This could cost them EVERYTHING

[00:00:00]Watch the whole video.

[00:00:01]Listen to the whole segment before you send me hate mail.

[00:00:04]You know, when it starts that way, it's going to be good.

[00:00:06]Listen, the Democratic Party is showing the early signs of the same disease that destroyed the Republican Party.

[00:00:16]I've got so many friends on the left texting me and saying, David, we're not going to allow the same thing to happen on the left that Trump did to MAGA, to sorry that Trump and MAGA did to Republicans.

[00:00:29]Are we Republicans back in 2010?

[00:00:32]Their leaders laughed at the Tea Party conspiracy theorists, their far right internet trolls.

[00:00:38]They're not going to do anything.

[00:00:40]And then the Tea Party took over local organizations, threatened primaries, built their own media universe, and eventually were part of a process that gave us Donald Trump, the left and Democrats can't make the same mistake.

[00:00:54]There is a small group of far left extremists gaining influence inside youth groups and party organizations because they spend all day online organizing and enforcing ideological purity and attacking anyone who disagrees.

[00:01:13]Now, let me be very clear.

[00:01:15]I am not talking about people who want Medicare for all and affordable housing.

[00:01:21]I want all that stuff. I'm with all that stuff.

[00:01:24]I'm a social democrat in the style of Northern Europe.

[00:01:27]Of course I want those things.

[00:01:29]These are folks who treat political warfare like a full time job, and when they can't build their own coalition, they attach themselves to popular causes.

[00:01:43]They take real concerns about health care, housing, police misconduct, and use them to sell what is actually an authoritarian worldview.

[00:01:53]Now, there are things in DSA, for example, Democratic Socialists of America that are good and that I agree with, but there's also some stuff in there that I think doesn't make any sense.

[00:02:05]I saw their new platform promises a country where you have no debt, you pay no rent, no mortgage.

[00:02:13]You receive publicly funded housing, publicly funded retirement, food, education, energy, medicine, transportation.

[00:02:20]And it sounds incredible because it is incredible.

[00:02:23]How would they create it?

[00:02:25]Government ownership of the largest corporations and infant industries.

[00:02:29]Universal rent control.

[00:02:31]Abolishing police and prisons and abolishing the Senate and replacing our political system.

[00:02:37]Some of these ideas are reasonable to a degree.

[00:02:41]For example, I support universal healthcare, and I've talked about 4 or 5 ways that we could get to it.

[00:02:47]I want affordable housing, and I've done a dozen interviews with housing experts on what wooden wouldn't work to get us there.

[00:02:53]I support progressive taxation.

[00:02:55]We need to collect more taxes from the very rich.

[00:02:58]Voting rights have been hurt in this country.

[00:03:01]We need police reform.

[00:03:03]So there's elements of this that are great, and any social Democrat like me will tell you we got to do that.

[00:03:08]But you bundle it together.

[00:03:10]And this fantasy in which capitalism, private industry and major parts of the government simply disappear.

[00:03:17]Most Americans don't want that.

[00:03:20]Most Americans understand that there is no way that you could impose that without extraordinary authoritarianism.

[00:03:28]My one hesitation about confronting this now, and why I went back and forth, is the midterms.

[00:03:35]Publicly exposing the rot could make moderate voters think the entire Democratic Party has been infected.

[00:03:42]But I don't think silence is really going to hide it.

[00:03:46]I saw a crazy thing from the weekend where there was a College Democrats convention, which I was actually invited to participate in, and I couldn't couldn't make it.

[00:03:56]Hassan Piker was dressed like Mao and.

[00:04:03]I guess Destiny tried to show up and he was banned from entering, allegedly because the Mao dressed piker didn't want him there.

[00:04:12]Republicans are going to put these clips everywhere like it.

[00:04:15]People seem crazy when they see this stuff and they are going to take.

[00:04:20]Abolish the police and abolish borders and abolish prisons and play them on a loop for six months.

[00:04:25]If I were an average voter with no knowledge of these online personalities, which most of these people are, most people don't follow this sort of thing.

[00:04:35]They're busy living their lives and working and doing all this stuff.

[00:04:39]If I were an average voter with no knowledge of these online personalities, I would find these images and a lot of this stuff very alarming.

[00:04:47]So I, as I said last week and so many of you agreed with me.

[00:04:51]Democrats must act now and intelligently.

[00:04:54]The centrist don't really do anything.

[00:04:58]Make very milquetoast fringe suggestions that you don't even really push for not working.

[00:05:05]Okay, this other thing of like, end everything.

[00:05:09]It's a sort of destructive acceleration ism that's also not going to work.

[00:05:14]So I think that what we need here are no apologetics for dictatorship, no apologetics for authoritarianism, no harassment, no anti-Semitism, no allowing online factions to decide which liberals may enter the room.

[00:05:31]You know what would I even have been allowed at that college Democrats thing?

[00:05:37]They invited me months ago.

[00:05:39]I don't know.

[00:05:40]I mean, I couldn't go, so we didn't find out.

[00:05:43]So we just need normal people to participate, join local committees, attend conventions, get involved with state parties, and let's turn the DNC into something that works.

[00:06:00]Many reasonable people doing a little can defeat both the centrists do nothing and the hardcore extremists who would get nothing done.

[00:06:12]Republicans believed they were going to control the extremists.

[00:06:17]They were like, we got these people under control.

[00:06:19]The extremists took over the party.

[00:06:22]Democrats can still prevent that outcome, but we've got to get them to get things under control right now.

[00:06:28]I've said before, I've never been a Democrat.

[00:06:31]I don't care about the Democratic Party beyond who offers the better candidates.

[00:06:36]And usually it's Democrats over Republicans.

[00:06:38]But we've got to make sure that we don't allow that party if it is the vessel, at least for now, to something better than what Republicans are offering to be hijacked.

[00:06:50]This is about let's include but not allow any extreme faction to take over.

[00:06:57]And that is what I think makes the most sense.

[00:07:02]Can it be done reasonably and without self-inflicted damage between now and the midterms?

[00:07:09]I don't know. I hope so.

[00:07:11]Thanks for watching!

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