Democratic Party Must Ban DSA Candidates from Primaries

It is the DSA’s noxious style, more than policy substance that has caused a growing rift. They are often the most belligerent, obnoxious, self-righteous assholes I’ve ever encountered in politics. That is saying something, considering my day job is monitoring the Religious Right. I’m also a former progressive talk show host who can no longer stomach the moral purity tests or their exhausting martyr/savior complexes.

One of the primary arguments the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) routinely make against the Democratic Party is that they are spineless and feckless. Democratic leaders should respond with strength by prohibiting DSA members from running in future Democratic primaries. Change the rules now, before socialists can enact their devious plan to rule the Party.

Daniel Moraff is one half of the DSA duo, along with Leanne Fan, who is responsible for selecting Graham Platner as a U.S. Senate candidate. Platner quit the race this week after a credible rape allegation made by a Democratic woman.

Moraff made it crystal clear that his goal is to use subterfuge to destroy the Democratic Party, so why let him?

“We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces — forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party. Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists.”

Moraff wrote this deceptive strategy in a now-deleted 2017 essay published in the magazine In These Times, which was titled, “Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries.”

Democrats need to wise up and realize that DSA is an insurgency. The Party is under siege by a socialist organization that is not acting in good faith. Country Club Republicans similarly ignored radicals within their own Party and the results have been devastating. Mainstream Republicans first buried their heads in the sand in 1980 by opening the tent to the Religious Right. Then they stupidly welcomed insane the Tea Party and finally opened the door to MAGA. and now the GOP has been destroyed, overrun with radicalized extremists.

How’d that work out for non-crazy Republicans? They are now politically homeless, having quit the Republican Party or been unceremoniously purged. Do normie Democrats want to suffer the same fate?

Unfortunately, it’s too late to ban DSA renegades in 2026. Going forward, however, they should be forced to run under their own tainted brand. Every day that the Democratic Party allows DSA to invade their primaries, the socialists mock them as weak and wishy-washy—which I suppose is true if Democrats continue to allow themselves to be played as suckers.

What increasingly separates DSA members from actual Democrats is primarily not policy. Most Democrats also want to raise the minimum wage, tax billionaires, ensure that sick people can see doctors and focus on affordability. While Democrats want a strong defense, they also want to avoid endless Iraq-type wars.

No, it is the DSA’s noxious style, more than policy substance that has caused a growing rift. They are often the most belligerent, obnoxious, self-righteous assholes I’ve ever encountered in politics. That is saying something, considering my day job is monitoring the Religious Right. I’m also a former progressive talk show host who can no longer stomach the moral purity tests or their exhausting martyr/savior complexes.

On Facebook, political commentator John Becker—who is a progressive Democrat--nailed the problem with DSA and progressive extremists, as well the political implications of their know-it-all arrogance:

Platner is an all-too-perfect avatar of a movement that’s addicted to grievance and whose primary goal is not to win elections in order to preserve and strengthen democracy and build up the critical mass of power and votes in Congress to enact a progressive policy agenda... but rather, to feed its own addiction to anger — not at the MAGA fascist Republicans who are systematically tearing this country apart, but their anger at...other Democrats.

They’re the ones who heckle, protest, and scream the ugliest of epithets at members of their own party but have no such energy for the Republicans who spend every waking moment actually attacking all the communities and causes they claim to care about.

They’re the same folks who loudly and religiously practice performative purity politics, zealously enforcing arbitrary linguistic and single-issue litmus tests and delusionally insisting on rigid, 100% lockstep ideological conformity in order to even be bothered to vote for a candidate. And if the party’s candidate only agrees with them 98% of the time? Hope you like fascism, I guess.

Becker is correct--DSA members are frequently intolerant of even slight disagreements. Instead of civilized debate, they hurl F-bombs like they are candy from a Pez dispenser. And when they are proven wrong—like Platner’s predicable and inevitable flameout? Instead of offering humility, they spew endless conspiracies about “The Establishment” rigging the game, or they gaslight Democrats by accusing them of engaging in a circular firing squad, even as they hold the rhetorical machine guns and create political carnage in their destructive wake.

Speaking of gaslighting, Platner’s hopelessly naïve supporters nominated a dog shit candidate with more red flags than China. They elevated this walking scandal in a critically important race that could determine control of the U.S. Senate. After recklessly placing all of their rotten eggs in the Platner basket, they emotionally blackmailed those of us who warned against Platner, by accusing us of secretly “supporting Collins.”

In my case, I was repeatedly accused by antisemitic DSA extremists of working for AIPAC—which is their second most frequent boogeyman after “The Establishment.” Personally, I don’t care for AIPAC because they are too conservative and were rude to Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I’ve never given a penny to AIPAC. I don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu and hope he loses his election in Israel. Additionally, I’ve never visited Israel, don’t know any Israelis, and I’m not religious.

But I am a Jewish Democrat who questioned the wisdom of nominating Graham Platner. Apparently, that’s enough for a surprising number of DSA members to call me an agent of AIPAC or question my Democratic credentials—even though I’ve belonged to the Party since 1988.

