The adage goes that a conservative is a liberal following a mugging. In House of Representatives Ritchie Torres’ (D-NY) case, it was being mugged not by a criminal but instead by a willingness to see reality as it is, not as it's hypothesized to be.

“I am celebrating the 10-year anniversary of my Zionism,” he says. “The first time I went to Israel was in February of 2015,” when he was in his first term on the New York City Council. He describes the visit—his first trip abroad—as “one of the most formative and transformative experiences of my life.”

In Sderot, a city of some 30,000 northeast of Gaza, he “came to realize that Israel faces a level of insecurity that has no analog to the American experience,” he recalls. “I come from the Bronx, where families live in fear of bullets and guns. But no one anywhere in the United States lives in fear of rockets.”

To quote the late and lamented Robin Williams, reality—what a concept!

Snark aside, Torres represents a branch of the Democratic Party seldom noted by media, namely its middle. While not a red pill candidate—at least not yet—Torres is in at least some areas of life and politics showing promising signs of reality growing through the cracks in progressivism’s pavement.

Less than a decade ago, Torres was sufficiently hardcore progressive to be a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Today? While to a degree playing coy on the matter, he is at least talking the talk of someone prepping to challenge New York Governor Kathy Hochul in 2026 for tending far more to her progressive bon mots than offering any genuine relief to her constituents' social and economic concerns.

Although he (Torres) declines an invitation to announce his plans in our interview, he makes clear that he’s thinking about a 2026 challenge to Ms. Hochul, whom he describes as “an absentee governor.” She “might have the best of intentions, but she’s utterly ineffective. My concern about the governor is not ideology, it’s about a lack of competence. She has neither the will nor the wherewithal to fix the broken system.”

Torres has demonstrated another element of discovering life beyond ideological fealty: the ability to admit a mistake. Originally coming down hard on Daniel Penny, the New York City man unjustly prosecuted and thankfully acquitted for his efforts to protect the lives of fellow subway passengers against a mentally unstable assailant, subsequent to his knee-jerk reaction, Torres made efforts to rectify the error while admitting he had made one… sort of.

When I ask Mr. Torres to explain, he said his staff wrote the tweet “based on reporting that Penny had held [agressive homeless man Jordan] Neely in a stranglehold for 15 minutes.” That “was shown to be false, based on the court record. And so, whenever there’s a factual inaccuracy in a tweet, we will remove it.” He adds that “I take responsibility for it” and that he thinks Neely “should never have been allowed to roam the subways and the streets. He should have been receiving inpatient or outpatient care.”

Going along with this is a statement by Torres noted here by Mike Miller in December 2024.

In a nutshell, in the twisted world of so-called "progressivism," victims often matter less than assailants or vice versa (depending on skin color), the lives of unborn children are less important than the so-called "reproductive rights" of those who use on-demand abortion to end their lives, and the truly compassionate among us are to scorned.

In a recent example, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) tweeted a video of a vagrant urinating inside a subway car in New York City. Torres wrote that he was sure that “80% of New Yorkers agree” with him on the declining quality of life in the city.

A mentally disturbed person is publicly urinating in the subway, pissing on a public transit system that pisses away $700 million a year in fare evasion. Why do we accept this? New York can do better than what a broken system can deliver.

MORE: 'Perversion of Compassion': The Left's Repugnant View of Morality

Ritchie Torres is firmly positioning himself in John Fetterman territory. He is not a conservative. However, he gives all appearances of slowly waking up to the notion that the progressive mindset offers no solutions. Several years ago, although in time it came to be a punchline, the term RINO (Republican In Name Only) became a popular label to hang on GOP officeholders unwilling to act or vote in coordination with conservative principles. At his current rate, Torres may well turn into a DINO (Democrat In Name Only). That’s one dinosaur that should never be allowed to go extinct.