One cannot help but wonder if this person is actually a deep cover operative planted by radical right-wingers decades ago within the DSA's ranks, because if I were writing for the Daily Wire and created this person as a satire they would accuse me of being too heavy-handed.
(And I've read that part of the NYT interview. Anyone who thinks that the solution to murder is to create a socioeconomic system where people aren't going to have motives to commit murder is not a grown adult who should be taken seriously.)
It’s funny that if she WAS a deep cover operative designed to discredit the DSA, this is exactly how she’d behave, but she’s not, and the DSA is still like “full endorsement!”
Actually I don't think she is because a radical right wing agent wouldn't go this far because they'd think it's just too crazy, no one would believe me!
What is the alternative hypothesis? Because, "an adult spent their own time and money to campaign on this" seems equally implausible.
Just reading this article is like the moment before the moment of realization that it wasn't toothpaste on your brush, but anti-fungal cream: complete confusion. But then you say, aha! I have made a mistake! whereas this remains somehow real life.
If radical right wingers had planted someone in the DSA, he or she wouldn’t be this ridiculous. The backers would probably think someone this extreme would be too unbelievable.
The Soviets believed serial murder was a pathology of capitalism, which considering there were a number of Soviet killers, probably didn’t help with the investigations.
I would like to save myself some embarrassment by noting that I don't think she's a sleeper agent or anything. It's just that I'm baffled by, well, by this kind of crazy.
Like, if I were a super open minded career counselor I'd say to her: the amount of energy you are willing to expend in causes so far outside not just the Overton window, but well beyond the pale of civil society, makes you a great candidate for revolutionary insurgency. Have you considered a career in terrorism?
The "right" loves to heap claims about "hating America" on various leftys, but typically they say, understandably, "no I don't. " The rules of the game in politics are that you aver hatred of the nation you're running for elected office in.
> The rules of the game in politics are that you aver hatred of the nation you're running for elected office in.
She doesn't consider herself part of that nation. And the fact that she won tells us that a majority of voters there also don't. A nation where this can happen on any significant scale is in deep trouble.
I don’t get the “follow through” give that terrorism requires. She’s a PhD candidate still, yet apparently has the time to run for congress and be a “community organizer,” which I think is code for to annoying to get a real job, while on the left.
Say what you will about Baader-Meinhof, but follow through was not a problem for them.
Community organization is a legitimate enterprise. Obama famously had a lot of experience with it. She probably sucks at it, because she's closed-minded and arrogant.
"Joe Biden is a rapist" is a HUGE red flag for Russian influence to me, considering the accuser was herself an obvious Russian agent.
Apparently fine by Zohran, though? Why even get involved in something like this? It doesn't seem good for anything except burning the goodwill he's built with more moderate New Yorkers.
In a funny way, she's right that five years ago is a long time, because she's so young. Five years ago she was 27, which for normal people is "old enough to know better" but for politicians and activists is "practically in swaddling clothes still".
What's interesting, looking her up and trying to find her background, is that she was recruited by the Justice Democrats (not to be confused with the Justice League), an organisation founded by, amongst others, the Democratic party kingmaker Saikat Chakrabarti who got AOC elected. So she's one of the "go out and search for young, left-wing talent we can recruit and get elected to push out the more centrist Democrats" candidates, and I imagine she will drop or soften a lot of the rhetoric from the dim and distant days of 2020-21 and instead campaign on "Abolish ICE, the rent's too damn high, education and high-paying union jobs for all".
Meh, these are opinions you can get away with as an angry undergrad. You’ll be obnoxious but there’s still hope.
By 27 if you’re still shouting that rhetoric sincerely it probably means you’ve never been forced to make contact with the real world as an adult, and that is a worrisome characteristic on its own regardless of whether your opinions suck.
I agree that people can grow a lot politically from 27 to 32; I know I did. And I continued afterward, reaching my current level of moderation - which I emphatically refuse to describe as "becoming more conservative" - at 41.
But she kind of has to come out and SAY, "hey, that stuff I said was stupid, here's what I've learned since," etc. She can't just talk around it and hope people infer she has become more mature and realistic, and less combative.
Trump has proven that you can double down on that stuff and not lose any support. And now it works for the other side; Graham Platner is proof. I can't believe Al Franken's career ended over a silly photograph, but a guy with a Nazi tattoo and a history of homophobia is the future hope of the party.
I don’t think Trump has proven anything except that people will vote for some really weird and odious shit. His ability to get away with anything is partly a reflection of cultural-political dysfunction but also connected to his unique qualities. I do also think Trump has probably raised the bar quite a bit for what is “unacceptable” across the board, and he may have helped lay the groundwork for scandal-weathering on the scale Platner has shown, even if nobody else is going to reach the same bizarre “no apparent consequences for basically anything” status.
"I imagine she will drop or soften a lot of the rhetoric from the dim and distant days of 2020-21 and instead campaign on "Abolish ICE, the rent's too damn high, education and high-paying union jobs for all"."
You would think, but I've read parts of the very recent NYT interview, and at the very least she's still all for abolishing prison.
I’m thinking she’ll give Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Green a solid run for their money over who can consistently be the most obnoxious in public. And, I predict an active betting market on how many motions of censure she will rack up in two years.
I think she’s a rather normie DSA Democrat now. This is who they are. Just like the crazy Republicans like MJT. The Democrats are fighting fire with fire. We need firefighters.
I'm in a service field, and coach my managers and teams that most folks instinctively shade towards arsonists, where as we need firefighters. Tamp down the flames, don't accelerate them.
Of course when I was 20 (and therefore stupid), I thought the revolution was necessary and would be great, among a zillion other really dumb things I thought. I went to Catholic schools, therefore history wasn't taught, therefore it was a mystery to me that we had a long track record of humanity to use to fact check ideas. Be well out there -
Actually the last part is true. The only way to stop murder is to have a world where no one wants to do it. It just happens to be impossible to achieve that. But it actually is the only way! Laws won’t make it happen.
