By: Rick Kupchella
If you’ve watched our documentary, Precarious State, and tried to check out the DSA website to see what we claimed to be their party platform, you may have been surprised to find that there was nothing of the sort there after all…I was equally taken aback.
It’s taken us several hours and a deep dive down several Internet rabbit holes to find it and we’re sharing it with you exclusively on this website…but the how and why of the platform’s burial is an important and cautionary part of the story too. And we want to share that with you.
I first read the DSA platform on dsausa.org two years ago, when I began researching our documentary. It shocked me. DSA had adopted a detailed platform at their 2021 convention, which included explicit abolitionist and socialist policies.
I’ve revisited that site many times over the past two years, to see if anything had been added or changed. I last checked it around Labor Day—early September. But just a few weeks ago, as I was trying to find a straight link to give the public to view the platform… I discovered … IT DISAPPEARED!
ALL OF THESE THINGS… THAT WERE REALLY STANDOUT ELEMENTS OF THEIR PLATFORM… ARE GONE… IN FACT THE “PLATFORM” ITSELF IS GONE. I’ve SEEN it there for TWO YEARS… and they took it down three weeks ago.
The DSA has taken a lot of their extreme language “OUT” as well. What’s there now is a radical departure from the reformist language of the past two years.
This is the NATIONAL D-S-A WEBSITE that removed the platform, NOT the site for the local DSA. The National “Platform” was just replaced with a shorter list they now call their “program.”
In fact, the platform described in our documentary (and outlined below) DISAPPEARED ON SEPTEMBER 9TH… We don’t know if there is a cause/effect reason for this…but it happened just ONE DAY BEFORE a major article profiling Democratic Socialist Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES – an article that would have undoubtedly driven hundreds of thousands of people to the DSA website wanting to learn more.
Mercifully… our team was able to find all of the DSA’s 2021 platform… by going into what is formally known as: “Internet Archives” also known as “The Wayback Machine”.
The Platform contained a sweeping demand framed as their horizon goal for 2021. Among the scores of goals outlined were (their words):
- ‘Freedom for all incarcerated people / Free all people from involuntary confinement’
- ‘Abolition of the carceral state.’
- ’Defund the police by cutting budgets annually toward zero’
- ’Disarm law enforcement officers, including police and private security’
- ‘Stop funding of new buildings, and close local jails
- ‘End all misdemeanor offenses, accounting for 80% of total court dockets.’
- ‘Cut funding to prosecutors’ offices.’ (part of broader decriminalization demands)
Click here to see the original DSA 2021 Platform which we copied from the Internet Archives to highlight some of their objectives. Beyond looking for the highlights we recommend reading the complete document.
Click here to see their newly published site, they now have something which they call the Program, the robust Platform is nowhere to be found.
As several people in our documentary pointed out, the DSA USES A CHAMELEON-LIKE STRATEGY to get more mainstream groups to ally with them by CHANGING THEIR RHETORIC TO SOUND MORE MAINSTREAM. For example, Zohran Mamdani says his past statement wanting to ‘globalize the intifada’ is merely an expression of Palestinian rights – something more palatable to mainstream voters than what critics say it really is—hate speech, interpreted as a direct call for violence, terrorism, and antisemitic attacks.