Ken Klippenstein: Cole Allen Hated the Democratic Party, Too

 Cole Allen Hated the Democratic Party, Too

Alleged shooter's views are more mainstream than you've been told

Ken Klippenstein April 28, 2026

Cole Tomas Allen

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Extremist. Radicalized. Leftist. Anti-Christian. Democrat.

To read the coverage of Cole Allen, the alleged White House Correspondents' Association dinner gunman, you'd think he was a poster boy for the administration's belief that the country is under siege from a left-wing insurgency (see: NSPM-7). The evidence, as you'll see, says otherwise — but everyone from the White House to major media outlets are sticking to the script regardless.

President Trump declared Allen “radicalized.” 

RNC Chairman Joe Gruters blamed a “radicalized left” for the incident, calling it “the inevitable result of a radicalized left that has normalized political violence.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said investigators were probing any connection Allen may have had to left-wing groups or were looking for accomplices and co-conspirators.

Even hyper-liberal MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) “Justice and Intelligence” correspondent Ken Dilanian parrots the administration line, claiming Allen is one of several attackers “on the far left fringes”: 

“So it really fits the pattern of what we’ve seen with Luigi Mangione, accused of killing the United Healthcare CEO, or Tyler Robinson, accused of killing Charlie Kirk — of these sorts of people on the far-left fringes who have become radicalized, who are living in a world of unreality, bombarded by conspiracy theories, who decide that they have to take violent action.”

But as I’ve written, Luigi Mangione, Tyler Robinson and now Cole Allen were neither far-left nor on any partisan fringe. Instead, they were united in a sense of frustration with failed institutions defined by inaction — and a determination to embody the opposite through shocking spectacles of action. What nobody in power wants to admit is that the belief that institutions have failed is as mainstream as Taylor Swift, not the fringe radicalism of '70s outfits like the Weather Underground that pundits keep invoking.

Allen, his social media posts reveal, was not singularly focused on Trump. He had plenty of contempt for Democratic leaders too — a contempt for both parties that, far from being fringe, actually puts squarely in the majority of American opinion. By early 2025, the Democratic Party had sunk to historic lows: 27% approval in NBC News polling and 29% at CNN — the lowest in CNN's polling since 1992. A Pew survey found 59% of Democrats disapproved of their own congressional leadership. That’s more than 25 million American voters, according to the latest numbers.

Hating the political establishment may once have made you a member of the radical fringe, but those days are long gone. Strange as it may seem, Allen is, politically speaking, a dime a dozen.

Consider his social media posts.

“If this is the extent to which Democratic leadership is willing to lead, it is time to form an actual third party,” Allen posted on Bluesky on January 21, 2025. 

It was one of numerous other similar posts in which Allen called for an alternative to the Democrat and Republican parties.

“At this point might be faster to replace it with a new party … call it the ‘Do Something’ party, idk,” he said in another post, one of countless hints at his frustration with political inaction.

“If this is the level of analysis coming out of the leaders of the dem party!!…might need an entirely new party tbh,” he said in another post.

“I swear the democrat party does not comprehend the concept of priorities…,” he wrote on February 13.

By March, he was calling for the ouster of the top-ranking Democrat in Congress, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Is there such a thing as a vote of no confidence for Senate minority leader?” he posted on March 13.

The day before, Allen was cracking jokes about Schumer’s uselessness.

“Schumer is acting like an rpg [role playing game] player who hoards every single potion, powerup, and consumable he comes across because ‘maybe I’ll need them later,’” he wrote on March 12.

“Schumer’s assignment was not turned in on time,” he cracked on April 8 — days before the attack.

To call Allen a foot soldier of the Democratic left requires ignoring much of what he posted online. It’s a convenient narrative — it casts political violence as a product of partisan extremism rather than what the polling actually suggests: a broad, bipartisan collapse of faith in American institutions and their leadership.

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No Kings Day. Millions Must Break From the Democratic Party's Stifling Grip and Bring Real Power to the Table

Source: Minnesota Reformer

By Sirantos Fotopoulos

Eight to nine million Americans took to the streets yesterday. That figure, if accurate, represents the single largest day of protest in the history of the republic — a number that ought to inspire something more than a modest, collegial pride in the capacity of a citizenry to inconvenience municipal traffic. And yet, when one examines what was actually said, what was actually demanded, and what the organisers have advertised as the desired outcome, a terrible deflation sets in. The crowd was enormous. The imagination animating it was not.