It's more likely that Jeff is the plant. As the party continues to move, left the moderate Republicans posing a Democrats will continue to expose themselves. If you want to vote neocon the rest of your life, you should change parties.
Sometimes I think Mamdani isn't as bad as I thought then he endorses utter wastes of carbon like this. Honestly at this point Democrats are victims of their own dumbass messaging and cowardice, because people like her are the products of leftist institutional capture.
In some ways, he’s governed as a centrist (because you simply can’t do some of the dumb stuff he campaigned on), but it’s like he feels the need to do something crazy sometimes so that he doesn’t lose his street cred with the crazies.
Yes, but think of how easy it would have been to create the fig leaf of reasonableness by distancing himself from her. Kind of an own goal, I would say.
The funny thing is that the DSA have topped out at about 100,000 members. The Wikipedia list of American cities by population stops at #348 - Longmont, CO at 100,109 - so this is not a huge number of people in a nation of 330 million. Democrats just need to get over their fear of looking old and tell the DSA that they don't matter outside of New York.
Correct. They're like Christian Dominionists who get everyone excited when one of them attains a marginally powerful position, but neither has any chance of enacting substantive policy. DSA makes two mistakes - first, they vastly overestimate their own numbers, and second, they assume that the policies their supporters like will be equally popular across mainstream America.
People tend to confuse Mamdani's laziness for moderation. He's managed to triple the rate of antisemitic hate crime and open a personal government propaganda office (the parts of the job he actually likes), but he's mostly just too lazy to actually do much else about socialism stuff; mostly the city just stays on its course of managed decline as he ignores the problems and lets the budget blow up.
Genuinely what are you talking about, hes fixed the deficit and repaired 100,000 + potholes, and those are just things off the top of my mind, how does that constitute ignoring problems.
He "fixed the deficit" by illegally raiding the pension budget and rainy day fund and asking the state for a bailout. The actual budget is literally the highest it's ever been (and no, not for improved services).
The potholes thing is actually a good example of how he acts though: he's good at propaganda and it's the one part of the job he enjoys, so he takes "potholes keep getting patched at roughly the same pace as before" and makes a bunch of propaganda videos about it to pretend he's making some grand achievement so people look away while the city goes bankrupt and jobs keep leaving.
Saying he “illegally raided” the pension and rainy day funds isn’t accurate. The budget was balanced through a combination of state aid, budget changes, and pension restructuring. You can disagree with those choices or argue they aren’t sustainable, but that doesn’t change the fact that the deficit was eliminated. On the potholes matter, he fixed 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days of his term, if he keeps that rate up through to December it would be almost a 70% increase on NYTs usual 170,000 potholes filled a year.
I live in her district and so I see all her volunteers at tents passing out flyers. This is a predominately black and latino neighborhood and Darializa claims to be speaking for"the community" but of course all her volunteers I see are bright-eyed corn-fed white 20-somethings who probably just moved here and have no idea what life is like in a big crime-ridden City. That is, gentrifiers. The community she speaks for is Columbia students.
Just voted against her. My wife didn’t vote because she said there was no one she wanted to vote for. Which fair enough the democrats are all about the narcissism of small differences these days.
The good news is that incumbent Adriano Espaillat will probably withstand this primary challenge from Ms. Crazypants, and thus the thing will have blown up in Mamdani’s face. The bad news is that another of his endorsed candidates, Brad Lander, will probably win his primary challenge against Rep. Dan Goldman. Goldman is a very smart guy, and was lead counsel in the first impeachment trial against Trump. But Lander has shown that if you say “AIPAC” and “GENOCIDE” against a candidate named “Goldman” three times (both candidates are Jewish), you can win a Democratic primary in New York’s 10th Congressional District.
For more shits and giggles, Goldman was told not to return to a Brooklyn coffee shop because GENOCIDE:
I'm a Michigan Dem, and we've currently got DSA darling Abdul El-Sayed running in our Senate primary. I get emails from him multiple times a day, and 99% of them are about AIPAC: how AIPAC is trying to defeat him, and how Michigan voters need to rally against AIPAC. It's really disgusting. Even my wife, who's much more a "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" type than I am, agrees that his campaign message is basically "we must defeat the Jewish menace."
I'm a lifelong Independent here in MI, and my wife's a lifelong registered Democrat. And we both agree that El-Sayed is one of the best cases in recent memory for not failing to vote in a *primary* election.
BS is about all this guy has going for him, which is all that's needed for the weaker minded and / or true believers and crazies in the electorate, as we've so clearly seen time and again on the right side of the ballot these past years and which now's increasingly infecting the left here and elsewhere as well.
When all's said and done, my take is that a win for El-Sayed in the primary will equal a win for Rodgers in the general.
So, I'd urge any and all Michiganders who'd prefer not to be represented by another Trump sucking Republican or just possibly a DSA Hasan-Piker-promoting asshole, to not fail to vote for one of the two 'normal' flavors of Democrats running in the primary in August, however your conscience may dictate...
... traditional moderate and coalitionist Haley Stevens, who understands 'compromise' isn't a four-letter word except concerning Constitutionality and the rule of law..
... or Mallory McMorrow, a seemingly principled young woman who's been labeled a Progressive for her stand on some issues (she defines herself as a "pragmatist"), but is definitely *not* a far left-wing guerilla socialist insurgent in the party as El-Sayed and the rest of the DSA wack jobs are, intent on using the Democratic party as a springboard to power for themselves and their so-called socialist agenda for "the people", not for the benefit of people who believe in traditional Democratic - and *democratic* - values.
It just all boils down to this, by my lights: When it comes to the sum of the people here in deep purple Michigan, if the Ds want to win state-wide races, El-Sayed and his like are people the Democrats could (and should) well do without.
