What Really Happens at a DSA Meeting?

GONZO

The Blind, Murderous Happiness of the New York Communist

By Sperry Collins · June 25, 2026 · 8 min read

The New York Times officially knighted Zohran Mamdani with the title “Kingmaker” after three of his allies—Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—won congressional primaries, beating establishment candidates (including an heir of the Levi Strauss fortune) and chanting “Free, free Palestine” along the way. It’s a coup for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the burgeoning activist organization known for upper-middle-class hipster communists—the sons of millionaires who hate billionaires.

The fertile ground of disgruntled almost-elites has long been the fodder for leftist revolution, so I decided to attend one of the DSA’s notorious meetings. I found bloodlust dressed up in therapy-speak, fueled by pizza and hard seltzer.

The Chinatown office of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America is as red as it sounds. Not the red of the blood of their revolutionary fantasies, nor the imposing red of Stalin’s Russia, but the red of bright fluorescent lighting bouncing off whitewashed walls.

Two pillars near the front of the room are painted a fire-engine red and covered with large stencils of white roses. Along the side wall, there’s a mural by Molly Crabapple and Juan Antonio Corretjer in shades of gray against red: “Gloria A Las Manos Que Hoy Trabajan!” curling across the cherry-red wall in extravagant cursive, dancing around a strong, independent Puerto Rican woman and other oppressed figures of the city. The bookshelves are stuffed with paperbacks side by side with theory—New Jim Crow; Reconstruction; Tana French Book; A Long View of the Left; Blood in the Water; The New Student Left; Radical Paradoxes; Readings in US Imperialism. Modest rows of three folding chairs each, a hanging projector screen, and a whiteboard buzzing with ideas. It looks less like the headquarters of a revolution and more like the common room of a student co-op.

With “Tax the Rich” posters and that ubiquitous rose, the NYC-DSA was hosting a double-header that night: DSA 101 and a mixer for the Socialist Soccer League (AKA Commie Kickball). I wanted to spy on them.

The organizers outnumbered the organized. When I first arrived, I quickly realized that I was one of only two attendees of this particular DSA 101. All the rest were known entities, at least to each other: Janelle, an elegant and eloquent young black woman womaning the door; Harper, a middle-aged woman with piercing blue eyes who worked in fintech, part of the committee to unionize tech workers; Lucy, a strangely handsome trans woman in her early 30s, who would be leading the lecture portion, or, rather, reading the lecture portion off of three pages of computer paper.

Then there were the normal guys: Clinton, a short and wide-smiling black guy who I had pegged at 22, was 28; Marlow, a mystery-meat twink with a shy confidence and the respect of the whole room—he’d been around the block; and Dwight, a very normal blue-collar white guy, probably listening to Cumtown a decade ago and doesn’t swing that way anymore.

Then you had me and the other attendee, Maddie, also new to DSA. A pretty white girl of about 22 with a few pencil-line tattoos on her arm and a nose piercing. I sat next to her. We talked about books for a minute before I asked, “What brings you here?”

“I’m in the Socialist Soccer League…and now I want to get involved in actual organizing. My boyfriend’s the real socialist, but I’m getting very into it.”

“What’s your team called?”

“This Team Kills Fascists. We’re pretty good.”

After about twenty minutes of sitting in an awkward silence next to Maddie and watching our would-be commissars get ready, the actual lecture began.

Lucy, the trans, is strong of jaw, fine of nose, and has a slight shadow of beard. Her Tiresian breasts seemed to glorify gender aesthetically, suggesting that maleness had become boring and that becoming a woman represented a thrilling new difficulty. She shuffled printer paper in her hands nervously, signaling to a man sitting behind me in the last of the three rows of three that all was ready.

“Welcome to the 101!” Lucy smiled bright and inviting, along with all the other comrades, who stared bright smiles at Maddie and me. They skipped the land acknowledgement and jumped straight to pronouns. Lucy asked us to introduce ourselves and describe what our understanding of socialism is. “Sperry, he/him, and, uh, socialism, to me, means, uhhhhhh, unity, and, ummm, um, coming together as a society to, y’know, achieve something you never could on your own.” Everyone smiled.

“All the things that make our lives shitty,” said Lucy, in a transfried voice, “come from the power structures that exist in a capitalist system.”

“There are about 50 billionaires in New York. So if we tax them effectively, all our problems go away. We organize, we vote, we run, we win. It’s all about waking people up to the chains they don’t even know they’re wearing.”

The idea, according to trans Lucy, is that DSA slogans are created and emphasized explicitly to radicalize. Everything flows from class conflict. “Our goal,” said Lucy, “is to create as much antipathy for the rich as possible. And that’s why we bring every kind of identity that experiences oppression into our fold: to wake them up to the most fundamental root of all the other forms of oppression—capitalism.”

A few of the more experienced attendees recalled watching Zohran take the reins of campaign management before winning a seat on the New York State Assembly. A big part of his campaign’s energy came from NYC-DSA leveraging their massive organizational power and covering the city in canvassers who knew how to sell. Despite the message of unity, Lucy assured us, the goal is class antagonism. This is the goal: creating and exacerbating tension.

And yet, despite lofty language about the clash between haves and have-nots, everything about who they were leaned heavily into wholesome chungus socialism: Zohran’s ’70s retro aesthetic, the smiles, the promises of affordability. Who doesn’t want the cost of living to go down, after all?

The elegant black lady, Chloe, shared a vision of what NYC-DSA could be. She’d recently seen the documentary Seeing Red, about life in the American Communist Party between the Great Depression and the Cold War. Chloe’s main takeaway was that NYC communists back in the day could “live their whole lives inside the party.” Shopping, parties, entertainment—all were supplied by membership in the ACP. She said that an organization like the Socialist Soccer League was a step in that direction: providing like-minded people with a place to link and build.

The following Socialist Soccer League mixer was small but cozy. Those there were eager to meet new friends and reconnect with old ones. The conversation turned to New Jersey. Chloe declared that she was a certified Jersey-ologist, to which several present humorously questioned these credentials. Jokingly, Lucy asked Chloe how it felt to be “Jersey-vestigated.” One fellow, Ryan, a white guy in his mid-thirties, observed the strange frequency of Confederate flags flying in Union states such as Ohio and New Hampshire. “You know you guys died fighting them, right?” he asked, redditly.

I offered that I’d seen a handful of the Stars and Bars flying in Suffolk County, out east on Long Island. At this point, Ryan decided to drop serious ball knowledge about the Nazi history of Long Island. Hitler’s nephew, William Stuart-Houston, had moved to Patchogue and is buried in Coram, NY. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that in all likelihood, socialist knowledge of Nazi history is probably more thorough and accurate than that of the lumpen-Nazi-tariat that’s cheering on the war in Iran right now. Despite this, though, and on account of the address, the number “14” was written all over the room.

Today’s socialists are not throwing bombs or sending money to Communist countries. They are cracking jokes and drinking hard seltzer. Laughing between bites of pizza, today’s socialists don’t promise a workers’ paradise. They’re promising to “make life less bad.” The temptation to believe them grows by the day.

But the promises of affordability hide the sinister dialectic at the core of their ideology, the ideology of class resentment and the pathway toward the end state of Communism. The totalizing worldview of the DSA is a Trojan Horse for extreme violence. Cadre candidates are real, and the DSA isn’t going anywhere, and their mission is not to kill, but to castrate anyone considered a source of oppression: religious, ethnic, racial, or political. Beware of DemSocs bearing gifts.