“Don’t judge a book by its cover!” A cute proverb? No! It is, for all who have minds to think and eyes to see, the towering declaration that stands as the culmination of the entire body of human thought. A hundred millennia of torment and a hundred millennia more of contemplation were necessary in the blood-soaked annals of human activity to even approach it, and still, to this day, many of the theorists of democratic socialism have no grasp of it at all.

They have allowed, since the momentous rise of an American popular left movement in 2016, for the bourgeoisie and their allies, entirely at their own expense, to set the form in which the political struggle for the freedom of the working class takes place. They have abandoned the sine qua non of Communist politics: an independent party. They have betrayed the revolutionary principle in favor of pushing a platform, in practice, of narrow-minded and short-sighted concessions on behalf of their class: the urban petty bourgeoisie.

How could this have happened? How could they have all forgotten November 5th, 2024? A bleak day if there ever was one. For those with willful amnesia, a brief recapitulation of recent history:

The popular left have, for three presidential cycles, acquiesced with gritted teeth to the overwrought yet utterly cynical wails of the Democratic establishment. To gain the submission of the left, these rotting gerontocrats sold bridges of all shapes and sizes. “Electability!” they cried, forwarding the contemptible swamp creature and warmonger-in-chief known as Hillary Clinton. “The next FDR!” they proclaimed, foisting Joe Biden, the wrinkled vegetable, upon the country. “The bulwark against fascism!” they assured, enthroning the cackling genocide denialist and wino hack Kamala Harris.

In the wreckage of all this, the popular left and its purported representatives were out in the desert. It was then that ten years of objective failure should have finally struck the denizens of DSA. A new approach, an independent approach, as the majority of the caucuses assure us they believed in, should have been enacted. Instead of independence, which has remained a dream deferred, the so-called “Democrat Tea Party” emerged with the sudden rise to the national stage of one Zohran Mamdani in New York City, sweeping away all such talks in any real sense.

The term “Tea Party”, of course, applied to this sudden rogue element aimed at the Democratic Establishment, harkens back to the political conflagration in the aftermath of the 2008 recession that saw the GOP ousted by its own rogue element, culminating, of course, in the successful 2016 bid of Donald Trump.

All in all, the conditions amenable to the Tea Party strikingly resemble those that are taking place now within the Democratic Party. The pretext for both came in the form of an economic crisis. We have already mentioned ‘08, but in the case of the Dems, it was the 2020 Pandemic. In either case, the masses were wrenched out of their alienated working existence, if only for a brief moment, and were gathered online, where agitated fury was given expression by coinciding revolutions in information technology, whether this be YouTube and Facebook in the first Tea Party, or livestreaming and short-form in the second. The most politically conscientious and least financially encumbered sections of the masses, generally speaking, the petty bourgeois class, fell in behind rabble-rousers and joined organizations, and the seeds were laid. With an almost identical timeframe, the Republican Tea Party in 2010 was made manifest 6 years later as MAGA in 2016, and the Democratic Tea Party now emerges, 6 years after COVID, in 2026.

If the relevance of this information is not yet clear for our contemporary situation, I will now show my full hand: historical experience has shown the inevitable path of the Tea Party phenomenon. Trump capitalized upon the antagonistic sentiment of masses, only to renege on all that was genuinely radical, popular, and anti-establishment within his message. He showed himself to be an opportunist, a braying donkey who the Likudniks and the big bourgeoisie rode into the White House. The swamp wasn’t drained; it got bigger and more wanton in its corruption. The industrial capacity of the country wasn’t restored; it was sold away at a more rapid pace. American foreign policy was not placed in the public interest and became all the more tethered to the fascist pariahs of Azovite Ukraine and Zionist Israel. The GOP was not revolutionized; it merely gained new, more pernicious fascist managers.

