The Democratic Socialists of America may have Democrat in their name and operate as part of the Democratic Party, but they hate the team they play on.

DSA members see the Democratic Party as a cuckoo sees other birds: a means of achieving an end. Just as a cuckoo mother lays her eggs in other species’ nests so that her offspring will be fed and nurtured until her chicks are strong enough to kill the hosts, so the DSA has a parasitic relationship with the Democratic Party.

A video from the watchdog organization Canary Mission describes it like this: “DSA candidates run as Democrats in safe blue districts. They slip through low turnout primaries, and once inside, they use the Democratic label as camouflage while advancing an extremist anti-American agenda far beyond the party's mainstream. ... Once in office, DSA candidates take orders from DSA’s internal enforcers and working groups. City halls and state houses start running as socialist machines controlled by the organization, not the Democratic Party and certainly not voters.”

This kind of hostile takeover is happening right now in New York City, where Muslim democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor.

On this episode of “The Liz Wheeler Show,” Liz exposes three key figures inside the Mamdani administration who are currently working to ensure that the rotten fate of the Big Apple spreads like a cancer across the nation.

Mamdani’s recent appointment of NYC tenant rights activist Cea Weaver as the director of NYC’s Office to Protect Tenants is evidence that a total socialist takeover isn’t fear-driven speculation from the right wing, but the certified plan.

A resurfaced clip from a 2021 DSA event that’s recently gone viral captures Weaver discussing a push for shifts in housing policy: “I think the reality is that for centuries we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good, and ... in transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families, especially white families but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

“That is, in essence, Zohran Mamdani walking down the street and seizing private property, implementing racially biased, racially discriminatory policies that prevent white people specifically from having the same relationship with property (also known as ownership of property) that they have had in the past,” Liz translates.

“[Cea Weaver] will use her position of power to destroy private property, to take it away, despite the fact that her mom, by the way ... owns a $1.6 million house in Tennessee,” she laughs.

But Weaver is just the tip of the iceberg. “[Mamdani] has saturated New York City with DSA members — DSA members who want to orient themselves towards insurrection, who want to overthrow the empire, who believe that you’re not just pushing socialism, you are tearing down a nation built on capitalism,” Liz continues.

One of those people is Alex Vitale — a key adviser on Mamdani’s transition team, specifically for the Committee on Community Safety. Vitale, a Brooklyn College sociology professor and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, is the author of a book titled “The End of Policing,” in which he argues for the “abolition of police.”

“He has pushed to abolish the New York City Police Department’s gang database. ... And he’s very open about this,” Liz says.

Another deeply concerning member of Mamdani’s administration is a man named Gustavo Gordillo — the co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. He was a key architect of the chapter’s electoral strategy that helped propel Mamdani’s successful 2025 mayoral campaign, and he now serves on the transition team’s economic development and workforce development committee, advising on policies tied to Mamdani’s economic agenda.

Liz plays a video clip of Gordillo from a 2025 DSA rally spewing the following anti-American vitriol: “They make figures like Hamas and, quote, unquote, terrorists into effective enemies. I think all of us in the working-class movement need to spend more time villainizing too. There are actual terrorists in the United States, but they are not Mahmoud Khalil, nor are they the students and working-class people protesting Israel’s genocide. And it is definitely not the Palestinian people. The terror comes from the capitalists and their pawns. ... The terror comes from their fascist government and their ICE squads.”

“These are the people in the Mamdani administration,” Liz says.

“Remember: Sometimes the most detrimental impacts are from policies that are imposed on us by people whose names we’re not even familiar with.”

To hear more of Liz’s analysis, watch the video above.

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