From your lips to God's ears. I'm fine with either Stevens or McMorrow, and feel like this wouldn't be a particularly close race if only one of them was running against El-Sayed. But I'm worried about them splitting the normie vote and letting El-Sayed slip in with like 36% or something like that.
Ditto on all of that for me as well. I could easily live with either one of these women in the Senate.
But If El-Sayed manages to fuck this up and get on the ballot, I guess I'll be writing in a name in the general, since I wouldn't vote for Rodgers *or* El-Sayed just to keep Rodgers out, El-Sayed being that bad of a choice as far as I'm concerned.
And with my being nominally a lukewarm Christian and considering that after the past ten years I wouldn't vote for Jesus Christ for dogcatcher if he showed up and ran as a Republican, that's kinda' saying something.
Yeah I have relatives in Bloomfield Hills who are lifelong Dems but if he wins, they will crawl over broken glass to vote against him. But I’m sure there are people in Dearborn who will stay home if Stevens wins. Yikes.
I lived in Michigan for 15 years and am pretty concerned about the senate race. He’s vile. Is there any chance one of the other candidates gets the nomination? The polls look bleak, but I remember he also overperformed in polls in 2018 and then got his ass handed to him by Whitmer.
I have hopes that one of the normie candidates, probably Stevens, will pull it out. El-Sayed tends to run noisy campaigns that fizzle at the ballot box, and I'm hoping that's the case again.
He’s even admitted that zeroing in on AIPAC makes him feel “queasy” because of the antisemitic tropes but he continuously does so anyway. Typical spineless politician with no principles who’ll sell himself out to win.
The historical term “court jew” used to be dusted off to describe someone like Lander, but that instead makes me queasy. “He’s one of the good ones,” instead, is probably a phrase running through the heads of some of Lander’s DSA and DSA-adjacent supporters.
I think “useful idiot” is more appropriate. He makes an alliance with a group that has so many red flags that the organizer of a Moscow May Day parade would say it’s over the top. Landed will soon be shocked! shocked! that the group of morons, which includes outright islamists and anti-semites, is antisemitic.
Win or lose, I don’t see the DSA becoming less openly antisemitic. Mamdani is a a skilled politician with real charisma, so he was able to deflect his most retarded statements. Most of the other people in the DSA…are not that. They are morons who believe stuff so dumb that only the over educated and under- or unemployed could believe.
I also expect a lot of election denialism/trutherism once they start losing. It wasn’t commented on much at the time, but I found Sanders’ complaints about primary system in 2016 concerning. Not the “DNC rigged it” narrative, although that was ridiculously overblown, but his claims about outperforming in open primaries. I don’t think it was accurate, but regardless, the strategy is take over the party from the outside and reshape in its own image, people who care about the part be damned.
"I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
Lander is also just such a loser. I can't believe anyone in his life likes him. But to be fair of the three he's three least crazy by far so there's that
Serious question, why are these loons allowed to run in the Democratic primary and not as a third party in the general? Do Republicans allow Nazis and Libertarians to call themselves Republicans for 6 weeks to run in their primaries?
Yes, they do. The whole point of primaries is to decide who gets to represent the party. There is no process to filter out lunatics before the primary, because the primary *is* the lunatic-filtering process.
Now, if your complaint is that the primary process is handled by a public vote instead of party leaders choosing a candidate... well, that's how it used to work in the US, and there's a case for going back to it. That case is currently holding UFC fights on the White House lawn and surrendering to Iran. The other option is finding ways to boost primary participation and dilute the crazy vote. Right now it's the worst of both worlds -- a small fraction of the electorate making the decision without anything to vet the decision-makers.
Yes. Duverger's Law states that in a first past the post system, you end up with two major parties that subsume what would otherwise be separate small parties under them. Just as the GOP includes Christian Zionists, abortion abolitionists, theocratic Dominionists, white nationalists, tech bros, and checked-pants country club types, the Democrats include any number of disparate interest groups. In a parliamentary system with proportional representation, you can end up with the opposite, like the recent Dutch elections that had, if I'm not mistaken, over 1000 candidates in 27 parties.
There is a part of me that thinks it's almost impressive and even a little heartwarming how so many far-left types seem to honestly think that we're genuinely almost on the verge of achieving anarcho-syndicalist utopia to such an extent that we can just... get rid of police and prisons and the concept of criminal justice and law-enforcement. And that all that stands between the world and paradise is people finally throwing off the last vestiges of false consciousness and voting them into positions of power. In spite of all the vast vast vast amounts of evidence to the contrary. It makes me picture that pure trusting look of utter innocence my four-year-old niece gives me whenever I tell her something that she has never experienced and so is learning about for the first time.
This does not mean, I hasten to add, that I think my four-year-old niece should be anywhere near the levers of power. She turns into enough of a dictator when we play "post office".
These people are just like religious fanatics in how they hermetically seal themselves off from any dissenting voices, whom they deem as sinful heretics. This basically creates a Petri dish for the dumbest ideas you've ever seen.
Every time someone tries to emphasize a serious point by writing out the word "period" at the end of a sentence, I always think of those"tampax fits, period." commercials.
Sorta undercuts the point. Unless the point is about a fine line if menstruation products.
Regarding the What Was I Thinking series, I sometimes think there hasn't been enough time to have a meaninful change of perspective. But now I know differently. "Half a decade ago is the early 2020s, a mostly-forgotten, black-and-white era so antiquated that many of us had slightly different haircuts and our around-the-house jeans were still our out-on-the-town jeans. Five years ago, I was a Mormon communist who thought that the global economy was run by the Keebler Elves."
I hope she wins. Normal Democrats need a low stakes wake up call that these DSA types are going to make their lives miserable if they don’t grow a spine.
