DSA Co-Chair's Journey to Socialism Began With Jon Stewart. That Explains Everything.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people who wind up in the Democratic Socialists of America. Intellectuals who have actually read Marx and can explain socialism on a theoretical basis. And Woke liberals, who are radicalized culturally rather than intellectually.

The DSA co-chair is clearly one of the latter. Romer recently sat down with New Yorker editor David Remnick and described her political evolution in unusually candid terms. She said she started as what she called a "Jon Stewart liberal."

DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer says "We believe in taxing the hell out of millionaires."

She then struggles to explain what that actually means:

Remnick: "What does 'taxing the hell out of them' mean?"

Romer: "Yeah. You know, again, I don't have, like, a solid…"

Remnick: "But… pic.twitter.com/JMKW1egLM9

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) August 7, 2026

"Got most of my news from Jon Stewart," Romer said. "That was my primary news source."

Then came the 2016 election. Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Romer was "horrified and baffled," and eventually a folk singer invited her to attend a DSA meeting.

Now she's the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

That biography becomes considerably more interesting when paired with another part of the interview.

Romer confidently declared, "We believe in taxing the hell out of millionaires."

Remnick asked the obvious question: What does that mean?

DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer says "We believe in taxing the hell out of millionaires."

She then struggles to explain what that actually means:

Remnick: "What does 'taxing the hell out of them' mean?"

Romer: "Yeah. You know, again, I don't have, like, a solid…"

Remnick: "But… pic.twitter.com/JMKW1egLM9

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) August 7, 2026

"Yeah. You know, again, I don't have, like, a solid…" Romer began.

"But shouldn't you?" Remnick interrupted.

After an extended "ummmmm," Romer conceded: "That's a good question."

Remnick wasn't finished.

"If you're the co-chair of the DSA, shouldn't you be more specific than just taxing the hell out of something? What exactly do you mean?"

Romer pivoted to: "So again, it's democracy, right?"

Remnick wasn't conducting a hostile interrogation. He was asking the leader of an explicitly socialist political organization to explain one of its most recognizable economic positions. The slogan was readily available.

And that brings us back to Jon Stewart. As Larry O’Connor put it on X, “This. Explains. Everything.”

READ MORE: The Democrat Establishment's Pivot on DSA Insurgency Begins, and This Is Not Gonna Go Well

Stewart took over The Daily Show in 1999 and gradually transformed what had been a relatively conventional parody of television news into one of the most culturally influential political programs of its era.

As Variety heralded, "When Jon Stewart took over ‘The Daily Show,’ satire became a trusted news source." That is a barometer for how unmoored our country has become.

The show's political persuasiveness is that it drips smugness. This is catnip for wine moms who want to feel like elites without having to actually go through the hard work of becoming one. 

And Stewart is a master of wielding sarcasm as accusation. It is critical theory with a laugh track. 

Instead of sitting through congressional hearings, reading legislation or following interminable policy arguments, viewers could watch Stewart compress the day's politics into an entertaining morality play. A politician says something ridiculous; the videotape rolls; Stewart stares incredulously into the camera; the audience laughs. Rinse, repeat.

"Oh, my God! The justice system hunts Republicans while protecting Democrats?"

Jon Stewart is back on The Daily Show to mock the weaponized justice system.

This is a propaganda masterpiece of false equivalencies and satire used to service power. pic.twitter.com/tAGx5igzKC

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) June 4, 2024

But the audience isn't politically representative of America. Pew found that Daily Show political-news consumers were substantially younger than audiences for conventional television news. Liberals and college graduates were also disproportionately represented. In one Pew analysis, 34 percent of Americans with consistently liberal views watched the program, compared with just 1 percent of consistent conservatives.

That doesn't mean Stewart single-handedly turned people into Democrats, much less socialists. But Romer's description of him as her "primary news source" illustrates something more interesting.

Entertainment can function as political education without announcing itself as political education. And comedy has a particular advantage as a vehicle for ideology: the argument doesn't always have to be completed. The punchline completes it.

