Socialist influencer Hasan Piker is praising Mao. Here’s the truth about Chinese communism.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are having a moment: Candidates affiliated with this group are winning Democratic primaries all over the country—and that’s bad. Very, very bad. Why? Well, because their ideas for how to run the country are wrong, and dangerous, and in many cases authoritarian. We know that because we can read their plans and listen to their speeches.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Don’t Republicans call everybody who disagrees with President Donald Trump a socialist? Sure, that label as an insult has been overused before. But these people self-describe as socialists and communists—and they revere figures and governments from history that engaged in actual authoritarian communism.

Take Hasan Piker, a popular far-left commentator associated with the DSA. He recently spoke at a gathering of College Democrats and explained his plan to drive all the nonsocialists out of the Democratic Party:

Dressed like Mao and talking about how much he hates the majority of Democrats as an invited guest of @CollegeDems. Our party having a normal one. pic.twitter.com/y1QDuF7I9Q

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) July 19, 2026

You might have some questions about that, including, uh, what was he wearing? Well, it turns out he just so happened to dress in the uniform of one of his favorite great men of history: Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.

Mao did, in fact, change the world—by making it much worse. Under Mao’s communist economic policies known as the Great Leap Forward, tens of millions of people starved to death in China. He also implemented widespread political repression and censorship, and encouraged state violence against dissenters. Several million more people died as a result of his Cultural Revolution, which was Mao’s effort to maintain power despite the complete failure of his economic policies.

China’s situation only began to improve following Mao’s death in 1976, when his successors moved away from rigid central planning and allowed free markets to lift the people out of poverty.

Now, you might be thinking, Piker is just one random guy. Surely the DSA doesn’t want to implement Maoist authoritarianism. Well, read its program: It sounds pretty Maoist to me.

According to official DSA materials, it would collectivize food, education, medicine, energy, and transportation: These would all be things the government made available rather than the market. The problem with that is that governments are bad at providing such services cheaply and efficiently. When private, profit-seeking firms compete with one another to offer you stuff at the best price, it works a lot better.

The DSA goes on to say that in its socialist utopia, you’d be free to spend your day however you want, and you’d never have to work if you don’t feel like it. But that obviously doesn’t make any sense. Somebody has to work to provide all those supposedly free things: grow the food, drive the transportation, build the power plants, offer the medical services. Under capitalism, you perform those tasks in exchange for money that you use to buy what you need. But under every actually existing socialist government in history, including Soviet Russia and Maoist China, the government ends up having to force people to work, since they don’t have profits to motivate them, and you end up with both shortages and repression.

So let’s not ignore the unworkable, radical nature of the DSA’s agenda, which calls for scrapping the entire U.S. Constitution. It writes: “Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital.”

That’s right: It is declaring war on a system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty over the course of the last century.

But just because they’re wrong about everything doesn’t mean they’re going to be easy to beat. Democrats are clearly furious with the leadership of their party for failing to stop Trump, and Democratic primary voters are lashing out at incumbents and instead picking the most left-leaning person in the race—even someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has tweeted in support of communism, and yet is likely to be the next congresswoman from New York.

That has some more reasonable folks in the party worried. Van Jones recently sounded the alarm on CNN:

This weekend I shared a post voicing my concerns about the far left. The response has been overwhelming. Leaders in both parties called to tell me the same thing: this stuff has gone too far.

To be clear: I’m a progressive Democrat. My whole life, I’ve wanted to see a youth… pic.twitter.com/RZXKQw5DSB

— Van Jones (@VanJones68) July 21, 2026

Saying some of these people evince support for literal terrorists is no slur. Kyle Kulinski, another far-left commentator like Piker, recently appeared on a livestream and expressed his fears that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis were going to lose the Iranian government as a source of funding.

Now, I’m mostly against the current U.S. war on Iran because I think it’s a waste of our tax dollars and unlikely to improve things in the Middle East, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be shedding any tears for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, which are terrorist groups that murder civilians. Kulinski feels differently, obviously. I wonder how many of his DSA friends agreed with him? Because you know who else appeared on that stream? Avila Chevalier, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, and possible 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.).

The bottom line is this: The DSA is about to take the entire Democratic Party on one wild ride. And while it’s tempting to simply point and laugh at the idiot in the Mao uniform, if Democrats want to keep this tide at bay, they’re going to have to do a little bit more than absolutely nothing about it.

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