Conditional on the DSA winning SOMETHING, this is about as good a place for her. She's in a safe seat, and no one is going to introduce (let alone pass) any federal bill containing the most moronic of DSA ideas. And she doesn't have the charisma/intelligence of AOC, so there's little chance of her becoming a national star. As a non-entity backbencher who will occasionally say stupid stuff that tarnishes her/the DSA's brand? Ugh. But it could be worse.
Therein lies the problem. This is the kind of stuff that drives home the point that both parties are prone to attracting crazies. The reason people like Trump get elected in the first place is entirely because people are seeing elections as a race between two sets of crazies and deciding that the red crazies are at least closer to their values than the blue ones. Given that the red crazies took over their party long ago, this has been a complete own goal by Democrats.
Agreed. And if she is enough of a headache, they’ll redistrict her out of a job in a few years and she can go back to getting her PhD in decolonial basket weaving.
What’s scary is that these ppl do seem to be gaining traction. I have a number of friends that are going to vote for a DSA member for mayor of LA. I ask them if they’ve read the DSA charter and understand what these ppl are really trying to accomplish. To which they respond that they don’t care because, like Mamdani, they won’t be able to actually accomplish the crazier shit they espouse.
This type of thinking is so reckless imo. The far-left socialists have already achieved massive success through the academic institutions, and this is just the next page of the playbook. I think we’d be naive at this point to think they can’t capture a real foothold (at least in city / state politics).
Here's a crazy thought on "crazy"... Hard to tell how much Chevalier weighs from the pictures of her that I've seen, but why not just gather up about 145 pounds or so of those green algae from the Reflecting Pool in D.C., stuff it all into a DSA skin suit of a human-looking candidate and run *that* for office?
The crazy thing here isn't Chevalier - wackos like her have been around forever and always will be. The crazy thing here is that NYC now has a mayor who thinks *she* is the kind of representative New York needs in D.C., where the algae bloom in the Reflecting Pool has a higher I.Q. and stronger grasp on reality than the entirety of the DSA and the dipsticks who support these dipshits.
The thing that I cannot understand about the "abolish the police" types is just who the hell do they think will enforce their socialist system? It pretty much sounds like a wild west scenario where you can do whatever to whomever you want.
Does she not realize that the wealthy oligarchs will just hire private security and have them kill whomever they feel threatened by? Maybe even her? Does it not occur to her that without police to arrest people for being racist or other woke transgressions that people will be free to do these things? That killings of minorities will go up because there is literally no penalty for doing so?
I know she doesn't care about "normal crime" as she sees things like theft, assault, murder, and rape as just revenge against "evil whites" or whatnot, but without police what is left to stop the "evil whites" from shooting rioters/looters/protestors or other troublesome people?
Like even from a far-left perspective it just makes no sense. How the hell do you enforce ANYTHING without police? It just makes me think that she is completely unserious/cynical and just says incendiary things to get her rocks off and/or rile people up.
I've asked the same question of AnCaps. Their answer is that interested people will band together to protect their interests. I think the assumption from people on Chevalier's side is that the Crips, Bloods, MS13, etc. are left wing and will maintain order.
Which is darkly amusing, considering many of these same people will criticize the police for being just a gang with a uniform. Maybe we can just put the policemen in plainclothes and that will satisfy them...
The idea that Crips and MS13 would step in and become the tolerance police is so hilarious that I almost wish this happens in some jurisdiction just so we can watch such a travesty unfold.
Also, wouldn't this make he Crips the police? The police are not abolished, only changed.
Well, the one difference with gangs would be that there'd be nothing close to an official monopoly of force. A town doesn't typically have two or more police forces of similar strength who fight each other as much as they fight crime.
Now does this sound better than just having police? That's a question they'd rather not answer...
Oh, and while people do joke, there's no police force that has a requirement that you kill an innocent to join up.
In all the time I’ve spent on substack I’ve actually laughed maybe twice, and one of those times was after reading “I went boom boom at the ballot box!”
One cannot help but wonder if this person is actually a deep cover operative planted by radical right-wingers decades ago within the DSA's ranks, because if I were writing for the Daily Wire and created this person as a satire they would accuse me of being too heavy-handed.
(And I've read that part of the NYT interview. Anyone who thinks that the solution to murder is to create a socioeconomic system where people aren't going to have motives to commit murder is not a grown adult who should be taken seriously.)
It’s funny that if she WAS a deep cover operative designed to discredit the DSA, this is exactly how she’d behave, but she’s not, and the DSA is still like “full endorsement!”
Actually I don't think she is because a radical right wing agent wouldn't go this far because they'd think it's just too crazy, no one would believe me!
What is the alternative hypothesis? Because, "an adult spent their own time and money to campaign on this" seems equally implausible.
Just reading this article is like the moment before the moment of realization that it wasn't toothpaste on your brush, but anti-fungal cream: complete confusion. But then you say, aha! I have made a mistake! whereas this remains somehow real life.
If radical right wingers had planted someone in the DSA, he or she wouldn’t be this ridiculous. The backers would probably think someone this extreme would be too unbelievable.
The Soviets believed serial murder was a pathology of capitalism, which considering there were a number of Soviet killers, probably didn’t help with the investigations.
I would like to save myself some embarrassment by noting that I don't think she's a sleeper agent or anything. It's just that I'm baffled by, well, by this kind of crazy.
Like, if I were a super open minded career counselor I'd say to her: the amount of energy you are willing to expend in causes so far outside not just the Overton window, but well beyond the pale of civil society, makes you a great candidate for revolutionary insurgency. Have you considered a career in terrorism?
The "right" loves to heap claims about "hating America" on various leftys, but typically they say, understandably, "no I don't. " The rules of the game in politics are that you aver hatred of the nation you're running for elected office in.
My uncle would say: "it takes a lot of education to be that stupid."
> The rules of the game in politics are that you aver hatred of the nation you're running for elected office in.