The audience learns who deserves ridicule, who deserves sympathy, which institutions are respectable, which people are stupid, which positions are beyond the pale, and, ultimately, which side has the "reasonable people."

For Stewart's audience, the conceit is that liberal America is watching the country's absurdities from the sane side of the glass.

That worldview has had trouble surviving contact with the electorate. The Democratic Party now finds itself deeply unpopular nationally. Pew's April 2026 survey found 59 percent of Americans viewed the Democratic Party unfavorably, while only 39 percent viewed it favorably.

And the ideological problem is hardly imaginary. Pew found that 57 percent of Americans described the Democratic Party as "too extreme in its positions." Even 38 percent of Democrats themselves said that description fit their own party.

Common Sense America lies outside the parody of The Daily Show.

Republican voters are just as fed up with their elected officials failing to deliver on promises as Democratic voters are with their own party’s lurch toward radical politics.

This should be an occasion for unity. Instead, these “entertainment” shows further divide Americans, thereby breaking a mechanism of public accountability.

America's politics are being driven by the fringes, particularly on the left. While conservatives have their insipid range wars over cultural issues, the Democratic Party is now captured by the ideologues. 

How did this happen? Culture has artificially mainstreamed radicalization. Those who feel like outcasts from society aren’t typically radicalized by intellectual positions, but are drawn by the possibility of belonging to a community.

As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, “A mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”

Hoffer’s main insight is that mass movements typically gain followers because they provide identity, purpose, and membership in something larger than themselves.

Jacques Ellul made a related point in Propaganda: “Propaganda furnishes man with a complete system for explaining the world.”

The attraction is obvious. An otherwise bewilderingly complicated society suddenly becomes comprehensible: there are victims and oppressors, heroes and villains, and an ideology capable of explaining virtually everything.

George Orwell understood the emotional dimension perhaps better than anyone. He wrote in 1984, “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

In 1984, the Party doesn't survive merely because people intellectually accept Ingsoc. It channels loneliness, frustration, sexuality, fear and resentment into political devotion. Orwell pointedly depicts some of the Party's most fanatical participants as people whose ordinary human attachments have been displaced by ideological ones.

But at this point, I am not sure what's worse: A Marxist academic who has been completely brainwashed by social science jargon or a shallow-minded person converted by bumper-sticker sloganeering and radicalized by the left's media echo chamber.

Both are dangerous for different reasons. Academics — their minds are too far gone after reading volumes of socialist propaganda.

You would think the liberal woman would be easier to talk sense into if you simply speak to their fear. Wrong.

Instead, these "feminists" are out championing the mass immigration of Muslim extremists whose host countries subjugate women, discriminate against gays and lesbians, and oppose every "liberal" value.

They also believe black neighborhoods are filled with hapless victims who have no agency, and the only reason they are poor or uneducated is that "white people" are somehow keeping them down.

They can't explain why many Asians come to America and thrive in our job market. So, what's really holding back Americans?

Mass migration, for starters. We now have to compete with the entire world for jobs in our own country. Not only that, those of us who still have jobs have to sponsor both legal and illegal migrants who flooded into our country through public education, welfare spending, and entitlements. They also drive up the cost of living for those of us to pay bills.

So, the actual brains behind the DSA are not oblivious. They are not stupid, just dishonest.

Make the Supreme Court and president subject to the party's dictates. End the Electoral College. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police. Abolish the Senate. And so on and so on.

But it is not classic "socialism" to support these policies. They are policies designed to overhaul the institutions of the United States of America.

This is not easy for people who believe they are on the side of the angels. They are just on board because their lives are otherwise empty and they need a "holy cause." They want to feel important and accepted.

This is a role in society that was once filled by religion. Unfortunately, socialism has become their new religion. 

Socialism's key evangelizers are not politicians in the pulpits, but “comedy show” street preachers like Jon Stewart.