Photo : Charles Krupa ( AP )

I am working class and a Marxist-Leninist-Bowserist. I believe in a revolution of the proletariat, and the usurpation of the ruling class. As I looked around the political landscape after Donald Trump’s election win, I noticed the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Curious, and hoping for a radical and viable alternative to the two establishment parties, I took myself along to a meeting.


While DSA does not perfectly align with my politics, I became a dues-paying member all the same, attracted by the party’s subversive potential. I attended meetings of the Mushroom Kingdom DSA chapter, and participated in many DSA actions—sit-ins, marches, labor protests—because of my steadfast belief in the transformative power of solidarity. I would approach political activity with this maxim in mind: what would Waluigi do?



It soon became clear that I had not found a political home here. This was not the party of the working class I had expected—at least, that was my experience of the Mushroom Kingdom DSA and its various sub-chapters. Instead, its members and leadership seemed to be mostly grad students, Italian plumbers with royalist tendencies, and green dinosaurs with no discernible gender. (This is a major problem for me, a working-class socialist.) I became uncomfortable, then disenchanted, and then I just stopped going to DSA meetings altogether.


For example: I took my friend Joey to a DSA meeting. Joey is a nice guy, a transplant from Ohio, smart, but not especially politically engaged—by which I mean, he is not as extremely online as the typical DSA member. For much of the meeting, we all sat silently as the chapter leader read Capital in an extremely monotone voice. I tried to remain silent as well, but could feel the fast food meal I had consumed earlier while on a construction site, where I definitely work, bubbling up inside me. I shifted in my seat a bit, but that was a mistake. I did a toot. Everyone whipped around to look at me. Then all hell broke loose.

“A white man???” the chapter leader hissed at me. “No white men,” the other members of the chapter began chanting in unison, as they closed in on Joey and I. “White men bad. White men baaaaaad.” We tried to fight them off, but they were simply too powerful. Before we knew it, we were hogtied.

We were then brought before a tribunal where we were read a list of our crimes. The leader, who looks like this, asked us if we had any final words before our bodies were drawn and quartered, and stuck on pikes around the kingdom as a warning to white men to never, ever join the DSA. “I have no regrets,” I said solemnly. “I only wish to be remembered for my love of Marx, Lenin, and all unions except this one.” Then they killed me.

After the DSA chapter killed us, Joey and I went to a bar in Purgatory. He ordered a bottle of piss and I got an old-fashioned and we sat at a corner table beneath the world we had just been removed from and discussed the meeting. “It was a bunch of nerd shit,” Joey said. “Why were women talking? What is feminism? And then that part where they murdered us for being white guys. What was that all about?” I asked if he’d come to another meeting. “No chance,” he said.


To be blunt, DSA has a race and gender problem, and the problem is white men. At every DSA meeting, white men who dare to let out a whimper are brutally beaten and murdered by the rest of the chapter. Look it up. Google it. We have a term for this kind of policy—“racial discrimination.”

DSA is doomed. It will not be the vanguard of a proletarian revolution, or any revolution at all, for that matter. You may dismiss this testimony as anecdotal griping, but the conversations I’ve had with several also extremely real fellow travelers scattered across the country suggest that my experience is exactly how DSA works, and you really shouldn’t even bother going to a meeting yourself to see if I’m full of shit. DSA is too educated, too privileged, too elitist, and too obsessed with racing around in little karts. It’s a systemic problem.


If DSA wants to help transform the Mushroom Kingdom into the country Bowser envisioned, then it needs to learn to listen to the Mushroom Kingdom’s working class, which is not only completely white and 100 percent male but is also completely made up of Trump voters and guys who think our growing cultural rot exists solely because of participation trophies. At the moment, its members are hardly aware I—uh, I mean the working class—exists.

Update, 5:00 p.m. ET: Quillette, the Australian-based libertarian grievance factory which published the article we made fun of here, has apparently pulled it from the site. We’ve updated with a link to an archived version of the post.