and don’t think (un)democratic socialists have to ‘remake’ it!
My father was born on Independence Day, as were two of his sisters in a family of nine farm children in the Town of Sun Prairie WI. He was proud of that. When Kodak set about to assemble Americans born on the Fourth of July for every year of the Twentieth Century, they chose Jerome to represent the year 1919, perhaps because he was veteran of WW2 and the WI state legislature as well as an active member of the Lions Club, Farmers Union, Knights of Columbus — among many others. He was proud of all that, too.
The photograph was taken with Philadelphia’s Independence Hall as the fitting backdrop on July 4, 1999. That was then. On July 1, 2026, a U.S. congressman felt the need to remind his party that “Democrats need to show our love for America.”
That any American should need to reminded that the USA was deserving of gratitude, respect or even love on the eve of its 250th birthday, conceived in liberty, would puzzle Jerome Blaska, who was a Truman Democrat until the party left him, as he often said.
Hate to tell you dear old dad, but your old party is even more unrecognizable today. It’s being taken over by hard-line, command-and-control socialists. Democrats, with their fixation on identity politics and billionaires, lifted the tent flaps for them.
Not just in New York
“Every Democrat should be alarmed by what happened to Scott Wiener at the Trans March,” writes a San Francisco party official named Lily Ho. “Intimidation is not a protected form of dissent.” That’s where we are after 250 years!
Wiener, Ms. Ho relates, “is a tireless champion of LGBTQ rights and one of the most progressive voices in California. He was driven by a group of angry people from an event he attended annually for 22 years, since its inception. They surrounded him, accosted him with threatening language, cornered him, and put their hands on him until he was intimidated out of the joyous Trans March. Wiener is Jewish. Didn’t we see this in Doctor Zhivago?
In Denver, “virulently anti-Israel” socialist candidate Melat Kiros defeated an incumbent Democrat who has held the congressional seat for nearly three decades.
Law professor Jonathan Turley recounts that the Democrat(ic) nominee for congress in Pennsylvania denounced the Declaration of Independence. “For many of us who were raised in liberal, Democratic families,” Turley recounts:
The infusion of socialist, anti-free-speech, and anti-Semitic elements into the party has been alarming. The party was always in favor of social welfare programs but remained ardently committed to free markets and free speech. Now, we have CNN anchors openly questioning whether candidates are too Jewish-looking for the Democratic base as socialists sweep away establishment candidates.
The socialist takeover
“What the DSA demands of the Democrats is not merely to advocate more generous social policies, or more cautious foreign affairs, but to welcome, or at least accept, authoritarians as their coalition partners,” Atlantic magazine journalist Jonathan Chait reports.
After October 7, 2023, many pro-Palestine student-activist groups endorsed the Hamas attacks, and the DSA’s International Committee as well as multiple local chapters followed suit. … the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. — “There’s nothing democratic about these socialists”
Hardline anti-Semites like Hasan Piker raised $57,000 for Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong, a DSA cadre member trying to hijack the Democrat(ic) party’s nomination for governor. Chait reports that “Hasan Piker himself has followed the DSA’s militant line, repeatedly praising authoritarian regimes such as China’s, Cuba’s, and Russia’s, as well as terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”
Do not let Bernie bro John Nichols tell you that State Rep. Hong is cast in the mold of Milwaukee’s sewer socialists of the first half of the 20th Century. (“Can a Democratic Socialist win Wisconsin? … Midwestern state’s radical history points to what’s possible.”) Chait sets the record straight:
The DSA’s version of democratic socialism goes far beyond routine public functions such as garbage collection and Social Security (which most Republicans, not to mention Democrats, support), or even aspirational policies such as Medicare for All.
The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. [Mandani endorsee] Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a “rapist” and wrote “[F-bomb] Kamala Harris” on social media. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally. … She … has repeatedly praised communism.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Far as we can tell, Milwaukee socialist mayors like Daniel Hoan never defunded police, abolished prisons, cast straight white men as Ur-oppressors, demanded reparations, or hectored Jews. They may even have loved America.
How much leash
will The Capital Times give Comrade Nichols?
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