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00:00:22.960i'm here with james kerchick jamie thanks for joining me on the podcast thanks for having me
00:00:29.340Sam. So if memory serves, I wrote you a fairly plaintive email not that long ago, just more or
00:00:36.380less crying out to the universe, who is going to write an article that reveals just how awful the
00:00:42.800DSA is and how this emerging suicide pact of embrasure from the Democratic Party is just
00:00:50.180completely dysfunctional. And yet it seems to be in the making. And you have written that article
00:00:56.060over at The Atlantic, where you now are. You used to be at The New York Times. I think we want to
00:00:59.940talk about how and why you made this transition. But over at The Atlantic, people can read your
00:01:05.440article, which is currently titled, The DSA is a Parasite. The left-wing faction is hijacking the
00:01:10.980Democratic Party. So I want to get into that. I want to link it up with our, I think, concerns we
00:01:16.440share about the state of American politics. But I'll just, you know, I'll save you a little time
00:01:21.180by just quickly summarizing these facts, that the DSA platform calls for abolishing the presidency,
00:01:27.780the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Pentagon, the police, prisons, border enforcement,
00:01:32.420all debt, capitalism, and private property itself. So I guess the big picture question,
00:01:38.660which I don't know if you have an answer to, but I would like us to never lose sight of it,
00:01:44.980How is it that mainstream Democrats, but literally every mainstream Democrat, hasn't recognized that this group and their consultation, their approval, any input from them at all should be treated like plutonium?
00:02:03.000Yeah, so I think this has been a problem on the left really for a century.
00:02:07.460If you go back to the Cold War, right, there were many people on the left who refused to see the danger of communism.
00:02:13.920There was the Progressive Party, which was basically controlled by the Communist Party, and they ran a presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, who had been the vice president of FDR and then served as agricultural secretary as well.
00:02:26.920And that party was basically, it wasn't an openly pro-communist party because there was a communist party in the United States, but it was a party of fellow travelers, which is the term that sort of came up in that time to describe people who were ideologically sympathetic to communism but weren't communists themselves.
00:02:41.980And there was this other sort of turn that came up of how liberals might describe communists, which is where they were liberals in a hurry, right? Which is that we basically same, we share the same outcomes, the same fundamental beliefs, but it's just that they want to get there a little faster. They want to break a few more eggs before we get there.
00:02:58.620And I still think there is this sort of residual sympathy among people on the left in the United States for people on the extreme left. There's even some sense, a sense of admiration for them, right? That we're not as courageous as they are. I wish I could be as courageous as Zoran Mamdani and come out and say the things that he's saying. But I'm kind of stuck here in my political reality where I have to do the day-to-day, you know, give and take with the Republicans.
00:03:21.720There are Democrats who have spoken out very clearly against this. I want to make that absolutely clear. You know, Josh Gottheimer, who's a congressman, Jared Moskowitz, who's a congressman, Tom Suozzi. These are all moderate Democrats. And obviously, John Fetterman, who's been probably the most vocal of them all. But there is this fear. And I think among the kind of intellectual class, you know, like sort of journalist types, the Ezra Clines, if you will, it's a fear of not being seen as cool, right? Because the DSA is cool.
00:03:50.620They're the cool kids at the cool kids' table.
00:03:52.760And there's a lot of pressure if you are a center-left or left-liberal commentator.
00:03:58.060There's a lot of pressure not to make fun of the cool kids, because then the cool kids
00:04:01.080are going to come and steal your lunch money.
00:04:02.900And that's just been a factor, I think, of American intellectual life for a very long
00:05:27.380And there's this alliance which is not even covert between Islamists and the far left and this so-called red-green alliance, which has been a century in the making.
00:05:40.580And perhaps we can talk about that. But I just want to focus on the communist piece or the Marxist piece. This word socialism is sort of deliberately ambiguous. And many people have it in their heads that when any representative of this side of our politics uses the term, they're signaling their support for some of the policies you see in Western Europe and just a more general concern about
00:06:12.360The extent to which wealth inequality in the limit is going to obviously make politics in, you know, not just in America, but in any Western democracy unworkable.
