President Trump told reporters this week that the rise of communist-aligned candidates within the Democratic Party represents the biggest threat to the nation since its founding, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, and September 11th. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins objected that the correct term is socialist, not communist. Trump dismissed the distinction, saying they use the phrase social democrat because it sounds nice but what they are actually introducing is communism.
Scott Greer, award-winning journalist and author of White Pill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the trajectory of the Democratic Party, the degrowth movement, and the information dynamics shaping both parties.
Greer said the results of last week’s New York primaries and the broader pattern of DSA-aligned candidates winning races across major American cities represent the complete opposite of what the Democratic Party claimed it was going to do after losing the 2024 election. In early 2025, the narrative was that Democrats lost because they were too radical, too out of touch, and too closely associated with open borders and extreme cultural positions. By the middle of 2026, the party has returned to abolishing ICE, electing soft-on-crime mayors, redistributing wealth from middle America to favored constituencies, and openly embracing socialism and communism. He said the party figures like Ezra Klein and Rushi Tushnett who have been pushing for moderation and a so-called abundance agenda have been completely steamrolled by activists who are transforming the party in exactly the opposite direction.
He cited Daria Lisa Chevalier, who defeated Latino Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat in New York despite Espaillat having a more progressive voting record than AOC, because Espaillat was insufficiently hostile to Israel and insufficiently radical on the cultural questions that now determine standing within the DSA coalition. He noted that researchers found an old Bluesky account belonging to Chevalier showing she had endorsed explicitly communist policies and expressed admiration for communist dictatorships. This is now who represents the Democratic Party in a growing number of districts.
On AOC’s commentary about AI and data centers, in which she claimed data centers are driving up electricity bills and laptop prices, that tech companies are giddy about putting people out of work, and that major technology firms need to be broken up through antitrust action, Greer said the underlying philosophy is straightforward: anyone who earns a billion dollars did so through theft, not through innovation, hard work, or creating products people want to buy. There is no legitimate path to that level of wealth in the progressive worldview. Billionaires are by definition robbers of the poor, not creators of jobs, economic growth, or products that improve people’s lives.
He said the degrowth element within the DSA coalition is real and distinct from even the Green New Deal ambitions of a few years ago. The Green New Deal at least proposed large-scale government-initiated projects that would generate economic activity, even if the underlying economics were fantastical. The current movement does not even want that. New businesses, new construction, new economic activity in a city are treated as inherently harmful because they represent displacement and inequality. The only acceptable large-scale project is high-speed rail, which is proposed alongside tax and regulatory regimes designed to ensure nothing actually gets built. Seattle is the most visible current example of this dynamic, where municipal policies are systematically forcing businesses to leave.
On Senator Chris Murphy positioning himself as a moderate while proposing a twenty-five dollar minimum wage, Greer said this is exactly how the radical transformation manifests in the supposedly mainstream wing of the party. Murphy calls himself a moderate and says he is not a democratic socialist, but his voting record is indistinguishable from AOC’s, and he is now proposing policies that would have been considered extreme even by DSA standards five years ago. The escalation from fifteen to twenty-five dollars is not a big idea or even a radical one. It is simply the latest bid to maintain relevance with an activist base that keeps moving the boundary of acceptable positioning further left.
On Ezra Klein’s recent New York Times piece arguing that Hassan Piker is not the problem, Greer said this is a perfect example of a supposedly serious liberal intellectual prostrating himself before the mob he claims to want to reform. Piker is not the only problem, but he is a direct manifestation of exactly the problem Klein purports to be addressing, and writing publicly that he is not the problem is an act of capitulation rather than analysis. Greer said the Hassan Pikers of the party cannot be resisted by the Ezra Kleins, and the party’s trajectory reflects that imbalance.
On the online information ecosystem more broadly, which is the subject of his book, Greer said the benefits of the new media infrastructure are enormous. The internet has broken the ability of legacy media outlets to manufacture and sustain fake narratives the way they did with stories like the Duke Lacrosse case twenty years ago, where a completely fabricated story fitting a preferred racial narrative was able to dominate national consciousness because there was no mechanism to challenge it. Today that kind of manufactured consensus is far harder to sustain. The downside is that the freedom of information places the burden of discernment on individual consumers, and some people are not equipped to distinguish credible reporting from conspiracy theories. He also flagged the problem of foreign actors operating within online political communities while claiming to be American patriots, noting that the anonymity of the internet makes it impossible to know whether a seemingly grassroots voice is genuine or a foreign operation pursuing its own agenda. He said on balance the new information environment is significantly better than the old one, but the tradeoffs are real and the responsibility falls on individuals in a way it did not when three networks told everyone what the truth was, even when they were lying.