Bernie Sanders let the cat out of the bag yesterday. In an interview with Axios, he said what I think we’ve all been thinking: that AOC is almost certainly going to run for president in 2028 — with the backing of Bernie Sanders. “She is an incredibly intelligent person and in the best sense of the word, a very, very good politician,” he declared. “I’ve been out on the streets where the people come up and how she responds to people is so incredibly genuine and open, you know, it’s just something. That’s a gift that she has. It’s a quality that she has. She’s a great speaker out there. She comes from the working class. She was a kid who was cleaning houses with her mother. She knows what it’s like not to have any money. And she’s going out fighting for working families all over this country. And I think as a young person who six years ago was a waitress, becoming politically prominent has been incredibly inspiring.” She’s not inspiring. To the wild Left, however, she is inspiring. Sure, she is a dunderhead who says unintelligent things every five seconds. But Bernie Sanders is also a dunderhead, and he’s been able to get away with it for 2,000 decades at this point. I believe he was a contemporaneous follower of Methuselah. Sanders has taken over the Democratic Party wholesale at this point. They are moving further and further to the Left. And one of his chosen acolytes is Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat running for the Senate who leads in the polls by leaps and bounds. According to new reporting from our own Luke Rosiak: Democrat Senate candidate Graham Platner was a member of a radical Left group whose members have been linked to a slew of attacks, including an assault on an ICE facility that was designated a terrorist attack this month as part of a crackdown on Antifa. Maine’s Democrat Senate primary was upended after CNN reported that Platner had called himself a “communist” in posts on the Reddit forum r/SocialistRA, where he wrote that if people “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history.” The forum name refers to the Socialist Rifle Association, a group whose members have been repeatedly linked to violent political crimes. On July 4, a group of militants allegedly swarmed law enforcement at an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas and “opened fire at the unarmed DHS correctional officers.” One of them, Benjamin Hanil Song, is charged with shooting a police officer in the neck. Song was a member of the Socialist Rifle Association’s Dallas-Fort Worth chapter, a fellow group member told KERA. Last week, the Department of Justice charged two suspects in that attack, Cameron Arnold and Zachary Evetts, with providing material support to terrorists, calling their crew an “Antifa Cell.” It was the first use of the terrorism statute against domestic extremists since Trump ordered a crackdown on far-left political violence. Arnold, like the founders of the Socialist Rifle Association, is transgender and goes by the name Autumn Hill. Membership in the Socialist Rifle Association isn’t required for users to post on the Reddit forum. But a New England publication, the Robinson Report, revealed that Platner explicitly described his membership in the group. “Check out the Maine SRA chapter, we’re quite active,” he wrote in April 2020. In August 2020, he said “my local SRA chapter” does “lots of range days, firearms education classes, and developing mutual aid networks in our community.” Images of the main chapter include a man training in a pink tutu shooting a gun, and one who has facial hair matching Platner’s. This is a person, a Nazi-tattooed Antifa-training pseudo-man-of-the-people oyster farmer, who went to a $75,000-a-year prep school when he was younger. And he’s Sanders’ chosen guy in the Senate race in Maine. If the Democrats wish to embrace this sort of radicalism, I do not think the American people will move alongside them. I know there are a lot of Republicans who are rooting for the socialists to take over the Democratic Party. I am not. I’ve been saying this since 2020, when Bernie Sanders was running against Joe Biden. I said I preferred Joe Biden to be the nominee rather than Bernie Sanders, even if Bernie was more likely to lose to Donald Trump. Why? Because the risk factor in having a socialist leader was higher than the risk factor in having a “dead” leader like Joe Biden. Even if Joe Biden had slightly higher odds to win the presidency than Bernie Sanders, if I had to calculate the damage that a Bernie Sanders presidency would do versus a Joe Biden presidency, it would be astronomically higher under Bernie Sanders than Joe Biden, no matter how bad Joe Biden was. I feel the same way about the Democratic Party falling wholesale to the wild-Left democratic socialists. If they do that, it’s true there’s a lower chance that they will win power anytime soon. But to pretend that chance doesn’t exist is to whistle past the graveyard. Let’s say, for example, that the Democratic Party has a 40% shot of winning the White House in 2028 right now with some sort of pseudo-moderate, like a Gavin Newsom or a Wes Moore. And let’s say they have a 30% shot of winning the White House with a clear, insane socialist like AOC at the top of the ticket. The damage that would be done by Wes Moore or Gavin Newsom would be a seven out of ten, and the damage done by an AOC would be a ten out of ten. I would rather take the low-risk scenario, even if there’s a greater risk that the person might become president, than take the absolutely disastrous apocalyptic scenario of having a Democratic party controlled by the nutjobs. This is why the rise of the Zohran Mamdani Left is truly, truly troubling. * * * Join us now during our exclusive Deal of the Decade. Get everything for $7 a month. Not as fans. As fighters. Go to DailyWire.com/Subscribe to join now.

Socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani lamented on Friday that — after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States — his Muslim aunt could no longer take the subway because she wore a hijab. Mamdani made the comment while delivering a speech on Islamophobia in front of a mosque one day before early voting begins for the heated NYC mayor’s race. The speech focused on condemning attacks against him from his opponents, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, that he claims are “racist” and “baseless.” During the speech on Islamophobia, Mamdani fought back tears when he talked about his aunt. “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab,” he said. The remark unintentionally evoked the famous Norm Macdonald quip, when the late comedian said, “What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?” He did the meme. https://t.co/pb3KIRMI3J pic.twitter.com/le7xEG1fNa — Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) October 24, 2025 Later during the speech, Mamdani spoke about his own experience as a Muslim and again brought up 9/11. “Growing up in the shadow of 9/11, I have known what it means to live with an undercurrent of suspicion in this city,” he said, adding, “To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity, but indignity does not make us distinct. There are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does.” Join us now during our exclusive Deal of the Decade. Get everything for $7 a month. Not as fans. As fighters. Go to DailyWire.com/Subscribe to join now. On Thursday, Mamdani called an exchange between Cuomo and a conservative radio host “disgusting” after they discussed what a terror attack on New York City would look like with Mamdani leading the city. “God forbid another 9/11, can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo asked. “Yeah, I could,” replied radio host Sid Rosenberg. “He’d be cheering.” Cuomo chuckled and then responded, saying, “That’s another problem.” Mamdani decried the exchange, saying that Cuomo “in his final moments in public life is engaging in rhetoric that is not only Islamophobic, not only racist, is also disgusting, and is his final closing argument with less than two weeks before Election Day.” Mamdani, who is pushing a socialist platform, has long taken strong anti-Israel positions, such as advocating for boycotting Israeli institutions. Mamdani, who was once a rap artist, praised men in a song who were convicted in the United States of providing material support to Hamas. During his speech on Friday, the socialist mayoral candidate said that recent “racist” attacks on him have shown him that he was “wrong” for thinking that he could become more than his faith. “I thought that if I behaved well enough or bit my tongue enough in the face of racist, baseless attacks, all while returning back to my central message, it would allow me to be more than just my faith,” Mamdani added. “I was wrong. No amount of redirection is ever enough.”

'Pattern of extreme brutality'

'We are in the middle of a government shutdown'

'We are grateful for this donor’s assistance'

'F*** Around, Find Out'

‘Battle is not over yet’

'He was sharp'

Virginia Democrats are planning to try to stack the 2026 congressional elections in their favor via redistricting if they are victorious in November’s off-year elections. The announcement Thursday is making the fate of the partisan composition of Virginia’s 11-member congressional delegation a campaign issue ahead of the Nov. 4 elections.  “This seems like a pretty desperate move from Democrats to change the conversation a week before the election,” Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told The New York Times.  “It’s nuts, and it’s a desperate political ploy, and I think it is unconstitutional,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, told Washington’s WJLA-TV News.  “But here we are, with the Democrat leadership in Virginia, in our House and our Senate, calling everybody back next week, literally 33 days into an election, trying to run some desperate ploy to redistrict Virginia,” the governor added. Youngkin’s comments come after Democrats have been criticized by Republicans for not calling for Democrat Virginia attorney general nominee Jay Jones to drop out after revelation of a 2022 text-message exchange, first reported by National Review, in which Jones mused about shooting then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert. Jones later apologized for the texts. The story surfaced in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as he was giving a speech on a college campus in September. There are currently five Republicans representing districts in Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives. If the Democrats’ gerrymandering attempt were to be successful, they could eliminate two or three of the Republicans’ House seats. Democrats would have to pass the measure twice in the state General Assembly in consecutive sessions. The effort would then be decided by voters through a statewide ballot referendum. Virginia would be the second state to see Democrats attempt to redistrict in their favor following California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s endeavor to temporarily ditch the state’s independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission.  “In 2020, Virginians overwhelmingly—nearly 2-to-1—expressed their support for an independent redistricting process by establishing the Independent Redistricting Commission,” the Virginia Republican delegation said in a statement following the Democrats’ announcement. “That mandate was designed to take politics out of drawing congressional maps, and reports that Virginia Democrats are seeking to redraw the map mid-decade disregards the will of the people,” the statement added. Republicans passed their own new congressional map in Texas, and similar GOP efforts have been contemplated in Missouri and Indiana. The post Virginia Democrats Move to Scuttle Independent Redistricting Commission Draws GOP Pushback appeared first on The Daily Signal.