Woke is dead — but what’s rising from its corpse should terrify every American

BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo believes the Democrat Party machine and its woke politics is being replaced by something far more sinister: die-hard socialists and third worldism.

Just last week, three Zohran Mamdani-backed Democratic socialists — Claire Valdez (NY-7), Darializa Avila Chevalier (NY-13), and Brad Lander (NY-10) — won their Democratic congressional primaries, defeating establishment incumbents and candidates, including two sitting representatives.

“The Dem establishment is totally crushed, totally weak, totally ineffective,” says Rufo, “and in New York, we’ve seen this playing out now for about a year where they tried to run moderate Dem candidates … trying to stop the DSA candidates from gaining so much power, but the DSA is really running the show.”

“They have control over the municipal government; they have control over the greater New York City congressional delegation; they have a permanent infrastructure,” he continues.

The Democrat establishment, Rufo argues, has virtually become a “misnomer” because the Democratic Socialists of America has really become the establishment power now. They’re the ones with “full-time activists, a full-time messaging apparatus, [and] a full-time get-out-the-vote operation.” They have mastered the art of “out-organizing” their opponents, he says.

Co-host Jonathan Keeperman doesn’t see the Democrat establishment vs. the DSA as a matter of “competing architectures,” however. He believes the left’s “lack of leadership” has allowed the DSA to begin “colonizing the old Democrat machine.”

“The Democrats have nothing even close to … a singular figure who can point that constituency in a particular electoral direction,” he says, calling the Democrat Party “a totally rudderless ship.”

“[The Democrat Party is] up for contest,” says Rufo, “and it seems clear that the more radical left-wing factions within the Democratic Party feel like they have all of the energy; they have all of the momentum; and that they can ride it to the end point, which is changing the party from within.”

While he acknowledges that DSA power is still relatively confined — pocketed in deep-blue places like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — its ability to “take a minority faction in a larger political body, capture it, subvert it, bully it, and then get it to submit” is disturbing.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of the DSA ideas trickling upward in the party. These activists are going to use their leverage, their star power, their charisma, and it’s going to change the Democratic Party,” Rufo predicts.

And that’s a terrifying prospect because these ideas will be rooted not in wokeism, which is bad enough, but in “third worldism” — an even more “serious threat to life, liberty, and property.”

“The left has molted the dead skin of woke,” he says.

The push is no longer “the oppressor-oppressed narrative” that urges redistribution of goods and services to “oppressed groups.” The DSA promotes a far “harder-edged political ideology,” says Rufo. “If you listen to these candidates like Darializa Chevalier, it’s seize property, seize housing, seize wealth.”

“It is a third-worldist ideology,” he declares.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.