She doesn't consider herself part of that nation. And the fact that she won tells us that a majority of voters there also don't. A nation where this can happen on any significant scale is in deep trouble.
It's not just her. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of someone like Donald Trump being elected president would have been called satire.
I don’t get the “follow through” give that terrorism requires. She’s a PhD candidate still, yet apparently has the time to run for congress and be a “community organizer,” which I think is code for to annoying to get a real job, while on the left.
Say what you will about Baader-Meinhof, but follow through was not a problem for them.
Now that makes the scenario a great sketch comedy.
"But your lack of real commitment makes me think you'd do better as a... New York political hack."
Community organization is a legitimate enterprise. Obama famously had a lot of experience with it. She probably sucks at it, because she's closed-minded and arrogant.
The one that helped inspire Thomas Harris to create Hannibal Lecter was even a party member.
You have to wonder if she has interacted with a single person outside of the DSA.
Or like, just a single person
"Joe Biden is a rapist" is a HUGE red flag for Russian influence to me, considering the accuser was herself an obvious Russian agent.
Apparently fine by Zohran, though? Why even get involved in something like this? It doesn't seem good for anything except burning the goodwill he's built with more moderate New Yorkers.
I honestly think he just can’t help himself, he’s a true believer in this kind of stuff no matter how much he tries to hide it.
Right? Opportunity missed. It would’ve been brilliant cover if he had manifested the slightest reservation about her.
In a funny way, she's right that five years ago is a long time, because she's so young. Five years ago she was 27, which for normal people is "old enough to know better" but for politicians and activists is "practically in swaddling clothes still".
What's interesting, looking her up and trying to find her background, is that she was recruited by the Justice Democrats (not to be confused with the Justice League), an organisation founded by, amongst others, the Democratic party kingmaker Saikat Chakrabarti who got AOC elected. So she's one of the "go out and search for young, left-wing talent we can recruit and get elected to push out the more centrist Democrats" candidates, and I imagine she will drop or soften a lot of the rhetoric from the dim and distant days of 2020-21 and instead campaign on "Abolish ICE, the rent's too damn high, education and high-paying union jobs for all".
Meh, these are opinions you can get away with as an angry undergrad. You’ll be obnoxious but there’s still hope.
By 27 if you’re still shouting that rhetoric sincerely it probably means you’ve never been forced to make contact with the real world as an adult, and that is a worrisome characteristic on its own regardless of whether your opinions suck.
I agree that people can grow a lot politically from 27 to 32; I know I did. And I continued afterward, reaching my current level of moderation - which I emphatically refuse to describe as "becoming more conservative" - at 41.
But she kind of has to come out and SAY, "hey, that stuff I said was stupid, here's what I've learned since," etc. She can't just talk around it and hope people infer she has become more mature and realistic, and less combative.
She is still saying that stuff.
Trump has proven that you can double down on that stuff and not lose any support. And now it works for the other side; Graham Platner is proof. I can't believe Al Franken's career ended over a silly photograph, but a guy with a Nazi tattoo and a history of homophobia is the future hope of the party.
I don’t think Trump has proven anything except that people will vote for some really weird and odious shit. His ability to get away with anything is partly a reflection of cultural-political dysfunction but also connected to his unique qualities. I do also think Trump has probably raised the bar quite a bit for what is “unacceptable” across the board, and he may have helped lay the groundwork for scandal-weathering on the scale Platner has shown, even if nobody else is going to reach the same bizarre “no apparent consequences for basically anything” status.
Will never stop being heartbroken about Al…
"I imagine she will drop or soften a lot of the rhetoric from the dim and distant days of 2020-21 and instead campaign on "Abolish ICE, the rent's too damn high, education and high-paying union jobs for all"."
You would think, but I've read parts of the very recent NYT interview, and at the very least she's still all for abolishing prison.
When I was 27 I wasn't going around saying "Ronald Regan is a rapist" (even though at the time I wasn't a big fan). I was mostly fully-baked then.
I’m thinking she’ll give Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Green a solid run for their money over who can consistently be the most obnoxious in public. And, I predict an active betting market on how many motions of censure she will rack up in two years.
In a word, great success. The real winners are the citizens not.
> B: So if a man rapes a woman, he’s to blame for it, but if he punches her in the face and breaks her jaw, poverty did it?
> A: How much does he make?
From https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/a-conversation-about-crime
"It's a fair cop, but society's to blame."
"Right, we'll arrest them instead "
I think she’s a rather normie DSA Democrat now. This is who they are. Just like the crazy Republicans like MJT. The Democrats are fighting fire with fire. We need firefighters.
I'm in a service field, and coach my managers and teams that most folks instinctively shade towards arsonists, where as we need firefighters. Tamp down the flames, don't accelerate them.
Of course when I was 20 (and therefore stupid), I thought the revolution was necessary and would be great, among a zillion other really dumb things I thought. I went to Catholic schools, therefore history wasn't taught, therefore it was a mystery to me that we had a long track record of humanity to use to fact check ideas. Be well out there -
There is no right-wing SPLC.
Thomas More Law Center is one.
Actually the last part is true. The only way to stop murder is to have a world where no one wants to do it. It just happens to be impossible to achieve that. But it actually is the only way! Laws won’t make it happen.
I wonder what she would have said if asked whether Dylann Roof should have gone to prison.
It's more likely that Jeff is the plant. As the party continues to move, left the moderate Republicans posing a Democrats will continue to expose themselves. If you want to vote neocon the rest of your life, you should change parties.
This is a fantastic example of Poe's Law.
Based on John Q’s substack reading interests, it does not appear to be parody.
Sometimes I think Mamdani isn't as bad as I thought then he endorses utter wastes of carbon like this. Honestly at this point Democrats are victims of their own dumbass messaging and cowardice, because people like her are the products of leftist institutional capture.
