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Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
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of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan. Required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See Terms this episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for, from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
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Alrighty. Today we're going to talk about the history of the Democratic Socialists of America. Now of course, the splinter faction of the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly powerful and popular. In fact, it's eating the host organism. But it actually has a long history. It's been around for quite a while. Originally, the Democrat Socialists of America was formed in 1982 as a merger between two pre existing socialist groups. One was called the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that was itself a splinter faction of the Debian Socialist Party and another group called the New American Movement that was an anti violence breakaway of Students for a Democratic Society. SDS was of course a radical left wing group that ended up being the seed for a bunch of left wing terrorist groups, including for example, the Weather Underground. While the DSA originally rejected Soviet style communism, it framed itself as a democratic socialist group designed to push socialism higher through elections and unions and civil society rather than violent revolution. Now important to note, DSA was never a separate party running separate candidates. That's not what it was created to do. It has always worked as a faction pressure group within the Democratic Party. The founder of Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and then later the dsa, a guy named Michael Harrington. He used the DSA to endorse various candidates, including for example Teddy Kennedy in 1980. Harrington had a long history as a writer, as a columnist. He was a socialist who was anti communist. He was opposed to using force. He was on the far Left of the traditional Democratic Party. One of his books, very famous book called the Other America, was a major inspiration for President Lyndon Bain Johnson's Great Society programs. Now, Harrington actually broke with other socialist groups in the 1970s over their inability to separate off from authoritarian communism. He said, you shouldn't be mimicking the Soviet Union. He thought that romanticizing Third World's revolutionary movements were was both intellectually dishonest and politically dangerous. I know things have gone a little astray. By the way, he was also pro Israel. He wrote, actually, quote, if one preposterously charges that Zionism is racist, then so are all nationalisms, which joined to condemn it at the UN and that is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning. So in other words, today Michael Harrington, the founder of the dsa, would probably be in sort of the mainstream of the Democratic Party, like a Joe Biden, NANCY Pelosi Democrat well, the early focus of the DSA was labor solidarity, anti Reagan activism, nuclear disarmament and opposing corporations. Michael Harrington died in 1989, and the DSA ended up as a sort of small, aging intellectual organization with very little mass appeal. Over the course of the 1990s, they remained a splinter fringe group. They were opposed to Bill Clinton's Third Way centrism. They opposed nafta, they were opposed to welfare reform. They actually didn't endorse Clinton either 1992 or 1996. They didn't actually endorse anyone in the presidential elections. They did, however, endorse in local elections, including a little known Illinois state Senate candidate in 1996 named Barack Hussein Obama. Well, after the rise of the Bush administration, they remained pretty fringe, but they started growing in power largely because of the failures of the Bush administration. They opposed the Iraq war, they opposed the Bush administration, and they began framing democratic socialism as an alternative to what they called neoconservatism and also neoliberal Democrats. Now, now the failures of the Bush administration gave them some wind in their sails. If you oppose the Iraq war originally, then when it went wrong, you could take credit. And if you opposed capitalism, you could blame the economic downturn of 2008 on capitalism. So they get this major boost and with the election of Barack Obama, again, a person that they had endorsed for local office 20 years before, suddenly the DSA is starting to become more live. The Occupy Wall street movement again gives them a shot in the arm. We'll get some more on this in a moment. First question for you. We're when was the last time you looked at your credit card statement? And thought, finally, I'm getting ahead. For a lot of people, that never ever happens because once you fall behind, you just stay behind. And that's what credit card companies want because they make more money if you're behind on your bills. That's why I want to tell you about PDS Debt. If you're carrying balances on credit cards, personal loans, collections or medical bills, every day you wait can end up costing you more money. PDS Debt has customized options designed to help people get out from under that burden. They use AI and data to go beyond the numbers and personalize saving solutions for your specific situation. They may even be able to reduce up to half of what you owe and help combine multiple payments into one lower monthly payment. Checking your options is fast and free. There's no minimum credit score required. Your savings can begin the same day you complete that 30 second assessment. PDS debt is also the top rated company in the industry with thousands of five star reviews and an A rating from the Better