00:06:25.640And there's a certain there's certain Gini coefficient that no democracy can tolerate. And with the advent of AI and and this obviously corrupt, if not kleptocratic alliance between the billionaire class and the Trump administration, we're seeing just a very ugly side of capitalism and democracy now.
00:06:46.520And it's understandable that some people would say, well, this is all so awful. There's so much self-dealing. It's so cynical. Wealth inequality is such a problem. Something like Western European socialism has to be on our menu as Democrats.
00:07:05.000And yet what's astonishing is that if you just look at the DSA website, you have the poster boy for young, charismatic energy in the Democratic Party, Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, claiming to be a proud DSA member.
00:07:21.800right? And you just go to the website and you are pitched into an unapologetic communist0.58
00:07:29.920manifesto, right? And so, but my concern here is that leaving aside, you know, the Islamism of it0.88
00:07:36.480all, the antisemitism of it all, the insanity of having a New York mayor who spends half his time0.65
00:07:40.800talking about Israel and AIPAC, and perhaps we'll get into all of that. But if you just take this
00:07:46.800fact that the Democrats seem poised to promote people who can be credibly tarred as communists
00:07:57.060at the national level, right? And that just seems like the path, that is the path that fascism will
00:08:03.720take in America. Because I think if you give the American people a choice between communism and
00:08:07.760fascism, they will take the latter every time. It's what happened in Weimar, Germany,0.60
00:08:12.780Yeah. In other societies at the time. Yeah. But I mean, somehow, especially in America,
00:08:17.700that seems where we will default. And if, you know, a fear about, you know, fascist,
00:08:23.160a truly fascist takeover of America seems farfetched to you, then we can dumb it down
00:08:28.540perhaps considerably and just ask yourself, what would it take for one of these cartoon
00:08:35.240characters out of Trumpistan to become president in 2028? How would the Democrats have to misplay
00:08:41.220their hand, such that we get Donald Trump Jr. or President Matt Gaetz or President Mr. Pillow
00:08:49.420or some other just golem from right-wing populism. This is how you do it, right? You run someone who
00:08:58.960can't figure out what's wrong with being allied with a platform that explicitly says we are going
00:09:04.340to abolish capitalism and abolish private property. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we're close,
00:09:09.820hopefully, to having the Democrats nationally nominate a presidential candidate like that
00:09:14.580yet. I do think that this kind of hype about AOC becoming a presidential nominee, she might run,1.00
00:09:20.940but I do find it difficult to see her becoming a nominee. But we've got El-Sayed in Michigan,
00:09:26.540who may well become the senator there that will turn the Senate. I mean, this is a,
00:09:31.940Democrats haven't figured out how to say, sorry, this guy who, when you confront him with a
00:09:39.080attempted jihadist atrocity in his own state, when a fan of Hezbollah drives a pickup truck
00:09:45.980into the largest reformed synagogue in the world and tries to plow into a daycare center
00:09:53.080with 140 kids in it and he's armed to the teeth and we only avoid a massacre because a security
00:10:00.680guard kills him, for you then to say, in addition to any other lip service you paid to the problem
00:10:07.120of anti-Semitism, you say, but hurt people hurt people. And this is, you essentially blame Israel's
00:10:13.940defensive war against Hezbollah and Lebanon as the reason why Jews are now being targeted in
00:10:19.100your own state. I mean, Democrats are tolerating this now at the national level. So the only way
00:10:24.940that I can explain this is I think, again, there's something perhaps inherent to being on the left or
00:10:29.880being a liberal-minded person, which is that you are open-minded and oftentimes open-minded to a
00:10:36.440fault, right? That can be a good trait, being open-minded, right? You want to be open to new
00:10:40.400ideas. You want to be tolerant. You want to be respectful. You don't want to be a closed-minded
00:10:44.640right-wing authoritarian, okay? But you want to be open-minded. There's a difference between being
00:10:48.940open-minded and having absolutely no boundary. And I think that is a problem more for people
00:10:55.400on the left, actually, than I think on the right. I think we saw much, and I wrote this in the
00:11:01.320point that you, in the article that you mentioned in The Atlantic, there was a very nasty fight
00:11:05.600in the Republican Party and in the conservative movement 10 years ago over Donald Trump and MAGA.