In some ways, he’s governed as a centrist (because you simply can’t do some of the dumb stuff he campaigned on), but it’s like he feels the need to do something crazy sometimes so that he doesn’t lose his street cred with the crazies.
Yes, but think of how easy it would have been to create the fig leaf of reasonableness by distancing himself from her. Kind of an own goal, I would say.
The funny thing is that the DSA have topped out at about 100,000 members. The Wikipedia list of American cities by population stops at #348 - Longmont, CO at 100,109 - so this is not a huge number of people in a nation of 330 million. Democrats just need to get over their fear of looking old and tell the DSA that they don't matter outside of New York.
Correct. They're like Christian Dominionists who get everyone excited when one of them attains a marginally powerful position, but neither has any chance of enacting substantive policy. DSA makes two mistakes - first, they vastly overestimate their own numbers, and second, they assume that the policies their supporters like will be equally popular across mainstream America.
People tend to confuse Mamdani's laziness for moderation. He's managed to triple the rate of antisemitic hate crime and open a personal government propaganda office (the parts of the job he actually likes), but he's mostly just too lazy to actually do much else about socialism stuff; mostly the city just stays on its course of managed decline as he ignores the problems and lets the budget blow up.
Yes. In his heart he’s still at Bowdoin.
Genuinely what are you talking about, hes fixed the deficit and repaired 100,000 + potholes, and those are just things off the top of my mind, how does that constitute ignoring problems.
He "fixed the deficit" by illegally raiding the pension budget and rainy day fund and asking the state for a bailout. The actual budget is literally the highest it's ever been (and no, not for improved services).
The potholes thing is actually a good example of how he acts though: he's good at propaganda and it's the one part of the job he enjoys, so he takes "potholes keep getting patched at roughly the same pace as before" and makes a bunch of propaganda videos about it to pretend he's making some grand achievement so people look away while the city goes bankrupt and jobs keep leaving.
Saying he “illegally raided” the pension and rainy day funds isn’t accurate. The budget was balanced through a combination of state aid, budget changes, and pension restructuring. You can disagree with those choices or argue they aren’t sustainable, but that doesn’t change the fact that the deficit was eliminated. On the potholes matter, he fixed 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days of his term, if he keeps that rate up through to December it would be almost a 70% increase on NYTs usual 170,000 potholes filled a year.
I live in her district and so I see all her volunteers at tents passing out flyers. This is a predominately black and latino neighborhood and Darializa claims to be speaking for"the community" but of course all her volunteers I see are bright-eyed corn-fed white 20-somethings who probably just moved here and have no idea what life is like in a big crime-ridden City. That is, gentrifiers. The community she speaks for is Columbia students.
Exactly. Fresh off the boat from Iowa
Just voted against her. My wife didn’t vote because she said there was no one she wanted to vote for. Which fair enough the democrats are all about the narcissism of small differences these days.
Gulag for you
The good news is that incumbent Adriano Espaillat will probably withstand this primary challenge from Ms. Crazypants, and thus the thing will have blown up in Mamdani’s face. The bad news is that another of his endorsed candidates, Brad Lander, will probably win his primary challenge against Rep. Dan Goldman. Goldman is a very smart guy, and was lead counsel in the first impeachment trial against Trump. But Lander has shown that if you say “AIPAC” and “GENOCIDE” against a candidate named “Goldman” three times (both candidates are Jewish), you can win a Democratic primary in New York’s 10th Congressional District.
For more shits and giggles, Goldman was told not to return to a Brooklyn coffee shop because GENOCIDE:
https://nypost.com/2026/06/22/us-news/nyc-coffee-shop-bans-pro-israel-politician-in-nasty-post-despite-promise-to-treat-all-customers-with-unconditional-dignity/
ETA: I was wrong. Ms. Crazypants won.
I'm a Michigan Dem, and we've currently got DSA darling Abdul El-Sayed running in our Senate primary. I get emails from him multiple times a day, and 99% of them are about AIPAC: how AIPAC is trying to defeat him, and how Michigan voters need to rally against AIPAC. It's really disgusting. Even my wife, who's much more a "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" type than I am, agrees that his campaign message is basically "we must defeat the Jewish menace."
Aren’t people worried that he will lose to Mike
Rodgers?
I sure am. His campaign claims to have polls showing him doing better in the general than the other potential Dems, which seems like obvious BS to me.
I'm a lifelong Independent here in MI, and my wife's a lifelong registered Democrat. And we both agree that El-Sayed is one of the best cases in recent memory for not failing to vote in a *primary* election.
BS is about all this guy has going for him, which is all that's needed for the weaker minded and / or true believers and crazies in the electorate, as we've so clearly seen time and again on the right side of the ballot these past years and which now's increasingly infecting the left here and elsewhere as well.
When all's said and done, my take is that a win for El-Sayed in the primary will equal a win for Rodgers in the general.
So, I'd urge any and all Michiganders who'd prefer not to be represented by another Trump sucking Republican or just possibly a DSA Hasan-Piker-promoting asshole, to not fail to vote for one of the two 'normal' flavors of Democrats running in the primary in August, however your conscience may dictate...
... traditional moderate and coalitionist Haley Stevens, who understands 'compromise' isn't a four-letter word except concerning Constitutionality and the rule of law..
... or Mallory McMorrow, a seemingly principled young woman who's been labeled a Progressive for her stand on some issues (she defines herself as a "pragmatist"), but is definitely *not* a far left-wing guerilla socialist insurgent in the party as El-Sayed and the rest of the DSA wack jobs are, intent on using the Democratic party as a springboard to power for themselves and their so-called socialist agenda for "the people", not for the benefit of people who believe in traditional Democratic - and *democratic* - values.
It just all boils down to this, by my lights: When it comes to the sum of the people here in deep purple Michigan, if the Ds want to win state-wide races, El-Sayed and his like are people the Democrats could (and should) well do without.
