A national leader of the Democratic Socialists of America faced a difficult exchange Friday during an interview with The New Yorker, struggling to spell out what the group’s call to “tax the rich” would mean in practice and appearing unfamiliar with a major Clinton-era Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative.
Megan Romer, one of the DSA’s two national co-chairs, was pressed by New Yorker editor David Remnick on one of the organization’s most recognizable policy themes.
“Well, what does ‘taxing the hell out of them’ mean?’” Remnick asked on an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour titled “How Socialist Is the DSA? Megan Romer Explains.”
“Uh, yeah, you know, again, I don’t have like a solid…” Romer replied, laughing awkwardly as she searched for an answer.
Remnick pushed back, asking whether the co-chair of the DSA should be able to offer more detail. “But shouldn’t you?” he said. “If you’re the co-chair of the DSA, shouldn’t you be more specific than ‘taxing the hell’ out of something? What exactly do you mean?”
“Um, that’s a good question,” Romer said, appearing caught off guard by the request to move beyond the slogan, which had also been used frequently by Mayor Mamdani during his campaign.
She then framed the issue in broader ideological terms. “So again, it’s democracy, right?” Romer said. “And we have to look at what we have to spend and what we need. We don’t want to depend on the existence of millionaires because that means people are still getting exploited.”
The exchange quickly drew attention online, with clips from the interview circulating widely across social media.
“When you realize you took $60,000 out in student loans and can’t answer a single friendly polite question,” slammed media commentator Stephen L. Miller on X.
“They have never been challenged on any of this for their entire life, by anyone. An entire generation of privileged idiots.”
Remnick then asked Romer whether the DSA supported a two-state solution or a binational one-state solution — where both Israelis and Palestinians would co-exist under one state — to the decades-long conflict in the Middle East.
Romer picked a different option.
“Our position is a free Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem, so I think that could be safely read as a one state solution,” she proudly stated, making no mention of what would happen to the 10 million people living in Israel.
When Remnick followed up by asking whether she would have been satisfied with the Camp David Summit proposal, Romer’s brain appeared to break again.
“Good question,” she said. “I need to look at what the actual specifics there were, I don’t know them off the top of my head.”
Former President Bill Clinton famously brought Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to the Maryland retreat in 2000, to lay out plans for a two-state solution, but the historic efforts ultimately failed.