Up to this point, barring the deluded elements of the left who are inclined to agree with Hillary Clinton in regarding all of MAGA and the entire Trump moment as being ushered in by a “basket of deplorables”, it can be agreed upon that what came of the Republican Tea Party was a carefully stage-crafted controlled opposition to the American regime. The righteous anger of the masses was diffused and scattered by false promises and migrant scapegoats. A book was judged by its cover by the hurting, ingenuous masses and the petty bourgeois political agents alike, and when its pages were laid bare, it was all fraud. The latter element, the petty bourgeoisie, with such names as Tucker Carlson, of course, could rationalize their cognitive dissonance, cashing out with the economic treats, platforms, and fame that were afforded them. The masses were left, however, as they always have been left: with nothing to lose but their chains, though the rational kernel of their partisan fury has been siphoned into the great fraud, and they are now rudderless and disillusioned: tea leaves drawn from the harbor by the tide, adrift at sea.

We must have the courage to announce to those who cannot read the writing on the wall that the forthcoming Democrat Tea Party will result in the same catastrophe, and, in all likelihood, a far worse one.

Unlike the political agitators of the petty bourgeoisie who stood for MAGA, a largely disparate grouping of influencers, spontaneous local groupings, and electoral opportunists–who either acquiesced to the bourgeois take-over, or were just as easily dispersed as they were gathered–the agitators at risk amid this Tea Party disaster are the most prominent organization of Marxist and communist organizers in the nation: the DSA.

I readily admit that I am not a Democratic Socialist, nor will I ever be, but an attack upon Marxists–an attack upon the believers in the Communist revolutionary principle of any stripe–despite what divides us, is an attack upon us all. It cannot be denied; the petty bourgeois right-wing element of the organization, and those that they have duped, are already primed to liquidate everything into the Democrat Tea Party wave under the “socialist” AOC chimera. The disaster for whatever could have been said to be a mass revolutionary kernel in MAGA now is set to take place for the left-wing.

I agree with Noah Emke of DSA’s Marxist Unity Group who writes, “our class enemies give us nothing for free, and the cost will be steep. To put it bluntly, a President AOC would enact their policies while wearing our colors, thus neutralizing the threat of a social-democratic challenge…”^[1]

Emke’s line on AOC is correct. She has no spine and never will. Cordially, however, I would like to add an addendum. Later on in the article, Emke contrasts AOC to Zohran, stating that, “Mamdani is the best we have had so far, a true cadre of DSA and incredibly talented as a politician”. He acknowledges, of course, that even if Mamdani could legally make a presidential bid, the same pitfalls going for AOC would be applicable to him. I would like to make the argument, however, as difficult as it might be to hear, that even in New York City, the heartland of DSA, where 3 million doors were knocked for the mayoral race by DSA activists, the faultlines–which are inherent in bourgeois democratic politics–plague Zohran’s rise just as much as they do AOC’s vacillating careerism.

To the naive, the triumph of Mamdani in New York City is a story of grassroots socialist political power standing up to the billionaires and the establishment to seize a surprise victory. Yet behind the book’s cover, a much different story is told. In his victory speech, Mamdani was eager to tell us about the “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties,”^[2] who supported him. There was no mention, however, of the millions of dollars of 501(c)(3)-to-501(c)(4) transfers, bringing money from non-profit groups backed by the big bourgeoisie to political committees spending and operating on the ground on behalf of the campaign. This was not a rag-tag assembly of ideological socialist organizations (for the record, such a thing does not exist). Take, for instance, the whopping 1.8 million dollars wired from the Working Families Party (WFP) PAC through the WFP New York State Independent Expenditure Committee to supporting groups for Zohran in the critical days before the election.^[3] In total, WFP spent 16 million dollars on the Mamdani campaign,^[4] utterly dwarfing Mamdani’s grassroots individual contributions of over 4 million dollars. WFP’s spending was even greater than the taxpayer matched funding of just under 13 million dollars Mamdani received.^[5] This, however, is only the beginning.

