Recent high-profile electoral successes have thrust the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) back into the national spotlight, but public understanding of the group’s far-left worldview lags considerably behind the understanding of its political influence. It is crucial for Americans to appreciate that the DSA has become a deeply radical organization, with a membership whose politics increasingly roll right off the leftmost edge of the ideological spectrum. In its newly updated platform, the DSA calls for (among many other things) the wholesale abolition of capitalism — to be replaced by a centrally planned “classless society” wherein government monopolizes socioeconomic life. It seeks to abolish police, prisons, and immigration enforcement, defund the U.S. military, eliminate the Senate, and remove federal checks-and-balances by making the executive and judicial branches explicitly subordinate to the legislative. The DSA is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit — not a political party — and it is overwhelmingly funded through membership dues. These accounted for over 87 percent of its total revenue of $6.38 million in 2024 — a budget that is quite modest by national political activist groups’ standards. It also maintains a much smaller 501(c)(3) charitable affiliate called the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, which raised just $399,886 that year. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, it is hard to point to a group that currently commands more attention in Democratic Party politics than the DSA. This was not always the case. Most of the group’s current influence can be traced to growth that began in earnest following the 2016 election cycle. This increase in membership has been accompanied by steady political radicalization, to the point where the DSA may now be considered an organ of the revolutionary far-left — one which has found common cause with Marxist-Leninist one-party states such as China and Cuba, and attacked the United States as “the heart of a global capitalist empire that has wrought untold suffering on billions of people and the environment.” The DSA’s hostility towards Israel is also notoriously virulent, something which infamously manifested itself through declarations of Palestinian solidarity and cries of “long live the resistance!” during the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attacks, which the group blamed on the Israeli victims. A resolution approved at the DSA’s 2025 national convention went so far as to make opposition to “the Palestinian cause” — including by uttering the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” — an expellable offense. At that same convention, the DSA elected a new National Political Committee. The ideological affiliations of these committee members illustrate the influence that full-blown revolutionary communism holds over the group’s internal politics. Several committee members (including one of its two co-chairs) are members of the DSA’s Red Star caucus, an association of Marxist-Leninists that aims to foster a revolutionary vanguard “to abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism.” Others were elected from the Marxist Unity Group, whose objective is to “fight to overthrow the Constitution” so that the revolutionary working class can “take power by any means necessary” and institute “a fully liberated classless society: communism.” Yet another caucus with multiple National Political Committee members is Reform & Revolution, which characterizes its “revolutionary Marxist” politics as being derived from “the Bolshevik Tradition.” All told, the DSA’s internal political “Left” — which is more-or-less tantamount to revolutionary communism — now wields major influence over the organization’s leadership. This is far from the vision of the DSA’s founding ideological lodestar, Michael Harrington, who died in 1989. Though a dedicated left-wing socialist, Harrington was also fully committed to democracy and explicitly rejected communist totalitarianism. He was said to have been deeply troubled by the Port Huron Statement released by Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, because he felt the language used was insufficiently anti-communist. Harrington was also avowedly pro-Israel. Though the DSA still trades on the once-accurate descriptors of its Harrington-era name, “Democratic Socialists of America” might today be more akin to a Holy Roman Empire-style misnomer, in the sense that the group is neither particularly democratic, nor socialist, nor American. The American radical left has traditionally demonstrated a propensity for factional infighting, self-marginalization, and organizational implosion. Perhaps this will ultimately be the fate of the DSA in its current iteration. Something of a boom-and-bust cycle has characterized the group’s fortunes over the past decade — it was scarcely two years ago that the DSA appeared on the verge of an existential fiscal crisis brought on by a combination of declining membership and profligate spending. Today, it claims over 120,000 members and appears to be riding higher than ever. For now, the undercurrent of political radicalism that has existed on the American Left since at least the 1960s appears to have found an institutional home within the DSA. *** Robert Stilson is a senior research analyst at the Capital Research Center.

