Angelenos face a nearly biblical number of plagues and crises at the moment. Homelessness has long since passed the disaster stage. Fires continue to erupt, thanks to poor management strategies and neglected firefighting infrastructure. Housing prices continue to escalate far past the ability of the middle class to keep up, exacerbated by all of the bureaucratic delays obstructing the rebuilding of homes lost in the Palisades and Alta Dena fires. Crime is so bad that it almost appears impolite to mention it these days.
And if that weren't enough, voters in Los Angeles have to choose between the incumbent and incompetent socialist mayor who has made all of this worse, or the more extreme socialist who will, er ... make everything worse. Could this possibly get more embarrassing for Angelenos?
Of course it can! Axios reports that a 'civil war' has erupted among the Democratic Socialists of America who endorsed Nithya Raman over incumbent incompetent Karen Bass. Their national committee wants to force the local chapter to disavow Raman on the eve of the election, which she reportedly leads.
Can you guess why? Let's play Name That Lunacy:
- Homelessness policy
- Housing
- Regulatory enforcement
- Position on California's 'wealth tax' referendum
- Crime and law enforcement
- Reservoir and water management
- Israel and the Joooooooos
Psyche! Of course, this is a trick question. It's always about the Jews with Marxists:
The same socialist movement celebrating its ascendancy through New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now debating whether to disown Nithya Raman before Los Angeles voters can even weigh in.
National Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leaders face demands to overturn the local chapter's endorsement of Raman over her position on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
The Los Angeles chapter of DSA still enthusiastically endorses Raman, arguing Angelenos deserve a functioning city government.
Go figure. The local chapter may be crazy, but they're not insane. The national leadership, on the other hand, wants to make an example of the DSA candidate while she's in a fight with a Fidelista. Vanity Fair reported on the struggle session last week as well, and notes that the DSA's timing could not possibly be worse:
Nationally, the fight raises a larger question about how much ideological compromise the DSA will accept in its pursuit of electoral power.
Just yesterday, The New Yorker published a story about how the DSA is embracing political pragmatism over ideological purity in an attempt to gain some real governing power, and they highlighted DSA-LA’s endorsement of Raman as evidence of that shift in thinking.
More than 900 local DSA members voted to endorse Raman. There’s currently a petition circulating among them urging national leaders to respect their vote to endorse Raman.
When Vanity Fair profiled Raman earlier this year, her team asked us to qualify a line in the story about Raman accepting an endorsement from a Pro-Israel group (Democrats For Israel-Los Angeles) in order to specify that it wasn’t from AIPAC. Then at last week’s mayoral debate, Raman quoted Ronald Reagan. The trouble with trying to please anti-zionist socialists and Reagan Republicans? You risk alienating both.
The problem with being a radical is that your allies are all radicals, too. They belong to the same cult, the same groupthink, and they do not take well to heretics. Using Israel and BDS as a litmus test for a mayoral race on the only candidate of your own party in a general election is a very good demonstration of that reality. Ask Angelenos what's going wrong in their city, and Israel probably would rank no higher than space aliens or Bigfoot. And yet the DSA is so obsessed with it that they are threatening to un-endorse their own nominee with a week to go before Election Day unless she denounces the Joooooooooos.
And the irony here is that there's likely not a dime's worth of difference between the two radicals that managed to get spots on the general-election ballot. Bass spent most of her adult life looking up to Fidel Castro; Raman worships at a similar Marxist-revolutionary shrine. The DSA wins no matter what, and Angelenos lose no matter what, but the latter is the fault of voters in Los Angeles. The DSA's civil war offers them a belated lesson in promoting radicals, but it offers everyone else a lesson in places where election choices include a non-Marxist, non-Islamist, and non-antisemite.
In the meantime ... pass the popcorn.