people killed and they get to be in charge of all the things. And they are going to be so well set up after the revolution when actually they're probably either going to be in a pit or digging the pit. but that's why I don't really worry that it gets a lot of traction because at the core, the more they get back to that 60s style, Harry Che Guevara stuff, the more people are repulsed by it at an atomic automatic level. But I have to ask then, is there, right now they're having the moment and everybody's,

you have all the zines, you have all the websites and everybody's getting together and figuring out what it means to be a DSA. But as we all know, there are inevitably splitters. what do you see could be one of those dividing lines that actually tends to take the movement that fractures the movement so it loses some of its momentum and power well there's still a little bit of an old guard left they've basically lost their positions of power on the the nPC the national political committee is the name of the uh the central body the npc they're the non playable characters that's great. There's that it also just has like such a great Soviet ring to it. Yeah. Like it's just yeah. NKVD and PC. Now obviously like we're talking about a party so so to some extent that that is inevitable. Most of them have been have been replaced by open Marxist Leninists or Maoists or

you know people who like to leave lots of blood emojis in their in their posts on social media. just to tell you what they're all about. And that spooks some of the old guard. But ultimately, I don't think that that's where DSA shows serious fault lines. The serious fault lines are going to be, I mean, this is like Alcove 1, Alcove 2, Alcove 3, right? Or, you know, the popular people's front of Judea versus the Judean people's popular front. Right? It's like, oh, do we take Mao as our guiding light?

Do we take Lenin as our guiding? And obviously, the more granular you get and the more high you get on your own recent political success, the more you think that it's urgent to hash out these infinitesimally small ideological differences. That's kind of the great hope of conservatives and free market capitalists is that the commies will just tear themselves to death because it's almost in their nature as constant purity seekers, constant, like true ideologues, people who are really rigidly tethered to their ideological foundations that eventually the differences between them will come to a four, and obviously putting differences aside is the key to coalitional and party politics. So that's the hope.

It's not obvious where that rift is going to emerge, though. You know, I'm having flashbacks tell to, I mean, I read about these things. I'm not old enough for this, but not just Mao versus Lenin versus Trotsky, but here in this country, as you may know, back in the 30s, it was the fights between the Shachtmanites and the Lovestonites, right? And Mother Joe, all these crazy things, Emma Goldman, crazy stuff. But I do think, you know, James mentioned the affinity people on the left had for so long for these foreign utopias. And that brings me back to the famous book now, gosh, more than 40 years old, but so am I.

by Paul Hollander and political pilgrims, right? And the point is, if you go back decades ago, a century ago, there were all the fellow travelers, we call them. They love the Soviet Union until it became indefensible. They love Cuba until, you know, that became hard to defend, too. They were Maoists for a while until that became indefensible. And then he pointed out, you know, serious people saying, Albania, that's our country that we're going to hold up as the socialist utopia

and North Korea for a while. You know, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, who I knew very well, back in their days in the left in the late 60s, early 70s, they would sing these songs in praise of, was a Kimmel song, whoever the guy was who ran the North Korea for all those decades. And the point is, is today it's hard to point to a foreign left-wing utopia

they can point to. And I think in a way that most people have and take account of that partly fuels their anger and rage. I mean, they always had the anger and rage and were violent and all the rest of that, but they at least said they had someplace to point to as their model. And now there isn't one. I can't, it wasn't Venezuela.

I mean, they tried for like a couple months. What's his name? Sean Pan and even Bernie Sanders. But that evaporated pretty fast. So they don't have a utopia anymore. So what are you going to do when you lose your God? There is a strong, well, I should say, first of all, that the North Korean dream has not completely died. The DSA's international committee has sponsored multiple events aiming to rehabilitate

North Korea's image in the West and trying to blame, obviously, blame any suffering there, of which there is shockingly little. But whatever suffering there is is the United States fault. And really, if the United States were just less imperialist, less supportive of South Korean capitalism, then the North Koreans would be living in paradise. With that said, China is the the closest thing they have to a model. Now, it's a totally invented version of what China and the Chinese Communist Party have wrought. They'll say things like, oh, it's a true ecological society. It's the future of it. The world's worst polluter, right? But if you just, if you swallow CCP propaganda whole, which is essentially the policy of the DSA, we do not believe anything that comes

out of the United States. We believe everything that comes out of China. And they are living glorious future. I mean, this is like, it's, it's, it's, it's so dumb. Yeah. It's really hard to believe that this is the word. That's the word for it. It's really stupid.

So we can hope then that actually this whole movement sunders and sputters because they're dumb enough to say, you know, North Korea is really getting a bad shake. I mean, North Korea is sort of a humorous meme, you know, an ex. people that have fun with it, the actual horrors of the regime, I think everybody realizes. And when you see the sneaked out of video of these clockwork societies, it looked like some nightmare out of wrinkle in time of the regimentation. It's abhorrent. Everything they point to is abhorrent. Everything that they point to and want manifests the sins they find in America times 10.

