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(Main headline, 3rd story, link)
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As a rose-tinted wave of progressives and democratic socialists win Democratic primaries across the United States, we take a look at two of the organizations behind this recent slate of successful electoral campaigns: the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats.
From Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York to Melat Kiros in Colorado to Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., major victories from self-described democratic socialists and DSA-backed candidates show that "socialism is losing its scare factor." Ashik Siddique, co-chair of the DSA's National Political Committee, explains that DSA's "goal is to reframe politics around class lines in the United States, which is what the ruling class has been doing forever. We want to transfer power from the 1% to the working class, and to replace capitalism with socialism, which means expanding democracy in every part of our lives."
By equipping progressives with alternatives to the traditional money streams relied upon by establishment Democrats, like the pro-Israel lobby or Big Tech, DSA and the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats hope to propel genuine advocates for the working class, unbought by corporate funding, into the halls of Congress.
"We went into this cycle viewing it as an existential one," says Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of Justice Democrats, which recruited candidates like Avila Chevalier and Adam Hamawy in New Jersey. "We see fascism here at our doorstep, and this is a now-or-never moment for our party."
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WASHINGTON - Today, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas released the following statement and video on International Holocaust Remembrance Day:
"When you walked into the home where I grew up, our living room shelves were filled with books of Jewish history and, regrettably and all too often tragically, histories and stories of antisemitism and violence that accompanied it.
"My mother had lived this history. As a girl, she and her parents fled from Romania to France, and on to Cuba, because they could not make it safely to Israel or the United States. Her father lost his parents, brothers, and other family members in the Holocaust. Through the years in the United States, my mother stayed in touch with her two cousins who survived the camps and had made it to Israel alone.
"Our home was deeply rooted in my mother's experience of the Holocaust and the fragility of our safety, wherever we might live in the world. As you might expect, my mother's childhood profoundly shaped her approach to a young child away from home through the night. When our fellow elementary school students went to sleepaway camps and had sleepovers with friends, my siblings and I did not. My mother taught us the meaning and experience of independence in different ways.
"She also taught us three foundational principles that defined for her the scourge of antisemitism and other ideologies of hate. First, their existence manifests in ways that we readily can see, but also lies more widely beneath the surface, often undetected in the day-to-day goings-on of life but sometimes appearing in the most subtle of ways. Second, their prevalence continues to present an existential threat, and one can never assume that a holocaust could not happen again and could not happen where we, her children, might live. And third, that an attack borne of hate against one minority is an attack against all of society.
"I am proud to work in the Department of Homeland Sec
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