For example, Mr. Ramirez appears to believe them:
A couple text pieces to go with the Eye Candy du Jour: First up is Noah Rothman's indictment: The DSA Is a Hate Group, and What It Hates Is America. (archive.today link)
The DSA cannot be coopted, mollified, and incorporated into a broader political coalition. It is not a constituency. It is a hate group. And the object of its hatred isn’t the “Zionists” as they increasingly euphemistically refer to Jews, or the capitalist enterprise. It is America itself. For a while, though, casual observers could be forgiven for thinking that this rabid sect just had a pathological contempt for Israel.
Even as Hamas terrorists were still at large inside Israel — raping, torturing, and massacring any Jew in their line of sight — the DSA held an “anti-Israel” rally in “solidarity” with the terrorists, who were “not unprovoked.”
They kept up the pace in the weeks that followed. Almost 140 people were arrested during a nighttime march through New York City — a menacing, destructive outburst in which marchers held signs that read, “I do not condemn Hamas,” and chanted, “There is only one solution. Intifada. Revolution.” On October 28, 2023, thousands attended a DSA rally, which they called “Flood Brooklyn for Gaza” in a direct reference to the October 7 operation that Hamas called “al-Aqsa Flood,” throttling traffic on roads and bridges and harassing Jews.
Antisocial? Yes. Bigoted? Sure. Criminally malicious? Definitely. But anti-American? Democrats could still tell themselves that was a bridge too far.
But as Noah goes on to document, that ain't so.
At the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter, James B. Meigs checks out The Radicals Inside the Tent. (WSJ gifted link)
“Free, free Palestine!” the crowd chanted when New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani arrived at the Tuesday night party celebrating the primary win of his close ally, Claire Valdez. Given the city’s paucity of Republican voters, Ms. Valdez is almost certain to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives come November. So are Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, two other insurgent candidates backed by the mayor.
Like Mr. Mamdani, all three upstart candidates have roots in the far-left Democratic Socialists of America. Their primary victories help cement Mr. Mamdani’s “status as a formidable kingmaker,” the Journal reports. Once they arrive in Washington, the new members of Congress will share an agenda much broader than protecting the parochial interests of New Yorkers. Ms. Valdez and Ms. Chevalier consider themselves part of a socialist vanguard. Their campaigns focused on claims that Israel is committing a “genocide” in Gaza. As the “Free Palestine” chants suggest, their closest supporters also believe this election reflects a global radical movement.
And (also at the WSJ), James Freeman warns: Here Come the Mamdani Marxists!. (WSJ gifted link) Concentrating on the DSA's victorious primary candidate (and likely future CongressCritter) Darializa Avila Chevalier:
Ms. Avila Chevalier’s history of commentary certainly ought to embarrass her. Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck reported recently for CNN on a series of online comments that have since been deleted:
During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Avila Chevalier reposted a message calling for a sweeping government takeover of large parts of the economy. The repost advocated nationalizing utilities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies; suspending rent and mortgage payments; dissolving private health insurance companies; and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords.”
Other deleted posts and reposts included references to communism and anti-capitalist politics. In one April 2020 post, Avila Chevalier wrote that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” adding a laughing emoji.
“Seize the means of production,” she wrote in a since-deleted 2019 post, the phrase commonly associated with Marxism.
Yes, that is exactly the line used by the world’s most murderous dictators. And there’s more […]
There's more, but that's enough for me. Unfortunately, probably unproblematic to the voters in Ms. Chevalier's district.
Also of note:
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A perennial question. And Elizabeth Nolan Brown asks it: Who Owns Your Data?
Can police get your digital information and make you a suspect just because you happened to be in a location at a given time or happened to search for certain terms online? The U.S. The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in next week.
The court must decide whether cops can use what are known as "geofence warrants"—requests for information on every phone that was in the vicinity of a crime scene or every person who used a search engine to look up a certain topic on a certain date. Geofence warrants let law enforcement go on fishing expeditions, obtaining data on numerous people without presenting probable cause against any one of them specifically or naming a specific person or device to be searched.
Note the question-begging inherent in the "Who owns your data?" question. Try asking again without the thumb-on-the-scale word "your".
Data doesn't exist in a vacuum, though. (Well, unless it's encoded in some electromagnetic wiggles… come on, you know what I mean!)
So my half-serious answer to data ownership: it belongs to whoever owns the media it's maintained on.
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Warning: Don Draper photo at link. But Jeff Maurer uses it to bolster his perhaps-true claim: Capitalism Has a Brand Problem.
Much of Jeff's article is a response to a BBC video segment featuring "deep-fried, smothered-and-covered moron: Italian economist Clara Mattei" engaging in "ahistorical lunacy." Self-recommending, but I can't figure out how to embed the clip. So let's skip down a bit for our excerpt. What's wrong with "capitalism?"
I think it’s largely because the word “capitalism” invokes a bunch of stuff that isn’t really capitalism. The technical definition of capitalism is simple: It means buying and selling stuff with prices determined by the market. A grandmother selling homemade pies at a roadside stand is a capitalist, and so are all the small businesses that Americans love to fetishize. But when many people hear “capitalism”, they think “Wall Street stuff” — they think of slick-haired guys in suspenders, $500 cigars, The Wolf of Wall Street, political cartoons of fat cats scratching each others’ backs, and annoying corporate stuff like Ticketmaster having the balls to call a $14 surcharge a “convenience fee”. But those things aren’t capitalism; they’re some of the most annoying features of capitalism. Anything defined by its worst features will be unpopular; nobody would like puppies if the word “puppy” made you think “a thing that shits, sheds, and watches you masturbate.”
Jeff suggests advocates use instead:
“Free enterprise” is a good term for capitalism because capitalism isn’t really a system: It’s the absence of a system. The main way that Clara Mattei is wrong — and there are galaxies of ways that she’s wrong, but this is how she’s most wrong — is that capitalism wasn’t created by anyone. If you leave people to their own devices, they make stuff, they buy stuff, and market forces are the natural product of that interaction. Economic systems like feudalism and communism are an attempt to control economic relations; capitalism is what happens when you let those relations be free.
I will point out (and commented on Jeff's article): Reason magazine has had the masthead motto "Free Minds and Free Markets" since (I think) its inception. It hasn't taken the world by storm.
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