There is a distinction — one that the liberal mind has spent the better part of a century carefully avoiding — between the politics of expression and the politics of leverage. To march, to carry a sign, to chant in unison, is to engage in the former. It is to signal one's preferences, to perform one's values, to exist, for an afternoon, as a moral actor in a public space. It is not without worth. It is not, however, power. Power is not the expression of a preference; it is the capacity to impose a cost upon those who ignore it. And the cost that eight million Americans imposed on Saturday upon the systems that govern their working lives, their wages, their healthcare, their housing — was precisely nothing.

History is not generous to those who mistake visibility for leverage. Consider what actually broke the back of American apartheid — not the marches alone, magnificent as they were, but examples such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, which lasted three hundred and eighty-one days and drained the municipal transit system of the revenue it depended upon. The citizens of Montgomery, Alabama did not merely express their contempt for segregation; they withdrew their economic participation from the machinery that enforced it. They hit the system where systems are built to feel: in the accounting ledger. The result was a Supreme Court ruling that the segregation of public buses was unconstitutional. This was not sentiment. This was organised economic coercion of the most disciplined and principled kind.

Or consider the Flint, Michigan sit-down strike of 1936 and 1937, when workers of the United Auto Workers occupied the General Motors plants at Fisher Body and refused to vacate. They did not petition. They did not rally in a public square and disperse at dusk. They seized the productive apparatus of the then largest corporation in the world and held it for forty-four days until General Motors recognised their union and their right to collective bargaining. The lesson was not lost on American capital, which is precisely why it has spent the ninety years since methodically dismantling the legal and institutional framework that made such actions possible.

The South African anti-apartheid movement succeeded not when it generated sympathetic international coverage, though it did, but when the combination of internal labor strikes and external sanctions made the maintenance of apartheid economically irrational for the white business class. In each of these cases, the mechanism of change was identical: the withdrawal or threatened withdrawal of productive participation. Not the expression of grievance, but the imposition of its costs upon those with the power to remedy it.

 

The question must then be put, with all appropriate directness, to the leadership of the organised American liberal center: why does it consistently channel these energies away from that mechanism and toward the electoral ballot box? The answer is not flattering, and the evidence for it is voluminous. The Democratic Party since Obama's election has had multiple opportunities — unified control of the federal government, enormous popular mandates, genuine public appetite for structural change — and in each instance it has deployed the language of transformation to deliver the reality of management. The Obama administration inherited the worst financial crisis since 1929, the product of a deregulated banking sector whose executives had enriched themselves catastrophically at public expense. Not one senior financial executive went to prison. The banks were recapitalised. The executives kept their bonuses. The foreclosure crisis was managed with instruments carefully calibrated to protect creditor interests. And the Democratic Party called this a rescue.

The party's record on war is, if anything, more damning. It was Obama that expanded the drone assassination programme into a bureaucratised machinery of extrajudicial killing across seven countries, that prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, that continued the military presence in Afghanistan for another decade before a chaotic and humiliating exit, that armed the Saudi coalition in Yemen and presided in silence over one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the century. It was under Biden that the genocide in Gaza was not simply ignored, but prosecuted, funded, and armed.

The progressive base of the party organised, marched, donated, and delivered electoral victories — and received in return a programme that any honest foreign policy analyst would recognise as the managerial continuation of American imperial prerogative under a more articulate and palatable executive.

The corporate Democratic Party currently functions to absorb the energy of popular discontent, to translate it into electoral mobilisation, and to return it to the existing order shorn of its structural ambitions. It is the most sophisticated mechanism of co-optation in the democratic world, and it has been performing this function with remarkable consistency for five decades. The unions that appear at rallies like No Kings are not there as power-wielding institutions making demands upon the system; they are there as props, lending their iconography to a movement whose explicit horizon is a midterm election in which the same party, with the same donors and the same structural commitments, seeks to return to office.

None of this is an argument for despair, and anyone reaching for that conclusion has misread both the historical record and the present moment. Eight million people in the streets is not nothing. It is a vast reservoir of organised human will, and reservoirs can be redirected. The Minnesota general strike earlier this year — workers withdrawing their labor in explicit response to a specific act of state violence — demonstrated that the infrastructure for production-side politics exists, that it can be activated, and that it produces a qualitatively different kind of political pressure than any march. The task is not to condemn those eight million people but to argue, with all available force and clarity, for a different theory of change. And the point is to perpetuate such actions beyond a mere performative twenty-four hours.

 

That theory begins with the workplace. Not the polling station, not the consumer boycott, not the performative gestures against creeping authoritarianism — though these have their limited uses — but the site of production, where the worker's indispensability is a structural fact rather than a sentimental aspiration. A sustained general strike with clear demands imposes immediate and quantifiable costs upon the powerful in ways that eight million cleverly-worded signs do not. The rebuilding of genuine trade union power, particularly in the service sector, logistics, healthcare, and the supply chains upon which the entire economy depends, is the long-term project that a serious Left must pursue with the same discipline and patience that the Right has brought to its judicial and legislative programme over the past fifty years.

