The "victims" in America are not buying their White Knights' arguments.

There is a particular confidence required to appoint yourself the liberator of people who never asked for your help and do not resemble you in the slightest. The Democratic Socialists of America possess that confidence in abundance. They present themselves as the conscience of the oppressed, the tribunes of the working class, the last honest defenders of Black and brown Americans against a rigged capitalist order. Then you open their own membership data, and the noble pose collapses into something the Democrat Party has produced before.

I will be discussing this topic further on today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show.

According to the DSA’s 2021 member survey, compiled not by conservative opposition researchers but by the organization’s own Growth and Development Committee, 85 percent of respondents listed white as one of their ethnic identities. Seventy-seven percent listed white as their only identity. Black members accounted for 4 percent. The same meager 4 percent described themselves as blue-collar workers.

The membership skews young, overwhelmingly credentialed with roughly four in five holding college degrees, and comfortably paid, with better than a quarter reporting six-figure household incomes.

So here is the movement that lectures the rest of the country about privilege. A room that is 85 percent white, stocked with degreed professionals out-earning the neighbors they claim to represent, has nonetheless decided it knows precisely what is best for the working-class and minority communities it can barely persuade to join.

The DSA is not a coalition of the marginalized. It is a coalition of the well-off telling the marginalized what their interests are.

A self-portrait the DSA would rather you not study

The organization is not oblivious to this. It simply cannot fix it. Central New Jersey’s chapter published a 2024 census admitting the chapter is “underrepresented” by Black and Hispanic residents, and even reached for the phrase “burden of diversity” to describe the awkward reality that the few minority members present are expected to shoulder the group’s inclusion problem. New Orleans DSA has conceded it is a majority-white organization operating in a majority-Black city.

In New York, the epicenter of the movement’s recent electoral triumphs, DSA organizers have struggled to reach Black voters despite governing the largest Black population of any city in the country. Some Black Democrat leaders in the city have gone so far as to call the organization “white supremacy.”

Consider the tidiness of that arrangement. The constituency the DSA insists it fights for keeps declining, at the meeting and at the ballot box, to sign up for the fight. A movement genuinely built by and for the working poor would look like the working poor. This one looks like a faculty lounge that discovered Marx and never left.

Peace, peace, where there is no peace

The prophet Jeremiah described exactly this failure of a self-satisfied class certain of its own righteousness.

They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

A superficial cure offered with total confidence, applied to a wound it never actually closes. That is the DSA program in one verse. The sales pitch is compassion. The result, when the policies meet reality, is harm that lands on the very people the salesmen claim to love. Two of the movement’s signature commitments prove the point beyond serious dispute.

The platform that gets Black Americans killed

The DSA does not merely flirt with defunding the police. Its national Abolition Working Group demands that police budgets be cut “annually towards zero” and openly commits the organization to the eventual abolition of police and prisons entirely. This is not a fringe caucus talking. It is written into the platform.

Now weigh that against the evidence. A growing body of research on police staffing finds that adding officers reduces homicides, and that the lives saved are disproportionately Black. Fewer police means more dead bodies, and those bodies are concentrated in exactly the neighborhoods the DSA says it wants to protect.

Minneapolis, ground zero for the 2020 abolitionist surge, watched violent crime climb after the experiment began, then scrambled to rebuild the departments its activists had spent a summer demonizing. The whitest faction in Democratic politics adopted a criminal-justice agenda that endangers Black families most, and called it justice. What would injustice have looked like?

A rent freeze that prices out the people it pities

The housing agenda follows the same arc. The rent-freeze and rent-control enthusiasm now animating DSA figures such as New York’s socialist mayor collides with one of the most settled findings in economics. When Stanford researchers studied San Francisco’s rent control, they found it accelerated gentrification and widened income inequality, the precise opposite of the stated goal, as landlords converted regulated units into high-end housing that drew wealthier residents.

The Manhattan Institute concludes that rent control’s restrictions on supply harm low-income, minority, and immigrant Americans most of all, while a recent meta-study confirms the near-consensus that price caps shrink and degrade the rental stock.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Cap the price, and you shrink the supply. The insiders lucky enough to hold a controlled lease win. The outsiders, disproportionately young, minority, and newly arrived, find fewer doors open and higher rents on everything left uncontrolled. The DSA promises the poor a home and delivers them a shortage.

The strongest case for the DSA rests on intentions and on the fortunes of those already inside the door. The case against it rests on what happens to everyone still standing outside. In politics, results are the only mercy that counts.

The new Dixiecrats wear socialist pins

Which brings us to the uncomfortable historical rhyme. The Dixiecrats of the 1960s were not shy about their whiteness or their certainty. They too were a faction convinced it understood the true interests of Black Southerners better than Black Southerners did, and they too dressed domination in the language of principle, calling it states’ rights rather than economic justice.

The DSA marches under a very different type of segregationist banner, but the end results are the same. In fact, they might be worse.

The structure is unmistakable. An overwhelmingly white political class, affluent and educated, presumes to speak over the heads of Black and immigrant Americans, advances an agenda that measurably worsens their safety and their housing, and grows offended when those same Americans decline to follow.

The paternalism is identical even when the platform is not. Then, as now, white men gathered in a room and decided what liberation should mean for people who were not invited.

So the question the DSA has never satisfactorily answered is the simplest one. By what authority does the whitest, wealthiest faction in the Democrat Party appoint itself the voice of communities it cannot recruit, cannot persuade at the ballot box, and cannot protect from the consequences of its own ideas?

A movement that loved the poor would listen to them. This one only talks.

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