Abolish the police. Abolish ICE. Abolish the "empire." Every DSA slogan is a door, and not one of them has read what's on the other side of it.

Claire Valdez wants to usher in a golden age. Her words, top of the homepage: "We will usher in a golden age for organized labor to battle back the new gilded age that is upon us." I believe her that she wants to usher in something. I just don't think she has any idea what's standing in the doorway.

This is the whole problem with the DSA, and Golden Age Claire is a clean specimen of it. They have a slogan for everything and a plan for nothing. Every plank is a verb pointed at an institution. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police, where the slate is concerned. End the "empire." Decommodify housing. The slogans are short and the consequences are long, and the comrades have only ever read the slogans.

Take "golden age." The last people who promised a workers' golden age and meant it this literally ran it in real life, in the twentieth century, and the golden age came with a body count and a bread line. Claire isn't summoning that on purpose. That's the point. She's summoning it the way a kid with a Ouija board summons something. Hand on the planchette, no idea the lights are about to go out.

"For decades, we have been sold a lie: that the U.S. empire defends freedom, advances democracy, and protects human rights."

Here is a candidate for the U.S. Congress calling the United States an "empire" that lies about freedom. Fine. Tear it down. Then what? There is no then-what. There is never a then-what. The DSA platform ends at the demolition and the blueprint for the rebuild is three exclamation points and the phrase "human right." Health care is a human right. Housing is a human right. The empire is a lie. Cool. Who pays the nurses. Who pours the concrete. Who guards the border you just abolished. Silence, and then another slogan.

"Abolish ICE," she writes, and "dismantle and abolish" it again for emphasis, as if saying abolish twice abolishes it twice. What replaces a federal immigration authority for a nation of 340 million people? She has a word for the problem and no word for the morning after. This is the entire intellectual move. Name the villain, abolish the villain, skip to the credits where everyone is happy and somehow housed and the money came from a billionaire who stood still and let it happen.

"Tax the rich" is not a budget

Every promise on the site is funded by the same magic sentence: the rich will pay. Medicare for All, "paid for by taxing billionaires and corporations." Public housing, billionaires. The numbers never appear because the comrades genuinely believe arithmetic is a tool of the oligarchy. There are not enough billionaires in America to buy what Claire Valdez is selling. There were not enough kulaks either. They found that out the hard way and so will we, except the comrades have decided that history was a misunderstanding and this time the slogan will hold.

And the slogans are good. That's what's dangerous. "Workers Deserve It All." "Housing for All." "Unions for All." It all rhymes, it all fits on a tote bag, and not one line of it survives contact with a spreadsheet. The DSA has perfected the art of the demand with no invoice attached. You get to feel righteous and the bill arrives later, addressed to your kids, in a currency nobody warned you about.

The endorsement wall is the warning label

You don't have to take my word for what this is. Read who's clapping. Zohran Mamdani. Bernie. The DSA itself. Jewish Voice for Peace Action and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, logos proudly mounted next to "Stop Funding War and Genocide." This is not a fringe she stumbled into. This is the slate. Nine of them on the ballot, same slogans, same missing second paragraph, same cheerful certainty that the thing on the other side of the door is a golden age and not the oldest, dumbest, bloodiest mistake in modern politics.

I am not afraid of Claire Valdez because she is a villain. She isn't. She seems pleasant. I am afraid of her because she is sincere, and she has memorized the incantation, and she truly does not know that incantations summon things. The comrades think they're opening a door to the golden age. They've read the front of the brochure. Nobody on the slate has turned it over to see what's printed on the back  in every language, every time it's been tried.

A slogan is a door. Read what's behind it before June 23.