WFP, alongside multiple 501(c)(4) advocacy groups that were crucial for Mamdani’s victory, such as Make the Road Action, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, NY Communities for Change, MoveOn.org Political Action, Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund, Emgage Action, and Jewish Voice for Peace, spent tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars for Mamdani. One wonders, where did all of this money come from? These groups, all of whom endorsed the Mamdani campaign, taken together, are beneficiaries of nearly 41 million dollars of donations channeled from liberal anti-communist Zionist billionaires George and Alex Soros’ Open Society network, alongside the Rockefeller Fund and the Ford Foundation. Suddenly, Zohran’s coy Zionist stance, his endorsement of Brad Lander, his retention of the Zionist Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner, and his appointment of Renita Francois, the former Chief Program Officer for the 501(c)(3) Tides Foundation–one of the principal channels of Soros money to Mamdani–for a Deputy Mayoral position start to make more sense. Money, of course, isn’t everything in a campaign. Moreover, the above-mentioned groups coordinated and deployed over 1,200 volunteers to knock on 95,000 doors for Mamdani and made 30,000 phone contacts.^[6]

My intent in raising these concerns is not to suggest that Mayor Mamdani is a vassal of the billionaires and their apparatus which backed him. It simply is impossible to delineate in any concrete manner the degree to which these supporters were of decisive import. What is indisputable, however, is that while Zohran may be a good democratic socialist, the further one goes adrift of the unique social and political conditions of the so-called “Commie Corridor”--with its large host of petty bourgeois professionals amicable to the DSA’s minimal program (i.e the social democratic Tea Party line)--the more the influence of the big bourgeoisie, who can buy their way into relevance wherever they please, becomes a definite wall against them.

If the DSA wants to genuinely be anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist, opposed to the big bourgeoisie, and in support of a working class political revolution–boldly proclaiming what even Zohran hid away within DSA’s biggest stronghold–it will be utterly crushed on the national stage. Ten years of tailing the Democrats have led to “independence” being a platitude and the concrete dual power needed to fight a class war against the big bourgeoisie and its money being non-existent.

The sad truth of the matter, however, is that the organization does not have the wherewithal to prevent itself from being dragged in by outside influencers and ignoramus rightists from joining the overwrought, overhyped, and reckless subsumption into the next Tea Party. This was proven by the elements of the DSA, predominantly the petty bourgeois elements loyal to Socialist Majority and Groundwork, who have launched the reactionary July Days against the National Political Committee, circumventing the weak binds of the organization. If AOC runs, the principled elements, who treat an independent party of the working class as more than a platitude, will either have to go their own way in the war against the regime and for the emancipation of the working class, or be thrown, kicking and screaming, into harbor: victims of the Tea Party catastrophe.

1. Noah Emke, “Just Say No: Avoiding an AOC 2029 Disaster,” Cosmonaut, July 14, 2026, https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/07/just-say-no-avoiding-an-aoc-2029-disaster/.

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2. Guardian Staff, “The Full Transcript of Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Speech after Being Elected NYC Mayor,” The

   Guardian, November 5, 2025,

   https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/05/zohran-mamdani-victoryspeech-transcript.

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3. Sam Antar, “Did a Tax-Exempt Political Network Help Elect Zohran Mamdani While Certifying It Was

   Independent?,” White Collar Fraud, May 4, 2026,

   https://whitecollarfraud.com/2026/05/04/did-a-tax-exemptpolitical-network-help-elect-zohran-mamdani-while-certifying-it-was-independent/

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4. THE CITY, “Cuomo Backers Burned $65 Per Vote, Including $13.3 Million from Bloomberg,” November 6,

   2025, https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/11/06/cuomo-mamdani-bloomberg-attack-ads/.

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5. New York City Campaign Finance Board, “NYC Campaign Finance Board Approves Pre-General Matching

   Funds Payments to 2025 Candidates,” October 30, 2025,

   https://www.nyccfb.info/media/press-releases/nyccampaign-finance-board-approves-pre-general-matching-funds-payments-to-2025-candidates-10-30-2025/

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6. Sam Antar, “How Soros Tax-Exempt Syndicate Laundered Charitable Donations into Political Support and

   Ground Operations for Mamdani,” White Collar Fraud, October 28, 2025, https://whitecollarfraud.com/2025/10/28/how-soros-tax-exempt-syndicate-laundered-charitable-donations-intopolitical-support-and-ground-operations-for-mamdani/

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