The Democratic Socialists of America continue to expand their political footprint beyond the Mamdani-backed candidates who won New York primaries last week, with DSA-aligned figures now holding or contesting mayoralties in Seattle, Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, in addition to growing influence in city councils and state legislatures across blue states. Stu Smith at City Journal has been documenting the organizational infrastructure behind this expansion, including figures like Christopher Winston, a self-described Maoist and member of the DSA’s Red Rabbit Security Commission who trains members in what is euphemistically called unarmed community defense. Winston has publicly declared that armed struggle is the highest form of struggle, that political adversaries will be brought to people’s justice and executed after the revolution, and that revolutionary violence is universal law.
Taki Theodoracopulos, longtime Spectator columnist, co-founder of the American Conservative, and author of The Last Alpha Male: The Amorous Pursuits and High Life of a Poor Little Greek Boy, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to react to the DSA’s revolutionary rhetoric and offer his perspective on America at its 250th anniversary.
Taki’s reaction to hearing Winston’s audio was visceral and immediate. He said he witnessed communist revolution firsthand as a young boy in Greece and what the communists actually did was kill his father’s workers, not his father, who was the capitalist. The proletarian revolution that Marxists romanticize has never existed in practice. What occurred in Russia was a managerial revolution in which people who could run things seized power, not a liberation of the working class. The same dynamic has played out everywhere communism has been implemented, and the people who suffer most are invariably the ordinary workers these movements claim to champion.
He said he cannot believe anyone in America would preach violent revolution given what the country has accomplished through precisely the opposite approach: freedom, entrepreneurship, and technological innovation that no other nation has replicated. He acknowledged that the danger is real because figures like Hassan Piker and the DSA’s growing roster of elected officials are being taken seriously by audiences whose minds have been shaped by a media class and professoriate that are overwhelmingly left-wing. He said ninety percent of American journalists lean left and pretend otherwise, and that the brainwashing effect of that imbalance is compounded by an education system that produces each generation less equipped to recognize demagoguery than the last.
On America’s semiquincentennial, Taki said his overriding reflection is on the almost incomprehensible wisdom and moral seriousness of the founding generation. He said he attended the university Thomas Jefferson founded and has spent a lifetime marveling at how close to perfection those men came, and that the country has not produced their equal since, yet has still become the greatest nation in history through the system they designed. He contrasted America’s trajectory with Britain’s, noting that the British spent two centuries bragging about a sun that never set on their empire and now spend their time bowing to the wealthy foreigners who have purchased most of London.
He illustrated American exceptionalism with a personal family story. His father, a Greek industrialist, had voluntarily closed his factories during World War II rather than allow them to be used by the Axis powers. The communists subsequently destroyed the factories during the Greek civil war. After the war, his father obtained an introduction through Senator George Smathers of Florida to President Truman and in a two-minute meeting explained that he had sacrificed his business to fight the Axis, lost everything to the communists, and wanted the right to purchase a surplus Liberty ship even though he had not been a shipowner before the war. Truman said yes on the spot, and his father went on to become a major shipowner. Taki said that kind of decision, recognizing the justice of a man’s claim and acting on it immediately and without bureaucratic obstruction, could never happen in Europe and could only happen in America, and it is the reason the country continues to attract talent and ambition from around the world while European nations that lost their best minds across two world wars have never recovered.