00:11:10.180Really nasty. I mean, go back and look at what the candidates were saying to each other.
00:11:13.680I don't think that the left is as equipped to do that because they have this belief that being a
00:11:20.780liberal, being an open-minded person means that you have to be sort of open to anyone to the left
00:11:27.520of you, right? To the right of you, they're fascists, they can be condemned and whatnot.
00:11:31.280But anyone who claims to be to the left of you, even though Hamas and Hezbollah,
00:11:35.220despite what Judith Butler says, okay, are not socially progressive movements. They have taken
00:11:40.440this bizarre role in the left-wing mind that these, you know, Islamist reactionary fascist groups
00:11:48.120are somehow on the left, right? And so therefore we have to be open to them. They have legitimate0.61
00:11:53.220grievances. It is not our place to criticize them. If you are a person of color, we have no right to
00:11:58.600criticize you unless you're right wing, of course. So there's this whole mindset that I think a lot
00:12:04.140of liberals have, which is why you've seen so few of them really get up and say, you know what,
00:12:08.200I believe in a muscular liberalism, okay? Which says that, yes, I'm open-minded and I'm tolerant,
00:12:13.140but there are core values on which I will not compromise. And those values are, you know,
00:12:18.960small L, liberal democracy, women's equality, right? You know, freedom of expression. These
00:12:23.920are the things that I'm not, you know, terrorism, intentionally murdering civilians. These are the
00:12:27.960things that I'm not going to compromise on. And I don't care what you say your grievances are or
00:12:32.360where you come from, or how you identify yourself on the ideological spectrum. And we unfortunately
00:12:37.300do not have enough political figures on the left who are willing to stand up and draw those lines.
00:12:43.980How much of this is just sheer confusion on the part of the young and how much of this is actually
00:12:49.360calculated misinformation from people who know exactly what they're up to? And I'll give you
00:12:55.860just one example. What percentage of people on a college campus, like Columbia or Harvard or
00:13:01.860Stanford or any place that would protest Israel or be in favor, you know, uniformly love someone
00:13:08.200like Mamdani. But what percentage of people do you think actually believe that the hijab is a
00:13:15.280symbol of women's empowerment, as it was invoked at the Women's March years ago, with, you know,
00:13:20.580Linda Sarsour being one of the three anchors of that huge event? And what percent actually
00:13:27.140understand what it really is which every islamist understands is that it's the antithesis of that i0.84
00:13:33.120mean it is the sign of male dominance over women and that you know the women are are the repositories
00:13:40.480of male honor their behavior the the so-called male gaze is a theft of every man against every
00:13:48.000other man when he glances that you know at his the women in his life right so these these women
00:13:53.060are chattel, right? And yet it gets completely flipped and coded the opposite in left-wing1.00
00:14:00.820discourse. And there are probably many other examples of that sort of thing. How much of
00:14:04.880this do you chalk up to confusion? Among the young, I do chalk most of it up to confusion.
00:14:10.020It's really the professors who I think are the enemy. It's the professors who know better,
00:14:14.040right? They do know better. They've traveled and studied in these places, the area experts who
00:14:18.660make up the Middle Eastern Studies departments.
00:14:43.440And they—and this is, you know, if you want to get back—you mentioned this earlier,
00:14:46.760this history of the relationship between the far left and the Islamic right. And it really started
00:14:52.320to emerge after the Cold War, right? Because let's think about the Cold War. Communism was
00:14:56.260extremely hostile to religious faith of all kinds. I mean, right? What was the war in Afghanistan
00:15:01.580about that brought down the Soviet Union? It was the Soviets were going in to prop up a communist0.50
00:15:05.660government that was being fought by Islamic rebels. And across the Soviet Union, they suppressed
00:15:09.940Islamic religious practices throughout Central Asia and all the parts where there was Islam.
