Now Trending: Van Jones vs. the DSA

What's trending is a Van Jones rant, and what's underneath it is a genuine power struggle inside the Democratic Party. Jones — the CNN commentator, Obama-era environmental adviser, and founder of the racial-justice group Color of Change — posted a lengthy Substack message over the weekend accusing activists in the Democratic Socialists of America of hijacking the word 'progressive' to smuggle in ideas he says most Democrats don't actually believe. His own words, not a critic's paraphrase: Supporting Hamas is not progressive. 'No police, no prisons, no borders' is not progressive. Celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians is not progressive. These ideas are REGRESSIVE. He drew a line between that and what he calls his own lifelong platform — criminal justice reform, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free education, clean air and water — and topped it off with the line that made the rounds even faster than the substance: we don't need 'party poopers.' So STOP pooping in the punch bowl — and telling us the turds are ice cubes.

This didn't come from nowhere. Jones' criticism came after democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado's Democratic primary, while in New York, DSA-backed candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier won congressional primaries, part of a broader wave of DSA wins in state legislative races too. The DSA's newer Workers Deserve More platform — which, per reporting, calls for defunding police, abolishing prisons, and sharply cutting U.S. support for Israel — is the specific target of Jones' fire, and he's not the only establishment-aligned Democrat sounding alarms; strategist James Carville has floated the idea the party may eventually need a formal split, and Rep. Henry Cuellar has accused the DSA of trying to use the party as a vehicle.

The reaction split along predictable but revealing lines. Conservative media outlets are running Jones' quotes as vindication, treating a lifelong progressive's warning as proof the far left really has gone off the rails. On the left, the reaction is angrier and more personal — one widely shared post calls Jones a Maoist gone traitor who 'knows what socialism is' but is choosing career over conviction, essentially accusing him of protecting his own perch at CNN rather than his principles. Others are pointing out the irony: a poster on X argued that Jones is really upset not that the socialist agenda exists, but that young socialists are saying their agenda out loud instead of keeping it hidden and creeping it in, the implication being that establishment Democrats have quietly held these same positions for years and are now furious the mask is off. That's the conspiracy-adjacent read worth taking seriously — not that Jones is lying, but that his outburst is less about ideology and more about a donor class and cable-news class that built its brand on being the reasonable alternative to Trump, and can't afford an internal insurgency that says the quiet part loudly.

In my opinion, both things can be true at once, and that's what makes this more interesting than the usual pile-on. Jones has a real point that 'no police, no prisons, no borders' is not what most Democratic primary voters signed up for, and pretending otherwise for the sake of party unity is its own kind of dishonesty. But I also think the people accusing him of protecting establishment turf aren't wrong to be suspicious — a man who spent decades cultivating credibility with the party's left flank doesn't turn around and call his allies 'insane' and 'regressive' without calculating exactly who's watching. The DSA's electoral wins are real, they're growing, and they threaten a Democratic establishment that has quietly relied on donor money and media-friendly moderation to keep power. When elites in either party start using words like 'regressive' to describe an opponent's popularity, my instinct is always to ask who benefits from voters staying confused about what's actually on the table. Here, I think the honest answer is: everybody currently holding a microphone or a donor list.