A new bookstore has opened in my Oxford neighborhood. Given the academic reputation of this city of dreaming spires with its medieval colleges and historic libraries, one might think such a bookstore would cater to a highbrow and scholarly readership. But no, it exclusively stocks “romantasy,” a fusion of romance and fantasy literature, and the fastest-growing sector of the global book trade. The literary genres of romance and fantasy have been popular for centuries, but their fusion into romantasy is relatively new. Many argue that the 1983 novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley, “The Mists of Avalon,” which upended traditional Arthurian mythology, started the trend. This was followed by Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” books, blending historical adventure, time-travel fantasy, and an emotionally central romance. These books established the template: fantasy as a stage for romantic destiny, psychological intimacy, and female-centered moral stakes.  Since the turn of the millennium, the formula has been replicated at scale. Self-published authors began producing romance-fantasy hybrids that traditional publishers had overlooked. According to industry analyses, romantasy has become “the single biggest growth engine in global publishing,” with sales in the U.S. and more recently in the U.K. either tripling or quadrupling over the past five years. Prestige publishing houses remain cautious, but with such astonishing sales figures, one wonders for how long.  The opening weekend of my local romantasy bookstore, Bad Girl Books, reflected that popularity. Even with pre-booked tickets, there was a line down the sidewalk of excited fans, among whom I waited in some trepidation. Once inside, I discovered there are many sub-genres of romantasy, ranging from “Cosy Romantasy,” where characters bake cookies and muffins to woo and enchant each other rather than fighting battles, to the “Reverse Harem” or “Why Choose?” stories, in which the girl ends up with all the guys. (Imagine a gender-swapped “Mormon Wives” and you get the idea.) As one of the more memorable sub-genres, “Monster Smut” (I won’t elaborate) suggests, sex is a big part of the attraction. The degree of explicit content in books is indicated through a “spice” rating, which was illustrated in the bookstore via the relative number of chili pepper icons on shelves, rather like one might find on the menu of a Mexican restaurant to denote how hot a particular dish is. Fans of the genre are quick to challenge suggestions that the appeal of the books is their “fairy smut,” even if the available merch might suggest precisely that. These books are about self-actualization, their defenders claim, about seeking one’s destiny and achieving empowerment of a predominantly female variety. Yet the sex in modern romantasy stories is vastly different from the way sex was treated in the OG romantasy stories, the Arthurian romances that had a similarly popular appeal throughout medieval Europe.  Arthurian literature is a storytelling tradition built around King Arthur, his knights, and the mythical kingdom of Camelot. It began as an oral Celtic legend in Wales and Brittany and circulated for centuries before being written down. By the late Middle Ages, authors such as Chrétien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory had turned these tales into great romances, establishing the themes we still recognize today: the noble quest, the testing of virtue, the tension between love and duty, and the tragic fall of a once-ideal kingdom. Two of the most famous written versions anchor the tradition. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” explores chivalry, temptation, and moral testing through a single knight’s ordeal, while Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” gathers the whole cycle into a sweeping narrative of Arthur’s rise and fall.  In these Arthurian stories, adultery is not just about knights and queens swept up in forbidden passion. Rather, it becomes the place where personal desire collides with the hard work of building an ideal society. When those Arthurian lovers Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolde give in to desire, they are not simply breaking a marriage vow but are shaking the foundations of loyalty and duty that hold Camelot together. Lancelot, formerly the most heroic knight of the Round Table, fails in his quest to find the Holy Grail and must slaughter his fellow knights and closest friends to save Guinevere from the punishment her adultery brought down upon her. In contrast to such a tragic story, Sir Gawain manages to reject the seductive advances of the wife of the Green Knight. His reward for staying loyal to his values is moral clarity, public honor, and the respect of his fellow knights. In medieval struggles between right and wrong, the ultimate battleground is the invisible human soul, where a person wrestles with temptation, pride, and sin. But how do you make a silent, internal, spiritual struggle visible and dramatic for an audience? You externalize it through magic. Magic in Arthurian literature provides the moral framework within which temptation, deception, and testing can occur. Enchantments, shape-shifting, and illusions create the narrative conditions for characters to confront their moral vulnerabilities. Magic is used as the stage for an ethical trial: characters must discern truth from illusion, loyalty from seduction, virtue from glamour. The modern term glamour comes directly from this medieval positioning of magic; the word originally meant an illusion or enchantment that makes something appear more beautiful or desirable than it truly is. In Arthurian romance, glamour is not decoration but moral danger, and the shimmering surface tests whether a knight’s inner virtue can withstand the world’s deceptions. By using this magical frame, medieval authors could show how sin rarely presents itself as ugly; it presents itself as enchanting, beautiful, and magically justified. The knight’s task was discernment: piercing through the magical illusion to see the objective moral reality underneath. The celebrated author of the Narnia books, C.S. Lewis, who himself taught medieval literature at Oxford, positioned magic in precisely this way in “The Silver Chair.” The more beautiful and appealing a character was in that story, the more dangerous and dishonest they turned out to be. Undergoing a moral trial like that of the medieval Sir Gawain, the children in the story must resist the temptation to follow a beautiful illusion by choosing to do their duty, however unappealing it feels at the time. Modern romantasy treats magic differently from the old Arthurian world. In the medieval stories, enchantment was a test. But in romantasy, magic becomes a superpower, a personal strength that expresses identity, desire, and emotional intensity. It is something a heroine “comes into,” something a couple “unlocks together,” something that grows as they grow. That shift matters. Once magic becomes a form of self-actualization rather than a moral hazard, the whole ethical framework of the story has changed.  