The Democratic Socialists of America keep racking up primary wins, and the Democrat Party’s biggest names keep cheering them on.
Most people in politics are too scared to say what that actually means.
But Mike Rowe just went on record with a warning about the Democrat Party that Gavin Newsom is not going to want to hear.
Rowe Calls Out the DSA for What They Are
Rowe posted on X that if the Democratic Socialists of America “continue to grow in popularity, and the Democrats actually campaign on their behalf, I think it’ll be the largest political blunder in my lifetime.”
Rowe prefaced his remarks by saying, “I’m not what you’d call a keen observer of the political climate in our country, but I do pay attention, broadly, to what’s going on within our two parties.”
The post accompanied a monologue from a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, and Rowe noted how people “struggle to reconcile our support for an idea we might like, if it’s promoted by a politician we hate.”
But Rowe wasn’t interested in the usual political hedging. He went straight at the DSA’s platform and named what it actually is.
Rowe said DSA candidates “have clearly articulated precisely what they want, and exactly what they will try to accomplish if they gain power. No borders. No police. No prisons. No Senate.” He added that the group is “literally quoting Karl Marx” and is “literally on the record as desiring to completely dismantle our government and replace it with actual communism.”
That’s not a fringe interpretation. That’s the DSA’s own stated agenda, drawn from its official platform documents, which call for government seizure of major corporations, abolition of the Senate, and dismantling the constitutional order and replacing it with a council of commissars. Rowe didn’t embellish. He just read what they wrote.
In a follow-up post responding to the backlash, Rowe confirmed: “What I can tell you for sure is that more than a few have called for the complete dismantling of capitalism, free markets, representative government, property rights, borders, police, prisons, and the Constitution in general.”
Newsom Hands the DSA a Megaphone
What made Rowe’s post land so hard wasn’t just the DSA’s platform. It was who in the Democrat Party is actively embracing it.
California Governor Gavin Newsom became one of the latest prominent Democrat figures to embrace DSA-backed candidates as socialists dominated primary elections, telling a YouTube livestream that he rejects the idea that socialist candidates are a “threat” to the party.
“I’m for addition, not subtraction,” Newsom said. “The Democratic Party needs to be in the addition business if we’re going to get back into the majority.”
Rowe pushed back on that directly in his follow-up post, writing that his original statement referred to “a number of elected Democrats who have agreed to campaign on their behalf — including Gavin Newsom, who said, ‘The Democratic Party must accept the DSA in order to take back the Congress.’ His words, not mine.”
And the DSA keeps winning. After electoral successes in Colorado and New York, the openly Marxist organization added another victory in Michigan, with DSA-backed state Representative Donavan McKinney handily beating Representative Shri Thanedar.
Abdul El-Sayed also emerged victorious over Representative Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democrat Senate primary.
Michigan’s DSA chapters, the Working Families Party, and the United Auto Workers all flexed their muscles up and down the ballot.
Newsom’s calculation is transparent. He wants the seats. He’ll worry about the ideology later — or maybe he won’t worry at all. Either way, he’s telling the country that the Democrat Party is open for business with people who openly quote Marx and want to abolish the Senate. Voters will have to decide what to make of that.
What This Means for the Country
Rowe closed his original post by invoking a warning that carries more weight today than it did when it was first spoken.
He wrote: “But if the DSA continues to grow in popularity, and the Democrats actually campaign on their behalf, I think it’ll be the largest political blunder in my lifetime. Unless of course, I’m wrong, and the DSA expands to swallow the Democratic Party, and communism winds up on the ballot. In which case, Ronald Reagan’s warning will haunt us all. ‘Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.'”
Reagan said that in 1961. He was talking about the slow creep of government control over medicine. But the principle holds for every generation and every form of collectivist overreach, because the mechanism is always the same: a movement promises to fix what’s broken by seizing what works.
Rowe had said Democrats have “an opportunity to speak out loudly and clearly against an ideology that has been proven, demonstrably, to be a really bad idea,” calling it “the best opportunity Democrats will ever have to make some kind of reasonable appeal to Independents.” He said it was “a chance to affirmatively distance themselves from an ideology that has caused more human suffering than any other scheme dreamt up by man.” And yet, he noted, “they have not.”
The record of Marxist governance isn’t ambiguous. Every country that has tried it produced the same results: economic collapse, political repression, shortages, and the destruction of the middle class that socialist politicians claim to champion. Venezuela. Cuba. The Soviet Union. The script doesn’t change, only the names of the people promising this time will be different.
And the Democrat Party, rather than running from that history, is handing its microphone to candidates who cite it approvingly.
Rowe is right that this is a blunder. But it’s only a blunder if you assume the goal is to win over the broad American electorate. If the real goal is to permanently reshape the Democrat Party’s base and drag the Overton window so far left that openly socialist positions become the new normal, then what Newsom is doing makes a different kind of sense.
That’s the part nobody in the mainstream press wants to say out loud. Rowe said it anyway, and the post drew 7,600 comments — a reaction so large that Rowe felt compelled to address it directly.
But the left didn’t engage the argument. They attacked the messenger. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what you’d expect from people who can’t defend the platform on its merits.
Rowe posted his warning to more than 682,500 X followers. It hit a nerve because ordinary Americans already know what socialism produces. They’ve watched it play out in real time in other countries, and they’re watching the Democrat Party try to import it here one primary at a time.
Reagan’s warning wasn’t a prediction. It was a reminder that freedom requires active defense in every generation. The DSA is counting on this one to forget that.
Sources: Breitbart News; X/@mikeroweworks; Fox News; Washington Times; Gateway Pundit; Axios; CNBC