 

Alongside this, the municipalist tradition offers a more immediate path. Cities and counties can be won, administered, and used to build counter-institutions: public banks, community land trusts, public ownership of resources, and other such cooperative enterprises that remove productive assets from the speculative market and place them under democratic control. This is not utopian; it is the patient, unglamorous, brick-by-brick construction of a parallel economy that reduces dependence on the goodwill of a federal government and a corporate class that have repeatedly demonstrated they do not share the interests of the people who marched on Saturday.

 

The choice, stated plainly, is this: eight million people can return to this arrangement every few months, expressing their displeasure with ever-greater articulacy and ever-diminishing effect, until the next election cycle absorbs them and a party machine converts their passion into donations and voter turnout for candidates who will govern in the interests of the existing ruling class. Or they can ask the harder question — not who shall we vote for, but what shall we refuse to do, what shall we withhold, what shall we build in the spaces the present order cannot reach. The first path is comfortable, photogenic, and historically futile. The second is slow, difficult, unglamorous, and the only one that has ever actually worked.

Mamdani Treads an All Too Familiar Path

Richard Mellor

Zohran Mamdani's election as Mayor of New York City inspired thousands of working class people, giving many of them hope that their living standards were about to improve. It showed that a candidate that kept the issues to the needs and aspirations of working class people could get elected even in the face of vicious racist and xenophobic attacks from the Wall Street criminals, land speculators and real estate pimps that control the city's finances. Beyond that, as a Muslim, he won in a city with a large Jewish population as he spoke in support of Palestinian rights.

The propaganda machine was relentless.  Never ending fear mongering, threats from the billionaires that they would take their money and leave the city never toppled the Mamdani train from the tracks. How can that not be exciting?

The problem is, we have seen these campaigns before. Myself and others like me, particularly those of us that have been around for a while, have lived through many of them. So, exiting as his victory was, it was an electoral victory, in the face of many firsts---he's a Muslim, he is an immigrant born in Uganda, a child of Indian parents. There is one unfortunate similarity with other victories like his; he is a candidate of the other Wall Street Party-------the Democrats.

I went back to look at Jesse Jackson's platform in 1988 and it was similar to Bernie Sanders platform 30 years later. Jackson made class appeals, talked of "us and them" ""fishes and sharks" "haves and have nots" and so on. But the Democratic Party machine put a stop to all that nonsense and Jackson shifted to the right, to the, "we are all in this together" mode. Class war must not be mentioned even in its mildest form which is what Mamdani’s platform was.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's victory was exciting too. Any time the big guys get taken down a peg it gives people hope that things will change for the better. But that hope gets dashed pretty quickly because the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and as much a billionaire’s party as the Republicans are. 

Those three billionaires we saw in the front seats at Trump's inauguration would be sitting in the same spot were a Democrat elected president. The billionaires own both parties and we could see that during the 2020 election when even the hated Dick Cheney, who was often referred to as Satan by many Democratic Party faithful’s, switched sides and was Satan no more. In the face of Trump, the imbecile George W Bush, the guy who slaughtered a million Iraqi's and destroyed their country, one of Michelle Obama's close friends, became cuddly. These people know only too well how important class solidarity is.

The Democratic Party is known as the black hole of all social movements. After the Battle in Seattle in 1999 that shook US capitalism, the trade union hierarchy that is an arm of the Democratic Party in the workers' movement, sent its staffers in to temper the movement, direct it away from any independent path politically and it to the safe confines of the Democratic Party. 

 

The base Mamdani built was purely for electoral reasons. But that base should have and can be, a starting point for an independent direct action movement based in our communities and organisations, and as Mayor of a major city like New York the resources are there to spread that movement beyond the Big Apple. He had the support of major unions in the city.

 

But unless, there is some secret strategy that I don't know about, it looks like Mamdani is in there with AOC as a rising star in a party that represents big capital. They will join Bernie Sanders as yet another disappointment that will tend to drive people in two ways, one is to abandon the electoral process altogether and the other to seek a way out through right wing or nationalist policies. The complete failure of the Democratic Party to offer a way out is a major reason we have the sexual deviant racist in the Oval Office. 

Mamdani 's Rapid Capitulation to Big Capital

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED

2-20-26

It doesn’t take long does it! We have seen this so many times by now. Mamdani’s election was uplifting but this lesser evilism has finally lost any meaning and it’s experiences like this that has led over time to 100 million or more people opting out of the electoral process altogether. Many others moved right in the desperate hope that an angry con man might shake things up and we can see how that’s played out. Working people have no political voice in the US.

