Third Way, a prominent Democratic lobby group in Washington, has a new multi-million dollar effort to “combat extremism” on the “far-left,” an internal staff email leaked to me reveals.
“[E]xtreme far-left voices gaining purchase over the past year … represent a sharp break from a traditional left wing in American politics,” the July 23 email says. This break, the email continues, has led to the rise of a faction that is both “radical” and “illiberal” — figures like Zohran Mamdani — pursuing a government like authoritarian Cuba.
“When some folks hear ‘socialism’ they think of Scandinavia, but what the activists behind the DSA are advocating for is closer to Cuba,” the email says, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America.
Cuba!
The irony is that Third Way, sharply critical of the Trump administration, is echoing it perfectly. In fact, the email was sent just days before the release of a State Department report alleging Cuban influence on the American left, mentioning such frightening subversives as Ben Cohen (founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, as I reported at the time.
Also, earlier that month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio led an international summit on “political terrorism” also targeting the left, even introducing a new term: “Far-Left Terrorism.”
It’s not a war against Trump or MAGA or the Republicans in 2028. It’s not against disinformation or foreign influence; that was yesterday’s panic. It’s not against anti-semitism, or the impact of social media, or guns. It’s not even against violence in general.
It’s a war against other Democrats (socialists specifically), and what Third Way labels far-left “extremism.” That sure sounds more like the FBI and homeland security than a “center left … organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas,” as it describes itself
This isn’t just someone running their mouth in an email, either. The author, senior vice president of Third Way, Lanae Erickson, is announcing an organized and sustained effort to defeat the supposed new extremist threat.
As the email says, “we are launching a strategy to drive awareness of these threats to the party, including adding to our team by hiring a Director of Anti-Extremism to help us make the case against these noxious ideas and recruit many others to do the same.”
The goal, the email continues, is to “create a counterweight to the forces pushing more Democrats to embrace extreme and illiberal ideas.”
Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, alluded to the plan last week.
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” Cowan told the New York Times, describing a $15 million effort to discredit democratic socialism between now and 2028. This week, Third Way posted a job announcement for a director to head its “Anti-Extremism” project, corroborating the email.
Beyond the Washington rhetoric, Third Way is saying that if your political views aren’t vanilla, you’re an “extremist.” That’s national security’s polite word for terrorist, once a reference to Muslim Americans and would-be revolutionaries but now applied to any American citizen who dares to venture away from Party talking points.
What is worse, it used to be the case that when the government or the administration, whether Obama or Bush, used the word “extremist” they were always careful to include a qualifier: “violent extremism.” That meant that physical violence (actual or intended) was necessary to get one labeled a terrorist.
Back during the Obama years, there was “countering violent extremism.” Then from Trump’s first term to Biden, there was “domestic violent extremism.” The FBI’s threat categories carried it too — “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism.” They are all imperfect and ugly labels, but the “violent” qualifier at least maintained a pretense that there was a threat of physical harm. And pretended that the threat label wasn’t questioning free speech or association.
Now it’s just “extremism” — one word. Third Way is joining the Trump administration in dropping the violence qualifier. It’s enough to just have the wrong beliefs; wrong, that is, in the eyes of the Party apparatus in Washington.
When I asked Third Way this week how it defines this “extremism,” spokesperson Kate DeGruyter said that the effort “is aimed at the DSA itself, not at liberal Democrats” — though it wasn’t clear how they define “liberal Democrats.” Asked who gave Third Way the $15 million for this project, DeGruyter’s only response was: “This a new effort and we are in the process of fundraising.”
Before Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan primary to run for Senate as a Democrat, Cowan, the Third Way president, issued an open letter and op-ed directly targeting him as a member of DSA despite his never having been a member of the organization and explicitly describing himself as a “capitalist.” (Third Way tells me it now supports El-Sayed, presumably because he’s since won.)
Three members of Congress are DSA members or describe themselves as democratic socialists — Senator Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib — along with the mayor of the country's largest city, Zohran Mamdani. You may have heard of them.
*The Times *reported that Third Way’s new campaign would go after both self-described democratic socialists and candidates like El-Sayed, whom Cowan at the time accused of running a DSA-style campaign without the membership card. So because DSA is too narrow, Third Way has done exactly as the FBI would do: it has expanded the definition of the threat category. The war is against members of DSA and people who espouse DSA positions or use DSA tactics, or just socialists, or just “far-left extreme voices and forces,” as Third Way says, or even more broadly people with “politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric.”
Politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric? That sounds like me and half the people I know. I call top bunk at the Third Way reeducation camp!
Third Way is all but an arm of the Democratic Party. It’s run by former administration officials — Cowan was chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton — and exists to supply the party’s leadership with the language that leads to the talking points that become the way elected Democrats describe the country and their own voters.
As for what this all looks like in practice, Third Way offered a preview this week in its remarks on Francesca Hong's campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin.
“She’s not a real person,” Yemisi Egbewole, a Senior Fellow at Third Way and former Biden White House official, 𝕏told Mark Halperin. She added an implication of mental illness, saying Hong is “deeply unsettled, and she should really work through in therapy some of her own beliefs.”
The goal with the “extremist” label is to make anyone who doesn’t conform with the vanilla politics of Washington seem not just idiotic but insane. It’s a real-life *One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, *and if your beliefs aren’t something you’d see on cable news, the nurse would like to see you.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
