The Democrats complained that Republicans weren’t taking the condemnation of socialism seriously enough.
Page A15From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 September 2026
Centrist Democrats move to out-condemn the GOP on DSA as conservative outlets work over a progressive Muslim candidate.
As it ran on the front
Watch the pincer close. On one side you got conservative Democrats filing an amendment to out-condemn the Republican condemnation of the Democratic Socialists of America — not oppose it, not counter it, outdo it, like there's a contest for who can distance themselves fastest from their own coalition's left flank. On the other side you got the same week's opposition press running two separate hit pieces on El-Sayed, one telling him to forget his own comments happened, the other timing the takedown to an uneasy moment at a campaign event with a union member. That's not a coincidence of news cycles. That's a pincer, and both jaws are aimed at the same guy from opposite directions, one from inside the tent and one from outside it.
Here's the con, plain: you don't need the GOP to beat the left flank of the Democratic Party if the center does it for free, and does it faster, and does it in writing, as an amendment, with a roll call attached. The condemnation isn't a disagreement about policy anymore, it's a competition for who can prove loyalty to the donor class quickest. And the press does the mop-up — every uneasy pause at a rally, every old quote, gets run as a character piece, while the amendment gets run as governance. Same target. Different bylines.…
…(cont) I've watched this movie before. It's not about DSA, not really, and it's not about El-Sayed's actual record either — go read the transcripts, that's a whole separate argument. It's about who gets to be the acceptable left in this country, and the answer, every single time this comes up, is: less of it, and further right than last time. The DSA amendment isn't a rebuke of extremism. It's a location marker. It tells you exactly where the center of the Democratic Party wants to stand this cycle, and it's a few steps further from its own base than it stood the cycle before.
Here's the stakes part, the part that actually lands in your kitchen: every one of these amendments, every one of these takedowns, is a Democratic Party deciding, in public, on the record, that the fight worth having this year is with the people to its left, not the people cutting your kid's school lunch program. That's not strategy. That's a tell.
“They don't need Republicans to primary the left, they just do it themselves and call it responsible. Watch who the actual amendment protects — it ain't your kid's lunch program, it's a seat at the table for whoever wrote the check.”
“Look, condemning actual socialism isn't controversial, that's just a bipartisan value statement, Democrats agree with us on this one, that's not us winning, that's consensus. The El-Sayed stuff, that's earned scrutiny of his own words, we didn't write his comments for him — wait, that's a direct quote characterization, not my phrase, I'm just reporting the coverage, I don't assign the adjectives, the outlets do.”
The receipts
A UAW worker's struggle at Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan Senate press conference sparked a fierce debate between conservative and liberal commentators on X.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed has realized that his terrorist-sympathizing antisemitism is unpopular and is trying to sprint away from it, using the most insincere excuses possible. El Sayed has tried to walk back several of his own comments, chief among them being his reaction to the attempted terrorist attack…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.