From your lips to God's ears. I'm fine with either Stevens or McMorrow, and feel like this wouldn't be a particularly close race if only one of them was running against El-Sayed. But I'm worried about them splitting the normie vote and letting El-Sayed slip in with like 36% or something like that.
Ditto on all of that for me as well. I could easily live with either one of these women in the Senate.
But If El-Sayed manages to fuck this up and get on the ballot, I guess I'll be writing in a name in the general, since I wouldn't vote for Rodgers *or* El-Sayed just to keep Rodgers out, El-Sayed being that bad of a choice as far as I'm concerned.
And with my being nominally a lukewarm Christian and considering that after the past ten years I wouldn't vote for Jesus Christ for dogcatcher if he showed up and ran as a Republican, that's kinda' saying something.
Considering Slotkin, one of the most run-of-the-mill Dems possible, only beat Rogers by less than 1% in 2024, I’m a little skeptical as well.
Yeah I have relatives in Bloomfield Hills who are lifelong Dems but if he wins, they will crawl over broken glass to vote against him. But I’m sure there are people in Dearborn who will stay home if Stevens wins. Yikes.
I lived in Michigan for 15 years and am pretty concerned about the senate race. He’s vile. Is there any chance one of the other candidates gets the nomination? The polls look bleak, but I remember he also overperformed in polls in 2018 and then got his ass handed to him by Whitmer.
I have hopes that one of the normie candidates, probably Stevens, will pull it out. El-Sayed tends to run noisy campaigns that fizzle at the ballot box, and I'm hoping that's the case again.
Straight out of a 1930s Der Sturmer pamphlet.
Brad Lander is such an asshole.
He’s even admitted that zeroing in on AIPAC makes him feel “queasy” because of the antisemitic tropes but he continuously does so anyway. Typical spineless politician with no principles who’ll sell himself out to win.
The historical term “court jew” used to be dusted off to describe someone like Lander, but that instead makes me queasy. “He’s one of the good ones,” instead, is probably a phrase running through the heads of some of Lander’s DSA and DSA-adjacent supporters.
I think “useful idiot” is more appropriate. He makes an alliance with a group that has so many red flags that the organizer of a Moscow May Day parade would say it’s over the top. Landed will soon be shocked! shocked! that the group of morons, which includes outright islamists and anti-semites, is antisemitic.
Win or lose, I don’t see the DSA becoming less openly antisemitic. Mamdani is a a skilled politician with real charisma, so he was able to deflect his most retarded statements. Most of the other people in the DSA…are not that. They are morons who believe stuff so dumb that only the over educated and under- or unemployed could believe.
I also expect a lot of election denialism/trutherism once they start losing. It wasn’t commented on much at the time, but I found Sanders’ complaints about primary system in 2016 concerning. Not the “DNC rigged it” narrative, although that was ridiculously overblown, but his claims about outperforming in open primaries. I don’t think it was accurate, but regardless, the strategy is take over the party from the outside and reshape in its own image, people who care about the part be damned.
"I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
Someone said recently that it’s particularly risible to run on a platform of what kind of Jew you aren’t.
Chickens for KFC.
Yep, and as a token Mayor Smiley can use to parade around and prove that he’s not antisemitic.
Lander is also just such a loser. I can't believe anyone in his life likes him. But to be fair of the three he's three least crazy by far so there's that
He should be doing pharm ads for low T.
I have to remind myself once a week that he is straight.
Serious question, why are these loons allowed to run in the Democratic primary and not as a third party in the general? Do Republicans allow Nazis and Libertarians to call themselves Republicans for 6 weeks to run in their primaries?
Yes, they do. The whole point of primaries is to decide who gets to represent the party. There is no process to filter out lunatics before the primary, because the primary *is* the lunatic-filtering process.
Now, if your complaint is that the primary process is handled by a public vote instead of party leaders choosing a candidate... well, that's how it used to work in the US, and there's a case for going back to it. That case is currently holding UFC fights on the White House lawn and surrendering to Iran. The other option is finding ways to boost primary participation and dilute the crazy vote. Right now it's the worst of both worlds -- a small fraction of the electorate making the decision without anything to vet the decision-makers.
Yes. Duverger's Law states that in a first past the post system, you end up with two major parties that subsume what would otherwise be separate small parties under them. Just as the GOP includes Christian Zionists, abortion abolitionists, theocratic Dominionists, white nationalists, tech bros, and checked-pants country club types, the Democrats include any number of disparate interest groups. In a parliamentary system with proportional representation, you can end up with the opposite, like the recent Dutch elections that had, if I'm not mistaken, over 1000 candidates in 27 parties.
Republicans have pedo James Fishback running in the Florida Gubernatorial primary on an open white nationalist platform
Fast forward to now... Adriano lost ☠️
A testament to the resilience and perspicacity of the global anti-zionist movement. They’ve truly ‘got that dog in them’, as the kids and the NYT say
But would they have to bake a cake in the shape of a Star of David if requested?
Of course not. But a Jewish baker would be required to bake a cake with "We love Hamas."
There is a part of me that thinks it's almost impressive and even a little heartwarming how so many far-left types seem to honestly think that we're genuinely almost on the verge of achieving anarcho-syndicalist utopia to such an extent that we can just... get rid of police and prisons and the concept of criminal justice and law-enforcement. And that all that stands between the world and paradise is people finally throwing off the last vestiges of false consciousness and voting them into positions of power. In spite of all the vast vast vast amounts of evidence to the contrary. It makes me picture that pure trusting look of utter innocence my four-year-old niece gives me whenever I tell her something that she has never experienced and so is learning about for the first time.
This does not mean, I hasten to add, that I think my four-year-old niece should be anywhere near the levers of power. She turns into enough of a dictator when we play "post office".
These people are just like religious fanatics in how they hermetically seal themselves off from any dissenting voices, whom they deem as sinful heretics. This basically creates a Petri dish for the dumbest ideas you've ever seen.
