When I decided to attend a Democratic Socialist fundraising party in NYC on Saturday I had no idea I was going to see the far-left’s secret plan to interfere with ICE enforcement first hand, presented to us via a Power Point slideshow.
My producer and I RSVPed for the event a few days beforehand, which was listed on the DSA’s website and newsletter for a minimum ticket price of $20.
We drove out to Starr Barr in Brooklyn around 7:30 with good intentions to meet and speak with real socialists - the people who got Mayor Zohran Mamdani elected and helped a slew of other socialist candidates win their primaries in recent weeks.
Who were these people? How do they socialize with each other? Would they be okay with a polite conservative reporter crashing their party?
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We parked on the grimy street, covered in trash and graffiti and full of young hipsters with piercings, tattoos, and smoking cigarettes. As we approached the venue I started to think to myself: “Why did I wear a suit and tie to this?”
My plan was to be open and forthcoming about who I was, a conservative editor of The Capitalist Magazine on Substack looking to observe the DSA in their natural habitat. But if I’m the only guy in a suit in a sea of baggy band t-shirts and ripped jeans then I’m already going to stand out in a bad way.
The suit signals productivity, ambition, and the professional class of people antithetical to the socialist worldview. And it was like fucking 95 degrees and very humid. I realized I was a moron and didn’t think this all the way through, but I was already committed to my first mistake of the evening.
We walked right in, no problem. Showed our digital tickets, awkwardly nodded to the Hot Topic employees at the front door and beelined to the bar for a Miller Light and a Jameson on the rocks for my producer.
They only had obscure hipster craft beers. Should have guessed.
There was only about 30 people in the whole place when we arrived, and we were about 45 mins late. An empty dance floor and a pool table covered in DSA literature and pins across from the bar. Not the packed venue of young socialists I was expecting, but not completely dead either.
I started talking to a nice bald man who passed by the bar. He was a healthcare worker and started talking my ear off about how socialized healthcare should be a no-brainer here in New York. He said every other civilized country has it, it’s great and other countries laugh at Americans because of our healthcare system, etc. He made some admittedly strong points, focussing on the logistics of implementation rather than ideological slop. I wasn’t completely convinced, and the American healthcare system is not my area of expertise, so we parted cordially with a handshake.
The room filled up a bit more before everyone was told to be quiet for a big speech. Marina Weiss, the event organizer and the person who would soon kick me out of the party, got on stage and grabbed the mic.
Fortunately, the first thing she said was that she goes by she/her pronouns, something I could tell the whole room, including myself, was relieved to confirm, otherwise how would we know she’s a woman?
This is when I could tell we weren’t supposed to be here and that they did not want press or outsiders present. She explicitly said as much, acknowledging that it was an “unvetted room” yet continued to explain how community members could text a hotline when they spot ICE agents around the city and activists would immediately be mobilized to the scene to interfere with ICE’s “kidnapping.”
I’ve covered anti-ICE protests in NYC where activists stand in the way of ICE agents, block their cars, drag trash cans out into the streets to disrupt and impede law enforcement, and now I was witnessing how they know where to be and who is involved in organizing all of this chaos.
The video embedded at the top of this article shows the highlights of the nearly 30 minute speech. Watch her explain it for yourself, it’s surprisingly simple how they do it.
After her speech, someone I was speaking with earlier introduced me to Marina. I shook her hand and introduced myself as the editor of The Capitalist and that I was eager to learn about how the DSA organizes and speak with attendees about their beliefs, etc.
This was a big mistake.
She looked me in the eye and demanded I follow her and she started toward the front door. I knew where this was going. But I proceeded with the hope I could talk to her more before she deported me from her event.
“Uh oh, I hope I’m not in trouble,” I said.
“You’re not in too much trouble,” she responded, then walking over to the bouncer at the front door and commanding him not to let me back inside.
“Why can’t I go back in?” I asked.
“What are your feelings about abolishing ICE?” she asked, I guess giving me one more chance to conform to her ideological purity test before I was banished.
“Well, I agree with you that ICE is not perfect, but I also think that there has to be some enforcement of immigration law. So, if you support abolishing ICE, what would take its place?” I asked her.
She didn’t even answer. She told the bouncer again to not let me back in and stormed back inside.
In ICE-like fashion, she deported me from the party without any due process. But was I entitled to due process as an outsider and a non-DSA aligned alien? Probably not. So she was in the right. I was a deportable target, subject to lawful removal from the private event, and I respected that.
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I apologized the bouncer, assuring him I did not want to cause any trouble for him and would finish my drink outside. He laughed and said he agreed with me and the premise of my question: How are we going to enforce immigration law without ICE or another federal law enforcement body assigned to do so?
He was a chill dude just tryin to keep his job and I had absolutely no quarrel with him. But luckily the party came outside to me and my producer who was smoking like a chimney with a group of shaggy leftists on the sidewalk.
We spent the rest of the night debating DSA members about deportations, Mamdani’s free services proposals, free markets vs central planning and more, and it was a lot of fun. It took me back to my college days of engaging in political debates as a proxy for socializing. I made a lot of friends and enemies and it primed me for what we are up against today.
There are cool people in almost every group, including radical political movements. I try not to demonize anyone before getting a chance to meet them and hear them out. It’s clear that the DSA is extremely motivated and emboldened by their recent primary wins and I had a sense that they felt like their nationwide victory was not only plausible but inevitable.
I hope they are wrong. As nice as some of them were, their ideas are not new, they have come to fruition by way of young passionate revolutionaries in other countries who stopped at nothing to achieve their utopian goals at the cost of millions of lives and wide scale poverty.
Even after bloody socialist revolutions pan out, the systems that are implemented are objectively dysfunctional and yield unspeakable suffering. Democratic Socialism isn’t just affordable housing and healthcare, it’s a broad and intense rebuke of the western capitalist superstructure and a rejection of American traditionalism. They are not fooling me, or really anyone on the right with their ploy to appear moderate. The movement is an all-or-nothing heist of the tenets of American civilization, aka everything conservatives are trying to conserve.
Let’s not whine and complain like they do when they call us fascists, lets defeat their politics in the marketplace of ideas and make America’s choice very clear between a system that works and a system that cannibalizes itself every single time.
I look forward to attending more DSA events in the future as a respectful observer, though I don’t expect to be on their VIP list any time soon.
Enjoyed the article. Takes real initiative to tolerate many of those people.
Next time, don’t shave or even bathe for a few days before. Wear jeans and a t-shirt. Piercings are optional. Good luck!