 

The US working class is disgusted with the two parties of capitalism and the political system in general. Workers often make the mistake of seeing the political crisis as a production of corruption or character flaws or greed in the abstract, and the Democratic Party and its allies atop organised labor do nothing of substance to alter this view. But that is not the issue. The Democratic party “aligns itself”’ with corporations a critic wrote recently, but it’s more than that. “We’re capitalist”, Nancy Pelosi reminded a rather naïve young DSA member at a Town Hall meeting. It’s not that this party aligns itself with big business, it is “their” party.

 

The election of Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez  (AOC) was an exciting event too as she defeated an incumbent Democratic Party machine member in a Congressional election but she’s crossed the line and is a rising star in the party.

 

It is not that Mamdani or AOC are rotten, or are misleading their constituents. They may or may not be. The reason they and so many others have betrayed working people is that they are reformers, they believe capitalism can be “made nice” but it can’t. “If only the bosses' would be less aggressive” many labor tops say in private, and more often than not in public; they just want the American Dream back. 

But the material base for that dream which was not a dream for everyone and a nightmare for millions has gone and is not returning. 

The DSA, which had about 6000 members, a left rump in the Democratic Party prior to Bernie Sanders and the 2016 election, had 90,000 at one point. But DSA and so many people calling themselves DSA members are simply left liberals, more like Social Democrats I would say and its leadership is still overwhelmingly linked to the Democratic Party and they brought in Labor Notes types to direct the approach to labor relations which was a major mistake.

 

The first major obstacle to Mamdani’s very mild reforms was and is the Democratic Party itself. It cannot change its spots. 

 

Political parties, like the state apparatus (government) have class content, they are not empty vessels. In the US, the Democrats, a political party that is a major global capitalist party that millions of workers have looked to to defend our rights and living standards, has failed to do so. This rhetoric can’t last forever in the face of material reality.

Mamdani had built a base of over 100,000 activists I understand. This is a significant starting point but what that base represented to Mandani was an electoral force. It was a base built to win elections and it succeeded. The gains for working people stopped there, trapped in the back hole. Like Sanders, describing themselves as socialists they have both been great recruiters for a Wall Street party that has failed working people time and time again. The Democratic Party, and its agents atop organized labor share a huge responsibility for the election of the degenerate gangster capitalist, paedophile and convicted felon that sits in the Oval Office.

The big split in the AFL-CIO back in 2005 when the Fight to Win Coalition was formed was not over any substantial economic issues, either. There was no throwing out of the Team Concept by the “radicals”  it was all about organizing new members to increase the bureaucracy’s clout with the Democratic Party providing increased support at election time.

 

So for many of us Mamdani’s experience is just another betrayal. This will lead to a split in Democratic Party at some point in the not so distant future I would think. It seems likely that voters will seek relief in the Mid-Terms and the Dems may win control of the house, after all, where else can folks go when it comes to elections. It's hard to tell, what will happen but either way, we'll be back at square one.

 

Sanders has betrayed the millions of young people that looked to him for change back in 2016 repeatedly herding them in to the Democratic Party, supporting the war criminal Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Jo Biden in 2020, the man that laid waste to Gaza and denied US workers the right to strike defending the rail bosses' profits. This left many in despair, some dropping out of politics altogether. Mamdani had the numbers too. In the past 10 years opportunity after opportunity has been wasted.

 

Sanders, AOC, Mamdani have had mass popular support. Mamdani’s hundreds of thousands of supporters could have been channeled in to building community committees throughout the districts that can take up community defense, crime, educating the young people and organizing direct action activity like occupations of slumlords property, fighting for squatters rights, for new housing, and against the capital management companies that are the biggest landlords in the country today. This rather than just numbers at the ballot box. 

Reaching out to other cities and generalising the struggle against the billionaires who used every tool in their arsenal to defeat Mamdani is a necessity if we are serious about changing the balance of class focus in society.

 

Winning elections is fine, but not in order to put Democrats in power. While we must defend the right to vote as we won it from them, we must also be clear that we have won precious little through the ballot box. The legislation workers won in the 1930’s was a result of the mass occupations of industry and the rise of industrial unionism (CIO), and in the period that followed, a response due to the Black Revolt that shook the US to its foundations and embarrassed it in the eyes of the people of the world. Politicians merely codified what US workers had already won in the streets, workplaces and education institutions of America.