Every time someone tries to emphasize a serious point by writing out the word "period" at the end of a sentence, I always think of those"tampax fits, period." commercials.
Sorta undercuts the point. Unless the point is about a fine line if menstruation products.
This Tampax guerilla marketing campaign is unorthodox but I like it.
To borrow from Patton Oswalt, "We're not number one, but we're up there!"
Also "Darializa Avila Chevalier" sounds like the kind of thing Ron Burgundy says as a diction warm-up
I would vote for the Republican to protect the party brand from this. I'm not even kidding.
Forget it. It's a deep blue district. Whoever wins the primary wins the general.
Sure but there have been extreme circumstances like when Doug Jones won in Alabama. That said, this is probably not that kind of situation.
I never stopped using "retard". After all, I currently live in Trumpworld.
I called the (orange) cat a retard this morning and my wife didn't even get mad, so I think the word is back.
Regarding the What Was I Thinking series, I sometimes think there hasn't been enough time to have a meaninful change of perspective. But now I know differently. "Half a decade ago is the early 2020s, a mostly-forgotten, black-and-white era so antiquated that many of us had slightly different haircuts and our around-the-house jeans were still our out-on-the-town jeans. Five years ago, I was a Mormon communist who thought that the global economy was run by the Keebler Elves."
She might have a shot with the Face Eating Leopards Party
I hope she wins. Normal Democrats need a low stakes wake up call that these DSA types are going to make their lives miserable if they don’t grow a spine.
Conditional on the DSA winning SOMETHING, this is about as good a place for her. She's in a safe seat, and no one is going to introduce (let alone pass) any federal bill containing the most moronic of DSA ideas. And she doesn't have the charisma/intelligence of AOC, so there's little chance of her becoming a national star. As a non-entity backbencher who will occasionally say stupid stuff that tarnishes her/the DSA's brand? Ugh. But it could be worse.
Like Fox News won't start running back to back coverage of her once she's in power. She's toxic to the brand.
Therein lies the problem. This is the kind of stuff that drives home the point that both parties are prone to attracting crazies. The reason people like Trump get elected in the first place is entirely because people are seeing elections as a race between two sets of crazies and deciding that the red crazies are at least closer to their values than the blue ones. Given that the red crazies took over their party long ago, this has been a complete own goal by Democrats.
Agreed. And if she is enough of a headache, they’ll redistrict her out of a job in a few years and she can go back to getting her PhD in decolonial basket weaving.
She will be the Lauren Boebert of the left.
What’s scary is that these ppl do seem to be gaining traction. I have a number of friends that are going to vote for a DSA member for mayor of LA. I ask them if they’ve read the DSA charter and understand what these ppl are really trying to accomplish. To which they respond that they don’t care because, like Mamdani, they won’t be able to actually accomplish the crazier shit they espouse.
This type of thinking is so reckless imo. The far-left socialists have already achieved massive success through the academic institutions, and this is just the next page of the playbook. I think we’d be naive at this point to think they can’t capture a real foothold (at least in city / state politics).
Nithya Ramen actually didn’t even get the DSA endorsement in LA because she didn’t hate Jews enough.
They probably can do it in a D+30 city. Good luck to them doing it anywhere else.
Here's a crazy thought on "crazy"... Hard to tell how much Chevalier weighs from the pictures of her that I've seen, but why not just gather up about 145 pounds or so of those green algae from the Reflecting Pool in D.C., stuff it all into a DSA skin suit of a human-looking candidate and run *that* for office?
The crazy thing here isn't Chevalier - wackos like her have been around forever and always will be. The crazy thing here is that NYC now has a mayor who thinks *she* is the kind of representative New York needs in D.C., where the algae bloom in the Reflecting Pool has a higher I.Q. and stronger grasp on reality than the entirety of the DSA and the dipsticks who support these dipshits.
The thing that I cannot understand about the "abolish the police" types is just who the hell do they think will enforce their socialist system? It pretty much sounds like a wild west scenario where you can do whatever to whomever you want.
Does she not realize that the wealthy oligarchs will just hire private security and have them kill whomever they feel threatened by? Maybe even her? Does it not occur to her that without police to arrest people for being racist or other woke transgressions that people will be free to do these things? That killings of minorities will go up because there is literally no penalty for doing so?
I know she doesn't care about "normal crime" as she sees things like theft, assault, murder, and rape as just revenge against "evil whites" or whatnot, but without police what is left to stop the "evil whites" from shooting rioters/looters/protestors or other troublesome people?
Like even from a far-left perspective it just makes no sense. How the hell do you enforce ANYTHING without police? It just makes me think that she is completely unserious/cynical and just says incendiary things to get her rocks off and/or rile people up.
I've asked the same question of AnCaps. Their answer is that interested people will band together to protect their interests. I think the assumption from people on Chevalier's side is that the Crips, Bloods, MS13, etc. are left wing and will maintain order.
Which is darkly amusing, considering many of these same people will criticize the police for being just a gang with a uniform. Maybe we can just put the policemen in plainclothes and that will satisfy them...
The idea that Crips and MS13 would step in and become the tolerance police is so hilarious that I almost wish this happens in some jurisdiction just so we can watch such a travesty unfold.
Also, wouldn't this make he Crips the police? The police are not abolished, only changed.
Well, the one difference with gangs would be that there'd be nothing close to an official monopoly of force. A town doesn't typically have two or more police forces of similar strength who fight each other as much as they fight crime.
Now does this sound better than just having police? That's a question they'd rather not answer...
Oh, and while people do joke, there's no police force that has a requirement that you kill an innocent to join up.
"No more police at all ever.” with clap emojis between the words, which is exponentially worse.
In all the time I’ve spent on substack I’ve actually laughed maybe twice, and one of those times was after reading “I went boom boom at the ballot box!”