00:15:14.480And so once the Soviet Union collapsed, the left did not have the sort of global proletariat to fight for. Those were the masses that the left-wing intellectuals were going to fight for. So once that idea collapsed, they just simply replaced the proletariat with the Ummah, with the global community of Muslims.
00:15:34.880And this has been in the works since the 90s, and it was much more present in Britain and0.95
00:15:40.820And it's much more developed in those countries, by the way, where the main left-wing party
00:15:44.880in France now, La France Insoumise, is basically an Islamo-communist party.
00:15:51.240The Labour Party hasn't gotten to that point yet.
00:15:53.700I mean, there are elements of it, certainly.
00:15:55.800And certainly during the Corbyn years, it was drifting in that direction.
00:15:59.320And I just have to hope that in the United States, we have more kind of built-in, you
00:16:03.880know defense mechanism to to prevent such a thing from taking place because at the end of the day0.89
00:16:08.760there aren't that many islamic extremists living in the united states and there are not that many
00:16:13.200left-wing radical intellectuals okay like there really aren't but that's that's what i would say0.95
00:16:19.240is sort of the one thing that makes me think that there's a that we have some hope in in preventing
00:16:23.440what's taken place in europe from taking place in the united states well then let's kind of sharpen
00:16:28.760this up in talking about some specific characters here so mayor mamdani right i've taken a lot of
00:16:35.960from my audience for not uh recognizing what a charming secular uh and compassionate uh man he
00:16:43.920so obviously is given the percentage of time he's speaking a sentence with a smile but i mean i view
00:16:50.660him as somebody who could have just been cooked up in a lab and had his facial muscles tuned to the
00:16:55.820the perfect algorithm so as to just baffle 90% of any audience he's ever in front of. I mean,
00:17:03.340I view him as superficially charming and quite obviously evasive on points that he,
00:17:09.680where he knows what, you know, words mean. The fact that he can't clearly condemn the phrase
00:17:15.480globalize the Antifada does not, I mean, I do not think he's like one of these undergraduate dummies
00:17:22.300who thinks it must mean must be benign in principle i mean given his background given
00:17:26.940who his parents are given his his immersion in these issues i know he knows that globalize the
00:17:32.500intifada means globalize a terroristic campaign targeting jews right and this is so the fact that
00:17:39.720he is so hair splitting and mincing of his words on that topic as well as others to me is a tell0.71
00:17:49.220Now, I don't know that he's, you know, I don't know that he really is in his heart of hearts a proper Islamist. I don't know how strong his actual religious commitments are. You know, El-Sayed strikes me as having less of a veneer and he's more obviously kind of a religious bully. And again, I don't even know where to put him on the continuum of, you know, Islamism, right?0.50
00:18:11.080But these guys are at minimum fellow travelers with people who I think should scare us, right?0.62
00:18:17.500I mean, this is the inroads that the Muslim Brotherhood, to name one extreme organization, has made into our politics through, you know, care.0.84
00:18:28.340You know, the Council of American Islamic Relations is treated like some Muslim version of the ACLU, whereas it really is an Islamist front group.0.71
00:18:35.060There's something nefarious about all of this. And again, I don't know how deep it runs with Mamdani or El Saeed or any particular person, but it's obvious that these people have created a kind of public face and in El Saeed's case, not even much of a face, given how he doesn't check boxes that he really you would think he should to get elected.0.71
00:18:56.900Am I right to be as allergic as I am to the careers of these two guys so far? I mean, you can throw in their proximity, especially El-Sayed's proximity with Hassan Piker here, who is just a goon. I mean, I don't even think he's a practicing Muslim, but he's certainly an anti-Semite and who's stirring this pot. What's your perception of these characters?
00:19:20.360No, I think Mamdani is the most sinister of the bunch.0.61
00:19:23.060And I think the reason why he's so sinister
00:20:04.140But if Trump were born and raised in Venezuela, okay, he would be, you know, a caudillo.0.97
00:20:11.700He would become a Chavez-like bully and do those things.