Alongside that reorientation, sexual consummation becomes the narrative’s highest aspiration, and the surrounding moral world must thin out to make room for it. Duty, sacrifice, and communal responsibility have no logical place now that personal fulfillment is the story’s guiding star. Honor becomes the first casualty of this new storyline; the quest is no longer to uphold a kingdom, but to complete the self. The move away from the ideals of Arthurian altruism has been a slow and subtle constant across the 20th century, from T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” a retelling shaped by his own pacifism during World War II, to the later habit of casting the Kennedy political dynasty as a modern Camelot. Given the uniformly unchivalrous treatment of women by the Kennedy men, the only point of connection with the Arthurian origins seems to have been physical hotness. The mushy 1995 movie “First Knight” even portrayed Sean Connery’s Arthur, on his deathbed, blessing Guinevere and Lancelot’s union.  Romantasy is purely the latest manifestation of a broader cultural shift away from duty and toward self-fulfillment. But has this jettisoning of moral absolutes in favor of expressive individualism made us happier? More fulfilled? More free to be our true selves? The statistical evidence suggests not. Data from long-term scientific studies such as MIDUS and the Dual-Continua Model now show what earlier generations intuited: that when self-expression becomes the highest good, psychological resilience tends to collapse. One recent research paper from the U.K. even “explores the decline in adolescent mental health and the weakening of traditional moral frameworks, positing education in the virtues as protective of mental health due to the intrinsic link between moral/existential wellbeing and psychological health.” Well, yes. Quite. Modern scientific data simply confirm what the compilers of the original Arthurian romances instinctively knew all along: that a strong sense of duty — committing oneself to a community, a code, or a purpose greater than the self — acts as a psychological buffer against mental health crises. A truism familiar to previous generations was “virtue is its own reward.” This is the neglected message of Arthurian romances and a moral truth that all the chili peppers in the world cannot replace. *** Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion. This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

An elderly Chicago woman has been identified 50 years after her dead body was found stuffed in a box in Indiana. The DNA Doe Project helped identify the woman as Jane Hart, who was found in a cardboard box in rural Indiana in 1976. She was 69 years old at the time of her murder. The breakthrough brings closure to this decades-long mystery that started on October 8, 1976. That day, a farmer tending to his field near Otterbein, Indiana, found a box about 15 yards from a nearby road, according to DNA Doe Project. When the farmer looked in the box, he found Hart’s body stuffed inside. She had been shot in the back of the head. Local authorities reported at the time that the box had only been in the field for about 12 hours, but estimated the woman had been killed about one week before her body was discovered. “Everybody knew everybody, so it was a big deal, you know, finding a dead body in a box,” Curtis Skoog, who was 16 at the time his dad found the box, told CBS. “I can’t explain to you how awful I felt.” It wasn’t until 2021 that DNA Doe Project got involved after the Benton County Coroner’s Office brought the case to the organization. After Hart’s DNA profile was generated, the team was able to determine that the unidentified woman was of Croatian descent. Though that was quickly identified, Hart’s DNA had just a 1.6% match to other DNAs in the databases available. “We could tell that our Jane Doe had Croatian ancestry, which posed a challenge,” said team co-leader Harmony Vollmer. “Without more people of Eastern European descent uploading to the GEDmatch.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com and DNAJustice.org databases we have access to, cases like this will remain tricky to solve.” The team made a breakthrough in 2024 when research led them to a Croatian woman who immigrated to the US in 1905 and gave birth to a daughter the next year. The daughter was brought to an orphanage, and the DNA Doe Project was able to find census records showing that the same woman later moved from Ohio to Chicago as an adult. Lo and behold, her name was Jane Hart, and in the 1970s, she appeared to vanish from the public records. “We uncovered further documentation from institutions that Jane had lived in, as well as probate records linking her to her family,” said Traci Onders, director of case management of the DNA Doe Project. “This research revealed genetic and genealogical connections that enabled us to identify her as a candidate.” The key was that Hart’s surviving family members were able to identify her. After the family took DNA tests, the results confirmed that the Jane Doe from Benton County, Indiana, was their relative. Skoog, who had spent his entire life wondering about the woman his dad found in the box, was thankful for the closure. “It’s been a long road,” he said.

