Is actively trying to destroy our children’s future with the disaster known as communism. it’s communism. the concept, the policy is a loser and it always has been and it always will be. with communism, everything turned to [bleep].
There you go. president trump in georgia putting the threat of communism front and center in the midterms. trump’s speech, a lot of attention to the trump accounts today but also, obviously, he’s in georgia for a reason. as we get a pretty good look at the voters fueling the socialist surge inside the democratic party. election guru nate silver posting this chart and saying, quote, what’s the most democratic voting group in america? people with postgraduate degrees but lower to middle incomes. think about that. and of course there is one other thing that unites the movement and that is opposing israel. new york city mayor zohran mamdani admitting that he can’t actually arrest israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu.
benjamin netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the palestinian people. it is clear we do not have the legal authority to enforce this warrant. the federal government, however, does, and i call on them to join the icc and execute this warrant, and i want to be equally clear, benjamin netanyahu is not welcome in new york city.
‘The Five’: Trump rails against communism
abolishing the senate, replacing the presidency, the country would be run by workers and congress, basically, and amnesty for all. the dsa has made its far left priorities crystal clear but daily show host jon stewart tells voters forget all that. it’s all about economic populism.
generally their crazy ideas aren’t where the energy is. the energy isn’t around, like, we shouldn’t have prisons or borders. the energy is around a belief that their economic populism, it’s about strengthening a safety net for a country that has suffered too long, overvaluing capital and money and undervaluing labor and work. that’s it.
All right, kayleigh, let me start with you. so jon stewart is arguing that the stuff that is getting everyone’s attention isn’t really the problem and it isn’t where the focus is. he says it’s not where the energy is, either, in this debate. he wants workers to be more highly valued and you heard president trump talking about what he sees communism doing and how it turns everything to.
And it is communism. it is a myth out there that this is scandinavian social democracy. it is not that. and i do agree with james carville that when i showed him the poll, 66% of democrats like socialism, he said i don’t think they understand what that means, and i think he’s right about that because when you dig into the dsa’s platform it’s all over their website, communism is everywhere, it’s a part of the various factions. they are overt that they support communism, but i do not believe 66% of democrats understand it or know that. i spoke with jake altman, who is a former dsa local leader, and he really clearly put out some of the things that happened in his leadership meetings. in april 2025, he proposed saying to the dsa their governing board to demand that hamas release all hostages. and they would not do that. i mean, imagine that. release hostages. there were babies that were hostages. there were women.
That is something dsa cannot get on board with. fast forward to august of 2025, they voted to remove a provision from the dsa’s constitution that barred leninists from entry. vladimir lenin was a communist revolutionary. that is who these people are. they are very well organized. they know exactly what they are doing. so how do you stop this? there needs to be an education of the democratic party. there needs to be more john fettermans.
There needs to be more van jones, and i applaud him on his current for speaking out against this. there needs to be more james carvilles, more henry cuellars who said get rid of i.c.e., i reject that, defund the police, i reject that, open borders i reject that, literally went point by point through the dsa’s provisions and i reject them completely. you might disagree with the names i just mentioned but i firmly believe that the van jones, the henry cuellars, john fettermans love their country and want to fight the good fight in the democratic party to win their party back, and we need more courageous democrats, and it’s very sad that i can count on a little more than two hands the number of courageous democrats currently out there.
Let’s talk to a courageous democrat, harold ford jr., who joins us at the table. you know, i’m fascinated by the fact that this group is driven by, as nate silver pointed out, highly educated, downwardly mobile. i mean, that’s every parent’s dream, right? send your kid to college and hope that they end up in a downwardly mobile spiral where they want to have a socialist day off, and wouldn’t it be great if every day you could wake up and just do just what you want to do and no more?
‘The Five’: GOP gains ground ahead of midterm elections
it probably would be. i wouldn’t necessarily like it but it’s good to be with you. i think jon stewart, the way he framed that there at the end, the economic anxieties, and i think kayleigh was trying to do it, as well, the economic anxieties that so many americans are facing caused them to flock and to attach themselves to something that when you really try to understand it, no prisons, no borders, supporting hamas, i don’t understand how that helps us get to where we are. watching the young mayor give a speech there about how he wants to arrest netanyahu, i don’t understand how that lowers prices. i don’t understand how that addresses. i listened to cab drivers here in the city who said they like mamdani because he’s about getting their rent lower. i don’t hear any of them saying i like him because they want to abolish prisons, they want to abolish borders, they want to defund police, we think hamas is absolutely right and we should be supporting them and we should be arresting netanyahu. that’s an agenda of a group of people who are radical, who i believe have no place in my party. the party i grew up in and the party i was raised in. my dad was a member of congress. my uncles and aunts served in elected office back in tennessee throughout my entire life. i was blessed to be there ten years. there are democrats who i disagree with on spending policy and a few things tax policy every once in a while, i was a blue dog, but nobody said abolish the police abolish borders, abolish law enforcement, support hamas. we democrats have to step away from these people and if they want to continue to align themselves with us rhetorically, so be it. i say to democrats and i said it on monday, if we lose in november, in a tight race, and some independent-minded republicans say i can’t support them because they want to abolish police and abolish borders, not that they were going to make things more affordable or not because we think they have a better plan to beat iran. we will have only ourselves to blame. if that happens.