So they're dumb at the bottom angle of it. And if they were smarter, they would realize that they could just get away with an awful lot of things. by wrapping it up in more of an American tradition and being the guys who come wrapped in the flag to tell us how we can be even better if we take these ideas on. But what you're describing is a group of kids who just never got out of college

and wanted to stay there in the dorm room with the chae poster behind them, do bong hits and talk about it. It'll be great when the man is dead. When dad is dead. I'm sorry, not dad. I'll just say. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of that too, for sure. I would say they're dumb in a smart way, which is everything is framed. in an unfalsifiable fashion. Were it not for America's dominance, were it not for capitalism, all these things would occur. Now, nobody knows that world, right? That it's a totally counterfactual universe in which the North Koreans are free from

American influence. But as long as you can frame your support for those hostile foreign nations as, like, were it not for the United States as it is, they would be everything that we hoped. We would have utopia here on Earth. Then you can say the craziest things and just say, oh, well, all the bad things that you've heard about the CCP, all the times you've been told to distrust them, that's just American propaganda. It's all a conspiracy theory about American dominance. So, Tal, let me shift gears back to, we inside our own borders and give you what I think we'll end up being an exit question.

And it is, is Momdami the key to the near and intermediate term for this whole story? I mean, your article points out how the Democratic establishment rolled over so quickly for him. He appears to be serious. He's not just a dorm room BSer. I mean, he's really trying to do this in New York City. And look, I mean, I'm sure he's going to fail, but it looks to me like he's the it person. He's clearly the new Bernie Sanders. And he's going to be a national, international celebrity.

And so is Mondami the key to this whole story? right now. Well, he's certainly the model to the DSA takeover, right? He presents a particular archetype of the DSA candidate who's who's a true believer. He's got a history of that kind of street activism. That's the highest vocation for for aspiring DSA members. And then he ran a snappy campaign in a winnable place and gained a lot of power. Now, how he governs in the long run is to be seen and whether that form of governing serves as a model for other jurisdictions is to be seen twice over. But I do think that that is the key to understanding the political strategy. How does the DSA run candidates? What are they encouraged to do when they

govern at a particular level, what perhaps they are encouraged to keep in the quiver for when the DSA has a little bit more sway, power, a little bit more of a coalition of its own. That is a really interesting and open question that clouds any semblance of moderation that we might see from from Mammani. Like if he is truly a true believer, then perhaps anything he's done that appears to be moderate is really strategic. That's not a crazy thing to think. Yeah, Lenin's new economic plan, right? Remember Lenin's new economic plan of 1921, right?

Yeah, right? Well, I don't remember that. I'm a little. Okay, never mind. Nothing we've done is working, so let's try this and not call it capitalism. Tell us been a pleasure, and everyone should go to National Review and read this piece. We'll look it in the comments here at brachshay.com. And if you hit a paywall, well, you know, that's pony up.

National Review's got to keep the lights on too. I've been to their office. They're not palatial. They're nice, but there's no golden fountain. So Tell needs to get paid, as do we all. And I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, Tell that, you know, when you do, you're cleaning up this week. You're going to have to listen to yourself, I'm afraid. I know that I fast forward through that whenever I do so.

Grit it, bear it, and listen to yourself and be proud because it's been fun. We've enjoyed having you. We look forward to the next time of it. Thank you so much, guys. I'll look through the archives for this afternoon. There you go. There you go. Okay.

Bye-bye. I'm Greg Carumbus. Join Jim Garrity of National Review and me each weekday for the three-martini lunch podcast. We'll give you the good, bad, and crazy news of the day and lots of laughs too. Find us right here on the Rikoschet Audio Network at ricochet.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, before we go, a couple of things. Somebody mentioned Albania. I hadn't thought about Albania in a long time.

And I thought, who was the guy who. Hosa. Denver Hosa. Right. And I thought, I remember that guy's name. Ha, that he was the Albanian. Albania was always one of those weird things out there.

It wasn't one of your marquee commie states in the Eastern Bloc, you know. And the fact that they fastened on it is the future. Ah, yeah. Next up, Liberia. So, yeah. I don't wish that. I do wish sort of having, you know, the cultural amusement we got out of having just a parade of gray suited doer idiot functionaries in charge of countries that we could always sort of make fun of. But it reminds me that whenever Mission Impossible or shows of that ilk of that time would go to a kami country or for that matter, one in Central America.

They would always, they'd never quite, they'd never name any of them. Like they were scared of somehow losing the future Albanian distribution rights. if they said, you're going to Albania, Peter, with your staff. And we, you know, yeah. So, yeah, we are not done because we have to talk about a couple of things. One, Gavin Newsom, I think everybody's sort of expecting is going to be, you know, a real contender for the damson 20, the next presidential election. Made a remarkable speech the other day where he was talking to an audience largely

composed, if not entirely, of African-Americans with an African-American interlocutor and said, look, I'm like you guys. I'm crap SAT scores and I can't read. I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to impress you. I'm just trying to impress upon you. I'm like you.

