The DSA Built a Security Force. It Was Born in New York.

The Red Rabbits Security Commission trains cadres for a "national uprising against federal agents." The model was incubated in NYC-DSA, the same chapter that now co-governs the city. And the whole operation runs on the tax code.

The Democratic Socialists of America has a security force. It has a name, a national commission, a training curriculum, and a stated mission: preparing for a "national uprising against federal agents and police brutality." That language is not a critic's paraphrase. It comes from the commission's own authorizing resolution, passed at the DSA's 2025 national convention. The commission is called the Red Rabbits.

Credit for surfacing this belongs to my friend Stu Smith at City Journal, whose June 9 report on a recent Red Rabbits organizing panel gave the public its first real look inside the project. What follows builds on his reporting, and adds the parts of the story that run straight through New York.

Start with the authorizing document. The commission grew out of Resolution 26, "Fight Fascist State Repression & ICE," authored by Springs of Revolution, a caucus that openly wants to remake the DSA as "a mass revolutionary force." The branding came later. Organizers rejected "National Vigilance Committee" as too stark. Some members worried it sounded like an endorsement of vigilantism. So they named it after the rabbits in Watership Down instead. The mission did not change. The label did.

THE APPARATUS

The commission claims five core skills: de-escalation, Stop the Bleed first aid, firearm safety, unarmed self-defense, and protest marshalling. Its goal is five trained members in 40 percent of DSA chapters. But the panel Smith documented, organized by National Political Committee member Hazel Williams, showed chapters going well past the official curriculum: martial-arts sparring, wound-packing, radio communications, umbrella phalanxes against "fascists," and chemical-exposure drills in which members practice being pepper-sprayed.

Philadelphia is planning what one member called "sick" firearm-safety trainings. Oklahoma City runs a Queer Fight Club that functions as a regional training hub. Portland teaches "corking," blocking intersections with bicycles. These are not book clubs.

A protection racket needs clients. The Red Rabbits have them.

The most important detail in Smith's reporting is the dependency structure. The Red Rabbits are not just protecting DSA events. Other organizations now rely on them. In New Jersey, the DSA's immigrant justice working group is the go-to security resource for immigrant organizations and Palestine affinity groups. In Philadelphia, the team started with abortion clinic "defense," then expanded into "immigrant justice" and "Palestinian solidarity" work, leading the direct action contingent of the Philly Palestine Coalition. One panelist described the Philly team as a "movement incubator." That is the right phrase. The DSA is making itself structurally indispensable to the street-protest left, one security detail at a time.

THE NEW YORK ORIGIN

Here is what the national coverage underplays. The Red Rabbits were invented in New York. NYC-DSA formed the original team in 2017, trained by two veterans of ACT-UP, and built the curriculum that every other chapter copied: info security, meeting security, jail support, street marshalling. By the time the national commission was chartered in 2025, internal DSA convention materials acknowledged that "the New York City DSA Red Rabbits crew has been taking up most of the space."

So the model for a national protest-security apparatus was incubated inside the same chapter whose members now hold City Hall. NYC-DSA does not merely sympathize with the administration. It staffs it. The chapter that built the prototype for confronting federal agents in the street is the chapter co-governing the largest city in America during a year when anti-ICE protests shut down parts of Minneapolis, Portland, and New York. That is not a coincidence worth ignoring.

THE PERSONNEL

Then there is who runs it. In February 2026, NPC member Katie Sims moved to remove Christopher Winston from the Red Rabbits slate. Winston is a self-described Maoist who runs a YouTube channel under the alias "BlackRedGuard" and has a public record of praising revolutionary violence. The National Political Committee voted 15 to 10 to keep him. Read that again. The DSA's governing body took a formal vote on whether a Maoist with a history of endorsing political violence should help run its national security commission, and the Maoist won.

The alliances tell the same story. Tucson's Red Rabbits work with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a revolutionary party with documented ties to the Communist Party of China. Portland's work with the National Lawyers Guild, a group with historic ties to the Soviet Union. Portland's representative also flagged the Sunrise Movement's "No Sleep for ICE" campaign as the kind of "high-risk stuff" that official organizations now undertake.

THE TAX PROBLEM

All of this runs through the tax code. The DSA is a 501(c)(4), required by the IRS to operate primarily for "the common good and general welfare of the community." Its sister charity, the DSA Fund, is a 501(c)(3). Umbrella phalanxes, intersection takedowns, and uprising preparation are hard to file under social welfare, and the panelists know it. Cliff Connolly, the NPC member who spearheaded the commission, stressed that trainings were being "cleared" with staff so there would be "no question marks or gray area." Tucson talks about matching "the reality of what a 501(c)(4) can do."

Oklahoma City said the quiet part. Its Queer Fight Club is structured to be "DSA-sponsored and community-supported" but not DSA-operated, citing liability "and tax purposes," so that problems would not "come back to the DSA." It even cited a separate Red Rabbits 501(c), an entity whose existence Smith could not confirm. When an organization starts engineering corporate shells so that its training program's legal exposure doesn't touch the mothership, it has told you what it thinks the training program is.

The IRS knows how to read an authorizing resolution. So do New York's elected officials, who have so far said nothing about the fact that the prototype for this apparatus was built in their own city, by the political organization that put many of them in office. The Red Rabbits planned for an uprising. The paperwork is the confession.