OPINION:
The 2026 midterms delivered the Democratic Socialists of America its most successful electoral performance in history.
Six DSA-endorsed candidates won U.S. House seats on Nov. 3, quadrupling the party’s representation from two to eight members when the 120th Congress convenes in January.
Christians looked at those results, the “Squad,” and the socialist organizations they believe are undermining this country and asked a familiar question: How do we dismantle this? That is the wrong question to ask.
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The better question is why we keep sending our children into the very institutions where these organizations recruit their future members.
The indoctrination pipeline toward socialism begins in government K-12 schools and continues on college campuses, where students are recruited and activated. If we are not protecting our children from that pipeline and are still writing tuition checks, we are effectively paying to have our offspring trained and mobilized.
By the time we turn around and complain about the organizations our children have joined, we will be years too late to confront the system that led them there in the first place.
The youth wing of the DSA does not hide any of this. The Young Democratic Socialists of America describes itself as the youth and student section of the DSA and says, in its own words, “We are students organizing in our universities, colleges, and high schools.”
Its 2026 Fall Recruitment Drive is aimed at “university and high school campuses across the country.” The pitch is blunt: “Now it’s time to bring this revolution to your school.”
In a September newsletter, DSA’s leadership said that “since last semester, more than 45 new campuses have started chapters,” and that since the beginning of August, YDSA has doubled its membership.
The same recruitment drive promises training, coaches and a “Chapter Building Kit” of banners, posters, buttons and stickers. It tells students they are “investing in the future leaders of the socialist movement” and notes that even New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “was a campus organizer.”
Government K-12 does the early work. It spends our property taxes teaching children to see themselves as members of identity groups, to distrust their parents and to treat American life as a system of oppression that only political activism can fix.
School counselors, nongovernmental organizations and curriculum writers have spent years softening the ground. By the time a 17-year-old meets a YDSA recruiter, the language already sounds familiar.
The Sunrise Movement is running the same play in government K-12 under a climate banner. Its Green New Deal for Schools campaign says it will “radically transform our school system” and that “high school students across the country are organizing to win a Green New Deal for our schools,” including a plan to “rewrite our curriculum.” My organization, Courage Is a Habit, exposed that work in March 2024.
College does the rest. What parents still call “academia” has become a Marxist activation center with beautiful landscaping. The ideology that was introduced as “social-emotional learning,” “inclusion” or “civic engagement” in K-12 gets a sharper edge in the lecture hall in college. YDSA is waiting there with the kit and a handler.
We cannot leave our children inside these training centers and then act shocked when they come home as DSA members.
Still, a movement that can grow a congressional caucus fourfold in one cycle did not appear because children watched a few videos online. It appeared because families kept delivering young, impressionable children to be trained into soldiers.
Every conservative household that treats government K-12 and a four-year university as defaults is making a contribution to that socialist army.
If at all possible, pull your children from the government K-12 system and homeschool them. Many parents hesitate to do this because they assume that homeschooling requires seven hours a day. It does not. It takes two to three hours. Traditional schools waste an enormous amount of time.
Protecting your child’s mind and future is worth the effort, but no family should have to navigate that transition alone. That is where my organization steps in. If you want to make a change but do not know where to start, we offer two targeted resources: “Parenting 101” and “Countering Emotional Blackmail.”
Washington will not fix this. We can spend the next two years yelling about the DSA’s new U.S. House members, or we can rob these organizations of the only thing they cannot replace: the next members … your children.
• Alvin Lui is president of Courage Is a Habit.
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