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Another Day Another DSA

It’s getting to be regular order. A young DSA immigrant ingénue wins a Democratic primary in a D+20 district. The latest is Melat Kiros:

Melat was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, just weeks before her father was selected by the United States’ Diversity Visa Lottery. Seeking out community and support from other Ethiopian immigrants, her family moved to Denver, Colorado.

Now she’s a lawyer and a hard-left socialist, and likely to win the 1st Congressional District in Colorado, which is D+29 according to Wikipedia. At least hard-left DSA NY Candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier was born in Florida to Dominican immigrants.

The question that experts are puzzling over is whether the DSA surge is a cunning plan that will take over the United States, or whether it is a Baldrick’s Cunning Plan that ends in disaster.

My non-expert guess is that the DSA candidates are going to encourage ordinary middle-class voters to come out and vote Republican. There is no politics without an enemy, and the whole point of populist nationalism is to fight the educated class domination and hegemony to a draw.

I’m reading a long critique of the populist movement — particularly in Europe — by Eugyppius, in which he criticizes the populists for being too amateurish and too disorganized. Obviously the right-wing populists are the opposite of the hard-left DSA bunch who are highly organized trained activists that seem to be taking over the Democratic Party without even firing a shot.

But I think that the populist nationalist movement is disorganized by necessity. If it were organized then the establishment would play the Nazi Card and demolish the populists. Of course, they play the Nazi Card anyway, but since all the populist leaders — except perhaps Tommy Robinson in UK — project a just-folks vibe, the Nazi Card doesn’t work too well. Guess why Nigel Farage likes to be photographed with a pint of beer in his hand.

It’s interesting, and it makes sense. The populist movement is not really a movement to gain political power. Ordinary people don’t think that politics can do much for them; they just want to live their ordinary lives in peace — but don’t you dare cut my Social Security. Establishment figures in the Democratic Party want to climb the greasy pole according to the current rules. But the DSA folks are revolutionaries; they want to burn the place down.

Here’s my take. I suspect that revolution only works after defeat in war. Russia in 1917 was wrecked by World War I. Germany was wrecked by the punitive Versailles treaty. China was wrecked by the combination of the Japanese and the various rebel armies marching around raping and pillaging. They were ripe for revolution.

Perhaps it is true that the Democratic Party right now is semi-wrecked by a generation of incompetents, from Obama to Biden to Harris. That makes the party vulnerable to attack from populists on the right and DSA crazies on the left.

And here is another idea, that the current political situation is similar to the runup to the Civil War. The North was industrializing and flooding with immigrants from potato-famine Ireland and Germany. The South was defending the old ways, of slave plantations, that had served them well for generations. But the North said: enough already, and the South said: No.

Let’s describe the current situation as tech lords trying to implement AI on the one hand, and Organized Crime Democrats trying to keep the grift going on the other hand.

Perhaps the Colorado 8th District, with lefty (but not DSA) State Rep. Manny Rutinel winning the Democratic primary, will tell us the real story in November. The District is north of Denver up to, but not including Boulder, home of the University of Colorado, or Fort Collins, home of Colorado State University. When I visit relatives in Loveland we drive through this district on the way to and from the airport. It is pure modern suburban sprawl, voting D+0, and is represented by Republican Gabe Evans. It’s 51.7% White and 38.5% Hispanic.

Keep your eye on that race if you want to know the direction of the USA.

| Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:11:34 GMT |


The Kiddies Contemplating the End Times

It was just over a year ago that I wrote a deep and penetrating article on “The Dissolution of the Universities.” I wrote that just as the monasteries declined over the centuries, staying very rich and not spending much money on the poor, our modern universities have declined from crucibles of knowledge into ruling-class narrative factories with gigantic endowments.

Could King Henry VIII, who dissolved the monasteries, and gave us Downton Abbey, be just a foretaste of King Donald the Great effecting the Dissolution of the Universities? Now I understand what “No Kings” is all about! Except, of course, that the universities are dissolving themselves without the help of The Donald.

The thing to understand is that back in the day the monasteries were vital repositories of knowledge:

[T]heir primary utility, from the perspective of the wider society, was as repositories, preservers, and disseminators of knowledge. Their scriptoria ensured that books were copied from one generation to the next, preventing knowledge from being lost.

But then came Gutenberg and the printing press.

Isn’t that just what our universities were, back in the day? If you wanted to get an education in philosophy, in the early 19th century, you had to go to the University of Berlin and listen to Schelling, like Kierkegaard did in the early 1840s.

But today there is AI. I asked Grok to “describe latest developments in philosophy.” Grok replied:

  • Concern about AI and human values and posthuman conditions

  • “Ethics of inequality… climate, human rights, and institutional justice.”

  • “interdisciplinary problem-solving—especially around AI’s disruptive power”

So really, it’s not surprising that the kiddies at their graduation ceremonies are booing mention of AI. Not because of the ethics of inequality, but the disruption that they are already experiencing. Imagine a future that does not give a damn about credentials!

The fact is that AI is making the universities — and all institutional education — obsolete. So the kiddies just went deep into debt to finance educations that aren’t worth a dime. Like I say, you can ask AI how to produce a daily schedule for homeschooling and it will give you an answer in seconds. I dare say that AI will tell you all the steps to take in founding an AI startup.

It puts me in mind of the “machine breakers” in the 19th century, the “19th-century English textile artisans who protested the rapid mechanization of industry.” See, the hand spinners and handloom weavers were being replaced by machine textile factories that were producing cheap textiles for the poor. And they decided they couldn’t take it any more. Of course, a century later, nobody gave a damn about the buggy-whip makers all losing their jobs. And whatabout the whalers and poor old Moby-Dick, replaced by a mere commission clerk and his cheap oil from oil wells. And whatabout the armies of programmers now that AI is taking over and doing it in a tenth of the time.

It’s not just kiddies at graduation facing the prospect of a bartender job like Sandy Cortez. I suspect that the current crop of hard-left DSA activists issuing from our universities reflects the rage of a declining aristocracy. Like the monasteries, the universities are rich. Like the nunneries, girls from high-status families are attending universities for the status now that high-status marriages are a thing of the past. Like the monasteries, we don’t need no stinkin’ universities any more.

I wonder if someone, right now, is developing an AI streaming series called Downton U, all about a family that had been in academia since the first research university in the US was founded at Johns Hopkins in 1876 and is now desperate to keep the old family prestige going for one more generation. No doubt Lady Mary will have to marry some low-rent tech bro.

| Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:23:05 GMT |


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Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) is a writer and conservative.

He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.


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A Commoner Manifesto

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TODAY’S MAXIMS:

Today’s Activist is a ruling-class stooge.

Anyone who raises the subject of race is a racist. The one who talks about race the longest is the racist.

all maxims...

BIG IDEAS:

The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.

My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.

And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.

But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.

The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.

The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.

IN BRIEF:
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