The reality is and has been that the time is right for significant change in US society. How to combat the capitalist offensive, in its most brutal form through the state’s security apparatus was revealed in the heroic defense of their communities and their neighbors by the people of Minneapolis. Make no bones about it, the lull in the offensive there and the undermining of the Trump Administration over the past period is a direct result of that battle.

 

In the end days of the capitalist system and as US, capitalism, the world’s most powerful and violent nation, faces serious competition in the global stage particularly from China, there is no room for even the mild reform platform that put Zohran Mamdani  the mayor’s seat of one of the world’s most important citiy and major financial center. 

 

The struggle for a democratic socialist society means taking in to public ownership the dominant corporations that control the political and economic life of the nation. This has to include the financial industry, health care, transportation, the production of life’s necessities and electorally building a political party of our own based on our organizations, our communities and workers from outside our borders, our international allies.

These should be our goals and building a mass movement that can win them is the key.

Mamdani Reverses Campaign Promise to Expand Rental Assistance

A rental voucher program costs more than $1 billion. The mayor’s decision to curtail its expansion reflects the clash between his ideology and the realities of managing the city.

Reprinted from the New York Times

·       

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who faces a budget deficit, said expanding a costly rental voucher program might not be feasible.Credit...Kent J. Edwards for The New York Times

By Sally Goldenberg and Mihir Zaveri

Feb. 12, 2026

Expanding a New York City program to help struggling tenants pay rent seemed like an obvious campaign promise for Zohran Mamdani, who staked his insurgent candidacy last year on making life more affordable in the five boroughs.

Now, confronting a grim fiscal picture in his second month as mayor, Mr. Mamdani no longer intends to back the growth of the $1 billion-plus initiative known as CityFHEPS, despite a plan passed by the City Council and upheld in court.

The reversal marks the clearest example yet of the clash between the ideology of his democratic socialist campaign and the tough realities of managing a sprawling, costly bureaucracy.

During a recent news conference, as the mayor lamented a looming budget deficit that on Wednesday he pegged at $7 billion over two years, he suggested the program’s full expansion may be too expensive.  Read the full NYT  article here.

 

Condemning Socialism. The Eighty-Six: A Study in Manufactured Courage

by Bruce Fanger

White Rose USA — November

 

Let’s strip away the spin and look at what actually happened. 

 

H. Con. Res. 58 — the Republican “condemn socialism” resolution — wasn’t some hot potato dropped on the House floor the morning Zohran Mamdani walked into the Oval Office. It wasn’t reactive. It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t leadership panicking.

 

It was worse.

 

The bill was introduced in February 2025.

It sat in committee for most of the year.

Democratic leadership had nine months to kill it, ignore it, amend it, or bury it.

Instead, Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark, and Jim Clyburn walked it right onto the House floor themselves.

 

That choice tells you everything.

 

Because while Republicans timed the vote for maximum humiliation, it was Democratic leadership that made the decision to let it happen. Not under duress. Not in a moment of panic. But as a calculated signal — a pre-planned ritual cleansing to reassure donors, moderates, and the Sunday shows that the party’s left flank would be kept on a tight leash.

 

So while Mamdani — a democratic socialist who has actually called Trump a fascist to his face — was preparing to sit across from the President, the Democratic leadership wanted the cameras to see something else:

 

Eighty-six Democrats standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Republicans to condemn “socialism,” while saying nothing about the authoritarianism that’s actually restructuring the country.

 

This wasn’t ideology.

This wasn’t principle.

This was branding — the party distancing itself from the very people who give it its moral center.

 

Progressives didn’t just get thrown under the bus.

Leadership parked the bus, handed Republicans the keys, and said, “Take it for a spin.”

 

Because here’s the truth the Beltway will never say out loud:

 

The Democratic establishment is more terrified of appearing aligned with its own left wing than it is of confronting the MAGA right.

 

They didn’t condemn socialism.

They condemned courage.

They condemned clarity.

They condemned the only faction in their party still willing to speak in moral terms about authoritarianism.

 

And voters notice.

Especially when some of those eighty-six came from safe blue seats — meaning they didn’t vote this way out of survival, but out of obedience.

 

This is why I am not a Democrat.

Because when fascism is the threat, they treat the left as the problem.

When the country needs a spine, they offer a shrug.

When the moment demands defiance, they choose performance.

 

And the polite version of what comes next?

 

Several of those eighty-six are going to face primaries in 2026 — real ones, with real candidates — and the clip of this vote is going to be the centerpiece of every campaign.

 

Because if you can't stand up when it matters,

you shouldn’t be standing in Congress at all.

 

US House Votes to Condemn Socialism With Help From Democrats.

Rachel Hurley 

11-21-25

Rachelandthecity.com

JFC. Does ANYONE in power have any sense at all?

