Why Adam Milstein Is Warning the Democratic Party That the DSA Is a Trojan Horse

On July 13, 2026, Adam Milstein published a warning aimed not at the Democratic Party's opponents but at the party itself. Writing in The Times of Israel, he argued that the Democratic Socialists of America are not a progressive wing to be managed but a hostile force to be expelled. "The DSA is a trojan horse poisoning the Democratic Party from within," he wrote, and the rest of the piece is an argument for treating it that way before the damage becomes permanent.

Milstein is an Israeli-American "Strategic Venture Philanthropist" and a regular Jerusalem Post columnist whose commentary returns again and again to a single discipline: assess threats by what they do, not by which team they claim. In the DSA he sees an organization pursuing what its own strategists call a "dirty break," using the Democratic Party's ballot lines, donor lists, and institutional machinery to build power while intending, eventually, to break from the party and replace it. The recent electoral record is his evidence. DSA-aligned candidates have unseated long-tenured incumbents and won primaries in New York and beyond, and Milstein reads those wins not as ordinary intraparty churn but as a takeover advancing on schedule.

The platform is the part he wants Democratic leaders to read closely. He points to positions that include nationalizing whole sectors of the economy, eliminating private insurance, abolishing the Senate, subordinating the executive and judicial branches to the legislature, and dismantling conventional policing. Whatever one makes of any single plank, his contention is that this amounts to a program for a different system entirely, carried by people who have found it convenient to run under a familiar label rather than reform the one they joined.

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For Milstein, the decisive tell is where antisemitism fits. He argues that anti-Zionism has become the DSA's membership litmus test, with opposition to Israel's existence written into its platform rather than left to individual conscience. The practical consequence, in his account, is that Democratic officials aligned with the movement have begun "stripping antisemitism protections from Jews unless they renounce their connection to Israel," a condition placed on no other minority. A protection available only to Jews willing to disown Israel is, in his reading, not a protection at all.

His prescription is unusually concrete for an op-ed. He calls on Democratic leadership to strip DSA-aligned officials of committee assignments, cut off party funding, deny them ballot access where possible, and mount aggressive primary challenges against sitting DSA politicians. The ask is blunt rather than conciliatory: treat entryism as the organizational threat it is, and use the tools the party actually controls to counter it.

What keeps the piece from reading as partisan sport is Milstein's record of pointing the same scrutiny in the other direction. Months earlier, he used The Jerusalem Post to warn against a resurgent isolationism on the political right, the strain of thinking that would have the United States turn away from confronting hostile regimes. He has criticized anti-Israel radicalization inside the Democratic coalition and misjudgment on the right in the same season, publishing each critique where the audience most needed to hear it. The standard does not move. Only the target does.

Underneath the specific case sits an argument about how antisemitism travels. It rarely announces itself as hatred of Jews. It arrives wearing whatever ideology is ascendant, and in progressive activist spaces it arrives dressed as anti-Zionism and liberation politics. Milstein has made this case before, tracing the phenomenon to the convergence of radical and progressive movements he has warned about for years. The DSA op-ed is that longer analysis brought to a single, immediate test case.

There is a strategic reason he addresses Democrats directly rather than writing them off. Milstein has argued repeatedly that a Jewish community identified wholly with one party becomes invisible to the other and taken for granted by both, and that the correct posture is to hold both parties to account and to want both healthy. In his framing, warning the Democratic Party about the DSA is a way of trying to save it, keeping one of the country's two major parties from being captured by a faction hostile to Jewish security.

At 74, Milstein continues to write as though the label on a threat is the least interesting thing about it. The trojan horse of his headline is an old image for a reason. The danger in the story was never the horse. It was the confidence of the people who wheeled it through their own gates.

[GP/KS]

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