How Much More Evidence Do We Need?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

Fifteen-term Representative Diana DeGette was ousted by her Democratic constituents last night in favor of the 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros — a candidate who made national headlines by refusing to call the firebombing of Jewish anti-Hamas protesters antisemitic and appeared to endorse Osama bin Laden’s rationale for the 9/11 attacks.

 

Progressives might say there is more you need to know about Kiros to understand her appeal, but I wouldn’t.

 

“We will not wait to reject corporate PACs like AIPAC,” Kiros exclaimed in her victory speech. “No, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine.” But there is no genocide in Palestine. AIPAC is not a collection of “monsters,” as Zohran Mamdani slandered them, but Americans engaged in nothing more than lobbying their government. Israel and the Americans who support it dominate progressive thinking today because it represents an elaborate, abstract, and often highly literary metaphor for what Democratic voters are really getting at: their hostility toward modern America.

 

That obsession isn’t exclusive to the DSA.

 

“Nearly all House Democrats voted for a Lebanon war powers resolution on Tuesday that aimed to block U.S. support for Israeli operations against Hezbollah, though the legislation failed to secure a House majority,” Jewish Insider reported on Tuesday. Just 22 House Democrats objected to a measure designed to upend a productive diplomatic process restoring Lebanon’s sovereignty over a region controlled by an Iranian terrorist proxy and to handcuff Israel in its fight with a group that has killed Americans.

 

I have no idea what that has to do with “genocide” or AIPAC or whatever other talisman the left latches onto to justify their myopia. This crusade to handcuff America’s ally in their conflict with a shared adversary makes little sense unless it is understood as an expression of the notion that America is an evil actor on the world stage.

 

Democrats who appear befuddled by the rise of the militant socialist fringe should look in the mirror. It’s they who have legitimized the madness that is now consuming their party.

 

It’s not as though DeGette was some contemptible moderate. She “had the backing of a prominent progressive, Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus,” the Wall Street Journal reported. She supported a host of left-wing policies even as she maintained relationships with stakeholders in the major American industries she sought to regulate. But, as DeGette said as she was being berated by one anti-Israel activist, “If the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me.” They didn’t.

 

In a paroxysmal post, Axios reporter Avery Lotz accused the GOP of reviving the “Red Scare” as a campaign tactic. She invoked the specter of McCarthyism, scoffed at Republican “red-baiting,” and quoted a variety of Democratic Socialists who are deeply wounded by the charge. But the GOP is right.

 

Citing a 2025 survey conducted by one New Jersey chapter of the Democratic Socialists, New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall noted that the movement is as white as it is red. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent) identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7 percent as democratic socialists,” Edsall wrote. The survey’s authors were deeply disturbed by the lack of ethnic diversity in their movement. They were, apparently, unperturbed by the uniform ideological fanaticism they had encouraged.

 

We don’t have to pretend that anarchism and Marxism are just another flavor of progressivism. They’re not. Nor are we obliged to take seriously the mainstream Democrats who insist that the radical left is nothing to worry about. They said it was just a New York thing, just a Netanyahu thing, just a populist thing. It’s none of those things. It is an anti-American thing.