The House voted this morning to condemn socialism - 285 to 98 - just hours before NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is scheduled to meet with President Trump at the White House at 3 PM. 

Eighty-six Democrats joined Republicans in this performative garbage, including Hakeem Jeffries, who endorsed Mamdani just three weeks ago but apparently needs to distance himself from the democratic socialist running America's largest city before he walks into the Oval Office.

Maria Salazar, whose parents fled Cuba, led the charge with a resolution that denounces socialism "in all its forms." The timing is supposedly a coincidence - they just happened to schedule this vote for the same Friday morning that Mamdani meets Trump. Sure it was. Just like it's a coincidence that Republicans have been promising to make Mamdani the "new, radical face of the Democratic Party" for their 2026 attack ads.

Here's what makes this particularly insane. Mamdani isn't some fringe candidate who squeaked through on a technicality. He crushed Andrew Cuomo twice - once in the June primary, again in the November general. He brought out more voters than any NYC mayoral race since 1969. Young people actually showed up. Working-class communities that usually sit out local elections came out in droves. 

But instead of learning from that success, 86 Democrats decided to preemptively surrender to Republican framing right before their own mayor sits down with a hostile president. Josh Gottheimer stood up there warning about "government-run grocery stores" like that's the real threat to America. Meanwhile, people can't afford groceries at the corporate-run ones we have now, but sure, let's focus on the hypothetical socialist produce section.

The whole thing is ASININE. Byron Donalds claimed socialism "always leads to a destruction of liberties" while Trump literally threatens to withhold federal funding from cities that don't kiss his ring. Trump demands companies hand over stock to the government - actual government seizure of private property - but we're supposed to be terrified of a mayor who wants to make buses free.

Maxine Waters tried to point out the obvious hypocrisy. She asked why Republicans are silent when Trump follows "Chinese communist tactics" by demanding equity stakes in companies. Nobody answered her because this was never about principles. It was about making sure Democrats help Republicans paint their own mayor as an extremist right before his crucial White House meeting.

What Mamdani actually wants isn't radical at all. Freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments. Universal childcare. A higher minimum wage. Free buses. These aren't Soviet five-year plans. They're policies that exist in countries Republicans vacation to. Norway has most of this stuff. So does Denmark. Last I checked, Copenhagen hasn't devolved into a gulag.

The resolution lists Stalin, Mao, Castro - all the greatest hits - as if Mamdani is planning to collectivize Central Park. Meanwhile, the actual authoritarians are the ones threatening "seditious treason" charges against Democrats, sending the National Guard to blue cities, and demanding loyalty oaths from federal workers. But yeah, the real danger is a Muslim democratic socialist mayor who wants people to afford rent.

Even better is watching Jeffries try to thread this needle. When asked if he condemns socialism yesterday, he just kept repeating "strong floor, no ceiling" like he was having a stroke. Three times he said it. The top House Democrat couldn't just say "I support the policies that New York City voters overwhelmingly chose." He endorsed Mamdani on October 24th. Three weeks later, he's voting to basically condemn him hours before the guy has to negotiate with Trump.

The Democrats who voted for this think they're being strategic. They think distancing themselves from socialism will protect them in the suburbs. What they're actually doing is validating every Republican attack line while alienating the exact voters who just proved they'll show up when you give them something to vote for.

Republicans will still call every Democrat a socialist. They called Biden - BIDEN - a socialist. They called Hillary a socialist. They said Obama was a secret Muslim socialist from Kenya. Voting for this resolution doesn't buy you protection. It just shows them you're scared.

Here's the pattern that drives me insane. Every time a progressive wins something meaningful, Democrats rush to denounce them harder than they ever denounce Republicans. 

When AOC won in 2018, half the party spent more energy distancing themselves from her than from kids in cages. When Sanders almost won the primary, they acted like he was more dangerous than Trump.

The particularly stupid part is that Democrats use socialist programs every day and their constituents love them. Medicare? Socialist. Social Security? Socialist. Public schools? Socialist. The fire department? Socialist. The interstate highway system? Socialist. But god forbid we apply the same principle to childcare or housing.

Mark Pocan tried to add an amendment declaring that Social Security and Medicare aren't socialism. Republicans blocked it. They know exactly what game they're playing. They want to use this vote to justify cutting the programs people actually depend on while Democrats are too cowardly to defend them.

Tom Suozzi, who voted for the resolution, tweeted that the answer isn't "the populism of Donald Trump or Zohran Mamdani." Imagine thinking those two things are equivalent. One threatens the death penalty for "seditious treason." The other wants to freeze rent. Clearly the same level of threat to democracy.