A Thursday night speech from President Donald Trump on “free and fair elections” may not be broadcast on any of the major channels.  The network television stations — ABC, NBC, and CBS — have not yet committed to airing the primetime speech. The speech, expected to focus on election integrity, is set for 9:00 p.m. EST and will be streamed by The Daily Wire and across the White House social media channels.  No adjustments to the channel’s primetime schedules have been made yet, and representatives from the networks have not commented on their plans when asked by media outlets, including The Daily Wire.  Axios reported that officials from the networks “declined to comment” when asked if they would broadcast the speech, while Status reporter Natalie Korach reported that officials had yet to “divulge their coverage plans” for the speech. The Daily Wire reached out to representatives from the networks for comment.  Trump said earlier this week that his speech would focus on “free and fair elections.”  “It’s really, really big news, and our country has to shape up. That’s what we’re going to be talking about Thursday,” he said. “It doesn’t get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.” While various reports have suggested that the speech could focus on alleged election fraud in Georgia or Chinese election interference, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt kept the topic of the speech broad when asked by Axios.  “President Trump will deliver a major address to the nation on protecting the integrity of our elections. We encourage every American to watch the president’s speech,” she said.  The speech comes as Trump has repeatedly pushed Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require photo ID to vote in federal elections. MS Now reported that Trump plans to discuss newly declassified intelligence reports on foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. The White House would not confirm the report, referring The Daily Wire to Trump’s public remarks. Washington Reporter journalist Matthew Foldi reported, citing “a well-placed source in Georgia,” that Trump could declare that Georgia Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock “are illegitimate because of fraud.” Trump and the broadcast channels have fought for years, and the president has sued both CBS and ABC News. A lawsuit against CBS over its selective editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris resulted in a $16 million settlement for Trump. The president was also paid $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit against ABC over comments by host George Stephanopoulos.

Vice President JD Vance’s decision to spend nearly three hours chatting with Joe Rogan on his podcast is the type of choice that drives consultants to drink more heavily than they do on a normal Wednesday. Devoting that amount of time to open questioning and long-winded theorizing about politics, culture, and conspiracy theories is a minefield for any elected politician, and one where it’s easy to create clips that will be edited and used to make half-baked arguments or warp what’s said into an unintended context. Unfortunately for Vance, despite his well-known and much-admired communication prowess, that’s exactly what happened. On Iran, Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, and more, the vice president came across as far more interested in defending his own personal opinions than fulfilling the task of representing the Trump administration. Taken as a whole, the interview reads as if he’s already the 2028 nominee, speaking for the Republican Party he wants to manifest, not the one that currently exists under President Trump. Time and again, the knock on this VP has been simple: He’s too online. He pays far too much attention to random social media accounts criticizing his tireless advocacy for a bad deal with Iran than he does to the possibility that the deal is, well, bad. He complained vociferously to Rogan that Israel is apparently funding some of the same people who are criticizing his deal online. But given that polls show the deal is unpopular with a significant portion of Republicans, and that only a small minority of voters think it’s a better deal for America than it is for Iran, Vance seems to be investing a gargantuan belief in the effectiveness of pro-Israel propaganda to move the needle. Conservative Fox viewers and Daily Wire readers have never been sold on this deal, and now that it’s fallen apart, it’s something he should be eager to put in the rearview mirror — a collapse he should understand is the fault of Iran doing what Iran always does, not something he should blame on foreign manipulators. The sooner voters forget about Vance’s cheerleading for a doomed plan as his first major foray into foreign policy, the better it is for him. For a vice president who seems to view the world more through the lens of podcasters than real life, the prescription is clear. The biggest viral trend over the past few months for American parents is in favor of giving kids a “nineties summer” — minimal screen time, maximum outdoor time, a throwback to the America where the rare moment of connecting to the internet came with the crackling sound of AOL dial-up and people focused on the real world of their neighbors and friends, long before the word “podcast” even existed. Perhaps that’s the recipe the vice president needs to reset, and get back to being the effective voice for this administration he was in its first year. Let the podcasts roll on. Everybody needs a break sometimes.