Business Bureau. Get your free 30 second personalized assessment today@pdsdebt.com Shapiro Again, that's pdsdat.com Shapiro if you got a debt problem, don't wait on that. Go get it solved right now with my friends over at PDS Debt. Get your free 30 second personalized assessment right now at pdsdet.com Shapiro Then 2016 after 8 years of Barack Obama, the DSA really starts to flex some muscle. They move behind Bernie Sanders and they start making him their top priority. As early as 2014, he was their biggest vehicle for mainstreaming what they called Democratic Socialism. DSA membership climbed from the from 6,500 to 8,500 in the 2016 election cycle. Doesn't sound like a lot, but you know, in percentage terms it was large. And then they surged again after Trump's election by another 13,000 people by mid-2017. By 2017, the DSA's revenue had more than doubled from 2016 and their expenses more than tripled because of the rise of the so called Bernie Bros and the rise of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election. Again, campaigning from inside the party against the party. This created a massive contingent of DSA inclined voters who didn't like Hillary Clinton and concluded that her nomination meant that the Democratic Party was rigged. So if you didn't like Hillary, even if you weren't a huge Bernie fan, you started moving toward the anti elite narrative promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America. After that you see the rise of DSA associated candidates like Alexandra Ocasio, Cortez in New York. So fresh, so phase. The DSA gets more and more organized and they start targeting very blue areas. They start local and then they go national. They start targeting Democrats in some of the deepest Democrat areas in the country and replacing them with Democratic Socialists of America. Between 2018 and 2023, the DSA's revenues, this isn't just like small donations necessarily. Some of them are coming, presumably via Marxist billionaires like Neville Roy Singham. They jumped from $2 million to $6 million per year. So now they've got a bit of a budget. AOC winning in 2018 gave the DSA a fresh face and a gigantic cultural cachet. Other prominent DSA members of Congress soon enter, like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman. Notably, Bush and Bowman were voted out of office in 2024. But the DSA is now growing by leaps and bounds. Membership is up to 46,000 in 2018. Today there are over 200 elected democratic socialists of America politicians on the federal, state and local levels combined. 90% of those were elected after 2019. That includes Zormandani in New York City, Katie Wilson in Seattle, Janice Lewis George in Washington D.C. and Karen Bass in LA. She claims not to be DSA, but she literally ran propaganda campaigns and attended terrorist training in Cuba back in the day. And now she might lose her mayoralty to an actual DSA candidate, Nithya Rahman in Los Angeles. Lots of other DSA candidates are winning on the local level now. Every Communist faction ends up fighting itself at some point. And so you see a sort of breakaway faction of the DSA fighting other factions of the dsa. But the bottom line is this. The DSA has become increasingly radical over time. So Michael Harrington's perspectives, Basically the only thing they kept from Michael Harrington was don't be violent, take over an existing party and also spend a lot of money on the government. Those are like the things they kept from Michael Harrington. Otherwise they've embraced Third Worldism, anti Americanism, Communist authoritarianism, all those things they've now embraced. The DSA platform currently includes everything for everybody. So Medicare for all, housing for all, college for all, gigantic increases in the minimum wage, a four day workweek, unions for everyone, tax the rich, redistributionism at the very highest scale, ending all incarceration, literally no jails, backing a new state of Palestine that would be a terrorist state, ending the so called military industrial complex, defunding the Department of Defense, total opposition's economic sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, abolition of the borders, abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court. All of this is an attempt to overthrow the system from within. This activist faction inside the left is taking over the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party is gradually acclimating to all of this. They're gradually taking in the positions of the DSA and then spitting them out as mainstream Democratic positions. This is why, for example, by 2028 it will be a litmus test how much you hate Israel because the DSA has made this a litmus test for its own candidates. It's the stated reason for primary very, very left politicians like Dan Goldman in New York or Adrenal Espad in New York. So more and more the DSA's positions are defining the rest of the party and up and coming Democrats are espousing these positions because of course, it is better to have the DSA running with you than running against you. All of this is designed to tear down the system from within. That is what the DSA is designed to do. Today they have 100,000 registered members a by the end of the year, they'll probably have 500,000 registered members. They're doing heavy, heavy lifting in these local races. And then they are generating a narrative for mainstream Democrat politicians across the country that you had better surrender to the DSA or find yourself on the firing line. So far it's working. And the Democratic Party has no immunity whatsoever to any of this because they themselves have moved so far to the left. And so pretty soon the Democratic Party will just be the Democrat Socialist Party of America. They will be the same. It won't be a splinter faction anymore. It'll just be the entire party.