While 86 Democrats were busy condemning socialism this morning, Mamdani was boarding a plane to face down a president who calls him a "communist lunatic" and questions whether he's even legally in the country. Mamdani became a citizen in 2018. Trump was born here and tried to overthrow the government. Guess which one Democrats just condemned?

 

The resolution claims socialist ideology promotes "a concentration of power." You know what actually concentrates power? Billionaires buying Supreme Court justices. Tech monopolies controlling all information. Three companies owning every rental property in your city. But sure, worry about the theoretical state-owned grocery store while actual monopolies destroy the economy.

 

What really happened here is that Democrats got spooked by Mamdani's success. They saw a young, Muslim, democratic socialist win big in New York and immediately thought "we need to distance ourselves from this before his meeting with Trump." 

Not "maybe we should learn from this." Not "perhaps voters want bold solutions to actual problems." Just pure, reflexive COWARDICE.

In a few hours, Mamdani will walk into the Oval Office with Trump already threatening to strip NYC of federal funding. And instead of backing their mayor, House Democrats just gave Trump ammunition by condemning the very ideology New Yorkers voted for.

The future of the Democratic Party just proved you can win by standing for something real. And the response from House Democrats was to immediately, publicly reject everything about it right before he needs their support most.

They're condemning their own future while enabling the actual authoritarians. They're so scared of being called socialists that they'd rather help Republicans destroy popular programs than defend them. They're more worried about hypothetical government grocery stores than actual corporate monopolies.

Frankly, nobody in power has any sense at all. 

Chuck Schumer Should Be Humanely Euthanized*

Chuck Schumer Should Be Humanely Euthanized* 

 From Ken Klippenstein on Substack

Nearly a dozen congressional Democrats agree (*politically/metaphorically, of course). 

Ken Klippenstein Nov 12 2025

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74-year-old Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer just crashed his party’s car so badly that it’s time to take his keys away. And not when he’s up for reelection in three years. Now.

After plunging the country into its longest government shutdown ever, eight Senate members from the Democratic Party caucus folded on Sunday, joining their Republican colleagues in voting to open the federal government.

The defections took place without any meaningful healthcare concessions — the whole point of the shutdown in the first place — and in a clear break with the rest of the Party, most notably helpless Chuck.

This is far from Schumer’s only car crash as leader, but this time many of his insurers in the Democratic Party seem unwilling to cover the damages. Nearly a dozen House Democrats are calling for his ouster. These are not just progressives, but moderates too, like Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Mike Levin of California, and Glenn Ivey of Maryland.

Coming on the heels of Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular win in New York and the instant conversion of just about everyone in public office (even Donald Trump!) to affordability as the “new” agenda, Schumer’s failure here to enforce Party discipline looks that much worse. As a result, Schumer, who has been in politics for nearly half a century, has practically overnight become the face of his party’s gerontocracy problem.

Here’s what the House Democrats are saying:.

• Ro Khanna of California: “Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”

• Mike Levin of California: “Chuck Schumer has not met this moment and Senate Democrats would be wise to move on from his leadership.”

• Seth Moulton of Massachusetts: “Tonight is another example of why we need new leadership. If @ChuckSchumer were an effective leader, he would have united his caucus to vote ‘No’ tonight and hold the line on healthcare.”

• Mark Pocan of Wisconsin: “Don’t endorse or say who you voted for in NYC despite there being a Dem candidate. Get Dem Senators to negotiate a terrible “deal” that does nothing real about healthcare. Screw over a national political party. Profile of scourge [sic]? Next.”

• Delia Ramirez of Illinois: “For the sake of our country, Schumer needs to resign.”

• Rashida Tlaib of Michigan: “Sen. Schumer has failed to meet this moment and is out of touch with the American people. The Democratic Party needs leaders who fight and deliver for working people. Schumer should step down.”

• Shri Thanedar of Michigan: “It’s high time we replace Senator Chuck Schumer with a competent and strategic leader.”

• Glenn Ivey of Maryland: “...it may be time for the Senate Democrats to get a new leader.”

• Sylvia Garcia of Texas: “If I were a senator, I would be asking Senator Schumer to step down as minority leader. He simply cannot meet this moment. Senate Democrats need someone who won’t cave to Donald Trump and will actually fight for working families. Democrats deserve better.”

• Veronica Escobar of Texas: When asked by Axios if Schumer should remain Leader, she replied that he “should not.”

The usual Washington smokescreen of process-oriented excuses isn’t working anymore. As Rep. Ro Khanna bluntly told Breaking Points, Schumer is Leader of the Senate Democrats and the buck stops with him.