And jesse, you can see exactly that in the president’s speech today. he started off within the first three lines, he talked about communism and the threat of it. you can feel that the republican party is saying great, game on, we now have something that is a defining issue about what it means to be an american in this country that we can dig into and we do see some of these polls closing. washington post poll shows the democrat, republican generic poll comes in at 48-45, very close.
It shouldn’t be that close. it definitely, because you look at history, you look at gas prices and the war in the middle east, but they are blowing it. i want to talk about these college educated, downwardly mobile women, because it’s mostly women. the people that i know that got these advanced degrees, their parents paid for it. these are well-off families that they can afford to get a graduate degree, and then their network worked out so they can get a job, or they get a phd at academia or government and they know what to expect. but if you are going to take out a loan to get a degree in the humanities or the social sciences, what are you thinking? you are going to be 28 years old, and you are going to have no skills and no experience, and you are not going to take an entry level offer because you think you have this big fancy degree, that you are worth more, and you don’t want to take that entry level salary because you can’t afford to. because you are in debt. and you want to live in manhattan. but you can’t. so you are going to have to move in with mom and dad. and that is going to kill your love life. and you are going to look around, you are going to see all your other younger friends doing better because they have been in the workforce longer, and they have worked harder, so then you are going to be resentful. and then you are going to get bitter. because you are single, and if you are a woman, men don’t care if you have a phd. that is not high on our list of attributes. and if you are a woman and you are looking at a guy who can’t provide resources, you are not really in the market, so you are going to get angry, and then you are going to get ugly, and you are going to have a bad attitude. no one wants to hire anybody with a bad attitude, nobody wants to date anybody with a bad attitude. but you could dig yourself out of the hole. you could take a job in a totally different field and work your tail off. or you could move somewhere else. or maybe, just maybe, you could get it together and find love. and then you could build a life together, because it’s a lot easier to do that with someone else with another income. but the democrat party doesn’t preach that. they preach you are a victim, and you are owed something, and you are entitled to something, and it’s not your fault that you can’t take care of yourself so this party is here to give you things, and to punish other people who have made it, because it makes you feel better to punish them. but the republican party has to say no, no, no. the american dream is alive and well. if you work hard and you keep your nose clean and you have a routine, it will all open up when you are in your 40s. you can have a great and beautiful life because if you preach this other scam, you don’t say that to your own son and daughter. why are you saying that to all these other young americans? all right? you have to have delayed gratification, and you have to have a good attitude and a good work ethic. and if you don’t want to be a broke democrat, that is the formula.
I spoke to the co-chair of the dsa in new york this week, greg, and he told me that landlords make 12% and that there’s nothing in the constitution that guarantees a double digit profit. but you didn’t see that part of the constitution, it breaks down exactly how much profit you are allowed to get. but a lot of these young people think that they are being trod upon. and that they can’t afford a life. and yet they seem to be, their level seems to be a little different than the poverty of the proletariat.
You know, i have to say, it’s going to be hard to improve upon what jesse said. i think you summarized everything. i get this sense, we keep hearing the word estrangement, people being estranged from their families. i think we are seeing people who are estranged from life. they were faced with a choice early on. financial security or social clout. and they chose prestige over paychecks. but then they realized the jobs aren’t there.
They got the college debt. they have got no skills. but they are still desperate to maintain that social status that they thought they would get from that degree. so instead of saving for a down payment on a house because that is square, you go to pilates, therapy, fancy vacations. you still spend this money, but it’s not going into the savings, and then like you say, they see the guy from their high school who didn’t go to college show off his boat on instagram, and suddenly they want to burn it all down because that’s just not fair. and worse, all these people live near rich people. and man, that drives up the envy because you’ve got to keep up with technology, entertainment, organics, streaming services.
You’ve got to know what’s going on. you’ve got to be part of the conversation. you’ve got to keep up. you’ve got to go to the gallery openings. and what happens is, while they are spending all this money on all this stuff, they’ve rejected the free stuff. the free stuff that makes your life happy and possible no matter where you are, which is, believe it or not, marriage, kids, staying in touch with your family, getting to know your neighbors, a community. none of that exists in this world, so they end up paying for stuff that their parents got for free. they are estranged from life, and while these overeducated and undervalued elites see their less educated, less therapied peers doing better, it drives them crazy. can i comment a bit on what harold said also about jon stewart which is true? he’s not talking about the goal in the system, the goal is economic populism, what can go wrong with that? but you can’t just say i like the goal and ignore the system that they are pushing. you can’t have economic populism when you defund the police because you can’t have a strong economy and a crime ridden town. you cannot have economic populism with an open border because that depresses wages.
It stresses the city systems, raises rents. and by overtaxing and punishing the wealthy, they will leave, that shrinks your tax base. there is no economic populism there. so you can say the goal is great. what’s wrong with economic populism? but you kind of get away with telling the truth by not identifying the system that they are pushing. so when he says this other stuff is nuts, dude, that’s the stuff that they want to do. and these elites choose socialism because they can’t have nice things, but the reason they can’t have nice things is because of the socialism. our government spent trillions on economic redistribution. 4.1 trillion out of 7 trillion on social insurance and safety net outlays. the government spends more than half on handouts, and these people are pissed because they can’t get any. that is not our fault.