It’s interesting, but the DSA fanatics who are obsessed with Israel—to a pathological degree—are rarely concerned with what’s occurring in other parts of the world. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wisely pointed out:

“We should have the fortitude to speak up about human rights outrages whether the responsible party is Russia, China, Israel, America or the Emirates; if you care about human rights in only some places, you don’t actually care about human rights.”

As I’ve said repeatedly, it is perfectly okay to question Israel’s policies and disagree with its leaders. It’s completely unacceptable to question whether Israel should exist. That debate ended in 1948 when Israel became a country.

Antisemitism, like racism and misogyny, warp the mind. When not diagnosed and properly treated, it can lead to radicalism, bizarre conspiracies and often results in poor political decision making—such as thinking Platner was a good candidate.

Platner’s Nazi tattoo and long history of bigoted, woman-despising online comments should have derailed his campaign. Yet, we were treated to moral and political blindness by progressive “leaders” like Representative Ro Khanna of California.

“I made the wrong call [on Platner],” Khanna admitted. “I missed the signs. Are there any takeaways? Being even more sensitive to warning signs or red flags in candidates who may have those kinds of allegations show up.”

Sorry, but such a high level of self-delusion doesn’t cut it. A Nazi tattoo wasn’t enough of a clue? Khanna missing the signs on Platner was like missing the flashing signs on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. It is the equivalent of missing the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It is what happens when progressives become so desperate to defeat MAGA, they resort to lowering the bar and end up recruiting flakey candidates who are “dumb and sleazy”, instead of finding good candidates who are “smart and tough.”

Tragically, too many of DSA candidates are in the Platner mold—peddling raw bigotry or extremist views. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens pointed out a few DSA’s luminaries:

Barring a political miracle, the party will next year have a new member of Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who, the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, celebrated the event in Times Square. Another probable future representative, Claire Valdez, vowed on July 4 to “fight for liberation from Palestine to Puerto Rico.”

A would-be U.S. senator, the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, offered an alternative take on Michelle Obama’s famous line about going high when your opponent goes low: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” he said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.” (El-Sayed is a doctor.)

In Wisconsin, a democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, is the polling favorite in the race for the Democratic nominee for governor; in 2021 she said that “police exist to uphold white supremacy” and should be abolished; more recently, she has said her “perfect world would be a world without prisons.”

Where are these lunatics coming from? We can look to DSA strategists like the aforementioned Daniel Moraff, who discovered and then failed to properly vet Platner. In July, Moraff told The Wall Street Journal, “I think if what voters wanted were people who were grown in vats and had never done or said anything they might regret their entire lives we’d have a very different country.”

Platner’s candidacy, however, was anything but organic. It was birthed from scratch inside of a socialist vat. Moraff owns Dark Forest, a consulting firm that scours the country to scout for DSA candidates. The New York Post wrote:

Moraff and Fan…had first gotten wind of Platner through the local DSA network, where he had been active in the local offshoot group Acadia Action and had been featured in a recent New York Times travel story about oysters in Maine. They entered Ironbound, Platner’s mother’s restaurant, just a few miles from where he lives in Sullivan and made contact. After talking with him, they felt they had their candidate.

So, Moraff and Fan cynically cast Platner—without proper vetting. They knew he was merely an actor playing a conjured role that had little resemblance to his actual life. Platner was not the gruff, working class every-man that they were presenting in the media.

Platner grew up in a wealthy family—who sent young Graham to an $80,000 per year private school—before he was expelled for bad behavior (First Red Flag). His one accomplishment in life—which is laudable--was serving his country in the military. Other than that, he was a lifelong fuck up with a tawdry paper trail.

Ironically, these DSA Ivy League-educated consultants created the Platner oysterman action figure in the name of “authenticity”—which they habitually accuse the Democratic Party of lacking.

While we are on the subject of Moraff, he may have a personal stake in lowering standards for candidates running for public office:

Payday Report learned that Congresswoman Summer Lee barred Moraff from her 2022 congressional campaign after receiving at least three complaints of sexual misconduct against Moraff.

Given the fact that both Congresswoman Lee and Justice Democrats stopped working with Moraff following these accusations, questions have been raised about why so many on the left trusted him to give a thorough vetting and assessment of Platner.

“Birds of a feather, flock together and Moraff and Platner were predators,” said one woman, who says she was sexually harassed while working to elect Congresswoman Lee.

It’s time to put the kybosh on DSA’s hostile takeover of the Democratic Party by changing the rules to ban them from Democratic primaries. It is bad enough these self-important fools may have handed the Senate over to Donald Trump. If we let them continue their power grab, they will most certainly cost us the presidency in 2028.

That doesn’t mean that Democrats can’t learn from DSA’s recent successes. The Democratic Party should adopt their best attributes—the immediacy they bring for passing progressive legislation and helping with affordability, recruiting inspiring candidates and superior online messaging.

But it should also jettison DSA’s fatal flaws: Unabashed Antisemitism, BernieBro misogyny, peddling conspiracies, not properly vetting candidates, acting like jerks, and pushing extremist ideas that make Democrats unelectable outside America’s bluest cities.

It could be a net positive that the DSA has lit a fire under the behinds of often-lethargic Democrats. The trick is to quickly siphon off DSA’s energy before these nihilistic insurgents burn down the Democratic Party.

Share