As democratic socialists openly publish plans to dismantle core constitutional institutions, the question is no longer what they believe, but whether Americans are finally paying attention.
This editorial ran in the Tuesday 14 July 2026 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
When socialists tell you what they intend to do, believe them.
The Democratic Socialists of America has published its program. It calls it “Workers Deserve More.” The title flatters the reader, hides the cost, and turns a power grab into a moral appeal.
But slogans are not policy. Policy follows the applause line. The DSA says working people should control “their own lives, their government, and the economy.” That sounds democratic until you notice the missing word: individual. In socialist language, “the people” rarely means your family, your church, your savings account, or your conscience. It means political management by those who claim to speak for the collective.
City Journal reports that the DSA’s platform includes abolishing the Senate, abolishing what it calls “the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” amnesty for all immigrants, public ownership of major corporations and essential industries, defunding the Department of War, “Free Palestine,” voting rights for noncitizens, and replacing the president and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress.
That is regime change. A platform that calls for a new socialist republic is not trying to repair the Constitution. It is trying to bury it.
Members of Congress do not swear loyalty to a theory, a party, or a movement. They swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to bear “true faith and allegiance to the same.” Federal officers and service members face it too. Those who take that oath may criticize the Constitution or seek amendments through Article V. But they cannot honestly say they will defend a Constitution they intend to scrap.
Nobel laureate economist F. A. Hayek warned that central planning fails because planners lack knowledge. Ludwig von Mises pressed the harder point: without private ownership and real prices for capital goods, planners cannot rationally calculate. Rand put the political danger more sharply: communism imposes the collectivist end by force, while socialism seeks to reach it by vote. Democracy can count votes. It cannot repeal scarcity.
When the Berlin Wall fell, no one ran toward East Berlin. And nobody risks life and limb to escape to Cuba for the blessings of socialism. People flee socialism, they do not flock to it.
The DSA understands the Democratic Party in the same instrumental way. NYC DSA Co-Chair Gustavo Gordillo said the Democratic Party functions as a ballot-access vehicle, not a political home. Win under the Democratic label. Caucus with Democrats when useful. Push the socialist agenda from inside. Treat the establishment not as an ally, but as an obstacle.
That is entryism with a campaign office.
Colorado now offers the sequel. In Denver, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette. Socialists can topple entrenched Democrats wherever activist networks and low-turnout primaries line up.
Darializa Avila Chevalier shows where this pipeline leads. She is a DSA-backed Democratic nominee in a Democratic district. Reports say her deleted posts backed abolishing police, prisons, and borders, seizing private property, nationalizing major industries, and questioning Israel’s right to exist. She attended a pro-Palestinian rally one day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre and later refused to condemn Hamas.
This is not youthful idealism. It is abolition, dispossession, and anti-American contempt wearing a congressional campaign button.
The Red Rabbits show the street-level side. DSA describes them as protest marshals and de-escalators, while City Journalreports their commission has prepared for a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality”. A lawful republic protects protest. It does not owe political movements a private enforcement arm.
Nick Gier has spent years asking Daily News readers to embrace democratic socialism. He has praised “market friendly redistributionism,” trying to distinguish democratic socialists from authoritarians.
So here is the local question: Does Gier still want Daily News readers to treat the DSA as benign, or will he now say plainly that today’s DSA has crossed a line? Does he support this DSA? Does he defend its anti-constitutional program? Does he support abolishing the Senate, public ownership of major corporations, and Red Rabbits-style organizing against law enforcement?
Or does he reject all of that and admit that the DSA has become exactly what many of us warned socialism becomes when it gains confidence?
Workers do deserve more. They deserve sound money, honest prices, safe streets, property rights, and a government limited enough to leave room for family, church, business, charity, and local life.
They do not deserve to become raw material for someone else’s revolution.
The DSA is not hiding the destination. It is publishing the road map.
Believe the map. Read the map. Stop following the map.