00:20:14.580It's only because he grew up in a society, a democratic society with all the restraints
00:20:18.340And that imposes on someone that he can't be that, right? I have no doubt that Mamdani, you know, had he stayed in Uganda, right, or wherever his parents moved him to, that he would have come up and grown up just like any kind of third worldist political leader.0.83
00:20:34.500And that's a term that we also need to introduce into this conversation, because it's more specific than Islamo-leftism, is third-worldism. And this was, of course, the idea that started in the 1950s and 60s to describe what was then known as the non-aligned movement. And these were the countries of what was then called the third world, the undeveloped world.
00:20:52.820these were the countries that were sort of nominally independent they were not a part of the
00:20:57.380western coalition nor were they a part of the communist coalition although most of them it
00:21:02.380should be said were sympathetic to and often collaborated with the ussr and its satellite
00:21:07.800states and so third worldism i think is really if you want to understand mamdani's ideology
00:21:12.560if you want to understand the ideology of piker and sayed it's third worldism and what is that
00:21:19.360it is a belief that the West, the collective West, the industrialized, you know, Western
00:21:25.320advanced countries are essentially at the root of all evil and that they are the problem.
00:21:31.660They have caused all the problems and that basically what politics needs to be is a form0.89
00:21:37.320of revenge from the downward trodden from the third world, right? From the, um, from Muslims1.00
00:21:44.460or part of the UMA, from the trans who are part of, you know, all these sorts of intersectionally
00:21:50.540connected oppressed classes, the Jews, you know, being notably one that are not included in this
00:21:55.920paradigm, right? That basically politics has to be a form of revenge against the West. And that0.74
00:22:01.960is, I think, what Mamdani wants to play out. He's, you know, working obviously on a much smaller
00:22:07.680scale in New York. He's so, again, he's so clever, right? He's not just, he's only seven or eight
00:22:12.660months into office, he's not going to screw things up by firing the police commissioner,
00:22:16.160who everyone agrees is doing a great job in keeping crime down, right? He's going to move
00:22:20.380slowly, incrementally. He's doing this now with some of the property laws, some of the tax laws
00:22:25.780that he's implementing, certainly building these ridiculous government-sponsored grocery stores,
00:22:30.420which are going to put the private grocery stores out of business. And so now they're going to
00:22:34.100give government money to the private grocery stores so they don't go out of business. It's
00:22:37.440just creating this massive boondoggle that, of course, if you were a 10th grader learning
00:22:42.620economics, you would know that this sorts of thing doesn't work. But again, it's not just
00:22:46.800performative. It is part of a long-term strategy. And so, yeah, I just think third-worldism is
00:22:53.040really a term that we need to be using more. And if I were someone, you know, in the mainstream of
00:22:57.900the Democratic Party, that's what I would be actually campaigning on and trying to expose
00:23:02.260these people. Yeah, it offers some key to the fate of Israel at the UN. I mean, many people0.76
00:23:10.140take Israel's pariah status in the international community as a sign of just how malevolent a state
00:23:19.160it is. It must be a bad actor because the UN has passed more resolutions against Israel than all
00:23:25.680other states combined, including Iran and Russia and China and North Korea, et cetera. Well, how
00:23:31.280did that happen? Well, it happened because all of these states, the Arab states, the African states
00:23:35.440have historically operated in a coalitional way, often backed by the Soviet, back in the day by
00:23:42.260the Soviet Union. And there was a period where it was Israel and South Africa, which were the
00:23:47.420demonized states. And then when apartheid got evaporated, it was just Israel left being the
00:23:54.120outlier against which this coalition has continued to work. And again, stepping away from the
00:24:01.540foreign policy of it all, the Israel of it all, the, you know, I'm hearing echoes of Noam Chomsky
00:24:07.780and much of that criticism. Step away from all of that. I'm still finding it difficult to understand
00:24:13.620how mainstream Democrats, you know, from President Obama on down, can look at Mamdani, look at his
00:24:21.720unselfconscious proud affiliation with the dsa look at the dsa website and not see
00:24:30.040that this is a kind of suicide pact politically for 2028 i mean how is it that you how are you
00:24:37.100going to hold up as your new star player somebody who is proudly associated with a platform that
00:24:44.380envisions the eradication of private property and i was like what does this hold for the next