“Come on, Schumer’s been in politics for 50 years,” Khanna said. “He controls the caucus, he determines when a deal can be cut.”

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have been more circumspect, like Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who when asked if he has confidence in Schumer’s leadership, declined to say yes. Senator Bernie Sanders of all people came to Schumer’s defense when asked by Jake Tapper if he still has confidence in his leadership. 

“If Schumer steps down, who is going to take his place?” Sanders replied.

There’s hardly any defense of Schumer’s actual competence, just vague warnings about how there’s simply no one else who wants the job. But sources tell me that Senator Chris Murphy has quietly expressed interest in the position, going back several months now (though he’s loathe to say so publicly). 

The most surprising part about the flood of condemnations from congressional Democrats is that it took this long. In February, Schumer became a viral laughingstock and embodiment of his Party’s geriatric leadership when his answer to the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts to the federal government was to chant at a protest in DC, “We will win! We will win! We will win! We won’t rest! We won’t rest! We won’t rest!”

More than just a cringey meme, the incident was symptomatic of a much deeper problem: Schumer’s inability to engage the public in any compelling way. This comes across in virtually all of his public appearances. 

A perverse hobby of mine for the past year has been monitoring Schumer’s media hits on cable news, thinking it show people how alarmingly out-of-touch he was. But Schumer’s performances were much worse than that, reminiscent of President Biden’s decline. He frequently pauses and forgets words — that is, when he even does media hits. Sometimes he just disappears entirely, as was the case earlier this year when he was briefly hospitalized (his staff says for dehydration). This summer, he went two months without a single TV interview.

When the shutdown began, Schumer vowed on Morning Joe that he and his party would “be fighting everywhere,” including “in the social media.” The!(His vow echoed another similar remark when, after Trump won, a grinning Schumer assured Democratic influencer Aaron Parnas that he’d be “dealing with the social media.”)

Schumer talking to Aaron Parnas

In another shutdown appearance on Morning Joe, Schumer, trying to reply that the host had posed a good question, instead flubbed, “That’s a good Chuck.” Amid laughter from one of the hosts, he corrected himself: “I’m the Chuck.”

It felt like watching Biden stumble through one of his speeches.

Then there’s his bizarre jokes, like during an otherwise solemn press conference about the need for a shutdown deal to address the soaring cost of health insurance. Schumer likened one of the sources he was citing, the Kaiser Family Foundation, to, well, fried chicken.

“New data came out today from KFF — and that is not Kentucky Fried French Fries,” Schumer said, breaking down laughing.

In March, he folded in the face of another funding resolution favored by President Trump. This pissed off Democratic voters worse than anything I could remember. The only discernible change in Schumer behavior’s since then is the replacement of his grandpa-style, half moon reading glasses with a hipper plastic-frame pair, right before the current shutdown. Presumably part of an image update in anticipation of a media blitz, Schumer at first sat down for a few more TV interviews than usual but then just … stopped.

The emperor’s new frames

With prominent Democrat-aligned advocacy groups like MoveOn, Indivisible, Our Revolution, Leaders We Deserve, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee calling for Schumer to step down from leadership, it seems a question of when, not if.

The gerontocracy is dead, as I wrote last week The question is if they’ll be allowed to continue shambling along as zombies until the next election, driving the party vehicle into the next catastrophic wreck, or if someone will grab the wheel. The voters seem to have made it clear that they are ready for the next generation. They urgently want action on pocketbook issues.

Then there’s the predictable Washington solution brewing, one that abandons progress and vision altogether, which I touched on yesterday. It’s the idea that national security experience should be the basis for the next generation of leaders, that this kind of service evinces responsibility and grownup-ness. Virginia’s Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, who served in the CIA, and New Jersey’s Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, represent this camp. They are both fairly young and frequently cited by Democratic leadership as the future of the Party.

And then there’s Zohran Mamdani, whose unsanctioned and even repudiated campaign succeeded at engaging exactly the young voters that the same Democratic leaders had resolved to reach after their bruising loss to Trump and Republicans in 2024. Others might have been mouthing affordability as some vague objective, but Mamdani showed that normal people need and want to be heard; that they want politicians who aren’t afraid to think big — with specific promises like “RENT FREEZE” — and are going to fight tooth-and-nail for their vision. Now affordability is so lodged in the national political consciousness that even Trump is imitating Mamdani. With polling showing affordability concerns at the top of voters’ concerns by a mile, the affordability mandate is clearly the path to political power.

No one wants to put a beloved pet down; Schumer’s leadership, however, is not engendering much love these days. He registers the lowest approvalrating of any Democratic Senate Leader in recorded history. It’s time for his political career to cross the rainbow bridge.

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