I'm no better than you. You know, I'm a 960 SAT guy. And, you know, and I'm not trying to offend anyone, you know, trying to act all there if you got 940. But literally, a 960 SAT guy.

I cannot, you've never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech. I'm still goggling over that particular speech and why anybody would think that was a wise thing to do and why there hasn't been the blowback that you would think. There's been amusement and shrugging. Oh, I mean, I mean, nobody, maybe you're seeing something out there that I'm not, but, I mean, Newsom doesn't have that.

Oh, that's just getting. Gavin talking off the cuff. He's kind of a babbler. He's weird in that way. That's not his persona yet. So was this a calculated move? And if so, what the hell were they thinking? Well, okay, I can explain it all to you.

But first, I do have to say, I don't think he's going to end up being a top contender for the nomination. I think he's going to have a glass jaw the way Campbell did in 2020. And he might not even make it to the first primary. But first of all, can I just set the scene for listeners? And I hate to do this to you, James. But I'm sitting here in my shorts in the morning out here. where it's going to top out at 80 degrees today.

Yesterday, I was watching a pot of whales swim by my window in the middle of the day and the ocean out in front of my house. And yet people are leaving California. How was this possible, right? Only, you know, all the other sunbelt states are gaining population. We're losing it by a lot. Well, that's the legacy of Newsom. But when I heard that comment, my mind ran back to something you might remember to,

or at least it was close enough to your sentient youth. it's when George Romney, the governor of Michigan, in late 1967, even with Richard Nixon in the polls for the Republican nomination the following year, made the offhand comment to Detroit TV station, oh yeah, I went over to Vietnam and I just got the most thorough brainwashing you can imagine. His campaign collapsed instantly because, I mean, of course, there are some great jokes. You know, Gene McCarthy there from your state, you know, who really did have a great wit, said Romney didn't need a brainwashing. A light rinse would have been just, father. Yes. Great stuff. And, you know, he never recovered from that because, you know, you just made you look like a moron. So why is Newsom so far not gotten that kind of blowback? Well, so here's an interesting thing. You know, I've never been for the psychological theory we call projection, except maybe I think it's true. And so one reason liberals are always accusing

the rest of us of being racist is because guess what? That's what they actually are. So a few years ago, actually, 2018, so what, eight years ago now, an African-American professor at Yale and a woman social scientist at Princeton did a study that was a very thorough content analysis of speeches by Republican and Democratic politicians. And you know, they code all this stuff, and you can contest the methodology, but come back to that in a minute. What it found was Democratic politicians routinely talk down to minorities. The way they characterized it was, They profess a certain incompetence. In other words, they described this study exactly what Newsom did the other day.

And they want on to say, and I'm guessing these professors have liberal sympathies, probably, if they're social scientists at Yale and Princeton. They're saying, oh, you know, these people are trying to be egalitarian and non-racist, but they're betraying subtle racism in thinking the capabilities of minorities are lower than everyone else. You remember the famous statement that Biden made about poor kids are just as smart as white kids, right? Right. Yes. Right. So, I mean, I actually think that's what's going on here. And I think that's now deeply embedded on the left. They are paternalistic. They really do privately believe that minorities are not as capable without their help as everyone else. They don't believe. That's one reason they don't believe in treating people as individuals and equally in the strict sense of it. So I think that's what's going on. But I do think that between that problem, which I think all of them share really. But I think between that gaff, And just generally, a Newsom's record, I think he's going to get clobbered, maybe by another liberal. I mean, if J.B. Pritzker runs, he's going to say Illinois may stink, but we don't stink as bad as California.

Yeah, run on Illinois. That's interesting, interesting. Yeah. Well, I just add, by the way, about that study. You know, I see all these, look, I read a lot of these things, and I always say, I wonder how it turn out with a different methodology. No one to my mind has either replicated the study or done a study refuting it. I can point to a whole lot of social science studies that give a very anti-liberal conclusion and other social scientists avoid taking it up because I think they fear that they would ratify it if they did it. I think you're right. Well, those sort of predicates underline the opposition to voter ID that these groups are too stupid

and too incapable to actually go and get voter ID. And there's a second part of that too, which is, well, how exactly do they get the documents to get these order IDs? Well, they get them from the government, as you're saying that the government makes very hard to get them because the government isn't very good at this. Why don't you get better at it then? I know. Well, you know, I think the main thing going for Newsom is his presidential hair.

I think people look at that and say, we haven't seen presidential hair like that since Martin Sheen. And that's going to get them a certain distance. But yeah, I would love to know that you're right. Brits doesn't have a particular amount of charisma for me. I can't see them putting up another white guy to go up against Vance, who would have a lot more Brio energy and sideways knowing looks at the camera during debates. We'll see, we'll see. Long ways away, and I'd have no intention of thinking about it on a beautiful day like today.

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