Read an exclusive excerpt from journalist Casey Michel's new book exploring how the country's wealthiest are monopolizing U.S. democracy and propping up dictators and autocrats in the process.
It’s a funny experience, opening your local newspaper and finding that it condemns your own politics as a threat to the nation. But that’s what happened this Sunday, when the Times-Picayune of New Orleans ran a column by editor Quin Hillyer, breathlessly informing the Crescent City that “leftist Dems are dangerous.” Everyone should be worried about “the radicals and socialists who are making big inroads in the national Democratic Party,” Hillyer insists, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (who is not a socialist), Melat Kiros of Colorado, Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York, and so on. According to the column, these candidates are “outlandishly beyond the pale” because they seek to “tear down a host of cultural institutions and mores that most Americans see as essential parts of a healthy society.” Like many conservatives, Mr. Hillyer believes he knows best about where “the pale” is and what a “healthy society” consists of: his objections to leftist politicians are many, but include that “they want to defund the police, adopt the financially and arithmetically impossible Green New Deal, provide Medicare for All, defund the Department of Defense (!) and eliminate ‘the entire global system of capital,’ among many other radical (or even crazy) ideas.” Allow the Democratic Socialists of America and their allies to gain power, he warns, and the Democratic Party risks becoming a “den of malevolence and lunacy.”
The victims were among the 308 people from the same clan who were massacred in Israeli airstrikes on a residential block in Gaza City in November 2023.
Several Democrats are pushing for Ohio GOP Rep. Max Miller to resign or face expulsion over allegations of domestic abuse, but privately some wouldn’t mind if he stuck around for now.